July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Protestors against Turkey’s government ran a full-page ad in the New York Times today using money from a crowdfunding campaign.

The Indiegogo campaign went live on June 3 and achieved its initial goal of $53,800 in under 24 hours. Now it has attracted $103,282 million from 2,587 funders around the world, supporting efforts to raise awareness about the current political situation in Turkey. Protests broke out in Istanbul last week after the government attempted to bulldoze a park to build a shopping mall and military barracks. The movement quickly turned into a nationwide demonstration of tens of thousands of people protesting the government’s lack of consultation with its citizens, the police’s excessive use of force, and infringement of free speech and the right to assembly.

“Millions are outraged by the violent reaction of their government to a peaceful protest aimed at saving Istanbul’s Gezi Park,” the campaign read. “Over the course of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s ten-year term, we have witnessed a steady erosion of our civil rights and freedoms. Arrests of numerous journalists, artists, and elected officials and restrictions on freedom of speech, minorities’ and women’s rights all demonstrate that the ruling party is not serious about democracy. Time and again, the Prime Minister has mocked and trivialized his nation’s concerns while Turkey’s own media have remained shamefully silent.”

Campaign owners Murat Aktihanoglu, Oltac Unsal, and Duygy Atacan live in New York and are active in the tech community. They watched the protests and violent government response from afar but were unsatisfied with coverage of the situation. They turned to crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise money for a prominent ad in the New York Times that would draw media and public attention. The ad demanded an end to police brutality, a free media, open democratic dialogue, and an investigation of the government’s recent abuse of power.

Drafting and editing of the ad’s text was also opened to the crowd to reflect the nature of the campaign — fully inclusive, tech-assisted, and democratic. Furthermore, the owners asked people to provide suggestions for the extra money on community news site Reddit. The most popular response is to fund a professional team to create a documentary summarizing the situation.

Crowdfunding is a powerful phenomenon. Charitable causes, creative endeavors, and businesses have all used platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to get projects off the ground. The approach has fundamentally changed the way people seek exposure and financing and opens up opportunities to people who may not have otherwise had them.

You hear a lot of buzz about the “democratizing” effects of crowdfunding. In this case, it really means democracy.

Photo Credit:  Murat Aktihanoglu/Twitter

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Turkish citizens are crowdfunding their protests against the government.

Turkish protestors have raised $86,000 on Indiegogo to place a full-page in the New York Times raising awareness about the current political situation in Turkey. The campaign went live yesterday with the goal of $53,800 and according to Forbes is one of Indiegogo’s fastest politics campaigns ever. The campaign has 2,210 funders from around the world.

Protests broke out in Turkey over the weekend after the government attempted to bulldoze a park to build a shopping mall and military barracks. The movement quickly gained momentum and turned into a nationwide demonstration of tens of thousands of people against the government. Citizens are “protesting lack of consultation, police’s use of excessive force, defending freedom of speech and right to assembly, and the resignation of Erdogan’s government.”

Murat Aktihanoglu, Oltac Unsal, and Duygy Atacan set up the campaign to attract attention and support they “push for true democracy in our country.” The three live in New York and are active with the entrepreneur/startup scene there. They watched the protests and violent response by the government but felt the events were not receiving adequate coverage in the Turkish press and turned to social media and Indiegogo to gain a following. They also opened up the drafting of the ad’s proposal to the crowd and allowed  supports to edit and vote for their favorite.

The current copy reads “Millions of Turkish citizens have been outraged by the violent reaction of their government to a peaceful protest aimed at saving Istanbu’s Gezi Park […] Over the source of Prime Minister Erdogan’s ten-year term, we have witnesses a steady erosion of our rights and redeems […] We demand an end to police brutality. We demand a free and unbiased media. We demand an open dialogue, not the dictate of an autocrat.”

The campaign owners also asked contributors to suggest how the extra money will be used on community news site Reddit. The ad should run on Thursday or Friday of this week in the front section.

Photo Credit: JamesReaFotos/Flickr

Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty to “publicizing internal e-mails” associated with the hack on security intelligence firm Stratfor today. His twin brother says his treatment while incarcerated has been too harsh for a young man who executed an “act of protest from which he did not personally benefit.”

Stratfor, a “global intelligence” firm, was hacked in December 2011, exposing millions of emails between clients and employees. These emails, obtained by Anonymous, were then released to Wikileaks — the same website associated with the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010. The emails included personal communications between the company’s leadership, others included references to borderline nicknames given to groups and individuals such as “Hizzies” for member of Hezbollah, and “Adogg” for Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hammond was arrested soon after the attacks.

A website supporting Hammond explains that he has been help in a Manhattan jail for 15 months without bail or family visits, and has been reportedly placed in solitary confinement. Hammond’s twin Jason has started a petition on online petitions website Change.org to ashing U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska to grant him a sentence of time served already in jail. Hammond currently faces up to 10 years in prison as having violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Hammond’s twin goes on to stress that Hammond was a protester and that his current conditions do not warrant those of a protester.

In March 2012, however, the FBI revealed that over $700,000 in fraudulent credit card transactions were found in the weeks following the Stratfor hack. Whether Hammond was involved with this element of the Stratfor hack is unknown.

Clients of Stratfor include the Department of Defense, Bank of America, and major defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

hat tip The Verge; Hammond brothers image via Jason Hammond petition

People are reaching out to the President this week, asking the White House to recognize distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as a form of protest rather than a punishable offense.

DDoS attacks are used to overwhelm a website and knock it offline. They do this by sending lots of traffic to a website’s server, effectively overloading it. The method is often used by “hactivist groups” such as Anonymous, who focus their hacking efforts not on financial gain, but rather on political protest.

The petition states that:

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any “occupy” protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time.

Not everyone will agree, however. While picket lines and sit-ins discourage people from entering a retailer or business, they doesn’t deny them access wholesale. If a website is knocked offline, then any potential revenue is completely lost, not just scared away.

At the time of writing this post, the petition has 1,438 signatures, and needs 23,562 more in order to reach the necessary 25,000 signature limit to be considered by the White House.

The petition also requests that anyone who has been punished or jailed for DDoS attacks should be “immediately released” and have their records wiped clean of the related offenses.

via Ars Technica; Protester image via Shutterstock

Ustream is undergoing what chief executive Brad Hunstable says is the “largest and most coordinated DDOS attack Ustream has ever seen” today, and the team is pissed. The attack is rumored to be an attempt to censor a Russian citizen journalist reporting on protests in the county.

“We’re a business, we lost a lot money today,” said Hunstable (pictured above) in an interview with VentureBeat. “This was on a scale that I’m not sure many websites would be able to fight off. This was one of the biggest denial of service attacks on the Internet.”

Live video of protests in Russia on Ustream’s homepage

A denial of service attack is when an individual or group of individuals attempt to access a website at hyper speeds, clogging up the network and eventually bringing the tired website down. Hunstable and his Ustream team have dealt with two previous denial of service attacks pertaining to citizen journalists streaming video of protests in Russia since the reelection of President Vladimir Putin. The first two DDOS attacks, which occurred on December 6th 2011 and January 6th 2012, were not at the scale of today’s.

Hunstable is not taking this lying down, however. Within the last hour (since the writing of this post) Ustream finally got back up and the team is squarely featuring the Russian citizen journalist, ReggaMortis1, on its homepage. It’s a veritable “don’t mess with my users” move, which Hunstable (who mentioned he was a West Point graduate) said could turn into a full fledged Russian website tomorrow.

“We’re going to huddle up late tonight and take a step back and figure out what we can do differently,” Hunstable said. “I told my guys, I want us to roll out a Russian Ustream tomorrow.”

The team got a tip-off from a Russian user who revealed two names of suspected attackers. Riots have broken out across Russia. Putin, who was recently reelected to Russia’s leadership was inaugurated this past Monday.

“We may not agree with what [all our users] have to say, but in my opinion everyone has the right to speak,” Hustable told us. “Today you could summarize that there was an attack on Internet freedom.”

Update: Ustream had made good on its threat, and its first go at a Russian channel, with localized and translated content, is now live and can be found at ustream.tv/russia.

Brad Hunstable image via PoliticalActivityLaw.com/Flickr

Anyone who helps the governments of Iran and Syria obtain technology to track dissenters through social media will soon find their U.S. assets frozen, thanks to sanctions announced today by the White House.

President Barack Obama signed a new executive order Sunday that freezes U.S. assets linked to people who have aided satellite, computer, and phone network monitoring in Syria or Iran, reports Reuters.

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook were a key factor in helping many groups overseas organize democratic protests against their governments, and helped facilitate efforts to overthrow repressive authorities, as demonstrated during the Arab Spring. However, it’s believed that the Iranian and Syrian governments are now using tools to mine data from the very same social network to search for dissenters, which “facilitate(s) serious human rights abuses,” said one administrative official.

The executive order identifies several organizations guilty of aiding Iran and Syria, including Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, Syrian cell phone company Syriatel, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s Law Enforcement Forces, and the Iranian ISP Datak Telecom. The Reuters report also indicates that the order identifies a number of individuals as well.

“The United States condemns the continuing campaigns of violence and human rights abuses against the people of Syria and Iran by their governments and provides a tool to hold accountable those who assist in or enable such abuses through the use of information and communications technology,” Obama states in the executive order.

Photo via Clive Chilvers /Shutterstock

In the crowds at major Apple stores across the U.S. for the new iPad were a few people who were decidedly out-of-place: protestors who wanted to remind the shoppers about “unethical” working conditions of the Chinese laborers who make Apple’s products.

Apple has attracted criticism for treatment of workers at the Foxconn plants that manufacture iPads, iPhones, and other popular items. Factory workers receive little pay and work very long hours to make these products. Foxconn and Apple opened their factory doors to ABC News, but the report felt lightweight in its treatment. Foxconn factories also produce products for other big electronics companies such as Nokia, Microsoft, Sony, and Motorola.

At the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York, first time launch protestor Charlene Carruthers from Change.org told VentureBeat that Apple CEO Tim Cook has not done enough to address the alleged hardships of Chinese laborers.

“We want Apple to release a clear strategy on how they plan to treat workers,” Carruthers said. “Apple is based around innovation, so in this case we want them to ‘think differently’ about how they treat workers.”

Carruthers and a few others held up a large sign (see above) and attracted interviews from several media outlets. The online petition she was there to support now has more than 250,000 signatures.

At the Market Street San Francisco Apple store, a dozen people from Change.org stood in front of the iPad line handing out fliers and holding a large banner covered in comments taken from the online petition. Volunteer William Winters said what the protesters want is “an iPhone or iPad that doesn’t have blood in it.”

While the protesting could be viewed as commendable, the throngs of Apple fans clamoring for a new iPad didn’t seem phased as they shuffled by toward the front door of the Apple store.

You can see more photos of today’s iPad launch in the gallery below:

Protestors photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

San Franciscans took to the streets today to express their frustration with banks and a host of other economic institutions.

About 200 protestors blocked all three entrances to the Wells Fargo headquarters downtown, chanting, singing songs and waving signs. While the protestors offered a variety of opinions and messages, they all seemed more or less unified around the feeling that most Americans — “the other 99 percent” — are suffering while a tiny minority of the wealthiest see increased profits, reduced taxes and a general lack of accountability for the overall country’s economic health.

“We’re here because many people have lost their homes because of foreclosures by Wells Fargo,” said Barbara Roose, a Berkeley, Calif. resident who came to the protest with her son and grandson.

“Many, many large corporations pay no taxes while the rest of us suffer,” continued Roose’s son, Mateo Nube, of Oakland, Calif.

It’s not an unusual sentiment in San Francisco, a famously liberal city with a long history of support for labor movements and anti-corporate sentiment. But it does illustrate one striking note of discord in the city to the north of Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest engines of entrepreneurship and the cradle of large corporations (such as Google, Apple and Oracle) and of billionaire founders (such as Larry Page, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison). This part of the world is famously friendly to startups, entrepreneurs and technology companies, as well as the venture capitalists and banks that facilitate them. But the region also has a strong current of anti-corporate and anti-financial sentiment.

One protestor, Charles Smith, parked himself in front of the bank’s ATMs with a big sign calling for a general strike. A retired member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 444, Smith said that a nationwide strike was the public’s only option for getting their demands met.

“This is an economic issue, not a moral issue,” said Smith. “The only option available to the other 99 percent is a general strike.”

One woman, who gave her name only as Rachel, said that she came to the protest because of her concern over the inequalities in the economy.

“The economic system isn’t working for the 99 percent,” she said, pointing to joblessness, poverty and lack of health care. Meanwhile, she said, “There are record profits for banks. The inequity is appalling.”

“It’s a global thing and it’s not going to end until it all evens out.”

The majority of protestors gathered in front of the bank’s main entrance, but a secondary group blocked the side entrance. A singer, Sky Nelson, played guitar for protestors as police stood by in front of the bank’s empty lobby.

In contrast to other recent protests in San Francisco, this demonstration seemed very well organized. A media representative spotted me taking photos and gave me a press kit.

The protest remained peaceful. While demonstrators had blocked traffic and snarled the morning commute, police were on the scene in force by 9am and were keeping people out of the street. A long line of motorcyles stood by, with police standing around in case things turned ugly.

Even the bank’s back loading entrance was blocked by protestors. It was there that the protest’s best music was to be found, with a brass band, the “Liberation Brass Orchestra,” playing funky and somewhat wooly New Orleans-style jazz (see video below).

While Wells Fargo was shut down completely, other banks in the neighborhood were unaffected by the protests. Citibank, California Bank, Bank of the West, the Far East National Bank and even the Bank of Guam (“The People’s Bank”) all remained open.

Photos and video by Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.

The Egyptian government has restored Internet service to the country after an unprecedented nationwide Internet shutdown that lasted almost a week, the Internet security firm Renesys confirms.

The communications shutdown, which began on January 27, was meant to make it more difficult for protesters to organize. But it didn’t stop an estimated 250,000 citizens from gathering in Cairo yesterday to call for the end of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, which has lasted for three decades. Smaller protests also sprung up in other major Egyptian cities like Alexandria.

By restoring Internet access, the Egyptian government may be hoping to stabilize the turmoil the country is currently facing. Yesterday President Mubarak announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election later this year. But anti-Mubarak protesters are fed up and want him out of the country as soon as possible.

The government first blocked social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook on January 25 — services that have become increasingly important to activists over the last few years. During Iran’s protests in 2009, Twitter became one of the most widely used tools for protesters. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone responded to Egypt’s Internet block last week, declaring “The tweets must flow!” Google ended up launching a speak-to-tweet service last week to help Egyptians be heard (you can listen to recordings at the Speak2Tweet Twitter account).

Photo via Al Jazeera English