At ETech, a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of doing a video interview with Xeni Jardin. Xeni’s one of my very favorite journalists, in part because she’s passionate about both technology and the developing world - she’s travelled and reported extensively in Latin America and West Africa, and frequently brings topics up on BoingBoing that might not otherwise be included on a tech/pop culture/intellectual property/DIY blog.
Xeni wanted to feature some of the topics I talked about in my Cute Cats talk, but realized that it’s hard to summarize the entire talk in a short videocast. So we chose a small segment of the talk, about Tunisian video activism, and sat down in the hall of the conference hotel for a chat about propoganda, video activism, censorship and human rights.
And now it’s online. And pretty good, if I do say so myself. Feel free to go onto BoingBoing and tell Xeni you like it. Or whatever you really think about it.
I tend to feel like BoingBoing - along with Metafilter, and a couple of other sites - serve as a daily newspaper that’s read by both my activist friends and my tech geek friends. I can’t always be sure that my geekier friends are aware of the latest YouTube blockage in Pakistan or imprisoned blogger… just as I can’t be sure that my activist friends are up on the latest in giant squid news. But if it’s on BoingBoing, it’s in the popular imagination. As such, I’m grateful for Xeni’s pieces on subjects like Tunisian blogging, Zimbabwe election monitoring and other key topics. Oh, and for the occasional unicorn chaser.
As Zimbabwe faces a pivotal presidential election on March 29, expect a great deal of conversation about whether polls were free and fair. It may be very difficult to answer that question decisively, as the Zimbabwean government has been extremely restrictive in allowing election monitors into the country. AFP reports that the US and the EU have been denied access as observers; instead, the poll will be monitored by the African Union, SADC (the Southern Africa Development Community), China, Venezuela and Russia. Both SADC and the AU are heavily dominated by South Africa, which controversially pronounced the 2005 parliamentary elections as free and fair, despite widespread reports of human rights abuses.
There are lots of ways to rig an election, and it sure helps to be the incumbent if you’re planning on doing so. Morgan Tsvangarai, the candidate from the opposition MDC party, argues that the government has printed over 9 million ballots, which does seem like a lot for a nation of 5.9 million voters - he believes the excess ballots will be used to stuff ballot boxes. Other forms of rigging may be more subtle. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has recruited 90,000 polling officers, who will oversee voting at polling places. Polling officers are often asked to help illiterate voters cast their votes, which can lead to vote rigging. And the ZEC has primarily recruited schoolteachers - who are government employees - to serve as the polling officers.
The Zimbabwean government is evidently afraid that the US will attempt to monitor the election clandestinely. Government-controlled newspaper The Herald reports:
According to sources who work in the US embassy public affairs section, the embassy had decided to rope in the services of a number of NGOs, institutions and individuals to provide updates on the elections across the country.
Those recruited have also been mandated to provide “data” that will be used in the embassy’s final report on the elections and the briefing it will send back to Washington after the results have been announced for use in post-poll policy formulation. It is also understood that some of these NGOs and individuals volunteered their services when they heard that the US embassy was in the market for proxy observers.
That certainly makes sense. If I were a consular officer with the US state department, I’d be talking to anyone I could to try to get believable elections data. Unfortunately, this is likely to put additional pressure on reporters in Zimbabwe who are attempting to cover events. MISA - the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a leading free-press NGO in Zimbabwe - reports that they, along with several indepedent journalism organizations, are being accused of being “recruited” by the US Embassy. These accusations are based on the fact that MISA representatives attended a meeting in Pretoria on “the state of the media in Zimbabwe and the upcoming elections.” (Indeed, it’s this meeting that the Herald uses as “evidence” that journalists and NGO workers are now working for the US embassy.) These accusations raise the danger level for independent journalists in Zimbabwe, which was already extremely high.
All this is useful context in considering the project that activist organization Sokwanele announced today: a Google maps mashup of election-rigging incidents. Each icon on the map corresponds to a media report of an incident that controvenes SADC standards for a free and fair election. Clicking on an icon will take you to the issue of Sokwanele’s Zimbwbe Elections Watch newsletter, which summarizes media report on the elections, and to a database record, where each instance is coded as to which SADC rules it violates.
The Sokwanele site is very careful to note that these media reports represent a sample of violations of SADC standards. It’s very difficult for journalists to afford to travel to rural areas, so reports of possible rigging in those locations are less likely. And since Zimbabwe’s press climate is quite constrained, it’s likely that many incidents of election fraud will go unreported.
Sokwanele has employed some clever and careful tactics here. Because they’re not accepting reports of election fraud, they’re not reporters so much as aggregators. That may help them steer clear of Zimbabwe’s laws which require journalists to be licensed - were they to attempt a strategy like Ushahidi’s of allowing citizens to report incidents of violence, I suspect they’d be shut down immediately.
Will Sokwanele’s map show us whether the Zimbabwe election was rigged? It’s possible that it already has - the map is filled with incidents of “political cleansing”, violence where people who don’t hold membership cards in ZANU-PF have been chased out. If you can’t safely make it to a polling place, you can’t vote. There are countless reports of failures to register voters, of food being given to government supporters and not to the opposition, of violence from police and troops against citizens.
It’s hard to know what a map like this can do in a situation as volatile as the Zimbabwe elections. Very, very few Zimbabweans can afford to go online and look at the map before casting their votes. And Mugabe’s government is unlikely to be shamed by this thorough cataloging of offenses. But it’s possible that SADC might, and that international attention to the circumstances surrounding the election could make it harder for observers in countries that neighbor Zimbabwe to close their eyes to election rigging.
Contest winners will be flown to the NetSquared contest and win their share of a $100,000 prize fund. You can help honor amazing projects like Ushahidi by visiting the site between now and the end of Friday and voting for the projects you think are doing the best work with mapping and mashups.
I’ve gotten a great deal of feedback on my Cute Cats talk, which is very gratifying. It’s been a useful reminder that there’s a great deal of interest in digital activism, the practice of using online tools to advocate for offline political change. (Businessweek ran a pretty good article on digital activism a month back, focused mostly on online donations and on Facebook organizing.)
I’ve done my best to outline some of the best developing world examples of digital activism on this blog - regular readers will likely note that almost all the examples in the Cute Cats talk have been discussed on this blog previously. There’s a small but growing cadre of folks documenting digital activism, including Katrin Verclas’s MobileActive site. And there’s a new entrant to the field, which I’m very excited about.
DigiActive is a project by web activist Mary Joyce and her collaborator Amine, a Moroccan activist who is remaining semi-anonymous in conjunction with this project. The site is designed to document instances of digital activism, and to encourage more people to use these tools for the purposes of social change.
The site is currently in alpha - Mary and Amine are offering posts indicative of directions they’d like to see the site go in… and they’re recruiting volunteer contributors who can write more stories in the future. If you’re interested in the field of digital activism, writing for DigiActive would be a great way to learn lots more about this emerging field. Please check it out.
I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come out and say that it’s his favorite conference, but he’s willing to declare it the most important that his organization puts on.
Singel did an excellent job with my talk as well, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. I was grateful to have the excuse to explore at more length some of the ideas I’ve been writing about for the past year, and was gratified that the talk was well received. There were several requests for me to post the slides - that’s not really realistic, as they were 100MB and rather video-rich - what I’m going to do instead is post my notes, a bunch of links and a few of the slides. This won’t be an accurate picture of what I said - it’s more likely to be a picture of what I meant to say.
Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
I had a front-row seat for this transition, working with Tripod. We sincerely believed that the purpose of the web was to give college graduates helpful information about renting apartments, applying for jobs and investing their money. Our users rapidly told us that what the web was really about was publishing their own information… which left us with the difficult challenge of figuring out how to make money off of people’s collections of cat pictures.
User-generated content, on average, is a lot less interesting than professional content. But there are a lot more people creating their own content for fun than those doing so for a living, and in aggregate, that content is at least as interesting.
Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
In late 1996, we noticed that Tripod was receiving a great deal of traffic from Malaysia. Searching through the server logs, we found lots of pages in Bahasa Malay talking about “Reformasi” and “Anwar Ibrahim”. I had to visit the Political Science department at Williams College to figure out that we were apparently hosting much of the Malaysian opposition political movement, dedicated to helping deposed and imprisoned deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim return to power. Malaysian media was largely closed to opposition voices, but investment in internet infrastructure meant that the opposition was able to access the internet and publish material that couldn’t be disseminated any other way. (Several of these pages still exist on Tripod.)
A more economically rational company would have likely removed the Malaysian content, as we had no way of selling ads to Malaysian advertisers. Economic rationality was never Tripod’s strong suit, and we ended up sponsoring Malaysia’s olympic team instead. (They took the silver in Men’s team badmitton.)
With web 2.0, we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.
There’s been understandable excitement about use of online video by the Obama campaign. I was in Doha, Qatar, when Larry Lessig showed the above video as an example of the way that remix culture could reinvigorate American political culture. Others have pointed to the video as an example of “user-generated swiftboating“, and the potential for amateur nastiness to be even more evil than our debased professional political culture.
I was sitting next to Tunisian activist Sami ben Gharbia at the meeting in Doha, and he nudged me, saying, “We did this years ago in Tunisia.” I thought he meant the idea of using video to motivate voters. Actually, he meant that Tunisian activists - specifically a friend of his who works under the name “Astrubal” had remixed the 1984 Apple ad for political ends. (See my post “Democrats Invent the Remix, only three years after the Tunisians” for more on this story.)
In the Tunisian video, the guy on the screen is Ben Ali, a major opponent of free speech and a long-serving dictator. No matter how negatively you feel about Hillary, he’s a more Orwellian figure, in part because he’s so skilled at PR. Tunisia is more repressive than many of its Middle Eastern neighbors, but it enjoys widespread tourism and was selected - absurdly - to host the World Summit on the Information Society conference in November 2005. (For more on this absurdity, you may want to refer to my posts from WSIS, perhaps starting with this one.) Because Ben Ali is so good at PR, Sami, Astrubal and others see themselves as an ad agency, making videos designed to embarass the government on an international scale.
One of the most amazing of these videos features the peregrinations of the Tunisian presidential aircraft. You wouldn’t expect to see this jet in Europe very often, as Ben Ali is famous for rarely leaving the country. But Sami and Astrubal used planespotter sites - sites like Airliners.net that allow amateur plane enthusiasts to post their photos - to determine that the President’s jet travels a whole lot more than he does. They He used footage from Google Earth and pictures from the plane spotter sites to make a video that shows the power of the participatory web at its best. (Sami has asked me to make it clear that the Tunisian flight video was solely Astrubal’s work - his function was solely to publicize it, on his blog and in talks given about online activism.)
Their video raises all sorts of ethical questions - is it permissable for the country’s first lady to take the Presidential jet, fueled and crewed on taxpayer dollars, for shopping junkets in Europe? Foreign Policy magazine didn’t think so, and ran an article critiquing the first lady. They also published instructions on how you, too, can become a presidential planespotter.
Sami and Astrubal posted the video on their personal blogs… but as known activists, their blogs have been blocked in Tunisia for years. They also posted it on DailyMotion, a video site popular in the French-speaking world. Shortly after, the Tunisian government blocked access to DailyMotion.
This is a good thing if you’re an activist. Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politicially active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.
Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.
So why don’t governments block only he offensive speech? Why would governments be stupid enough to close off these tools entirely? It’s a reasonable question and one that’s an active research topic. One answer is that it’s surprisingly difficult to censor the web well. (Pakistan’s recent shutdown of YouTube shows one remarkably stupid and dangerous way to screw up and overblock web traffic.)
If you want to prevent your users from accessing online content, you’ve got four basic options. You can block keywords, block URLs, pollute your DNS or block IPs. It’s surprisingly hard to block keywords - you need to open and examine all the packets crossing your network. China does a bit of this, but mostly blocks keywords within URLs - it’s prohibitively expensive to examine every packet for an entire nation and check against a blocklist. URL blocking simply doesn’t work very well - it’s easy to rewrite a URL and access the same content. DNS blocking is very simple, but it tends to backfire - your smarter users simply switch towards using an unpolluted DNS and you have no way to control their behavior with this technique in the future. And so, most repressive governments block IPs, which limits access to banal as well as sensitive content.
But perhaps this isn’t stupidity on the part of nations. When Pakistan blocks YouTube, it limits traffic to the site. Google notices these sorts of things. Perhaps it’s coincidental that the video named by Pakistan has been removed from YouTube due to a terms of service violation - perhaps not. But while advocates try to raise the price of censorship for governments, smart governments are raising the price for noncompliance for Web 2.0 companies.
My colleagues at the Open Net Initiative began documenting net censorship a bit more than five years ago. At that point, Saudi Arabia and China were censoring widely. Now at least two dozen nations censor the net regularly, and more may be participating in “event-based filtering”, blocking access to political sites before a key election, for instance. My fear, in the medium to long term, is that every nation that constrains freedom of the press will begin filtering the net, realizing that the Internet is where important press takes place these days.
Of course, the activists win sometimes too. When Google Maps became accessible in Bahrain, it let Bahrani activists answer a pressing question in that small, crowded nation - who owns all the land? From the air, it becomes pretty clear that large chunks of the nation are reserved for palaces owned by the royal family.
An anonymous Bahrani activist thought this was pretty interesting, and made a PDF document of screen captures from Google Maps, enhanced with notes comparing crowded communities with spacious palaces. The document flew around the country from mailbox to mailbox. The Bahrani authorities couldn’t block the file - it’s a PDF, and blocking PDFs has nasty consequences for businesspeople. So they blocked Google Maps, which got bloggers like noted free speech advocate Mahmood Al-Youssif up in arms. After a brief block, they simply gave up and let citizens see the site, rather than letting Mahmood and others train people to use proxy sites. (More on this story is available on my blog.)
When governments really want to shut people up, they don’t just block them, they imprison them. Egypt has blocked very few websites - the Muslim Brotherhood site gets blocked occasionally, but most are uncensored. But they’ve jailed Kareem Soliman for his critical remarks about Islam, and they haven’t hesitated to arrest protesters seeking political reform.
This, in turn, has been known to backfire. When Kefaya activist and open-source proponent Alaa Abdel Fateh was one of 700 activists arrested at a protest supporting the independence of the Egyptian judiciary, it was hard for government authorities to know that they were about to have a PR crisis on their hands. Alaa began blogging from prison, passing notes to his wife, Manal, who jointly maintains their blog. These blog posts helped attract international attention to the case, which meant that camera crews from Al Jazeera and CNN covered a situation they normally would have ignored. It probably meant that Alaa spent much more time in jail than he otherwise would have, but it also may have meant that he was safer than if he’d been anonymous in prison.
(A piece of advice I offer at this point in many talks - if you’re planning on being an online activist, marry a blogger. It’s worked very well for me.)
The imprisonment of bloggers has taught activists some interesting lessons about advocacy in the era of Web 2.0. When Global Voices China editor Hao Wu was arrested and detained in Beijing, I and other GV friends wanted to go online immediately and advocate for his release. But that’s not the right way to do things - you’ve got to get permission from the detained person’s family first. And it took Rebecca MacKinnon a month of phonecalls to get his sister, Nina Wu, to agree to let us advocate on Hao’s behalf.
More importantly, Nina began blogging herself. Unsurprisingly, she knew a lot more about her brother than we did, and she wrote much more movingly than we could. Eventually, our campaign focused on translating her posts from Chinese to English and disseminating them as widely as possible. My conclusion from this: good advice for the advocate in a web 2.0 age - “Don’t speak. Point.” (Bruno Giussani explains what I mean by that phrase far more eloquently than I ever have.)
Nina wasn’t a professional activist. She was a successful career woman, a young mother, living the Chinese dream in Shanghai. She became an activist because she was forced to and she reached out for the tools she had access to - which hapened to be MSN spaces. MSN is heavily censored in China - it’s certainly not what we would have chosen for her. But you don’t get to choose the tools - activists use what’s at hand. It’s fine to build tools for activists, but even better to build tools for folks who don’t know they’re activists yet.
(In making this point, I should be very, very careful to point out that I have deep respect for tools that have been developed successfully for activist uses, tools like Martus or FrontlineSMS. My point is simply that there are huge numbers of web users who don’t yet think of themselves as activists who are likely to reach for the tools they have at hand, not to look specifically for tools designed for activists.)
Most activists discover they’re much more effective out of jail. It’s possible that bulk SMS tools - especially Twitter - might be useful in keeping activists out of jail. Alaa now uses Twitter to report on his political activities - this gives friends watching his feed the possibility of relauching the FreeAlaa site, should we see his note that he’s going in to talk to the police, and there’s no message letting us know he’s out of the police station afterwards. (Alaa tells me that tons of people are now subscribing to his Twitter feed and that they should back off because it’s a very boring time right now in Egyptian politics… :-)
Kefaya activists were able to use mobile phone messages, some sent through Twitter, to alert activists to the impending arrest of Malek Moustafa. As activist came to the place where Moustafa was being taken into custody, they attracted a huge crowd of police, who effectively blocked the street and prevented the police car with Moustafa from leaving the street. He was eventually released. Corresponding with Alaa about the situation, he raises questions of whether this was really a victory for Twitter - this is something Egyptian activists have done with SMS for a long time. Twitter may simply be useful in confusing Egyptian authorities, who might choose to block local SMS in a crisis, but might not consider blocking an international SMS number.
Twitter is also becoming more useful in crisis reporting. Viktor Markovic used a Twitter feed to report live on events in Belgrade after Kosovo declared independence; Juliana Rotich has used her feed to report live from Eldoret during post-election violence. And mobile phones are allowing people to report incidents in Kenya and include them within the map on Ushahidi.
Twitter is far from the perfect tool - it’s centralized and easily blocked. But it’s also used for lots of dumb purposes, which means it passes the cute cats test. Lots of the tools that have become most useful to activists have characteristics that un-recommend them for activist uses. Facebook, which has helped organize major protests against the FARC in Colombia, is notoriously bad about letting users pull data out of the system. Imran Jamal spoke about the challenge of trying to move a community of 400,000 users from Facebook to Avaaz, so they could fundraise more easily. (See “Pros and Cons of Facebook Activist“.) One challenge for activists using Web2.0 tools is figuring out when it’s time to get real and get onto dedicated platforms.
What happens when governments begin taking Web2.0 activism seriously? A funny example comes from Belarus. Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko noticed that YouTube was beginning to carry a wealth of anti-Lukashenko content, and suggested the Belarussian government might build it’s own YouTube competitor. Belarussian bloggers went one better and built LuNet, a set of parody sites designed to represent a Lukashenko-compliant read/write web. Perhaps the best of the sites was a Google parody - most searches resulted in a page telling you that the KGB was on lunch break and asking you to try again later when they could watch what you were doing. (See Global Voices Advocacy coverage of the story.)
More competent regimes have managed to exert significantly more control. China filters the internet more effectively than any other nation, using a combination of keyword filters, IP blocks and some DNS fiddling. The system is extremely complicated, involving filtering at a national boundary level and throughout the network, with some blocking taking place deep within the national network. China uses some techniques not widely seen elsewhere, including sending RSET packets when certain keywords are detected to knock users offline.
But that’s not the sinister part. Effective as the Great Firewall may be (and, actually, it’s not that effective - lots of dissidents get around it using various proxy techniques), the most relevant Chinese censorship takes place within Chinese Web 2.0 companies - including US companies operating servers in China. There’s an incredible wealth of Web 2.0 startups in China. These companies allow Chinese users to share video, post photos and write blogs. They’re much more useful to the average Chinese user as the tools and content are in Chinese, not English. And, unlike most popular web 2.0 tools, they’re not blocked in China.
And they’ve got censorship baked in. The above image is from research conducted by my colleage Rebecca MacKinnon. She discovered that MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s Chinese-localized and Chinese-hosted service prevented her from putting the terms “democracy” or “human rights” in the title of her blog. According to a report published by RSF, the heads of web companies meet weekly with censors who instruct them on what keywords to block, allowing the system to be extremely flexible and adaptable.
Some Chinese bloggers have responded by being extremely creative in their use of images. Some Chinese bloggers began posting images of river crabs on their blogs. The joke is that the term for “river crab” sounds very similar to the word “harmonize”, a term that had become slang for “censored” - “My blog just got harmonized.” The term “harmonized” became so popular that it became blocked. So Chinese bloggers began to refer to their blogs as having been “river crabbed”. The watches are a pun on “the three represents“, a political philosophy put forward by Jiang Zemin. This is also a commonly blocked term, so has been rewritten as “wears three watches”… which explains the oddly dressed river crab.
Here’s the thing - for the vast majority of Chinese internet users, they’re encountering a much more free information environment than their parents experienced. Michael Anti argues that Chinese society is much freer than the US in terms of personal behavior, especially around premarital sex and homosexuality. The vast majority of young Chinese are enjoying these personal freedoms and are willing to accept a world in which political freedom is somewhat constrained.
China’s censorship genius is that they’ve found a way to let people have their cute cats and have censorship as well. While China will block sites like Human Rights Watch, they won’t block domestic Web 2.0 sites, and hence the collateral damage from blocking banal content doesn’t draw non-activists to become aware of activist issues. Is this unique to China, or will we see this technique spread? It’s hard to imagine Ethiopia, for instance, being capable of building their own Amharic internet applications and blocking all Web 2.0 tools.
It’s also interesting to see what tools China won’t block. GMail, thus far, has remained unblocked - Anti theorizes that it’s popular with the communist party. Skype is unblocked, and it has some intriguing holes in it - Skype voice chatrooms are tailor-made to serve as pirate radio stations. Pipe a podcast into a chat room and you’re broadcasting audio via an encrypted system to users around the world. And China’s unlikely to block MMOGs, even if people periodically stand on hills inside games and shout out the IP addresses of proxy servers.
It seems criminal to give a talk at the ancestral home of Lolgeeks and not talk about the brave and noble Lolcat. We did some informal research within the Global Voices community and discovered that, while our non-north American, non-European colleagues thought Lolcats were very funny, they simply didn’t exist within their own communities. (Trading funny pictures of animals was quite common, just not the leet-speak captioning.)
Our early attempts to propogate lolcats in other cultures have been largely unsuccessul. (That’s a lolcat by Rachel with our cat, Thorn, saying “Oh Hai”…) There’s a real challenge within the world of lolcats - making activism viral probably means making it funny as well as political and heart-wrenching. My single favorite comment on SUP’s acquisition of LiveJournal is a lolcat, which sums up the situation better than any angry post could have.
It’s typical to end these sorts of talks with a call to action, possibly a better one than “export lolcats to repressive nations”. If there’s a single message to the talk, it is that activists are going to use your tools if your tools are any good - watch them, pay attention to them, protect them and learn from them. They’ll make tour tools better, and they’re one of the reasons to make social software in the first place.
One of the inspirations for Global Voices Advocacy, our online free speech project, was the good work being done by Don’t Block the Blog, a project led by two Pakistani bloggers to protest that nation’s block of Google’s Blogger platform. Don’t Block the Blog has been a real innovator in the anti-censorship space, and has done some excellent work reaching across borders, including the border with India, where they provided scripts to allow India’s bloggers - who were briefly blocked by their government - to reach their blogs. This sort of cross-border collaboration is what Global Voices is all about, and we hope to encourage more collaboration when some of these anti-censorship activists meet face to face in Budapest this June.
Today I’m leaning heavily on the Don’t Block the Blog guys to understand Pakistan’s attempts to block YouTube, and the widespread consequences of that decision. Sami ben Gharbia has a copy of the block order posted at GV Advocacy. It orders Pakistani ISPs to block a single URL - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3s8jtvvg00 - as well as three IP addresses. The URL now leads to a YouTube page that declares “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.” But many Pakistani users are discovering that YouTube, as a whole, is inaccessible as their ISPs are blocking access to the IP addresses associated with the site.
While it’s always a drag when countries overblock, taking offline whole services instead of offending content, it’s become increasingly common. Sami’s Access Denied Map shows blocks - current or past - of YouTube in Turkey, China, UAE, Iran and other nations. What made the net sit up and take notice was that a Pakistani ISP managed to take YouTube off the net as a whole for a brief period of time.
Here’s how it happened, more or less:
There are at least three ways to block internet traffic to the customers of an ISP. The most exact way is to block specific URLs, like the URL specified by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority. There’s two problems with this, from the perspective of the blocking ISP. It’s expensive - every request that goes over your network needs to be examined, not just at the header level, but within the packet to check for the offending URL. And it’s imperfect - tell the system to block “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3s8jtvvg00″ and it will fail to block requests for “http://youtube.com/?v=o3s8jtvvg00″, which will get you the same video.
A second way to block traffic is wicked cheap, but extremely ineffective - change the Domain Name System (DNS) records. People using that DNS suddenly discover that youtube.com no longer resolves to 208.65.153.238 but to an IP address controlled by the ISP - you can then put up a page saying, “YouTube is blocked by order of the Pakistan Telecom Authority.” The problem with this method is that it’s trivially easy to defeat - users can simply type in the correct IP address for the site, or switch to using an “unpolluted” DNS server like OpenDNS.
A third way involves blocking IP addresses. It’s far cheaper than blocking URLs, as the IP address is in the header of every packet, and all routers can be easily programmed to block IPs (it’s a routine way to fight denial of service attacks.) It’s effective - users need to use a proxy to get around it - though the major downside is that it’s overbroad. If you’re trying to block a single offensive page on Tripod, block the IP and you block all the millions of pages hosted there.
PieNet, a Pakistani ISP decided to block YouTube using the IP block method. (It’s unclear to me from these accounts if PieNet is part of Pakistan Telecom or not - I’d appreciate insights from my readers if you know.) They also wanted to implement a blockpage. Rather than tell their routers to block all traffic to 208.65.153.238 and redirect any requests to a blockpage, they decided to tell their users that they controlled all IP addresses that began 208.65.153.* - when a user requested YouTube, the DNS server would tell them that the site was at 208.65.153.238. Their browser would request that page, and they’d be redirected to a PieNet server, which would tell them they were blocked.
So far, so good. But PieNet’s rewiring of the net was propogated by their upstream internet service provider. PieNet accomplished its rewiring using Border Gateway Protocol, the internet’s core routing protocol. BGP is designed to allow large network operators (called autonomous systems, or AS’s) to announce paths to certain destinations on the internet. BGP is designed so that router prefer the most specific route possible. Google had announced a (correct) route that covered a fairly large block of IP addresses, including YouTube’s - PieNet announced a much more specific route, covering only 256 addresses. So routers that “trust” AS17557 - Pakistan Telecom - began telling their neighbors about a great new way to reach YouTube… which was now hosted by PieNet.
As a substantial portion of the world’s YouTube traffic attempted to make requests on PieNet’s servers, they went offline. In the meantime, Google released the correct routing information with more specific routing info, and most routers were looking at the correct address within two or three hours. To prevent Pakistan Telecom from propogating the bad address, its upstream provider, the Hong Kong based PCCW, removed Pakistan Telecom from the internet until they were able to fix its servers.
This sort of misrouting isn’t uncommon on the net - old net hands have been citing the AS7007 disaster, where a misconfigured router advertised that all Internet routes could be reached through it… and a good chunk of the Internet believed it and attempted to route itself through a single, overwhelmed router.
There’s at least two, and possibly three, things that went wrong in this case:
- Modifying routing records via BGP is probably a bad way to censor the net. (I’ll wait for confirmation from smarter people like Nart Villeneuve before removing that probably.) There are lots better ways to block IPs than to claim IPs that aren’t yours via BGP.
- Pakistan Telecom should not have advertised this route to other routers - they should have checked that PieNet was authorized to route this block of IP addresses before passing it on to the rest of the network. And PCCW should not have accepted Pakistan Telecom’s new route, as Pakistan Telecom didn’t have authority over these nunbers.
- Depending on who you ask, BGP is too trusting a network protocol. Back when the net was used mostly by academics, lots of systems simply trusted each other - you could send mail to another mailserver and ask it to deliver it for you. That doesn’t work so well in the age of commercial spam, and so network operators don’t do it anymore. The idea that one network can simply tell another that it’s got a route to certain IPs scares some operators, who see this as a system that would be very vulnerable to attack. There’s discussion on some blogs, mailing lists and message boards that this incident will get network operators to start using more secure forms of BGP that check carefully to make sure that another network is who it says it is, and that it has authority over the addresses it wants to route, before accepting its instructions.
NANOG, the North American Network Operators Group, has a long and intriguing thread, which includes technical discussion on fixing the problem, speculation on how to prevent such accidents/attacks in the future… and political arguments about the Islamic world. At least one network operator threatened to block all routing changes from 17557 - Pakistan Telecom - while others pointed out that, even on “a sleepy Sunday”, it took less than two hours to fix this problem. In other words, even if a network operator wanted to “attack” the rest of the network by propogating bad IPs, they’d likely be shut down pretty quickly.
I’m always interested when realworld and network politics intersect. While issues like this take some effort to understand, the solutions offered and adopted on lists like NANOG can have profound implications for how the Internet works for everyone. It bothers me a great deal that there’s routine discussions on some forums on how to block entire nations from accessing a website. I’d be very disappointed to discover that some network operators began blocking routing information from Pakistan based on what, I suspect, was a mistake… but I wouldn’t be surprised.
At its heart, the Internet is based on trust. That trust has been badly abused over the past decade, and the net as we know it today is a patchwork of trust and verification. I don’t know who you are, but you’re able to read this blog entry from (pretty much) any IP address in the world. But when you go to comment, I try to verify that you’re a human being using a CAPTCHA… and Akismet tries to verify that you’re not a spammer by checking your comments against other comments identified as spam. This doesn’t always work - I end up blocking more comments than I mean to, but with over a million attempts to post spam on this blog in the last 18 months, running comments without verification would be disastrous.
What worries me is when we move from verification strategies to strategies that simply deny access based on preconceptions about national identity and character. Yes, it sucks that there’s a lot of spam and fraud originating from Nigeria. Yes, it’s a drag that Pakistan decided to censor YouTube. But it would be truly, truly stupid for network operators to stop accepting certain types of traffic from these countries due to laziness and prejudice.
Lots more information on the situation and the tech behind it at Data Center Knowledge and at Renesys. Apologies in advance for anything I’ve gotten wrong in trying to offer a readable gloss on what’s a very complex technical issue.
Imran Jamal is at the Berkman meeting in Istanbul as the “unofficial UK representative” of the Burma Global Action Network, a group that advocates for the monks and citizens who protested the Burmese junta during the “Saffron Revoluion”. His focus is on the use of Facebook for digital activism, reporting his experiences using Facebook during a recent campaign.
He reminds us that Burma has been a dictatorship since 1962, when the military junta took over from a democratic government. The junta now calls itself the “State Peace and Development Council” - SPDC - a truly Orwellian name. Since the 8888 uprising (a widespread protest on August 8, 1988) the nation has been officially named “Myanmar” - Jamal contends, “It’s another way to make the world forget about Burma.”
Burma vaulted back onto the global stage in August 2007, with the “Saffron Revolution” - widespread economic protests led by Burmese monks. To document the events in Burma and to coordinate events in solidarity, Jamal and others began a Facebook group. The group, at its peak, reached 440,000 users, a fairly astounding number. The users it reached were different from the dedicated activists who were reading the main Burma advocacy websites. Jamal feels like the Facebook group served as a clearinghouse for information, as some of the Burma advocacy sites don’t work well together.
Some of the “features” of Facebook are problematic when using the tool as a professional organizer. The “wall” of the Burma Facebook group was a very popular feature… but thousands of comments asked whether the protests should be about “Burma” or “Myanmar”, a debate that’s taken place for years and has no good resolution. As the administrator of a Facebook group, you have limited control over your page. Messages can get lost - during the peak of the campaign, over a hundred pages of status messages appeared per day. In that flood of data, it’s possible to lose key messages, like the announcement of an event in Mongolia. There were major layout changes the organizers wanted to implement, but they weren’t possible within the Facebook system.
The Facebook group didn’t attempt to raise money - it partnered with an outside foundation to support that work. Instead, it focused on bringing as large a group as possible together. The people who got involved weren’t dedicated activists, for the most part. They were bored students, clicking on their friend’s links, possibly being drawn in by some of the striking images of monks marching in the streets. The hope is that some percentage of the people involved with these groups could turn into long-term advocates, but Jamal characterizes many of the users as “serial activists”, moving from Darfur to Burma to whatever cause is next.
There were clear upsides to the Burma Fcebook group. At the very least, it worked as an intermediary between the different Burma activist groups, some of which don’t communicate well with one another, and many of which are poor at communicating with the wider world. But there were a lot of downsides as well. The organizers found themselves characterized as spammers by the Facebook operators because they were sending too many messages a day.
Jamal wonders whether Facebook is simply a glorified petition. “It’s very easy for peopl to join, but there’s no guarantee they come back, and it’s not neccesarily the tool for building an activist base.” One of the major things the BGAN group tried to do is move dedicated users to their website, in the hopes they would get more engaged with the effort, and that communication could be organized outside the Facebook structure.
In a discussion after the talk, people speculated that Facebook might be more anonymous than blogging, suggesting that the Facebook operators would be loath to release information on Burmese users posting information on Facebook. Jamal explained that most Burmese bloggers weren’t actually posting directly, but were sending information to friends outside Burma via the phone, rather than posting online. Given the pervasiveness of surveillance in Burma, it’s likely that posting to Facebook is as dangerous as posting to a blog from within the nation.
Another update from the Berkman internet and democracy meeting in Istanbul:
Ken Banks, the creator of FrontlineSMS, offers a presentation on the strengths and weaknesses of mobile phones for activism. His software is a clever and powerful tool that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone to send a large number of SMS messages. The software runs on the laptop and can send a message - through cable to a mobile phone or through a GSM model - to a list of recipients. It can be quite slow - Ken says that on old Nokia mobiles, it sends about eight messages a minute, and overwhelms the phone in the process - but it’s vastly faster than manually sending thousands of SMS messages.
Banks developed the tool in response to a situation in Kruger National Park in South Africa. Large numbers of people were displaced from their land in the process of creating nature preserves. There was a strong need to communicate with these dispersed populations, but there’s very few media that can reach these populations. Banks was inspired to create a tool that communicated with these groups via SMS and hacked a tool together in Finland for use in South Africa. (In a sad note, the tool wasn’t used very effectively in the Kruger situation, as the government did a very poor job of involving the community in the decisions to create preserves.)
The tool is being used by several dozen groups in over forty nations. A Lebanese group uses it for education on human rights; in South Africa, another group uses the tool to provide feedback to community radio programs; an Albanian group uses it to monitor corruption in public services; in Uganda, the tool is used for community healthcare. Banks says that he’s amazed the tool has been useful to people beyond the ones he’s originally intended to serve.
One of the major applications for FrontlineSMS is election monitoring. Banks tells us about a project that allowed 800 Filipino election monitors to coordinate their work via SMS, performing very thorough monitoring of elections. A similar project in Nigeria put the ability to monitor elections into the hands of private citizens, not official election monitors. The results were interesting - the citizen monitors were very interested in getting good news out about the Nigerian elections, combatting the perception Nigeria has for corruption and for election violence. This may not be a completely accurate picture of the recent Nigerian elections, but it shows the desire of the people in Nigeria to combat negative reporting and stereotypes about the country.
Recently, Banks has been working with an NGO in a highly repressive nation that’s looking for ways to deliver audio content via mobile phone. He’s working with Tad Hirsch’s Dialup Radio project to help make it possible for NGOs to deliver radio-style content via mobile phone. In conjunction with Dialup Radio, Banks developed a tool that can accept thousands of SMS messages and make them available over the web. This would allow a radio station to conduct polling via SMS and then display results on a website, perhaps allowing for a voting system to prioritize questions that are submitted.
FrontlineSMS is more expensive than solutions that depend on the cooperation of local phone operators - it’s expensive for an individual citizen to send thousands of messages, while in partnership with a phone company, you might be able to bring these costs down. But Frontline is very useful for grassroots groups that don’t want to cooperate with the local telcos - Banks tells us about an application in Pakistan, where the organizers sent thousands of SMS messages from a laptop in the trunk of a car that drove thoughout a city to avoid detection.
Banks reminds us that there’s a huge gap between software developers and practitioners. People who develop mobile applications often don’t understand the context in which they’re going to be used. “Tech people vho write things requiring Nokia 95s really don’t understand that people in Uganda don’t walk around with those kinds of phones.” It’s important to introduce developers to the people who actually use these tools to ensure they’re appropriately designed. Banks also wonders how he would feel if his tool had been used to spread ethnic hatred in the post-election violence in Kenya - it’s an important reminder that any sufficiently powerful tool is a double-edged sword.
I’m in Turkey this week participating in a Berkman conference on internet and democracy - it’s a meeting of activists from almost twenty countries, talking about ways that activists can use the internet to promote democratic movements. Many of the sessions are off the record or under Chatham Rules, to protect the identity of people speaking here. But the first speaker this morning is Sami ben Gharbia, the leader of Global Voices Advocacy and a leading Tunisian free speech advocate, and he’s not exactly a shy guy. :-)
Sami’s presentation is on video advocacy and mashups, with a focus on advocacy in Tunisia. While Sami and other Tunisian activists have worked hard on other free speech campaigns around the world, this presentation focuses specifically on activism in Tunisia, specifically around the legislative and presidential elections of 2004 and the World Summit on Internet and Society in 2005. Sami and other activists were urging a boycott of the 2004 elections, which they expected to be rigged. And they wanted to ensure that the political and internet leaders from around the world who came to Tunisia in 2005 would encounter the Yezzi Fock Ben Ali (Enough is enough, Ben Ali) campaign that they were running.
Sami argues that Tunisia is one of the most successful propoganda machines in the world - despite being a highly repressive nation, it’s rarely criticized by Europe and North America - he believes that Tunisia is viewed as a model for repressive dictatorships. To take on such a propoganda machine, Sami argues that you need to create your own propoganda, including video, which is easy for non-activists to understand and be moved by.
He shows some early videos, often flash animations that have turned into videos distributed on YouTube and DailyMotion. One shows Ben Ali in a washing machine, making the point that a military dictator can’t wash off his military and security background. Another shows reports of human rights organizations about Tunisia and urges Tunisian internet users to “enlarge their vision.”
Several of Sami’s videos use footage of animals. One shows a gorilla looking directly at a camera. Her motions are subtitled and tell the viewer, “I’m a primate, you’re not a primate. You’ve got the power to vote for someone other than Ben Ali.” Another video uses footage of lions chasing and killing a zebra - the point is that manufacturers of filtering and censorship software are chasing down and killing freedom of speech. The film ends with a slide that says, “Smartfilter - your dirty business is killing our freedom of expression”.
A video I’ve written about at length is Astrubal’s remix of the Apple 1984 commercial. Years before American activists remixed the Apple ad to promote Obama over Hillary Clinton, Astrubal used the commercial to protest against Ben Ali’s never-ending presidency. Another video focuses on the 404 error page - a page the Tunisian internet authorities show when a site is blocked, to try to fool users into believing that the internet is experiencing a technical problem, rather than being censored. Sami tells us that “404″ evokes a Peugeot motor car, and offers a video clip from a 1962 commercial parodying these 404 errors.
Much of the Tunisian video activism focuses on humor. Sami points to an article that appeared in Tunisian newspaper La Presse - “the Pravda of Tunisia” - that reported that a city in Italy had named an avenue for Tunisian president Ben Ali. Sami and others researched the street using Google Maps and discovered that the “avenue” was actually a small alley, a dead end, in a tiny village. To show the disparity, they created a video that highlighted the claim in the newspaper and then showed the actual road on an online map.
Google Maps and Google Earth are increasingly popular in Tunisian activism. A new video uses the theme of 1001 Nights and features Ben Ali and his wife on a flying carpet, touring Tunisian presidential palaces via Google Maps. Another video looks at the use of the Tunisian presidential plane. Sami and Astrubal started searching for images of the Tunisian presidential plane on “planespotter” websites - they discovered that the plane had made at least 13 trips outside the country in an interval when onl one official trip had been reported. They used Google Earth to show the thirteen trips and raise the question about who was using the plane and why.
Sami mentions that the video was blocked in Tunisia within five days - the Tunisian authorities blocked DailyMotion, where it had been posted. (Oddly enough, they haven’t blocked either Google Maps or Google Earth.) But Sami had been promoting the video on his blog in Arabic, and Astrubal promoted it on his in French. When Global Voices picked up the story, it became accessible to the Anglophone world as well. Sami credits my blog post on the situation with bringing the story to the attention of Foreign Policy magazine, which has now reported both on the Tunisian activism, and offered advice on how you, too, can become a presidential plane spotter.
One of the questions offered after the talk is whether video advocacy is appropriate for low-bandwidth environments. There’s evidence that videos, once they go viral, are shared even by people who don’t have high bandwdith - Sami has seen some of the videos he’s made being distributed on DVD in Tunisia.
Like many of you, I’ve been following the events in Kenya closely the past three weeks. One way to measure the continuing protest and unrest is to follow the story through Ushahidi, a citizen media site put together by friends of mine to allow Kenyans to post news about post-election unrest and violence. Each incident is added to a map, giving a visualization of the ways in which reactions to a rigged election have spread across the nation.
Most of the news on the Ushahidi blog is extremely sad. Some reports feature stories that are getting play in international media, like the shooting of youth by government soliders in Kisumu - video of the incident made its way onto Kenyan television and has been widely circulated on the internet. Many of the incidents documented on Ushahidi point to violence from state actors against protesters, something that’s become depressingly common as Kibaki’s government continues to maintain a “no tolerance” policy against protests, including peaceful protest.
But Ushahidi is also documenting stories that don’t get as much coverage internationally, or even within Kenya. A recent report on “Mama Peter” in Eldoret focuses on one aspect of the unrest - property crimes. An entrepreneur who’d invested in a hair salon and a training school for hair dressers found herself fleeing violence in Eldoret and the destruction of her stores. These reports aren’t as dramatic or brutal as video of soldiers shooting unarmed men, but they add to the complexity and sadness of the current situation in much of Kenya.
Ushahidi is tracking hopeful stories as well. A category of incidents on the site is “Peace Efforts”, community-based projects that are attempting to bring Kenyans together while other factors tear them apart. A report on a meeting of senior doctors in Nairobi begins:
A group of senior doctors concerned about the escalating insecurity met to think through the issues of the day and in particular to consider their possible role in the mediation process.
Their starting point is the fact that they as doctors are able to work across tribal lines while their patients in particular the politicians seem to be unable to do so.
In the long run, I suspect tools like Ushahidi - which now accepts reports via SMS - will be useful for everyone working in citizen media when events grip a nation or a region. I also suspect that the tool is important for Recovery 2.0 efforts, where having visualizations of people in trouble is a first step in deciding where and how to deploy aid. It’s too early to be looking for silver linings in a situation that’s still rapidly evolving, but I suspect the reaction of the Kenyan tech and blogger community will be one of the long-term positives of this situation.
