DigiActive.org

DigiActive Memo: US Embargoes Harm Activists

DigiActive’s Mary Joyce, Andreas Jungherr and Daniel Schultz recently created a policy memo on the harmful effects of American software embargoes on digital activists around the world. It was presented for a Congressional hearing before the US Helsinki Commission.

A brief overview:

In the digital age, where a “good” is a string of code that can be delivered anywhere in the world with the click of a mouse, even today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough.  By preventing access to blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media, current embargo policies harm the very activists who are furthering our common goals of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian governments free to spread propaganda through a range of state-controlled media outlets.

The full version is below.  Click to download the .pdf:

Not Smart Enough:
How America’s “Smart” Sanctions Harm the World’s Digital Activists

by Mary Joyce, Andreas Jungherr and Daniel Schultz[1]
The DigiActive Working Group on Sanction Reform for the Digital Age

A Wave of Attacks on the World’s Digital Activists

In the winter and spring of this year, a wave of attacks on digital activists began.  In Zimbabwe, the web site of one the nation’s strongest pro-democracy groups, Kubatana, was threatened with being shut down.  In Belarus, another pro-democracy web site, this one representing the Belarussian American Association, received the same threat.  In February bloggers in Iran received a similar notice that their blogs would be suspended, this in spite of research by the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society that the Iranian blogosphere is a vibrant arena for both supporters and opponents of the current regime.  In Sudan, aid workers are unable to download Google Earth and its “Crisis in Darfur” map, which would give them important information on sites of violence.  In April users in Syria were temporarily blocked from using the social network LinkedIn, though social networks have played an important role in organizing grassroots citizen movements in countries from Egypt and Morocco to Colombia.

… Perpetrated by United States’ Embargo Policies

Who was behind this wave of attacks?  Was it President Mugabe? President Lukashenko? President Assad?  No.  The perpetrator of these attacks on pro-democracy activists was none other than the United States government and American companies adhering to its embargo regimes.

The United States has several embargo regimes related both to particular products (such as encryption software) and to individuals.  These sanctions were designed to protect US interests while limiting the effect of these measures to our nation’s enemies.  Yet in the digital age, where a “good” is a string of code that can be delivered anywhere in the world with the click of a mouse, even today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough.  By preventing access to blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media, current embargo policies harm the very activists who are furthering our common goals of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian governments free to spread propaganda through a range of state-controlled media outlets.

… With American Firms Caught in an Untenable Position

These embargo policies leave American firms in a difficult position.  Overwhelmed by a mass of overlapping sanctions, many take the most conservative position and simply cut off all clients in targeted countries, even though sanctions target only a few individuals.  This was the policy of the Utah-based company Bluehost, which was responsible for cutting off users in Zimbabwe, Belarus, and Iran earlier this year.  Especially in light of potential fines, Bluehost decided to play it safe by cutting off all users in embargoed countries, rather than constantly cross-check their users against Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) lists.

Though activists may be frustrated with this kind of corporate decision-making, it is consistent with the firm’s role as a profit-making entity.  American companies may choose to promote ethical activity and protect activists in foreign nations, but this is hardly their purpose.  When protecting activists means potentially running afoul of the US government, it is not surprising that many firms choose to cut off activists to protect shareholder interests.

New Embargo Policies for the Digital Age

In light of these private-sector realities, responsibility for protecting foreign democracy activists falls to the US government.  DigiActive’s Working Group on Sanction Reform for the Digital Age recommends the following steps in order to bring about this reform:

1. Creation of a Single Body of Software Regulations: Members of the government bodies responsible for promulgating sanctions should conduct a thorough review of all regulations and legislation related to embargoes on software including, but not limited to, the Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations and the sanctions programs maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.  This review would result in the creation of a single volume of software policies which, at a minimum, will make it easier for US firms to abide by current rules and, by clarifying their responsibilities, would allow them to follow the letter of the law rather than taking the unnecessarily conservative positions they are currently applying to avoid the risk of transgressing unclear embargo regulations.
2. Stakeholder Review of Software Regulations:  Once this single body of regulation is created, stakeholders should be invited to comment and suggest modifications to the existing rules.  This stakeholder group should include, but not be limited to, representatives of the agencies responsible for promulgating and enforcing the sanctions, representatives of American firms who must abide by the sanctions, and experts in digital activism and democracy promotion.
3. Promulgation of New Regulations:  Based on this stakeholder review, DigiActive suggests that a new set of sanctions be promulgated that recognize 1) that software embargoes function quite differently than embargoes on physical goods 2) that any software embargo is highly susceptible to failure because of the ease in circumventing online blocks to digital goods and 3) that access to new media tools is a great benefit to democracy activists, who lack other means of organization and message dissemination, while being of little use to authoritarian regimes, who have entire state apparatuses at their disposal.

We at the DigiActive Working Group on Sanction Reform for the Digital Age are optimistic about the positive outcome of this process and would like to offer our continuing assistance.  You may contact us through our web site at www.DigiActive.org .

[1] This policy memo was originally written for a Congressional briefing panel before the Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe (October 22, 2009)

To download the full version, please click

Twitter list of top digital activism resources

We’ve begun a TweepML list of some of the influential Twitter users in the digital activism space, primarily individuals, groups and organizations who are focusing their time on following the digital activism space from a research/analytic/reporting standpoint.

The list can be found here.

We want to be as inclusive as possible and would love to expand this list.  Our goal is to get a Top 100 for the field (we need 75 more).

But we need your help! Please Twitter Kate, send her an email (kate @ katebrodock (dot) com) or leave a comment with additions to the list.

Iranian Elections, Information Sharing and Twitter

Earlier this week, amidst travel and trying really hard to work, I followed the events of what was happening in Iran post-election.  I followed it all on Twitter.

There are many comments I could make on the events, but I wanted to highlight something that will be important for how information and participation happens in the months and years to come.

The fact is, we are all becoming a larger part of the information dissemination mechanisms that were once reserved for formal media channels.  DigiActive has reported many instances of citizen journalism, on-the-ground reporting and information gathering, but now we’re talking about the addition of a process of broader dissemination.

We’re “regular” people, we have the information coming to us, and it’s our choice to pass it on or not.  The reason I  read hardly a single newspaper article on the topic all day was because I was getting my information handed to me by people from Boston, Europe, Iran… everywhere.  Regular people.  I got all the relevant links I needed from those 140-character posts.

The fact is, we are all now part of the information dissemination mechanism now.  When I reported on the Moldovan protests in April, I noted that part of the process that we were seeing was not necessarily just that the protesters were using social media tools to get their message out, but that the resulting international furvor that erupted was fueled by other people who were not on the ground.  Not even in the country.

This time around, we saw this same process magnified immensely.  A message from Mousavi highlights how important this process was not only in what was said – One Person = One Broadcaster – but also in the the resulting relay-like speed that the message reached the world.

Mousavi recognized the the power of this information stream.  Clay Shirky alluded to it in his Q&A with TED on the topic, and colleague Gaurav Mishra highlighted it in his analysis of the events as well.

No one was told to do anything with the information coming out of Iran, or had any explicit instructions to do so.  The messages could have remained dead in the water.  But we were all engaged by what was happening, we were interacting with other people through discussion, and we genuinely wanted to participate by adding to the conversation, spreading the information and learning more about the situation.

The fact that people had real-time, important information in their hands that they could “touch and feel,” and their ability to actively join in the conversation and the spread of vital information made momentary journalists out of us all.  And it will continue to do so more and more in the future.

Moldovan Protests: Was it really a “Twitter Revolution”?

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/creepysleepy/3429118253/

Since Tuesday’s protests and riots in the Moldovan capital Chisinau, there has been much analysis on how this group of protesters was formed.  Initial reports focused primarily on the use of Twitter, while paying scant reference to other social media tools, let alone the still relevant power of human mobilization.  The extent to which Twitter has been connected to the event has even led to unfortunate outcomes such as the charging of Natalia Morar, a Moldovan activist blamed for starting the “revolution” using the application.

The analysis on the technological aspects of this event in the past few days have revealed a different story.  It still involves Twitter, but Twitter has a different role.  While Twitter had a part in the pre-protest mobilization in and around Chisinau on Monday night, it may not have necessarily turned the protests into mobs or rioters, nor did it necessarily invoke the violence that occurred on Tuesday, as some believe.

As Evegeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, pointed out, Twitter’s more important role was getting the information out to the world, bringing it international attention and keeping the story alive and buzzing, as well as acting as a channel to push out user-generated content from on the ground.  After some great immediate analysis of the Twitter scene in Moldova (which was a follow up to his initial, but still quite insightful assessment on Tuesday), Morozov found that there were actually very few registered Twitter users in the country, and he suspects that most of the Tweets on #pman were not on the ground and were elsewhere in the world, taking information and pushing it along.

Aside from the fact that the government of Moldova quickly shut down cell phone service for the square where the riots took place, it seems there is limited use for Twitter in terms of mobilization efforts once you already have people in the square.  The violence was somewhat self-contained and more of a product of human beings being human beings than a technologically enhanced provocation.  As you might predict, the use of a megaphone became more useful than using Twitter.

However, the broader set of social media tools beyond Twitter seems to have played a greater part in the process of mobilization than originally thought, as Daniel Bennett hints at in his blog post discussing the events.  One commenter to Bennet’s blog, Julien, stated that “If it were social media, I’d say it were rather social networks like Facebook. I saw messages from Moldovan contacts the evening before asking to gather for the first meetings on Monday.”  Even more telling was this comment by zerolab:

“As evisoft stated, Twitter was used for the initial organization and consequent spread of information. Add facebook statuses tied to twitter updates and a few other means like SMSes, word of mouth, LiveJournal.

There is no doubt about Twitter’s role on starting/organizing the protests, but they’ve evolved into something bigger and way too hard to coordinate anything.”

There’s no doubt that there was a complex system of social media tools that were being used prior to and during the event, but they went beyond Twitter, and included blog aggregators like blogosfera.md, Facebook, and regionally-specific social networks such as Odnoklassniki.

The use of Twitter cannot, however, be discounted.  This is a very interesting case of more sophisticated tactics for activism.  People have realized the ability of the tool not only to draw people to your cause, mobilize efforts or provide information, but they were able to harness it’s ability to spread information with the explicit goal of attracting attention to a particular event that otherwise may have gone largely unnoticed.  For them, personally, this means international pressure on a government and an election that determines their very well-being.

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Guide: Quick ‘n Easy Guide to Online Advocacy

Title: Quick ‘n Easy Guide to Online Advocacy

Author: Tactical Technology Collective

Published By: Collective Commons (2009)

What is it?: This guide offers ways to use social networking and web 2.0 tools to improve advocacy campaigns.  It aims to expose advocates to online services that are quick to use and easy to understand.

The guide provides descriptions of online services including social networking sites, image and video hosting services, and services that enhance an organizations web presence. The guide also offers advice on where and when to use these services.

Case studies, security concerns as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various web services are discussed, with the aim of improving advocates ability to conduct online advocacy campaigns.

It covers four main areas of internet services that may prove helpful:

• Informing and communicating
• Documenting and visualizing
• Mobilizing and coordinating
• Bypassing and accessing

Campaign: Bangladeshis microblog the elections to ensure transparency

On 29 December 2008, Bangladesh held its 9th Parliamentary elections, but this time there was a new twist.

Global Voices reported that Software company Somewhere In would offer to the citizens of Bangladesh a set of internet and mobile tools that allowed for quick and easy dissemination of election news. Their motives were simple: offer a public forum where people can get real-time information and, more importantly, hold the government accountable.  In part of its open statement to the government, Somewhere In states:

“tomorrow, any update from any blogger has the potential to reach the whole world.

this time, for the first time in your political history, bloggers are watching you.”

On election day, people were urged to use either the internet or SMS message to report events of the day to the New Age website, which also provided direct synching with an interactive map.  The following tools were offered:

“bloggers share quick news to the election microblog
- just login and type from web or sms to 5455: ! your message

bloggers can sms directly to an interactive map
- send sms to 5455: ! your message @location regarding their district

bloggers can analyse and share political stories on the election blog

bloggers can share the latest microblogs through nearly any blog“

The results, continually updated, are displayed on the sites homepage, along with numerous blog posts with various information.

Importance: This joint business/citizen initiative is a big move towards increased transparency of a country that has, in recent years, topped the list of highest corruption rates in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (It was ranked most corrupt in 2005 and has slowly moved to number 147 in 2008) and has been under interim government (and military) rule for two years.

The full impact of the initiative is yet to be seen, however, its collaborative and public nature is sure to raise a few heads within the country and around the world.  We at Digiactive hope to see its effectiveness carried through and perhaps duplicated elsewhere.

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Campaign: Homeless Nation offers a place to tell stories and interact

Description: Homeless Nation was started by Daniel Cross, a documentary filmmaker who has highlighted Canada’s homeless population in several of his films. While gathering thousands of stories given by the homeless, most of which wouldn’t fit into the films, Cross envisioned a space where these reports wouldn’t be lost.

He thus created a social network that not only brought many of these stories to the forefront, but offered continued opportunities for sharing and interaction between the homeless and those interested in listening.  Furthermore, part of their mission is “ensuring that digital tools for media, learning and communication are made available for homeless Canadians.”

Tools: Internet, podcasting, video

Application: Armed with donated computer and video equipment, Homeless Nation “outreach workers” go to various drop centers (shelters, day-centers, squatting areas, etc) located in several Canadian metropolitan centers and create audio, video or written testimonials from the homeless, while also providing them internet and computer training.  Additionally, they provide a place online to find resources that offer food, shelter, healthcare etc.

It allows the homeless, who would otherwise not have access to the sorts of web-based communities that many of us are used to, to join in conversation, make connections with people and have a voice they may not otherwise have.

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Book Review: Activists and Innovation

Book Title
Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovation

[Hardcover Publish Date is 18 January 2009]

Author
Hayagreeva Rao

Subject
This book explores how innovations and new technologies are changing the way people mobilize  around a cause.  Rao offers several examples of how activists have gone against the mainstream and used various technologies and tools to their advantage.

He offers many examples of how this has occurred, but one of the most insightful conclusions he comes to is that some of the most successful examples are a combination of what Bob Sutton, who has worked closely with Rao, calls the “one-two punch of a “Hot Cause” and “Cool Solutions.”  He goes on to say:

A hot cause like deaths from tobacco or medical errors can be used as springboards to raise awareness, spark motivation, and ignite red-hot outrage.  And naming these as enemies is an important step in mobilizing a network or market. But creating the heat isn’t enough; the next step needs to be cool solutions.   This doesn’t just mean identifying technically feasible solutions, it also means finding ways to bind people together, to empower them to take steps that help solve the problem, and to create enduring commitment to implementing solutions.

Activists, or “market rebels,” are those who defy conventional communication channels and leverage existing digital technologies by introducing radical and innovative ways to use them.  Under this model, many of the examples highlighted on DigiActive indicate that the range of uses for these tools will broaden beyond what which they were originally “intended” for.

It sounds like a book that should be top on the reading list of anyone with a cause they feel strongly about who wants to utilize the technologies out there.

Using social networking tools in to combat drug abuse in South Africa

Description: A group of former drug users and gangsters have teamed up with Mr Marlon Parker, a PhD candidate and lecturer on IT at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, to offer an online platform for people to combat their own drug use and find support on their road to wellness.

The network is a response to the increased violence and drug abuse that has occurred in Cape Town in the past several years, a trend that is causing much restlessness in society.  By providing young members of the society who may be caught up in drug use or gang activity a place where they feel comfortable, they can begin opening up and receiving help from counselors.

Tools: Mxit

How they use the tools: Mxit is a mobile service that is used by 8.6 million people in Africa, and offers an easy way to send and receive text messages via mobile phone or internet.  Parker partners with school districts to offer a counseling service through Mxit to students, who can text in or use the platform’s chat capabilities via General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) as opposed to SMS.

For his PhD thesis, Mr Parker has been researching how technology can be used for community change.

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Campaign: Ali Ardekani videoblogs about the everyday life of a Muslim

A few weeks ago, Talia wrote about the Ramadan blog that had been started by three Muslims giving their perspectives on the Holy Month.  This week, I wanted to highlight another activism campaign along the same vein.

Description: Ali Ardekani, Co-Founder of Ummah Films, has launched a series of videoblogs that highlight issues concerning both the identity and image of Muslims around the world.  Under the alias “Baba Ali” and using Bill Cosby as a role model, Ali attempts to paint Muslims, especially American Muslims, as ordinary.  Using his comedic talents, he directly addresses some of the views that people may have of  extremism in “all Muslims.” He does not deny the fundamentalist views that there are held by some Muslims, but clearly does not condone them.

As a response to finding little to no positive or “regular” depictions of Muslims after conducting a video search online, it is his attempt to encourage discussion without accusations, mass-labels or defensiveness by talking about “everyday situations” that Muslims find themselves in as part of American society and that everyone “can relate to.”  He upholds some Muslims customs or beliefs but often ridicules others in a light-hearted way.  He is part of a larger movement of younger-generation American Muslims who feel they lack a voice in mainstream media, and want to change the current image they see as given to them by the wider public.

Tools Used: YouTube, various other video-sharing sites, videoblogging

How it’s Worked: As of now, Ali’s films and other films have a very large following of American Muslims on YouTube.  This confirms the desire for this group to support movements that have the potential of positively changing their image in the eyes of the public in general.  Of the responses by people outside of this community, there are both positive responses and negative responses.  Some individuals or groups have responded with their own videoblogs.  Several of his and other’s videos have found their way to mainstream media, notably on the Islam Channel in the UK, New York Times and USA Today, and he is frequently asked to speak at various conferences.

A few of Ali’s videos are below.

Muslim While Flying

$25,000 Muslim Weddings

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