In a country notorious for human rights abuses, police storm the home of a suspected political activist, entering without a warrant to search for evidence he works for the opposition movement. Finding nothing, they throw the man in a police car and drive him to the station for interrogation.
What the police don't know is that, moments before they arrived, the man had called Amnesty International in London on his cell phone. Amnesty immediately emails its 70 Urgent Action Alert offices around the world, which in turn put out the call to human rights activists, medical groups, lawyers, and democratic government officials. Even before police bring their suspect to the station, the police chief is bombarded with faxes, Telex messages, and phone calls from around the world.
A fanciful scenario with technology saving the day? It could happen, says Scott Harrison, director of Amnesty International's Urgent Action Alert USA. "Governments need to be warned that the world can see what they are doing," Harrison says. "In the future, we will be able to prevent rather than protest human rights abuses."
Human rights non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, are already old hands at using technology - particularly the Internet - as a cheap and timely way to chronicle illegal detainments, torture, disappearances, and executions, and are continuing to wire offices in developing countries. Next month Harrison will travel to Nigeria - a country with a particularly gruesome human rights history - to help the local Amnesty office get hooked up to the Net. Meanwhile, small NGOs are going online, thanks to nonprofits like the Association for Progressive Communications, which provides cheap Net access to more than 40,000 NGOs in 133 countries.
"The dramatically lower costs of international communication have altered NGOs' goals and changed international outcomes," Jessica T. Mathews, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, said in a recent report in Foreign Affairs. Indeed, the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, has been kept alive in large part because of support culled on the Internet.
Although some human rights groups - from the multinational Amnesty to local groups in Argentina - started communicating online in the early 1980s, the proliferation of the Web has energized the human rights movement in the past few years. The ability to transmit photos, scan documents chronicling governments' abuses, and provide information in several languages at once make the Web a powerful tool in influencing international - particularly Western - public opinion.
"The blue ribbon campaign challenging censorship was really the turning point," says Jagdish Parikh, a longtime human rights advocate and now online activist for Human Rights Watch, referring to last year's online campaign protesting the Communications Decency Act. "All human rights groups believe in civil liberties, and all participated in the global protest. Everyone had blue ribbons on their Web pages."
But it is perhaps encryption technologies that best enabled human rights activists to get on the Net.
"The use of PGP [Pretty Good Privacy encryption software] has been particularly helpful," for those involved in the dicey business of opposing authoritative governments, says Audrie Krause, founder of NetAction, a group promoting the Internet as a tool for community outreach and advocacy.
"We've learned that through the use of PGP signatures, we can verify the identities of the people we are communicating with," says Robert Kimzey of Human Rights Watch, which just got online in the past six months.
The new force on the global scene - international public opinion - is being largely formed by the nimble, networked NGOs, says Matthews of the Council of Foreign Relations. And yet, how much the Internet actually helps free political prisoners and stop other affronts to civil liberties has yet to be analyzed.
"It's hard to say how effective our online efforts are," admits Michael Katz-Lacabe, co-founder of Derechos, a human rights group in California focusing on abuses in Latin and Central America. "But it doesn't hurt."
