Online protests click with Tunisian dissidents

WIRED:The Tunisian state has fought back against the use of the internet as a tool of news and protest, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

VIOLENT CLASHES have rocked the country of Tunisia for weeks now.

Protests against the administration of the country’s authoritarian president Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali began after a 26-year-old university graduate set himself alight in his home town of Sidi Bouzid after police confiscated his fruit and vegetable cart. He later died.

Street clashes have produced fatalities but the government has been effective in excluding local and foreign journalists from reporting.

However, online stories from Tunisia have taken a far more prominent global position.

In an echo of the riots that attended the Iranian election in 2009, thousands have followed reports of the unrest on Twitter, following the #sidibouzid tag.

Others have sought to play their own more active part. The contributors from online group Anonymous gathered in the first few days of January to attack Tunisian government websites, initially because of the administration’s attempts to block circulation of WikiLeaks cables.

As reports of protests spread, they stayed to help propagate news of the Tunisia’s internal protests to the rest of the world.

The Tunisian government fought back against the use of the internet as a tool of news and protest. They chose to fight their battles online in a way that was guaranteed to raise the profile of their internal disputes online.

Tunisia’s clumsy blocking of WikiLeaks was just the first step.

In response to the growing distribution of incriminating video and photographs of violent police actions, the government’s state telecoms company chose an audacious and blatant method to control its own citizens’ privacy and online access.

It chose not to block popular services like Facebook, Google Mail and Yahoo, but in a subtle way to manipulate those company’s web pages.

When Tunisian users entered their user names and passwords to access private messages and upload videos on these websites, the Tunisian ISP inserted an invisible code on those pages, which copied the user’s login details to its own webserver.

As a consequence, everyone who uses Facebook effectively handed over their passwords to the authorities.

As the unrest spread in Tunisia, so the government’s agents spread online, logging on as prominent bloggers and journalists, deleting Facebook pages and videos in an attempt to disrupt online reporting of the demonstrations.

It is hard to imagine a technique more offensive to dedicated internet-users in the rest of the world.

Their connection with the sites they use was grossly manipulated, in a way that had more in common with criminal computer fraud than the role an internet service provider is meant to play.

Coders identifying themselves as Anonymous wrote code that Tunisians could install in their browser to immunise themselves from the state’s malicious scripts.

Others renewed their work, mirroring and distributing the videos that the government hackers had deleted, and attempted to spread the stories from Tunisia further afield.

Is it working? At time of writing, the Tunisian story is still buried in the foreign sections of newspapers (the New York Times dedicated just 91 words to the story in their Wednesday edition).

Prominent Tunisian bloggers, especially those who uncovered the government’s actions, have been detained and threatened.

Online supporters abroad had the dismaying experience of discovering where one activist had disappeared by seeing his Google Latitude account (a web service that lets your mobile phone share your location with your friends) display his latest position in Tunisia’s ministry of the interior.

Brief flurries of excitement, including a false rumour that Ben Ali had been deposed in a military coup, interrupt a monotonously depressing picture of growing repression and police violence.

Echoes of Iran are unmistakable.

Then, too, an online army came to the aid of internal protesters in the country, only to find themselves forced into the position of a sidelined audience as the authorities shut down external ties and used the old techniques of domestic intimidation and suppression against their own population.

But even if the quick revolution hoped for and expected by anti-Ahmadinejad groups in Iran didn’t come to pass, their online supporters did not forget or leave them behind.

Even now, as the Iranian authorities try once again to eradicate the Green Movement online and off, at home and abroad, a core of western internet supporters continue to struggle to relay unfolding events in that country to the rest of the world.

It is a strange form of politicisation at a distance: to go from passive western internet user to informed Middle-East activist.

I’m sure some of those working the longest hours in the chat forums of Anonymous may not have been able to point to Tunisia on a map just a week or so ago.

There’s nothing more likely to attract the anger of the average internet-user though than to see a fellow online contributor censored or spied upon.