Gobal Voices Online ha anunciado la publicación del Handbook For Bloggers and Cyberdissidents (versión pdf) editado por Reporters Without Borders. El comentario de GV incluye una detallada descripción de los participantes (una combinación de periodistas, geeks y activistas políticos, algunos de ellos participando de modo anónimo) y de los temas tratados en el libro. El handbook es un pequeño manual (87 páginas) útil tanto para bloggers primerizos como para veteranos y tanto para conocer aspectos técnicos del manejo de un blog como aspectos de estrategia política. Para muchos, felizmente, puede que no sea necesario, pero para otros puede ser una herramienta tremendamente útil. Así lo explica Rebecca Mackinnon
Lately there has been a proliferation of blogging guides published in English, but almost all of them are aimed at Americans and Western Europeans. Or they’re meant for companies and organizations who want to use blogging for smarter P.R., “knowledge management,” or internal communication purposes, or for people who want to turn their blogs into little commercial media enterprises. Then there are the articles about how you can improve your social and romantic life through blogging… or how to use your blog to make yourself notorious, get on TV and become famous…
The Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents is not for any of those purposes. It is the first truly useful book I’ve seen aimed at the kinds of bloggers featured here at Global Voices every day: People who have views and information that they want to share with the world beyond their own national borders. They are often people whose perspectives are not well represented in their own country’s media, and certainly not well reported by the international media. Sometimes they are political dissidents, but usually not. Mainly, they are just ordinary citizens with a passion to communicate with the world - and no easier way to do so than by writing, podcasting, and posting pictures on their own blogs.
The Handbook for Bloggers is for people who want to be serious participants in the emergent online global conversation: How to set up a quality, credible blog. How to get it noticed. And.. if you’re in a country where there government might not like what you’re saying, how to avoid getting in trouble when you by-pass the information gatekeepers and talk directly to the world.
As Julien [Pain] writes in his introduction to the booklet, blogging can be revolutionary in countries where freedom of speech is not respected:
Blogging is a powerful tool of freedom of expression that has enthused millions of ordinary people. Passive consumers of information have become energetic participants in a new kind of journalism - what US blog pioneer Dan Gillmor calls “grassroots journalism… by the people, for the people” (see chapter on “What ethics should bloggers have?”).
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest. Plenty of bloggers have been hounded or thrown in prison. One of the contributors tue
ACTUALIZACIÓN: Ethan Zuckerman hace un elogio del handbook y define claramente su utilidad siempre que el contexto lo requiera. Critica a los ciber-paranoides, que habitan en las democracias occidentales y piensan que e gobierno y su legión de espías se dedican a controlarlos. Este libro no está dirigido a ellos, si no a los activistas que viven en dictaduras en que la libertad de expresión no existe y él que la practica corre serios y reales riesgos. [el comentario de Alfonso Hidalgo a este post muestra por que otras razones este libro no es necesario en sistemas democráticos desarrollados].
Zuckerman también analiza la posible crítica que se puede hacer a este libro por colocar en el dominio público una serie de herramientas y estrategias que pueden ser útiles para los grupos terroristas. Su respuesta es clara y razonable:
The simple answer is “Yes, terrorists can and will find ways use online anonymity techniques to claim responsibility for attacks and disseminate information.” I don’t believe, however, that the appropriate reaction to this is to hide information on anonymous blogging from the world. Security through obscurity is a pretty feeble form of security. The techniques I and others are writing about in the RSF guide are well documented and widely known within the Internet security community. Smart terrorists can find these techniques by searching the web, academic papers and textbooks. Obscuring these techniques in the hopes that the dumber terrorists don’t find them means that they’re difficult to find for the people who need them: independent journalists, human rights activists and dissidents in nations that restrict speech.
