Shouting in the Dark, Internet as the Heart of Darkness Options

[GlassBeadGame]

The whole documentary is extraordinary. But the part relevant to this post begins at 39:26.



In the wake of democracy protests earlier this year the Al Khalifa regime utilized Facebook sites to get citizens to inform on protestors, coordinate vigilantes and hunt down activitists for arrest and torture. Facebook seems to have removed the pages as an embarassment to itself but too late to help the victims. Mr. Zuckerman is on the way to monetize torture. Not since the Rawadian radio stations coordinated the genocide there have I seen anything to match this use of media.

Facebook wants information to be free. Pro-Democracy protestors facing brutal oppresion...not so much.

[nableezy]

The whole documentary is extraordinary. But the part relevant to this post begins at 39:26.



In the wake of democracy protests earlier this year the Al Khalifa regime utilized Facebook sites to get citizens to inform on protestors, coordinate vigilantes and hunt down activitists for arrest and torture. Facebook seems to have removed the pages as an embarassment to itself but too late to help the victims. Mr. Zuckerman is on the way to monetize torture. Not since the Rawadian radio stations coordinated the genocide there have I seen anything to match this use of media.

Facebook wants information to be free. Pro-Democracy protestors facing brutal oppresion...not so much.

People made a huge deal out of facebook being used in to organize and mobilize protestors in Egypt (as though anything close to a significant portion of the protestors had regular access to a computer much less an account on facebook), but less reported were the stories about how technology was used by the state to go after protesters. For example, a US based company (Narus) sold to Egypt (and Saudi Arabia, that other bastion of freedom in the Arab world) technology that would enable it to track what phone was used to send a specific tweet, which was then used to track the location of the person sending the tweet (tweeter, twater, whatever).

Bahrain's uprising has sadly been dismissed by most Western media. After the Saudis went in to help crush the initial protests (and on the way desecrate any Shia mosque they happened to march by) there was barely any coverage in any of the Western press. Al-Jazeera didnt do much either, and al-Arabiya had nothing but positive things to say about the Bahraini monarchy. There were a few stories about the doctors and nurses being jailed because they did not refuse treatment for injured protesters, but that is pretty much it. Everybody did however cover Bahrain's decision to withdraw its ambassador to Syria as a protest to that country's repression of its citizens. Dont get me wrong, Syria has to fall along with the rest of these bitches, but Yemen and Bahrain have been almost ignored. One because it is too poor to matter, the other because it is too rich (or important in the context of being the base for the fifth fleet) to bother.