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"Palestinian email lists based outside the Middle East region have operated without interruption."
Even before infrastructure conditions worsened in Palestine, social conventions prevented lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Palestinians from organizing openly there. To make things worse, many websites recently fell off the Internet as the computers hosting the websites lost electrical power and staff under curfew were unable to tend to the machines.
But other online Palestinian communities based outside the region have operated without interruption. For example, by working with the QueerNet project of the Online Policy Group (OPG), a BAIDO member based in San Francisco, gay Palestinians and Palestinian expatriates have been able to form a supportive online community that is at reduced risk of both persecution and logistical problems.
The Online Policy Group provides free email lists, website hosting, website domain registrations, and colocation services to organizations and individuals who are underrepresented, underserved, or who face unfair bias, discrimination, or defamation online.
In many countries, activists fighting for better working conditions, women's rights, and a variety of other causes are at risk of crackdowns and sabotage from governments or other opponents seeking to censor or cut off their communications.
With help from OPG, organizations such as the Independent Media Centers [www.indymedia.org], "IndyMedia" for short, have published groundbreaking, up-to-the-minute news on important developments in countries where protest actions are met by police repression, including in the United States. With OPG's free colocation services, IndyMedia can place an entire computer administered by its staff into a secure OPG facility in the Bay Area.
OPG also partners with organizations like Privaterra [www.privaterra.org], an ongoing project of Palo Alto-based Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that trains human rights activists in the use of privacy and security tools. Another partner organization, Interconnection.org [www.interconnection.org], based in Eugene, Oregon, assists activists with website design and implementation.
"Ensuring the privacy and security of information and communications is often a matter of life and death when combating human rights violations," explains Robert Guerra, a founder of Privaterra.
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