Australia jumping on the internet filtering bandwagon

A couple years ago, the Australian government announced that they wanted to institute a mandatory internet filter. Despite opposition, the government seems to be continuing with their plan. This filter would remove content that is deemed illegal under Australian law, such as hardcore pornography, online casino-style gambling, some hate speech, and “R” rated computer games. This proposition was justified by claiming that NetNanny (which the government gives out to families for free) cannot possibly protect children from all the dangers of the internet. The government has also said that users will be able to opt-out of the filter, but only from the pornography part of the blacklist, other illegal content will still be prohibited.

As of now, no filter has yet been set up, but it is still being discussed. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) keeps a list of websites that would be blocked were the filter introduced. The list was leaked on Wikileaks a couple months ago, and the ACMA has threatened them with fines of $11,000/day, however, the list is still up. The website says, “While Wikileaks is used to exposing secret government censorship in developing countries, we now find Australia acting like a democratic backwater. Apparently without irony, ACMA threatens fines of up to $11,000 a day for linking to sites on its secret, unreviewable, censorship blacklist — a list the government hopes to expand into a giant national censorship machine.” The list posted in late 2008 totaled to 2,000+ websites, most of them appearing to be pornography websites. The ACMA has cut down the list in past months, and the change has been reflected on the Wikileaks website. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Already, a significant portion of the 1370-site Australian blacklist – 506 sites – would be classified R18+ and X18+, which are legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.”

I found this interesting because when I think of Australia, I think of a liberal, democratic country, similar to the United States and the U.K., and it is surprising that they are emulating nations like China by instituting such a filter. Although it seems like they wouldn’t be filtering websites that oppose the political mainstream, they are still considering filtering out a large chunk of the internet, however perverted it may be, which can be alarming. What if the government is able to get enough support for this idea and finally institutes this filter and takes even greater steps toward filtering in the future? Will other liberal democratic nations follow in their footsteps and create even larger filters?

-Sylvia Avila

Well I’m a truth addict… ahh sh*t i got a head rush.

“Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine; I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.” Bob Dylan said that in 1965. The midpoint of an era that shook, like a withdrawn junkie, with political unrest. And to put it lightly, ain’t shit changed — just the names, faces and places….oh yeah, and now we have this thing called the internet. Once upon a time, the markings of a true activist were physical action and the robust will to stand in harm’s way; bottles broken in streets, sit-ins, Molotov cocktails and marches. Today the political landscape has changed. Concurrently, the weapons we use to fight injustice on this terrain have evolved. After all, who wants to sit in a Humvee with paper thin siding when the freedom fighters* come?

For North Americans, Europeans and citizens of other empowered nations (are there any others?), we have our armored Humvee! We may sit safely behind our computer terminals and type “smack” till our fingers swell. So we have a Facebook group and we all agree, with a click, that “we don’t like your injustice, foreign leaders!” However, we’ll still support conglomerates that aid in a quest for your total dominance and suppression — pinky swear! For our fellow citizens in the global community: we insist we feel your pain, even if we don’t know what ten years in Chinese prison (or a secret holding site in Iran) is like. Allow me to readjust my cynicism for a hot second. I’m frustrated.
When do we stop talking and start doing? Others in more oppressive nations do not have the luxury of hiding. Their words are actions; their dissent online is dissent in real life. Its easier to throw words around when they remain, as long smoke in a stiff breeze. What happens when they become the cinder blocks that comprise your new 4′x8′ condo in a desert outpost? We need to help our brothers and sisters with more than just civil debate, we must help them with action. What can we, as the fortunate, do for those without fortune? Here’s an idea: take it back to 1965 and get out in the streets. “God made us number one because he loves us the best; well, he should go bless someone else for a while and give us a rest.” Ben Folds said that. He’s playing in Davis Square tonight; you should probably go watch that because Hossein Derakshan can’t. He’s too busy fighting real oppression with real actions and feeling real consequences for it.

*read “terrorist depending on which side you’re on… you do have a side right?)”

Sam Neill

The Cute-Cat Deterrant; Social Networking and China

After reading Susan Shapiro’s article in the New York Times discussing the role of Facebook in the Egyptian pro-democracy movement, I was struck by two quotes she included from Harvard research fellow Ethan Zuckerman.  He characterizes the use of Facebook in political movements as “Cute-cat digital activism,” going onto say that, “Authoritarian regimes can’t block political Facebook groups without blocking all the American Idol fans and cat lovers as well.” Essentially Zuckerman sees the use of Facebook for pro-democracy organizing as a way for activists to hide in plain sight among the millions of other users simply posting photos or making mundane wall posts.  Building upon this idea he posits that repressive regimes will not bring down Facebook precisely because of this dearth of non-politically active traffic.  According to Zuckerman, shutting down a popular social networking site would create a backlash against the government from users who before were happy using the site purely for social networking.  This got me thinking about how this concept of a “Cute-cat” deterrent will fare as Facebook crosses into another repressive society, China.

The world knows by now that China meticulously censors and monitors most, if not all the internet traffic of its citizens.  When people create websites or forums directed at political activism it is easy for Chinese censors to either block access to these sites, or if they are within China, shut them down and arrest their creators.  If Zuckerman’s contention holds true a site like Facebook could possibly threaten these tried and true responses to digital activism because the government will not be able to only shut down specific groups, the whole website would have to be taken down. The question becomes whether or not China will risk alienating all the other users using Facebook for non-political purposes in order to crack down on dissidents.

Historically the size of the non-politically active portion of a site’s user base has not served as an effective deterrent to blockage.  Even hugely popular sites like Wikipedia and Google have felt the wrath of the Chinese censors in the last few years. In spite of this discouraging portent, it is important to note that when Facebook began offering a Chinese version of its site in July of last year it joined an already crowded market. Myspace, Qspace and a Chinese clone of Facebook (xiaonei.com, that already boasts 22 million registered users and has raised more money than Facebook) are already players on the mainland social networking scene.

The growth of these networks shows that the Chinese seem to be embracing the concept of social networking.  This is significant because it is a very different thing to block a search engine or encyclopedia but a social networking site is a different beast.  What I mean by this is that a page on Facebook effectively contains one’s online identity; a profile page is not portable or replaceable like a search engine or encyclopedia.  If Facebook, or any other site on which you have information goes away, so does your page and all the work you put into making and maintain the network attached to it.  Perhaps when Chinese citizens find that all their uploaded materials and friend networks have suddenly vanished due to the banning of their networking site there will be a larger domestic outcry than in the past. When this happens we will truly see just how powerful the “cute-cat deterrent” can be.

-Mike Stillman

Brian Martin: Misinformed, under-informed, and unrealistic

Up until recently, I worked for a tech company for whom I reviewed business proposals submitted by staff, would choose ideas to be developed into business plans by our team, and would help initiate the launch of approved plans. Some ideas were fantastic, some were silly and ill conceived, and others seemed fantastic. The latter type of plan is often the most troubling. Depending on the skill level of the person proposing the plan, it could have been easy to accept the “game-changing” plan and spend endless hours trying to turn it into a venture.

Here is an example of a plan that seems fantastic: “PetroCat, Inc will change the energy market forever. After minutes of planning and testing, the PetroCat team has developed a process by which kitty litter can be turned into an environmentally friendly energy source.” Have you ever heard of PetroCat, Inc? Probably not. I just made it up.

People often have grand ideas that could change the world. Whenever confronted with such an idea, the most important questions to ask are: (1) Is the idea backed by legitimate research? (2) Is it feasible? and (3) Is it realistic?

In Chapters 1 and 3 of Technology for Nonviolent Struggle, Brian Martin proposes his own grand idea. Perhaps, his idea is a little bit more realistic than fueling the cars of the future with cat excrement, but its not much better. Statements like “if manufacturers, commanders or operators refuse to cooperate, weapons will not be created or used” are not constructive or realistic. Instead of presenting the utopian view, Martin should have used his knowledge of the world as it stands to present a reasonable course of action.

Maybe this is what he is trying to do; however, there are other major underlying problems with his argument. A number of the proposed “facts” that underlie his argument are simply wrong. Given that I was able to find a few and don’t have any real academic experience with international relations or world affairs, I have to assume that there are many more.

Competition vs Cooperation
Statement by Brian Martin in Chapter 3: “All the available evidence shows that human beings have no instinctual urge to physically harm other people. Indeed, cooperation is much more “natural” than competition. Without day-to-day cooperation, what is called society would be impossible.”

The first and last sentence may be fine. I simply don’t have the background to affirm or dismiss them. The second sentence, however, is clearly false. In fact, I would bet that a freshman that only took Introduction to Psychology for two weeks and then dropped would be able to guess with some degree of certainty that the second sentence is false.

The statement is true in some Eastern countries (e.g. some of China) but does not hold for any Western or Westernized countries. There are almost endless journal articles and reports that argue just the opposite of Martin’s statement. Martin did cite research for the first and second statements; however, you can find research that supports nearly anything. (If you ever watch the news, you’ve seen some of it featured there!) The good academic or researcher does extensive research to back up his or her statements rather than taking the ideas put forward in one article as the ultimate truth.

Examples are meaningless
Throughout his writing, Martin uses an arsenal of powerful and descriptive examples to support his ideas; however, examples are in themselves meaningless unless they comprise a general truth. If an academic uses examples to give deeper meaning to a correlation, trend, or effect, the example can produce greater understanding. On the other hand, using singular examples as Martin does to attempt to back ideas does not produce the desired result. It is as inane as saying that just because I have trouble sleeping that everyone in the world has trouble sleeping. What is true in one example is not necessarily true in all or any other examples or situations.

Martin should have been attempting to code all examples to find correlations. Since an academic cannot ethically manipulate level of violence or nonviolence, Martin’s research would have had to be observational. This produces another problem. Given that the situations he would have been coding for are complex and largely novel, it would be impossible to tell whether the correlation was truly between the variables of interest or if an intermediary variable was what really should have been of interest.
- Parker Noren

Burmese Activism Redux

The digital revolution seems to be coming sooner than we thought.  My last post was about how the activist citizenry of Burma were in a very similar cultural position as those from the “Dickensian” era; that their culture was on the cusp of a technological and social revolution that would shake up the foundations of power.  Well if the current activities in Burma are anything to go by, then it’s only a matter of time.

 

I have covered some of the hurdles to democratic activism in Burma in my last post; the military government, counter-activist espionage, and censorship of the media and tourists.  The military junta that has had a stranglehold on Burma for decades now is starting to slip.  After Cyclone Nargis last summer, there were more than 130,000 Burmese citizens that were either killed or injured.  The junta failed to reply with adequate aid and social services, leaving the Burmese people to instead rely on other groups such as USAID, and the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters for critical assistance. 

 

It was during this reconstruction/aid effort that many activist groups such as the HRDP were able to get their message o democratic action out to the people.  HRPD members capitalized on the momentary loss of infrastructure to distribute information on how to get involved with activist movements across the nation without fear of reprisal from the government.  With the state of free speech in Burma as it normally stands, such a mass distribution of counter-cultural support and propaganda would have been all but impossible without the chaos provided by the natural disaster.  To give a frame of reference, the only reliable method of making a phone call in Burma is to use one of the monitored telephones on major streets, which effectively eliminates the prospect of using it for spreading information. 

 

In addition, it seems that the Burmese youth has indeed begun to pick up the torch of activism in opposition to the new constitution, a government creation that would theoretically re-legitimize their power.  Legions of young Burmese students have created tons of stickers, buttons, shirts and other propaganda devices emblazoned with the simplest slogan in history “NO”.  The propaganda now proliferates through trendy spots throughout Burma.

 

It is unfortunate and more than a little horrifying to think that it took something as tragic as Cyclone Nagris to finally unite the dissatisfied Burmese populace, but it has had an undeniable impact on everyone.  People who were always content to sit back and endure before are now rising up in ways they have rarely explored before.  The Burmese democratic advocates need to strike while the iron is hot and use the outrage of the nation at the junta’s pitiful support after Nagris to galvanize them into action.

 

Patrick Farley

A Criticism of “A DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism”

” A DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism” gives a concise overview of how to best use Facebook to achieve a successful campaign. While I believe the advice given in the guide is fairly helpful, I believe it grossly overestimates the power of digital tools for grassroots movements looking to achieve substantial reform. There are three criticisms of the guide that I have which concern accountability, sustainability, and results.

1) Accountability – One of the chief problems with digital activism that the guide recognizes is that the barrier of entry towards activists movements are so low that the commitment of these individuals are most often inconsistent at best. However, I believe that one of the most important aspects of activism and organizing is the ability for members to be accountable to both one another and the group’s mission. Often accountability in activist groups are reached by developing strong relationships with other members. Although developing relationships with other individuals in the digital world is not impossible, it is much harder to establish and maintain these relationships if contact between members remain digital. In addition, if you follow the advice of the guide, the goal of a Facebook group is to invite as many people as possible, it is even harder to develop robust relationships if you are trying to manage so many members.

2) Sustainability – One of the primary challenges for activists on any campaign is to maintain a sustainable campaign in order to accomplish their mission. While the guide acknowledges this necessity with their eighth step “Keep it Going”, it states that “if you can attract media attention your group will probably flourish…” While media attention will certainly assist your group in building members and getting recognized by the powers to be, it is far from a guarantee or even a higher probability that your organization will flourish. In fact, media attention can be worthless or even hurt activists if the group does not respond or use the attention in an effective manner.

3) Results – This guide looks at media and raising awareness as an end in itself. The success stories illustrated in the guide represent three missions that garnered as much as 140,000 members in Facebook, while an example of organizational success as having tens of thousands of individuals marching to show solidarity to their cause, in this case it was to support the monks in Burma. While this is important and illustrates the power of the organization, little has changed in Burma since the protests. Although the group is now sustainable, it has yet to achieve a similar action to the protests in 2007.

Ultimately, these criticisms point towards the overall strategy that the guide suggests which I believe are flawed. The guide recommends that the most important aspect of an activist’s movement is to recruit as many members as possible, while raising as much awareness in the general public as possible. Although both aspects of a campaign are incredibly important, I believe that neither represents the sufficient or even necessary features of a grassroots organization. Ultimately, organizations will achieve sustainability with committed members that are held accountable by each other. Achieving lasting results will come out of painstaking strategic planning, detailed but specific communication amongst members, and controlled actions based on manipulating the powers to be to commit to your mission.

- Aaron

Digizenship

I know that this week we’re studying digital activism which generally precludes talking about action taken by government. In fact, most of the case studies we’ve been studying are directed against sitting governments. But I don’t think that precludes digital activists from working with governments or forming constructive relationships with  incumbent institutional frameworks – especially when those structures are willing to take an enlightened approach to ICT participation and transparency. 

Last week, the White House announced the appointment of the nation’s First Chief Information Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, a “Google-apps loving, happiness-index-embracing, data-democratizing” Chief IT officer for DC, according to TechPresident. One of Kundra’s big ideas is to create data.gov – a huge data dump for all manner of inaccessible or unavailable government information and a viable platform for inviting community data mashup and analysis. 

Poking around TechPresident, I found out about an interesting project at Wired.com on developing an open-government “data.gov” strategy that Kundra could then implement. Wired had a writer working on the piece until he realized that a magazine story…

…wasn’t up to the task.” So, he figured, hey, what’s good for the government is good for the writer, and went open source with the project. 

Going “open source” means harnessing the crowd at an the Open Government Google Group and creating an interactive wiki on the Wired site to encourage community input on what a “data.gov” strategy ought to entail. The conversation going on at Wired is informative, provocative, and active. The foreword to the wiki:

This is your place to report where government data is locked up by design, neglect or misapplication of technology. We want you to point out the government data that you need or would like to have. Get involved!

Based on what you contribute here, we’ll follow up with government agencies to see what their plans are for that data — and track the results of the emerging era of Data.gov.

Now if this were a state-sponsored initiative, it would have no credibility. If it were a team of Wired writers plugging away, it would have no relevance. But Wired.com’s editors have chosen to build a powerful portal to access a wide range of voices and empower citizens to be constructively active. Don’t like what the government’s doing about information technology? Forget writing your Congressman, just build a better strategy. 

Who knows if the Wired wiki will have any effect on the ultimate data.gov implementation. But if Kundra is as user -friendly as he claims to be, ignoring the mountains of advice would be a missed opportunity for the kind of synergy the government is looking to capitalize on. 

— Patrick Roath

Why Bloggers’ Rights?

China is a Big Bad Censorship Machine. Members of the “Fifty Cent Party” get paid fifty Chinese cents a pop (a little more than a nickel, American) to post pro-Chinese comments on the web. Companies are told they must self-censor, or else get kicked out of the Chinese market. Questionable cell phone SMS messages get blocked on the fly.

Despite this rep, in my time living in China I found that English-language content was generally accessible. Even if CNN.com did not work, I could always find the article elsewhere- it might be a little slow, but I could do it.

But as a foreigner I legally had to register my location with the government once I was there for over 24 hours, and I could not use an internet café without handing over my passport. A friend of mine was teaching English for the summer near Tibet and living with a local family. His host-mother had to go to the province’s capital to take the annual standardized test for her low-level government position, and when there was taken out of the testing room and told that a) the government knew a foreigner was living with her family and b) they were monitoring all internet and communications from her town. She understood.

Now, it can be argued that most of the actually censorship the government does is passive; people know the government COULD be monitoring what they are doing at any time, so only the most reckless do anything blatantly anti-Chinese (synonymous with “anti-government” in China) online or by SMS. And many Chinese people have been found to actually WANT the government to control some of what they see, in much the same way that governments in the West, like Australia, have proposed nationally-sanctioned internet censorship. Parents don’t want their kids looking at porn, and people don’t want to know the information they read is correct (“correct” is, of course, a complicated idea).

But we often tend to overlook a very serious point when talking about China: many Chinese people love their country. Nicholas Kristof posted a piece to his NYT blog about Grace Wang, the Duke student, ”who tried to encourage dialogue between pro-Tibet protesters and pro-China protesters. Grace is from China, and bloggers there perceived her as betraying her country and siding with Tibetan independence. The result was a nationalist explosion on the Chinese web, with people posting her parents’ home address and comments that came across as threatening. Her parents abandoned their home for reasons of safety.”

He concludes the post with the hope that, “more Chinese intellectuals will speak out against this nationalism.”

The six pages of responses in the comments section were particularly illuminating. The overwhelming reason given for the very high level of pro-Chinese nationalism is “China-bashing” in the Western media, and Western biases against China in general. The debate going on in this comment section addressed almost any issue one could think of
regarding this issue.

When looking at China’s situation, the facts must be clear. We are dealing with a country that, like much of the world, is concerned about the effects of de-centralized media. China has responded with a harsh stance, but they have a right to. And Chinese people are proud of China’s recent economic growth, and want to feel they have power and a voice in the international community. The movement for rights to free speech in China cannot come from outside of China. The movement has to be embraced by the people, not just the bloggers. What the Chinese government does by jailing bloggers is, in effect, separate the political activists from the rest of the people. This gap must be bridged, and one way to start is by affording bloggers more rights.

-Matt Nix

Again, a fine line: due punishment vs. violation of rights

jailed bloggers = violation of human rights = repressive government = INJUSTICE

The above is a primitive expression of the thought process most individuals seem to take on when the subject of jailed bloggers is broached. Yet, for me, the subject of jailed bloggers immediately brought to mind the two Singaporean bloggers who were jailed for their offensive racist remarks. Here, another formula is proposed:

jailed bloggers = due punishment for action harmful to other persons/society = enforcement of law + maintenance of civil society = JUSTICE

Why this difference? Are they mutually exclusive?

Let’s examine these two different modes of thinking about jailed bloggers further.

Both modes are informed by principles: the first is informed by the principle of there being certain rights that all persons are entitled to which must be enforced and not infringed upon, one of them being the right to expression; the second is informed by the principle of justice, where persons receive punishment if they cause harm to others. This empirical way of looking at these modes of thinking demonstrate that they are not inherently mutually exclusive. However, I would argue that the particular subject of whether bloggers should be jailed compels us to choose which principle will have overriding authority over the other.

This is where you may be telling me that we do not have to choose, that I have no case here, conflating two inherently different contexts with each other – political bloggers and bloggers who have made incendiary comments against a particular ethnic group -  but let me put it to you this way: if you choose to recognize bloggers’ right to free expression, and thus judge governments who imprison political bloggers to be unjust, you cannot in good conscience punish other bloggers for making incendiary comments that were their right to make. Conversely, if you choose to recognize the need for some form of punishment for harmful actions, and thus judge governments who imprision bloggers with offensive messages to be just, you cannot in good conscience denounce another government for taking action against persons whom they saw as launching attacks on them, citizens who fall under their protection, and their society as a whole. (In some cases, this may even be the same government.)

Or can you?

The fact is, most people can and do. Most people operate on the unspoken norm that once a person commits a harmful act, he gives up his right to freedom. Most people also operate on the norm that attacks on a government are acceptable and even necessary for a government to obtain and sustain its legitmacy, while attacks on people or ethnic or socio-economic groups are inacceptable in any form.

Is this hypocrisy? Is this inconsistency? Or are these simply norms that mediate between the principles of inviolable rights and justice?

With its emergence, blogging has rehashed this perhaps ancient philsophical point of contention, and hopefully will contribute to defining a place of reconciliation and consensus.

- Hui Lim

To Digitally Crack a Soul

In 2007, Jim Kim, the co-founder of Partners in Health (PIH), a non-profit whose mission is to provide medical care to the impoverished, spoke at PIH’s annual conference. In his keynote address, he spoke about the value that the organization puts on its ability to share stories. Throughout the conference, the audience heard from community members from Haiti, Rwanda, Peru, and Malawi. Dr. Kim expressed urgency for the audience to internalize these stories and share these stories in order to “crack the soul”

What Jim Kim meant by “cracking the soul” was to share a narrative that has such a deep affect on an individual that they cannot ignore the poverty, disparities, and other problems in this world, thereby launching them into action. Although both oral and written narratives can have this affect on individuals, it is more widely believed that the only way to truly “crack the soul” is for that individual to have an outstanding first hand experience.

For example, an individual may go to Kenya and work in an orphanage, or travel to Peru and do aid-work with rural farmers, or provide healthcare in the slums of Mexico City. It is these personal experiences that are thought to be the only (or most probable) experiences powerful enough to change an individual’s paradigm, and start a hunger (or guilt) that can only be satisfied by doing charitable work. These personal experiences are said to be more powerful than texts in books, images in anthologies, and a lecturer at a conference.

The ability of bloggers to instantly translate first hand stories of the impoverished and the oppressed, share both images and videos, document human rights violations on interactive maps, and stream live video of protests and rallies, allow any individual in the world to more closely experience international events, no matter what the scale. The capability of instant communication allows human experience to be shared, and not by a third party such as an interviewer or author, but by the individual who went through the experience.

We have already seen the power of digital media in the Obama campaign as it was able to rally and harness the energy of the younger generations. However, can blogs, new media sources (such as Global Voices), and digital tools provide a medium to share stories, while rallying and harnessing the energy of both current and future generations to aid the impoverished and the oppressed. As countless of human experiences are able to be imitated in the digital world, can a digital experience ever be profound enough to crack an individual’s soul?

-Aaron Marden