JAKARTA, Indonesia — Every year during Ramadan, the poor from every corner of the island of Java gravitate here to the capital to beg. They wander in between cars stuck at traffic corners, in the shadows of the city’s skyscrapers and gigantic shopping malls, in the knowledge that Islam’s most sacred month makes people particularly charitable.
This year, however, Jakarta is cracking down on the seasonal influx of beggars. Many of them belong to organized gangs and simply exploit religious sentiments, the authorities say. And they add that the beggars pose a threat to the stability of Jakarta, Indonesia’s most important city and the seat of power, a bubble of five-star hotels and luxury stores that, in the words of one law enforcement official, feeds the outsiders’ “sweet dreams.”
Thirteen days into Ramadan, Jakarta had rounded up 1,465 beggars, most of them women and children, almost all from outside Jakarta. For the first time, the authorities are also going after those caught giving to beggars, though they have fined only 12 people so far.
“A capital is built on the condition that it be a comfortable, safe and dignified place,” said Budiharjo, who took over Jakarta’s Social Welfare Agency eight months ago and decided to penalize charity givers for the first time.
“If we stop giving, naturally they will disappear,” said Mr. Budiharjo, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name.
He said investigators found that about 500 of the arrested beggars belonged to groups that gathered Indonesians in villages and bused them to Jakarta to beg during Ramadan. Officials have arrested coordinators of the ring in Jakarta, but were still looking for leaders outside the city, he said.
The authorities were enforcing a 2007 city bylaw that made it illegal not only to beg on city streets, but also to give to street beggars. Violators on both sides can be fined up to $2,000 and jailed for up to two months.
The 12 people caught giving were fined between $15 and $30, Mr. Budiharjo said. All were apprehended while handing out money to beggars from inside their cars, an act as common as the city’s traffic jams.
But the severity of the crackdown, in a developing country with not much of a social safety net, has drawn criticism from some of the local media, as well as those caught in the daily raids against beggars.
“Begging should be allowed,” said Jariyah, 39, who had traveled a couple of hours by bus to beg with her 16-month-old son. “We can ask for assistance from our relatives, but only once or twice. Otherwise, I’d lose my dignity. That’s why I came here.”
Ms. Jariyah, who was being held in a screening center after being arrested, said she had come to Jakarta on her own. She had started begging, she said, because a daughter was entering junior high school and her husband, a day laborer, earned only a couple of dollars a day if he was lucky enough to find work.
The city was trying to steer both the needy and their donors to organized charities, though the number of poor vastly overwhelmed the few national charities.
One of this country’s largest charities, Rumah Zakat, raised $7.1 million last year from individual and corporate donations, mostly in Jakarta. About 40 percent of the gifts came during Ramadan and during the festival of Id al-Adha, another important holiday, said Rachmat Ari Kusamanto, the organization’s chief executive.
Rumah Zakat finances educational and health programs, and lends money to help people start businesses.
“The concept of charity is to empower people, not to make them dependent,” Mr. Rachmat said. “By giving money directly to a person, we are not empowering that person.”
And yet things did not seem so clear-cut at the screening center where some of the beggars were being held along with others picked off Jakarta’s streets. A bus arrived regularly, dropping off people who were then placed in one of 15 categories at the center: beggars, of course, but also unlicensed hawkers and musicians, the mentally ill, prostitutes, transvestites and other fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape.
According to a large board, 120 beggars were among the 500 people being held at the center. Seventy-five were women, and children made up many of the 45 males. They would stay at the center for up to 21 days, though most were held only a few days before being released or transferred to a rehabilitation center.
Most milled around a large, open courtyard where laundry hung on clotheslines and neighborhood women were selling fried plantains. But most of those caught for begging were inside a large room with carpets on which mothers and children usually lay.
None of the people randomly interviewed said they belonged to begging organizations. The women, many of them nursing infants, said they just needed extra money.
“I didn’t know that begging was illegal,” said Sumilah, 33, who said her husband had deserted her and their three children. “People like us haven’t gone to school.”
Suciardi, the social welfare official in charge of the center, walked around, joking with some of those being detained. A young girl, brought to the center for being a street musician, followed him around.
In his office, Mr. Suciardi said that allowing beggars to operate freely would lead to increased criminality and, eventually, political instability.
“If we allow them here,” he said, “Jakarta will become the center for Indonesia’s poor.”
A deaf and mute teenage boy — who had made the center his home after being picked up in a gutter a decade ago — came inside the office, clearly happy to see Mr. Suciardi. Smiling, he patted Mr. Suciardi’s shirt pockets. Eventually, Mr. Suciardi reached for his wallet inside his pants pocket and handed the boy a 20,000 rupiah bill, or $2.
“We don’t want to be mean to these people,” Mr. Suciardi said. “But national security and safety are at stake.”
West Africa is experiencing particularly severe flooding this year, with some 350,000 people affected in six countries. The United Nations reports Burkina Faso is the worst affected. The floods also have spread to Ghana, Niger, Guinea, Senegal and Benin.
UN aid agencies say this year's flooding across West Africa may match the severity of the floods that occurred in 2007. Those killed some 300 people and displaced 800,000.
This year's toll has not reached that level. But the torrential rains have not stopped. They are expected to continue for several more weeks, enough time to add to the already extensive damage that has occurred.
UN Humanitarian spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs says Burkina Faso has been the hardest hit. She says at least five people have been killed and 110,000 forced to flee their homes, mainly in the capital, Ouagadougou.
"The rain in Burkina Faso during one year represents 1,200 millimeters," said Byrs. "In one day in Ouagadougou, the rain represented 300 millimeter for one day."
That means that one-quarter of Burkina Faso's annual rainfall happened in just one day. Byrs says this is extremely worrying as more rain and more flooding is sure to occur. She says the country has not yet recovered from the economic losses suffered in 2007.
Yet now, she says, people once again are faced with extensive crop losses and the loss of cattle from drowning. She says infrastructure has been badly damaged. Electricity in the capital has been cut off. Roads and bridges have been washed away.
"And, all those public buildings," said Byrs. "In particular, the main hospital in Ouagadougou has been flooded and patients have been evacuated these days. You have floods in the corridor. Sixty children who were in this hospital have been evacuated. It is another strain on the economic life of this country."
Concern is rising about an outbreak of water-borne diseases. Diarrhea is already on the rise.
Byrs says Ghana also has been hit hard by, what she calls, the deluge. She says 25 people died from the bad weather and from the floods. She adds the death toll is likely to increase in the coming days.
Douglas Khayat is a psychologist for the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders//Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), working in Complexo do Alemao, one of the poorest and most violent favelas in Rio de Janeiro.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- An estimated 150,000 people live in Complexo do Alemao, where armed groups fight for turf, and fighting between police forces and ruling groups leave thousands of people trapped by violence.
There are no private or public health facilities inside Alemao and not even government ambulances enter. In this extremely violent corner of the world, residents live with a great deal of psychological trauma.
In recognition of this trauma, Doctors Without Borders offers psychological support, in addition to the medical services we provide to the community in the favela.
The people who call Alemao home live under a vow of silence, the unspoken code of survival that dictates that no one discuss what goes on inside the community particularly the violent episodes they endure or witness. Killings, beating, threats, expulsions, regular exposure to heavy weapons, and other forms of abuse, are all carried out by the armed groups that control the drug trafficking, imposing their own set of rules. See images of life in the favelas »
Since October 2007, Doctors Without Borders psychologists have conducted 2,000 consultations for 1,000 different patients. For 85 percent of patients, suffering was directly related to violence. They have either been directly affected by combat, experienced the trauma of witnessing extreme violence, have had family members killed or tortured.
The symptoms we mostly see are anxiety disorders, depression, psychosomatic conditions, and learning and behavior problems in children. When police enter the area, fighting often breaks out with armed groups. The state of fear created by these groups creates an environment in which psychological disorders multiply. Some get used to living this way, but others do not, particularly children. See a report on healthcare in Brazil »
The needs are incredible, so are the stories.
Last year a middle-aged man arrived at our project asking to see a psychologist. Two years earlier he suffered a series of tragic events that resulted in persistent insomnia and anxiety that almost ruined his family.
He was crossing a football field holding hands with a female friend, not his wife, when suddenly a armored police car entered the community and began shooting.
Everything happened in a matter of seconds. His girlfriend told him she was wounded. The shooting became so bad that he had to leave her to find shelter. She died and he could not stop blaming himself for leaving her in the middle of the field.
It made his marriage hell. It started to affect his work and he began to have terrible nightmares. He started to drink a lot. But our treatment with him went really well. We helped him reevaluate others facets of his life and things started to get better, his marriage, his work. People around him reacted to his new attitude, and his life began to improve.
The population trusts us because we live the same day-to-day routine they live. Our project is the only health facility inside Complexo do Alemao. During the day, we are exposed to the same environment as the residents. This experience in the same environment helps to develop a bond with our patients.
For me as a Brazilian, as a middle class carioca (from Rio de Janeiro), it is difficult to experience this aspect of my country. I've grown angrier about the conditions in my city and country after doing this work.
At the same time, it has been and continues to be a life changing experience, a possibility to dive into my country's soul and play an important part of people's lives.
When Libyan Leader Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi announced that he supports the independence of southern Sudan if its people want to, it was clear that his message goes beyond the Sudanese crisis to the West of North Africa, particularly the issue of Western Sahara, especially since both crises erupted at the same time in the mid-1990s in order to separate the Arab space from its African extension.
Those who are acquainted with Col. Al-Qaddafi realize that he has been keen on giving precedence to the image of the thinking leader over the reality that he is a head of a state who can hit and miss. When a Moroccan court prosecuted some newspapers for criticizing the Libyan leader, the issue was considered closed at this level. On the one hand, this newspaper was unofficial and only reflects the ideas of its publishers. On the other hand, the commitment to principles in the relations among states is not subject to mood swings. It is different when Libya expresses its discontent with some reports published by the Moroccan press, and when Libyan officials go back in time and manipulate the Sahara issue.
It was enough for the Libyan officials to inform the Morocco officials that the leader of the Polisario Front Mohammad Abdelaziz will attend the celebrations of Al-Fateh Revolution in order to avoid any embarrassment. In this case, Morocco's absence would not be more serious that driving it to face a fait accompli. Also, Morocco does not agree to be at the same distance with the Polisario Front, especially since the issue is still on the table of the United Nations.
In its current experience, Libya has replaced resounding slogans with a pragmatic methodology that is closer to understanding the laws of the times. Going backward in dealing with the Sahara issue and southern Sudan just because Libya was displeased with reports published by the press is out of the question. The Libyan role is necessary to help solve the problems of the African continent, not to complicate them. The Libyan Republic might have been forced to deal with the European Union in its current structure, or it might have been exposed to political pressures to ensure a mass rally to mark the 40th anniversary of Al-Fateh Revolution.
However, it realizes that the accession of the "Sahara Republic" to the Organization of the African Unity in 1984 raised political and legal controversies which the efforts of the wise people of African failed to overcome. The evidence is that the Sahara dossier in particular has moved to the corridors of the United Nations, and thus there is still a need for a political solution to the predicament of the African Union, all the more so after many countries suspended their recognition of the "Sahara Republic" and are yearning for a political solution to end the problem.
Likewise, the situation in southern Sudan would not have enjoyed the current dimensions had it not been for the repercussions of the Darfur crisis which put Sudan's unity before the unknown. This can only be faced by consolidating unity and sovereignty in light of respecting ethnic and political pluralism. After all, there are many African and Arab frameworks that can contain the struggle of the brother-enemies in Sudan.
No one wants the relations between Morocco and Libya to deteriorate. Both countries are bound by joint commitments inside the Maghreb Union, which can obviously play a role in encouraging the parties of the Sahara conflict to carry on with negotiations, let alone the fact that its current situation cannot withstand new differences.
It is worth mentioning that while the Maghreb capitals abstain from carrying out any efforts to arrange the appropriate atmosphere for a political solution brokered by the United Nations, international envoy Christopher Ross took the lead and talked with the Maghreb Union Secretariat about the issue. But Col. Al-Qaddafi still heads the current session of the Union, and he had experienced, two years ago, how the Sahara differences reflected negatively on the Maghreb Summit hosted by Tripoli at the time. His position and responsibilities perhaps push him to contemplate over the dreams that fade away of establishing a Maghreb Union, one that is active in its periphery and a partner to its neighbors. The opportunity remains favorable to do something, but not under the circumstances of the protest of the celebration which necessitated the withdrawal of Morocco. And it is not too late!
A report into an ambitious housing scheme for Australia's Aboriginals has found that not one dwelling has been built in the year since it began.
The A$660m (US$562m; £342m) scheme is designed to address chronic housing problems in Aboriginal communities.
The project aims to construct 750 homes in the Northern Territory and refurbish hundreds of others.
Officials blamed "administration problems" for the delays - which prompted one minister to quit.
The slow pace of this ambitious programme to help Aboriginal families almost brought down the Northern Territory government when a former minister quit in disgust at the lack of progress.
A review has recommended that federal agencies take more control of the scheme and that administration costs be reduced.
“ Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house ” Nigel Scullion Senator
It has all been an embarrassment to the government of Kevin Rudd in Canberra and his indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, who has insisted that the building work will be completed within budget and on time by 2013.
Critics, though, are not convinced.
Nigel Scullion, a conservative senator for the Northern Territory, says the whole affair has been a disaster.
"The minister has taken absolutely no responsibility for this.
"This was a fundamental of Kevin Rudd's undertaking and promises to indigenous people of Australia and he has failed and it has failed under the leadership of Jenny Macklin.
"And I cannot understand why Mr Rudd would allow her to stay and preside over the second stage of this complete and unmitigated disaster.
"Our First Australians deserve better than a cubby house or a dog house."
The delays mean that the amount of money earmarked for each new dwelling has been cut by 20%.
For generations, poor housing has blighted many Aboriginal communities.
Australia's original inhabitants often suffer squalid and over-cramped living conditions which contribute to the 17-year gap in life expectancy between them and their non-indigenous counterparts.
Further evidence has come to light of widespread fraud during the recent Afghan presidential election.
One tribal elder has admitted to the BBC that he tampered with hundreds of ballots in favour of incumbent President Hamid Karzai.
More than 600 serious complaints are being investigated, but the deadline for new complaints has now passed.
With 60% of polling stations having already declared, Mr Karzai has a clear lead.
In the latest case of alleged fraud uncovered by the BBC, a tribal elder from Zaziaryoub district - in the eastern province of Paktia - said he had helped to fill in about 900 ballots in favour of President Karzai.
The elder says in a neighbouring village, his nephew saw one man fill in more than 2,000 ballots.
Allegations of fraud have been made against all the prime candidates, but the election process seems to have been working overwhelmingly in favour of Mr Karzai, says the BBC's Chris Morris in Kabul.
However, some of these complaints will not get heard by the Electoral Complaints Commission, as the time to file an official complaint has passed.
The commission is currently looking into 2,000 fraud claims overall.
Figures obtained from the campaign of Hamid Karzai's leading opponent, Dr Abdullah, suggest that in four provinces alone results have been declared from 28 polling stations which observers had reported were closed.
Damning evidence
AFGHAN ELECTION
Vote held on 20 August for presidency and provincial councils
Turnout not made official yet but estimated at 40-50%
More than 400 insurgent attacks on polling day, Nato says
More than 2,000 fraud allegations, 600 deemed serious
Final result expected 17 Sept but fraud allegations must be cleared
Hamid Karzai has clear lead over Abdullah Abdullah in presidency race
Candidate needs more than 50% to avoid runoff
Just days ago, a tribe in the south made the most serious claim so far.
The leader of Kandahar's Bareez tribe said that nearly 30,000 votes were cast fraudulently for President Hamid Karzai instead of primarily for the main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.
Mr Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who heads the Kandahar provincial council, called the claims "baseless".
Because of time needed to investigate the fraud allegations, the final results of the election may not be known until the end of September.
There are concerns continuing claims of fraud could undermine the legitimacy of the election, which Afghanistan's Western allies see as crucial in their campaign against the Taliban.
The moves follow days of ethnic unrest in the regional capital Urumqi in which at least five people have died.
No official reason has been given for the sackings.
Mass protests have followed a spate of stabbings with syringes blamed on Uighur Muslim separatists. Unrest in Urumqi in July left nearly 200 dead.
ANALYSIS Michael Bristow, BBC News, Urumqi It is not entirely unusual for a communist party boss to be sacked in China following an accident, scandal or some kind of crisis. It is one of only a few ways the authorities can show ordinary people that they've taken their feelings into consideration.
But few officials have been sacked quite as publicly as Li Zhi, Urumqi's former party chief. The fact that he has been forced out while this current phase of unrest has yet to subside, reveals just how serious the situation is here.
It also shows how desperate the country's national leaders are to persuade Urumqi's Han Chinese population to calm down. But this sacking might not appease them: the protesters had called for Mr Li to step down, but many also want to see the back of Xinjiang's party boss, Wang Lequan.
Xinhua first announced that Urumqi Communist Party chief Li Zhi was to be replaced by Zhu Hailun, the head of Xinjiang region's law-and-order committee.
A later statement added that Liu Yaohua, director of the Xinjiang Autonomous Regional Public Security Department, had also been dismissed.
Correspondents say that protesters who have marched in their thousands through Urumqi in recent days have demanded Mr Li's dismissal for failing to provide public safety.
The BBC's Michael Bristow in Urumqi says the sacking is unusual as it shows the Chinese authorities believe they may have made mistakes in the handling of the unrest.
Tight security
Security in Urumqi has been tight this week, after thousands of Han Chinese demonstrated over the alleged hypodermic syringe stabbings.
In fresh unrest on Saturday, angry Han Chinese rushed to the city's main square following reports that three Uighur men had attacked a child with needles.
Video of the incident showed police driving the boy away and the crowd being dispersed.
China's top security official, Meng Jianzhu, arrived in the city on Friday to try to restore order.
He was quoted by Xinhua as saying the syringe attacks were a continuation of the July unrest in which 200 people - mostly Han Chinese - were killed in ethnic riots.
Xinjiang's population is evenly split between Uighurs and Han Chinese - the country's majority ethnic group. But Hans make up three-quarters of Urumqi's population.
Tension between the Uighur and Han communities has been simmering for many years, but July's ethnic unrest was the worst for decades.
It began when crowds of Uighurs took the streets to protest about mistreatment - but their rally spiralled out of control and days of violent clashes followed.
The book—a series of essays and anecdotes that work together—forms an argument in two parts. The first part argues that the oppression of women in (mostly) developing countries is a devastating and under-recognized injustice that’s the equivalent of slavery, and that demands a moral and political movement as focused and principled as the campaign against slavery to bring it to an end. The second discusses practical ways to create this movement and effect the change that’s needed.
Kristof, a New York Times columnist, and WuDunn, a former Times foreign correspondent who now works independently on multimedia projects involving women’s issues, make their first case effectively, drawing on their years of research (and it’s clear they know the subject and its complexities very well). They tell how women are promised work, then sold into sexual slavery and imprisonment, while authorities turn a blind eye. They tell how these women are beaten, and raped, and drugged if they try to resist the men who have bought them; how many contract AIDS from forced sex work without protection, and die in their twenties; and how returning them to families and normal life is complicated by shame and addiction. They tell how in some cultures it’s accepted practice for a man to rape the woman he wants to marry to force her to submit to him, and how in others it’s common for rape to be used as a weapon by criminals, or in family feuds—the perpetrators secure in the knowledge that shame will prevent the victim from reporting the attack to the authorities (and will often result in the victim’s suicide). They describe how families and states fail to invest in education and healthcare for women, so that girls who could be an economic asset to their families and country instead end up controlled by and dependent on male relatives, undernourished and often dead at a young age from preventable diseases, or African women who suffer fistulas in childbirth (a painful, embarrassing condition, but curable by a simple operation) are abandoned to die on the edges of villages. They describe how some traditions that may be seen as oppressive, and are at least very dangerous to women’s health, like genital cutting, can become so ingrained in a culture that women themselves support them.
The authors make their argument through a combination of statistics and some truly horrifying stories of individuals they’ve met who have been subjected to this kind of oppression—such as 14-year-old Mahabouba Muhammad, from Ethiopia. Mahabouba was abandoned by her parents, then sold into marriage by a neighbor. She found herself a virtual prisoner, raped by her “husband” and constantly beaten by his first wife. She became pregnant and ran away, but—as a pregnant and “married” woman—no relatives would help her and she was left to give birth alone. By the time help finally arrived, she had suffered obstructed labor (the baby died inside her) and internal injuries that left her doubly incontinent and unable to walk. Her relatives, fearing she was cursed, left her alone in a hut after removing the door, hoping hyenas would kill her. Only her indomitable will to live, and the fortuitous presence of a Western missionary in a nearby village, allowed her to survive.
The second part of the authors’ argument—practical ways to aid women—is sometimes on shakier ground. But this is mostly due to their honesty about the complexity of the problems faced by those who try to come from outside to fight the oppression of women in places where it’s deeply ingrained: “‘This is our culture!’ a Sudanese midwife declared angrily when we asked about cutting. ‘We all want it. Why is it America’s business?’”
They describe their own attempts to buy prostitutes out of slavery, and the social conditions that make restoring these women to a normal life so difficult. They tell of an attempt to help a woman dying in childbirth in an African hospital, and the institutional, social, and financial problems that foiled that effort. They discuss how their initial support for legalization of prostitution was undercut by the more sordid reality they discovered behind the apparent success of just such a legal zone in India (in Kolkata), and examine how legalization of prostitution in the Netherlands compares as an anti-trafficking technique with the criminalization of sex-service purchases in Sweden. They point out how the campaign against female circumcision has been set back by the campaigners’ use of terminology (“female genital mutilation”) that turned the people they wanted to help against them. They point out over and over the inadequacies of the law—and of those who are supposed to enforce it—in the face of tradition and silence and public indifference.
This question of legality fits the anti-slavery analogy less well. Slavery was legal, and the abolitionists focused on arguing that it should become illegal. Once it was illegal, the trade stopped. Nowhere in the world are rape (outside of marriage), or enforced sexual slavery actually legal. The problem—and several of the stories the authors relate make this very clear—is the indifference or corruption of the authorities, and the silence of the victim, who would be subject to public humiliation were she to admit to her ordeal. Similarly, the denial of schooling or medical care often reflects families’ ignorance of the earning potential of healthy, educated women.
Given their understandable suspicion of the effectiveness of corrupt and conservative authorities in fighting injustice, and their equally understandable discomfort with attempts by outsiders to impose change in places they don’t fully understand, much of Kristof and WuDunn’s proposed solution to the problem involves supporting individuals they call “social entrepreneurs.”
They tell the story of Mukhtar Mai, in Pakistan, who was gang-raped and expected to commit suicide—but protested, instead. With the compensation she eventually received, she started her own school and social-welfare organizations and then started to speak out nationally and internationally against endemic violence against women in the country—often in a risky conflict with Pervez Musharraf’s government, which didn’t want its reputation sullied abroad. They write about Usha Narayane, who fought back against the gangsters who used rape to control her slum neighbourhood in India; Sunitha Krishnan, a literacy worker whose experience of rape at the hands of a group of men who objected to her organizing women in their village led her to found a group dedicated to opposing trafficking; and Edna Adan, who, against all odds, built a modern maternity hospital in Somaliland.
Kristof and WuDunn stress the importance of individuals speaking up and resisting—but it’s here that their proposals (or, at least, their exhortations) seem questionable. Mukhtar Mai, Usha Narayane, and Sunitha Krishnan are clearly remarkable women, and deserve every support, but it is also true that they are very rare, brave, and driven individuals—and lucky, because their work clearly carries a very high risk. In a society where all the power is elsewhere, resisting is very likely to end in defeat and quite possibly death. Even though the authors themselves, relatively affluent Westerners, clearly do not lead a safe life (there’s a very casual reference to Kristof’s involvement in a plane crash in the Congo), it still seems that it’s no one’s place to push others to take such risks. It’s not enough to rely on a few brave individuals being prepared to fight for change.
The authors are more convincing when they make a case for improving education for women, and for other initiatives (often local and small-scale) that empower women financially. Women who are well-educated and who have an independent income naturally find a voice in the family and in democratic society. They gain the power to speak out and resist the injustice they see around them, or are suffering themselves.
As the authors note, this is also consonant with the growing evidence suggesting that empowering women as political leaders alters policy, often in ways that empower other women. In my research, I have found that voters, especially male, are willing to alter their beliefs about women’s role in society when they see women leaders and, importantly, are then more likely to vote for women. I have also found that voter-information campaigns are effective in altering how slum dwellers in India vote—suggesting that the power of the ballot can potentially be harnessed to enable local action for women’s rights.
Kristof and WuDunn conclude by exhorting readers to take action. In an earlier chapter, the authors mention that stories about individuals are much more effective in promoting action than statistics. They might have more confidence in the stories they tell. The exhortation feels unnecessary, and perhaps even patronizing. The case for change has already been made—and some of the actions they suggest to casual readers, such as signing up for e-mail updates from www.womensnews.org and www.worldpulse.com, or volunteering in the developing world, sometimes feel more like an attempt at moral improvement of Westerners than effective ways to bring about change elsewhere.
Over and over, the narratives make the same point: the problem here is the invisibility of the oppression, the silence and powerlessness of the humiliated and the uneducated, the indifference of the unknowing world. It becomes clear that the answer is to bring what is hidden into the light—whether it’s oppression or neglect of individuals or groups, or the corruption of authorities—and to make it matter. That may be achieved by publicly supporting the brave individuals who speak out, and organize, and resist; or by working to give other women the economic status and education to be able to speak out without risk, to ensure for themselves that laws are enforced and women are treated with respect. It may also be achieved by using our positions as citizens of a rich and powerful country with relative freedom of speech to speak truths and make moral arguments that others don’t have the influence to make or freedom to say. In this book, Kristof and WuDunn have done exactly that.
Rohini Pande is Kamal professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries. She has examined the role of microfinance in enhancing social capital among women in India, as well as the role of gender quotas in politics in changing voter perceptions. She is now examining the role of information in enabling slum dwellers to hold politicians accountable (see www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/rohini-pande).
Imagine if you waved to someone and, without your knowledge, a high-resolution camera took a photograph of your hand, capturing your fingerprints. You might be upset. Or—if you were visiting Disneyland, where they already make an image of your fingerprint to save you from waiting in a long line—you might find the novelty of the technology, and the immediate benefits…gratifying. The ambivalence we sometimes feel about new technologies that reveal identifiable personal information balances threats to privacy against incremental advantages. Indisputably, the trends toward miniaturization and mass-market deployment of cameras, recording devices, low-power sensors, and medical monitors of all kinds—when combined with the ability to digitally collect, store, retrieve, classify, and sort very large amounts of information—offer many benefits, but also threaten civil liberties and expectations of personal privacy. George Orwell’s vision in 1984 of a future in which the government has the power to record everything seems not so farfetched. “But even Orwell did not imagine that the sensors would be things that everybody would have,” says McKay professor of computer science Harry Lewis. “He foresaw the government putting the cameras on the lampposts—which we have. He didn’t foresee the 14-year-old girl snapping pictures on the T. Or the fact that flash drives that are given away as party favors could carry crucial data on everybody in the country.”
It’s a Smaller World
Information technology changes the accessibility and presentation of information. Lewis gives talks on the subject of privacy to alumni groups in private homes, and often begins with an example that puts his hosts on the hot seat. He projects a GoogleEarth view of the house, then shows the website Zillow’s assessment of how much it is worth, how many bedrooms and bathrooms and square feet it has. Then he goes to fundrace.huffingtonpost.com, an interface to the Federal Elections Commission’s campaign-contributions database. “Such information has always been a matter of public record,” says Lewis, “but it used to be that you had to go somewhere and give the exact name and address and they would give you back the one piece of data. Now you can just mouse over your neighborhood and little windows pop up and show how much money all the neighbors have given.” In the 02138 zip code, you can see “all the Harvard faculty members who gave more than $1,000 to Barack Obama,” for example. “This seems very invasive,” says Lewis, “but in fact it is the opposite of an invasion of privacy: it is something that our elected representatives decided should be public.”
Technology has forced people to rethink the public/private distinction. “Now it turns out that there is private, public, and really, really public,” Lewis says. “We’ve effectively said that anyone in an Internet café in Nairobi should be able to see how much our house is worth.” Lewis has been blogging about such issues on the website www.bitsbook.com, a companion to Blown to Bits:Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, the 2008 book of which he is a coauthor. “We think because we have a word for privacy that it is something we can put our arms around,” he says. “But it’s not.”
One of the best attempts to define the full range of privacy concerns at their intersection with new technologies, “A Taxonomy of Privacy,” appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 2006. Its author, Daniel Solove, now a professor at George Washington University Law School, identified 16 privacy harms modulated by new technologies, including: information collection by surveillance; aggregation of information; insecurity of information; and disclosure, exposure, distortion, and increased accessibility of information.
That privacy would be a concern of the legal profession is not surprising. What is surprising is that computer scientists have been in the vanguard of those seeking ways to protect privacy, partly because they are often the first to recognize privacy problems engendered by new technologies and partly because the solutions themselves are sometimes technological. At Harvard, the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) has become a focal point for such inquiry. CRCS, which brings computer scientists together with colleagues from other schools and academic disciplines, was founded to develop new ideas and technologies for addressing some of society’s most vexing problems, and prides itself on a forward-looking, integrative approach. Privacy and security have been a particular focus during the past few years.
Database linking offers one such area of concern. If you tell Latanya Sweeney, A.L.B. ’95, nothing about yourself except your birth date and five-digit zip code, she’ll tell you your name. If you are under the age of 30 and tell her where you were born, she can correctly predict eight or nine digits of your nine-digit Social Security number. “The main reason privacy is a growing problem is that disk storage is so cheap,” says the visiting professor of computer science, technology, and policy at CRCS. “People can collect data and never throw anything away. Policies on data sharing are not very good, and the result is that data tend to flow around and get linked to other data.”
Sweeney became interested in privacy issues while earning her doctorate at MIT in the mid 1990s. Massachusetts had recently made “anonymized” medical information available. Such data are invaluable for research, for setting up early infectious-disease detection systems, and other public-health uses. “There was a belief at the time that if you removed explicit identifiers—name, address, and Social Security number—you could just give the data away,” she recalls. That dogma was shattered when Sweeney produced a dramatic proof to the contrary.
The medical data that had been made available included minimal demographic information: zip code, birth date, and gender, in addition to the diagnosis. So Sweeney went to the Cambridge City Hall and for $25 purchased a voter list on two diskettes: 54,000 names. By linking the demographic information in the voter database to the demographic information in the publicly available medical records, Sweeney found that in most cases she could narrow the demographic data down to a single person, and so restore the patient’s name to the record. She tried this data-linking technique for then-governor William F. Weld ’66, J.D.’70. Only six people in Cambridge shared his birthday. Just three of them were men. And he was the only one who lived in the right zip code. Sweeney had reidentified someone in a putatively anonymous database of private medical information. The system had worked, yet data had leaked. Newspaper coverage of her testimony to the state legislature about what she had discovered ultimately brought a visit from the State Police. “That was my introduction to policy,” she says with a laugh. (She was recently named to the privacy and security seat of the Health Information Technology policy committee in the Obama administration.)
Later, she proved that her results were not unique to Cambridge. Fully 87 percent of the United States population is uniquely identified by date of birth, five-digit zip code, and gender, she says: “So if I know only those three things about you, I can identify you by name 87 percent of the time. Pretty cool.” In fact, Sweeney’s ability to identify anyone is close to 100 percent for most U.S. zip codes—but there are some interesting exceptions. On the west side of Chicago, in the most populated zip code in the United States, there are more than 100,000 residents. Surely that should provide some anonymity. “For younger people, that’s true,” she says, “but if you are older, you really stand out.” Another zip code skews the opposite way: it is on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York and includes only dormitories. “Here is a tiny population,” she says, pulling up a graphic on her computer. “Only 5,000 people.” But because they are all college students of about the same age, “they are so homogenous…that I still can’t figure out who is who.”
A potentially even more serious privacy crisis looms in the way Social Security numbers (SSNs) are assigned, Sweeney says. “We are entering a situation where a huge number of people could tell me just their date of birth and hometown, and I can predict their SSN. Why is this a problem? Because in order to apply for a credit card, the key things I need are your name, your date of birth, your address, and your SSN. Who is the population at risk? Young people on Facebook.”
Facebook asks for your date of birth and hometown, two pieces of information that most young people include on their pages simply because they want their friends to wish them a happy birthday. The problem is that SSNs have never been issued randomly—the first three digits are a state code, the second two are assigned by region within state—and the process is described on a public website of the Social Security Administration. Starting in 1980, when the Internal Revenue Service began requiring that children have SSNs to be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, the numbers started being assigned at birth. Thus, if you know a person’s date and location of birth, it becomes increasingly simple to predict the SSN.
One way or another, says Sweeney, someone is going to exploit this privacy crisis, and it “is either going to become a disaster or we’ll circumvent it.” (Canada and New Zealand, she notes, may have similar problems.) “But there are many easy remedies,” she adds. She has proposed random assignment of SSNs from a central repository. She has also devised solutions for setting up public-health surveillance systems that don’t reveal personal information, but still work as early-warning systems for infectious-disease transmission or bioterror attacks.
Sweeney believes that technological approaches to privacy problems are often better than legislative solutions, because “you don’t lose the benefits of the technology.” One of her current projects, for example, aims to make sure that technologies like photographic fingerprint capture are implemented in such a way that personal privacy is maintained and individuals’ rights aren’t exposed to abuse.
Scientists have long been excited by the possibilities of using biometric information such as fingerprints, palmprints, or iris scans for positive identification: people could use them to open their cars or their homes. But just how private are fingerprints? With a grant from the National Institutes of Justice, Sweeney and her students have shown that inexpensive digital cameras are already good enough to capture fingertip friction-ridge information at a range of two to three feet, and image resolution and capture speed are improving all the time, even as the cost of the technology keeps dropping. As a result, because it is contactless and very cheap, photographic fingerprint capture could become “the dominant way that prints are captured in a lot of public spaces,” Sweeney explains. That means fingerprint databases are everywhere, and “you don’t have any control over the use of those prints, if somebody wanted to make a false print, or track you. It is like walking around with your Social Security number on your forehead, to an extent. It is a little different because it isn’t linked to your credit report or your credit card”—but it does not require a tremendous leap of imagination to picture a world where credit cards require fingerprint verification.
Sweeney began working with fingerprints because of concerns that, given the huge numbers of fingerprints in linked databases, there would be false positive matches to the FBI’s crime database. “To the extent that fingerprint matching has been successful, it might be because only criminals are fingerprinted and criminals tend to repeat crimes,” she says. But she was “ridiculed a lot by law enforcement for making those statements,” until the Madrid train bombings in 2004. When a print at the scene was falsely matched by the FBI to a lawyer in California, it became clear that the science of fingerprint matching needed to be studied more deeply. (Palmprints ultimately may have a better chance at providing a unique match.) Furthermore, Sweeney points out, “What if someone advocated replacing Social Security numbers with fingerprints? If something goes horribly wrong with my number, I can get a new one. I can’t really get new fingerprints.”
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Tyler Moore, left, and Allan Friedman
A Legal Privacy Patchwork
As the Facebook/SSN interaction and the ability to capture fingerprints with digital photography illustrate, social changes mediated by technology alter the context in which privacy is protected. But privacy laws have not kept up. The last burst of widespread public concern about privacy came in the 1970s, when minicomputers and mainframes predominated. The government was the main customer, and fear that the government would know everything about its citizens led to the passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. That law set the standard on fair information practices for ensuing legislation in Europe and Canada—but in the United States, the law was limited to circumscribing what information the government could collect; it didn’t apply to commercial enterprises like credit-card companies. No one imagined today’s situation, when you can be tracked by your cell phone, your laptop, or another wireless device. As for ATM transactions and credit-card purchases, Sweeney says “pretty much everything is being recorded on some database somewhere.”
The result is that even the 1974 law has been undermined, says CRCS postdoctoral fellow Allan Friedman, because it “does not address the government buying information from private actors. This is a massive loophole, because private actors are much better at gathering information anyway.”
As new privacy concerns surfaced in American life, legislators responded with a finger-in-the-dike mentality, a “patchwork” response, Friedman continues. “The great example of this is that for almost 10 years, your video-rental records had stronger privacy protection than either your financial or your medical records.” The video-rental records law—passed in 1988 after a newspaper revealed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s rentals—was so narrowly crafted that most people think it doesn’t even apply to Netflix. “Bork didn’t have much to hide,” Friedman says, “but clearly enough people in Congress did.” Medical records were protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in 1996, but financial records weren’t protected until the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. (Student records are protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, passed in 1974, while the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed 1998, prohibits the online collection of personal information from children under the age of 13.) “Legally,” Friedman concludes, “privacy in this country is a mishmash based on the common-law tradition. We don’t have a blanket regulation to grant us protection,” as Europe does.
The End of Anonymity
Friedman co-taught a new undergraduate course on the subject of privacy last year; it covered topics ranging from public policy and research ethics to wiretapping and database anonymity. “If there is a unified way to think about what digital systems have done to privacy,” he says, it is that they collapse contexts: social, spatial, temporal, and financial. “If I pay my credit-card bill late, I understand the idea that it will affect a future credit-card decision,” he explains. “But I don’t want to live in a society where I have to think, ‘Well, if I use my card in this establishment, that will change my creditworthiness in the future’”—a reference to a recent New York Times Magazine story, “What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know about You?” It reported that a Canadian credit-card issuer had discovered that people who used their card in a particular pool hall in Montreal, for example, had a 47 percent chance of missing four payments during the subsequent 12 months, whereas people who bought birdseed or anti-scuff felt pads for the legs of their furniture almost never missed payments. These disaggregated bits of information turn out to be better predictors of creditworthiness than traditional measures, but their use raises concerns, Friedman points out: “We don’t know how our information is being used to make decisions about us.”
Take the case of someone with a venereal disease who doesn’t want the people in his social network to know. “If I go to the hospital and the nurse who sees me happens to live down the street,” says Friedman, “maybe I don’t want her peeking at my medical records.” That particular threat has always been there in charts, he notes, but problems like this scale up dramatically with online systems. Now the nurse could check the records of everyone on her street during a coffee break. He cites a related example: “Massachusetts has a single State Police records system and there have been tens of thousands of lookups for Tom Brady and other local sports stars.” Unlike celebrities, ordinary people have not had to worry about such invasions of privacy in the past, but now computers can be used to find needles in haystacks—virtually every time. There are nearly seven billion people on the planet: a big number for a human brain, but a small number for a computer to scan. “John Smith is fairly safe,” says Friedman, “unless you know something critical about John Smith, and then all of a sudden, it is easy to find him.”
Digital systems have virtually eliminated a simple privacy that many people take for granted in daily life: the idea that there can be anonymity in a crowd. Computer scientists often refer to a corollary of this idea: security through obscurity. “If you live in a house, you might leave your door unlocked,” Friedman says. “The chances that someone is going to try your front door are fairly small. But I think you have to lock your door if you live in an apartment building. What digital systems do is allow someone to pry and test things very cheaply. And they can test a lot of doors.”
He notes that computers running the first version of Windows XP will be discovered and hacked, on average, in less than four minutes, enabling the criminal to take control of the system without the owner’s consent or knowledge (see online Extra at www.harvardmag.com/extras). Botnets—networks of machines that have been taken over—find vulnerable systems through brute force, by testing every address on the Internet, a sobering measure of the scale of such attacks. (Another measure: the CEO of AT&T recently testified before Congress that Internet crime costs an estimated $1 trillion annually. That is clearly an overestimate, says Friedman, but nobody knows how much Internet crime actually does cost, because there are no disclosure requirements for online losses, even in the banking industry.)
The durability of data represents another kind of contextual collapse. “Knowing whether something is harmful now versus whether it will be harmful in the future is tricky,” Friedman notes. “A canonical example occurred in the 1930s, when intellectuals in some circles might have been expected to attend socialist gatherings. Twenty years later,” during the McCarthy era, “this was a bad piece of information to have floating around.” Friedman wonders what will happen when young bloggers with outspoken opinions today start running for political office. How will their earlier words be used against them? Will they be allowed to change their minds?
Because personal information is everywhere, inevitably it leaks. Friedman cites the research of former CRCS fellow Simson Garfinkel, now an associate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, who reported in 2003 that fully one-third of 1,000 used hard drives he had purchased on eBay and at swap meets still contained sensitive financial information. One that had been part of an ATM machine was loaded with thousands of credit-card numbers, as was another that a supermarket had used to transmit credit-card payments to its bank. Neither had been properly “wiped” of its data.
Data insecurity is not just accidental, however. Most Web-based data transmitted over wireless networks is sent “in the clear,” unencrypted. Anyone using the same network can intercept and read it. (Google is the only major Web-based e-mail provider that offers encryption, but as of this writing, users must hunt for the option to turn it on.) Harry Lewis smiled at the naiveté of the question when asked what software the laptop used to write this article would need to intercept e-mails or other information at a Starbucks, for example. “Your computer is all set up to do it, and there are a million free “packet sniffers” you can download to make it easy,” he said. And the risk that somebody might detect this illegal surveillance? “Zero, unless somebody looks at your screen and sees what you are doing,” because the packet sniffers passively record airborne data, giving out no signals of their presence.
Civil libertarians are more concerned that the government can easily access electronic communications because the data are centralized, passing through a relatively few servers owned by companies that can legally be forced to allow surveillance without public disclosure. Noting that the conversation tends to end whenever privacy is pitted against national-security interests, Friedman nevertheless asks, “Do we want to live in a society where the government can—regardless of whether they use the power or not—have access to all of our communications? So that they can, if they feel the need, drill down and find us?”
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Harry Lewis
Social Changes
Paralleling changes in the way digital systems compromise our security are the evolving social changes in attitudes toward privacy. How much do we really value it? As Lewis points out, “We’ll give away data on our purchasing habits for a 10-cent discount on a bag of potato chips.” But mostly, he says, “people don’t really know what they want. They’ll say one thing and then do something else.”
Noting young people’s willingness to post all kinds of personal information on social networking sites such as Facebook—including photographs that might compromise them later—some commentators have wondered if there has been a generational shift in attitudes towards privacy. In “Say Everything,” a February 2007 New York Magazine article, author Emily Nussbaum noted:
Younger people….are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reed or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not…. So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.
Some bloggers, noting that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have lived communally, have even suggested that privacy may be an anomalous notion, a relatively recent historical invention that might again disappear. “My response to that,” says Lewis, “is that, yes, it happened during the same few years in history that are associated with the whole development of individual rights, the empowerment of individuals, and the rights of the individual against government authorities. That is a notion that is tied up, I think, with the notion of a right to privacy. So it is worrisome to me.”
Nor is it the case that young people don’t care about privacy, says danah boyd, a fellow at the Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies how youth engage with social media. “Young people care deeply about privacy, but it is a question of control, not what information gets out there,” she explains. “For a lot of teenagers, the home has never been a private place. They feel they have more control on a service like Facebook or MySpace than they do at home.”
She calls this not a generational difference, but a life-stage difference. Adults, boyd says, understand context in terms of physical space. They may go out to a pub on Friday night with friends, but not with their boss. For young people, online contexts come just as naturally, and many, she has found, actually share their social network passwords with other friends as a token of trust or intimacy (hence the analogy to a safe space like a pub).
Teens do realize that someone other than their friends may access this personal information. “They understand the collapse of social context, but may decide that status among their peers is more important,” she notes. “But do they understand that things like birth dates can be used by entities beyond their visibility? No. Most of them are barely aware that they have a Social Security number. But should they be the ones trying to figure this out, or do we really need to rethink our privacy structures around our identity information and our financial information?
“My guess,” boyd continues, “is that the kinds of systems we have set up—which assume a certain kind of obscurity of basic data—won’t hold going into the future. We need to rethink how we do identity assessment for credit cards and bank accounts and all of that, and then to try to convince people not to give out their birth dates.”
Friedman agrees that financial information needs to be handled differently. Why, he asks, is a credit record always open for a new line of credit by default, enabling fraud to happen at any time? “Is it because the company that maintains the record gets a fee for each credit check?” (Security freezes on a person’s credit report are put in place only ex post facto in cases of identity theft at the request of the victim.) Friedman believes that the best way to fight widespread distribution and dissemination of personal information is with better transparency, because that affords individuals and policymakers a better understanding of the risks involved.
“You don’t necessarily want to massively restrict information-sharing, because a lot of it is voluntary and beneficial,” he explains. Privacy, in the simplest of terms, is about context of information sharing, rather than control of information sharing: “It is about allowing me to determine what kind of environment I am in, allowing me to feel confident in expressing myself in that domain, without having it spill over into another. That encompasses everything from giving my credit-card number to a company—and expecting them to use it securely and for the intended purpose only—to Facebook and people learning not to put drunk pictures of themselves online.” Some of this will have to be done through user empowerment—giving users better tools—and some through regulation. “We do need to revisit the Privacy Act of 1974,” he says. “We do need to have more information about who has information about us and who is buying that information, even if we don’t have control.”
There is always the possibility that we will decide as a society not to support privacy. Harry Lewis believes that would be society’s loss. “I think ultimately what you lose is the development of individual identity,” he says. “The more we are constantly exposed from a very young age to peer and other social pressure for our slightly aberrant behaviors, the more we tend to force ourselves, or have our parents force us, into social conformity. So the loss of privacy is kind of a regressive force. Lots of social progress has been made because a few people tried things under circumstances where they could control who knew about them, and then those communities expanded, and those new things became generally accepted, often not without a fight. With the loss of privacy, there is some threat to that spirit of human progress through social experimentation.”
Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.
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