Tracker Editor's Blog » free speech

Good, Evil, Digital: The Promise and Peril of Life in the Cyber Lane (link suite overview)

J.A. Ginsburg — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 01:50:26 +0000

TrackerNews link suite on internet freedom, internet security and the power of digital networks. Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

“Good, Evil, Digital” is one of the largest link-suite “stories” we have ever featured on the aggregator, with more than four dozen links to articles, books, videos, websites and software tools. It has also been one of the most fascinating to research and challenging to assemble.

Internet freedom and internet security are two sides to the same coin:

Social networks are powerful tools for organizing “Revolutions 2.0,” as well as convenient intelligence-gathering sites
To promote openness, Wikileaks and its clones operate in secrecy
Human rights NGO’s use the web to expose abuse, but must protect themselves from cyber-retribution
Crisis mapping, a key tool for humanitarian response, requires secure protocols to keep potentially sensitive information safe

Likewise, determining who’s a hero and who’s a villain isn’t always so clear cut. When ad hoc vigilante “hackivists” under the theatrically ominous moniker “Anonymous” go after the inarguably awful Iranian government, it’s Robin Hood in bits and bytes. It is a tougher call for “Operation: Titstorm,” which targeted the Australian government over censorship issues, using porn as the standard bearer for free speech.

The curious case of Aaron Barr, a software security expert singled out for attack, crosses the line straight to creepy. Barr, who had boasted of being able to strip the hacktivists of their most precious asset—anonymity—found himself on the wrong end of some sharply aimed code. The Anonymous crew tunneled through tens of thousands of Barr’s emails, making them public, along with his cell number, address and social security number. Found among the email booty, a possible smoking gun, implicating not one, not two, but three security firms proposing a variety of dirty tricks—including cyber attacks—on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America.

In the midst of all this cyber-sniping, some are calling for a “Geneva Convention” to outline the rules of cyberwarfare, spare “civilian targets” and inject some ethics into battle. Others say the “war” analogy doesn’t really work when dealing with an enemy can’t be seen or even tracked all that easily. The “Stuxnet” worm that attacked Iranian nuclear facilities, for example, was designed to cover the evidence of its own existence. It went about wrecking gyroscopes with commands to speed up and slow down while simultaneously generating data reporting that everything was operating as it should.

Meanwhile, the award for innovation in mobile data distribution goes to the Jihadists, for whom Bluetooth has become a “…a distribution mechanism of choice. ” From crunching video files to developing special encryption-friendly operating systems, they’ve got it down.

Taking the opposite tack, Egyptian-Googler-turned-freedom-fighter Wael Ghonim and a network-savvy generation placed their bets on openness, struggling to keep a nascent revolution alive through posts on Facebook and Twitter. Throughout the 18 days of unprecedented protest, the government tried everything it could to throttle communication, including shutting down the country’s internet and cell phone services.

Despite the limits, the “Facebook revolution” prevailed, not only sweeping a despot from office, but also shredding in the process Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis on activism and the “strong ties” of personal friendships versus the “weak ties” of internet networks. Clearly, is not an either/or choice, but a powerful cross-reinforcing combination.

Indeed, at this point, the only force that could possibly bring down the internet and put an end to this furious, sometimes frightening, often marvelous flowering of digital communication is an extra-terrestrial event: a solar storm. And it could happen. After years of quietly shining in the distance 93 million miles away, the sun is starting what scientists dryly describe as a “more active phase.” Tongues of particle-charged plasma are reaching across the heavens to short circuits here on Earth. In 1859, a solar storm fried telegraph lines. Today, that same storm would cause an estimated $2 trillion worth of “initial damage,” which could take a decade or more to fix. What Mubarek couldn’t manage, Apollo can do in a blink.

________________________________________________

Additional links include:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on internet freedoms (video) / PBS/Newshour

“Twitter’s Biz Stone on Starting a Revolution” (print/audio) / NPR/Fresh Air

“The Net Delusion” by Evgeny Morozov (book website)

“Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks” / TED

“WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency” by Micah Sifry (book excerpt) / Huffington Post

“2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks” / Berkman Center, Harvard

Tactical Technology Collective (website)

The Tor Project (website)

“Malcolm Gladwell is #Wrong” by Maria Popova / ChangeObserver

and more!

All links become part of the TrackerNews’ searchable archive.

Free Press?

J.A. Ginsburg — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:46:52 +0000

Last night, I posted a record 12 links on a single topic on TrackerNews: a dozen stories from around the world about efforts to thwart a free press. I could easily have posted more. Here is what made the cut:

A story about Russia’s efforts to recast Stalin as a hero. In a recent raid, computer hard-drives full of inconvenient documentation to the contrary were carted off from the offices of a human rights group. Also, a new treason law that not only threatens media, but any NGO that maintains an office in Russia.

Critics warned the loose wording will give authorities ample leeway to prosecute those who cooperate with international rights groups.

Under current treason statutes, some NGOs are not considered “foreign organizations,” meaning a person who passes a state secret to an NGO might not be considered a traitor.

Some of Russia’s most prominent right activists, including Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Civic Assistance director Svetlana Gannushkina, said the bill in fact gives authorities the power to prosecute anyone deemed to have “harmed the security of the Russian Federation.”

It is “legislation in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler,” the activists said in a joint statement — legislation that “returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s.”

“Online and in Jail” - the snappy headline from an article summarizing a new Committee to Protect Journalists report that found 45% of all “media workers” jailed in 2008 were web-based.

“Online journalism has changed the media landscape and the way we communicate with each other,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “But the power and influence of this new generation of online journalists has captured the attention of repressive governments around the world, and they have accelerated their counterattack.”

China - back to its old “Great Firewall” tricks, restricting web access and harassing bloggers. Sri Lanka is in lock-step, jamming BBC broadcasts and forbidding a leading newspaper from printing the name of the president’s brother, who happens to be the defense minister. ICT4Peace’s Sanjana Huttotuwa paints a bleak future for the nation’s bloggers :

Bloggers in Sri Lanka aren’t recognised as journalists (save for a single statement by leading media freedom organisations in 2007) and do not enjoy the legal protection afforded to traditional media personnel. Independent online media websites have been increasingly hacked into this year. With traditional print media now embracing citizen journalism and with web audiences / consumers growing apace, there is no doubt that the regime’s attention will focus on the web and Internet in the future. Arguably, this already evident is some of the legislation it proposes for media regulation.

In Kenya, the Communications Amendment Bill – which still awaits the president’s signature to become law - would give the state the authority to raid newsrooms, control broadcast content and take stations off the air. Malaria researcher Bill Breiger wonders whether this aversion to bad news at all costs could impact the monitoring of malaria treatment programs. After all, as a Gates Foundation-funded study released earlier this week on vaccine delivery stats shows, corrupt regimes falsifying records to skim off millions of donor dollars isn’t unheard of.

Committee to Project Journalists audio slideshow: "From Bad to Worse in Zimbabwe"

In Zimbabwe, which has a knack for making every other “failed state” look slightly less failed, “press freedom is almost extinct,” according veteran journalist Geoff Hill. That was back in June. Today, confronted with a massive outbreak of cholera that has sickened 20,000+ and killed over 1,100, press freedom seems like a dim distant memory. Robert Mugabe can deny the epidemic or blame it on the British and no one inside the country can question it.

____________________________

Australian blogger Antony Loewenstein traveled to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Cuba, China for his latest book, The Blogging Revolution: Going Online in Repressive Regimes, He found plenty of encouraging against-the-odds tales, but the game of cyber cat-and-mouse gets riskier by the day. And though the Global Network Initiative, an all-star effort to protect free speech on the web, is certainly a move in the right direction, it is difficult to say what tangible difference it can make against governments aggressively hostile to the cause.

In the U.S., the biggest threat to the fourth estate is economic rather than political. The New York Times has been forced to take out a mortgage to pay its bills, while the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times recently declared bankruptcy. Still, even in its weakened state, the Tribune broke a wiretapping story that led to the indictment of a governor on corruption charges last week.

Take a free and independent press out of the equation and you get Stalin as a hero, a Zimbabwean despot who makes up the “truth” as he goes along, creative corruption and a lot of suffering and death that might possibly be prevented. A free press alone isn’t a fix. But knowledge is power and ignorance can be lethal.

( *twitter-friendly url: http://tinyurl.com/95vce9)