R U IN JAIL?

[spectre]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/

-

TXTMOB CODER GETS SUBPOENAED
http://sourceforge.net/projects/txtmob
http://www.txtmob.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/nyregion/30text.html

NY City Subpoenas Creator of Text Messaging Code
BY Colin Moynihan / March 30, 2008

When delegates to the Republican National Convention assembled in New
York in August 2004, the streets and sidewalks near Union Square and
Madison Square Garden filled with demonstrators. Police officers in
helmets formed barriers by stretching orange netting across
intersections. Hordes of bicyclists participated in rolling protests
through nighttime streets, and helicopters hovered overhead.

These tableaus and others were described as they happened in text
messages that spread from mobile phone to mobile phone in New York
City and beyond. The people sending and receiving the messages were
using technology, developed by an anonymous group of artists and
activists called the Institute for Applied Autonomy, that allowed
users to form networks and transmit messages to hundreds or thousands
of telephones.

Although the service, called TXTmob, was widely used by demonstrators,
reporters and possibly even police officers, little was known about
its inventors. Last month, however, the New York City Law Department
issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote the code that created
TXTmob.

Lawyers representing the city in lawsuits filed by hundreds of people
arrested during the convention asked Mr. Hirsch to hand over
voluminous records revealing the content of messages exchanged on his
service and identifying people who sent and received messages. Mr.
Hirsch says that some of the subpoenaed material no longer exists and
that he believes he has the right to keep other information secret.
"There's a principle at stake here," he said recently by telephone. "I
think I have a moral responsibility to the people who use my service
to protect their privacy."

The subpoena, which was issued Feb. 4, instructed Mr. Hirsch, who is
completing his dissertation at M.I.T., to produce a wide range of
material, including all text messages sent via TXTmob during the
convention, the date and time of the messages, information about
people who sent and received messages, and lists of people who used
the service.

In a letter to the Law Department, David B. Rankin, a lawyer for Mr.
Hirsch, called the subpoena "vague" and "overbroad," and wrote that
seeking information about TXTmob users who have nothing to do with
lawsuits against the city would violate their First Amendment and
privacy rights.

Lawyers for the city declined to comment. The subpoena is connected to
a group of 62 lawsuits against the city that stem from arrests during
the convention and have been consolidated in Federal District Court in
Manhattan. About 1,800 people were arrested and charged, but 90
percent of them ultimately walked away from court without pleading
guilty or being convicted. Many people complained that they were
arrested unjustly, and a State Supreme Court justice chastised the
city after hundreds of people were held by the police for more than 24
hours without a hearing.

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has called the convention a
success for his department, which he credited with preventing major
disruptions during a turbulent week. He has countered complaints about
police tactics by saying that nearly a million people peacefully
expressed their political opinions, while the convention and the city
functioned smoothly. Mr. Hirsch said that the idea for TXTmob evolved
from conversations about how police departments were adopting
strategies to counter large-scale marches that converged at a single
spot.

While preparing for the 2004 political conventions in New York and
Boston, some demonstrators decided to plan decentralized protests in
which small, mobile groups held rallies and roamed the streets. "The
idea was to create a very dynamic, fluid environment," Mr. Hirsch
said. "We wanted to transform areas around the entire city into
theaters of dissent."

Organizers wanted to enable people in different areas to spread word
of what they were seeing in each spot and to coordinate their
movements. Mr. Hirsch said that he wrote the TXTmob code over about
two weeks. After a trial run in Boston during the Democratic National
Convention, the service was in wide use during the Republican
convention in New York. Hundreds of people went to the TXTmob Web site
and joined user groups at no charge.

As a result, when members of the War Resisters League were arrested
after starting to march up Broadway, or when Republican delegates
attended a performance of "The Lion King" on West 42nd Street, a
server under a desk in Cambridge, Mass., transmitted messages
detailing the action, often while scenes on the streets were still
unfolding.

Messages were exchanged by self-organized first-aid volunteers,
demonstrators urging each other on and even by people in far-flung
cities who simply wanted to trade thoughts or opinions with those on
the streets of New York. Reporters began monitoring the messages too,
looking for word of breaking news and rushing to spots where mass
arrests were said to be taking place. And Mr. Hirsch said he thought
it likely that police officers were among those receiving TXTmob
messages on their phones.

It is difficult to know for sure who received messages, but an
examination of police surveillance documents prepared in 2003 and
2004, and unsealed by a federal magistrate last year, makes it clear
that the authorities were aware of TXTmob at least a month before the
Republican convention began.

A document marked "N.Y.P.D. SECRET" and dated July 26, 2004, included
the address of the TXTmob Web site and stated, "It is anticipated that
text messaging is one of several different communications systems that
will be utilized to organize the upcoming RNC protests."

.

CONTACT
Tad Hirsch
http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/
http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/htm/txtmob.html
email : t...@media.mit.edu

John Henry
Institute for Applied Autonomy
www.appliedautonomy.com
email : i...@appliedautonomy.com

.

PROTEST SWARMS
http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/pub/txtmob_chi05.pdf
TXTmob: Text Messaging For Protest Swarms
BY Tad Hirsch and John Henry

Abstract: "This paper describes cell phone text messaging during the
2004 US Democratic and Republican National Conventions by protesters
using TXTmob - a text-message broadcast system developed by the
authors. Drawing upon analysis of TXTmob messages, user interviews,
self-reporting, and news media accounts, we describe the ways that
activists used text messaging to share information and coordinate
actions during decentralized protests. We argue that text messaging
supports new forms of distributed participation in mass mobilizations.
"

-

SEE ALSO
http://www.themobilecity.nl/langswitch_lang/en/
http://www.themobilecity.nl/program/
http://www.160characters.org/
http://fromgoodtogold.blogspot.com/

CONVENTIONEERS
http://protestrnc2008.org/
http://crashtheconventions.com/

-

KIWANJA CONTEST
http://www.kiwanja.net/
http://www.ngomobile.org/

Competition to Offer Prizes and SMS Platform to Grassroots NGOs /
Sep. 17, 2007
http://www.sys-con.com/read/429616.htm
nGOmobile initiative highlights the benefits of mobile technology in
the developing world

CAMBRIDGE, England, Sept. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobile technology
organization kiwanja.net has launched its latest non-profit mobile
initiative - nGOmobile, a competition to help grassroots NGOs take
advantage of text messaging.

The explosive entry of mobile technology into the developing world has
opened up a raft of opportunities for the non-profit sector. Text
messaging has proved itself to be remarkably versatile, helping remind
patients to take their medicine, providing market prices to farmers
and fishermen, distributing health information, allowing the reporting
of human rights abuses and promoting increased citizen participation
in government. While the list may be long, not everyone has been able
to reap the benefits.

nGOmobile is a competition aimed exclusively at grassroots non-profit
Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working for positive social and
environmental change throughout the developing world. "Behind the
scenes, the often unsung heroes of the NGO community battle against
the daily realities of life in developing countries, where it can take
all day to fulfill the simplest task," said Ken Banks, Founder of
kiwanja.net. "These people don't lack passion and commitment, they
lack tools and resources" said Banks."

Grassroots NGOs around the world are invited to submit short project
ideas explaining how greater access to mobile technology - and SMS
text messaging in particular - would benefit them and their work. The
competition is open from today until 14th December 2007 with the
winners announced in January 2008.

The top four entries, chosen by a distinguished panel of judges, will
each win a brand new Hewlett Packard laptop computer, two Nokia mobile
phones, a GSM modem, kiwanja.net's own entry-level text messaging
platform - FrontlineSMS - and to top it all, a cash prize of US$1,000.

Sponsors of the competition include Hewlett Packard, Nokia,
ActiveXperts, 160 Characters, Wieden+Kennedy, mBlox and Perkins Coie

Panel of Judges Ken Banks, Founder, kiwanja.net Neerja Raman, From
Good to Gold Mike Grenville, Editor, 160 Characters Micheline Ntiru,
Nokia's Head of Corporate Social Investment for the Middle East and
Africa Bill Thompson, Journalist/commentator Renny Gleeson, Global
Director of Digital Strategies at Wieden+Kennedy The competition
website can be found at http://www.ngomobile.org/

CONTACT
Ken Banks, Founder
http://www.kiwanja.net
email : ken....@ngomobile.org

About kiwanja.net: Since 2003, kiwanja.net has been helping local,
national and international non-profit Non-Governmental Organizations
(NGOs) make better use of information and communications technology in
their work. Specializing in the application of mobile technology, it
provides a wide range of ICT-related services drawing on over 22
year's experience of its Founder, Ken Banks. kiwanja.net believes that
all non-profits, whatever their size and wherever they operate, should
be given the opportunity to implement the latest mobile technologies
in their work, and actively seeks to provide the tools to enable them
to do so.

-

MEANWHILE

TWO TRILLION SMS IN 2008
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c84203

TWITTERERS
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/san-francisco-a.html

FBI LISTS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18protest.html?scp=1&sq=surveillance+aclu+protesters&st=nyt

-

PORTLAND ANTIWAR RALLY GOES WIRELESS
http://skylab.org/~plumpy/oregonian.html
BY Jeffrey Kosseff / March 25, 2003

At first glance, it looks like a 9-1-1 log or a transcript from the
police scanner:

05:37pm Protesters damage cars on Second and Davis.
05:38pm March spreading north into Oldtown.
05:43pm Morrison Bridge closed again.

But the communications Thursday during antiwar protests in downtown
Portland weren't from the police. Instead, they were part of 126 text
messages sent out to 65 protesters' cell phones, pagers and e-mail
accounts.

Protesters say they have long searched for an efficient and quick way
of sharing news of bridge shutdowns, flag burnings and pepper
spraying. And they seem to have found it in a relatively young
wireless technology that is reliable, cheap and instantaneous, sending
short bursts of text onto many cell-phone screens at once.

"It definitely helped spread the news around," said Michael Plump, a
24-year-old computer programmer who organized a text-messaging system
to improve communication among protesters.

Spreading news of developments takes too long with cell-phone calls
because organizers can reach only one person at a time. Walkie-talkies
aren't reliable or secure enough. And most people don't have laptops
with wireless e-mail access.

Plump said that since police pepper-sprayed him at a protest during
President Bush's Aug. 23 visit to Portland, he has wanted to get more
involved with peace protests. "I wanted to help people know where the
police actions were occurring and where they were pepper spraying so
they could get away from it," Plump said.

Web of reports

So he developed a Web-based program that allows protesters to enter
their cell phone or pager numbers or e-mail addresses into an online
database, which he promoted on Portland activist Web sites. Most
people received the alerts on cell phones or pagers, though a few
received e-mails.

From 4 p.m. to midnight Thursday, about 15 protesters throughout
downtown Portland phoned or sent e-mail and text messages to Plump's
friend, Casey Spain. Spain summarized developments into a few words
and sent them on to the 65 cell-phone numbers in the database. Plump,
who was in downtown Portland throughout the protests, said cheers
erupted whenever Spain sent news of activists storming a bridge or
highway.

And even amid the chaos, the protesters found time for text-messaging
sarcasm:

08:27pm Rummor -- police may be planning assult from under Burnside
Bridge.
08:28pm Someone plase scout under the bridge please!
08:31pm Police may be eating donuts under the bridge.

Cell-phone text messaging is gaining popularity. According to
Telephia, a California research firm, 24 percent of U.S. cell-phone
subscribers used text messaging in the first quarter of this year, up
from 20 percent the previous quarter.

Verizon service up

Verizon Wireless, which charges 10 cents to send and 2 cents to
receive each text message, has seen its news-alert service double
since January for headlines about the military and Federal Bureau of
Investigation. "A lot of people use text messaging now, and it has
been going up all the time," said Georgia Taylor, a Verizon Wireless
spokeswoman.

Wireless companies began offering text messaging in the United States
about two years ago, said Goli Ameri, president of eTinium, a Portland
telecommunications consulting firm. It is not yet as popular in the
United States as it is in Asia and Europe. Intel recently ranked
Portland the top city in the nation for the use of wireless
technology, so Ameri said she isn't surprised that people here are
finding new uses for text messaging.

"Portland is a pretty tech-savvy city," she said. "That's why you see
so many of these new technologies get introduced here first."

email : jeffk...@news.oregonian.com

-

CELL PHONES, CONT.
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0413-05.htm

Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest
BY Jim Dwyer / April 12, 2005 / New York Times

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer,
the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul
him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth
Avenue.

"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,"
the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his
legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the
first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the
Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day
after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single
witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the
prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr.
Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library
steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was
nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking
part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom
he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive,
lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer
observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over
precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the
convention.

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings
provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the
charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers
and prosecutors.

Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going
to pick up sushi.

Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same
police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had
been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop
behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more
complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer,
prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician
had cut the material by mistake.

Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal
charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that
week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent
ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after
trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also
without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests,
with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases
should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."

So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted
after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case
played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors
could not provide details.

Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the
prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also
highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the
Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades
and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of
explicit violence.

Throughout the convention week and afterward, Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg said that the police issued clear warnings about blocking
streets or sidewalks, and that officers moved to arrest only those who
defied them. In the view of many activists - and of many people who
maintain that they were passers-by and were swept into dragnets
indiscriminately thrown over large groups - the police strategy
appeared to be designed to sweep them off the streets on technical
grounds as a show of force.

"The police develop a narrative, the defendant has a different story,
and the question becomes, how do you resolve it?" said Eileen Clancy,
a member of I-Witness Video, a project that assembled hundreds of
videotapes shot during the convention by volunteers for use by defense
lawyers.

Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that videotapes often do not
show the full sequence of events, and that the public should not rush
to criticize officers simply because their recollections of events are
not consistent with a single videotape. The Manhattan district
attorney's office is reviewing the testimony of Officer Wohl at the
request of Lewis B. Oliver Jr., the lawyer who represented Mr. Kyne in
his arrest at the library.

The Police Department maintains that much of the videotape that has
surfaced since the convention captured what Mr. Browne called the
department's professional handling of the protests and parades. "My
guess is that people who saw the police restraint admired it," he
said.

Video is a useful source of evidence, but not an easy one to manage,
because of the difficulties in finding a fleeting image in hundreds of
hours of tape. Moreover, many of the tapes lack index and time
markings, so cuts in the tape are not immediately apparent.

That was a problem in the case of Mr. Dunlop, who learned that his
tape had been altered only after Ms. Clancy found another version of
the same tape. Mr. Dunlop had been accused of pushing his bicycle into
a line of police officers on the Lower East Side and of resisting
arrest, but the deleted parts of the tape show him calmly approaching
the police line, and later submitting to arrest without apparent
incident.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Barbara Thompson, said the
material had been cut by a technician in the prosecutor's office. "It
was our mistake," she said. "The assistant district attorney wanted to
include that portion" because she initially believed that it supported
the charges against Mr. Dunlop. Later, however, the arresting officer,
who does not appear on the video, was no longer sure of the specifics
in the complaint against Mr. Dunlop.

In what appeared to be the most violent incident at the convention
protests, video shot by news reporters captured the beating of a man
on a motorcycle - a police officer in plainclothes - and led to the
arrest of one of those involved, Jamal Holiday. After eight months in
jail, he pleaded guilty last month to attempted assault, a low-level
felony that will be further reduced if he completes probation. His
lawyer, Elsie Chandler of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem,
said that videos had led to his arrest, but also provided support for
his claim that he did not realize the man on the motorcycle was a
police officer, reducing the severity of the offense.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that despite many civilians
with cameras who were nearby when the officer was attacked, none of
the material was turned over to police trying to identify the
assailants. Footage from a freelance journalist led police to Mr.
Holiday, he said.

In the bulk of the 400 cases that were dismissed based on videotapes,
most involved arrests at three places - 16th Street near Union Square,
17th Street near Union Square and on Fulton Street - where police
officers and civilians taped the gatherings, said Martin R. Stolar,
the president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers
Guild. Those tapes showed that the demonstrators had followed the
instructions of senior officers to walk down those streets, only to
have another official order their arrests.

Ms. Thompson of the district attorney's office said, "We looked at
videos from a variety of sources, and in a number of cases, we have
moved to dismiss."

-

SMS ELECTION MONITORING
http://mobileactive.org/texting-it-in

Texting It In: Monitoring Elections With Mobile Phones
BY KatrinVerclas / August 11, 2007

In Sierra Leone's national election today, 500 election observers at
polling stations around the country are reporting on any
irregularities via SMS with their mobile phones. Independent
monitoring of elections via cell phone is growing aqround the world,
spearheaded by a few innovative NGOs.

The story starts in Montenegro, a small country in the former
Yugoslavia. On May 21, 2006 the country saw the first instance of
volunteer monitors using SMS, also known as text messaging, as their
main election reporting tool. A Montenegrin NGO, the Center for
Democratic Transition (CDT), with technical assistance from the
National Democratic Institute (NDI) in the United States, was the
first organization in the world to use text messaging to meet all
election day reporting requirements.

Since then, mobile phones have been deployed in six elections in
countries around the world, with volunteers systematically using text
messaging in election monitoring. Pioneered by NDI, SMS monitoring is
becoming a highly sophisticated rapid reporting tool used not just in
a referendum election like in Montenegro, but in parliamentary
elections with a plethora of candidates and parties and complex data
reported via SMS. This was the case in Bahrain, a small country in the
Middle East, where monitors reported individual election tallies in a
series of five to fourty concurrent SMS messages, using a
sophisticated cosding system, with near accuracy.

Today's election in Sierra Leone is lead by the National Election
Watch (NEW), a coalition of over 200 NGOs in the country. Assisted by
NDI, NEW has monitors at 500 of the 6171 polling stations. Monitors
report on whether there are any irregularities via SMS back to
headquarters. This election is particularly significant for the
country: It is the first presidential election since U.N. peacekeepers
withdrew two years ago. It considered a historic poll that many hope
will show that the country can transfer power peacefully after a long
civil war and military coups. In the run-up to the election there was
sporadic violence in Freetown; making the independent monitoring by
NGOs particularly relevant and necessary.

Election monitoring is a highly technical discipline, with a
sophisticated set of methodologies and extensive volunteer training.
Preparation for an election monitoring exercise involves volunteer
training and advance planning that often starts months before an
election. Election monitors, typically led by domestic non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) often with the help of foreign
technical assistance providers like NDI, can report on multiple
dimensions. They may, depending on the election, report on
quantitative data such as real-time voter turnout and even on actual
election results. In those cases, monitors use the data to provide a
"quick count" projection of the election results. If a "quick count"
is conducted then a statistical random sample of polling places is
carefully selected to ensure the validity of projections.

Monitors also report on qualitative data about how well the election
is executed. This may include information on whether polls are opening
on time, whether there are enough ballots available, whether there is
free access to polling places, and whether there is any evidence of
intimidation or any other irregularities.

Reports are transmitted using an agreed-upon set of codes from a
representative sample of polling places around the country. In Sierra
Leone, for example, there are monitors stationed at 500 polling places
in every part of the country who text in reports at regular intervals.

In many contested elections, especially in emerging democracies, speed
of reporting is of the essence. It is critical that NGOs and
independent civil society organizations report data accurately and
quickly even before official results are released, especially when
fraud is feared. Mobile phones have been an important tool in this
regard. They are, of course, not a new phenomenon in election
monitoring; after all, cell phones have been around for a while now.
But prior to NDI showcasing that SMS is a viable and reliable
communication medium in elections, mobile phones were used merely to
transmit reports verbally that then still had to be transcribed in a
time-consuming and error-prone manual process.

Chris Spence, Director of Technology at NDI recalls: "In 2003, we had
24/7 shifts of college students in five locations across Nigeria
entering data from paper forms that were faxed or hand-carried into
the data centers. Timeliness and quality control were huge issues when
nearly 15,000 forms containing dozens of responses each had to be
manually entered into a database. Today, in the elections where we've
used SMS, you watch the data flow into the database directly when it
is time for the monitors to report. The system automatically sends
confirmation messages back to the observer in an interactive exchange
of SMS messages, so accuracy increases. At reporting time, it is quite
amazing to see the numbers change on the screen as the sms messages
pour into the database."

In addition to increased speed and greater accuracy of reporting, SMS
election monitoring has a noteworthy ancillary benefit: the real-time
ability by headquarters to communicate with observers throughout the
election day by sending text reminders and updates keeps volunteers
motivated and engaged. SMS and phone contact also provides vital
opportunities for security updates should political conditions take a
turn for the worst. As a result, morale amongst the volunteers soars
there is far less polling station abandonment.

In order for large-scale SMS election monitoring to succeed, a number
of conditions have to be in place. When NDI assisted an Albanian
consortium of NGOs in the local elections there in 2006, all the right
elements were present: NDI was working with an experienced and
reliable local NGO partner; SMS bulk messaging was available for all
of the mobile phone companies; the phone companies worked with the
NGOs and were available and ready during election day to deal with any
problems on the spot; phone companies and the bulk SMS vendors were
able to handle thousands of messages per minute to a few numbers at
reporting times, wireless coverage even in rural areas was excellent,
and the phone companies provided so-called interconnect ability that
allowed monitors to send messages from all of the different carriers
to one reporting number.

In Sierra Leone where most of the carriers lack international gateway
interconnect ability, the NGO coalition there will need to set up a
series of local phone numbers so that observers can text to a number
within their own provider network. This necessitates a much more
rudimentary and complicated setup: Seven phones are tethered to a
laptop and observers are texting directly to those phones without any
bulk messaging intermediary. Messages arrive in the phone and are
passed to computer, the software reads it using custom scripts, and
the data is compiled in an Access database ready for analysis.
Concerns about the phones handling a high volume of messages in this
situation necessitates a more complicated reporting strategy whereby
each observer will report all of data in a single text message using a
simple coding scheme. Because Sierra Leone has more spotty wireless
coverage, election monitors in rural areas will have to travel to
areas where there is coverage to send in their reports at the end of
the day.

An important consideration is the cost of a wide-scale program. To
date NDI has found this method of reporting much more economical than
other strategies. Pricing for bulk sms from a provider like Clickatel
is relatively inexpensive. In the Albanian election, for example, the
bulk messaging costs for a total of some 41,000 messages received and
sent from 2100 monitors was $2400 US Dollars -- an extremely
inexpensive way to receive such massive amounts of data.

NDI uses a software called SMS Reception Center, built by a developer
in Russia and costing all of $69 USD. NDI tweaked the scripts over
time, and paid the developer to improve the product for its purposes
and specific local conditions.

In addition to the technical issues and costs inherent in running a
large-scale operation, Spence notes a number of strategic issues to
consider: The NGO partner on the ground needs to be experienced in
electoral monitoring, the information collected needs to be suitable
for the limited text messaging format of 160 chracters, and text
messaging needs to be commonly used and part of the local culture.
Notes Spence: "In all the countries we have worked, one thing we do
not have to do is train anyone how to text."

In Nigeria earlier this year, a local NGO, the Human Emancipation
Project, ran a small-scale citizen monitoring program that used
untrained citizen reporters to send in SMS messages to one number. The
NGO compiled and aggregated the incoming messages and issued a report
after the election. Using a grassroots software tool, Frontline SMS,
organizers reported that about 8,000 individuals texted in some kind
of report. This is a very different method from the systematic
election monitoring conducted by NGO observer organizations and their
technical assistant providers where a more rigorous protocol is
adhered to. There is merit in engaging every-day citizens to protect
their country's elections even if these efforts do not produce
reliable and verifiable election results and reports in the manner
that systematic election monitoring does. The Nigerian effort was
widely covered BBC News, and other outlets.

In the two years since the first large-scale SMS monitoring in
Montenegro, there have been rapid improvements in mobile services as
competition in the wireless industry has increased worldwide, and
there is growing interest and understanding on the part of NGOs that
systematic election monitoring is not as difficult as it first may
seem. As election monitoring via SMS becomes standardized and NGOs
gain experience, there is no reason for mobile phones and SMS not to
play a greater role in other areas of civic participation. For
example, imagine citizen oversight of public works projects where
people might report on whether a clinic is actually built as indicated
in a local budget. Other applications may be monitoring and
accountability of elected officials, and dissemination of voter
registration information such as the address of where to register, or
the nearest polling station. Several pilot projects in the United
States showed promising results in increasing voter turnout by text
message reminders. The future is bright for innovative ways in which
cell phones are used by citizens to participate and engage in their
countries as the mobile revolution unfolds.

-

COMING SOON
http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/08/27/moving-beyond-nigeria%e2%80%99s-mobile-rough-patch/

Moving beyond Nigeria's mobile rough patch
BY Judy Breck / August 27th, 2007

Reuters is reporting this morning that "Nigeria Aims to Let Mobile
Phone Users Keep Numbers." The plan is to allow subscribers to keep
their numbers as they switch among providers -- hopefully to improve
service through competition. The report includes this description of
the roughness of present service in Nigeria, which is interesting to
realize. Mobile has been making a positive transition in Africa in
spite of the problems described below. When mobile service gets
better, the transition should have important new impetus one would
think.

Nigeria's booming mobile phone market has grown from scratch to over
30 million subscribers in six years, making it one of the fastest-
growing in the world.

It is seen as having potential for many more years of rapid growth as
Nigeria is Africa's most populous country with 140 million people, the
majority of whom do not have phones.

However, the quality of service from mobile phone providers has always
been patchy and it has deteriorated over time.

Subscribers often have to dial several times before a call goes
through. Sometimes no calls go through for hours. When they do
connect, the lines are often so bad that callers cannot hear each
other. Calls frequently cut off after a few seconds and text messages
can be delayed by hours.

Mobile operators argue that services are impaired by frequent
blackouts, forcing companies to provide their own power with costly
diesel generators, and constant vandalism and armed attacks on
facilities and staff.

-

NOT YET
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/asia/04info.html?hp

Monks Are Silenced, and for Now, Internet Is, Too
BY Seth Mydans / October 4, 2007

BANGKOK, Oct. 3 -- It was about as simple and uncomplicated as shooting
demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video and
photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the
generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet. Until
Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded with
scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets and of
chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest popular
uprising there in two decades.

But then the images, text messages and postings stopped, shut down by
generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to jeopardize
their crackdown. "Finally they realized that this was their biggest
enemy, and they took it down," said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile
magazine based in Thailand called The Irrawaddy, whose Web site has
been a leading source of information in recent weeks. The site has
been attacked by a virus whose timing raises the possibility that the
military government has a few skilled hackers in its ranks.

The efficiency of this latest, technological, crackdown raises the
question whether the vaunted role of the Internet in undermining
repression can stand up to a determined and ruthless government -- or
whether Myanmar, already isolated from the world, can ride out a
prolonged shutdown more easily than most countries.

OpenNet Initiative, which tracks Internet censorship, has documented
signs that in recent years several governments -- including those of
Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- have closed off Internet access,
or at least opposition Web sites, during periods preceding elections
or times of intense protests. The brief disruptions are known as "just
in time" filtering, said Ronald J. Deibert of OpenNet. They are
designed to quiet opponents while maintaining an appearance of
technical difficulties, thus avoiding criticism from abroad. In 2005,
King Gyanendra of Nepal ousted the government and imposed a weeklong
communications blackout. Facing massive protests, he ceded control in
2006.

Myanmar has just two Internet service providers, and shutting them
down was not complicated, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar
with Human Rights Watch. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off
most telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets
confiscated cameras and video-recording cellphones. "The crackdown on
the media and on information flow is parallel to the physical
crackdown," he said. "It seems they've done it quite effectively.
Since Friday we've seen no new images come out." In keeping with the
country's self-imposed isolation over the past half-century, Myanmar's
military seemed prepared to cut the country off from the virtual world
just as it had from the world at large. Web access has not been
restored, and there is no way to know if or when it might be.

At the same time, the junta turned to the oldest tactic of all to
silence opposition: fear. Local journalists and people caught
transmitting information or using cameras are being threatened and
arrested, according to Burmese exile groups. In a final, hurried
telephone call, Mr. Aung Zaw said, one of his longtime sources said
goodbye. "We have done enough," he said the source told him. "We can
no longer move around. It is over to you -- we cannot do anything
anymore. We are down. We are hunted by soldiers -- we are down."

There are still images to come, Mr. Aung Zaw said, and as soon as he
receives them and his Web site is back up, the world will see them.
But Mr. Mathieson said the country's dissidents were reverting to
tactics of the past, smuggling images out through cellphones, breaking
the files down for reassembly later. It is not clear how much longer
the generals can hold back the future. Technology is making it harder
for dictators and juntas to draw a curtain of secrecy. "There are
always ways people find of getting information out, and authorities
always have to struggle with them," said Mitchell Stephens, a
professor of journalism at New York University and the author of "A
History of News."

"There are fewer and fewer events that we don't have film images of:
the world is filled with Zapruders," he said, referring to Abraham
Zapruder, the onlooker who recorded the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy in 1963. Before Friday's blackout, Myanmar's hit-and-
run journalists were staging a virtuoso demonstration of the power of
the Internet to outmaneuver a repressive government. A guerrilla army
of citizen reporters was smuggling out pictures even as events were
unfolding, and the world was watching.

"For those of us who study the history of communication technology,
this is of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first
medium that separated communications and transportation," said Frank
A. Moretti, executive director of the Center for New Media Teaching
and Learning at Columbia University. Since the protests began in mid-
August, people have sent images and words through SMS text messages
and e-mail and on daily blogs, according to some exile groups that
received the messages. They have posted notices on Facebook, the
social networking Web site. They have sent tiny messages on e-cards.
They have updated the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

They also used Internet versions of "pigeons" -- the couriers that
reporters used in the past to carry out film and reports -- handing
their material to embassies or nongovernment organizations with
satellite connections. Within hours, the images and reports were
broadcast back into Myanmar by foreign radio and television stations,
informing and connecting a public that hears only propaganda from its
government.

These technological tricks may offer a model to people elsewhere who
are trying to outwit repressive governments. But the generals' heavy-
handed response is probably a less useful model. Nations with larger
economies and more ties to the outside world have more at stake.
China, for one, could not consider cutting itself off as Myanmar has
done, and so control of the Internet is an industry in itself. "In
China, it's massive," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet
Project and an adjunct professor at the graduate school of journalism
at the University of California, Berkeley.

"There's surveillance and intimidation, there's legal regulation and
there is commercial leverage to force private Internet companies to
self-censor," he said. "And there is what we call the Great Firewall,
which blocks hundreds of thousands of Web sites outside of China." Yet
for all its efforts, even China cannot entirely control the Internet,
an easier task in a smaller country like Myanmar.

As technology makes everyone a potential reporter, the challenge in
risky places like Myanmar will be accuracy, said Vincent Brossel, head
of the Asian section of the press freedom organization Reporters
Without Borders. "Rumors are the worst enemy of independent
journalism," he said. "Already we are hearing so many strange things.
So if you have no flow of information and the spread of rumors in a
country that is using propaganda -- that's it. You are destroying the
story, and day by day it goes down." The technological advances on the
streets of Myanmar are the latest in a long history of revolutions in
the transmission of news -- from the sailing ship to the telegraph to
international telephone lines and the telex machine to computers and
satellite telephones.

"Today every citizen is a war correspondent," said Phillip Knightley,
author of "The First Casualty," a classic history of war reporting
that starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s and
ends with the "living room war" in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first war
that people could watch on television. "Mobile phones with video of
broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war,"
he said in an e-mail interview. "You just have to be there. No trouble
getting a start: the broadcasters have been begging viewers to send
their stuff."

-

FLASHMOBS AS ACTUAL PROTEST --- "TAKING A STROLL" --- "LET'S GO
SHOPPING"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/25/AR2008012503500.html

Shanghai's Middle Class Launches Quiet, Meticulous Revolt
BY Maureen Fan / January 26, 2008

SHANGHAI -- Bundled against the cold, the businessman made his way
down the steps. Coming toward him in blue mittens was a middle-aged
woman. "Do you know that we're going to take a stroll this weekend?"
she whispered, using the latest euphemism for the unofficial protests
that have unnerved authorities in Shanghai over the past month. He
nodded.

Behind her, protest banners streamed from the windows of high-rise
apartment blocks, signs of middle-class discontent over a planned
extension of the city's magnetic levitation, or maglev, train through
residential neighborhoods. The couple checked to make sure no
plainclothes police were nearby and discussed where security forces
had been posted in recent days. "Did you take any photos?" the man
asked. Yes, she said, promising to send them to him so he could post
the evidence online. In a minute, the exchange was over, but the news
would soon be added to the steady flow of reports being posted on
blogs and community bulletin boards, as well as in housing compounds
along the proposed extension -- which residents contend will bring
noise pollution and possibly dangerous radiation to their
neighborhoods.

The sudden "strolls" by thousands of office workers, company managers,
young families and the elderly in this sleek financial hub are the
latest chapter in a quiet middle-class battle against government
officials. The protesters are going about their mission carefully, and
many speak anonymously for fear of retribution in a country that
stifles dissent. The Communist Party has a massive security apparatus
that closely monitors what it views as subversive activity. The party
sometimes allows public protests if they serve its political
interests, such as the ouster of corrupt officials.

But the protests here have been unusual. They are led by homeowners
and professionals -- people who may not previously have had much to
complain to the government about but whose awareness of their
individual rights has grown along with their prosperity. Police, who
have routinely put down rural protests by poor farmers, have found it
more difficult to intimidate an affluent, educated crowd in a major
city.

The demonstrations do have at least one recent precursor, and it is
one Shanghai residents acknowledge using for inspiration. In the
picturesque seaside city of Xiamen, thousands of middle-class
residents have managed at least temporarily to halt the construction
of a $1 billion chemical factory because of environmental concerns.
Demonstrators in that city, in Fujian province, relied on the Internet
and cellphone text messaging to organize strolls and other opposition.
"We learned from Xiamen," said Gu Qidong, 36, a Shanghai protester and
freelance sales consultant in the health-care industry. "We have no
other way besides this. We once asked if we could apply for a march
permit, and the police said they would never approve it."

As in Xiamen, Shanghai residents have spent countless hours
researching their cause. They have posted fliers sprinkled with such
phrases as "electromagnetic compatibility" and wooed residents and
news media with slick PowerPoint presentations that question whether a
55-yard-wide safety buffer envisioned for each side of the rail
extension would be sufficient to keep noise and vibration from
reaching their apartments.

They say the existing maglev route, which takes passengers from an out-
of-the-way suburban subway stop to one of the city's international
airports in less than eight minutes, is a showy waste of money. When
it opened four years ago, they note, the line operated at less than 20
percent capacity; after ticket prices were lowered, it ran at 27
percent capacity.

Armed with knowledge of the law, the Shanghai residents became angry
that public officials had neither given proper notice of their plans
for the extension nor held a public hearing. And so they decided they
had no alternative but to "take a stroll" or "go shopping." They
started small, and they were careful to say they did not oppose the
government.

First, a small group of protesters met at a shopping center the
morning of Jan. 6, shouting "Reject the maglev!" and "We want to
protect our homes!" They left after an hour, regrouping later in a
neighborhood near where the extension would be built.

A few days later, hundreds of people went to a mall that is popular
with tourists and made an evening stop in another affected
neighborhood. By Jan. 12, thousands of people were gathering at
People's Square and on Nanjing Lu, both high-profile locations in
downtown Shanghai, shouting "People's police should protect the
people!" and "Save our homes!"

The growing boldness of the protesters has prompted city officials to
emphasize that residents should find "normal" channels to vent their
unhappiness. "We will forestall and defuse social tensions," Shanghai
Mayor Han Zheng said in his annual government report Thursday, in what
appeared to be a tacit nod to the protesters' concerns.

After each stroll, residents upload photos and videos to Chinese Web
sites, which are often blocked by the government, and to YouTube, a
site that isn't. The project has turned neighbors who did not know
each other into close friends and allies who now compare notes and
strategize. "They can't arrest everybody," said Yao, a 58-year-old
protester who asked that his full name not be used because he is a
manager at a state-owned enterprise. "We haven't done anything wrong,"
said Wang Guowei, 51, a manager in a Chinese-Japanese plastics venture
whose family lives near the planned extension. "We always follow the
Chinese constitution, we never violate the law. And in our many
contacts with the police, they say we are within the law."

A victory for the protesters here does not seem as likely as the one
activists achieved in Xiamen. Proud city officials hope the maglev
extension will further cement Shanghai's reputation as the mainland's
most advanced city when the train connects the city's two airports and
the site of the 2010 World Expo. City officials have already made some
concessions. An original plan to extend the train from Shanghai to the
city of Hangzhou, for example, was scrapped in May. The new extension
proposal announced Dec. 29 lops almost two miles off the old plan, and
one section of track would be underground. But opponents say such
concessions are small.

Critics of the government plan point out that even some residents who
use the train are skeptical of the usefulness of an extension. "I'd
rather see an ordinary railway connecting" Pudong international and
Hongqiao airport. "It's cheap, and it's almost the same convenience,"
said Chen Min, 37, an airline pilot who rides the train each time he
flies abroad. "Does China really need more maglev trains? Does China
really need expensive things?"

Shanghai municipal officials declined requests for comment. At a news
conference this week, government spokeswoman Jiao Yang said Shanghai
Maglev Transportation Development Co., the Shanghai Academy of
Environmental Science and the Municipal Urban Planning Administration
would analyze public opinion "seriously."

Without the entire city united against the project, residents concede
they are not optimistic the extension will be scrapped. "But we must
insist on our position. We require our government to respect the law,
and public construction must follow a legal framework and the right
procedure," said the 54-year-old businessman who asked another
protester for her photos. "Our action is a way to wake up people's
awareness of their civil rights."

-

THIS SWINGS BOTH WAYS --- FACEBOOK V. FARC
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0204/p04s02-woam.html
Facebook used to target Colombia's FARC with global rally

Internet site to spawn protests in 185 cities Monday against rebel
group's methods
BY Sibylla Brodzinsky / February 4, 2008

Bogotá, Colombia - Hundreds of thousands of Colombians are expected to
march throughout the country and in major cities around the world
Monday to protest against this nation's oldest and most powerful rebel
group.

What began as a group of young people venting their rage at the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on Facebook, an Internet
social-networking site, has ballooned into an international event
called "One Million Voices Against FARC."

"We expected the idea to resound with a lot of people but not so much
and not so quickly," says Oscar Morales, who started the Facebook
group against the FARC, which now has 230,000 members. Organizers are
expecting marches in 185 cities around the world.

The event is another example of how technology - such as text
messaging on cellphones - can be used to rally large numbers of people
to a cause. Some observers say it's less a response to the FARC's
ideology than it is global public outrage over kidnapping as a weapon.

Colombia continues to be the world's kidnapping capital with as many
as 3,000 hostages now being held. Anger over the practice has risen in
recent months after two women released by the FARC last month after
six years in captivity recounted the hardships they and other hostages
endured.

Monday's protests have the support of the government, many
nongovernmental organizations, and some political parties but its main
battle cry of "No More FARC" has also polarized some Colombians rather
than bringing them together.

While few Colombians support the Marxist insurgent army that has been
fighting the Colombian state for more than 40 years, many people are
uncomfortable with the message of Monday's rally. They would prefer a
broader slogan against kidnapping and in favor of peace and of
negotiations between the government and the rebels to exchange
hostages for jailed rebels. The leftist Polo Democratico Party said it
will hold a rally in Bogotá in favor of a negotiation but would not
march. Some senators say they will march against Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez, and other participants say they will be marching in favor
of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Consuelo González de Perdomo, one of the two women released by the
FARC on Jan. 10 said she would not be marching at all.

The families of the 45 remaining FARC hostages will not march either.
"The way the march was called aims to polarize the country," says
Deyanira Ortiz, whose husband, Orlando Beltrán Cuéllar, has been held
by the FARC for six years. "It's not for the freedom of the hostages
but against the FARC. And that doesn't serve any purpose."

Instead, the families and released FARC hostages will gather in
churches to pray for the release of their loved ones and for a
humanitarian agreement.

Rosa Cristina Parra, one of the original organizers of the march said
the position of the hostage families is "completely understandable"
and will not detract from the importance of the event. "We cannot
forget the other victims of the FARC, the land-mine victims, the
displaced people," she says.

-

LAW BEHIND CURVE, AS ALWAYS
http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/10/20/sorting-out-student-mobile-rights-and-smarts-at-school/

-

NICK TURSE V. THE CITY OF NEW YORK
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1574/nick_turse_on_republicans_in_green_zone_manhattan
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1786/nick_turse_on_the_new_homeland_security_state
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174843/turse_the_mean_streets_of_the_homeland_security_state_let

NYC, the NYPD, the RNC, and Me
Fortress Big Apple, 2007 / BY Nick Turse

One day in August, I walked into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan
United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Nearly three years before
I had been locked up, about two blocks away, in "the Tombs" -- the
infamous jail then named the Bernard B. Kerik Complex for the now-
disgraced New York City Police Commissioner. You see, I am one of the
demonstrators who was illegally arrested by the New York City Police
Department (NYPD) during the protests against the 2004 Republican
National Convention (RNC). My crime had been -- in an effort to call
attention to the human toll of America's wars -- to ride the subway,
dressed in black with the pallor of death about me (thanks to
cornstarch and cold cream), and an expression to match, sporting a
placard around my neck that read: WAR DEAD.

I was with a small group and our plan was to travel from Union
Square to Harlem, change trains, and ride all the way back down to
Astor Place. But when my small group exited the train at the 125th
Street station in Harlem, we were arrested by a swarm of police,
marched to a waiting paddy wagon and driven to a filthy detention
center. There, we were locked away for hours in a series of razor-wire-
topped pens, before being bussed to the Tombs.

Now, I was back to resolve the matter of my illegal arrest. As I
walked through the metal detector of the Federal building, a security
official searched my bag. He didn't like what he found. "You could be
shot for carrying that in here," he told me. "You could be shot."

For the moment, however, the identification of that dangerous
object I attempted to slip into the federal facility will have to
wait. Let me instead back up to July 2004, when, with the RNC fast-
approaching, I authored an article on the militarization of Manhattan
-- "the transformation of the island into a 'homeland-security state'"
-- and followed it up that September with a street-level recap of the
convention protests, including news of the deployment of an
experimental sound weapon, the Long Range Acoustic Device, by the
NYPD, and the department's use of an on-loan Fuji blimp as a "spy-in-
the-sky." Back then, I suggested that the RNC gave New York's
"finest," a perfect opportunity to "refine, perfect, and implement new
tactics (someday, perhaps, to be known as the 'New York model') for
use penning in or squelching dissent. It offered them the chance to
write up a playbook on how citizens' legal rights and civil liberties
may be abridged, constrained, and violated at their discretion."
Little did I know how much worse it could get.

No Escape

Since then, the city's security forces have eagerly embraced an
Escape From New York-aesthetic -- an urge to turn Manhattan into a
walled-in fortress island under high-tech government surveillance,
guarded by heavily armed security forces, with helicopters perpetually
overhead. Beginning in Harlem in 2006, near the site of two new luxury
condos, the NYPD set up a moveable "two-story booth tower, called Sky
Watch," that gave an "officer sitting inside a better vantage point
from which to monitor the area." The Panopticon-like structure --
originally used by hunters to shoot quarry from overhead and now also
utilized by the Department of Homeland Security along the Mexican
border -- was outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight,
sensors, and four to five cameras. Now, five Sky Watch towers are in
service, rotating in and out of various neighborhoods.

With their 20-25 neighborhood-scanning cameras, the towers are
only a tiny fraction of the Big Apple surveillance story. Back in
1998, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that there were
"2,397 cameras used by a wide variety of private businesses and
government agencies throughout Manhattan" -- and that was just one
borough. About a year after the RNC, the group reported that a survey
of just a quarter of that borough yielded a count of more than 4,000
surveillance cameras of every kind. At about the same time, military-
corporate giant Lockheed Martin was awarded a $212 million contract to
build a "counter-terrorist surveillance and security system for New
York's subways and commuter railroads as well as bridges and tunnels"
that would increase the camera total by more than 1,000. A year later,
as seems to regularly be the case with contracts involving the
military-corporate complex, that contract had already ballooned to
$280 million, although the system was not to be operational until at
least 2008.

In 2006, according to a Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA)
spokesman, the MTA already had a "3,000-camera-strong surveillance
system," while the NYPD was operating "an additional 3,000 cameras"
around the city. That same year, Bill Brown, a member of the
Surveillance Camera Players -- a group that leads surveillance-camera
tours and maps their use around the city, estimated, according to a
Newsweek article, that the total number of surveillance cameras in New
York exceeded 15,000 -- "a figure city officials say they have no way
to verify because they lack a system of registry." Recently, Brown
told me that 15,000 was an estimate for the number of cameras in
Manhattan, alone. For the city as a whole, he suspects the count has
now reached about 40,000.

This July, NYPD officials announced plans to up the ante. By the
end of 2007, according to the New York Times, they pledged to install
"more than 100 cameras" to monitor "cars moving through Lower
Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system
that would be the first in the United States." This "Ring of Steel"
scheme, which has already received $10 million in funding from the
Department of Homeland Security (in addition to $15 million in city
funds), aims to exponentially decrease privacy because, if "fully
financed, it will include.... 3,000 public and private security
cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police
and private security officers" to monitor all those electronic eyes.

Spies in the Sky

At the time of the RNC, the NYPD was already mounted on police
horses, bicycles, and scooters, as well as an untold number of marked
and unmarked cars, vans, trucks, and armored vehicles, not to mention
various types of water-craft. In 2007, the two-wheeled Segway joined
its list of land vehicles.

Overhead, the NYPD aviation unit, utilizing seven helicopters,
proudly claims to be "in operation 24/7, 365," according to Deputy
Inspector Joseph Gallucci, its commanding officer. Not only are all
the choppers outfitted with "state of the art cameras and heat-sensing
devices," as well as "the latest mapping, tracking and surveillance
technology," but one is a "$10 million 'stealth bird,' which has no
police markings -- [so] that those on the ground have no idea they are
being watched."

Asked about concerns over intrusive spying by members of the
aviation unit -- characterized by Gallucci as "a bunch of big boys who
like big expensive toys" -- Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
scoffed. "We're not able to, even if we wanted, to look into private
spaces," he told the New York Times. "We're looking at public areas."
However, in 2005, it was revealed that, on the eve of the RNC
protests, members of the aviation unit took a break and used their
night-vision cameras to record "an intimate moment" shared by a
"couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse."

Despite this incident, which only came to light because the same
tape included images that had to be turned over to a defendant in an
unrelated trial, Kelly has called for more aerial surveillance. The
commissioner apparently also got used to having the Fuji blimp at his
disposal, though he noted that "it's not easy to send blimps into the
airspace over New York." He then "challenged the aerospace industry to
find a solution" that would, no doubt, bring the city closer to life
under total surveillance.

Police Misconduct: The RNC

As a result of its long history of brutality, corruption, spying,
silencing dissent, and engaging in illegal activities, the NYPD is a
particularly secretive organization. As such, the full story of the
department's misconduct during the Republican National Convention has
yet to be told; but, even in an era of heightened security and
defensiveness, what has emerged hasn't been pretty.

By April 2005, New York Times journalist Jim Dwyer was already
reporting that, "of the 1,670 [RNC arrest] cases that have run their
full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a
verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any
finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the
circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's
office agreeing that the cases should be 'adjourned in contemplation
of dismissal.'" In one case that went to trial, it was found that
video footage of an arrest had been doctored to bolster the NYPD's
claims. (All charges were dropped against that defendant. In 400 other
RNC cases, by the spring of 2005, video recordings had either
demonstrated that defendants had not committed crimes or that charges
could not be proved against them.)

Since shifting to "zero-tolerance" law enforcement policies under
Mayor (now Republican presidential candidate) Rudolph Giuliani, the
city has been employing a system of policing where arrests are used to
punish people who have been convicted of no crime whatsoever,
including, as at the RNC or the city's monthly Critical Mass bike
rides, those who engage in any form of protest. Prior to the Giuliani
era, about half of all those "arrested for low-level offenses would
get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court." Now the
proportion is 10%. (NYPD documents show that the decision to arrest
protesters, not issue summonses, was part of the planning process
prior to the RNC.)

Speaking at the 2007 meeting of the American Sociological
Association, Michael P. Jacobson, Giuliani's probation and correction
commissioner, outlined how the city's policy of punishing the presumed
innocent works:

"Essentially, everyone who's arrested in New York City, in the
parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through 'the system'....
if you've never gone through the system, even 24 hours -- that's a
shocking period of punishment. It's debasing, it's difficult. You're
probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet
paper. You're given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green."

In 2005, the Times' Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since
the time of the RNC, police officers had not only "conducted covert
surveillance... of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking
part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist
killed in an accident," but had acted as agent provocateurs. At the
RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents
influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a "sham arrest" of
"a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising
confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders."

In 2006, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), reported
"that hundreds of Convention protesters may have been unnecessarily
and unlawfully arrested because NYPD officials failed to give adequate
orders to disperse and failed to afford protesters a reasonable
opportunity to disperse."

Police Commissioner Kelly had no hesitation about rejecting the
organization's report. Still, these were strong words, considering the
weakness of the source. The overall impotence of the CCRB suggests a
great deal about the NYPD's culture of unaccountability. According to
an ACLU report, the board "investigates fewer than half of all
complaints that it reviews, and it produces a finding on the merits in
only three of ten complaints disposed of in any given year." This
inaction is no small thing, given the surge of complaints against NYPD
officers in recent years. In 2001, before Mayor Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Kelly came to power, the CCRB received 4,251 complaints.
By 2006, the number of complaints had jumped by 80% to 7,669. Even
more telling are the type of allegations found to be on the rise (and
largely ignored). According to the ACLU, from 2005 to 2006, complaints
over the use of excessive force jumped 26.8% -- "nearly double the
increase in complaints filed."

It was in this context that the planning for the RNC
demonstrations took place. In 2006, in five internal police reports
made public as part of a lawsuit, "New York City police commanders
candidly discuss[ed] how they had successfully used 'proactive
arrests,' covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political
demonstrations in 2002, and recommend[ed] that those approaches be
employed at future gatherings." A draft report from the department's
Disorder Control Unit had a not-so-startling recommendation, given
what did happen at the RNC: "Utilize undercover officers to distribute
misinformation within the crowds."

According to Dwyer, for at least a year prior to those
demonstrations, "teams of undercover New York City police officers
traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe" to conduct
covert surveillance of activists. "In hundreds of reports, stamped
'N.Y.P.D. Secret,' [the NYPD's] Intelligence Division chronicled the
views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking
the law, [including] street theater companies, church groups and
antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed
to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies."
Three elected city councilmen -- Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and
Larry B. Seabrook -- were even cited in the reports for endorsing a
protest event held on January 15, 2004 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s birthday.

In August, the New York Times editorial page decried the city's
continuing attempts to keep documents outlining the police
department's spying and other covert activities secret:

"The city of New York is waging a losing and ill-conceived
battle for overzealous secrecy surrounding nearly 2,000 arrests during
the 2004 Republican National Convention.... Police Commissioner Ray
Kelly seemed to cast an awfully wide and indiscriminate net in seeking
out potential troublemakers. For more than a year before the
convention, members of a police spy unit headed by a former official
of the Central Intelligence Agency infiltrated a wide range of groups...
many of the targets ... posed no danger or credible threat."

The Times concluded that -- coupled with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's
efforts to disrupt and criminalize protest during the convention week
-- "police action helped to all but eliminate dissent from New York
City during the Republican delegates' visit. If that was the goal,
then mission accomplished. And civil rights denied."

Police Commissioner Kelly had a radically different take on his
department's conduct. Earlier this year, he claimed that "the
Republican National Convention was perhaps the finest hour in the
history of the New York City Department."

Police Misconduct: 2007

"Finest" might seem a funny term for the NYPD's actions, but these
days everyone's a relativist. In the years since the RNC protests, the
NYPD has been mired in scandal after scandal -- from killing unarmed
black men and "violations of civil rights" at the National Puerto
Rican Day Parade to issuing "sweeping generalizations" that lead to
"labeling almost every American Muslim as a potential terrorist." And,
believe it or not, the racial and political scandals were but a modest
part of the mix. Add to them, killings, sexual assaults, kidnapping,
armed robbery, burglary, corruption, theft, drug-related offenses,
conspiracy -- and that's just a start when it comes to crimes members
of the force have been charged with. It's a rap sheet fit for Public
Enemy #1, and we're only talking about the story of the NYPD in the
not-yet-completed year of 2007.

For example, earlier this year a 13-year NYPD veteran was
"arrested on charges of hindering prosecution, tampering with
evidence, obstructing governmental administration and unlawful
possession of marijuana," in connection with the shooting of another
officer. In an unrelated case, two other NYPD officers were arrested
and "charged with attempted kidnapping, armed robbery, armed burglary
and other offenses."

In a third case, the New York Post reported that a "veteran NYPD
captain has been stripped of his badge and gun as part of a federal
corruption probe that already has led to the indictment of an Internal
Affairs sergeant who allegedly tipped other cops that they were being
investigated." And that isn't the only NYPD cover-up allegation to
surface of late. With cops interfering in investigations of fellow
cops and offering advice on how to deflect such probes, it's a wonder
any type of wrongdoing surfaces. Yet, the level of misconduct in the
department appears to be sweeping enough to be irrepressible.

For instance, sex crime scandals have embroiled numerous officers
-- including one "accused of sexually molesting his young
stepdaughter," who pled guilty to "a misdemeanor charge of child
endangerment," and another "at a Queens hospital charged with
possessing and sharing child pornography." In a third case, a member
of the NYPD's School Safety Division was "charged with the attempted
rape and sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl." In a fourth case, a
"police officer pleaded guilty.... to a grotesque romance with an
infatuated 13-year-old girl." Meanwhile, an NYPD officer, who molested
women while on duty and in uniform, was convicted of sexual abuse and
official misconduct.

Cop-on-cop sexual misconduct of an extreme nature has also
surfaced.... but why go on? You get the idea. And, if you don't, there
are lurid cases galore to check out, like the investigation into
"whether [an] NYPD officer who fatally shot his teen lover before
killing himself murdered the boyfriend of a past lover," or the
officer who was "charged with intentional murder in the shooting death
of his 22-year-old girlfriend." And don't even get me started on the
officer "facing charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and
conspiracy to commit robberies of drugs and drug proceeds from
narcotics traffickers."

All of this, and much more, has emerged in spite of the classic
blue-wall-of-silence. It makes you wonder: In the surveillance state
to come, are we going to be herded and observed by New York's finest
lawbreakers?

It's important to note that all of these cases have begun despite
a striking NYPD culture of non-accountability. Back in August, the New
York Times noted that the "Police Department has increasingly failed
to prosecute New York City police officers on charges of misconduct
when those cases have been substantiated by the independent board that
investigates allegations of police abuse, officials of the board say."
Between March 1, 2007 and June 30, 2007 alone, the NYPD "declined to
seek internal departmental trials against 31 officers, most of whom
were facing charges of stopping people in the street without probable
cause or reasonable suspicion, according to the city's Civilian
Complaint Review Board." An ACLU report, "Mission Failure: Civilian
Review of Policing in New York City, 1994-2006," released this month,
delved into the issue in even greater detail. The organization found
that, between 2000 and 2005, "the NYPD disposed of substantiated
complaints against 2,462 police officers: 725 received no discipline.
When discipline was imposed, it was little more than a slap on the
wrist."

Much has come to light recently about the way the U.S. military
has been lowering its recruitment standards in order to meet the
demands of ongoing, increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, including an increase in "moral waivers" allowing more
recruits with criminal records to enter the services. Well, it turns
out that, on such policies, the NYPD has been a pioneering
institution.

In 2002, the BBC reported that "New York's powerful police union....
accused the police department of allowing 'sub-standard' recruits onto
the force." Then, just months after the RNC protests, the New York
Daily News exposed the department's practice of "hiring applicants
with arrest records and shoving others through without full background
checks" including those who had been "charged with laundering drug
money, assault, grand larceny and weapons possession." According to
Sgt. Anthony Petroglia, who, until he retired in 2002, had worked for
almost a decade in the department's applicant-processing division, the
NYPD was "hiring people to be cops who have no respect for the law."
Another retiree from the same division was blunter: "It's all judgment
calls -- bad ones.... but the bosses say, 'Send 'em through. We'll
catch the problem ones later.'"

The future looks bright, if you are an advocate of sending the
force even further down this path. The new choice to mold the
department of tomorrow, according to the Village Voice, the "NYPD's
new deputy commissioner of training, Wilbur 'Bill' Chapman, should
have no trouble teaching 'New York's Finest' about the pitfalls of
sexual harassment, cronyism, and punitive transfers [because h]e's
been accused of all that during his checkered career."

In the eerie afterglow of 9/11, haunted by the specter of
terrorism, in an atmosphere where repressive zero-tolerance policies
already rule, given the unparalleled power of Commissioner Kelly --
called "the most powerful police commissioner in the city's history"
by NYPD expert Leonard Levitt -- and with a police department largely
unaccountable to anyone (as the only city agency without any effective
outside oversight), the Escape from New York model may indeed
represent Manhattan's future.

Nick Turse v. The City of New York

So what, you might still be wondering, was it that led the
security official at the federal courthouse to raise the specter of my
imminent demise? A weapon? An unidentified powder? No, a digital audio
recorder. "Some people here don't want to be recorded," he explained
in response to my quizzical look.

So I checked the recording device and, accompanied by my lawyer,
the indomitable Mary D. Dorman, made my way to Courtroom 18D, a
stately room in the upper reaches of the building that houses the
oldest district court in the nation. There, I met our legal nemesis, a
city attorney whose official title is "assistant corporation counsel."
After what might pass for a cordial greeting, he asked relatively
politely whether I was going to accept the city's monetary offer of
$8,500 -- which I had rejected the previous week-- to settle my
lawsuit for false arrest. As soon as I indicated I wouldn't (as I had
from the moment the city started the bidding at $2,500), any hint of
cordiality fled the room. Almost immediately, he was referring to me
as a "criminal" -- declassified NYPD documents actually refer to me as
a "perp." Soon, he launched into a bout of remarkable bluster,
threatening lengthy depositions to waste my time and monetary
penalties associated with court costs that would swallow my savings.

Then, we were all directed to a small jury room off the main
courtroom, where the city's attorney hauled out a threatening prop to
bolster his act -- an imposingly gigantic file folder stuffed with
reams of "Nick Turse" documents, including copies of some of my
disreputable Tomdispatch articles as well as printouts of suspicious
webpages from the American Empire Project -- the obviously criminal
series that will be publishing my upcoming book, The Complex.

There, the litany of vague threats to tie me down with
depositions, tax me with fees, and maybe, somehow, send me to jail for
a "crime" that had been dismissed years earlier continued until a
federal magistrate judge entered the room. To him, the assistant
corporation counsel and I told our versions of my arrest story --
which turned out to vary little.

The basic details were the same. As the city attorney shifted in
his seat, I told the judge how, along with compatriots I'd met only
minutes before, I donned my "WAR DEAD" sign and descended into the
subway surrounded by a phalanx of cops -- plainclothes, regular
uniformed, Big Brother-types from the Technical Assistance Response
Unit (TARU), and white-shirted brass, as well as a Washington Post
photographer and legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild --
and boarded our train. I explained that we sat there looking as dead
as possible for about 111 blocks and then, as the Washington Post
reported, were arrested when we came back to life and "tried to change
trains." I asked, admittedly somewhat rhetorically why, if I was such
a "criminal," none of the officers present at my arrest had actually
showed up in court to testify against me when my case was dismissed
out of hand back in 2004? And why hadn't the prosecutor wanted to
produce the video footage the NYPD had taken of the entire action and
my arrest? And why had the city been trying to buy me off all these
years since?

Faced with the fact that his intimidation tactics hadn't worked,
the city attorney now quit his bad-cop tactics and I rose again out of
the ditch of "common criminality" into citizenship and then to the
high status of being addressed as "Dr. Turse" (in a bow to my PhD).
Offers and counteroffers followed, leading finally to a monetary
settlement with a catch -- I also wanted an apology. If that guard
hadn't directed me -- under threat of being shot -- to check my
digital audio recorder at the door, I might have had a sound file of
it to listen to for years to come. Instead, I had to be content with
the knowledge that an appointed representative of the City of New York
not only had to ditch the Escape from New York model -- at least for a
day -- pony up some money for violating my civil rights, and, before a
federal magistrate judge, also issue me an apology, on behalf of the
city, for wrongs committed by the otherwise largely unaccountable
NYPD.

The Future of the NYPD and the Homeland-Security State-let

I'm under no illusions that this minor monetary settlement and
apology were of real significance in a city where civil rights are
routinely abridged, the police are a largely unaccountable armed
force, and a culture of total surveillance is increasingly the norm.
But my lawsuit, when combined with those of my fellow arrestees, could
perhaps have some small effect. After all, less than a year after the
convention, 569 people had already "filed notices that they intended
to sue the City, seeking damages totaling $859,014,421," according to
an NYCLU report. While the city will end up paying out considerably
less, the grand total will not be insignificant. In fact, Jim Dwyer
recently reported that the first 35 of 605 RNC cases had been settled
for a total of $694,000.

If New Yorkers began to agitate for accountability -- demanding,
for instance, that such settlements be paid out of the NYPD's budget
-- it could make a difference. Then, every time New Yorkers' hard-
earned tax-dollars were handed over to fellow citizens who were
harassed, mistreated, injured, or abused by the city's police force
that would mean less money available for the "big expensive toys" that
the "big boys" of the NYPD's aviation unit use to record the private
moments of unsuspecting citizens or the ubiquitous surveillance gear
used not to capture the rest of the city on candid camera. It wouldn't
put an end to the NYPD's long-running criminality or the burgeoning
homeland security state-let that it's building, but it would, at
least, introduce a tiny measure of accountability.

Such an effort might even begin a dialogue about the NYPD, its
dark history, its current mandate under the Global War on Terror, and
its role in New York City. For instance, people might begin to examine
the very nature of the department. They might conclude that questions
must be raised when institutions -- be they rogue regimes, deleterious
industries, unaccountable corporations, or fundamentally-tainted
government institutions -- consistently, over many decades, evidence a
persistent disregard for the law, a lack of accountability, and a deep
resistance to reform. Those directly affected by the NYPD, a nearly
38,000-person force -- larger than many armies -- that has
consistently flouted the law and has proven remarkably resistant to
curtailing its own misconduct for well over a century, might even
begin to wonder if it can be trusted to administer the homeland
security state-let its top officials are fast implementing and, if
not, what can be done about it.

.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the
new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American
Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in 2008. His new website
NickTurse.com (up only in rudimentary form) will fully launch in the
coming months.

-

BEST PRACTICES
http://help.riseup.net/security/about/
Why security matters

Every email takes a perilous journey. A typical email might travel
across twenty networks and be stored on five computers from the time
it is composed to the time it is read. At every step of the way, the
contents of the email might be monitored, archived, cataloged, and
indexed.

However, it is not the content of your email which is most
interesting: typically, a spying organization is more concerned by
whom you communicate with. There are many ways in which this kind of
mapping of people's associations and habits is far worse than
traditional eavesdropping. By cataloging our associations, a spying
organization has an intimate picture of how our social movements are
organized--a more detailed picture than even the social movements
themselves are aware of.

This is bad. Really bad. The US government, among others, has a long
track record of doing whatever it can to subvert, imprison, kill, or
squash social movements which it sees as a threat (black power, anti-
war, civil rights, anti-slavery, native rights, organized labor, and
so on). And now they have all the tools they need to do this with
blinding precision.

We believe that communication free of eavesdropping and association
mapping is necessary for a democratic society (should one ever happen
to take root in the US). We must defend the right to free speech, but
it is just as necessary to defend the right to private speech.

Unfortunately, private communication is not possible if only a few
people practice it: they will stand out and open themselves up to
greater scrutiny. Therefore, we believe it is important for everyone
to incorporate as many security measures in your email life as you are
able.

Email is not secure

You should think of normal email as a postcard: anyone can read it,
your letter carrier, your nosy neighbor, your house mates. All email,
unless encrypted, is completely insecure. Email is actually much less
secure than a postcard, because at least with a postcard you have a
chance of recognizing the sender's handwriting. With email, anyone can
pretend to be anyone else.

There is another way in which email is even less private than a
postcard: the government does not have enough labor to read everyone's
postscards, but they probably have the capacity and ability to scan
most email. Based on current research in datamining, it is likely that
the government does not search email for particular words but rather
looks for patterns of association and activity.

In the three cases below, evidence is well established that the
government conducts widespread and sweeping electronic survillence.

full-pipe monitoring
According to a former Justice Department attorney, it is common
practice for the FBI to practice "full-pipe monitoring". The process
involves vacuuming up all traffic of an ISP and then later mining that
data for whatever the FBI might find interesting. The story was first
reported on January 30, 2007 by Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com.

AT&T
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action
lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant
of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating
with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal
program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications.

Because AT&T is one of the few providers of the internet backbone
(a so called Tier 1 provider), even if you are not an AT&T customer is
is likely that AT&T is the carrier for much of your interent traffic.
It is very likely that other large internet and email providers have
also worked out deals with the government. We only know about this one
because of an internal whistleblower.

Carnivore
For legal domestic wiretaps, the U.S. government runs a program
called Carnivore (also called DCS1000).

Carnivore is a 'black box' which some ISPs are required to install
which allows law enforcement to do 'legal' wiretaps. However, no one
knows how they work, they effectively give the government total
control over monitoring anything on the ISP's network, and there is
much evidence that the government uses carnivore to gather more
information than is legal.

As of January 2005, the FBI announced they are no longer using
Carnivore/DCS1000 and are replacing it with a product developed by a
third party. The purpose of the new system is exactly the same.

ECHELON
ECHELON is a spy program operated cooperatively with the
governments of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia,
and New Zealand. The goal is to monitor and analyze internet traffic
on a wide scale. The EU Parliament has accused the U.S. of using
Echelon for industrial espionage.

Call database

On May 10, USAToday broke the story that the NSA has a database
designed to track every phone call ever made in the US. Although this
applies to phone conversations, the fact that the government believes
that this is legal means that they almost certainly think it is legal
to track all the email communication within the US as well. And we
know from the AT&T case that they have the capability to do so.

.

http://help.riseup.net/security/measures/
You can do something about it!

What a gloomy picture! Happily, there are many things you can do.
These security pages will help outline some of the simple and not-so-
simple changes you can make to your email behavior.

* Secure Connections: by using secure connections, you protect
your login information and your data while is in transport to
riseup.net.
* Secure Providers: when you send mail to and from secure email
providers, you can protect the content of your communication and also
the pattern of your associations.
* Public Key Encryption: although it is a little more work, public
key encryption is the best way to keep the content of your
communication private.

See the next page, Security Measures, for tips on these and other
steps you can take. Remember: even if you don't personally need
privacy, practicing secure communication will ensure that others have
the ability to freely organize and agitate.

Practice secure behavior!
These pages include a lot of fancy talk about encryption. Ultimately,
however, all this wizbang cryto-alchemy will be totally useless if you
have insecure behavior. A few simple practices will go a long way
toward securing your communications:

1. Logout: make sure that you always logout when using web-mail.
This is very important, and very easy to do. This is particular
important when using a public computer.
2. Avoid public computers: this can be difficult. If you do use a
public computer, consider changing your password often or using the
virtual keyboard link (if you use riseup.net for your web-mail).
3. Use good password practice: you should change your password
periodically and use a password which is at least 6 characters and
contains a combination of numbers, letters, and symbols. It is better
to use a complicated password and write it down then to use a simple
password and keep it only in your memory. Studies show that most
people use passwords which are easy to guess or to crack, especially
if you have some information about the interests of the person. You
should never pick a password which is found in the dictionary (the
same goes for "love" as well as "10v3" and other common ways of
replacing letters with numbers).
4. Be a privacy freak: don't tell other people your password. Also,
newer operating systems allow you to create multiple logins which keep
user settings separate. You should enable this feature, and logout or
"lock" the computer when not in use.

Use secure connections!
What are secure connections?

When you check your mail from the riseup.net server, you can use an
encrypted connection, which adds a high level of security to all
traffic between your computer and riseup.net. Secure connections are
enabled for web-mail and for IMAP or POP mail clients.

This method is useful for protecting your password and login. If you
don't use a secure connection, then your login and password are sent
over the internet in a 'cleartext' form which can be easily
intercepted. It is obvious why you might not want your password made
public, but it may also be important to keep your login private in
cases where you do not want your real identity tied to a particular
email account.

How do I know if I am using a secure connection?

When using web browser (Firefox, Safari, etc.)
If you are using a web browser to connect to Riseup, you can look at
three things to check to see if you are using a secure connection.

The first is easy, are you using Internet Explorer? If so, switch to
Firefox. The security problems with Internet Explorer are too numerous
to mention and making the switch to Firefox is an easy step in the
right direction.

Secondly, look up at the URL bar, where the address is. If it starts
with "https://" (NOTE the 's'), then you have a secure connection, if
its just "http://" (NO 's'), then you are not using a secure
connection. You can change that "http" to "https" by clicking on the
URL bar and adding the 's' and then hit to load the page securely.

The third way to tell is by looking for a little padlock icon. It will
either appear in the URL location bar, or in the bottom corner of the
window, it should appear locked, if the lock doesn't exist, or the
lock picture looks like it is unlocked, you are not using a secure
connection. You can hover your mouse over the padlock to get more
information, and often clicking (or sometimes right-clicking) on the
lock will bring up details about the SSL certificate used to secure
the connection.

If you click on the padlock, you can verify Riseup's certificate
fingerprints, this is a very good idea! Follow these directions to
verify our fingerprint.

When using a mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.)
For POP and IMAP, your mail client will have the option of enabling
SSL or TLS. For sending mail (SMTP), both SSL and TLS will work, but
some ISPs will block TLS, so you might need to use SSL. For more
specific, step-by-step configurations for your mail client, see our
mail client tutorials and SMTP FAQ.

The limits of secure connections

The problem with email is that takes a long and perilous journey. When
you send a message, it first travels from your computer to the
riseup.net mail server and then is delivered to the recipient's mail
server. Finally, the recipient logs on to check their email and the
message is delivered to their computer.

Using secure connections only protects your data as it travels from
your computer to the the riseup.net servers (and vice versa). It does
not make your email any more secure as it travels around the internet
from mail server to mail server. To do this, see below.

Use secure email providers
What is StartTLS?

There are many governments and corporations who "sniff" general
traffic on the internet. Even if you use a secure connection to check
and send your email, the communication between mail servers is almost
always insecure and out in the open.

Fortunately, there is a solution! StartTLS is a fancy name for a very
important idea: StartTLS allows mail servers to talk to each other in
a secure way.

If you and your friends use only email providers which use StartTLS,
then all the mail traffic among you will be encrypted while in
transport. If both sender and recipient also use secure connections
while talking to the mail servers, then your communications are likely
secure over its entire lifetime.

We will repeat that because it is important: to gain any benefit from
StartTLS, both sender and recipient must be using StartTLS enabled
email providers. For mailing lists, the list provider and each and
every list subscriber must use StartTLS.

Which email providers use StartTLS?
Currently, these tech collectives are known to use StartTLS:

* riseup.net
* resist.ca
* mutualaid.org
* autistici.org/inventati.org
* aktivix.org
* boum.org
* squat.net
* tao.ca
* indymedia.org
* eggplantmedia.com
* so36.net

We recommend that you and all your friends get email accounts with
these tech collectives!
Additionally, these email providers often have StartTLS enabled:

* universities: berkeley.edu, johnhopkins.edu, hampshire.edu,
evergreen.edu, ucsc.edu, reed.edu, oberlin.edu, pdx.edu, usc.edu,
bc.edu, uoregon.edu, vassar.edu, temple.edu, ucsf.edu, ucdavis.edu,
wisc.edu, rutgers.edu, ucr.edu, umb.edu, simmons.edu.
* organizations: action-mail.org, no-log.org
* companies: speakeasy.net, easystreet.com, runbox.com,
hushmail.com, dreamhost.com, frognet.net, frontbridge.com, freenet.de,
blarg.net, greennet (gn.apc.org)

What are the advantages of StartTLS?
This combination of secure email providers and secure connections has
many advantages:

* It is very easy to use! No special software is needed. No
special behavior is needed, other than to make sure you are using
secure connections.
* It prevents anyone from creating a map of whom you are
communicating with and who is communicating with you (so long as both
parties use StartTLS).
* It ensures that your communication is pretty well protected.
* It promotes the alternative mail providers which use StartTLS.
The goal is to create a healthy ecology of activist providers--which
can only happen if people show these providers strong support. Many of
these alternative providers also also incorporate many other important
security measures such as limited logging and encrypted storage.

What are the limitations of StartTLS?
However, there are some notable limitations:

* Your computer is a weak link: your computer can be stolen,
hacked into, have keylogging software or hardware installed.
* It is difficult to verify: for a particular message to be
secure, both the origin and destination mail providers must use
StartTLS (and both the sender and recipient must use encrypted
connections). Unfortunately, it is difficult to confirm that all of
this happened. For this, you need public key encryption (see below).

Use public-key encryption
If you wish to keep the contents of your email private, and confirm
the identity of people who send you email, you should download and
install public-key encryption software. This option is only available
if you have your own computer.

Public-key encryption uses a combination of a private key and a public
key. The private key is known only by you, while the public key is
distributed far and wide. To send an encrypted message to someone, you
encrypt the message with their public key. Only their private key will
be able to decrypt your message and read it.

The universal standard for public-key encryption is Pretty Good
Privacy (PGP) and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). GPG is Free Software, while
PGP is a proprietary product (although there are many freeware
versions available). Both work interchangeably and are available as
convenient add-ons to mail clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

For information configuring your mail client to use public key
encryption, see our mail client tutorial pages. In particular, see the
tutorials for Apple Mail and Thunderbird. Otherwise, you should refer
the to documentation which comes with your particular mail client.

Although it provides the highest level of security, public-key
encryption is still an adventure to use. To make your journey less
scary, we suggest you keep these things in mind:

* Be in it for the long haul: using public-key encryption takes a
commitment to learning a lot of new skills and jargon. The widespread
adoption of GPG is a long way off, so it may seem like a lot of work
for not much benefit. However, we need early adopters who can help
build a critical mass of GPG users.
* Develop GPG buddies: although most your traffic might not be
encrypted, if you find someone else who uses GPG try to make a
practice of communicating using only GPG with that person.
* Look for advocates: people who use GPG usually love to
evangelize about it and help others to use it to. Find someone like
this who can answer your questions and help you along.

Although you can hide the contents of email with public-key
encryption, it does not hide who you are sending mail to and receiving
mail from. This means that even with public key encryption there is a
lot of personal information which is not secure.

Why? Imagine that someone knew nothing of the content of your mail
correspondence, but they knew who you sent mail to and received mail
from and they knew how often and what the subject line was. This
information can provide a picture of your associations, habits,
contacts, interests and activities.

The only way to keep your list of associations private is to to use an
email provider which will establish a secure connection with other
email providers. See Use secure email providers, above.

.

http://help.riseup.net/security/certificates/
What are certificates?

On the internet, a public key certificate is needed in order to verify
the identity of people or computers. These certificates are also
called SSL certificates or identity certificates. We will just call
them "certificates."

In particular, certificates are needed to establish secure
connections. Without certificates, you would be able to ensure that no
one else was listening, but you might be talking to the wrong computer
altogether! All riseup.net servers and all riseup.net services allow
or require secure connections. It can sometimes be tricky to coax a
particular program to play nice and recognize the riseup.net
certificates. This page will help you through the process.

If you don't follow these steps, your computer will likely complain or
fail every time you attempt to create a secure connection with
riseup.net.

What is a certificate authority?
Certificates are the digital equivalent of a government issued
identification card. Certificates, however, are issued by private
corporations called certificate authorities (CA).

I thought you were against authority?
We are, but the internet is designed to require certificate
authorities and there is not much we can do about it. There are other
models for encrypted communication, such as the decentralized notion
of a "web of trust" found in PGP. Unfortunately, no one has written
any web browsers or mail clients to use PGP for establishing secure
connections, so we are forced to rely on certificate authorities. Some
day, we hope to collaborate with other tech collectives to create a
certificate (anti) authority.

Your certificate is not recognized - what should I do?
We recently installed new certificates that should solve this issue
for webmail and mail client users. However, users accessing the secure
pages for lists.riseup.net, help.riseup.net, we.riseup.net and
user.riseup.net will still receive this annoying error message. The
problem is that these servers use a CA Cert root certificate, which is
not on the list of "trusted" certification authorities. So, in order
to use the certificates without receiving the error message, you will
need to import the CA Cert Root Certificate.

What are the fingerprints of riseup.net's certificates?
Some programs cannot use certificate authorities to confirm the
validity of a certificate. In that case, you may need to manually
confirm the fingerprint of the riseup.net certificate. Here are some
fingerprints for various certificates:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

1. SSL fingerprint for mail.riseup.net
* sha1: BA:73:F5:45:E0:98:54:E5:6D:BA:5C:4B:98:EF:1A:A9:4B:C1:47:9D
* md5: 88:12:94:4D:D5:43:FE:22:84:4E:67:C9:0C:1E:DC:DA

2. SSL fingerprint for tern.riseup.net
* sha1: F2:1D:DC:23:89:36:15:F9:1B:2C:66:F0:93:99:6E:C8:EB:2C:43:BB
* md5: A1:3E:38:19:39:70:DA:F0:0E:B1:58:D9:1A:67:41:AD

3. SSL fingerprint for petrel.riseup.net
* sha1: 13:C8:86:19:53:52:C7:A1:B8:03:B0:53:1A:E9:DA:FF:AD:A9:BB:24
* md5: 84:32:84:43:81:13:16:56:0F:CE:68:A9:CF:29:4D:8D
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFHIWAyxOALs3NV+v8RAnyjAKCcrOPwP6xkvSoqd50cCprASMuFfACfe0WO
FtzEyPg6MjDgC2hLdTpm7O4=
=DO3k
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

When should I verify these fingerprints?
You should verify these fingerprints whenever they change, or you are
using a computer that you do not control (such as at an internet cafe,
or a library). Verify them if you are suspicious, be suspicious and
learn how to verify them and do it often.

How do I verify these fingerprints?
To verify these fingerprints, you need to look at what your browser
believes the fingerprints are for the certificates and compare them to
what is listed above. If they are different, there is a problem.

In most browsers, the way you look at the fingerprints of the
certificate that you were given is by clicking on the lock icon that
is located either in the URL location bar, or in the bottom corner of
your browser. This should bring up details about the certificate being
used, including the fingerprint. Some browsers may only show the MD5
fingerprint, or the SHA1 fingerprint, some will show both. Usually one
is good enough to verify the validity of the fingerprint.

I want to learn more

Great, this is an important topic and we encourage you to read this
piece which clearly articulates in a non-technical way the problems
involved in certificate authorities as well as outlining some
interesting suggestions for ways that the existing architecture and
protocols can be tweaked just a little bit to change the situation for
the better.
http://lair.fifthhorseman.net/~dkg/tls-centralization/

.

http://help.riseup.net/security/

Policy at riseup.net
We strive to keep our mail as secure and private as we can.

* We do not log your IP address. (Most services keep detailed
records of every machine which connects to the servers. We keep only
information which cannot be used to uniquely identify your machine.)
* All your data, including your mail, is stored by riseup.net in
encrypted form.
* We work hard to keep our servers secure and well defended
against any malicious attack.
* We do not share any of our user data with anyone.
* We will actively fight any attempt to subpoena or otherwise
acquire any user information or logs.
* We will not read, search, or process any of your incoming or
outgoing mail other than by automatic means to protect you from
viruses and spam or when directed to do so by you when
troubleshooting.

.

LINKS
http://help.riseup.net/security/resources/

Security resources for activists

This site contains a quick overview of email security. For more in-
depth information, check out these websites:

http://security.resist.ca/
Helping activists stay safe in our oppressive world.

http://secdocs.net/manual/lp-sec/
A series of briefings on information security and online safety for
civil society organizations.

http://www.activist.ca/guide/encrypt.html
Guide to Email Security Using Encryption and Digital Signatures

http://www.madisoninfoshop.org/compsecurity.pdf
Computer Security for the Average Activist

http://www.backspace.com/action/
An introduction to activism on the internet

-

AND FINALLY --- NEXTEL BUGS
http://www.news.com/FBI-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/2100-1029_3-6140191.html

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
BY Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh / December 1, 2006

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic
surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile
phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S.
Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York
organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance
techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his
attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby
conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in
the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this
week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving
bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to
permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a
suspect's cell phone.

Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned
whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully
powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia
models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set. While the
Genovese crime family prosecution appears to be the first time a
remote-eavesdropping mechanism has been used in a criminal case, the
technique has been discussed in security circles for years.

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular
telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the
purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone."
An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can
"remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the
owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its
owner is not making a call."

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially
vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said
James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked
closely with government agencies. "They can be remotely accessed and
made to transmit room audio all the time," he said. "You can do that
without having physical access to the phone."

Because modern handsets are miniature computers, downloaded software
could modify the usual interface that always displays when a call is
in progress. The spyware could then place a call to the FBI and
activate the microphone--all without the owner knowing it happened.
(The FBI declined to comment on Friday.) "If a phone has in fact been
modified to act as a bug, the only way to counteract that is to either
have a bugsweeper follow you around 24-7, which is not practical, or
to peel the battery off the phone," Atkinson said. Security-conscious
corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from their cell
phones, he added.

FBI's physical bugs discovered

The FBI's Joint Organized Crime Task Force, which includes members of
the New York police department, had little luck with conventional
surveillance of the Genovese family. They did have a confidential
source who reported the suspects met at restaurants including Brunello
Trattoria in New Rochelle, N.Y., which the FBI then bugged.

But in July 2003, Ardito and his crew discovered bugs in three
restaurants, and the FBI quietly removed the rest. Conversations
recounted in FBI affidavits show the men were also highly suspicious
of being tailed by police and avoided conversations on cell phones
whenever possible.

That led the FBI to resort to "roving bugs," first of Ardito's Nextel
handset and then of Peluso's. U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones
approved them in a series of orders in 2003 and 2004, and said she
expected to "be advised of the locations" of the suspects when their
conversations were recorded.

Details of how the Nextel bugs worked are sketchy. Court documents,
including an affidavit (p1) and (p2) prepared by Assistant U.S.
Attorney Jonathan Kolodner in September 2003, refer to them as a
"listening device placed in the cellular telephone." That phrase could
refer to software or hardware.

One private investigator interviewed by CNET News.com, Skipp Porteous
of Sherlock Investigations in New York, said he believed the FBI
planted a physical bug somewhere in the Nextel handset and did not
remotely activate the microphone. "They had to have physical
possession of the phone to do it," Porteous said. "There are several
ways that they could have gotten physical possession. Then they
monitored the bug from fairly near by."

But other experts thought microphone activation is the more likely
scenario, mostly because the battery in a tiny bug would not have
lasted a year and because court documents say the bug works anywhere
"within the United States"--in other words, outside the range of a
nearby FBI agent armed with a radio receiver.

In addition, a paranoid Mafioso likely would be suspicious of any ploy
to get him to hand over a cell phone so a bug could be planted. And
Kolodner's affidavit seeking a court order lists Ardito's phone
number, his 15-digit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier, and
lists Nextel Communications as the service provider, all of which
would be unnecessary if a physical bug were being planted.

A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely
employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of
a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug,"
the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to
pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."

For its part, Nextel said through spokesman Travis Sowders: "We're not
aware of this investigation, and we weren't asked to participate."
Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of
surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it "works closely with
law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with
legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way
possible." A Motorola representative said that "your best source in
this case would be the FBI itself." Cingular, T-Mobile, and the CTIA
trade association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mobsters: The surveillance vanguard

This isn't the first time the federal government has pushed at the
limits of electronic surveillance when investigating reputed mobsters.
In one case involving Nicodemo S. Scarfo, the alleged mastermind of a
loan shark operation in New Jersey, the FBI found itself thwarted when
Scarfo used Pretty Good Privacy software (PGP) to encode confidential
business data. So with a judge's approval, FBI agents repeatedly snuck
into Scarfo's business to plant a keystroke logger and monitor its
output.

Like Ardito's lawyers, Scarfo's defense attorneys argued that the then-
novel technique was not legal and that the information gleaned through
it could not be used. Also like Ardito, Scarfo's lawyers lost when a
judge ruled in January 2002 that the evidence was admissible. This
week, Judge Kaplan in the southern district of New York concluded that
the "roving bugs" were legally permitted to capture hundreds of hours
of conversations because the FBI had obtained a court order and
alternatives probably wouldn't work.

The FBI's "applications made a sufficient case for electronic
surveillance," Kaplan wrote. "They indicated that alternative methods
of investigation either had failed or were unlikely to produce
results, in part because the subjects deliberately avoided government
surveillance."

Bill Stollhans, president of the Private Investigators Association of
Virginia, said such a technique would be legally reserved for police
armed with court orders, not private investigators. There is "no law
that would allow me as a private investigator to use that type of
technique," he said. "That is exclusively for law enforcement. It is
not allowable or not legal in the private sector. No client of mine
can ask me to overhear telephone or strictly oral conversations."

Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been
done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to
surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems
like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations.
When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in,
passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were
being monitored.

Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report last year said Spanish
authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that secretly
activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings.