Whistle-blowers.com

Using the internet to out governments is the latest political fad, and with good reason, many countries including ones with oppressive media laws are effectively using tools such a wikileaks to fight the status quo, although, such efforts don’t necessarily yield the ripest or sweetest fruit.

Bangkok- a group of anonymous internet activists has set up a website to display information about Thailand that comes from the whistle-blower Wikileaks, which is blocked to some viewers in the Southern Asian country.

The group calling itself “Wikicong” says that it set up the thaileaks.info site “as a tool to break the censorship”. An apparent reference to the alleged effort by the Thai government to block access to the material which includes a private video of the country’s Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. The video shows the prince having dinner with the woman who later became his wife.

The video is now being widely circulated around the country, which has a strict lese majeste law that mandates a jail terms in up to 15 years for anyone who “defames, insults or threatens” the royal family.

New York- Omoyele Sowore, a 39 year old political dissident from Nigeria now in exile in the US, has created a website that has come to be referred by many as “Africa’s Wikileaks”.

The site Sahara Repoters, is dedicates to the gathering up, from mostly anonymous sources, and then publishing all of the dirt it can find on corruption and political Skullduggery in Nigeria.

Its scoops are shielded by U.S libel laws, but the site has brought threats against Sowore, who is often publically denounced by political leaders back in Nigeria as a scandal-mongering criminal.

Since its launch five years ago, the site has tracked the overseas assets if several politicians, including a large, impoverished Nigerian state’s former governor whose holdings are reported to have included $6million London townhouse, a fleet of luxury cars that includes a 12 seat private jet .

The scoops go beyond corruption. Sowore said Sahara Reporters was the first news organisation to a produce a photo of the young Muslim terrorist from Nigeria who attempted an attack on a trans –Atlantic flight on Christmas Day.

“This is evidence-based reporting” , said Sowore . “We are here to check against corruption and bad government. If we have photographs of the corruption we post them.”

A lot the site’s scoops come from Nigerian who are angry and want to see a difference in their country. The site has also given Nigerians a journalistic watchdog that local reporters could not hope to duplicate. In Nigeria, reporters are routinely threatened with violence or bribed into silence.

There is no denying the importance of such online whistle-blowing platforms in media constrict countries. The anonymity they allow sources encourage participation and disempoweres governments from action. T he growth of sites will only increase with time and online population, but the initiation of social change by such companies will be the true deciding of their success.

North Korea takes on social networking

In a move that’s sure to leave the world scratching its head, the secretive nation of North Korea has become the newest member of Twitter. Using the Twitter name @uriminzok Korean for “our people” North Korea has taken the microblogging site as part of a rejuvenated PR campaign. The account’s first was post published on August 12 and four days since has attracted more than 7514 followers. Much like the country’s life long tyrant, it follows no one.

According to a new analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists, North Koreans live in the most censored country in the world. As the world’s deepest information void, the communists nation has no independent journalists, and all radio and television receivers sold in the country are locked to government-specific frequencies.

Last month to much surprise, the country’s government also opened a YouTube account uploading 78 clips in four weeks with most clips praising Kim Jong-Il . Not surprisingly however, the account appears to have bee set up by the government-owned news agency, Uriminzikkiri, one of the few to offer an English-language version of its content.

Lately, North Korea has been embracing social media, albeit for clearly dubious motives. It most defiantly isn’t looking to chit-chat about the latest episode of True Blood or even the 8th parallel, the latitude separating it from democratic mimesis South Korea. The Twitter account contains links to past speeches praising the regime’s dear leader Kim Jong-Il and a denunciation of reports that a North Korean torpedo sank South Korean warship Cheonan in March, while another criticised US led sanctions on North Korea and Iran.

Gilles Lordet, chief editor of Reporters Without Borders, said North Korea’s move into social media is the natural extension of government propaganda.

“For people inside North Korea this makes no difference at all. I don’t consider what they’re going to say on their Twitter page as honest or objective, so it’s not something we can welcome,” Lordet said.

Ironically, Twitter is blocked in South Korea and few people in the country even have access to a computer. Many of the country’s few followers posted derisive comments in Korean on the new account. Although the Twitter account can’t exactly be referred to as a success, the scathing comments left by locals on the site could eventually yield some results. I for one would never have imagined that the tyrannical regime would even allow such comments to be posted on the account, or at lest expectd drastic action to be taken as a response, but perhaps I utter too soon .

In North Korea all news is good news. According to the country’s rigidly controlled media, North Korea has never suffered from famine or poverty, and citizens would willingly sacrifice themselves and their loved ones for their leader. The website however, allows citizens to post anonymous comments of view point that would be considered anathema to the state.

The lead campaign

What happens when the world’s largest democracy teams up with its expansive media to create and pick a leader? The Lead India Campaign is such an initiative. Conceived by The Times of India , the campaign was aimed at the objective of identifying India’s future leader.

As the contest got keener, a fair share of public discussion centres at who amongst the contenders would ultimately emerge as the one best suited to lead a nation. The choice, ultimately, was whittled down to RK Misra from Bangalore and Devang Nananvati from Ahmedabad, with the former eventually being declared the winner.

However questionable the ethics of tailor making a leader might be, the initiative however, was not purely about identifying a winner. It was more about providing every right-thinking Indian a chance to step out of the comfort zone of talking about progress and getting down to the job of actually stewarding a nation, something that the Indian people got behind very quickly. The general public feels that the political process in their country has been hijacked, and what exists today is a system based on caste and creed, and therefore intelligent and able people are not getting the change to come forward.

If Lead India has been a success, a lot of the credit has to go to the multi-media campaign that was used to generate awareness about the initiative across the eight main cities of India. The campaign strategy involved print and TV advertising, a reality show, it also had an online presence through blogs, and social networking sites as well as YouTube.

Now the same initiative has been launched in South Africa calling on all citizens to respect the country’s laws and lead by example. The Lead SA call to action is the brain child of Primedia Broadcasting and is supported by Independent Newspapers. It aims to encourage action with immediate effect and reminds every South African to challenge negative perspectives, follow the rule of law and help change the country.

This campaign is on paper a perfect marriage between the media and political change. Primedia Broadcasting CEO Perry Volkwyn said that everyone can do something “ I think that people can do a lot of little everyday things that make a difference and it has to start somewhere with the small stuff. Lead SA is following former president Nelson Mandela ‘s call to the citizens of the country to be proactive about improving their lives. The campaign includes like India’s, an official video as well as other new media mediums such as blogs, social networking such as twitter and facebook.

Although the message and tone of the Lead SA campaign came off as slightly authoritarian and at times dangerously dogmatic, the project also shows media companies taking on a more positive stance about the county’s state and mobilising SA for positive action.

Primedia’s Yusuf Abramjee said that response so far has been overwhelming. “The response from the public has been phenomenon, with more than 100 000 South Africans having viewed the Lead SA website on the day of its opening and responding with thousands of ideas and suggestions”, he says.

The success of this particular initiative, we will have to wait and see.

Google breaches national laws

Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy dubbed it the “single greatest breach in the history of privacy”. Google is under fire from the Australian government for breaking the country’s privacy law when it collected private information from wireless networks for the internet giant’s Street View mapping service.

Goggle’s Street View service has been controversial since its launch in 2007. Privacy groups and authorities fear that people filmed without their consent might captured doing things they wouldn’t want publicised. Nearly half of the 60 worldwide legal or criminal investigations faced by Google relate to the company’s Street View service. Google’s products have been the subject of bans or threatened bans in at least 23 countries, and faces 33 lawsuits in the US alone, according to new estimates by the analysts Aqute Intelligence.

According to Australia’s Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, Google has breached the nation’s Privacy Act. The collection of private data for the project by Google is also seen as a serious matter, according to Curtis the Australian people should be appalled and should reasonably expect that private communications should remain private.

Under fire, Google has promised to conduct a privacy assessment on any new Street View projects involving personal information and regularly consult with the state about personal data collection activities in the future. Google has also agreed to publish an apology to Australians on its official blog, but has declined to comment beyond its blog statement.
The Australian Federal Police is also conducting a separate criminal investigation of Google over the project. The probe focuses in whether the company breached the country’s telecommunications interceptions act, which prevents people accessing electronic communications other than for authorised purposes.

Several other governments are investigating Google over the data collection, and there are growing concerns from regulators and consumer watchdogs worldwide that Google isn’t serious enough about people’s privacy, of course a charge the company refutes. In May, Google acknowledged it had mistakenly collected fragments of data over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries while it was collecting pictures of neighbourhoods for Street View , saying that it discovered the problem after German regulators launched an inquiry.

In the UK, the information commissioner ruled last year that Google’s Street View technology carries a small risk of privacy invasion but should not be stopped , although members of the public have taken direct action in at least one location to prevent the company from taking photographs on their streets.

And where does South Africa stand in these new proceedings? The country’s officials seem captivated by the project’s tourism capabilities. During the World Cup, seven of South Africa’s soccer stadiums were available on Street View a pitch level. Marthinus van Schalkwyk, minister of tourism believes that the service will be of great benefits to tourists allowing then them to explore tourist sites before physically gonging there.