While wasting time on YouTube today, I came across a series of videos by Targuist Sniper, (Targuist is a small city in northern Morocco by the Mediterranean Sea) a Moroccan activist who is shooting videos of police in Morocco stopping vehicles at checkpoints and blatantly collecting bribes.
Now, what struck me the most about the videos was not that public officials in Morocco are especially egregiously corrupt – because they are not: in 2006, Morocco ranked 79th out of 163 countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, and there are places where the problem is much more acute.
What’s interesting about the videos is how the new information technology is changing the balance of power by allowing ordinary people to take matters into their own hands and be very effective doing it.
Here are links to the three videos posted so far: Video 1, 2 and 3.
