Ugandan voters outwit censors
As Uganda’s ruling party arrested opposition leaders and shut down social media in the wake of a disputed presidential election, a Toronto scholar is among those leading the charge to circumvent media controls using the same technology that Canadians use to watch American Netflix.
“We are like ninjas,” Gerald Bareebe told the Na- tional Post in a Twitter direct message from Uganda.
“There is a feeling you get that I cannot even describe. You feel more powerful than the mighty state. You feel like you have broken the chains that have been holding you captive,” Bareebe added by email.
On Thursday, Ugandans went to the polls in a presidential election that will decide the future of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who first took power in a 1986 coup.
But as v ot i ng began Thursday morning, Museveni’s government cut off access to social media platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.
The president explained that the shutdown was ordered to “to avert lies ... intended to incite violence and illegal declaration of election results.”
However, the blockage can be circumvented via the use of a “virtual private network,” a method that can be used to hide a user’s identity and l ocation. Commonly used by Canadians to access international versions of Netflix or Hulu, VPN services are also popular in China to access websites blocked by government firewalls.
Originally from Western Uganda, Bareebe is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and a former Jeanne Sauvé Scholar at McGill University
After voting first thing Thursday morning, Bareebe said he noticed the outage, immediately installed a VPN to bypass it and then joined other Ugandans in using phone calls and text messages to alert others to the workaround.
“Once I tried and it worked for me, I started spreading information to my colleagues,” he said.
According to Google Trends, Ugandan Web searches for VPN went up dramatically on election day. By Friday, one VPN provider, Trust.Zone, reported 300,000 downloads of its software coming from Uganda.
Other counts had Uganda’s total number of VPN downloads reaching more than 1.5 million, although this number could not be confirmed.
“Because local media houses are very scared of the regime, we have used Twitter and Facebook to break stories about opposition arrest and published images of voters being beaten by the military on polling station,” said Bareebe.
“These guys came to power through a guerrilla war. It is no surprise that they want to rule like bandits.”
Images that have emerged appear to show ballot boxes being stuffed and a military presence in opposition areas.
After configuring their VPNs to show their location as being in Canada, some Ugandans openly celebrated being virtually “in” Canada on election day.
“Tweeting from Canada, voting in Uganda ,” wrote Twitter user Samuel Gaamuwa.
A hashtag # 1986pictures was also started to mock Museveni’s 30- year hold on power. Amid images of boxy cathode ray tube televisions and a pre-pubescent Leonardo diCaprio, one 33- year-old Ugandan wrote: “I was three years old when these rebels took power.”
The Internet crackdown attracted condemnation from international sources, particularly t he United States mission in Uganda.
On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called Museveni to demand that the Internet blockage be removed “immediately” and added that the U.S. “stands by the Ugandan people as they undertake this most essential democratic endeavour.”
A statement from Amnesty International called the shutdown “nothing but an exercise in censorship.”
Mus eve ni remained poised to win as of press time, although, amid the chaos of voting, observers had severe doubts as to the legitimacy of the result.
Thursday saw the arrest and brief detention of opposition leader Kizza Besigye as he was leading reporters to a house where he alleged ballot stuffing was taking place.
YOU FEEL
MORE POWERFUL THAN THE MIGHTY STATE.