Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Suppose you live in an oppressive country, and wish to report on the brutal repression of your government. How would you get images and videos out of the country? In much of the developing world, internet access is difficult to acquire, but mobile phone access is often more available. It would thus be useful to have some means of uploading videos, images and stories from a cell phone.

But how can this be done safely? Reporters sans frontières reports the following about the recent government crackdown in Burma (Myanmar):

"A Rangoon reporter said all of his colleagues were afraid to go about with cameras or video cameras. Radio DVB reported that the government has ordered the security forces to identify the journalists and demonstrators who sent photos and video footage abroad showing the demonstrations and their violent dispersal. The information ministry, the official news agency and the security forces have reportedly been told to work together to identify the 'citizen journalists.'" (full article)

Reporting on political oppression can be very dangerous for the reporter. Consequently, it would be highly desirable to have some means of protecting the anonymity of reporters.

On the internet, there are a variety of tools which can be useful in protecting anonymity:

• Tor is an "onion routing" scheme which bounces your communication among a large number of other peers before it reaches its ultimate destination, protecting the anonymity of the users.
• Off-the-Record Messaging is a cryptographic protocol for instant messaging which not only encrypts communication, but also provides deniability and forward secrecy, which are essential to anonymous communication.
• GnuPG and PGP are industry standard encryption systems which don't intrinsically provide anonymity, but do provide secrecy - so long as your private keys are not compromised, noone will know what you are sending.

All of these, however, are difficult to use on mobiles. Bandwidth and processing power are severely limited, which may make public key cryptography (on which all of these systems depend) less feasible There are no implementations of Tor on mobile phones that I have found, and the outlook of its feasibility is not too great. There are not yet any mobile implementations of OTR, and even the computer-based OTR systems don't currently support file transfers.

I'll continue to post more as I learn more.