Valour: Ethiopian journalist Dawit Kebede

Part i

Part ii

Ethiopian Political Activists Opposed to Meles Claim Power-Cable Sabotage

By William Davison - May 23, 2011 12:23 PM GMT

Ethiopian political activists opposed to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s rule said they sabotagedpower lines in the west of the country as part of a campaign against the government.

The Tinsae Ethiopian Patriots Union said it cut electricity cables in Awi Zone on May 20, causing outages in towns including Asosa, 477 kilometers (296 miles) west of Addis Ababa, and Metekel, 400 northwest of the capital. Power still hasn’t been restored in some parts of the region, it said in an e-mailed statement today. The group posted pictures on its website that it said showed the damaged cables.

“They must be joking,” Communications Minister Bereket Simon said a phone interview. “There were problems with power supply, but it’s not related to sabotage,” he said, adding that he had only previously heard of Tinsae on “some foreign blogs.”

Tinsae said it and other groups are planning a campaign of “peaceful civil resistance” to bring about “multiparty Western- style democracy where government exists to serve the people” in Ethiopia. A Facebook group calling for protests on May 28 against the rule of Meles’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front said 3,112 people had confirmed they would attend. The date is the 20th anniversary of when rebels marched into Addis Ababa to remove Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist military junta from power.

Crackdown

Tinsae says it is composed of members of the now defunct Coalition for Unity and Democracy that led street protests after a disputed 2005 election resulting in a crackdown by security forces that left 193 people dead.

In March, the group said it distributed pamphlets in three of the major Ethiopian languages calling for protests this month. At the time, the group also appealed to the country’s armed forces to support its campaign.

The EPRDF won more than 99 percent of 547 parliamentary seats in May 2010 elections that European Union observers said failed to meet certain “international commitments.” Ethiopia’s economy has grown by an average of 11 percent for the last 7 years, International Monetary Fund data shows. The country ranks 157th out of 169 countries ranked in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, education and living standards.

To contact the reporter on this story: William Davison in Addis Ababa via Nairobi atpmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Richardson in Nairobi atpmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

Ethiopia buys unmanned aerial vehicles from BlueBird

Written by defenceWeb
http://www.defenceweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15527:ethiopia-buys-unmanned-aerial-vehicles-from-bluebird&catid=35:Aerospace&Itemid=107
Monday, 23 May 2011 12:14

The Ethiopian army has ordered unmanned aerial vehicles from Israeli manufacturer BlueBird Aero Systems, and has also contracted the company to establish maintenance facilities for the aircraft.

BlueBird specialises in small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for military and civilian markets. Its products include the MicroB, SkyLiteB, Boomerang and Blueye. Flight International reported last month that the deal involves a version of the Boomerang and SpyLite.

According to BlueBird, the Boomerang is a man-portable, catapult-launched UAV that is recovered by parachute. The fuel cell powered aircraft has a payload capacity of 2.5 kg and an endurance of three hours. The SpyLite is another small UAV, with the entire system weighing only 40 kg, making it transportable by a two-person team.

BlueBird could not be reached for comment at the time of going to press.

More and more African countries are looking into purchasing UAVs as a cost effective and less labour intensive way of monitoring long borders and infrastructure such as oil installations. In early February this year the Ugandan army signed a contract with another Israeli manufacturer, Aeronautics Defence Systems, for two Orbiter 2 UAVs.

The Orbiter 2 is another small UAV with a three metre wingspan and an endurance of 3.5 hours. Last year the type was selected by the Israeli navy for deployment aboard some of its vessels, Flight International reports.

Meanwhile, Angola could soon purchase Heron UAVs from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and is currently negotiating with the company. IAI has also been promoting the Heron in Africa and has conducted flight demonstrations in Angola and Kenya. However, IAI did not want to comment about its marketing efforts in Africa.

Angola has previously used another Israeli company to supply unmanned aerial systems. In 2003 Aeronautics Defence Systems supplied its Aerostar UAS to patrol oil installations for Chevron/Texaco over a two year period. The contract was reportedly worth US$4 million, according to E&P Magazine. The Aerostar carries a payload of up to 50 kg (110 lbs) and has an endurance of 14 hours.

The Heron 1 is a medium-altitude, long-endurance air vehicle designed to perform strategic reconnaissance and surveillance operations. Capable of automatic take-off and landing, it has a 30,000ft (9,150m) maximum altitude and can be fitted with a variety of payloads totalling 250 kg (550 lb), including infrared, visible light and radar surveillance systems. Communication with the ground is via line of sight data link or satellite/airborne relay.

Ethiopia's human rights record scrutinized

Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi shows it is hard to sustain democracy.

Tristan McConnellMay 23, 2011 06:20

Editor's note: The idea for this article was suggested by a GlobalPost member. What do you think we should cover? Become a member today to suggest and vote on story ideas.

NAIROBI, Kenya — It has proven notoriously tricky for Africa’s rebel armies to transform themselves into democratic governments and Ethiopia offers perhaps the clearest case study on the continent of how and why this transition so rarely happens.

Ethiopia, under rebel fighter turned political leader Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, attracts huge donor support for its aid programs and no-holds-barred criticism for its human rights record.

In May 2010 the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition won all but two of the seats in the 547-member national parliament, a 99.6 percent landslide.

European Union election observers were among the few foreign monitors permitted into the country at the time and judged the election to have fallen short of international standards.

Often seen sporting a flatcap and glasses, Meles cuts a slight figure and looks more like a 1960s intellectual of the sort that might be found smoking Gauloises and discussing Foucault outside a Parisian cafe than a ruthless guerrilla fighter and military tactician.Now aged 56, Meles seized power 20 years ago at the end of a long armed struggle to overthrow Mengistu Haile Mariam, who led the notoriously bloodthirsty "Derg" regime.

Before his 20th birthday Meles gave up medical studies to join the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which was part of the EPRDF anti-Mengistu alliance which rules the country today.

Meles set about rebuilding his country under a system he called “ethnic federalism” which would devolveLike Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Meles argues that with economic growth Ethiopians will eventually become rich enough that tribe no longer matters.

The Ethiopian economy has grown impressively, at about 5 to 7 percent a year recently, albeit from a very low base. Helping Ethiopia along Meles's path are international donors who see in Meles someone they can do business with and who talks their language.

The United States is one of Ethiopia’s biggest backers giving close to a billion dollars in aid in 2008 and in 2009, a figure that was expected to fall to between $500 to $600 million in 2010 and 2011 as food aid was reduced dramatically.

The aim of the aid is to improve the livelihoods of Ethiopia’s 82 million people by funding boreholes (deepwater wells), schools, hospitals, seed and fertilizer particularly in the rural areas where the specter of famine — such as the one that hit Ethiopia and Western television screens in 1984 — is never far away.

But late last year Human Rights Watch, a New York-based pressure group, criticized the delivery of hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid. It alleged that the Meles's EPRDF party uses the aid as a political tool, selectively disbursing foreign-funded support to party members or using the threat of withholding aid to coerce people to join the party.

“Assistance to Ethiopia's government has increased while its human rights record has deteriorated," said Rona Peligal of Human Rights Watch. "Donors are contradicting their own principles on human rights and good governance by increasing funding without adequate safeguards."

Peligal accused the government of manipulating aid and warned that donors may be contributing to human rights violations

The U.S. State Department’s own assessment of Ethiopia’s respect for human rights and progress toward democracy is scathing.

“Human rights abuses reported during the year included unlawful killings, torture, beating, and abuse and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, especially special police and local militias, which took aggressive or violent action with evident impunity in numerous instances,” said the most recent report, published last month by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Human rights groups say there are 300 political prisoners held in Ethiopian prisons and in the run-up to last year’s elections Voice of America’s Amharic service was jammed as were broadcasts by Germany’s Deutsche Welle radio.

Meles, like other ex-rebel leaders on the continent such as Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerke, does not like his authority questioned.

Freedom House, a New York-based think tank, rated Ethiopia 168 out of 191 countries worldwide for its freedom of the press in a report published this month to coincide with World Press Freedom Day.

As if to underscore the point, an event to mark the day in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa was reportedly “hijacked” by government officials. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, independent speakers were replaced by pro-government reporters causing many of the journalists to walk out.

The respected annual survey, "Freedom in the World," also published by Freedom House this year ranked Ethiopia as “not free” for the first time since it began including the country in 2002.

The downgrading from “partly free” was attributed to, “national elections that were thoroughly tainted by intimidation of opposition supporters and candidates as well as a clampdown on independent media and nongovernmental organizations.”

One of the government’s most effective tools in curbing dissent is its monopoly hold over the entire telecommunications industry, and as a result Ethiopia has one of the lowest rates on the continent of internet and mobile phone penetration.

In most African countries it is the simplest thing in the world, upon arrival, to buy a sim card for a few dollars and some airtime on a scratchcard and start making calls. Equally, keeping up with events online is straightforward.

In Ethiopia getting a simcard requires paying-off a local to apply for one at great expense and on your behalf, and news websites are regularly blocked. Local journalists suspect their phone calls and text messages are tapped and their emails are hacked.

Such draconian control may well pay-off. In North Africa the rising costs of living sparked discontent with oppressive and corrupt governments which was then facilitated by social media websites.

Ethiopia maybe oppressive but a Facebook revolution is not about to happen on Meles’ watch even as year-on-year inflation creeps ever higher, reaching almost 30 percent last month. power from the center and prevent domination and oppression by any single ethnic group.

Any Questions ? BBC discuses Ethiopia's aid issue

22-5-11

Eddie Mair chairs the live discussion from Easingwold in North Yorkshire, with panellists columnist Peter Oborne, businesswoman Julia Hobsbawm, Ivan Lewis MP and Alan Duncan MP. Oborne challenges MP Alan Duncan on the validity of aid to Ethiopia''s 'maoist' regime.

The program was broadcast on 20/05/2011.

Listen from the thirtieths minute.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01130qk/Any_Questions_20_05_2011/

A ‘Judgment day’ ad. Removed in Addis Abeba

21/5/2011

By Anko Zuta ,Blogger of De Birhan Blogspot

Few banners and paper ads. that announced May 21, 2011 as world judgment day ,were removed shortly after they were posted in Stadium and Bole areas of Addis Abeba. De Birhan’s associate in Addis Abeba confirmed that similar judgment day posters have been posted in various parts of Addis Abeba bearing the attribution to Harold Egbert Camping’s organisation, familyradio.com and later removed.

The messages written in Amharic read the following, “ግንቦት-13, 2003 የ ፍርድ ቀን ነው:: ተዘጋጀትሃል ? ጥሩንባው ይነፋ : ህዝቡ ይጠንቀቅ :: ”

The billboards were vivid until May 20,2011.There are still some parts of the city where the posters have not been detached, the associate said.

The identity of those who put up the billboards and those who ordered the pulling down was unknown. Some passersby expressed their surprise at the message and the fact that such messges were allowed to be posted in the presence of authorities and government.

The issue of judgment day has been the catch talk in Addis Abeba for the past few days. Similar prediction by Harold Camping in 1994 and reported in the defunct, Godanaw newspaper in Addis Abeba caused a lot of confusion and stress in the Capital.

Similar billboards have appeared in Uganda and Kenya.

Camping an American Evangelical said he used Bible-based numerology to predict dates for the end of the world .His most recent end times prediction is that the Rapture will occur on May 21, 2011 and that God will subsequently completely destroy the Earth and the universe five months later on October 21.

Harold Camping's homemade mathematical formula for the apocalypse works, in part, like this:

• · He bases it on a verse in Chapter 2 of Peter verse 3:8, which says that one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like one day to God.
• Elsewhere it is said that there will be seven thousand years between Noah's flood and the end of the world
• Camping believes that the Noah’s Ark flood happened in the year 4990 BC
• So to Camping, the seven days translates to 7,000 years.
• And 4990 plus 2011, minus one because there was no year '0', equals 7,000 years.
• The date of May 21 has been derived from complex mathematical formula made up from numbers that appear repeatedly in the Bible.

A Polishman among Ethiopians

A century before global Jewry reached out to Ethiopia's community, a researcher named Jacques Faitlovitch sowed the seeds for a future ingathering.

By Ofer AderetPublished 09:50 20.05.11 http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/a-polishman-among-ethiopians-1.362983

An odd sculpture recently appeared on the Tel Aviv University campus, following a complex, transcontinental, logistical operation. It was designed in London, assembled in Italy and shipped by sea to Israel. The artwork consists of metal pipes emerging upward from the ground, splitting, and winding around two palm trees. "This expresses continuity and departure," said the sculpture's designer, Israeli-born architect Ron Arad, in a phone call from London.

The sculpture is a memorial to Ethiopian Jews who left their homes between 1977 and 1985 for the exhausting, traumatic journey to Israel. The trek took them from Ethiopia to Sudan, and across mountains, deserts, rivers and forests; they faced hunger, thirst, illness, harassment and arrest before winding up in refugee camps

	Jacques Faitlovitch in Ethiopia.
	Photo by: Reproduction photo by Moti Milrod

About a fifth of the people - about 4,000 - died on the way. The others were flown or taken by sea to Israel in several stages that climaxed with the Operation Moses airlift. Six years later, in Operation Solomon, an additional 14,500 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel. This month is the 20th anniversary of that operation.

The statue was commissioned and financed by Michael Benabou, a French-Jewish businessman and a member of the French Friends of Tel Aviv University, which provides scholarships to Ethiopian-Israeli students. Two years ago he decided it was time to dedicate a memorial to these students' community. "It is a tribute to the operation that brought them to Israel, commemorates their suffering, and expresses hope for their future," he said by phone from Paris.

Another artwork commemorating the Ethiopians who died on their way to Israel stands at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. A ceremony is held there every year on Jerusalem Day, the official memorial day for the Ethiopian Jews who perished on the way here. The Jerusalem sculpture was initiated by Uri Rada, chairman of a volunteer association commemorating the Ethiopian Jews; his mother was one of those who died on the way over in the early 1980s. Now he is waging a campaign to collect the names of those 4,000 people and inscribe them on a memorial stone.

Lost brethren

The relationship between the Jews of France and Ethiopia began a century ago, with one man who devoted his life to the latter community. The new sculpture stands opposite Tel Aviv University's central library, where a small, crowded room on the second floor stores the archives of that man, researcher Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch, who died in 1955.

Only a few people outside the Ethiopian Jewish community know who he was. His Tel Aviv house has been abandoned for years. However, thanks to Faitlovitch's research, visits and diplomacy, Ethiopia's Jews underwent a revolution of consciousness that eventually led them to Israel.

"At first it is hard to believe that a white man, Polish no less, was the one who went to Africa to tell the Ethiopian-Jewish community that they were his lost brethren," said Wasihun Achenefe, a 26-year-old Tel Aviv University law student who works with the Faitlovitch archives.

Faitlovitch was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1881, and visited Ethiopia for the first time in 1904. He received a grant from Baron Edmond de Rothschild to "look for black Jews," newspapers reported at that time. The European scholar, who had studied at the school for oriental languages at the Sorbonne in Paris, astounded the Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, with his fluent command of the country's languages, and told him that the Ethiopian Jewish tribes were connected to white Jews elsewhere in the world.

Several years later, an interview with him was published in Warsaw's Hebrew newspaper Hatzfira. "The first time I came, in 1904, they did not want to believe that I, too, am a Jew, and only after a while did I manage to prove to them that there are many more Jews in the world. Since then they have wanted to be closer to these Jews," the article quotes him. When asked about that mission's chances of success, he said: "I am sure of it. So sure that I have decided to devote my life to this cause."

There are various theories about the community's origins. Some people consider them descendants of the 10 Lost Tribes. Others believe they are descendants of Ethiopian Christians and idolators who accepted Judaism.

Faitlovitch was not the first Westerner to visit the remote Jewish community known by two names: Beta Israel, the term the community uses for itself, and Falasha, a derogatory term meaning exiles, that is commonly used in Ethiopia.

In 1769 a Scottish explorer, James Bruce, set out on an expedition around Ethiopia that included a visit to the Jewish community. Prof. Joseph Halevy, who eventually became Faitlovitch's teacher, was the first Jew to visit the community 100 years later. But he failed to "draw" the community closer to world Jewry, and passed the baton to his pupil.

Faitlovitch tried to tell the Jews and the rest of the world about the community, launching diplomatic efforts in their name. He also tried to convince the community to change its religious practices to conform with rabbinic Judaism. Therefore he opened two Hebrew schools, one of them in Addis Ababa, to teach Judaism and the history of the Jewish people and also to preserve the community's own religious traditions. And before World War I, he sent some of the community's youth to study in Europe and Palestine so they could share their knowledge back in Ethiopia.

"Education was supposed to crack the community's isolation and link it to world Judaism, in order to reconnect this branch that has been forgotten for so long, preserve it, revive it and arouse it out of its apathy," he said.

On his second visit to Ethiopia, in 1909, he met 15 Jewish families in the village of Adi Shohu in the northern district of Tigre. He related his experiences in his book "Masa el Hafalashim" (Journey to the Falasha ; published by Dvir in 1959 ): "When we arrived, the Falasha greeted us enthusiastically. Despite the pouring rain they came out in festive clothes to greet us. They invited us to huts they had built for us and hurried to finish preparing the Sabbath meal ... After the work was done, all the Falasha gathered in the synagogue for Friday night services. The prayer lasted all night long with occasional breaks to eat ... the Falashas occasionally sang in religious exhilaration ... I told them the Jewish people wished to convey friendship and told them my trip's goal."

Faitlovitch fought Christian missionaries, who sought to make the Jewish community adopt the "real" religion. He would give the boys Hebrew names and organize bar mitzvahs for them, causing the Protestant missionaries to complain about "the French missionary."

In a Gonder suburb, he met converts from Judaism. "They said they were happy to see me in their country again and said they wanted to return to their forefathers' faith. They told me: 'Your presence encourages us and we all want to return to being Falasha - do not forget us, we are Falashas too.'"

In his book, Faitlovitch says they were forced to abandon Jewish practices. "The Falasha artisans were compelled to undertake all sorts of forced labor for senior officials ... so they could not avoid working on the Sabbath and eating forbidden foods. Resistance was punished severely. One man who refused to desecrate the Sabbath was chained and detained until he agreed to work on the Sabbath."

Years on the road

Faitlovitch became a legend in Ethiopia and many people respected him. Pictures in his archives show him in white clothes and a black hat in order to impress his audience during addresses in Ethiopia. "He told us stories about Jerusalem and the Jewish people. No one wanted to listen to the priests' stories, only to Faitlovitch's," recalled one of his students, Yona Boagle. But others say he treated some of his pupils resolutely and patronizingly.

Faitlovitch spent years traveling, and had no permanent residence until his final years. Between his visits to Ethiopia, which he traversed on a mule, he traveled the world to raise money for the Falasha Jews, helped by his contacts with diplomats and important Jewish institutions.

Faitlovitch continued with his strenuous work even in the face of tough diplomatic circumstances. For example, he returned to Ethiopia in 1942, shortly after the Italian occupation of Ethiopia ended and amid reports of the destruction of European Jewry. He said at a farewell party in Jerusalem, "According to reports that have reached me from Abyssinia (Ethiopia ) ... life is returning to normal ... The government is willing to oblige the Jewish exiles, expelled from their European states by the Nazis ... and allow entry to any Jewish group willing to settle in Abyssinia."

His good contacts with senior Ethiopian officials gained him two government jobs. In 1942 he was appointed inspector general of the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, and two years later he became an adviser at the Ethiopian Embassy in Cairo, a job he held for two years. It was an odd position for a Jew: representing a Christian African power in a Muslim capital, Haaretz wrote after his death.

In 1947 Faitlovitch started to actively promote Ethiopian immigration to the Land of Israel. In a letter to the Joint, he said the destruction of European Jewry made it the Jewish people's duty to help the Falashas move to Palestine. "With the millions of Jews who were just now exterminated, we cannot afford to ignore the potential source for Jewish manpower," he argued.

Faitlovitch was the first person who brought an organized group of young Ethiopian Jews to Israel, 30 years before Israel waged a big operation to bring them over. In 1955, 12 Ethiopian Jews came to the Kfar Batya youth village, near Ra'anana, to study Hebrew and Judaism. As part of the agreement with the Ethiopian authorities, and despite the youths' desires, they had to return to Ethiopia to serve as teachers there.

Faitlovitch spent his final years in a home on Tel Aviv's Vitkin Street, where he kept his collection of books and rare manuscripts, including hundreds of books about Ethiopia, dozens of manuscripts in Ethiopian languages and a historical archive of Ethiopian Jewry. After he died in 1955, his widow gave the house to Tel Aviv's municipality, and it served as a public library. "I want to hope that the Faitlovitch House, which I gave Tel Aviv's municipality ... will be a source of information for all the people who go to Abyssinia and for its Jews," his widow, Miriam, wrote in Haaretz in 1959.

Twenty years later, the municipality moved the library to Tel Aviv University. About a decade ago a doctoral candidate, Haim Admor, started restoring its contents. "It is the community's sole historical archive and is a rarity in the world," he said. Hopefully, Tel Aviv's municipality will pick up the gauntlet and restore the Faitlovitch House. As a first step, it could put up a sign commemorating him.

News in Brief

20-5-2011

*With a hope that the Ethiopian government would liberalize the mobile telephone next year ,a number of foreign companies and local operators have started submitting applications and proposals.

**The attempt of reconciling and reuniting the two rival factions of the Oromo Libeation Front (OLF) to make them come to a gentleman’s agreement has reportedly ended in failure.

*** Prime Minister Meles Zenawi may travel to France at least two times before the end of the year, one is following on from Srakozy's trip to an African Union meeting in Addis Abeba and the other could be in relation to the G7 heads of States meetings.

Source : The Indian Ocean Newsletter and http://www.africaintelligence.com/

The Website also has a report on the former Army Chief of Staff, Tsadkan Gebre Tensai " The former Ethiopian army chief of staff, General Tsadkan Gebre Tensai, has for some time been living in Juba, South Sudan , where he is working on behalf of the United Nations. He lives at the Habesha Continental Hotel, which is owned by an ... "

You may read the rest,

Anonymous and the Arab uprisings - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

Anonymous and the Arab uprisings - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

The cyberactivists discuss their work and the broader global push for freedom of speech and freedom from oppression.

Yasmine Ryan Last Modified:

19 May 2011 18:16

Anonymous's rapid rise from the depths of geekdom to becoming a catalyst and nerve centre for real-life revolutionaries is one that has taken even some of its own members by surprise.

The loosely-knit hive brings anonymous techies, hackers and, increasingly, activists together under a single appellation, united in their non-violent but often illegal collective action.

With high-profile campaigns, centred on "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attacks that knock target websites offline, it has been transformed from a fringe group of law-breaking pranksters that emerged in 2006 into an international movement that draws new recruits by their thousands.

In an interview with a group of Anons conducted on their home turf, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), they tell Al Jazeera that they are fighting, above all, for the free flow of information.

"You can't make a decision on something if you don't know anything about it," one Anon says.

"I'm into this because it's a more modern and technical approach than traditional activism like protesting against [the] G8 or something like that," another adds.

While some traditional activists have criticised the group for its methods, few would argue that its unique cocktail of anonymous civil society and collective action has proven to be powerful agents of change.

Indeed, Amnesty International, the prominent human rights NGO, chose to focus its 2011 annual report on what it describes as the "critical battle [that is] under way for control of access to information, means of communication and networking technology".

Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty's international secretariat, told Al Jazeera that Anonymous' outrage over government and corporate pressure against WikiLeaks underlined the hotly contested power dynamics that surround information.

"The desire to be able to speak freely about what is going on in your life is something that's always there, but what we have with social media is the ability to amplify it," she says.

"Governments are obviously threatened by the fact that activists have become so effective at using these new technologies and social media," she says.

Amnesty considers the use of non-conventional methods by cyberactivists in defense of these principles as justified, so long as they are not violating other people's legitimate right to privacy and security, Brown says.

Yet for Anonymous, personal privacy is not always sacred, as the very public nailing of the HBGary security firm - the firm's CEO's had his email hacked and his reputation destroyed in a stinging revenge attack, after threatening to reveal the identity of leading Anons - in February demonstrated.

Anti-individualism

The antithesis of the rampant individualism that the internet has fostered, through the likes of Facebook and self-promoting blogs, Anonymous represent the untameable wild west of the web, a world where geeks teach the corrupt and powerful a lesson.

Using pseudonyms, the Anons gather in the virtual space created by IRC, a type of online chatroom where they discuss technology, politics and activism, all with a dose of sexual banter and "lulz"(a play on LOL - laugh out loud - that describes the thrill of mischievous, and sometimes nasty, pranks).

The Anons are very much a product of this type of chat, says Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at New York University who has been following the group for several years.

"If you didn't have IRC, you wouldn't have Anonymous. That's where they co-ordinate, that's where they socialise, that's where they have fun, that's where they get to know each other," she explains.

In the parallel, more manicured universe of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has insisted that users make their real names known or face deletion, a principle that internet activists condemn as potentially life-threatening for activists in many parts of the world.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange recently called Facebook an "appalling spy machine", condemning the way in which the social network stores such extensive information on its users, information which can potentially be used against them by authorities.

For those who frequent IRC, in contrast, anonymous free speech is a fundamental value, and one for which they are willing to fight.

Most Anons take precautions to ensure that their identities remain hidden from the authorities, and from their fellow Anons.

"There's definitely people involved who don’t care about the politics, but who want to create a kind of space where people can do politics," Coleman says.

And it is a space to which many activists have turned to in recent months.

"Many people come here [be]cause they don't know [an]other door where to knock to be listened when nobody else hears," one Anon said.

Anonymous and the Arab Spring

While mainstream media was slow to tune in to the revolutionary drumbeat that has been rising in the Arab world, Anonymous was present from the beginning.

Tunisian Anons collaborated with their international counterparts on Operation Tunisia, which was launched on January 2 - well before most Western media outlets had clicked onto the fact that there was a revolution underway.

"We did initially take an interest in Tunisia because of WikiLeaks, but as more Tunisians have joined they care more about the general internet censorship there, so that's what it has become," one Anon told Al Jazeera in the midst of the DDoS attacks on selected Tunisian government sites.

As Anons realised the significance of what was taking place in Tunisia – and the fact that it was being ignored by foreign media – they collaborated with Tunisian dissidents to help them share videos with the outside world.

Anonymous quickly created a "care packet", translated into Arabic and French, offering cyberdissidents advice on how to conceal their identities on the web, in order to avoid detection by the former regime's cyberpolice.

They used their collective brainpower to develop a greasemonkey script - an extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser - to help Tunisians evade an extensive phishing campaign carried out by the government.

After Tunisia, Anonymous' interest in the wave of protest movements did not wane.

In Algeria, where internet use is more limited and web users have been slower to embrace trends like Twitter than their Tunisian neighbours, Operation Algeria never really kicked off, much like the protests on the street.

Operation Egypt, meanwhile, was launched on January 25 at the request of Egyptian activists and is viewed by many Anons as a success. Reflecting the mood on the streets of Cairo, it was decided from the outset not to attack media or to promote violence.

The Anons worked in collaboration with Telecomix, a cluster that uses legal means to promote free speech, torestore mirrors and proxies to help restore Egyptians' access to sites being censored by the government. They even used faxes to communicate important information when the internet was no longer an option.

In the operations for Egypt and Tunisia, some lulzy methods were used that harked back to Anonymous' past, including placing massive orders for pizza to be delivered to the countries’ embassies.

In contrast, the IRC channel for Operation Libya took on a more militant tone, particularly before NATO agreed to impose a no-fly zone when rebels were on the defensive.

"Libyan freedom fighters came to Anonops as a safe meeting point," another Anon explains, referring to how some members of the Libyan opposition used IRC as a virtual shelter early on in the uprising.

"They were really thankful for listening to them and their problems and helping them, although we could only do so much," another Anon adds.

Several Anons interviewed for this article agreed that Anonymous’ interaction with activists in the Arab world had changed the nature and demographics of their own movement.

"Previously, I'd say that Anons were pretty evenly distributed among North America, Europe, and Australia," an Anon says.

"But since Anonymous' actions in Tunisia especially, a lot more have taken up the Anonymous banner, around the Muslim world especially."

Anonymous did, however, have a history of involvement of rallying in support of protest movements against authoritarian governments.

Operation Iran was founded during the protests which followed the country's 2009 contested presidential election. The cyberactivists launched their subgroup to take down the "hitlist" websites of protesters' photos which were being published by the Iranian government's supporters.

Al Jazeera spoke to the founding member of Anonymous Iran, who says his group has around 15 dedicated members, mainly Iranian nationals living overseas, who are joined by hundreds of "seasonal" supports whenever it launches a campaign.

"We don't accept users from inside Iran because of the risk," he says in an email interview.

"We are fighting for freedom of speech and ideas inside of Iran."

Coleman says that, despite such precedents, Tunisia marks a turning point.

"[Anonymous] went to Tunisia because of the censorship. But in some ways, they stayed beyond censorship questions, and that enlarged the types of operations they'd be willing to engage in," she says.

"It really shifted the realm of possibility."

Anons in the West found they shared a common goal with those fighting oppression elsewhere in the world. And crucially, she says, regardless of nationality, religion or politics, Anons the world over are avid geeks.

Jacqui True, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Auckland, affirms that Anonymous' involvement in the Arab Spring has been an exceptional case of kindred spirits meeting in cyberspace.

"They've been led into the Arabic-speaking world by Arabic-speaking activists, who they've found common ground with," she says.

"The internet knows no borders, so even those who come to questions of political freedom and democracy from really different vantage points and from really different experiences can have a common cause."

You can follow Yasmine on Twitter: @yasmineryan