A shocking story is emerging from the Northern Vanuatu island of Maewo. Last week, two brothers, fugitives from Kaiovo village, appeared at Lolowei Hospital on neighbouring Ambae island. One was treated for injuries. Witnesses said he claimed he had been stoned following a village meeting. The other walked onward to Tumsisiro, an Anglican mission, and requested sanctuary.

Before long, a caller from Maewo ascertained the brothers’ presence in Ambae, and a motor boat was dispatched. Reports estimate that up to a dozen men armed with axes and bush knives arrived at Lolowei. They proceeded to the outpatient clinic and promptly murdered the first brother. Stunned onlookers watched as they struck him dead, then dragged his corpse down to the shore, mocking and abusing it as they went. The second brother met the same fate soon afterward.

Within hours of the events, the story began to spread that accusations of sorcery and murder were the cause of this tragic episode. As with most such events, speculation is rampant and details are difficult to corroborate. One distraught Ambaean related a tale that seems to align well with others:

She told of a meeting held in Kaiovo to deal once and for all with the death of two local school employees, widely suspected to have been poisoned. At its climax, a local church elder announced that God had given him the names of the perpetrators. He had no sooner identified the two brothers and an elderly male accomplice than the local chief instructed the villagers to kill them.

Before the brothers could react, she said, one of the villagers picked up a large volcanic cooking stone and launched it at one of them. He missed, and the two began to scramble to their feet. Another stone quickly followed, striking one of the brothers and injuring him. They nonetheless managed to escape, leaving the older man to be beaten severely by the villagers.

Reports indicate that they obtained a canoe and paddled across several kilometers of open ocean to Lolowei’s tiny cove. It was there that their pursuers caught them up and murdered them.

Poison, witchcraft, religious visions and mob justice. One could easily dismiss these events as the actions of a backward, primitive people, benighted in superstition.

We should be careful not to mock too loudly, lest we mock ourselves.

The same week this story emerged, Internet pundits noted the rise of a pernicious and dangerous trend in online ‘crowd sourcing’ behaviour. People in China have taken to organising themselves to avenge various social transgressions. Using social networking tools, they identify and publicly shame people who, they claim, have committed various acts of cruelty and callousness.

In one case, a Chinese woman posted a video of herself as she tortured and killed a kitten with her stiletto heels. Indignant viewers tracked down personal details including her name, address and employer and began a harassment campaign that culminated in her flight into hiding.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, one is tempted to say. Surely someone so thoughtlessly cruel brought her fate upon herself. Some have observed that it’s hardly surprising to see such behaviour arising in China, with its inept local police and corrupt administration.

But such vigilantism is everywhere. In a case whose circumstances closely mirror that of the young Chinese woman, a teenage American boy uploaded a video of a dog being molested and was subjected to nearly identical treatment. The loosely-organised confederacy of online activists known as Anonymous has a track record of posting incriminating information about their targets.

They too claim the moral high ground, arguing, for example, that their disruption of the Church of Scientology, both online and In Real Life (their term), is a reaction to Scientology’s suppression of information about their organisation. Their tactics, claims Anonymous, include kidnapping, torture and even murder their own members.

People often complain that the Law is impersonal, an uncaring instrument whose application too often punishes the innocent and allows the guilty to walk free. In practice, it is capricious and too often selectively applied. All of this is true, from time to time.

But the alternative is summary judgment and mob justice. Far too often, they’re driven by hysteria and a deep-seated desire to find a scapegoat in order to externalise the worst aspects of human nature that exists within all of us. A recent Daily Post story on the Lolowei murders reports that villagers had long made use of the two accused poisoners to settle their own petty differences.

The very people who had commissioned these despicable acts were the brothers’ accusers and ultimately their executioners.

So where was the rule of Law? As with so many government services, policing is little more than a charade in rural areas. Newspaper reports indicate that, far from detaining the perpetrators and securing the bodies as evidence, police escorted the bodies to the attackers’ boat and allowed them to be taken away. The bodies were apparently fastened with stones and dumped into the ocean.

(It must be acknowledged that police dispatched criminal investigation staff to Ambae the very same day the reports first surfaced. As this column is being written, anonymous sources are reporting that 7 men will be summoned to face charges of unlawful assembly and murder. Whether these people are already in custody is not clear.)

Had these events happened even a few years ago, the brothers might have made good their escape. But with the advent of mobile telecommunications throughout Vanuatu, it only took a few phone calls to locate them, to coordinate transport and, yes, to propagate the sordid story across the nation.

Truly, technology can change lives, but it doesn’t change human nature.

A recent report from the Pacific Institute of Public Policy measuring the social effects of mobile telephony has solid evidence indicating that one of the primary benefits of mobile services is to reinforce social bonds and to sustain them over distance.

Such benefits are undeniably good, but development – especially social development – cannot consist only of technological advances. Improved access to information is a good thing, but it’s only as useful as our ability to process, filter and understand the information itself. No amount of technology will mitigate the worst excesses of jealousy, superstition and mob instinct.

One surprising datum emerging from the PiPP telecoms report is that people don’t recognise the role played by the Government in these recent changes. Satisfaction rose over last year’s report with regard to access to family and friends, business opportunities, travel, even education. But satisfaction levels with the government services actually dropped slightly this year, safeguarding their place at the very bottom of the index.

Social development is a complex, often amorphous and always difficult undertaking. But the government of Vanuatu has to state clearly, publicly and unambiguously what its role will be in this regard. If it doesn’t, people will continue to take matters in their own hands, sometimes with tragic results.

Marshall McLuhan’s rise to prominence as a cultural icon parallels that of television. Today, just like television, he is as widely lionised as he is misunderstood. Like credulous children, we toss around the terms he minted without a moment’s reflection. ‘The media’ has become a shibboleth for corporate commentary on the events of the day, filtered arbitrarily through a lens that sees no further than the next ratings cycle.

McLuhan saw this trend and feared it. Contrary to popular belief, his famous image of a global village was a pessimistic, almost despairing vision. A flickering television screen replaced the campfire at the centre of the human experience, but those huddled around it, seeking meaning in its seductive gaze, were as brutish and unreflective as he imagined early man to be.

It’s a shame he wasn’t around to see the how the rise of personal communications has subverted this dark vision. A new PiPP report, “Social and economic impact of introducing telecommunications throughout Vanuatu”, demonstrates unambiguously that access to personal communications has the power to change lives.

McLuhan’s dark metaphor was wrong in one critical regard: The people sitting around the village campfire are not nearly the simpletons he imagined them to be. Dozens of case studies in the PiPP report demonstrate that even in a world with only the most rudimentary technology, people show ingenuity, perspicacity and intelligence. Given access to mobile telecommunications, they grasp the initiative, improving their lives in almost every way.

The personal stories appearing in ‘Social Impacts…‘ provide striking contrasts between a world bereft of the amenities taken for granted in the developed world and the immediacy of electronic communications. Before the advent of mobile telephony, a process as simple as ordering goods for a village shop involved days of effort and weeks of waiting. Just making a phone call often required long treks over difficult terrain and prohibitively high costs.

The report offers numerous examples of the inordinate lengths that rural merchants go to just to keep stock on their shelves, putting paid (one hopes) to the stereotype of the indolent islander waiting patiently for the cargo to come. If it serves no other purpose, it is invaluable for this insight alone.

But there is a great deal more to it than that. The image it conjures up is not so much of new entrants to the Global Village as of residents of Digital Islands: While communication has improved –and social and economic well-being along with it– the distance from one island to the next has diminished only slightly.

Mobile telephony in and of itself is a boon in most regards, but without complementary infrastructure and services, it is of limited value.

It’s not even clear how our new telecoms infrastructure can be further leveraged to bootstrap access to the Internet. Digicel’s Mobile Internet fees put the service out of reach of the overwhelming majority of its customers, and TVL is simply absent from the field.

Furthermore, lack of access to electricity forces rural residents to spend as much charging their mobile phones’ battery as they do on credit. If they can’t keep even a mobile phone running cheaply, what hope have they of running a computer?

The PiPP report recounts the story of Simon, a lobster salesman based in Ipota on Erromango island. Before Digicel’s appearance on the island, he was forced to rely on the teleradio at the local airport, making delivery of his highly perishable stock extremely difficult. He now relies almost exclusively on his mobile phone to conduct his business. But limited coverage in his area means that he has to ride 9 km on horseback to get reliable service.

The image of a man riding his horse across Erromango’s rugged jungle trails to place a call on his mobile phone says it all. The telecoms market liberalisation strategy represents an historic policy win for the Government of Vanuatu, but unless it’s treated as a first step of a much more comprehensive development strategy, its value will be significantly diluted.

Dozens of stories like Simon’s are peppered throughout ‘Social Impacts…‘, each as illuminating as his. Their lesson is consistently the same: Improvements in transport, access to credit and secondary infrastructure are all necessary if we want to see further improvement in household outcomes in next year’s report.

Another concern raised by the report is the impact on kastom and culture as the immediacy of personal communication provides new channels for information, insight and guidance. While some of them are undeniably positive –women, for example, are making extensive use of mobile telephony to sustain and strengthen their social networks, improving their safety and access to information– these changes present new and largely unacknowledged sources of conflict with kastom’s inherent conservatism.

This year’s survey was nearly an order of magnitude larger than the inaugural report, which was conducted only weeks after Digicel’s initial roll-out. A total of over 900 participants were interviewed this year. The resulting dataset is a goldmine of demographic and economic intelligence whose import extends well beyond the primary focus of the report.

‘Social Impacts…’ should be read by more than just researchers and policy wonks. Anyone with even a passing interest in development, Vanuatu culture and its leap from a largely unchanged 3000-year-old agrarian culture into the Information Age will find it a fascinating document. Its 140-odd pages are replete with fascinating insights into social phenomena affecting the entire Pacific, indeed much of the developing world.

Comprehensive research reports into the dynamics of Vanuatu society are few and far between. Rarely are they presented in such a concise and approachable format. The report is available from www.pacificpolicy.org.

On the 12th of January, David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, made a startling announcement: Google – and dozens of other companies operating in China – had been the target of concerted online attacks originating from China. Google also claimed that the attackers, targeting human rights activists inside China and around the world, used the activists’ own PCs to take over numerous GMail accounts.

These attacks used ‘0-day’ exploits, hitherto-unknown vulnerabilities in common software applications. In a Wired Magazine interview, security analyst Ryan Olson stated that the code itself was unremarkable, but that ‘the sophistication here is all about the fact they were able to target the right people using a previously unknown vulnerability.’

Businesses and governments face online acts of vandalism and attempts at corporate espionage all the time. Even this attack, which exploited flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Acrobat reader software, was ‘not ground-breaking’, according to security expert Mikko Hypponen.

‘We see this fairly regularly,’ he told the BBC, but ‘most companies just never go public.’

Running against tide of companies flooding into China, Google has retaliated against these intrusions by stating that they will no longer censor google.cn, their Chinese search site. If that can’t be done within Chinese law, wrote Drummond, it ‘may well mean having to shut down google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.’

With annual revenues of around US$150 million (some estimates range far higher), China is a small but significant part of Google’s global operation. Pulling out, however, is commonly seen as passing up on the largest single consumer market in the world. Virtually all large online search providers have quietly acquiesced to China’s diktat regarding search results.

Some, indeed, have gone above and beyond the call. Reporters Without Borders accused Yahoo of becoming a ‘police informant’ following the 2004 arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist. Yahoo had apparently exceeded the strict requirements of the law in granting Chinese authorities access to Shi’s offshore email accounts.

Microsoft, renowned for their winner-take-all approach to business, finds itself in a similarly subservient position. With trademark deftness, China largely de-fanged one of the most effective and brutal corporate negotiating teams in the world. Negotiators got virtually everything they wanted. China pays about 10% per license of what other governments do. They not only negotiated access to the Windows source code, they have to right to alter it to suit their purposes.

Just this week, both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and founder Bill Gates made public pronouncements simultaneously espousing the principle of Internet freedom and respect for Chinese law. They did not elaborate on how they intend to square this circle. Gates characterised Chinese censorship as ‘very limited’ in a recent interview on US network television.

For its part, China angrily denounced Google’s assertions, calling them inaccurate and suggesting they were motivated by outdated, imperialistic notions. They refused to draw any link between their censorship activities and the attacks on Google and others, stating unequivocally that such attacks are just as illegal in China as other countries. IT security experts remain convinced nonetheless that China sponsors such activities.

Despite strong pronouncements from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, most US businesses are holding their fire, according to the Wall Street Journal. Nobody wants to miss out on China’s rapidly growing consumer market.

The principle of Internet freedom is increasingly under attack in other countries as well. When questioned about their complicity in the suppression of Iranian online dissent, Nokia-Siemens’ phlegmatic reply was that they hadn’t done anything unusual. Most European and North American carriers are required to make wholesale surveillance and censorship possible, too.

Australian Minister Stephen Conroy has been steadily advancing an agenda that includes censorship of online material ‘refused classification’ by an Australian ratings body.

Businesses and governments both have reason to feel uncomfortable about the Wild West atmosphere that pervades the Internet. Its organised anarchy and ability to reformulate itself from one day to the next makes it a threat to many traditional business practices as well as to governments leery of dissent.

Increasingly, network carriers and content providers are cooperating to introduce measures to make the Internet a ‘walled garden’ rather than an open range. This implies a top-to-bottom approach encompassing centralised networks and wholesale filtering, copy-protection technologies and the criminalisation of file-sharing as well as computing devices on which only pre-approved software can run.

Yet again, people are seeking technological solutions to problems that are social in nature.
So far, Internet activist Perry Barlow’s affirmation that ‘the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it’ remains true. But with the increasingly evident willingness of corporate and government agents to create and use what MIT researcher Benjamin Hill terms ‘anti-features’, we may soon find that there’s nowhere else to route to.

Copy protection mechanisms included on CDs, DVDs and other media only serve to inconvenience legitimate users. People intent on copying quickly rip new versions and shared them widely. Likewise, content filters on individual networks are easily avoided through the use of relatively anonymous Internet cafés and proxy servers, allowing people to access contentious content even over rigidly controlled networks. Locked-down phones and computing devices are quickly ‘jail-broken’.

But with the imposition of control over the actual cables and connections through which Internet traffic passes, proponents of Internet freedom lose their ability to manoeuvre. Their data can no longer route around censorship. For them, the damage is complete. The Internet has effectively ceased to exist.

Anti-features such as copy protections, filters and firewalls add to the cost of accessing information. They make things harder, not better. It would be far cheaper to rely on people to establish ethical and moral norms than to impose technical solutions which do little to deter the determined and much to inconvenience everyone else.

Often enough, their closed nature makes anti-features more susceptible to 0-day exploits, exactly the kind of attack that left Google and dozens of other companies so exposed.

Such measures have only one significant virtue: Technological solutions don’t require the consent of the people.

Faith. Belief. Trust.

These sentiments spring quickest to mind when we talk about what animates us, about what makes us strong and what keeps us on the moral path. We express these thoughts in terms of light and face constant imprecations to turn our back to the shadows.

I admire them all, but like objects of great value, sometimes they seem to be a little too fragile to handle, too easily sullied by circumstance. When it comes to coping with the world and its complexities, doubt is my tool of choice.

Doubt – the willingness to question every assumption – seems at first to cast shadows on everything. But every light does this, so we can clearly see the contours. True, this makes the picture more complex than it was. In that sense, doubt is subversive and troublesome. It makes our elders fret and leads the naive astray.

But it works.

So what to make of the ‘debate’ currently raging over humanity’s role in global climate change (Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW)? At first glance, it seems to pit the skeptics and doubters against the true believers. Wait a minute, say the skeptics, are we 100% sure about the data? What proof do we have? Can we trust that proof?

The believers, having already completed over a decade of deliberation and debate, impatiently try to move the conversation away from discussing whether AGW is true. That’s established fact, they say; it’s time to decide what to do about it.

Again and again the doubters drag the debate back to first principles. How can we be sure about all this? Isn’t science about proof? Where’s the proof?

Doubt, like salt, is useless alone. While it’s often useful to question ‘common knowledge’, the goal is not come out knowing less but to learn more. Doubt must be the search for better answers. And that requires reason.

Do we know what next year’s weather will be like in Sydney? Do we know how many years we have before Tuvalu sinks below the waves? Do we know whether we’ve already gone too far, or whether we can still pull ourselves back from the brink? No, we don’t.

Do we know that man-made carbon dioxide has caused a drastic rise in the level of atmospheric CO2 in the last 50 years? Do we know that the world hasn’t seen a comparable increase in the previous 200,000 years? Do we know that atmospheric CO2 traps heat? Yes, yes, yes.

Like faith, doubt can be misapplied too easily. When it’s used to obscure rather than to illuminate, when it’s used selectively rather than systematically. When it refuses the possibility that it might ever be satisfied.

The Bislama phrase ‘askem question’ carries heavy connotations. It implies that something is not settled, that consensus has not been achieved. And without consensus, we have nothing. At least, not in Vanuatu.

But often enough, the process of asking questions, offering contradictory interpretations of events, or even just bull-headed denial, consists of nothing more than opposition for opposition’s sake.

Most of the opposition to movement on Climate Change is economically motivated. Simply stated, those who stand to lose the most protest the loudest. There’s nothing innately wrong with that; honestly, one would expect no less. What’s upsetting is the dishonesty of it all.

They pretend to want a dialogue, they appeal to science, but they don’t ever admit that a satisfactory answer is possible. They demand godlike knowledge, even certainty, from all-too-human scientists. They pester and pester and pester and, when the scientists finally snap at them, they howl that they’re being persecuted.

They are specifically, deliberately opposed to the very dialogue they claim to be denied.

This tactic is quite familiar in Vanuatu politics. On more than one occasion we’ve seen various political players pee into the well rather than let others drink from it. Speaker Korman’s antics last week are only the most recent example.

So the question then, is what can we do? If developed nations and certain industries are going to be deliberately dishonest about the extent, the nature or even the existence of global climate change, what can we, the most vulnerable nations in the world, do?

We can apply the tools of doubt. We can ask again: What is the relationship between climate change and development? Has the fundamental problem of global environmental degradation significantly changed in the last few decades, or just our understanding of it?

What, ultimately, is the difference these days between combating climate change and development? Are they not ultimately the same thing?

If that’s the case, then what we’re really seeing in Copenhagen is the refusal of the world’s economic leadership to admit that there should be limits to the damage humanity inflicts and that we must become our brother’s keeper, whether we like it or not.

The crisis of the world has not changed, except in immediacy. We must, as we always have, continue to question our faith in development as proffered. We require only that the rest of the world admit that real, honest answers are possible.

Following a recent workshop on copyright, the plight of the local reggae group Naio was used to demonstrate how copyright legislation could improve the lot of struggling Vanuatu artists.

Unauthorised copying, they claimed, had so reduced income from CD sales that the band simply couldn’t make a living on recording alone.

While the principle of respecting creative works is one I support wholeheartedly, I need to make this clear: Recent copyright reform has done little to change the plight of performers elsewhere in the world.

There are numerous interwoven ideas wrapped up inside what people call ‘Intellectual Property’. The World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN body, clumps many of them them together under the term Copyright. In essence, it says that Copyright – the right to exercise control over one’s creation – can be exerted over any creative work, its production or its broadcast.

The idea here is quite simple: Artists deserve to be rewarded for their work. Because they share their work with the world, and because we all benefit when they do so, they should be allowed a limited monopoly on the right to reproduce the work in question.

Well, that seems perfectly reasonable.

Of course, we do need to carve out a few exceptions. We need the idea of Fair Use. People need to be able to talk about the artists’ work; so common everyday uses such as humming a tune or copying out a few key sentences of a book are considered okay. How about using creative material to teach? That seems safe enough. We should also be allowed to re-sell, trade or give away books, CDs, DVDs and magazines, right? We can make copies of them to safeguard our purchase, can’t we?

But what about a sing-along at a bar? That popularises the song, so that should be fine, right? How about if we pop the CD into the bar’s sound system, so that everyone can listen and dance to it? Or how about if I keep one copy of a song at home and put another onto an MP3 player to listen to in the car? It’s already been paid for, right? So that shouldn’t be a problem. What if I copy just a little bit of it, and use it as a ringtone in my phone? Can I give that ringtone to my friends?

What if I use a well-known hook as a witty commentary in a song of my own?

What if I’m in a band and I like a song so much I want to play it myself? Do I have to ask permission to play it?

The rights enjoyed by the authors of creative works vary widely from one country to another. In some countries most of what I’ve described above is can be done without worrying.

In some other countries, you start paying as soon as you buy a blank CD to make a backup. The music you hear in restaurants and elevators and when you’re holding the phone? Paid for.

Copyright is a great idea. In practice, however, it gets messy fast.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to boil down copyright to a few basic elements, and many of them are easily enforced, even without special legislation.

If I record a song, for example, I can license a distributor to press a number of copies and sell them in stores around the country. In order to protect our collective investment, I give the distributor the exclusive right to sell my disks for a period of time. That’s a pretty straightforward grant of copyright that I could write up in a simply-worded contract.

But that’s not where copyright is going. Increasingly, copyright favours not the original artist, but the distributor.

Fair use provisions such as the right to make a few copies or to share with my friends actually popularise the artist’s creation. Especially in the early days of an artist’s career, exposure is everything. Some people contend that the best way to become popular quickly is to give stuff away and rely on people to spread the word to their friends.

But that particular kind of free publicity reduces profits for the distributor, at least notionally. Every copy made for free seems like a lost sale to the distributor.

Most of the movement on copyright law is being driven by distributors, not artists. They feel threatened by the ease with which music and video can be copied on the Internet, and they’re doing what they can to turn back the tide.

Naio’s work – and that of countless other talented musicians and performers – needs protecting. Of that there is no doubt. We can protect those rights today: Penalise anyone who sells their CDs without permission. Two policemen on weekly patrol could reduce the black market nearly to zero.

What WIPO is proposing, however, is much broader than that.

Bands like Naio and others in Vanuatu could benefit hugely from the free exposure that the Internet provides. (One can only hope that their exclusive sponsorship agreement with TVL includes some kind of ring-tone/website/online distribution provision.) But measures currently being touted internationally would make things harder, not easier for small acts like them.

There is increasing movement internationally toward what distributors have termed a ‘graduated response’ to file copying. If you’re caught copying online once, you get a warning; two times and there’s a penalty; three times and you’re out.

That’s a bit like revoking someone driver’s license, not for dangerous driving, but for running on knock-off tires.

It may be inevitable that Vanuatu harmonises its so-called Intellectual Property laws with the rest of the world. But let’s not pretend: We’re doing it for Disney’s sake, not Naio’s. By forcing all music and video through official distribution channels, bands like Naio might find recognition harder than ever to come by.