I&D Blog

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 »

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.

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.

Check out this provocative and fascinating piece by Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute. The central question it raises, whether the Internet is really a force for democratic change, is as complex as it is necessary to ask. Cyber-savvy young voters (see also our coverage of “Born Digital”), kindled by Obama, may have heralded a civic reawakening for America, but as Morozov rightly points out, one should be cautious about overstating the internet’s power as a catalyst for an activist citizenry, especially in authoritarian countries. As Morozov sadly notes:

The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but the Chinese Firewall has been erected in its place.

The role of the internet in democratization is sometimes ambivalent or contradictory. The Berkman study of the Saffron Revolution in Burma turned on this question. Why was the internet, so crucial in organizing and publicizing protests, not ultimately effective in overthrowing Burma’s repressive military junta?

Morozov provocatively points to the web’s endless stream of entertainment as a possible explanation for the malaise of democratic movements. The internet is a sirensong of cheap thrills and escapism, foreign movies and sex. It is slowly transforming “digital renegades” and potential activists into “digital captives” of Hollywood distraction. As Antony Loewenstein, author of a book about blogging in repressive regimes, remarked at a recent Berkman luncheon, far more bloggers want to meet girls than agitate for reform.

Having said all that, Morozov’s conclusion — that young people in repressive regimes prefer Paris Hilton clips to freedom — strikes me as too cynical. Though no quick fix panacea, the internet has contributed to greater participation and group association. Strong correlations between increased internet capability and democratization, though not ultimately conclusive, surely reinforce this belief.

Perhaps the changes have less to do with formal democratic movements than the immense proliferation of speech on the web. This is what makes the Iranian blogosphere so vibrant, the Chinese one so resilient and the Burmese one so dedicated, despite varying levels of autocratic control. The web has broken the authoritarian choke-hold over information, even if what is flooding in from the outside is imperfect or censored. Web 2.0 technology is clearly one source of this altered dynamic; it’s easier to gag a newspaper than censor a thousand blogs.

The more impossible internet output becomes to contain, the more plausible I think it is that censorship regimes will crack, even ones as massive as the Chinese firewall. This may not be democratic activism of the most visible form, but perhaps it gives more radical democratizing movements a chance to succeed.

Check out this interesting article in New York Times Magazine on the legal team Google currently employs to make decisions about controversial content. Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, leads the group and daily must walk the thin line between protecting free expression and mollifying the world’s easily offended governments.

YouTube in particular has proved treacherous legal ground in Turkey and Thailand, where statutes make it illegal to speak out about certain taboo topics (respectively: Ataturk and Thailand’s aging constitutional monarch). Part of Google’s controversial response has been to program geolocational filters into YouTube’s search function.

Nicole Wong runs the other half of the operation. Her team of humans attempt to analyze videos flagged as “inappropriate” by users and angry governments. They must then make decisions which balance local laws and YouTube’s terms of service agreement with a purported commitment to free speech.

The most interesting part of the article speculates on how long, in a rapidly proliferating landscape of user content, Google can practically keep up this kind of case by case kind of judgment. The approach is itself already flawed. Only the most clamorous and sensitive material crosses Wong’s desk. That means that hundreds of content decisions are given much less legal attention and care, but are just as final and unquestionable.

The alternative I suppose is the nastiness of auto-filters and national firewalls, but my faith in a benevolent Google dictator, both capable and just in its patrol of the net, is not overwhelming. Nor am I completely convinced as yet that agree to censor a small number of videos (let us say, for example, the offensive “Ataturk is gay” clips) is a moral compromise small enough to swallow, even for the sake of partial YouTube access.

I was thinking about a possible analogy with the former East Germany. Should the West have capitulated in shielding East Germans from images or reports of its quality of life and political freedom? Google is a company, not Radio Free Europe, but complicity, however careful, with any government’s attempt to create a closed information world is troubling, at best.

If there is some hope, it rests with something like the Berkman-backed GNI (Global Network Initiative), which created an international, multi-company framework for guidelines and legal accountability when it comes to free expression online. Google is participating in this agreement; but it is not alone, co-signing with giants like Yahoo! and Microsoft and prominent human rights groups (minus Amnesty International which has criticized the initiative).

This will hopefully distribute the burden of responsibility away from companies with potentially compromising internal profit motives (even gentle giants like Google) to a cross-market competition for high compliance ratings (and the potential of “socially responsible” investment capital to follow). In that picture, companies will have an incentive to stick to their guns when it comes to free expression and allies when parliaments and bureacrats come calling for the internet’s silence.

Source: Committee to Protect Journalists

For the first time in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ prison census, more online journalists than traditional journalists are now in jail. From the press release:

Reflecting the rising influence of online reporting and commentary, more Internet journalists are jailed worldwide today than journalists working in any other medium…45 percent of all media workers jailed worldwide are bloggers, Web-based reporters, or online editors. Online journalists represent the largest professional category for the first time in CPJ’s prison census.

As our case study series and the CPJ report have shown, bloggers and online journalists have increasingly drawn the attention of governments that limit free speech, and they rarely have the type of protection a large, traditional newspaper can provide. As the CPJ’s Joel Simon notes:

The image of the solitary blogger working at home in pajamas may be appealing, but when the knock comes on the door they are alone and vulnerable. All of us must stand up for their rights–from Internet companies to journalists and press freedom groups. The future of journalism is online and we are now in a battle with the enemies of press freedom who are using imprisonment to define the limits of public discourse.

Rebecca MacKinnon just posted an interesting excerpt of academic research on Chinese censorship. She focused her work on domestic blogging services in China and how politically sensitive material is censored within or without the “Great Firewall.” Since some blogging services are foreign companies operating domestically in China (MySpace, Yahoo! China), she broaches the now familiar quandary of corporate complicity in Chinese state censorship.

Google (and YouTube’s geolocational filtering) have been much discussed. Perhaps less visible was the story that came out a month ago about even Skype conversations are now being monitored (thanks to Toronto-based Citizen Lab) by an automatic filtering system hunting for keywords and targeted users. One wonders if there will ever be a moment when the sprawling expanse of internet expression will become too large and unwieldy for Chinese authorities to keep a costly censorship regime.

Unfortunately, the Chinese government has already found ways of increasing the efficiency of the operation. In addition to automatic filters and regional censors, China has practically outsourced the work to private companies by requiring licenses (and their implicit conditions) to operate.

What is interesting about MacKinnon’s work (which we earlier covered here) is how uneven and inconsistent blog censorship in China turns out to be:

All Chinese blog-hosting companies are required by government regulators to censor their users’ content in order to keep their business licenses. But as Liu [Liu Xiaoyuan, a prominent Chinese blogger] discovered, they all make different choices not only about how to implement censorship requirements, but also how to treat the users who get censored.

If you don’t get shut down on one site, you’re likely to slip through on another…

Anthony Loewenstein, author of the recent book The Blogging Revolution, stopped by for a luncheon/lecture here at the Berkman Center yesterday. Loewenstein, a journalist in background, prepared for the book by traveling to some of the world’s more repressive regimes and interviewing bloggers about how the internet and blogging in particular is changing the world they live in. The full transcript of his remarks can be found here. I wanted to offer a few of the points I found to be particularly interesting.

1. Loewenstein repeatedly pointed to a sort of blind spot in Western journalism that is actually obscuring our view of the non-Western world. This includes the fact that most Western coverage is reported by Western correspondents who sometimes (as he himself confessed during the Q&A; he only spent a month there and mostly spoke to American bloggers living in Syria) do not remain long in a country or learn the requisite local languages to penetrate deeply into more indigenous stories and perspectives.

In particular, the Western “lens” (and here Loewenstein singled out the New York Times) tends to self-filter news into the categories and pre-suppositions that fit the exigencies of American foreign policy. On this point, one had the feeling that Loewenstein was mostly right (e.g. the newspeak “War on Terror”), though he seemed to have an almost conspiratorial conviction about Washington’s influence. He was careful to stress that the Manichean division of “good” versus “bad” nations (for example, “Israeli” vs “Arab”) has been more a hallmark of Bush-era policy.

The point of all of this is that bloggers fill in our picture of the developing and Islamic world where newspapers and major media fail, in large part because the bulk of Western stories obsessively follow themes like “terrorism” and “Palestine/Israel” which tend to reduce and oversimplify our view of the entire region. Instead of puffing our ghosts and specters, the West should be tuning in to hear the real story from the ground, as provided by citizen journalists and just average people writing blogs.

2. This does not mean, however, that bloggers are the harbingers of upcoming democratic revolutions in the Middle East or China. Although the internet widens the scope of free expression (or at least makes it more difficult for authoritarian regimes to contain dissent), Loewenstein often encountered a kind of weariness for calls to arms and revolution. One Iranian blogger, in particular, told Loewenstein that he felt strongly about reform, but that it needed to come about in a gradual, almost Burkean, sort of way.

Loewenstein connected this to a need for the West to overcome its epistemological shortcomings and embrace moderate factions, particularly elements of political Islam like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Instead, in the relentless fight against a spooky AlQaeda menace and pragmatic energy policy, Washington props up pretty bad rulers. If they read native blogs, they would have a better idea of who these factions are. The would hear the voices of moderate factions who are as uneasy with American or European meddling as they are with the regular torture, repression and abuse which characterizes their own regime. This includes Muslim women against female circumcision or restrictive social policies, pro-reform Islamists and change-eager Cubans.

3. Having said all that, most blogging in the developing world is not political in scope. Not everyone running a blog (and these are generally middle class folks to begin with) is a dissident or human rights activist. Much of it centers on dating or music, fashion and everyday life. Loewenstein rightly insists, however, that this is itself a kind of free expression and step toward an open society worth paying attention to.

I think there is a kind of cynical rebuttal to his argument which says that the banality of everday blogs in repressive regimes is highly conditioned by the fear of speaking out on anything political. Of course, this dynamic must differ from regime to regime. In Iran, where even Western music and fashion is banned by the morality police, the struggle to do banal and everday things is already a political struggle; in Thailand, where only the borders of internet are really policed (lese majeste and jihadist websites), it’s easier to maintain an apolitical kind of free expression.

4. Loewenstein had harsh words for internet companies which collude in censorship. He pointed, as we have before as well, to the geo-locational filtering YouTube uses to adapt content to local countries. He did concede that perhaps blocking four videos instead of four thousand is better, but I almost wanted him to stick to his guns and insist that countries take YouTube all or nothing. Not because I think this will loosen the knots of censorship, but because public outcry and dissent could be wide enough to choke back the state’s ever encroaching authority and control over democratic discourse.

All in all, a great talk and we thank Antony for stopping by!