As a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as through essays in many newspapers and websites, Ira Chernus has spent decades bringing the tradition of nonviolence to bear on concrete current events, particularly American and Israeli foreign policy. What drives him most of all, though, is his fascination with nonviolence as a profound intellectual tradition, and the passionate thinkers whose minds and imaginations inspire the more visible work of public, performative activism.

On a recent trip to New York, Chernus took the time to talk with me about his work. He has written several books, but the one we discussed most of all is American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which is available in print through Orbis Books, as well as for free, in its entirety, on his website. Culled from the lecture notes of the course on nonviolence he has been teaching for years, it is a definitive chronicle of the major thinkers who shaped the distinctly American lineage of nonviolence.

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Here’s how it starts:

Waging Nonviolence: Why did you decide to write American Nonviolence as an intellectual history of nonviolence, specifically, as opposed to a history of movements and actions?

Ira Chernus: Part of the reason is just because that’s what I’m good at. If I’m good at anything, I’m good at ideas and being able to understand the underlying logic of a body of writing. Most of the major figures in the history of the nonviolence movement were not philosophers and certainly were not really theorists. They were leaders of movements that had to get jobs done. But in the course of their work, they offered a very, very rich body of ideas, but they didn’t lay them out systematically. Gandhi’s collected writings are, what, 93 volumes or something; he was writing at an incredibly rapid rate, and each thing he wrote was largely designed to meet the needs of a particular moment. He wasn’t thinking about laying out the overall intellectual architecture of his thought. He was not primarily a theorist. The same is true for Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, and any of the great leaders in the movement. But, as I read their work, I found that there was a very rich underlying intellectual structure there, and I believe—and maybe it’s just a leap of faith—that one of the things any successful movement needs is a strong intellectual structure.

For more, listen to the interview above.

After a statue of a 10-year-old Obama was placed in a central park in Jakarta in December, Indonesians began to protest. More than 56,000 people joined an Indonesian-language Facebook group called “Take Down the Barack Obama Statue in Taman Menteng Park.”

The resistance to the statue was apparently not so much because of what Obama has or hasn’t done as president, but because they questioned his real contribution to Indonesian society.

“Why should Obama’s statue be displayed in the center of Jakarta?” Linda Christanty, one of Indonesia’s most well-known writers, told Andre Vltchek in an article on Foreign Policy in Focus today. “Why didn’t they erect statues of the reformation heroes — people who were kidnapped during the Suharto era? Such statues would serve as a warning. It could help to prevent some terrible crimes from happening again — crimes like the forced disappearance of the people.”

Due to the mounting protest, Jakarta’s City Park and Cemetery Agency actually took the statue down on Sunday. City officials confirmed that it will be moved to the grade school that Obama attended from 1967 to 1971, which is in the area.

While this protest is fine, I’m a bit surprised that the folks behind the push to take the statue down didn’t express a wider range of grievances. For one thing, I don’t know of any major shift in US policy towards Indonesia, which has really been hideous for decades. And I would think that many in Indonesia – which is a predominately Muslim country – might be offended by the fact that Obama has significantly escalated the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan and has not altered US support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the Muslim world in any meaningful way. But I guess those are just a couple of my own gripes with our dear leader.

Over the last couple years, I’ve followed with intense interest the growing use of robots in war and tried to document some of the dangers (and ethical problems) of going down this path.  On this site we’ve also looked at the growing resistance to this trend in war.

One thing I have never thought about, however, is the potential for activists to use robots to further their work. Over at Glocal Christianity, Matt Stone has a post today about the Pamphleteer, a “propaganda robot which automates the often dangerous practice of distributing subversive literature to the public,” created by an anonymous group of artists and activists called the Institute of Applied Autonomy (IAA). At first I thought this little robot, which can be seen in the video above, was some kind of joke. But after perusing their website and doing a little outside research, it seems they are legit.

According to their website, the mission of the IAA – which was founded in 1998 – is to “to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.”

On top of the Pamphleteer, the Institute has developed several other robots and initiatives that are quite interesting, including a programmable bot that can spray paint graffiti on the ground and i-See, a “web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments,” which allows users to “walk around their cities without fear of being ‘caught on tape’ by unregulated security monitors.”

Long before the advent of Twitter, the group also created TXTmob – a free service allowing texts to be sent to hundreds or thousands of people at once – that was widely used during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York to alert protesters of the police crackdown.  In 2oo8, according to the New York Times, “the New York City Law Department issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote the code that created TXTmob.”  Pretty interesting stuff.

From a purely nonviolence perspective, my gut reaction to this is that we can’t lose the human element to our activism. Yes, using a robot to distribute fliers may initially attract more folks to check out the message, but the opportunity to engage those passersby in real conversation is totally lost. And while some of our work may put us in harm’s way or land us in jail, advocates of principled nonviolence, like Gandhi and King, believed that it is that willingness to suffer for what we believe is right that has the power to convert an opponent into a friend.

The story of Elliot Madison—a New York City social worker who was arrested at the G20 protests in Pittsburgh and charged with essentially hindering the police crackdown on protesters by posting their whereabouts on Twitter—has quickly spread from activist circles and independent media outlets to the mainstream.

Naturally, there’s a bit of a difference in the coverage. The New York Times for instance didn’t mention, as Amy Goodman did in her most recent column, that the information Madison tweeted was public information made available by the police on the Internet. To highlight the unjust nature of his arrest, she quoted Madison comparing the situation to someone being arrested for “essentially walking next to somebody and saying: ‘Hey, don’t go down that street, because the police have issued an order to disperse. Stay away from there.’ ”

Goodman also pointed out that the State Department and President Obama took the opposite stance on Twitter, when protesters in Iran were being arrested for using it in much the same way. They demanded that Twitter delay its system maintenance so that the election protesters could have uninterrupted service.

Hopefully these points raised by Goodman will find their way into the mainstream press, which to it’s credit does not seem to be treating the story like some quirky bit about social networking tools aiding and abetting crime. Articles by the Times and CNN show that they consider it a new and serious trend in police/activist interaction. But it remains to be seen if they will consider it a precedent-setting move by the US government to challenge the limits of free speech.

C’mon, let’s get those Teabaggers riled up on this issue!

There are a lot of debates about whether violent video games contribute to causing violence in the world. They do. To remedy that, some have tried to develop nonviolent video games, notably A Force More Powerful, which we have but have yet to try out fully because Jasmine’s PC is so phenomenally slow. Violence in video games is so dangerous, in part, because it misrepresents violence in reality; there is no cost and no real effect.

Now, artist Zach Gage has created Lose/Lose, a simple arcade game that takes a small step toward changing that. When an object in the game gets destroyed, so does an actual file on your computer. Here’s his statement:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?

Following Lose/Lose, maybe it’s time for a new rule: violent video games must have violent consequences. I cringe, though, at the thought that people would probably play them anyway, just as they continue to get into real fights.

At the very least, it is time for a real warning on video game packages. Not just the current system of labels which even seem to make a violent game look more enticing, but truly substantive warnings, as on cigarettes. The research exists to support it. Still, that’s pretty pedantic. Do grown-ups really need to be told that they shouldn’t fantasize for hours about going on killing sprees? We should know better.

(h/t Joel Dietz)

Correction: A previous version of this post stated that the game only deletes files internal to itself. Zach Gage wrote in to clarify that, indeed, the game can delete any file on a user’s computer.

There seems to have been pretty good coverage of the G-20 protests last week, at least in the alternative press. If you want to read up I would suggest checking out the reports posted on Common Dreams.

In the meantime, I thought it’d be good to share a few of the more extreme and bizarre videos of the police crackdown from the summit.

First, and probably the most widely viewed, is the footage of the kidnapping of a protester by men wearing camo. This is really frightening, and reminds me of something you might see under a dictatorship, but not here. Check it out:

While some questioned its authenticity – probably because it seems so crazy – officials with G-20 security released the following statement regarding the event:

Military members supporting the G20 Summit work with local law enforcement authorities but do not have the authority to make arrests. The individuals involved in the 9/24/09 arrest which has appeared online are law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team assigned to the security operations for the G20. It is not unusual for tactical team members to wear camouflaged fatigues.  The type of fatigues the officers wear designates their unit affiliation.

Prior to the arrest, the officers observed this subject vandalizing a local business.  Due to the hostile nature of the crowd, officer safety and the safety of the person under arrest, the subject was immediately removed from the area.

The protester in the video is reportedly still locked up.

This next video is of the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) being used against protesters. If you don’t know about this latest non-lethal technology, it generates a narrow beam of intense sound that can be physically painful and even permanently damage hearing.

Read the rest of this article »

Originally designed after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 to help the US Navy repel unwanted approaching boats, the non-lethal Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has not surprisingly worked its way down to the level of local law enforcement.

At two different town hall meetings and a sand castle building competition in San Diego recently, local police had the LRAD – which generates a narrow beam of intense sound that can be physically painful and even permanently damage hearing – on the ready in case any shenanigans broke out.

This is the first I’ve heard of this weapon being deployed domestically at political gatherings, although I’m sure it won’t be the last.

In a recent episode of Bang Goes The Theory, a new popular science show on the BBC, the team sees whether the LRAD can be defeated by a ridiculous looking sound proofed helmet. To see what happens, check out the video.

David Hambling over at Danger Room puts this latest effort at “foiling non-lethal crowd control weapons” in context:

Ever since police and security forces started using non-lethal weapons for crowd control, people have been looking for ways to counter them, trying everything from onions, tinfoil and Viagra.

Take tear gas, which has been around in various forms since the First World War and has been a regular feature of demonstrations from Seattle to Tehran to Khartoum. Experienced protesters expecting a blast of tear gas bring eye protection in the form of goggles and use a bandanna soaked in water or vinegar as an improvised gas mask. Real pros bring actual gas masks. An alternative approach is to use onion juice, which allegedly reduces the effect, a technique which is used everywhere from Israel to Iran. Read the rest of this article »

When a private security company launched an experimental floating surveillance camera over Port Huron, Michigan two weeks ago, Canadian activists opposed to the invasion of their privacy quickly organized a “moon the balloon” protest. The action occurred on Saturday and saw around 300 people gather at the St. Clair River international boundary, drop their pants, and aim their rears skyward.

Unfortunately, the high tech camera, which is “capable of identifying the name on a ship 12 to 15 kilometres out in Lake Huron,” was apparently grounded at the time of the protest for repairs. But that news didn’t discourage the protesters.

“If the balloon’s sitting on the ground or it’s in the sky, the fact is that they’re still using it,” said Eli [one of the organizers].

“It still needs to be said that we don’t think it’s necessary, that we think it’s a potential invasion of privacy and of sovereignty.”

Sierra Nevada Corp., the makers of the balloon, have said they are only conducting tests and that “the transmission will shut down anytime it passes a building.” Of course if their tests succeed, Sierra intends to sell the technology to the US Department of Homeland Security, which doesn’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to avoiding the temptation to spy on its citizens, particularly peaceful antiwar groups.

Sierra also has a rather interesting history working on technologies that are planned for use against non-combatant civilians. Aside from its work on the Air Force’s Predator Drones, the company has also helped develop a “non-lethal” device known as MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) that has the ability to make people feel as though their skin is burning.

The Pentagon has been as up front as to say that it will be tested on “American citizens in crowd-control situations.” But a 60 Minutes segment that ran last year, showed rather shockingly what is meant by “crowd-control.” Military personnel posing as peaceful protesters—carrying signs that read “Love for All” and “World Peace”—were the demonstrated target.

It doesn’t appear as though the bare-assed Canadians were aware of these connections when they staged their “moon the balloon” protest. But that’s all the more reason we should be watching their backs.

In an op-ed last week in the Christian Science Monitor, Mark Pfeifle, a former national security adviser to George W. Bush, makes the case for the micro-blogging site’s nomination for the prestigious peace award.

When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world to view hope, heroism, and horror. It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer. And, because of this, Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.

[…]

Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy. They did so because they knew the world was watching. With Twitter, they now shout hope with a passion and dedication that resonates not just with those on their street, but with millions across the globe.

It’s really hard to know where to begin with a crazy story like this. So I’ll just throw out a few thoughts.

First, what is a national security adviser for the Bush Administration doing even writing on this subject, and why did the Christian Science Monitor dignify his opinion with publication? Counseling those in power on when to employ violence rather than nonviolence is Pfeifle’s expertise.

Second, how does giving the prize to a website or technology make any sense considering the original intention of Alfred Nobel? According to his will, the prize for peace was to be awarded to the person who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses,” during the preceding year.

While the Nobel Committee has on numerous occasions given the award to organizations that are dedicated in varying degrees to promoting peace – such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and the American Friends Service Committee – rather than individual people, Twitter is simply a texting service that happened to come in handy during recent protests.

How Twitter meets any of the other criteria, apart from possibly improving the fraternity between nations (which every other tool of communication does as well), is beyond me. More importantly, however, the site is fundamentally amoral. Therefore, it can and probably is being used to push intolerance, hate and war as well. Just search for your favorite derogatory or racist word on Twitter to get a taste of the garbage that is regularly “tweeted.”

Third, the idea that Iranians would not have felt empowered to do what they did without Twitter truly shows Pfeifle’s ignorance on the history of nonviolent movements. In recent decades, ordinary people have brought down dictatorships and repressive regimes in many countries – including Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, South Africa, Poland, Serbia, and the Maldive Islands, to name just a few –  without violence and without Twitter.

Getting images and videos of protests and the violent crackdowns by government authorities that often ensue out to the wider public can be extremely important in building momentum and international solidarity for nonviolent movements. While this may generally not be difficult in western countries, when a repressive regime like the Chinese government or the military junta in Burma wants to cut off the flow of information to its citizens and the international community, such activity can be extremely dangerous for activists.

In preparation for his presentation at the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict last week, Patrick Meier gave the most thorough run down on digital security – which he defines as “the art and science of staying safe when communicating in non-permissive environments” – that I’ve ever seen at his blog iRevolution. (He also gave a brief recap of every presentation at the conference on his site for anyone who is interested in checking out the other topics that were discussed.)

The must-read list of tactics and technologies that he provides should be extremely useful for activists trying to operate under the watch of repressive regimes. Here is a sampling of his tactical suggestions:

• Purchase your mobile phone far from where you live. Buy lower-end, simple phones that do not allow third-party applications to be installed. Higher-end ones with more functionalities carry more risk. Use cash to purchase your phone and SIM card. Avoid town centers and find small or second-hand shops as these are unlikely to have security cameras. Do not give your real details if asked; many shops do not ask for proof of ID.
• Use multiple SIM cards and multiple phones and only use pay-as-you go options; they are more expensive but required for anonymity.
• Remove the batteries from your phone if you do not want to be geo-located and keep the SIM card out of the phone when not in use and store in separate places.Use your phone while in a moving vehicle to reduces probability of geo-location.
• Keep the number of sensitive pictures on your camera to a minimum.
• Add plenty of random non-threatening pictures (not of individuals) and have these safe pictures locked so when you do a “delete all” these pictures stay on the card.
• For sharing offline, do not label storage devices (CDs, flash drives) with the true content.  If you burn a CD with an illegal video or piece of software on it, write an album label on it.

Meier then provides a detailed list of specific technologies that can help activists stay safe and keep their data more secure. Here are just a few examples:

Mobile phones

• Use CryptoSMS, SMS 007 or Kryptext to text securely (this requires java-based phones).
• Use Android Guardian as soon as it becomes available.

Digital cameras

• Use scrubbing software such as: JPEG stripper to remove the metadata (Exif data) from your pictures before you upload/email.

Read the rest of this article »

Over the last few days the role that Twitter is playing in the nonviolent movement in Iran has been widely lauded. Time magazine dramatically called it the “medium of the movement,” and the U.S. State Department even asked the site to delay its scheduled maintenance earlier this week so that the service would not be interrupted for Iranian users. But how important can Twitter actually be in a country where only 30 percent of the population has access to the internet? Nicholas Thompson over at Danger Room had a great post yesterday that challenges the hype:

We have no idea how many Tweets are spreading through RSS, Facebook pages, and text-messages. Nor do we know how info gets into every Twitter feed. But there’s evidence that the reach of some of the most prominent Iranian “Green Revolution” Tweeters may not be as great as it first appears. For example, many of the Iranian tweeters described in the Western press seem to have between 10,000 and 30,000 followers. That’s a lot; but Ashton Kutcher it ain’t. And many of those followers are in the U.S. Check out @Change_for_Iran, @persiankiwi, @StopAhmadi, @persiankiwi, or @mousavi1388 and you’ll see a lot of American names. At least in the first few pages, it seems to be about a third who are clearly in the U.S.

English-language tweeters of course have English-language followers. But Twitter isn’t set up to make Farsi use easy (for example, you can’t search for Farsi posts in the language section of Twitter’s advanced search feature). In fact, the always helpful Nancy Scola has done a search on Twitter of all users who have listed their location as within 250 miles of Tehran. One interesting result: there are posts there only in Spanish, German, and English.

In an e-mail interview with washingtonpost.com, Evgeny Morozov, a blogger for Foreign Policy magazine and a fellow with Open Society Institute, also had a nuanced take on how important Twitter has been:

…it has been of great help in terms of getting information out of the country. Whether it has helped to organize protests — something that most of the media are claiming at the moment — is not at all certain, for, as a public platform, Twitter is not particularly helpful for planning a revolution (authorities could be reading those messages as well!). However, in terms of involving the huge Iranian diaspora and everyone else with a grudge against Ahmadinejad, it has been very successful.

Read the rest of this article »

Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman has a great post on how activists both inside and outside of Iran have taken what is now being dubbed the “Green Revolution” online, and the various ways that these cyberattacks could potentially backfire.

Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime’s propaganda sites with junk traffic. “NOTE to HACKERS – attack www.farhang.gov.ir – pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,” Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn’t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. “There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep, which seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating bogus requests for serving images,” notes Open Society Institute fellow Evgeny Morozov.

In both Iran and abroad, the cyberstrikes are being praised as a way to hit back against a regime that so blatantly engaged in voter fraud. But some observers warn that the network strikes could backfire – hurting the very protesters they’re meant to assist. Michael Roston is concerned that “it helps to excuse the Iranian regime’s own cyberwarfare.” Text-messaging networks and key opposition websites mysteriously went dark just before the election. Morozov worries that it “gives [the] hard-line government another reason to suspect ‘foreign intervention‘ – albeit via computer networks – into Iranian politics.”

Iran has one of the world’s most vibrant social media communities. That’s helping those of us outside Iran follow along as this revolution is being YouTubed, blogged, and Tweeted. But Iran’s network infrastructure there is relatively centralized. Which makes Internet access there inherently unstable. Programmer Robert Synott worries that if outside protesters pour too much DDOS traffic into Iran, carriers there “will simply pull the plug to protect the rest of their network.”

For the moment, however, those connections are still live. And activists are using them to mobilize mass protests in Tehran.

And if you’re simply interested in following the protests real-time on Twitter, rather than actually participating, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin writes:

Link to Twitter search for hashtag “IranElection.” Some Twitterers I’m following on this issue: @persiankiwi, @ johnperrybarlow , IranRiggedElect, @Pouyan.

As the 20^th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on demonstrators at Tiananmen Square approaches tomorrow, the Chinese government is taking extreme measures to stop potential commemorations or protests. Dissidents are being rounded up and shipped out of Beijing, and internet users throughout China awoke yesterday to find that the popular text messaging service Twitter, photo-sharing site Flickr and Hotmail were all blocked. The government apparently began shutting down user-generated websites months ago. According to the Guardian:

Blogger.com was blocked last month and YouTube has been inaccessible from the mainland since March.

Internet monitors have also shut down message boards on more than 6,000 websites affiliated with colleges and universities, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

The clampdown, however, is reportedly not foolproof. One website that covers happenings in China reports that these blocked sites can still be accessed through a software proxy, virtual private network (VPN), or a service that “converts the requested URL into an encoded string.” While I’m not tech savvy enough to really understand what any of these options are, the fact that they exist shows that struggle for internet freedom in China, which has the world’s largest online population, is far from over.

From a strategic perspective, this draconian move by the government is bound to backfire in the long run. Such blatant censorship will only make the Chinese more aware of their lack of free speech and encourage resistance.

Last week, filmmaker Robert Greenwald sprung into action upon seeing an article in the New York Times about Starbucks’ new multi-million dollar ad campaign involving Twitter. The very same day, Greenwald’s Brave New Films countered by launching the “Stop Starbucks” website, which includes a petition, a new video about the coffee giant’s poor treatment of workers and harsh anti-union stance, and much more. So far, almost 15,000 have signed the petition, and the video has already been viewed nearly 58,000 times on YouTube. On the spur of the moment, the campaign came up with another creative idea for protest. According to a piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

The anti-Starbucks onslaught also featured an attempted Twitter “hijacking” designed to undermine a Starbucks promotion in which contestants vied for prizes by submitting photos of themselves at Starbucks cafes. The virtual saboteurs forwarded the required “Twitpics” but hoisted signs blaring seditious mottos such as “I want a union with my latte” or Schultz “makes millions, workers make beans.”

[...]

The campaign against Starbucks was timed to coincide with the titanic congressional battle anticipated for organized labor’s major legislative goal: the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for U.S. workers to choose union representation.

Like most big businesses, Starbucks is opposed to the act. The coffee giant, which generates $10 billion a year in revenue, has joined forces with retailers Whole Foods and Costco in forming the so-called Committee for a Level Playing Field, which is backing what it calls a compromise plan.

In response to recent incidents in London where police have deleted photos that protesters or tourists have taken on their phones, a cool new remedy has been developed. According to Boing Boing:

“GandhiCam” is an application for post-8700-series BlackBerry devices that automatically emails you (or an address you set) the images, audio, or video as it is taken, with the aim to make it easy to get the data off the device before it is confiscated or destroyed…

There are other live broadcast from phones like Qik, obviously, as well as phone-to-Flickr or email gateways, but there’s something to be said for a no-click solution.

Where governments are willing to take more drastic measures to squelch dissent, however, such technology may not prove to be useful. During the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Burma, for example, the authorities disconnected the entire country from the internet and turned off cell towers to stop the flow of information about the nonviolent uprising to the outside world. After the clampdown, the Burmese were forced to resort to accessing cell service from across the Thai border, and smuggling information out of the country the old fashioned way – on CDs and thumb drives.