Public support is key to royals’ survival
Achara Ashayagachat
Bangkok Post: December 9, 2009
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/28892/public-support-is-key-to-royals-survival
The popularity of Europe and Japan’s serving monarchs has stood the test of time because they still have the backing of most of their people, according to diplomats.
King Juan Carlos of Spain and the Spanish royal family continue to enjoy wide public support because of the monarch’s philosophy of hard work, Spanish ambassador to Thailand Ignacio Sagaz Temprano told a seminar yesterday on “Constitutional Monarchies Outside Thailand: Experiences from Europe and Japan”.
Mr Temprano said more than 70% of Spaniards believed their king had outperformed elected officials and saw him as the country’s pillar of democracy. In Spain, the maximum penalty for committing lese majeste is a two-year jail sentence. Recently, a person was fined 200 euros (about 9,800 baht) for burning a photo of the king, he said.
Norwegian ambassador Merete Fjeld Brattested said the Norwegian monarch also was a popular ruler.
“The main reason [is] the King, the Queen and the Crown Prince are seen as role models for their representative generation, especially the young generation,” she said.
Norway, a constitutional monarchy since 1937, has a lese majeste law that carries a punishment of five to 21 years imprisonment for acts of defamation and slander against the monarch.
However, no one except the king himself could file a lawsuit and the last time there was such a case was in 1878, the ambassador said.
Japanese ambassador to Thailand Kyoji Komachi said his country’s constitution had explicitly listed what the emperor could do. In short, the emperor was the symbol of the state and had no power related to the government, Mr Komachi said.
“There is no lese majeste law and there has been no defamation cases involving the emperor as the people consider him a symbol of unity,” Mr Komachi said.
“An NHK poll revealed last month that 85% of the respondents appreciated the role of the monarchy, especially his visit to the victims who suffer from natural disasters,” he said.
Tjaco Theo van den Hout, the Netherlands ambassador, said the Dutch did not consider lese majeste cases because everyone was equal under the country’s judicial system.
Yet, the Dutch monarch enjoyed 80% to 85% popularity, he said.
“The moral authority of the monarchy is not something written in the constitution but something one needs to earn by performing,” he said.
Swedish ambassador to Thailand Linner Lennart said the monarchy system needed to be maintained.
People in Sweden believed a presidential system would be more expensive to maintain than a monarchy, he said.
Monarchies and Political Systems Discussed in Bangkok
Simon Roughneen
The Irrawaddy: December 8, 2009
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=17365
| In a rare gathering, four ambassadors representing constitutional monarchies in Europe and Asia convened at Chulalongkorn University on Tuesday to discuss the political system in their countries.
Opening the discussion, Dr Charas Suwanmala, the dean of the political science faculty, said that “as academics, we want to learn more about how monarchy works in Europe and in Japan.” The discussion, hosted by the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS), took place just days after His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej celebrated his 82nd birthday, with thousands of Thais taking to the streets of Bangkok to catch a glimpse of the long-serving monarch. Dr Charas said “organizing a forum with four very busy ambassadors has not been an easy task. ISIS has been trying to put together this panel since August, and the only time the ambassadors would be available in the same morning before the end of the year is this morning. The timing of this panel is thus coincidental. Indeed, if we do not do it this morning, we may have to wait another year or two before Your Excellencies are all free at the same time.” Representing Japan, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands, the diplomats outlined the respective histories behind their current systems of government, and shed some light into the ongoing popularity of royal heads-of-state in contemporary western society and in Japan, the world’s second largest economy. The discussion was limited to comparison between and analysis of the four countries represented by the ambassadors. All four countries feature lese-majeste laws, which sit in the statute books alongside robust freedom of speech and expression regulations. In the case of European countries, these include the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe. Ambassador H.E. Tjaco Theo van den Hout of the Netherlands described how contemporary Dutch lese-majeste cases are taken by national law enforcement agencies, which determine whether it is in the interest of the monarchy to have a particular issue brought to the courts or not. “It can be counter-productive to the status of the monarchy, in some cases, to bring every potential incident of lese-majeste in the Netherlands to trial, ” he said. Norway is not a European Union member-state, but has “a highly-egalitarian culture” and legal system, according to Her Excellency Mrs Merete Fjeld Brattested. She recounted that the last lese-majeste case taken in Norway was in 1878, and outlined that Norwegian citizens cannot sue each other for this offense. Spanish Ambassador H.E. Ignacio Sagaz Temprano outlined the poignant recent history of the Spanish monarchy, with the current King Juan Carlos retaining high public esteem and a vestige of moral authority, dating back to his decisive intervention to prevent a military coup in 1981, which would have reversed Spain’s short-lived democratic reforms, after the death of General Franco in 1975. Going back farther, he said that “unified Spain would not have been possible without monarchy, and that is why Spanish people still value this system.” A Spanish kingdom along the lines of the current Spanish state came about in 1492, with the marriage of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabelle, bringing together the two largest kingdoms (Aragon and Castille) in what became modern Spain, under one dynastic roof. Japanese Ambassador H.E Kyoji Komachi said that the position of the Japanese Emperor “derives from the will of the people,” according to the 1946 Constitution. He said that 82 percent of the Japanese people support the Emperor’s status as symbol of the nation, with similar approval ratings for monarchs in the three European countries under discussion. Only one of Norway’s political parties has any republican leanings, according to Ambassador Brattested, and apparently those are half-hearted as a majority of Norwegians see the royal family as role models and want the country to remain a constitutional monarchy, well over 200 years after the American and French revolutions made republicanism a central tenet of political reform. |
| Thais worried by health of King and country |
The birthday celebrations of King Bhumibol Adulyadej are muted this year as the king remains in hospital recovering from pneumonia. Instead of hearing his annual speech and watching the king’s inspection of the glittering trooping of the colour, his loving subjects are worrying about his – and their nation’s – health. More than 1.2 million people have visited the Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok where the king has been staying for more than two-and-a-half months. Monks, schoolchildren, groups of work colleagues and ordinary people have travelled from across the country to bring flowers and write messages sending him their best. “I am writing my wish – for the king to get well very soon so he can go back to the palace,” said a woman writing in one of the many royal-crested books. Another woman broke down as she spoke: “The king right now does not feel well so we have come here to support him. I pray every morning for him to get well soon, as the people love him so much.” Unity and division The king’s poor health and a political crisis which has divided Thailand is worrying many people in the kingdom who fear instability and a deepening crisis. The king has been the country’s unifying figure for decades and is seen to have intervened positively in times of crisis. |
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| “The application and increasing use of these lese majeste laws represents a very serious threat to press freedom in Thailand,” says Shawn Crispin, who has worked as a journalist in Bangkok for more than a decade and represents the Committee to Protect Journalists in South East Asia.
“Earlier this year the Thai information and communications ministry professed to have closed down at least 2,000 websites because they violated these lese majeste laws which are some of the strictest in the world. “Penalties of 3-15 years in prison for convictions and the fact that any Thai citizen can file a complaint against any other Thai or foreign citizen, means that without clear guidelines as to how this law is to be applied, it may be undermining the institution this law was designed to protect.” There are still some websites which are still operating, among them Same Sky which has a chatroom dedicated to discussions about Thai politics and royalty. They cover questions over the lese majeste laws, and some criticisms of the monarchy, but to translate them and publish them here could also leave me open to possible imprisonment. “The website is public, but because people’s privacy is protected by pseudonyms, subjects hidden for a long time are being disclosed more,” says Thanapol Eawsakul who edits the website and a political magazine of the same name. “We can’t say that everything on the Same Sky web board is the truth but at least we believe there should be a space where people can discuss and share their opinion.” Future fears There is no denying the real, unconditional love people have here for King Bhumibol Adulyadej. His picture can be seen in many public places, the national anthem is played twice daily across the country and everyone stands for the king’s anthem which is played in cinemas before every film. Chotisak Onsoong, 28, considers himself a human rights activist and for the past five years has not stood for the king’s anthem. On one occasion a fellow cinema-goer objected: “He told me to stand up and when the song finished he went to get the cinema staff and told them to throw me out, but they didn’t. “Then he started to throw water bottles and snack bags and everyone in the movie theatre started to throw water bottles at me too so I left and called the police.” They both went to the police station, but it was Chotisak who was charged – with insulting the king. “It’s my right to not stand up. It’s my body so it’s my right to do anything with it. A cinema is a place to relax, not a place for political performance,” he says. There have been claims the law to protect members of the Royal Family is being used by political factions as the current law permits any Thai citizen to go to any police station and make a complaint against any Thai or foreign citizen in Thailand. Once that complaint has been made the police are duty bound to investigate. Thailand is a deeply divided and unstable country and there is fear for its future without the revered leadership, but there is also fear over what people can even say out loud about certain members of the Royal Family. |
The Thai Monarch’s Birthday Address
Pavin Chachavalpongpun
Asia Sentinel: December 6, 2009
http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2181&Itemid=185
King Bhumibol, looking frail, delivers an abbreviated address that does little to still the national qualms .
“My happiness derives from the stability, prosperity and peace of our country,” King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand told members of the royal family, cabinet ministers, privy councillors, state officials and members of the House of Representatives on Dec. 5, his 82nd birthday. In an abbreviated speech from the Amarin Winitchai Thorne Hall in the Grand Palace, the King also reminded the Thais that they must know their duty and fulfil their responsibilities “with sincerity, true intention and honesty, and put the country above self interest”.
King Bhumibol has been on the Chakri throne for 63 years. Throughout those six decades, the king has witnessed 17 military coups and constitutions, 27 prime ministers and the rise and fall of countless civilian governments. The king himself made a lifelong project of transforming the monarchy, once an unpopular institution, into becoming one of the most important components of the Thai political life.
Since the military coup of September 2006 that overthrew the government of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, critical debates have emerged on whether the real political conflict is about the clash between Thaksin Shinawatra and the palace. Some scholars explained this phenomenon as a collision between two political networks: one that represents the network monarchy and the other the new money led by Thaksin.
Paul Handley, author of “The King Never Smiles”, argues that the Thai king must be perceived as a political actor even when the Thai state has incessantly claimed that he remains apolitical. Looking at the role of the monarch this way allows us to understand why and how he has become entangled in the protracted political crisis.
During the past months, the king’s frailty has more than ever been visible. He has been hospitalised since late September. Rumors of his deteriorating health drove down the stock market by 7 percent from 14-15 October 2009. Both domestic and foreign businesses worried about the political and economic uncertainty should the end of the reign come too soon.
The king originally decided to skip this year’s speech, citing his ill health although he did appear after all although he remains hospitalized. The king’s annual speech is a much anticipated political event in Thailand, and even more so since Thailand has sunk deeper into political turmoil.
In past years, the king has used the speech to send out certain signals and messages of how he evaluated the efficiency and the work ethics of the incumbent government. As Thailand’s political situation has gone from bad to worse, any statement from him has become increasingly significant and undoubtedly politicised. The speech on Dec. 4, abbreviated as it was and confined to platitudes about working together, was a disappointment.
By not delivering a more complete address, he has kept Thai society guessing on how and what he has been thinking about the perturbing political situation. Unfortunately, his silence could further engender a negative impact.
Thais are wondering and even worrying, about the imminent royal succession, which remains a taboo subject in Thailand. Any discussion that could be interpreted as criticizing or insulting the royal institution makes Thais and foreigners alike dare a heavy jail term, according to the stiff lèse-majesté law. At this critical moment in Thai politics however, not knowing about what will happen in the event of the royal transition could prove counterproductive.
Already staunch royalists, mostly led by the yellow-clad People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), have begun the so-called process of re-glorifying the monarchy, which, if one looks closely, is actually not so much about strengthening the role and status of the King but more about using this revered institution to offset their own political opponents. In other words, they have continued to take advantage from the monarchy to undermine Thaksin and his red-shirted supporters, thus further deepening the division in Thai society.
They also hoped to exploit the period of the King’s birthday celebration to take back the political limelight recently hijacked by Thaksin. They were concerned about the return of a stronger Thaksin, who, at the moment, seems to work closely with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen in belittling and pressuring Thailand’s ruling elite, including those inside the palace walls.
From this perspective, it is rather clear that the Thai crisis will not end anytime soon, and definitely not until the arrival of a new reigning monarch. On the one hand, there has been unending expectation among some royalists that the king would one day exercise royal intervention to break the political impasse. On the other, some fear that any intervention from the royal institution, now or in the future, could exacerbate the already fragile political situation, and more importantly, further delay the country’s democratisation process.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies of Singapore.
NK weapons plane to where?-BBC
15-12-09
| ‘N Korean arms cargo’ men charged in Thailand | ||
The Il-76 was unloaded by Thai soldiers Five crew members of a plane seized in Bangkok on Saturday have been charged with the illegal possession of weapons. The five men, four from Kazakhstan and one from Belarus, are to be detained without bail for a further 12 days while investigations continue. The cargo plane is believed to have left from North Korea and requested a stop in Bangkok to refuel. When the aircraft was inspected, it was found to be carrying more than 30 tonnes of weapons. The cargo included rocket propelled grenades, explosives and missile components.
International intrigue There is a good deal of mystery, and an equal amount of speculation about the five men, their plane, and its illicit cargo. But the few hard facts that have now been established paint an intriguing picture. The aircraft is believed to have started its journey in Central Asia. It made several stops on its way to North Korea, including a brief stop in Thailand on Friday. But when it returned on Saturday morning to the same Bangkok airport to refuel, the plane was searched and the huge cache of weapons discovered. The crucial question which remains unanswered is where the plane was ultimately heading. Several local reports suggest that Sri Lanka may have been the next scheduled re-fuelling stop. But beyond that, theories vary wildly from Pakistan to Yemen. Thai investigators now have twelve more days to question the crew, but so far the five men deny any knowledge of the cargo they were carrying. |
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[FACT comments: As Bangkok Pundit notes, this seizure reminds us that Viktor Bout is still in Thai prison. Would it have been different if the plane landed in a ‘friendly’ country, say, Vietnam or Laos to refuel? Or would the weapons have been seized in Sri Lanka? Would it have made a difference had the crew not lied about their cargo? In any case, Americans hate competition!]
Plane with war weapons from North Korea seized in Thailand
Bangkok Pundit: December 13, 2009
AP reports:
| Five foreigners who crewed an aircraft carrying tons of weapons originating in North Korea were charged with arms smuggling in Thailand on Sunday.
Police Col. Supisarn Pakdinarunart said the men — four from Kazakhstan and one from Belarus — denied the charges and were refused bail. They will appear in court Monday. The men were detained and their foreign-registered aircraft impounded after it landed in the Thai capital Saturday with about 35 tons of weapons, Thai officials said. The cache included explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and components for surface-to-air missiles. Air Force spokesman Capt. Montol Suchookorn said the chartered cargo plane, an Ilyushin 76 transport, originated in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang and requested to land at Bangkok’s Don Muang airport to refuel. North Korea has been widely accused of violating United Nations sanctions by selling weapons to nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Local press reports said Thai authorities were tipped off by their American counterparts about the cargo aboard the aircraft. Officials at the U.S. Embassy could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday. There were differing local media reports about the plane’s destination with some saying it was headed to Sri Lanka and others saying Pakistan. “We are not yet clear why they were transporting these weapons, we only know they were due to refuel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.” “Security and intelligence services are continuing to investigate. It is not yet clear if this is terrorist activity,” he said. Abhisit said the plane start from North Korean capital of Pyongyang and the cache came from a North Korean company and the plane was registered in Georgia. The crew requested permission to land for refuelling in Bangkok and then lied to inspectors about its cargo, saying it carried only oil drilling equipment. The Bangkok Post: One suspect told authorities that the aircraft flew from Russia to North Korea where the weapons were loaded. The foreigners are in the custody of the Crime Suppression Division. They face charges of violating aviation regulations, arms trafficking and making a false declaration. BP: This reads like a movie plot. Simply bizarre. btw, saw the story and immediately thought of Viktor Bout who is still locked up pending an appeal – see posts on Bout here, here, and here. |
WikiLeaks works!-CMLP
15-12-09
WikiLeaks in the Crosshairs
The holiday season is in full swing, as evidenced by the marked uptick in the number of gift-giving guides clogging up my browser. We here at CMLP, ever the helpful sort, wanted to get in on the action. But rather than offer yet another list of plastic doodads that are sure to be relegated to the bottom of the sock drawer by January 1 (but how cool are the R2D2 lights?), we thought we’d offer a helpful suggestion for the WikiLeaks editor in your life: a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Why, you might ask? Because, after the past few weeks, they’re going to need all the help they can get.
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few months, you’ve probably heard about some of the recent high-profile “releases” on WikiLeaks. Back in November, WikiLeaks published nearly 573,000 intercepted pager messages sent on September 11, 2001. The week before that, WikiLeaks published thousands of documents and correspondence between British and U.S. climate scientists just in time for the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen. WikiLeaks followed up these feats by releasing the air-traffic control recordings from the British Airways flight 038, which crash landed on December 2, 2008, and reposting a TSA operations manual that had been improperly posted on a government website. All of this has certainly raised the profile of the three year old whistle-blower site. But WikiLeaks is about to learn what happens to those that rise above the crowd: they become a target to have their head chopped off. You see, the government doesn’t appreciate being made to look foolish. Always ones to shoot the messenger, various Congresscritters are calling for an investigation and considering potential criminal sanctions against WikiLeaks and other sites that repost such material in the future. Not to be outdone, Rep. Peter King has asked his staff to take time out of their busy schedules wringing their hands over the White House party crashers to investigate the release of those 9/11 messages. Even our friends across the pond are getting in on the act, issuing a take-down notice to demand removal of the BA flight 038 recordings. So how successful are the Congressional challenges likely to be? Probably not very. As Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center has pointed out (and as our own Sam Bayard explained in connection with the Twitter-leak brouhaha), back in 2001 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case called Bartnicki v. Vopper that the First Amendment protects the reposting of even illegally-obtained material in situations where the speech is about a matter of public concern. (Of course, if the material is posted by a WikiLeaks user, Section 230 would likely also come into play). Similarly, additional legislation to expand criminal sanctions for republication of classified information is likely to run afoul of the Constitution, for many of the reasons articulated in the concurring opinions in New York Times Co. v. United States. But don’t expect that to keep some Congresspeople from trying. |
Technology of Liberation? Activists Get their Own Smartphone
Rebecca Novick
Huffington Post: December 10, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-novick/technology-of-liberation_b_385294.html
You’re in a jail in a remote region of southwestern China. The men who arrested you have confiscated your mobile phone, which contains photos of a Public Security Bureau official brutally beating a young man who organized a protest over the working conditions in a local salt mine. No one knows where you are and the police officer sitting opposite you is not smiling.
But what he doesn’t know is that you have already used your phone to send the photos over the Internet to a prominent human rights organization who has distributed it to the international press. Your phone has automatically replied to a text message inquiry as to your whereabouts with your GPS coordinates. A friend is on her way to the jail in a jeep with a civil rights lawyer, and your detention is already being discussed in Congress. The same friend has remotely erased all incriminating material off your mobile. Without evidence, the police have no choice but to set you free with a warning.
The Guardian–a revolutionary mobile phone software–will embody a number of such James-Bond-like features especially designed with these situations in mind. Its developer, Nathan Frietas, who has been writing code since he was eight years old, is one of a growing community of digital specialists who are bringing their skills and knowledge to social justice causes. He describes Guardian as “the first open-source, secure, privacy-focused mobile phone with a target user base of activists, human rights advocates–people working for good and change within difficult circumstances.” Open source describes an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software that allows public access to the source code, and encourages peer-based collaboration to customize the source code for the needs of specific users.
“The exciting thing is that this software is being developed already around the world by many different open-source developers,” says Freitas. “Guardian, in a sense, is pulling these pieces together.”
Guardian’s software is especially designed for privacy and security, including a foundational network that protects anonymity and offers secure web access. Internet use is the critical issue of mobile phone security, as mobile phone operators generally have much more control over their networks than do Internet providers. Guardian also offers encrypted SMS, voice messaging and walkie talkie options, ingenious ways to hide information, and instant one button erase all for sensitive content. The software will also include custom citizen journalist tools as activists often find themselves playing the role of reporters in places where access by independent journalists has been restricted.
Tenzin Dorjee, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet, sees the Guardian phone as “a game-changing tool” for social justice movements. He points out how Tibetans routinely get arrested, tortured and imprisoned for phone conversations that are tracked and censored by Chinese authorities.
Freitas himself served for four years on the board of Students For a Free Tibet and Guardian was directly inspired by his experience with Tibet activists. A former senior manager at Palm, the mobile technology company responsible for the Palm Pilot, he became frustrated by stories of activists having to resort to eating their SIM-cards or smashing their phone and flushing them down the toilet. “You have to do something better than eating SIM-cards and flushing mobiles.”
The Center for American Progress agrees. In a recently published report, the liberal think tank calls on the US government to take steps to apply technologies such as mobile phones to the issue of human rights abuses, and proposes direct collaboration between human rights workers and new technology researchers and developers.
“As new technologies are discovered, new human rights applications will emerge,” the report reads. “If the US government is to be the global human rights leader its citizens want it to be, it will need to ensure that human rights are a principal beneficiary of the development of cutting-edge innovations.”
The Guardian software is designed to be compatible with Google Android mobile phones, 18 variations of which will be on the market by the end of 2009. Anyone who buys an Android phone and has Internet access will be able to upgrade to Guardian for free, says Freitas. “The vision is that some young person somewhere in the world goes to a night market, picks up an HTC [Android] phone, downloads the software off the internet, and we’ve enabled someone to have this phone in their pocket. ” Once someone downloads the file onto a secure digital (SD) card, they can then pass the software from one phone to another, by-passing the Internet.
Security phones with encrypted voice and SMS messaging that scrambles the data into a form that can’t be understood by unauthorized people, already exist. But their price tag puts them beyond the reach of the average user. The idea of Guardian is to create a crypto-phone that is accessible for everyone. Don’t get an iphone, says Freitas, because AT&T shares its user information with the US government and Apple is close-sourced. According to Freitas, Blackberry’s developer, Research in Motion, has collaborated with various authoritarian states “and doesn’t make clear what they’ve compromised in their security.” Do not buy these products, he says, “because you can’t trust them.”
Guardian looks destined to become a must-have for human rights defenders the world over. But activists aren’t the only people interested in protecting their privacy and security, and the projections for Android phones puts Guardian on the breaking end of a potentially massive wave. Analysts predict that by 2012, Android will become the world’s 2nd most popular smartphone platform, pushing iPhone into 3rd place, and that the shipment of Android phones will close in on 32 million by the following year.
Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight, told the BBC that social networks “are the fuel propelling the momentum,” behind an anticipated explosion in the sales of smartphones next year–a market that has proved persistently resilient to the global recession. While the rest of the world is exchanging jokes, pick up lines and film reviews, however, civil resistance groups and activists are using communications technology to more effectively network and organize against authoritarian states. This is an example of what Patrick Meier calls an irevolution–the merger of technology and individual empowerment that he believes has the potential to change the balance of power between repressive regimes and resistance movements in favor of the resisters. Meier, a doctoral research fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, sees the Guardian phone as one example of the “technologies of liberation” to emerge from this union.
But Meier is quick to point out that authoritarian states will naturally respond by stepping up their own systems of control. “Just at the same time as civil resistance groups, civil society groups, and transnational networks, are starting to leverage these technologies to create more transparency and accountability, obviously repressive regimes are not going to just sit still and watch that happen.”
It’s a good bet that states like China that have become expert in managing citizen access to information, will respond to Guardian by stepping up their monitoring and filtering technologies. And if these attempts are successful, then people working against the interests of authoritarian states may be making themselves more vulnerable by using these phones, especially since their increased sense of protection will encourage them to act less cautiously with politically sensitive information.
“In the state-of-the-arts censorship system in China, there is a great need for technology that provides secure data and communication tools,” says Sharon Hom, the Executive Director of Human Rights in China. “The Guardian phone could be empowering, depending upon specific functions, ease of use, and price–and its ability to stay ahead of the censors.” It’s this ability to stay ahead of the censors (and hackers) that will be the measure of Guardian’s success.
Greg Walton, a fellow at Toronto University with the think tank SecDev and consultant for Psiphon–a human rights software project whose censorship circumvention software is part of the Guardian package–is cautiously optimistic about Guardian’s future. In the Spring of 2009, his group at Toronto exposed “Ghostnet”–an international computer spy ring that had infiltrated embassies and government offices around the world. Walton is part of Psiphon’s “red team” that attempts to hack its own technologies to find possible security weaknesses that the “black hat” hackers (i.e. the bad guys) might manage to exploit.
Walton describes Freitas as a “software curator” bringing together the best of open-sourced software. “It may seem counter-intuitive,” he says, “but people have made very strong cases for the inherent security of open source software.” This is because anyone can download the code and read it line by line, looking to see if it’s been tampered with. “Because the code is openly available to hundreds and thousands of developers, it’s far more likely that they’re going to discover security vulnerabilities in the software than were the codes proprietary or close-sourced, as is the case with Microsoft, for example, where there is a very limited pool of software engineers looking for flaws and vulnerabilities.”
Walton is the author of a seminal study analyzing China’s censorship and surveillance systems. If Guardian proves to become the tool of choice for activists, he says, “the Chinese state is going to mobilize significant resources both technical and human, to monitor and block networks of people using it.” He points out that China now leads the world in internet censorship, a technology that was once believed to be impervious to government interception.
“It’s definitely an arms race,” admits Freitas, who envisions keeping one step ahead of the “black hat” hackers through regular system upgrades that can be easily downloaded, much like Firefox.
The trend of toys for social fraternizing becoming tools for social change is on the rise. Twitter did not define the post-election Iranian protests, but it galvanized international concern by bringing the living rooms of the world into the dust, terror and excitement of the streets of Tehran. Perhaps more importantly, it created a forum to unite the personal and real-time narratives of ordinary people that not only challenged state propaganda but made it seem silly.
The Guardian phone may well have a similar role to play in future movements. And as ordinary citizens gain increased access to secure communications technologies, the autocracies of the world may find it increasingly difficult to dominate the story.
Rebecca Novick is a writer and founding producer of The Tibet Connection radio program online at http://thetibetconnection.org
Zinn’s ‘People’s History’ Masterwork Hits the History Channel
AlterNet: December 11, 2009.
Don’t miss Howard Zinn’s ‘Voices of a People’s History’ debut on the History Channel on December 13th.
On December 13th, a date I’ve basically had tattooed on my arm like the guy from Memento, The People Speak finally makes its debut on the History Channel. This is more than just must-see-TV. It is nothing less than the life’s work of “people’s historian” Howard Zinn brought to life by some of the most talented actors, musicians, and poets in the country. Howard Zinn and his partner Anthony Arnove chose the most stirring political passages in Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States, creating a written anthology called Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Those “voices” have now been fully resurrected by a collection of performers ranging from Matt Damon to hip hop artist Lupe Fiasco to poet Staceyann Chin.
The People Speak also showcases John Legend reading the words of Muhammad Ali, Kerry Washington as Sojourner Truth, David Strathairn’s take on the soaring oratory of Eugene Debs, and Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass asking, “What is the 4th of July to the American Slave?” There are also the words of women factory workers read by Marisa Tomei, rebellious farmers personified by Viggo Mortensen, and escaped slaves voiced by Benjamin Bratt.
Certainly the lunatic right will howl to the heavens after seeing “liberal Hollywood” perform the words of labor radicals, anti-racists, feminists, and socialists. In fact, aided by the craven Matt Drudge, they are already in full froth, campaigning online to get the History Channel to drop The People Speak before its air-date. If it weren’t so contemptible, their actions would be almost quaint, like a virtual book burning.
But beneath the bombast, their hostile aversion “a people’s history” speaks volumes about why we need to support this project. This is a country dedicated to historical amnesia. Our radical past holds dangers for both those in power and those threatened by progressive change. We need to rescue the great battles for social justice from becoming either co-opted or simply erased from the history books. Our children don’t learn about the people who made the Civil Rights movement. Instead we get Dr. Martin Luther King on a McDonald’s commemorative cup. Because of our country’s organized ignorance, endless hours are wasted in every generation reinventing the wheel and relearning lessons already taught.
One reason Barack Obama made so many of us feel “hopey” during the 2008 election season is that he seemed to understand and even take inspiration from our “people’s history.” Candidate Obama would invoke the odysseys of abolitionists, suffragettes, freedom riders, and Stonewall rioters. He linked his campaign to this history with a slogan from today’s immigrant rights and union struggles: Si Se Puede, Yes We Can.
And yet this Presidency in practice has been like watching George W. Bush with a working cerebellum. Send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan? Say nothing in the face of racist rallies held outside the capitol? Tell LGBT people to shut up and wait for their civil rights? All in a year’s work. The Obama administration is now counting upon the American people, to once again, quietly go with the flow all while pretending we never saw this movie before. This is why The People Speak matters. It’s aimed at reclaiming our hallowed history from all who would profane it: to resurrect our past as a guide to fight for the future.
There are those who will wrongly see The People Speak as a kind of “spoonful of sugar” approach to education. Get a celebrity to recite the words of Susan B. Anthony and all of a sudden, we’ll all want to be history buffs. But this isn’t Hollywood “slumming” in the land of radical chic. It is instead a bracing spectacle where our sacred history is reimagined by performance artists of tremendous craft. Consider the dramatic task at hand: they are attempting nothing less than turning politics into art. If Zinn and co-producers Arnove, Damon, Josh Brolin and Chris Moore pull this off, it holds the potential to introduce a new generation to Sojourner Truth, Eugene Debs, and perhaps most importantly of all, to the works of Howard Zinn.
As Zinn himself once said, “Knowing history is less about understanding the past than changing the future.” This is the grand adventure of Howard Zinn’s life. I encourage everyone to come along for the ride. Get your friends and family together on Sunday night and experience The People Speak. Then take them by the hand and pledge to be heard.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The Atlantic: July/August 2008
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. Read the rest of this entry »
