Author: Mathias Klang

Letter In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub

Came across this letter online and wanted to save it here for future reference.

In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. “It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them,” he says, “but you are of no use to the stars that you own”.

There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin1 stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”2 For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the world, and render it a token of privilege.3

Elsevier has recently filed a copyright infringement suit in New York against Science Hub and Library Genesis claiming millions of dollars in damages.4 This has come as a big blow, not just to the administrators of the websites but also to thousands of researchers around the world for whom these sites are the only viable source of academic materials. The social media, mailing lists and IRC channels have been filled with their distress messages, desperately seeking articles and publications.

Even as the New York District Court was delivering its injunction, news came of the entire editorial board of highly-esteemed journal Lingua handing in their collective resignation, citing as their reason the refusal by Elsevier to go open access and give up on the high fees it charges to authors and their academic institutions. As we write these lines, a petition is doing the rounds demanding that Taylor & Francis doesn’t shut down Ashgate5, a formerly independent humanities publisher that it acquired earlier in 2015. It is threatened to go the way of other small publishers that are being rolled over by the growing monopoly and concentration in the publishing market. These are just some of the signs that the system is broken. It devalues us, authors, editors and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access6.

We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society. But closed access’s monopoly over academic publishing, its spectacular profits and its central role in the allocation of academic prestige trump the public interest. Commercial publishers effectively impede open access, criminalize us, prosecute our heroes and heroines, and destroy our libraries, again and again. Before Science Hub and Library Genesis there was Library.nu or Gigapedia; before Gigapedia there was textz.com; before textz.com there was little; and before there was little there was nothing. That’s what they want: to reduce most of us back to nothing. And they have the full support of the courts and law to do exactly that.7

In Elsevier’s case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said: “simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest”8. Alexandra Elbakyan’s original plea put the stakes much higher: “If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge.”

We demonstrate daily, and on a massive scale, that the system is broken. We share our writing secretly behind the backs of our publishers, circumvent paywalls to access articles and publications, digitize and upload books to libraries. This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge, custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make property of, our knowledge commons.

More than seven years ago Aaron Swartz, who spared no risk in standing up for what we here urge you to stand up for too, wrote: “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”9

We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices.

30 November 2015

Dušan Barok, Josephine Berry, Bodó Balázs, Sean Dockray, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anthony Iles, Lawrence Liang, Sebastian Lütgert, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Marcell Mars, spideralex, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulić, Femke Snelting…

  1. Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (June 10, 2015): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.,
    “The Obscene Profits of Commercial Scholarly Publishers.” svpow.com. Accessed November 30, 2015.  ↩
  2. Sample, Ian. “Harvard University Says It Can’t Afford Journal Publishers’ Prices.” The Guardian, April 24, 2012, sec. Science. theguardian.com.  ↩
  3. “Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish – Al Jazeera English.” Accessed November 30, 2015. aljazeera.com.  ↩
  4. “Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s ‘Illegal’ Copyright Paywalls.” TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com.  ↩
  5. “Save Ashgate Publishing.” Change.org. Accessed November 30, 2015. change.org.  ↩
  6. “The Cost of Knowledge.” Accessed November 30, 2015. thecostofknowledge.com.  ↩
  7. In fact, with the TPP and TTIP being rushed through the legislative process, no domain registrar, ISP provider, host or human rights organization will be able to prevent copyright industries and courts from criminalizing and shutting down websites “expeditiously”.  ↩
  8. “Court Orders Shutdown of Libgen, Bookfi and Sci-Hub.” TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com.  ↩
  9. “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Internet Archive. Accessed November 30, 2015. archive.org.  ↩
Posted on by Mathias Klang

How to beat a Trump

Power is given, not taken.

If this is true then the most important thing for those with power is to make sure that it continues to be given to them. Early politicians were like royalty. Their right to rule was based on their belonging to – and being seen to belong to – a ruling caste. But two world wars have changed this. The right to rule shifts to the meritocracy and the best qualified shall rule. However, the meritocracy has cracked and the object is not to persuade the voters that they too can become kings or billionaires.

Adapting to change, politicians attempt to come across as folksier. They argue that they know what the common man needs, and they can provide it. We are currently at the point where this is failing. And Trump is the result.

Royalty does not need the populace to identify with them. They are there by the grace of god or some other power. In order to increase the distance from common folk they wear tiaras and crowns, gowns and sashes to distract people that underneath it all they are flawed individuals. The golden carriage is necessary if they are to remain in power.

The same is true of the pre-war(s) political elite. Yes, they needed votes but the system was corrupt enough and the populace confused enough to vote them into office on the basis of their arrogant belief in the right to rule.

The meritocracy has its own internal flaw. It’s built on the fallacy that everyone can achieve greatness through work. The meritocracy therefore attempts to argue that it’s not an elite. It is simply a club to which you currently don’t belong. But you may do in the future.

The meritocracy did not need to pander in person to the voters. They were quite obviously the right to rule since they had the right name, right manners, right schools, etc. However, the meritocracy has begun to crack. The political class is recognized to a much greater extent as a class.

The poor don’t get into the right schools, and if they do, they don’t get the right backing. Rarely do we see true class journeys in the political elite. Which means the elite must appeal to the larger group. For the last three decades the politicians belong to the elite but strive to show themselves to be “of the people”. They take of their ties, they role up their sleeves, they share beer recipes and eat common food. And if they fail, they do so at their peril.

Analyzing American presidential campaign ads can be fun. They are all sons of immigrants, they all appear in semi casual wear and they all promote the idea of their “commonness”. This is despite the fact that they mostly have gone to very exclusive schools, where they made invaluable contacts for the rest of their lives.

With Trump its different. Yes he is part of the elite and he has gone to the right schools and made the right connections, but that’s not what he is trying to do. He doesn’t role up his sleeves or take of his tie.

He is not telling crowds that he is a man of the people and has their best interests at heart. He is telling the voters that he is better than them. He is better than everyone. By his own boastful admission, he is richer, went to the best schools, has the best vocabulary, is the best negotiator, best businessman, and now, in what should have been predictable, he’s told the world on national TV that he has a big cock.

His appeal is not that of royalty, he is not the dream of meritocracy (you will never be as good as him), appeal is not to be the trustworthy politician that acts in the voters best interest.

His appeal is that he is offering the opportunity to bring people into the corridors of power. Once he is there the voter can live vicariously through him as he shouts at world leaders: “You’re fired”

This is why he can be racist, misogynistic, stupid, evil, and just plain rude without losing popularity. He is the uncommon man that offers vicarious life. He cannot be stopped by facts – there is more than enough proof to show that he lies about many things. He cannot be stopped by scandal – the man invites scandal through his life and language and speeches. The tools to stop each type of politician vary depending on the type of image they are trying to project.

  • To win an election against royalty = prove that they are common
  • To win an election against meritocracy = prove that the club is closed
  • To win against the “common man” = reveal the hypocrisy that political elites don’t care for commoners.
  • To win against Trump = prove that he will not take the viewers with him, and that his powers are an illusion. And when the cameras are on him, the experiences of the onlooker will be shame and defeat as the leaders of the world laugh at him.

In his own words: Nobody likes a loser.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Privacy a Question of Class

As we are in the beginning of the privacy course I dedicated today’s class to a closer reading of the classic Warren & Brandeis Right to Privacy article from 1890. We began with a discussion on what rights were, where they came from, and what they meant. The concept of rights is interesting as it is invoked often enough but it is often only vaguely understood.

From this point the discussion moved to trying to understand why Warren & Brandeis were interested in writing the article and what at that time in history made it relevant. The often cited cause is that Warren married Mabel Bayard, the daughter of a senator and future secretary of state – and that the press were overly prying. However, an interesting article What if Samuel D. Warren Hadn’t Married a Senator’s Daughter? by Amy Gajda shows that this was not the case. The press naturally reported it but hardly in a prying manner. Also the couple were married seven years before the publication, this may be a long time to hold a grudge. While the press were “nastier” when reporting the death of Mabel’s mother and sister, it is difficult to see if this was the true impetus for writing the article.

What is clear is that Warren had the main desire for the article and Brandeis was the lead author. Their anger was directed at the ways in which gossip had turned into an industry.

The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and the vicious, but has become a trade which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. . . . To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle . . .

The lowering of production costs for newspaper production, the increase in the gossip press, the desire for people to read this material is all reflected in the article. This was also a period of time when new technologies were enabling a new level of recording and transmitting data

Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ” what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.

It is clear that the authors see a mix between technology and the business models that these technologies support. All this together was creating harm. Here they were looking towards a type of psychological harm that comes from the lack of protection from the sphere that is necessary for people to stay healthy in an ever more distressing world:

The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.

By looking at a wide range of cases and laws they explore, for example the ways in which copyright and defamation work, in order to

It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is.

The answer they seek, lies in the rights stemming from the individual and are an extension of the physical space that is the property of the individual. And there extent is interest as they recognize the importance of metadata when they write

A man writes a dozen letters to different people. No person would be permitted to publish a list of the letters written. If the letters or the contents of the diary were protected as literary compositions, the scope of the protection afforded should be the same secured to a published writing under the copyright law. But the copyright law would not prevent an enumeration of the letters, or the publication of some of the facts contained therein.

The article was well received. For example an article in the 1891 Atlantic Monthly wrote (from Glancy The Invention of the Right to Privacy Arizona Law Review 1979):

…a learned and interesting article in a recent number of the Harvard Law Review, entitled The Right to Privacy. It seems that the great doctrine of Development rules not only in biology and theology, but in the law as well; so that whenever, in the long process of civilization, man generates a capacity for being made miserable by his fellows in some new way, the law, after a decent interval, steps in to protect him.

But an interesting social critique comes from Godkin writing about the Right to Privacy article in The Nation in 1890

The second reason is, that there would be no effective public support or countenance for such proceedings. There is nothing democratic societies dislike so much to-day as anything which looks like what is called “exclusiveness,” and all regard for or precautions about privacy are apt to be considered signs of exclusiveness. A man going into court, therefore, in defence of his privacy, would very rarely be an object of sympathy on the part either of a jury or the public.

He also wrote (from Glancy The Invention of the Right to Privacy Arizona Law Review 1979)

” ‘privacy’ has a different meaning to different classes or categories of persons, it is, for instance, one thing to a man who has always lived in his own house, and another to a man who has always lived in a boardinghouse.”

Godkin is interesting as he puts the privacy that Warren and Brandeis are calling for into an social or class perspective. The harm that Warren and Brandeis experience is a lack of comfort that only exists in the class that can afford it. There is no right to privacy in the sense that everyone should be given the opportunity to experience the right. It is the protection of those who already have power – not the creation of a right to empower people.

An interesting comparison is when Mark Zuckerberg declared that privacy is no longer a social norm in 2010. But in 2013  he bought four homes surrounding his house in order to ensure his privacy. Privacy is what can be afforded.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Privacy and Media Power Teaching

This is my second term at the Communication Department at UMass Boston and this term I am teaching a capstone course called Privacy: Communication, Technology, Society (early syllabus here) and News Media and Political Power (early syllabus here). The courses are lots of fun and the students seem to be responding well.

In the privacy course we have already had lectures and discussions on the history of the toilet and bedroom just to get things started. In Media Power we have discussed Postman, the causes of the Iraq war and the purpose of war.

Its going to be a busy and exciting term.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Bassel Khartabil, Syrian prisoner who lives and risks dying for a free Internet

 Article by Stéphanie Vidal under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Please attribute author Stéphanie Vidal and first publication in Slate.France with a link to https://www.slate.fr/story/107927/bassel-khartabil-prisonnier-syrien-internet
Translation into English by Philippe Aigrain, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Jean-Christophe Peyssard
Source for reposting:
https://annuel.framapad.org/p/freebassel-traduction-slate
6553833251_e561474e2f_z
Known worldwide as a free Internet defender and an Open Source culture promoter, he has been detained for three years and a half by the Bashar al-Assad regime and has been transferred from Adra prison to an unknown place on 3 October 2015. On October 10th, his wife has been informed that his name has been deleted from the prison register, without further information on where he could be. None of the parties involved recognizes they have him or not (http://freebassel.org/).
Bassel Khartabil, 34, fervent defender of a free Internet and promoter of open source culture, has been held prisoner since 15 March 2012 in the jails of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. According to the opinion of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (http://en.alkarama.org/iraq/1763-syria-un-calls-for-the-release-of-freedom-of-speech-advocate-bassel-khartabil) during its 72nd session, held in Geneva in April 2015, he had been arbitrarily detained for “peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression” and having “advocated a non-restricted use of the Internet.” He was transferred on 3 October 2015 from the Adra prison, located in the north-eastern outskirts of Damascus, where he was imprisoned since December 2012, he was taken to an unknown location, possibly for trial. Accused without evidence having ever been presented against him, he is more than ever in danger.
A developer recognized worldwide for his contributions to open source projects such as Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia and Creative Commons, Bassel Khartabil was also involved in local action, based in Damascus at Aiki Lab, a place dedicated to digital art practices and teaching of collaborative technologies. For all of his work, he was awarded by the Foreign Policy website the 19th position on its prestigious Global Thinkers ranking of 2012 (http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/11/26/the-fp-top-100-global-thinkers/) and in 2013 won the Digital Freedom Award from the Index on Censorship (https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/03/winners-index-awards-2013/), an international organization that promotes and defends freedom of expression since 1972.
His imprisonment and his recent transfer deeply affect and concern the Open Source community and activists for human rights and the fundamental freedom of free communication of thoughts and opinions. At the announcement of the news, Jillian C. York, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, posted on her Twitter account the following message:
https://twitter.com/jilliancyork/status/650380722465730560
In less than 140 characters, Jillian C. York managed to raise two realities: the frightening silence of the Syrian government in response to the actions taken for the release of Bassel Khartabil and the protection power that lies in the watchfulness of the Internet users for political prisoners fate. On the first point, Ines Osman, Coordinator of the Legal Service of the Alkarama Foundation NGO, linking the victims of violations of human rights in the Arab world and UN mechanisms, confirms the impassivity of the Syrian authorities:

 

“We have taken action at the UN twice, in 2012 and 2014, and the Syrian authorities have never responded to UN requests. This past April, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for the release of Bassel, and this appeal once again remained ignored. It is essential that the international community is calling for the implementation of these decisions, which clearly state that his most basic rights were not respected: he was arrested, held incommunicado, tortured, and brought before a military judge with false accusations.
On Saturday morning, we were informed that Bassel had been transferred from the Adra jail towards an unknown destination. Nobody knows his present whereabouts. We immediately informed the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances. We hope that this time, the Syrian authorities will answer.”

When there is no longer respect for human rights, public calls can only state what one hopes for. This brings us to the second point: the more the affirmation of our hope is shared and present on the Web and social media, the more it may turn to a reality. Bassel’s engagement in favor of a free Internet may have brought him to jail, but the attention that we, citizens on the Internet, give to this case may, to some degree, help bring him out of the darkness. To demonstrate interest for his life is one of the ways by which people can become aware that in Syria, one can die because one uses a smartphone and understands how the Internet works.

 Survival in Adra, even under the bombings

 To tell Bassel’s story over these last five years, is also to try to portray implicitly a devastated Syria, from the beginning of the Syrian revolution 15-18 March, 2011 (first calls to uprising, further to the Egyptian revolution; first “Friday demonstrations” and their brutal repression) to the slow transformation of this revolution into an inextricable armed conflict where 240,000 people have died and millions displaced.

4670781482_d072301ef0_mBassel Khartabil, who was forced by restraint to remain in Syria, is yet another of these prisoners whose number is hard to establish: one speaks of 8,000 prisoners, of which 600 women, only in Adra prison, three times its nominal capacity. Prisoners have been jailed in Adra for a wide variety of motives such as drug dealing or use, murder or robbery, but it also detains prisoners whose name is known abroad for the engagement in favour of freedom of expression. Mazen Darwish, for instance, is one of them. He is the President of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, arrested in February 2012, almost a month to the day before Bassel Khartabil. He was freed temporarily on 10 August 2015 (http://en.rsf.org/syria-mazen-darwish-free-at-last-10-08-2015,48211.html) before being found not guilty of the charges of “publishing information on terrorist acts” on the 31st of the same month.

Detained under other charges, Bassel Khartabil was accused in front of military courts, and thus excluded from the general political amnesty of June 2014, which, though opaque, cleared many peaceful activists from the charges brought against them. He was thus still in Adra when the jail was stormed by the armed rebel group Jaysh al-Islam, who took control of two of its buildings on last September 12th, a date that may be symbolic as it is the day after Bashar al-Assad’s fiftieth birthday. The prisoners found themselves caught between bombings by the regular army and fire by the rebels trying to free the jail. Bassel Khartabil survived to this deluge of fire, but it seems that around twenty other prisoners were killed and several dozens, possible a hundred, were injured (http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2015/Sep-12/314959-11-dead-in-rebel-shelling-on-damascus-activists.ashx).

Again, when it comes to Syria, information sources are difficult to obtain. Numbers are approximate, speech is choked in fear, and communication is slowed because of regime surveillance. As stressed by the lawyer Benoît Huet in an op-ed published in the French newspaper Libération, the war in Syria has also become, in a connected world, an information war, raising the question of its dissemination and manipulation. Internationally, this information war prevents us from clearly seeing the facts in a media-pervasive but terribly distant conflict because of its extreme complexity. This should not make us overlook the other information war, which raged this time at local level: in the heart of Syria, personal information and content posted on social networks are used as weapons.

Syrian smartphones, fear in the pocket

Internet, and particularly social media such as Facebook, have been privileged communication means used by Syrian population to testify of the revolution of 2011 and the regime‘s bloody repression. The documentary Syria: Inside the Secret Revolution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_SIeljZ3Tc), initially broadcasted by the BBC on 26 September 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015flwq), gathers some of these videos which, after their publication online, allowed the international community to realize the revolt on Syrian streets.

Bassel Safadi @basselsafadi  31 Jan 2012  https://twitter.com/basselsafadi/status/164355948582932480                                      
the people who are in real danger never leave their countries. they are in danger for a reason and for that they don’t leave #Syria
Bassel Khartabil, 31 January 2012, two weeks before his arrest
It should nevertheless not be forgotten that Internet has not always been authorized in Syria, nor Facebook accessible to its population. As he took office after the death of his father Hafez in June 2000, Bashar al-Assad appeared like a reformer demonstrating opening spirit in several economic and political domains. He even made access to Internet possible but, understanding the power of the network, took care to have most social networks censored in 2007, followed by Wikipedia in Arabic in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Syria).
From the start, the network was monitored: those who would go to cybercafés had to show proof of identification and their web history was kept, as explains Wahid Saqr, former officer of security of the Syrian government, to Mishal Husain in the second episode of How Facebook Changed the World: The Arab Spring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDjCYBMxZAQ%2042:10), another documentary broadcasted by the BBC on 15 September 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014s261)
It was only in February 2011 that Bashar al-Assad made possible connections to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The gesture, intended to be magnanimous, was quickly interpreted as threatening, social networks appearing as a useful tool for the govenrment to surveil its population and gather information on those who could, through words and images, be opponents. Employed as digital surveillance weapons, they have been used to track those whose voice could rise, virtually or for real, against the Damascus regime, but also all those who had computer means or competences.
Dana Trometer, researcher and producer of the documentaries quoted above, could feel this dreadful reality:
    
“People who I met for all movies on which I worked on the Arab world, and especially of Syria, have very often been forced to escape or have unfortunately disappeared shortly after our interviews”.
    
Even today, on the road of exile, refugees explain that it is particularly dangerous to carry a mobile phone (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/europe/a-21st-century-migrants-checklist-water-shelter-smartphone.htm). This simple possession can lead to arrest – or much worse – by Syrian government representatives or ISIS members who ask them, at their respective checkpoints, to give their Facebook username and password to determine their political allegiance.
Bassel Khartabil was saying that in Syria, holding a mobile phone was much more dangerous than walking around with a nuclear bomb. Because of his job as a developer and his commitments to the promotion of a free Internet, it was impossible for him to get rid of his computers and connected mobile phones, nor to have his Information Technologies competences forgotten. On 31 January 2012, two weeks before being arrested, he posted the following tweet: “the people who are in real danger never leave their countries. they are in danger for a reason and for that they don’t leave #Syria” (https://twitter.com/basselsafadi/status/164355948582932480)

Wanting to build: the AikiLab and Palmyra Project

His role of Creative Commons lead in Syria and his participation, at the international level, in the free culture movement, led him to frequent travels abroad, but he would always go back home. It was in Poland, at the September 2011 Creative Commons Summit, that his friend Jon Phillips, who became since them the leader of the #FreeBassel campaign, saw him for the last time:
“I begged him to not go back, that he would be killed or made prisoner. He tried to reassure me by telling that maybe he would not be risking that, and that anyway, his friend, his family, his love was there, that he could not stay. We cried and it was really ugly, then we spent the rest of the night laughing and designing a new world. When the sun rose, he took his cab, waved a last time through the open window, and I remember thinking that it was the last time I would see him; that he would be arrested as soon as out of the plane.”
It didn’t exactly happen like that: Bassel Khartabil got a few more months of respite, during which he continued his local engagement. Syria being under embargo, only certain proprietary software had received the authorization to be taught in universities. Bassel Khartabil had thus founded in 2010 the AikiLab (https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Aiki_lab), described, depending on the person, as a hackerspace or a cultural center, in order to allow education in social media and open source technologies.
Developers, artists, professors, journalists and local entrepreneurs would frequently visit: the AikiLab, as described by artist Dino Ahmad Ali, was a large apartment with two rooms where anyone could come work and even sleep if the task was long, and take a coffee or a beer in the kitchen to give oneself courage or relax. The large living room was fit for conferences, and Internet celebrities visited to share their knowledge, such as Mozilla founder Mitchell Baker MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito.
Dino Ahmad Ali and Bassel Khartabil were also colleagues. They were both working for a publishing house called Al-Aous (http://discover-syria.com/), on Discover-Syria.com, a website providing cultural information on Syria – Dino as artistic director and Bassel as technical director. Always for the same company, Bassel Khartabil dedicated himself for years to a project which was particularly close to his heart, the Palmyra Project (https://archive.org/details/freebassel-palmyra). On CD-Rom, this project was an ambitious virtual tour of the antique city, fully reconstructed in 3D images from documents of scientific and archaeological research. “Initially, Bassel was only dealing with programming, but as a person with multiple talents, he learned to use the Maya software and realized 3D models, remembers Georges Dahdouh, who joined the team several months as head of 3D modeling. “He also learned the functioning of a game engine to conceive the path of the virtual tour in 3D and at the end, together with other team members, he would work on every other aspect, except copyright and research, for which a team was dedicated to the study of historical sources and interviews with archeologists.”
View of Palmyra reconstituted by Project Palmyra: https://archive.org/details/freebassel-palmyra
Oriented for a general audience, Project Palmyra was expected to constitute a sort of digital encyclopedia on this city also called Tadmor, bringing its return through gathering images and texts and realization of new technologies involving specialists and archaeologists. Khaled Al-Assad, director of antiques of Palmyra between 1963 and 2003 and friend of Bassel Khartabil, was one of those. This scholar was beheaded on 18 August 2015 by ISIS, before his body was exposed on the streets by his executioners and photos broadcasted on social media.
If the CD-ROM has not been published to date, the members of the #FreeBassel campaign decided to revive Palmyra Project by launching on 15 October 2015 #NewPalmyra, an online community and a platform of data storage, in order to honor the work of Bassel. A project is directed by Barry Threw, digital artist and director of software for Obscura, who also contributed to allow technically #racingextinction, a video projection on the Empire State Building. Behind both hashtags is a similar desire to use architecture to raise public awareness, by displaying endangered species on one of the most famous skyscrapers in NYC, raising awareness on climate change, or by putting digital technology at the service of a threatened Syria:
    
“The Ancient City of Palmyra was a vital gateway for commerce and cultures. With #NewPalmyra, we oppose the foolish destruction of archaeological treasures led by ISIS by the will of construction of a man like Bassel Khartabil. We hope this project will raise awareness on his work and contribute to his liberation.”

A civilian pursued by a military tribunal

It was at the exit of his job, located in the district of al-Mazzeh in Damascus, that Bassel Khartabil was arrested on 15 March 2012 by the men of Branch 215 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Intelligence_Directorate_%28Syria%29#Regional_Heads_of_Military_Intelligence), one of the military intelligence services in Damascus. After having been interrogated and tortured for five days, he was accompanied to his house so that his computers and documents could be seized. He was then detained in secret for nine months. We know since then that he was first taken to the Branch 248 of military intelligence and that he spent eight months in solitary confinement in the Adra prison. He was there presented to a military count on 9 December 2012.
“The military court, specialised in trials of military criminals in times of war, obeys to the Defense minister and not to the Justice minister. It is composed of three soldiers, including one president. Its procedures are kept secret, and accused do not have the right to a lawyer’s assistance, explains Noura Ghazi, attorney and human rights activist, who had gotten engaged to Bassel Khartabil a short time before he got arrested. Sentences are particularly severe and can go to death. Penalties are executed immediately, preventing any re-examination of the sentences. Since 2011 events, the military counrt was activated to persecute peaceful activists such as Bassel, Anas and Salah Shughri and many others (http://forusa.org/content/anas-shughri-ns-shwgry). This is a clear violation of the law, the Constitution and even the founding decree  of this court.”
A civilian without a lawyer trialed by a military court, Bassel Khartabil saw his trial last no more than a few minutes, without any evidence advanced against him, as underlined the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. After this expedited and unfair trial, he was immediately transferred to the prison of Sidnaya, known to be one of the most infamous of the regime. (http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2008/07/24/revelations-sur-le-massacre-de-la-prison-de-saydnaya)
Then sent again to the prison of Adra, he could receive a visit of his family on 26 December 2012. They found him in an alarming physical and psychological state. He obtained the right to marry Noura Ghazi in the prison on 7 January 2013. He has been detained in Adra until 3 October 2015. According to a message posted on that day on the Facebook page of the #FreeBassel campaign (https://www.facebook.com/FreeBasselSafadi?fref=ts), he was “transferred from the Adra prison to an unknown location after a patrol, which origin is unknown, came to ask him to arrange his affairs. It is assumed that he has been transferred to the headquarters of the military police civil tribunal in the district of al-Qaboun. Once more, we do not know where Bassel is, and are very worried.”
Bassel Khartabil, developer, teacher and pacifist, who survived torture, solitary confinement, hunger and bombing, certainly lives under the knife of a terrible sentence. Do not forget, you certainly have a mobile phone in your pocket.
                        
Article by Stéphanie Vidal   
First publication in French on 9 October 2015 in Slate.FR at https://www.slate.fr/story/107927/bassel-khartabil-prisonnier-syrien-internet
Translation into English by Philippe Aigrain, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Jean-Christophe Peyssard
Due to international emotion (https://twitter.com/hashtag/freebassel?src=hash) raised by the fate of Bassel Khartabil, Slate decided to share this article under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Republication is free, please mention the author Stéphanie Vidal and the media of first publication Slate.fr.
Posted on by Mathias Klang

Broken Academia

There are many ways to break academia. I just came across this section in an article that reminded me of the problems we face

Besides, the biggest threats to academic freedom these days aren’t coming from government. They’re coming as conditions attached to funding from billionaires and big corporations that’s increasing as public funding drops.

When the Charles Koch Foundation pledged $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, for example, itstipulated that a Koch-appointed advisory committee would select professors and undertake annual evaluations.  The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that funding doesn’t underwrite research on inequality and environmental justice.

Yupp, that’s whats going to happen, unless we are careful, when we sell ourselves to large corporations.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Another mass killing

I have no words, this is from Vox:

Maybe something will change; maybe this time we will manage to act. But it’s difficult to be anything but pessimistic, and when I think about why that is, my mind goes back again to Virginia Tech and 2007, when the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote what is, to me, the single most powerful paragraph I have read on the subject:

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were OK. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling — dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief — is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened — specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people — and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said, “People who want to … make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them. … At this point, what it’s about is comforting family members … and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”

Many things have been written and will continue to be written on America’s gun ownership rate (the highest in the world), its gun violence (the worst in the developed world), and the political and social forces that keep this from changing.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

What LGBTQ Students Want Their Professors to Know

Teaching starts tomorrow. This is a timely reminder to ask the class participants how they identify instead of making assumption based on class rosters.
‘Ask Me’: What LGBTQ Students Want Their Professors to Know

Simple beginning for identity identification. Ask preferred name, preferred pronoun.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

New Job & Teaching Fall 2015

Fall 2015 marks the beginning of my academic career in the states. I have begun as an Associate Professor in Political Communication and Social Media at the Communication Department at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Aside from my research I am very excited be teaching a course in Political Communication (syllabus here) and a course in Communication and Mobilization (syllabus here).

For Political Comms I shall be using Graber & Dunaway Mass Media in American Politics. While in Communication and Mobilization I shall be using Goodwin & Jasper The Social Movements Reader. In both courses I also be using Joyce Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change.

These two classes are very exciting to me and I hope that I will be able to transmit my enthusiasm to my students. Don’t we all wish this?

In both courses I am requiring that the students research and write biographies and do documentary film reviews as part of the work. I will let you all know how that works.

Thus far at UMass everyone has been very welcoming and friendly. But wow, the environment is pretty bleak as the buildings are constructed in a form of brick brutalism that would make any dystopian film maker lyrical. All the online pictures are taken from a distance and include the water which does tend to mellow out the architecture.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Jaywalking – who owns the city?

This thoughtful quote comes from the thoughtful essay The End of Walking by Antonia Malchik

Making jaywalking illegal gave the supremacy of mobility to those sitting behind combustion engines. Once upon a time, the public roads belonged to everyone. But since the ingenious invention of jaywalking we’ve battered pedestrianism in one of those silent culture wars where the only losers are ourselves.

After reading this you may enjoy reading The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking” by . And the great podcast 99% Invisible’s has an episode on jaywalking.

In the end it’s about what our public space is for. Who has the right of way. Of course we need to prevent people from getting killed but how much space should the road take from us?

Posted on by Mathias Klang