[wsfii-discuss] Bloggers in Prison, Too

[Rob Dyke]

“Today Tunisia, Iran, China… there are lots of things that people can’t 
see there. They can see them with a bit of effort, but most people don’t 
know how to make that effort.”

I want to highlight parts of the transcript of a meeting entitled 
“Bloggers in Prison, Too” 
<http://www.political-explorations.info/en/wiki/Bloggers_in_Prison%2C_Too>, 
which took place on 18 March 2007 at the Centre for Socialist Studies in 
Cairo, Egypt. The background for the meeting was the case of Abd 
Al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, an Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in 
prison for contempt of religion. The discussion touched on many 
subjects, including the worldwide battle against freedom of expression, 
the state of Egypt’s opposition groups, young people’s participation in 
protests, the political role of blogs, the loss of privacy and the 
spread of wireless Internet technology.

Thanks to Benjamin Geer for the translation and the post to [nettime-e] 
that popped it up on my radar.

http://www.political-explorations.info/en/wiki/Bloggers_in_Prison%2C_Too

The full discussion makes fascinating reading but I wanted to draw 
attention to the a few WSFII-salient parts…

“Today if you go to my home town in Buhaira, in Al-Kawm Al-Ahdar, you’ll 
find wireless internet antennas on the towers in which pigeons are 
raised. That’s a local area network. They can block web sites so that 
when I’m sitting in Egypt I can’t see that’s out there, but as soon as 
something gets into our local area network, it will spread” ( page 14 / 
50:34 )

“All this is still at the stage of technology that the law permits. When 
we get to the stage where I say no, why should I just set up the kind of 
antenna that they allow me to have? I’m going to set up an antenna that 
can reach a distance of 100 kilometres, and the government won’t be able 
to do anything about it. Then we’ll see that there’s absolutely no way 
to block anything. It’ll be a completely decentralised network. They 
won’t be able to do anything about it.” ( page 14 / 50:57 )

“Some of it [decentralising networks] will be done by activist networks. 
Some of it will be done by people as part of development work, and so 
on. The natural situation is for this alternative technology, leaving 
aside the question of its cost, to be adopted among the poor. And if 
it’s being adopted among the poor in sub-equatorial Africa, where 
experience and scientific knowledge are very limited, I don’t see why it 
wouldn’t happen in Egypt, where we still have universities, graduates, 
engineers, inventors and so on.” ( page 18 / 1:25:45 )

http://www.wsfii.org/2007/06/26/what-can-not-been-seen/