Did the Facebook-organized Protests Fall Flat?

The much-vaunted 10,000-people protest against the Myanmar government's crackdown on Buddhist monks didn't happen this week-end in London.

Its organizers, the Burma Campaign UK, Amnesty International and the co-ordinating volunteers on Facebook failed to produce a crowd as sizable as projected.

Instead, the newswires reported that the London police estimated that just under a third of that crowd – around 3,000 people showed up.

While the protests did take place around the globe, the relatively low turnout in London and elsewhere must have been disappointing to its organizers. * As The Economist points out in its recent leader, the key to change is co-ordination among the world's leaders.

"If the world acts in concert, the violence should be the last spasm of a vicious regime in its death throes," wrote the venerable magazine's editors.

There is no other time in history when the world can act as much in concert as it can now. With tools such as Facebook, blogs, YouTube and everything else that's available in our communications revolution, there's never been a time when people around the world can better co-ordinate. (Just ask Texas congressman and Republican US presidential contender Ron Paul's supporters.) Never have ordinary citizens had more power than they do now to co-ordinate, vent and funnel their anger and frustration into real political action. But it may all be meaningless if the more experienced political advocacy groups don't get their act together and usefully harness and direct all that citizen-energy.

For now, it's a bleak outlook for Myanmar, a country rich with natural resources of multiple kinds, but which is ruled by a psychologically and physically brutal regime.

The latest news is that the junta is hunting for the leaders of the opposition movement. And they're doing it by raiding United Nations' offices to get to office workers' hard drives.

From the The Times of London:

UN
staff were thrown into panic over the weekend after Burmese police and diplomats entered its offices in Rangoon and demanded hard drives from its computers.

The discs contain information that could help the dictatorship to identify key members of the opposition movement, many of whom have gone underground. UN staff spent much of the weekend deleting information.

The stream of dramatic images of tens of thousands of monks parading through Rangoon inspired condemnation of the Government across the world. On Saturday, demonstrations denouncing the regime were held as far apart as Sydney, Singapore, London and Washington.

Many of the images were disseminated through e-mail by Burmese bloggers who used software to outwit attempts to block them. Even after the Government shut down the internet altogether ten days ago, photographs and films were smuggled out on tiny storage drives and memory cards by travelers to Thailand.

Some of the demonstrators have reportedly been arrested after being identified in footage of the rallies. The junta is going after the UN, in the belief that its officials allowed images to be transmitted through their own internet links – channeled via satellite phones and therefore less vulnerable to interference by the authorities.

“It’s part of this systematic, repressive response to the demonstrations,” said a Western diplomat in Rangoon. “We’ve seen them focus on people who directly participated in the demonstrations by picking them up through the videos Then they’ve arrested people with cameras containing images of the demos. And now they’re trying to track down the means that were used to send them out.”

If you're wondering what any of this has to do with privacy – step back and and think: Myanmar is the ultimate surveillance state – every red-blooded American's worst nightmare come true. Anyone who's spent any time in Myanmar has experienced it, and they've seen the resulting attendant fear that pervades every local's life there.

Twelve years ago, I met a man at a dinner party in Rangoon who helped opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi communicate with the outside world via fax. He was extremely kind and jovial, and we spent a long time talking. I still have his business card in my rolodex.

Subsequent to our meeting, he was jailed, and died in prison after experiencing a heart attack while incarcerated. James
Leander Nichols' card serves as a reminder to me that our communications revolution is a powerful force against tyranny, and the tyrants are constantly scared.

The question is, as the Burma Campaign UK's acting director Mark Farmaner said in an interview last week – will the outraged citizens of the world continue to use these tools to push the boundaries, and to organize both online and offline to push for change?

This Saturday's results don't seem to suggest so.

But a glance at what's happening online suggests otherwise. Already, Facebook's rapidly-growing global volunteer corp of activists is planning the next round of action. This time, it's a protest against Chevron, scheduled to take place tomorrow via phone and fax.

The group has also spawned other notable new efforts. Database programmer and Web developer Chantal Guevara, one of the Facebook group organizers in London, has established an informative new Web site to better organize and channel all the information and ideas for action that constantly stream into the group. And she's assigned another "volunteer" in Ottawa, Canada to archive the information emerging on the discussion section of the group so that nothing gets lost.

"I could see something like this emerging from Facebook or Myspace and ending up in mass mobilization against the 2008 Olympics in China," Bookbinder told me in an interview.

Unlikely? Only time will tell. As Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler has amply documented in his excellent book "The Wealth of Networks," activist bloggers in the United States' 2004 presidential election succeeded in persuading Sinclair Broadcasting to abandon its plans to air a biased documentary attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over his war service in Vietnam.

Benkler recounts how the bloggers organized themselves online, brainstormed publicly, and used quickly-created databases and other resources created on-the-fly to influence advertisers to pull their dollars from Sinclair Broadcasting affiliates.

The point is to keep track of ongoing developments in a systematic fashion, and to enable people who are interested in taking action to stay constantly updated, Guevara says.

Guevara is just one of the several global citizens who have jumped in to lend their talents to 19-year-old Alex Bookbinder's Facebook-organized campaign. It's worth remembering that historically, revolutions were first ignited by a few determined individuals.

Image: Worak

*Farmaner has contacted me to say that 10,000 people did show up, and that the organizers weren't disappointed – just the opposite.