from Twitter

The events in Iran the last several days illustrate a theme repeatedly at this year’s CFP in the panels on Internet censorship, China, anonymity, and social network activism: governments will routinely block access to the internet and SMS to prevent organizing.  Or at least they’ll try to …

As the video of CFP08’s panel on Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet discusses, activists in Iran have plenty of practice in getting around their government’s technical and legal restrictions.   And so, despite horrendously slow internet speeds in Iran and multiple reports that the government is blocking SMS and Facebook, there continue to be viable communication channels in cyberspace:

• Octavia Nasr’s Tear gas and Twitter: Iranians take their protests online on CNN.com, the BBC’s Internet brings events to life and Ben Parr’s HOW TO: Track Iran Election with social media on Mashable are excellent overviews.
• Tehran Bureau, the bloggers at niacINsight, Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic , and the New York Times’ The Lede and many others highlight and contextualize the online news.
• Blogs like Raye Man Kojast? Where Is My Vote?,  25khordad, Flickr, YouTube, and aggregators like Iran primary sources are also playing important roles in keeping information flowing.
• Twitter is a particularly vibrant source of first-person information and links via the #iranelection hashtag.  Twazzup’s page is a great way to view it.

Additional resources for people in Iran:

• proxy servers can often let you access sites the government is trying to block.  How do I use a proxy server? has instructions for many different browsers.  Austin Heap has been keeping an updated list of available proxy servers and there’s also a lot of information on Twitter.
• If you need to remain anonymous, Tor can help — there’s a Farsi download page at گمنامی آنلاين : Tor For bloggers, Global Voices Advocacy’s Anonymous blogging with Wordpress and Tor is important reading.  There’s a lot more information and many additional tools at sesawe.net, which also has Farsi-language pages.

At CFP09, Gaurav, Ralf, Nancy and I ended the Online activism around the world panel discussing with a sobering discussion of whether social network sites favored grassroots activists or regimes in power.  At least so far, the protestors in Iran seem to be using the Internet to route around censorship, and social networks — Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook — are a huge part of it.

Twitter figures prominently in the “coverage of the coverage”, with headlines across the world like La révolution n’est pas télévisée, elle est twiterrisée and Twitter links Iran protestors to the outside world. Twazzup, who provided a custom page for CFP09, has done a great job steadly enhancing their Iran coverage.  Dolores M. Bernal’s Twitter users shame CNN for not covering Iran elections, riots on News Junkie, Mark Drapeau’s How online word-of-mouth can change mainstream election media coverage in the Examiner, and Brian Stelter’s Real-time criticism of CNN’s coverage of Iran in the New York Times illustrate the effect Twitter can have on other media.  As Ralf said in our panel, Twitter changes everything … hopefully enough to make a difference.

CFP09 speaker Michael Anti, on Twitter

jon

What about 2009?

For me, magic happened a coupel of times on Thursday:

• the panelists on the Internet and social change in China panel using Twitter and their cellphones to track reports of the demonstrations in Hong Kong and the mass censorship of the Chinese internet
• at the closing Panopticon panel, where speakers like Anne Roth and Steven Hatfill talked about how their lives had been turned upside down by total government surveillance — at the same time as tweets about the unexpected success of the Chaffetz amendment limiting whole-body imaging (aka “digital strip search”) showed the potential for privacy advocates using social network activism

What are the other “CFP moments” you particularly remember, from CFP 2009 or past years?

jon

Panel, June 4: the Internet and social change in China

The wiki page we’ve created for the session has the video, presentations by Ralf, Gaurav Mishra, and me, and links out to moderator Nancy Scola’s Global Digital Activism Case Study: Germany’s Freedom Not Fear in techPresident as well as Gaurav’s The 4Cs Social Media Framework, which provided a great intellectual framework for the session.  There’s also a document Katrina Neubauer put together summarizing panelists’ email responses to a handful of questions.  If there’s other information that should be here, please add it to the page or leave it as a comment here … thanks!

There were a lot of logistical challenges with this panel, and so four of the invited panelists weren’t able to attend in person.   We’ll try to work with Basem Fathy, Evgeny Morozov, Michael Bolognino, and Willow Witte to incoporoate their perspectives on the page as well, via a presentation, video, blog post, and/or article.  Over time, we’ll hopefully have with similar pages for other sessions as well. In other words, stay tuned for more!

And it’d be great to hear what others thought of the session — and thoughts what other campaigns we should have covered.  So please feel kick off some discussion in the comments!

jon

“Fight for me!”
– a privacy-loving Facebook friend, wishing me luck at the conference

Here’s our opportunity to realize the promise of the Net that was so present in the 1990s when CFP started.
– Deborah Pierce on the CFP blog

The program for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is outstanding even by CFP’s high standards. The mix of technology, legal, policy, and activism perspectives is particularly strong this year, and with the new administration and Washington DC location there’s significant involvement by government employees for the first time since the 1990s. As well as CFP regulars like Jennifer Grannick, Jim Harper, Ed Felten, Nicky Ozer, Alessandro Acquisti, Stewart Baker, and Lillie Coney, speakers incude first-timers like Marcy Wheeler, Dori Maynard, Paul Ekman, Shireen Mitchell, Rebecca Mackinnon, Nancy Scola, and Ari Melber. Don’t take my word for it — check out the program and prepare to be impressed.

Best of all, with streaming video, the #cfp09 Twitter backchannel ,* live-blogging, and a community wiki, the conference will be more accessible onine than every before. Kudos to Katy Nelson of the ACLU and Robert Guerra of Freedom House for taking the lead with the video streaming, and to all the volunteers of the online visibility team for all the great work on the blog, Twitter, and Facebook. The online schedule has details, we’ll do our best to keep the web site updated regularly, and the Twitter feed will be best way to keep up what’s going on.

As well as setting ambitious diversity, visibility, and community goals for the online visibility project, my contributions to CFP this year include working with Deborah Pierce, Shireen Mitchell, and Sarah Granger on Monday’s Twittering in the trenches workshop; helping Katrina Neubauer and Robert Guerra on Thursday’s Online activism around the world panel; organizing Wednesday’s keynote by Willow Witte of Join the Impact and DREAM Activist Mohammed Abdol; and a Wednesday night birds-of-a-feather session on New Strategies for fighting FISA and the PATRIOT Act. Notice a theme here?

There was a lot of skepticism when Deborah first proposed a social network activism strategy for privacy and civil liberties at Andrea Matwyshyn’s Data Devolution conference** and a CFP session in 2006. Since then, though:

• in 2007, Stop Real ID Now! demonstrated that an unlikely alliance of libertarians, agriculturalists, migrant rights activists, transgendered people, and biblical literalists could contribute to a civil liberties success
• in 2008, Voces Contra las FARC went from a Facebook group to millions of people in the streets in six weeks, the Obama campaign showed the power of social networks, and Get FISA Right, Twitter Vote Report, Voter Suppression Wiki, Join the Impact all used a wiki/social network approach to reach thousands of people and hte mainstream media
• in early 2009, EPIC joined forces with grassroots organizers and 100,000 users in the successful “Facebook TOS” flash action protests

So people are starting to come around

Too often, privacy and civil liberties advocates wind up talking to themselves. Speakers at most CFPs are predominantly white, male, older, and highly-credentialed; the audience is a little more diverse, but plenty of people who care about CFP can’t afford the time or money to get to the conference in person. Organizations too often rely on email-based outreach and static web sites, which makes it impossible to engage with the broad community, so it’s very easy to get cut off from most people’s reality.

Social network sites, by contrast, are filled with real people: moms, “millennials”,*** Obama and Ron Paul supporters, immigrants and peace activists who are sick of being the targets of government surveillance. Many of them care passionately about privacy and civil liberties, have perspectives that get virtually no attention in the media, want to learn more, and will find the time to help. We need to work with them if want to seize the opportunity that Deborah talked about and realize the transformational potential of the internet.

True, sites like Facebook are creepy panoptic environments that make money by exploiting users’ personal information and don’t even offer a pretense of due process or user rights. But hey, if changing the world were easy, everybody would do it. And organizations like PrivacyActivism, EPIC, EFF, and CDT are increasingly moving out of their comfort zones and engaging on social networks.

So the timing’s perfect for CFP09 to be a catalyst to social network activism: sharing best practices for education and technology, bringing in youth and international perspectives, highlighting success stories — all in a context of outstanding legal and policy experties. The Strategies for fighting FISA session is one example; I also expect we’ll see discussions of the Privacy Coalition’s Whole-body imaging campaign, CDT’s brilliantly-timed Privacy Act rewrite, and a lot more.

At last year’s CFP Susy Struble and I had led “Dear POTUS”, a collaboratively-written open letter to the presidential candidates; six weeks later, I was part of the group of Obama supporters who wrote an open letter on FISA — and he wrote back, on my.barackobama.com and the Huffington Post, in a moment that’s repeatedly cited as a watershed for online activism. Lillie Coney’s panel on e-Deceptive campaign practices last year helped lead to the Voter Suppression Wiki and some key early publicity for Twitter Vote Report. And I’m no exception; plenty of others had similar experiences.

I can’t wait to see what this year’s conference brings!

jon

* our thanks to Twazzup for setting up a custom search page at http://cfp09.twazzup.com

** the same conference where I presented my joint work with Sarah Blankinship on the implications of “computer science as a social science” for computer security, a theme being explored at CFP this year in a breakout session on The Psychology of Security. Shameless plug: Sarah and I will be presenting Securing With the Enemy: Social Strategy and Teams of Rivals at Shakacon on June 11-12. More on that subject soon!

*** the under-30 generation who sees email as something they use for work and to keep in contact with older relatives

The Twittering in the Trenches Workshop is Monday, June 1, 9am-5pm (eastern). Please join us online or in person

In 1995 I went to my first Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference. I was completely boggled: every issue that was discussed had at least three compelling sides to it. I was also inspired because I could really see how the Net could be great for building communities.  Even back then it seemed that the Net was about building bridges and communities.

I remember David Brin speaking about surveillance cameras (no cell phone cameras yet), how ubiquitous they were going to become, and how we had to turn them to our advantage. I remember very smart, tech-savvy, civil libertarians like John Gilmore and Mike Godwin on panels with representatives from the White House and the FBI debating the use of cryptography, free-speech, and privacy issues. The techies stated that the Net was going to be a place where we would have the ability to share knowledge widely, without regard to geographical location, and where we would have more freedom to discus topics than in traditional media.  We could reshape our reality; old-fashioned laws wouldn’t hinder us, technology would finally give power to ordinary people.  It was exciting stuff.

I also remember the White House representative responding, almost in angry frustration, that we may have won the first round of the crypto wars, but that they’d be back and he Net wouldn’t be a “lawless” place — meaning that the status quo would be regained.

Of course, he was right. Now we have CALEA, the Patriot Act, Carnivore and its successors, draconian copyright laws, and a host of other privacy-invading tools that governments can use against people.

So here we are again in 2009.  The same kind of power is there on social network sites – on Facebook, MySpace, Tribe, Second Life, Free-Association, LiveJournal, and all the rest. Unlike Usenet and other ways of communicating on the Net a la 1995, social networks now are quite usable for us non-technical people, and the interfaces are pretty and inviting.  It’s never been easier to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues online.

And those that want to keep the status quo, they see the power too, so they want to hobble the social networks as best they can. They use fear of drug abuse, pedophiles, terrorists, and porn … and draft the same kind of privacy invasive and free speech hindering laws they’ve been pushing for years.

We don’t have to allow entrenched power bases take away our ability to organize and make our voices heard. Let’s not allow the Net to become just another TV outlet and shopping mall.

Social networks have already proved extremely useful in various activist campaigns. Stop Real ID Now, Join the Impact (for marriage equality), Get FISA Right, President Obama’s election campaign, and others, have shown that shown how quickly we can organize using online tools. At this workshop, we’ll discuss what worked and what didn’t, so that we can be more effective in the future.

We’ve learned from our experiences and so can empower users of social networks.  We can provide and expand online resources for people so that they can quickly get up to speed on services like Twitter, and know how to better translate online communications into actions.  We can work with site operators to make it more likely that we’ll have policies that protect our ability to use social networks, policies that protect our privacy and our free-speech rights.  And we can reach out on social networks to involve more diverse groups of people and hopefully jump start activism on privacy and first amendment issues.

Here’s our opportunity to realize the promise of the Net that was so present in 1990s when CFP started. If we don’t take and use our power now to keep social networks as open as we can make them, I don’t think we’re going to get another chance.

A new study by Cambridge law Professor Pratricia Akester looks at the effects of Digital Rights Management on Freedom of Expression.   Apparently, it turns us all into pirates.

With Obama about to announce a new Cybersecurity Czar with a “Broad Mandate,” folks are weighing in on what path the senior White House official should (or shouldn’t) take.  A CFP Panel on Cybersecurity and the New Administration, featuring congressmen Alan M. Grayson (D-FL) ask what is the best way to improve the security of the nation’s cyber infrastructure.

As Proposition 8 was upheld on Tuesday, activists from across the country turned to Join the Impact as they organized demonstrations.  Michael Bolognino of JTI will join us at CFP to discuss net-roots organizing on the Wednesday’s Online Activism Around the World panel.

We’d love to hear about the news related to CFP topics that you’re interested in!  Please share your links and ideas in the comments!