It's the oldest trick in the book. The KGB or their successors or pupils around the world tell you directly, or via their proxies involved in active measures that "you should not visit or help dissidents or you will get them in trouble." Time and again I would see liberals traveling to the Soviet Union to make peace, or for that matter, liberals travelling to the USSR's descendants today, saying that they didn't want to get an activist in trouble, so they didn't visit him. This is a powerful weapon the secret police uses, because it preys on precisely the weakest point of the well-intentioned concerned soul -- that he should help, and not harm. It hooks the liberal conscience squarely where it is most vulnerable and where it can be most dissembling -- it avoids the tough job of confronting a regime and breaking protocol by having a handy *good* reason to do so: "it might get the dissidents in trouble".
I'm quite prepared to acknowledge that Iran, an old ally of the Soviet Union and still essentially an ally of Russia today despite everything, works differently than the Eurasian states -- it is more vicious, and yet almost more porous. Even so, the principle applies: you must let dissidents, and not regimes and their proxies be the judge of what helps or hurts, and not get snarled up in hypotheticals when the main culprit is the regime, and the main thing to do is resist it and not placate it.
Yes, people make mistakes, often predicated on their vanity as helpers of humankind, in providing external assistance -- or the regime is just better than they are at tradecraft. Remember Jan Kavan's carload of samizdat books caught at the border and the address list that got all the Charter 77 people in trouble and even in jail? Everybody endlessly blamed him, although he was a seasoned exile fighting censorship, and tended to forget the real culprit was the Czechoslovak regime at the time. Emigres and ex-pats endlessly engage in mutual recriminations about such incidents, and in whose interests is it, ultimately? The regime's.
So let's be clear here: the chief evil in this latest struggle between Iran, the State Department, and a clique of neuralgic hackers and social media pundits is the Iranian dictatorship. The Iranian regime is deadly and vicious, and doesn't need the excuse of the carelessness of a would-be hacker helper or a bumbling U.S. official to crack down on dissidents. Teheran is vicious, and you don't soften its nature by pretending that third-way politics and appeasement defang it -- it has never worked.
The crusade Evgeny Morozov is waging against the State Department and Haystack has long since reached the point of becoming unseemly, and the question seriously needs to be asked: why is Morozov serving as a proxy for the Iranian regime (and by extension, other despotic regimes) in mounting a sustained and vicious attack on a misguided circumvention program and exploiting it to call into question the entire Internet Freedom initiative?
I'd like to believe that Evgeny, who I see as a kind of political refugee who has left Belarus -- and Russia -- under circumstances I don't know, as not someone who would do something so banal and venal as become a regime tool, either outright as a paid agent or as a like-minded agent of influence. He seems both too young and too smart to have followed that old Cold War paradigm. I'll put that thought out in the open as few would.
So what's it about? There's no question that his persistent, even bullying harangues about Haystack and the Internet Freedom program, along with his years of bitter maligning of Twitter revos, have reached the point that they are destructive and no longer instructive, and now he has Sami Ben Gharabi piling on, and Ethan Zuckerman in tow and others as well. What's up?
As somebody who only plays the home version of this game (I'm not a paid operative in the Internet freedom wars and don't even have TOR or PGP installed on my computer), I have to figure it's some kind of battle of wills and struggle for power over if not grant funding, then at least influence of public policy.
What does Evgeny hope? Perhaps he expects now that he has so handily blown the whistle on Haystack that the State Department will recognize the error of their hubris-infused ways and hire him as a consultant now or at least put him on some sort of panel. But that's a) not likely, as the government seldom likes whistle-blowers even when they reluctantly concede their case and b) Evgeny is not likely to go into a revolving door he is always knocking on his blog.
Or perhaps this is about a war, waged by foundations ultimately, with the Obama Administration for the franchise, in making the point that the government has to bug out of freedom fighting and let the private sector handle it. If so, one wonders why this war had to assume the "take-no-prisoners" and "scorched earth" mode, and torpedo the program entirely -- I honestly wonder what will be left of it.
Of course, there is much to be said for keeping sensitive circumvention and clandestine operations inside countries out of government, especially public government subject to FOIA and leaks. If you don't like the CIA doing this sort of work, and I think most people don't think they can even handle it anymore, then yes, the private sector, with its warren of private foundations and independent NGOs and unaffiliated civic actors is a better arrangement for supporting dissidents, and always has been as far as domestic support goes.
That doesn't mean that the external role of governments isn't relevant. As I've said before, the U.S. government can and should support things like travel to international conferences or venues like the UN Human Rights Council, publications or web costs, and even core institutional needs from those NGOs that are willing to take their grants, i.e. through NED or Freedom House. It's all good. Micro-managing instead of remote-controlling internal operations is where it went wrong -- and why it went wrong was simply an artifact of the Internet itself -- the ease with which you could ask people abroad to test software, blurring the distinction between "internal" and "external".
Morozov makes much of what he views as the politicization of the Censorship Research Centre, the involvement of Gary Sick and his famous closed Gulf 2000 list, etc. I see absolutely no reason for allowing the Iranian regime to set the tone here and isolating these institutions and people and making it seem like their expertise can't be enlisted in the struggle for freedom in Iran. Again, why are we doing the regime's work for it, Evgeny, why?
If Saudi Arabia can buy pages for thinky intellectual forums in The New Republic; if Kazakhstan can buy Washington think-tanks to hold conferences about OSCE, then I fail to see why NED can't play, either. This is the clash of civilization, a war that needs to be fought, but preferably in cyberspace and in intellectual debate, not on the ground in real wars.
So what is Evgeny's real objective, other than the supreme and smug satisfaction of "being right"? Perhaps this is a bid for certain foundations and think tanks to knock out competition -- especially incompetent competition for the war of Internet Freedom which is, of course, a war for power, in which the gurus like Morozov want us to become dependent on them. It's always about accepting their judgement and expertise and following their advice without debate, isn't it?
But given the somewhat shocked and humble tone sensed from Ethan Zuckerman's response to Sami, where he seems to be entertaining out loud almost for the first time the idea of taking the USG out of the Internet freedom struggle, I think that probably he isn't spear-heading this campaign -- after all, he wasn't the one to out the Haystack FUBAR.
No, I think this is actually about something else. Evgeny is as idealistic as they come, underneath the cynical anti-utopian pose (they always are), and that belief in a third-way, independent alternative featuring himself as enlightened leader and crusader is powerfully appealing. For Sami and others, too. And I actually think they have reached the point where they think their cyber-movement of hackers is unstoppable and they will force others with resources to do their bidding, either by vigorous approval (look at all the fans in the comments on Sami's blog) or by guilt-tripped coercion (if you don't think certain funders from certain progressive foundations aren't quietly calling these two right now, you haven't been paying attention.)
Perhaps these folks think they can go it alone with Soros and MacArthur or EU grants (there, government attachment may not matter to these sensitive lefties) and maybe they are right. They may be overplaying their hand, however, as they may not be aware of just how up to their necks in collaboration (collusion) some of these foundations are with the government and its agenda (paging David Rieff and to quote his quip, yes, Guy Debord, call your office!).
What's needed now to make all this credible instead of a disgraceful mess in which the cynical Morozov gets more lecture invitations and book offers to keep performing the work of dictatorial regimes by proxy and Iranians keep getting arrested anyway?
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