Active e-skirmishes

Ethan Zuckerman describes how activists are using new networked tools to circumvent the authorities’ restrictions. These include:

• Zimbabwean e-cards commemorating the forced evictions of Murambatsvina
• Tunisian on-line prison maps, adapted from Google Maps to show the location of prisons and the profiles of political prisoners
• Egyptian Twitter used to dispatch message from human rights activist
• A Chinese Great Firewall Image builder as a tool for putting banned words into images, therefore circumventing on-line censoring

Needless to say, Global Voices Online continues to offer a platform for worldwide bloggers who want to bypass mainstream media and report about their countries.

These are just the first skirmishes.