Jenny’s Pennies

A nice profile from Australian paper The Age about a young Australian activist who uses his tech knowledge to help human rights defenders around the world:

IN THE bustle of a Melbourne cafe strip, Dmitri Vitaliev’s eyes glaze as he remembers a very different crowd. In 2004, the then 24-year-old travelled to the East Congo to hide an internet connection in a church.

“It was one of the most incredible experiences,” the Russian-born, Melbourne-raised Mr Vitaliev says. “In many ways very scary, very sad. We drove through the killing fields, where in one day they killed 70,000 people. It was full of UN peacekeepers, tanks rolling around on broken roads. People starving.

“When I was there, a troupe of child soldiers, rebels, came from the mountains to surrender. It was a group of 50 child soldiers, everybody armed with a machine-gun, myself and my friend were the only white shapes standing there in the middle of the square. It was unnerving.”

He was there to give human rights activists access to the internet by hiding a satellite access point in a church. Previously, they had to travel 40 kilometres and cross the border into Burundi just to send an email.

It is part of his job: Mr Vitaliev travels the world helping human rights organisations set up their IT so they cannot be spied on or censored by oppressive regimes.

Found via …Or does it explode?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Activism, Human rights, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.