On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.
Tag Archives | human rights
Digital revolutionaries: What’s your Plan B?
Farhad Manjoo wrote an article in Slate: The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized: How the Internet helps Iran silence activists. Consider this: According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has one of the world’s most advanced surveillance networks. Using a system installed last year (and built, in part, by Nokia and Siemens), the government routes [...]
Is changing names enough when you post images online?
What about their faces? These photos are online for everyone to see. The book is on Amazon.com. Doesn’t this assume that Rwandans cannot access this article and these images? Or that they have no friends or relatives in other countries with better access?
Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information
Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is an experimental web platform that crowdsources crisis information. People can submit reports via text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or the web. Looks like it can be deployed (sorry, geek speak) for a specific crisis. It was most recently use to track events in Gaza and was also used [...]
Work alongside farmworkers in Florida
I had the pleasure of doing a bit of work for the Student-Farmworker Alliance for my master’s practicum. I learned about the situation of farmworkers in Florida from a 2003 article by John Bowe in the New Yorker: “Nobodies: Does Slavery Exist in America?” (download PDF). You may be surprised, but U.S. Department of Justice [...]
Network mapping and analysis for human rights
Skye Bender-deMoll’s Network Analysis and Mapping Report (April 2008) examines how network analysis and network mapping can facilitate human rights work. It introduces non-academics to network concepts, gives some examples of this work in practice, discusses risks and challenges, and provides a series of recommendations. The report was prepared for the Science and Human Rights [...]
Blogging for Good Governance
This week I was in Kampala and had the opportunity to meet a friend-of-a-friend, John Gattorn, a super-cool dude who does human rights and democracy work. As I’m obsessed with finding practical ways to use technology for social change, I told him about Global Voices Advocacy and their guide to blogging anonymously. Two days later, [...]