Here's the situation: I have an acquaintance who has asked me to check in via email every now and then to make sure he has not been taken by the security forces of his country. He lives in one of the countries of the Arab Spring where the official resistance is very strong to the innovations coursing through society. This is not the first time I've been asked to do this and every time I do so I am honored by the request.

All three of these examples were of people with a number of global connections to people who had bullhorns of their own, blogs, organizations, newspapers and so on. Had one of these people gone missing, those of us keeping tabs on them would have never stopped screaming: to our friends, to journalists, to NGOs, to human rights non-profits and to governments. As I've said before, tyrants abhor attention.

But what if you didn't have such contacts, or people, being human, dropped the ball on you, or who knows what else? Well, if you had a specially-designed check-in app on your phone, you could alert people to your situation automatically.

The app I'm challenging developers to build would need a number of tools and qualities to work.

Automation

A user should be able to set up a profile so that it would expressly set out what actions should be taken when and how their continued disappearance should escalate those actions. Check-in frequency should also be automated so that, for instance, after one day of not checking in, an alert goes out. After a week, the information is released to the media, or at least to a contact-group that would in turn contact the media. It should be as granular as possible.

Anonymity

Check-in apps can give the very people you're seeking to avoid a way to track you. So this app would need to have an anonymizing feature built in, perhaps a random number assignment with each account. At a certain customizable level, the user name is released.

Safeguards

Given the possible life-or-death results of a breach, the app would have to be airtight, with every possible security measure taken, from encryption to coherent data sharing policy.

Caveat

This is a challenge, and the first part of the challenge is to think it out prior to writing one scintilla of code. So I am hoping that the least I get from this challenge is you, chiming in and sounding off. Is this a thing that can be automated? Is there already a tool out there doing the same thing, something I've missed? Given the risks, is it even something that should be automated? I think so, but I'd like to hear your input, especially if you're not an unmarried marriage counselor like me.

Airport photo by A., Sana'a photo by Sallam, Homs photo by Syriana

Naturally, YouTube doesn't want to get people killed. But it doesn't want to censor such videos either - not an easy place to be. The site is soliciting ideas about this delicate issue to stimulate discussion about the role of online video in human rights.

Citizen video is one of the most powerful ways to spread a message. YouTube is highlighting such videos on Citizentube, an official channel for breaking news viewed through the eyes of people on the street.

But YouTube's emergence as a record of human rights abuses is also very scary, especially with new technology that can identify faces in a crowd. Online video can increase the effectiveness of a protest, but it can also increase the risk of retribution against those who are involved.

In China, for example, it's not uncommon for a viral video to result in a "human flesh search" for the girl who is a subject of a cute love letter or the bully who was caught beating up a student. Users on message boards and blogs will post whatever they know about the target or the location of the video. Often the aggregated intelligence leads to a target's name, address and phone number, like a prank you might see on the message board 4chan, only more frightening.

Targeting people who appear in a video would be even easier for government or the police, who could use YouTube videos to help them arrest dissenters.

YouTube is soliciting ideas about this delicate issue for future blog posts examining the role of online video in human rights.

YouTube is asking users to consider questions such as:

How can uploaders balance privacy concerns with the need for wider exposure?

How can we stay alert to human rights footage without getting de-sensitized to it?

Does human rights content online require some kind of special status?

Submit your ideas and answers to the Google Moderator.

Facebook account removals criticized. Jillian York wrote an extensive examination of Facebook users around the world who have had their accounts closed out. "Facebook has not spoken publicly about how this process works, but my suspicion is that when a number of users report the same user, their profile is automatically disabled." If this is true, it's disturbing. Because it's mob rule.

Microsoft had a role in media repression that led up to the Kyrgyzstan coup. According to author Jeffrey Carr, writing in Forbes, "Microsoft's Kyrgyzstan agent assisted the Kyrgyz authorities in cracking down on dissenting media five days before last week's uprising." Carr publishes a timeline of online repression prior to the overthrow of Kyrgyz president Bakiev. A Microsoft representative showed up with state authorities to the offices of an internet TV station with the charge that the station used pirated Microsoft products. The authorities shut the station down. This is a strategy that repressive governments use with some regularity.

UK candidate makes "digital pledge." In response to the passing of the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, candidate Tom Watson issued a set of pledges to maintain access to online information and defend user rights.

South Korea institutes gaming curfew. Gizmodo reports South Korea "is disabling internet connections for six hours per night for underage gamers.The ban won't affect most internet uses, just a blacklist of 19 specific games."

Thai government blocks thousands of websites. Building on last week's crackdown, Thailand goes from 36 blocked websites to somewhere between 9,000 10,000. Global Voices says in their headline that they have begun locking up webmasters, but do not elaborate or source the statement.

Top photo by Cdogstar
Bottom photo by Karen Blumberg

Tunisia blocks another video site. The Tunisian government blocked YouTube and DailyMotion. What was left to block? Why, WAT.TV, of course. This one seems to have been blocked for hosting opposition videos.

China's online espionage exposed. A group of Canadian and American internet researchers found and exposed a Chinese electronic espionage group. Ronald Deibert and his fellow ruffians, rakes and ne'er-do-wells at the Information Warfare Monitor kicked open the internet and found spies lining the trunk line from Shanghai to Delhi.

Egyptian police crush April 6 protest. The original April 6 Youth Movement was organized two years ago as a protest against increased bread prices and communicated via Facebook and other social media. Kids, old folks, whomever, many of whom would not be considered traditionally political, got their heads stove in with fists and truncheons around Egypt. Chemins de fer de l'etat Egyptien, indeed.

U.S. Federal Court decision goes against net neutrality. This decision may make it possible for communications companies like the large carrier Comcast to slow traffic coming from competing data-carrying companies and sites. Precedent counts in law and this is a bad one if you believe data should get carried at speed regardless of origin.

Author on book about Google cancels China trip. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta was advised by his Chinese publisher to cancel his speaking trip because a block on coverage of the search engine was in effect. The book's title is "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It." Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage on Google and China.

UK Government passes "Digital Economy Bill." The bill will allow Britain's Secretary of State to block any site on the basis of it being a "location on the internet" where copyright is, has been, or might be, "in connection with an activity that infringes copyright." Now, Orwell was British, right? Probably a coincidence.

Taiwan police request Plurk IP information. Police have been sending letters to Alvin Woon, CEO of microblogging service Plurk, requesting that the company provide IP information on certain users.

Venezuela's president demands digital news site be prosecuted. Despite having no constitutional powers to do so, Hugo Chávez "ordered" the courts to prosecute Noticiero Digital for publishing false information, in this case, the death of a public figure who wound up not having died. The National Assembly hurriedly agreed to el presidente's decree.

Croatian blogger arrested. Marko Rakar, founder of Pollitika, was arrested for leaking a registry of Croatian War veterans.

Thai government censors, well, anything with electricity. Nine television stations and at least 36 websites have been blocked by the Thai government under a "state of emergency" declaration. The so-called Red Shirt protesters provided the excuse to cut the informational lights in that country.

A few other important issues, that took place prior to this week, included U.S. Army Counterespionage's plans to counter Wikileaks; criticism of Australia for its filtering system, the worst in the Western world; two Iranian bloggers who were threatened with judicial murder escaped to France; European Union blocking plans; Turkish reporters protest for the unblocking of YouTube; and an Egyptian activist arrested then released for his Facebook group.

Top photo by Adrian Van Leen
Graphic from Reporters Without Borders

Feel bad? I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. All this technology we use and write about and enthuse on has higher stakes than we think. Here are some of them.

Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger Le Thi Cong Nhan rearrested. In the middle of March, only three days after Le Thi Cong Nhan was released from prison after a three year sentence, she was arrested again. "Police took her to a Hanoi police station for allegedly violating the terms of the supplementary sentence of three years of house arrest that she is now supposed to serve," according to From The Old, which has more information.

Germany blocks content country-wide, imitates China and Iran. Germany, according to the OpenNetInitiative, has instituted "block lists." What starts with porn ends with you shutting the hell up. (What was that thing about the lessons of history? Ah, whatever. Let's dance! Ganz toll!)

Google gets hacked in China. Intermittent hacking and other mysterious interference slows, and in some places, blocks Google. Google stammered in response. More from ReadWriteWeb.

Yahoo gets hacked. In China. Over a dozen Yahoo email accounts belonging to foreign journalists, activists and analysts in China were hacked. Effectively, the email accounts were shut down. More from ReadWriteWeb.

Still. Iranian blogger Hessam Firouzi's still in prison. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in prison. Omid Reza Mir Sayafi (murdered March 18, 2009) is still dead.

Top photo by Adrian Van Leen
End photo by FreeKareem.org

The author was a co-founder of the March 18 Movement.

Internet access in a time of democratized online publishing may be understood as a contemporary form of the right to self-expression. It could also be understood as part of basic access to public services in an increasingly online world. We do wonder what such a designation would mean for pricing policies and the internet economy.

Legal theory trailblazer Corey Doctorow wrote the following bold prediction in an article about homeless people and internet access last week:

Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.

What do you think? Do you think internet access should be understood as a fundamental human right? Do you think that it's a frivolous distraction at a time when millions of people still don't have access to food, clean water and shelter?

France is a nation that decided earlier this year to give its citizens free one year subscriptions to a newspaper of choice on their 18th birthdays. Ostensibly to bail out the newspaper industry but also to foster a life-long habit of learning. That's pretty neat.

If you're interested in more details about this particular French ruling and can read French, check out our partner blog ReadWriteWeb France. If English is a requirement, Techdirt will no doubt have solid coverage of this and related issues.

Image: "PC bang", Seoul. By Flickr user tawalker

Indians around the internet are condemning the ruling as a blow against freedom of speech and democracy. It certainly appears to be a dangerous misunderstanding of the nature of the internet on the part of the court and a bad precedent in the most populous democracy in the world.

We're not sure what the number of potential readers has to do with anything and we find it pretty frightening that a court that would say "you're a computer student so you know how many people use the internet" had any say at all in such matters.

According to reports the comments in question were left by anonymous users and the group's owner claimed they were legitimate exercises of free speech. The youth arm of the political party facing criticism apparently filed suit under a law pertaining to "hurting public sentiment."

There are more than 1,000 groups on Orkut that show up in a search for "Shiv Sena," some for and some very much against the party. We're writing based on relatively light local reporting, so it's possible that the group started by Ajith D was particularly heinous. On principle, though, we presume that the young man should not face legal charges for anonymous comments left by others - no matter what those comments were.

Late last year Facebook shut down a group on that site that appeared to be celebrating acts of genocide against Bosnian Muslims. People lost their Facebook accounts and the group was closed due to violation of the site's Terms of Service against advocating violence - but filing legal charges against the group's admin would have been an entirely different matter.

India's Supreme Court ruling that the Orkut group owner could be sued for anonymous comments sounds like a terrible ruling to us and the kind of thing that web users all around the world should be concerned about. India is the world's second most populous country and its largest democracy. It's a large and complicated country, though. While the recent rise of the Indian middle class and tech sectors have received substantial attention, the country still has one of the highest child malnutrition rates in the world - twice that of Sub Saharan Africa according to the World Bank.

Democracies are complicated; the United States has one of the highest rates of imprisonment of any industrialized countries in the world, holds a shockingly disproportionate number of its young black men in prison and was founded on an experiment in ethnic cleansing. Who has the moral high ground?

While big picture questions are important, this particular case is as well. Will Google intervene in defense of Ajith D's use of its website? Will the US government, now more than ever advocating the use of free-flowing information technology to advance human well being, have anything to say about this potentially terrible precedent being set? We suspect neither will occur.

It's a good idea for us as individual web users to remember that even as new internet technology sets so much information and so many voices free, even in a celebrated democracy - online freedom may be one repressive legal ruling away from being put at serious risk. No matter where you might live - do you trust that your local judiciary would understand the issues in a case like this? We don't.

Will this be of any consequence? We like former CNN journalist turned human rights campaigning blogger Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it: maybe.

What kinds of things have these companies done that are being frowned up?

• "In April 2004, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo! email account to send a message to a U.S.-based pro-democracy website. In his email, he summarized a government order directing media organizations in China to downplay the upcoming 15th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists. Police arrested him in November 2004, charging him with 'illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.' Authorities used email account holder information supplied by Yahoo! to convict Shi Tao in April 2005 and sentence him to 10 years in prison." - Amnesty International


• Google censors images and other information in China when the government deems the content unacceptable.
  
  Image from Search Engine Watch


• YouTube shut down, then reinstated but erased, an Egyptian activist's YouTube account filled with videos documenting police brutality. It appears that after some time YouTube has since reposted the man's videos after continued international pressure.
  

Is This Going to Change?

These are a few examples of the kinds of issues the new Global Network Initiative will likely engage with. Will the Initiative have any teeth? We're skeptical, this isn't the first time these companies have promised to do better by their users. It's hard because their fundamental drive is to monetize these huge markets. We have a lot of respect for Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it, which we excerpt at length below.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

That said, the initiative must prove its value in the next couple of years by implementing a meaningful and sufficiently tough process by which companies' adherence to the principles will be evaluated and benchmarked. If there is a rigorous process that rates the companies' behavior, then investors who care about social responsibility, and users who want to know how trustworthy a given company is compared to others, can make more informed choices.

The initiative is based on the reality that there is pretty much no country on earth - including the United States - where governments aren't pressuring telecoms and Internet companies to do things that potentially violate users' rights to privacy and free expression. Companies must consider the right to free expression and privacy of users in all markets to be part and parcel of what it means to be socially responsible. Part of the problem is that many telecoms and Internet companies just have not been thinking through
these issues as they roll out products and services around the globe, resulting in all kinds of unintended consequences - the TOM-Skype fiasco in which Skype's Chinese business partner was found to have allowed a huge security breach being the latest example. The Initiative is about getting companies to think ahead and incorporate human rights assessments into new product plans or plans to enter new markets. It's also about being more transparent and honest with your users about what's being censored, why and how, and informing them about how and with whom their personal data is being stored and shared. That way, users can make informed choices about how and when it is safe or reliable to use these services - or not.

The detentions follow a wave of arrests of Chinese dissidents leading up to the Olympics. The US government pledged as the games began to engage the Chinese government concerning human rights - we wonder what those conversations look like now that China has detained journalists consistently critical of US policy as well.

New online media have opened the doors to people publishing on budgets that would never have supported journalistic efforts in the past. That new generation of publishers has a greater freedom to take risks because they aren't as beholden to the interests of sponsors. That's one way to describe the political impact on journalism of blogging - another way might be that these new media have opened up publishing to activists with less interest in objectivity than traditional journalists have aimed for.

Either way, the impact of blogging and video blogging on the world at large is widely recognized and it's no surprise that the authoritarian Chinese government is taking steps to protect itself. We condemn the detention of any journalists, whether they strive for objectivity or tell stories from a particular perspective.

According to extensive coverage on BoingBoing, the following US journalists and/or activists are all currently missing:
- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

We're working on creating a widget displaying video, information and a button to call US Congressional representatives but for now we'll leave you with the following video published by Conley in China last week. Update: Ribbit.com doesn't want to give us an account promptly, so we'll just say - if you want to call the US Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee to register your concern about the 5 people above, they are at +1 202 225 5021 and they are waiting for you. We just called them a few minutes ago.

Many people say that Twitter is frivolous and unimportant. In this case those people would be correct. Just six weeks ago the US Supreme Court rejected Exxon's appeal to drop a lawsuit alleging that its employees in Indonesia "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity" in defense of one of the world's largest liquid natural gas facilities. Placed in this context, whether or how this company deals with Twitter seems irrelevant.

The conversation about how Exxon should have or will deal with the spoofed Twitter account can be followed via a post last night on analyst Jeremiah Owyang's blog. It makes sense to tackle the general questions concerning "big brands" and new media, but a line should be drawn somewhere in order to keep technology in a larger perspective. The case of Exxon Mobil is on the other side of that line.

The Context in Indonesia

Indonesia is a sprawling country of more than 220 million people and an amazing 17,000 islands. It possesses huge amounts of liquid natural gas and gold and has major geo-political significance.

The country has a long and troubled history of international and internal conflicts but the US government's own documents detail US payment of local groups killing subversives based on US provided lists of individuals in the 1960's and US State Department acceptance of Indonesian government massacres of civilians using US supplied weapons in the 1970's.

Key player and Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger retained financial interests in the country's natural resources throughout the 1980's, the human rights abuses alleged to have been committed by Indonesian soldiers working as Exxon employees were far from the only crimes alleged to have been committed in the 1990's (see in addition the Dili Massacre, for example) and since the turn of the 21st century multiple US administrations have sent elite US military training groups to "train the trainers" in Indonesia despite US Congressional bans against direct co-operation with the Indonesian military on the basis of documented human rights abuses.

It's not a pretty picture. There's an intense history of globe-dominating nations doing horrible things to the people of Indonesia.

The Current Lawsuit

On June 16th, 2008 the US Supreme Court denied a request by Exxon Mobil to dismiss a lawsuit titled Exxon Mobil v. John Doe, 07-81, brought by international rights groups on behalf of 11 villagers in Indonesia's Aceh province. The suit alleges that Indonesian soldiers hired by Exxon Mobil "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity."

One British rights organization specializing in Indonesia, called Down To Earth, further reports that "the company has been accused of providing the military with buildings used for torturing local people suspected of involvement in the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and excavators to dig mass graves for the victims of military violence." The worst accounts of the treatment of civilians in Indonesia are something no one wants to read.

Exxon argued to the Supreme Court that the lawsuit against it should be dismissed because it involves issues of international relations that should be left to the Executive Branch. In 2002 the US State Department said that "adjudication of this lawsuit at this time would in fact risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States..." Indonesia is a country heavily populated with Muslims and the US argued that a ruling on the Exxon lawsuit could harm anti-terrorist efforts, among other concerns.

Since that time various courts have shaped the debate such that now-resigned Solicitor General Paul Clement said this May that the case had been sufficiently narrowed to avoid harm to the nation's foreign policy interests. According to the Associated Press, the Bush administration urged the US Supreme Court to reject Exxon's request to drop the case this June.

Thus the lawsuit still stands and Exxon may, years later, have to answer to some allegations of human rights violations.

And what about Twitter? There may or may not be a time when Exxon's engagement with new social media is important, but this same summer when the Supreme Court has just said they will be judged is not that time.

New Media and International Human Rights

In October we wrote here about the last active bloggers in Burma, fighting to let the world know what was happening there as the military massacred monks and turned the country inside-out. In December we wrote about YouTube's deleting videos documenting torture of civilians by Egyptian police because of the site's policy against violent imagery. On the Fourth of July we wrote about the Iranian Parliament's consideration of the death penalty for subversive bloggers.

The internet and human rights intersect often. If we are to believe that these democratizing media are going to make the world a better place, then it's important to keep them in context regarding what's going on in the world outside of our tech niche. It's with that in mind that we point at the lawsuit and Supreme Court ruling against Exxon when the company's communication strategy with the world comes up in conversation.

After all, as Exxon Spokesperson Alan Jeffers said yesterday about Twitter: "It's our perception that social networking is based on honesty, transparency and trust..."

Photo: A market in Aceh, Indonesia. Creative Commons from Flickr user A. www.viajar24h.com