Thanks to both of you for sending your comments, But I tend to agree with Maxim on this, and I find point (2) mentioned by Maxim to be quite compelling:
2. Retaliation to discourage further protests, as smartphones are expensive, > and Ukraine is a relatively poor country. After giving a though, I find that point (4) about wrecking phones is to hide evidence of police brutality may not be much of an effective strategy because of two main reasons: 1) One can probably find ways of retrieving digital data from most of those devices. If the aim is to hide evidence, they would do something that police in some authoritarian countries -like my own, Yemen- usually do, i.e., seizing cameras and mobile phones. If protesters are lucky, they'd get the phones/cameras back from the police station without their memory cards. It might be possible in some instances to recover footage from internal memory. 2) Such a strategy won't be of much use nowadays considering that many mobile devices are connected directly to the cloud so whatever is being documented is already out of reach for the police. The second hypothesis reminded me of what the Egyptian police did when they vandalizes cars of protesters and the Syrian army robs and destroys homes and property of anti-government neighborhoods. I can't comment much about points (3) and (4) though. But they raise interesting aspects. Sincerely, Walid ----------------- Walid Al-Saqaf Founder & Administrator alkasir for mapping and circumventing cyber censorship https://alkasir.com <[email protected]> PGP: https://alkasir.com/doc/admin_alkasir_pub_key.txt On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Maxim Kammerer <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Walid AL-SAQAF <[email protected]> wrote: > > Just notice how riot policemen intentionally wreck and destroy mobile > > devices one by one. Kind of confirms the LibTech notion, doesn't it ? > > Fact is, you don't know why they do it. I can see at least several options: > > 1. Destroying communication options of opposing forces during the protests. > 2. Retaliation to discourage further protests, as smartphones are > expensive, and Ukraine is a relatively poor country. > 3. The protests are viewed as propaganda warfare by the authorities, > and contrasted with Orange Revolution, which is considered a case of > Western interests scoring a win using propaganda techniques. > Smartphone cameras are a tool used in propaganda warfare. > 4. Preventing documentation of police brutality. > > Last option is possible, but doesn't make much sense to me in a > country like Ukraine, since a much more effective tactic is to > document mob brutality (e.g., see a policeman hit with a stone at 3:10 > in the video), and following it up with a few show trials. > > -- > Maxim Kammerer > Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte > -- > Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations > of list guidelines will get you moderated: > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. > Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at > [email protected]. >
-- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
