SMS Privacy Tips for Election Monitoring And More

Submitted by on 12 July, 2010 - 17:07

I was recently asked to contribute my thoughts on how election monitors using simple mobile phones could improve their safety and security when working in hostile environments. More specifically, the goal was to find techniques by which their use of SMS messaging to report back to a centralized service or team could be done in a more secure, private manner, that would make it more difficult for an adversary working against them to stop, block or track. All of this must be done without software or special hardware, instead just relying on easily teachable techniques.

Here’s the collection of tips and ideas I came up with on short notice. It is by no means complete, but I felt it would be useful to publish these to a wider audience here on my blog. Finally, before you say “well couldn’t criminals and terrorists use these techniques too?”, I will refer you to an excellent Abuse FAQ page from the Tor Project which covers this very topic (“Criminals can already do bad things. Since they’re willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides”).

Now, on to the topic at hand…

The next stage of development in the East African ICT Sector – the evolving Mobile Web

Submitted by Matthew Dawes on 18 January, 2010 - 19:40

Following on from the impact that SMS, Voice and Mobile Money has had on the African continent the next stage of mobile technology evolution appears to be in the process of development – with the upsurge in the use of the internet and applications on mobile handsets.

Kabissa champions Ipeace project at Netsquared conference next week

Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 23 May, 2009 - 01:11

I have been invited to return to Netsquared as champion for Ipeace, a featured project of the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. The innovative project is described as follows:

n2y4 mobile challengeIpeace, is a safety open source mobile telephony platform and Web 2.0 platform to allow journalist, human rights activist, scientist and people to expose war crimes and human rights violation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ipeace open-source mobile telephony platform will uses J2ME code that can run on a wide range of java-enable phones. 

It will include  different options (Video, Camera, SMS, MMS, GPS, GIS) to collect information, alerts and spread those information world wide.

I am excited to meet the people behind the project, Narcisse Mbunzama Lokwa and Dueme Patrick Safi, and to learn more about the Ipeace project. I am particular intrigued to find out how the creators intend to very quickly  implement such a challenging set of features on a limiting platform (mobile phones) and all of this in a way that is anonymous and secure. The need is great for such functionality, and not just in the Democratic Republic of Congo! 

Last time I was there was for N2Y2 together with Kim Lowery, presenting our own Kabissa 2.0: Strengthening the Social Web in Africa project which was featured that year. Reviewing Erik's blog post about it, I am reminded that I still think it's well worth doing even two years later!

It will be interesting also to spend more time with innovative friends at the event, including Mary Joyce of DigiActive and Ken Banks of FrontlineSMS. Indeed, it's great that 3 of the 10 finalist projects are based on FrontlineSMS. If you are coming, please let me know @kabissa!

Hewlett Foundation announces major kiwanja.net funding

Submitted by Ken Banks on 24 November, 2008 - 14:53

Hewlett Foundation logo


The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have today announced a major grant in support of kiwanja's ongoing activities. The grant, worth a total of $400,000 over two years, will see the ongoing support and development of FrontlineSMS, the creation of an MMS (multimedia messaging) version of the platform, FrontlineSMS outreach, the creation of a non-profit online text messaging aggregator, and the scaling of the nGOmobile competition

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation makes grants to address the most serious social and environmental problems facing society, where risk capital, responsibly invested, may make a difference over time. The Foundation places a high value on sustaining and improving institutions that make positive contributions to society

Ushahidi Deploys in DRC - mobile number to send SMS reports to is +243992592111

Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 9 November, 2008 - 01:45
The DRC deployment can be found at http://DRC.ushahidi.com, and the mobile number to send SMS reports to is +243992592111.
From Ken Banks via the mobileactive mailing list: Some of you might be interested to know that Erik Hersman and his team have just deployed an instance of Ushahidi (http://www.ushahidi.com) to help report on the DRC crisis.

You can read more on the Ushahidi blog here:

http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2008/11/07/ushahidi-deploys-to-the-congo-drc/

Ushahidi, which means ''testimony'' in Swahili, is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi's roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The new Ushahidi Engine is being created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them. It is being built so that it can grow with the changing environment of the web, and to work with other websites and online tools.

Press Release: Frontline SMS releases new version of the text messaging platform

Submitted by Sokari Ekine on 24 June, 2008 - 20:49

kiwanja.net launches its next-generation text messaging platform for the
grassroots non-profit (NGO) community.   FrontlineSMS continues to unlock the potential of mobile technology for non-profits working for positive social and environmental change throughout the developing world. 

 

kiwanja.net's work is innovatively and uniquely centred around three complementary areas:

Kubatana uses Frontline SMS to monitor and report on Zimbabwean elections

Submitted by Sokari Ekine on 7 April, 2008 - 18:47
Kubatana.net is the second Zimbabwean human rights group to use Web 2.0 technology to monitor and report on the elections and the third in Africa following the Ushahidi project on the Kenyan elections started in January. Sokwanele [Enough is Enough] created a google map for mapping election breaches using data they collected from their Zimbabwean Election Watch series.

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