Now that I've been reading a lot more sources on the Haystack debacle, talking to people in NGOs and at the State Department, actually reading the blog of the coder Austin Heap, and other industry blogs, and thinking about the crusade of Evgeny Morozov and Sami Ben Ghrabi against the American Internet Freedom program, the lenses are starting to fall into place.
First of all, it's quite important -- because you can come away with the wrong impression from reading Morozov's indignant posts on this subject -- to note that the State Department never supported Haystack, had concerns about it earlier than Morozov made it public, and the Center for Censorship Research never received any State Department or U.S. government grants. So as the poster boy to examplify Sami's theories that association with the USG taints and actually harms NGOs, it's a fail.
The only point of relationship with the government, then, appears to be the question of the "fast-tracking" of the licensing. But as I've noted earlier, it's a tendentiously literalist -- and surly -- interpretation of the *intent* of the U.S. embargo on Iran to claim that fast-tracking itself is some sort of elitist and connected exception, when it should be seen as the desirable norm for things that would benefit the democracy movement -- as the point is not to create a cordon around Iran, but just not to obviously help the regime with technology and goods that it can use to go on oppressing people. Of course some tools can be worked in either direction so it needs parsing, but there's no reason why reason can't prevail. The objective is not to play geeky gotcha.
I generally have nothing but the greatest scorn for the casual ethics-free script kiddie types (as you can read on my many entries about Second Life on my other blog Second Thoughts). But I think it has to be said that Heap has gone through at least one of those simulations of remorse that these kids will periodically engage in like a purge diet, and it has to be taken for what it is. To be sure, he can be charged with outrageous hubris (it comes with the territory), with his mantras like "Good luck finding that needle in the haystack". Yet the guilty party in this story seems not so much young Austin or the State Department but "the media" -- the hype is absolutely incredible (the picture of Austin wrapped in a mouse wire to illustrate censorship is disgusting disaster porn) and it just snowballed way out of control. I have to marvel that the opensource-loving lefty-nasty Charles Arthur at the Guardian let that "innovation award" go by without seeing the code or getting more information about the whole story.
I do have to actively wonder, however, despite Ethan Zuckerman's careful disclaimer that he tries to keep an open mind, whether Austin's main crime for the geek squad was that he didn't issue Haystack as an opensource code on a GPL/FOSS license or at least submit it for scrutiny to some actual experienced cyber-security expert given that people's lives were at stake in Iran. Not opensourcing code is the prime evil for this gang, and they can't pretend they think otherwise. I've written before about the fanatical TORniks (I guess my post on that got Google-bombed because now I can't even find it -- paging Shava Suntzu/Shava Narad!) -- but people walk around the robots and get commercial solutions that they find work better for them. It's important that there is *choice*.
I'm also extremely suspicious of the "human element" in the original story before a single line of code in fact gets written. And that is the preposterous story, described by Austin Heap in Newsweek where in a chat-room he just "happened" to run into a "dissaffected Iranian official":
But then he had a stroke of luck. Someone with the online handle Quotemstr asked Heap to join a specific chatroom. Quotemstr wasn’t interested in making idle conversation. He was a disaffected Iranian official with information to share. He provided Heap with a copy of the internal operating procedures for Iran’s filtering software. The 96-page document was in Farsi, but the diagrams told Heap what he needed to know.
Maybe I've been following the KGB too long (or they've been following me), but it seems pretty obvious to me that "Quotemstr" is really a regime operative, a kind of Persian Pastebin honey trap, if you will, who somehow got wind of what Austin was up to because he was open about it on Twitter or his blog, and decided to snag him with this cover story and lure him into a caper that proved to be successful beyond the regime's wildest dreams. Quotemstr probably just hoped to keep Austin tied up in knots on outdated information or dissinformation, and along the way, learn about his own plans for overthrowing the regime, but thanks to "the media," it so escalated that pretty soon he had Hillary Clinton enthusing and it imploded. I wonder why nobody seems to be focusing on that highly dubious notion of *the Iranian regime* having such loose control over even "disaffected" officials that they just let 96-page protocols flop around the Internet. I'm not buying this. So it seems the cover was blown and doomed from the start.
There's a larger philosophical discussion to be had as to whether the entire circumvention software crutch is a good thing for social movements. There's an inherent utopian or transhumanist belief that the right technology *can* be made sooner or later, and save us all from government eyes. Steganography? *Really*? We saw how long that lasted with the third-party viewer for Second Life called Emerald burying code to snag the C: drive path in the Kakadu library files -- and the uncovering of this likely happened due to "humint" and not necessarily a crack. Somebody always chats on the IRC channel and somebody always pastes in Pastebin and somebody always tapes to convo for Youtube. Remember, it's called "open source"?
There's also always going to be a debate as to whether that's a good thing across the board, given that some of the things people want to encrypt (terrorist plans, child pornography) are crimes and need to be stopped. Sure, there's irony to be found in the U.S. government tapping into Internet communications monitoring citizens at home and offering circumvention software abroad, but you only find that malicious if you believe that America is worse than the Arab regimes.
I think any social movement that becomes too dependent on the Internet is in trouble anyway, but that's a hard case to make these days.
The real question to ask about this, however, isn't about political taint or the political and policy-influencing aspirations of bloggers like Evgeny and Sami, but whether or not Iranian bloggers or activists were harmed.
Despite titling his piece provocatively as much of the media spectacle around this story with "How Haystack Risked Exposing Iranian Dissidents," Neal Ungerleider writing at fastcompany.com concludes that in fact none were hurt:
For Iranian dissidents, this news is troubling but not catastrophic. An informal network of workarounds for governmental Internet censorship and snooping has been in place in years—it is not the fastest or reliable, but it exists. No reports from the bustling Iranian social media community indicate that any arrests, questionings, or detentions have taken place as a result of Haystack [emphasis added]. But Haystack's failure is a massive challenge for proponents of free Internet access in unfree societies and for the non-profits and foreign governments with an interest in promoting it. The question remains: Can someone make a Haystack that works?
I guess I am less interested in that imponderable and impractical proposal than in considering more how Iranian emigres and exiles and those few Westerners who know Farsi, as well as interested followers who want to help in English, can stay in communication with people who need solidarity under terrible conditions, using a wide variety of tools and means. A needle in a haystack is instantly seen if put under a giant MRI or subjected to a huge magnetic field, and that is what happened to this little well-intended but misguided project. The situation can only change when there are so many Iranians involved, that they can hide the needle by putting it out in plain sight.
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