Dear Awards Committee,
I am pleased to nominate a story from the CLICK HERE podcast from Recorded Future News in the tech reporting category.
Just to introduce ourselves, we’re a twice-a-week tech news podcast from Recorded Future News and we’re on a mission to make the world of cybersecurity and intelligence accessible to non-techie audiences by telling true stories about the people on the edge of the Internet who are making and breaking our digital world.
Here is our showdeck.
Our primary submission was published on CLICK HERE on September 3, 2024:
Ehtesab in Afghanistan: an app’s struggle to survive under the Taliban
(Here is a downloadable mp3 version without midrolls)
This past August, CLICK HERE’s team began reporting on how technology has changed the way countries wage war, and we looked at an app in Afghanistan that wanted to change the way people on the ground experienced it.
We met an extraordinary young activist and tech entrepreneur from Afghanistan who came up with an idea to save countless lives. Sara Wahedi dreamt up Ehtesab, an app meant to help Afghans survive in times of conflict. Her app didn’t just issue emergency alerts about shootings and bombings that become part of life in unstable countries, but it also warned people of simpler things like traffic jams and road closures.
Embassy employees and NGOs in Kabul have had access to these kinds of alerts for years, but locals in Afghanistan were left to fend for themselves. Ehtesab was trying to change all that with a curated, crowd-sourced app that created a sense of community.
“I didn’t want to shock people,” Sara told us. “I didn’t want to stress people. I just wanted to give the information directly to them.”
And she took a big risk to do that. When Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, officials shuttered newspapers, jailed journalists, and silenced independent radio stations in a bid to control the narrative.
In that context, Ehtesab became a lifeline. Sara’s small team worked in secrecy, risking their own lives as they continued to verify reports and post alerts – their desire to use tech to help the Afghan people became a small act of resistance.
Just before we released our story, Sara reached out to us with word that because of dangers operating in Afghanistan under the Taliban, she had to shutter Ehtesab’s operations. She said it was a bittersweet end to a five-year mission.
