“Throughout his tenure, John helped lead the firm during the various waves of innovation in Silicon Valley, from the growth of software and communications to the Internet Age, the emergence of biotechnology to the present focus on clean technology and renewable energy.”

Concurrently Japan, the world’s second largest economy, is to host its national elections. A Parliamentary Democracy, Japan has both an Upper House of Councillors and a Lower House of Representatives. On August 30, elections in the latter will determine the distribution of power across the 480 seats, and it’s interesting because the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been in power (except for 10 months, 20 days) since 1955. Largely seen as the guardian of the post-Cold War U.S.-Japan relationship, the LDP has been relatively unopposed in ruling seats in the Japanese Diet.  However, polls indicate that the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) could alter Japanese history.

Currently the DPJ holds 112 seats in the Lower House.  They would need 220 to have a “relative majority,” 241 for a “majority,” and 269 for an “absolutely stable majority,” according to Takako Hikotani of Japan’s National Defense Academy, formerly at Harvard. A potential LDP loss, and DPJ win would unsettle an institutional path dependence, and shake up ties in a country built of relationships. Such a DPJ win could have profound impact on US-Japan political, security, and technology relations.  With issues such as the Support of Forces Agreement, a potential US-Japan Free Trade Agreement (FTA), Okinawa U.S. troop deployment, and Japan’s perennial “Article 9” debate on the purview of its military, a DPJ win next Sunday could create substantive bilateral and regional change.

On security issues the U.S. collaborates with Japan on regional air defense, missile defense, and maritime security, but it’s the economics that are perhaps even more central to the bilateral US-Japan amity. The US and Japan cooperate on multiple fronts, not least of which is technology development. Recent Japanese GDP data indicated 3.7 percent growth, but confirmation that the country is still reliant on export demand in the West.  “Decoupling” remains but a sound-bite on CNBC. Domestic groups such as the Japanese Business Federation state that a DPJ win could mean labor reform, new targets on unemployment, and potential for immigration policy alteration.

But at the end of the day, a DPJ win will not likely alter Japanese green technology development as a priority, and U.S.-Japan technology transfer as a silicon cornerstone of pan-Pacific partnership. While the acronym associated with Lower House Diet seats may change, while business-to-government relationships may need to refresh, and while this is no doubt historic, bilateral technology cooperation will remain a core issue. President Obama’s appointment of John Roos, a lawyer skilled in Internet venture capital, heralds a cooperative continuation. Perhaps it’s fitting that Ambassador Roos’ transition from Silicon Valley to Akasaka can be monitored across Japan on Palo Alto-based Facebook, and described on Deputy Chief of Mission James Zumwalt’s blog, “Z Notes.”

Last Wednesday, on July 8th, Indonesia swiftly completed the second direct democratic presidential election in the country’s history. According to a national polling group, Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI), incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (popularly referred to as “SBY”) won 60.82 percent of the vote, with the opposing Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) candidate Megawati winning 26.57 percent, and the Golkar party candidate Jusuf Kalla taking 12.61 percent. Despite tepid claims that 5.9 million fictitious names had been included among the eligible voters (made by Megawati’s billionaire financial contributor, Hashim Djojohadikusumo), the election took place without incident.

LSI Regional Presidential Election Data.

Observation of relative trends over time has been used in many contexts. For example, Raymond Fisman, co-author of Economic Gangsters, observed corruption by monitoring stock prices and news. Under the Indonesian Suharto regime, insider-information as to Suharto’s health moved the then-Jakarta Stock Exchange before news became public. In this case, insider information, driven by concealed concern over political change, facilitated opportunistic buying and selling of stock that, in moving the market price, helped reveal corrupt practices.

Today, Internet users reveal themselves publicly in a variety of ways that collaboratively paint a picture of preferences and concerns that, if not generally applicable to the populous, are immediately reflective of the online demographic in the region. In Internet ecosystems such as the Netherlands, where 90 percent of the population is online, or in the United States, where 72 percent of Americans have access, Internet trends can be more widely extrapolated to indicate the public ethos. In Indonesia, despite its low Internet penetration of roughly 5 percent, the Internet is still a useful tool to observe opinion on important issues as well as regional strongholds of support.

Over the course of 90 days leading up to the election, top Google queries across Indonesia almost exclusively included references to popular networking sites such as Facebook and Friendster. As such, among connected Indonesians, use of social networking platforms is important. “Facebook Lexicon,” a tool that allows one to observe trends of terms or topics used in “wall posts” between friends, becomes relevant in indicating shifting ethos. Within the Indonesian Facebook demographic — admittedly a small and likely young group– Facebook Lexicon reveals that over the last year there has been significant change in topics of on-site political discussion.

While Facebook is a networking and discussion platform and its use typically involves conversation, active use of Google search engine indicates explicit interest. And over the same period, data from Google Insights for Search queries confirms a swelling Internet interest in incumbent candidate SBY. Since January 1, 2009, Google queries across Indonesia on “SBY” grew by 625 percent, compared with 40 percent on “Mega.” While relative search on “Jusuf Kalla” increased by 1100 percent, his absolute search volume was roughly 90 percent lower than SBY.

Telephone polling without regard for demographics.

Retrospective analysis is always problematic. One must be wary of ex-ante conditions observed ex-post, and the ease of false attribution. And as was seen in the telephone polls of American voters prior to the 1948 presidential election, the misinterpretation of niche trends for alterations in public opinion can yield headlines such as “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” perhaps the greatest Chicago Daily Tribune gaffe. But as Google.org and the CDC have shown, aggregated search engine query data can, by observing online health-seeking activity, “accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States.” In politics, if the frequency of Internet user queries about candidates correlates with the percentage of votes cast, then perhaps this information could also be applied to pre-election statistics, which could augment offline polling data on connected demographics.

Pre-election polling by LSI and other Indonesian polling groups showed SBY leading followed by Jusuf Kalla.  Putative belief was that Megawati was entirely out of the running. Pre-election Google search query data pointed to an online reality that Megawati was still garnering much attention.  In fact, nationally, the results for actual votes cast more closely followed the numbers of Internet search query data –not domestic polling numbers. Perhaps such observation is mere coincidence. Perhaps Internet Search Analytics is an increasingly important data point to cohere with off-line demographic polling.  Today the online information-seeking behavior of a geographically diverse sample of connected Indonesians is perhaps illustrative of broader pre-electoral interests. It’s not perfect, and its scope is limited to Internet penetration, but I’m betting that tomorrow’s crystal ball could be made of silicon.

The LA Times and other media outlets are reporting that a resilient group of Iranians has defied the government by publicly protesting the nearly month old election results. The opposition chose today to commemorate the 10th anniversary of student-led protests against the closing of reformists newspapers by conservatives during the Khatami presidency. Andrew Sullivan and others are back to relying on Twitter for updates. According to the LA Times, over a thousand protesters turned out in Tehran, and they have been met with violence by the Basij and regular security forces. In an attempt to thwart protest organizers, the government has cut off cell phone access for the last few days, although they apparently released 2,000 who had been arrested after earlier protests. On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad called the election, the “freest ever,” which alone was probably enough to push the opposition back into the streets.

Sunday’s elections are pivotal in the ability to provide majority. While no Senate seats are up for grabs, should PRI or PAN secure sufficient seats in the lower Chamber of Deputies –350 of whom are elected, 150 appointed– the President’s ability to push reformist policies will alter. With the onset of Swine Flu, the disengagement of tourists, rising unemployment, and destabilizing macroeconomic climate, the mid-term election offers potential for facilitated policy change, not to mention a tacit referendum on Calderon half way through his six-year term.

Today, Mexico has roughly 27M people, or 25 percent of its population, online. Although looking at Internet data in  low-connectivity nations can be problematic –as many online in Mexico are “Panista,” meaning they support the Calderon’s PAN party– such data can still be illustrative if used to describe proper demographics.  Before Sunday’s elections, online trends point to pockets of support across demographics and regions. It can point to issues of regional importance. Relevant to Mexico’s youth demographic, Facebook’s Lexicon displays prevalence of terms on Facebook Wall posts. When comparing “PRI” with “PAN,” the margin of difference for Calderon’s PAN has increased since March 2009. In fact, Facebook Wall reference volume on PAN is triple PRI, and peaking around June 15. As yet, there is still no means of parsing Facebook Lexicon data by geography.

Facebook Lexicon PRI vs PAN Wall Posting Data

Regarding use of Google, 30-day moving averages of relative search data indicated that Calderon’s PAN was leading in regional online interest, with strongholds in states of Sonora, Jalisco, Distrito Federal (Mexico City), Nueva León, and Baja California.

Geographic Distibution of Relative Google Search on "PAN"

The 30-day domestic Mexican Internet search volume puts PAN at roughly 40 percent greater volume than PRI, however recent spikes in traffic and initial post-election results are putting PRI roughly ten points up on PAN. Internationally, the importance of the mid-term election as partial referendum is indicated by high volume on President Calderon. Outside Mexico, greatest interest in Calderon –as a proportion of domestic search– comes from Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. Outside of Mexico, the issue remains important across much of Latin America, in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and even Spain.

Global Geographic Overview of Google Search on "Calderon"

Initial post-election results show Calderon’s PAN trailing the PRI in new Lower House seats won. Diminished PAN influence in the Chamber of Deputies will hamper Calderon’s reform movement, and strike an initial blow to the Mexican economy, with lack of Congressional majority undercutting likelihood of decisive leadership. As of 9:40AM, stocks and the Mexican Peso had fallen by half of a percent against the Dollar. Initial results indicated that in Mexico online interest in party and candidate terms by connected voters did not translate into a reflection of ballots cast. But the Internet demonstrated that such electoral events matter not only in Mexico, but also indicated a leading interest in Mexican politics across Latin America and across much of the globe.

On July 8, Demokrat party incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will face off against the incumbent Vice President Jusuf Kalla, now the Golkar party presidential nominee, and against 2001-2004 Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, also daughter of Indonesia’s first President Sukarno. Megawati is the leader of the opposition party known as Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan, or PDI-P. Her controversial career soldier running mate, Prabowo Subianto, is the son-in-law of Suharto and the well-heeled founder and former Presidential nominee of the Gerinda party.

30-day domestic relative data on most popular candidate terms

While the perennial elite continues to vie for Indonesia’s top office, political engagement is moving from the streets to the information superhighway. Despite religious differences, the most salient non-domestic interest in the Iranian elections came from Jakarta, where –according to Google Insights for Search– Indonesian (Bahasa) trailed only Persian as the language of choice for entering Google search queries on Iranian presidential candidates. Outside of Iran and its diaspora, Indonesian interest in Iranian politics underscores religious trans-national solidarity, and an increasingly politically active youth demographic.

Within Indonesia, primary interest during the Iranian elections of early June stemmed from Internet users in the Javanese cities of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya, and in the Sumatran capital of Medan. Prior to the July 8 Indonesian elections, increased online circumspection in these cities could impact domestic voting patterns. Though Internet penetration in Indonesia is low, limited to 13M –or 5.4 percent of its 240M people– its use is strong in young demographics, evidenced not least by the fact that seven of the 90-day Indonesian top-ten growth Google search terms relate to Facebook or Friendster.

Indonesia is an immensely diverse and complex country comprised of a rich history, and 922 inhabited islands, each multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious. Internet penetration is not ubiquitous, its use is not widespread across demographics, and Internet Service Providers are centralized predominately in hub cities.

Even accounting for such gaps, understanding the use of new online media such as search, social networks, and micro-blogging adds a necessary –if not sufficient– layer of analytical firepower for deciphering trends. One week before Indonesian presidential elections, search volume data yields interesting information. While incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono leads by 10 points according to a June 11 poll, aggregated search on iterations of his name –“sby,” “boediono,” “budiono,” “pd” (after his party)– show him leading by 6:1 over Megawati, and by even wider margins over former Vice Presidential incumbent Jusuf Kalla. Putative opinion in Indonesia is that “Mega” –as she is known– is out of the running. In certain regions such as Jawa Timur (East Java) “SBY” leads both in search and in political stronghold. Online “Mega” appears competitive until one realizes that predominate queries are, by “Breakout” proportions, “say no Megawati.”

Top Megawati search terms in Indonesia over last 90 days

But illustrative online activity must be conjoined with offline knowledge. Coupled with an understanding of demography, geography, language, religion, and domestic influence, the political application of this data can be at a minimum indicative of desultory intrigue, but potentially a leading indicator of alteration in public opinion. It must be understood in the context of its influence on domestic social and political institutions. Only if being informed translates to being influential, and only if political will moves from router box to ballot box, will those observations made online be indicative of likely political change. With the most recent polls indicating a spread in public opinion of no more than 10 points, should relative online search volume be correlated with votes cast, Presidential incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will be re-elected, and the Indonesia of next Wednesday won’t look all that different from the Indonesia of today.

While Twitter is getting a lot of attention in the current Iranian crisis, it’s good to know that the robust Iranian blogosphere also remains active in the face of the government’s interference with the Internet. The figure below shows new blog posts on blogfa.com, the dominant Iranian blogging platform, over the past three weeks. While some Blogfa users are outside Iran, the vast majority are inside. We can see significant, through sporadic, disruption of Iranian blogging for a period of about two and a half days beginning a day after the disputed election. After that, posting returns to roughly pre-election levels.

What are bloggers talking about? A scan of text reveals high levels of discussion about politics. Many bloggers continue to link to websites supporting Mousavi (such as mirhussein.com), whereas linking to the main site supporting Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com) has nearly stopped, including among conservative political bloggers.

One harrowing story lately has been how the Revolutionary Guards have been posting pictures of protesters and asking readers to identify them. Perhaps hearteningly, the Guards’ site for this, gerdab.ir, is being linked to by a relative handful of bloggers [gerdab.ir map below], even among the conservative bloggers who mainly support Ahmadinejad. In fact, the site is being linked to by reformist bloggers, presumably calling out the practice, at nearly the same rate as the conservatives.

As for Twitter, we see a dramatic rise in the number of Iranian bloggers linking to Twitter in the first 15 days after the election [first map below], as compared to the same period a month earlier [second map below]. Interestingly, this linking is localized to a cluster of the map featuring longstanding opposition (as opposed to merely “reformist”) and expatriate bloggers. As we showed in our paper last year, this is also the portion of the map that is most frequently filtered by the Iranian government.

* From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
* Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone.
* 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number.
* The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets.
* 1 in 4 tweets about Iran is a retweet of another user’s content.

You can download the full PDF report here.

Statement by a group of Iranian bloggers about the Presidential elections and the subsequent events

1) We, a group of Iranian bloggers, strongly condemn the violent and repressive confrontation of Iranian government against Iranian people’s legitimate and peaceful demonstrations and ask government officials to comply with Article 27 of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution which emphasizes “Public gatherings and marches may be freely held, provided arms are not carried and that they are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam.”

2) We consider the violations in the presidential elections, and their sad consequences a big blow to the democratic principles of the Islamic Republic regime, and observing the mounting evidence of fraud presented by the candidates and others, we believe that election fraud is obvious and we ask for a new election.

3) Actions such as deporting foreign reporters, arresting local journalists, censorship of the news and misrepresenting the facts, cutting off the SMS network and filtering of the internet cannot silence the voices of Iranian people as no darkness and suffocation can go on forever. We invite the Iranian government to honest and friendly interaction with its people and we hope to witness the narrowing of the huge gap between people and the government.

A part of the large community of Iranian bloggers

July 26, 2009

Cross-posted on the ONI Blog

The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective. None of this is surprising; it reflects similar events seen in many places around the world.

Digital tools have been shown to be effective political organizing tools, from the Obama presidential campaign in the US to Ukraine, Colombia and Moldova. As powerful as new technologies may be as political tools, information and communication technologies have also been proven to be exceedingly fragile; in countries where the government has sufficient latitude to interfere with the use of these tools, they are easily disrupted and if necessary, can be shut down entirely.

The role of information and communication technologies in Iranian politics has matured rapidly over the past year. Political opposition groups in particular have adopted new online and mobile phone-based organizing tactics, using Facebook, Twitter, Web sites, email, cell phones and SMS and the full suite of Web 2.0 tools as mechanisms for political organizing. This is has all taken place in a highly restrictive media environment in which the Internet and other forms of digital communication are intensely regulated. Facebook has been blocked and unblocked several times in the past year. The rationale and legal justifications for censoring Internet communications are broad. Anything construed as anti-Islamic or damaging to the Iranian state can be blocked by what amounts to executive fiat, although there are many voices within the institutions charged with blocking web sites in Iran.

Earlier reports that the government shut down the Internet entirely during the June 12 elections appear to be exaggerated. Jim Cowie at Renesys looked at the evidence from international routing data and indeed found evidence of some strange events in Iran’s traffic to the outside.

However, the Internet is still up in Iran, though reports from inside Iran suggest that it is much slower than normal and a broader range of websites are being blocked. The fact that Iran has invested so much in blocking Internet content might mean that they have greater confidence about keeping tight controls over content available in Iran without shutting down the Internet entirely, as Burma had done in the face of popular protests there.

After a large surge in SMS traffic in the run-up to the election, multiple sources inside Iran reported that the country’s SMS networks went down just nine hours before the polls opened. This is unsurprising, as SMS has been used in many places as a powerful tool for organizing protests. Reporters Without Borders reports that the SMS take-down was part of attempt to prevent opposition supporters from collecting election results.

By Saturday, all mobile phone services had been shut off in Tehran. Plans by an organization led by former president Rafsanjani to carry out election monitoring using cell phones might have factored into this decision. Cell phone service was restored on June 14, but SMS continues to be blocked.

Western media sources have covered the news as it unfolds, although some US media outlets have been criticized for not focusing more attention on the events in Iran. The government has not thrown western journalists out of the country, though it has made reporting difficult. The BBC has traced the jamming of one of its satellites, which has interrupted access to radio and television for audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe, to a location inside Iran.

Despite the tightening restrictions on communications tools, citizen journalists inside Iran have been hard at work. Video clips are widely available on the net, as are photos of Iranian voters and post-election protests. Although YouTube and DailyMotion are both blocked, we were able to upload a small video to Vimeo. The generally slow Internet speeds will hinder the upload of large files.

ONI has confirmed the expansion of blocking over the past several days, making access to ongoing reporting of events as well as political organizing far more difficult for Iranians. In the past several days, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have been blocked. The English version of BBC is now blocked; the Persian version has been blocked for months. Websites of the major opposition candidates are all blocked, including Mousavi’s website  mirhussein.com) and Karoubi’s website  teribon.com). The blog host, blogfa.com, has been down for several days now, preventing many Iranian bloggers from updating their blogs.

We tested the thirty web sites that receive disproportionate attention from the reformist segments of the Iran blogosphere and about half of these are not blocked, including norooznews.ir, webneveshteha.com, emruz.biz, emruz.info, yaarinews.com, mowj.ir, maryamshab.blogfa.com, mirhussein.com, masoudbehnoud.com, drmoeen.ir and noandish.com. Among those not blocked include ghalamnews.ir, aftabnews.ir and khatami.ir. (Thanks to John Kelly for the list of sites that we tested. This is derived from the blogosphere mapping work of John Kelly and Bruce Etling).

In response, some pro-democracy activists are targeting government Web sites with DDOS attacks in an attempt to strike back at the current regime. While they have had some success – leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir were reported to be down – experts worry that the attacks may be used by the Iranian government to justify their own filtering or, worse, may cripple the Iranian network as a whole. (Note: Leader.ir was back up when we tested. Ahmadinejad.ir and iribnews.ir were still down.)

Many years of Internet filtering have prompted the development of circumvention tools by and for Iranians. Many Internet users in Iran have become adept at getting past the Internet censors there. An unintended consequence is that there are many sophisticated users and tools that are prepared to circumvent government attempts to limit access to online sites. This increase in filtering associated with the elections can be expected to increase the demand for access to and knowledge about circumvention technology.

These measures to further limit access to information around the contested election results are not going to help the current the Iranian government if it seeks to build legitimacy.

Based on our monitoring of the Iranian blogosphere on election eve, it looks like Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad. (For a broader understanding of the different attentive clusters in Iran check out our new online interactive Iran blogosphere map). The below maps show who is linking to websites associated with the candidates. It’s pretty interesting to see the contrast between Ahmadinejad  emtedadmehr.com), whose links are very concentrated in the Conservative Politics cluster, and Mousavi  mirhussein.com), whose links come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group.

We are particularly struck by how many links come from the poetry cluster, which rarely links to political sites. Also, Moussavi has even more links from the CyberShi’a than Ahmadinejad.

This online interest doesn’t necessarily translate to the offline world, but it may indicate a broader level of excitement about Mousavi in the electorate, particularly among those outside his expected base of supporters, which could ultimately lead to higher voter turn out for Mousavi.

As Hamid Tehrani wrote earlier this week, YouTube is being used a lot by Iranians in this election. Here is one of the YouTube videos most linked to by reformists.

And here is the video most linked to by conservatives, which Hamid pointed to earlier in the week as an example of conservatives trying to discredit Khatami, who has supported Mousavi since he dropped out of the race himself.

Iran experts caution against trying to predict election winners Iran (because we’ve been surprised before), and we’d caution against predicting a Mousavi win just on this analysis, but it is certainly interesting to see the larger level of online support for Mousavi on the eve of the election. We’ll have to leave it to the voters at this point.

Some additional data and analysis on Iran’s election eve blogosphere is posted on Morningside Analytics Shifting the Debate blog. You can also catch an interview and find all of Hamid Tehrani’s posts on the Internet and the Iranian election on the PBS Web site.

Check back here next week for the big release of our Arabic blogosphere paper and accompanying event at USIP.