Tech-Savvy Protesters Battle Iranian Government in Cyberspace

By Michael Bowman Washington 18 June 2009

Picture of Mousavi supporters in Tehran 17 Jun 2009 posted on photo-sharing site Twitpic by user 'madyar' via AFP.

In the days since Iran's contested presidential vote, demonstrators have proved resourceful and adept in bypassing a government clampdown on information sharing. Aided by mobile phones and an array of Internet services, technology-savvy Iranians have organized among themselves and communicated with the outside world, sending personalized and unfiltered accounts of events as they unfold in their country. We examine the role technology is playing in Iran's post-election saga, and how it is affecting the balance of power between some autocratic regimes and the people.

Iranians have seized the world's attention through gripping, first-hand people-to-people reporting. Surf the Internet, and you will find countless uploaded videos depicting defiance, as well as chaos and violence on the streets.

At the same time, messages disseminated through Web-based services like Twitter and appearing on social networks like Facebook have helped demonstrators coordinate activities, warn each other of danger, and keep the world informed on a minute-by-minute basis.

It is precisely the global outreach of ordinary Iranians that impresses Virginia-based social media entrepreneur and author Geoff Livingston.

"To see it happen in Iran and to see the global community embrace it and pick up on it and watch it as it happens - we have never seen anything like this before," he said.

With foreign journalists either forced to leave Iran or confined to their hotels, major news organizations have come to rely heavily on Iran's fledgling crop of citizen journalists.

"There are no reliable [official] sources right now in Iran," said VOA Persian News Network television anchor Hamideh Aramideh. "People are the reliable sources. They are not just one, two, three hundred. They are thousands."

Aramideh's Facebook page has added thousands of new Iranian contacts in recent days.

Iran's demographics help explain the country's post-election dynamic, according to Alex Vatanka, Senior Middle East Analyst for Jane's Information Group.

"It is a reflection of the youthfulness of the country," he said. "A country of 70 percent being under the age of 30. It is youthful, it is technologically-savvy, it is able to use the latest gadgets."

But Vatanka adds that the use of technology is not limited to Iranian demonstrators.

"Authorities also can use Facebook and other social networking services as their own as a way of rallying support," he said. "And, they can monitor what is being said in cyberspace. Monitor who is saying what."

Iran's authorities have limited options when it comes to blocking communication, according to blogger and author Daniel Drezner, who teaches international politics at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

"The obvious option is to try to disrupt the means of communication," he said. "But it is worth recognizing that, even if you shut down Twitter, word-of-mouth still works, just as it did over a century ago."

Drezner says Iran is only the latest country in which technology has facilitated a popular uprising.

"Democratic movements have undoubtedly benefited from this," he said. "We have had a whole series of 'color revolutions' where we have seen this kind of thing. That said, there are two caveats. The first is: it is a dynamic process where you do have governments over time learning how to thwart these things. For example, while you had an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the government in Belarus was very quick to crack down on any possibility of a social movement. The second [caveat] is that sometimes things happen through these technologies that would have happened anyway. It is simply that we would not have observed them otherwise."

Geoff Livingston says authoritarian governments stifle their citizen's ability to communicate at their own peril.

"That really puts them in a dangerous spot, because in order to prevent this [information sharing] from happening, they have to stunt their own technological development," he said. "Which means they have to stunt their own economic development and their own welfare. Do you become North Korea - walled off from the world with no technology? Or do you embrace this and start moving towards democracy?"

Web-based services have taken special measures in response to developments in Iran. Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance that would have disrupted the service. YouTube is relaxing restrictions to allow videos from Iran that contain scenes of violence, saying the images are "important" for the world to see.

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Mobile Money Democratizes Uganda's Banking Sector

By Linda Blake Kampala 22 June 2009

A growing number of Ugandans are starting to utilize a service called "Mobile Money" to transfer millions of dollars via text message on their mobile phones. The phenomenon is democratizing banking in Uganda and changing the country's socioeconomic landscape.

Like the majority of Ugandans, Margaret Okello has never had a bank account. But thanks to an incident involving her mother's cow, the Kampala housewife recently learned that she could use her mobile phone to transfer cash.

Okello says the cow was crossing the road in the Bukwali village in Western Uganda when a motorcyclist crashed into it and damaged his bike. With zero savings, Okello says her mother was stuck in a serious legal predicament.

"According to the regulations the owner of the cow has to pay because the cows don't have right of way, so the owner of the cow has to pay," said Okello.

Moments after the accident, Okello visited a MTN service center in the capital, Kampala, one of 600 service centers the regional telecom giant operates in Uganda. There, an agent converted Okello's $20 into electronic funds. In less than 5 minutes, Okello's mother received a text message listing a special pin code which she used to retrieve the funds at a MTN service center in her village.

In east Africa, the mobile banking system was first introduced in Kenya a few years ago. Now, one out of every six Kenyans uses the service to transfer money. In the past two months, telecom providers such as MTN, Uganda Telecom, and Zain have cooperated with local banks to expand this service into Uganda.

In the case of MTN, Ugandans are using their phones to send allowances to their aging parents in outlying villages. Others use it to pay off their children's' school fees, and more than 20 percent of subscribers are using their mobile phones as a substitute for a savings account.

Uganda has only three million bank account holders, but close to 10 million mobile phone subscribers. Traditional banks are sparse in most parts of rural Uganda. MTN's Mobile Money head, Richard Mwami, says mobile phones have created a new "battleground" for banking.

"The power of the mobile phone [is] we have taken our financial services to people who before have not been exposed to these services. In fact, what we see happening is a lot of growth has been registered in the central part of the country," said Mwami.

Mwami says subscribers are sending an average of $35 each transfer, which he says means low-income people are using the service most. He attributes this to the minimum 40 cents MTN charges per transfer as compared to the $5 charged by traditional banks.

Although it is too soon to weigh the full economic impact of mobile money on rural Uganda, the ease of the service has inspired people like Kampala tour guide operator Timothy Sekanwagi to do something he would not have considered doing before.

Sekanwagi recently bought property in the Ugandan countryside. The businessman saved himself a 90-minute drive each way to the village and high fuel charges by using his mobile phone to transfer a payment to a local contractor.

"I bought a piece of land so I'm trying to put up a structure there so instead of going there I can just send the money, so it is very cheap and convenient," Sekanwagi said.

Mwami adds that this is only the start of an emerging money transfer culture that could significantly boost economic development in Uganda in the coming decade.

Mobile money transfers are popular in several other African countries as well, including South Africa and Nigeria. Telecom operator Zain is now piloting projects across the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Statistics indicate the developing world will use their mobiles to transfer more than $5 billion in the next three years. Some analysts are already dubbing mobile companies like Zain the "biggest bank in East Africa."

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Robotic Mission Dives to Deepest Part of Ocean

By Rosanne Skirble Washington, D.C. 19 June 2009

Prior to the test run of a new robotic vehicle last month, underwater research vehicles operated no deeper than 6,000 meters. Nereus changed that.

The newly developed hybrid ROV Nereus is launched from the RV Kilo Moana during a test cruise in 2007 off Hawaii

The robotic craft, developed and operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, dove to 10,902 meters in the western Pacific, pushing the frontiers of exploration into unknown depths, says Andy Bowen, project manager for the Nereus Robot Development Program.

"Nereus is a tool which we hope the scientific community will use to make important discoveries about that final 4,000 meters of the ocean," he says.

Bowen says the hybrid design allows Nereus to be operated remotely while tethered to its mother ship or to run as a free-swimming craft controlled by onboard computers.

Nereus's specialized manipulator arm samples sediment from the deepest part of the world's ocean - the Mariana Trench

"It performs a series of routine surveys gathering routine information about the sea floor, using sensors such as sonar and digital photography to map out the area of interest in great detail."

Using these maps, scientists onboard the surface ship direct Nereus in its tethered mode through a fiber-optic cable. Bowen explains this lighter cable replaces the steel reinforced copper wire cables used by traditional robotic systems.

"We are able then to go in with a mechanical arm and high-quality cameras and actually interact directly with the sea floor under human control."

Because the 40-kilometer-long tether is so light - it weighs less than a kilogram and is nearly as thin as a human hair - it does not snap under its own weight and can withstand the crushing pressure of the deep ocean. The cable uncoils from both ends - a canister onboard the robot and one attached to the surface vessel.

WHOI biologist Tim Shank (at right) and Patty Fryer (left), a geologist with the University of Hawaii, examine the samples retrieved from the Mariana Trench

"And so as the vehicle goes about its business, it is essentially trailing a piece of glass fiber behind it, which allows us to range freely while remaining in contact with the surface ship. And that's really the big breakthrough with the Nereus system. At the end of the mission, we actually cut the fiber and then bring the end onboard the ship and dispose of it and recharge the batteries, and we're ready to go again."

Nereus weighs 3 tons and is just over 4 meters long and 2 meters wide. It is powered by 4,000 lithium batteries. The craft carries ballast weights in its descent to 11,000 meters, diving at 20 to 30 meters a minute for eight hours. The weights, Bowen says, are dropped on the sea floor.

"It really neither sinks or floats and using its propulsion system, which is a series of small propellers, we can actually drive the vehicle around near the sea floor much in the same way you might think of a helicopter. And that driving is done by a pilot 7 miles [11 kilometers] away on the surface vessel through a joystick."

The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is located near the island of Guam in the west Pacific. It is the deepest abyss on Earth at 11,000 meters

Last month, Nereus dove nearly twice as deep as previous submersibles to reach Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest known place on earth. It's here near the Island of Guam in the Western Pacific that many of the world's volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur. Andy Bowen says the mission's success paves the way for new scientific discoveries and ocean theories.

"Certainly, the role, for example, of the trench in the carbon cycle; how carbon is recycled within the [earth's] crust. Things such as earthquakes, various other chemical processes are an important part of coloring in a picture about the ocean that is critically important to our understanding of the global environment."

During its 10-hour dive to Challenger Deep, Nereus sent back high-quality video, gathered rocks and samples of deep ocean sediments and returned with microbes and small worms that live in extreme depths. But, Bowen says, Nereus has barely scratched the surface of the ocean floor, and he expects a research team to mount an expedition with Nereus within a year.