The arrest of the ‘blogger’ in Sri Lanka: Crowd-sourcing trumps traditional media follow up

Ayubowan, a blog I didn’t know of before, helpfully posted a screen grab of a post from Gossip Lanka, a blog I also didn’t know of before, on the recent arrest of a ‘blogger’ in Sri Lanka that had many concerned. Gossip Lanka’s post is in Sinhala and doesn’t render at all on my Mac, which is why Ayubowan’s screen grab is helpful. The post avers in Sinhala that,

A few days ago, a derogatory email, also containing five nude photos, were sent to the Secretary of Defense and the President. Resulting CID investigations probed the IP address to ascertain the sender. It was discovered that the email was sent from a cybercafe in Matale. Based upon further investigations, the Police were able to apprehend the individual who was a regular customer of the cybercafe and owned the account used to send the email. However, the suspect vehemently denied he had sent the email in question. “This must have been done by someone to set me up” he said. The Police then asked who this could be. It was then the suspect said that his password was with his former girlfriend, who was not on good terms with him.

The Police then questioned the suspect’s girlfriend, who let known in her fear that she had given the password to her new boyfriend. She also told Police that her new boyfriend had set out to teach her old boyfriend a lesson.

Gayan Rajapakse is the name of her new boyfriend, and he admitted that he had sent the email. He will be in remand till the 6th under the instructions of the Matale District Courts.

This version is corroborated, also in Sinhala, by Web Alochana, an identity I read and trust. As Web Alochana notes, it is still not clear what the exact nature of the threat to the Defense Secretary and the President was.

It is not yet confirmed whether Gayan Rajapakse is a blogger, though he could still turn out to be one. His actions deservedly put him in the hands of the law and cannot be condoned. However, sending an email is emphatically not the same as publishing “offensive and defamatory comments regarding the President and the Secretary of Defense through a website he was operating”, which is what the Daily Mirror first reported and in turn gave rise to fears that a blogger had been arrested in the context of Sri Lanka’s atrocious media freedom. The Daily Mirror’s follow up story the day after also failed to mention that the suspect had been arrested over an email.

There has been to my knowledge no further reporting by the Daily Mirror on this incident. Leading Sri Lankan bloggers, justifiably alarmed, wrote a number of posts such as this one by Indi Samarajiva to find out more information on the incident that were also picked up by Global Voices Online. And it’s on comment threads on these posts, and on the blogosphere, that the incident was probed deeper and a more comprehensive account determined.

It’s an interesting model of crowd-sourcing a story, and one that the Daily Mirror and other traditional print media are well advised to study. The Guardian in England has already shown how this works to hold government accountable.

1000 posts on Groundviews: Bearing witness, shaping peace

Exactly three years after its launch, Groundviews published its 1000th post today. In it Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu identifies the site with quality debate and asks citizens to use it to canvass their ideas for constitutional reform, governance, human rights and the economy and whatever else they see as constituting essential elements of an agenda for change and reform.

Over three years, Groundviews has borne witness to that which traditional print and electronic media did not, and for well-known reasons, could not. Post-war for example, our path-breaking coverage of the situation facing IDPs in Menik Farm was picked up and featured on leading domestic and international media, including theNew York Times, Al Jazeera and the BBC. The wealth of debate and submissions online already makes Groundviews unique as an online resource and platform for engaging discussion in Sri Lanka. We are globally recognised as an authoritative voice on Sri Lanka and were the first to feature a mobile version, and the first to leverage social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

At a conservative average word count per submission, we now feature well over one and a half million words on the site of original content. Recently, we hosted the world premiere of a short film on one of Sri Lanka’s least known communities of African origin. Banyan News Reporters, a series of satirical articles on key issues related to war, human rights and peace has generated a cult following, and sui generis in Sri Lanka as an innovative way to flag issues of significant concern in cycles of violence. Groundviews has commissioned award winning Sri Lankan poets and dramatists to bear witness to violence. The site has also featured compelling and innovative photojournalism that explores, post-war, hope for a just and enduring peace amongst our citizens. A series of articles commemorating the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 and the race riots of 1958, along with a series of short-form videos, remain invaluable resources for the student of conflict resolution and the discernible historian.

Over 160 authors have contributed to the 1000 posts published on the site to date. There are over 9,300 comments to date generated by this original content, penned by from those as diverse as senior diplomats in government and retired civil servants to university students and those writing into online media for the first time in English. These comments alone feature nearly one million words. Framed by our progressive editorial guidelines, these comments are invaluable insights from citizens in Sri Lanka and from the diaspora unique to the site. For example, The Internment – A Collective Punishment? by Dr. Devanesan Nesiah has been read over twenty four thousand times and mind-bogglingly generated well over sixty thousand words of critical comments through over 140 comments to date.

Our 1000th post is a significant milestone in a quest to define journalism as it should be in Sri Lanka, and a peace with dignity for all which we believe is so much more than the absence of war.

We invite you to join us.

White House visitor logs and e-gov

The White House website has an interesting post on new disclosure policies that make available on the web, for the first time in history, all White House visitor records. Transparency like you’ve never seen before is a progressive record of transparency made possible by a forward thinking administration, strengthening and complementing existing Right to Information legislation.

Compare this with Sri Lanka’s proposed use of ICT at local and national government levels and lack of any Right to Information legislation.

Mobiles, new media and citizen journalism in Kashmir

Photo credit: BBC World Service

Kashmir has, according to a new BBC World Service documentary, the highest rate of mobile phone usage per capita in India although services were only introduced in 2003. As the BBC reporter points out, without mobile phone services there would be no cyber resistance. And there’s the irony, for it is this largely mobile phone based cyber resistance that is today documenting human rights abuses in the region, and serving to bolster international attention on a region that is tremendously difficult and dangerous for traditional news media to cover in a sustained manner.

When I first wrote about citizen journalism in Kashmir I noted,

Of the hundreds of videos on YouTube, I am positive that one won’t get any context, a sense of history or impartiality. That’s still the realm of professional journalism and the more committed citizen journalist. What one does get are snapshots of a polity and society mired in conflict, where ordinary people, with no training whatsoever in journalism, are capturing vital moments, people, events, places and processes that define their lives and in doing so, are collectively producing an oral and visual history.

This BBC World documentary is an excellent production, that speaks with youth recording the violence in their daily lives through mobiles, and putting it up on YouTube for posterity. It asks hard questions, and with revealing answers. For example, it is confirmed that security agencies monitor mobile phone conversations and IP addresses, even though no arrests have been made to date over the nature of the content posted online by cyber activists. The resulting fear psychosis is clearly brought out, and yet the responses by some of the cyber activists as to why they do what they do, at great risk to personal safety and security, are also hugely inspiring.

It is remarkable that the mother of the slain mobile phone salesman Shaheed Tanveer, who sees the video of her son’s killing for the first time in the presence of the BBC journalist, comes out strongly in favour of keeping the video online as a record of what happened. It is the same sentiment that Neda Agha-Soltan’s mother expressed earlier this year when she said, “I don’t want people to forget her.”

The BBC World Service podcast can be downloaded as a MP3 here and related photos can be seen here. New media in Kashmir documents just one example, Iran this year being the other outstanding one, of how mobile phones and sites like YouTube – first created without any intention of helping human rights and democracy – are today platforms and devices for ordinary (and often even illiterate) citizens to record their lives. It is arguable whether this is professional journalism as we know it through even the BBC itself. It is irrefutable however that this new content is changing our perspectives on this beautiful yet violent region.

And that’s a good thing.

The Hub poses vital questions over controversial execution video

Should You Believe Your Eyes? Allegations of Doctored Video from Sri Lanka is a good post on The Hub, analysing the reactions to the controversial video first broadcast by Channel 4.

Well over 14,000 people have to read read a related post on Groundviews (A video of shame and outrage: Responses, positions and clarifications) looking at the reactions to this video from government, civil society, media, the international community, diaspora and others. Despite concerns over the authenticity of the video by government, the Sunday Leader reported recently that “a United States company specialising in forensic services has in a preliminary report maintained that no tampering or editing was carried out in either the video or audio portions of the controversial Channel 4 video clip which showed a man in Sri Lankan military uniform executing civilians.” Further, in late October, the UN Special Rapporteur on arbitrary executions Philip Alston said he was initiating inquiries into the video.

The Hub asks some pertinent questions in this regard (some of which have been tackled on Groundviews by commentators),

• What should advocates do to ensure a video they may use is authentic?
• What indicators can be used to determine authenticity?
• What can/should video-sharing sites like the Hub or YouTube do to tackle the issue of fake or doctored video?
• What other ethical issues does the Sri Lanka video raise – safety concerns, respect for individuals’ dignity, etc.?

As The Hub notes,

Somewhat obscured by the controversy over the Sri Lankan video’s authenticity are the ramifications of the video if it is real. How might the Sri Lankan government respond? Would it acquiesce to international demands for an investigation into war crimes committed during the long war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military or would it stonewall and continue to deny any crimes occurred?

Blogger arrested in Sri Lanka for “offensive” comments regarding President and Defense Secretary?

The Daily Mirror web edition carries a story about a youth arrested by the Criminal Investigations Department and remanded till the 6th of November by the Matale Magistrate. The crime? Making “offensive” comments regarding the President and the Secretary of Defense on the web.

The newspaper has no further information on the individual, the nature of the “offensive” comments, or the language and location in which they were published.

The disturbing transition from banning pornography to open web censorship seems to have been made.

Update: 2nd November 2009

The Daily Mirror now confirms that the name is Gayan Rajapakse and that he was arrested on charges of having used the internet to threaten President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. Again, no further information on the nature of the threat, or at which location it was published, and why this threat was taken more seriously than others which can be found on the web.

The Mobile Phone Jirga: Supporting Rule of Law in Afghanistan with ODR

My friend Colin Rule’s put up this presentation on the use of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) using mobiles in Afghanistan around which he and I had several rounds of email discussion. I have championed the use of mobiles in ODR for years, and it’s good to see initiatives such as this use infrastructure already present on the ground rather than rely on the introduction of PC’s and associated infrastructure to make ODR work.

In several rounds of interesting discussions over email with Colin as well as Lin Wells in the development of this proposal, I flagged the following points related to ODR and competing legal systems in the country, and the use of mobile technology to facilitate dispute resolution at the community level.

• Can we talk about the Rules of Law in Afghanistan? I think the problems we face would be that much easier if Law was, as it is in the UK, a jurisprudence based not on competing ethno-religious interpretations of Islamic scripture. In Afghanistan, you have justice systems that condone stoning as a form of punishment, and such abominations as this, signed by the good Mr. Karzai himself.
• And how will the project deal with tensions between competing Islamic justice systems such as the Hanafi code or and the ultra-conservative Salafist code?” I see the central challenge of m-jirgas as one that is able to locate dispute resolution within these competing interpretations, without necessarily prefacing what we (of a more liberal mindset) see as progressive? It’s actually easier said than done.
• Given the abysmal literacy in the country, I really don’t think the publication of the first Dari and Pashto Legal Glossary makes the slightest impact on the ground. How about recording these definitions to a system where the caller can get to definition, or peruse this glossary, by using her / his voice through a telephone (allowing for on-demand access of this information even by illiterate citizens)? Could this be a simple idea (the software platforms actually exist) that furthers ODR?
• My understanding is that there are competing Islamic justice systems such as the Hanafi code and the ultra-conservative Salafist code. Again, does m-jirga negotiate differences between these schools, does it facilitate dispute resolution within these schools or does it help introduce a new justice system? To avoid the pitfalls of mission creep, and worse, the perception of something m-jirga is not, I strongly suggest we need to be very clear in how we frame our idea, approaches and innovation.
• Technically, the IVR system will need to have a way in which recorded messages can be rewound and fast forwarded on demand, which is not an existing feature of many IVR platforms.

Peace on Facebook

The Persuasive Technology Lab of Stanford University seems to have teamed up with Facebook to create a dedicated page on Facebook celebrating initiatives and conversations using and on Facebook in support of peace.

http://peace.facebook.com is in and of itself not a tool for peacebuilding, and does not for example point to the platform’s use in Egypt to stand up against a repressive, dictatorial government, as reported by the New York Times in January.

The page does link to how Facebook was used to organise against FARC, against crime in London, and its integration in a documentary on children in Uganda. I have also written earlier about pathbreaking uses of  Facebook’s in Sri Lanka to strengthen dissent and critical discussions.

Do you know of any other meaningful examples that use Facebook as a central tool for peacebuilding or in a peace process?

Brief note on the incorporation of ICT in draft National Policy on Local Government

This brief note I wrote for the Centre for Policy Alternatives responds to the following points enumerated in the National Policy on Local Government as published in the Daily News on 25th September 2009;

4.6.3 Information Communication Technology for Management Efficiency

4.6.3.1 In compliance to the state policy of ‘an efficient and people friendly public administration system will be established in Sri Lanka with the assistance of Information and Communication Technology’, ‘the automation and process re-engineering’ of local government functions will be done in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local governance with the aim of enhancing its contribution towards upgrading the public service delivery and improving socio-economic development. Thereby, it is also expected to rectify the following weaknesses in the present local government system.

4.6.3.1.1 lack of data management system.
4.6.3.1.2 lack of public confidence in Local Government.
4.6.3.1.3 lack of civil society participation.
4.6.3.1.4 obsolete systems and inefficient resource and revenue management.
4.6.3.1.5 lack of accountability and responsiveness in service delivery.
4.6.3.1.6 lack of facilities for a meaningful democratic representation.

4.6.3.2 In this technical transformation, the provincial level capacities will be improved to enable them to provide the technical support services to the local government institutions and the ‘Sri Lanka Institute of Local Governance’ and other national level institutions also will be mobilised for this purpose. The contribution and support of the national and international resource agencies will be provided, for the purpose of making capacity development and providing necessary computer hardware in line with the applications of new technology.

4.6.3.3 Information Technology Project on Local Government – e Local Government. The Ministry of Local Government and Provincial Councils with the assistance of Information and communication Technology Agency (ICTA) has already commenced an information technology project on local Government under the title of ‘e-Local Government’ to address the above issues. Moreover, by this project, the solutions based on free software which could be provided freely to all local authorities are designed and implemented.

Download the PDF to read the full note which includes several recommendations on ICT provisioning for local government authorities. You can also read it as a Word document here.

State of the blogosphere in 2009

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 report is out, and as in previous years, makes for interesting reading. The findings help dispel somewhat the commonly held perception that those with the most influence online are ‘ordinary citizens’, when in fact many, as in Sri Lanka, come from privileged backgrounds. Importantly, this would not be the case with mobile phone content creation and information consumption around the world.

It’s time someone did a similar study on the state of the Sri Lankan blogosphere.