Undercurrent

Du bist Terrorist from lexela on Vimeo.

This is very impressive work. As Robin Meyer-Lucht says, why don’t we see more such use of videos by professional news organizations?

But I also think the narrator comes close to demagoguery here. For example, the EU data retention directive, which is targeted in the first part, is restricted to traffic data. That can be bad enough in itself, but does not mean that data on which web pages you visited will be potentially available to the police. That’s a difference, and a very important one. The video also moves seamlessly from that directive to the German BKA law about online surveillance, which is not exactly the same. Activists should get their facts right as well. There’s a discussion about this over at Spreeblick.

To be fair, the Du bist Terrorist website does have links to media stories where the facts are presented correctly.

The Korean blogger “Minerva” (aka Park Dae Sung) has been arrested for allegedly destabilising currency markets! And hurting the nation’s credibility! This one really is hard to make up. “Minerva” has achieved guru status in South Korea during the last year, as he has churned out predictions (right and wrong) on how the economy would develop. Apparently he now has gone too far:

The commentary that got him in trouble was his claim on Dec. 29 that the government issued an “emergency order” to financial firms and major corporations to stop buying U.S. dollars in a dire effort to arrest the fall of the Korean won. The government was forced to issue a denial to calm the market, though officials had previously appealed to large companies to stop hoarding dollars.

“Minerva”, when he finally was found, turned out to be a “soft-spoken 31-year-old Internet buff in between jobs who holed up at home reading mail-order books on finance and scouring the Web.”

UPDATE: Global Voices has reactions from the Korean blogosphere.

Yesterday saw the launch of the Quilliam Foundation, a British “counter extremism think tank” started by ex-islamists Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz. Here is what Nawaz wrote in The Sun this week:

A new standard needs to emerge. Protecting “our own” means all the people of our country, not merely one religious faction. Freedom of speech is a non-negotiable right. Just as some Muslims invoke this right when they attack freedom and democracy, others may invoke this right when drawing cartoons criticising our faith. If Muslim sensitivities are a reason not to draw the cartoons, then others’ sensitivities are also a reason not to attack freedom and democracy.

Sunny Hundal comments on the launch event and the Quilliam people’s challenges.

Now why write about this in a Norwegian blog? As the cartoon controversies and many other conflicts have shown in the past few years, stories and developments involving extremism — in the name of islam, but not only that — are domestic now. In this sense, the old concept of foreign news is dead. The launch of a think tank in London is a British event, but also a Norwegian/Scandinavian and Middle Eastern. Tellingly, I first read about the Quilliam initiative in an article in the Swedish magazine Axess, written by a Swedish muslim writer.

The proposal for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct again provokes cries of censorship (via the New York Times). But I’ve never understood how deciding the rules for debate on your own blog could be the same as censorship. As publisher you are responsible for your blog, who else could be? So I have no problems with the opening “clause” of the code of conduct:

We take responsibility for our own words and reserve the right to restrict comments on our blog that do not conform to basic civility standards.

Still, the initiators O’Reilly and Wales quickly reach difficult waters with clause 5 “We do not allow anonymous comments.” Importantly, they qualify this: An alias is allowed, but commenters have to supply a valid e-mail address before they can post. Demanding from people that they must always identify themselves with their full name creates a very high barrier against a free debate online. And it would effectively stop people from commenting who have every reason to guard their identity (such as whistleblowers).

Actually, Norwegian news website Dagbladet recently adopted clause no. 5. They went from no restrictions on commenters to making a valid email address mandatory. The first results: The amount of comments were reduced by 40-50 percent, but the discussions gained a lot in civility (see report in Norwegian. I was interviewed in the piece). I’m looking forward to hear about the long-term effects.

The issue is about something larger than blogging, then. News websites that allow readers to comment face the same challenge: Keep the debate lively and open, but combat trolls and vandals. Just reproducing the old reader’s letters page from the printed newspaper is not the answer, that much we know now.

UPDATE: Dan Gillmor joins the discussion:

If I invite someone into my living room, that’ls not permission to spit (or worse) on my carpet. I will invite anyone who does that to leave.

(About my own policy: In fact, I moderate comments before they go online, but that’s because of an inadequate anti-spam system, not to stop uncivilized comments. I hope to install a better anti-spam solution. Then I will allow direct publishing and moderate afterwards).