My Global Voices colleagues have been taking time at the end this year to reflect on the past five years of our joint project. I’ve been rather busy with another joint project, my new son Drew, who is a month old today, and haven’t been particularly reflective. (Moments for reflection are generally spent asleep these days.)

Talking with an old friend today gave me the opportunity to step back and reflect a bit. My friend works for a foundation that supports social entrepreneurs and he’s interested in ways that the projects he’s supporting could work together. How could a set of cool, worthwhile organizations supported financially by the same funder somehow become a coherent movement, working together and learning from each other?

It took me a couple of moments to realize that my friend was turning to me for an answer to this question: how do you build a movement? (I’m sleep-deprived, remember?) He’s right – five years in, Global Voices isn’t just a website, a project, or a community. It’s a movement. Reading reflections from GV folks from around the world, it’s clear that Global Voices is a very different thing to different people – a window into other corners of the world, an alternative to despair, an antidote to stereotypes, a technologically-enhanced pilgrimage, a defender of language and culture, and of Article 19 rights, and an odd sort of family. The people who participate in Global Voices do very different things – mapping online censorship, translating texts, collecting links and offering original reporting – for very different reasons.

Believe it or not, this is by design. But it’s taken five years to get there.

Many nonprofit projects are the manifestation of the vision of one or more dedicated founders. That’s not the story behind Global Voices. Yes, Rebecca and I set the ball rolling five years ago with a meeting at Harvard. And we’ve both done what we can to move the work forward, Rebecca using her unparalleled journalistic skills, me leveraging my hard-earned talent for begging.

But the parts of Global Voices we’re proudest of are the results of other people’s passions and energies. Without Sami ben Gharbia, we’d be on the sidelines of the freedom of expression debate in cyberspace, rather than on the frontlines. Had Portnoy Zheng not started translating Global Voices into Chinese, we’d be a monolingual project, working to bring the world to an English-speaking audience, rather than the complex polyglotism we are today. Without Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen, we’d be writing just for blog readers, not reaching out to audiences through partnerships with newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. Had David Sasaki not challenged us to demonstrate that citizen media wasn’t just the province of the wealthy and well-connected, we’d not know about remarkable efforts in Colombia, Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire and dozens of other parts of the world.

When Rebecca and I invited some dozen bloggers from around the world into a conference room at Harvard in late 2004, our goals were pretty simple – we wanted to see if there was common ground between people from different circumstances and cultures, united by a single, simple practice: writing about their thoughts and lives online. By the end of the day, I was so excited and energized that I wanted our group to produce a detailed plan for world domination, complete with marching orders. I was furious at my friends Jim Moore and Joi Ito, who moderated our closing session, because we came out of it not with a concrete plan, but with a general sense that we had some common values that we could build on.

They were right. I was wrong.

Global Voices – the people, the projects – hold together not through a grand, structured design, but because we share some very simple principles: people have a right to speak and an obligation to listen. (That’s my Twitter-sized summary of the Global Voices manifesto, itself a compact little document.) The people and projects who’ve chosen to flock under the GV banner tend to share a fondness for late-night parties in global cities, a strange sense of humor and a fondness for open source software… but the core values that allow us to work together are extremely simple. More complicated, more tactical and less vague and we’d find ourselves excluding some of the remarkable people and the creative ideas they’ve brought to the table. Had we a plan, an agenda, a schedule, we would have said no to ideas that have shaped us, making us what we are today.

Here’s the thing about a movement as inchoate as ours – there’s no way to know what’s coming next. That’s the challenge for Ivan Sigal – who ably took the reins from Rebecca and me eighteen months ago, and who’s kept our project thriving through the toughest of financial times. I don’t think a project like Global Voices can be steered. I think a leader needs to listen, to discover where the community is going and figure out how to smooth the path ahead. It’s the opposite of what a management textbook might tell you to do, a form of leading by following.

So what’s next for Global Voices? I don’t think anyone can tell you. Not just because we can’t predict the Green revolution, the Fijian Coup or the Malagasy crisis. Not just because we don’t know what comes next after Facebook and Twitter. We can’t predict because a movement isn’t predictable – it’s the product of the passions and energies of the people who’ll stay with us, the new ones who’ll find us, and the continuing influence of those who choose to leave us. Global Voices has never stopped surprising me: what’s worked, what hasn’t, what we’ve done and left undone. Here’s hoping for an unpredictable, chaotic, participatory, passionate future built on the simple foundations of speaking and listening.

Many of my colleagues have featured a favorite recent GV post in their meditations. I wanted to do the same, but couldn’t fit the post I’d chosen into the thoughts above. So here it is as a bonus.

In early December of 2008, Mark Dummett of the BBC reported a wonderful “news of the weird” story from Dhaka, Bangladesh – a life-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built at enormous expense. Global journalists sprang into action, documenting a diplomatic spat between Bangladesh and India over ownership of this cultural treasure, talking about the shocking idea of “pirating” another nation’s national symbols.

None of these intrepid reporters actually visited the Bengali Taj, though. Bloggers did, and they weren’t impressed. Aparna Ray translated their posts for Global Voices and explained that it was a poorly-made tourist trap clad in bathroom tiles, not the diamond-studded wonder those hardbitten AFP journalists credulously reported on.

A critical underreported story? An important victory for intercultural understanding? Nope. But as someone who spent far too much time the past five years answering journalistic questions about the credibility of bloggers, I can’t but help celebrating this inversion.

Breaking news: Pastor Warren has released a video condemning the Ugandan anti-gay legislation. (The video was released December 10th, the day after I posted this piece, and after Reverend Kaoma’s press conference.) I’m very grateful that he’s made this statement, and hope that his unambiguous statement will be heard in Uganda, influencing policy on the ground. More on Warren’s statement here.

Could Rick Warren be the man to stop pending anti-gay legislation in Uganda?

That’s the hope of Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Episcopalian Priest from Zambia, the author of a new report from Political Research Associates, which traces a wave of homophobia on the African continent to the efforts of conservative evangelical pastors in the US. In a conference call with members of the media today, Kaoma declared that, “The US culture wars are being exported to Africa. They’re having an impact not just in the US, but also amongst African Christians.”

The culture wars Kaoma refers to have been particularly intense within the Anglican communion, his (and, as it happens, my) church. After the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, to bishop of New Hampshire, a number of bishops moved to “realign” their congregations outside of mainstream Anglican authority. Two new, more conservative Anglican groups have emerged, and some African congregations have aligned with these new groups.

Kaoma argues that, in the mainline US churches, most congregants and pastors are leaning towards progressive Christianity. The more conservative individuals – in the minority – are aligning with the fast-growing churches in Africa. “Conservatives have gone to Africa because they’re going where the numbers are, and because they’re being legitimated by associating themselves with Christians outside the US.”

These conservative pastors, Kaoma argues, “need to demean the leadership of US mainline churches,” and present their views as the legitimate alternative. It’s become common to present the US mainline churches as imperialistic, and to argue that these mainline churches as trying to export non-African values. “Once you appeal to the post-colonial ethos, people are bound to overreact. The entire gay issue has been put into the post-colonial narrative.” Because the issue of gay rights has been turned into a battle about a purported recolonization of the African continent, Kaoma argues, a struggle for gay rights isn’t seen as a human rights issue, but as an attempt to export “un-African” ideas to the African continent.

Uganda has been a particular battleground for this exported culture war. The wife of President Yoweri Museveni, herself an influential MP, is a born-again Christian, and has been instrumental in bringing abstinence-focused anti-AIDS funding to the country. (Helen Epstein’s “God and the Fight Against AIDS” in the New York Review of Books is an excellent introduction to the spread and politicization of evangelical Christianity in Uganda.) And Uganda, bordering on majority Muslim countries, has become a popular venue for evangelical outreach.

Kaoma argues that conservative pastors from the US are coming to Uganda to campaign against sexual equality using tremendously deceptive materials. His key example is a set of talks given by Scott Lively, who a PRA colleague describes as a “holocaust revisionist”, based on his authorship of a book titled “The Pink Swastika“, which argues that the Nazis were closet homosexuals, that they didn’t exterminate gay people, but secretly plotted a gay takeover of the world. (Southern Poverty Law Center’s quick, but thorough, refutation of the work is a worthwhile read.) Reverend Kaoma reports that Lively came to Uganda in March 2009, spoke at a conference organized by the Family Life Network, met with Ugandan parliamentarians as well as church leaders, and warned them that homosexuality is an international, western agenda, being perpetrated by the UN and by human rights defenders as part of a gay plot to take over the world.

Kaoma has some compelling footage that demonstrates the influence Lively’s ideas are having in Uganda. In the video above, Stephen Langa, the director of the Family Life Network, offers a history of the homosexual agenda, as outlined by Lively. David Roberts, of Ex-Gay Watch, unpacks the video, pointing out that Langa quotes at length from a satirical essay, apparently unaware the essay was satire. The history offered is paranoid, false and designed to inspire a hateful counterreaction.

That part of the plan has evidently been quite successful. Kaoma draws a direct line between Lively’s appearance at the FLN conference and the proposed legislation that would sentence gay and lesbian people who’ve committed the crime of having gay sex to, at minimum, life in prison, and could subject gay people who test positive for HIV to execution. Kaoma tells us that the Christian right groups presenting this fantasy of a gay takeover to the Ugandans expressed their hope that Uganda would fight this agenda and take up the war – evidently, that message was well received. (Possibly too well – Kaoma reports that Lively now says the proposed Ugandan legislation goes to far. When a homophobic holocaust denier says your legislation goes to far, you might want to reconsider your plan…)

So how does Rick Warren fit into all this?

Well, Pastor Warren has a long history in Uganda. He’s worked closely with Pastor Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan activist who is focused on pro-abstinence approaches to AIDS treatment and on marginalizing and criminalizing homosexuality. Ssempa has led workshops at Warren’s Saddleback Church, and Warren has visited Uganda at Ssepma’s invitation, meeting with senior Ugandan officials, including the president. Ssempa is evidently one of the major figures in proposing the anti-gay legislation. And he’s willing to use virtually any tactic in fighting what he sees as a homosexual movement – in 2006, a Ugandan paper printed the names and addresses of 45 people Ssempa identified as gay, leading to threats and harrasment.

Warren has severed ties with Ssempa, but has not yet condemned the proposed Ugandan legislation. Kaoma worries that a statement Warren made in Uganda in 2008 – stating that homosexuality is not a human right – is being quoted and used to justify the current proposed legislation. “Here’s the problem I have with pastor Warren – he’s a friend of Kagame, of Museveni,” says Kaoma. “He knows the politics of Uganda, and he’s respected by the MPs
He’s the one who can influence politicians in Uganda.” While Warren has dissociated himself from one extreme Ugandan pastor, he hasn’t dissociated himself with other anti-gay activists in Rwanda and Nigeria. Kaoma hopes that Warren will realize the potential power and influence his words would have in Uganda and clearly denounce this sort of legislation. “Unless Warren tells fundamentalist groups that gays have rights, which need to be protected, theres no respected religious voice saying this. He needs to complement the voice of human rights activists on the ground.”

While I strongly agree with Reverend Kaoma, and believe the proposed legislation is abominable, I thought he was putting too much weight on international activists and not enough responsibility on people in Uganda. I asked whether it was fair to offer his interpretation, given that the majority of Sub-Saharan African countries have laws against homosexual activities – was it possible that the law in Uganda was simply a manifestation of public will and mood?

Reverend Kaoma explained that a framing of homosexuality as an attack on the family has worked extremely well in bringing activist anger to the forefront. The combination of a neo-imperial narrative, an international conspiracy and classic “the gays are out to get your children” are collectively changing attitudes on the ground in countries like Uganda, he argues. He points out that, in most countries where homosexual behavior is banned by law, very few people are arrested and prosecuted for violating those laws. He also referenced King Mwanda, a ruler of the Buganda in the 1880s, who many historians believe was gay. “Even Pastor Ssempa himself accepts this part of Ugandan homosexual history,” says Kaoma. “Gays are part and parcel of African life. What’s strange now is using the Christian religion as a foundation for persecution around homosexuality.”

While Kaoma believes that Ugandans are more liberal about homosexuality than the current bill would lead one to believe, he acknowledges that the masses are not speaking out or supporting the bill. “There’s been a call to go door to door and tell people that ‘if you love your child, then fight homosexuality’. There is a petition going around Uganda in rural areas, saying that homosexuals are recruiting young children in the schools, using money from America. The petition says that if the Americans get just get two kids per school, Uganda as we know it is gone.”

Kaoma argues that the authoritarian nature of Ugandan politics is also making it easier to carry out this sort of crusade. In his native Zambia, the Vice President urged the arrest of gays, but there were no arrests. In Ghana and Kenya, church leaders have advocated cutting ties with the Anglican communion over gay issues, but many churches have refused to comply. But in less representative societies, these crusades – with the support of political authority – have a much higher chance of success.

There are brave Ugandans standing up for gay rights. Frank Mugisha, the leader of Sexual Minorities Uganda (which uses the wonderful acronym SMUG), has been a visible opponent of the legislation, despite the fact that he will likely need to leave the country or face arrest if the bill passes. The Dean of the prestigious Makerere University has publicly opposed the legislation. Such support entails serious risks – Kaoma tells us about meeting with SMUG at a hotel in Kampala – a woman attending the meeting, who is lesbian, stepped out of the hotel as was immediately arrested, beaten and had her money stolen by the police. “And there was nothing we could do,” says Kaoma.

Reverend Kaoma spoke about this story in a sad but calm fashion. But he got quite agitated when I asked him about the possibility that the Anglican church – hugely influential in Uganda – would condemn the legislation. “The Archbishop doesn’t want to be seen as interfering. After the bill passes and people are getting killed, then we’ll hear his voice? Our friends are being rounded up because people think the bill has already been passed.”

If the Archbishop of Canterbury and Rick Warren won’t step up, are there other paths to leverage the Ugandan goverment? Sure – there’s always money. Up to 40% of the Uganda government budget comes from aid dollars. Kaoma tells us that Sweden has declared that if Uganda passes this bill, Sweden will sever all ties. It’s unlikely that the US would take nearly such a dramatic step. But Kaoma leaves us with a challenge: “Don’t just condemn Uganda – accept responsibility for helping start this on American soil.”

That’s tricky, of course. Gay rights groups in the US condemning the legislation simply add fuel to the fire for those who argue that homosexuality is a western plot. And that’s why the voice of someone like Pastor Warren could be so powerful in affirming the human rights of GLBT people and condeming this dangerous legislation.

It’s interesting to note that Reverend Kaoma isn’t the only one linking US conservatives with anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Jeff Sharlet links The Family, a group of politically influential conservative Christians to the proposed Ugandan legislation. I found it interesting that the figures mentioned by Sharlet didn’t come up in Kaoma’s discussion today, or in his report. Kaoma’s report focuses primarily on the Institute on Religion & Democracy. Had I the time to do some original reporting, I’d be very interested in seeing what links exist between these organizations.

Kathryn Joyce of Religion Dispatches has an excellent interview with Reverent Kaoma – very much worth reading if you’re interested in his arguments.

While we’re on the topic of questionable Facebook “features”… I’m happy to see that I wasn’t the only person complaining about Facebook’s “suggestions” today.

Earlier today, Facebook offered this helpful piece of advice:

Facebook suggests I reconnect with Hossein Derakhshan

I’d love to reconnect with Hossein – he’s been on my mind lately. Unfortunately, he’s in Evin Prison in Tehran, and probably isn’t being allowed to check his Facebook account.

Obviously, Facebook doesn’t know this – they’ve got an algorithm that, likely, is sensitive to inactive accounts. (This is pure guesswork on my part, with nothing to back it up.) Rather than prompting those users to return to Facebook, it encourages their active friends to send them a note, bringing them back within the Facebook fold – quite clever, actually, as it’s social pressure, not pressure from the tool itself.

Of course, it’s going to lead to some awkward suggestions – that you reconnect with a deceased loved one, or the girlfriend who dumped you. The brilliant Randall Munroe explored the topic on xkcd today with typically hilarious results.

I posted an angry Facebook status update and tweet complaining about Facebook’s insensitivity. Obviously, I understand that Facebook can’t be expected to know that my friend is a political prisoner being held incommunicado. But they could consider more carefully wording these suggestions. My friend Scott Hill offered this thoughtful insight:

Personally I’ve configured my browser to block the entire right-hand sidebar (mostly for the ads), but I think this feature could be redeemed with with a little more subtlety: maybe label it “Friend of the Day” with the usual links, without the pressure to do something. If it’s someone who has simply fallen off your radar screen, then the message may prod you into thinking about them and even contacting them if the mood strikes. But if that person happens to be dead or ill or imprisoned, it can still serve as a token of memory.

There are ideas that, when you first encounter them, you say, “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”

That’s how I and colleagues at the Berkman Center felt when we saw a preview of Facebook’s Beacon “feature” in November of 2007. Introduced in time for that year’s Christmas shopping season, Beacon used a cookie set on one website (Overstock.com, for example) to display information on Facebook (information that you’d just bought a DVD on Overstock) in your events stream. The geeks in the crowd were nervous because the new feature looked a lot like a cross-site scripting attack, while user advocates like David Weinberger thought the feature represented Facebook either trying to change the nature of privacy or misunderstanding user privacy norms.

Suffice it to say, we thought it was a bad idea. So did Facebook users, who organized online campaigns to protest the feature. Some sued the company. And Facebook, as part of the settlement of a class action suit, recently sent a fascinating email to some users. I received it this morning and it reads as follows:

Facebook is sending you this notice of a proposed class action settlement that may affect your legal rights as a Facebook member who may have used the Beacon program. This summary notice is being sent to you by Court Order so that you may understand your rights and remedies before the Court considers final approval of the proposed settlement on February 26, 2010.

This is not an advertisement or attorney solicitation.

This is not a settlement in which class members file claims to receive compensation. Under the proposed settlement, Facebook will terminate the Beacon program. In addition, Facebook will provide $9.5 million to establish an independent non-profit foundation that will identify and fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security.

For full details on the settlement and further instructions on what to do to opt out of, object to, or otherwise comment upon the proposed settlement, please go to http://www.BeaconClassSettlement.com.

Please do not reply to this email.

Commenting on the settlement – which doesn’t pay affected users anything (fair enough – it’s a mostly free site), but creates a new non-profit foundation to work on online privacy issues – some have noted the irony that you need to choose to opt out of the class should you want to retain your right to sue Facebook over Beacon. (Part of the frustration with Beacon is that you had to choose to opt out of the system and it wasn’t especially easy to turn it off…)

I’d add another irony. As David Weinberger suggested, privacy norms are changing online. I shopped on Overstock.com for the first time in a couple of years, looking at birthstone jewelry to give my wife as a congratulatory gift for giving birth to our child. I bought a necklace… which proved to be sorta chintzy and ugly, and which I promptly returned. I’ve run into a dozen Overstock ads on different sites, each of which urges me to repurchase the ugly necklace I rejected, or similarly dreadful blue topaz jewelry.

It’s the same sort of cross-site behavior I found so uncomfortable in Beacon, though it’s not using the cookie information to publish on my behalf, simply to (ineptly) target ads to me. Perhaps David’s right, and Facebook has succeeded in changing social norms around purchasing. Or perhaps most of us are so good at ignoring web ads that it hardly matters that Overstock is taking what it knows about us and displaying it on other websites.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve discovered that I really dislike blue topaz, but I can’t help thinking every time I see an Overstock ad, “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (”Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

Christopher Dickey posted an interesting, though somewhat odd, story on Newsweek’s web site yesterday. Odd, because there’s nothing in the story that’s new since he began repsearching the story in late August. My guess is that the story hasn’t run until now because it’s a story that has no real facts. It’s about an absurd, Kafka-esque conspiracy… and I worry that Dickey’s article may not be entirely clear on how absurd the conspiratorial accusations are.

Hossein Derakhshan has been in custody in Iran for over a year – I’ve written about his detention on the blog several times. In August, in the wake of arrests after the Green Revolution, a series of show trials went on in Tehran, where an unnamed “spy” was said to have “confessed” to being involved with a vast, global conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. This conspiracy was widely reported in Persian-language media, and the details of the case made it clear to anyone who knew Hossein that he was the “spy” in question.

Friends who follow Persian media closely alerted me to the testimony because I, along with other individuals, were named in the show trial as Hossein’s collaborators. Investigating the story in August, Dickey contacted me to ask about my interpretation of events. I told him that the conspiracy was absurd, that Global Voices and I certainly knew and worked with Hossein, but that we were in no way involved with attempting to overthrow the Iranian government.

Because the story is completely false and because it makes accusations that are blatantly untrue, we decided not to cover the story on Global Voices and introduce the fabrications into the English-language media. Dickey made a different decision and reprints these imaginings – months after they appeared in Persian-language media, along with my denials that I or Global Voices are involved with anything more than promoting blogging around the globe, and then includes this paragraph:

“There are aspects of the testimony that align closely with reality.” Zuckerman continued. “Hossein participated in the first meeting of Global Voices in November 2004, hosted by the Berkman Center.” Just as the prosecutor said he did.

Let me be very clear about what I was saying in that comment. The aspects of the testimony that align with reality aren’t the ones about me – they’re details about Hossein’s travels and meetings. Yes, I’ve met with Hossein half a dozen times since 2004, when he first came to the Berkman Center’s inaugural Global Voices meeting. That’s not because I’m involved in plotting to overthrown the Iranian regime, but because I’m one of the founders of an international blogging network and Hossein’s a key figure in the Iranian blogosphere.

To understand what’s going on in this case, it’s worth listening to Omid Memarian’s recent story on This American Life. Omid was also a pioneering Iranian blogger, and he was detained in 2004. In his TAL story, Omid describes being forced to write his life story dozens of times, while interrogators attempted to fit details from his life into a paranoid narrative about a CIA plot to destabilize the country. Memarian’s description explains precisely how Hossein’s life story – an unusual and complicated one, to say the least – has been reframed into a spy novel-worthy fantasy. The initial Global Voices meeting at Harvard – memorable mostly because Hossein coined the term “bridgeblog” at the conference – turns from an academic conference into a fantasy vision of an initial planning phase for the green revolution.

Let me just be very clear, because Dickey’s story is not:

- Hossein Derakhshan isn’t an Israeli spy. He’s been unfairly detained for over a year and has likely been forced to issue a “confession” that includes real biographical details as well as fabrications.
- The other people and entities that feature in Derakhshan’s forced testimony – myself, the Berkman Center, Global Voices – have no involvement in Iranian political unrest beyond studying it and reporting on it.
- The Iranian government’s characterisation of my background and ties are as absurd and fabricated as any other aspect of this story.

Dickey gets it right in the last paragraph when he says, “Only a regime as introverted, unworldly, and uncertain as Ahmadinejad’s could believe in the conspiracy theory that’s been pumped up in the Iran show trials.” It’s rather unworldly to be somehow blamed (credited?) with masterminding a plot to overthrow the Iranian government. In reality, my involvement goes no further than sharing my concerns about an old friend who’s been unfairly detained by an unjust regime.

An earlier version of this blogpost suggested that Dickey had acted unethically in publishing our Facebook exchange. Dickey forwarded that exchange to me – which I had deleted – and pointed out that I had not explicitly asked him to keep the exchange confidential. While I still would have prefered that Dickey contacting me before quoting what I had perceived as a background exchange, I retract my earlier accusations and offer him my apology on those grounds.