Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Expect similar social unrest, and the same tactic from the government (blaming the protesters as violent, calling then "right-wing fascists") in the rest of latin america as their economies start tanking as deep as Venezuela. Argentina is on the brink of it. Brazil is 4-6 years from it if it keeps being brainwashed and electing incompetent, corrupt left-wingers.
There's this automatic solidarity among these latin American countries where they will cover each other's back as long as they help each other out. The govt keeps giving away our oil, so everyone stays quiet. The more desperate ones like Kirchner in Argentina immediately make loud statements.
I agree with you on Argentina but Brazil is probably a different story - not as corrupt and not as crazy. Peru and Ecuador are much closer to Venezuela's and Argentina's situation.
The amazing thing is how long these situations can go on. The combination of the survival skills of millions of people and their desire to avoid civil war along the lines of Syria mean this can continue for a very long time.
I've lived in Brazil my whole life. I think the situation is moving towards it. It's just as corrupt and politically unstable. It's just humming along because the economy hasn't tanked (yet). Economy is everything.
Right now twitter is working normally, but the govt keeps running these small tests, taking websites offline, in preparation for a complete blackout since the only way to find out right now what is going on is through the internet.
Dead people in this one:
If they can't talk freely to one-another over emails or popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter... maybe they shouldn't use them.
You either tone down the stuff critical to the government or you will shut down sooner or later because of the lack of printing material.
Right now the biggest newspapers in the country have reduced their issues to around 12 pages every day. They've had to print only the essential stuff (these twitter news will probably be printed tomorrow since this took place last night at around 1am).
Some newspapers are still critical of the government, but I'm surprised to see many of them switch sides possibly because they've either been bought or blackmailed. You can feel self-censorship in some of them. Just like they silenced TV, they're trying to end freedom of speech in the press.
I need to find a similar solution for mobile phones since most people here access twitter using the phones. Any suggestions?
https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/
It is Tor on Android devices.
This is one of those times when I wish there was a simple, secure messaging app for everyone. I don't know if apps like whisper or threema are 100% safe so I'm wary about recommending them.
https://securityinabox.org/en/pidgin_main
For Android, I had probably trust anything by Moxie. Plus, you don't need to trust him - it's open source. Not that you have to verify it, but it's a good chance it's more secure than closed-source products.
Assumptions:
* the government has (or can easily) link you/your associates to a SIM/Router/DSL/Phoneline
* link your ip to said sim/router
* the government probably already have you listed as an "enemy" (assuming you've ever said or done anything useful in terms of protest, aren't completely spineless or apathetic)
Historically (in Latin/South America), at least one group will have support from the US -- so assume all VPN traffic is logged for trying to match up things like twitter posts to in-country IPs.
The only reasonable action is to use TOR for onion routing, and encryption tunnelled through that. This will still show that you communicate covertly (covertly, being "not-open"). It will still show bursts of activity, and clustering of devices (Note that if you both have access to location meta-data, and have half a brain and a couple of informers/officers noting down where people are gathering, you can feed that back into lists of SIM/IMEIs to target...).
The best approach would probably be to generate a rate-limited stream of traffic over TOR, and allow that stream to be replaced by communication as needed. I don't know of any tool to do this for phones -- but layering TOR and jabber+OTR might be about as good as you're going to get for now?
I suppose something similar can be done for android but I havent looked into it.
The system can be more socialistic or more free-marketist, that's the only choice. And the more socialistic have failed more.
Of course it is a system. Just as feudalism is a system. It's a way in which to organize distribution of abstracted wealth. You might claim that it's a consequence of industrialization (and still be wrong, but at least make sense).
Would you characterize the organization of the native North Americans as a capitalist society, before the arrival of Europeans?
Feudalism is a system, but it was built into capitalism. Feudal lords had land as their property, they made voluntary contracts of their vassals: I'll protect you and give you some land, you'll give some of your production to me. There was also trade, merchants et cetera.
This applies to everything. The Native North Americans had private property and various kinds of contracts -- which probably involved some communal property and other stuff.
When there's some entity exercising coercion (non-voluntary contracts), that entity is the State and there is socialism.
Agreed. In particular, ownership of the means of production, land and natural resources (and now extended to ownership of ideas, information and data [eg: gene sequences that have been "discovered"]).
> and voluntary contracts.
I don't think we agree on what "voluntary" means.
> It's impossible to untie life from that.
"Life"? Are you trying to say that property isn't a social construct? How is the concept of property relevant outside of a society?
> The Native North Americans had private property
"What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?" -Massasoit
"We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?" -Sealth