Nathanial Freitas
Opening Statement
CSCE Hearing “Twitter vs. Tyrants”
October 22, 2009

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing.
Thank you to the members of the commission, Chairman Cardin and
Co-Chairman Hastings, for the invitation to appear here today, and for
your interest in this very important topic. I come to you as a
representative of the countless technology and new media advocates,
experts and educators who believe that the most amazing and
ground-breaking innovations of our generation should be used for more
than just the acquisition of wealth or as new channels of
entertainment and distraction. I am also a longtime member and former
board chair of the international non-profit group Students for a Free
Tibet, led by Tibetan activists Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Dorjee. What
I will share with you today are some of my experiences working with
new media technology as an activist practitioner, and my ground-level
perspective, so to speak.

First, a small bit of history. The roots of this latest wave of new
media technology, specifically Twitter, began in 2004, with an
open-source web service called TXTMob. TXTMob was first developed by
MIT’s Institute for Applied Autonomy for use by protesters at the 2004
Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National
Convention in New York. I was part of a team that utilized TXTMob to
broadcast thousands of short messages to over 10,000 people on the
streets of New York, letting them know what was happening moment by
moment. Later in 2004, during the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine,
students utilized the same service to coordinate spontaneous protests
also know as “flashmobs”, strikes and sit-ins. In 2005, two of my
colleagues who had been involved in TXTMobs use during the RNC went to
work for the company that became Twitter, where they demonstrated the
power of short message broadcasting to their coworkers around the
office. It was in those times and in those moments, that the idea for
Twitter was born. It is not an accident that things have come full
circle, with Twitter now being the standard go-to tool for activists
around the world.

In my activism work, my areas of focus and expertise is Asia. I have
specific experience traveling in and working with organizations
focused on China, Tibet and India. I have also been employed in
Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, developing patented technology
focused on the exchange of data between mobile devices over wireless
networks. As a student at the University of California in the mid 90s,
I worked on a DARPA and NSF-funded research effort known as the
Digital Library Initiative. Today I am an instructor at New York
University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, teaching a new
graduate course entitled “Social Activism using Mobile Technology”.
My personal path in this sphere, as a developer, practitioner and
instructor in the use of new media technologies within social
movements, may seem novel, but is in fact built upon a very long
tradition of geeks trying to good.

During the second world war Second World War and the Cold War,
inventors, mathematicians and the earliest digital computers played a
critical role in helping the allies stay one step ahead of the axis.
During the civil rights movement, the use of telephones, telegrams and
traditional social networks within churches and universities, helped
build a foundation to mobilize supporters throughout the south. In
recent years, open-source hackers, nerds and geeks have gravitated
towards the social justice, environmental and human rights movements,
creating unique alliances and very rich opportunity for innovation.
The idea of two guys in a garage in Silicon Valley has translated into
global teams of activists communicating in realtime through Twitter,
Skype, Facebook through their laptops, iPhones and Blackberries,
working to weave together the grassroots organizing and non-violence
tactics of Gandhi with freely available, open-source software, cheap
internet bandwidth, cloud servers and mobile devices.

Take the case of Burma in 2007. Video journalists and I.T. (Internet
technology) student organizations teamed up to provide their own
coverage of the Saffron Revolution. Using SMS, instant messaging
technology, digital video cameras, internet-based file transfer
services, combined with old fashioned “sneaker nets”, a network was
able to present an uncensored view of the protests as they unfolded.
As their footage began reaching the outside world, appearing on the
BBC and elsewhere, the journalists became more bold and increasingly
targeted by the state security forces. When the revolution never fully
materialized, the monks, activists and journalists involved paid a
very heavy price, facing imprisonment, torture or worse. However, the
innovative work of the video journalist teams made a lasting impact
and was largely considered to have been successful due to the global
attention the protests received. A similar model is being used in
Iraq, through the award-winning online video channel, “Alive in
Baghdad”, that works to cover and disseminate stories of the every day
lives of Iraqis. We have also seen this model used with simple camera
phones in the Kashmir and most recently in Iran, when a single video
clip of video of an innocent dying girl instantly clarified the issue
for a global audience and brought overwhelming sympathy and support to
the side of the Iranian people. The power of the moving image is
unavoidable, and with the low cost of distributing video online, the
ability to easily stream live over mobile and satellite data networks,
its reach and impact has come to rival broadcast television.

In many cases, the authoritarian states’ power proves too formidable
for new media technology to have a meaningful impact. While we can
instantly know about the smallest conflict in any part of the planet,
there is often very little that the Internet can do to help those in
harms way. In Tibet, the largely peaceful uprisings in March 2008,
were perceived by the outside world as being “riots”, due to China’s
ability to control the story by severely restricting news media access
and blocking telephone and internet communication. Thousands of
Tibetans were detained, many died, and hundreds were given lengthy
sentences, many convicted through evidence gathered via close-circuit
security cameras, use of mobile phones, PCs and the Internet. Just
yesterday, four Tibetan political prisoners were executed after being
hastily convicted of crimes related to the March uprising. There are
countless stories of Chinese, Tibetan and other activists within China
being incriminated through their use of email, Skype and other tools.
The evidence gathered by the state is often done in collaboration with
the technology providers – Yahoo!, eBay/Skype, and so on.

In August of 2008, over seventy activists from around the world
traveled to Beijing to protest for Tibetan human rights and
independence during the Olympic games. New media tools played a major
role during this effort, providing a loosely coupled link between the
various independent activists who were traveling to Beijing to
participate in protests. The tools also enabled a team of citizen
journalists to document the many different protests and press
conferences that occurred, using techniques evolved from what the
Burmese students accomplished in 2007 and a bevy of new technology -
solid-state HD digital video cameras, handheld tablet computers, live
streaming camera phones. Their photos and footage were broadcast
around the world, appearing in the NY Times and on the BBC and CNN
International. Mainstream press was unable to cover the majority of
these events due to the close monitoring and scrutiny they faced. The
Beijing authorities eventually caught on, arresting and detaining for
a week, six American citizens who had been documenting the protests.
During their detention, they were told that the crimes they were
guilty of, documenting and spreading media of protests, were a far
worse a crime than actually participating in the protest itself.
Fortunately, due to their American passports and support from the
White House, they were treated fairly and made it home. Chinese and
Tibetan activists, bloggers and journalists who have been arrested for
similar acts have faced far worse treatment and sentences.

During last year’s presidential elections, I was a member of a diverse
team of software developers and open government activists who came
together to build “Twitter Vote Report”, a nation wide web 2.0-style
election monitoring system that tied together google maps, wikis, and
iPhones with human resources on the ground from watchdog groups and
the media. Over 30,000 citizens reported from outside their polling
places, providing a real time view and instant notice of any long
lines, hanging chads and potentially voter fraud. The data captured
that day was released freely to the Internet for analysis and research
by academic institutions. The open-source code from this project, as
well as a few others, has been utilized in India and Afghanistan, and
we hope to see it become a standard tool in the fight against election
fraud. It is important to remember that using technology to promote
civic engagement and democratic participation is as important as its
use for active dissent.

As you can tell, I am very enthusiastic and active participant in the
use of new media tools for social good and in the fight against
authoritarianism. However, the use of these tools also brings about
the possibility of serious risk to the user, their friends, family and
broader movement. As a friend of mine said, “You cannot twitter your
way out of a bludgeoning by security goons”. Mobile phones are unique,
always broadcasting personal identifiers; changing SIM cards does
nothing, phones are tracked easily tracked by their hardware IDs.
Laptop computers are often full of incriminating documents, web caches
and email addresses. Digital viruses that deliver powerful
espionage-ware such as GhostNet are common and becoming more powerful
and more invisible every day – one slip and your entire email inbox
can be copied by an adversary. Use of new media and social networks
reveal one’s “social graphs”, buddy lists, friends & followers… in a
free country, these provide benefit, amplifying your ability to
communicate and connect. In an authoritarian state, these same tools
can make clear loose connections between activists, which make the job
of cracking down on dissent much easier and more efficient. It often
takes an entire generation to rebuild when an activist network is
decimated. The protests of 2007 and 2008 in Burma and Tibet were at
level not seen since 1988 and 1989. That twenty year gap is no
accident. Rather than just focus on the use of technology as a better
megaphone, we need to consider how it can be used to safeguard and
protect the identities and well-being of dissidents. The Tor Project
is a successful case of technology that provides anonymity to web
surfers and the ability to route around state-sponsored censorship.

While the free world is easily enamored of applications of new media
tools within dictatorships and authoritarian states far way, our own
federal, state and local law enforcement are often quite fearful and
hostile towards their use within domestic movements. I raise this
point not to say that we do not enjoy great freedoms in this
democracy, but in order to make clear that tools which provide a more
powerful platform for dissent are universally threatening to those in
power. Tad Hirsch, creator of TXTMob, is the subject of a subpoena by
the City of New York in connection with several active lawsuits
against the City that allege police misconduct during the 2004
Republican National Convention. Elliot Madison, a 41 year old social
worker, was been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with
hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication
facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania
State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and
police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to
spread information about police movements. Just this week it was
announced that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, has invested
in a company whose technology is capable of powerful data mining from
any information openly published on Twitter, Facebook and other social
networking sites. In summary, measures taken to secure our homeland
from violent terrorists often have similar justifications to those
taken by authoritarian governments to squelch dissent and democracy.
We all must be mindful of these contradictory positions on the benefit
of new media within our own democracy.

In summary, there are constructive steps that can be take today by
policy makers, NGOs and technology developers. We need to support the
development of a Global Technology Bill of Rights that extends
freedoms of speech and the press to the tools needed to communicate
using the Internet and mobile phones. Congress should develop policy
and programs that recognize and fund new media technology as a
fundamental component to the promotion of human rights, liberty and
democracy. There also must be guidance and motivation for
corporations, startups and venture capitalists who are building these
technologies to consider their global impact on human lives, and not
just on the bottom line or their stock price. I am all in support of
entrepreneurs being rewarded for their risk, and am happy that tools
such as Twitter can be used just as well to cover the daily lives of
Ashton and Demi or break the news of Michael Jackson's death, as it
can to broadcast updates live from the streets of Iran or spread the
news of the execution of four Tibetan political prisoners this morning
in China. I just hope that MBA students at Harvard and Stanford will
consider the Humanity Quotient of their work while dreaming up the
next big thing.

Finally, I would like to briefly emphasize the comments from Mary
Joyce of DigiActive, who could not be here today, on the topic of
embargoes. In the digital age, where a “good” is a string of code that
can be delivered anywhere in the world with the click of a mouse, even
today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough. By preventing access to
blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media,
current embargo policies harm the very activists who are furthering
our common goals of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian
governments free to spread propaganda through a range of
state-controlled media outlets.

Referenced web resources of note:
TXTMob: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob
Alive in Baghdad: http://aliveinbaghdad.org/
TwitterVoteReport: http://twittervotereport.com
Beijing Olympics Protest Coverage: http://freetibet2008.tv
GhostNet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostNet
Tor Project – anonymous web browsing – http://torproject.org

Nathanial Freitas
Opening Statement
CSCE Hearing “Twitter vs. Tyrants”
October 22, 2009

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing.
Thank you to the members of the commission, Chairman Cardin and
Co-Chairman Hastings, for the invitation to appear here today, and for
your interest in this very important topic. I come to you as a
representative of the countless technology and new media advocates,
experts and educators who believe that the most amazing and
ground-breaking innovations of our generation should be used for more
than just the acquisition of wealth or as new channels of
entertainment and distraction. I am also a longtime member and former
board chair of the international non-profit group Students for a Free
Tibet, led by Tibetan activists Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Dorjee. What
I will share with you today are some of my experiences working with
new media technology as an activist practitioner, and my ground-level
perspective, so to speak.

First, a small bit of history. The roots of this latest wave of new
media technology, specifically Twitter, began in 2004, with an
open-source web service called TXTMob. TXTMob was first developed by
MIT’s Institute for Applied Autonomy for use by protesters at the 2004
Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National
Convention in New York. I was part of a team that utilized TXTMob to
broadcast thousands of short messages to over 10,000 people on the
streets of New York, letting them know what was happening moment by
moment. Later in 2004, during the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine,
students utilized the same service to coordinate spontaneous protests
also know as “flashmobs”, strikes and sit-ins. In 2005, two of my
colleagues who had been involved in TXTMobs use during the RNC went to
work for the company that became Twitter, where they demonstrated the
power of short message broadcasting to their coworkers around the
office. It was in those times and in those moments, that the idea for
Twitter was born. It is not an accident that things have come full
circle, with Twitter now being the standard go-to tool for activists
around the world.

In my activism work, my areas of focus and expertise is Asia. I have
specific experience traveling in and working with organizations
focused on China, Tibet and India. I have also been employed in
Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, developing patented technology
focused on the exchange of data between mobile devices over wireless
networks. As a student at the University of California in the mid 90s,
I worked on a DARPA and NSF-funded research effort known as the
Digital Library Initiative. Today I am an instructor at New York
University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, teaching a new
graduate course entitled “Social Activism using Mobile Technology”.
My personal path in this sphere, as a developer, practitioner and
instructor in the use of new media technologies within social
movements, may seem novel, but is in fact built upon a very long
tradition of geeks trying to good.

During the second world war Second World War and the Cold War,
inventors, mathematicians and the earliest digital computers played a
critical role in helping the allies stay one step ahead of the axis.
During the civil rights movement, the use of telephones, telegrams and
traditional social networks within churches and universities, helped
build a foundation to mobilize supporters throughout the south. In
recent years, open-source hackers, nerds and geeks have gravitated
towards the social justice, environmental and human rights movements,
creating unique alliances and very rich opportunity for innovation.
The idea of two guys in a garage in Silicon Valley has translated into
global teams of activists communicating in realtime through Twitter,
Skype, Facebook through their laptops, iPhones and Blackberries,
working to weave together the grassroots organizing and non-violence
tactics of Gandhi with freely available, open-source software, cheap
internet bandwidth, cloud servers and mobile devices.

Take the case of Burma in 2007. Video journalists and I.T. (Internet
technology) student organizations teamed up to provide their own
coverage of the Saffron Revolution. Using SMS, instant messaging
technology, digital video cameras, internet-based file transfer
services, combined with old fashioned “sneaker nets”, a network was
able to present an uncensored view of the protests as they unfolded.
As their footage began reaching the outside world, appearing on the
BBC and elsewhere, the journalists became more bold and increasingly
targeted by the state security forces. When the revolution never fully
materialized, the monks, activists and journalists involved paid a
very heavy price, facing imprisonment, torture or worse. However, the
innovative work of the video journalist teams made a lasting impact
and was largely considered to have been successful due to the global
attention the protests received. A similar model is being used in
Iraq, through the award-winning online video channel, “Alive in
Baghdad”, that works to cover and disseminate stories of the every day
lives of Iraqis. We have also seen this model used with simple camera
phones in the Kashmir and most recently in Iran, when a single video
clip of video of an innocent dying girl instantly clarified the issue
for a global audience and brought overwhelming sympathy and support to
the side of the Iranian people. The power of the moving image is
unavoidable, and with the low cost of distributing video online, the
ability to easily stream live over mobile and satellite data networks,
its reach and impact has come to rival broadcast television.

In many cases, the authoritarian states’ power proves too formidable
for new media technology to have a meaningful impact. While we can
instantly know about the smallest conflict in any part of the planet,
there is often very little that the Internet can do to help those in
harms way. In Tibet, the largely peaceful uprisings in March 2008,
were perceived by the outside world as being “riots”, due to China’s
ability to control the story by severely restricting news media access
and blocking telephone and internet communication. Thousands of
Tibetans were detained, many died, and hundreds were given lengthy
sentences, many convicted through evidence gathered via close-circuit
security cameras, use of mobile phones, PCs and the Internet. Just
yesterday, four Tibetan political prisoners were executed after being
hastily convicted of crimes related to the March uprising. There are
countless stories of Chinese, Tibetan and other activists within China
being incriminated through their use of email, Skype and other tools.
The evidence gathered by the state is often done in collaboration with
the technology providers – Yahoo!, eBay/Skype, and so on.

In August of 2008, over seventy activists from around the world
traveled to Beijing to protest for Tibetan human rights and
independence during the Olympic games. New media tools played a major
role during this effort, providing a loosely coupled link between the
various independent activists who were traveling to Beijing to
participate in protests. The tools also enabled a team of citizen
journalists to document the many different protests and press
conferences that occurred, using techniques evolved from what the
Burmese students accomplished in 2007 and a bevy of new technology -
solid-state HD digital video cameras, handheld tablet computers, live
streaming camera phones. Their photos and footage were broadcast
around the world, appearing in the NY Times and on the BBC and CNN
International. Mainstream press was
unable to cover the majority of
these events due to the close monitoring and scrutiny they faced. The
Beijing authorities eventually caught on, arresting and detaining for
a week, six American citizens who had been documenting the protests.
During their detention, they were told that the crimes they were
guilty of, documenting and spreading media of protests, were a far
worse a crime than actually participating in the protest itself.
Fortunately, due to their American passports and support from the
White House, they were treated fairly and made it home. Chinese and
Tibetan activists, bloggers and journalists who have been arrested for
similar acts have faced far worse treatment and sentences.

During last year’s presidential elections, I was a member of a diverse
team of software developers and open government activists who came
together to build “Twitter Vote Report”, a nation wide web 2.0-style
election monitoring system that tied together google maps, wikis, and
iPhones with human resources on the ground from watchdog groups and
the media. Over 30,000 citizens reported from outside their polling
places, providing a real time view and instant notice of any long
lines, hanging chads and potentially voter fraud. The data captured
that day was released freely to the Internet for analysis and research
by academic institutions. The open-source code from this project, as
well as a few others, has been utilized in India and Afghanistan, and
we hope to see it become a standard tool in the fight against election
fraud. It is important to remember that using technology to promote
civic engagement and democratic participation is as important as its
use for active dissent.

As you can tell, I am very enthusiastic and active participant in the
use of new media tools for social good and in the fight against
authoritarianism. However, the use of these tools also brings about
the possibility of serious risk to the user, their friends, family and
broader movement. As a friend of mine said, “You cannot twitter your
way out of a bludgeoning by security goons”. Mobile phones are unique,
always broadcasting personal identifiers; changing SIM cards does
nothing, phones are tracked easily tracked by their hardware IDs.
Laptop computers are often full of incriminating documents, web caches
and email addresses. Digital viruses that deliver powerful
espionage-ware such as GhostNet are common and becoming more powerful
and more invisible every day – one slip and your entire email inbox
can be copied by an adversary. Use of new media and social networks
reveal one’s “social graphs”, buddy lists, friends & followers… in a
free country, these provide benefit, amplifying your ability to
communicate and connect. In an authoritarian state, these same tools
can make clear loose connections between activists, which make the job
of cracking down on dissent much easier and more efficient. It often
takes an entire generation to rebuild when an activist network is
decimated. The protests of 2007 and 2008 in Burma and Tibet were at
level not seen since 1988 and 1989. That twenty year gap is no
accident. Rather than just focus on the use of technology as a better
megaphone, we need to consider how it can be used to safeguard and
protect the identities and well-being of dissidents. The Tor Project
is a successful case of technology that provides anonymity to web
surfers and the ability to route around state-sponsored censorship.

While the free world is easily enamored of applications of new media
tools within dictatorships and authoritarian states far way, our own
federal, state and local law enforcement are often quite fearful and
hostile towards their use within domestic movements. I raise this
point not to say that we do not enjoy great freedoms in this
democracy, but in order to make clear that tools which provide a more
powerful platform for dissent are universally threatening to those in
power. Tad Hirsch, creator of TXTMob, is the subject of a subpoena by
the City of New York in connection with several active lawsuits
against the City that allege police misconduct during the 2004
Republican National Convention. Elliot Madison, a 41 year old social
worker, was been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with
hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication
facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania
State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and
police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to
spread information about police movements. Just this week it was
announced that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, has invested
in a company whose technology is capable of powerful data mining from
any information openly published on Twitter, Facebook and other social
networking sites. In summary, measures taken to secure our homeland
from violent terrorists often have similar justifications to those
taken by authoritarian governments to squelch dissent and democracy.
We all must be mindful of these contradictory positions on the benefit
of new media within our own democracy.

In summary, there are constructive steps that can be take today by
policy makers, NGOs and technology developers. We need to support the
development of a Global Technology Bill of Rights that extends
freedoms of speech and the press to the tools needed to communicate
using the Internet and mobile phones. Congress should develop policy
and programs that recognize and fund new media technology as a
fundamental component to the promotion of human rights, liberty and
democracy. There also must be guidance and motivation for
corporations, startups and venture capitalists who are building these
technologies to consider their global impact on human lives, and not
just on the bottom line or their stock price. I am all in support of
entrepreneurs being rewarded for their risk, and am happy that tools
such as Twitter can be used just as well to cover the daily lives of
Ashton and Demi or break the news of Michael Jackson's death, as it
can to broadcast updates live from the streets of Iran or spread the
news of the execution of four Tibetan political prisoners this morning
in China. I just hope that MBA students at Harvard and Stanford will
consider the Humanity Quotient of their work while dreaming up the
next big thing.

Finally, I would like to briefly emphasize the comments from Mary
Joyce of DigiActive, who could not be here today, on the topic of
embargoes. In the digital age, where a “good” is a string of code that
can be delivered anywhere in the world with the click of a mouse, even
today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough. By preventing access to
blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media,
current embargo policies harm the very activists who are furthering
our common goals of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian
governments free to spread propaganda through a range of
state-controlled media outlets.

Referenced web resources of note:
TXTMob: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob
Alive in Baghdad: http://aliveinbaghdad.org/
TwitterVoteReport: http://twittervotereport.com
Beijing Olympics Protest Coverage: http://freetibet2008.tv
GhostNet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostNet
Tor Project – anonymous web browsing – http://torproject.org