GOOGLE : LIVES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN BUSINESS

388e jour après Ben Ali

On the espionage part : what China did is unconstitutional and illegal. Nevertheless the scope of this brief for humanity sake is to give information system related ideas and security tips to the cyber activists. We are deeply sorry for those activists who had their accounts compromised as for us they do mean more than business or a company’s brand image problem. I do have solid views about the business implication of the Chinese threat but here I want for once to have you guys consider the human part.

Who is Foetus? what’s TAKRIZ?, Foetus is the co-founder of TAKRIZ which is one of the earliest forms of online citizen activism in dictatorshiped countries. I first got online in early 96. I got involved in many projects related to new technologies from the early usenet, email, opensource, web etc. TAKRIZ was founded in 98, it was censored in Tunisia in year 2000. Except some of its publicly known members, most of the group is safe. Most members were able to escape torture and jail during these 12 years and many chose to relocate outside the country.

My points:

Cyber activism or online activism emerging from dictatorship governed countries is dangerous for the cyber activist. Cyber activists put their lives at stake. They put the integrity of their families and social ties in addition to their academic or professional situations at risk doing cyber resistance. The goals of such activist groups vary but the most common one is mainly related to giving people from outside the country as much as those inside a realistic image of what’s happening in the oppressed nation. Emphasis is giving to civil liberties and dictatorship. The reasons behind this are that, most of the time, governments and dictators control every aspect of media information inside those countries. Furthermore these governments which are mostly unconstitutional tend to over lie by portraying a false democratic masquerade to a very high degree. So depending on the actual freedom of the specific country, those lies turn out to be believed in by both developed countries, their politics and part of the local population that doesn’t have access to any uncontrolled information whatsoever. The Internet is the best way to push and pull, in and out, government uncontrolled information covering what’s really happening in the oppressed country. This roughly defines what cyber or online citizen activism is.

When we started TAKRIZ in Tunisia, we were very new to the internet but still back in 1998 there was no gmail, there was no facebook, google was a foetus if we want to make an analogy :) The servers and the applications we used were mostly self built and home made. Truth said today, gmail and other commercial web applications far outweigh custom built solutions in terms of functionalities. The problem however is that these commercial applications are not designed to deal with life threatening situations the cyber activist faces. They weren’t developed to withstand the outmost desire from dictatorship to install fear in the activist portion of their populations by hacking into their dissident systems. These web application are barely capable in terms of defining critical business logic and enforcing secure privacy settings. Most importantly there is no certitude on how they are implemented, how they are maintained, how secure they are and which direction they’ll take when evolving. A cyber activist who gets identified by the dictator is toasted and becomes a liability for the cyber activist group. This make it very clear how crucial the choice of the technology underlying online communication is in this context.

That’s the main issue.

All in all, thank you Google for promoting free speech. For you guys in free countries it’s probably trivial, for us censored people it’s of utmost importance and we support your move on China. We hope Tunisia is next.