Russian blogger arrested after post-election protests

Russian blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has been arrested after participating in post-election protests in Moscow against the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 

He was sentenced to 15 days in jail. 

The BBC has a good profile of Navalny which explains how his Livejournal blog gained traction for exposing corruption:

"The popularity of his blog allowed him to start mobilising internet users to take an active part in his anti-corruption campaigns by means of what he called his "unstoppable mass complaints machine". 

"The "machine" worked by getting internet users to send hundreds of online complaints to investigative and oversight bodies demanding that they look into the case that Mr Navalny was pursuing at the time. 

In March this year, the Russian business daily Kommersant was forced to retract an article which attempted to discredit Navalny's exposure of large scale fraud at Transneft, the state-owned pipeline company in 2010.

Russian bloggers complained earlier this week that Livejournal was down for several consecutive days around the day of the election, alleging that a cyberattack had been designed to stop them discussing Sunday's vote. 

The head of Livejournal, Ilya Dronov, believed the perpetrators had "a mountain of money" in order to sustain the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.  

More on Drone Journalism

The other day I posted a link about the use of drones to cover a protest in Poland. And now there is a student Journalism Lab for this kind of reporting: 

"The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications is starting a lab to educate students on what it sees as one of the new frontiers for newsgathering and reporting: drone journalism.

"The lab will look at the ethical, legal, and privacy concerns surrounding the collection of video and photographs from small, unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as provide hands-on experience: students will be building their own drone platforms to collect data in the field."

(Not that me posting a link and the formation of said Lab were in any way connected...)

I'd be up for someone throwing a 'drone journalism'-shaped curve ball at the Leveson Inquiry which is currently looking at the practice, culture and ethics of the press.

I think the inquiry is running a bit short on really difficult privacy questions... 

Election Monitoring Crowd-Sourced in Egypt

From the New York Times' Lede blog:

"Although some prominent Internet activists decided to boycott Monday’s elections in Egypt to protest continued military rule, many well-known bloggers spent the day working as self-appointed election monitors. Using the same social media tools that helped them to force Hosni Mubarak from office, the bloggers posted images of long lines at polling places and passed on reports of apparent violations of the electoral code."

Front line photography

Syria
A French photojournalist goes undercover to access the hidden plight of Homs as political unrest continues in Syria.

Iraq
Marike van der Velden captures daily life in Iraq. "In Holland," she tells the New York Times, "we don’t know anything about the Iraqi people".

Kenya
An aerial photo taken by Oxfam provides a glimpse of the scale of Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Global Voices has more on the camp which is home to 450,000 people. Many of those taking refuge have fled civil war and drought in Somalia.

How the failure of self-regulation has undermined press plurality

For various reasons, I've ended up watching more of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press than I intended.

On Wednesday, solicitor Mark Lewis was giving evidence. Lewis has represented a number of individuals whose phones have been hacked but I was particularly interested in his thoughts on the regulation of the press. 

I've added headings to summarise his argument...you can find all this in full on pages 44-6 of the transcript from Wednesday's evidence.

1. A black and white choice?

"...what is portrayed is a stark choice, a black and white choice between state regulation and self-regulation, and in fact everybody knows that we must avoid state regulation in terms of this Trotskyite, Stalinist, Nazi minister of propaganda..."

2. Everyone knows state regulation should be avoided

"One understands that that has to be avoided, but that's how state regulation is portrayed by the newspapers, that's what it inexorably leads to, we have state regulation as state control."

3. Journalists should self-regulate anyway

"...self-regulation should be what journalists do and newspapers do themselves, not the PCC or any third party, because there ought to be a code that journalists think: you know what? This is what we can do, this is what we can't do."

4. But there is no secondary form of regulation which means there is effectively no regulation

"So it's a secondary form of regulation. The Press Complaints Commission, in the words of Lord Hunt, who is now the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, is not a regulator, so in fact the preservation of the status quo by the press is the preservation of no regulation at all."

5. The consequence of not having secondary regulation is that press plurality has been undermined because sections of the press have proved incapable of self regulation to the point where the News of the World was forced to close.

"the consequence of no regulation is that on Sunday, people will not be able to read the News of the World because it was the absence of regulation that allowed this Inquiry to happen, it allowed the News of the World to go, it allowed the readers of the News of the World -- I mean, whether one agreed with everything they put in and wanted to take issue, it was an absolute consequence because parts of the newspaper industry, not all the newspaper industry, were completely unregulated and out of control."

Armed With Smartphones, Russians Expose Political Abuses

From the New York Times...

"Violations of Russia’s elections rules have typically gone unnoticed, but now Russians armed with smartphones and digital cameras are posting videos of the abuses online." 

The article also notes that Russian bloggers are influencing Google's search results (though just how often is "occasionally"?):

"A slogan adopted by bloggers describing United Russia as “the party of swindlers and thieves” has become such a prominent Internet meme that it occasionally appears as a top hit when Googling the party’s name."

Drone Journalism Arrives

The Lede Blog: Drone Journalism Arrives: "A Polish firm called RoboKopter scored something of a coup last week when it demonstrated that its miniature flying drone was capable of recording spectacular aerial views of a chaotic protest in Warsaw." Anybody in the UK doing this sort of thing or planning to?