Filed under: Ethiopia | Tags: Arab-spring, Egypt, Freedom, muBARTak, Orwell, Revolution, Technology, Twitter
20 August, 2011
I don’t know if it started in Iran, but it was during the Iranian uprising last year that a new revolution first came to my attention. Protesters turned the tables on the government (almost) with the help of a magical little creature called Twitter. Citizens with cell-phones took raw pictures and videos of their realities and instantly broadcast them to the world. One image, showing the dead body of a young woman, still lingers in my mind, as do chilling tweets describing violent oppression as the Iranian government cracked-down on those individuals with the impudence to stand against it. At the time, it was not uncommon for those tweeters to fall silent, never to be heard from again.
I first learned about the Twitter Revolution through the concerned postings of a handful of my Facebook friends, who were losing nights of sleep in order to sit up, ‘watching’ the events unfold on their Twitter-feeds. (As an aside, I think it’s interesting that Iran has remained largely silent throughout the Arab-Spring. Did the government successfully beat the dissenting masses into terrified submission, or did they only succeed in blocking the websites?) Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were heralded at the time as ushering in a new era of freedom for the oppressed of the world. The lone camera at Tiananmen Square had been replaced by a million people with a million cameras. No longer could governments get away with bloody murder without the world knowing. No longer would the voices of dissent be isolated islands in a sea of fear. Things were going to change.
And sure enough, they have. From the taseing at the Vancouver airport to the murder of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka, cell-phone videos, uploaded and viewed by millions have tipped the scales of justice and forced the hands of power around the globe. The ongoing Arab-Spring represents the so-far culmination of this movement. The massive protests in Tahir Square and across Egypt were organized, documented and given incredible momentum by the power of tiny mobile devices. The ongoing violent repression of anti-government protests in Syria continues to be broadcast daily, in living colour, on televisions, computer monitors and smart-phones around the world. In Yemen, Tunisia, Libya and Bahrain (and anywhere else), technology has and is changing everything, making anything possible and literally rewriting history … again.
Much of the world is celebrating, and indeed, why shouldn’t they be? The power of mobile devices, wirelessly connected to the internet is realizing its promise to usher in a new era of global freedom, as one despotic regime after another is forced to contend with the power of the informed and organized masses. Those governments that attempt to restrict internet freedoms, from Libya to Cuba to China, are chastised and berated by civilians, businesses and heads of state alike. Internet freedom, they say, and the open-communication it facilitates, is the right of all people, and no one should stand in its way.
At least that was the story until a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago, riots broke out across London. The rioters, we are told, made exceptional use of BlackBerry Messaging (BBM) in coordinating their attacks and in evading the police. Research in Motion, the makers of BlackBerry, agreed to cooperate with police in providing records of BBM messages sent during the riots. Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that restrictions be applied to websites that could be used to coordinate unrest. All civilian disturbances are equal on Animal Farm, but some civilian disturbances are more equal than others. The exercise of freedom is great when it’s on the other side of the world. The exercise of freedom in the West is far less desirable.
A few months ago, for the second time in three years, police officers on the San Francisco Subway murdered a poor man. The first incident, which was caught on cell-phone video, involved a man being held face-down and executed at point-blank range. The officer received 7-months in prison for his crime. A July protest in response to the most recent incident shut down part of the San Francisco Subway (called the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART) for a short time. A second protest was planned for August 11. That protest never really happened, because for the first time in American history, officials turned off the cell-network to prevent the protesters from organizing. Mubarak did the same when the Tahir Square protests were accelerating, opting to silence dissent by stifling the capacity of protesters to communicate. (The San Francisco issue has since been dubbed “muBARTak.”)
Of course, in San Francisco, as in London, such restrictions on open-communication and internet freedom are justified from on high. They say that they are protecting public safety. They say that they are acting in the best interests of the population. Though I haven’t heard it said, I don’t imagine the rhetoric slung by Gadafhi or Mubarak or Assad sounds much different. Surely they condemn the isolated actions of a small number of trouble-making dissidents and thugs. Surely they suggest that, in acting to silence and stifle this dissent by cutting off communications, that they too are only acting to maintain the peace and to protect the public’s best-interest. Of course, that was them and this is us. They are despotic dictators. We are peace-loving people, who wouldn’t harm a fly if it tried to sell oil to the Russians.
In Egypt, as well as in Tunisia, Libya and Syria, a group of guerrilla techies (Telecomix) banded together and set up ‘pirate’ cell-networks so that the protests could be seen and heard across their countries and around the world. Many regard them as heroes of the revolution. In San Francisco, a group of guerrilla techies (Anonymous) banded together to ‘hacktivist’ the BART website. They are now under investigation from the FBI.
I don’t suppose any of this should be surprising. The double-standard (‘demonization vs. rose-coloured-glasses’) is the usual modus operandi for the powers that be in Western culture. For generations, the double-standard has allowed our industrialists to gleefully rape and pillage the world and her people, drawing apathetic consent from our populace by painting themselves (read: ourselves) as valiant and virtuous heroes, working always in defence of good and freedom and kittens stuck in trees. I am worried though, that a dangerous precedent is being set. At Seattle, Davos, Toronto, etc., they proved that peaceful protest is no protection from the violent iron fist of global capitalism. If that protest becomes inconveniently large/loud, they can and will silence it, with impunity, by any means necessary. Now they have decided that it’s ok to deny us the freedom to communicate should we be so audacious as to stand together in opposition to their policies and actions or in defence of our freedoms. They can murder us, as they did on the BART, and if we don’t like it, we can just shut up. The Arab-Spring has demonstrated to the world just how powerful the freedom to communicate can be. It would seem that it is far too powerful for our leaders to risk affording such freedom to us. We should trust them though. They are only acting in our best interests. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery.
Peace and love.
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Agreed! The latest alarm re: the erosion pf our civil rights rings clearly from the inappropriate and inconsistent punishments currently being awarded by British courts, under the urging of the “people’s” government.
Comment by BMB August 22, 2011 @ 4:09 pm