Internet & Democracy Blog

In a meeting with human rights activists, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said that competition among political forces should be restored in the country. He also argued for changes in the NGO registration law, which many civil society leaders argue was created as a legal means to shut down civil society groups the government disapproved of–including the Salvation Army.

These recent moves appear to be part of a deliberate policy shift to allow greater political openness as a means to respond to the economic crisis, which has led to the first widespread protests in Russia in years. Medvedev said in the meeting with civil society leaders:

It is clear that in times of crisis, we should think about strengthening mutual understanding and trust between the state and the civil society. Without this, we will not be able to overcome the crisis.

This is not the first time we have heard the idea that the economic crisis will require political changes; last February Medvedev aid Igor Yurgens said:

The social contract consisted of limiting of civil rights in exchange for economic well-being. At the current moment, economic well-being is shrinking. Correspondingly, civil rights should expand. It’s just simple logic.

If this liberalization continues, it will add credence to the theory that economic development and democracy go hand in hand. Of course, it could also mean that once the Russian economy recovers, that Russia could retract any of the political changes allowed now in order to sate Russians’ anger over the economic crisis.

It was hard not to chuckle a bit when I first read this. Alabama? E-Voting? And yet, making up for abysmally slow absentee vote processing in the 2008 elections (roughly 80 days), the Alabama State Legislature is now debating a bill that would provide secure channels for e-voting to Alabamans overseas. The plan is modeled on a similar system used in parts of Florida (hanging chads?).

The bill seems particularly targeted at military personnel. Alabama is a heavy recruiting ground for the Army, which enlisted over 6,000 new soldiers from Alabama in the past three years alone. Regardless, so long as the system can be reasonably hack-proof — I still worry about Estonia, though Switzerland had some positive test results — this is a positive step toward making technology serve democratic participation. Here’s hoping other states will catch on.

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

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has been celebrating its soft power over the past two months by dismantling several sites it accused of being anti-religion, pornographic, and conducting anti-national security activities. (1)

It seems the Revolutionary Guards Corp was so pleased by its conquest of the virtual world that it launched a Web site (2) where it names the sites this military ideologically motivated organization has dismantled and hacked. The Web site also reveals photos of arrested people who were allegedly involved with these sites.

The Revolutionary Guards Corp accused some Western countries of supporting these anti-religion sites and cyber dissidents who, they claim, are planning a soft overthrow of the regime. The Corp has also warned that the Internet is not out of its reach anymore.

Several Iranian bloggers and Western media members pointed out that this virtual, well-organized attack is a sign that a new era has dawned where the Iranian cyber world is less secure, and repression is more frequent and real.

Some Iranian bloggers also write that this well-publicized action, which was covered several times on national TV, is just the tip of the iceberg, and that it aims to make people scared and tarnish the image of the blogosphere among Iranians. Some bloggers have also demanded that those arrested for running the sites should have access to legal defense as their rights have been violated by mistreatment and torture.

It seems all these thoughts, doubts, and speculations have some roots in reality and that imprisonment for Iranian bloggers, filtering of Web sites, and censorship are hard facts in the country.

But the Western media have chosen to ignore one very important fact, one not discussed much in the Iranian blogosphere–that the action by the Revolutionary Guards involved not only hacking and jailing.

Some of the pornographic sites shut down were not ordinary, normal ones. They exposed naked Iranian women and girls who were filmed without their knowledge, and even some of the victims in these films were sexually violated.

Hacking and dismantling these sites has nothing to do with either censorship or freedom of speech. The action of the Revolutionary Guards, by ending the virtual existence of these sites, can be considered as a humanitarian action because it upholds the honor, private life, reputation, and existence of its people. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an Iranian citizen in Iran to hire an international lawyer to complain against a foreign-based hosting company.

The Revolutionary Guards frequently use soft-overthrow conspiracies and threats to justify their actions. Soft overthrow can be considered a sad reaction to the George Bush regime’s changed mantra, and the former American Government’s $75-million investment in soft power to achieve this goal.(3)

Bush’s soft power rhetoric not only failed to empower Iranian cyber activists or NGOs but it became an excuse for the Iranian regime to step up pressure on Iran’s civil society.

Now that Bush is gone, the Iranian regime is being courted by the Obama administration’s offer to help in Afghanistan. The Revolutionary Guards Corps flourished with its soft power, and instead of haggling over half measures such as filtering, it wiped off sites and blogs. Cyber dissidents are worried about what their next move will be, and do not know to whom they can pray. But at least they have Bush to curse.

A month ago, I wrote about the disturbing use of Twitter by American jurors. The private sphere of the jury box — sealed-off in order to preserve impartiality — is slowly being permeated by Tweets, status updates and unauthorized trips to Wikipedia for information.

Twitter may not belong inside the courtroom, but in Dubai at least SMS is a clerk’s best friend. For about 16 cents (60 fils), any member of the public may now text the Dubai Public Prosecution agency, and receive text message sized updates on the details of the case.

Nothing sounds so deadening to my soul as dealing with legal bureaucracy. But this kind of e-Government — streamlining and making legal services accessible — is a smart solution to the morass of paperwork, the kind of thing Vivek Kundra would think up.

UPDATE: I missed this ABC report on a federal judge allowing court reporters to follow the case by Twitter. Excellent read!

Russia watchers are reading a lot into President Medvedev’s decision to give a rare and wide-ranging interview to Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper that has had four of its journalists assassinated in recent memory, including Anna Politovskaya. Many believe those journalists have been killed for their critical political coverage. The trial and eventual release of Politovskaya’s alleged killers was quite a bit of political theater (as both comedy and tragedy), which Keith Gessen described well in this New Yorker piece. Novaya Gazeta has also been critical of the Kremlin, although it’s worth noting that newspapers in Russia are allowed more latitude in their coverage than television. The Internet, it appears, remains a relatively free space relative to other Russian media, especially TV.

The Washington Post summarized the interview here, but they left out an important section: Medvedev’s view of control of the Internet in Russia. As I’ve written here before, the Russian president’s views on freedom of the Russian Internet are more liberal and open than one might expect. He confirmed those views again in the Novaya Gazeta article (in Russian), reminding us that he uses the Internet everyday (take that John McCain!), and that the Internet is “the best platform for discussion” that there is. He also called for expanded Internet access in Russia, but noted the steep costs for wiring such a large country. In terms of regulation of the Internet, Medvedev says that Russia needs to be smart about how they go about it; on the one hand ensuring its continued development, but at the same time preventing criminal elements from taking advantage of Internet technologies. The Internet, he concludes, is not any more dangerous than any other means (of communication), and is not “absolutely evil.”

When asked about the need for the “rehabilitation of democracy” in Russia, Medvedev demurred, noting that Russian democracy did not need rehabilitating, that many Russian view democracy and particularly the institutions created in the 1990s skeptically, in part due to economic upheavals at the time, and that “nowhere does democracy require rehabilitation.” I’ll have to disagree with that statement, since many have argued that democracy, including established democratic systems, require constant attention, care and feeding to ensure their survival. He concludes that democracy existed, exists and will exist in Russia, which the Post reminds us, is not dissimilar from the Soviet slogan that Lenin lived, lives, and will live. We’ll have to wait and see if the same holds for the Internet in Russia.

Suwicha Thakhor, a Thai national, has been sentenced to ten years (reduced from twenty) for uploading content to YouTube that violated Thailand’s medieval lese majeste laws and a junta-era cybercrime law. The exact details of Thakhor’s alleged insult to Thailand’s aging monarch are unknown. The three judge panel presidinginstructed reporters not to take notes. In short, his story:

Suwicha’s nightmare began on Jan. 14, when the oil engineer was arrested and charged by the police for posting a video clip on the YouTube website that was considered to be defaming the royal family. He had done so using a pseudonym.

The police had tracked his web postings and read his e-mails, according to his wife, Thitima Thakhor. ”He was arrested after he had dropped his children at school.”

To me, it no longer seems useful to wonder aloud whether a majority of Thais think lese majeste laws are good. For the most paltry offense — for the smallest shred of free expression — Thakhor was slammed with TEN YEARS. It’s Soviet. It’s Burmese. And it’s wrong.

New Mandala is right on to ask why the monarch, reputedly uneasy about the law, doesn’t speak more forcefully for reform. Regardless, the internet is accelerating a collision course between free speech (its natural tendency) and thuggish laws built to muffle satire and dissent. Who will win globally is not yet clear.

I wish I could say that to one side is stands a progressive path toward greater civil liberties and to the other self-defeating censorship regimes crumbling under the weight of isolation and sanctions. But when democracies, stable or emerging, lock up YouTubers on inflated “national security” charges, it’s hard not to feel dulled by pessimism and false hope.

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read this great Boston Review think piece. It turns on the central question of this blog: Does the Internet spread democracy? The author cites and, to an extent, criticizes some of the Berkman research on the Orange Revolution and “smart mobs.” I’ll have a fuller critique tomorrow. In the meantime, money quote:

Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be president.

There’s nothing sexier than a spy. Unless, of course, that spy is a faceless web spook stealing documents from the Dalai Lama. Hope all of you have already read this fascinating Times piece about GhostNet, the shadowy malware espionage project uncovered by those smart folks at the Munk Centre, affilited with the University of Toronto. (Munk’s Citizen Lab also broke the story of China’s Skype monitoring, which I wrote about back in December.) GhostNet covertly spied on computers in over 103 countries, including a host of different computers affiliated with the Dalai Lama. Read the full report here.

Researchers traced the servers back to their physical locations, and as it turns out three of the four are in China. It’s hard to not to feel, especially given the focus of Tibetan computers, that this wasn’t an inside job by People’s Liberation Army cyber-warriors. James Fallows, however, has made a persuasive case for skepticism.

Fallow’s chief point is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish state from non-state actors on the web. GhostWeb might be in cahoots with the Chinese intelligence service, or it might be a band of patriotic hackers, or, God knows, the CIA. One does wonder though what patriotic Chinese hackers would do with sensitive Tibetan documents besides hand them over to Chinese authorities.

Regardless, the Web’s dense underbrush of anonymity empowers astro-turfers, spreaders of misinformation and, as we can now say with certainty, powerful hacker-spies (do they wear tuxedos and drink martinis too?) to prowl unnoticed. No fancy glass cutters or laser trippers needed. This includes dramatic digital cossacks, like the kids that nearly toppled Estonia’s government websites, and more pernicious and hidden efforts like Ghostnet.

For all the powerful and positive changes the Internet heralds (and we have been eager prophets on this blog), there are coequal dangers posed by our greater inter-connection and -dependence. Not to go Luddite on you all, but remote access is always a blessing and a curse.