ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

In recent months, pedestrians who filmed public bomb attacks on their mobile phones have been confronted by the police. One citizen who passed on such footage to an independent TV channel was later vilified as a ‘traitor’. Overly suspicious (or jealous?) neighbours called the police about a friend who was running his video editing business from home in suburban Colombo.None of these individuals had broken any known law. Yet each one had to protest their innocence.

It may not be illegal, but it sure has become difficult and hazardous to use a camera in public in Sri Lanka today. Forget political demonstrations or bomb attacks that attract media attention. Covering even the most innocuous, mundane aspects of daily life can be misconstrued as a ’security threat’.

Nalaka Gunawardene writes to Groundviews on the emerging threats facing citizen journalists in Sri Lanka in an article titled Endangered: Our right to ’shoot’ in public

As Nalaka points out in his article, even liberal democracies such as the US have also tried to clamp down on User Generated Content (USG). As I’ve noted on this blog, while France24’s citizen journalism initiatives are commendable, they largely ignore the fact that France has clamped down on citizen journalism as well.

The problem facing citizen journalists in Sri Lanka is the vigilante justice in the form of Civil Defence Committees that have sprung up all over the country. As the Free Media Movement (FMM) in an open letter to the Inspector General of Police notes in relation to two recent cases involved accredited journalists:

We firmly assert that journalists and media workers have a right to gather and disseminate information in the public interest. Any means that directly or inadvertently curtails the rights journalists is tantamount to censorship. We believe the duty of the Police is to protect these rights that are the foundation of democracy. Sadly, in the both cases noted above, the actions of the Police were inimical to their role as defenders of rule of law, giving in as they did to the arbitrary actions of essentially over enthusiastic vigilantes.

If the situation is incredibly bad (and deteriorating further to boot) for journalists today, Nalaka’s understates the challenges facing citizen journalists in Sri Lanka today when he avers that:

It may not be illegal, but it sure has become difficult and hazardous to use a camera in public in Sri Lanka today. Forget political demonstrations or bomb attacks that attract media attention. Covering even the most innocuous, mundane aspects of daily life can be misconstrued as a ’security threat’.

Read his article in full here. The chapter on Citizen Journalism I wrote for Communicating Disasters, that Nalaka quotes from in his article, can be read in full here.

There’s a Star Trek episode called The Ultimate Computer that has Spock, at the end of episode, turning to Dr. McCoy and stating with his inimitable deadpan face that if Dr. McCoy’s engrams were impressed on a computer, the resulting torrential flood of illogic would be most entertaining!

I found myself recalling Spock’s comment when I read the news snippet in The Sunday Times that brought to light this government’s avowed policy to deal with “bogus” SMS messages that resulted in “public fear”.

“Next, it could be your mobile phone in Colombo they shut down” is how I ended a short article I  wrote over a year ago on Groundviews in response to the major telcos shutting off mobile services in the embattled North and East of Sri Lanka. As noted by Prof. Rohan Samarajiva from Lirneasia earlier this month on the same issue:

When the government shut down phone networks in the North and the East, I posted the facts, but did not explicitly protest. Few others did.

The lack of strong opposition to their censorious actions has now led the government to take another step: to shut down SMS use on Independence morning. Censorship is coming close to home.

The issue of public safety and security vs. access to mobile phone services and telephony is not unique to Sri Lanka. As I noted on a post that dealt with this issue last year, mobile phones are increasingly a device used for essential emergency communications, even in low income countries.

The regime’s reasoning that shutting mobile phone services to curtail the spread of misinformation / disinformation is just wrong on so many levels. One, it ADDS to public fear and insecurity if people can’t get the information they need to ascertain whether a rumour is false or not if SMS services are cut, if only because many today rely on news and information services like JNW and Ada Derana for 24/7 updates on their handsets.

The news report mentions the following:

Phone service providers may bar SMSs (Short Message Services) for a certain period if unnecessary public fear is created through text messages prior to national events or emergency situations, the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC) said.

This is bizarre, because SMS today plays a vital role in disaster response. As Chanuka’s experience suggests, SMS’s can be a vital source of information that PREVENTS panic between and amongst family, friends, colleagues and communities. Even Mr. Hulugalle, from the MCNS surely knows this, since the MCNS itself was allegedly going to use SMS mechanisms to provide information in the public interest!!!

That the regime, in its own torrential flood of illogic that’s far from entertaining, now suggests that these vital services will be shut off to prevent public panic is laughably tragic on one level, deeply ominous on another, since this measure can easily become a means through which the government, at its whim and fancy, shuts down mobile services for the transmission of anything it deems to be a threat to public order.

Censorship, now on mobile media, is moving closer to reality and sadly, all our telcos are part of it.

Nicholas Carr’s video, and his book, compel us to think about what computing will look like a few years hence when the slew of new online services from the likes of Adobe, Google, Microsoft and others will to a greater or lesser degree shape the way we create, store, disseminate and archive most of what we usually now have on our PC hard drives, USB sticks or mobile phones.

Even in Sri Lanka, the cloud is growing. Having bought Mobitel’s HSPA modem + connection, I can now work anywhere I Colombo and in many other places around the country with speeds that rival my wired SLT ADSL Business Connection.

WiFi in and around Colombo is growing (even if those who provide wifi access don’t exactly know they are doing it!). Wimax, though hyped, is the wrong technology to use in Colombo but may have an impact in rural areas where large swathes of land can be covered with less of the problems associated with Line of Sight in urban / built up areas.

Mobile phone coverage with GPRS Edge, from Dialog and Mobitel, already covers a great deal of land, with 3G service coverage growing apace.

A lot of this (wireless) connectivity would have been unimaginable a few years ago. What it means is that using PCs and mobile phones, the possibility of connecting to the web and Internet and more importantly, producing content that can be distributed via web media channels, is increasingly open for citizens outside of Colombo and the Western Province.

A few years ago I wrote Mediation from the palm of your hand: Forgining the next generation ODR systems that along with several other papers explored the potential offered for conflict resolution through the increasing footprint of wireless internet access and the growth of mobile devices.

I’m not entirely convinced however by Carr’s assertion that we will find less use for our local hard drives. Local hard drives will only disappear once I can transfer, at the same rate as I can today with my PC’s local storage, information to and from the internet. Broadband internet speeds today even in developed countries don’t even come close. As someone who works with digital media where average file sizes range in hundreds of megabytes, my hourly data transfer (upload + download) needs would outstrip any wired or wireless internet access that I have encountered and know about (that’s commercially available and affordable) in Sri Lanka.

The cloud, seen here as ubiquitous (and hopefully free or very cheap) internet and web access, will certainly complement my work. It already does. Today, for some of the work I do with large Word or PowerPoint docs, I just create an online collaboration space with www.box.net. All the org’s I work with are on Google Apps, which allows for easy exchange of documents amongst colleagues without having to email them around all the time (why the hell doesn’t Google Apps support PDFs?!) I use Flickr and YouTube in my work a lot, and it’s great that I can now access these services from my mobile phone or laptop in most places I go in Sri Lanka and even on the road, along with Gmail and my office mail on my mobile wherever I have a signal.

I’m primarily a web publisher - the stuff I throw up to the web requires high bandwidth to upload, lesser bandwidth to consume, little bandwidth to engage with via comments and emails. I’m still unable to really use services like Yahoo’s new video streaming service, or U.Stream, still unable to do, reliably, things like Skypecasts and still unable to do anything that Apple says I can do with iChat video and screen sharing on my Mac - because the sustained bandwidth I need, just ain’t there.

That’s the problem with Carr’s thesis.

He assumes that the growth in broadband access speeds, that underpins his vision reminiscent of Sun’s assertion that the network is the computer, will take place around the world at more or less the same pace and in the same manner. Even a cursory glance at broadband services in the US tells us that this is very far removed from reality (though I suspect things may be different in Nordic countries).

For us in Sri Lanka, the growth of hyped up wireless broadband access holds much promise, but it will take years to mature. That said, as a peacebuilder, I’m excited today by the potential such technologies hold to get communities and individuals that rarely participate in democratic debates and produce digital content of their own to enter into the world of the Internet and web we take for granted. From oral histories to digital diaries (an SMS a day with a photo telling the life of an IDP in a camp), from podcasts in the vernacular (e.g. VOR Radio) to citizen journalism (e.g. Vikalpa), from mobile phone videos uploaded from the field itself (e.g. Vikalpa Video) to text messages that inform and alert (e.g. JNW), the cloud holds tremendous potential for those of us interested in interrogating war and peace.

It is in fact a shift (a necessary and long over due one at that) from an emphasis on e-government (all too often seen as and constructed as a one way street that really doesn’t offer citizens the potential to communicate with Government) to e-governance - holding government and public bodies, including NGOs, accountable and transparent.

I think Carr will eventually be proved right - we will all end up storing more and more of our lives online. But until such time this is possible and prevalent, local storage will still be hugely important and will only continue to grow in size - as our own digital content creation grows exponentially.

Put the two together - higher density data storage on smaller media and higher speed connectivity over larger footprints, and you have the recipe for a communications architecture that can be leveraged for peacebuilding in any number of ways.

Amantha Perera, with whom I spoke to on the phone around a fortnight ago on Groundviews, ran with a story on new media and its impact on shaping the news agenda in Sri Lanka on IPS today. Titled MEDIA-SRI LANKA: New Media - First With Reports On Intensifying War the story is a explores the growth and impact of JasmineNewswires (JNW), Lanka E News and Groundviews in particular.

It’s not a particularly well written or researched article, typical of so many other traditional media journalists attempting to grasp the pitfalls and potential of new media and and the gamut of technologies supporting it, but it’s a valuable first take on the nascent new media news and information services in Sri Lanka by a respected wire news agency.

I’ve reviewed and written on JNW more than once on this site and was involved in some discussions with its founder, Chamath Ariyadasa, on expanding and strengthening its services further into areas that I felt it had potential to make far more of an impact than what it has to date through just SMS based news and information dissemination. Chamath seems to have settled on SMS news services through various mobile operators, with sadly no real interest in pursuing ways through which the service, that I am a subscriber of and love, can be made more meaningful, interactive and pervasive. As I noted here:

JNW, in trying to be all things to everyone (which may have worked as a new startup) will soon begin to frustrate its subscribers with an overload of information that is mass produced and sent to everyone, with no real emphasis on the sectors they each work in.

Lanka E News, that was recently raided by the Police, is a daily staple for me. I found what it’s founder had to say interesting:

Lankaenews has carved a niche among the upstart websites due to its quick news gathering and dissemination in Sinhala (Sri Lanka’s main language together with Tamil). “I think the fact the we operate in Sinhala opened up a huge untapped audience, the Sinhala-speaking internet users who don’t have a high proficiency in English,” Lankaenews founder, Sadaruwan Seenadira, told IPS.

He told IPS that his site gets about 100,000 visits every day, a third of these are regulars. “What made the news website workable was that we developed an HTML based Sinhala font,” Seenadira said.

From the response to Vikalpa and Vikalpa Video, I can confirm that the thirst for critical analysis and commentary that questions the status quo is growing apace on the web. Lanka E News and Vikalpa however diverge in their use of fonts on the web.

Vikalpa (and Groundviews before it) took a conscious decision to go with UNICODE fonts for Sinhala and Tamil. Lanka E News took another route and developed fonts of its own. The difference is that content on Vikalpa even in Sinhala and Tamil is searchable through Google, whereas content on Lanka E News (such as its archives) is simply not indexed on Google or any other search engine. UNICODE is tough - the keyboard is irascibly different, some of the characters don’t display accurately and it doesn’t work on Macs. Our decision was based on the fact that a couple of years down the line, UNICODE’s flaws would have been sorted out. It was important to us that the content we published on our sites today would be immediately and easily accessible even a few years down the line.

Sadaruwan’s statistics for the site clearly demonstrate the interest in vernacular content that mirrors the growing figures for Vikalpa as well. However, Amantha could have explained more clearly as to what “100,000 visits” a day really means.

100,000 hits is meaningless. 100,000 page views is incredible.

Vikalpa gets around 300 page views a day, a far more useful and honest metric of a site’s real readership. Groundviews stats, as of December 2007, are available here.

Email to IPS and Amantha

In an email to Amantha and IPS penned earlier today, I noted inter alia that,

… the point about stories on IDPs I made explicitly over the phone was not just that they appear more frequently on the site when compared to traditional (newsprint) media, but that they are WRITTEN and/or PRODUCED by IDPs themselves and published on the site after being translated to English. Such stories are the raison d’etre of citizen journalism and what differentiates it from occasional stories by journalists on the same issues / peoples in traditional media. The site is replete with such stories. For example:

‘I want a decent Education’ – A twelve year old’s plea

The divide between Muslims and Tamils: Perspective of an IDP

It is also the case that Groundviews, more than any other newspaper I know (web + print) has published first-hand investigative reports on the situation the embattled East and North of the country. For example, two recent and complementary narratives on the situation in the East are:

“Liberated”- A Personal Account Of Batticaloa And Ampara

WHAT LIBERATION?

I ended by saying that “… Groundviews in particular, which along with Vikalpa and Vikalpa Video are sui generis in Sri Lanka in the manner they introduced, promoted and raised the awareness of citizen journalism and a news agenda markedly more compelling and free than what traditional media offers today.”

I watched the brilliant Michael Clayton yesterday, a movie with a tagline that’s deeply resonant in Sri Lanka.

The obnoxious Sri Lankan President and his government, over the course of 2007 and particularly this year, has censored media and communications in Sri Lanka violently and with complete impunity, adjusting the “Truth” as they see it so that no other critical narrative or analysis sees the light of day.

The most recent edict from the Government curtailing communications came on our “independence day” when SMS communications were shut off. As Rohan Samarajiva from Lirneasia notes:

The lack of strong opposition to their censorious actions has now led the government to take another step: to shut down SMS use on Independence morning. Censorship is coming close to home.

Mobile or fixed phones (the million plus CDMA phones can also for this while people are moving around) can be used to convey messages and coordinate actions. So can SMS. If the government believes that SMS poses a security threat, it should come out and tell us exactly what that threat is, before shutting down a service we have paid for and are entitled to use.

The Telecommunications Act lays down specific provisions for these kinds of actions. I want to know whether these lawful provisions were followed. Were these provisions followed when the phone networks were shut down for long periods in the North and the East?

If not, the actions taken last night to shut down SMS were unlawful. The shutting down of the phone networks in the North and East were illegal. I believe that it is necessary to protest these unlawful and arbitrary actions if we are to prevent the extension of the Great Firewall to this country as well. Otherwise we will not end up like China; our fate will be that of Burma. (Emphasis mine)

In February 2007, Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) severely restricted communications to the embattled Jaffna Peninsula and mobile communications were frequently cut off in the Eastern Province. Hans Wijesuriya failed to give me a straight answer to an explicit question I posed to him last year as to why Dialog Telekom (with no written instruction) supinely complied to the Government’s diktat’s to curtail communications. The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission Director General, Kanchana Ratwatte, as reported here, thinks it is “routine” to shut off communications during major military offensives, with absolutely no emphasis on or interest in the full and quick restoration of services.Access to Tamilnet continues to be blocked by all major ISPs in Sri Lanka and can only be accessed by way of proxies.

Accordingly and with due respect to Rohan, asking the Rajapakse administration to justify its actions as lawful is a complete and utter waste of time. Gotabaya Rajapakse actions alone against media freedom and media personnel is a case in point of the futility of any sort of constructive dialogue with this government on media freedom. In April 2007, he made a vicious phone call threatening the Editor of the leading English newspaper The Daily Mirror.

Nothing was done.

This month he openly stated that media has to be censored and criminal defamation brought back.

No official clarification regarding his statement or retraction was made.

The utter fiasco regarding the outrageous behaviour of the unfortunately animated lump of bovine excrement that is Mervyn Silva and its incredible aftermath is another indication that the President himself is scarce interested in any sort of action that holds to account, and keep in check, actions that erode media freedom and seriously erode the safety and security of journalists.

And this is just scratching the surface of what the President, his vicious brothers and a coterie of brutish thugs and acquiescent apparatchiks have done to significantly erode media freedom and curtail free communications within and between communities in Sri Lanka since they assumed office in late 2005. It is quite simply the emergence of the same savage intolerance for critical opinions and dissent that we find in the LTTE’s approach to and understanding of media in territories under their control.

Finally, it also occurs to me that ICTA’s raison d’etre as the the apex ICT body of the State and an agency that promotes and promises, through communications, stronger and more effective governance mechanisms can be seriously questioned in light of egregious Government censorship and media repression. For every single project and initiative ICTA touts as yet another groundbreaking example of e-government that empowers communities, this President and his government have been directly responsible for significantly undermining democratic governance by flagrantly violating fundamental rights of citizens and entire communities.

The truth can indeed be adjusted. In Sri Lanka today, the only “truth” is that which the President countenances. Every other counter narrative is stamped out, with a vengeance rivalling that of the LTTE at the height of its power and hubris.

It’s difficult to think of ICT for peacebuilding when, much like Burma, you have to deal with a State hell bent on shutting you up. Groundviews, Vikalpa, VOR Radio and Vikalpa Video are, amongst others, four significant initiatives I created to maintain the space for critical dialogues. I don’t know how long I have before the likes of Gotabaya or Mervyn decide that they too are not kosher against a reprehensible Chintanaya that simply trucks no dissent.