On January 26, Twitter noted on its blog that, as it expanded overseas into regions with more restrictive Internet policies than our own, it would be willing to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis when requested by legal authorities. This unfortunately timed announcement, coming on the heels of the anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, for which Twitter received much credit for at the time and after, was widely panned. Twitter itself once proudly asserted, “Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely.”

The example that Twitter provided in its post was mild enough—pro-Nazi content would be blocked only in countries where it is forbidden by law like France or Germany but would be displayed in other countries where it is not illegal—the announcement is clearly aimed at assuaging political concerns from wary governments in places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Thailand. Thailand, one of the more heavily censored countries in the world, even officially came out in support of Twitter’s plan, suggesting that the two might “collaborate” in the future.

Though Twitter got slammed by bloggers for this, the announcement was also a victim of bad timing, coming as a startling contrast to the anti-SOPA, pro-free-speech rhetoric still dominating the front pages of tech sites and in the midst of more unrest in the Middle East. In actuality, Twitter already engages in taking down illegal posts (though the ones the company has publicly revealed to Chilling Effects seem to be mostly regarding minor copyright infringement cases) and is merely following a well-established precedent of multi-national corporations, even idealistic Internet companies, bending their values in order to enter foreign markets. This is merely a case of moral equivalence, however, and no amount of transparency and good intentions to the contrary should suffice to make it more than that.

In political terms, once a service like Twitter becomes subject to oversight from every government in the world, it is a crippled one. It may continue to serve well as a way to chat with celebrities and trade viral videos, but it no longer will be a tool for free speech and justice. And unfortunately, because of network effects, even if a more open tool designed specifically for political work were released to fill the gap abandoned by Twitter, it would have a hard time reaching out to non-activists. Those who chat with celebrities will remain happily on Twitter.

Twitter has tried to claim that what it is doing isn’t out-and-out censorship. It promises that the company’s take-downs will be merely reactive, coming only after a valid legal request. There will be no blacklists and Twitter will not have a team of censors invisibly scrubbing its site clean of questionable content the way Chinese Internet companies do. However, it isn’t so far-fetched to think of a day when Twitter will be required by law to pre-emptively sanitize its site. In fact, one of the primary “features” of SOPA would have been a requirement that companies actively monitor against copyright infringement, risking an immediate shutdown for any lapses. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon noted in a recent anti-SOPA op-ed,

Recent academic research on global Internet censorship has found that in countries where heavy legal liability is imposed on companies, employees tasked with day-to-day censorship jobs have a strong incentive to play it safe and over-censor—even in the case of content whose legality might stand a good chance of holding up in a court of law. Why invite legal hassle when you can just hit “delete”?

One of Twitter’s defenses is that all take-downs will be transparent—a sort of checks-and-balances system that in theory discourages those sorts of non-mandatory deletions. Tweets and users will not simply be disappeared; instead, notices will be posted when content has been restricted, allowing viewers to know that content has been suppressed and giving readers the opportunity to verify the legality of the deletion. Of course, users in other countries might be able to view the sensitive material, but what good is that if the content of the tweet—say an announcement of the date and time of a protest—is banned in the only location for which it has “IRL” value?

Earlier in the month, Google also quietly noted that its Blogger web platform would redirect viewers to country specific domain names, thus allowing for similar country-by-country restrictions. Though neither Google nor Twitter mentioned China in their official announcements—Blogger and Twitter have been banned in China in previous years and each company has for the most part given up trying to compete with entrenched local competitors—the specter of Chinese-style Internet regulation obviously hangs over both of their decisions. Artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who resorted to posting to Twitter after his Sina Weibo account—China’s version of Twitter—was censored and shut down, threatened to quit Twitter if the company began censoring. If Twitter moves toward a Sina Weibo model of social media, should other Internet users committed to the cause of free speech quit as well?

Egyptian protesters participating in a silent stand on June 6, 2011, at Kasr Al Nil bridge. By Zeinab Mohamed, via Flickr.

The starting point for a movement of mass action usually cannot be pinpointed to a single moment or person. This is true of the 2011 Arab Awakening, despite the temptation to credit Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia or Wael Ghonim’s prowess on Facebook in Egypt; such struggles defy simplistic explanations of origin.

“I don’t want to take much credit; the revolution was leaderless,” Wael told 2.8 million listeners on BBC’s Radio 4 recently. Encircled in a tight studio in London’s Portman Place BBC headquarters, along with Paul Mason, economics editor for the BBC program Newsnight, newscaster Andrew Marr had convened the three of us to discuss the topic of “Revolution.” Egypt’s revolution, our conversation made clear, was far from spontaneous. For years, Egyptian activists were sharing knowledge, organizing and learning to think strategically.

Wael is a 31-year-old Google executive in charge of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa who helped to catalyze the movement centered in Tahrir Square last year. On June 8, 2010, he saw a photograph of a young Egyptian who had been, in his words, “horribly tortured.” The visual proof of Khaled Mohamed Said’s atrocious June 6 fatal beating by secret police in Alexandria struck a chord throughout the  country, in part because the 28-year-old was middle class. Weeping over “the state of our nation and the widespread tyranny,” Wael saw the image as representing “a terrible symbol of Egypt’s condition.” He decided to create a page on Facebook called “Kullena Khaled Said,” or “We Are All Khaled Said.” Some 36,000 joined the page on the first day, many writing comments, and thus a conversation began to occur that could not otherwise have taken place under Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

Explaining that he had never been an activist before, Wael wrote in the first person and in colloquial Egyptian dialect, rather than classical Arabic, with “a lack of conspiracy.” He avoided using political phraseology and wrote personally as “an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on Kahled Said and motivated to seek justice.”

Wael credits Mohamed Eisa with sending to the page’s email account the idea for the “Silent Stands,” a critically important tactic used in the build-up to what would eventually become a national movement. The concept was that individuals would stand in a human chain for one hour, wearing black and carrying a Qur’an or a Bible for quiet reading. “We wanted to send out a clear message that although we were both sad and angry, we were nevertheless nonviolent,” Wael writes in his new book, Revolution 2.0. Reckoning that they could not be arrested for wearing black, they started their first single-file stand at 5 p.m. on June 18, 2010, calling it “A Silent Stand of Prayer for the Martyr Khaled Said along the Alexandria Corniche.” Purposely designed to circumvent physical confrontation with the security apparatus, Wael writes, “The goal was for members to summon the courage to take positive action to the street.”

The next stand was in Cairo. They carried out this type of vigil five times, with participants turning their backs to the street, sometimes with three or four kilometers of silently praying Egyptians. A thousand people took part in Khaled Said’s public funeral. The April 6 Youth Movement also organized an event to denounce Said’s murder in Cairo, and Wael’s hopes rose.

The April 6 movement had been launched in 2008. Among its Internet-savvy organizers was Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer, who, in March of that year, urged young Egyptians to support the 26,000 textile workers planning to strike on April 6 in the town of Mahalla al-Kobra. For more than a year, workers had been striking across Egypt, protesting high inflation and unemployment, but their actions were not coordinated. When the Mahalla strikes were violently repressed in March, with police killings of strikers, Maher and his allies called a nationwide general strike for April 6. Maher was brutally tortured by the police a few weeks after the strike. “Security forces were in disbelief,” Wael says. “How had opposition youth groups emerged without any political affiliations, Islamist or other?”

Naming themselves after the April 6 action, members of the movement participated in online tutorials with organizers of Otpor! (Resistance!), the Serbian student movement that unified 18 competing political parties and the general population to bring down Slobodan Milošević in 2000. The April 6 movement even sent one of their group, Mohamed Adel, to Belgrade in 2009. Learning from Otpor trainers about how they had organized, and why it was critically important to avoid violence, Mohamed came back talking about “unity, discipline, and planning,” carrying films and teaching aids. The April 6 movement modeled its logo after Otpor’s and adopted Otpor’s organizational approach, in which all were equal, making it harder for authorities to pick off so-called leaders. By 2009, some 76,000 were involved and posting on its Facebook page.

Practical and tangible lessons came into Egypt over a period of years through a variety of channels. The Otpor leaders had formed a network of activists that included experienced veterans from nonviolent struggles in South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine. The Egyptians tapping into Otpor were therefore learning from a global interchange. Scholars Maria Stephan and Stephen Zunes visited Cairo in 2009 to work with liberal academicians and reform-minded civil-society actors. For five years, some Egyptian activists and bloggers had been meeting with people central to nonviolent movements across the world, comparing notes. This is how they met the Serbian veterans.

Seeing Tunisia’s success, the April 6 movement sought to capitalize on Egypt’s annual Police Day—a January 25, 2011, holiday that would commemorate a police revolt suppressed by British colonial authorities. Wael Ghonim used Facebook to marshal support. If 50,000 people were willing to commit to march on the day he posted, the demonstration would be held. More than twice that number signed up. On January 25, the numbers turning out in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez took police by surprise. April 6 made common cause with Mohamed ElBaradei’s supporters, some liberal and leftist parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Wael Ghonim tweeted:

Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.

On January 28, the Day of Rage, Mubarak’s regime blocked the Internet for five days. Egyptians outwitted this measure by relaying through other outlets. A print shop reproduced a 26-page pamphlet for instant circulation. As police used tear gas and water cannon against demonstrators, the pamphlet, “How to Protest Intelligently,” warned people not to disseminate the plan through Facebook or Twitter, because both were monitored by the Interior Ministry. Listing the democracy movement’s demands and calling for tactical unity, it asked for “strategic civil disobedience” in winning over of the police and army “to the side of the people.” It called for disciplined, positive slogans and language. As demonstrations spread across the country, some of the biggest rallies occurred when the Internet was down.

Social media alone are not causative. Nonviolent movements have always appropriated the most advanced technologies available in order to spread their messages. When fighting with the force of ideas, rejecting violence or militarized methods, the reframing of old grievances as wrongs that might now be  corrected requires argumentation and teaching. People must be helped to see that deep-rooted predicaments can be amenable to direct action. Wael agreed when I made this point on the BBC: “We’re trying to give too much credit to social media, because it’s a new thing,” he said.

Indeed, far more important than media, pre-existing conditions or the political culture in the Arab rebellions were two other factors that helped give rise to revolt: 1) The existence of a civic capacity for sustained action and protracted long-term resistance—mosques, churches, labor unions, networks of professional and other organizations, and groups that have gone underground. 2) The sharing of lessons and knowledge from other movements, and the dissemination of historical insights among guiding activist intellectuals. Political thinking affects strategic planning. Both of these forces involve human agency—individual and collective.

On the 17th day of protest in Tahrir Square, the waves of strikes that had been ongoing since 2006 widened. They spread throughout all of Egypt.  After 18 days—January 25 to February 11—Mubarak resigned from the presidency, his legitimacy destroyed.

Egyptians had been organizing themselves long before they would fill Tahrir Square. Enough of them in sufficiently dispersed centers of society had obtained the knowledge and a level of preparedness to build a national mobilization of noncooperation. This included the country’s dispirited civil-society groups. It included young activists, some of  whom had been learning from experience abroad and organizing through online social networks. It included working-class people who had been trying to improve their lot by striking. Ultimately, the refusal of laborers to show up for work in the days just before the Mubarak resignation was the last prop to be pulled away from Mubarak’s regime. Working in diffuse groups, Egyptians knew how to organize, how to withdraw cooperation and how to handle the unexpected. As they confront Mubarak’s successors, they will need this knowledge for their continuing struggle.

Volunteers for InterOccupy.org meet at the Occupied Office in New York City. Photo by the author.

As Occupy camps spread around Southern California in early October, a small group of occupiers located at City Hall in Los Angeles reflected on our experiences setting up a camp and our first assemblies. “It’d be awesome to see what they do in San Diego,” I remember saying, sitting in the comfort of Occupy LA’s People’s Library. “Do you think the cops will even let them put down tents?”

The librarian replied, “We should help them. We should be there so that their first GA isn’t as bad as ours was.” But, as we would soon learn, both the challenges and the potential of coordinating Occupy assemblies would be far greater than that.

I drove to San Diego on October 6th to meet with their General Assembly’s facilitation team as they marched around downtown, eventually settling in Children’s Park. We talked about the idea of having a team of people ready to keep the peace and teach horizontal democracy. Then, a week later, after moving the camp to the Civic Center and doggedly resisting pressure to leave, OSD was given an eviction notice. Occupiers were pepper-sprayed when they decided to defend one lonely tent in the middle of a public space. I raced down to San Diego to help arrange bail funds that night. Curiously, another person, a young man dressed in a Tommy Bahama shirt, also showed up and claimed to be from Occupy Wall Street.

He suggested that remaining members of OSD break off into smaller groups and spread out around the city. He disrupted the General Assembly several times to say that the cops were going to move in soon, but that OWS was sending “1,000 people to OSD to fortify their camp.” I was perplexed, because if this person was really from OWS, he should know how to build consensus rather than cause disruptions. On my way back from San Diego, I stopped at Occupy Long Beach to check in with them. There, one occupier mentioned that his girlfriend at Occupy San Francisco heard 5,000 people were coming from OWS to OSF to prevent eviction. Infiltration was afoot, but I had no direct line to OWS to confirm or deny these rumors.

I went back to OLA dismayed, eager to find someone with a connection to OWS on the ground. I thought about sending an email—but to whom, and how would I know their information was reliable? At that time, most emails that were sent around occupations went unanswered for a variety of reasons, including inability to access computers and Wi-Fi at the camps. Fortunately, the brother of someone at OLA, Jackrabbit, was at OWS. Jackrabbit was patient with my paranoia and assured me that there wasn’t a plan from OWS to send anyone to California. In fact, they don’t even have 5,000 people at OWS. I relayed the info back to San Diego, and the infiltrator’s response was to further divide the General Assembly by stating that OWS was going to denounce OSD as an occupation. He disappeared from OSD the next day and never returned. Crisis averted, with just a simple phone call.

The last week of October, I received notice that the OWS Movement Building Working Group would be hosting a conference call with other occupations on October 24th. The OLA Occupation Communication Committee set up a speakerphone in the media tent at our camp and dialed in. There were over one hundred people on that call and nearly 40 occupations represented. At the end of it, OWS asked for volunteers to help set up the next call—and thus began the early makings of InterOccupy. The first “Call Planning” meeting happened via telephone the following Thursday, when we decided on some protocols for rotating the hosts of the Monday night general call and soliciting agenda items. Occupy Philadelphia led the charge on the second general call, and OLA took up the third—albeit with technical support from OWS when the bomb squad showed up at OLA that night. After much debate, this small call-planning group settled on registering the domain name InterOccupy.org and started a call calendar.

Before the encampments suffered eviction, the calls provided a sense that the movement was much bigger than any one camp. It felt truly global when I heard an occupier say “Goodnight, from Italy” on a call in November. OLA hosted a call for sharing advice on peaceful resistance among occupiers all over the country. By December, InterOccupy was arranging calls for large-scale actions such as the West Coast Port Shut Down—but most of its organizers still had not met one another.

After the evictions, we decided that it would be important to meet in person to improve our services. I bought a plane ticket to NYC in mid-December, as did an occupier from Portland. Occupiers from Philadelphia drove up, while members of OWS arranged places for us to stay. Others from Kalamazoo, Stanford, and Reno called in to the three-day meeting. In a sunny apartment in Manhattan, we established some best practices for getting new voices on the calls, set up a series of subgroups for administration and expanded our call services. InterOccupy evolved from a group of distributed occupiers to an organization intent on providing a platform for truly horizontal communication. Clay Shirky, the New York University professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, attended the meetings, where he talked with us about decentralized communication and described the structure of Occupy as “loosely connected clusters of tightly connected groups” united by “satisfying and effective ties.”

InterOccupy is able to put horizontality at the forefront of its mission to foster coordination across general assemblies and working groups. It’s meant to expand the way rhizomatic plants mature, with growth spreading out, rather than up. Any occupation can ask for a call, and no one agenda is given priority. The content of the calls, therefore, is up to the movement itself, with the goal of aligning strategy and actions, not to efface the autonomy of local assemblies.

Because many of us started out traveling and connecting with other occupations face to face, we knew that the virtual network is strengthened, both emotionally and effectively, by physical encounters with one another. Modeled on the communication networks in the American revolution, Occupy Philly designed a network model called Committees of Correspondence. CoCs are encouraged to spread information about the actions of other occupations, inform local working groups about upcoming calls through InterOccupy and arrange face to face regional meet-ups. This model greatly increased the density of ties between occupations and, in doing, the volume of calls through InterOccupy.

Using this model, Occupy So Cal in Long Beach recently hosted the first regional gathering with 50 occupiers from 10 occupations attending. We discussed how to better facilitate our communication, how to work together towards the proposed May 1st general strike and how to combat corporatism nonviolently. A second meet-up for Occupy So Cal is in the works for February 11, and InterOccupy is helping to coordinate it. Currently, others working with InterOccupy are on an OWS bus tour, spreading the model of CoCs around the northeast.

Because face-to-face communication is as central to this movement as the latest technology, InterOccupy seeks to provide channels that amplify voices and ideas of the Occupy movement, while simultaneously deepening regional networks. As InterOccupy organizer Nate Kleinman says, “We lay the tracks, someone else has to drive the train.”

This article is published in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council’s Possible Futures project. Learn more about Possible Futures here.

Image borrowed from Triple Canopy.

The enigmatic Internet-driven collective Anonymous, thank goodness, has an anthropologist in its midst. For a few years now, Gabriella Coleman has been arduously participant-observing in IRC chat rooms, watching Anonymous turn from a prankster moniker to a herd of vigilantes for global justice. In an extraordinary new essay at Triple Canopy, “Our Weirdness Is Free,” she summarizes what Anonymous is all about this way:

Beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent an ethos as much as an objective.

The more I learn about Anonymous, especially in light of the offline, on-the-ground praxis of the Occupy movement, the more I’ve been wondering whether we’re seeing a glimpse of the future for all of us.

Here’s why. Over the past couple of years, as Anons became lulled—pun intended—into politics through their Scientology, Wikileaks, and Arab Spring operations, the lulz ethos has turned into a mode of movement-building. And it’s a movement that appears singularly scary to the powers that be, from globalized corporations to the governments of superpowers, despite (or perhaps because of) the Anons’ apparent disorganization and probably in excess of their actual capacity:

Political operations often come together haphazardly. Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” This approach could easily devolve into unfocused operations that dissipate the group’s collective strength. But acting “on the wing” leverages Anonymous’s fluid structure, giving Anons an advantage, however temporary, over traditional institutions—corporations, states, political parties—that function according to unified plans.

This bears striking resemblance to the activist framework of “diversity of tactics” that has prevailed in the Occupy movement, which emphasizes fostering dexterity and decentralization (as well as, relevantly, permissiveness toward “black blocs” of masked crusaders). But Anonymous’ allergy to unified planning isn’t limited to tactics; it extends to overall strategy and even ultimate purpose. Continues Coleman:

While Anonymous has not put forward any programmatic plan to topple institutions or change unjust laws, it has made evading them seem easy and desirable. To those donning the Guy Fawkes mask associated with Anonymous, this—and not the commercialized, “transparent” social networking of Facebook—is the promise of the Internet, and it entails trading individualism for collectivism.

In fact, Anonymous bespeaks a collective recognition that’s fueling uprisings from Lagos to Bucharest: the kinds of governments we have in place actually have little capacity for addressing the longings we have for freedom and collectivity in a globalizing, digital age. The reason both Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street don’t put forward “any programmatic plan” that existing institutions could follow is that there isn’t one. Or, rather, the movements themselves are their own programmatic plan, parallel institutions unto themselves.

One of the things that amazed me during the first weeks of Occupy Wall Street was that, as the movement spread to occupations all around the country and the world, they were so similar to one another; all took direct democracy as the basic unit of political legitimacy, and prided themselves on a decentralized, horizontal structure, and discouraged credit-taking and self-aggrandizement. How did people all over the U.S. and the world know how to Occupy, and so quickly? Their preparedness can at least partly be attributed to the veterans of the global justice movement of a decade ago who flocked to the occupations. But perhaps even more significant an influence among the younger occupiers was the experience some of them had had with Anonymous and groups like it online.

Coleman explains the resemblances:

The Romanian people have been asleep for quite some time now. After more than 20 years since the end of Communist rule, Romanians have decided to wake up, to wake up and see that the faith they put in their elected officials has not brought them the life they wished for. The current economic crisis, the austerity measures implemented by the government, the corruption among the politicians, the undemocratic way in which laws are implemented by the executive branch, poor living conditions and other interrelated grievances have brought Romanians into the streets.

It started about two weeks ago when the president, Traian Basescu, wanted to remove a highly esteemed medic from his job as an official in the Ministry of Health because he did not support the new healthcare law that was drafted by the president. This official, Raed Arafat, is a Palestinian who came to Romania and built the most advanced ambulance service the country had ever seen. For almost 15 years it has been the pride of the Romania healthcare system. But with the new law, this life-saving service would disappear.

That was the spark which ignited the fire inside the hearts of Romanians. First, 500 people protested after several NGOs and activist groups, like Active Watch Romania and Militia Spirituala, posted a call on Facebook and other social media networks. After just three days, people from around the country started to gather in squares, especially University Square in Bucharest. The number of protesters throughout these two weeks of demonstrations has varied, from the 500 on that first day to more than 20,000 after only a few days.

Nobody seems to have had a concrete plan for what has happened. The important thing was that the crowd was mixed—the elderly, students, activists with different causes and ordinary working people fed up with their living conditions—not just party or syndicate activists. People decided to bear fiercely cold weather in order to show their discontent to those in power.

During these days of protest, some people took to violent tactics. Clashes erupted between the riot police and a group of football fans supporting the protesters, which resulted in injuries among some who had been protesting peacefully. Naturally, the media focused on these incidents, putting the entire protest in a bad light. However, other protesters have managed to turn the mood around, recognizing that nonviolent discipline would be vital to their cause. This kind of understanding isn’t something many Romanians have, though that may be changing.

Most days, the young activists leading the protests in University Square have been instructing the crowd to protest nonviolently, and that is what happened for most of the days. They also surprised the media with tactics meant to show the world that they were not there to fight the riot police: offering flowers, big plastic hearts, tea and free hugs to police officers standing a few feet away from them; blocking traffic around the square while offering hot chocolate to people who got out of their cars and inviting them to participate; making snowmen and putting protest signs in their hands. Most importantly, they showed their determination to hold the line and maintain their presence despite the abuses inflicted by riot police. In recent days, a fierce snow storm struck Eastern Europe, but people, although smaller in number, are still going out into the square and protest.

Already, this wave of protests has brought about results: the healthcare law, which was about to privatize the entire medical system and put thousands of medics out of work, did not pass and will probably not get into parliament any time soon. Raed Arafat has been asked to take up his old post, which he did, and the foreign minister, Theodor Baconschi, was demoted after he called the protesters “maggots.” The Constitutional Court also declared that the law to merge local and parliamentary elections of 2012 was unconstitutional—perhaps after hearing how many of the slogans shouted in University Square were against that law.

Overall, these protests show that a new way of thinking has emerged among the population of Romania. People are tired of the way things are going and have decided to do something about it—largely in a nonviolent manner. Whatever comes of the protests, they seem to be on the way to helping build a stronger civic society for in Romania the future, showing politicians that the people will not be ignored any longer.

As the movement reflects on last fall and prepares for spring, the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD) is becoming an ever more valuable resource. Since its release on the web in September, the database has surged to more than 530 cases of nonviolent direct action campaigns, available at no charge to activists and researchers everywhere. The GNAD draws on people’s struggles from over 190 countries, and goes back in history as far as 12th century BCE Egypt. Most are from the 20th and 21st century. The student researchers from Swarthmore College—aided by students at Georgetown and Tufts—have found far more cases than they’ve had time to write up so far. A hundred additional cases are underway.

While many of the campaigns have used the “occupation” method in their struggle—77, in countries including Kenya, Mongolia, Paraguay, Brazil, Germany, England, and Chile—campaigners have used dozens of other methods as well. As the Occupy movement grows to encompass a wider range of tactics, from eviction blockades to strikes and boycotts, the GNAD can help organizers learn from past experiences.

Over two hundred of the database’s cases involve campaigners who are seeking economic justice. In Sweden, for example, the political power of the wealthiest—that country’s own “1 percent”—was undermined by a mass nonviolent struggle in the 1920s; when the 1 percent resorted to ordering troops to shoot workers in 1931, protests surged even more and the Social Democrats took over the leadership of the country, bringing a truer democracy and the redistribution of resources that today is the envy of most of the world.

There are older campaigns for economic justice in the database. The first strike in the U.S., for example, was in colonial Jamestown, Virginia—somehow not included in Disney’s Pocahantas! It also includes much more recent examples, such as last year’s victories in Bolivia, Jordan and Oman.

A virtue of the database for strategizing is that all the published cases cover complete campaigns; they’ve reached a conclusion—win, lose or draw. The reader can therefore more easily take lessons from them, seeing how certain choices led to certain outcomes. In addition, all sources are cited, so readers can delve more deeply into any particular case to learn more about it.

We’re already hearing back from activists about how the database is expanding their ideas of what is possible. It builds, in fact, on scholar Gene Sharp’s famous taxonomy of 198 nonviolent methods of struggle—it has already added a 199th method to his list! We’re also always looking for more cases that are not yet in the database; if you know of one that you don’t find after conducting a search, please write to me at glakey1@swarthmore.edu.

Happy strategizing!

In case you haven’t heard, or tried to use some of the most popular websites today, like Wikipedia, Reddit or Boing Boing, there is a unique protest underway by these online giants and many others. For the first time, they have voluntarily gone offline today to register their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), two bills that they see as an existential threat to themselves and the internet as we know it. Instead of just going dark, they wisely decided to post messages that explain their action and provide ways for users to learn more and get involved in the campaign to stop these bills in their tracks.

Right now Wikipedia and Reddit are asking users to call their representatives and sign a petition to make their voices heard. If this initial push doesn’t work, opponents of these bills may benefit from studying a similar struggle, which Ter Garcia reported on for this site, against the SOPA-like Sinde Law in Spain that was being pushed by the U.S. and was recently defeated after a massive mobilization both online and off against it.

Rather than explain the ins and outs of the bills myself, I suggest checking out the Electronic Freedom Foundation for starters and delving deeper from there. And if you have the time and interest, you can read the SOPA and PIPA bills themselves.

Many of the other biggest sites on the internet, including Google (which has blacked out its logo for the day), Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Mozilla, Ebay, Paypal, Tumblr, Kickstarter and AOL have spoken out against the bills and could take similar action should they continue to move forward. Were this “nuclear option” implemented, it would be reminiscent of when Mubarak shut down the internet last year in Egypt in an extremely counterproductive move to thwart the budding revolution. It would also reveal more clearly than ever before the power that these companies have over our lives and how rarely they have flexed their muscle for any issue, good or bad.

Another ingenious way anyone with an Android phone can get involved in the campaign is by downloading and using the “Boycott SOPA” app, which allows you to scan barcodes in stores to see whether products are “either created by or intimately related to SOPA supporting companies.” Created by two computer science students from the University of British Columbia in less than two days, this app is the first of its kind and has the potential to make boycotts of all kinds far more easy to join and effective. (At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor offers several helpful suggestions for how this app or its successors could be improved.)

In response to the growing opposition to these bills, the Obama administration came out on Saturday against SOPA, at least as it currently stands, which many believe has shelved it for the time being. PIPA, on the other hand, is still moving forward and is scheduled for a vote next Tuesday in the Senate. How today’s blackout will impact this timeline or the bills themselves is yet to be seen.

In light of the dire news out of Syria, international action is ever more urgent. In my judgment, Syria reflects one of the paradoxes of international politics: its strategic importance in the region renders international military action nearly impossible–or at least extremely unlikely. Regional and global powers are not willing to risk the potential regional  or global conflagration that would result from foreign military intervention in such a key state, even if inaction means that they will be witnesses to the senseless slaughter of thousands of civilians.

But when governments and international governmental organizations are unwilling or unable to act, civilians across the globe can still play a vital role. It’s time to demonstrate the power of “civilian diplomacy”—a concept that Hillary Clinton has been touting for a couple of years, and which has some real potential to change the course of the Syrian revolution.

This means you.

What follows are ideas of things that people both inside and outside Syria can do to help. Read more to find your inner civilian diplomat.

A modified dollar bill from the Sindegate campaign.

While the United States government debates the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Spanish Internet activists have won a small victory against the threat of censorship on the web. If the proposed Sinde Law had been approved in Spain on December 2, the government would have won the power to shut down websites that offer downloads and streaming of digital content under copyright. But ultimately, the lame-duck, left-wing party PSOE kept the law from passing because of an internal debate created by a two-year long mobilization that was the prelude of the occupation-based May 15 movement.

Since 2008, Spain has aroused the concern of the U.S. government on issues of piracy and intellectual property rights, as is reflected in that year’s Special 301 Report:

The United States is concerned by the Spanish government’s inadequate efforts to address the growing problem of Internet piracy, described by U.S. copyright industries as one of the worst in Europe. … The United States will continue to work closely with Spain to address these IPR enforcement issues during the next year.

Several leaks released by Wikileaks last December show how the U.S. government prepared a plan to defend the interests of its cultural industries in Spain before the end of the PSOE’s legislature in 2012.

U.S. pressure soon showed results. At the end of 2009, the first news about the issue came with the Sustainable Economy Law, which was presented by the PSOE as the answer to the economic problems of Spain. Buried in its 200 pages of text was, as one of more than fifty final provisions, a new regulation for the “protection of intellectual property in the scope of the information society.” This rule became known as the “Sinde Law,” after Ángeles González-Sinde, the minister of culture and its main driving force. The U.S. pressure seemed to be working, reinforced by Spain’s own Coalition of Creators and Content Industries—known as The Coalition—which presented a list of 200 websites that “must be closed urgently” to the Ministry of Culture.

People mobilized quickly. Just a few days after the release of the preliminary bill, 40 journalists, bloggers and other Internet professionals created a manifesto against the Sinde Law. The manifesto, “In Defense of Human Rights on the Internet,” gained 100,000 supporters in just three days, and the hashtag #manifiesto became a trending topic. More than 700 articles about the issue were published in print and digital media. Soon, the Ministry of Culture invited 14 people associated with the manifesto to have a urgent meeting with González-Sinde. The meeting was broadcast live on Twitter, but it had no result. The next day, on December 4, there were several demonstrations in the main Spanish cities.

Actions against the Sinde Law continued with the creation of the “La Lista de Sinde” (“Sinde’s List”) campaign in response to the censorship committee proposed by the law. The campaign, created by the group Hacktivistas, invited web managers to “incriminate themselves” for sharing culture. By March, 2010, the Hacktivistas handed over to the Ministry of Culture a list of 1,000 websites.

Organizing continued throughout 2010 with demonstrations summoned by the Spanish Pirate Party and with mass mailing to their representatives until December 21, when the Sinde Law was voted on in Congress. Around that time, too, Anonymous appeared in the Spanish scene, as an organization that later would later join Democracia Real Ya and the May 15 movement with attacks on the websites of PSOE, SGAE (an organization of artists comparable to ASCAP in the U.S.) as well as the Ministry of Culture. The Hacktivistas launched campaigns including Sindegate (to spread information about the Sinde Law and the role of U.S. in its creation) and Adopt a Nationalist (inviting people to ask their representatives to reject the law and stop its approval in Congress). Popular streaming and downloading websites showed their opposition to the law by changing their homepages to a black screen with protest messages.

The law was rejected in Congress, but it went to the Senate, where it would be voted on in February of 2011, thanks an agreement among various political parties.

On the occasion of the Goya Awards, the Spanish Oscars, Anonymous organized Operation Goya, which gathered 300 people in Guy Fawkes masks who booed the minister of culture and several artists, while applauding Alex de la Iglesia, president of the Spanish Film Academy. De la Iglesia, a popular Spanish filmmaker, made public his opposition to the Sinde Law on Twitter, and announced his resignation from the Academy, as well as that of his fellow director Santiago Segura.

The protest around the Sinde Law also coincided with the creation of #Nolesvotes (#Don’tvoteforthem). This movement, closely tied with May 15, started as a hashtag on Twitter this past February during the Senate’s vote on the Sinde Law, and it became a trending topic in Spain. Behind the hashtag were people such as David Bravo, known for his defense of Internet freedom and one of the lawyers who supported the May 15 movement; Ricardo Gallo, creator of Menéame, a popular Spanish website similar to Digg; and Enrique Dans, an IT expert and collaborator with major Spanish news organizations, including El País and El Mundo.

Despite the protest, though, the Sinde Law was approved by the Senate and came back to the Congress, where it was approved with some changes, but without creating a regulation to put it into practice. The hashtag #Nolesvotes then became a campaign against the political parties that supported it, which were facing regional elections of May, and it denounced the corruption of the Spanish politicians with a map that became very popular on the Internet.

More than 80 percent of Spaniards opposed the law, according to polls at the time. Groups such as No to the Sinde Law organized campaigns to collect signatures on petitions against it. Meanwhile, the Hacktivistas created a “Manual de Desobediencia a la Ley Sinde,” with instructions on how to break a censorship law, with the help of the underground publishing house Traficantes de Sueños and the alternative journal Diagonal. Subsequently, they released another guide, “Música, cine y televisión legal, libre y gratuita para madres y profesoras” (“Legal, free and open music, films and TV for mothers and teachers”). Within a few hours, more than 50,000 people downloaded it.

Several more protests, together with the close elections in May and November, delayed the law’s implementation even further. The minister of culture announced that the regulation would be approved before the November election, but Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the presidential candidate of PSOE, gave the order to not push this issue in order not to loose even more popularity while facing the national election.

Just after last month’s election, the cabinet announced that it would vote on implementing the Sinde Law. December 2, two years after the manifesto against the Sinde Law was first released, would be the day that it became a reality. The hashtags #redresiste (#resistnetwork) and #leysindeno (#notosindelaw) were trending topics that morning, and a reissue of the original 2009 manifesto started circulating online.

The popular pressure worked. Despite the support of the right-wing Partido Popular for the Sinde Law, the PSOE ultimately didn’t let it pass. Its passage “would be the end of the PSOE,” according to the minister of public works, a senior member of the party.

The threat of an internal crisis in the PSOE led its government to decide not to approve a law opposed by the majority of Spanish people. Now, after last month’s elections, the PSOE has left the winning Partido Popular holding a screaming child. The cyberactivists won a battle, but the war against the Sinde Law is not finished.

At the Chicago Humanities Festival last month, Ethan Zuckerman delivered this talk on digital activism, which is long but well worth watching. In his speech, he offers a very well-reasoned middle path between cyber-pessimists, like Malcolm Gladwell, and cyber-optimists, like Clay Shirky.

Zuckerman, who is the new director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, also gives a more complicated and I think accurate account of the role that social media and technology played in sparking the revolution in Tunisia than could generally be found in the mainstream media.

Among the many other issues he tackles, Zuckerman makes a convincing case that activists are better off using large sites, like Facebook and YouTube, to organize and spread their messages rather than smaller platforms designed specifically for activists. Larger sites are far more difficult to incapacitate through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by governments, which has been a serious problem for sites like Irrawaddy.

It also significantly raises the costs of government censorship. If a site that is used only by a small number of activists is shut down by the government, only they will know about it. On the other hand, if governments choose to censor digital activism by shutting down sites millions are using primarily for entertainment, it heightens awareness of censorship and may get them out in the streets for the first time.

That’s the latest conclusion from scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan on the average number of acquaintances separating any two people on the planet.

As online social networks multiply, not only does our interconnectedness increase, but a glut of cyberworld data become available to see if Stanley Milgram and others, who decades ago first asserted this beguiling supposition, were right.

Turns out we’re closer than even they imagined, according to this recent research project that, as the Los Angeles Times reports, took a month and “examined all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them.”

As suggestive as this finding might be, it raises a number of thorny issues. Some of them are definitional. For example, what counts for an acquaintance—let alone a friend—anymore? By merely “befriending” someone, have we really broken through the yawning barriers of isolation? Are we really any closer?

No one at Facebook is claiming that we are all soul mates, bosom buddies, or even best friends.  But undeniably there are new ties, and those ties are increasingly three-dimensional, connecting me to people I would never have met otherwise. There are, as the sociological jargon puts it, “weak ties” and “strong ties,” but even the slenderest of weak ties can connect us under the right circumstances.

There is the famous case of Malcolm Gladwell pooh-poohing the potential impact of social media on social change three months before the Arab Spring got rolling, when he asserted that the weak ties of Twitter and Facebook would never play a key role in social transformation.

I would be the last to claim that social media were the primary engines for the events in Tunisia and Egypt—or in the Tar Sands struggle or the Occupy movement—but it is clear that they have played an enormous role in all of these grassroots initiatives. These social networking synapses that are growing at an exponential rate have already helped us glimpse—and, in some cases, experience—the power of this web of linkages for social change.

But the regime of proliferating weak ties is not enough.

The emergent connectivity all around us is only the palest hint of our true unity. Social media can be fruitfully understood as a metaphor—an image representing the less tangible but much more primordial vision and experience of oneness. We came out of oneness—from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, from the plains of Africa since then—and, in spite of the fratricidal violence we inflict on one another, this experience of oneness is actually growing and expanding, if Jeremy Rifkin’s research is right in his book, The Empathic Civilization. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Rifkin charts a growth in empathy in the human species as its social organization has systematically expanded its notion of family and belonging: from tribes to religious communities to nation-states. (Here is a video summary of Rifkins’ book.)

We are on the threshold of potentially expanding this circle of care and concern once more, as will ultimately be required if we have any chance of tackling and resolving the monumental challenges facing our societies and Planet Earth.

The tricky word in that last sentence is “potentially.” There is no guarantee that we will make this leap. Contrary to the tenets of social Darwinism, our genes don’t fate us to apocalyptic violence, but neither is there a nonviolent determinism. Instead, there is a choice. We have a choice to gamble that we are all connected, and that our survival actually depends on one another, even those people who, empathic tendencies aside, we don’t like very much.

When I read that I am connected by 4.74 links to virtually any one on the planet, the evanescent smoke of mystical concepts like “oneness” and “interdependence” suddenly vanishes: we are one crew living in one house (“The World House,” as Dr. King wrote in his last days). We are related to all, including enemies, strangers, those from whom we are estranged—those who have rejected us or whom we have rejected—as well as family, friends and our dearest loved ones.

Being one family doesn’t automatically mean that we love each other or even like each other—there is irrefutable evidence of this, and more of it piles up everyday—but this connection can be a basis for choosing a more effective way.

The greatest violence is the act of denying this connectedness. However, no matter how vicious or extensive, no act of denial can extinguish the prior foundational reality of our relatedness. Under no circumstance is relationality ever extinguished. It is primordial, thoroughgoing, and at the heart of all that is. Were relatedness to cease, all life would cease.

So this brings me to the University of California at Davis Police pepper-spraying a line of nonviolent Occupiers on UCD campus last week. This traumatic incident got me thinking about my own experience of my being tear-gassed at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, where the Seattle police also used pepper-spray.

I am quite certain that I did not have the theory of “six degrees of separation” in my head as I sat linking arms with my fellow anti-globalization advocates as an unremitting cloud of tear gas bore down on us, leaving us momentarily blind and unable to breathe.

But there was a part of me that intuited this radical indivisibility of all life. It was why I was sitting there in the first place—this web connects the sweatshop worker in Indonesia with the thousands of us sitting in the street in downtown Seattle.

But there was also this irreducibly foundational connection with those firing rubber bullets into the crowd and lobbing the latest round of tear-gas canisters at us. What, I might ask, were the degrees of connection to them? I was born in Seattle—perhaps three, perhaps two. Hey, maybe even one.

To own up to our deepest connection is not to condone the violence of our “sibling.” This foundational interconnectedness, instead, offers a sturdy place (sociological but also biological and existential) from which to nonviolently resist such violence with every fiber of my being—but to do so with the knowledge that I do so to strengthen, not weaken, the strongest tie of all.

The First Thanksgiving by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

This Thursday, the United States and its citizens around the world will celebrate our day of thanks, known as Thanksgiving. The tradition’s origins are often disputed. Some say it was a European harvest cycle tradition that immigrated to the “New World” with the explorers. Others dispute whether the tradition began in Plymouth, Massachusetts or in Florida or Virginia. Of course, the image of Native Americans sitting together with European colonists – actually, occupiers – is disputed as well.

Fast forward to today, and most dictionaries describe Thanksgiving as:

1) the act of giving thanks

2) a prayer expressing gratitude

3) a public acknowledgement of celebration of divine goodness

I am aware that the way we Thanksgiving is celebrated today runs contrary to the historic origins of the New World. There are so many Thanksgiving myths, and any actual story or history has been white washed. To make the holiday even more discouraging, the focus of Thanksgiving for so many Americans is on Black Friday, football, and holiday shopping. None of the dictionary definitions of Thanksgiving fit with contemporary consumerist and indulgent activities.

This Thanksgiving, I gratefully acknowledge the people who risk their lives and stand steadfast in their demands for dignity, justice and economic equality. And for all the authentic journalists who tenaciously follow them and report on their work, and the tools that help them achieve their goals.  I am grateful that an interesting combination of forces and human ingenuity is showing the world what democracy looks like.

1) Leaderless nonviolent movements: The Arab Spring, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, students’ calls for educational reform in Puerto Rico and Chile, the miners protests in Bolivia, Tar Sands action, and Occupy Wall Street offer fantastic examples of a breaking of a persistent stereotype that people can only come together with one voice and vision if they have a charismatic public leader (who is usually male). This has been an amazing year for civil resistance. As a student, writer and educator of nonviolent social movements, I have felt like a lone voice declaring the potential of people power. And after January, all that changed.

2) Arab women front and center: One of the most inspiring features of the Arab Spring was the exposure of the strength of Arab women. Their participation, leadership, reporting, video documentation, and public representation in each country undergoing political reformation was an education for their countrymen and for the world.  In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, women are actively involved in their countries’ struggling amidst deeply patriarchal societies. From Asmaa Mahfouz of Egypt to Tawakul Karman of Tunisia, women have acted with boldness and determination, and they have been organizing and participating long before their faces became known to the Western world.

3) People-powered news: Anyone can go on the internet each morning and within five minutes, with a global network of interesting and active Facebook friends, get authentic news from around the world rarely offered by mainstream journalists. This is due in large part to the blogger activists taking risks to expose injustices and frame stories honestly, without marketing gimmicks or commercial influences. This site, for example, has been a key source for on the ground news related to the Tar Sands Action and Occupy Wall Street.  Many bloggers are activists who, in stark difference to mainstream news journalists, work not for profit or a salary, but out of concern, passion and a desire for truth telling on issues simply not covered in nightly cable television newscasts.

4) Technology tools: The forces I mention above are continually benefiting from easy-to-use tools like smart phones, SMS, You Tube and Twitter.  Many of these basic tools are being integrated with more sophisticated human rights tracking/reporting and crowd sourcing tools like Ushahidi, Martus, Frontline SMS, and Mobile Accord.  The combination of technology, authentic voices, nonviolent education and exchanges of information among activists, and social sharing platforms like Facebook have served as a kind of catalyst for social movements this year. Technology tools must be harnessed for public good rather than only for profit, consumerism or nefarious causes.

5) Al Jazeera English: One of the great things about living in Washington, DC is having access to Al Jazeera English news service on television. For the rest of the U.S. and the world, Al Jazeera English makes most if not all broadcasts available on the web. I remember many days in January when I could not pull myself away from the television as Al Jazeera covered events in Tunisia, Egypt, and later in Bahrain and Yemen. While U.S. and perhaps European commercial news outlets must cater to its citizens’ apathy and attention deficit disorder, Al Jazeera was steadfast in its coverage of Middle East events. For example, months before Takawal Karman of Tunisia women the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, Al Jazeera was featuring her in its People and Power program, episode Yemen: A Tale of Two Protests.  To learn more about Al Jazeera, the documentary film, Control Room (2003), investigates the ethics of media-managed wars and offers insight into Al Jazeera reporting and vision.

The latest issue of The Catholic Worker includes a new article of mine about covering Occupy Wall Street for Waging Nonviolence. Since the paper isn’t published online, you’ll have to see either a (slightly edited) portion of it about Dan Berrigan at Occupy Writers, or a blown-up pdf here. I’ll also be giving a talk—which was gracefully entitled for me “The Ballerina and the Charging Bull”—at Maryhouse (55 East 3rd St., New York) on January 13 at 7:45 p.m.

Written on the hand of this young protester, “Leave” - a message to Syria's President Bashar Assad

Bits and pieces of information about the growing uprising in Syria are coming our way through mainstream media sources like Al Jazeera. But dig down deep, and you’ll find a revolution with women forging the way, and with a news gap that’s being filled by Syrian expatriate females.

Let’s begin with a little known fact: The youngest known convicted prisoner of conscience in the world is a Syrian citizen. Her name is Tal al-Mallouhi, a young blogger who has been in prison since 2009, when she was 17 years old. Tal’s poetry and political interests and activism chaffed with the authorities. After being held in jail for more than two years, in February 2011, Mallouhi was sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of spying for the U.S. The case of Tal became part of Syrian consciousness, particularly among women. The idea that young people were increasingly disappearing, often later found tortured or killed, sounded an alarm in villages across Syria.

During a recent conversation with Rafif, a female Syrian expatriate activist living in Northern Virginia, I learned some of the deep grievances that were at the core of decades of citizen activism in Syria. “There is a kind of gang mentality in Syria that goes beyond politics. You either support the government-supported mafias, or you are excluded from ‘inner circles’ that allow you some economic leverage. All major industries, like tourism, mobile communications, and petroleum industries are regime-controlled. In any business, you have to strike a deal with the regime in order to operate without too much government interference,” she explains. “It is a culture of bakhsheesh, meaning tip or bribe. Those who cannot afford to pay off every level of government or businesses are excluded, and therefore don’t benefit economically.”

The case of Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit vendor in Tunisia who set himself afire outside a local municipal office and sparked Tunisia’s revolution, resonated for average Syrians who too had been suffering such indignities all their lives. It is a system of total psychological, social and economic repression. For the average Syrian, it is total humiliation—long waits for basic services, bribes each step of the way, and a long chain of corruption. Syrian activism for decades had been around ending this system of corruption, and this unifying theme was slowly shifting.

I am told that Syrians watched the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in awe. Early this year, a few young students aged 8 to 15 years old were emboldened by the unfolding events in the region and wrote graffiti in their school in Dar’a, a poor area south of Damascus. The youngsters were arrested for scrawling the word “freedom” on the school wall. They were beaten and dropped off to their families. As Rafif describes it, “The city went crazy.” Many demonstrations and marches followed as people publicly expressed their outrage at the regime’s tactic to suppress a revolution: the torture of children.

Several weeks later, Hamza al-Khatib, a 13-year-old boy, again from a village in Dar’a, became the symbol of the Syria’s blossoming revolution. He was tortured to death for participating in a demonstration. Dar’a citizens staged massive demonstrations. For so many years, people had been mobilizing around reforming the system, but suddenly the focus shifted to the overthrow of the regime, as was happening in Tunisia and Egypt.

The women of Syria, both young and old, have been courageously leading many protest activities throughout the country. For them, it is personal, and they are deeply invested in the idea of change. In, April in the city of Bayda, nearly every adult male was imprisoned in an attack on the town to repress government opposition. More marches and protests followed.

Women have also been active in funeral processions, traditionally the domain of men. (Women normally mourn at home.) When women began coming out in large numbers, they too became victims of the regime’s violence. And they adapted. Syrian women traditionally do not cover their faces in public, but they are doing so during protests to protect their identities, as are many men. A clever adaptation to the face veil can be seen here, as women use the Syrian flag as a face cover, doubling as protection and a message to a regime that accuses them of being part of a foreign-led regime change plot.

Women, both expats and in the country, are extremely active. Still, protestors on the streets are mostly men. And the aspiring transitional government, the Syrian National Council, are mostly men. Between the protestors and the aspiring government, there is the wide middle wherein lies a huge network of people, many of whom are women. That network is helping document disappearances, deaths, forced detentions and torture. And they are communicating the news to the outside world through technology tools like social media and video posts on YouTube. Women are recording their actions on the ground and sharing that information with Syrian expatriates in London, Paris, Northern Virginia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, New York and New Jersey.

“I didn’t realize how Syrian I was until this uprising began. I am a U.S. citizen by birth and have spent only a few years in Syria, as a child and later as an adult. I was disappointed,” my friend reflects, often with tears welling. “Now I realize that what I hated about my country: it was the system.” Another Syrian expat woman, Mohja Kahf, writes regularly and provides analysis, video and photos of the ongoing revolution—particularly women in resistance. Their work is full of risks. Many Syrians expats who are active in the movement understand that they are being watched by Syrian intelligence agents. Rafif and other Syrian women from around the world translate news and spread it through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They spread awareness globally and also offer information to the insiders on effective civil disobedience.

Rafif explains her motivation to take part in the uprising: “I get to do this while Syrians inside the country are getting shot at. Seven and eight year old children who even speak of freedom are considered enemies of the state. When they take to the streets, it’s like a suicide mission. But they’d rather die than be silent. I look at how these children are being harmed, and I think, ‘that child could be my son or daughter.’ As a mother, a woman, and a human being, how could I not get involved?”

She recognizes that some may see them as supporting the revolution from “9 to 5.” Rafif acknowledges that she gets to go home each night in relative safety. But she is confident that many Syrians on the inside are appreciative of the support from their fellow Syrians on the outside. “We are helping broadcast the revolution and building global awareness,” Rafif explains between tears and determination, gripping her laptop full of first-hand accounts and resources.

The world has had little reason to pay attention to the intensifying human rights meltdown in Fiji at the hands of the ruling military junta. After all, it hasn’t affected the bottom line: foreign exploitation of the island nation’s cheap natural resources or the discounted soldiers it supplies to the United Nations and American mercenary companies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fiji Water, one of the top imported bottled waters in the United States, still markets itself as an untarnished taste of paradise, while giving millions of dollars to the country’s brutal dictatorship and hiring a military-led company to run its security. Even Gibson Guitar, the favorite of rock-stars which just became the new darling of the Tea Party after federal raids on its imported wood, is busy courting the despotic regime for preferential access to Fiji’s mahogany riches, which were behind the country’s 2000 coup.

The draconian censorship of all media in Fiji means constant suppression of reports about the increasing surveillance, harassment, detentions, beatings, rape and murder of Fijian citizens at the hands of their dictatorship. International press has recently noticed that the junta is even censoring news of tourist deaths on the island in order to maintain the facade of idyllic calm.

But in the past few months, the discontent simmering in Fijian society has come spilling out through several key fractures. There have been high-level defections, calls for global solidarity by labor unions and on-the-ground protests. For the first time since the junta took power in a 2006 coup, many Fijians have hope that the ingredients of a revolution are coming together.

Fiji’s highest-profile defector yet, Lieutenant Colonel Ratu Tevita Mara, believes that Fiji is ripe for an Oceanic version of the Arab Spring. In a video posted on his site, he said the regime will be brought down by “peaceful means,” and that “we will use passive resistance, there will be no violence.” These are no doubt surprising words coming from the former fourth highest-ranking member of Fiji’s military and the army’s chief of staff. In a recent interview, I spoke with Mara, about the junta, its vulnerabilities, and what he sees as its inevitable downfall.

Mara was initially a key supporting official of Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama’s 2006 coup — the U.S. Embassy calls Mara a “coup ringleader” in Wikileaks cables — but he has since described his government as a “vicious and brutal illegal military junta” run by a “mafia of violent and corrupt terrorists.” Mara’s words carry additional weight with Fijians as he is the son of the founding father of modern Fiji, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara — the first prime minister of post-independence Fiji and later its president. He’s also the brother-in-law of Fiji’s current president, Ratu Epeli Nailatikau, who answers to self-appointed Prime Minister Bainimarama. Mara was charged this spring with sedition and mutiny after a military officer reported him for making a critical comment about the regime.

Mara spoke to me from Australia, where he’s a declared fugitive from Fiji after being picked up at sea by the Tongan navy in May. (Being related to Tonga’s royal family, he was given citizenship there.) The junta has filed extradition papers for him all over the South Pacific, where he’s been on a speaking tour airing their dirty laundry to regional governments and Fijian expatriate democracy groups. He has also put a series of videos on his website in which he appeals directly to soldiers and police officers to end Bainimarama’s reign, calling some out by name. According to Mara, Bainimarama’s inner circle has become increasingly insular, and that it’s this inside group of soldiers and bodyguards that has been behind the physical assaults on dissidents, including Fiji’s infamous nighttime arson attacks on the homes of perceived critics. “It’s not the whole of the military that’s doing these atrocities in Fiji, it’s only a select number of people under Bainimarama,” Mara explained.

Recently-released Fijian Wikileaks cables — explored in depth by the Australian press — document the torture, rape, and even murder of detainees that constitute the reign of Bainimarama’s henchmen. A 2007 cable reported that Bainimarama privately confirmed to EU diplomats that “if someone insults the President or the RFMF [Republic of Fiji Military Forces], of course we must have them taken to the barracks and have them beaten up.” In another 2007 cable, the U.S. Embassy related Fijian human rights reports that Bainimarama himself had joined in the beating of a senior government official, barking “don’t f*** with the military” as he did. The U.S. Embassy also reported on an incident when the military had handed over the bruised, dead body of a detainee to the police.

Fijians are arrested not only for public statements against the junta, Mara explained, but are now even taken to barracks for comments made in private conversation — a tactic he described in one of his internet videos as “more like Nazi Germany and the Gestapo, or the Soviet Union and the KGB.” A more contemporary comparison, however, would be China, where Fiji’s chief censor — the secretary of the Ministry of Information —is attending workshops on how to control the flow of information to the public.

Mara confirmed to me that “the mobile phones are tapped, the landlines are tapped.” He also confirmed that the internet is indeed monitored — a fact that I discovered on my own in 2009 after my emails were intercepted by Fiji police at an internet cafe and I was arrested for them.

“There is control on the internet, they control that. The internet monitoring is done by the internet company Connect,” which the government owns, said Mara. “I’ve sat in meetings where transcripts of conversations have been brought up to Bainimarama. Civil servants have even been sent from their jobs for phone conversations criticizing the government.” People who appear to be civilians are paid by the military to monitor their neighbors: “Reserve soldiers, they get put on the payroll. They remain in civil society, continue their normal civilian jobs, and send information back to military headquarters.” Mara recalled taxi drivers calling military headquarters with tips about seditious passengers.

The surveillance apparatus, the censorship of media — which the regime has dubbed the “journalism of hope” — and a climate of fear around public protest have led many Fijians to use anonymous methods to communicate to each other and to the world that they’ve had enough. The capital city of Suva and other parts of the main island were recently tagged in the middle of the night with graffiti like “PM MURDERER,” “BAINIMARAMA U EVIL LEADER,” and “PM YOUR TIME IS OVER – NEW GOV’T SOON,” followed by the torching of police huts. A group calling itself the Viti Revolutionary Forces emerged to take credit, and managed to send out a nationwide text message urging Fijians to “start passive resistance now.” The military has started to arrest suspects, and five men appeared in court this month to plead not guilty to charges of sedition.

Anti-regime blogs by well-connected dissidents have flourished, and are becoming the go-to drops for whistleblowers with inside scoops about the junta. Satirical accounts masquerading as the regime have been created on social media, such as a junta Twitter account which tweets at unsuspecting foreigners who’ve made comments about Fiji (“As long as you do not criticise us you are welcome to stay. Smile for the men with the guns.”) A former Fijian government minister was arrested, and says he was beaten, for distributing an anti-regime DVD to villagers. Fijians abroad have started displaying upside-down Fijian flags at public events, as they’ve been doing at this month’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. (Rugby is Fiji’s national sport.)

But perhaps the most critical mass of resistance comes from Fiji’s trade unions, whose leaders have been repeatedly arrested and beaten by the military. They’re now taking the risk of being publicly quoted by Australian and New Zealand press about their ordeals, while the unions are persecuted for holding public meetings due to Fiji’s martial law forbidding unpermitted gatherings.

International trade unions have raised the alarm about the junta’s abuses and called for global solidarity. As a result, the Australian Transport Workers Union, along with their New Zealand counterparts, have even considered shutting down flights to Fiji.

The regime escalated its war against Fiji’s workers last month with the release of its Essential National Industries Decree, a hugely controversial law designed to shred workers’ rights. An Air Pacific pilot was just arrested and charged with cyber-crimes for releasing internal documents to an anti-regime blog showing that the airline, which is nearly half-owned by the Australian giant Qantas, had helped to draft the decree and paid a New York law firm tens of thousands of dollars to consult on it.

While workers continue to step up their resistance in the face of repression, there are signs that the military is losing its moral authority. This developing situation — to be discussed in part two of this series — has heightened prospects of a popular uprising. As Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty told regional press this month, “In all these places, we are talking currently about Syria, Yemen, I don’t see how Fiji is such an exception. If this level of violation of human rights continues and if people don’t have a voice and if they have no basic freedoms, in my view it’s a matter of time.”