Eric Lee

In the old days (before the Internet) there was clear separation between reading about injustice and acting on it. One could read about dozens of cases of violations of human rights in the newspaper, or hear about them on television or radio. And entirely separate from this, there were campaigning organizations which gave activists opportunities to make their voices heard. There was very little overlap between reading and acting in the traditional media. But on the Internet, this distinction (between passively learning about a problem and actively doing something about it) is becoming blurred.

The obvious change is in terms of speed. We can now respond rapidly to cases of violations of trade union rights, or to appeals by workers for solidarity during disputes with employers and governments. But much more than that is taking place.

By integrating news with the possibility to act, we are beginning to change people's behavior when they read news online. They move from being passive observers to active participants.

That all sounds a bit philosophical, so let me be practical, giving a real-life example.

When the LabourStart website was launched in March 1998, it featured columns on its front page including news and campaigns. The news and campaigns were entirely separate from one another. And even as the project moved along and grew, news and campaigns remained separate functions. Of course there were efforts to occasionally link the two, but nothing systematic.

Recently, we changed all that, and began a process of integrating trade union news with campaigning. It was a simple thing to do, technically, but the effect is going to be powerful.

Today when you see a headline on LabourStart like "Cambodia: Arbitration Council orders Raffles Hotel to reinstate workers" the words "Act NOW!" will appear next to it, as a link. So if you want not just to read about this news story but to instantly act on it, you click on the "Act NOW!" link, which takes you to the page where you can send off your message of protest.

That's one half of what's going on. The other half is what happens on the campaign page itself.

Many unions and campaigning organizations have pages set up where visitors can send off email messages of protest or solidarity. One of the most sophisticated systems is the one set up by the AFL-CIO in the USA. They call their system the "Working Families E-Activist Network". It's a powerful system and very effective, but like most of the ones I've seen, when you are taken to the page where you're supposed to take action, you basically see an online form with the text of the protest, some background information, and a 'send this message' button.

What you don't see is what now features on LabourStart's system: a prominent display of current news and updates about this campaign.

For example, if you were to visit the campaign page on LabourStart which is building solidarity with Cambodian hotel workers, the first thing you're likely to notice is the headline "Latest news about this campaign". This is followed by links to seven recent news stories about the struggle there. In this way, you'd have learned that unions representing 35 million workers in Russia had expressed their strong support for the Cambodian workers, or that a prominent Democratic congressman from the USA had called for international organizations to boycott the hotel.

The page becomes not only a place where you go once, to send off a message of protest, but a page to which you will return, to find out what's happened to these workers.

And that's important because sending off a message of protest should not be a one-off thing. We want people to remain involved, to be informed and updated. That's why the news is such an important part of the campaign page.

We don't claim any credit for inventing the idea of integrating news and campaigns. The very best trade union websites already do so. For example, many of the Australian websites have long followed this approach. A current example can be found on the website of the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU), whose campaigns routinely include lists of current news stories related to them.

You still can't do this in a print publication or even on radio -- but television is increasingly becoming a tool which might allow the same sort of approach. Interactive television is a reality, at least in Britain where one can do online banking, participate in an online poll, or even order a pizza using a remote control.

The day may not be far off when you will be able to see a report on some terrible injustice on your television news. Instead of just moaning about how terrible that is, you'll be able to click on the red button on your remote. In this way, you'll be able to add your name to an online petition, or send off a protest message to a government or employer, or even make a donation to a strike fund.

All this without getting up off your couch, seconds after hearing about the need for action.

That's not possible today, but the web is giving us a glimpse of a new era, one in which millions of working people will be able to instantly act across borders and time zones -- an era in which a tremendously strengthened international labour movement once again takes its place on the world stage.

- 30 -

Posted by Eric Lee at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A decade ago, many of us were enthusiastic about the Internet in part because we believed that it opened up extraordinary opportunities for the left. The Internet could not be censored, we argued. Censorship would be treated as damage to the system, and information would route around it.

But a recent report from the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders makes for frightening reading. Indeed, after spending only a few minutes reading it, you may well become convinced that the dream of a free and instant means of communication which governments would be unable to censor has turned out to be an illusion.

The report tells us about some of the "usual suspects" -- the kinds of regimes you just know are blocking free use of the web by their citizens. A typical example would be Cuba, where in the words of Reporters Without Borders Secretary-General Robert Ménard, it is "no surprise that Fidel Castro gives orders about the Internet as he does about everything else in Cuba". (The chapter on Cuba asserts that "Cuba is one of the world's 10 most repressive countries as regards online free expression.")

The outstanding example of an authoritarian regime which is grappling with control over the web and email is, of course, China. As the report points out, "With a total of 61 Internet users in detention at the start of May 2004, China is the world's biggest prison for cyber-dissidents. It is also the country where the technology for e-mail interception and Internet censorship is most developed. What's more, the authorities recently decided to tighten the vice and roll back the few gains made by Internet users in recent years."

Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, US corporations are providing the technology to make it possible for the dictators in Beijing to control the net. According to Reporters Without Borders, "Cisco Systems supplies China with equipment that allows it to intercept and analyse data circulating on the Internet with great precision. Cisco's state-of-the-art routers enable the Chinese cyber-police to spot 'subversive' Internet users."

In an appendix to the report written by Harvard's Ben Edelman, examples are given of how the censorship is often concealed. Try to visit a website which the government wants to block and you usually get error messages about 'time-outs' and sites not being found -- and not an explanation of what is really happening.

Far more chilling, I thought, was Edelman's reference to the case of Uzbekistan -- a primary ally of the US in the war against terror. The former Soviet republic has decided not merely to block access to undesirable websites, but in some cases, to create fake versions of those websites. They call these counterfeit versions of the sites 'modified mirrors'. Edelman writes, "When Uzbek users request the controversial sites, they automatically receive the altered copies in place of the authentic originals. Experts might realize something is wrong, but this tampering is exceptionally difficult for ordinary users to notice or detect."

One might think that the focus is on relatively poor countries where only a small percentage of the population is Internet-literate. After all, blocking access to particular websites in Uzbekistan is something that affects only a very small number of people. In that country, only around two percent of the population is online.

But South Korea is one of the world's most wired countries. According to the report, fully 85% of the population uses email, and 40% have broadband connections. And yet even there, the government routinely blocks websites that "undermine law and order". In practice, this means things like the arrest a year ago of two activists, Kim Yong-Chan and Kim Jong Gon, because -- among other "crimes" -- they had downloaded from the Internet a copy of The Communist Manifesto. The report states that "they were accused of violating national security laws and are still being held without trial".

There are also chapters in the report about the kind of Western democracies like Canada, Australia, the US and Britain where one wouldn't expect to find a lot of censorship, but where censorship is in fact growing all the time.

This should concern trade unionists. While trade union websites have not been the primary victims (yet) of Internet censorship, the regimes which are today doing most of the blocking are regimes which are extremely unfriendly to unions. It is only a matter of time before websites which campaign for union rights internationally, such as Global Unions, LabourStart, the International Centre for Trade Union Rights, and the Campaign for Labor Rights, find themselves being blocked or -- in a worst-case scenario -- get 'corrected' by a regime like the Uzbek case described above.

So whatever happened to the dream of world in which the free flow of information couldn't be stopped? Was it really an illusion?

It was only a dream -- if one believed that technology provided the solution. The technology of the net is great, but it is in the end only technology. To ensure that there will be a free flow of information, a web without borders, requires constant vigilance and struggle.

***

The full text of the Reporters Without Borders report is available online here on their website.

Posted by Eric Lee at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

A couple of years ago, I attended a meeting with the staff of the IT department of one of Britain's largest trade unions. We were discussing a plan for me to train union officials to make better use of e-mail. One of the issues I raised was training people to avoid getting spam. "No need for that," I was told. "Spam is not a problem."

Even then, I was amazed. Already two or three years ago, heavy Internet users were finding that a significant portion of their incoming e-mail messages were offering them pornography, get-rich-quick schemes, and the like.

Today, everyone realizes that unsolicited commercial email has reached epidemic proportions.

As I write these words, the United Nations has even decided to attempt to tackle the problem. Regulators from sixty countries are spending this week in Geneva, meeting under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union, discussing what governments can do.

Unfortunately, the problem is no longer spam in one's email inbox. It's gotten much worse. Spam is now everywhere.

One of the first places to be hit were the extremely popular instant messaging (IM) programs such as ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and many others. (By the way, these programs -- though not widely used in the trade union movement -- have attracted hundreds of millions of users. For example, the latest incarnation of ICQ was downloaded 247 million times from just one website.) If you use an IM program, chances are you'll start getting hit by unwanted messages, just as you would with email.

SMS -- the short text messages sent via mobile phone -- is now also a means for the distribution of millions of unwanted messages. According to a recent study by a London-based mobile data services company, 65% of the world's mobile phone users receive up to five unsolicited text messages per week. And that number is growing.

In other words, the same people who are attacking our e-mail are attacking every other means of communication that reach us -- our mobile phones, our instant messaging software, and so on.

But they are not stopping there. Spammers are writing "robots" -- automated computer programmes -- which trawl the net looking for places to put free notices about their various products and services. One of the first victims has been the network of weblogs (also known as blogs). These online journals often allow visitors to post comments, and spammers have found ways to locate the blogs and automatically send off comments. Recently, one popular trade union blog here in the UK was hit by over 60 spam comments in a single day. (Fortunately, anti-spam software already exists that can block most of these attacks.)

As if that wasn't enough, even the humble Wiki -- a tool designed for collaborative document authoring and made popular by the online encyclopedia known as the Wikipedia -- has been targetted by spammers.

All of this is bad news for trade unions which are making increasing use of e-mail, websites, mobile phones and even blogging. And as more trade unionists discover the joys of instant messaging and Wikis, they will discover even more spammers anxious to ruin their online experience.

There are defences against spam, both e-mail spam and the newer varieties, and trade unionists need to be made aware of these.

If we don't take steps now to defeat spam, we risk reducing the effectiveness of this extraordinary tool (the Internet). People will use e-mail less and less, they will turn away from weblogs which are full of spam comments, and they will not even be willing to try out new technologies like instant messaging and Wikis. For trade unions which have so much at stake in the high-speed, low cost means of communication that is the Internet, we cannot let that happen.

Posted by Eric Lee at 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)