Internet & Democracy Blog

I’ve been watching the rise of the quasi-libertarian “Tea Party” movement with bemused curiosity. The viral explosion of the net-based movement must far exceed the expectations of its original proponents: the unwitting Rick Santelli, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, and the host of libertarian organizations which helped to build up publicity.

Yet, as Andrew Sullivan and at least one perceptive Daily Dish reader have noted, there is a certain haziness to the movement’s goals. What exactly are they agitating for (or against)? Besides the Boston Tea Party metaphor and a populist and indistinct discontent with taxes and the stimulus bill, protesters seem to be running on the hot air of their own fervor. Social networking and brilliant internet marketing have created a behemoth with no head, all grassroots and no agenda.

This presents, as I see it, some of the limits of crowd-sourced politicking. Yes, as with the election of Barack Obama, we are seeing thousands of people participate in digital activism; but without some kind of central organization, the momentum is all centrifugal. Or as that Dish reader put it:

Let them find out how easy it is to have things go viral and how hard it is to sustain something without a cogent message or an articulate messenger.

If, on the other hand, the Tea Party camp can stay loud into next year, I think the effect on the big tent of mainstream conservative politics might be tangible. This “squeaky wheel” electoral effect would prove the power of the web to amplify messages, even mildly incoherent ones, through the blogosphere and beyond.

A new Texas “shield” law, designed to protect journalists from being forced to yield up confidential sources, will reportedly not include bloggers. Of course, the line between the two is rapidly blurring as established journalists (Mark Ambinder, for example) begin quasi-blogging full-time. Yet, because those journalists are paid to blog, they may be included under the shield. Rather, this is a blow for citizen journalists, whose un-paid status somehow makes them ineligible to report on corruption or malfeasance. Disappointing, to say the least…

1. Oman, one of the world’s most closed societies, is prosecuting a Web forum moderator for allowing an anonymous post to go up criticizing a telecom company for corruption. I think Arab autocracies are going to come face to face with the explosion of internet speech sooner rather than later. Blogging (particularly anonymous) posting will continue, though aggressively prosecuting the fora where dissenting speech is found might set things back a bit.

2. For a comprehensive look at Chinese censorship and a chart of the security agencies which control the web, see this Digital East Asia article. As it turns out, even Chinese e-books have keyword filtering code buried in their javascript (Hat Tip: NetEffect). Add this to Skype, video sharing websites, WordPress, and so on… Between self-censorship and the Golden Shield, the crackdown on Chinese cyber-freedom is as terrifying as it is ubiquitous. I’m thinking aloud, but doesn’t it seem plausible that the oft-cited Pew poll which suggests the Chinese approve of censorship are results conditioned by fear of authority and a closed information world? From that grossly limited perspective, Tibetans and Falun Gongers may really seem like rabblerousing no-goodniks.

Mosey over to RadioBerkman for a discussion of how Pres. Obama is beefing up .gov web presence, and what that could mean for greater participation by average, everyday citizens via the web.

NetEffect has some preliminary thoughts on the role of Twitter in the on-going Moldovan youth protests. I think Morozov’s right to see them as a tech protest movement a la the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine (for full background, read Berkman’s study here). Both of these social movements were stoked, organized and facilitated by technology.

Twitter has not only helped rally protesters, though, it has also given us — as during the Mumbai bombings or the war in Gaza — a glimpse of reality on the ground. Visceral, real micro-news before the MSM or anyone else can write up a narrative of what’s happening. If you want to follow the action, start reading this tweet aggregator or search for tweets with the hashtag #pman.

One more point should be raised. Cell phones, Facebook and Twitter are morally neutral. Although they can be positive tools of peaceful protest and democratic engagement, they can’t prevent flashmobs become real mobs which break windows and destroy property, or worse. G-20 activists in London used Twitter to elude police and stage more coordinated (and sometimes violent) anti-globalization protests.

I don’t know if the Black Bloc anarchists who set the Strasbourg hotel on fire used Twitter to organize, but I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. It’s important not to forget this darker side of mass coordination. At least in a traditional social opposition movement, the supposed leader can call off violence. By contrast, a de-centralized twitter mob may not have enough allegiance or restraint to prevent destructive mayhem from breaking out.

John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, Senate backers of a bill which gives the executive branch broad crisis powers over the internet, have separately introduced legislation to create a “cyber-security czar.” This new federal position will oversee the many new programs, regulations and crisis planning which the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 lays out in fuller detail. The “czar” will require Senate confirmation, but will come with a high security clearance.

It’s not yet clear to me whether the president must give authority to shut down private networks for “national security” reasons, or whether, like the Federal Reserve, Obama’s technology “czar” will have broad discretionary power to determine and enact crisis measures. A figure like this may be necessary in an increasingly interconnected web filled with patriotic hackers (ask the Estonians about Russian DDOS attacks), astro-turfers and other digital mercenaries.

Still, while the vagueness of “national security” may match the amorphousness of cyber-threats, this is certainly a momentous power shift toward “federalizing” the web. I wonder how far down the road some kind of law enforcement censorship regime is. Australia and other Western democracies are facing that battle right now, and web freedom advocates are losing in spades.

Rick Santelli, the lively CNBC correspondent whose on-air outburst went viral on YouTube and in libertarian/conservative circles, continues to distance himself from the web-organized anti-tax tea parties which have been spawned in his honor.

A short-lived Playboy article had accused Santelli of planting his reference to an anti-stimulus Boston tea party protest as part of a massive libertarian astro-turf campaign. Santelli publicly denied the charge, and an army of bloggers left and right picked apart the Playboy piece until it mysteriously disappeared. See more coverage here.

The humorous and strange take-away from all this is the power “viral”-ness has on social movements. If Santelli is correct that his outburst was spontaneous, then he will have become a libertarian hero in spite of himself. Indeed, a revolutionary without a platform save what political organizers, harnessing the web, have made in his YouTube image. Nor is there any need for an elaborate astro-turf theory to explain this. It is simply the stunning power of internet social networks at work. Obama understood it, and now the libertarians running the “Tea Party” have figured it out, too.

I have the feeling Santelli is sympathetic to the cause, if bemused to find himself so transmogrified.

New Senate legislation introduced by John Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would grant the president sweeping powers to control the internet in the event of a cyber-security crisis, including control of the on/off switch for both public and private U.S. networks. The bill is said to follow many of the suggestions of a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report released Dec. 8, 2008, calling for a cyber-security czar. See my coverage of that report here.

Then, as now, my concern was how to balance self-defense from hackers and digital cossacks and civil liberties from bureaucrats and federal agencies. Crisis powers and preparations are one thing, unrestrained federal control of the web is quite another. Who will be able to declare an internet emergency… the executive branch? Could this end up being a backdoor for new surveillance efforts in the war on (digital?) “terrorists”?

The Center for Democracy and Technology managed to get a draft PDF of the legislation, which you can check out here. More coverage of this bill, which is already scaring the pants off computer professionals and civil libertarians, can be found here and here.

Oh, and you folks should also check out Evgeny Morozov’s spiffy new FP blog, NetEffect. He’s a lucid thinker, great tech writer, and a friend to Berkman. Congratulations Evgeny!

I’ve had some time to pour over Evgeny Morozov’s thoughtful and sobering piece on cyber-utopianism. He’s dead on in diagnosing Western academics and activists with quixotic belief in the Internet’s power to democratize. The web is no panacea for totalitarianism, Morozov warns, and to fervently hope otherwise is hopeful blindness.

In at least two respects, I agree with Morozov. First, simply increasing access to the internet has not taken down the world’s notorious human rights offenders. “Logistics,” as Morozov points out, “are not the only determinant of civic engagement.” The web may have amplified the efforts of democracy activists (in the Ukraine, Burma or China), but this fact has not necessarily swelled the ranks of freedom fighters.

Connected to this is a corollary point, and one which I previously discussed in connection to a paper Morozov wrote for the Open Society Institute. The Web contains as much distraction as dissidence; it’s a hall of mirrors, often a projection of active fantasy, not political activism. In the BR piece, Morozov nails this:

Once they get online unsupervised, do we expect Chinese Internet users, many of them young, to rush to download the latest report from Amnesty International or read up on Falun Gong on Wikipedia? Or will they opt for The Sopranos or the newest James Bond flick? Why assume that they will suddenly demand more political rights, rather than the Friends or Sex in the City lifestyles they observe on the Internet?

Returning to my first point, Chinese and Burmese cyber-dissidence has simply been met with heavier repression and authoritarian backlash. In direct proportion to the expansion of internet access, Chinese users have seen the creation of a behemoth Great Firewall, monitoring all traffic, even Skype conversations, for subversive keywords. Those bloggers and netizens caught red-handed are shut down or arrested — in chilling 1984-esque slang, they are “harmonized.”

In Burma, by contrast, the Saffron Revolution of Buddhist monks was defeated by a complete take down of the internet and brutal military repression, despite well publicized and shocking photographs from citizen journalists and bloggers. Indeed, one of the motivating questions in our study of the Saffron Revolution was why democratic reform did not materialize in Burma despite the pro-democratic catalyst of internet activists.

However warranted Morozov’s cyber-pessimism may be, there is some room for counter-argument. Cyber-utopians may falsely subscribe to technological determinism, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility that the web’s influence on democratic reform is subtle and slow, almost Burkean in quality.

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