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Ed Webb

WikiLeaks hoax hits Pakistan media - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • A couple Pakistani papers and TV networks were deceived by false US diplomatic cables [EPA] Several leading Pakistani newspapers have acknowledged that they were hoaxed, after publishing reports based on fake WikiLeaks cables that contained crude anti-India propaganda. The reports, which featured prominently in several papers on Thursday, cited alleged US diplomatic cables as confirming many right-wing Pakistani views and conspiracy theories about the country's arch enemy India and the disputed Kashmir region. Much of Pakistan's media toes a pro-military, anti-Indian line, which was reflected by the papers' extensive coverage of the fake memos. The instigators of the hoax remain unclear, though the material appeared to have originated on a news website that features anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani articles.
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    Next phase: expect more attempts of this kind to capitalize on the wikileaks moment to spread propaganda.
Ed Webb

How a man setting fire to himself sparked an uprising in Tunisia | Brian Whitaker | Com... - 0 views

  • Reporting of these events has been sparse, to say the least. The Tunisian press, of course, is strictly controlled and international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, perhaps. But in the context of Tunisia they are momentous events. It's a police state, after all, where riots and demonstrations don't normally happen – and certainly not simultaneously in towns and cities up and down the country.So, what we are seeing, firstly, is the failure of a system constructed by the regime over many years to prevent people from organising, communicating and agitating.Secondly, we are seeing relatively large numbers of people casting off their fear of the regime. Despite the very real risk of arrest and torture, they are refusing to be intimidated.
  • Ben Ali may try to cling on, but his regime now has a fin de siècle air about it. He came to power in 1987 by declaring President Bourguiba unfit for office. It's probably just a matter of time before someone else delivers that same message to Ben Ali.
  • international news organisations have shown little interest: the "not many dead" syndrome, No, that's not the reason. The reason is that this SOB is one of our SOBs. We must be absolutely sure that we don't risk letting let any nasty Islamists or not-compliant folk near the levers of power before we start to fan the flames of democracy.
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  • Tunisia could be the most "laique" eligible country , more than many other arab and some european countries. Women emancipation and civil family laws are an example. Education rate is very high, and the gdp per capita is good.What's missing : transparency, freedom and real democraty.Please don't think that the regime of Ben Ali is the bastion againt extremists .. the unique bastion against all extremists are education , freedom , respect and well being. Fighting extremists by guns , fire and jail is a complete failure. Please note that the modern governments in maghreb countries have destroyed the islamic in-country traditional institutions known by their moderation and their knowledge of the religion whick maked the influence of "eastern islamic schools" like wahabism from saudi be predominant on the new era of staellite channels .. which is not very good news for all of us ..
Ed Webb

Tunisian president criticizes rioters, urges calm - 0 views

  • image released by the Tunisian Presidency office
  • accusing rioters of hurting Tunisia's image
  • a minority of extremists and mercenaries
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  • pledged to "respect freedom of opinion and expression." Human rights groups routinely criticize Tunisia for abuses including a lack of media freedom.
Ed Webb

Ebert Schools Us in Reading Movies - CogDogBlog - 0 views

  • Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left.
    • Ed Webb
       
      But is this true trans-culturally? What of those from cultures where text moves in other directions - Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu etc speakers, or some of the East Asian languages?
Ed Webb

Index on Censorship » Blog Archive » Tunisia: The Middle East's first cyberwar - 0 views

  • “The police aim to break into the accounts of users to know who communicates with whom and on what subject,” blogged Astrubal, the Tunisian co-editor of the independent www.nawaat.org website, “with the end objective of dismantling the citizen journalist networks that formed spontaneously after the Sidi Bouzid protests.”
  • This systematic stifling of independent opinion over the years has turned many Tunisians to the internet for news denied by the mainstream press, keeping the Tunisian online censor, popularly nicknamed Ammar 404, particularly busy.
  • Tunisia was the first Arab state to embrace the internet, and to no-one’s surprise, the first to systematically repress it.
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  • The conventional wisdom is that the alternative communications links offered by the internet and social networking on the web will have a limited effect on change in Tunisia. But with national media either repressed or full square behind the state, it remains the main conduit for news of any kind from Tunisia, especially for foreign media, chief among them al-Jazeera, which has given substantial coverage to the protests, even though its operations in the country are strictly limited, requiring it to rely on video content and updates from social networking sites.
Ed Webb

Tunisia's bitter cyberwar - Features - Al Jazeera English - 2 views

  • Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven't generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.
  • Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.
  • Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia's web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique. The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol. The government's internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals' usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail. Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations. "The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer," a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for fireFox internet browsers that deactivated the government's malicious code.
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  • The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign is organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.
  • In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites. Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the "killing" of the Tunisian blogosphere.  Ben Mhenni said that the government's biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites. She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored. Amamy said the government's approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling. "Here we don't really have internet, we have a national intranet," he said.
Ed Webb

gary's choices - The Stuxnet Worm and Iran: The Day After - 0 views

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    Gary Sick asks questions about the consequences of the revelations in the NYT report about US/Israel cooperation on the Stuxnet worm.
Ed Webb

Arab Leaders Keep a Wary Eye on Tunisia - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • In Egypt, where the leadership continues to rely on a decades-old emergency law that allows arrest without charge, there is a lot of room for free and critical speech, offering a safety valve for expression that did not exist in Tunisia, he said.
Ed Webb

Why the Internet Is a Great Tool for Totalitarians | Magazine - 0 views

  • Modern communications technologies are already being deployed as new forms of repression.
  • not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are. Some of these governments are even beginning to follow the path laid by Western corporations, actively deploying regime-friendly bloggers to spread talking points. Is this “samizdat”? Cold War baggage, in short, severely limits the imagination of do-gooders in the West. They assume that the Internet is too big to control without significant economic losses. But governments don’t need to control every text message or email. There’s a special irony when Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests—as he did in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last November—that China’s government will find it impossible to censor “a billion phones that are trying to express themselves.” Schmidt is rich because his company sells precisely targeted ads against hundreds of millions of search requests per day. If Google can zero in like that, so can China’s censors.
  • modern authoritarian governments control the web in ways more sophisticated than guard towers
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  • Superpowers like China have to engage with the global economy. So for them, the best censorship system is the one that censors the least. Millions of people already disclose intimate social data on Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and their Russian and Chinese alternatives—and that’s all the data governments need to pick the right target. Online friends with an antigovernment blogger? No access for you! Spend most of your day surfing Yahoo Finance? Browse whatever you want. Satisfied Chinese investment bankers will have access to an uncensored web; subversive democracy activists get added to the government watch list.
Ed Webb

Palestinian charged with insulting leader online - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • Abbas' security forces have previously mined social networks to catch dissenters. In November, an atheist blogger was arrested after posting incendiary comments about Islam on Facebook.
Ed Webb

Egypt braced for 'day of revolution' protests | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

  • Tomorrow's events, dubbed a "day of revolution against torture, corruption, poverty and unemployment" by protest leaders, were initiated by two dissident movements, both based online. One is dedicated to the memory of Khaled Said, an Alexandrian man beaten to death by police last year, while the other, "6 April", is a youth group named after the date of an uprising two years ago in the Nile delta town of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, in which three people were killed by police.
  • In a sign of how seriously the Mubarak regime is taking any challenge to its authority following the downfall of Tunisia's president Ben Ali, counter-protests are being organised under the banner of "Mubarak: Egypt's security". Organisers say they want to express their rejection of the "destruction of state institutions" by the opposition, raising fears of violent clashes on the ground."Regardless of how many people turn up, these protests will be highly significant," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, a political analyst at the semi-official Al-Ahram Research Centre. "Those confronting the regime on Tuesday will be the sons and daughters of virtual activism - a new generation that has finally found something around which they can unite and rally.They are the product of a government that has never offered them any ideological vision to believe in, and now they have themselves become a symbol of contemporary Egypt.
Ed Webb

Watching Egypt (but not on Al Jazeera) | Marc Lynch - 4 views

  • One key factor was missing, though, at least early on. Al Jazeera has played a vital, instrumental role in framing this popular narrative by its intense, innovative coverage of Tunisia and its explicit broadening of that experience to the region. Its coverage today has been frankly baffling, though. During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can't remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.
  • More broadly, it's astonishing how much is now in motion in Arab politics after such a long period of seeming stagnation. There's a vivid sense of an era coming to a close and an uncertain new vista opening. Even if Al Jazeera's release of the so-called "Palestine Papers" doesn't bring down Abu Mazen's negotiating team or the PA it feels like the autopsy of a long-dead peace process. Hezbollah's Parliamentary maneuver to bring down the Hariri government and replace him with veteran politician and businessman Najib Miqati, a response to the Special Tribunal's reported indictments which has sparked violent protests by Hariri backers, may mean an end to the era of U.S. alliance with a March 14-led Lebanon. It's hard to know where to focus --- but in fact I continue to see these seemingly unrelated events as part of a broader story of the crumbling of an Arab status quo which has long seemed unsustainable.
  • 3pm:  Al-Jazeera's lack of coverage of the protests has become a major story.   It doesn't seem to have gotten any better since this morning --- since getting back on line I've seen an episode of a talk show, more Palestine Papers, and only short snippets of breaking news on Egypt.  Al-Arabiya apparently hasn't done any better.  My Twitter feed and email are full of comments like "AJ Arabic is covering childrens gymnastics programs in Indonesia right now. Good call." (@mwhanna1) and "Exposed. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya's failure in covering #Jan25" (@SultanAlQassemi).   Egyptian activists are complaining bitterly, and most seem to think that Mubarak cut a deal with the Qatari and Saudi governments. 
Ed Webb

Clinton shows where US stands on Egypt - Bikya Masr - 0 views

  • The protester remembered when US President Barack Obama spoke out in favor of Iranian activists, but this time around, in Tunisia and Egypt, there is little overt support for the anti-government protests. “Our leaders are horrible, just as bad as Iran, but they are liked by Washington, so it is us who suffer twice, when we go to the streets and then when we try to have a voice internationally,” she said.
Ed Webb

Twitter / @Telecomix: Calling all radio amateurs ... - 0 views

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    Old media, new media - information wants to be free?
Ed Webb

A day with Egypt's protesters - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

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    Participant observation - how does it affect the work of journalism?
Ed Webb

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Participatory Media Literacy: Why it mat... - 0 views

  • students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that force them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise)
  • participatory media literacy is as much about a literacy of *participation* as it is a literacy of media
  • Knowing something about privacy and the ways online behavior can have consequences at home, at work, in school, along with some sense of how to determine the credibility of information found online, ought to be taught in high school, or at even younger ages. But one of the big questions I don’t have a clue about is how educational institutions are going to be able to adapt quickly enough to a world in which being able to learn, fine, verify, collaborate, and communicate online requires acquisition of active skills, not an easily transmitted collection of facts.
Ed Webb

Al-Azhar sheikh says protesting forbidden in Islam - Bikya Masr - 0 views

  • Al-Azhar is the most influential Islamic institution in the country, however, in recent years it has become more in line with the government and most Egyptians have ignored fatwas that have been released
Ed Webb

Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S. - 0 views

  • I think if anything the Obama administration has indicated to Al Jazeera that it sees us as part of the solution, not part of the problem
  • "It is downright un-American to still refuse to carry it," wrote Jeff Jarvis on Sunday. "Vital, world-changing news is occurring in the Middle East and no one-not the xenophobic or celebrity-obsessed or cut-to-the-bone American media-can bring the perspective, insight, and on-the-scene reporting Al Jazeera English can."
  • Al Jazeera is the scourge of authoritarian governments around the Middle East, which attempt to block it. The network, however, covers much more than the Middle East, and now has more bureaus in Latin America than CNN and the BBC, said Burman. "As proud as we are of our Middle Eastern coverage, we are in other places in the world that are never, never seen on television in American homes," he said.
Neil Devoe

BBC News - Egypt protests: Army rules out the use of force - 0 views

  • Meanwhile, new Vice President Omar Suleiman said Mr Mubarak had asked him to open dialogue with all political parties on constitutional reform.
  • In its statement, carried on Egyptian media, the military said: "To the great people of Egypt, your armed forces, acknowledging the legitimate rights of the people... have not and will not use force against the Egyptian people."
  • The US state department has despatched a special envoy to Cairo, former ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner, to urge Egyptian leaders to embrace political change.
    • Neil Devoe
       
      This seems like quite a shift in supporting the Egyptian people over Mumbarek, especially in comparison to Hilary Clinton's original comments about supporting the "stable government" that Mumbarek led. Hopefully, Wisner can help influence a change to a new form of Egyptian democracy.
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  • Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu warned against the takeover of Egypt by "an organised Islamic group" as had happened in Iran.
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