Berkman Buzz: October 3, 2014

After a good long run in its original design, the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has moved to a new design and infrastructure. The new database offers APIs for data submission and researcher access, along with better web search functions for site visitors. The new version of the site, with its faceted data, has turned our roughly two million notices into over 450 million data items!

With these upgrades, we look forward to welcoming additional researchers and submitters of data. As more web companies adopt transparency reporting, publishing to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse can be a component of that reporting.

On September 30th, 2014, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. (CDM) will launch Contratados, a social justice initiative that uses technology and art to increase transparency and combat abuse in U.S. guest worker programs. Materials were designed and produced in collaboration with Research Action Design (RAD), Studio REV-, and the Migrant Defense Committee. The project, whose name refers to the process of being contracted under a temporary work program, is specifically directed to H-2 and J-1 workers from Mexico but can be used by workers of all backgrounds and visa categories. With an interactive website, a hotline, pocket-sized comics, audio novelas, and a transnational radio campaign, Contratados is a groundbreaking tool that provides workers with resources to more securely navigate the recruitment and employment process. Using the crowdsourcing website similar to Yelp.com and the accompanying hotline, workers themselves can write reviews of recruiters and employers and collectively fill critical gaps in publicly available information about international labor recruitment.

Back in 2011, I was small part of the Occupy Wall Street movement (occasionally helping stock the kitchen and First Aid tents in Zuccotti Park), so arriving in Hong Kong, I had a sense of what Occupy Central with Love and Peace would look like.

This morning, I headed over to Central, the main street through Hong Kong's financial district, to see the occupation trying to secure for Hong Kong the democratic election they were promised in 2017. Walking east from the ferry terminal, the scale of the event certainly seemed like Occupy in New York -- hundreds of people, many wearing that dazed, curious smile people get when they see their fellow citizens behaving as if politics could include them.

Walking uphill on Central, now turned into a political pedestrian mall, felt like a kind of elongated Zuccotti Park. Then I got to the crest of the roadway, and looked down towards the Admiralty neighborhood, the moment captured in the picture above.

And I realized how wrong I was about the size. Occupy Central is absolutely massive, endless participation as far as the eye can see. (Amazement at the scale of the event seemed to be a common reaction -- my picture includes several other people holding up their cameras at about the same spot, having had roughly the same reaction.)
 

Want to stay up-to-date on student privacy? Sign up for the #BerkmanSPI newsletter: tinyletter.com/spi @berkmancenter @LeahAPlunkett
—Paulina Haduong (@phaduong)
 

The Internet Monitor team is delighted to announce the publication of "Russia, Ukraine, and the West: Social Media Sentiment in the Euromaidan Protests," the fourth in a series of special reports that focus on key events and new developments in Internet controls and online activity.

The report, authored by Bruce Etling, analyzes content from a range of online Russian- and English-language sources, including both social media (Facebook, Twitter, and forums) and traditional media, to explore sentiment in the online conversation about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine last winter:

This paper investigates sentiment in the online conversation about the Ukrainian Euromaidan protests across a range of English- and Russian-language social and traditional media sources. Results from this exploratory research show more support for the Euromaidan protests in Russian-language sources, including among sources and users based in Russia, than originally expected. Sentiment in English-language sources, including those located in the United States and United Kingdom, is more negative than anticipated given the rhetorical support among western governments for the Euromaidan protests. However, social media content in Ukraine, the US, and the UK is more positive than traditional media outlets in those countries.

This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China's plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person "nominating committee." Critics charge the committee will be "dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite." "We want genuine universal suffrage," Martin Lee, founding chairman of Hong Kong's Democratic Party demanded, "not democracy with Chinese characteristics."

But there's not much particularly Chinese in the Hong Kong design, unless Boss Tweed was an ancient Chinese prophet. Tweed famously quipped, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Beijing's proposal is just Tweedism updated: a multi-stage election, with a biased filter at the first stage.

On September 28, after Hong Kong police unleashed tear gas on protesters, many said that they could not access the Internet with their mobile phones and had to run to Central or Wanchai districts before they could send their messages.

Since then, a large number of protesters have downloaded FireChat to prepare for communication during network outages or network congestion.

The FireChat application can run over a mesh network. As each mobile phone sends out a weak signal, a mesh network turns each mobile phone into a network node and links the nodes together to form a local telecommunication network that enables the exchange of messages between users.