This week’s Letter from London illustrates the friction between rumor and reality on an extremely hyperlocal scale, so please bear with me. On the morning of Saturday, August 7, I woke at my usual time of around 6.30am and made myself a cup of coffee. After a 15-month-long pandemic, which has seen gyms and group sports largely locked down, I had begun retraining for ParkRun, a free, weekly series of timed events held across the world and organized by a U.K. charity. 

I was almost certainly going to leave my house around 7.30 a.m. for a run around the local Finsbury Park, which would end with another coffee overlooking a nearby nature reserve. That might sound like a healthy way to begin the weekend, but unfortunately, I was also scrolling through my Twitter feed. #FinsburyPark was trending — a rare phenomenon — and I decided to have a look. I now wish I hadn’t. 

The hashtag’s top tweets were a mixture of chaos, rumors and rebuttals. In a nutshell, something major had happened or not happened overnight. Getting to the bottom of it took some time, but a toxic mixture of facts and lies eventually emerged. At around 7.45 p.m. the previous evening, dozens of police were dispatched to an address around the corner, to investigate a tip-off that that as many as 70 venomous snakes had escaped a residential address. Officers shut down a road close to my home at around 8 p.m. and carried out a series of searches for just over an hour, before declaring the incident to be the result of a hoax call. 

One reason why the rumor went viral was because a Twitter account with over 100,000 followers named @CrimeLdn had posted footage, ostensibly from the scene, showing a large police presence, with the caption: “Estimated 70 poisonous snakes have escaped from a flat (according to the police) on the road between Manor House and Finsbury Park.” The footage can be viewed here. 

While @CrimeLdn, an account that usually shares reports of knife crime in the U.K., later confirmed that a member of the public had sent in false information, dozens of Twitter users were still sharing news of the allegedly escaped reptiles the following morning. @CrimeLdn’s correction also prompted criticism from other Twitter users about the importance of verification, using second sources, and the dangers of spreading fake news. 

By the time I had fixed myself a second coffee on Saturday morning to continue reading through the hashtag, I was half wondering whether running through my local park would be safe. I didn’t actually believe that 70 venomous snakes were on the loose in the area. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely sure what to believe. I mean, venomous snakes have escaped residential buildings in other parts of the world. One actually made a break for freedom from a Cologne apartment in February. Coverage of the incident had also leaked to other parts of the internet. I saw the story published on several London news sites. Debunking of the hoax appeared throughout the day on national tabloid websites, including The Mirror and Metro. 

I did go for a run and, eventually, continued with the rest of my day, but the whole fiasco has reminded me of how the hollowing out of local news sources has left a void in our digital spaces. As much of Coda Story’s work demonstrates, a tsunami of fake news is an ongoing and persistent menace in countries around the world, including the U.S., Spain and Pakistan. Much of it is unleashed by political, religious, anti-science or business interests. Some of the most disturbing violence around the world has also been caused by the dissemination of fake news in hyperlocal situations. My experience seemed worthy of inquiry. 

I recently messaged @CrimeLdn to ask about the incident, in an attempt to find out how this kind of misinformation can spread across digital platforms and affect the lives of ordinary people. After several requests, an account administrator agreed to a short interview via Twitter Messages. I asked if moderators felt bad about posting the original material. “We got a little bit of criticism but at the same time I think people know it was a hoax call and it did make us feel a bit bad,” read the reply. 

I also asked the media team at Twitter. The response I received wasn’t particularly informative about this specific incident, but here’s an extract: “We use a combination of technology and human review to identify misleading information on the service. This includes Tweets that contain content that violates our synthetic and manipulated media policy, our civic integrity policy, and our Covid-19 medical misinformation policy. As a uniquely open, public service, the clarification of falsehoods happens in seconds on Twitter.” 

I felt like I needed to speak with an expert, so arranged an interview with Professor Shakuntala Banaji, professor of media culture and social change at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I wanted to find out why so many people would share false information, even after it had been fact checked, eventually leading to the deployment of police at taxpayers’ expense. 

“People have come to believe that passing on information of whatever kind, whether you have checked it out or not, is a civic duty,” she said. “So, a lot of people who unwittingly get caught up in these kinds of both hyperlocal and national chains of misinformation are not necessarily fools or violent people or inclined towards prejudice. They have thought of themselves in this context as being a good citizen. They have a belief in their own integrity and have a belief in the person from whom they found the information.”

Later the same day, I went to a friend’s birthday party, and related the story to some guests who live in other parts of London. A couple said they had also experienced their own examples of hyperlocal fake news. There was also some light relief. I looked at Twitter again in the evening and one user had posted about Finsbury Park. The story had obviously moved on. He was paraphrasing actor Samuel L. Jackson’s soliloquy from “Snakes on a Plane.”

The post Letter From London: Snake news is fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

“I really rely on those payments to be able to get things for my daughter,” she told me, during a telephone conversation. “We’ve got her school uniform to buy in the next couple of months. That is a large chunk of money and a bit of a worry.”

Bates is one of tens of thousands of Hackney residents — the borough is home to some 280,000 people and 10,000 businesses — who have been affected by a crippling ransomware attack on the council’s website. (In the interest of full disclosure, I live in Hackney and use the website regularly.) The breach took place in October 2020, disabling a number of vital local services, including systems that allow residents to access social security benefits, and pay rent and council tax.

Over the past few years, ransomware attacks on public and private institutions, including councils, utility companies and banks, have become an increasingly common form of online terrorism. In late 2020, dozens of U.S. hospitals and healthcare organizations were hit by malicious code distributed by cyber-criminals. Security analysts said the hacks were tied to a Russian gang known as UNC 1878 or Wizard Spider

Large corporations and financial institutions have the means to pay off ransomware gangs. For example, Brazil-based JBS SA, the world’s largest meat processing company, gave the equivalent of $11m to hackers who broke into its computer system in June. 

However, U.K. local authority budgets have been progressively slashed since the financial crisis of 2008, rendering most councils incapable of spending such large sums of money, even if they could get past the miles of red tape necessary to do so. Hackney has faced some of the most brutal cuts in the country: the council’s core funding from central government has been reduced by £140m ($195m) since 2010 – a reduction of 45%. 

On top of that, years of underinvestment in new technologies have left many of them more or less wide open to criminal assaults that endanger vulnerable people, who rely on the digital services they provide.

The damage done by the Hackney ransomware attack highlights both the importance of local authority services — which include public housing, garbage collection and the upkeep of roads — and the parlous financial situation of many U.K. councils. 

Put simply, councils are not lucrative targets. Hackney set aside £2m in last year’s budget for future cyber attacks, but the borough is also having to make almost £11m of savings this year after incurring additional costs during the pandemic. Affected areas will include education, children and families services and public health.

The council, which employs 4,500 people, refuses to pay off the attackers and has not disclosed their identity or the amount demanded. Describing the incident as a “significant threat to the organization,” Hackney Council’s head of digital and data, Matthew Cain, detailed the chaos it has caused. 

“Ten years-plus of significant investment in technology was removed overnight,” he told me. “From that point, the question was not which systems were available, but what data could we find and how could we rebuild that from the ground up? We have had the best part of 200 people working on it solidly since October, which represents more than our total investment in IT in a typical year.”

To make matters worse, Hackney’s ransomware attack was quickly followed by a data leak. In January, a criminal group published the personal details of council staff and residents on the dark web. While experts said that the stolen data was “limited” and “not visible through search engines,” nine months on, digital services continue to be affected, including changes to existing benefits and council tax claims and payments.

The audacity of ransomware gangs has pushed the issue into the international spotlight. During a June summit in Geneva, U.S. President Joe Biden urged President Vladimir Putin to crack down on hackers operating in Russia. Biden warned of consequences should such activities continue unchecked. 

But it isn’t just criminal gangs who are targeting government institutions. In July, U.S. and Britain announced that Russian spies accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election have spent most of the past two years attempting to breach the digital security of hundreds of organizations worldwide. The announcement did not identify any of the targets by name, but said they included government offices, political parties, law firms and media organizations in the U.S. and Europe.

In the U.K., a number of other government institutions have been hit. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency was hit in December 2020. Repair work to its systems is still ongoing. Since 2019, Hull City Council, in the north of England, has suffered at least 10 serious incidents and thousands of phishing attempts by criminals seeking to steal login details. Ireland’s public healthcare system is also rebuilding its digital infrastructure after a May attack. 

Meanwhile, council workers and residents are left counting the costs. In Hackney, this will doubtless mean less money for already strained local services, which could deepen financial instability for those most in need. “This is going to be an 18-month recovery,” said Cain. “We will do that rather than doing all sorts of other things.”

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Videos posted to social media by protesters on Sunday have shown hundreds of people marching through Havana and elsewhere in anti-government demonstrations sparked by a worsening economic crisis. Food and medicine shortages, rising prices and Covid restrictions have seen ordinary Cubans unable to work in the island nation’s tourism industry and led to lengthy queues for basic food items. 

One video uploaded to Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles from Havana. 

Recently, shutting down the internet has become the repressive tool of choice for authoritarian governments. In countries throughout Africa, popular elections have occasioned nationwide internet closures. Russia has broadly cracked down on internet freedoms in tandem with attacks on the media. And since the internet was introduced in the country, the Chinese government has used its vast powers to control its digital spaces and censure online speech.

The three or four internet outages began at around 4pm local time on Sunday, according to Marianne Díaz Hernández, a Chile-based Fellow at the digital rights group, Access Now. “This means that there are some places where there is no internet. It is too early for us to know precisely which places are affected but we do know that Havana and places where the protests were more significant yesterday were most affected.”

The rollout of digital connectivity across Cuba has been painfully slow since President Miguel Díaz-Canel took office in 2018. Díaz-Canel, the first Communist Party leader to hold the post outside of the Castro family, looked to increase access to the internet for ordinary Cubans. Since 2018, all Cubans have had access to mobile and Wi-Fi internet services via the state-owned telecommunication company ETECSA.  

The state tightly monitors Cuba’s digital spaces — the island has one of the lowest internet connectivity rates in the Western Hemisphere and connections are poor. The internet is also heavily censored and sites are blocked by the government. Freedom House, an organization that ranks political and digital freedoms around the world, gave Cuba a 22 out of 100 in its 2020 “Freedom on the Net” report. 

Díaz Hernández said the Cuban government’s grip on the internet mirrors other aspects of the Communist Party’s control throughout the country. “We need to remember that this is a small part of a larger structure of control,” she said. “That it is not just that the internet is controlled by the government, it's that everything is controlled by the government. Cubans cannot have independent businesses, they cannot make many decisions by themselves.” 

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of digital network solutions and intelligence, said he first saw declines in internet traffic on Sunday afternoon. He tweeted a graph showing a reduction in internet traffic in and out of Cuba. He said he initially wasn’t sure whether to ascribe the outages to technical difficulties being experienced by the Cuban government. 

“I don’t know if they are having technical problems or if they are trying to shut down portions of the country,” said Madory, who first began tracking internet availability in Cuba in 2013. “This year there have been a number of outages, nothing quite like this. All these shutdowns are new to Cuba. In Cuba, the internet has long been inaccessible, not a lot of people have had access to it, it’s censored.”

In a televised speech on Sunday afternoon, Diaz-Canel, who heads the Communist Party, blamed the unrest on the United States, which in recent years tightened its nearly 60-year-old trade embargo on Cuba. Diaz-Canel said that the protests were a form of “systemic provocation” by dissidents working with the U.S.

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The document, signed by groups and individuals including Amnesty International and the Internet Freedom Foundation, demands a halt in all public investment in uses of technologies enabling mass surveillance and advocates for their prohibition in all public spaces.

The coalition was convened by the digital rights group Access Now, and the letter was drafted by European Digital Rights, Human Rights Watch, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor and a number of other organizations. Signatories from Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America include Big Brother Watch and Privacy International.

Biometric technologies have the capacity to identify and profile both individuals and populations around the world. Coda Story has previously reported on the use of facial recognition in Hyderabad, India and Moscow, and fingerprint and iris scans in Kenya.

The letter cites the threat of biometrics systems to human rights and civil liberties. It also warns of untrained staff at private facial recognition providers compiling databases of “suspicious” individuals, shared by private companies, which are not subject to official oversight, and the discrimination such practices could lead to.

“The use of these technologies to surveil people in city parks, schools, libraries, workplaces, transport hubs, sports stadiums, housing developments, and even in online spaces such as social media platforms, constitutes an existential threat to our human rights and civil liberties and must be stopped,” says the letter.

Daniel Leufer, a Brussels based Europe policy analyst at Access Now, told me that the window for regulating such technologies has passed. “If we have cameras capable of running live facial recognition or live gait or voice analysis to detect aggressive behavior littered throughout public spaces, our belief is that there is no way to safely and adequately regulate that and keep it in check,” he said. 

The years-long debate on the use of surveillance tools has included appeals for a moratorium on its use in the U.S. and recommendations for an outright ban by the EU privacy watchdog the European Data Protection Supervisor. In 2019, David Kaye, the then U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression, published a report calling for an immediate pause on the use and sale of surveillance tools and software. Kaye, a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, recommended that countries exporting surveillance technology like malware should sign up to the Wassenaar Arrangement, formally established in 1996 to promote transparency and greater responsibility in sales of conventional weapons.

Leufer added that pausing the use of biometric  would be inadequate. “We can’t have a situation where these technologies are in place in public spaces, they could be on, they could be off, that already creates a chilling effect,” he said.

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Vaccine hesitancy in individuals takes many forms, including a fear of side effects, skepticism about their efficacy and the misguided belief that the coronavirus does not pose a significant danger to health. Initiatives to increase vaccine uptake are not surprising, even in countries where denialism is relatively low. In the UK, where acceptance rates remain high, one recent study published in The Lancet found that around 10% of British adults have said that they will never take a Covid-19 vaccine, or will avoid doing so for as long as possible.

Many of the announced schemes aim to reboot ailing economic sectors, such as tourism, hospitality and retail, and to boost worker morale. Earlier this month, the Russian airline Aeroflot launched a dedicated program for flight and cabin crew, offering each fully vaccinated employee one additional paid vacation day.

In New York, vaccinated members of the public can claim a free serving of french fries from the gourmet burger chain Shake Shack, as publicized in an excruciating video featuring Mayor Bill de Blasio. Other food and drinks companies jumping on the bandwagon include Krispy Kreme, White Castle, Nathan’s Famous, Budweiser and Sam Adams.

The state of West Virginia has announced it will give out $100 savings bonds to all 16-to-35-year-olds who get vaccinated against Covid-19, including people who have already received a shot.

Meanwhile, one enterprising marijuana dispensary in Walled Lake, Michigan, is giving any vaccinated person over the age of 21 a free pre-rolled joint, in a campaign called “Pot for Shots.”

Perhaps the most generous offer so far is Ohio Republican governor Mike DeWine’s Vax-a-Million lottery initiative, in which vaccinated adult residents could win one of five $1 million lottery prizes. Ohio is also offering younger people the opportunity to win one full four-year college scholarship — so far, over 104,000 have registered. 

Earlier this month, a new vaccination site at a shooting range in Sparta, Illinois, announced it will give 100 free target rounds to those who are vaccinated there. “If you come and get vaccinated at the World Shooting Recreational Complex vax site — which is already completely free — you’ll get 100 FREE targets of trap, skeet, or sporting clays, to use any time before the end of October,” said Illinois’ Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker. “These vaccines are incredibly effective and protective for the person who gets them, but just as important, they make the whole community safer."

In less wealthy countries, special offers are being aimed at communities that have been hit hard by the economic effects of the pandemic. A town of 43,000 in northern Thailand has launched a raffle for vaccinated residents to win one live cow per week for the rest of 2021. “Our vaccine registration numbers have gone from hundreds to thousands in a couple of days," district chief Boonlue Thamtharanurak told Reuters. "The villagers love cows. Cows can be sold for cash."

Not everyone agrees that incentivization works. Anna Baker, senior lecturer in health psychology at London Metropolitan University, believes that cash incentives or prizes are “unlikely to pick up all of those people who are resistant.” 

“It depends on who is being targeted, because it may not get over those psychological barriers by giving someone a financial reward,” she said.

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Tin had steered clear of Facebook since the armed forces deposed the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. He was concerned that he would be attacked on social media: his family in Myanmar has longstanding connections to the country’s powerful military. Tin’s father and grandfather — both retired — were once officers in the air force, a captain and brigadier general, respectively.

In the two-and-a-half months since the coup, over 730 civilians have been killed by security forces and thousands more arrested. Nationwide protests have also paralyzed large sections of the country. While anti-military protesters continue to voice their objections to the takeover online and off, anger and suspicion has driven some of them to target individuals who have entrenched family links to Myanmar’s armed forces.

In the March 4 post, Tin explained to the 650,000 followers of his page, Zeyar Vlogs, that he had been absent from social media because his personal Facebook account had been attacked. He added that his family’s security in Myanmar had been compromised. “Therefore, in order to be able to fight for the cause without affecting anyone’s safety, I decided to stay off social media,” he said.

Tin’s 10-minute clip, narrated in Burmese, received nearly 9,000 comments, many of them confrontational or abusive. “Can anyone believe the words of an ignorant man?” asked one user. “Shut your mouth, you sucker. Never come back,” read another post.

“People are very angry and frustrated at anybody who has ties to the military, because we can all see what the military has been doing,” said Tin, during a recent telephone conversation. 

Tin launched the Zeyar Vlogs account in 2018. Until the coup, he usually posted videos about his life in the U.K., including the five years he studied for a medical degree at Glasgow University, advice on nutrition and trips to towns and cities such as the northern English seaside resort of Blackpool. The March 4 video was the first time he had publicly criticized the coup and the military to his followers. It racked up nearly 6,000 shares.

With over 400,000 soldiers, according to the U.K.-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Myanmar’s military — also known as the Tatmadaw — is the nation’s largest employer. It ruled the country from 1962 until 2011, when the slow process of democratic reform first began. It has also maintained a tight grip on the nation’s finances through investments in a number of industries, including tobacco, mining, real estate and banking. 

Experts say the attacks on pro-democracy activists who have links to the military indicate rising levels of suspicion within the protest movement. 

“It started off with identifying the sons and daughters of the absolute top leaders, many of whom were studying or living overseas in the United States or Australia,” said Professor Ian Holliday, vice-president and pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong and the author of “Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar.” 

“As the stresses and the strains of the movement have increased, we have seen that there has been a lot more ad-hoc finger pointing at people. Some of it is probably identifying the next tier down in the military hierarchy.” 

In many cases, the children and relatives of the Tatmadaw’s top brass have made no public statements about the events of February 1. Disagreements about the role of the military in Myanmar certainly cut both ways. Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a pro-democracy activist based in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, has family ties to the Tatmadaw. Her grandfather, father and uncles were all in the army. She explained that people with similar connections who disagree with the coup may find it difficult to express their opinions. 

“I think, if their family members are in the military, it is quite challenging for them to come out,” she said. “They worry about their family or that their parents might threaten them.”

“I face a lot of criticism about my opinion of the military or their ideology, from my own friends, from my own family members,” she added. “I have been named as disloyal to the institution. That’s how I have been framed by the military people.”

Yi said that while she tries to avoid confrontation with family members who support the military, the coup and the escalating violence in Myanmar can dominate conversations. 

“They know my positions and I know their positions, so when we have to talk about something, we end up arguing,” she said. “I know their limits and they know my limits, so we don’t cross the line most of the time,” she added.

Social media and shaming

For the past two months, protestors have used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to target junta members and their relatives living in several countries — including Myanmar, Australia and the United Kingdom — using the hashtag #socialpunishment. Those accused of benefiting from the Tatmadaw have often been referred to as “maggots.”

In March, activists launched the website, Socialpunishment.com, which features details of 120 individuals with military links who have been accused of failing to speak out against the coup. The profiles, which have been widely shared on social media, contain photographs of the individuals in question and rank them on a “traitor” scale from low to elite. 

The aggressive nature of the #socialpunishment campaign has obvious shortcomings. Bryan Tun, a doctor at Redland Hospital in Queensland, Australia, told me that he has been abused on social media, even though he is not listed on the site. Tun has no links to the military, regularly posts Facebook messages in support of the protest movement and is a longtime supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi. He has also attended pro-democracy protests in Australia and donated funds to Myanmar’s civil disobedience movement.

Tun said he was attacked on Facebook feed because he is the son of Myanmar’s commerce minister, Pwint San, who was appointed after the coup. While he disagrees with his father’s decision to accept the role, he says that it took time to convince detractors of his loyalty to the pro-democracy movement. 

“They would post my personal photos — not only me, but also of other children whose parents took up positions given by the military,” he said. 

In the eight weeks since posting his first anti-coup video, Tin, the doctor based in the U.K., has intensified his political activism. Earlier this month, he took part in a pro-democracy protest outside the Myanmar embassy in London. Last Saturday, on a clear and sunny morning, he travelled to the capital again to take part in a three-day hunger strike being held by the Myanmar Students' Union, an organization that represents Myanmar nationals studying in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Like many opponents of the coup living outside Myanmar, Tin worries that his criticism of the military will result in the punishment of his family members back home. Earlier this month, he learned that his friend, the popular actor May Toe Khine had been arrested for supporting the anti-coup protests. 

“In the UK, I always have to consider, no matter what I speak, ‘Is this going to get my grandparents in trouble, my parents in trouble?’” he said. “Because I am away, I feel like I am really exposing my parents. Instead of them worrying about me, most times I am worried about them.”

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Dozens of tracks by hip-hop artists living inside Myanmar and abroad have been uploaded to social media platforms and streaming sites, including Facebook, YouTube and Soundcloud. The music marks a new front in an ongoing information war against the military junta.

In the six weeks since the overthrow of the elected government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi of the National League for Democracy party, martial law has been imposed in districts across the country. At least 149 people have been killed by police and security forces, and another 1,800 have been detained. Last Sunday, in the deadliest day of protests so far, 74 people lost their lives in Yangon and Mandalay, the nation’s two largest cities.

Hip-hop tracks criticizing the military began to appear online within days of the coup. One of the most popular — “End Game” by Nay Ye Khant, Adjustor, Yung Hugo, GRACEe, D-Vision, Young Yair and EilliE — has been viewed over 200,000 times on YouTube.

It describes Myanmar’s current authoritarian crackdown — the country’s third period of military rule since gaining independence from Great Britain in 1948 — as a fight for freedom and democracy. 

Over a chanted chorus, rapper Nay Ye Khant solemnly outlines stakes in the weeks and months ahead: “The last battle, the last battle, the final ending/ The people must win, the truth must prevail/ The last battle, the last battle, the final ending/ We shall revolt and end the dictatorship and its roots.”

Speaking by telephone, Khant explained how violence by the police and armed forces, as well as a number of new restrictions on everyday liberties, compelled him and his friends to write “End Game.” 

“The military started making laws, like we can’t go out between 8pm and 4am, and we started losing our rights, like they cut the internet between one and nine in the morning,” he said. “They have raided neighborhoods and homes at night for no reason, shot at houses and arrested people involved in the movements against them.”

Khant, who has over 34,000 followers on Facebook, added, “It is getting worse day by day, so we have to end this as soon as possible.”

From the U.S. civil rights movement to apartheid-era South Africa, music has long played an important role in political struggles. Born of the New York party scene in the late 1970s, hip-hop rapidly became a powerful medium for messages of empowerment and social justice. But, when Public Enemy’s Chuck D commented back in 1989 that the genre was “the Black CNN,” he may not have fully imagined how far it would spread or the number of causes it would give voice to worldwide.

The past two years have seen hip-hop on the front lines at global protests. In the U.S., Black Lives Matter has motivated dozens of MCs — including Run The Jewels, Meek Mill and Ty Dolla $ign — to release songs highlighting police brutality, racism and inequality. Elsewhere, British rappers have responded to the country’s knife crime crisis and artists in Hong Kong have expressed their support for the pro-democracy movement.

“Hip-hop is about rising up against oppression,” said Khant. “That’s how hip-hop walks in the world.”

The quick release of dozens of anti-coup hip-hop songs also speaks to the freedoms only recently enjoyed by local musicians. Myanmar has a long history of censoring music. When the military first seized power in 1962, the authorities regularly banned songs they deemed subversive. This led to the creation of a style of music known as “copy thachin” or “copy song,” in which local artists rewrote and toned down hits by songwriters like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to fit prevailing national sensibilities.

As the process of democratization began in the mid-2000s, restrictions began to loosen, and Myanmar developed thriving hard rock and heavy metal scenes. Now, hip-hop is the dominant youth genre. In 2015, Zayar Thaw, whose group Generation Wave helped pioneer rap music within the country, was elected to parliament as a member of the National League for Democracy.

Dr Jane M. Ferguson, a lecturer in Southeast Asian history and anthropology at Australian National University in Canberra, believes that the outpouring of anti-coup rap performs an important function in Myanmar’s protest movement. “It’s giving it a creative and interesting package that attracts the attention of outsiders, but also it can galvanize support across generations,” she explained.

Ferguson also cited the traditional poetry style of thanjat, which has historically been used to mock and satirize the powerful, as an antecedent to today’s anti-junta hip-hop tunes. “You already have this cultural affinity or propensity or skill to be able to come up with this form of rhythmic, rhyming poetry, which has always been political as well,” she said.

On February 3, two days after the military takeover, the Yangon-based rapper Louz Xa Lone, 24, released a track titled “The Voices.” Over a keyboard melody and a speeded up hook sampled from Laura Lee’s 1971 ballad “Two Lovely Pillows,” he considers a bleak future for Myanmar. “What is life like for all of us?/ Can’t even think about it in this country’s situation/ Wrong sayings are still maintained until the next generation.”

The tune has picked up 7,000 likes and 2,000 shares on Facebook. “After the military coup, almost everyone, including me, lost their future,” Lone said, via email. “It is depressing to live in this darkening life right now.”

The rapper, who has over 84,000 followers on Facebook and has been making music for six years, said he wrote the lyrics to “The Voices” in one evening, ahead of a recording session in a Yangon studio. 

“The one thing I know is that the military is the main obstacle to the development of our country — we don’t want them anymore,” he said.

Hip hop artists based in Myanmar have also been joined by others living outside of the country. Rapper Vanzzzo, 22, a Myanmar national who claimed asylum in the U.S. in 2009, released “Rebel (Save Myanmar)” earlier this month. 

Like a number of songs about the coup, it takes an uncompromising view of life under military rule: “Me and my people, yeah, we’re the rebels/ We ain’t gonna live like cattle/ Mark my words, we ain’t never gonna settle/ Till we get our freedom/ We just want peace, not pistols.”

“The first couple of days, I couldn’t do anything because it was just overwhelming,” Vanzzzo, who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, said of his reaction to the military takeover. “I couldn’t write. I couldn’t do anything, no inspiration, nothing.”

In addition to music, hip-hop culture has always provided other avenues of expression. One in particular has been highly visible throughout the protests, with graffiti writers drawing anti-coup murals and slogans on buildings and roads around the country. 

Si Thu Aung, from Mandalay, has painted wall pieces in a number of towns and cities over the past six weeks. “I’m a graffiti artist,” he told me, via Facebook messenger. “We don’t have weapons, we have only art, so we will revolt with our art until everyone knows our voice all over the world.”

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The February 1 power grab, which ousted the elected government of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has placed a number of businesses in the spotlight. International and local companies with links to the security forces have come under growing pressure from activists who say the firms are complicit in war crimes committed by the armed forces. 

Myanmar’s powerful armed forces have long maintained a tight grip on the country’s finances by investing in a number of lucrative sectors, including mining, tobacco, garment manufacturing and banking. A recent Amnesty International investigation found that shareholders in a secretive business conglomerate called Myanma Economic Holdings Limited — which is linked to international businesses such as the Japanese drinks giant Kirin Holdings and INNO Group, a South Korean property developer — have received payments of up to $18 billion over the past 20 years.

Last week, Kirin Holdings announced it will abandon its partnership with a brewery part-owned by army generals. In a statement, the company said it was “deeply concerned” by the recent actions of the military and would be “taking steps as a matter of urgency to put this termination into effect.”

The focus on businesses connected to the armed forces has spurred the release of new mobile apps from activists in Myanmar seeking to weaken the income of the now ruling junta. Last week, the Myanmar-based company Genxyz launched an app titled Way Way Nay (Stay Away). It lists 250 companies, including financial institutions, retail concerns, construction firms, media outlets and health and beauty manufacturers with links to the military. Way Way Nay, which is available on both Google Play and Apple’s App Store, has been downloaded 70,000 times since its launch.

In an interview, the app’s operations manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was looking at adding another 450 businesses to the list. “We wanted to be able to show ordinary people in Myanmar how the military is linked with all aspects of daily life. We thought an app would be a good way to remind people what to boycott when they are shopping for products or services,” he said.

The military’s efforts to quell Myanmar’s largest pro-democracy protests in more than a decade have led to increasingly repressive crackdowns in the past month. According to human rights groups, more than 50 people have been killed and nearly 1,700 detained since the armed forces took control of the country. 

On Wednesday, at least 38 people were killed, when security forces fired on protesters in multiple cities and towns across the country. Video footage apparently taken by residents in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, appeared to show security officials shooting one man at point-blank range. In a separate incident, CCTV footage published by Radio Free Asia showed police assaulting and detaining three ambulance workers. 

The severity of the official response to the protests marks a hardening of the junta’s attitude to daily demonstrations that have paralyzed the economy and large swaths of the country. On Thursday, Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Myanmar's security forces to halt their "vicious crackdown on peaceful protesters" and urged the military to release the hundreds of people believed to have been unlawfully detained since February 1.

Blacklist Myanmar, launched on March 3 on Android, is another guidebook for shoppers who want to avoid firms whose sales benefit Myanmar’s armed forces. Blacklist Myanmar also allows users to submit new suggestions for businesses to boycott via an in-app email function.

The app’s creator, who asked to go by the pseudonym Red Warrior, explained that it was designed to limit the military’s access to different revenue streams. “In the long term, the reason why they have all the power and all the influence is because of these businesses and brands that they have been promoting,” he said.

“If people don’t support these brands or services, then our money won’t go into the military regime. We can slowly cut down their monopolizing influence on the country.”

Myanmar’s digital activists have also created apps to warn ordinary citizens and protesters of the increased presence of police and troops on the streets. Launched on Android on February 11, Genz Map Live takes real-time data from users to highlight areas with a high concentration of security personnel. The app, which has 40,000 users already, also reveals the locations of water cannons, roadblocks and ambulances. All of the data is fact-checked by moderators before it is uploaded.

One of the makers of Genz Map Live told me that the app’s designers took their cue from a similar digital street map used by protesters during pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019. He added that members of his team consulted an anonymously authored 70-page document named “The HK19 Manual,” which has been widely shared among protesters in Hong Kong and recently translated from English to Burmese.

Digital democracy and milk tea

Over the past month, digital activists in Myanmar have had to overcome a series of military-enforced internet outages and disruptions to mobile networks. On Thursday night, the UK-based organization Netblocks confirmed that national internet connectivity had plummeted for the 19th night in a row, to 13% of pre-coup levels.

Pro-democracy organizers in Southeast Asia say that Myanmar’s internet shutdowns are similar to those deployed by authoritarian governments elsewhere. Sunny Chou, a former Hong Kong protester and founder of the human rights group Umbrella Union, who sought asylum in the UK earlier this year, said that the interruption of internet and data services in Myanmar was a strategy widely employed by the authorities in Hong Kong. 

“During the height of the movement in Hong Kong, there were a few times when our apps were disabled,” he said. “Telegram was also attacked a few times, so that the protesters could not properly communicate and organize their response.”

However, as Myanmar’s pro-democracy demonstrations have gathered pace, the country’s digital insurgency has also sparked interest among online and offline activists in the region. In Thailand, Cambodia and Hong Kong — all places that have been rocked by pro-democracy protests in recent years — an informal but watchful alliance of like-minded campaigners has used the internet to highlight the ongoing violence in Myanmar, while shedding light on their own oppressive regimes.

Sina Wittayawiroj is a Bangkok-based visual designer and activist. He first took an interest in his country’s pro-democracy movement in January 2019, when demonstrators took to the streets after the country’s ruling military junta signaled that long-postponed elections would be delayed for the fifth time in five years.

Activists like Wittayawiroj have gathered on social media, spreading satirical memes and advice highlighting the violence in Myanmar under the hashtag #MilkTeaAlliance, named for a sweet drink popular across the region. Many who follow the hashtag share a common fear about China’s dominance in wider Asia. In Thailand, for example, support for Taiwan and Hong Kong has become a rallying point for ordinary citizens who believe their own government is anti-democratic and too closely aligned with Beijing.

Wittayawiroj, who works for a video production and streaming platform, said he learned about the current crisis in Myanmar from a Burmese co-worker. He has regularly posted illustrations featuring the #MilkTeaAlliance hashtag since Myanmar’s February 1 coup. “I talk to them a lot and try to understand the situation that people are facing. I understand there was an election, but the military took control. I felt I had to draw something to help them.”

Experts say that the #MilkTeaAlliance has been energized by regional protest movements. 

“When we had the very popular pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019, the world was watching,” said Debby Chan, a Hong Kong-based researcher who studies Sino-Myanmar relations. “The activists in Thailand and Myanmar also paid close attention to what happened in Hong Kong back then.”

“When some of the Hong Kongers witness Thai and Myanmar activists in their struggle, we see ourselves,” she added.

Correction: An earlier version of this story included a video recording of Myanmar Map Live. This has been corrected to Genz Map Live.

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For digital startups, the interruptions to the internet and phone networks have led to constant turmoil. According to Shady Ramadan, who founded the online food delivery service Yangon Door2Door in 2013, orders fell by 80% in the days after the February 1 coup. “I’m really worried for my business,” said Ramadan, 44, during a recent telephone conversation. “Right now, I feel like we are turning backwards and I fear there is no one to talk to.”

Ramadan’s company employs 300 bicycle couriers, who deliver over 2,000 orders a day in Myanmar’s largest cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Bagan. Before the internet shutdown, the riders worked in eight hour shifts until midnight and Ramadan was planning to expand to a 24-hour service. A curfew enforced by the military now means that last orders must be processed by 6pm.

While orders to Yangon Door2Door have recovered to around 1,000 a day, the decline in business has cut the couriers’ monthly incomes by 50%. Ramadan said he was considering both cuts to wages and lay-offs. Riders who once earned around $300 a month, including commission and tips, have seen their pay drop to $150.

Unlike companies such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats, whose couriers are broadly classified as self-employed, Yangon Door2Door employs around 450 staff. “Our messengers are full-time employees,” said Ramadan, who was born in Egypt and moved to Myanmar in 2010. “This is different from other food delivery companies around the world.”

The Myanmar coup took most of the international community by surprise. Only three months after the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election, the army seized power and declared a year-long state of emergency. Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and senior members of the NLD were placed under house arrest, and power now rests with military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The armed forces moved quickly to gain control of the country’s institutions. Both internet and mobile data services were suspended and have since experienced sustained interruptions. Last week, Netblocks, a UK-based organization that monitors digital rights around the world, said the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had also been blocked in Myanmar. 

The military alleges that widespread election fraud was to blame for the defeat of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party. Near daily protests peaked on Monday with millions taking to the streets across the country in mass strikes. The demonstrations are now being referred to as the “Five 2s” uprising, named for the date they began: 22/02/2021.

President Joe Biden has issued an executive order imposing financial sanctions against 10 individuals linked to the coup and steps are being taken to block military access to $1 billion of Myanmar government funds held in the U.S. Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken posted a tweet in support of protesters in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

“The United States will continue to take firm action against those who perpetrate violence against the people of Burma as they demand the restoration of their democratically elected government,” it read. “We stand with the people of Burma.”

On the day of the coup, cuts to the internet and mobile data meant that customers could no longer access Yangon Door2Door’s app or website. “We are an online business, everything for us is based on the internet,” said Ramadan. “Our guys out in the street are based on the internet. If there’s no internet, we’re down.”

The staff worked up a solution by reverting to how restaurants once delivered food in the years before online connectivity. Workers sent text messages to regular customers and asked them to call to place orders.

Ramadan says the internet shutdowns have affected his company’s growth. He adds he will soon have to halt deliveries in Bagan and lay off workers. He also believes the outages are harming Myanmar’s small but vibrant e-commerce economy, valued at about $6 million in 2019.

“People sell things on Facebook, it’s a huge market here,” said Ramadan. “Whether it is food, or whether they import things from Singapore and sell them. They buy from Amazon and bring stuff to Myanmar. There are thousands and thousands of online businesses. All of them now have been switched off. Even if these businesses are two to three people, they are supporting families and there’s a trickle-down effect.”

Targeting the internet

The military junta’s crackdown on the internet and mobile data services has intensified since February 1. A cyber security bill released on February 11 proposes granting the regime a wide range of new powers, including requiring online service providers in Myanmar to locally store user data for three years. While the law doesn’t specify what kinds of companies might be affected, individuals convicted of failing to manage data in line with the cyber security bill could be jailed for up to three years, fined up to $7,500, or both.

The draft bill also gives the new government access to users’ personal data for security purposes and allows the authorities to force platforms to remove online content that threaten Myanmar’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” According to more than 150 local civil society groups, the 36-page document could pave the way for serious privacy and human rights abuses.

The military appears to be making calculated decisions about when ordinary citizens can access the internet. A nighttime curfew has been backed up by new daily internet blackouts. Recent data from Netblocks shows that the internet in Myanmar has been operating at around 13% of ordinary levels between 1am and 9am.

Yet those taking part in the country’s ongoing civil disobedience continue to livestream protests and strikes, with campaigners saying that the military’s control of the internet has been chaotic.

“We saw at the beginning they were chasing after social media platforms, shutting down Facebook, shutting down Twitter,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK. “Then they were shutting down the whole internet for two days, then starting it back up again, and then the overnight shutdowns. It seems like they are scrambling and don’t know exactly what to do and how to cope with the situation.”

Even though the military seems unwilling or unprepared to build a permanent wall around Myanmar’s internet, the disruptions have served to underscore the sometimes fragile link between emerging democracies and the freedoms widely believed to be enshrined in the world wide web. Long before this month’s army takeover, Myanmar was an important test bed for the use of new technologies in the decades-long struggle between the country’s military and its opposition groups.

Myanmar was an early example of how activists could harness the internet for positive change, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a sweeping victory in 1990’s first multiparty election in three decades. The military junta refused to recognize the results or hand over power. Suu Kyi was also placed under house arrest and the army banned her and other senior pro-democracy figures from taking part in elections.

Suu Kyi’s arrest galvanized global internet users who mobilized against the military. Digital mailing lists like BurmaNet, launched in 1993, shed light on the country’s worsening human rights situation by sharing news reports about Myanmar. BurmaNet proved to be so popular that in 1997, the military regime initiated its own rival electronic mailing list, called MyanmarNet.

Local and international activists, students and pro-democracy organizers from around the world also led online and offline efforts to limit the army’s income by campaigning against Western companies with business links in Myanmar. Activists with the popular Free Burma campaign used the internet to share audio and video files of human rights abuses, along with speeches by Suu Kyi.

As international pressure mounted, companies like Disney, PepsiCo Inc and Pizza Hut all terminated their business operations in Myanmar. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed federal legislation banning any new investment by American companies in Myanmar.

Over the past decade, Myanmar has also seen the mass adoption of cellular services by ordinary citizens. A surge in network providers and affordable data plans has given residents access to some of the fastest mobile networks in the region. 

“The population of Myanmar has access to more information now than at any time in the past,” said Dr. Lee Jones, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, who has written extensively about Myanmar’s politics and economy.

Jones said the daily internet blackouts have been used to cover up the nighttime arrests of hundreds of opposition politicians, civil servants and activists by police “snatch teams” in cities like Yangon. Recent video footage has shown residents banging pots and pans to warn their neighbors of approaching security forces.

“The control of the internet is a temporary tactical device,” said Jones. “The temporary outages are linked to providing cover for military operations in particular urban areas, which is why there isn’t a kind of actual shutdown, it keeps coming on and off.”

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“I had received a lot of calls in the early morning, but when I woke up, I tried to call them back and I couldn’t,” said Yi, an advocacy coordinator at the Action Committee for Democracy Development, a coalition of community-based rights groups. “I checked and there was no service at all, it had been cut off.”

Yi soon understood that Myanmar’s powerful military had taken control of the country overnight. “I was worried about friends, colleagues, leaders, politicians and activists,” she said. “Anything can happen at that time.”

On February 1, three months after Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election, the army seized power in a bloodless coup and declared a year-long state of emergency. Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and prominent members of the NLD were placed under house arrest. Power now rests with military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The military alleges that widespread fraud took place in the November election, at the cost of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party, and has taken control of major cities and introduced a curfew.

A crackdown on the internet and mobile networks was central to the coup. Internet access fell by 50% on Monday, according to NetBlocks, a UK-based organization that monitors digital rights around the world. In a tweet, it said that the “pattern of disruption indicates a centrally issued telecoms blackout order.”

NetBlocks also revealed that users were unable to access at least two cellular networks. Myanmar is home to four main providers, the Myanmar-backed MPT, a Qatari company named Ooredoo and Norway’s Telenor. All three are rivals of the military-backed telecommunications company MyTel.

Rights groups have previously raised concerns about the potential security threats posed to MyTel users. In 2018, the European Union considered applying sanctions against it, in response to human rights abuses by the military that left thousands of Rohingya Muslims dead and drove more than 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

On the day of the coup, the activist group Justice for Myanmar posted on Twitter warning of potential surveillance by MyTel: “On Mytel + the other mobile networks, the military can monitor voice calls, SMS, location and some online activity. We appeal to activists, human rights defenders and journalists to take extra care of their safety in this dangerous and uncertain time by taking these steps.”

The group called for human rights workers and journalists to adopt a number of measures to protect themselves from surveillance, including boycotting MyTel, using end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal, and avoiding voice calls and the sending of SMS messages on all networks. 

While it is uncommon for a nation’s armed forces to invest in mobile and internet infrastructure, as is the case in Myanmar, military control of digital spaces can yield huge power over citizens.

“The communication disruptions are an attempt by the Myanmar military to pull a blind over its heinous actions, including arbitrary detention of prominent critics of the military, wrote a spokesperson for Justice for Myanmar in an email. “This has instilled fear among the public and disrupted the daily lives of many who rely on the networks to conduct their work, which for some has been crucial during the time of pandemic.”

The internet has provided authoritarian leaders and democratic governments with a valuable off-switch to control populations during times of crisis. Online blackouts, disruptions to connectivity and social media outages have been a hallmark of elections and protests in 35 countries since 2019, including Iran, Uganda and Ethiopia. Coda Story has previously reported on blackouts in India and the introduction of new laws limiting digital freedoms in Russia.

While cellular network and internet access has mostly returned to Myanmar, digital rights activists are concerned about future consequences for free speech as the military consolidates its control of the country’s institutions. On Wednesday morning, users on two Facebook groups, Myanmar Civil Disobedience Movement Funds and Yangon Youth Network, were calling for doctors, teachers and other professions to halt work in protest against the coup. 

“From a freedom perspective, I believe there will be more control of internet traffic,” said an employee of Internet in Myanmar, a technology news website, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Since the last few months, the government started to introduce some filtering, I think we should expect that will happen more and more.” 

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A recently exposed disinformation campaign on Facebook has highlighted the powerful role played by military-backed telecommunications companies in controlling digital spaces in one of the most authoritarian corners of the world.

As part of the social media platform’s much-publicized crackdown on fake news, the company earlier this year began to publish monthly reports about accounts, pages and groups designed to misinform and mislead users. 

A recently released document revealed a coordinated campaign targeting hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar geared toward improving public opinion toward MyTel, the telecommunications company backed by Myanmar’s military.

The social media company found that a number of accounts, originating in both Myanmar and Vietnam, had posted material critical of three companies: the Myanmar-backed MPT; a Qatari company named Ooredoo; and the Norwegian Telenor. All are rivals of Myanmar’s military-backed telecommunications company MyTel. In total, the network of pages had gathered some 265,000 followers and spent more than $1.1 million on Facebook advertising.

According to the report, the administrators and owners of the accounts, which purported to be independent consumer news pages, operated financially-motivated influence operations that shared content about the alleged business failures of MyTel’s rivals. The posts were written in English and Burmese. 

MyTel is a joint venture between three major groups, including Myanmar’s military and VietTel, which is owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense. In its investigation into disinformation in Myanmar, Facebook also discovered that although the organizations behind the campaign had attempted to conceal their involvement, a trail tied the network of Facebook pages to MyTel, VietTel and a Vietnam-based PR firm named Gapit Communications.

MyTel and Gapit did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

While telecommunications companies owned by governments can be found in countries around the world — Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates and the Data and Communication Company in Iran, for example —  those backed by armed forces are rare. However, where they do exist,  experts say that such companies wield huge power over digital spaces and competitors.

“Telecoms are very lucrative, and in some countries, like Myanmar, Vietnam and Egypt, the military really plays an outsized role in their economy and the country at large,” said Allie Funk, a researcher with Freedom House, an organization that ranks political liberty around the world. 

“Control over ISPs and other types of mobile services means that it is easier to access data that’s really sensitive to minority groups. It’s also then easier for the government to shut down the internet or block websites,” she added. 

Freedom House gave Myanmar an Internet Freedom Score of 36/100 in its 2020 country report. 

The network of fake accounts also highlights the penetration of social media platforms like Facebook in impoverished countries like Myanmar, where the company has more than 18 million users and is, for many people, the most popular way to access and share news.

The importance of telecoms to the military can be seen in a 2015 announcement by the Egyptian ministry of defense, which said it would create a National Company for Communications Infrastructure and own a 51% controlling stake in the new entity, overseeing the laying out and monitoring of fiber-optic cables nationwide. The plan never came to fruition. 

Danny O'Brien, director of strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S. based nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world, said Myanmar and Egypt share common forms of military oversight. 

“I think Myanmar and Egypt stand out because of a recent history, where military dictatorships were threatened by internet-mediated revolutions, and then managed to secure some degree of control,” he said, via email. “I think they learned a lesson then about the dangers a free and open internet can pose to military control.”

Myanmar’s restive Rakhine State is now home to the world’s longest-running internet shutdown. In June 2019, amid mounting clashes between the armed forces and insurgents from the predominantly Muslim Rohingya ethnic group, the Myanmar government ordered telecommunications networks operating in much of the state to switch off mobile internet access.

Facebook and Myanmar’s military

The discovery of the fake Facebook pages underscores concerns about how military-backed telecommunications companies seek to preserve their market share and raises questions as to whether Facebook should be doing any business at all with companies linked to Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw. 

Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK, a human rights advocacy group that publishes a “Dirty List” of businesses with ties to the Myanmar military, said Facebook’s move to curb coordinated disinformation about telecoms is insufficient.

“Facebook are happy for the Myanmar military to promote products that help pay for genocide, but if they spread disinformation about their rivals, that’s where Facebook draws the line. It’s a strange standard,” wrote Farmaner in email.

In 2018, Facebook removed the accounts of several Myanmar military officials from both Facebook and Instagram,  in order to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” related to the Rohingya.

In September 2018, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar, which is tasked with investigating human rights violations in the country, stated that the nation’s military has “so seriously violated international law that any engagement in any form with the Tatmadaw, its current leadership, and its businesses, is indefensible.” 

The UN’s findings followed a 2017 crackdown by the Myanmar military that left thousands of Rohingya dead and drove more than 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

Photo by SAI AUNG MAIN/AFP via Getty Images

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Our story examined a host of potential privacy concerns related to the country’s newly launched Covid-19 tracking technology, including the government’s use of a system originally developed to combat terrorism. Authorities are also using a national biometric data center that has, in the past, been subject to several major digital breaches.

Digital rights experts warned that the data collected from millions of Pakistanis was not securely protected. Days after our story was published, the personal details of thousands of Covid-19 volunteers was leaked online. 

One month later, many of the concerns highlighted by our story remain unaddressed. “Unfortunately, given the lack of data protection laws and in the absence of a privacy commission, there has been no investigation into these leaks,” wrote Nighat Dad, director of the Digital Rights Foundation. 

“There have not been any reported cases of harassment or individuals being targeted, but experience tells us that data leaks often lead to private companies using leaked personal data for profit through targeted advertisements and selling that data to others.”

Dad also expressed concerns that the rollout of the new technology included no sunset clauses from the government about when user data might be deleted. 

“We have seen no measures taken on their end that would boost our confidence in the retention and processing of personal data, the level of intrusiveness the state seems to exert in our lives,” she added. 

When Ramsha wrote her story about the pandemic in Pakistan in early May, the country had reported nearly 15,000 cases of coronavirus and at least 32 deaths. According to current data, figures now stand at 82,000 confirmed cases and 1,717 deaths. 

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The report is published by Equality Labs, a New York-based South Asian community advocacy group. It shows that the hashtag #Coronajihad has run rampant on Twitter since late March. Posts featuring the hashtag and a range of anti-Muslim rhetoric have also been shared widely on platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

“What happens on social media matters,” said Equality Labs' executive director Thenmozhi Soundararajan. “When platforms like Twitter fail in responding to addressing hate speech and disinformation in a timely manner, there are consequences. This was a preventable tragedy.” 

The organization calculates that more than ​293,000 conversations pushing Islamophobic Covid-19 content have taken place on Twitter, where they have generated more than 700,000 points of engagement, including likes, clicks, shares and comments. It has also found that the majority of users creating and sharing such content are young men between the ages of 18 and 34, based in India or the United States. 

The report, which is due to be published tomorrow, notes that ​Islamophobic coronavirus-related ​hate speech and disinformation first appeared on Twitter as early as March 1, weeks before countries around the world began to enforce lockdowns. 

In many cases, Islamophobic content blaming Muslims for the spread of the virus was first posted to Twitter by Indian Hindu nationalists, but was later amplified by global Islamophobic individuals and groups. Hate speech and disinformation tied to Covid-19 also emanated from Islamophobic social media accounts, pages and groups based in the West.

According to the report, #Coronajihad first gained popularity in India as part of an ongoing campaign by Hindu nationalists targeting Indian Muslims. This campaign includes a widely criticized tweet made last month by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, declaring that it would “remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs,” via the introduction of a national registry.

The term “infiltrators” is commonly seen in India as an Islamophobic dog whistle, pointing to minority groups, including millions of Indian Muslims, Bangladeshi immigrants and Rohingya refugees.

Anti-Muslim sentiments have been on the rise in India for years. In late February, Muslim neighborhoods and shops in Delhi were targeted, after posts inciting violence went viral on both Facebook and Twitter. The rampages that followed resulted in 53 deaths, over 200 injuries and 2,000 arrests.

“As a result of these hashtags, we saw Muslims in India being denied healthcare, women who were pregnant and in labor were turned away from hospitals, there was widespread discrimination against Muslim businesses, which were boycotted,” said Soundararajan. “This discrimination goes beyond Muslims. Public health requires a sense of collective trust. All of that stops when you have the arms of a government targeting one community and social media platforms look unwilling to do anything about it.”

The Equality Labs report reveals that that Islamophobic social media content related to Covid-19 often reflects common themes. These include Muslims being depicted as the virus and linked to bioterrorism, with Covid-19 as the weapon of choice. Other posts have falsely claimed that Muslims are testing positive for the coronavirus at a higher rate than others and that they are intentionally spreading the disease to non-Muslims as a form of “jihad.” 

#Coronajihad was just one in a number of social media hashtags which attempted to blame Muslims in India for spreading Covid-19. Other included #BiologicalJihad, #MuslimVirus, #MuslimDistancing, #Jihadivirus and  #BanTheBook, referring to the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam.

While #Coronajihad has recently been blocked in Twitter search results, Soundararajan said the platform’s slow response amounted to serious negligence. 

“The reaction of platforms like Twitter to Islamophobic disinformation and hate speech is a case of way too little and way late,” she said. “They have the ability to move and take down content as soon as it is launched. Yet, as our report shows, Islamophobic content has been targeting Muslims in a dangerous way for months. Twitter just chose not to do anything about it. The failure of moderation is a complete dereliction of duty for the market,” she added. 

The report’s authors make a number of recommendations for social media platforms. These include prioritizing the removal and prevention of Islamophobic coronavirus-related disinformation and hate speech. Other recommendations include more attentive moderation and increased engagement with internet freedom experts, Muslim civil society advocates and public health officials.

Twitter declined to answer specific questions about Islamophobic hashtags and content asked for this article via email. A spokesperson for the company did, however, email a statement detailing the platform’s zero-tolerance approach to online threats, including instances of harassment and hateful conduct.

“We're prioritizing the removal of content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm,” it read. “Since introducing these new policies, and as we’ve continued to double down on tech, our automated systems have challenged more than 4.3 million accounts which were targeting discussions around Covid-19 with spammy or manipulative behaviors."

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On Monday, thousands of Twitter accounts retweeted a doctored video claiming that gunshots had been fired in the coastal Qatari city of Al Wakrah. The footage alleged that a plan to overthrow the ruling Al-Thani family was underway. At least two other videos featuring audio of gunshots pushed similar narratives. 

The videos mark the latest in a new round of attacks against Doha. Last week, an article published by the Saudi Gazette alleged that a member of the Qatari ruling family had called on Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani to step down. 

Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, was the first to discover that the videos had been manipulated and audio tracks of gunshots had been dubbed onto the footage. 

Jones published a thread showing his Twitter analysis of a disinformation campaign that employed the Arabic hashtags “Al Wakra” and “Coup in Qatar.” Jones found the two hashtags had been tweeted, retweeted and replied to in some 20,700 posts from around 12,000 unique accounts. He also found a pattern of “sockpuppets” — fake accounts often employed for disinformation purposes. According to Jones, each sockpuppet had retweeted the false stories 22 times.

The narrative of the “fake coup” was also given some legitimacy by a number of high-profile news organizations, including The Independent Arabia, a Saudi offshoot of the British newspaper The Independent. 

“I think you can tie these disinformation campaigns with events taking place in Saudi Arabia that we’re not aware of,” said Jones, in a telephone interview. “The sense I get is that it is aimed at domestic audiences in Saudi, to distract them from the economic situation there and the spread of the coronavirus.”

Jones added that the claims were likely to be designed to reinforce the policy of ostracization pursued against Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.  

“This is an attempt to legitimize the blockade, the reasons for it, and the effect it has had on people's lives,” he explained.

The geographical and diplomatic isolation of Qatar began during Ramadan in June 2017, when the four countries cut ties with Doha, after years of disputes about its foreign policy. 

The quartet later issued a 13-point ultimatum, stating that Doha should shutter its media operations — including the broadcaster Al Jazeera — and submit to monthly external compliance checks. Qatar was given 10 days to comply with the demands or face unspecified consequences.

In the years since the blockade was launched, Qatar has faced numerous accusations from Saudi Arabia and the UAE of supporting terrorism and, more recently, of spreading the coronavirus. Armies of Twitter accounts have been established to work alongside UAE and Saudi media organizations in an often brazen disinformation campaign against Doha.

Gulf experts have quickly debunked this week’s “fake coup” as part of an ongoing program aimed at undermining the authority of the Qatari ruling family. 

“This sudden spike in activity seems to have returned to the same ground that triggered the blockade in 2017 — a fake news bubble which then becomes a pretext for further action,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of Qatar and the Gulf Crisis. 

“It is bizarre and a repetition of what happened three years ago, in terms of timing and tone and content. It also flies against reason when the initial attempt to blockade Qatar in 2017 failed to win results and created antagonisms in the region.”

This latest round of disinformation ends any hope of an imminent resolution to the Gulf dispute. Qatar withdrew from recent attempts to negotiate a settlement earlier this year. 

At the time, Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, said, “Unfortunately, efforts did not succeed and were suspended at the beginning of January, and Qatar is not responsible for this.”

The post The coup that wasn’t — the latest conspiracy against Qatar appeared first on Coda Story.

Musicians like Run the Jewels have also sought to make sense of the potential pitfalls of connectivity. In 2015, the electronic producer Holly Herndon released “Platform,” an experimental album that works through themes of surveillance by sampling everyday sounds, such as fingers tapping on a keyboard and a Skype session. 

The subject also lends itself easily to illustration and has already been mined by graphic novels like the acclaimed “Verax: The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance” by Pratap Chaterjee. In 2010, European Digital Rights, a Brussels based non-profit that campaigns on issues relating to privacy and freedom of expression, published “Under Surveillance,” which deals with the subjects of data protection, counter-terror measures and privacy.

“The Machine Never Blinks,” a new graphic novel, takes a 360-degree view of the history of surveillance. Rolling through more existential subject areas, including the humanities, religion and philosophy, the ancient story of the Greek Trojan horse entering Troy is compared to the way governments now use malware to monitor populations. The Bible is also reexamined, showing the way that God’s watchful eyes – as well as those of the angels – are worthy of praise, while ordinary people should largely refrain from spying on others.

“Many people don't really seem to recognize how much the stories in both Old Testament and the New Testament are centered around watching by a higher authority,” wrote author Ivan Greenberg in an email interview recently. “The point is to highlight that watching has been a part of human culture for a very long time.” 

“The Machine Never Blinks,”  illustrated by the Portland-based artist Everett Patterson, also examines how the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and the surveillance systems that enabled slavery in the U.S. all later influenced the way organizations like the CIA and the National Security Agency operate. The book ends by drawing a correlation between the J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI and the present-day audit of populations via the harvesting of their social media postings and biometric information.

Underlining all of this are Greenberg’s concerns about the societal effects of continuous surveillance. The author, who has written several books on aspects of authoritarian control and protest, including a critical analysis of the FBI titled “Surveillance in America,” said that he wanted to return to the subject after Edward’s Snowden’s 2013 revelations about numerous global spying programs, many run by the U.S. and European governments.

“I have been writing books and articles about surveillance in the U.S. for about a decade,” wrote Greenberg. “I also am a visual artist, although not with the skill to draw a graphic novel. The combination of those two things led me to think about finding a new way to represent surveillance issues, especially post-Snowden.”

Greenberg said that public and private surveillance of urban populations in cities like New York and London is intensifying. “Surveillance in the workplace today is worse than it ever has been in the past,” he wrote. “If you use management's computers or phones, they can listen in and check your activity because they own the machines. Drug testing – what gives them the right to invade our bodily privacy? GPS tracking also can be very invasive by tracking – really spying on – our physical movements.”

Greenberg added that ordinary citizens can do two things to limit how governments and local authorities use surveillance. “As I suggest in the book, the first-step is to spread more knowledge about surveillance practices. The second step is to demand that our elected leaders act to limit surveillance and spying to bring them under better control. It would not hurt if people rally and protest to make their voices heard.”

Nearly two weeks after our email interview, I contacted Greenberg again. As the number of worldwide coronavirus cases neared 400,000 and countries across the world introduced lockdown measures, a number of governments, including Italy and Germany announced the development of new tracking tools which would use smartphone data to pinpoint virus carriers and the people they might have infected.

I asked Greenberg if he was concerned that in the aftermath of a global pandemic, could these new tools lead to an even more pronounced role for authoritarian tech? “New tracking technology certainly can be used for the public interest – helping to fight the terrible outbreak of covid-19 around the world,” wrote Greenberg.

“However, I worry if these technologies later will become mainstreamed by intelligence agencies,” he added. “I mean, become another tool used for authoritarian control. History shows that once governments deploy new spying technologies, they rarely give them up unless forced by new laws or other forms of regulation. So, the people must remain vigilant and insist their governments act responsibly.”

“The Machine Never Blinks” is out now, published by Fantagraphics.

The post Surveillance gets the graphic novel treatment appeared first on Coda Story.

Workers from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — many of whom are employed in the construction and retail industries — form the majority of the population in Gulf states such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Applications that use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, including WhatsApp and Skype, have long been restricted to varying degrees in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman. No such blocks exist in Bahrain or Kuwait.

In Qatar, which is home to 1.9 million migrant workers, residents told Coda Story how the restriction of such services affects their lives.

Mark*, a Filipino who works as an administrator in a labor camp on the outskirts of Doha, spoke to Coda Story by phone this week about the challenges of contacting his family in Manila. He has been in Doha for seven years, earns $950 a month and lives on the complex, along with 5,000 other migrant workers. He said he would rather send money home to his family than pay for expensive overseas voice calls. 

Mark said that it has been a month since he last made a video call to his family. “Now we are recording video and sending it in Facebook Messenger,” he explained. “It is very, very difficult to stay in touch. I am using voice calls or sending messages on Messenger. The consequence of blocking VoIP apps is you cannot see your family face to face. We communicate through sending text messages.” 

To date, the Philippines has reported 552 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 35 deaths. “I am worried about my family,” added Mark. “As of now, in the Philippines, there is also a lockdown [and] most cases of the coronavirus are in Manila.” 

The UAE’s two telecommunications firms, Etisalat and Du have recently enabled Microsoft Teams, Zoom and CloudTalk over both wireless and mobile data connections. However, voice and video features on popular applications such as WhatsApp and Skype remain blocked.

While a large number of the Gulf’s expatriates use virtual private networks (VPNs) to bypass VoIP restrictions, the monthly fees of around $10 charged by such services prove prohibitive for many low-income workers.

Khalid Ibrahim, executive director at the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, an NGO based in Beirut, also notes that the blocking of popular VoIP applications could place the Gulf’s migrant workers in an even more vulnerable position than that which they already occupy.

“They are hardworking, paid little and deprived of basic rights like setting up a union,” Ibrahim explained. “Not to have access to these applications is a violation of their basic rights. They [may also] go to other applications, which are not safe and face hackers.”

Other human rights experts believe that unrestricted internet calls play a crucial role in the exchange of information and that governments should not curtail freedoms during the global coronavirus outbreak.

In an email to Coda Story, Christen Dobson, senior project lead at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre in New York, said, “Technology and social media companies have a critical role to play in ensuring that our rights to access information, free expression, and privacy are respected and not restricted during this crisis.” 

* Mark declined to give his second name, in order to protect his job

The post Foreign workers in the Gulf can’t call home during coronavirus crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week, Noura Almoteari — a Saudi Arabia-based journalist — posted on Twitter, saying that Qatar has known about the existence of COVID-19 since 2015. Earlier this month, she accused Doha of paying billions to China “to grow the virus.” She also coined the Twitter hashtag “Qatar is corona,” which has now been used hundreds of times on the platform. Almoteari stated that the country was spreading the virus in order to damage both the UAE’s upcoming Expo 2020 and Saudi Arabia’s future plans to diversify into a post-oil economy.

In addition to this, Qatar has come under attack from Twitter bot accounts that blame the country for the coronavirus outbreak. In January and February, numerous fake Twitter profiles advanced the theory that Qatar was responsible for spreading the virus to Argentina. The accounts have since been suspended.

The land, sea and air blockade of Qatar began in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain severed diplomatic links with the gas-rich country, after years of rancor over Doha’s foreign policy.

The blockading quartet issued a list of demands, which seemed designed to turn Qatar into a client state. The orders included that Doha cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements, and that it shutter its media operations, including the broadcaster Al Jazeera. 

In the years since the blockade was launched, Qatar has faced repeated accusations from Saudi Arabia and the UAE of supporting terrorism. Armies of Twitter accounts and carefully orchestrated disinformation campaigns have become a prominent and ongoing feature of this diplomatic quarrel.

“The coronavirus campaign against Qatar began online as early as January, long before the current corona outbreak,” said Marc Owen Jones, assistant professor of Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, in a phone interview with Coda Story. 

“There were definitely some early disinformation campaigns on Twitter, which were basically saying that Qatar was responsible for the coronavirus, and that it had played a role in spreading it. People are trying to preempt the crisis and exploit it politically.”

The disinformation campaign has also targeted Qatar’s labor camps — institutions common in Gulf nations, which house thousands of low-paid migrant workers. One Saudi newspaper has published a number of stories about the outbreak of COVID-19 affecting “hundreds” of people in the industrial areas outside Doha, where many of Qatar’s 1.9 million migrant workers live.

Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health says the total number of reported coronavirus cases in the country currently stands at 481. 

“I would say this is a continuation of the verbal barrage of misinformation and disinformation that is part of the Qatar blockade,” said Dr Sanam Vakil, a senior research fellow with the Middle East & North Africa Programme at Chatham House in London. “In this current iteration, it accuses the Qataris of spreading the virus. This will continue for quite a degree of time, and these sorts of campaigns are a reflection of how deep seated the tensions are.”

Vakil said the disinformation about Qatar echoed how other countries are trying to internationalize the cause of COVID-19. In recent days, China has sought to blame the U.S.; earlier this month, Bahrain accused Iran of “biological aggression” by covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

“While it is interesting these bots are blaming Qataris, I think it is part of a nationalist impulse that is not just unique to the Gulf in using an external crisis to whip up support,” Vakil added.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of “Qatar and the Gulf Crisis,” believes that the outpouring of digital disinformation about Qatar on Twitter must at least have the tacit approval of authorities in countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where social media is closely monitored. 

“The fact that such comments have been made by high-profile individuals in Saudi Arabia and the UAE without facing any official censure suggests that their messaging carries the implicit approval of authorities, who are in other circumstances extremely quick to police and respond harshly to commentaries that they do not agree with,” he said.

The post Disinformation about Qatar surges in wake of COVID-19 appeared first on Coda Story.

According to the new rules, which were leaked on Tuesday, the Indian government would require technology companies to garner consent from users before collecting and processing their personal data. A newly proposed government agency, the Data Protection Authority, will write specific rules, monitor how companies are applying them and mediate to settle disputes.

While the bill, dubbed the “Personal Data Protection Bill 2019,” addresses long standing needs for data protection in India, it also posits more worrying concerns about authoritarian overreach by the government.

According to the current draft, which is expected to be debated by lawmakers over the next few weeks, the rules would allow the government to “exempt any agency of government from application of Act in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order.”

Of equal concern is how the bill mandates the use of public data by the government. One rule seeks to grant the government the power to ask any “data fiduciary or data processor” to hand over “anonymized non-personal data” with the aim of helping legislators deliver better governance and services to their citizens. 

While the bill is unclear, this could essentially allow the government to request user data from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

Critics of the bill have been quick to highlight their concerns. Udbhav Tiwari, a public policy advisor at Mozilla, said the bill would “represent new, significant threats to Indians’ privacy. If Indians are to be truly protected, it is urgent that the Parliament reviews and addresses these dangerous provisions before they become law.”

The draft has also come under fire from a judge who led the committee that drafted an earlier version of the bill. Justice BN Srikrishna said the new version is “dangerous” and could turn India into an “Orwellian State”. 

“They have removed the safeguards,” said Srikrishna. “That is most dangerous. The government can at any time access private data or government agency data on grounds of sovereignty or public order. This has dangerous implications.”

Rahul Matthan, a partner at the Indian law firm Trilegal, said that businesses had real concerns as to whether the new data authority would have the capacity to manage all of its responsibilities. “We are expecting this Data Protection Authority to be at the standard of a G.D.P.R. without any experience,” Matthan told the New York Times. “That’s a tall ask.”

You can read a good breakdown of the bill in this Twitter thread by digital advocates Media Nama.

My favorite Coda piece this week: 

Scant coverage has been given to Algeria, where a popular protest movement against an entrenched regime has mobilized weekly protests for over 40 weeks. Ahead of a presidential election last Thursday, we published this story by Layli Faroudi about how pro-regime social media accounts, dubbed “electronic flies”, targeted platforms like Facebook and Twitter with fake news and fear mongering.

Recommended reads:

• China is about to become becoming the first major economy to issue sovereign digital money. According to reports, a digital currency has been in development In China for several years and may be rolled out in a small-scale pilot in Shenzhen as early as this month, before expanding in 2020. Important questions about privacy and anonymity, as well as how much transaction information the government will be able to access, remain unanswered. (MIT Technology Review)
• From offering users the chance to take a Tai Chi class, fly above New York City or even have a guided meditation with Jesus, virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Quest are having a major effect on retail, science and security. In this entertaining and often funny essay, Patricia Marx tries out the best of the Oculus store. (New Yorker)

If you have any tips about how governments and companies use authoritarian technology, you can send me an email at burhan@codastory.com or contact me on @BWazir1.

The post Data protection comes to India appeared first on Coda Story.

This week, I thought I’d take an entirely different tack. 

We don’t often get the chance to write about how these same issues are being documented by artists. In musical terms, concerns about the uses of technology are as old as sheet music. Over the years, subjects like automation (Kraftwerk), surveillance (M.I.A.) and the dangers looming in our near future (EMA) have all been extensively tackled by electronica, hip-hop and pop artists. 

A new song from an upcoming album by the American musician DJ Shadow puts some very contemporary issues like data gathering and surveillance front and center. The song, “Urgent, Important, Please Read”, uses three rappers (Daemon, Rockwell Knuckles and Tef Poe), to warn about addiction to mobile phones, data collection and the motives of tech companies.

You can listen to the song on Spotify and YouTube. Listeners will notice the track sounds impatient, much like the alert notifications which punctuate our daily lives. You may also trace an unmistakable through-line from older recorded works by groups like Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest. 

Earlier this week, I interviewed two of the three rappers who appear on the song, Daemon and Rockwell Knuckles. Both live in St Louis, Missouri. 

Daemon told me he and Knuckles were inspired to write about aspects of technology after DJ Shadow sent them a message outlining the kind of oppressive mood he was hoping to create. “I felt like he [Shadow] kept things open-ended enough so we had plenty of room to play,” wrote Daemon, in an email. “From there it was all about trying to get into the right headspace.”

While “Urgent, Important, Please Read” doesn’t specifically mention artificial intelligence, both rappers think technology ultimately aids an ever more anonymous brand of policing. “We’re not out here dreading the rise of AI, that kind of concern is the luxury of a rich man,” wrote Daemon. “Every leap in technology is used to better monitor, trap, and villainize us. It’s hard to get worked up about the coming robot apocalypse when you’re already stuck in a system that is specifically engineered to take advantage of you until it kills you so that someone else can have a better life. And it’s designed in such a way that the people who benefit the most have maximum deniability.”

Rockwell said there were issues he felt he had to address. On “Urgent, Important, Please Read”, he raps about deleting his browser history: “Deleting every record, you know what I mean/ Puttin' mind on my money, downloadin', flee the scene.” 

In the same verse, he strikes a more pessimistic tone later, on realizing there is no escaping the digital world: “A futurist gotta say it, it’s odd/ The land of technology, the hacker is god/ Everybody charge or church up, get the bag.”

“I think I was trying to say that technology is the new religion,” said Rockwell, speaking by phone on Monday. “Everyone is on Instagram. The man that can control the technology can control the phone. So to me, your phone is like your church. Charge your church, open your social media and bow for prayer.”

“I think the key thing is we’re all trying to find a middle ground in how technology controls us all,” he added. “Our phones, alarm clocks, the things you buy, everything is pretty muddy.”

My favorite Coda Story this week:

Last week, Evan Gershkovich attended a two-day event in Sochi which featured a number of African heads of state. As Evan discovered, the Kremlin is leaning on its “anti-colonial” past for greater influence in Africa, offering trade and security initiatives in a bid to counter U.S. and European influence. Ayanda Dlodlo, South Africa’s State Security Minister, said, “As Vladimir Putin put it very well: Russia has not colonized my country.”

Elsewhere: 

More than a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Facebook, it has emerged that the social media platform recently asked several U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients. According to the report, Facebook intended to match patient data with user data it had collected in a bid to understand which patients might need special care or treatment. The proposal never went past the planning phase and has been put on pause. (CNBC)

And finally: a fascinating account of how the West sometimes overestimates the Chinese government’s ability to push innovation. The author argues that China’s support for digital innovation has an uneven track record to date. China might be great on simpler technologies like solar cells, but lags in producing quality semiconductors, despite favorable government subsidies. (SupChina)

Pitch alert: We are seeking story ideas on worldwide anti-science movements. Send your pitches now on character-driven narratives explaining how anti-science movements are created and how they thrive. Email me on burhan@codastory.com

The post “Every leap in technology is used to better monitor, trap, and villainize us.” appeared first on Coda Story.

A new book, “The Smart City in a Digital World” (Emerald Publishing), provides a good overview of some of the challenges faced by local and national policymakers who are under pressure to innovate and save public finances. As the author Vincent Mosco demonstrates, smart city solutions often involve the outsourcing of data gathering and other services to companies like Amazon or Google. At the same time, in its most insidious form, the technology can be used to surveil minorities like Uyghurs in China. 

Mosco’s research shows that there are around 1,000 smart city projects in various stages of planning or development worldwide, and around half of these are located in China. India plans to build 100 new smart cities and rejuvenate another 500. 

I recently interviewed Mosco and began by asking him if smart cities were like utopian cities of the past. What follows are highlights of our conversation which have been edited for length and clarity.

Are the smart cities of today any different from the kinds of fiefdoms we have seen in the past - for example, Henry Ford’s Fordlandia, Disney’s Celebration or the large infrastructure projects built by planners like Robert Moses?

I think they are similar in certain, specific respects. They embody a kind of private master builder approach, whether it is Ford or Disney or a tech company like IBM. The smart city movement represents a prominent viewpoint in American urban history, that it takes great men, and it tends to be men - unencumbered by governments and regulation — to build truly great cities. Companies like Google are the master builders of the digital word, and unlike in the past, they are not building an industrial society but an informational society. 

Builders of large infrastructure projects in the past often looked to governments or officials as partners. Is that still true? 

I don’t believe tech companies see this to be true anymore. There is a sense of hubris that governments have gotten it wrong in the past and it takes private innovation to do this. The key difference with master builders in the industrial era was that there was a sense that governments would be a close partner to industrial leaders. While corporate execs would take the lead, the work would be done with government help and regulation that would assist and legitimize. Today, there is a difference, private entrepreneurs take the lead. People like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk look on their projects as a way to get away from governments. 

Turning more directly to smart cities, we often see invasive digital technologies rolled out ahead of big events as a form of policing, I’m thinking of how Brazil and Russia used camera systems ahead of their FIFA World Cups, as well as the 2016 Summer Olympics. The technology then stays around long after the event has moved on. 

 One of the key selling points of this technology is the availability to better root out crime and manage police and security forces. This began years ago when IBM built an operations center in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the World Cup. Smart city technology was installed on the basis of saving money and better managing a part of a city, but underlying it all was facial recognition which became a tool for mass surveillance. 

One of the points in my book is that smart city solutions in New York first grew out of an interest in bringing the Olympics to the city ahead of 2012 and spurred the redevelopment of huge swathes of the city itself caused more privatization and gentrification. 

Much has been written about biases in algorithms. What do you think can be done to counter this? 

In the smart city and in the digital world, if we are going to make use of algorithms, we need to make the process of developing and using them much more transparent  We rely on tech experts who know very little about the racial biases built into the systems. We need to open this up to access by private citizens. This doesn’t necessarily provide us with the solution. 

Technologies tend to embody the societies and social divisions that they are used for. We need to recognize from the start that the algorithms we deploy are biased. This will require more regulation and it is no surprise the technology industry would resist. My experience in this area shows that the communications and tech industry, starting with the introduction of the telegraph, has resisted regulation. There is nothing new about the resistance of Google and Amazon and Facebook to these efforts. 

Can ordinary people do anything? 

Urbanites need to take back their cities. We need to do this soon, before these technical systems are so influential in decision making that it would be difficult to redesign them to make them more human. 

More and more people are coming to recognize that putting down devices alone will not be enough. What makes smart cities particularly interesting, given how Google Sidewalk Labs are setting up their projects, is they will be tracking people simply by virtue of them being in the area. Cameras, point of sale registers, energy systems will monitor all of your use. Communications and scanners and transportation, sidewalks and street lamps. You don’t have any opportunity to sign up for this level of surveillance. With a website, we can click the “I Agree” box. In smart cities, that opportunity won’t be there. 

Do you worry that populations in countries like India or China may be more susceptible to control from smart cities? 

We need to be deeply concerned about this. Singapore is becoming the laboratory for smart city development. China has taken a page out of Singapore’s story by applying technologies that are quite authoritarian, like the social credit system which keeps track of all of one’s activities and uses it as an index of citizenship or worthiness. If you happen to be surveilled by it, whether at a demonstration or not, can impact your social credit score, government benefits, schooling, etc. India is different in that while the state is involved in funding the benefits, a lot of private companies are involved in overseeing the projects. 

Some people have gone so far as to call for a halt to the sales of authoritarian technology. Do you think a moratorium would be helpful? 

It may not go far enough, in my view. Authoritarian regimes will be defined narrowly to include nations like China. But we are seeing the rise of authoritarian tendencies in countries like the United States and Britain. I am concerned about Google and Amazon assisting the reprehensible immigration system in the U.S. where tech companies are rooting out refugees and sending them to their deaths back in their home countries. I think a halt is a good start, but we need to recognize that China and Saudi Arabia are not the only governments to be concerned about. Western governments need to be examined as well.

OTHER NEWS:

• Earlier this week, I visited a new exhibition at the Tate Modern museum here in London. “Higher Resolution”, presented by a number of creators, including Romy Gad el Rab and Caroline Sinders, simulates platforms like Twitter and Facebook in everyday settings. Visitors are encouraged to sit in a public “living room,” a “town hall,” and even a “loo” and speak as loudly and as emphatically to strangers as they might on a social media platform. Those participants who were British seemed to embrace the idea with some initial hesitancy. The exhibition includes curated playlists and informative talks about subjects like artificial intelligence and the feminist internet.
• In the forthcoming weeks, we are going to be looking at the use of facial recognition in public spaces like schools and private housing. This story looks at the backlash to the use of facial recognition systems in public housing in Detroit. 

One of our highlights this week was this piece about how a global network of Uyghurs living outside of China are digging deep into the popular social media app TikTok (they are using the  Chinese version, called Douyin) to uncover information about life in Xinjiang. From footage of demolished mosques to video of long lines of Uyghurs passing through security checkpoints, the story explains the extent of China’s determination to control its minority populations. 

The post The world’s cities are becoming Singapore appeared first on Coda Story.

Some aspects of this debate could be heard during a panel discussion titled “Smarter Than Us: The Rise Of AI” in Old Street, London on Thursday evening. In an upstairs room in the heart of Silicon Roundabout, around 140 attendees - including programmers and public sector workers - ate pizza and listened to five speakers discuss how their companies are harnessing AI to improve sectors like digital identities, healthcare, journalism and even real estate. 

A number of the panelists spoke about how their businesses gather information like historical property sales data, images and case studies about Type 2 Diabetes, while trying to preserve some sense of privacy and anonymity. 

Samuel Rowe, Research and Policy Executive at Yoti, a company with a digital identity app, spoke about the lack of guidelines around facial recognition. “There are insufficient safeguards in place for a lot of facial recognition technologies,” he said. “However, from this interrogation, at least in my opinion, there comes an opportunity for radical transparency from organizations working in this field.”

Avinash Bajaj, who previously worked at a health tech firm called Biolink.Tech, said his company opted not to use a cloud solution for storing information belonging to patients. “We wanted privacy at the center and at the core of everything we do,” he said. “So we came up with this aspect of private AI where we did not store any private information on our cloud. We stored all the information on users’ devices.”

Unsurprisingly, governments have struggled to meet the regulatory demands of AI. Only this year did the European Commission announced the launch of a pilot project which hopes to draft ethical rules for developing and applying artificial intelligence technologies. On privacy and data governance, the Commission said “Citizens should have full control over their own data, while data concerning them will not be used to harm or discriminate against them.”

Afterwards, as the panel took questions from the audience, I was reminded of how predatory and illegal conduct in other industries, like banking, prompted government intervention but only after calamities like the financial crisis of 2008. A number of people in the audience repeated the often heard mantra that regulation stifles innovation. Someone said self-regulation would be enough. One person commented, “I want that facial recognition to work, I want that convenience. But at the same time, I don’t want to give up my privacy.”

No one seemed willing to address the wider moral dilemma: With smart assistants on nearly every phone, can we trust those who watch over us to go unwatched themselves?

OTHER NEWS:

• We have an upcoming story on Delhi’s plans to roll out a citywide surveillance system with over 300,000 cameras. The project, which would allow ordinary residents to access camera footage in their neighborhoods, has been characterized by a lack of transparency. You can find an interesting primer here. (IEEE Spectrum)
• As demonstrations against the Chinese government enter their 12th week, some businesses in Hong Kong are fast adopting cryptocurrency. One department story has announced it will now accept Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin at all its locations. Earlier this month, demonstrators were seen withdrawing Hong Kong dollars from ATMs and banks and converting them to U.S. dollars - the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to its U.S. counterpart. (Business Telegraph). 

Elsewhere in Coda Story: In the aftermath of the collapse of Italy’s government, this is a good week to look at how a weaponized social media has had a whiplash effect on politics in the country. One of our contributors has profiled liberal politician Laura Boldrini, who comes under regular attack from supporters of the hard-right, anti-migrant League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. As one political scientist in Rome puts it, “Facebook and Twitter are a gutter.”

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