I&D Blog

From I&D Guest Blogger Hamid Tehrani, Global Voices Iran Editor

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at the end of 2008 made a historic announcement: a project to launch 10,000 blogs for the paramilitary Basij forces. (1)

IRGC’s official press organ, Sobh Sadegh, writes that it considered the Internet and other digital devices including SMS as a threat to be controlled. It announced that the 10,000 blogs will promote revolutionary ideas. IRGC considers the Internet as an instrument for a “velvet revolution” and warned that foreign countries have invested in this tool to topple the Islamic Regime.

The use of social networking or blogging by military forces is not new. The U.S. Army has launched a video series that documents events in Iraq. (2) A series of blogs have also covered military activities in a number of countries, including Sri Lanka. (3)

What makes the IRGC project particularly interesting is its uniquely large scale, its timing and its possible consequences.

For years, different political groups, ranging from leftist students and women activists to ready-to-be-martyrs Hezbollah members, have been active in the blogosphere. Reformist politicians and hardliners such as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discovered blogging years ago.

It seems that IRGC, an ideologically motivated military force with important business interests in the country, is acting like a supermarket that wants to establish its shops all over the city and shut down small groceries by any means necessary. But why now?

Uncontrolled bytes bite

Iranian authorities control all TV and radio programming in the country. Almost all newspapers that express an independent viewpoint have been banned. The only media tool available for Iranian citizens and the civil society movement is the Internet. And they use it as a tool to both inform and organize.

For example, last year information about corruption emerged on Iranian Web sites and blogs, which had an impact in real life. Such news challenged Ayatholas, informed people about student demonstrations and the repression of women by security agents, and forced some high-ranked officials to resign. The Islamic republic finally had to face non-controlled information and the reaction from the public.

In early summer 2008, a member of Iran’s Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission, Abbas Palizdar, created a scandal by accusing several top clerics and influential members of the Islamic Republic of corruption in a speech at Booali University in Hamadan. (4) He offered details of many illegal business deals and criminal offences, and pointed the finger at several of Iran’s leading political figures, including influential Ayatollahs. Video footage of the speech spread through blogs and Internet media. Palizadar was arrested, and for the first time high-ranking clerics were named and shamed.

In another event in summer 2008, students at Zanjan University in northwest Iran recorded and uploaded a video of their school’s vice president, Hassan Madadi, with his shirt unbuttoned. He was allegedly preparing to have sex with a female student. Several Iranian websites and blogs say the female student had alerted her university’s Islamic Student Association that he had pressured her to have sex with him. (5)

These two examples only begin to show the growing impact of Iranian citizen media.

Iranian bloggers have used the Internet to talk about demonstrations against dictatorship and gender discrimination, or to support political prisoners.

According to officials, 5 million blogs and sites have been filtered. But it seems that filtering has not had the desired impact.

A good example of the inefficiency of filtering is the Campaign4equality case. This feminist site has been filtered 18 times. It seems that civil activists have not been discouraged by the filtering policy.

The Iranian government continues to put pressure on cyber activists but it is almost impossible to fight the ones who are anonymous.

Since filtering and repression does not stop the civil rights movement from growing, then it is IRGC’s turn to play the game.

IRGC is the military force that enforces Islamic Revolution principles, just like the Turkish army that protects secularism. IRGC realized that the Internet and the free flow of information is out of its control and can hurt the regime. Does IRCG have a solution? Is 10,000 is the magic number?

Mass production of toothless soldiers

The Basij (Persian for “mobilization”) is a large and omnipresent paramilitary organization with multifaceted roles, such as repressing urban unrest. It created human-wave attacks against Iraqi forces during the final years of the Iran-Iraq war. It seems that IRCG took the wrong virtual path through Tehran’s streets and battlefields in that war.

The presence of 10,000 Basiji blogs without interesting content and quality will fail to attract readers or promote any ideas. The Islamic Republic’s state-controlled media has been a failure for three decades. The Iranian regime in recent years launched several TV channels, but even poor-quality satellite dishes became a must-have for millions of Iranians to access banned foreign films, music clips or news.

The Islamic Republic easily banned certain journals and magazines, but it failed to attract readers to its conservative Keyhan and similar publications.

The Islamic Republic will likely end up with another failed scenario in the media world, this time in the blogsphere.

The Iranian State has supported a cleric-controlled organization, the Office for Religious Blogs Development, to promote religious bloggers in the last two years. Yet, this organization has come under fire from Islamists for its lack of revolutionary zeal.

Blogs are personal and accessible, with no intermediaries. They are where people express their ideas and opinions. In contrast, Basij blogs probably will be a mass production of obedient voices who will be careful about the content of their posts as Big Brother watches them.

According to Harvard University’s Berkman Center study, a very significant number of Islamist bloggers who support the Islamic Republic write anonymously.(6) The main reason is that red lines are not defined in the Islamic Republic. These same ill-defined red lines will restrain any free action and thought in mass-produced blogs. They are an invisible border that makes people shut up and be censored.

Basij forces have a reputation for loyalty to Islamic leaders — ready to repress and sacrifice. Such characteristics are not an asset in the Iranian blogosphere. Perhaps the IRGC should open a military base in Second Life and try to chase Iranian activists there, if it is able to find any.

…blog, that is. The already excellent foreign affairs blog Passport, by the editors at Foreign Policy magazine, has undergone a major expansion as part of an upgrade to their Web site. It’s well worth checking out. They are now calling the site an online magazine, and have adopted a number of star foreign policy bloggers to write for them. This includes our friend Laura Rozen who has a new blog on the site called The Cable–she’s already digging up scoops on potential candidates for top foreign policy slots in the Obama administration (looks like I’m not the only one waiting for the phone to ring). Long time blogger and Fletcher School professor Dan Drezner has moved his blog to the new site, as well as Harvard heavy weight Stephen Walt who today memorializes Samuel Huntington, and GW’s Marc Lynch (aka Abu Aardvark), among others. An impressive cast. I’ve also been reading Steve Coll’s new blog Think Tank at the New Yorker, which he seems to be growing into–initially he didn’t quite bring the personal touch to his blog, but getting better with dispatches on his recent travels to India and Pakistan. For those stuck in the print age, you can still find Foreign Policy on the news stands as well as online; including articles this month on the impact of the Internet on foreign affairs, one of which highlights the work of our friends over at Ushahidi, and quotes our recent case study on post-election violence in Kenya.

Check out this interesting Post piece about Vivek Kundra, the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer. His gangantuan task is accelerating the implementation of innovative technology, despite an often dilatory Washington bureaucracy. What makes Kundra so exciting, and what has caught the eye of the Obama folks as a tech policy advisor, is his desire to use technology to open and speed up local governance by utilizing the power of social networking and Web 2.0 technology.

Instead of contracting with expensive software developers, Kundra used a YouTube-based contest to crowdsource the software he needed. He also has plans to digitize the vast reams of the government data about crime rates and police response times, which are currently available, but poorly accessible. This has naturally rankled some bureaucrats, but I think there is some potential in his proposals, if not for more transparent, then atleast for more efficient local government.

Vivek has the mind of a private sector tech start-up balanced with his commitment to public service. I think that puts him quite clearly into the orbit of Obama’s vision of the internet and citizenship (see my piece from a few months ago for more), which emphasizes broad access, open information and creative tech solutions to democratic problems. Here’s hoping Obama might even tap Kundra tomorrow for the much hyped technology czar position.

The detention of prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakshan (aka Hoder) has been confirmed. Everyone has been concerned since reports of his arrest were confirmed by friends and family about a month ago. The question was how long and on what charges the Iranian authorities would be holding him.

In 2006, Hoder, who has dual citizenship with Canada, visited Israel. Possibly in connection with this trip and the recent high pressure diplomatic sparring between Iran and Israel, the Iranians now accuse the blogger of espionage. Matching the gravity of this political charge, an Iranian Revolutionary Court (designed to deal with issues of national security) will be taking on the case.

Hoder helped to ignite the Iranian blogosphere, now one of the world’s most vibrant and diverse (see Berkman’s research report on the topic).  His blog, an often insightful and incisive voice in Iranian politics, has not been updated since October when he was detained.

Wikileaks managed to find the official list of blacklisted sites from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) in Thailand. Thailand has aggressively, if often ineffectually, attempted to control the internet, especially supposed infractions of its severe lese majeste law (see my piece earlier this year, as well as this article for more background on Thai censorship).

The list demonstrates exactly what is to be expected. Many sites were over-blocked and nixed for political reasons, even by the standards of lese majeste, itself a politically motivated statute, intended to “protect” the King. I trust Thai bureaucrats much less than Google, about whose policy of evaluating flagged YouTube clips I feel some unease. More abstractly, this story brings an Orwellian truth to light, that citizens should always distrust a government’s control over their information world.

What is fascinating to me though is how clearly the Thai government’s attempt to tame a medium as porous and expansive as the internet is failing. In the good old days, you forced the newspapers and TV stations either to license or self-censor under the threat of fines and jail. You might arrest a few prominent journalists as an example and call it a day. Although today many bloggers are being jailed (now, according to Bruce Etling here at Berkman, more frequently than traditional journalists) the mechanisms of state censorship are no longer as shrouded in mystery or difficult to assess.

The internet, by publishing leaks which none but the most underground of traditional newspapers might dare to print, naturally resists the yoke of the censorship regime. The harder a country tries to censor the internet (and China and Thailand are trying pretty hard), the more its stream of information slips like sand through their fingers.

1,203 is a paltry sum of websites, and yet probably represents a significant exertion of man hours on the part of government employees, bewildered that they must patrol a world wide series of interconnected networks, mirrors and proxy servers of free information. The censorship regime, as I see it, even the fancy Chinese firewall, is doomed to crumble under the weight of this exponentially expanding infrastructure of ideas. That includes all the taboo, dissident and revolutionary ones, too.

Andrew Keen has penned a provocative editorial criticizing Obama’s plans for the democratization of broadband internet access (for more on the plan itself, see my summary of Obama’s technology platform). Keen’s chief worry seems to be that universal technological empowerment, particularly of the internet, does not correlate to a more enlightened citizenry.

Even more than that, he suggests that under significant economic stress (a reality towards which, the economists murmur, we’re rapidly hurtling), the technologically literate but hopeless ranks of the unemployed could find themselves more attracted to dangerous mass movements like fascism. Social networking and mass media venues like YouTube could become the Hitler youth rallies of the past.

Superficially at least, the viral Obama/Muslim conspiracy theories may seem modest proof that free information does not a reflective citizenry make. The “Obama is a Muslim” myth was amplified with alarming speed by the conservative blogosphere and Obama’s Conservapedia page, eventually making its way into the mouth of that “He’s an Arab” women at the McCain rally. Keen is right to think that on a mass scale this could threaten representative democracy. The Framers (Hamilton comes to mind) were openly distrustful of the mob’s judgment; it was too often hasty and irrational.

On the other hand, part of the success of Obama’s PR camp was in reaching out to thinking voters with immediate corrections, frequently through information technology. The subsequent and obsessive media/internet conversation sparked by the controversy proved to be an open forum which Muslim-baiting bigots simply could not win. As far as I can tell, that is democracy in action.

(Along similar lines, James Glassman over at the State Department has suggested that engaging jihadists in online debates, instead of lecturing them from the West’s “city on the hill,” often wins public support for liberals in the Middle East by exposing Islamic fundamentalism to be precisely that.)

This doesn’t mean that the Internet is a democratic panacea. The new frontier of astro-turfing, propaganda tools and internet media censorship are troubling developments for a medium that has otherwise liberalized expression and encouraged revolutions, if not always successful ones. Robert Faris and Bruce Etling have written some great analysis for Berkman on the effects, both postive and negative, of digital networking on democracy. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I posted about China  re-blocking several of the sites temporarily accessible during the Olympics. During this re-censorship spree, the New York Times website was blocked for mainland Chinese users, but only for three days. This morning it was finally free again. When pressed for comment about the ostensible arbitrariness of this action, Chinese authorities played dumb. Such highly visible waffling can only be counter-productive to the censorship regime. The average Chinese internet citizen must know what he or she is missing, had temporarily and could have again. A porous Chinese firewall (and the more users, the more porous it will become) is destined to fail.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced yesterday it will shift the focus of its anti-piracy efforts, particularly against P2P users, by using ISPs to deter illegal file-sharing, instead of relying on costly, PR killing lawsuits against individuals. The idea is that the RIAA would notify a local ISP if one of its users, identified by IP address, is thought to be illegally sharing music, movies or other copyrighted material.

The ISP would then send a desist warning with the added threat that internet access for that user may subsequently be permanently revoked. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the new strategy already has netizens worried about civil liberties, censorship and potential blacklisting (cf. also this great summary of the situation over at Public Knowledge).

The tactic is not exactly new. It has been used before on college campuses, long the front line in the battle over digital piracy. Individual users who were repeatedly caught hogging bandwidth with filesharing were banned from university network access for a period of time, sometimes up to a year or longer.

What concerns me is how powerful this collaboration between the RIAA and ISP companies could turn out to be. Will there be any process for appeal if internet service is terminated? If access to, say, Comcast has been revoked for copyright infringement, will it be possible to seek service elsewhere? In an increasingly consolidated media environment, the possibility of blacklisting across ISPs seems quite real, despite the protestations of RIAA president Cary Sherman.

Moreover, for a world in which the internet is becoming increasingly central to everyday functioning, communication and civic participation, categorically banning access equals quasi-pariah status. Nor will this loss of privileges be weighed by a judge in a court of law where minimum due process is required; rather, the RIAA, long eager to twist the arms of ISPs protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, will call the shots.

Will it deter music piracy? Quite possibly. But is there also potential for abuse and arbitrary denial of service? Absolutely. It doesn’t seem too far to count out systemic internet filtering either. The RIAA will no doubt make the same argument already voiced over child pornography. If it’s illegal material, then networks have a responsibility to filter it. Anything else you’d like censored or controlled? Jihadist websites? Unsavory but legal erotica?

The internet is too powerful and democritizing a means for free expression to be leashed by either governments or powerful companies. This is the hard lesson of Burma and China where not just child porn and stolen records are illegal; political dissent is too.

A year long Berkman research collaboration called Media Re:public has just been released. It is a wide-ranging and diverse set of papers analyzing the seismic shifts which the internet and the participatory media are creating in the landscape of traditional news.

What I like so far from what I’ve read is how it engages not only the obvious questions of new and different revenue streams, but also the stickier complexities of how the internet is altering how the news is written, disseminated and consumed. I highly encourage you to read the pdf of the overview (fair warning: it’s fifty some pages long). It’s a comprehensive, readable summary of this exciting initiative.

I was particularly interested in the section on how the slow contraction of foreign newspaper coverage in remote or dangerous areas has de facto transferred the responsibility of covering them to coalitions of human-rights groups and citizen journalists (p. 17 and following, Overview). It may be too expensive (or indeed, illegal) to maintain a foreign correspondent in Burma, but international human rights groups and the activists they support are in the business of writing investigative reports and sharing them with the world.

Allowing human rights types to shoulder reportorial responsibilities may have other benefits as well. I think a greater sense of urgency could permeate the international news cycle, particularly when it comes to repressive regimes. If produced with the help of local activists and citizen journalists, the report could also avoid the pitfalls of some MSM international coverage, which can seem America-centric or out of touch with historical and cultural realities.

Recall that in Burma, due to a restrictive foreign journalist visa policy, much of what was happening during the Saffron Revolution came from locals with camera phones and blogs. Human rights advocacy groups could thus function as the facilitating network (and the internet, their conduit) for a totally reconceived kind of international coverage of the developing world.

Anyone who thought the Beijing Olympics would be a catalyst for greater freedom and human rights in China should be upset (though perhaps unsurprised) to learn that many of the websites unblocked during the games have now been re-censored. The Times has the full story here.

One quote in particular, from Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Berkman Fellow and co-founder of Global Voices, helps to shade China’s particular brand of censorship in relief relative to the more mild, though to my mind still serious, censorship that many Western countries are now implementing (child pornography blocks in the US and Australia; Holocaust denial websites in Germany):

Ms. MacKinnon noted that, in contrast to other countries, the Chinese government defines crime very broadly, imposes censorship with little if any explanation and provides no process for operators of blocked Web sites to appeal censorship decisions. She added that even when entire Web sites are not blocked, the Chinese government still sometimes limits certain keyword searches.

There is something all together arbitrary about the Chinese firewall, an absurdity which will no doubt only increase as the size of the Chinese web rapidly outpaces the government’s ability to police it. There are already signs that the Great Firewall is relatively permeable when it comes to blog censorship. The renewed interest, however, in re-censoring previously open sites (in principle, like the shuffling of Beijing’s heavy industry outside the city limits during the Games) demonstrates the Chinese aren’t going to give up the battle without a fight.