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Venezuela's Internet Crackdown Escalates into Regional Blackout
- gmjosack 13y agoInterestingly my girlfriend has been using What's App to communicate with her family in Venezuela cheaply throughout the last week since they've been unable to get any news. It's really sad to see the government act this way and hopefully the realize that they're causing a lot of unrest in their citizens. It's always inspiring to see citizens standing up to the government in all these other countries. you see some protests in the States but it never feels near the scale.
- higherpurpose 13y agoLet's hope Whatsapp doesn't have a deal with the Venezuelan government for access to its data, too, then? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/messaging-apps-government-reach_n_3399316.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/messaging-apps-gove... If I were them I wouldn't take the risk, and use something more secure. Here's a list of open source secure messaging apps she or others could use: http://missingm.co/2014/02/fighting-dishfire-the-state-of-mobile-cross-platform-encrypted-messaging/ http://missingm.co/2014/02/fighting-dishfire-the-state-of-mo...
- nzonbi 13y agoFrom my experience, I can tell that they have irrestricted access to whatsapp and facebook.
- kaonashi 13y agoWhen you're under full assault from the US intelligence agencies, sometimes you overreact.
- tsotha 13y agoI doubt the US is involved. What would be the point? It's been obvious for years eventually the government would run out of other peoples' money and fail to deliver basic services. Once you start in with price controls the end is near.
- kaonashi 13y agoThey've been involved for years… they're going to sit this one out?
- tsotha 13y agoWhat evidence do you have the US intelligence agencies are involved in Venezuela?
- kaonashi 13y agoAre or were? Were, there's plenty. Are -- well we're talking about a covert agency, no?
- tsotha 13y agoWhat is the latest incident you can document involving US intelligence agencies and Venezuela?
- kaonashi 13y agoDocument? Going by Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pliers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pliers. Venezuela.info has quite a bit of info going back a decade or so. The point of the comment is not to definitively state anything, merely conjecture. If you'd like to debunk said conjecture, feel free; but asking for documentation seems beside the point.
- kjs3 13y agoInvoke the boogie-man of "US spies" and open fire on your own people. FTFY.
- higherpurpose 13y agoYou'd think that after 10 or so such major protests in the past few years, the dictators would learn not to repeat the same mistakes everyone else did before them. Someone should write a "10 commandments" of sort for how dictators should react in case of major protest. Maybe do what American presidents do: promise major changes and tell them everything they want to hear, and then do cosmetic changes at best over a long period of time, until people forget about it. That strategy seems to work pretty well in US, and it seems to pacify almost everyone. It should certainly be much better than doing drastic stuff like shooting at protesters and cutting off their communications "to make them stop". That always makes the situation worse and forces the protest to escalate and even become violent.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoAnd additionally, when you hear from your dictator something you've heard like ten times from other dictators in the last ten years - you become like really enraged. Don't you. "What it claims as being foreign interference online", I'm speaking to you.
- pessimizer 13y agoMaduro isn't a dictator, he's the democratically elected head of a weak government. The government had been run as a cult of personality, that personality died, and the professional class smelled blood. These protesters are ultimately demanding that the police shoot more people, not fewer. They feel their country is spinning out of control, and needs a strongman to save it. Paging Dr. Pinochet?
- skrebbel 13y agoI know nothing of the issue, so please educate me, but isn't Maduro the one who currently controls all media and just shut down his people's acces to the internet? Sounds pretty dictator-y to me.
- davidw 13y agoAs far as I understand it, he is democratically elected, but the government doesn't have much in the way of checks and balances. The stuff about the protesters wanting a military strongman sounds like biased propaganda.
- yread 13y agoI saw this post yesterday http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=180977 http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=180977 It shows how leaders of opposition are using images from protests from Egypt, Bulgaria and other places as if they were from Venezuela
- guard-of-terra 13y agoAnd what you are implying is "so let's just close internets"?
- wslh 13y agoWhat are you trying to say? You can check more than one... i) Maduro's government is right and the opposition wrong? ii) The opposition is [even partially] right but they are using the wrong methods? iii) Maduro's government is not using propaganda as a way to gain the favor of the people? iv) Other. Please elaborate.
- zimbatm 13y agoOP provides an interesting fact. There is no need to extrapolate more meaning than what's given: that there is media manipulation going on. To answer to your points more data points would be needed.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThe fact is either irrelevant to discussion (in which case it is off-topic) or it isn't (in this case we have to extrapolate more meaning to link those two).
- pessimizer 13y agoOr the listener can decide how relevant it is, because this thread is about Venezuela, the protests, and the internet, and the fact is about Venezuela, the protests, and the internet. Every fact shared isn't required to be an explicit part of a marketing campaign, is it? edit: it's depressing that this whine is floating above video of police actually kicking unarmed people in the head and (possibly) shooting at cameramen.
- acd 13y agoLets help them be able to read free information with modem dial uplinks, satellite uplinks and mesh wireless networks. http://www.meshnetworking.org/further-reading/current-projects http://www.meshnetworking.org/further-reading/current-projec... http://tidepools.co/ http://tidepools.co/ http://servalproject.org/ http://servalproject.org/ Mesh Firmware for Ubiquity network http://commotionwireless.net/download/routers http://commotionwireless.net/download/routers OpenBTS is a Unix application that uses a software radio to present a GSM Um interface to handsets and uses a SIP softswitch or PBX to connect calls http://openbts.org/ http://openbts.org/
- wslh 13y agoElias Levy (Aleph One) is originally from Venezuela. I don't know if he is involved in politics there.
- Thiz 13y agoIf your government shuts down the internet Keep calm And shutdown your government
- unhe 13y agoSadly, this is just the beginning for the rest of us LATAM countries. Mexico just sealed a deal this year to sell all of its oil to Canada and U.S. Venezuela is an oil country, and unlike mexico, Venezuela has more ethics in preserving all natural resources to itself instead of selling them. Another thing you should consider... who else has the power to shut down the internet in an entire nation? Lets assume, when U.S invaded Irak, the internet was also shut down and magically the U.S had won. Egypt,Venezuela and the U.K are following coincidentally the same protocol
- gadders 13y agoBut Venezuela is a democracy and Hugo Chavez was a democrat and man of peace!
- pmelendez 13y agoI can't tell if you are being ironic or not, but just to remind the people who can take your post seriously, that Chavez and his group commanded two unsuccessful coup d'etat attempts, that is hardly something that a "man of peace" would do.
- gadders 13y agoI am being ironic. He was lionised in the left-wing press in the UK when he died, and was a friend of our ex-London Mayor Ken Livingstone. In reality, he is no better than Castro.
- at-fates-hands 13y agoYou can also toss in Michael Moore and Hollywood: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130308/hollywood-liberals-hail-chavez-defiant-tradition http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130308/hollywood... "Sean Penn sat grim-faced at Hugo Chavez's funeral Friday -- one of a clutch of Hollywood stars who lionized the late Venezuelan leader, in defiance of America's fierce antipathy to his regime. Following a long tradition of Hollywood liberals, Penn was joined by Oliver Stone, Danny Glover and documentary maker Michael Moore in lauding the charismatic Venezuelan president after his death this week."
- gadders 13y agoThis is the Sean Penn that tied his then wife (Madonna) to a chair and beat her. What a prince.
- huherto 13y agoIt is definitely sarcasm. (Or irony, probably I don't even know the difference)
- etanazir 13y agoSyria, Sudan, google bus stop, Ukraine, Venezuela, ... who's next?
- alisson 13y agoBrazil is a bet
- diego_moita 13y agoYou dream. There are elections this year and current president Dilma is a strong favorite. The protests in Brazil are fizzling. The poor never took part on them and the middle class left them because radicals (black-blocs) turned it too violent.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoProtests on that scale only happen when the economy goes downhill like it did in Venezuela, because the igniter of those kind of protests is, usually, the middle class. Last year's protests didn't escalated into impeachment because despite blatant corruption and bad government spending, the current government represents the left and that means any movement against it doesn't have the support from the intellectual elite or the media. In fact, the protests started largely as a left movement, asking for more government (lower/free bus fares means more taxation elsewhere), and gathered more support after the clashes with the military police (which is still seen as a product of the authoritarian conservative right of the 60's). Unless the economy in Brazil tanks and the insatisfaction increases massively, protests against the government will be limited to anarcho-extremists. Until then this incompetent bolivarian left will keep brainwashing the population, invoking the shadow of the authoritarian right to stay in power.
- tsotha 13y agoArgentina.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoDon't forget Thailand. What we are seeing in all those countries is representation crisis.
- rafaelm 13y agoI think the internet is back up in most parts of the country, I have some friends in Tachira and it seems that things are back to normal, for now. The govt keeps running small tests like last week when they blocked twitter images for a couple of hours and last night in Tachira. Meanwhile, there is a complete media blackout. Local TV channels are being censored and are not informing what is going on in the country. Our only means of information is the internet, mostly twitter. This causes a lot of misinformation unfortunately. Last night , while there were protests everywhere in Caracas and the rest of the country the president went on TV live to talk (all the channels have to stop regular programming and have to transmit whatever he is saying), the National Guard with armed government supporters went out and cracked down hard on all the protestors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmzfwqczZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmzfwqczZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxbdzBYjAug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxbdzBYjAug I have friends in other areas in Caracas that had to sleep on the floor because of constant shooting from the streets up to the apartments.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoBased on the last ten years of coverage of Venezuela in the US media, I no longer believe the hype.
- andrewcooke 13y agoif anyone is still reading this thread, i found this link had a pretty good description of what i happening (i don't live in venezuela, but i do live in chile and the link below sounds reasonably consistent with the kind of thing i have heard about the unrest here - it sounds believable to me). http://feministing.com/2014/02/20/toward-a-nuanced-feminist-discussion-on-venezuela/ http://feministing.com/2014/02/20/toward-a-nuanced-feminist-... ps despite the title it doesn't have much to do with feminism - it's a pretty general article.
- lacion 13y agoi am baffled by the faith most people here have about electronic elections. this being hacker news and all there is too many people claiming "democratically elected"