Last month the United Nations published a report calling Internet access essential to the exercise of human rights like freedom of expression. This week the global organization has said that geospatial data is "as important for countries as the building of roads and telecommunications networks."

"Geospatial information has application in many fields," the organization said in a release issued last night, "including humanitarian, peace and security, environmental and development challenges facing the world, such as climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, famines, population displacement and food and economic crises."

The UN produces its own geodata as well, mapping resources, roads and crises in regions where it does humanitarian aid, for example.

Will the new committee reach beyond the ESRI-loving traditional geodata world? Will its experts include agile, web-savvy, API- and mashup-loving, mobile mapping, open standards geo 2.0 people? For the sake of that data providing maximum value over the long run, we can hope so.

As the UN rightly recognizes, geodata offers substantial value as a development platform.

Its latest move, however, goes far beyond the pale of common sense. It has passed a resolution outlawing "defamation" of religion. That means that wherever U.N. writ runs, neither a person nor an organization nor a representative of the press may say anything negative about a religion, part of a religion, an offshoot of a religion or a representative or member of a religion.

If you believe, as the United Nations allegedly does, that free speech is not a political right but a human right, you will be horrified by this.

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

If you're all for limits on speech that you dislike, you would do well to remember that this type of resolution is a textbook case of "slippery slope." If you can do it to someone you hate, it takes only a slight tip of the scale for them to do it to you.

Pakistan has shut off the web out of fear it will see a picture of Mohammed. Either out of fear of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, or using that event as an excuse, the Pakistani government has blocked the following at least: Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Apparently Twitter is still partially functional, but blocked in certain parts of the country. I imagine it will be banned everywhere in short order. Everybody Draw Mohammed day started as a joke in a cartoon, which the cartoonist backed down from, but others went forward with. It is supposedly a celebration of free speech. It has purportedly drawn a lot of outright racist crap, but I suppose that's what makes it free speech as opposed to sanctioned speech. Many Pakistanis are outraged more at the censorship than at any possible blasphemy. I guess they figure that they, and their faith, are proof against the deadly power of amateur cartooning. Maybe the government should take a page from their book instead of tear pages out of the Koran to cover themselves with.

Tunisian citizens protest online crackdown. Thousands of Tunisians joined an online anti-censorship campaign, posting on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and posting photos and videos on the topic. "Even some radio and TV shows slipped a word about it, which is a first: The silent crowd is not so silent anymore." Tomorrow, organizers are taking the protest offline in cities around the world, including Tunis.

Tunisia blocks Skype. (This from an email from ReadWriteWeb France editor, Fabrice Epelboin.) Possibly in relationship to the anti-censorship activities above, Tunisia has blocked the VOIP site, though not others.

Facebook refuses to remove Holocaust denial groups. Facebook has refused to ban holocaust denier groups from using its service. That seems odd and a breaking of its terms of service, but is a private company and has the right to decide what it does. It can also be boycotted by users if they do not respond to what those users want. If people can force Facebook's hand, good I suppose. Talk of suing Facebook seems off-base though.

Thailand attacks protesters. Thailand sent in the army to break up the camp of the Red Shirt protesters, many of whom use electronic media to present their case against the current government. Several of the leaders surrendered to avoid more bloodshed.

Internet unblocked in Uighur area but webmasters and bloggers remain in jail. After being shut down or blocked for almost a year, China has apparently unblocked Internet access in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. The webmasters, bloggers and journalists arrested in the crackdown of July 2009, however, remain jailed. These include "Memet Turghun Abdulla, a photographer who published an article online about an attack on Uyghur factory workers believed to have sparked the July 2009 unrest; Gheyret Niyaz, a journalist who was detained after talking to foreign media about the unrest; Dilshat Parhat, who co-founded the Uyghur-run website Diyarim; Obulkasim, an employee of Diyarim; Nureli, who founded the Uyghur website Selkin; and website supervisor Muhemmet."

Vietnam upholds sentences against blogger, other dissidents. Nguyen Tien Trung, a blogger and computer technician, did not appeal his sentence. He's jailed for speaking out against the regime. The court upheld attorney and businessman Le Cong Dinh's five-year sentence and businessman Tran Huynh Duy Thuc's 16-year sentence. The five-year term of Le Thang Long was reduce to three-and-a-half after he "admitted" his guilt.

Top photo by Arthit Suriyawongkul.

The new alliance wants to guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how mobile technology can be used to help save lives.

Already, mobile technology is providing and augmenting healthcare initiatives throughout the world. In a recent study released by the UN and Vodafone titled, "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World," over 50 of these types of initiatives throughout 26 countries were discussed. The biggest adopters of mobile technology were India with 11 projects and South Africa and Uganda with 6 each.

• Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
• Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
• In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
• In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
• In the Amazonas state of Brazil, health workers filled in surveys on their phones about the incidences of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
• In Mexico, a medical hotline called MedicallHome lets patients send medical questions via SMS.

The Power of Mobile Technology

But beyond just the altruistic aspects of mobile healthcare, the UN report also demonstrated to mobile operators how programs such as these could provide value to the industry. That, said UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership head Claire Thwaites, was a crucial step since the industry, like many others today, stands at the edge of a downturn.

Because mobile technology is relatively cheap and easy to spread, it can connect the rural areas that desperately need healthcare with the large populations of doctors who live in the urban centers. For example, "in India," said Dan Warren, director of technology for the GSM Association, the umbrella organization that hosts the MWC, "there are 1m people that die each year purely because they can't get access to basic healthcare. The converse angle to that is that 80% of doctors live in cities, not serving the broader rural communities where 800 million people live."

Some Drawbacks

Using mobile technology is not a panacea for the world's health issues, though. Says Forrester analyst Elizabeth Boehm, one of the biggest issues with mobile healthcare is that "the people who are most in need of healthcare are usually more aged, so they don't use the mobile or they're not comfortable with it." This limits the use of mobile phones in public health information campaigns.

However, as the technology continues to spread throughout the world, it's easy to see how, over the course of time, phones could become a "doctor in your pocket" for the less fortunate citizens of our world.

Mobile technology is most likely to be used in Asia or Africa, where wired infrastructure is less common. Indeed, seven of the eleven case studies included with the report detailed mobile use among organizations working in African nations.

"Well over 3.5 billion mobile phones are in use around the world and organizations are harnessing this technology to help overcome humanitarian challenges," said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation in a press release. "Modern telecommunications, and the creative use of it, has the power to change lives and help the UN solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. It can connect families separated by disaster, help emergency relief workers respond more quickly, empower health workers with data to help combat disease and epidemics, track the impacts of climate change, and even help in the resolution of civil conflicts."

By far the most common use of technology is voice, followed by text messages. But more sophisticated uses such as photo and video messaging, mapping, data collection and analysis, and inventory management are on the rise. NGOs said that the use of mobile devices has allowed them to save time, transmit data more quickly and accurately, more quickly mobilize individuals, gather data, and reach audiences that were previously unreachable.

The case studies cover the areas of public health (such as connecting health workers to one another in Uganda), humanitarian assistance (such as alerting Iraqi refugees to food aid drop offs in Syria), and environmental conservation (such as using text messages to raise awareness about deforestation in Argentina). The entire report is available for download in PDF format from the UN Foundation web site.