Cuban blogger arrested, tried & imprisoned

[Guest endymion]

A contributor to the Miami site CubaNet was arrested on Friday. He was tried without access to an attorney and sentenced to four years in prison. The charges were that he was a "pre-criminal social danger". In other words he was imprisoned on the grounds that he may in the future commit a crime, based on the writing that he contributed to CubaNet. He was imprisoned for contributing articles like this one:

Personnel changes reflect decline of Communist youth organization

MATANZAS, Cuba - June 26 (Oscar Sánchez Madan / www.cubanet.org) - The plenum of the provincial committee of the Union of Communist Youth in Matanzas deposed the organization's first secretary, José Anselmo Díaz, for "errors" committed in the management of the organization, according to an official announcement June 22.

Several members of the youth branch of the Party who asked to remain anonymous, said the deposition reflect unhappiness with the organization's performance at higher levels. One member said the organization's performance had "weakened" in recent years, especially in the ideological sphere, and also cited the failure to motivate younger members.

This journalist, Oscar Madan, was easy for the Cuban government to monitor because his communications with CubaNet in Miami traveled over computer networks that the Cuban government owns and controls. A simple private email link between Cuban journalists and CubaNet in Miami could have prevented this injustice, and could enable more independent journalistic accounts from the island.

If a handful of guys with a shoestring budget could launch a machine that flew around Jupiter, then through the rings of Saturn, then landed safely on a totally unexplored moon where they didn't even know if they were landing on solid ground or a liquid ocean, then we can create a simple private email link to a person 200 miles south of us.

Here is how you can help. Right now. Today. You don't have to be an engineer or a software developer to help. I have a very preliminary prototype Java applet for powering an email-carrying sneakernet. I'm trying to package the cryptographic magic in that applet that will be required to keep sneakernet emails private from eavesdroppers like Cuban police or North Korean border guards who will manage to confiscate some of the data storage devices. The preliminary applet runs in emulators when I test it, but so far I have not been able to successfully run it on my actual phone handset.

To help me move forward, please download the prototype sneakernet applet from the Information Without Borders web site and see if you can install it and run it on your mobile phone. That's all that I need right now. The applet doesn't move data yet, I'm just trying to verify that the cryptography software will run in an applet from a phone. I believe that my phone might not work because it supports the "MIDP 1.0" standard but not the newer "MIDP 2.0". All that I need to know is whether you can get the applet to run, or if you get an error message. If you see example screens like the ones in the pictures from the emulator then it's working. Those screens don't do anything so don't expect to be able to send email with it yet or anything like that.

[Guest endymion]

I have an old phone becaue I'm a Mac developer and I'm holding out until June for an iPhone. The sneakernet applet runs in emulators but it doesn't run on my Sony Ericsson T617. I think that it might run on a Palm or other PDA or on a newer phone. It's a simple Java applet just like any phone game applet.

Anybody, please download the applet and try to install it on your phone and let me know if it will run and you see screens like these.

[Guest pod]

Potential areas:

UAE, where Dubai is. Dance music fans know about Dubai. Don't forget kids, it's damned repressive over there.

Qatar. Right up the Gulf.

Iran. Well duh.

Boston?

Liberal, "tolerant", Boston? Heh, I might go visit the Commonwealth of Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts this summer. I'll check if your software works in the field.

[Guest barstar diana]

so those pages are blocked on our net?

[Guest pod]

No, if you try to access certain material from those areas...i.e. if you're at an internet café in Dubai, that message will come up if you try to access certain sites.

The Boston one I threw in there, since there was an article that BoingBoing, which is a daily blog of sorts (www.boingboing.net) is suddenly blocked to people using Boston's free WiFi service.

[Guest endymion]

Strange that BoingBing is too [something] for the filter that Boston uses. I noticed that some specific site was blocked by the Miami Beach library system, can't remember which.

It's a much different situation when your entire country is behind filters like that. It sucks if you're a high school kid or a library user and you can't get to some site, but if there's nowhere to go in the entire country to get around the filter then information control becomes a tool of oppression.

Oscar Madan was arrested, tried with no attorney, and thrown in prison for years, all in one day. Last Friday, while we debated the war or whatever, he was thrown in prison 200 miles south of us for saying the kinds of things that we say here in these forums every day. For saying much less criminal stuff, actually, Pod and I are way more irresponsible about saying dumb stuff in here all the time. In Madan's case it was for posting journalistic reports to a web site in Miami by email from Cuba, and they caught him because they can read any email that they want to read in the entire country.

That is Wrong. It's a new kind of Wrong that there will be more and more of as time goes on. So does the sneakernet applet work on anybody's mobile phone or PDA?

[Guest pod]

My 3650 had trouble installing it. I'll try it on the other one. Sometimes, the initial provider fucks with the phone to prevent third-party apps being installed.

[Guest endymion]

Thanks! Yeah that's what I'm trying to figure out, whether the applet is somehow defective or whether the phone is just not accepting it because of some kind of security policy from the provider. If you click that "runs in emulators" link above, then you should see it run in an emulator on your computer. So it doesn't seem defective but I can't seem to run it on a real phone.

If you would have to flash the phones or just unlock them or whatever to get the applet installed then that's no big deal for the sneakernet. But I thought that you could normally install a third-party Java game on any phone though?

[Guest pod]

Normally, yes. But sometimes the provider will lock it so only 'authorized' (i.e. apps you have to pay for) apps work. I might try to flash the phone with a generic firmware to see if that works.

[Guest endymion]

I might try to flash the phone with a generic firmware to see if that works.

Yeah, that's my next step. I'm a little worried that I'll break my phone when I do that so I wanted to see if it would 'just work' anywhere before I tried it. I've never done that.

[Guest pod]

Yeah, when it's your only one, you're a bit hesitant

[Guest endymion]

Yes exactly. If anybody can get it to run on real hardware then I would be overjoyed to hear it. It's running in the emulator, it must work. If they could land that robot on Saturn's moon then we can figure this out. I'll flash my phone and risk breaking it to get this moving faster. People are getting arrested for blogging, from 200 miles south of here. That's Wrong.

I was just reading a Time article about the memorial service at Virginia Tech on Tuesday. Part of it:

Yet technology also conferred a shroud of privacy amid the spectacle. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith noted seeing students silently text-messaging before the Tuesday memorial service. "It feels like there is an undercurrent of information being passed that doesn't reach to our level but is remaining within the Virginia Tech family," he said.

That phenomenon could occur in Cuba and North Korea as well. Maybe in some places you have to hide your phone really well and only use it in private. Who cares, phones are small. Maybe in some places your phone doesn't have phone towers to connect to. Who cares, the sneakernet doesn't use the phone towers. Maybe some borders are hard to smuggle phones over. Who cares, the emails can cross the border on anything, a thumb drive, a tourist's camera, it doesn't have to be a phone.

[Guest JMT]

ran across this today:

North Korea ups public executions against cell phone users: think tank

The Associated Press

2007-06-14

SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea has increased its public executions against cell phone users and those who circulate outside information in the communist country, a South Korean government think tank said Thursday.

The phenomenon of executions of those who "circulate South Korean leaflets and sell videos and use cell phones are on the rise," the South's government-affiliated Korea Institute for National Unification think tank said in a white paper on the North's human rights conditions. No exact figures were given.

North Koreans are officially banned from communicating with the outside world but some of them listen to foreign news and use cell phones through Chinese communication networks, according to North Korean defectors in South Korea. The use of cell phones in North Korea is banned though some are smuggled into the North by Chinese who have links with South Koreans.

The North has been struggling to prevent outside information from seeping into the country and believes the influx of information could possibly lead to the overthrow of the reclusive regime.

"The North carries out public executions regularly to maintain social order by creating an atmosphere of fear," said the institute.

Despite the unspecified increase in executions of certain people, North Korea has reduced the frequency of public executions from every month to each quarter due to harsh international criticism, the institute said.

The communist country insists it does not violate human rights, but it has long been accused of imposing the death penalty for political reasons, holding thousands in prison camps, torturing border-crossers and severely restricting freedom of expression and religion.

The institute also said the North has kept intact a system of family guilt by association for political prisoners in an attempt to keep in check any challenges and resistance to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Kim, who wields absolute power in the communist state, tolerates no dissent and demands unquestioning allegiance from its people.

[Guest endymion]

Thanks for posting that.

SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea has increased its public executions against cell phone users and those who circulate outside information in the communist country, a South Korean government think tank said Thursday.

This illustrates at least two things:

1) Regimes like North Korea are very vulnerable to disruptive new technologies that increase the free flow of information over their borders.

2) The Information Without Borders sneakernet MUST be designed to prevent confiscated phones from revealing the identities of sneakernet email users. Lives could be lost due to engineering mistakes. It's very serious business building a tool that people will be imprisoned and executed for using.