Today, over lunch, Yonatan Kelib and I had a very interesting discussion about the current mobile infrastructure in Africa and the potential use of anonymous posting to report government surpressed human rights violations. One thing that we both agreed was that we need to do extensive research into what kind of technology different countries are utilizing. Kenya recently announced the release of a 3gp infrastructure that, theorectically, would support the sending of video across a network. However, there is littlle documentation as to how extensive the network is. Mobile phones are exploding all over Africa, in fact in South Africa the poor living in shanty towns are more likely to have a cell phone then running water. But the question still remains, how many of these phones are camera phones, how many countries have technology to support multimedia messenging and who is actually controlling these networks, the telecommunication companies or the government?

We also extensively discussed the issue of anonymous posting in countries where the governement poses a significant threat to those transmitting imagery outside of the country that they would deem 'illegal' or 'offensive'. One thing we thought may be a possibility is satelite phones that would rely on a network outside the government's control. We both plan on doing research into all of these issues.