So far, the only concession from the Syrian government about the detainment of our former Wolfson Press Fellow, Dorothy Parvaz, has been confirmation that they are holding her. (She’s now been in detention for eight days and has had no contact with the outside world). We knew from Facebook and other sources that her friends have been pressing the US Embassy in Damascus on her behalf. (Dorothy has American — as well as Canadian and Iranian — citizenship.) This excerpt from yesterday’s Press Briefing by Mark Toner of the US State Department is the first public indication that the US is on her case.

QUESTION: Assistant Secretary Posner yesterday talked about the Ambassador working with the human rights groups and the families. Has he been able to help locate missing people, for example? Is that part of his duty, and has he done? And more particularly, there’s a missing woman from Al Jazeera TV who has Iranian, Canadian, and U.S. citizenship. Can you say anything about her?

MR. TONER: Lach, the – your second question first. We are certainly aware of the case of this detained American journalist for Al Jazeera. And as you said, I believe she has – has dual or even triple citizenship. But we are aware of her case and obviously concerned about it. And we’ve asked for, obviously, given that she’s an American citizen, for consular access.

We have pressed our concerns to the Syrian Government about missing individuals, as we often do. The other day we had the UN say that it was going to investigate human rights abuses by the Syrian Government. We are concerned about the situation there and we’re taking steps.

QUESTION: Does the Ambassador have a long list of missing people that he presents to his counterparts?

MR. TONER: I’m not sure, in fact, if he’s presenting a list or just inquiring in general about these cases. But obviously, it’s foremost on our agenda.

MORE: Chris Barton, a New Zealand journalist who was in the same group as Dorothy at Wolfson last year, has written a nice piece about her in the New Zealand Herald.

I recently attended a seminar in LSE given by a State Department official — one of the people who advise Hilary Clinton on technology. (The seminar was held under the Chatham House rule, so I can’t identify the speaker, but Charlie Beckett blogged about it.) What I found interesting — and encouraging — was the discovery that, despite its curiously disorganised reaction to the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables, the US administration still apparently believes in the idea of an open Internet. In that context, this report in the NYTimes is intriguing, perhaps even hopeful.

WASHINGTON Reuters – Some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they’ll be able to hit the ‘panic button’ — a special app that will both wipe out the phone’s address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists.

The panic button is one of the new technologies the U.S. State Department is promoting to equip pro-democracy activists in countries ranging from the Middle East to China with the tools to fight back against repressive governments.

“We’ve been trying to keep below the radar on this, because a lot of the people we are working with are operating in very sensitive environments,” said Michael Posner, assistant U.S. secretary of state for human rights and labor.

The U.S. technology initiative is part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s push to expand Internet freedoms, pointing out the crucial role that on-line resources such as Twitter and Facebook have had in fueling pro-democracy movements in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.

The United States had budgeted some $50 million since 2008 to promote new technologies for social activists, focusing both on “circumvention” technology to help them work around government-imposed firewalls and on new strategies to protect their own communications and data from government intrusion.

“We’re working with a group of technology providers, giving small grants,” Posner told reporters.

“We’re operating like venture capitalists. We are looking for the most innovative people who are going to tailor their technology and their expertise to the particular community of people we’re trying to protect.”

Very thoughtful piece in Technology Review by John Palfrey. One of his contentions is that

the technology matters far less than the context of the politics, culture, and history of the place and people involved in using the technologies. In Tunisia and Egypt, it was crucial that a minimal number of people, commonly both young and elite, had high literacy rates, access to the technologies, and skill in using them. These states have very large youth populations and growing levels of sophistication, at least among the children of the wealthy, in their access to and use of digital technologies. One organizer of the Egyptian uprisings is now known to have been 30-year-old Google executive Wael Ghonim. He had created a Facebook page to commemorate 28-year-old Khaled Said, a businessman beaten by police the previous June. The sophistication of the activists and the corresponding lack of sophistication of the autocrats matters enormously.

The regional context matters in another way. It is plausible that the domino effect that we are witnessing in the Middle East and North Africa has something to do with the network as well. In some respects, common language and use of the same Internet-based tools is more important in a digitally mediated world than geopolitical boundaries are. The fact that the uprising in Tunisia prompted sympathetic protests in the region, and as far away as Turkey, may have something to do with the extent to which digital networks carried news of the uprisings very quickly, through social media and formal news outlets, in Arabic, English, French, and other languages. This is not to say that the governments in Libya and Bahrain will necessarily experience what the governments in Tunisia and Egypt have. It is instead to say that linguistic and regional affinities may be strengthened through digital networks, and may in turn lead to tinderbox-like conditions in certain regional settings.

He also has a useful categorisation of the four phases of governmental interactions with the Internet:

1. Open Internet: 1983-2000
2. Access denied: 2000-2005
3. Access controlled: 2005-2010
4. Access contested: 2011-

You can see why satirists are having such a hard time. Reality is even funnier.

Source — Renesys.

Thoughtful article in Salon by Dan Gillmor.

This isn’t the first time government has shut down access to the Internet during a national crisis, or ordered mobile phone companies to stop letting customers make calls and send text messages. Burma largely succeeded in closing off its media borders several years ago, and regimes around the planet have created harsh censorship systems that prevent the majority of their people from seeing information deemed unacceptable by the people in charge.

Now, the shutdown isn’t absolute. Some data is still getting in and out of Egypt, and circulating within the country. The reports are so sketchy, even from experts in the field, that it’s hard to know precisely what is happening. But Egypt’s shutdown of most communications to the outside world, and communications inside the country, is the most blatant abuse yet of this kind by a large power. And it’s Exhibit A in how the modern Internet, despite its heritage as a system where information would find its way around outages, has become increasingly vulnerable to choke points that governments and their corporate partners/subjects have become adept at using to restrict the flow of information.

The Internet isn’t the only way people use digital communications, of course. But most phone service in Egypt is mobile. So it’s trivially easy, unfortunately, to take mobile phone service off the air. In Egypt’s case, it simply ordered the providers—which operate at the government’s sufferance—to stop providing service. Vodafone and other mobile carriers, having no real alternative, complied–though we still might wish for an example of corporate guts in the face of dictatorial abuses. Oligopolies and monopolies are easy to tame.

Yep.

Oh and btw this is the same ‘kill switch’ that Joe Lieberman would like to pull in the US.