November 09, 2005
Youths 'use blogs to plan riots'
WORLD
Youths 'use blogs to plan riots'
Wednesday, November 9, 2005 Posted: 1525 GMT (2325 HKT)
PARIS, France (Reuters) -- France's government is policing cyberspace as well as rundown suburbs in the battle to end two weeks of rioting.
Young rioters are using blog messages to incite violence and cell phones to organize attacks in guerrilla-like tactics they have copied from anti-globalization protesters, security experts say.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has diverted resources to monitoring blogs -- short for Web logs -- in an effort to anticipate the movements of the protesters, who have set fire to thousands of cars since the unrest began on October 27.
Two youths were placed under official investigation, one step short of
pressing charges under French law, early on Wednesday on suspicion of
inciting violence over the Internet after urging people to riot in blogs, a judicial source said.
But tracking rioters' blogs is a big task for the security services,
already stretched by the violence on the ground.
"This is a new dimension to take into consideration," said Internet
security expert Solange Ghernaouti-Helie.
"To do the tracking on the Internet to identify the people involved is
without doubt possible. But it requires considerable surveillance and
analysis resources," she said.
Blogs are easy-to-publish Web sites where millions of people post
commentary. Those allegedly posted by the two youths under investigation were made in online diaries hosted by Skyblog, a Web site belonging to popular youth radio station Skyrock.
Skyblog's site says it hosts over three million blogs, with thousands added each day. One of those urging people to riot -- since deactivated by Skyrock -- read: "Unite, burn the cops."
Some bloggers have urged people not to incite violence.
The host of bouna93.skyblog.com, a memorial blog for the two youths whose deaths sparked the riots, urged contributors to respect the dead boys, adding: "It would be preferable not to make racist, fascist comments or to give rendez-vous spots."
Youths are also using cell phones to coordinate the violence, mainly blamed on frustration over racism and unemployment, and to evade the police once the riots are underway.
"Text messages and mobile phones ... help small groups of rioters," said criminologist Alain Bauer. "They can connect easily. It's not only a way to avoid the police, it's a way to organize the fires."
The rioters have learnt from anti-globalization protesters, some of whom have used cell phones to coordinate riots at meetings of the Group of Eight industrial nations and the World Trade Organization in recent years, Bauer said.
"I think they learnt from what they saw on television. I think
anti-globalization movements and rioters have the same way to organize or to disorganize the police," he said. "It's old guerrilla tactics with modern technology."
The political establishment is also harnessing technology to amass and
organize support.
The ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) has tapped into intense Web traffic searching for information on the unrest to try to rally support for the tough line taken against rioters by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the party's president.
Since the weekend, searches on Google for words such as "riots" or "burned cars" in French have thrown up a link to a UMP site where readers are invited to put their names to a petition supporting Sarkozy's policy of "firmness".
A UMP official said more than 12,000 people had registered their support via the online petition since Sunday.
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November 07, 2005
Seeing is Believing - Cizek & Wintonick
Website accompanying the film Seeing is Believing, a fil by Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick of Necessary Illusions Productions of Montreal.
Posted by shade at 06:41 PM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2005
Handbook for Bloggers & Cyber-dissidents
Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers & Cyber-Dissidents
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February 20, 2005
Mediactivism : a situationism ?
En France, les antipubs, les chasseurs de pubs, les casseurs de pub, se battent pour resister à l'agression publicitaire...
Cousins francophones des "addbuster"...je connais moins bien le monde anglophone...Peut-etre que leurs pratiques et leur reception different selon les contextes...en France, leurs actions sont très controversées.
www.antipub.net
GRAFFITIS MEDIATIQUES SUR LES PUBS DU METRO.
Le Metro Parisien est connu pour ses grands panneaux publicitaires...et ses graffitis refractaires.
En prenant ces photos dans le métro parisien, j'ai du attirer l'attention sur ce que racontaient ces grafitti..à deux reprises, dans la rame de métro, cela à donner lieu à un débat animé sur les médias, et la publicité...
Du moins, les actes de ces activistes font réfléchir...en dénoncant des pratiques,sur les lieux de leur "crime"...
Nous pourrions appeler cela, un activisme situé...ou situationiste.
(en reference au situationisme, et à l'organisation révolutionnaire qui fut mis en place en 1957, désireuse d'en finir avec la société de classes en tant que système oppressif et de combattre le système idéologique de la civilisation occidentale : la domination capitaliste. )
MEDIAS TACTIQUES ET TACTIQUES MEDIATIQUES
La multinationale Leclerc s'est mise à jouer le jeu de ces pratiques, en lancant une premiere vague de pub, durant l'été 2004, qui mimait les graffiti rageurs des casseurs de pub (prix furieusement barés, réécris à la bombe ou au marqueur)
Leclerc sort en ce moment une nouvelle campagne cette fois ci inspirée de mai 68:
"Il est interdit d'interdir la baisse des prix."
"La hausse des prix oppresse votre pouvoir d'achat."
...l'entreprise affiche son coté "militant".
voir l'article du monde :
....http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3236,36-398727,0.html
...jeu de mots, jeu d'images, jeu de dupes...
Posted by icianita at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)
Le sale Marché
Posted by icianita at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)
L'abrutissement
Posted by icianita at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)
Activism-Online or On the Ground?
Image is from Shawn Ewald's Solidarité: A Quebec Diary. Other images from the Quebec City FTAA Summit can be found from photographer Jo-Anne McArthur's site.
Excerpt from Sandra Smeltzer and Leslie Regan Shade, Resisting the Market Model of the Information Highway, PP.226-237 in Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest, ed. Mike McCauley (Armonk N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe), 2003.
Mobilization for protests at the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) meetings in Quebec City in April 2001 also involved a vigorous on-line strategy, as a diverse range of NGOs, citizen groups and spontaneously-created affinity groups used websites, listservs, and e-mail to coordinate, strategize (in light of the security perimeter erected to detract protesters), and then report on both the official government-sponsored meeting, the NGO People’s Summit, and the actual street protest. Sylvia Ostry refers to such use of the Internet to bring together disparate groups that share a common theme (in this case, anti-globalization) as “dissent.com”— “a new service industry: the business of dissent… that is very effectively operated by a core group of NGO’s headed by a new breed of policy entrepreneurs” (2001, 7). Not only is dissent.com’s function to coordinate and organize on-the-ground demonstrations; it is also, as Ostry explains, to create “the libretto for the street operas and the TV sound bites that inevitably accompany the counter-meetings… examples of sound bite versions at Seattle were ‘Fix it or nix it’…these slogans circulate on the Internet and one can hear echoes in newspaper and television interviews, at student meetings, and so on. As soon as a book or pamphlet is published summaries are circulated and the message is spread. The Internet clearly is having an unprecedented impact on the diffusion of information and the process has just begun." (2001, 7).
Dissenting groups involved in the FTAA protest, which utilized the Internet as an instrument for coordination, included the Montreal-based SalAMI, WomenAction, the Stop FTAA group, the Convergence des Lutes Anti-Capitalists (Carnival Against Capitalism) and established NGOs such as the Council of Canadians and Solidarity Network. The Quebec Indymedia also posted news, commentaries, digital photographs and videography. As Castells specifies, an anti-globalization movement (such as this FTAA protest) is more than “simply a network, it is an electronic network, it is an Internet-based movement. And because the Internet is its home it cannot be disorganized or captured. It swims like fish in the net ” (2001, 142).
Returning to the new climate of criminalizing dissent, we must then ask: if the Internet helps to coordinate the convergence of citizens outside of an international meeting such as the FTAA, only to have these citizens turned away and even possibly charged as terrorists, how effective, then, is the Internet in its oppositional role? Certainly, the Internet is valuable in facilitating the spread of information about onerous pieces of legislature and threats to our civil rights. As Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999) and Naomi Klein (1999) have argued, the Internet has been used to spread information about exploitative labor practices, the plight of domestic and distant workers, of gross consumerism at the expense of social concerns and the criminalization of dissent. However, a vicious circle has emerged. Assuming that The Bills discussed above become law, will give organizations such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) will possess increased power to monitor and track our Internet usage in order to pinpoint possible security risks to our country (especially considering that the definition of “terrorist” acts has been expanded since 9-11). Similarly, under the new Patriot (Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act in the United States, intelligence agencies have been given greater authority to track individuals suspected of terrorist activities. In light of recent concerns regarding security in both Canada and the United States, these modifications may not seem unreasonable. However, privacy advocates and civil libertarians are concerned that these new laws will push citizen rights into a precarious situation (see resources at the Center for Democracy and Technology at URL: http://www.cdt.org/security/usapatriot/analysis.shtml).
Castells, M. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Dyer-Witheford, N. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 1999.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf, 1999.
Ostry, S. “Dissent.Com: How NGO’s are Re-making the WTO”. Policy Options/Options Politiques: 6-15, June 2001.
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