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YouTube Video Sends Guatemala Into Crisis
Several have sent word that a YouTube video of recently assassinated lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg has sent Guatemala into a tailspin. The video of Rosenberg claims that if you are watching, he has been murdered by President Alvaro Colom with help from presidential secretary Gustavo Alejos. "The video spread across the Internet after family members handed it out during Rosenberg's funeral on Monday. In the 18-minute tape, a seemingly calm Rosenberg, sitting behind a desk and microphone, alleges that Colom, the First Lady and two associates were involved in murder, corruption and money laundering. The group, he says, filtered public funds through a state-owned bank for personal gain and to finance drug traffickers. Rosenberg then claims that after Khalil Musa, a prominent businessman and bank board member, had learned of the Coloms' scheme, Musa and his daughter were shot to death in front of a shopping center in April. Rosenberg says the President signed off on the killings."
Where are all the people clambering for censorship when the internet is used for something good?
... well, there is one more thing ... they may have mailed a copy to the United States or a press outlet here. ... paid for by the people, of course!
... see ... about that. Um, they kind of put it on the internet. ... ... we ... need to ... torture everyone?
Pre-Internet:
President Alvaro Colom: They passed out a tape at his funeral? Quick get me a list of everyone at the funeral, I want them all in custody and tortured until we have every single one of those tapes!
Gustavo Alejos: Yes, sir
President Alvaro Colom: Ahahahh, Gustavo, so naive. I suppose I'll have to make a phone call to the director of our postal system. He'll be quite cooperative with a little bonus this year
Post-Internet:
President Alvaro Colom: They passed out a tape at his funeral? Quick get me a list of everyone at the funeral, I want them all in custody and tortured until we have every single one of those tapes!
Gustavo Alejos: Yeah
President Alvaro Colom: The internet?
Gustavo Alejos: Yeah
President Alvaro Colom: Very well, torture them until they take it down!
Gustavo Alejos: Uh, it's on YouTube. Everyone's seen it.
President Alvaro Colom: So
*Gustavo Alejos shakes his head back and forth*
Gustavo Alejos: No, I think the order you are looking for right now is 'Prepare my escape helicopter and fake passport for Colombia.' The noise outside right now with the thousands of people yelling for your death is bad.
President Alvaro Colom: What did I do wrong, I was only trying to live up to Oscar Humberto Mejia's legacy!
How can you argue against something that makes it more difficult for asshat dictators to remain in power?
My work here is dung.
its not a rickroll?
"Wouldn't the word have gotten out just the same if it had been televised instead?"
Not as quickly or widely. A TV station broadcasts a video once or, in some cases a few times. A video can hit the internet within minutes of being shot.
On the internet it can be saved, forwarded, and dispersed beyond the ability of any central or commercial authority to stop it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The fact that it was out and available all over the world as soon as someone posted it is important. It means the content can't be stopped by torture, mail inspection, border patrols, or a well-planned plane crash. The medium made the message possible to an extent that we could never have imagined a decade ago. THAT is the reason this story is here on /.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
Good luck to the average citizen trying to get an anti-government tape to be broadcast on what is probably a government run station...
Anyone can (And did) upload to youtube, which is the tech side of this story. A few years ago, this wouldn't have been able to happen.
The medium may not be the message; but without the medium, the message is going nowhere.
I'm guessing that el presidente might have just a teensy bit of "editorial discretion"(even if its only the killing people kind) over major news outlets in the country.
Youtube is nothing special in terms of broadcasting, except that everyone and his brother can use it, with relatively little control(if this poor lawyer had used a copyrighted soundtrack, this probably never would have come to light).
What's the over-under on Youtube taking this video down? I _think_ they'll keep it up, despite any demands to the contrary.
Now, if it was China...
> A video can hit the internet within minutes of being shot.
If that pun was intentional, you get the prize for making it look unintentional....
It is...
A 45,000 people march is building up. They demand the president to stand down.
NO SIG
Has anyone considered the possibility that he was killed by someone other than the Guatemalan president? Like, say, a family member with an axe to grind?
Youtube should have a feature: Upload and store a video, and it requires a weekly password confirmation in order to NOT go public.
That would be a fun channel to watch.
"Dad! There is a video on YouTube of you saying Mom killed you!"
"Damn, I knew I forgot something this week."
Quite arguably yes, though its not posted as a "computer" story, but as a "Politics" story. That it is, in fact, accurately labeled as a "Politics" story I think is pretty clear, whether or not one agrees that it is a "computer" story.
J. Random Citizen can't post a video to "television" and get it global exposure, particularly if they live in a country where the government has its thumb on the press. While there are certainly also governments that try very hard to control what goes on on the internet, it takes a lot less hardware to put something on the internet than to broadcast it on TV, making it much hardware for governments to control. So, yeah, if it had been televised around the world rather than being carried around the world on YouTube, word would have gotten out just the same -- its just a lot less likely that it would have successfully been televised around the world before the government threatened by it managed to sweep the message (and the people trying to distribute it) under the rug, permanently.
By which I do not mean remove it from YouTube.
I mean, download it, copy it, ensure that it continues to survive even if YouTube is persuaded somehow to remove it. Help personally ensure that this is impossible to suppress by taking individual action right now to back it up.
Child pornography is inherently offensive, which only limits its public display. It is not inherently dangerous, nor is it inherently harmful. It is evidence of a felony. Nothing more, nothing less. Would you say that a picture of an axe murderer's bloody implements warrants the same censoring? What about a picture of rape? A picture of a businessman hiring a hooker? Or that same businessman's expense account summaries, displaying his money laundering? Where the fucking hell is the line?
~ C.
censoring child pornography is nothing remotely like censoring political speech
and if country A censors child pornography, while country B censors political speech, they are not anywhere near comparable
How many times do we have to go through the reality that Internet censorship filters are improperly and often irresponsibly implemented, even to the point of showing a political slant. From their use in US schools, to the nation-wide Aussie plan that was recently discussed so much, we have seen again and again that tools like blacklists make the issues of A and B closer than we'd like.
Mmmhmm. Thank you god for handing down that edict! Oh wait, you aren't a god? Oh, my bad.
Please do me a favor and define child porn for me. I mean really define it. At what age is consent possible? Really at that age? That age is (insert arbitrary rhetoric here) too old/young by any standard. You should definitely raise/lower it.
Any student of Latin American history automatically thinks of the CIA whenever a leftist leader is being taken down. Especially since the last leftist leader of Guatemala was ousted by a CIA coup in 1954 in Operation PBFORTUNE, which is now declassified.
According to Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project of National Security Archives and a regular contributor to Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, most historians now agree that the military coup in 1954 was the definitive blow to Guatemala's young democracy. Over the next four decades, the succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare, destabilizing Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans, and some human rights activists put the death toll as high as 250,000.[15] At the later stages of this conflict the CIA tried with some success to lessen the human rights violations and in 1993 stopped a coup and helped restore the democratic government.
Prepare for some hilarious hypocrisy in the US media. When an enemy of US interests is on the chopping block, outlandish conspiracies are taken at face value. When US allies are accused of such crimes, there are calls for calm and due process. An investigation, a trial, and a fair sentencing are vitally important, at least when it's convenient for us. He may or may not be guilty of these crimes, but the only way to find out is to have a trial. I'll bet I can count on one hand how many news pundits ask for a trial.
It's the magic of propaganda. Saddam never shredded anyone (though he did use American biological weapons to kill Kurds). Iraqi troops never placed babies on the hospital floor during their invasion of Kuwait. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But to someone who just watches the news, these are all accepted as fact.
Yeah we don't want every nutcase doing that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Except that it's impossible to censor only the one without having the means to censor the other.
as yes there actually ARE some things, like child porn, that SHOULD be censored, according to ANY ideology
Right! Life is never more complicated than an ultimatum!
yet you see people all the time, especially on slashdot, actually saying "country A censors child porn so how can it criticize another country for censoring political opinion?
Really? ALL the time? ESPECIALLY on slashdot? Lets see two examples. Not half-assed examples that might kinda sorta mean what you say if you looked at them from the most biased perspective, nor examples of people trolling, I want full-ass examples. Gotta be pretty easy to come up with since they happen ALL the time, ESPECIALLY here. Right?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The results of that should be interesting, given that the president has already stated that anyone who even suggests he's guilty is themselves guilty of sedition.
The UN typically pushes for due process. America typically avoids it, at least in international situations.
Plus, murder is a relative term. Every president since WWII has ordered military strikes that have killed innocent people, including Obama. Is that murder? Or do you prefer the term "collateral damage"? It's a stupefying moral perspective when killing one innocent man is murder, but killing tens of thousands is not.
obvious answer: the desire to view child pornography creates a marketplace for the creation of child porn
child porn just doesn't happen by accident, and people just happen to see it by accident. which is how you describe the situation, which is of course 100% bullshit
someone seeks out the images on purpose, and someone else fulfills this need because there is demand for it
this really should be pretty obvious
the viewing of child pornography is a desire that contributes to the creation of it, and is therefore a desire which is criminally culpable for the act of creating child pornography
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because what you are saying is pretty much the same argument used against violent video games and the absolute best anyone has been able to do with that is to show a minor increase in aggressive behaviour by very young children, that subsists pretty quickly, immediately following game playing.
You misunderstand. Child porn doesn't make people want to go out and rape children, the way certain people claim video games make gamers violent.
Rather, the already existing demand for child pornography leads to people raping children so that they can cash in on that demand. By outlawing it, the demand is greatly reduced. This makes it less profitable to rape children, so much so that so that it is (ideally) not worth the risk to the would-be pornographer.
It is nothing at all like the bullshit about video games making people into killers.
just scrolling down to the first 5 comments above a 3 threshold in the 3 randomly chosen recent threads below on the topic, in 2 or 3 of the comments out of the 5, one finds the retarded idea that censoring *anything* is as bad as the worst censoring places on the globe. which is 100% wrong, and commonly found thinking all over slashdot. no, censorship of something like child porn is not anything remotely like censoring political speech, yet it is a common line of thought here on slashdot. its fucking retarded and outright 100% logically, philosophically, and morally wrong. and commonly found in comments here
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/12/0012255
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1846207
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/01/1436237
anything else i can help you with?
censoring something like child porn is NOT comparable to censoring political speech
get it in your thick heads slashdot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because you might shoot an innocent person and not just a criminal?
so you are against stem cell research?
because you might clone a person instead of cure paralysis?
you are against nuclear tech?
because you might build a bomb instead of power a city with soemthign cleaner than coal?
are you against penises?
because you might rape a woman instead of love her?
all retarded lines of thought. which what you just wrote matches perfectly: "because we might do something bad with [x], regardless of our intent, we can't do [x] at all"
you're a luddite. you fear technology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, you're right -- it is nothing like video games. It's more like illegal drugs. The market exists and will always exist, and outlawing it doesn't reduce demand so much as it does drive up the price and makes it more profitable to produce for those who aren't detered, if in fact they're doing it for the money.
and not in any way a refutation of anything i said. so now you are just changing the subject
grey areas exist about what is child porn and what is not. duh
so now you are saying that just because grey areas exist in this world, that means there is no such thing as obviously vile and disgusting dark areas? that everyone agrees is wrong and should be punished?
say: an 8 year old in guatemala lured into a car with candy, and locked in a basement room and repeatedly abused. does this happen in this world or not? should it be punished in your mind or not? why did it happen? because a bunch of pedophiles desired this content be created for their consumption on their monitors? is this connection between demand and supply real or not?
wake up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In related news, Guatemalan police arrested a twitter user, after he put a message telling people to withdraw their funds from Banrural -the bank involved in the corruption scandal- as a way to protest against these acts. The authorities charged him of "intent to incite financial panic", a crime recently created in order to protect financial institutions from unfounded rumors.
well, stop
see, you'll never stop creating trash. you're never going to win the war on trash. its always going to accumulate, no matter what you do. so you should let the trash sit in your room and fester, and live in it
going after hardcore addictive drugs (not marijuana, that should be legal), or going after child porn, or going after terrorists, are not wars that ever will be won, ever. its simply a maintenance function, like taking ou the trash every week
there will always exist child porn, highly addictive drugs, and terrorists. but you fight these things anyway, simply to MINIMIZE their existence and the damage they do, and simply because you have a human conscience and a sense of simple human justice that innocent human lives are being destroyed by these things (or, rather, you SHOULD have that human conscience)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you honestly wish to assert that the creation and consumption of child pornography is a myth
No, the myth is that:
1) There is an industry behind it with millions of dollars. - Not the case, it happens for most part non-commercially.
2) That its a real problem. - There is virtually no child porn on public webpages as they would get shut down really quick.
3) That it would actually protect children. - Child abuse happens at home, not on the Internet and not on demand. Also lots of stuff qualified as child porn was produced without harming children (FKK pictures, nude pictures from back when it was legal, pictures they took from themselves, etc.).
that censoring child porn is worse than sanctioning someone just for speaking their political opinion!
With political censorship I at least would know what and why they censor and there would be a public outcry against it, with that whole child porn witch-hunt is a hell of a lot less predictable and it also untouchable, as nobody likes to argue against something that is supposed to "protecting the children".
Or to put it in practical terms: Wikileaks.de got raided by the police because it provides copies of a censorship lists and has a good chance to get put on one of those censorship lists itself in the next few month in Germany. None of that happened directly due to oppression of political opinion, all of that happens under the cover of childporn, while its really just the former.
The trouble with childporn is that its a perfect tool to shut people up. Don't like somebody? Mail him childporn and let the police raid his home. Public branding of "child porn consumer" will in turn to a good job that even those that might agree with him, distance themselves from that person. You can't pull stunts like that with political speech without getting caught. And no, thats not fiction, a case quite a bit like that has happened to a German politician just a few weeks ago.
That is a profoundly brilliant idea. You could run a service that hooks into youtube to provide this capability.
How do you kill that which has no life?
... No. You cannot advocate child pornography on those grounds.
If marijuana, for instance, were legalized, it _could_ (not saying it would) be produced without exploitation, given proper regulation.
The same argument cannot be made in regards to child porn.
(p.s.: you, sir, are despicable.)
This makes it less profitable to rape children...
'cause pedophiles are so in it for the money!
It's not like they're sick or anything....
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Lots of talk about people sharing picture on the net, nothing people prosecuted for producing child porn for money. I want proof that there is a child porn industry. I don't doubt that there are child abusers and I don't doubt that pictures of that are on the net and people are sharing them, but that is a very different thing that an industry producing child porn on demand.
The data in that link is even self contradicting, little example:
"The United States Department of Justice estimates that pornographers have recorded the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone."
"At any one time there are estimated to be more than one million pornographic images of children on the Internet"
So what is it? Do the child porn producers just make a single photo per child? Sounds kind of unlikely. Seems more the case of inflating data by lack of technological understanding. Internet makes copying easier, it also makes copying child porn easier. That however gives no indication on how many children are actually abused for child porn for money, as most of that stuff either was once legal or produce without any monetary interest.
I am still waiting to have some actual hard numbers on people prosecuted and children freed from the child porn industry.
We Americans really don't understand how the rest of the world works. We're dumb enough to think this will make a dent.
This is Guatemala we're talking about. Every friggin faction in Guatemala makes sport of screwing the other guys. Go review the case of one Rigoberta Menchu before you get too wild about believing anyone's testimony about anything in Guatemala.
Guatemalans have been jerked around so many times by both the left and the right that their default presumption is that everyone is at least embellishing, if not completely lying.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.