[iwar] [fc:wired.magazine.-.the.resistance.network]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-02-28 06:33:15
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 06:33:15 -0800 (PST)
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The Resistance Network
Too many people believe if it isn't on CNN, it isn't important. 
"Countrynets" expose dictatorships, unite activists, and give hope to the 
oppressed around the world.
By A. Lin Neumann
For the most part, people outside don't understand and don't care," says 
the slight young American man who calls himself Strider. "Burma is just too 
far away and too hard to understand." As a result, he says, a brutal 
dictatorship has existed there for years with scant outside attention paid 
to its excesses and abuses. The cure for the problem, as far as Strider is 
concerned, is partly to be found on the Internet and in a new kind of 
communications resource: BurmaNet, an information-heavy mailing list that 
targets activists, journalists, exiles, and academics intent on tracking 
Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989) with detail unavailable through traditional 
media.

While commercial online companies sell the flash and dash of the World Wide 
Web and US Congressional antiporn tub-thumpers seek to impose their 
parochial will on the global networking phenomenon, Strider and hundreds of 
other modem-driven activists are using the Internet to quietly transform 
the work of monitoring human rights violations and pressuring governments. 
They may exist outside most of the recent public Net scrutiny, but dozens 
of mailing lists, webpages, Usenet groups, and other tools are springing up 
to track events and affect political decisions in under-reported countries, 
many of them hindered by closed political systems.

These "countrynets" unite activists separated by tens of thousands of miles 
and allow instant access to a common pool of narrowcast news and 
information on nations and issues that are largely ignored by the mass media.

"For Americans, if it doesn't happen on CNN, it doesn't happen. We're 
trying to change that, at least for those who are interested," explains 
BurmaNet's Strider, 29, who says he began working on the project because he 
was frustrated by the lack of information available in the West about the 
deplorable human rights conditions in Burma. "Without the Net, there 
wouldn't be any information available," says Strider, who doesn't use his 
real name for security reasons.

Funded by the Open Society Institute of international financier and 
philanthropist George Soros, BurmaNet is one of the most effective of the 
new countrynet services that have emerged in recent years. More than 
information, however, these nets and a growing number of webpages are 
helping knit together diverse communities united around a given issue - be 
it human rights in Burma, the liberation of East Timor, or the release of 
political prisoners in Kenya.

As BurmaNet's Bangkok-based moderator, Strider has gradually built one of 
the world's best sources of information on events in Burma. A network of 
volunteers in Thailand and Burma reprint human rights reports and articles 
from wire services and the local press by rekeying them into their 
computers for posting on the Net. (Strictly speaking, this is a violation 
of copyright law, but Strider says he has the tacit agreement of wire 
agencies and newspapers to transmit the material because there is no profit 
involved.)

Occasionally, Strider and others do original reporting from inside Burma, 
and they have even distributed modems and laptops to a small network of 
correspondents working among refugees and relief workers on the Burmese 
border with Thailand. BurmaNet has opened the list to wide-ranging debates 
by its 500-plus subscribers and thousands of netizens who access portions 
of BurmaNet through Usenet and other services.

"What goes out over the Internet is largely aimed at a specialist 
community," Strider says, noting that the amount of material and the detail 
involved requires a serious commitment on the part of a reader. For casual 
observers and others, however, Strider believes the Web may be a better 
resource; there are now several different Burma pages.

"This is the information backbone of a larger movement that aims to 
mobilize public opinion against the military leaders of Burma," Strider 
says. It was the Net, he explains, that helped mobilize activists on 
college campuses and elsewhere in their opposition to investment in Burma 
by Eddie Bauer. (The clothing outfit pulled out of the country earlier this 
year.) And it was the Net that stimulated bipartisan sentiment in Congress 
to impose sanctions on the regime. "There are few Burmese in the States," 
he says, "and relatively few people who even know where Burma is. But those 
who care are organized and effective, and it's because of the Internet."

Not all of the countrynets are the same, of course, and not all of the 
information available is anti-government. Some carry a modest subscription 
fee: Kenya-net, for example, charts everything from news and gossip to 
stock-market quotations and political debate in the East African nation.




Others like the East Timor Action Network - devoted to the plight of the 
tiny former Portuguese colony that has been occupied by Indonesia for the 
last 20 years - are basically electronic extensions of networks that have 
functioned through other means for years. In the case of East Timor, 
activists in Australia and elsewhere use the Net to instantly disseminate 
information and calls for action, something that once took weeks of 
snail-mail and expensive telephone calls to arrange. The same can be said 
of services that track events in Israel and the West Bank, as well as in 
China, Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala, and the former Yugoslavia (see "Balkans 
Online," Wired 3.11, page 159), employing everything from relatively old 
listserve technology to the Web.

Often the technology allows for some surprising juxtapositions, as in the 
case of Christus Rex, which for all the world appears to be the work of the 
Vatican. Within this beautiful page are links to hundreds of pictures taken 
from the walls of the Sistine Chapel and other works of divine art and 
religious texts. But Christus Rex also features a photo history of the 1989 
Tiananmen rebellion, pages on Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, and human 
rights violations stemming from the Russian crackdown in Chechnya.

Christus Rex has nothing to do with the Vatican. Its seemingly odd mixture 
results from a singular vision: that of Michael Olteanu, a Romanian 
immigrant to the United States who once suffered at the hands of the gulag 
in Eastern Europe. (Olteanu declined to be interviewed for this story.) 
Christus Rex has also made space available to a group of Chinese activists 
in Silicon Valley who ran a Free Harry Wu page, devoted to the release of 
Wu, a US citizen who was arrested in China in June, convicted of espionage, 
and then released in August.

"We've gotten supportive messages from all over the world," says Chuck Lau, 
a Silicon Valley information-technology engineer from Hong Kong who 
designed the Harry Wu page and had it up within days of the announcement of 
Wu's arrest. Working with other Chinese-American computer experts, Lau 
credits people like Olteanu for seeing the possibilities of the Web and the 
Internet to explore issues such as Chinese human rights.

PeaceNet, a project of the Institute for Global Communications, provides 
space on its servers to BurmaNet along with hundreds of global mininets. 
BurmaNet, as with many others, acts as a PeaceNet "conference" and also 
e-mails its list free of charge to interested parties.

The rhetorical mud can be pretty thick inside some areas of PeaceNet, where 
activists sometimes debate the finer points of political theory while 
providing only a bare measure of what might be called news. And in some 
cases, the censors at PeaceNet are a bit weird. While the group trumpets 
the free flow of information, for example, PeaceNet's Cuba conference, 
reg.cuba, is little more than an outlet for the Cuban government to issue 
press releases and call for international support in its struggle against 
the US. You won't find many anti-Castro voices at PeaceNet.

That said, there is a wealth of little-reported information within 
PeaceNet. For example, the conference on Guatemala, which is also 
distributed as a mailing list, has featured a running account of the fight 
of Harvard-educated attorney Jennifer Harbury. Harbury, a US citizen, 
recently filed suit against the CIA for information in the 1992 death of 
her husband, guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, while in military 
custody. The conference helps activists pressure the CIA and the Guatemalan 
government by allowing them to quickly and cheaply share a common base of 
information.

PeaceNet also offers its users access to China News Digest, perhaps the 
largest countrynet project in existence. Staffed by more than 50 volunteers 
worldwide, China News Digest was set up in early 1989, shortly before the 
Tiananmen Square democracy movement was crushed in June. The digest now 
goes to some 35,200 e-mail addresses in 43 countries and contains a summary 
of wire-service reports, news, and commentary from dissident sources inside 
China. (It is curious to note that PeaceNet apparently does not approve of 
China, an out-of-favor socialist country, but does approve of Cuba, which 
is equally hostile to internal political dissent.)

"We see ourselves as serving activists, not being activists," says George 
Gundrey, PeaceNet's coordinator for international programs. "This is a way 
to decentralize the monolithic viewpoints of the major media." But 
activist-oriented services, some observers caution, are not a substitute 
for dispassionate analysis.

"They operate in a gray zone of committed activists," says writer James 
Fallows, an Asia scholar and computer analyst for The Atlantic Monthly, 
"and they tend to repeat the same information over and over. It doesn't 
replace careful reporting."




Even those who operate in the world of the activist nets concede that their 
information is only as good as those who post it. "I trust our people," 
says Gene Stoltzfus, who helps run a mailing list called CPT Net - a 
project of the Christian Peacemaker Teams - which gathers information in 
places like Haiti and West Bank Palestinian villages. "But we don't post 
stuff from people we don't know."

PeaceNet's Gundrey says the lists are a way for alienated, disenfranchised 
people to get their news out, and as such they have a growing validity. 
That validity is an act of faith, however, or an exercise in simple news 
gathering and dissemination, unless concrete gains of some kind are made 
for the people these nets are supposed to be representing.

Michael Koplinka of Cornell University, the man who started the Koigi wa 
Wamwere homepage, credits the Internet with helping to score a victory of 
sorts. Koigi - a former Cornell student, and an opposition member of 
Kenya's parliament and harsh critic of the government of Daniel arap Moi - 
was accused of "robbery with violence" in 1993 and was put on trial for his 
life in Nakuru for almost two years. His case generated protests by Amnesty 
International and other organizations. When a decision was finally rendered 
in October, charges against Koigi were reduced, and he was sentenced to 
just four years in prison.

"There is no question that if we didn't have this level of international 
pressure generated from the Net that Koigi would have been sentenced to 
death," says Koplinka. Koigi's sentence, which included six strokes of a 
whipping cane, seems harsh enough, but Koplinka says that the Net was 
extremely active during a crucial period in September when Koigi's fate was 
being decided. Activists visiting the Koigi page were given the option of 
clicking on a button to create a fax to lobby the Moi government. Koplinka 
says that over the past few months, 632 messages were faxed out of his 
office from 3,212 visits to the website. "We could track the response," he 
says, "through our contacts in Kenya. There is no question the government 
was listening to the response from the Net. In other cases in Kenya, 
prisoners were taken out and hanged in the courtyard 10 minutes after the 
verdict."

In contrast with traditional organizing, Koplinka says, the Net is both 
fast and international, generating responses from Europe and Africa, as 
well as the US. He cited an incident on August 10 in which the lawyers for 
Koigi were beaten on the courthouse steps in Nakuru when they attempted to 
visit their client. "We had that on the Net the same day and had letters 
and faxes of protest going out to the US embassy and the Kenyan government 
almost immediately," Koplinka says. "Amnesty International sent out an 
action letter on the incident which we didn't receive for three weeks. By 
then it would have been too late to do anything. But with the Net, we move 
instantly."

Koplinka's actions also belie the feeling that one man can do very little 
in the political arena. "It's really just me," he says when asked how many 
people were involved in putting together the Koigi effort at Cornell. 
Working with a cooperative Internet provider, Koplinka enlists volunteers 
who maintain the page, post the information, and track the issue. "It's 
pretty amazing what we've been able to accomplish," he says.

Others echo the experience of the Koigi case. "The Net has been so 
intrinsic to organizing in the US and internationally for the last few 
years that whatever successes East Timor's solidarity movement has had 
cannot be considered otherwise," says Charles Scheiner, the moderator of 
reg.easttimor, a PeaceNet conference mirrored on the East Timor Action 
Network mailing list. "Consider last month, when five young East Timorese 
activists sought political asylum in the British embassy in Jakarta. Within 
hours, their statement and biographies were e-mailed all over the world, 
and people began calling the British embassies in their own countries, as 
well as Indonesian government officials. Within a day, the Portuguese, 
British, and Indonesian representatives met and discussed what to do; 
within two days, they had agreed that the young men would be allowed to 
leave Indonesia for Portugal. Within a week they had left."

Individual action is a staple of the countrynets. BurmaNet was the work, 
initially, of just one person; Christus Rex is run by one man; East Timor 
Action Network is coordinated largely by Charles Scheiner. I found the 
Koigi homepage on a link inside something called the Human Rights Web. That 
page, it turns out, is not an organization at all, but the project of 
Catherine Hampton, a human rights activist who saw an opportunity to do 
some good in the virtual world and seized it.




"When a technology like the Web comes up, you don't have to have a lot of 
money or people - you can do it yourself," she says. Hampton designed Human 
Rights Web and posts information on prisoners of conscience and other 
rights violations, as well as links to related websites.

For an observer steeped in a more traditional worldview, there is a problem 
in that a page may look official, as if it represents something more than 
one individual. But that concern seems old-fashioned and out of touch to 
Hampton, who brushes it aside: "It's part of a web, it's a node, it's 
decentralized information. That's the point."

That may be true. But for the uninitiated, the Net can be a confusing 
starting point for insight into the inner workings of a complex society or 
international conflict. Occasionally on BurmaNet, one can be bombarded by 
competing analyses from splintered student groups whose inner divisions are 
almost impossible for a neophyte to wade through. PeaceNet's Gundrey says 
that users of the Net must develop "information literacy" in order to make 
sense of competing viewpoints and raw information.

Such literacy comes with study, analysis, and experience. It seems doubtful 
that unfiltered information will replace the work of reporters 
knowledgeable on their subjects and able to separate the wheat from the 
chaff. What to make, for example, of All About Geopolitics in Yugoslavia, 
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia - a page devoted to the proposition that 
the Serbian side in the ongoing war in Bosnia and Croatia is being 
portrayed unfairly in the media, and that the Croatians are a bunch of 
Nazis. Conversely, you can turn to the Alleged Criminals of Former 
Yugoslavia homepage, a website that liberally condemns the Serbian side. At 
least the old media offer some kind of distance from the conflict.

The problem of e-mail clutter can also be a major difficulty if you start 
tracking countrynet activity through mailing lists. In the course of 
researching this article, I subscribed to BurmaNet, Kenya-net, East Timor 
Action Network, and a mailing list on Chinese human rights managed from 
Silicon Valley. On any given day, I received 75 or more lengthy messages. 
Keeping up with several of these lists at a time is a full-time job.

But to someone who once clipped newspaper articles and coordinated phone 
trees on human rights issues, it is clear that the Internet is offering 
activists and others with a burning need to stay informed a wealth of 
information that was previously hard to come by. As a foreign 
correspondent, I covered the popular uprising in Burma that was brutally 
crushed by the military in 1988. But in recent years, I had grown 
unfamiliar with events there. That problem has been cured.

Earlier this year, when Burmese government troops overran rebel strongholds 
near the country's border with Thailand, BurmaNet carried often gripping 
updates from the border - on an almost hourly basis - during a time when 
most American newspapers and broadcast outlets ignored the clashes. In 
recent months, BurmaNet easily has been the best source of continuing 
information on events related to the release in July of Aung San Suu Kyi, 
the Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader who had been kept under house 
arrest by the regime for six years.

"For the first time, people all over the world who are interested in this 
issue are seeing essentially the same information at about the same time. 
That is really our main contribution," says Strider. "It is difficult to 
track the effect. You can't say this or that happened just because of the 
Net, but the information is what is allowing things to happen. There simply 
wouldn't be an activist movement for Burma in the United States without 
BurmaNet. None at
all."

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