Danny O'Brien on Free Speech, Open Source and Repressive Regimes
I felt a little out of sync with Danny O'Brien's k eynote at OSBridge. The topic was open source software, journalism, and oppressive regimes at 9am on the first day of a conference and the first day after a holiday weekend. The sunken ballroom at the former Masonic Temple, now the Mark building of the Portland Art Museum is an interesting setting for a gathering of Open Source geeks, most of whom in their individual ways changing the nature of the Internet as we know it. O'Brien himself noted that having the presentation scheduled at 9am is in itself a kind of human rights abuse when he humorously was expounding on how and why this presentation would not in itself be humorous O'Brien has been involved in Internet free speech advocacy for sometime both at the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the Committee to Protect Journalists where he presently employed as Internet Advocacy Coordinator.
The great thing about hearing someone speak at a conference like this is that you are going to take away some great nuggets from the wide lens view of the subject they maintain. And in O'Brien's case, he looks at the corners of world geography as it adapts the Internet. For instance Tajikistan, the poorest of former Russian republics who, because of political factors got even poorer afterwards. He says the Internet is hugely powerful there. He has been told that the rural populations prefer Yahoo! and the urban areas choose Google as their search engine of choice. In OS terms this would be a rivalry between Free BSD on the Yahoo! side and Linux via Google. O'Brien said that kind of debate sort of endorses that Linus Torvald's prediction that free software and open source will dominate the world.
One of the most useful and interesting of the sites and developments mentioned by O'Brien was Ushadi, which he described as a mashup between Google Maps and social media. The power of this tool is best understood by exploring the multiple ways it has been applied around the world. The application has been used to provide visualizations of everything from crime in Atlanta to activities surrounding the response to the Chilean earthquake earlier this year. I thought this video on their site did a good job of defining the tool.
What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.
O'Brien made mention of practices that should be considered in regards to online free speech in countries run by oppressive regime. The use of PGP encryption is an almost obvious level of response. O'Brien seems a little surprised why encryption is not built into all reader and publisher tools. Another less obvious practice would be to have system administrators use settings that don't collect extreme amounts of data on just about everything. He also talked about how security features are not stressed as greatly as they could be. For instance, by default encryption is turned off in Apache and system operators have to set SSL direclty.
But perhaps the most chilling of O'Brien's examples was the story of the Thai webmaster arrested for defamatory comments about the king that appeared on posts on her website. The authorities took this action without understanding that she had no controls over those who wrote the comments. Unfortunately, it is easier to go after the medium or web provider than the source, and with these kinds of regimes it still makes their point or example. In another take away image from O'Brien's talk, he talked about the huge amounts that Kenyans spend on phones and digital devices, but this is not about innovation, it is because messaging in the world of telephony grants them a better level of security when it comes to rights and free speech.
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