Tag: flickr

Mere om Flickrs censur af egyptiske SS-folk

Medlemmer af det egyptiske hemmelige politi, hvis primære opgave var/er at slå ned på regimets politiske modstandere.

Disse billeder er nu online igen, ikke takket være Flickr, som ikke turde modstå et ganske givet politisk pres for at tage dem ned. Du kan for eksempel se dem her eller her.

Selv om projektet med at udstille Egyptens torturbødler går flere år tilbage, kom disse konkrete billeder (i modsætning til, hvad jeg skrev i det sidste indlæg) fra sidste uges storm på det hemmelige politis hovedkvarter i Cairo.

Hossam El-Hamalawy fortæller:

When we stormed State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City, which hosted one of Mubarak’s largest torture facilities, on Saturday I found two DVDs in one of the offices, both titled “أرشيف السادة ضباط الجهاز” The Agency Officers’ Archive. The DVDs included profile pictures of State Security officers, organized in folders. Each folder had the officers’ name. Some however did not have the names. There were also sub folders that included pictures of those officers in social events like weddings.

I don’t know what was the purpose of these two DVDs, but I sincerely thank the State Security officials who gave us this present on a golden plate. I’ve uploaded the profile pictures to this flickr set and added them to the Piggipedia. I urge you all to circulate them. And if you have any more information about those officers please come forward.

Each member of SS has to be brought to justice. This was an agency devoted to spying, surveillance, torture and murder. Every member of this organization from the informer all the way up to the generals should be prosecuted. SS has to be dissolved. It cannot be “restructured” like what the current PM is calling for.

Although those torturers violated our private lives on a daily basis, bugging our phones, offices, and even our bedrooms, I will respect the privacy of their families and will not publish the photos of their social events that included family members.

Dear SS, yes you had every right to be worried from the Piggipedia. We will expose you, bring shame on you. You forced millions of Egyptians to live in fear and terror. Now you have to answer for your crimes.

Kan Flickrs beslutning om at censurere forsvares med henvisning til deres retningslinjer, som de selv gør? Nej, mener den mangeårige Flickr-bruger Thomas Hawks – det er rent hykleri:

This is one giant cop out on Flickr’s part. Flickr knows that Flickr is *full* of photos that are “not a member’s work.” In fact Flickr staff themselves routinely upload photos to their own personal photostreams that are “not their work.” For example, is this Flickr Maps screenshot of a Rev Dan Catt photograph really Flickr Chief Matthew Rothenberg’s own work? What about this screengrab of an AOL advertisement? Is this Rothenberg’s “own work?” How about this screengrab of a Valleywag page? While I suspect that this “flickrhq masturbating dinosaur award for excellence in the field of community abuse and advocacy,” is in fact Rothenberg’s own photograph, his own stream, as well as the streams of many other flickr staffers are full of photos that are not “their work.”Withdrawing Arabawy’s photos of suspected torturers by citing a technicality that the photos were not “his own work,” is disingenuous. The photos were pulled because Flickr was pressured to pull the photos and chose to respond to that pressure rather than to take a stand for freedom. Flickr knows that Flickr is chock full of photographs in photostreams that are not a members own work and this act on their part simply points to another act where they have selectively applied one of their rules to suit their needs using their overly ambiguous Community Guidelines as justification. Flickr should apologize to Arabawy and restore his photoset.

Men det kommer jo nok ikke til at ske. Og så er det godt, at vi har Anonymous og andre grupper, der ikke ryster nær så meget i bukserne som Flickr og de andre Web 2.0-dinosaurer.

Web 2.0-fail: Flickr bortcensurerer dokumentation af egyptiske Stasifolk

Wanted Egyptian Stasi Pig

Den egyptiske blogger og aktivist Hossam El-Hamalawy har i efterhånden årevis samlet billeder af egyptiske Stasifolk – medlemmer af det berygtede sikkerhedspoliti, der som deres vigtigste opgave har haft at udpege og nedkæmpe regimets modstandere, og det med ganske ubehagelige metoder – på sin Flickr-konto.

Den slags synes Flickr imidlertid ikke, at deres “pro”-konti skal bruges til, for nu har El-Hamalawy fået dette brev fra dem:

Brev om censur af billeder

Det lyder jo meget tilforladeligt med begrundelsen om, at man kun må have billeder, man selv har taget – eller gør det? Masser af mennesker lægger billeder, de ikke selv har taget, på Flickr, og det sker der næsten aldrig noget ved. Man aner, at det må være politisk motiveret – at Flickr nok synes, det er hyggeligt, at folk bruger siden til at lægge feriebilleder og den slags op.

Som El-Hamalawy selv gør opmærksom på: Billederne blev taget ned “because of ‘copyright infringement'”. Men der har næppe været fremsat noget krav om en sådan krænkelse af ophavsretten, eftersom billederne var bidraget af folk, der gerne ville have dem frem. Der er snarere tale om en politisk motiveret “proaktiv” censur fra Flickrs side.

Moderselskabet Yahoo! synes også, det er fint nok at angive folk, der engagerer sig i kampen mod et diktatur som det i Egypten eller Kina – men hvis nogen bruger deres tjeneste til at dokumentere et dikatorisk regimes overgreb , kommer de pludselig i tanker om reglerne.  Det er ærligt talt skammeligt og udstiller svagheden i det “nye” Internet – de meget store og centrale sider som Amazon, Google, Facebook og Flickr bliver også til et “single point of censorship”, hvor Censur 2.0 let kan få alt til at forsvinde fra de få steder, folk læser.

Men var den egyptiske sikkerhedstjeneste overhovedet så slem, at den fortjener at blive udstillet, dokumenteret og sammenlignet med Gestapo, SS og Stasi?

Ja, skriver Issandr El Amrani i den egyptiske avis Al-Masry Al-Youm, under overskriften “This is more of a revolution than you think“:

There were worse dictatorships, yes, but the problem was not simply an aging, authoritarian president, his ambitious son and his corrupt entourage. It was that, for the sake of regime preservation, a sprawling security apparatus collected information on citizens, manipulated them, cajoled and threatened them, humiliated them. State Security did not just, as its role should have been, keep tabs on possible terrorists and criminal networks. It ran Egypt on a day-to-day level, super-imposing itself onto the regular bureaucracy, acting as an intermediary.While ministries shuffled paper and red tape, state security kept tabs on people. This goes beyond the issue of torture, which it certainly practiced abundantly, or the racketeering, blackmailing and other schemes its officers carried out with impunity. What those who gained access to its offices discovered is that, much like the Ministry of Transport might keep an inventory of its buses and trains, State Security maintained an elaborate database on citizens, the threats they represented, their weaknesses, relationships and other every little detail of their lives.

This process that had its own chilling logic, reminiscent of the “banality of evil” Hannah Arendt chronicled in Nazi Germany, Andrei Almarik in the Soviet Union, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in East Germany, or Ariel Dorfman in Pinochet’s Chile. What it boils down to is that a vast bureaucracy existed simply to perpetuate itself and those in charge. Consider the neat categorizations of the population–“Muslim Brothers”, “Communists and human rights activists,” etc.–or the recent allegation that the Ministry of Trade paid a monthly retainer of LE174,000 to its own state security watchers to get them to write positive reports.

Whatever counter-terrorism and other legitimate roles State Security played, this must have been a relatively minor part of what it did: most of its resources were dedicated to the humdrum task of keeping tabs on those Egyptians who, for whatever reason–wealth, political opinion, media influence, foreign connections–posed a potential threat to the regime.

Flickr-gruppen Piggipedia er endnu ikke fjernet, men det er givetvis kun et spørgsmål om tid. El-Hamalawy opsummerer selv situationen således:

And once again, @flickr you should b ashamed. The only people u made happy tonight r police torturers. Way to go.