A generation of political activists have been transformed by new tools developed on the internet. Here, a leading net commentator profiles seven young radicals from around the world.

This is excerpted from the introduction, by Aleks Krotoski in the Guardian:

“So is the web over-hyped? In the 90s, when it still was in its swaddling clothes, revolution meant building a website brandishing the word “REVOLUTION!” in flashing red Comic Sans capital letters on a bright yellow background. Unfortunately, e-radicalism required a degree of technological capability. And political protests online were derivative, often no more effective than a giant billboard that people might drive by on the way to work or the shops. But everything did change in 2003 with the advent of a new crop of publishing platforms, blogs and social networks, that net pundits described as an entirely new phenomenon.

Stripping the hype away, this version of the web gives a new crop of cyber-revolutionaries access to a printing press, a radio station, a cable TV channel and more. Rather than virtual pamphleteering, they are developing technologies that take seed in grassroots communities. The power, as 20-year-old blogger and political activist Jody McIntyre puts it, is with the people.

In particular, there has been an explosion of technologies to circumvent censorship in countries where panic-stricken regimes have tried to stem dissident information. For example, Walid al-Saqaf developed an encryption technology called alkasir when the Yemeni government closed down his news aggregation site, YemenPortal.net. As the son of a campaigning journalist who died in mysterious circumstances, al-Saqaf felt that it was important that he use both his journalism and IT skills to get around the blockade, “because I felt it would have been a betrayal to my own profession to simply manipulate what people see”.

“Information freedom is essential if you’re really going to live a dignified life,” he argues.

The Chinese government is the most infamous of web censors, but there is evidence that even its Great Firewall is collapsing at its foundations. The country’s most popular blogger is Han Han, a 28-year-old author (and professional rally car driver) who posts treatises openly critical of the government, but because he speaks in the youth vernacular and enjoys such a tremendous following, his personal politics are generally overlooked by the powers that be.

As Han told me: “Although the internet is controlled, when compared with traditional media, it better reflects reality.”

Other political activists I spoke with are using the web’s hyper-connectivity and plug-and-play capabilities to crowdsource action. Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh helped create the website Ushahidi in the aftermath of her country’s disputed presidential election in 2007; it collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map, and the open-source software has since been released freely and used elsewhere for similar projects. Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of mySociety, a company that builds digital tools to provide a direct pipeline between individuals, local communities and local government.

Despite traditional media’s fears that they are fast becoming obsolete, there is great respect among the modern cyber-radicals for the scale of attention that newspapers and TV can bring. “If I was running an election campaign and I had £10,000, I would still spend it all on TV ads, leaflets and posters,” Steinberg says. “The internet is good at all sorts of things, but shoving your message down the throats of people who don’t care — which is what it takes to win a campaign – it’s not particularly great at.” But on the web, he says, “you can make things that say, ‘Go on, just have a go.'”

In some instances, the political impulse is almost an afterthought. Christopher Poole is the American creator of 4chan, an image-centric bulletin board that he set up to discuss Japanese anime – but now its users, or some of them at least, are making use of the anonymity that the site affords them to campaigning ends.

By contrast, Peter Sunde is the co-founder of the Pirate Bay, a site that allows for the peer-to-peer sharing of computer files of any kind, but one that was set up with an explicitly political purpose. Sunde now has a jail sentence hanging over him.

What today’s crop of cyber-radicals demonstrate is that power does reside in the hands of the people, thanks to the foundations laid by Tim Berners-Lee 20 years ago. And a new generation of social activists are exploiting the technological tools available to them for their own agendas.”

Here’s one of the interviews, as sample, from WALID AL-SAQAF of YEMEN PORTAL. The 37-year old Yemeni activist is the creator of Yemen Portal and of software used to circumvent firewalls.

“What is Yemen Portal?

YemenPortal.net is a news aggregator. More than 90% of the content is in Arabic. It gathers information or news articles released on official news websites and through dissident and independent sites, and puts them together to present a comprehensive view of what’s happening in Yemen. This feature has allowed a lot of people to look into dissident content they didn’t know about.

Why was this necessary?

The traditional media in Yemen are very restrictive, and the broadcast media are monopolised by the state: you wake up in the morning in Yemen and turn on the news on TV and you find that all the news is about the president’s meetings and the government’s meetings.

How did the government respond to the fact that an increasing readership was discovering dissident content through Yemen Portal?

They simply blocked access to it, to the whole site from within Yemen. So I had three choices: give way and let the government control what did and didn’t appear on my site; shut it down altogether; or keep the controversial content and find ways to allow people to access the site. I chose the latter, because I felt it would have been a betrayal to my professsion to manipulate what people see. I developed a piece of software called alkasir. If you were browsing the net and wanted to open your Gmail, your Gmail would go through the regular internet service provider. But when you open a blocked website, it activates itself and changes into the encrypted proxy mode. That’s better than anonymising everything because if you do that, you give the impression to the monitors at the ISP that there is a fishy connection”