[liberationtech] Drones are not storytellers or why Syrians need better storytelling was Re: Pirate Bay turns to drones
Not only the development costs, but the litigation/jail time costs as well are a huge issue with more innovative applications of drone tech. Further, the idea of implementing drones in Syria first of all is a huge safety risk, and could fundamentally change the perception of an already hostile regime to encourage increasingly worse actions. Secondly, the drones for human rights stuff all forgets a fundamental issue, people care about stories, not grainy footage, unless the crimes are so enormous, and even then they don't encourage action nor do they help inform outsiders what exactly Syrians want or need. For example, there is a fundamental difference between videos like these that Iraqis we worked with in Baghdad were producing years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVib2fMtP1w http://www.aliveinbaghdad.org/2008/07/28/al-sahwa-mistakes-in-adhamiya/ http://www.aliveinbaghdad.org/2007/10/08/us-military-destroys-iraqi-homes-by... ...and shaky content and long range images of what often may or may not be the "heinous crimes" individuals claim. see this video for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kQMSkdo_jc&feature=player_embedded I think its pretty clear why more efforts are not being made to more effectively and repeatedly tell the stories of individual refugees and people who have lost homes and loved ones. The people documenting are most often men, and as a man who has had the same problem myself when documenting police violence, war, etc, we too often resort to documenting horrible events, both because we are shocked and because that involves an adrenaline rush and provides its own sort of benefit to us as individuals, and leaves beside the wayside any review of whether this content is really moving minds or pushing forward a liberation agenda. As a trainer who has worked with individuals all over the world in conflict areas and the developing world, I have found that women are the best trainees, followed closely by older men. Young people are often too caught up in the moment and the injustice of it all to more effectively document or listen to recommendations about composition, pacing, etc. I guess this is a bit off-topic, but after spending a long time in a fairly pointless discussion with a man from Hama about this subject last night, I felt the need to mention it here. I'm still trying to sort out exactly why I think the idea of drones as human rights documentation may make sense, but it certainly cannot replace storytelling or investigative reporting. On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Andrew Lewis <andrew@pdqvpn.com> wrote:
Yes, telecomix is looking at drones, and really the proposal by TPB is outlandish to current drone builders/operators, but most of the limitations seem to be artificially limited technical issues that no one has thought past due to limitations by US/UK/EU regulations. If you disregard these rules, long range drones are well within the realm of possibility. I think an open source drone program is possible, if people are willing to commit the resources and accept the overall development costs.
Andrew Lewis Twitter: ThePunkbob
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 23, 2012, at 4:53 PM, KheOps <kheops@ceops.eu> wrote:
Indeed, we're working on drones to film and livestream stuff in hostile environment such as Syria :) Will keep you posted if something concrete is somehow produced :)
On 03/23/2012 04:57 PM, David Johnson wrote:
It sounded ridiculous, but ideas can come from jokes.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:48 AM, KheOps <kheops@ceops.eu <mailto:kheops@ceops.eu>> wrote:
This is a joke - at least according to tetsu0, one of the TPB folks :)
On 03/23/2012 04:44 PM, David Johnson wrote:
http://thepiratebay.se/blog/210
/TPB LOSS/
/We were down a few hours earlier today. There's no need to worry, we haven't been raided this time. We're only upgrading stuff since we're still growing./
/One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary./
/With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi <http://www.raspberrypi.org/>, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war./
/We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough./
/But when time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy's most resilient system. And all of the parts we'll use to build //that system on will be downloadable./
--
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