dpickensjones's blog

Issues of online posting and censorship

dpickensjones — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:57:57 -0500

Human Rights Watch recently released this article about the detention of Syrian writers and activists who express critical opinions and work to disseminate information online:

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/10/08/syria17024.htm

The article discusses ways in which the Syrian government monitors its citizens: internet cafe owners are required to spy on their patrons, and many Syrian websites are required by the government to display accurate biographical and contact information for every poster, to combat the "anonymous" posting practice which had allowed many Syrians to make critical comments with some impunity. Further, a number of websites - particularly news sites that feature information understood to be critical of the government - are blocked entirely.

It is important for us here in the New Tactics community to reflect how the sharing of information online - a capability we often take for granted, and one on which we are premising our community-based website - is in fact a human rights battleground. It may seem abstract, but to Karim 'Arbaji and Tarek Biasi, both still detained as I write this, the issues are much more immediate. This sort of repression is particularly frightening in the context a Syria, whose government has an unfortunate reputation for "disappearing" political prisoners - detaining them in secret prisons without informing their relatives.

I found this news particularly eerie, as I am applying for a scholarship to study in Syria next year. Two contacts of mine in Syria, professors, were going to write me a letter of welcome and reference in order to express their support for my project but at the last moment had to pull out because of the atmosphere of fear around the movement of information - particularly a signed letter going abroad, to America no less. The recent Israeli incursions into Syria have been no help, adding to tensions and increasing controls and restrictions on Syrian citizens.

For those who read Arabic, http://www.akhawia.net/ is a popular site for Syrian youth, dealing with social and political issues - but be careful - it was Karim 'Arbaji's moderation of akhawia that got him arrested. Thankfully I don't know enough Arabic to get myself into trouble.

Law and New Tactics

dpickensjones — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:47:44 -0600

The current discussion of events in Pakistan piqued my interest on a number of levels. I was struck particularly that the movement of civil disobedience currently underway in Pakistan consists primarily of lawyers. Lawyers have been injured; lawyers have been arrested; a group of approximately 1,000 lawyers in Multan were blocked from leaving a court complex to start a street protest. Pakistan's deposed chief justice has called upon lawyers to resist Musharraf's program. These images serve to upset some of the stereotypes of lawyers which I grew up with: that they are micromanagers, complacent, perhaps even self-interested.

The law has nevertheless been one of the integral institutions in "old tactics" in human rights; indeed, the very idea of a "right" needs to be set down in legislation if it is to have any practical value. We often guage the state of a community's observance of rights by the levels of equity or progressivism present in its codes, and the extent to which courts of law uphold these codes. But there are many different ways to conceptualize the legal insitution, at the community, national and international levels, and it is proving a fertile ground for creative new tactics.

In the case of the current events in Pakistan, the law as an institution is almost less important than the law as a community - a body of committed and articulate individuals, taking advantage of their collective power (and as I understand it, the legal community and civil service have traditionally been important demographics in Pakistani politics) and unique authority on matters constitutional to stage a powerful and visible protest.

In a very different conceptualiztion, Marcos Fuchs has worked to stimalate the institution of pro bono legal work to Brazil, and in particular has developed systems which puts legal professionals at the services of NGOs which would otherwise be unable to gain official status in Brazil. Read more about this tactic in Marcos' tactical notebook, Expanding Access to Justice.

In Making the Global Local, Columbus Igboanusi discusses the use of a local body of human rights moniters who enforce global agreements on the local level by first educating themselves on their own rights and then working to educate their peers and to spread awareness of human rights abuses. This takes the "old tactic" of legal agreements to the next level, bringing it within the purview of the community and the individual.

Share your thoughts! How else can we look at the institution of the law and put it to work for creative change?

Artivism

dpickensjones — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:09:36 -0600

Reading Phillipe Duhamel's most recent Intertactica blog post, I was particularly interested in the following case example:

4. Help across borders. Imagine an instrument that would help migrants and refugees navigate their way across borders, using their phone’s global positioning (GPS) information to show them not only the safest route and where water and shelter can be found, but also which itinerary offers the best scenery! That’s what an “artivist” project called the Transborder Immigrant Tool hopes to achieve.

What a beautiful idea! I encourage you to visit those two links and find out more about this interesting project. I was inspired to find out more about "artivism" (a portmanteau of "art" and "activism"), a recent movement which goes beyond traditional "politcal art" to find new and creative ways of subverting and reframing the furniture of our daily lives. A common artivist technique is "subvertising", an anti-consumerist approach which modifies publicly visible corporate advertising to rebound the message back at the corporation. "Culture jamming" can also include reclaiming public spaces to send a new message :

(found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Liberation_Front)

Other great examples of artivism:

-Will St Leger's "100 Landmines in Dublin", in which enamel plates made to look like landmines were placed around public parks, in order to get people to think about what it might feel like to live in a place littered with mines. (see www.woostercollective.com)

-Posters and paint on Greenwich Village adboards: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E3DE113AF934A35751C1A9659C8B63

In the words of artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, talking about more traditional political art: “To prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public. [...] Art in general seems to be a very useful artifice. Film, theater, painting, literature, media art—all of this is a very good conduit for transmitting the things which people would rather not hear or see. This is a possibility for transmitting something uncanny, something that ought to be hidden but comes to light.”

I think this can apply equally to artivism and culture jamming, which highlight the artifice of public products and investigate new, and perhaps powerful, conduits of communication.

View New Tactics website in 12 languages using Google Translate

dpickensjones — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:51:23 -0500

Google Translate is a powerful tool which can be used to render entire websites - not just single pages of text - into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese or Greek.

Visit http://translate.google.com/, and in the "Translate a Webpage" field, enter the URL of the wesite you wish to translate, such as http://www.newtactics.org. Choose the language pairing you would like from the drop-down menu (for example, English to Spanish), and click "Translate".

The page will appear in your target language, and you can continue to navitage the website in your chosen language without returning to the Google Translate home page. Cool!! To see the original English text of a passage, float your cursor over the text and a "mouse-over" box will appear with the original text.

The tranlations are far from perfect, but Google's translation software is sophisticated and improving every day. This is a very powerful resource and I encourage you to give it a try, and to spread to the word to others who would like to have access to our resources and discussions but have trouble navigating our site in Englsh.

Try putting our most recent Featured Discussion, "Engaging the media in human rights", into the translator:

http://translate.google.com
http://www.newtactics.org/en/announcements/engaging-media-human-rights

Enjoy!

-Daniel