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Guerrilla techniques for online activism
When you do not have the courage to speak out against dictatorship for the fear of being sent to jail, or against the human traffickers for the fear of being murdered, or against an abusive religious figure for the fear of being humiliated then your society will deteriorate to become a failed state. The price of you being silence is very high. The society will suffer when you decided to zip your mouth.
However, the reality of online activism has showed that many “weaklings” have survived from any onslaught and in fact have lived without any fear even though they have written articles that challenged the people who are so much powerful than them. This is because they have employed effective guerrilla techniques in order to pursue their advocacy goals.
Common Guerrilla Techniques
What are the examples of these guerrilla techniques and how do we employ them? The following section describes some of the common guerrilla techniques that could be employed drawing lessons from Malaysia online activism sphere which has greatly impacted the election outcome in the year 2008.
Multiple Anonymous Identities: The idea of having a multiple anonymous identity is to make it difficult for the government surveillance group to make a guess on the person or group members who is behind a certain blog agenda. In order to execute this strategy the author should have an exceptional skill to write in a style that represent a diverse group of people. Sometimes he emulates a college graduate and sometimes a housewife. And sometimes he creates an anonymous identity that attacks another of his own identity. When he writes he randomly choose an internet café at a random time, making it difficult for government officials to narrow down to any location where he could be nabbed.
The Invisible Ghost Writer: Using this strategy the person who has the “dangerous” information will build an alliance with another prominent blogger or writer in another country. The collaborator will then publish his article as if he is the one writing it. Prior to that, the ghost writer will conduct an analysis of his collaborator’s writing style, and adjust his writing styles. The collaborator will also do some editing to make it looks convincing that he is the actual writer. The Ghost writer will sometimes collaborate with another person who writes in a different language he is unfamiliar with.
The Trojan Horse Writer: In this strategy the writer will pretend as if he is supporting the government or the respective individual but will slowly discredit himself or shooting himself on the foot, thus discrediting the individual he is supporting. For an example the government may want to keep silent on a certain issue. However, the Trojan horse writer will continue to harp on an issue by defending it rigorously so that it will open more questions and scrutiny. The writers needs to be very delicate and not to be carried away with certain issues, as it may drives away readers who feels suspicious of his writing agenda.
The Multi-Platform Advocates: The champion of an agenda will use several delivery platforms concurrently to further support the points or assertion that he is making. The most popular support platforms that he can use are Wikipedia, Youtube and Flickr. For example he can ask a friend to write an article in Wikipedia and make a reference to that article. With respect to this he can actually use his actual name, but can make a reference to a source that is anonymous. When he is making a reference to a source he needs to do it concurrently with other bloggers so that he won’t be seen as the first person to make certain claims. Photographs and Youtube are important media to create satire and “poke fun” at politicians. It creates a lasting impression and people can remember it well. In Malaysia Today blog for example, photographs and youtube are being used by either the commentators or the bloggers to supplement the writing process.
Distributing Content Under the Radar
The above discussed common techniques that are being employed to avoid government detections or to confuse the government on the source of the information. The fact is most of the time the government do not have the resources to monitor everyone all the time. Even the government have the resources they will focus on some key people in the blogsphere, and most likely it won’t be you if you are just a rookie. Nevertheless, there is one big lesson we could learnt from the movie “One Million Dollar Baby”. Here is the interesting dialogue.
Frankie Dunn: You forgot the rule. Now, what is the rule?
Maggie Fitzgerald: Keep my left up?
Frankie Dunn: Is to protect yourself at all times. Now, what is the rule?
Maggie Fitzgerald: Protect myself at all times.
Frankie Dunn: Good. Good.
Now here is the tricky part. Even you think you could protect yourself from government detection, the government could simply ban the access to the website or content indefinitely. Then all your efforts will be futile and useless. As such, you need to assume that one day the government will block access to your website. The most logical thing for you to do is to collect the emails of your readers. You can do this by installing a newsletter component, or requires users to sign up to access certain parts of your content. Once you have the databases of your users, then you will be able to continue distributing content under the government radar.
The Sesawe.net projects aims to provide users a set of circumvention tools that can be used by banned website owners to enable their users to access to the sites. For example, the Hotspot Shield will create a virtual private network (VPN) between your computer and the Anchor Free Internet gateway. Another ready to be used software is Psiphon, which is an open source web proxy that helps users bypass content-filtering systems deployed by the government. Once your website is being banned, you should quickly inform the sesawe.net project owner, and mass mail to your readers on the alternative web access with a simple step by step guideline.
The ariticle, published in Free Voice was written by Sean Ang, Executive Director, Southeast Asian Centre for e-Media
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