American sanctions are being used to memory hole Israeli war crimes: we need new platform stacks asap
YouTube wiped over 700 videos from its platform documenting Israeli human rights abuses from accounts run by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. This was due to the U.S. weaponising its sanctions regime against Palestinian rights groups.
The Intercept reported (linked above) that “the deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like The Beach,' about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike.”
While Youtube caved in fast, it’s harder to wipe everything off the internet than some (zionists) would like, and a number of the videos remain scattered across the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Facebook pages, Vimeo, etc, but the damage is real. Several were only online via Youtube and each organisation’s channels represented complete online repositories accessible in one place, authenticated and easily accessed.
“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone. It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising. … They are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience. It’s not going to end with Palestine.” — Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)
Whitson may be shocked, but I’m not. Waiting for corporate tech to grow a spine when there’s not a clear profit motive to do so is akin to waiting for a bus you already know will never show up.
I’m a fan of the alternative platforms, particularly those running on decentralised systems. Media files can practically become like weeds on these given enough resources. Peertube, Torrent streamers, and so on exist. We can do a lot at the protocol level, but the protocol that’s really needed is chutzpah. It’s in really short supply these days. Building censorship resistant tools needs it. Depending on where you are, using them takes a little. Resisting illegal orders from powerful state agencies requires it.
There’s irony in this, as the U.S. tries to use sanctions to silence Palestinian human rights organisations, it’s threatening sanctions against the EU over its Digital Services Act, which the White House is concerned will silence “American conservatives” (this is not what the White House is really angry about and it doesn’t do that anyway). More and more, the concept of a free and open internet is on the back foot in various halls of power around the globe, and a few Big Tech companies are kind of excited by the business opportunities in shutting things down. Russia has its concept of ‘digital sovereignty’, China has its exportable firewall technology, America has sanctions. The results are the same: expanding control. We need ways and means that circumvent them all. The dumbest move is to appease any of them.
It’s not going to end with Palestine.
Long been a listener of the This is Not a Drill podcast, but Gavin Esler’s interview this week with Bruce Schneier, in “Big Tech, A.I. and the dictators – Inside the future of authoritarianism” is maybe one of the best episodes I’ve caught. It has the spoilers about how democracy ends. Enjoy.
Individuals associated with the federal government have, in defiance of a court order and without a trial or any form of due process, deported hundreds of people from the territory of the United States to El Salvador, where they will be held indefinitely in a concentration camp. — Timothy Snyder
The White House is currently transitioning the U.S. Constitution into a relic, replacing it with whatever the whims of the sitting administration demand on the day.
Hello yet again, cruel world
It’s a brand new blog on a new publishing platform. The jokes, however, are old.
Sci-fi is is commentary on real world events. It’s only escapism to people who already have checked out anyway.
Huwaida’s a political prisoner. Abducted by Israel’s occupation forces from international waters for nonviolent direct action against a genocide. #FreeHuwaida
“Uncritical adoption of AI, will inevitably create people without critical thinking, and this may be a feature - not a bug, as it represents an attack on human agency itself.” — Angelos Arnis, in The infrastructure of meaninglessness
A guide for the America you got, not the one you want
If you’re in the U.S., potentially an activist on issues the regime is tetchy about, or just someone it thinks might be, a new resource by Activist Checklist called “Police at the Door” may prove to be one of the more important downloads you get today. Want a blog about it? Here’s a blog about it.
“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
The White House has, in no uncertain terms, declared war on civilians inside the U.S. when the president addressed the nearly 800 military leaders in Pete’s Department of War and Discount Goods.
That’s where we are.
NPR, still existing for the time being, reports
The Taliban has virtually cut off everyone in the country from both the internet and mobile networks in the last couple of days. These moves generally come before something a regime desperately doesn’t want the world to see.
This is amazing, considering from where the Gaza flotilla project originally began in 2010: A group of activists with a simple idea, very complex in execution, to just keep sending boats to Gaza, which never should have been blocked to begin with. It was ignored, criticized, and even assaulted many times over the years. This is perseverance.
“Tip for Civil Society: Never Negotiate. Always make them do the bad thing. Don’t help them do it, but make their choice either: do something really bad, or nothing at all” —Alec Muffett
There’s no middle ground in privacy preserving software development, this is a good short post by Alec on that point.
Playing with micro.blog to see how it pings across the different federated platforms. This is a test. There may be more.