Supporting Dissent With Technology

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Hamed Saber

by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan | New York Times | February 23, 2010

Cameran Ashraf was instant-messaging from Los Angeles with an activist in Iran during anti-government demonstrations Feb. 11 when the chat went dead.

Had Iran’s government “shut down the Internet” to thwart dissidents from organizing online, or had the authorities come to arrest the man, Mr. Ashraf said he wondered as he described the incident during an online video interview. Mr. Ashraf, who says he sees himself as a digital aid worker, immediately alerted other Iranian contacts to block surveillance of their Web traffic.

A 29-year-old American whose parents emigrated from Iran, Mr. Ashraf is a co-founder of AccessNow, a group of tech-savvy volunteers who joined forces during Iran’s crackdown on election protests last year to help Iranians evade censorship. They are the type of cyberactivists the U.S. State Department is seeking to support with $50 million in funds for an expanding counteroffensive against suppression of Internet freedom.

“The fact that many governments are trying to prevent their citizens from expressing themselves or obtaining information that would be critical” underscores the importance of defending online speech and assembly, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a Feb. 16 interview. The United States wants to support “garage type” outfits trying to circumvent Web censorship, she said.

AccessNow has communicated with Google on censorship and security issues and received help from its YouTube subsidiary when Iranian protest videos were hacked, said Brett Solomon, a co-founder of the group, in New York.

“This is what we do, at the core of who we are: to make sure that everyone has access,” said Scott Rubin, a Google and YouTube spokesman who works on free expression issues.

The State Department has given $15 million in the past two years to private projects that use technology and training to promote online freedoms. It is reviewing applications for $5 million to support work including research into circumventing firewalls and surveillance, and $30 million more will be available later this year, said Daniel Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

Helping activists creates a problem by exposing them to retribution from repressive governments. Projects are so sensitive and the people involved at such risk that the State Department declined to identify current applicants. One Washington-based group that got the bulk of the money doled out so far — more than $13 million for projects worldwide — asked not to be named, fearing that Chinese employees would be jailed.

AccessNow’s founders haven’t received government funds and said they would have reservations about accepting any because they want to remain independent and protect contacts in countries where taking foreign money is a crime.

The group does disseminate open-source software that receives indirect U.S. support, including Tor, a network of virtual tunnels that allows people to surf anonymously. Built on work by the Office of Naval Research, the science and technology arm of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, Tor was developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and by volunteers. It is used by an average of 8,000 people in Iran and 100,000 in China at any moment, said Andrew Lewman, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Scrutiny of digital dissidents drew headlines last month when Google, the Mountain View, California, search-engine company, said the e-mail accounts of Chinese rights activists had been singled out in an attack on its computer systems. Mrs. Clinton called on the Chinese authorities in a Jan. 21 speech to “conduct a thorough investigation” and said U.S. technology firms should use their influence to protest censorship, surveillance and theft of information.

Iran’s post-election restrictions on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook — used to organize and publicize protests — inspired Mr. Ashraf, Mr. Solomon and two Internet enthusiasts in Los Angeles, who all met online, to form AccessNow. A handful of other volunteers help run servers and share technical support.

“Our genesis is Iran, but the idea behind AccessNow is to develop a global movement,” Mr. Solomon, a 39-year-old Australian, said in an Internet video chat, adding that he’s sharing his experience with Tibetan, Burmese and Cuban dissidents.

The Internet has built-in perils for democracy advocates. Users who don’t utilize encryption or other methods to obscure their identity leave a digital trail of conversations, contacts and Web sites visited.

Global Voices Online, an international bloggers network, has documented 206 cases of bloggers under arrest or threat, most in China, Egypt and Iran. Last year, Internet journalists outnumbered print, radio and television reporters among 136 imprisoned members of the news media, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York.

Mehdi Saharkhiz, 28, an Iranian in New Jersey, joined AccessNow after his father, a journalist named Isa Saharkhiz, was arrested outside Tehran eight months ago. He has gathered 2,200 videos on his OnlyMehdi YouTube channel, including iconic footage by anonymous Iranians who won a George Polk Award in journalism last week for filming the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, who has become a symbol of resistance.

“YouTube videos provided some of the only perspective of what was happening in Iran,” said Olivia Ma, 27, news manager of the video-sharing site. During the protests this month, videos were hacked and erased; AccessNow alerted Ms. Ma, who restored them.

Not every problem is so easily resolved. Mr. Ashraf hasn’t heard back from the Iranian rights campaigner who disappeared from his screen.

Digital Dictatorship?

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Yahoo! Georgetown Fellow Evgeny Morozov has written a fascinating opinion piece on what he describes as “techno-utopianism”: The belief that free and open access to information on the Internet inevitably leads to free and open societies. He argues that in many authoritarian regimes, the governments are using the Internet and technology to stifle free expression, and that in countries like Iran and China, citizens are arguably more repressed than before the “Twitter revolution”. I think his insights and conclusions are very interesting; Internet companies and diplomats alike need to carefully consider the limits of the Internet as a force for social change or diplomacy. That said, the examples Evgeny gives are, themselves, a bit of a paradox. I, for one, would say that authoritarian regimes’ strenuous efforts to shut down Internet services or censor content demonstrate that those governments themselves recognize the potentially liberating power of the Internet and free expression and are threatened by it.  Better worlds will not be built by Flickr or Twitter alone, and the same social media tools are available to both enemies and friends of open societies. I still believe that history demonstrates that all positive movements are born and nurtured through the exchange of information, and the ability of passionate and dedicated people to connect and to communicate their ideas. The Internet is a platform; a tool that enables information and ideas to spread at the speed of light. Its impact is wholly determined by how we use it. It’s not utopia; it’s potential.

Digital Dictatorship, by Evgeny Morozov

A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It’s not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn’t—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google’s popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.

Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic’s complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran’s state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country’s communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day). The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization now forms one of the pillars of “techno-utopianism.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vows to make Internet freedom one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy, and one senator after another issues calls to “tear down this cyber wall” and allocate more funding to groups that promote Internet freedom and fight online censorship without giving much thought to the footnotes. The spirit of techno-utopianism in Washington rides so high it often seems that the Freedom Agenda has been reborn as the Twitter Agenda—perhaps only with more utopianism about both democratization and the Internet’s role in it. Even such a seasoned observer of foreign affairs as Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana could not resist the urge to join the church of Twitter-worship, penning a Foreign Policy op-ed that urged American diplomats to engage with social media. What remains overlooked by Sen. Lugar and others is that authoritarian governments may survive the age of information abundance relatively unscathed—and in fact, they’re already using the Internet to fight the challenges posed by modernity.

Is this growing fascination with social media a mere sign of our desperation with other, more conventional instruments of diplomatic leverage? Perhaps so. While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

It’s easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran’s Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn’t collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

The government did its share to obstruct its opponents, too. Not only did it thwart Internet communications, the government (or its plentiful loyalists) also flooded Iranian Web sites with videos of dubious authenticity—one showing a group of protesters burning the portrait of Ali Khamenei—that aimed to provoke and splinter the opposition. In an environment like this—where it’s impossible to distinguish whether your online interlocutors are your next-door neighbors, some hyperactive Iranians in the diaspora, or a government agent masquerading as a member of the Green Movement—who could blame ordinary Iranians for not taking the risks of flooding the streets only to find themselves arrested?

Our earlier, unfounded expectations that the Internet would make it easy for the average citizens to see who else is opposing the regime and then act collectively based on that shared knowledge may have been inaccurate. In the age of the Spinternet, when cheap online propaganda can easily be bought with the help of pro-government bloggers, elucidating what fellow citizens think about the regime may be harder than we thought. Add to that the growing surveillance capacity of modern authoritarian states—also greatly boosted by information collected through social media and analyzed with new and advanced forms of data-mining—and you may begin to understand why the Green Movement faltered.

The excessive attention that many Western observers devoted to the role of the Internet in the Iranian protests also reveals another, more serious impact that techno-utopianism has on how we think about the Internet in an authoritarian context. Unable to transcend the hackneyed framework of post-electoral protest, we are becoming blind to more general changes and effects that the Internet has on authoritarian societies in between elections. We spend so much time thinking about the dissidents and how the Internet has changed their lives, that we have almost completely neglected how it affects the lives of the average, non-politicized users, who would be crucial to any democratic revolution.

For example, while the American public is actively engaged in a rich and provocative debate about the Internet’s impact on our own society—asking how new technologies affect our privacy or how they change the way we read and think—we gloss over such subtleties when talking about the Internet’s role in authoritarian countries. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream American magazine running a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Case of China,” as the Atlantic did (without the China part) in 2008. Such attitudes almost smack of orientalism-in-reverse: While we fret about the Internet’s contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed and engaged global citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments.

This is not to say that there are no young people living under authoritarian conditions who have used the Internet to organize a protest; they exist and should be applauded for their courage. But we should not lose sight of the fact that they are only a tiny minority. For the vast majority of Internet users in those countries, increased access to information by itself may not always be liberating. In fact, it may only undermine their commitment to political dissent.

The case of East Germany offers some valuable lessons here. According to data compiled by the East German government, East Germans who watched West German television were paradoxically more satisfied with life in their country and the communist regime. Speaking in 1990, the East German writer Christoph Hein spoke of the difficulties of mobilizing his fellow citizens, pointing out that “the whole people could leave the country and move to the West…at 8 p.m.—via television.” Ironically, the fact that Dresden—where the 1989 protests started—lies too far and too low to have received Western broadcasts may partly explain the rebellious spirit of the city’s inhabitants.

The parallels to the Internet with its endless supply of online entertainment are obvious: Twitter and Facebook might make political mobilization of the kind that is required to topple dictators harder, not easier.

Our binary view of modern authoritarianism as an endless struggle between the state and its anti-state, pro-Western and pro-democratic opponents also blinds us to the fact that public life in these societies has many more layers and textures. Not all opponents of the Russian or Chinese or even Egyptian state fit the neoliberal pattern. Nationalism, extremism and religious fanaticism abound; Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood are very active online too. It’s not at all guaranteed that empowering those forces by weakening the state with the help of the Internet is going to speed up the process of democratization.

Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like. To put it in a more formal framework: not all social capital created by the Internet is bound to produce “social goods”; “social bads” are inevitable as well. The political scientist Robert Putnam, who was instrumental in promoting the notion of “social capital” in popular discourse, was not blind to such possibilities. In “Bowling Alone,” his most famous book, he explicitly cautioned against the “kumbaya interpretation of social capital,” stating that “networks…are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive.”

Thus, it’s not just the women’s movement that is using Facebook to promote its causes in Saudi Arabia; it’s also religious conservatives who have set up an online version of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Not that the Saudi government disapproves of such online “activism”; the mutual empowerment between the state and the civil society does not always lead to liberalization. Similarly, Russian nationalist groups are very excited about organizing cyber-attacks on foreign governments and even using online maps to show locations of ethnic minorities in Russian towns. While Sen. Lugar’s op-ed lauded a new U.S.-backed mobile-phone-based system for Mexican citizens to report crimes, it failed to mention that Twitter users in Mexico use the site to share information about police checkpoints in their areas so that drunk drivers may avoid arrest.

What we don’t seem to realize is that some civil associations, undoubtedly greatly empowered by the Internet, may work toward rather uncivil ends. Instead, we cling to a very outdated view that, as far as authoritarian governments are concerned, all non-state power is good and inevitably leads to democracy, while state power is evil and always leads to suppression. Based on this logic, we often arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that it’s okay to scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater, as long as that theater belongs to the Chinese Communist Party or Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Despite these caveats, it would be unreasonable for the American government to simply abandon all efforts to use the Internet for promoting democracy abroad. A good starting point is to stop thwarting America’s own technology companies, which currently need a host of waivers from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to export Internet services to authoritarian countries (often the target of government sanctions). The reason Microsoft’s Messenger is unavailable in Iran is not because the Iranian government hates it, but because Microsoft would need to fight an uphill battle in Washington to bypass the numerous restrictions imposed by OFAC to make that happen, and the poor commercial appeal of places like Iran, North Korea or Cuba makes such fights very costly. Similarly, a host of American hacktivists who wanted to assist the Green Movement with anti-censorship and anti-surveillance technology have also found themselves paralyzed by these sanctions.

This is certainly not a good way to promote “Internet freedom.” Resolving such arcane policy disputes is likely to advance American interests abroad more effectively than the flashy and media-friendly undertakings—like the U.S. State Department’s leaked request to Twitter executives to halt the site’s maintenance during the June protests in Iran—of which American diplomats have grown so increasingly fond. The growing coziness between them and the top executives of America’s leading technology companies, epitomized by state dinners and joint trips to countries like Russia and Iraq, is also a cause for concern. (And flashy such trips really are: The recent delegation to Russia was spearheaded by such a distinguished American technology authority as Ashton Kutcher; why are American taxpayers paying for that once again?) It is certainly a good thing that Obama’s youthful bureaucrats have bonded with the brightest creative minds of Silicon Valley. However, the kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world—i.e. that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions of the U.S. State Department—may simply endanger the lives of those who use such services in authoritarian countries. It’s hardly surprising that the Iranian government has begun to view all Twitter users with the utmost suspicion; everyone is now guilty by default.

But there is a broader lesson for the Obama administration here: Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of “open government”; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.

Google and Yahoo raise doubts over planned net filters

By BHRP

BBC News | February 16, 2010

Google and Yahoo have joined two Australian organizations calling for a “rethink” of the country’s controversial internet filter plans.

Flickr Creative Commons | Digital Reflections

The Australian government has announced proposals to introduce a mandatory filter which would block all RC (Refused Classification) content.

The groups argue that the subjects covered by RC material are too wide-ranging for a blanket ban.

They also warn that the filter will not “effectively protect children”.

Iran’s resistance keeps up cat-and-mouse web game

By BHRP

TEHRAN (Reuters) – With their paths through the Internet increasingly blocked by government filters, Nooshin and her fellow Iranian opposition-supporters say their information on planned protests now comes in emails.

Flickr Creative Commons | Faramarz

They say they don’t know who sends them.

Internet messages have been circulating about possible rallies on February 11, when Iran marks the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. But the climate in the Islamic Republic is much harder than before last year’s post-election protests.

Last June, social media sites were hailed in the West as promising opposition supporters an anonymous rallying ground — especially when they were accessed via proxy servers that could mask participants’ actions and whereabouts.

For determined Iranians now, they are a high-risk tactic in a strategic game with the authorities, amid reports of mounting Internet disruption. Almost 32 percent of Iranians use the Internet and nearly 59 percent have a cellphone subscription, according to 2008 estimates from the International Telecommunications Union.

Since the disputed presidential poll that plunged Iran into its deepest internal turmoil since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the authorities have slowed Internet speeds and shut down opposition websites.

They also boast of an ability to track online action even from behind the proxies.

“This one is also blocked,” sighed Nooshin, a student, as she surfed the web in a cafe in downtown Tehran. “This is more Filternet than Internet.”

Speaking in a low voice and wearing a blue Islamic headscarf, the 22-year-old declined to use her real name due to the sensitivity of opposition activism in Iran.

MOMENTUM OF FEAR

The presidential vote was followed by huge protests led by opposition supporters who say the poll was rigged to secure hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election. The authorities deny that charge.

When their newspapers were shut down after the vote, defeated presidential candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi launched their own websites. The authorities later blocked them, forcing the opposition to set up new ones.

Much of this action and protest was publicized and tracked on the Internet, especially through micro-blogging site Twitter.

However, concerns are now mounting in Iran that the authorities may be able to track down people who use proxies.

“People are afraid of being identified and are not willing to use them any longer,” said Hamid, a shopkeeper in Markaz-e Computre, a popular computer shopping center in north Tehran, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Which is not to say that opposition efforts to plan and publicize their actions have been thwarted.

Afshin, a web developer who supports the opposition, said the authorities would not succeed: “Whatever the government blocks in the web, the people find another way,” he said.

“It is a cat-and-mouse game which the government cannot win.”

PROXIES

Arrayed against the web activists are the fact that Iran’s government is equipped with latest monitoring technology, which enables it to detect computers making a secure connection, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Helsinki-based F-Secure Corporation.

Some proxy servers use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to secure the connection with a remote server. This security layer helps ensure that no other computers can read the traffic exchanged.

When people make these SSL connections — the same type used in the West for Internet shopping — the authorities cannot see the content of material accessed. But they could physically raid sites to check on the computers involved.

National police chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam in January warned Iran’s opposition against using text messages and emails to organize fresh street rallies.

“These people should know where they are sending the SMS and email as these systems are under control. They should not think using proxies will prevent their identification,” he said.

“If they continue … those who organize or issue appeals (about opposition protests) have committed a crime worse than those who take to the streets,” Ahmadi-Moghaddam added.

Thousands of people were arrested during widespread street unrest after the election. Most have since been freed, but more than 80 people have received jail terms of up to 15 years, including several senior opposition figures.

On January 28, Iranian media said two men sentenced to death in trials that followed the election had been executed. Tension in Iran rose after eight people were killed in clashes with security forces in December, including Mousavi’s nephew.

“The security services can turn technology against the logistics of protest,” Evgeny Morozov, a commentator on the political implications of the Internet, wrote in the November edition of Prospect magazine, citing experiences in Belarus and elsewhere.

DETERMINATION

But the authorities are facing determined resistance.

Journalists inside Iran have been banned from attending opposition demonstrations, but that has not kept footage of anti-government gatherings from reaching the Internet.

“It is extremely important for me to check my email messages in order to be informed about the latest developments in the absence of independent free media in the country,” said Nooshin, her computer screen repeatedly flashing up the same message in Farsi: “Access to this page is prohibited by the law.”

A young customer in the computer shopping center in Tehran said: “It is very important to be unidentified while surfing the Internet these days … currently the most secure way for us is to have a secure email account.”

Hypponen said Iran’s international isolation — especially its tense relationship with the United States — is likely to hamper its ability to catch web activists.

“It’s easier for an activist from Iran to hide than for a web criminal,” he said. “When chasing criminals, countries help each other.”

“SOFT” WAR

The United States is also a factor. It cut ties with Iran shortly after its revolution toppled the U.S.-backed Shah, and Tehran and Washington are now at odds over Iran’s disputed nuclear work.

Iran has accused the West of waging a “soft” war with the help of opposition and intellectuals inside the country, and officials have portrayed the post-election protests as a foreign-backed bid to undermine the clerical establishment.

In January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged Beijing and other governments to end Internet censorship, placing China in the company of Iran, Saudi Arabia and others as leading suppressors of online freedom.

She said “electronic barriers” to parts of the Internet or filtered search engine results contravened the U.N.’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of information.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hit back, accusing the United States of trying to use the Internet as a tool to confront the Islamic Republic.

“The Americans have said that they have allocated a $45 million budget to help them to confront the Islamic Republic of Iran via the Internet,” he said in a January 26 speech.

The U.S. Senate voted in July to adopt the Victims of Iranian Censorship Act, which authorizes up to $50 million for expanding Farsi language broadcasts, supporting Iranian Internet and countering government efforts to block it.

(Additional reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Sara Ledwith)

© 2010 Reuters