The protest in Colombia turned out to be the biggest in the country’s history “The national police operations commander, General José Riano, said an estimated 4.8 million people turned out for 365 marches in the country. International protests were held mainly in Latin America, but some marches took place in Europe, Asia and the United States.”

“Spain’s EFE news service put the number of marchers worldwide at more than 10 million.”

Traditional resource mobilization theory states that there is a high cost involved to create and mobilize people as a social movement. With the internet, however, the costs of organizing people are negligible, if not zero. We often hear about the three traditional powers being the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. After the advent of newspaper, television and radio a fourth power that influenced all three came about: known as the traditional media. Now we could say that the internet and social media is giving rise to a 5th Power in which this facebook phenomenon fits in.

To analyze the success of the Colombian protests one must put the facts into the context.

•  The FARC is the oldest guerrilla movement in the world and has been trying to overthrow the Colombian government for over four decades.
• The FARC claim to follow a marxist ideology but in reality are now the armed wing of a narcotics business.
•  Protests came as a reaction mainly to the FARC’s lies about the whereabouts of a child they claimed was in their custody and their reluctance to release more hostages unilaterally.
•  Mass demonstrations don’t have a history in Colombia.
•  Cornerstone of current Colombian administration’s policy is weakening FARC militarily.
• FARC protests endorsed by the Colombian government.

The protest started as a group called 1.000.000 voices against FARC and due to its exponential growth shortly after its creation Oscar Morales, the creator, and his friends decided to organize a national march. “Oscar invited 20 friends, which is the maximum number of invites you can send in a 24-hour period. In less than 12 hours the group had more than 900 members, tripling the number of users every day after that.” The traditional media in Colombia akin to the governments agenda gave widespread publicity to the group and were instrumental in galvanizing the protests beyond facebook to the general public.

Facebook is only a spec of the much bigger picture that is Social Media. The rise of the 5th power is now evident not only through facebook but also text messaging. President Joseph Estrada in the Philippines was ousted from office in 2001 by what he called a “coup-de-text”. The Colombian protests have shown that social movements are now cheap to start and social capital is cheap to harness. Similar organizations have been created for other causes such as the pro democracy protests in Myanmar by the monks. The potential for growth of political movements using social media is immense and their success is now up to their ability to harness this power.

International Herald Tribune

PBS

More important, under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot: freedom of speech. The pieces she has been clandestinely sending out from Internet cafés—while posing as a tourist—are often funny, elegantly written and poignant. Her subjects have included the shortage of lemons, the turgid proceedings of the Cuban parliament and the slowness of meaningful reforms by Raúl Castro. [via Time]

Now what is interesting to consider is how the government is dealing with Yoani. First, official Cuban media highlighted that Evo Morales had made it to Time 100, but there was no mention of her and when she was invited to go to Spain to receive the Ortega & Gasset award for Digital Journalism, government officials delayed her travel permit and withheld her passport. To this she said:

“They forget that in cyberspace my voice can travel without limits, it can come and go without asking for permission” (translated Generacion Y)

All new forms of communication are revolutionary from the printing press, to the radio.

When these forms of communication become captured by government regulation and corporate interest they loose their revolutionary capacity and become tools for enforcing the status que.

The web is new, the web has not yet been captured by government regulation or corporate interest.

Both government and large corporate interests are looking to capture the web.

Those of us who think that (nearly) free grassroots level communications is a good thing need to realize that the web is not inherently grassroots, democratic, open etc. The web may have emerged that way but that’s not to say that this happy state of affairs will persist.

Therefore we must struggle to keep the web from being captured by the narrow interests of government regulation and corporate profit.

Today I read a fascinating article by Annalee Newitz entitled “User-Generated Censorship” Ms. Newitz argues that the web is not necessarily a place for free uncensored expression and she provides the mechanics by which web censorship occurs. Newitz tells us that web censorship can occur through a mass flagging campaign which targets an offending blog. For example if your blog is hosted by Google and you receive enough flags Google may decide to take action, “Generally what Google does if you get a lot of flags is make your blog impossible to find” (Newitz).

This action highlights two things, the tremendous power search engines posses (duh) and the ability for a small group to get a search behemoth to take action against an offending site/blog. Although Ms. Newitz does not tease out the broader implications of censorship by the crowd her article does highlight the political nature of the web, and it’s vulnerability as a democratic medium of communication. She reminds us (and me in particular) that the web is not just vulnerable from above but from below too.

BTW if anyone out there knows of some specific websites that were shut down in this way it would be interesting to hear about, how they were shut down, how many people were involved in the flagging campaign, what actions the censored author took, and what ultimately happened.

According to the article this change in the law reflects how people use the internet i.e. like a phone, or the mail. Both methods of communication for which users have an expectation of privacy. My question is this? If the police/security apparatus want to monitor our net usage is it really an invasion of my privacy if all they see is my i.p. address? In other words I don’t care if the police think that 223.125.542.234 has been frequenting porno hourly, however if they had my full name I might be a bit urked out?

For starters, let’s consider that after 9/11 Al’Qaeda has been forced to go underground, leaving the internet as one of their safest marketing channels. Whereas in the 80’s their ranks where the afghans that had been forced out to pakistan that rallied against the soviets, or in the 90’s, when the members were expatriates that had studied in the west and came to afghanistan for the training camps, today the growing number of their membership are wanna-be terrorists in the west that find each other and collaborate on message boards and video sharing sites. In the upcoming weeks we will look into this trend and study their practice to go in depth into what the director of national intelligence has warned as:

Mr. McConnell also warned the Senate panel about the growing threat of “cyberattacks” by terror groups or homegrown militants. He said President Bush signed a classified directive in January outlining steps to protect American computer networks.(source: NYT)      

Or as a recent foreign policy magazine article described:

It consists mostly of would-be terrorists, who, angered by the invasion of Iraq, aspire to join the movement and the men they hail as heroes. But it is nearly impossible for them to link up with al Qaeda Central, which was forced underground after 9/11. Instead, they form fluid, informal networks that are self-financed and self-trained. They have no physical headquarters or sanctuary, but the tolerant, virtual environment of the Internet offers them a semblance of unity and purpose. Theirs is a scattered, decentralized social structure—a leaderless jihad.(source: FP Magazine)      

How do terrorist groups use social media and how efficient is it? Are these organized by the organization leaders in a top-down manner, or is it inspired radicals that attempt to emulate or create their own social web terrorist movement?

Two hours after the photo taken by Mr. Lynch was posted, Allan Thomson, known on the forum as Numi, reported a Skyline [the stolen car] sighting the previous night and gave directions to the area. The forum exploded with vigilante fervor; members living close by proposed a search.

Four hours later, Mr. Thomson posted again, this time to say that he had sent out a personal message pinpointing the car’s position.

10:23 PM, March 27 FOUND!!! PMED with exact location. Guy drives it like he owns it. Idiot parks outside his house backed in so you cant see his plate.

Exactly 15 minutes later, a forum member added a link to a Google map with directions to the house. Other members scrambled to narrow their Facebook searches for the suspect to the closest high school. At about 11 p.m., a link to the Facebook profile appeared online. The photos seemed to show the same person in the picture taken by Mr. Lynch.

This kind of thing scares me. It’s now not enough that I need to worry that a friend of mine has tagged me at some party when I was drunk, 18, naked, and doing something stupid, that my employer might dig up and fire me for. Now folks are posting directions to peoples homes, perhaps with google street view we can get a picture of the homes interior. This all for everyone (or scarier anyone) to see. This dumb punk was photographed in a rare car in a city of about one million and was pinpointed within 2 days.

In this case the police work was legitimate, but is this kind of web use legitimate or appropriate? What if someone used that google map to violently reclaim or re-steal that car? Do we want vigilante geeks? I’m happy for Mr. Ironside, and this case is clearly an example of how net surveillance can do good things, but that doesn’t mean that we should consider this kind of thing legitimate police work. I fear this is a short-term lullaby but a long term horror show.

So what do prostitutes have to teach us about political activism? Well the article cited above references one of my favorite themes, survalence and the web.  Advertising and soliciting sex, allows users to avoid stings and police enforcement but it also “leaves the risk of a digital footprint”. According to the article, police are still unable (or unwilling) to use web 2.0 to effectively enforce prostitution law, but that is just the point. Individuals, using the web to engage in illicet activity are more out pacing enforcement. I have to wonder what other illicit activities the social web is enabling/streamlining?

As a matter of curiosity I wonder if drug cartels, or other organized criminals are able to affectively use the social web or if those organizations too suffer from a poor institutional learning curve as have governments, and legitimate corporation.

Already there have been protests as the torch passed through london and paris. In london, the torch was snatched and extinguished at least twice:

In preparation for the the arrival of the torch, San Francisco officials have re-routed the path of the torch and not released it to the public. However, groups like students for a free tibet are ready and armed with cell phones and text messaging to organize and mobilize. They will be updating the events as they happen and anyone can join in by sending SFTORCH to 41411 with their cellphones.

The repertoire in San Francisco began yesterday as protesters climbed the cables of the Golden Gate bridge to place large ‘free tibet’ signs. All of this was recorded and promoted on social media sites like Youtube and Flickr.

flickr photo set here

Today they are broadcasting their protest through their blog blog blog.studentsforafreetibet.org/ text messaging (http://twitter.com/sftorch/with_friends and http://twitter.com/teamtibet) and live web video through mogolus.

I am pretty sure that through the use of Twitter, tomorrow they will be able to foil the evasion tactics by local officials and swarm the torch path rather quickly.

The Indonesians and the Dutch are at it again! The AP, Reuters and others are reporting that a dutch legislator has created a film that not only depicts Muhammad (a no no for Muslims), but also encourages Muslims to “tear out ‘hate-filled’ verses from the Koran”. What has been the response to such an inflammatory film? Indonesia’s 4 largest ISP’s, “heeded a government order” to block youtube and myspace and they continue to search for places the video has been posted in order to expand the censorship. Yet again, we see evidence that states have no idea how to deal with the internet, but we also see evidence that the internet is itself not as free as we might assume. Let me elaborate….

In this particular story I see two interesting pieces of information relevant to the study of democracy and the internet, the video by a dutch legislator, the Indonesian response¹. Let’s start by considering the video². Fitna presents the words and actions of Muslim extremists. From the 9/11 catastrophe, to murder for being gay, to militant calls for world domination, Fitna presents the most extreme demands of extremists Muslims. There are no debates between atheists, competitor religions, liberals (in the classic sense), secularists etc. This video seeks to portray a view of Islam based on the actions and words of a few nuts. The same could be done for any religion or non-religion if you wish to attack my ilk…the atheists.

Indonesia’s reaction to this video? Ban it. The Indonesians are trying very hard to block all I.P addresses which provide an opportunity to view Fitma. This response is interesting and relevant for three reasons. First it provides evidence that states don’t know how to deal with information flowing over the web except for shutting down those sites (or the web) entirely. Banning youtube and myspace will not prevent circulation of Fitma within Indonesian territory. Furthermore such actions highlight the anti-democratic tendencies of the Indonesian state (a no no in today’s international context). Secondly, it allows us a window to be self critical of what we ban in the west (Europe, USA). Finally, attempts to ban the video show that the web is not necessarily a democratizing device.

We need to critically ask the question, should this video be banned? To my mind it is clear propaganda. The point in Fitma is to convince the majority of us, the calm, rational, moderates, of all faiths, that Islam turns people into murderers. That the religion in all of it’s incarnations is a threat to everyone in the west (and perhaps outside of the west). Here in Florida such propaganda probably won’t incite violence, but might it in Jakarta? If so perhaps the Indonesian authorities are right to try to limit distribution of this video. In the USA we have no problems with banning subversive and inciteful speech. Is Fitma, inciteful and subversive in Indonesia? We should consider this question before we decide if banning the video is democratic or undemocratic. Admittedly, I don’t know the answer to that question, but if it is perhaps the Indonesians are right to try to limit its distribution.

What is the place of the web in democracy? Do censorship standards vary across nations and cultures? If so, Fitma is perhaps justifiably censored in places where it might incite violence. But if not, if censorship standards are to be universal, then who sets that standard? If the Dutch produced a video calling all Latino-Americans gang members and murderers backed by videos and news clips from LA gang violence would that be inciteful and subversive? Could we justify a ban if we thought such a video would lead to violence? What if such a video did lead to violence but censorship rules are considered universal? Then would such a ban be undemocratic?

Ay, more questions then answers.

1Both the Governments’ and the ISPs’

2I encourage you to watch the video and form your own opinion. As I’m about to elaborate my opinion of the video and it’s meaning for democracy.