Amateur Videos Are Putting Official Abuse in New Light

The male officer had asked a phone technician to transfer the contents of his cellphone's memory card -- including the video of Hemy -- from his phone to his laptop computer. It is unclear whether the officer or the technician started it, but soon footage of Hemy squatting naked inside the police station was seen on cellphone and computer screens from one end of this Southeast Asian country to the other -- and far beyond.

Last Nov. 23, Teresa Kok, a member of Parliament from the opposition Democratic Action Party, saw it on a friend's phone.

"The next day I called a press conference," Kok said. "Everybody was shocked."

In Malaysia, a tropical country of 25 million, the number of cellphone subscribers has risen to about 20 million from just 5 million in 2000. As in other Asian countries, the phone models here are particularly advanced; people don't use them only for voice calls, but to record, for example, a toddler's first steps and then transmit the images to a grandparent's phone.

In the 1990s, Mahathir Mohamad, then prime minister, promised he would not censor the Internet. Mahathir, leader for 22 years and fond of grandiose projects such as the construction of the Petronas Towers, the world's tallest twin towers, wanted to steer billions into the Multimedia Super Corridor, an information and communications technology hub designed to rival Silicon Valley.

Now, as more criticism of the government and more homemade videos of police misconduct are posted online, authorities are contending with a new force. Earlier this year, for example, there was a news blackout in the mainstream newspapers and TV stations of protests over oil price increases, said Steven Gan, editor of Malaysiakini.com, an increasingly popular independent online news service. But photos and video of police smashing protesters with red batons appeared almost instantly online.

"The government can't collect everyone's phone" said Gan, who posted the nude squat video and graphic pictures of a bloodied demonstrator on his Web site. "This has opened more democratic space."

Fighting the System

Five-foot-three and visibly anxious, Hemy sat in a quiet law office in Kuala Lumpur, a capital with glitzy modern buildings and strict rules. Signs warn against playing music or chewing gum on the subway. Most woman in this predominantly Muslim country wear scarves covering their heads.

At the end of November, five months after her arrest, Hemy had married her fiance and was trying to put the six miserable nights she spent in police custody behind her. Then she saw herself, naked and squatting, on the television news.

"That's me! That's me!" she recalled telling her husband, wondering how she had been videotaped.

In a soft voice, frequently casting her eyes to the ground, she said her husband at first didn't believe that the woman in the video, the one millions were viewing, was his new wife. The segment broadcast on TV showed a woman's bare back, the detainee bending up and down in front of a female officer. Hemy pointed out the distinctive black-and-white hair band holding her long black hair in a ponytail.

On the tape, she could hear faint prayers from the Koran being recited -- the same verses she had heard coming from a nearby mosque when she was in the police lockup June 29.