Yesterday, photographer, activist and dear friend Nasser Nouri won the First Prize for Photo Features for his coverage of the Mahalla Uprising, in the Egypt Press Photo 2008 competition organized by the Photographers’ Association.
He also won the Third Prize for the “Daily Life Picture” for his photo of an Egyptian construction worker. Alf Alf Alf Mabrouk Nasser!
We have to expose the company for this:
Vodafone’s global head of content standards, Annie Mullins, told a Westminster eForum event on Wednesday that following food riots at Egyptian government-subsidized bakeries in March 2008, the Egyptian authorities demanded communications data from Vodafone to help identify rioters.
“We’ve had to hand over data on people in Egypt due to the food riots,” said Mullins. “Regulation can be a Trojan horse.”
Vodafone is not the first service provider to be forced to hand over customer data. In 2005, Yahoo gave Chinese authorities details which helped in the arrest and conviction of journalist Shi Tao.
Which riots happened in March 2008? The “food riots” Mullins is referring to are for sure the 6th and the 7th of April. There has to be a campaign against the company to expose these practices and find out more information about what happened. I’m honestly shocked how all parties involved in the surveillance, whether its Vodafone or the Egyptian Ministry of Telecommunication, are just too happy to go on the record stating publicly their crimes.
The surveillance is so systematic and rampant, that even Pope Shenouda had come out banning the Copts from confessing over the phone, coz “telephones may be tapped, and the confessions would be heard by State Security”!!
The Tax Collectors‘ struggle for independent trade unions is spreading by the domino effect, Sarah Carr reports:
Workers from the Ghazl El-Mahalla spinning factory have called off the sit-in they began eight days ago because, they say, the company trade union does not represent their interests.
The workers say that they plan to resign from the official, state-controlled trade union and form an independent union.
Negotiations over the course of the eight-day sit-in — staged in the headquarters of the company’s trade union committee — failed to reach solutions to the workers’ demands.
This is the second sit-in workers have organized after five workers were issued transfer orders last October.
The transfer orders were issued following a protest held at the Ghazl El-Mahalla factory on Oct. 31 during which some 800 workers protested mismanagement and alleged financial losses within the company.
The 22 workers who staged the sit-in demanded the revocation of the transfer orders and their return to their original posts as well as financial compensation for the transferred workers.