Internet & Democracy Blog

Estonia, the remarkably wired and internet savvy Baltic state, has just passed a law making voting in the 2011 national elections possible by cellphone. Special identification chips, freely available from the government, will allow cell phone voters to be properly vetted. Proponents of the law claim it will increase participation and reduce lines at voting precincts.

It’s a clever idea, and if they can pull off the security, it heralds an interesting new direction for democratic participation. Still, something in my gut makes me feel uneasy. The horror stories of American voting “irregularities” are bad enough; Estonia, a country targeted by sophisticated (Russian?) hackers before, will be transmitting votes through an even more unreliable kind of system, albeit smaller in scale. This may not even be a concern over hacking. What is to stop me from stealing a cellphone and casting a false ballot?
It certainly seem easier than stealing someone’s driver’s license/voter registration and impersonating them/signing a sworn statement before an election official.

I also worry cellular voting could be careless, an instant poll-the-audience kind of decision instead of reflective democratic discourse. Then again, we already tolerate careless voting. Most poeple are fine with straight-ticket party ballots, only come to the polls for major elections and feed themselves on talkradio and tv ads.

In contrast, voting by cellphone may help ingrain democratic decision-making into everyday life, making people more responsive and committed to common goals than before. Then perhaps national elections would spark the same interest as PTA meetings and bowling leagues. This may be a stretch, but if it’s not, then “eStonia” (as its jokingly called) is developing a polis for the 21st Century.

[Cross-posted on Corinna di Gennaro‘s blog]

A group of McCain and Obama campaigners, academics, activists, bloggers and journalists have gathered for two days at Harvard at a conference organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society examining the role that the Internet has played in the the 2008 US election. Parts of the conversation were under Chatam house rule, nevertheless here are some highlights of the lively discussions that have taken place. Some preliminary outputs of the meeting can be found here in essay format and other Berkman colleagues have blogged about the event here and at the Internet and Democracy blog.

The first day of the discussion focused very much on the role played by the Internet in the campaign. Did Obama win thanks to the Internet? Did the Internet play a role in engaging people who would have not otherwise been engaged? The first question was prominent, and the message that was stressed many times over and over, especially by Obama campaigners, was that the Internet served as a wonderful tool to coordinate and link online and offline action, with the technology playing a central but complementary role to the efforts of offline grassroots organizing. I came home with the feeling that top-down strategy played the key role in getting people involved, but that success depended very much also on the bottom-up grassroots efforts and energy that Obama and his campaign people managed to mobilize and draw upon.

Marshall Ganz – who gave the keynote talk – emphasized the transformative power of grassroots organizing. Ganz made his point with a good metaphor: there is a distinction between carpenters and tools – tools could be the best, but if you don’t have a good carpenter you won’t build a house. You need people with the right skills, the right strategy, the right training in order to achieve goals and build capacity for transformative action. The Obama campaign was extraordinary in that it managed in building leadership, strategy and in engaging volunteers locally in a systematic way. Jeremy Bird, organizer for Obama for America, showed how these idea worked in practice by speaking of his experience on the field. He highlighted the interdependence between technology and field organizing – not just the Internet but for example mobile telephony – in South Carolina – a state with low Internet use the connection to people was made via text messaging.

In the afternoon breakout sessions were organized which analyzed several themes: the role of Web 2.0 tools such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter played in the campaign; the role of the Internet in contributing to transparency and the analysis of different campaign strategies such as micro-targeting. Some outputs of these dicussions can be found here (essays by conference participants).
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This brief Times piece is worth a look. Egypt demanded for national security reasons that GPS capability be disabled in Egyptian iPhones and Apple very quietly complied. At first glance, this may seem a trivial detail to complain about, and even in an often volatile Egypt, a reasonable kind of security restriction. (Anti-American insurgents in Iraq have become very sophisticated in adapting disposable phones to evade eavesdropping and to detonate homemade sticky bombs.) The article did raise, however, this very interesting point:

It is enough to make one ask if new technologies — the personal computer, the World Wide Web, the all-powerful smartphone — will help set us free or merely give us that illusion.

One of the leading questions driving the Berkman study of the Saffron Revolution in Burma was why, if the internet and mobile phone technology had helped thousands to organize, to protest and to publicize the internal nightmare of Burma’s authoritarian military regime, had substantial democratic freedom or even some level of reform not resulted?

There seems to be a gap between the democratic potential for technology and its actual effect on the ground. Though the internet was more difficult to contain than old mass media models (which could be “licensed” and gagged), Burma quickly discovered ways to monitor and clamp down on internet activity of any kind.

Much more subtle has been the attempt of countries like Turkey and Thailand (in collaboration with YouTube) to close off information worlds involving sensitive political topics by implementing geolocational filtering into search queries.

In this context, Egypt’s ban of GPS (though admittedly less driven by taboo content or free speech restrictions) is simply another step down the road to a re-bordered technological future, where the liberating potential of devices like the iPhone is hamstrung in the name of broadly worded memes like “national security,” “lèse majesté” or “insulting Turkishness.”

For the first time in Saudi Arabia, a defense team for jailed Saudi activists are observing, and calling for a two-day public hunger strike to protest the detention without charge of human rights activists. The Saudi and Arab media ignored the group’s call but the group started Facebook and Google groups and a special Web site (http://www.humriht-civsocsa.org) where they disseminate information about the strike and coordinate campaign efforts.

The activist said in a statement they distributed online: “Saudi Justice system and legal procedures (e.g., Criminal Procedure and Arrest and Detention Laws) had failed to render just judgments to jailed Saudi human-right activists who have been arrested with no official indictments, and incarcerated indefinitely in solitary confinements with no right for an attorney or access to habeas corpus.”

“After exerting all means to get fair treatments to the constitutional movement’s detainees, the defense teams decided to observe a 48-hour hunger strike. The proposed strike will take place on Thursday and Friday, 6-7 November 2008, in protest against flagrant human-right violations for all detainees in Saudi prisons who have been deprived of their basic rights as guaranteed by Criminal Procedure Law and Arrest and Detention Law …” the statement added.

“Our demand is quite simple: either to set the detainees free or instantly grant them fair and public trials.”

Apparently for fear of repercussion, very few Saudi bloggers picked up the story and placed the campaign banner on their blogs. Saudi Jeans and Esam Mudeer are among the few.

This move is very risky and the participants face serious consequences, especially because strikes and demonstrations are banned in Saudi Arabia.

Interestingly, all of the campaigns Web sites are accessible from Saudi Arabia, at least so far.

The local and almost all of the Arab media ignored the event, but the activists managed to draw the attention of international media including CNN, Washington Post and France24.

The campaign’s Facebook Arabic group‘s membership grew from 11 in the first day to 376 in just 3 days (173 members in the Facebook English group) and the participants who publicly signed up to participate in the strike reached 26.

While it is obvious that activists throughout the world would use the Internet for activism and advocacy, the Saudi case has three interesting issues:

1. The Saudi activists live with one of the most repressive Internet regimes in the world, yet the campaigners managed to utilize the online resources available to them to win supporters from inside and outside the country, and to get the attention of foreign international media.

2. The Saudi activists use the online campaign not just to highlight their grievances and advocate reform, but also to perform an equally challenging task: to counter the government-endorsed fatwa (Islamic edict) that hunger strikes are not permissible in Sharia law. The campaigners have effectively used online tools to present well-documented research that Islam does indeed permit hanger strikes when necessary.

3. The fact that the campaign’s Web sites are currently accessible from Saudi Arabia does not necessarily reflect tolerance from the authorities to this movement, but could be a trap to find out who the supporters and sympathizers of the movement are.

A cross-post from Berkman Fellow Gene Koo’s blog, Anderkoo:

The crisis on Wall Street and subsequent negotiation between the Bush Administration and Congress over solutions expose a dangerous weakness of the people’s branch in the modern era: legislators lack unity and the power that unity affords. They will lose almost every time they get into a showdown with the President, especially without an O’Neill or Gingrich to rally them. The fact that the representative branch of government operates at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the executive branch presents an enormous threat to our democracy.

High school civics classes teach that Congress makes the laws and the President enforces them. Americans would be forgiven if they think that it’s the President who makes law and Congress who has the veto power. The Wall Street bailout and the Iraq war resolution illustrate how — in high-profile crises — the Executive branch drives its agenda through Congress due to its superior ability to plan, focus attention, and control national discourse. Often, Congress is relegated to nibbling around the edges or poking holes in the President’s plans.

Making the first offer gives the Administration enormous leverage over Congress. In both the Iraq war resolution and the Wall Street bailout, Congress never really questioned the core premise (Iraq presents an imminent threat; the economy will collapse without intervention) nor strayed very far from the proposed solution (invade; bail out). We know, in the case of Iraq, at least, that this is not because the President was right on the merits. Rather, he was simply in the better bargaining position, having “anchored” the negotiation.
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[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/1XBwjQsOEeg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I wonder if there is one of these for Web traffic?

(Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Building on the opening remarks, the second panel addresses Human right and Access to Knowledge. Caroline Dommen, director of 3D, an advocacy group promoting human rights consideration in trade agreements, emphasizes the need for metrics: how can we tell how open countries are? She suggests borrowing from the experience with human rights measurement. For example measuring the availability of a right, nondiscrimination in access, economic access (is it affordable?), acceptability or quality or the available good. She also suggests using the 4A human rights approach of 1) respect 2) protect and 3) fulfill the rights. There are corollary obligations: 1) non-discrimination 2) adequate process (including redress of violated rights) 3) participation 4) effective remedy.

Marisella Ouma, Kenyan team researcher for the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge Project, says that most African countries have had copyright laws since independence (starting with Ghana in 1957). She is concerned about the educational aspect of access to knowledge and related results of the educational materials access index: the highest ranking is Egypt and the lowest is Mozambique. So, why? What are the issues? Ouma notes that these countries have the laws but not strong policies: she asserts they need a copyright policy that acknowledges the basic fundamental right to education so there isn’t a conflict between property rights and the right to access educational information. She is concerned that people don’t understand copyright law and this makes advocacy of their rights difficult. She is also concerned that policy is not comprehensive enough: For example in Kenya or Uganda, the education policy is limited to basic education. She also describes the sad situation of there being billions of dollars available to build libraries but no money to stock them with information. Something is really wrong here. She notes that wireless internet is important for this, and how many people really have access? So how do they access the knowledge? she asks.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden

Shrinking the digital divide, the gap between those people with effective access to information technology and those without, worldwide has been on the table of activists, NGOs and governments for years now, and the UN has devoted a global conference on this issue, the World Summit on the Information Society, with the goal to “bridge the so-called global digital divide separating rich countries from poor countries by spreading access to the Internet in the developing world.”(0) The UN states in the Millennium Development Goals Report of 2006 that by the end of 2004 the digital divide is still a grim reality at large. By 2004, merely 14% of the world’s population were using the internet with the following large digital divide apparent:

In 2008, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reports that only 3% of the Sub Saharan Africans are online. However there has been tremendous growth in technology with the hope that these developments will eventually benefit everyone. To believe that such eventual global reach will occur without planning or analyzing and addressing existing (political and infrastructural) issues, would be naively optimistic! Although decreasing the digital gap is desperately needed for social, political and economic development, merely improving access to Information is not sufficient in my opinion.

Equitable access to communication for everyone should also mandate affordability. In 2007, Wired magazine reported that, “only about 3 percent of the world’s population has broadband, and prices vary wildly. In Japan, DSL or cable averages 6 cents per 100 Kbps … But in Kenya, that same hookup speed costs $86.11.” In this regard, the ITU notes that in Africa, “the scarcity of international Internet bandwidth and lack of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) drives up prices. Africa, the poorest region in the world, has the most expensive Internet prices. The average monthly Internet subscription is almost USD 50 in Africa, close to 70 per cent of average per capita income.”

The APC (Association for Progressive Communications) lists lack of competition in developing telecommunication markets as the main cause of the high prices (1,2). In some African states, satellite internet rates of around $10-15000 per Mb per second per month have been reported while the actual cost incurred to the operator is around $2000. More recently, the development of fibre broadband networks connecting West, Southern, and Eastern Africa is very encouraging. It promises higher data transmit rates, faster transmission and hopefully cheaper prices. However, without competition for the states of companies that have monopolies in the African market, the prices will not be accessible to the majority of the public(3,4). This need for further competition to drive down the broadband prices isn’t unique to Africa. According to GlobalVoices, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru (in decreasing order) also suffer from high Internet access fees.
So, the situation is prevalent in developing countries and any meaningful remedy will not happen over night. On the other hand, we can not afford to neglect discussing issues, existing shortcomings, and devise solutions as any meaningful improvement in democracy (or simply the living conditions of millions) will depend on hearing the voice of millions who may not (or simply can’t afford to) have access to the most connected network of Information. After all, as Yochai Benkler notes in The Wealth of Networks, “the networked information economy improves justice from the perspective of every single one of … theories of justice.”

A new video documentary project called “In Their Boots” hit the web recently, highlighting stories of troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan – and their families. NPR reported that these live, weekly webcasts called “real stories,” which are followed by an interactive online discussion, aim to raise awareness and understanding about the dramatic impact of war. The “issues and analysis” segment of its webcasts offer solutions to soldiers, veterans, and their families on concerns such as “accessing veterans’ benefits, living with Post-Traumatic Stress, and grappling with the economic challenges of reintegrating into civilian society.”

The host of the program and a veteran of the war in Iraq, Jan Bender, said that the purpose of the webcast was to show “the reality of a country being at war, and sometimes a reality that isn’t on the surface.” Such online programs not only create a forum for soldiers and their families to express, as Bender says, a “full spectrum of emotion,” but they also capture the realities of life in combat zones which have become too dangerous for journalists to explore. Often brutally honest depictions of the dramatic impacts of war, webcasts such as In Their Boots and military blogs, called “milblogs,” have presented a new, interesting challenge to officials seeking to control the message regarding US military policy, including the difficulty of separating personal opinion from official policy on the Web.

As military blogs have become increasingly popular over the last few years – especially since snapshots of Iraqi prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib were exposed online, and candid blog posts have been published by soldiers such as Colby Buzzell (also known as the “Blogfather” of military blogs and the author of “My War: Killing Time in Iraq”) – officials have become extra cautious of the content posted online by servicemen and women. Since then, the army released specific blogging guidelines and has shut down soldiers’ blogs, while the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) began “blocking access ‘worldwide’ to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular Web sites on its computers and networks.” Although top military officials such as Lt. Gen Caldwell implored the armed services to let troops blog and post to YouTube earlier this year, soldiers continue to practice self-censorship.

As the military continues to keep a watchful eye on milblogs, it reveals its desire to use web 2.0 in a top down, chain of command fashion; which is ineffective in the networked sphere where these tools are best utilized in peer-to-peer formats for learning and communicating among officers of a similar rank as well as between soldiers and citizens. Ultimately, Web 2.0 tools have significantly redesigned the 21st century battlefield, presenting new challenges to the military not only regarding its transparency, but its hierarchical structure.

Reactions to the July 27th election were largely reserved within Cambodia’s blogosphere this week, as the governing Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) clinched a large majority of votes. E.U. monitors have criticized the handling of the election, claiming that the CCP and the National Election Committee dominated media coverage, disenfranchised groups of voters, and mis-used state resources in the campaign effort. Only a small portion of Cambodian bloggers (self-referenced as “Cloggers”) have responded to the E.U. criticism or the campaign in general, and many have refrained from staunchly opinionated postings.

Blogger Vutha has frequently shared his observations of the campaign and other current issues within and around Cambodia. But his posts have remained, for the most part, politically neutral, and his blog appears to serve more as an information mechanism rather than an editorial forum. Blogger Drummond has kept up on the election, reporting poll results and reactions from local and international news media. His posts have also been largely informative and somewhat reserved, although he has expressed disappointment in the opposition party.

But sifting through the Cambodian blogosphere I found very little political content. Recently, APF News had an interesting piece about the burgeoning blogosphere in Cambodia. The article detailed how bloggers in the country have been opening up a traditionally conservative society, but it also explained how most bloggers opt not to incorporate political issues in their online diaries. One Khmer-language blogger, Be Chantra, even houses a “No Politics” banner on his site.

Fears of government repression may be steering the public discourse away from political issues. Gary Kawaguchi, a digital media trainer at the Department of Media and Communications of Cambodia explains:

The good thing about a blog is that it can be anonymous… But the press here is very controlled and people still find out who you are, so bloggers still have to be careful.

With approximately 1,000 bloggers, the Cambodian blogosphere is largely in a developmental stage. Bloggers are still learning the tricks of the trade and exploring new software applications, with the help of university-sponsored technology workshops. Such workshops indicate that the Cambodian blogosphere has much potential to grow. As it continues to mature and a new generation of bloggers develops, it will be quite interesting to follow. But the question remains if political content on the Cambodian blogosphere will be more ubiquitous in the future or if it will continue to be scarce.