O

n May 13 this year, Prita Mulyasari was sued by Omni International Hospital for defamation and was sent to prison for expressing her opinions online, an action many would consider stifling free speech.

Thousands of people, largely Internet-literate youth, took to Facebook and the blogosphere and rallied for her freedom, after which she was released from prison and placed instead under city arrest to await her trial.

Exactly one month later on June 13, the Islamic nation of Iran entered what has largely been called its worse period of civil unrest in over a decade following the release of election results.

Communication within the country was crippled, with phone lines and many IP addresses blocked. People worldwide signed petitions and voiced support for the protesting Iranians via cyberspace.

The protest movement in Iran have been widely dubbed a "cyberwar" as people offer support to the Iran opposition by providing new venues of free speech, including new proxies for the protesters, baiting fake Iranian identities to government authorities, leaking documents, setting up anonymous forums, and so on.

Regular updates of the situation on the ground that would never have made it to media outlets such as CNN instead emerged through grassroots sources such as Twitter.

Through this technology, people worldwide could follow the unrest virtually in real-time while on YouTube, amateur videos of the protests, complete with the shaky camera angles and sounds of violence, reached our computers.

While it is true that the significance of the Iranian election protests far dwarfs the case of Prita, one should never be so easy to dismiss one case in favor of another, as each provide insight into the current state of society.

The perceptive audience of today's news would be able to see striking similarities between the two seemingly unrelated topics that have graced the covers of newspaper this past May and June.

The first similarity is that they are both grassroots movements of people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

The second similarity is that they both involve the Internet. The events of May and June have shown the Internet to be a truly powerful tool that can lead to dangerous, real-world political turmoil. It is a weapon of the masses.

In the case of the Iranian elections, the government managed to cut off many major communication lines to prevent outsiders from learning about the situation on the ground.

It was mainly this attempt to curb free speech that drove many to empathize with the opposition movement and help get the word out.

It is interesting to consider whether the Iranian riots would have gathered such momentum had communication lines not been cut. Perhaps it would have just become another Middle Eastern riot.

It makes one wonder how effective powerful grassroots forces will be in the future.

Certainly massive organizations such as international hospitals and whole governments are suffering as they are forced to learn they should not mess with the Internet and its people.

One of the stronger protesting entities for Iran has as its slogan, "Even if a ballot is silenced, the voice behind it cannot be!" (see http://iran.whyweprotest.net/).

Incidentally, this entity happens to be none other than the infamous Anonymous Group, the mysterious clan behind the collapse of a white supremacist radio show run Hal Turner, bringing alleged Canadian child predator Chris Forcand to justice, conducting a worldwide masked rally against human rights abuses and exposing cases of financial extortion by the Church of Scientology.

They have become known as an "Internet vigilante group" and "hackers on steroids".

Then there is also Wikileaks.org, a website dedicated to leaking highly sensitive government and corporate documents while protecting its whistle blowers. The Internet poses some real dangers to corrupt authorities.

As we creep closer to our own national elections, we cannot help but wonder what the future will hold for us. Certainly we are capable of online protests and rallies, as the case of Prita has shown us. We realize, then, that there is perhaps an unprecedented brighter hope for the nation's future, once we learn to make better use of this new domain of people's power.