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New NSA leak: BOUNDLESSINFORMANT documents the extent of NSA spying around the world

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 09:20:08 +0000

In the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill leak a description of another NSA top-secret program, this one codenamed "BOUNDLESSINFORMANT." This is apparently a tool that helps spies keep track of which snooping tools they can deploy in which countries, and it produces pretty, color-coded maps showing where the NSA spying powers are strongest. The Guardian has excellent notes on how this fits in with the ongoing fight between the US Senate and the NSA on whether and how the NSA spies on Americans:

The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure."
An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: "The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country."
Under the heading "Sample use cases", the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: "How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country."
A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA "global heat map" seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97bn pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide.

They quote Judith Emmel, an NSA spokesperson who says, "The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs." However, the NSA would not admit the existence of these programs (not even to the senate), prior to this.

Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data

Obama's trade reps and the MPAA are killing a copyright treaty that gives rights to disabled people

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 May 2013 00:50:17 +0000

Jim Fruchterman, founder of the NGO Benetech, writes in frustration from the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, where the US Trade Representative is scuttling a treaty that will help blind people and people with other disabilities access copyrighted works, largely by making the (actually rather good) US laws the standard around the world.

Rather than promoting the US approach -- which allows for the creation of works in accessible formats without permission -- the US Trade Rep and his friends from the MPAA are advocating for a treaty that is far more restrictive than US law, ensuring that the US itself could never sign it.

In the process, they're killing a badly needed project to help people with disabilities around the world help each other to access creative works in formats that are adapted for their use.

To give you an idea of the poison pills being advocated for by the MPAA, publishers, and now the U.S. trade delegation, I've outlined the most notable ones below:
1. Commercial Availability Requirements. This poison pill says that if a book is commercially available in an accessible format, it can't be provided by a library to a person with a disability. This is equivalent to walking into a public library and finding padlocks on all the books with a note that says: "If you want to read it, buy it." With a commercial availability requirement, libraries like Bookshare, with hundreds of thousands of accessible books available to people with print disabilities, would have to go through such complex bureaucracy that we couldn't afford to serve people outside the U.S. under a Treaty. The World Blind Union's lead negotiator pointed out how these provisions would, in practice, stop Bookshare from serving blind people in India.
2. The "Three-Step Test" Chokehold. The three-step test is part of international copyright law meant to allow countries to reflect their own values in their copyright exceptions. The United States' copyright exception for the blind is a shining example of something that complies with the three-step test. So what are the negotiators trying to do? They are working to alter the very meaning of the three-step test, changing the language of the test to the point of which it will put a chokehold on a country's ability to make broader exceptions to copyrights. Which leads to #3.
3. Conflicts with American Law. Simply put--the US won't sign it. Our trade delegation is now advocating for a Treaty that would require, if ratified, the U.S. Congress to gut our model copyright exception. Essentially, the Treaty would be too poisonous for the U.S. to swallow. It's clear to everyone that if we couldn't even get the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, which was pretty much identical to our own Americans with Disabilities Act, ratified by the Senate, a poisoned Treaty for the Blind has no chance of ratification.

Poisoning the Treaty for the Blind

Internet penetration is never correlated with increasing power to dictators, and is often correlated with increased freedom

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:15:55 +0000

Philip N Howard wonders if there are any countries that have, on balanced, suffered as a result of the coming of the Internet -- say, because improved networks created so many opportunities for dictators to spy on dissidents that it swamped any free speech/free association benefits that the Internet delivered. So he scatter-plotted PolityIV’s democratization scores from 2002/2011, and cross-referenced them with World Bank/ITU data on internet users. The conclusion: by this method, no country experienced a decline in its overall levels of a democracy as it attained widespread Internet penetration, and ~~almost all~~ many countries experienced a rise in democracy levels that correlated to a rise in Internet penetration.

Are there any countries with high internet diffusion rates, where the regime got more authoritarian? The countries that would satisfy this condition should appear in the top left of the graph. Alas, the only candidates that might satisfy these two conditions are Iran, Fiji, and Venezuela. Over the last decade, the regimes governing these countries have become dramatically more authoritarian. Unfortunately for this claim, their technology diffusion rates are not particularly high.
This was a quick sketch, and much more could be done with this data. Some researchers don’t like the PolityIV scores, and there are plenty of reasons to dislike the internet user numbers. Missing data could be imputed, and there may be more meaningful ways to compare over time. Some countries may have moved in one direction and then changed course, all within the last decade. Some only moved one or two points, and really just became slightly more or less democratic. But I’ve done that work too, without finding the cases Morozov wishes he had.
There are concerning stories of censorship and surveillance coming from many countries. Have the stories added up to dramatic authoritarian tendencies, or do they cancel out the benefits of having more and more civic engagement over digital media? Fancier graphic design might help bring home the punchline. There are still no good examples of countries with rapidly growing internet populations and increasingly authoritarian governments.

Are There Countries Whose Situations Worsened with the Arrival of the Internet?

Guatemala: Rios Montt genocide trial, day 18. "If I can't control the Army, then what am I doing here?"

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:06:26 +0000

Rios Montt listens to a prosecution witness, during the tribunal.

I am blogging from inside the Supreme Court in Guatemala City, where the trial of former Guatemalan Army General and US-backed dictator Guatemalan José Efrain Rios Montt and his then chief of intelligence Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez has reconvened for the 18th day. Here's a good recap of Monday's proceedings, and here's another.

For the past two weeks, I have been here in Guatemala with Miles O'Brien, observing the trial in court and interviewing people involved in the story for a forthcoming report on PBS NewsHour. We have interviewed Rios Montt's daughter, Zury Rios, who is her father's most diligent defender. We have interviewed scientists whose work is entered as evidence in the trial. We traveled to the Ixil area where the conflict at the center of this trial took place, and we interviewed Ixil Maya survivors about their experiences in the US-backed counterinsurgency attacks. We interviewed government officials who worked closely with Ríos Montt, who believe that what happened was not genocide, but the unfortunate collateral damage of a just war against "International Communism."

As covered in previous Boing Boing posts, the past few weeks of the trial have included personal testimonies from dozens of Ixil Maya survivors of mass killings, rapes, torture, forced adoption, and displacement. More than two dozen forensic anthropologists from the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) have testified about human remains exhumed and analyzed from mass graves. Many other expert witnesses, or "peritos," have testified: among them, Patrick Ball of hrdag.org, who analyzed data of deaths during the armed conflict, to help judges make their decision about whether the mass killings constituted a focused attack by the Guatemalan Army, led by Ríos Montt, against the Ixil Maya ethnic group.

In other words: Was this genocide?

Not according to "The Foundation Against Terrorism," which published a 20-page paid newspaper supplement over the weekend here in Guatemala. "The Farce of Genocide in Guatemala: a conspiracy perpetrated by the Marxists with the Catholic Church." It's an interesting read.

The 18th day of the tribunal began this morning with defense witnesses for Ríos Montt and Sanchez.

The first witness to be called by the defense today was General Mauricio Illescas García, a lieutenant during Rios Montt's regime. Garcia's testimony focused on the notion that Ríos Montt wasn't in the know about everything troops were during his 1982-1983 regime, nor did he know at the time about damning Army documents which have been leaked in recent years.

The second witness called by the defense today is Alfred Antonio Kallschmit Luhan, the executive director of FUNDAPI (Foundation to Help Indigenous People). As the internal armed conflict ravaged Ixil communities during Ríos Montt's rule, the Guatemalan state implemented various programs in cooperation with international evangelical Christian groups. Ríos Montt's "Frijoles y Fusiles" (beans and bullets) program was implemented first, then "Techo, Trabajo, and Tortillas" (roofs, work, and tortillas) to rebuild razed villages. These programs were officially overseen by the state organization known as the National Reconstruction Committee (CRN), originally created to rebuild after the 1976 earthquake that devastated Guatemala. But much of the state's programs in the Ixil region during Ríos Montt's rule were driven by FUNDAPI, which was a state-sanctioned NGO operated by evangelical Christian and church groups. Most prominent among them was Ríos Montt's own "El Verbo" evangelical church, which had interesting origins in Eureka, California, and was supported by American evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, as well as members of the Reagan administration such as Ed Meese III and James Watt.

During Ríos Montt's rule, El Verbo operated an "emergency aid group" known as the International Love Lift, which was supported with funds from evangelical Christian groups in the United States.

Virginia Garrard-Burnet's "Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt," includes a section detailing FUNDAPI's structure and relationship with the US government and evangelical groups.

The short version: FUNDAPI was formed by El Verbo, and inextricably linked with El Verbo. FUDAPI operated, effectively, as a "humanitarian Christian extension" of the Guatemalan Army under Ríos Montt.

In Thomas R. Melville's "Through a Glass Darkly," this section details how Christian groups in the US organized "Love Lifts" to Guatemala during the armed conflict. They raised millions of dollars and successfully lobbied for support of then-US President Ronald Reagan's policies supporting the Ríos Montt regime.

In his court testimony today, Kaltschmitt argued that the "model villages" in the Chajul/Cotzal/Nebaj area into which Ixiles were forcibly relocated in 1982-1983 were aid camps to help victims of guerrilla aggression. "They weren't concentration camps, that was a hoax invented by who knows who."

"There was so much hunger in the countryside," he added; "Crops were pulled up and destroyed by one side or the other, or stolen, because hunger was so great; this was the greatest sin during the war... The policy of the state was to help and assist the civil population and end the conflict."

"This was the army's best moment," said Kaltschmitt. "History was fixed for the Ixils, the region was pacified." He testified that Ixil people could enter and leave at free will, when they pleased, in contradiction to testimony by witnesses and experts for the prosecution. "It is clear that there was no genocide."

Kaltschmitt further explained that the civil patrols into which Mayan people were forcibly recruited "restored people's dignity."

After Kaltschmitt completed his testimony, something even more interesting happened in court.

The judge called for footage from Pamela Yates "Granito" documentary production to be played in court. Yates directed two films about Guatemala: her first, "When the Mountains Tremble," was released in the mid-1980s and amplified global attention toward Guatemala and Rigoberta Menchu, the film's narrator and central character. Yates' second film, Granito, was released in 2011 and revisits the conflict and the decades-long struggle over justice, reparations, and impunity.

The first video clip presented in court today from Yates' 1982 footage was an interview with General Jose Efrain Rios Montt.

Here in the courtroom, one could feel great tension and excitement as the video began.

On screen, a Guatemalan Army general at the height of his potency and confidence smiled, spoke rapidly, leaned towards the camera at times; his dark brown eyes glistened with conviction and force. Immediately below the screen, a grey-haired 86-year-old man leaned back, silent and expressionless.

They are the same person.

The defense of Ríos Montt in this trial has focused largely on the argument that while he was in power, he could not and did not have control of everything the Army did; he could not know everything that was going on in the remote, rural Ixil region, and cannot be held responsible for any atrocities committed by rogue soldiers.

But the video played in court seemed to contradict this argument.

"If I can't control the Army," 1982 Ríos Montt said on screen, "Then what am I doing here?"

In the interview, he effectively claimed to have total control over the Guatemalan military; they were proudly fighting a just counterinsurgency war against the threat of international Communism that was aided by the USSR, Cuba, and Nicaragua. This subversive Communist menace, he said, said threatened to destroy Guatemala.

In the 1982 footage, Ríos Montt smiles and laughs, punctuating briskly-delivered answers with a wide grin. When annoyed or emphasizing a point, he raises his voice. His posture, voice, and words reflected confidence.

Below that image in the courtroom today, Ríos Montt was not smiling.

Since the trial began on March 19, Ríos Montt has maintained silence during court sessions as an act of protest against what he believes is an unjust trial.

He said in the 1982 interview that behind every one guerrilla, there are 10 guerrilla supporters. "If people go to another country, it's because they have committed crimes," the man on screen says when asked about the thousands of indigenous refugees streaming into Mexico.

"I'll shoot anyone who doesn't turn himself in."

Is there repression against the civilian population, filmmaker Pamela Yates asked him in the film? "There is no repression being committed on the part of the Army," he replies.

As the Ríos Montt footage played, the two defense attorneys at his side appeared bored and tired. By the end of the clip, attorney César Calderón was leaning on the table, head resting on his fists, elbows on the table, periodically massaging his furrowed brow.

“Muchissimas gracias,” Pamela Yates says to Rios Ríos Montt at the end of the 1982 footage playing on-screen in court.

No, thank *you*, Ríos Montt replies to her.

End tape.

The court then screened two more interviews conducted by Yates with two other Guatemalan Army leaders in 1982: General Francisco Luis Gordillo, and Horacio Egberto Maldonado.

"Water is to the fish as people are to the guerrilla," Gordillo said during his interview, echoing a line repeated by a number of military leaders in interviews and public appearances during this era.

"A fish without water dies; a guerrilla without people dies."

And indeed, in the Guatemalan Army's attempt to wipe out the insurgency, many people died.

"The Army is fighting against subversives," Gordillo says on-screen. "Not only domestic subversives but also international subversives."

Yates: "Is it true the Army is attacking people in rural areas?"

Gordillo: "Yes, the Army is attacking the elements of International Communism."

The Gordillo interview ended, and then the court played Yates' 1982 interview with Maldonado.

"The U.S. has proven to be open to our needs," says Maldonaldo, "They are completely willing to collaborate with us."

In this footage, he, Ríos Montt, and Gordillo each emphasized how important the US-provided helicopters were in their fight against "subversives," and how valuable they were in the state-run programs that provided "aid and assistance" to devastated communities.

"The Army is no longer just to be spreading lead in these communities," he says.

"Many priests were guerrillas," Maldonado added in the 1982 footage. "I call them ungrateful. They used the indigenous as cannon fodder."

Towards the end of the clip with Maldonado, Yates asks him if he has any final comments.

"A big brotherly hug to the people and government of the United States, to thank them for their ongoing support, which we need so much now to fight this battle."

Judge Jazmin Barrios ended the court session prematurely today, because Ríos Montt's defense team did not have additional witnesses ready and present to testify. Court will reconvene tomorrow, presumably with more witnesses for the defense. Judge Barrios scolded them for not having more witnesses; you should have a dozen a day, she said. And indeed, it seems odd that the defense isn't doing more to defend.

The sense among people close to the process here is that those in charge want it to end soon. It is possible that the trial will end as early as tomorrow or Thursday; a verdict could be delivered by the end of this week, or next Monday.

(This post was prepared in part with references to live-tweets in the courtroom from @pzPenVivo and @NISGUA_Guate.)

Oceans could yield new sources of rare earth elements

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:27:43 +0000

Rare earth elements aren't actually rare, but right now the vast majority of them (97%) come from a single place — China. Given how important these elements are to the making of everything from computers to cars, that gives China quite the monopoly. With that context, here's the news: Japan just found a big supply of rare earth elements in mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, what may be good news for manufacturing is not necessarily good news for the health of oceans.

Supreme Court to Wiley publishers: your insane theory of copyright is wrong

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:01:02 +0000

The US Supreme Court has handed down a verdict in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, one of the most important copyright cases of the century. In it, the publisher John Wiley & Sons sought to block the import of legally purchased cheap overseas editions of its books by arguing that "first sale" (the right to resell copyrighted works) only applies to goods made in the USA. However you feel about cheap overseas editions and their importation into the USA, this was a disastrous legal theory. Practically everything owned by Americans is made outside of the USA and almost all of it embodies some kind of copyright. Under Wiley's theory, you would have no first-sale rights to any of that stuff -- you couldn't sell it, you couldn't even give it away. What's more, the other "exceptions and limitations" to copyright would also not apply, meaning that it would be illegal to photograph anything made outside of the USA (no di minimum exemption) or to transform it in any way (no fair use, either). Thanks goodness the Supremes got this one right!

Here's some choice bits of the decision (PDF)

These intolerable consequences (along with the absurd result that the copyright owner can exercise downstream control even when it authorized the import or first sale) have understandably led the Ninth Circuit, the Solicitor General as amicus, and the dissent to adopt textual readings of the statute that attempt to mitigate these harms. Brief for United States 27–28; post, at 24–28. But those readings are not defensible, for they require too many unprecedented jumps over linguis tic and other hurdles that in our view are insurmountable. See, e.g., post, at 26 (acknowledging that its reading of §106(3) “significantly curtails the independent effect of §109(a)”).
...In reaching this conclusion we endorsed Bobbs-Merrill and its statement that the copyright laws were not “in tended to create a right which would permit the holder of the copyright to fasten, by notice in a book . . . a restriction upon the subsequent alienation of the subject-matter of copyright after the owner had parted with the title to one who had acquired full dominion over it.” 210 U. S., at 349–350.

And here's a serious smackdown of the "if I can make money doing it, copyright should protect it" theory of law:

Third, Wiley and the dissent claim that a nongeographical interpretation will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for publishers (and other copyright holders) to divide foreign and domestic markets. We concede that is so. A publisher may find it more difficult to charge different prices for the same book in different geographic markets. But we do not see how these facts help Wiley, for we can find no basic principle of copyright law that suggests that publishers are especially entitled to such rights.

Supreme Court Upholds First Sale Doctrine

Update: a great comment from Shrikant, below:

It would appear that the Supreme Court has essentially just paraphrased Robert Heinlein from Life-Line:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

This is why your office feels too cold

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:11:15 +0000

There is no single definition of comfort. My newest column for The New York Times Magazine explores the different cultural definitions of pleasant living, how those traditions affect energy use in different countries, and how globalization changes both the culture and the fossil fuel consumption. Fun fact: Engineers have a unit of measurement that helps them account for clothing when they're trying to figure out what temperature an office building should be. It's called the Clo, and 1 Clo is equivalent to one full business suit. As I discovered, that fact has a big impact on women, business people in the tropics, and basically anybody who doesn't wear a suit to work.

World SF Travel Fund fund-raiser

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:20:33 +0000

Lavie Tidhar writes, "We are now running the second World SF Travel Fund fund-raiser. The Fund was established in 2011 to help bring one or two international persons involved in science fiction, fantasy or horror to travel to a major genre event. The first recipient was Charles Tan from the Philippines, who travelled to the US for World Fantasy Con, and in 2012 we helped Swedish authors Nene Ormes and Karin Tidbeck travel to Toronto for the same convention. This year, we hope to help bring over to World Fantasy Con in Brighton two more guests, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, a writer from the Philippines now resident in the Netherlands, and Csilla Kleinheincz, a Hungarian-Vietnamese writer, editor and translator. We are looking to raise $3000 to help cover this and possibly next year."

In Israel, new insights on the science of medical Marijuana

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:30:32 +0000

A great piece in the NYT by Isabel Kershner on Tikkun Olam, a commercial medical marijuana plantation in Israel. The name is "a reference to the Jewish concept of repairing or healing the world," and while marijuana is illegal in this country, some of the most interesting scientific research into its healing properties is happening here. The last graf is the most amazing. (Thanks, Stoningham!)

Silicon Valley, meet Genome Valley

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:14:35 +0000

More than 100 biomedical and life science companies are clustered in Genome Valley, a research park in Hyderabad, India. (Via Joanne Manaster)

Science fiction of the world

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 01:00:04 +0000

Lavie Tidhar sez, "The Apex Book of World SF 2 is now officially released and available on Amazon and elsewhere. This is the second book in the international SF/F series collecting short stories from around the world, and the only current one of its kind. It particularly focuses on African and Latin American writers, alongside writers from Asia and Europe, and includes Clarke Award winner Lauren Beukes, World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor, original fiction from Cuba, India, China and Peru and much more."

WIPO's Broadcasting Treaty is back: a treaty to end the public domain, fair use and Creative Commons

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 09:19:30 +0000

The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization's Broadcasting Treaty is back. This is the treaty that EFF and its colleagues killed five years ago, but Big Content won't let it die. Under the treaty, broadcasters would have rights over the material they transmitted, separate from copyright, meaning that if you recorded something from TV, the Internet, cable or satellite, you'd need to get permission from the creator and the broadcaster to re-use it. And unlike copyright, the "broadcast right" doesn't expire, so even video that is in the public domain can't be used without permission from the broadcaster who contributed the immense creativity inherent in, you know, pressing the "play" button. Likewise, broadcast rights will have different fair use/fair dealing rules from copyright -- nations get to choose whether their broadcast rights will have any fair dealing at all. That means that even if you want to reuse video in a way that's protected by fair use (such as parody, quotation, commentary or education), the broadcast right version of fair use might prohibit it.

Worst of all: There's no evidence that this is needed. No serious scholarship of any kind has established that creating another layer of property-like rights will add one cent to any country's GDP. Indeed, given that this would make sites like Vimeo and YouTube legally impossible, it would certainly subtract a great deal from nations' GDP -- as well as stifling untold amounts of speech and creativity, by turning broadcasters into rent-seeking gatekeepers who get to charge tax on videos they didn't create and whose copyright they don't hold.

And since the broadcast right is separate from copyright, permissive copyright licenses like Creative Commons would not apply. That means that if you made a CC-licensed video -- as tens of millions of creators have -- that the web-host, the cablecaster, the satellite company or the broadcaster that made it available to the public could essentially strip off the license you provided and go back to an all-rights-reserved model, with them in the driver's seat.

Thanks, WIPO, for showing us once again what a corrupt, anti-creator, anti-free-speech, economically backwards waste of time and space you are.

During the last hours of the meeting, the WIPO Committee pursued discussions that led to the adoption of a single text titled “Working document for a treaty on the protection of broadcasting organizations” (which has not been published as of today)3. This working document will constitute the basis of further discussions to be undertaken in November in Geneva, which WIPO hopes will conclude with a consensus document to be signed as a treaty early 2013. If WIPO convenes this conference it is because members have reached a decision and a new treaty may be born.
This procedural detail is a really important one — despite there being no international consensus, WIPO is pushing for a treaty to be signed quickly. This is actually a cruel trend in other WIPO negotiations. In the past, it has seemed like the WIPO bureaucracy has pushed for a conclusion of treaties just because they have been in negotiation for a long period of time. For example, another long-running negotiation led to the adoption of a treaty about performance rights that was opposed by many.
We urge country Members to say no to the WIPO Broadcasting treaty—as they have said in the past. We continue to believe the preferable model for addressing these issues is the narrower signal-based approach in the Brussels Satellite Convention.

Negotiations for a 2014 WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Are Back

TMBG wants your global help to make a new "Alphabet of Nations" video

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 03:00:07 +0000

Dana Cooper writes on behalf of They Might Be Giants: "They Might Be Giants is calling on fans across the globe to help create a music video for their new, bonus extended version of 'Alphabet of Nations,' and you can be part of the action! The band has asked fans from various countries to snap photos of their faces, their flags, and their culture, and post them to the band’s Tumblr or tag them with the hashtag #TMBGnation on Twitter. For full details, check out the band’s call-to-action video, and be sure to submit your photos by July 10th!"

Random history from Wikipedia

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 20:18:03 +0000

The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars lasted for years and ultimately took the lives of six people. The subsequent court case took two decades to resolve. (Via Danny Mears)

Harvey Pekar's last interview?

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 23:27:41 +0000

James Gill of Trick Coin says: "A month before Harvey Pekar died, Frank Young did a Skype interview with him for a series of articles Frank was writing about the creative processes of comic book creators. We think this may be the last interview that Harvey ever gave."

Harvey Pekar's Last Interview?

Four people dead on Mt. Everest, one still missing

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:31:57 +0000

A long line of climbers follow each other up Mt. Everest. Image: Ralf Dujmovits.

1996 was the deadliest year in the history of modern climbing on Mt. Everest. In one May weekend, eight people died when they were caught on the mountain in a storm. Over the course of the year, the death toll climbed to 15 total.

In the wake of that year, people tried to make sense of what had happened—particularly when it came to the May 10/11 deaths. All the reporting brought some internal mountaineering debates into the public eye in a big way for the first time. Is it really a good idea to treat Mt. Everest as an adventure-minded tourist attraction, suitable for anyone with a little climbing experience and enough money? What are the risks of having lots of inexperienced, guided trekkers up on the mountain at the same time? Do those climbers have enough climbing instincts to make the right decisions about going on or turning back when they're exhausted and under the influence of a low-oxygen environment? What can their guides do, under those circumstances, to force a right decision? Remember: This isn't a place where help is readily available if you get into trouble. Helicopters can only go so high up the mountain. And if you collapse, the chances of somebody else being able to carry you down are pretty slim.

These questions are likely to come back into the spotlight now. Between May 18th and 20th—last weekend—four people died on Mt. Everest. One is still missing. This time, there was no storm. Instead, the problems seem to be a combination of human error, "everyday" harsh conditions, and the fact that 300 people were trying to summit the mountain all at the same time.

Grayson Schaffer, an editor for Outside has been in the Everest Base Camp for the better part of a month. He's not attempting to climb up the mountain, himself. His story on the deaths is very much worth reading.

"THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I've seen it like this," says Onzchhu Sherpa, 31. Starting on the night of May 18 and going through the 20th, roughly 300 climbers, guides, and Sherpas crowded onto the upper slopes of Everest's Southeast Ridge. From the 19,000-foot shoulder of a neighboring peak, where I was watching, Everest appeared to be lit up like a Christmas tree with the headlamps of climbers converging from the mountain's north and south sides.

... What I can tell you is that the mood at Base Camp has been overridingly gloomy since the news of the mishaps first began trickling down the mountain. On the 19th the air may have been filled with the customary bell ringing that that signifies a team member has just radioed in from the summit, but later in the evening I heard loud sobs coming from the direction of the Korean camp. Even now, two days after the chaotic events, the details are foggy. That's because of inherently poor communications and the fact that many climbers are so exhausted and woozy from their efforts at altitude that they have a hard time even remembering what happened during their own climbs, let alone those of their teammates and strangers. With radio communications further hampered by geology and an endless stream of information that’s difficult to verify, it would be easier to report on a moon landing.

Read Grayson Shaffer's full account of the deaths on Mt. Everest

Earthquake and bombs in Italy: An eyewitness report from Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:36:48 +0000

[Video Link.]

A weekend of fear and mourning in Italy.

Early this Sunday morning, an earthquake struck near Bologna: at least six killed (ceramic workers, and a hundred year old person), and big material damage in the region. The US Geological Survey heard the tremor: a magnitude-6.0 quake struck at 4:04 a.m. Sunday between Modena and Mantova, about 35 kilometers north-northwest of Bologna. Civil defence says that the quake was the strongest in the region since the 1300s. And the damaged building are valuable historical sites. In Italy such loss goes without saying.

We felt the earthquake in Torino, 260 kilometers from Modena at dawn. The apartment building shook and the late-night party people yelped with alarm in the streets. As I write this we hear the building crack and we tremble: I am checking on twitter. Yes, it' s an aftershock at 15.19.

Not unusual for Italy to deal with deadly earthquakes, but what comes afterward can be nearly as troublesome: state neglect and real estate speculation. Those who are not under earth may have the skies as a roof forever! The last big earthquake in Aquila in 2009 speaks about that.

On Saturday morning, a bomb exploded in front of a high school, killing a 16 year old girl and injuring several other students seriously. This school bears the name of an antimafia activist, but it seems this was a terror attack. As if this distinction mattered: what cruel frame of mind, what political activism wants to bomb teenage schoolgirls? What is this message supposed to convey?

Fear and anger among citizens: standings all over Italian towns in solidarity with bombing victims in the southern Italian town Brindisi, and loud opposition to the reign of terror of anonymous bombs against civilians. The "strategy of tension" was notorious during the "lead years" in the seventies and eighties.

Italy in these days is targeted as the next country after Greece to be tumbled out of the euro zone into severe recession and collapse. The new Monti government, struggling to undo Berlusconi's long unruly reign in mere months, is imposing grim economic measures. Monti was a banker, and now is a prime minister: the trade unions blame his approach as inspired by and for the financiers rather than the population. Even Italian lighthouses auctioned off to tackle public debt pile.

"They stand on imposing headlands with spectacular views of isolated bays and white sandy beaches, some of the most picturesque in the Mediterranean." (Telegraph, UK)

The rate of unemployment among young people is 40 percent.

Italian flags are at half staff for three days of mourning. The international press has been reporting on the school killing as well as the earthquake: the social networks are full of useful news and active support for concrete initiatives. This awareness doesn't stop the Italian earth from shaking, the euro from falling, or criminals from killing the innocent, but it's a vital sign in our modest domain of life.

—Jasmina Tesanovic

Mexican drug cartels now using Claymore mines

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:27:12 +0000

Just after a horrific week of news about mounting body counts in Mexico from the drug war, Danger Room points to news that at least one narco arsenal was found to include Claymore Mines. The mines can be triggered with an electronic remote, and are capable of spewing 700 steel balls in any direction, with a wounding range of 50 yards. Here's a video.

Amara/Universal Subtitles gets $1MM from Mozilla and the Knight Foundation to internationalize Web video

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:49:40 +0000

Amara, the free/open subtitling/dubbing project that used to be called Universal Subtitles, has just landed $1,000,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. Amara is run by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a charitable nonprofit that produces technologies to increase and deepen the average person's ability to participate in the online world. Amara is a technology that lets people bridge linguistic barriers in the world of video. Here's TheNextWeb's Anna Heim on the announcement:

In other words, it is a great example of what crowdsourcing can achieve. According to its parent non-profit, Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), the platform’s users have translated over 170,000 videos since its founding in 2010, including popular videos such as President Obama’s message to Sudan and KONY 2012.
However, it could expand into other territories, such as dubbing – hence its rebranding with a broader name, which may also help it capture the sense of community it is trying to create. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Mozilla was interested in supporting the platform, its executive director Mark Surman explains: “Mozilla’s global translation and localization communities have always been at the heart of who we are. For the first time, Amara lets us extend our community translation work to include video,” said Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla. “We are proud to support Amara as they build a crucial part of the open web.”

Knight Foundation and Mozilla invest $1m in crowdsourced video translation project Amara

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer on the board of directors for the Participatory Culture Foundation)

Lenin and Stalin still have a posse

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 02 May 2012 23:48:19 +0000

REUTERS/Denis Sinyakov

A Russian communist holds placards with portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin during a rally to celebrate International Workers' Day, or Labor Day, in Moscow on May 1, 2012. Related: our large photo gallery of May Day demonstrations around the world.

Married With Children, all over the world

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:22:49 +0000

On Neatorama, Miss Cellania rounds up images from various international versions of Married... With Children from around the world (extracted from this Reddit thread. I featured the Bulgarian version last month, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Above, Croatian Married with Croatian Children. Right:

Married… With Children Around the World

"My feelings could not be lifted but sunk down": Dispatches from Japan on the anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:17:00 +0000

Ichiroya Kimono Flea Market is a company that sells vintage and new kimonos. I don't own any kimonos, and I don't expect to ever buy one. But I do subscribe to Ichiroya's email newsletter. Why? Because it's hands-down the best corporate communique I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Honest, earnest, and unfiltered, the newsletter is written by Ichiro & Yuka Wada, who own and operate Ichiroya out of Osaka, Japan. The newsletters are not really about the company, per se. Sure, they discuss kimonos sometimes. But they're really more just a weekly personal letter from Japan. They're about life. And they're a pleasure to read, even when the life they're recording is incredibly sad.

I was turned onto the Ichiroya newsletters last month by science writer Shar Levine, who has been reading them for years. After the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan a year ago—and through the fear and madness that's followed the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns—Shar told me that the Ichiroya newsletters have been a powerful testament to how these disasters impacted the lives of everyday Japanese.

There are archives of some of the newsletters online. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find an archive that contained the letters written since March 11, 2011. However, when I got the Ichiroya newsletter today, I knew I needed to share it with you. The entire thing is posted below the cut. It tells a story of terrible sadness, strength, and rebirth that needs to be read.

Hello from Japan! This is

It is March 11th, exactly one year ago, a big earthquake hit Tohoku(northern east area of Japan)and the tsunami caused by the earthquake wiped away ordinary people's lives. In cluding 3155 missing lives, approx 20 thousands people lost their lives, we cannot imagine how many people are there who lost their beloved family members and friends.

Today, there have been prayers and memorial concerts and gatherings all over Japan. I was in a big book store in Osaka, in the afternoon, and there was an announcement for silent prayer at the time when the tsunami hit Tohoku. All TV channels had special commemorative programs, and showed the devastating video over and over.

Wherever I went, my feelings could not be lifted but sunk down. We offered prayers at our church today, and are having a charity concert next Saturday. There are positive message all over but the tsunami was too overwhelming. If I were one of the people who lost their houses and families in an instant, I probably could not be positive only in one year, I cannot even imagine wheather I could get over it and live on my own. There are so many charity concerts and events, but on the other hands, there are also many writers, artists, and singers who became not to write, or play music. One popular woman writer was saying in an interview the other day, she feels very responsible to express in appropriate words about this disaster but she is still seeking for the words. I had hard time finding a topic about newsletter this time, and I cannot help introducing the action by American Marine who saved people of small island called Kesennuma Oshima(it is different from Oshima of Oshima tsumugi).

Kesennuma Oshima is a very small island in Miyagi prefecture with only 3000 people. When the tsunami happened, it hit this small island from all direction over and over. Since the damaged area was so vast in northern area, this small island was left and isolated. Gareki(rubble- which is now the most serious problem after the disaster) blocked rescue mission boats from landing. Some rescue members of Japanese self-defense force were there but they were working to find survivors and could not handel all the work for other residents. They even lacked drinking water, so were drinking from school swimming pool by claryfing water for themselves. To that isolated island, more than three hundred US Marines landed for help. They built showers, cleaned rubbles-called on each house, and asked what they could do.

One man and his wife who owned a very small restaurant lost everything and things from the restaurants were all under mud with bad odor. One Marine offered to clean the debris- and the man and his wife saw the stacking bowls and dishes collected by this young Marine from the mud and rubble. They thought everything has ended and they lost their restaurant, but they have reopened their restaurant again, using these dishes and bowls- they said, when they saw the dishes dug out by the young Marine, they thought they should start again.

Also the Marine members saw a small boy cleaning up rubbles alone to make a path, they started to do the work with him.

This is what this boy wrote in his essay:
My house has gone.
My father's fish store has gone. I know he kept the store for a long time.
My mother said not to cry, and encouraged me but,
I could not stop crying.
I cried and cried and I used all my tears.
Now my tears stopped.

His parents were worried about this little son, and let him as he wanted to do.

I do not think the Marine members read the essay but saw this boy working alone to make a path-the Marine member who was taking photos said, he just could not help coming to the boy to help him and work with him. The action on this island by US Marine was one of the action of Operation Tomodachi.

Actually, the damaged area was so big, and what happened to this particular small island was not known so broadly, but this boy and the residents of the island were helped by tomodachi(friends). All the residents saw the Marine members off when they left the island, and then invited them again after 9 months for the token of their thankfulness-they were so happy to see them again and promised, to show the island again with the complete rebirth.

To real fukko(rebirth), it will be a long way. We may never be able to express in appropriate words what this Shinsai(disaster by tsunami and earthquake)gave us, and what words to tell to the victims. However, the offered hands truly helped so many people who got hurt. This will never be forgotten. Whole Japan will never forget the offered hands from all over the world.　We heard we received help from 163 countries and area.

Thank you, domo arigatou gozaimasu

Ichiro & Yuka Wada
Kimono Flea Market "ICHIROYA"

************

Video taken in Kesennuma Oshima on March 11, 2011.

Image: 気仙沼(波路上)でボランティア Kesennuma, Miyagi pref. Deeply damaged area by the Tsunami of Japan quake, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jetalone's photostream

Border Town design jam

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:18:55 +0000

Madeline Ashby (whom you'll remember from such Boing Boing features as Surfaces - a short story for a thesis on border security sez, "This is an invitation to join a 2-day design jam in Toronto, focused on user experience problems common to international border crossings. I'll be there Friday to give a talk, but what I'm really excited about is what the other jammers will produce. The theme of the jam is 'Everyone Must Pass...' and the design challenge will be presented at the event. After that, teams will develop their own solutions to the problem. And all those solutions will be Commons licensed, so they can be shared with border towns around the world!"

TODAY IS THE DAY TO KILL ACTA

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:30:47 +0000

Today is the day of global protest against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a copyright treaty negotiated in secret (even parliaments and other legislatures weren't allowed to see the the working drafts), and which many governments (include the American government) are planning to adopt without legislative approval or debate. ACTA represents a wish-list of legislative gifts to the entertainment industry, and will seriously undermine legitimate users of the Internet. It imposes criminal sanctions -- with jail time -- for people who violate copyright, including remixers and other legitimate artists and creators. ACTA requires governments to shut down legitimate websites whose users "aid and abet" copyright infringement, creating a regime of fear and censorship for sites that accept comments and other media from users and curtailing discussion and debate in order to maximize entertainment industry profits.

The arts should always be on the side of free expression. Creative industries should always be against censorship. This secret, undemocratic agreement that seeks to "preserve the creative industries" by imposing censorship and surveillance on the whole Internet lacks all legitimacy and should be rejected. If the entertainment industry wants laws passed to its benefit, let it use the same democratic mechanisms that all bodies use in free societies. Smoke-filled rooms and crony capitalism have no place in a free society.

Here is the form to contact lawmakers all over the world and tell them to reject ACTA. Many European nations -- including, most recently, Germany -- have halted their involvement in ACTA. The tide is turning. We won the SOPA fight. We can win this one. It's time that laws affecting the whole Internet took the fate of the whole Internet into consideration, and rejected the narrow interests of a single industry body as trumping all concerns about human rights, free expression and freedom of assembly.

You can embed this form in your own website, too.

Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country's officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it!

I urge you to vote no on ACTA and to communicate its severe problems to your colleagues. ACTA's vague language locks us into obsolete copyright and patent laws, preventing democracies from updating their laws to unlock new economic and social opportunities.It criminalizes harmless remixes by ordinary users if they achieve 'a commercial scale' (art 2.14.1) which many amateur videos do on sites like Youtube. And it criminalizes legitimate websites by making them responsible for user behavior ('aiding and abetting' art 2.14.4).Worse, it permanently bypasses the democratic process by empowering the 'ACTA Committee' to 'propose amendments to [ACTA]' without your approval. (art 6.4) In other words, it's impossible to know what you're voting for.The global movement against the US law SOPA showed that internet freedom is a crucial issue which belongs in the legislative process of each country. You should view ACTA as an attempt by a handful of companies to circumvent the democratic process, and you should vote against it.Thank you. Please reply if you have any questions.

For European users, this form will email every MEP with a known email address.
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Tell the US Trade Rep: don't let Hollywood set America's foreign relations agenda

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:43:58 +0000

Katy from Public Knowledge sez,

It's Special 301 season at the office of the US Trade Representatvie, which means that the content industry gets its annual opportunity to tell the USTR which countries should be put on the naughty list for not doing enough to protect American IP. The first round of comments are due next Friday, February 10th, and Public Knowledge has just launched a petition regarding the USTR's blind acceptance of big content's claims about foreign countries' IP laws.
This is part of how the US pressures foreign governments to adopt more stringent and draconian IP measures, like the Ley Sinde in Spain, with little regard for free speech and due process. As the recent SOPA/PIPA outrage has proven, this kind of overreach is not acceptable. Here's the blog post our international expert and staff attorney Rashmi Rangnath wrote, and here is the petition.

Tell The USTR Not to Do Big Content’s Bidding

In former Soviet state of Georgia, an iPad knockoff for police

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:20:03 +0000

An employee demonstrates a "Police Pad" at the Algorithm factory in Tbilisi, Georgia, on January 11, 2012. Five thousand police officers will receive portable field computers, equipped with features that will assist them with their work, assembled at this factory, according to local media.

Update: An official response to this blog post from the government of Georgia is here. And a response from a Boing Boing reader who is a Georgian native is here.

From the Tbilisi-based Georgian language news organization Rustavi 2:

Five thousand police officers will be handed over portable computers. New police pads were produced in Georgia by the Algorithm Company. Minister of Interior Vano Merabishvili observe the process of police pad production in the factory personally. `I have an honor to inform Georgian society and the officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that in a few days five thousand police officers will be equipped with such field computers, which will allow the citizens and the police officers to provide services offered by the ministry to our citizens more comfortably,` Minister said adding Georgian police would soon become the most developed and modernized police in the world.

Says a friend who travels to the region often: "100% guaranteed those crooked, fat, lazy cops will be using these devices primarily for porn and russian gambling services."

Update: A counselor from the Georgian embassy to the United States has contacted Boing Boing to express disappointment that the quote above was included in this article. The remark is unfair, the official says, and it's something of a sore point for a country that has done so much to address the issue in recent years. They direct our attention to the Georgian government's efforts to reform police and fight corruption—with results, they say, that are a global example of success for an emerging democratic state. We've invited the government of Georgia to share those comments in longer form, and we'll gladly post them here as a guest opinion piece in entirety. It should also be noted that the source of the critical quote in this article loves Georgia, its people, and its culture, and travels there frequently to this day. Some who applaud the success of reforms still argue there's more work left to do.

(photo: REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili)

Patry's How to Fix Copyright: deftly argued, incandescent book on the evidence-free state of copyright law

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:31:37 +0000

William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like Patry on Copyright. But Patry -- once copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives and policy planning advisor to the US Register of Copyrights -- is furious with the current state of copyright law, and he's marshalled his considerable knowledge of copyright and combined it with his considerable talent as a writer to produce a new book, How to Fix Copyright, a book that is incandescent in every sense of the word.

How to Fix Copyright is a superbly argued, enraging book on the state of copyright law today, one of the great evidence-free zones in policymaking, where every measure is taken on faith and whose results are never seriously measured (except by tame, partisan researchers who always conclude that more draconian laws are in order). Patry dismantles the arguments for "strong" copyright protection like a top chef deboning a fish, deftly carving away the industry rhetoric and leaving behind the evidence.

The evidence is grim. Bad copyright law, enacted on the basis of flimsy, cooked statistics (or worse, purely anaecdotal "evidence") is not serving to enrich artists, though it is funneling enormous wealth to their corporate publishers, studios and labels (especially the executive suites in those firms, where compensation in the tens of millions is handed out by firms that are "dying of piracy"). These laws are dismantling our culture, criminalizing our children and neighbors, attacking our cherished institutions, and distorting the progress of poor nations around the world.

Throughout the text, Patry offers two important (but rare) commodities: facts, and solutions. Patry's work is heavily footnoted, and his footnotes are generous, sometimes lengthy discursions, often citing primary, peer-reviewed works. Not cooked industry statistics, but impartial evidence from economists, social scientists, and creators modern and ancient. As to solutions, Patry notes that his publisher wanted him to include a list of bullet-point solutions at the end of the book, an approach he rejected because these aren't simple problems -- they're difficult and nuanced, and so are his solutions, so they're best couched in the arguments they refer to. I agree with this approach, though two of Patry's suggestions are simple enough: first, stop making new copyright laws until we know whether the current ones are working (we'll have to define what they're supposed to be doing first!); and second, make no new laws without a strong, impartial evidentiary basis.

Funnily enough, these two suggestions do mark Patry out as a copyright radical by modern standards. Copyright is supposed to be an unassailable doctrine of faith, and asking to see the evidence of supposed gigantic monetary and job losses due to piracy, or supposed gigantic contributions to the GDP and balance of trade as a result of the industries, makes you a loony heretic in the contemporary debate.

Patry currently works as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, and he is also a clarinetist -- in other words, he is both well-versed in technology and an artist himself. This puts him in a nearly unique position among copyright lawyers, and it's no wonder that he's one of copyright's best scholars. And while How to Fix Copyright is a book full of anger, it's never shrill or strident (though it's a good deal less calm than Patry's previous popular law book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars).

How to Fix Copyright

Global Chokepoints: new activist coalition monitors censorship through global copyright enforcement rules

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:57:41 +0000

A global coalition of activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation have created "Global Chokepoints," a worldwide initiative to monitor censorship arising from copyright enforcement.

Global Chokepoints will document the escalating global efforts to turn Internet intermediaries into chokepoints for online free expression. Internet intermediaries all over the world—from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to community-driven sites like Twitter and YouTube to online payment processors—are increasingly facing demands by IP rightsholders and governments to remove, filter, or block allegedly infringing or illegal content, as well as to collect and disclose their users' personal data.
At the same time, it's unclear whether and under what circumstances Internet intermediaries have liability for content posted by their users. Hotly contested court cases in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere are considering how copyright law fits with obligations to protect Internet users' rights of privacy, due process, and freedom of expression.
Global Chokepoints analyzes global trends in four types of copyright censorship: 1) three-strikes policies and laws that require Internet intermediaries to terminate their users' Internet access on repeat allegations of copyright infringement; 2) requirements for Internet intermediaries to filter all Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material; 3) ISP obligations to block access to websites that allegedly infringe or facilitate copyright infringement; and 4) efforts to force intermediaries to disclose the identities of their customers to IP rightsholders upon allegations of copyright infringement. The site includes links to digital rights organizations, consumer groups, law school clinics, and technology industry groups that are opposing the spread of overbroad copyright policing efforts, as well as national advocacy campaigns to protect the free and open Internet and citizens' fundamental rights.

New Global Chokepoints Project Tracks Censorship Around the World

Egypt police detain, beat, sexually assault US-based journalist Mona Eltahawy; other journalists also targeted

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:30:02 +0000

[video link] US-based Egyptian blogger, speaker, and journalist Mona Eltahawy was released today after spending 12 hours detained by Egyptian security forces in Cairo. According to her tweets, she was arrested by riot police while observing the ongoing protests in Tahrir Square, where thousands of Egyptian citizens are calling for the military junta SCAF to be disbanded, and a representative, democratically-elected leadership to take their place.

While she was held, Mona managed to tweet from a fellow detainee's Blackberry that she had been beaten and was in prison. When she was released, Mona tweeted more details: she had been sexually and physically assaulted, and sustained a broken arm and a broken hand from beatings inside the interior ministry in Cairo, in the early hours of Thursday morning.

"The whole time I was thinking about article I would write," she writes, "Just you fuckers wait."

A number of journalists and well-known voices from Twitter have been detained in the last few days, including Egyptian-American documentary maker Jehane Noujaim, and Maged Butter, shown below (WARNING: graphic image):

More details from Mona's tweet-stream over the last few hours:

I AM FREE
12 hours with Interior Ministry bastards and military intelligence combined. Can barely type - must go xray arms after CSF pigs beat me.
A thousand thanks for all well wishes and support. Fuck #EgyPolice.
I can barely imagine what my family and loved ones were going through those 12 hours-I know they were worried about me to begin with. Sorry
Thank God a political activist in MOI with me lent me his phone to tweet. Right after my tweet his battery died
5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers.
They are dogs and their bosses are dogs. Fuck the Egyptian police.
Yes sexual assault. I'm so used to saying harassment but those fuckings assaulted me. #CSF
@Sarahngb is coming to kindly take me to the hospital. Besides beating me, the dogs of CSF subjected me to the worst sexual assault ever
Didn't want to go with military intelligence but one MP said either come politely or not. Those guys didn't beat or assault me.
Instead, blindfolded me for 2 hrs, after keeping me waiting for 3. At 1st answered Qs bec passport wasn't w me but then refused as civilian
Another hour later I was free with apology from military intelligence for what CSF did. Took pics of my bruises and recorded statement
On sexual assault and said would investigate it and said they had no idea why I was there. Then who does??! WTF!
The past 12 hrs were painful and surreal but I know I got off much much easier than so many other Egyptians.
God knows what wuld've happened if I wasn't dual citizen (tho they brought up detained US students) & that I wrote/appeared various media.
#Egypt must be free of those bastards
Military intelligence blindfolded me for 2 hrs. Didn't want 2 go with them but 1 said I either go politely or else. 3 hrs later,
My Cairo phone got lost during my beating so no calls there
I was arrested alone and I didnt know that @MagButter was arrested too. Glad to hear he was released as well
My left arm and right hand are broken acc to xrays

More on US involvement in her release, from the Guardian:

A US embassy representative in Cairo told the Guardian that the reports of her detention were "very concerning" and that "US embassy consulate officers are engaging Egyptian authorities".

An AP/MSNBC item on the story is here.

PHOTO: The face of bravery. Mona, having just received medical treatment after being released from prison, tweeted this photo of her casts an hour ago.

UPDATE: There are now reports of other women, possibly a female journalist from France, being stripped and sexually attacked at Tahrir.

International human rights community vs SOPA

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:05:30 +0000

An enormous, diverse global coalition of press freedom and human rights groups have signed onto a letter (PDF) opposing America's Stop Online Piracy Act, the worst proposed Internet law in the USA's legislative history. Included signatories are as varied as India's Center for Internet and Society, the Church of Sweden, Colombia's Karisma, the UK Open Rights Group, and Reporters Without Borders. The letter itself is a great piece of writing: "This is as unacceptable to the international community as it would be if a foreign country were to impose similar measures on the United States." (Thanks, Alan!)