The proliferation of mobile technology has had a fundamental impact on the way we receive news and even on how the news is reported. Whereas dictatorial regimes used to be able to control the outflow of information and manipulate events to their own ends, the use of mobile video recording has opened the eyes of many as to what’s really going on behind the scenes.
In late 2010, a series of protests and demonstrations collectively referred to as the Arab Spring began to sweep across the Arab world. What started out as protests in Tunisia soon spread to countries like Egypt and more recently Libya where we were witnessed the capture of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were undoubtedly aided by technology and the free flow of information that dictatorships typically like to throttle. Is it any surprise that Egypt for a brief period a few months ago completely shut off access to the Internet?
In any event, things in Syria lately have been getting worse and worse. Put simply, the brutal government there led by Bashar al-Assad has been killing demonstrators and innocent civillians en masse, with the total body count well into the thousands.
But in typical dictator like fashion, Assad wants to spin the ongoing unrest in Syria in a certain way and decided that he doesn’t want people to see video footage of government forces cracking down on anti-Assad protests. So to help achieve this plan, Syria recently banned the use of iPhones in an effort to cover up government sanctioned violence, abuse, and human rights violations.
As a point of interest, it’s well known that Steve Job’s biological father was a Syrian named Abdel-Fattah Jandali who famously gave him up for adoption.
via Haaretz
Fri, Dec 9, 2011
News