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If Borat ever ventures into Uzbekistan, he may want to replace his sparring partner Azamat Bagatov (yes, that big hairy man who was fighting Borat in a hotel room), Alisher Usmanov would be a much better choice (hey, that rhymes!). 

Artistically, that's a replacement way better (bigger, stronger)  than the original: Usmanov is an Uzbekistan-born man of huge proportions; he makes Azamat look fragile by comparison. Borat would be smashed. 

Usmanov would also be a good match for other reasons: he has amassed a fortune of $5.5 billion and  is  ranked as 142nd richest man in the world according to Forbes magazine. Best of all, the oligarch (who now lives in Russia) has a mysterious past which includes a stint in Soviet prison (for political reasons, says Usmanov). This could hardly be surprising to anyone following post-Soviet politics; Ukraine was close to getting a president who served a brief term for rape (but don't get excited, he's an all-mighty prime minister today). But by the puritan British standards, a prison term is definitely a big no-no.

Enter Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and the author of "Murder in Samarkand", a provocative account of his tenure in the country accompanied by the British Foreign Office's complicity and tolerance for all the atrocities of the Karimov regime. Those who are not (yet) into Uzbek studies should be warned that Murray is a man who thrives on trouble and the rampant publicity that it generates; he has quite a controversial reputation among experts on Central Asia (which is a field with, perhaps, most fascinating court battles; hint: the region has too much oil and gas).

So when Murray blogged about the real reasons why Karimov served jail time (let's just say Murray doesn't believe that Usmanov was Uzbekistan's Sakharov; you can view a copy of his post here),  it's hard to believe that he didn't expect Usmanov to react in some way -- a drop of polonium making it into Murray's tea would be one appealing option. But what followed probably defied even Murray's expectations; Usmanov hired British lawyers (which is probably a sign of how even the Uzbek oligarchs start showing respect for the rule of law -- thumbs up, Alisher! Your opponents will soon realize that, compared to British lawyers, polonium may be the preferred option).

As turns out,  the ultra smart and expensive law firm Usmanov hired (don't get mislead by their name, Schillings, they don't toil for free) leaned on expensive rather than smart in their operations. In the next few days Murray's post was reprinted and linked to by a dozen other bloggers. No, there is no sudden British obsession with Uzbekistan; the Uzbeks are safe. It's just that Usmanov is about to buy a controlling stake in Arsenal, a leading British football club, hence all the scrutiny bestowed on him by the British bloggers.

Bloggerheads, another prominent British blog run by Tim Ireland, reproduced and decided not to remove Murray's accusations (which, on the surface of it, are just that, mere accusations -- Murray said the references to Usmanov's past in his post rely on his insider knowledge of Uzbekistan; no external sources were linked to--which is probably to be expected -- nobody was covering Usmanov's every more during communism).

It didn't take long for Schillings, that super-expensive London law firm that Usmanov hired, to write to Fasthosts, the host of Murray and Ireland's blogs, and asked them to remove them (they were also busy writing to all blogs and forums that have reprinted Murray's post earlier; many of them complied). Fasthosts, perhaps stricken by an unknown polonium- or lawyers-induced anxiety, agreed to do it without even running their decision by Murray or Ireland (not to mention the nasty option of fighting Schillings in court).

Perhaps expecting a bonus or Schilling's commitment to do more pro bono work, the ISP delivered way more than the lawyers had asked for. Fasthosts, which claims to be "UK's Number 1 web host" and have "revolutionary servers" (now, isn't that ironic?), blocked (deleted?) a few other prominent British blogs hosted on the same server as Murray and Ireland's (including blogs by Boris Johnson, a wanna-be London mayor, Bob Piper, a Labor councilor in Birmingham, and Clive Summerfield , a political blogger, none of whom have reproduced Murray's post -- they were innocent, even in Schilling's eyes). Thus, several independent voices of the British blogosphere were temporarily silenced at the whim of a Russian-Uzbek oligarch and his lawyers, not a court order or public outcry. So much for the freedom of speech.

It didn't take long for the British blogosphere to react. Dozens of blogs have reposted Murray's original post (and many have received threatening letters from Schilings); many more have linked to the story (more than 190, but the list is growing, check Chicken Yoghurt for the most recent count). It's become one of those threads where the left and the right tend to forget their ideological differences and join ranks to fight a  common enemy.

What is particularly intriguing about this story is how the British bloggers have used the Web for fighting back and claiming their right to free expression. Below are some of my personal observations on the online campaign, presented as "lessons learnt". Please keep in mind that in the particular case of Murray vs Usmanov,  most of the actions described occurred in just 48 hours.

So here goes my counterinsurgency cyberactivism manual drawn largely on the Murray-Usmanov saga. 

Cyberactivism 101

10 tips to make your distributed advocacy more effective

1. Make copies of the initial post widely available on third-party web-sites. This helps to garner public support by convinced those who have not yet decided whether to get involved or not about the nobility of the campaign's intentions (i.e. make sure that people know what they are fighting for). Murray's post was not a set of libelous accusations nor was it inciting to violence or intolerance; people who would get involved need to be convinced of that. The initial post has been reposted on various stand-alone platforms (like Blogger), which should be out of reach of the British lawyers. Copies of Murray's blog have also been posted, so one could always dig deeper into its archives and decide if Murray's messages have been consistent with what he had written before.

2. Document all developments related to the story via a single resource; make it easily accessible to non-blogging audiences. First of all, decide on which blog or web-site would serve serve as a resource of record for all new developments related to the story. Then take the time to update the original post with all new developments related to the story -- make sure you put the post at the beginning of the blog. In Murray's case, this blog was a popular British blog Chicken Yoghurt. The original post written about the matter was constantly updated with links to all other blogs writing about the matter, to coverage of the story in MSM, to the newly appearing cartoons, badges, and other materials.  

Once your story is picked up by the mainstream media, this resource page will be of great help to journalists who would like to cover your story. It may even be helpful to buy a URL that would be relevant to your campaign and just copy everything you have on your blog of record to that URL; believe or not, there are still people out there who are not friends with Google-- they may prefer to type something like usmanovvsmurray.com in their browser and expect a relevant page to load. You can't afford to be picky, so cater to their demands.

In addition to pointing MSM to your blog of record, it may help to create a special Wikipedia page dedicated to documenting the timeline of the affair and actions taken, linking to all the players involved, so that it's easy for reporters to get in touch with all main characters of the story. If you run into trouble with Wikipedia policies (relevance, editing, etc) , just go ahead and install Media Wiki on a stand-alone page and encourage everyone working on the campaign to document their actions on your stand-alone resource which can get much more detailed than what Wikipedia will allow, as their relevance criteria are getting stricter.  

Also remember that mainstream media requires a strong excuse reason to cover your story-- one way to convince them is to show how this particular topic is a matter of importance to hundreds of bloggers whose URLs are all collected on your aggregator. Once the campaign gets coverage in MSM, make sure you have a press person who can go on TV/radio and explain the campaign in plain English and also on behalf of all people involved, not just him- or herself.

3. Tell supporters of your campaign how they can help. This help can take multiple forms: they can write a post about it, they can link to the original post, they can help edit a Wikipedia entry, they can design a badge /banner/button/logo for the campaign, they can draw a cartoon that can help raise the spirits of the campaign. In Murray's case, there appeared a plenty of of badges or cartoons -- see at the very end of this post. Those are funny and viral, they also capture the message quite nicely; they also target all relevant parties -- Usmanov, the lawyers, the ISP -- nobody gets a free pass from the campaign (keep in mind that most of the cartoons below were done by volunteers using their own creative inputs). Hold a competition for the best cartoon -- this should be of help too. Even better, create your own LOLcat builder with pictures of the main culprits replacing those of cats. That way, you have a ready-made cartoon factory fueled by crowdsourcing.  

Remember, the more people link to one particularly damaging post, the more likely it is to end up REALLY high in Google search results. Thus, even if you lose in your campaign or in court, the culprit's reputation will be destroyed via Google. You need to explain this to people -- this makes their contribution to the common cause feasible even if they don't have the time or energy to get involved besides this. The more links there are out there, the more the episode warrants being mentioned in Wikipedia. So make sure there are as many links as possible -- no lawyer would force Wikipedia to delete reporting about the controversy, if not the contents of the actual controversy.

4. Leverage social news and community web-sites. At this early point in the campaign status, one of your main objectives is to raise general awareness of what you are fighting for and sign up as many new volunteers as possible. It helps to rely on the power of social news sites like Digg or Reddit to promote a story about your efforts to the front page -- please encourage all existing volunteers to go and cast their vote. This is easy to do and doesn't require any visible public commitment on their part -- the barrier for help in this case is very low and everybody on your campaign should be able to do it (but don't forget to send reminders anyway). The Murray campaign was quick enough to write a WTF entry on Technorati, publicize it on the campaign blogs and encourage everybody to go vote for the story and thus propel the story onto Technorati's front page.

5. Put meta-data on everything; it makes your posts/pics easier to discover. Don't forget to instruct your campaign supporters to take the effort to tag and name all cartoons they create and upload appropriately. The more meta data they provide, the more likely their cartoon is to end up among Google Image Search results. See this post related to the Murray campaign for a good example of how to encourage people to name their photos to make most out of them. Decide on a particular tag for the campaign and encourage everyone who is blogging about it to tag their posts with it (to be on the safe said, you can also set-up a Wiki page that would track all coverage of the story and ask bloggers who have written about the matter, add links to their content there). Don't forget to put a Creative Commons license on all campaign materials and encourage derivatives. .

6. Encourage and facilitate intra-campaign communication. This one is really simple: set-up a group on Facebook. Make it a place to aggregate all news, cartoons, videos, MSM coverage of the campaign, but also take advantage of the social networking component: encourage horizontal communication between different bloggers that take part in the campaign (use Wall and Discussions Board features proactively). Quite often, this intra-campaign communication will result in new ideas and directions for the campaign (in Murray's case, for example, it was an idea for an e-petition, which was raised and briefly discussed on Facebook). Make sure you coordinate the Facebook campaign with the owners of the blog that serves as "a blog of record" for the story -- while the content may often overlap, it's important to coordinate between different new media. Facebook is great for joint actions and intra-campaign communication, while the blog would be good for documenting, informing, and publishing -- as well as aggregating all pingbacks and trackbacks -- something that Facebook can't do that well. It also helps that the blog is open to anybody whereas Facebook is still a walled garden-- so don't rely on the latter exclusively, it would hurt you.

7. Crowdsource, crowdsource, crowdsource!. It's amazing how much online and offline data is out there that can further compromise the reputation of most parties involved in almost any dispute. Take advantage of the distributed effects of your campaign; have your volunteers dig deeper into the business activities of your adversaries.Set directions and point them to resources, and have them report back.  In Murray's case, there have been a number of efforts to examine the previous controversial cases that Schillings (the law firm) has been involved in.  The coordination between the parties involved in this particular effort was not outstanding, but one can imagine that if they had an internal Wiki that could aggregate all their findings and distribute all future work, the results may indeed yield a lot of interesting stuff (as they did in TPM readers' attempt to dig through the thousands of pages in the US attorney's case).

8. Find partners to build coalitions. Don't forget to search for potential coalition partners -- non-activist bloggers who may help you for their own particular reasons. In Murray's case, this turned out to be fans of Arsenal concerned with the prospect of having Usmanov own the club. There are probably more parties to this that one imagines-- they just need to be identified and invited on board--start looking for synergies! It helps if your campaign does not suffer from the left-right divide (i.e. is apolitical in a sense) and is instead about a social issue that unites all sides-- the reason why Murray's campaign has had such a success in the British blogosphere is because so many bloggers of all political colors have stood up for free speech rather than politics.

9. Find ways to form language hubs thus getting access/spreading your story to non-English language communities. There are a plenty of Usmanov-compromising materials that exist in the Russian-language sector of the Internet that the British bloggers simply have no access to (as an example, please see this profile of Usmanov (in Russian) on a popular Russian site that tracks the compromising aspects on the vita of famous Russian people, compomat.ru-- it states the same very facts that Murray has pointed to and MUCH more-- with the only exception, that, even if true, this would hardly shock anyone in Russia). There has not been much cross-border cooperation in this particular case, but one can expect that with the developments of cross-border projects that facilitate translation and communication between bloggers in languages other than English (think Global Voices Lingua project), there would be more and more examples of this happening. Nobody knows what the British bloggers may find out about Usmanov if the Russian bloggers were part of the conversation -- it may have easily lent more substance to Murray's claims.   

10. Be prepared! Always have back-ups of your blog/web-site stored somewhere outside of your primary ISP. Even better, set up another go-to URL in case your blog is blocked and publicize it widely with your audience (follow the advise of the Chinese blogger/activist Isaac Mao, who switches to notisaacmao.com when isaacmao.com is blocked LINK). If you are hosting with an ISP, set-up a copy of your blog on a platform like Blogger or WordPress -- it would be considerably harder to block it. If you have that option, try to secure a hosting deal with an American ISP -- at minimum, you'll rely on the first amendment to claim your rights -- this may be harder to do in Europe, where freedom /of speech laws are much weaker.

Below are the graphics of the campaign, most of them under CC license. If the creators of the pics are not happy with me showing them here, I'll comply and remove-- let me know.

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Those two images have been posted on the Facebook group:

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This one below is the first cartoon of the campaign. Author Matt Buck. Available at this URL: http://www-hack.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-free-is-speech-news.html

If you want to use the cartoon, here is the license. The caption plays on the themes from the Animal Farm (LINK)

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Banners from Mike Power (http://mikepower.net/)

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Badges/blog buttons from Matt Wardman:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2007/09/22/bloggerheads-and-craig-murray-buttons-for-your-sidebar/

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From Ministry of Truth:

http://www.ministryoftruth.org.uk/2007/09/23/its-banner-time/