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Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”

The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.

“websites cannot produce an activist organization.”

It was the latest in a series of rare but increasingly ambitious organized movements in Chinese cities aimed at derailing government-backed industrial projects that the protesters said could damage the environment and people’s health. The protest Sunday, like its predecessors, was organized through Web sites, blogs and cellphone text messages, showing how some Chinese are using digital technology, despite government attempts to control the Internet, to spur on the kind of civic movements that officials strongly discourage.

whether digital resistance poses a threat to authoritarian rule?

test whether the diffusion of information communication technology—measured by increasing numbers of Internet and mobile phone users—is a statistically significant predictor of anti-government protests after controlling for other causes of protests.

The cluster of countries with high levels of mobile phones produced a statistically significant and positive relationship between the number of mobile phone users and protest frequency. In other words, an increase in the number of mobile phones is associated with an increase in the number of protests.

This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

Beyond that, this attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion -- neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it -- and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.

"These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous," says a Chinese politics professor who asked not to be named.

"We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values."The term fenqinghas been used in each of the past three generations to describe very different kinds of rebel.

There are no indications that the contemporary fenqing are members of the sort of organised nationalist movement seen in places such as Russia, where Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, has had a growing profile.Rather, "since the mid-1990s urban educated youth in China have become much more nationalistic rather than angry at the government", says David Zweig, director of the centre on China's transnational relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "There is a strong sense that the west, led by the US, is trying to keep China down and stop it from taking its rightful place in the world."