What can not been seen…

“Today Tunisia, Iran, China… there are lots of things that people can’t see there. They can see them with a bit of effort, but most people don’t know how to make that effort.”

I want to highlight parts of the transcript of a meeting entitled “Bloggers in Prison, Too”, which took place on 18 March 2007 at the Centre for Socialist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. The background for the meeting was the case of Abd Al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, an Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of religion. The discussion touched on many subjects, including the worldwide battle against freedom of expression, the state of Egypt’s opposition groups, young people’s participation in protests, the political role of blogs, the loss of privacy and the spread of wireless Internet technology. Thanks to Benjamin Geer for the translation and the post to [nettime-e] that popped it up on my radar.

The full discussion makes fascinating reading but I wanted to draw attention to the a few WSFII-salient parts…

“Today if you go to my home town in Buhaira, in Al-Kawm Al-Ahdar, you’ll find wireless internet antennas on the towers in which pigeons are raised. That’s a local area network. They can block web sites so that when I’m sitting in Egypt I can’t see that’s out there, but as soon as something gets into our local area network, it will spread” ( page 14 / 50:34 )

“All this is still at the stage of technology that the law permits. When we get to the stage where I say no, why should I just set up the kind of antenna that they allow me to have? I’m going to set up an antenna that can reach a distance of 100 kilometres, and the government won’t be able to do anything about it. Then we’ll see that there’s absolutely no way to block anything. It’ll be a completely decentralised network. They won’t be able to do anything about it.” ( page 14 / 50:57 )

“Some of it [decentralising networks] will be done by activist networks.  Some of it will be done by people as part of development work, and so on.  The natural situation is for this alternative technology, leaving aside the question of its cost, to be adopted among the poor.  And if it’s being adopted among the poor in sub-equatorial Africa, where experience and scientific knowledge are very limited, I don’t see why it wouldn’t happen in Egypt, where we still have universities, graduates, engineers, inventors and so on.” ( page 18 / 1:25:45 )