Nathan Freitas will be on a panel at the 2nd annual Open Video Conference in New York this Friday and Saturday. He will be on the panel entitled “Cameras Everywhere” led by our partners at Witness, on Saturday at 3pm.

Summary: Cameras Everywhere: Human Rights and Web Video - (2:45 PM – 3:30 PM)

Description: Once upon a time, video cameras were rare. Now they are ubiquitous—as are the opportunities to share, use, and re-use video. What are the limits and possibilities of an ethics of openness when it comes to human rights footage?

Videos (particularly mobile and online video) make it possible to document and publicize human rights struggles – from monks marching for freedom in Rangoon and Lhasa, and the election protestors in Tehran, to individual voices speaking out against injustice on YouTube and other online spaces. But despite the growing circulation of images of human rights violations, of victims and survivors, there is limited discussion of crucial safety, consent and ethical concerns – particularly for people who are filmed.

Issues around consent, representation and re-victimization and retaliation have emerged even more clearly in an open and networked online environment, as have concerns about intentionality and authenticity. Video is being reworked, remixed and recirculated by many more people. New possibilities for action by a global citizenry have arisen, but these carry with them substantial challenges, opportunities and dangers.

Presenters:
Sam Gregory — WITNESS
Gabriella Coleman — NYU
Nathan Freitas — The Guardian Project
Steve Grove – News and Politics, YouTube

Following the panel, there will be an open workshop, to continue the discussion and brainstorm new approaches and tools to address the issues raised. This feedback will be gathered and fed into the OVC Hackday, held at NYU ITP on Sunday. Team Guardian will join in with whoever shows up at the hackday, take the ideas from the previous day, and build prototyped mobile video solutions in response to them.

You can get more information and register for the hackday here: http://www.openvideoconference.org/hacklabs/

OVC hack labs: Sunday, October 3

Join us at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program for an all-day open space gathering for innovators of all stripes. Meet and collaborate with conference attendees, HTML5 developers, transmedia storytelling experts, and more. Among the planned activities:

Make interactive HTML5 video using WebMadeMovies technology like popcorn.js
Map out a transmedia strategy for your content
Build a custom HTML5 player for your site
Create robust video sites using the free+open source Kaltura CE 2.0 self-hosted software stack
or just grab a room and hack on your project!

OVC hack labs are free and open to the public.

Here’s the collection of tips and ideas I came up with on short notice. It is by no means complete, but I felt it would be useful to publish these to a wider audience here on my blog. Finally, before you say “well couldn’t criminals and terrorists use these techniques too?”, I will refer you to an excellent Abuse FAQ page from the Tor Project which covers this very topic (“Criminals can already do bad things. Since they’re willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides”).

Now, on to the topic at hand…

Changing Your SIM Card
Often the first thing that comes to mind when people think about reducing tracking of their mobile phone is to change their SIM card. Unfortunately, changing SIM cards isn’t a reliable solution to stop centralized tracking because each phone also has an IMEI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Equipment_Identity) that uniquely identifies the underlying phone hardware itself. This means that even if you change your SIM card, the phone’s unique identifier can still be tracked. Still a new SIM card would change the phone number that is displayed or logged on the receivers phone, which could buy someone time or throw off a lazy investigator.

You can check your IMEI by typing in: *#06# or something similar depending upon carrier or phone. There are a number of cheap Chinese phones on the market in some countries that have an IMEI of 000000000000, which can come in handy if they are those types of things available. It is illegal in most countries to change the IMEI or to use a phone with an invalid IMEI.

Airplane Mode Ain’t Just for Airplanes
If their phone has “Airplane Mode” or a way to disconnect from a network or manually choose a network, that usually works as well as taking the battery out. This is useful if they still want to take pictures, notes, record message, queue up SMS messages to be sent once they reconnect in a different location from where the data was captured.

To step back a bit, it is important to understand, that mobile phones are always in constant contact with the cellular towers in the area. As you move about, your phone is in constant negotiation with different towers to connect to the best single, check for incoming calls, SMS message and so on. In addition, the server provider is checking your identifiers to make sure your phone is valid to work on the network, that you have an activated account, that your hardware isn’t blacklisted (aka stolen, etc), and so on. In summary, even if you aren’t using your phone, your phone is being tracked for operational and billing purposes, not necessarily malicious. However, it must be understand that this same data can be used by authorities for whatever purpose they like and is legal in the current country or context.

In theory, if you put your phone into “Airplane Mode” all signals emanating from your phone are stopped.

Complicating Monitoring by Turning Text into Pictures
If picture messages or MMS is available, write a message/code on paper and take a picture of it instead of sending it as text. Harder to automatically filter/monitor, and that the small resolution on the screen harder to read… if they can get the message on a PC on the receiving end, it can be zoomed up, but if the sender is stopped by local authorities, they may not see it.

In addition, picture messages of colors can also be a code:

• Blue Sky = “okay”
• Red Sign = “problem”
• Brown Dirt = “Ballot Stuffing”

Your Very Own Secret Code
Come with a very basic text code that say involves ten digits, with each different representing 0-9 of possible states.

• 0-9: how long is the wait (in hours)
• 0-9: how bad is intimidation from militia (scale)
• 0-9: how good is the turnout (scale)
• 0-9: general code (0 = no problems, 1 = polling place closed, 2 = armed men outside, 3 = riot, 4 = no ballots available)

could then result in a code:

• 2190 <— this would be a pretty good polling place
• 9912 <—- this would be a report of trouble

You could easily write this on piece of paper and take a picture of it as well.

Again, this type of code would just look like gibberish at the local level, and perhaps buy some time at a state surveillance level until they got their own copy of the code. At the least you would be making them work some more to figure it out, and make them less able to filter by keywords.

Mobile Pyramid Scheme aka Improved Autonomy
Local groups can send to one local person, and then that person can forward each message to another level up the tree and so on. This would enable a bit more protection than all field election monitors texting to a centralized number. It introduces some other issues around reliability of the data and complexity of the process, but in exchange you help foster autonomy and decentralization, two great tools to improve safety and privacy in your overall network.

Managing What Gets Logged
By default, phones tend to log and track everything you do, in the name of convenience. This includes all the text messages you send. The problem is that if a person is detained, it can be difficult to quickly delete those messages before the detainers take away the phone to see what they can learn from it.

Most phones offer a way to NOT save outgoing SMS messages and also to potentially delete inbound after they are read. This feature should be utilized. In addition, numbers should be memorized and manually entered, instead of stored in an address book.

More Ideas?
If you are reading this post and have your own thoughts or firsthand experience to contribute to the discussion, please add them using the comment section below. I will make sure the right people see this information. Your insight and creativity can make a difference!

Our goal is to build all of these applications using a mobile web-based approach. This means instead of building apps in Java for Android, or Objective-C/Cocoa for iPhone, we use HTML5, CSS and Javascript. However, this does mean we have to spend some extra effort to make these web apps feel like actual, native mobile applications.

Fortunately, projects like JQTouch, a library that provides automatic formatting and interactivity tuned for the iPhone, make our lives much easier. However, with the release of the iPad this weekend, it has begun to hit us that that same old lists, menus and forms that make sense on the iPhone, may not be the best metaphor for the larger iPad screen. With that in mind, I’ve begun some basic prototyping focused on building a more tactile interface where the user can drag, pinch and swipe their way through all the legislative data they might want. Through using JQTouch, along with the JQuery Touch plugin, I was able to pull something together fairly quickly.

Here’s a video below of my first crack at this. You can also point your iPad or iPad Simulator device at http://m.nysenate.gov/ipad to play with it live. I’ll release some of this code shortly, but you can also view source on that same URL with any web browser.

Here’s a brief summary of what we’ll be covering:

Join us for this important on-line dialogue featuring Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach from January 27 to February 2, 2010. This dialogue will feature practitioners that have developed database systems to document human rights violations, organizations on the ground documenting violations, and those that are training practitioners on how to choose the right approach and system for their documentation. We will look at options for ways to collect, store and share your human rights data safely and effectively. If you are trying to figure out the best documenting system for your work – or if you have found something that works well, please join us for this conversation to share your questions, ideas, resources and stories!

Featured Resource Practitioners
Featured resource practitioners for this dialogue include (click here for more biographical info):

• Vijaya Tripathi and Megan Price work with the Martus database developed by Benetech
• Agnethe Olesen, Daniel D’Esposito and Bert Verstappen work on the OpenEvSys database developed by HURIDOCS
• Jorge Villagran and Sofia Espinosa of the Guatemalan National Police Archive Team
• Patrick J. Pierce, head of the International Center for Translational Justice – Burma Program
• Oleg Burlaca, utilizes HURIDOCS methodology and working on websites for World Organisation Against Torture and SOVA Center for Information and Analysis
• Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke University and Seth Shaw, Duke’s Libraries’ Electronic Records Archivist
• Jana Asher, M.S., is the Executive Director of StatAid
• Agnieszka Raczynska of Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos, Mexico
• Daniel Rothenberg is the Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) at DePaul University College of Law

Read on:
http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/documenting-violations-choosing-right-approach

Mobile phones in human rights monitoring is still relatively rare and there are few examples where mobile shave been used successfully in this field. In this video from the recent Open Mobile Camp in New York, three experts are discussing their projects and thinking on the use of mobiles in human rights work. Nathan Freitas discusses security issues in regard to using mobiles in this field and his project Guardian, Enrique Piraces from Human Rights Watch describes his thinking in regard to the use of mobiles in human rights work, and Emily Jacobi features Handheld Human Rights and the mobile tools that are part of the project.

“I’ve learned an important lesson in working with the Tibetan
independence movement and others:  It’s that we can’t presume what people are
willing – are or are not willing to do for their own freedom and liberty and
democracy.  We can’t say, oh, if they do that, they might get arrested or go to
jail or get killed and we can’t do that.  These are people, as we saw in Iran,
who are willing to take to the streets and die for their freedom, and you know,
the – it’s an important fact to remember to not presume that you want to
protect them.”

“I get asked this question a lot as well because I’m building,
like, an encrypted phone and people are like oh man, the Mafia is going to love
that, or something.  So it is – and my students ask me this as well – and I
don’t, from an engineer perspective, I don’t want to be the guy that said yeah,
just, I made the AK-47 and you know, it’s a great gun.  (Laughter.)  So you
have to be careful.  You need to inject morality into these things, but you do
– it’s a slippery slope.”

“I’m happy for tools like Twitter, that they can be used just as well to cover
the daily lives of Ashton and Demi or break the news of Michael Jackson’s
death.  But the fact that they can be used to broadcast updates from the
streets of Iran or spread the news of political prisoners in Tibet being
executed is a very weighty obligation and responsibility that they’ve taken on.”

Many thanks to my fellow panelists (Daniel Calingaert, Evgeny Morozov, Chris Spence and Shiyu Zhou) for the enjoyable discussion.

Shout-outs to Ushahidi, Alive in Baghdad, Lech Walesa and more in the full un-official transcript.

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing. Thank you to the members of the commission for the invitation to appear here today, and for your interest in this very important topic. I come here today as a representative of the many, many technology advocates, experts and educators who believe that the most amazing innovations of our generation should be used for more than just acquiring more wealth or as simply new channels entertainment or distractions. 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.

From my perspective, the latest wave of new media protest technology began in 2004, with an open-source web service called TXTMob. TXTMob was first developed by MIT’s Institute for Applied Autonomy for 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 service to coordinate their spontaneous protests or flashmobs, strikes and sit-ins. In 2005, two of my colleagues who had been involved TXTMobs use during the RNC went to work for the company that became Twitter, where they showed the demonstrated the power of TXTMobs and short message broadcasting to their coworkers around the office. It was in those times, that 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 are Asia and the Americas. I have specific experience traveling in and working with organizations focused on China, Tibet and India. I have developed patented technology, focused on the exchange of data between mobile devices over wireless networks. I am also teaching at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program this semester – a new graduate course I’ve designed 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, is built upon a very long tradition that goes back to the first time someone figured out how to use drums, fire and birds to send signal messages.

During the 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. 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. Four guys in a garage in Silicon Valley, is now multiple activists communicating in realtime through Twitter, Skype, Facebook, all using their iPhones, Blackberries and Google Android phones, to weave together human rights campaigns using true grassroots organizing and tested non-violence tactics with open-source software, cloud-based web services and very powerful, yet very cheap hardware gadgets.

Take the case of Burma in 2007. Video journalists and I.T. student organizations teamed up to provide their own coverage of the Saffron Revolution. As their footage began reaching the outside world, they become bolder and more targeted by the junta. While the revolution never fully materialized, and many of the monks and activists who participated have been imprisoned, tortured or worse, the “VJ” model of Burma is largely considered to have been successful due to the global attention the protests received. A similar model is being used in Iraq, through the well known citizen journalist video service, “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, where a single 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.

In many cases, the authoritarian states power proves too formidable for adhoc efforts with new media technology. 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, mobile phones, PCs and the Internet. 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, 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. It provided a loosely coupled link between the various independent activists who were traveling to Beijing to participate. It enabled a team of citizen journalists to document the many different protest that occurred (since mainstream press was mostly unable to due to their “close” relationship with Chinese security agents) – all utilizing broadcast quality HD video cameras, small mobile computers and uploading photos and footage for publishing and broadcast around the world. 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, was far worse a crime than actually participating in the protest itself. Fortunately, due to their American passports, they were treated fairly and made it home.

During last years presidential elections, I was a member of an adhoc team of people 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.

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 actual spy-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 reveal your human networks, make the job of cracking down 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.

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. 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, acts taken to secure our homeland from violent terrorists often have similar justifications to acts taken by authoritarian governments to squelch dissent and democracy. Our government needs to be mindful of these contradictory positions on the benefit of new media within our own democracy.

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 URLs 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

Homework:
1) Create diagrams for your cause proposal based on the pyramid and pillar diagrams below.
2) Read the following:

• Gene Sharp, There Are Realistic Alternatives (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2003
  
• CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle (PDF), Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, Belgrade, 2007 (Chapter 3: Pillars of Support)
• Robert L. Helvey, On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking About the Fundamentals (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2004

3) Read this post: Turn Your Blog Into a Native iPhone App in 10 Steps
4) For those interested in Android development, you should download gReporter open-source project and get your development environment setup -> http://developer.android.com/

Here’s the audio from the first hour of class, listen to this while reviewing the text below:

Class begin with a discussion on the use of strategy from the school of non-violent direct action, as means for planning and designing mobile applications for social activism. In other words, approach mobile application design from a typical “product” or “consumer” perspective or even a thoughtful usability/design approach, may not make sense when it comes to trying to implement something to create actual change in society.

In the case of social activism, you must developer a strategy to affect an existing regime. A regime can represent a corporation, government, a specific issue, social prejudice, or any existing state of mind or structure in society that can be targeted for change. A long term strategy is necessary to keep focus on the goal.

Opportunities present themselves over time through the effort to affect change on an issue. They can be expected or unexpected. Your effort should be positioned to take advantage of them as they emerge.

Tactics are short term actions implemented to take advantage of opportunities. They can be of varying length and intensity, but must be aligned with your overall strategy. Multiple tactics can be used at once.

You must also consider deeply the structure of the existing regime you are targeting. Here is a typical governmental regime and the “Pillars of Support” which actually make a government function.

However, this same concept could be applied to more mundane campaigns such as increasing efficiency in shopping or promoting the purchase of only pasture-raised eggs at the Park Slope Food Coop:

These timeless approaches to campaigns, drawing from the likes of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” as much as from the non-violent victories of Gandhi and Mandela, are useful and powerful constructs within which any campaign must be processed. More specifically, for mobile application design, it is critical that you consider a non-corporate, non-consumer perspective as part of your design process, and ideally throughout your campaigns efforts.

Many thanks to The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict for their great instruction, content and overall efforts in this area of work and practice. Here are some related readings on these concepts and more:

• Gene Sharp, There Are Realistic Alternatives (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2003
  
• CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle (PDF), Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, Belgrade, 2007 (Chapter 3: Pillars of Support)

• Robert L. Helvey, On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking About the Fundamentals (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2004

Guest Speakers

Week 4 features two excellent guest speakers. The first, Ben Stein, presented a US-oriented perspective through the work of his organization, Mobile Commons, and the many mobile advocacy campaigns they’ve implemented, including fighting for their own right to broadcast Pro-Choice SMS messages on the Verizon Wireless network. The second speaker, Tonyo Cruz, spoke to us in the midst of the Philippines cleanup from a large storm and flooding in which mobile phones were used to coordinate rescue and raise money. Tonyo’s perspective on the use of mobile in a more social, distributed, “peer to peer” manner, was an excellent contrast to the more centralized broadcast and web-based models that Ben described in the US.

Ben Stein – MobileCommons – http://www.mobilecommons.com
Mobile Commons’ customers are some of the leading cause-related organizations in the world. They use our web-based application to create mobile programs based around text messaging, voice calls, and web-based interactive components. With those tools, they raise money, build their lists, add interactivity to live events, get more support from the web, and make it easier for their ideas to spread.

Our second guest of the evening was Tonyo Cruz of TXTPower- Mobileactivist, writer and journalist Philippines – Since 2001, Tonyo has helped convene TXTPower, the leading mobile activist group in the Philippines and helped initiate its many high profile campaigns.

NATHAN FREITAS

2:16 PM
Have you reviewed the week 3 post here? http://openideals.com/2009/09/25/itp2800-week3/

STUDENT:
2:16 PM
i did i got a chance to look at some of the links

NATHAN FREITAS
2:16 PM
I can break down for you the overall points of the class
other than when I talked about myself

STUDENT:
2:17 PM
ok that would be great

NATHAN FREITAS
First, I brought up the Tor Project http://torproject.org
his was done to start talking about alternative networking opportunities other than just using the internet directly
especially with mobile devices

so thinking about peer-to-peer, bluetooth, wifi
as tools for either getting around censorship
or as different ways to allow people to network.

too often everything revolves around access a website
or connecting to the internet directly to transfer data or communicate
but in many countries, for activists, etc this isn’t an option or isn’t reliable

thinking about bluetooth
there are also many other possilbities for sharing data directly or in a personal way
we also talked about the use of semacode, visual barcodes, etc… have you used or seen thos before?

STUDENT: 2:19 PM no are they like QR codes?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:19 PM
yes, QR codes are another type
there are about ten different methods for producing scannable bar codes…
one app i talked about
allowed direct exchange of information between phones
where one phone displays the QR code on their screen
and the other scans it
so the devices sort of kiss and share data that way w/o any need for internet

did you look at this diagram? http://www.flickr.com/photos/natty/3951991209/sizes/l/

STUDENT:
2:24 PM
and these scannable barcodes fall under satellite media?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:24 PM
they are more Local Area
but of a physical sort
I actually need to update this diagram to include this concept
the diagram is meant to draw connections between the physical media (glass fiber, copper, radio waves)
and the type of data transfer, and then the various levels of controls/authority at each layer
a barcode is “off the grid” in a sense
because it is completely uncontrolled data, as comparsed to using SMS which is completely controlled and tracked

STUDENT:
2:26 PM
ah i see

NATHAN FREITAS
2:26 PM
and very expensive
SMS is the most expensive medium of communication if you consider price per message size

STUDENT:
2:26 PM
so it is netither connected to the lowest layer nor the top later
layer

NATHAN FREITAS
2:27 PM
right. i just want you to think about the medium of communication
when you are designing applications or use case scenarios
and also consider the state/authrotiy you and your users, cause, movement are operating within

STUDENT:
2:27 PM
that’s interesting. when people say mobile, one automatically thinks of sms
at least for me

NATHAN FREITAS
2:27 PM
Yes, and not to say SMS isn’t powerful and useful
What we’ve seen though with the iPhone or Android phone
is that once you get a good TCP/IP internet connection on a device
so much more becomes possible, because it is less controlled
and then when you have WIFI even more is possible, b/c its very cheap and nearly free
and even less controlled

Some of this thinking is more relevant to certain apps than others
but for instance, if you are making an application targeting inner city youths in NYC
SMS may be very expesneive for them
but on T-Mobile sidekicks, they have unlimited internet browsing
but no wifi, etc.
Okay, so moving up to the top layer
Satellite is very very expensive, but also insanely powerful
in that it breaks any state/gov’t control
it bypasses even “the great firewall” of china for instance

I shared a video of a protest I developed the technology for
we did a live broadcast from Mount Everest on the China/Tibet side
everyone involved was instantly arrested and held for 4 days. all the equipment was taken.
but we were able to live stream the protest and get the footage out before that
on to BBC, NBC, etc. …

so in that case, we routed around the state control of the physical ground based connections

STUDENT:
2:31 PM
what was the protest regarding?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:32 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfe57qES7F8
It was in the lead up to the Olympics
TIbetans upset that China was using Mt Everest as part of the torch relay propganda
political agendas aside… if we had tried to use any other medium, whether phsycial (tape, usb key)
or WAN (3g, GPRS, etc)
we wouldn’t have been successful

STUDENT:
2:34 PM
what is WAN stand for?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:34 PM
Wide Area Network
vs. Local Area Network (LAN)
sometimes the physical layer (bluetooth or barcode scanning)
is called Personal Area Network
PAN

okay, so then I did a talk about my life using the various technology devices I’ve owned/used
the overall point of that was to clearly show how things are getting smaller, more powerful, cheaper, etc
at some point we’ll do a brainstorm about where we think things will be 5,10,20 years form now
in terms of mobile devices

STUDENT:
2:36 PM
wait for the protest in tibet you streamed via satellite?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:36 PM
Yes

STUDENT:
2:37 PM
i see

NATHAN FREITAS
2:37 PM
It was a very small satellite modem, the size of a laptop. BGAN Inmarsat 9201

STUDENT:
2:37 PM
are they very expensive?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:37 PM
http://www.inmarsat.com/Services/Land/BGAN/Terminals/HNS_9201.aspx?language=EN&textonly=False
they have dropped in price greatly
so $2000 ish
thanks to the Iraq and Aghan war
many soldiers are using them for their own personal connections back home
(higher ranking soldiers, etc)
the bandwidth is still very expensive $7/megabyte
but it is much more affordable than it used to be
Many mountaineers use them as well
there are some new smaller ones as well: http://www.outfittersatellite.com/bgan_wideyeSabre.htm

STUDENT:
2:40 PM
how much did it cost for the protest in tibet?
including bandwidth

NATHAN FREITAS
2:40 PM
10mb / minute of video is a good benchmark for good quality 320×240
we got that down to about 3mb with compression
so $20 per minute of footage
we sent b-roll footage ahead of time
and with testing before the protest and all it was about $1000 for bandwidth
$2000 for the sat modem
$1000 for macbook
DV video cameras, etc
all in all, the gear was about $7500
you can also rent satellite modems

Last point on the sat stuff… .embedded journalists are in Iraq, etc are using this version of it: http://www.outfittersatellite.com/bgan_videophone.htm
it works well, but not easy to hide, transport

STUDENT:
2:44 PM
and this piece of technology combines all the aforementioned gear you used in tibet?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:44 PM
yes, into one push button package

STUDENT:
2:45 PM
i see. could you tell me a little more about the TOR project

NATHAN FREITAS
Sure.
Have you heard abot people using proxy servers in places like Iran and China to get arond web censorship?

STUDENT:
2:48 PM
no. is it a bit like Xnet from little brother?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:49 PM
Yes
exactly that, but in reality
in the HTTP/web world
it is very easy to have a single proxy server that your web browser can be linked up to
and instead of your computer going directly to a website, the proxy servers get it for you
this is a very simple way to access web sites blocked by your school, job, country, etc

however, it is also very easy to shutdown
and worse, whoever is running that proxy
knows every single page you have requested, every site
you have to trust them w/o knowing who they are

Tor (which is short for “The Onion Router”)
is designed so that your request is wrapped up in a skin of layers
like an Onion!

STUDENT:
2:51 PM
i see. so it is one proxy?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:51 PM
Tor is a network of many many proxies
more like Napster or Limewire

STUDENT:
2:52 PM
ok. so it’s a web of trust ?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:52 PM
peer to peer
yes it is
using cryptography, key exchange, etc
it provides a mathemtical safe way for you to get proxied web access
without revealing who you are
it also stops there from being a single point of failure
or monitoring… so that means
so for instance, a government can’t just sit and monitor all the people accessing one proxy
and then arrest them or question them

The reason I have brought it up in ITP2800
is that two Fridays ago
i worked with the Tor Project developers
to get the code running on Google Android
so we have Tor ona mobile phone now
which is a big step forward for privacy on our mobiles, as opposed to just laptops, etc
and also important for places like Iran or China where people have mobiles more than computers

it is also very important here in the US
because AT&T and the FBI were found to be monitoring users w/o a warrant
last year
as part of “homeland security” work, even tho it was agains the consitution, etc.
Mobile phones are many times more succeptable to privacy violations and monitoring than laptops, pc’s

STUDENT:
2:56 PM
so they were following specific people ? (AT&T?) how did they sift through all that data?

NATHAN FREITAS
2:57 PM
well, that is another question, but once they have the ability to tap into a specific set of SMS messages from one user
it isn’t hard for them to get another user, or to start checking for anyone mentioning “George Bush”
for instance

This is exactly what happens in other countries.

STUDENT:
2:57 PM
i see

NATHAN FREITAS
2:58 PM
Voice data is much more difficult obviously
THe overall point, is that you don’t give up your rights just because you are using a mobile phone

The guest speaker we have tomorrow night from the Philippines
will be talking about this somewhat in context of his government and the work of http://www.txtpower.org/

actually he will probably talk about the flooding/storms there and what role mobile is playing
if he can connect at all (eek!)

STUDENT:
3:00 PM
i have one last question
it’s a broad question
but bothering me . do you think that society is getting better?

NATHAN FREITAS
3:01 PM
Wow
I am not sure if society as a whole is getting better
However, from my perspective as a technologist
and a mobile computing advocate
I believe it is a promising development
that the distance of communication between places has grown shorter
miniscule
and that the expense of communication has dropped
such that even the poorest people can use mobile phones
so that when tragedy or crisis occur

we can find out about it instantly and people can try to take action
or that in our own local communities,
even someone who is homeless or poor, can still connect and communicate

the flip side is that the state and corporations have more power than ever our us
in terms of monitoring, censorsing, controlling,
on a very very personal level

(and if you look through the slides on my life or watch the video)
I have been very fortunate to create a path for myself that has been unconventional
but that is hopefully less so as things evolve…
as a technologist/activist, etc who can make a good living, build products, etc
that improve the state of society

• Watch the videos linked to here: http://delicious.com/nathanialfreitas/itp2800+week2
• Continue reading/finish “Little Brother” http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
• Take pictures or video using a camera phone or Flip-style device of something controversial or in a place where you might be seen as a threat to the subject of the video or photo. The goal is to feel/experience the state of using mobile technology under duress. Post videos to a public website and share the link via textmarks ITP2800 or twitter #itp2800
• Write a one page proposal for developing a mobile technology solution for a specific cause

The slides begin with a review of a breakdown of the class title “Social Activism using Mobile Technology” that the class went through in week one. Out of that, I came up with some slightly silly, but potentially introspective, alternate titles for the course:

• People Organizing Portable Robots
• Social Justice Protest. Invsibiel + Frustrating.
• Casual Talking Grassroots Gadget (Not Naturally Evolved)
• Shared Experiences. Mobilized Magic. Organically Evolved.

Some brainstorming on the service value grid I shared…. the class brought up the idea that synchronous request/response service might provide a different experience than asynchronous messaging application. Larger questions about how and when to make value judgements about mobile services which interrupt, distract and complicate our lives was also brought up.

Week 1 homework results – students were asked to come up with their own TextMarks keywords and Twitter hashtags to promote a cause, idea or movement.

The tags/textmarks were: Sgsyn, Desair, IWantData, IWantHealthcare, SavePhillyLibraries, DaveBMiller, Represent, SiOnTheWeb, Mediate, Jeeee, IHeartPV, SecretPublicSpace, Rendezvous, WhatsThatBug, Rainforest, FirstJob, ITP101, GivKwik, PopulationPlanning, NoSmoke

The goal was to consider how to create a memorable tag that is also short. Positive feedback was given on tags that were intriguing, calling the user to take action to find out more. Some of the tags were actually put into use, gaining hundreds of re-tweets in just a few weeks. Another student created posters with mobile barcode images to promote their tag.

The overall topic of this week was “Simplicity is Powerful”, and so we did a whiteboard analysis of the “Flip cam”, cheap video cameras that have proliferated the market, and their usefulness in the service of social activism:

Flip Video Cameras are simple… but powerful.

- Cheap < $100 in some cases
- Durable
- Great battery life (electricity is a common foe)
- Push-button "fisher price"
- double as hard drive storage
- Unambiguous about what it is far
- Ambiguous in that it might look like a cellphone or iPod
- low profile
- has a screen for display
- has a video output jack
- has a tripod connector (gorilla grip clamps work too!)
- Can't remove storage (this is a plus and minus)
- Easy to carry
- quick to use, boot, load, very responsive UI
- standard, global usability, globally available
- standards based plugs, video (usb, rca 1/8 inch)

While it is easy to dream up complex, James Bond-esque technology solutions, often it is the more MacGuyver-esque "off the shelf" approach of combining cheap, easy to use things, that can make a greater impact.

Unfortunately, the video capture of the event failed, but you can view clips from a previous event with Mark and Emily – “Subversive Tech and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy”, a talk held in Brooklyn, NY in June 2009, involved a presentation by Digital Democracy on the use of technology inside and along Burma’s borders, footage from the Sept 2007 Saffron Revolution, where mobile phones and the internet allowed protesters to coordinate and publicize the largest protests seen in a generation, and a Q&A with “Stanley”, a Burmese computer programmer and chairperson of the All Burma IT Students Union.

Subversive Tech & Burma’s Struggle for Democracy (Part 2) from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

That’s it for week 2… see you next time!