Netizens were taking notice. Twitter was unusually quiet, but many social media users who watched the No Confidence motion against the government play out, flooded their Facebook status updates with commentary about the goings-on. Some even posted notes, like this one by Christian Hume – its contents are reproduced in this post with the writer's permission:

The good thing about Emailgate is that the majority of people who would decide the next General Election understand e-mail. The Attorney General himself has publicly stated that he has had a particular e-mail address for the last 15 years, which means that he too would have been among the earliest people in this country to sign up for e-mail back in 1997. I am therefore amused at the comical defenses being put up by himself and Anil Roberts in trying to convince people who do not understant e-mail (and some who do) that there is no connection between the e-mails read out in Parliament yesterday and the high government officials that they are purported to have come from.

Soon, the discussion, both on and offline, turned to the authenticity of the e-mails. In this blog post, diaspora blogger Jumbie's Watch wrote:

This revealed email exchange over the Section 34 débâcle is a deal breaker if it turns out to be true. Why I find it amusing though, is that it is so obviously fake.

There are several clues which reveal right off, to those who are semi-literate in email technology, why said emails are fudged.

First of all, and most strongly telling is that Gmail, even since its inception in 2004 (when people were paying for invitations to Gmail) did not allow for 4-character usernames. Not even 5… and I know; I was there… back in 2004, you had to use 6 alpha-numeric characters or more.

Secondly…I have never seen such childish spelling and grammatical mistakes from Anand Ramlogan. Sure, one can argue that most people are far more informal in emails than in a commentary column… but even so some lineament of the writing style will continue to hold true. In other words, wolf cyah play sheep.

Thirdly, how improbable is it for public figures in high positions to use ‘free’ email accounts to contact each other, when they have ‘official’ government provided email?

What has me is a puzzled frame of mind is trying to fathom the reason Keith Rowley would bring this up in Parliament. Is he so naive that he would fall into the clutches of desperation? Malicious? Or is he merely dotish?

Hume addressed that very question in his Facebook note:

I'm hearing people saying that Dr. Rowley should have presented the technical verification of the authenticity of those e-mails in Parliament yesterday. Given that he read the contents of 31 e-mails, that would have been impractical, seeing that he only had 75 minutes in which to make his presentation. At any rate, the technical verfication of those e-mails would have been incomprehensible to the most of the national population, and I daresay, to almost all the members of the House of Representatives, including the Speaker himseslf. Instead, Dr.Rowley went one better. He took pains to explain the necessity for Parliamentary privilege, before using it to lay his case before House and country. In doing so, he is challenging Kamla, Anand, Suruj, and the PP machinery to deny the authenticity of the e-mails, and as most people in that situation would do, the PP spokespersons have already obliged bombastically. I am confident that the technical details that would verify the authenticity of those e-mails will start to emerge in the days to follow, and not necessarily from PNM quarters. Grab your pop corn, sit back and watch. Doh say ah didn't tell allyuh.

The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society contributed to the discussion by tackling the topic of hacking. The post explained the phishing phenomenon, adding:

The method of phishing emails pretending to be from a friend or organisation you know underscores the ease of faking emails. The from field in an email can have any text (e.g ‘lldjlkdladajdlk@sdkaldjal') that looks like an email address and not be from the ‘real’ sender.

In this context, one Facebook user, suggested that if the Prime Minister's e-mail was indeed hacked, she should have noticed irregularities in the use of her account. The TTCS post explained:

To detect hacking attempts, one should set up two factor authentication which improves the security of your email account. One common implementation of two factor authentication uses your cell phone. Whenever a new device or software is used to access your email account, the email provider prompts you to enter a second password that is sent to your cellphone via SMS. If you receive an SMS and you are not trying to access your email from a new device, then you are aware that someone else has your password and is attempting to access your account.

Detection of whether your email account is compromised without two factor authentication requires a regular review of your email account profile and/or settings.

The rest of the post detailed a step-by-step process through which to protect yourself and to determine if your account was compromised:

The complete, strange emails…should be kept for study by you or pertinent authorities to study for clues as to the IP address where the email was sent from.

This requires the preservation of the email headers which are typically not shown by email clients nor included in the email when emails are forwarded. However, all email messages have e-mail headers.

Meanwhile, Robin Montano, a former Senator with affiliations to the United National Congress (one of the political parties in the coalition People's Partnership government), addressed the Opposition Leader's allegations on his blog, calling them the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass:

Dr. Keith Rowley's play in Parliament yesterday could be labelled such a pass because if what he said turns out to be not true he will have effectively sunk himself and his PNM team. That would be it! Finito! Kaput! On the other hand, if all that he has said is true the Government is sunk!

The e mails basically allege a criminal conspiracy between the Prime Minister, the Attorney General and the Prime Minister's special security adviser, Captain Gary Griffith over the section 34 issue. Further the e mails go further to suggest that the parties involved were planning serious harm to a journalist.

The problem here is that the e mails appear on their very face to be faked. For example, a lot of the e mails are supposed to have come from an e mail address: anan@ gmail.com. But it is not possible to create a g mail account with less than six characters. Then there is another e mail address that ends in “.coN “(I have high lighted and capitalised the ‘n’ for emphasis). There should be an ‘m’ where the ‘n’ is. Then there is an alleged exchange of e mails between Captain Griffith and Mr. Ramlogan starting with Mr. Ramlogan allegedly e mailing Captain Griffith at 1:33am on a Monday morning and Captain Griffith replying at 1:40am! So these men don't sleep and are sitting on their computers at that time?! Really?

The post then considered the potential political fallout:

The accusations that he has made are very, very serious. The Prime Minister has quite properly referred them to the Commissioner of Police. If they turn out to be true the Prime Minister and her Attorney General will have to resign. There is no question of that! But if the accusations turn out to be false then Dr. Rowley should be expelled from the Parliament.

In a follow-up post today, Montano declared:

I now believe beyond reasonable doubt that the e mails are fakes. Whether Dr. Rowley knew that the e mails were forgeries is another question.

He also challenged what the opposition knew and when they knew it:

You sent those e mails to the President? And by ‘you’ I mean the PNM. So that means that not only Dr. Rowley knew about those e mails but others in the PNM knew about them too? And therefore President Richards knew about them in December? And the Integrity Commission knew about it also in December?!

Mr. Ken Gordon, the Chairman of the Integrity Commission, is quoted in the press this morning as saying that if the e mails are true then that would be very serious. But I must ask Mr. Gordon directly, what if the e mails are forgeries? Fakes? Wouldn't that also be very serious?

To help determine whether the e-mails could indeed be fake, Global Voices contacted tech journalist and blogger Mark Lyndersay. We asked him, from a technical perspective, whether there were any red flags:

Mark Lyndersay: The first flag was that there only seem to be prints of these e-mails. It's hard to imagine that the Leader of the Opposition chose to stand before Parliament with no more evidence than some paper documents. His next logical step should have been an announcement that the electronic files would have been sent to the appropriate authorities for verification. That hasn't happened, though there is no reason to believe that it won't.

We then asked Lyndersay what he thought the next steps should be in order to determine the authenticity of the correspondence:

ML: First up would be the investigation of the e-mail transmissions to review the routing information that the messages took. Without that information, the argument is really about whether or not the printed information is convincing and that really shouldn't be a discussion at all.

Finally, we asked him about the impact that the technical aspects of this issue could have on its political aspects:

ML: Technology is absolute. It deals in verifiable bits that either are or are not. A message either has a proper transmission header or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's unverifiable and useless as evidence, regardless of who offers it. This may be a confusing matter for politicians, who trade in mood, feelings and allegiances, none of which have any impact on bits. Information on the web may have mood and feeling, but its existence is trackable and verifiable every step of the way (unless people take the trouble to use anonymizers and other identity obscuring tools). E-mails can't just look right or wrong, they are either truly electronic transmissions and can be verified as such with a trackable footprint or they are not. It really is as simple as that. From a verification point of view, an unverifiable e-mail, whether it was invented out of whole cloth on a word processor or copied and pasted into a fresh transmission, simply can't be used as a tool of accusation.

In light of today's failed motion, in part thanks to the fact that the very opposition that raised it walked out of Parliament, political blog The Eternal Pantomime summed everything up this way:

Dr Rowley took a massive gamble accusing the government of conspiring against the office of the DPP and conspiring to harm a citizen of the country with just a pile of transcripts. To have pulled it off successfully what was required were digital files or actual screen shots of the e-mails so that the members of the doubting public would have irrefutable proof, create a significant hue and cry and catapult the powers into action.

Without those digital files it all boiled down to playing the blame game…yet again. It is a game the country has been caught up in for the past 3 years and it has gotten old and tired. Despite the numerous scandals and missteps this government has gotten itself embroiled in, this Motion of No Confidence had the potential to land a PM, an AG and a senior government Minister in jail had it been handled right.

Now, three days later, with Keith pointing fingers and Kamla sticking out her tongue and saying prove it, we have the country right back where it started…wondering who lying.

If Stephen Williams wasn’t such a compromised Commissioner of Police, if we had a serious cyber crimes unit here, if the Integrity Commission actually functioned and if the President had the power he thinks he has…there would be an independent investigation and the first thing to be done would be to confiscate the devices of these individuals and to ask their email hosts for transcripts on the dates Rowley gave…

But this was a rape trial. Rowley accused them of fucking us over…it was up to him to prove there was unwanted penetration…and before he managed to accomplish that in Parliament…he pulled out.

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Social network followers. Navalny is an active user of both LiveJournal [ru] and Tweeter [ru], not so much of Facebook or VKontakte (his Facebook page is essentially an RSS feed of his Livejournal account). On LiveJournal, Russia's most popular blogging platform, he has 73,500 “friends“ [ru] signed up to follow his account. This number can be misleading in two ways. First, it does not include people who do not have LiveJournal accounts but still read his page. Second, it includes a number of followers who do not necessarily agree with his politics or activism, and would not, therefore, actively support him. Other followers could be “bots”, or fake accounts.

Navalny, in the company of his chin. CC 2.0 by Mitya Aleshkovsky. 26 May 2012. Wikimedia Commons.

The same holds true for Twitter, where the proliferation of fake accounts has lead to services like Twitter Audit, which “audits” 5,000 random Twitter followers of an account and determines the likely percentage of these followers that are fake, or bots. In April, 2013 Twtter Audit approximated that out of @navalny's 344,000 total followers, only 134,000 were “real”. While this number is almost twice as high as the number of Navalny's LiveJournal friends, it is subject to similar caveats — these 134,000 aren't necessarily all “supporters.”

Active support: A better way to judge the number of Navalny's die-hard fans is to look at the number of people willing to do something for his anti-corruption causes. For example, according to the Wikipedia page of the RosPil project [ru], over 15,000 people have donated money to the fund tasked with identifying and exposing corrupt government procurement contracts. The number is small, but likely indicative of wider support — for example, only half of one percent of adult Americans donate more than $200 to political campaigns (although the percentage of total giving is presumably higher, $200 is the smallest amount that can be claimed for tax purposes).

Another of Navalny's anti-corruption-related projects is perhaps a more accurate indicator, since it does not involve contributing money. Last month Navalny sounded a call [ru] for people to sign an online petition [ru] he started on Russia's Public Initiative [GV] website. If the petition, which wants to make it illegal for government officials to buy expensive cars using public funds, reaches 100,000 signatures, the Russian parliament will have to review it. A month later, on May 14, Navalny wrote another post, lamenting the fact that the number of signatures had apparently reached an asymptote at 40,000:

Number of signatures (on the right axis) for Navalny's petition as of May 14, 2013. Screenshot.

Navalny blamed this on the difficulties involved in signing the petition (users have to register with the government run GosUslugi (State Services) website in order to vote. If they are registered, they have to know their registration number.) Of course, for the purposes of this exercise, a relatively low-effort barrier to entry is a good indicator of what one might call “active” support. In fact, Navalny himself seemed to be of a similar opinion [ru]:

В связи с этим, мне кажется, помочь собрать оставшиеся 60 тысяч голосов нам могут только 40 тысяч уже проголосовавших человек. [...] Вы зарегистрируете свою жену. Или мужа. Или маму с папой. А лучше жену, маму с папой и бабушку. [...] Короче, каждый из проголосовавших должен привести, как минимум, ещё одного человека и провести личную мини-агиткампанию.

In light of this, I think that only the 40 thousand who already voted can help collect the remaining 60 thousand votes. [...] You will register your wife. Or your husband. Or your mom and dad. And even better, your wife, mom and dad, and grandma. [...] To put it simply, each one of those who voted should bring at a minimum one more person, and hold a personal mini-PR-campaign.

To aid in collecting signatures Navalny's team started a website [ru] which tracks the votes and provides several easy to follow FAQs on what the petition is hoping to achieve, and how to register to vote. A week later, the campaign has added another 8,000 votes, breaking the 50,000 barrier, but appears to be suffering from the same loss of interest as before:

Petition signatures as of May 22, 2013. Screenshot.

It seems safe to say, then, that Alexey Navalny's active supporters number somewhere in the 40 to 50 thousand range. This estimate is particularly convincing when compared to the number of people who voted for him in the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition elections last fall. There, participants were also faced with a somewhat daunting, but ultimately painless, registration process. The final tally for Navalny was 43,723 votes [ru].

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By connecting the millions of Weibo users to Alibaba, an e-commerce platform that handled more transactions than Amazon and eBay combined last year, the deal is widely heralded as a game changer that could jump-start an era of social commerce, or social media-driven e-commerce, in China.

New exclusion in the era of social commerce

Alipay has become the world's biggest third-party online payment platform. By IvanWalsh.com. (CC: BY)

But the deal also marks a subtle trend which will enable the authoritarian state to tighten its grip on the Internet. As the line dividing economics and politics in the Internet space erodes, new possibilities arise for governments to pursue systematic online persecution beyond content control. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen spell out this scenario in their new book “The New Digital Age“:

As connectivity spreads, Internet service and mobile devices offer vital outlets for individuals to transcend their current environment, connecting them with information, jobs, resources, entertainment and other people. Excluding oppressed populations from participating in the virtual world would be a very drastic and damaging policy [...]. As banking, salaries and payment transactions move increasingly onto online platforms, exclusion from the Internet will severely curtail people’s economic prospects. It would be far more difficult to access one’s money, to pay by credit card or get a loan.

As a country facing the Internet “dictator’s dilemma,” the above scheme presents great potential for China to bring the Internet’s convenience to bear upon curtailing of online freedom. By embracing the Internet, the Chinese government has reaped its benefits for economic and social developments, thereby enhancing its legitimacy. According to McKinsey, a global management consulting firm, China is the second largest e-tailing market in the world, after the United States, with sales totaling 120 billion US dollars in 2011. But at the same time, the Internet has become a vibrant public sphere filled with criticisms about government policies and corruption.

The well-known Great Firewall, which blocks “undesirable” foreign websites, and elaborate social media censorship, with forced cooperation from private Internet companies, are the official responses. A recent Economist special report described the Chinese Internet, with its distinct mix of economic freedom and political “unfreedom”, as a flourishing “giant cage” which is constantly watched over.

The Alibaba deal is a foretaste of how the Chinese regulators further manipulate the economic desires and needs of citizens. Bill Bishop, publisher of the Sinocism China Newsletter, highlights its sinister aspect in his New York Times Dealbook column that the deal, “through integrated online payment functionality, has the voluntary real name registrations of many users”.

Sina Weibo, China's biggest microblogging service. By jonrussell CC: BY-SA.

Information totalitarianism

In December 2011, the Beijing Municipal Government issued rules requiring microblogging services to verify the identity of their users. In December 2012, China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, passed a law requiring users to provide their real names when registering with an Internet service provider. While the rules have thus far not been well implemented, China’s leadership sees this as a top priority. In late March 2013, the State Council released its task list for the next five years, which includes implementation of an Internet real name registration system by June 2014.

But the task list includes something more worrisome, namely, the establishment of a unified credit information platform and a unified social credit coding system based on citizens’ ID numbers. Combined with an online real name system, these systems will give the government an unprecedented ability to gather and act on user data. In the future, it will be easier than ever  to electronically isolate outspoken individuals from economic and social opportunities. Beijing-based dissident writer Mo Zhixu calls this a state of “information totalitarianism,” one in which there will be no hiding place left for anyone (via Seeing Red in China):

First of all, once the real-name system is used in website backstage management where one ID card matches one ID number, as Alipay (支付宝) does, those ID numbers culled online will soon become useless for repeated use. Secondly, with regard to activists using ID numbers of relatives and friends, if the conventional deterrence measures don’t work, the government could resort to building control into services by bundling ID card and the correlating social credit code with matters of personal interest. That way, relatives and friends will not want to, nor dare, to lend their ID numbers to anyone else.

Having established “a unified credit information platform with gradual input of information about finance, commercial registration, tax payments, social security contributions, traffic violations and other credit information” and “a unified social credit coding system based on identification number,” personal credit information will necessarily include information about Internet use. Thus, the Internet real-name system will be tied with one’s social credit code, and even with the social welfare system. From there, it’s not unimaginable for the government to use the unified credit code as the exclusive online ID code.

When so much is at stake, the threat of being excluded from the Internet will have a powerful chilling effect. Self-censorship will be heightened to a whole new level for concerns of being excluded from commerce, finance and social security.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma recognizes that Sina Weibo has increased transparency in China, and stresses that Alibaba wants it to be more successful, but not by turning it into a glorified advertising platform. However, with the looming information totalitarianism, freedom will be eroded and manipulated in subtle ways, especially when the economic, political and ideological spaces converge. There is only a fine line between freedom and enslavement. The greatest danger comes when netizens are unaware of how power is being exercised over them, as Global Voices co-founder Rebecca Mackinnon, author of “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom”, noted in an article for The Atlantic:

In the Internet age, the greatest long-term threat to a genuinely citizen-centric society — a world in which technology and government serve citizens instead of the other way around — looks less like Orwell's 1984, and more like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: a world in which our desire for security, entertainment, and material comfort is manipulated to the point that we all voluntarily and eagerly submit to subjugation. If we are to avoid this dystopian fate, political innovation will have to catch up with technological innovation.

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Fogle's arrest was filmed by the FSB and shown on Russian television. In the video [ru], Fogle is seen in an unconvincing blond wig and baseball cap, which are then removed by an FSB agent before Fogle is frogmarched into a waiting car. Fogle's “spy-kit” (which included two wigs, sunglasses, a compass, a cheap Nokia phone, an Atlas of Moscow, a Swiss army knife and several envelopes of 500-euro notes) is then displayed for the cameras. Later in the video, Fogle and what appear to be three of his colleagues from the Embassy are given a dressing-down by a pixilated FSB agent. In a manner strangely reminiscent of a school headmaster scolding wayward students, the agent expresses his shock and disappointment at Fogle's attempts to recruit Russian citizens, in light of the recent close cooperation of Russia with American intelligence agencies in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings.

The story catapulted the murky world of counterintelligence into the spotlight of the Russian blogosphere, where the details of the case were dissected with glee. From the start many were somewhat perplexed at Fogle's spy-kit, which seemed to come straight from an early James Bond novel.

User Best_JS [ru] quipped

Парики,черные очки и особенно–компас в Москве.Не хватает только секстанта и астролябии.ЦРУ оснащает своих агентов в магазине 99 центов?

Wigs, sunglasses and especially — a compass in Moscow. He's only missing a sextant and astrolabe. Is the CIA equipping their agents at the 99 cent store?

Tweeter user Timque [ru] also took a dim view of Fogle's spycraft.

Если наша контрразведка способна ловить только шпионов с чуть ли не надписью «ШПИОН» на лбу. То из меня бы вышел отличный агент ЦРУ!

If our counterintelligence is only capable of catching spies with the word “SPY” practically written on their forheads, then I could make an excellent CIA agent!

Fogle's alleged spy-kit generated interest for it's “low-tech” nature. YouTube Screenshot. May 17, 2013.

Somewhat surprisingly, a much more charitable appraisal [ru] of Fogle's equipment came from popular Russian tech blogger Eldar Murtazin [ru], who pointed out the pitfalls of using advanced gadgets in the world of espionage.

Начнем с самого противоречивого предмета в глазах обывателей — обычного атласа Москвы и дорог с указанием каждого дома. В век высоких технологий, когда у каждого в телефоне есть навигация и хорошие карты, это выглядит анахронизмом. А теперь давайте представим специфику работы агента, когда он не должен оставлять следов, в том числе и цифровых. Я плохо представляю себе агента, который прокладывает путь к тайнику или месту встречу в Google Maps и затем сохраняет маршрут. Этот агент должен быть конченным идиотом. Равно, как мне сложно представить как сообщить о месте встречи в электронном виде, это дополнительный риск [...] Поэтому можно долго ворчать, что разведчикам чужды новые технологии, но это не так. Эффективный способ не оставлять следов, не использовать программы навигации.

Let's start with the most controversial item in the eyes of the average person: the common Moscow road atlas with the adresses of all the buildings in it. In the high-tech era, when everyone has a phone with GPS and good maps, it seems like an anachronism. But now consider the specifics of an agent's work, when he can leave no traces, including digital ones. I can't picture the agent who looks up the way to a secret location or a meeting place on Google Maps and then saves the route. That agent would have to be a complete idiot. Similarly, it's hard for me to imagine sending information about meeting place in electronic form, this is an additional risk [...] So you can whinge all you like about intelligence agents shunning new technologies, but it isn't the case. An effective means of leaving no traces is not to use GPS.

Blogger and social media guru, Anton Nossik [ru], on the other hand, laid the blame at Americans’ inability to work with agents in human intelligence. Referencing an interview [ru] with famous Soviet defector Viktor Suvorov, Nossik claimed:

По мнению Суворова, у ЦРУ просто очень хреново поставлена агентурная работа. Потому что, с одной стороны, львиная доля разведданных собирается с помощью техсредств (спутниковая съёмка, перехват коммуникаций), а не от живых людей. С другой стороны, самые эффективные агенты на службе Америки — иностранцы, шпионящие в своих собственных странах. Которых не нужно учить маскироваться, гримироваться, носить парики, потому что их главная маскировка — реальная биография и занимаемая должность.

According to Suvorov, the CIA is simply bloody awful at working with agents. This is because, on the one hand, the lion's share of intelligence info is gathered by technical means (satelite photos, intercepted communications) and not from living people. And, on the other hand, the most effective agents in the service of America are foreigners working in their own countries, who don't need to learn to disguise themselves, apply make-up, wear wigs, because their main disguise is their real biography and the work they do.

Nossik went on to claim Fogle's alleged letter [ru] (written in awkward if grammatically correct Russian) looked like “Nigerian spam run through Google translate”.

Of course, as usual, some RuNet users saw the invisible hand of the Kremlin at work in the entire episode. As one commentator [ru] sarcastically put it

Ну, да — накладные усы, парики, шифры и прочая хуета. Почти как в кино. Не верю я в это лицедейство! Компас меня убил окончательно. Надо было еще словарь англо-русский добавить. И детскую порнографию.

Oh yeah, fake moustaches, wigs, codebooks and similar bullsh*t. Almost like in the films. I don't believe this charade. The compass was the last straw. They should have added a Russian-English dictionary. And some child porn.

Interestingly, while Fogle's competence (or lack there of) as a spy has been a hot topic of conversation, almost no attention has been paid to the potential fallout from the expulsion of a US diplomat for spying. Similarly few have bothered to speculate on why the Kremlin chose to expel Fogle now, when the Kremlin and the US are in high-level talks about Syria and intelligence-sharing. It is telling that what should normally be a major diplomatic incident now barely registers as more than an amusing anecdote for Russian netizens.

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In March, the governmental Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission threatened to block WhatsApp, Skype and other applications that do not comply with Saudi regulations (which include allowing surveillance) and gave telecommunication companies a deadline to find a solution or block them. The American developer and privacy advocate Moxie Marlinspike published an email exchange that he had with Mobily as they were looking for help.

In one email, the Mobily head of security department used the standard terrorism line to try to convince him:

If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.

Marlinspike decided to publicize the request, and it got massive attention within the Saudi Twittersphere. Once it caught on, he tweeted in Arabic:

شكرًا للكلمات اللطيفة والتسجيعات من السعودية. كنو دائما بصوت عالي عندما يحاولون اسكاتكم. #موبايلي_تتجسس_على_الشعب

@moxie: Thanks for all of the kind words and encouragement from Saudi Arabia. When they try to silence you, be loud.

A line of people outside a Mobily office in Medinah, Saudi Arabia on October 16, 2012. Photo by Kashif Aziz.(CC-BY-Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Some called for a boycott, others criticized what they thought of as the root of the problem, namely, dictatorship and repression. Reactions were under the hash tag #موبايلي_تتجسس_على_الشعب [ar], which translates to “Mobily spies on the people.”

Saudi netizen Faris Abaalkhail called for a legislative change:

الحل هو ليس فقط تغيير مزود الخدمه اذا تبت #موبايلي_تتجسس_على_الشعب بل المطالبه بسن قوانين تحمي خصوصيتنا وتجرم مثل هذه الأفعال #السعودية

@FarisAbaalkhail: The solution is not to only change the service provider if [this] is proven to be true, but to demand laws that protect our privacy and criminalize such actions.

Bandr al-Amri and many others accused the Interior Ministry of being behind this attempt:

#موبايلي_تتجسس_على_الشعب لذلك يجب معاقبتهم .. و معاقبة من أمرهم بذلك يا # وزارة_الداخلية

@ZajeelBird: #Mobily Spies on the People – for that they should be punished and those who ordered them should be punished too, namely the Interior Ministry.

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At the center of the feds' probe [ru] is Duma Deputy and anti-Putin protest movement leader Ilya Ponomarev, who earned a surprising $750,000 [ru] for his outreach (see below) and planning work for Skolkovo between 2010 and 2012.

In the last two months, Ponomarev’s Skolkovo income has attracted growing national media attention, but the issue has been percolating [ru] on the RuNet since last year. On September 23, 2012 (in response to a scandal involving registration fees for elections to the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition), Ponomarev first addressed the large sum of money he earned from Skolkovo, writing [ru] on LiveJournal:

Про доходы. Моя декларация есть в открытом доступе. Я никогда не жаловался на доходы. За последний год я получил как депутат около 2 млн. рублей, и еще около 7 млн. получил как гонорары за поддержку инновационных проектов по линии Фонда Сколково.

About my income. My declaration is accessible to all. [See here for Ponomarev's 2006-2012 records.] I’ve never wanted for earnings. In the last year, I made 2 million rubles as a Duma deputy, and I earned another 7 million rubles ($225,000) in honoraria for supporting the Skolkovo Foundation’s various innovation projects.

Suspicious minds

Many bloggers reacted to these figures with suspicion. Vadim Skvortsov, for instance, highlighted Ponomarev’s apparently unique advisor position under Skolkovo President Viktor Vekselberg, writing [ru]:

Что-то мне подсказывает, что такие денежки идут частенько прямиком на финансирование антипутинских акций “болотной” либерально-анархической оппозиции.

Something tells me that such money goes directly toward financing the anti-Putin demonstrations of the “Bolotnaya” liberal-anarchist opposition.

Earlier that year in March, a Lithuania-based blogger named skolkovo_eu also raised the idea [ru] that Vekselberg was financing the opposition through Skolkovo, linking to an article [ru] in the online tabloid wek.ru titled “Viktor Vekselberg Funds Ponomarev’s ‘Million Man March’?”

An artist's impression of Ilya Ponomarev's radical politics. Remixed by author from Alberto Korda's iconic 1960 photo of Che Guevara.

On April 19, 2013, a day after police raided the offices of Skolkovo’s management, the Investigative Committee opened [ru] a criminal case against the fund’s senior vice president, Alexey Beltiukov, for embezzling money through Skolkovo’s contracts with Ponomarev. Over the next twenty-four hours, the story developed in several directions online, focusing mainly on (1) continued suspicions about Ponomarev’s large honoraria, and (2) a debate about whether or not Skolkovo serves as a funnel for state sponsorship of the opposition. Much of the controversy surrounding the high income is that almost half ($300,000) was compensation for just ten lectures, meaning that Ponomarev earned roughly $10,000 for each talk, some of which lasted less than twenty minutes. Investigators even allege [ru] that he may not have attended one of these presentations in Tomsk in October 2011 (though there is photographic evidence to the contrary, and Ponomarev did “check-in” from the event’s location, using Foursquare).

Ponomarev & friends fight back

On April 20, writing on LiveJournal, Ponomarev responded [ru] to investigators’ accusations, defending the size of his contracts and arguing that the state saved money by hiring him instead of outsourcing the labor to private firms. While his Skolkovo deal formally concerned a lecture series, Ponomarev insists that far more was included in the work:

Мероприятий было гораздо больше, но меня Фонд изначально предупредил, что надо отчитываться небольшим количеством из них, которые проходили в открытом режиме, и каждое из которых смогут подтвердить свидетели в ходе неминуемых проверок.

There were far more events, but the Foundation from the start warned me that we needed to give an account of [only] a small number—the ones open to the public, so witnesses could confirm each of these events during inevitable [future] audits.

On April 19, another Duma deputy on LiveJournal, LDPR’s Igor Lebedev, posted scans [ru] supposedly containing excerpts of Ponomarev’s Skolkovo contracts. (Ponomarev says the scans are fake.) What Lebedev published accounts for about 80% of the $750,000 work, which Ponomarev allegedly described in a March 2011 letter to Beltiukov as “scientific research.” On the subject of qualifications, questions remain about Ponomarev’s academic credentials, given that he had not completed his higher education at the time of the contracted work. (He returned for a degree in 2011, after a 14-year hiatus.)

Because of Skolkovo’s mysterious recordkeeping, the public is free either to take on faith or reject Ponomarev’s claim that his work for the government was honest. Skolkovo’s puzzling approach to contracted labor seems to have stemmed from fears that a more straightforward, transparent approach would make it vulnerable to state inspectors. Ironically, it’s the absence of a clear paper trail that now incriminates the project.

Some bloggers have tried to piece together the various input costs that Ponomarev would have incurred in his travels inside Russia and abroad (he visited a dozen foreign countries in connection with Skolkovo work). On April 20, 2013, California-based software engineer Yuri Panchul (a self-confessed admirer [ru] of Ponomarev) estimated the likely costs of the Skolkovo-related business trips throughout the United States, concluding [ru] that any Silicon Valley executive would not have taken the contract for less than $1 million. Regarding probable travel and hospitality expenses (which Ponomarev claims to have paid using his honoraria), Panchul argues that costs were as high as $700,000, meaning that Ponomarev’s real salary was only about $50,000.

Clan warfare then & now

Others on the RuNet have been less inclined to believe that Ponomarev’s income was all lost to unreported expenses. On April 22, 2013, Kremlin-sympathetic blogger Nikolai Starikov tried to connect Ponomarev’s Skolkovo work to foreign political interference [ru], implying a plot [ru] between Westerners and certain government insiders:

Нас еще ждут отставки и весьма интересные повороты сюжета. Ведь наша «оппозиция», а вернее говоря, их западные друзья и кураторы были уверены, что им удастся не допустить прихода Путина на пост президента. А, значит, все эти «шалости» останутся покрытыми тайной и туманом. И тот факт, что государственные структуры оплатят протесты против государства, так никто и не узнает.

Но вот эту правду про истинное назначение денег Илья Пономарев никогда не скажет. И предпочтет выглядеть банальным жуликом и вором.

We can look forward to resignations and some quite interesting plot twists. Indeed, our “opposition”—or better said, our opposition’s Western friends and sponsors—were sure they’d succeed in stopping Putin’s return to the presidency. That means that all these “antics” will remain covered in secrets and mist. And nobody realizes the fact that state structures are paying for protests against the state.

But Ilya Ponomarev will never reveal this truth about the money’s real purpose. He’d rather look like a common thief.

In July 2010, when Russian politics was still caught in a feverish debate about whether Medvedev or Putin would run for president in 2012, LiveJournal user _iga taunted Ponomarev on his blog, arguing [ru] that the Skolkovo project amounted to a retirement plan for Medvedev, sealing his fate as a one-term president. Ponomarev disagreed, writing [ru]:

думаю, строго наоборот – этот проект является заявкой Медведева на второй срок

I think it’s exactly the opposite. This project [Skolkovo] is Medvedev’s bid for a second term.

Almost three years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Investigative Committee’s raids on Skolkovo, Ponomarev’s thoughts about the innovation center’s place in Russian politics have changed. Whereas Skolkovo was Medvedev’s executive calling card in July 2010, Ponomarev now sees politics as an intrusion on the project:

Я не склонен оценивать происходящее как борьбу Путина с Медведевым. Но думаю, мы являемся свидетелями борьбы консервативного клана (условного кооператива Озеро) с условными либералами в правительстве. Мне не нравятся они оба. Но второй клан хотя бы что-то делает, чтобы разорвать зависимость России от нефти и газа. Первый клан устраивает статус кво, и он сознательно рушит все начинания, которые могут его поколебать.

I’m not inclined to see events as a battle between Putin and Medvedev, but I do think that we’re witnessing a battle between the conservative clan (your Ozero co-op) and your various liberals in the government. I don’t like either of them, but the second clan is at least doing something to break Russia’s dependence on oil and gas. The former clan is satisfied with the status quo, and it consciously destroys all endeavors that might shake it.

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Cairo Urban Initiatives Platform. Image from Cairobserver facebook page.

Supported by Ford Foundation and the British Council, Cluster has recently launched the Cairo Urban Initiatives Platform (CUIP), the first resource of its kind in Egypt.
(more…)

Written by محمد عادل · Translated by Mohamed Adel · View original post [ar] · comments (0)
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So while tied to modernity, moving image technologies was also seen as a potentially morally erosive force

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Facebook is free for all, but it doesn’t mean that we are liberated to slander others with impunity – or to make vile threats…without consequences.

POLITICAL BAHAMAS BLOG discusses “potentially criminal Facebook behavior.”

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