Late this summer, Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom employed an extraordinary tactic to quell a two-day pro-democracy uprising in his small Indian Ocean nation: He completely cut off Internet access and text messaging via cell phone, apparently to prevent activists from contacting press organizations and others outside the islands. Gayoom has ruled the Maldives since 1978, and his cabinet said the decision reflected “patience, wisdom, and leadership.” Free-speech advocates called the move irresponsible and unprecedented. There was one exception to Gayoom’s Internet ban—his personal Web site remained up and running, with regular updates during the 48-hour affair.

FP invites readers to suggest incidents in which a government, corporation, or any organization is involved in a unique technological abuse at
caughtinthenet@ceip.org.

Composing text messages—punching phrases and sentences onto a mobile phone’s keypad—is tedious and time consuming. So a form of shorthand has evolved: “Wait” becomes “w8,” “are you” becomes “RU,” and so on.

Young people are the vanguard of text language, says Mike Grenville, founder of 160characters.org, a text-messaging association based in Britain, a country in which users send some 2 billion text messages each month. A British schoolgirl grabbed headlines last year when she wrote an essay entirely in truncated text, and one European Parliament member recently tried to reach young constituents by translating part of the European Union constitution into French-based text language.

Predictably, text messaging’s popularity with young people is sparking concerns about its impact on language. One education association in Scotland, for example, has called for text messaging to be “stamped out” as a form of communication. But Carolyn Adger, a director at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Applied Linguistics (cal.org), says grammar is “hardy” and impervious to text messaging. Adger likens text language to slang. Although words such as “cool” may slip into the vernacular, most slang fades with time. “Some [text messaging] usages could become more common, but it’s not dangerous,” Adger says.

South Korea has the highest percentage of broadband Internet users in the world. Yet, the country’s cybersecurity record is one of the world’s worst. Last year, 26,000 hacking incidents were reported to South Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communication in a survey of government institutions, banks, businesses, and schools—a 178-fold increase since 1996. Kwon Seok-Chul, the head of Hauri (www.hauri.co.kr), a Seoul-based computer-virus vaccine developer, says the South Korean government’s ignorance of cybercrime has made it “quite normal for hackers from all over the world to want to test their skills in the country.” In June, foreign hackers (purportedly from China) penetrated several of South Korea’s security and defense agencies. Authorities are not sure what the hackers were after or how successful they were, but the rather embarrassing episode prompted the country’s National Cyber Security Center (www.ncsc.go.kr) to mandate that, as of July 30, 2004, all Internet-related firms must report hacking incidents. Future cyberintruders may find it harder to come and go undetected.

In 1995, a United States District Court in Texas sentenced Chris Lamprecht to 70 months in federal prison for money laundering. Because Lamprecht was a known computer hacker, Judge Sam Sparks also banned him from “the Internet or any computer network” after his release from prison—making Lamprecht the first American to be judicially banned from the Internet.

Experts are unsure how many additional people have been booted off the Internet since Lamprecht’s case, but the number is likely increasing as U.S. and foreign courts prosecute a growing number of computer crimes. In the last year, courts in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States have all banned people from the Internet. “The more cases, the more bans,” says Jennifer Granick, a lawyer who has defended hackers and is executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. The U.S. Department of Justice disposed of 631 computer crime cases in 2001, up from 137 in 1995 (for a sampling, see www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/cccases.html).

Court-ordered computer or Internet bans are typically imposed during “supervised release,” normally a three- to five-year period after a convicted criminal serves jail time but is still under a probation officer’s control. If the bans sound hard to enforce, it’s because they are. “I proved that,” says Lamprecht, “as [I] violated my ban almost every day for a year.” The problem, as Granick puts it, is that “most judges aren’t very tech savvy.” Neither are probation officers, apparently. “One time,” Lamprecht recalls, “my probation officer even did a surprise check, came in my apartment and inspected my computer for a telephone cable or modem. He didn’t find one. I was online…but I had broadband and not a modem.” Some courts are now tailoring Internet bans to specific online activities. For instance, a British pedophile recently became the first person there to be barred specifically from Internet chatrooms (for 10 years).

Granick and other lawyers have challenged Internet bans based on freedom of speech and additional constitutional rights. So far, they’ve failed. But Granick isn’t too worried about the precedent these cases set for the future: “I predict that as judges begin to see that the computer isn’t a novelty, but is an everyday apparatus like the telephone, we’ll see a lot fewer computer-use restrictions.”

Klaus Müller is an international museum consultant, writer, and filmmaker (www.kmlink.net). He has worked with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, London’s Imperial War Museum, and other leading museums and human rights organizations.

virtualmuseum.ca
Virtual Museum Canada is the world’s most advanced online museum network, bringing together more than 1,000 Canadian museums. The Web site currently features 146 exhibitions on topics ranging from Russian landscape painting to indigenous North American sports, including lacrosse and the tradition of the sacred run.

h-net.org/~museum
H-Net is a Michigan-based interdisciplinary organization of scholars and an essential source of information on museum developments worldwide. I use H-Museum, its museum studies network, which includes a moderated mailing list with more than 3,600 subscribers from 94 countries. It publishes a weekly news digest of articles on international museological topics in five languages.

archimuse.com
Trends in online exhibitions and museum Web sites change rapidly. An easy way for me to stay up to date—and to find the world’s best online museums—is the yearly “Best of the Web” competition organized by the Ontario-based consultancy Archives & Museum Informatics.

icom.museum
Created in 1946, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) is an organization of museums and museum professionals. ICOM explores solutions to pressing museum issues—such as the looting of cultural artifacts—that cannot be solved at a regional or national level. For instance, ICOM maintains a list of stolen and at-risk artifacts at icom.museum/redlist.