Return-Path: <sentto-279987-4533-1014906779-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 28 Feb 2002 06:34:11 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 14316 invoked by uid 510); 28 Feb 2002 14:32:53 -0000 Received: from n28.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.78) by all.net with SMTP; 28 Feb 2002 14:32:53 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-4533-1014906779-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [216.115.97.162] by n28.groups.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 28 Feb 2002 14:33:00 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: unknown); 28 Feb 2002 14:32:59 -0000 Received: (qmail 75960 invoked from network); 28 Feb 2002 14:32:59 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m8.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 28 Feb 2002 14:32:59 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (12.232.72.152) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 28 Feb 2002 14:32:57 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id g1SEXFs15736 for iwar@onelist.com; Thu, 28 Feb 2002 06:33:15 -0800 Message-Id: <200202281433.g1SEXFs15736@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 06:33:15 -0800 (PST) Subject: [iwar] [fc:wired.magazine.-.the.resistance.network] Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Resistance Network Too many people believe if it isn't on CNN, it isn't important. "Countrynets" expose dictatorships, unite activists, and give hope to the oppressed around the world. By A. Lin Neumann For the most part, people outside don't understand and don't care," says the slight young American man who calls himself Strider. "Burma is just too far away and too hard to understand." As a result, he says, a brutal dictatorship has existed there for years with scant outside attention paid to its excesses and abuses. The cure for the problem, as far as Strider is concerned, is partly to be found on the Internet and in a new kind of communications resource: BurmaNet, an information-heavy mailing list that targets activists, journalists, exiles, and academics intent on tracking Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989) with detail unavailable through traditional media. While commercial online companies sell the flash and dash of the World Wide Web and US Congressional antiporn tub-thumpers seek to impose their parochial will on the global networking phenomenon, Strider and hundreds of other modem-driven activists are using the Internet to quietly transform the work of monitoring human rights violations and pressuring governments. They may exist outside most of the recent public Net scrutiny, but dozens of mailing lists, webpages, Usenet groups, and other tools are springing up to track events and affect political decisions in under-reported countries, many of them hindered by closed political systems. These "countrynets" unite activists separated by tens of thousands of miles and allow instant access to a common pool of narrowcast news and information on nations and issues that are largely ignored by the mass media. "For Americans, if it doesn't happen on CNN, it doesn't happen. We're trying to change that, at least for those who are interested," explains BurmaNet's Strider, 29, who says he began working on the project because he was frustrated by the lack of information available in the West about the deplorable human rights conditions in Burma. "Without the Net, there wouldn't be any information available," says Strider, who doesn't use his real name for security reasons. Funded by the Open Society Institute of international financier and philanthropist George Soros, BurmaNet is one of the most effective of the new countrynet services that have emerged in recent years. More than information, however, these nets and a growing number of webpages are helping knit together diverse communities united around a given issue - be it human rights in Burma, the liberation of East Timor, or the release of political prisoners in Kenya. As BurmaNet's Bangkok-based moderator, Strider has gradually built one of the world's best sources of information on events in Burma. A network of volunteers in Thailand and Burma reprint human rights reports and articles from wire services and the local press by rekeying them into their computers for posting on the Net. (Strictly speaking, this is a violation of copyright law, but Strider says he has the tacit agreement of wire agencies and newspapers to transmit the material because there is no profit involved.) Occasionally, Strider and others do original reporting from inside Burma, and they have even distributed modems and laptops to a small network of correspondents working among refugees and relief workers on the Burmese border with Thailand. BurmaNet has opened the list to wide-ranging debates by its 500-plus subscribers and thousands of netizens who access portions of BurmaNet through Usenet and other services. "What goes out over the Internet is largely aimed at a specialist community," Strider says, noting that the amount of material and the detail involved requires a serious commitment on the part of a reader. For casual observers and others, however, Strider believes the Web may be a better resource; there are now several different Burma pages. "This is the information backbone of a larger movement that aims to mobilize public opinion against the military leaders of Burma," Strider says. It was the Net, he explains, that helped mobilize activists on college campuses and elsewhere in their opposition to investment in Burma by Eddie Bauer. (The clothing outfit pulled out of the country earlier this year.) And it was the Net that stimulated bipartisan sentiment in Congress to impose sanctions on the regime. "There are few Burmese in the States," he says, "and relatively few people who even know where Burma is. But those who care are organized and effective, and it's because of the Internet." Not all of the countrynets are the same, of course, and not all of the information available is anti-government. Some carry a modest subscription fee: Kenya-net, for example, charts everything from news and gossip to stock-market quotations and political debate in the East African nation. Others like the East Timor Action Network - devoted to the plight of the tiny former Portuguese colony that has been occupied by Indonesia for the last 20 years - are basically electronic extensions of networks that have functioned through other means for years. In the case of East Timor, activists in Australia and elsewhere use the Net to instantly disseminate information and calls for action, something that once took weeks of snail-mail and expensive telephone calls to arrange. The same can be said of services that track events in Israel and the West Bank, as well as in China, Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala, and the former Yugoslavia (see "Balkans Online," Wired 3.11, page 159), employing everything from relatively old listserve technology to the Web. Often the technology allows for some surprising juxtapositions, as in the case of Christus Rex, which for all the world appears to be the work of the Vatican. Within this beautiful page are links to hundreds of pictures taken from the walls of the Sistine Chapel and other works of divine art and religious texts. But Christus Rex also features a photo history of the 1989 Tiananmen rebellion, pages on Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, and human rights violations stemming from the Russian crackdown in Chechnya. Christus Rex has nothing to do with the Vatican. Its seemingly odd mixture results from a singular vision: that of Michael Olteanu, a Romanian immigrant to the United States who once suffered at the hands of the gulag in Eastern Europe. (Olteanu declined to be interviewed for this story.) Christus Rex has also made space available to a group of Chinese activists in Silicon Valley who ran a Free Harry Wu page, devoted to the release of Wu, a US citizen who was arrested in China in June, convicted of espionage, and then released in August. "We've gotten supportive messages from all over the world," says Chuck Lau, a Silicon Valley information-technology engineer from Hong Kong who designed the Harry Wu page and had it up within days of the announcement of Wu's arrest. Working with other Chinese-American computer experts, Lau credits people like Olteanu for seeing the possibilities of the Web and the Internet to explore issues such as Chinese human rights. PeaceNet, a project of the Institute for Global Communications, provides space on its servers to BurmaNet along with hundreds of global mininets. BurmaNet, as with many others, acts as a PeaceNet "conference" and also e-mails its list free of charge to interested parties. The rhetorical mud can be pretty thick inside some areas of PeaceNet, where activists sometimes debate the finer points of political theory while providing only a bare measure of what might be called news. And in some cases, the censors at PeaceNet are a bit weird. While the group trumpets the free flow of information, for example, PeaceNet's Cuba conference, reg.cuba, is little more than an outlet for the Cuban government to issue press releases and call for international support in its struggle against the US. You won't find many anti-Castro voices at PeaceNet. That said, there is a wealth of little-reported information within PeaceNet. For example, the conference on Guatemala, which is also distributed as a mailing list, has featured a running account of the fight of Harvard-educated attorney Jennifer Harbury. Harbury, a US citizen, recently filed suit against the CIA for information in the 1992 death of her husband, guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, while in military custody. The conference helps activists pressure the CIA and the Guatemalan government by allowing them to quickly and cheaply share a common base of information. PeaceNet also offers its users access to China News Digest, perhaps the largest countrynet project in existence. Staffed by more than 50 volunteers worldwide, China News Digest was set up in early 1989, shortly before the Tiananmen Square democracy movement was crushed in June. The digest now goes to some 35,200 e-mail addresses in 43 countries and contains a summary of wire-service reports, news, and commentary from dissident sources inside China. (It is curious to note that PeaceNet apparently does not approve of China, an out-of-favor socialist country, but does approve of Cuba, which is equally hostile to internal political dissent.) "We see ourselves as serving activists, not being activists," says George Gundrey, PeaceNet's coordinator for international programs. "This is a way to decentralize the monolithic viewpoints of the major media." But activist-oriented services, some observers caution, are not a substitute for dispassionate analysis. "They operate in a gray zone of committed activists," says writer James Fallows, an Asia scholar and computer analyst for The Atlantic Monthly, "and they tend to repeat the same information over and over. It doesn't replace careful reporting." Even those who operate in the world of the activist nets concede that their information is only as good as those who post it. "I trust our people," says Gene Stoltzfus, who helps run a mailing list called CPT Net - a project of the Christian Peacemaker Teams - which gathers information in places like Haiti and West Bank Palestinian villages. "But we don't post stuff from people we don't know." PeaceNet's Gundrey says the lists are a way for alienated, disenfranchised people to get their news out, and as such they have a growing validity. That validity is an act of faith, however, or an exercise in simple news gathering and dissemination, unless concrete gains of some kind are made for the people these nets are supposed to be representing. Michael Koplinka of Cornell University, the man who started the Koigi wa Wamwere homepage, credits the Internet with helping to score a victory of sorts. Koigi - a former Cornell student, and an opposition member of Kenya's parliament and harsh critic of the government of Daniel arap Moi - was accused of "robbery with violence" in 1993 and was put on trial for his life in Nakuru for almost two years. His case generated protests by Amnesty International and other organizations. When a decision was finally rendered in October, charges against Koigi were reduced, and he was sentenced to just four years in prison. "There is no question that if we didn't have this level of international pressure generated from the Net that Koigi would have been sentenced to death," says Koplinka. Koigi's sentence, which included six strokes of a whipping cane, seems harsh enough, but Koplinka says that the Net was extremely active during a crucial period in September when Koigi's fate was being decided. Activists visiting the Koigi page were given the option of clicking on a button to create a fax to lobby the Moi government. Koplinka says that over the past few months, 632 messages were faxed out of his office from 3,212 visits to the website. "We could track the response," he says, "through our contacts in Kenya. There is no question the government was listening to the response from the Net. In other cases in Kenya, prisoners were taken out and hanged in the courtyard 10 minutes after the verdict." In contrast with traditional organizing, Koplinka says, the Net is both fast and international, generating responses from Europe and Africa, as well as the US. He cited an incident on August 10 in which the lawyers for Koigi were beaten on the courthouse steps in Nakuru when they attempted to visit their client. "We had that on the Net the same day and had letters and faxes of protest going out to the US embassy and the Kenyan government almost immediately," Koplinka says. "Amnesty International sent out an action letter on the incident which we didn't receive for three weeks. By then it would have been too late to do anything. But with the Net, we move instantly." Koplinka's actions also belie the feeling that one man can do very little in the political arena. "It's really just me," he says when asked how many people were involved in putting together the Koigi effort at Cornell. Working with a cooperative Internet provider, Koplinka enlists volunteers who maintain the page, post the information, and track the issue. "It's pretty amazing what we've been able to accomplish," he says. Others echo the experience of the Koigi case. "The Net has been so intrinsic to organizing in the US and internationally for the last few years that whatever successes East Timor's solidarity movement has had cannot be considered otherwise," says Charles Scheiner, the moderator of reg.easttimor, a PeaceNet conference mirrored on the East Timor Action Network mailing list. "Consider last month, when five young East Timorese activists sought political asylum in the British embassy in Jakarta. Within hours, their statement and biographies were e-mailed all over the world, and people began calling the British embassies in their own countries, as well as Indonesian government officials. Within a day, the Portuguese, British, and Indonesian representatives met and discussed what to do; within two days, they had agreed that the young men would be allowed to leave Indonesia for Portugal. Within a week they had left." Individual action is a staple of the countrynets. BurmaNet was the work, initially, of just one person; Christus Rex is run by one man; East Timor Action Network is coordinated largely by Charles Scheiner. I found the Koigi homepage on a link inside something called the Human Rights Web. That page, it turns out, is not an organization at all, but the project of Catherine Hampton, a human rights activist who saw an opportunity to do some good in the virtual world and seized it. "When a technology like the Web comes up, you don't have to have a lot of money or people - you can do it yourself," she says. Hampton designed Human Rights Web and posts information on prisoners of conscience and other rights violations, as well as links to related websites. For an observer steeped in a more traditional worldview, there is a problem in that a page may look official, as if it represents something more than one individual. But that concern seems old-fashioned and out of touch to Hampton, who brushes it aside: "It's part of a web, it's a node, it's decentralized information. That's the point." That may be true. But for the uninitiated, the Net can be a confusing starting point for insight into the inner workings of a complex society or international conflict. Occasionally on BurmaNet, one can be bombarded by competing analyses from splintered student groups whose inner divisions are almost impossible for a neophyte to wade through. PeaceNet's Gundrey says that users of the Net must develop "information literacy" in order to make sense of competing viewpoints and raw information. Such literacy comes with study, analysis, and experience. It seems doubtful that unfiltered information will replace the work of reporters knowledgeable on their subjects and able to separate the wheat from the chaff. What to make, for example, of All About Geopolitics in Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia - a page devoted to the proposition that the Serbian side in the ongoing war in Bosnia and Croatia is being portrayed unfairly in the media, and that the Croatians are a bunch of Nazis. Conversely, you can turn to the Alleged Criminals of Former Yugoslavia homepage, a website that liberally condemns the Serbian side. At least the old media offer some kind of distance from the conflict. The problem of e-mail clutter can also be a major difficulty if you start tracking countrynet activity through mailing lists. In the course of researching this article, I subscribed to BurmaNet, Kenya-net, East Timor Action Network, and a mailing list on Chinese human rights managed from Silicon Valley. On any given day, I received 75 or more lengthy messages. Keeping up with several of these lists at a time is a full-time job. But to someone who once clipped newspaper articles and coordinated phone trees on human rights issues, it is clear that the Internet is offering activists and others with a burning need to stay informed a wealth of information that was previously hard to come by. As a foreign correspondent, I covered the popular uprising in Burma that was brutally crushed by the military in 1988. But in recent years, I had grown unfamiliar with events there. That problem has been cured. Earlier this year, when Burmese government troops overran rebel strongholds near the country's border with Thailand, BurmaNet carried often gripping updates from the border - on an almost hourly basis - during a time when most American newspapers and broadcast outlets ignored the clashes. In recent months, BurmaNet easily has been the best source of continuing information on events related to the release in July of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader who had been kept under house arrest by the regime for six years. "For the first time, people all over the world who are interested in this issue are seeing essentially the same information at about the same time. That is really our main contribution," says Strider. "It is difficult to track the effect. You can't say this or that happened just because of the Net, but the information is what is allowing things to happen. There simply wouldn't be an activist movement for Burma in the United States without BurmaNet. None at all." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Tiny Wireless Camera under $80! Order Now! FREE VCR Commander! Click Here - Only 1 Day Left! http://us.click.yahoo.com/nuyOHD/7.PDAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
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