When Evgeny Morozov spoke recently in New York (the film will be posted on ForaTV in due course), he didn't chose to address one of his pet topics, what he characterized as "The Great Internet Freedom Fraud", and slammed what is called "21st Century Statecraft".
So I did. I asked him directly whether he was for or against the U.S. giving aid to bloggers abroad, including through circumvention technology, and whether in fact we should have been doing this all along, as we had "backed the wrong horse" with Mubarak in Egypt.
Morozov of course has ranted against U.S. policy in many places, including in his "Freedom.gov" piece (see my reply in the comments below the article) and ferociously attacked the flawed Haystack program in numerous blogs -- but never really come clean on whether he was FOR the policy overall.
Morozov dodged and ducked, and even added something like "I know you think that I think that I'm in favour of Sami Ben Gharbia's opposition to U.S. aid" -- which of course I do, because he posted it with the usual implied Twitter approval, and never debated against it, only continuing to slam U.S. policy, and provide more fuel for taking a position to end it.
I find the Berkmanites very coy on this subject -- they've taken U.S. government aid themselves in the past -- and indeed, the whole issue is more of a stalking horse for their real issue -- U.S. foreign policy itself, and their dislike of the support of various unattractive allies, particularly Israel (Jillian York of the Berkman Center wants a one-state solution "with democracy and human rights for all" but bitterly rejects any questioning about issues like the Muslim Brotherhood and women's rights in Egypt or the issue of the use of violence -- she also admits being pro-Tor, yet unpersuasively denies that she isn't therefore dumping on proprietary solutions ).
Clay Shirky goes even farther in Foreign Affairs in openly calling for the U.S. not to get involved in technological solutions for Internet freedom (very counterintutive!) -- and with all of these Internet gurus, you get the sense that the problem is really that the Obama Administration failed to put them on an advisory panel and failted to do what they say -- but then, the State Department could be forgiven for that, because it's not clear what these pundits are *for*, even though it is very clear what they are *against*. Indeed, by making it seems as if Internet freedom is a developmental issue that can't be forced on countries "not ready for democracy," Shirky makes it seem like his position isn't opposed, but is merely incremental:
For these reasons, it makes more sense to invest in social media as general, rather than specifically political, tools to promote self-governance. The norm of free speech is inherently political and far from universally shared. To the degree that the United States makes free speech a first-order goal, it should expect that goal to work relatively well in democratic countries that are allies, less well in undemocratic countries that are allies, and least of all in undemocratic countries that are not allies. But nearly every country in the world desires economic growth. Since governments jeopardize that growth when they ban technologies that can be used for both political and economic coordination, the United States should rely on countries' economic incentives to allow widespread media use. In other words, the U.S. government should work for conditions that increase the conservative dilemma, appealing to states' self-interest rather than the contentious virtue of freedom, as a way to create or strengthen countries' public spheres.
Strip away the Internet guru speak, and you have the exact same position as the government of Kazakhstan: let us first have economic development (with us, the strong state, leading it without any dissent), let us not have the distraction and confusion of free media, and then later, we will add on Internet freedom.
I'm not afraid of U.S. government aid, given the duplicitious nature of the authoritarian governments and their inevitable fellow-travelers and the recognition that there is, in fact, a war in cyberspace. (And if you don't to hear it from me, you can hear it from David Rieff in the New Republic).
And I don't buy the line that it harms dissidents; I call this "the secret policeman's ruse" because he *wants* you to believe you are harming another you meant to help as the perfect way to convince you to stop.
The main objection groups really have that are advocating an end to U.S. aid or invoking various "technical objections" is their belief that the program is "tainted" by U.S. foreign policy -- by which they usually mean the support of two wars abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the support of Israel, as well as the support of various dictators, such as Mubarak, and others, for geopolitical reasons of energy security and the war on terrorism.
I've been in various organizations over the years that have endlessly dithered about whether to take government aid, and either defiantly refused or refused only such aid as seems to be filtered through intermediary agencies with Congressional oversight like the National Endowment for Democracy, or accepted only aid from governments they view as more pure than the U.S., like the Norwegian or Swedish government. (This debate is a sterile one in Europe, where NGOs depend far more on government aid than private aid, as there is less of a tradition of tax-exemption for charities and not as rich a network of private and privately-held public foundations.)
And in the U.S., quite frankly, there's a sterility to this debate as well -- not only because the Obama Administration is as liberal a government as you could hope to get, and ultimately because this program only has $30 million, and has not spent most of it, as it has been bogged down in a bureaucratic mire that often obstructs the rapid expenditure of aid in any event (and the EU is worse).
THE AID HAS BEEN TERRIBLY SLOW IN COMING
The Washington Post has editorialized about the program, urging the State Department to speed it up:
Congress allocated $30 million in the fiscal 2010 budget for the State Department to fund Internet freedom. But 16 months later, none of the funds have been allocated. The legislation was narrowly tailored to focus on expanding access for users in closed societies by supporting field-tested techniques for circumventing censorship and firewalls. But the State Department's Request for Statements of Interest issued last month seems unacceptably broad. It would divide the money into a series of small grants, soliciting proposals for nine categories of projects, including such goals as "Building the Technology Capacity of Digital Activists and Civil Society." These are valid missions, but they were not the designated purpose of these funds. Yes, there is no one answer to the challenge of freedom on the Internet. But there are also some proven solutions than can quickly achieve much.
It's not clear to me whether the concerted campaign led by Sami Ben Gharbia, Morozov, the Berkman Center, and others criticizing this program led State to change the nature of it to small grants for "building technology capacity" instead of"supporting field-tested techniques for circumventing censorship and firewalls". Quite possibly.
THE ISSUE SHOULD ONLY BE ABOUT THE CHOICE OF FOREIGNERS TO TAKE IT
I personally find nothing wrong with taking U.S. aid, but I myself would advocate against it in the context of a policy for a small NGO (while supporting it as a large program for infrastructure and any group, small or large, that wished to take it -- I'm for pluralism). This is not because I believe U.S. aid is the kiss of death but because the bureaucratic accounting procedures are onerous, and sometimes require staffing up just to serve them; various officials have oversight of programs that sometimes become intrusive; and ultimately, all your program material is available through a Freedom of Information Act request (or as we now know, through a WikiLeaked cable). Private organizations just keep privacy better than governments, although increasingly we see they are just as much stalked and hacked as well.
In any event, what I think about this isn't so important; what's relevant is that enough people abroad find this aid useful that they take it, whether in the form of the typical NGO grant for educational programs, conferences, travel, publications or whether for equipment and training or for other direct costs like rent and salaries, and that the amount is miniscule and should be increased and become an integral part of all grant-making. No activist should have to be convincing a donor that social media is merely an innovation or an exotic add-on; it should be incorporated as a necessity like the Internet and media and like rent. And every activist should have a CHOICE about this aid that is not interfered with by the browbeating by "progressives" in their own country or the U.S. against them.
Ultimately, in his talk in New York at OSI, Morozov dodged my question by saying that he saw nothing wrong with, say, a USAID-funded seminar -- he'd been to them myself -- but didn't find them effective. That meant he didn't really address the core of my question: should there be a robust Internet program that yes, would involve direct funding to dissidents abroad? He may never say.
SAYING THE PROGRAM HAS THE WRONG FOCUS IS DENYING THE PROGRAM
Meanwhile, the Center for the Internet and Democracy, with the slogan "Keeping the Internet Innovative and Free," has taken on this issue -- and essentially tacitly opposed the program by slamming it for the wrong focus.
I notice this tactic a lot with the Berkmanites and other "progressives" and Morozov -- they never come out and actually oppose the U.S. per se -- as Shirky has done by saying forthrightly:
To the degree that the United States pursues Internet freedom as a tool of statecraft, it should de-emphasize anti-censorship tools, particularly those aimed at specific regimes, and increase its support for local public speech and assembly more generally. Access to information is not unimportant, of course, but it is not the primary way social media constrain autocratic rulers or benefit citizens of a democracy.
Direct, U.S. government-sponsored support for specific tools or campaigns targeted at specific regimes risk creating backlash that a more patient and global application of principles will not.
This entails reordering the State Department's Internet freedom goals. Securing the freedom of personal and social communication among a state's population should be the highest priority, closely followed by securing individual citizens' ability to speak in public. This reordering would reflect the reality that it is a strong civil society -- one in which citizens have freedom of assembly -- rather than access to Google or YouTube, that does the most to force governments to serve their citizens.
I don't think he's advocating Poland's Solidarity, but I detect an old-line call for the people to organize into labor movements before they get press freedom. Say, I have a good model for you, Clay: Turkmenistan. Turn off all the cell phones, get people meeting in groups in their dormitories again where they are locked in after 8:00 pm. And if you do give them cell phones, don't let them hook up to the Internet.
These Internet gurus advocate so many idealistic prescriptions that you realize, absent the implementation of their notions, there shouldn't be any program.
It's as if they want to make sure that only they decide by their "progressive" values what should be supported and not supported by U.S. policies. With a big sneering headline, "There's No App for That," the Center says emphatically, and York is re-tweeting, that the U.S. should bug out -- because they have the wrong focus on circumvention technology. And you can just hear them objecting in the comments, "No, we didn't really say that, and you're misreading us -- we didn't say we opposed the program, we're just saying that it shouldn't focus on circumvention technology". Then, they proceed to attack the focus, and wind up with something so vague at the end that you can't understand -- once again -- what they're for, so you come away with the take-home: there shouldn't be a program.
The CDT theory here takes a different tack than Shirky -- circumvention technology is just the wrong way to go in the first place. Under colour of saying that obsession with circumvention is old hat technologically, the Center advances the same line as the Electronic Freedom Foundation:
The Post’s stance is shortsighted in several ways. First, Internet freedom is not just about circumventing censorship and blocking. As groups like the OpenNet Initiative have documented, controls on dissent and expression online have become much more sophisticated and multifaceted, moving well beyond mere filtering. Digital activists are engaged in an increasingly difficult battle against surveillance and cyberattacks online. Independent media in many places are just now beginning to adopt new media tools that can help maximize their impact. And traditional human rights groups are beginning to examine how new Internet laws adopted for seemingly unrelated purposes like copyright or child protection can have an enormous impact on free expression online.
FALSIFYING THE 'CHILLS ON EXPRESSION'
No, nobody has *really* documented that laws to protect copyright or children have *really* harmed freedom of expression for those other than IP thieves and pedophiles -- this is one of those chimeras of the left that is widely disseminated but never documented -- because it doesn't exist. You could be forgiven for *thinking* it exists -- so rabidly have we heard from the left on this topic ad nauseum -- but it really is important to note: Australia never passed that draconian Internet law; Obama didn't get permission to run his kill switch; Israel didn't block bloggers, either; just because Amazon didn't feel like having anarchists force it into illegal behaviour doesn't mean those anarchists didn't find another place to go in the ch domain. And so on. Yet even though the biggest threat to the Internet these days has come from Russian secret police breaking bloggers' arms or Egyptian secret police dragging bloggers out of an Internet cafe -- not to mention from Anonymous, that completely shut down mammoth corporate Internet sites -- you would think the gravest threat to the Western world's freedom is...a requirement to meter Internet usage in Canada lol. Honestly, I wish these people would *get a grip*.
THE OPEN SOURCE CULT IN ANOTHER GUISE
I find this issue constantly lends itself as a political stalking horse for unrelated agendas of copyleftism and anti-corporate, anti-capitalist movements that have a lot of energy in some parts of the world -- agendas that seem to have no basic concept of the relationship between private property and rights -- but that's another discussion.
Even so, some like Rebecca MacKinnon, who profess a belief that it's ok to have property and corporations and copyright law -- it just has to be "reformed" -- have still tried mightily to portray the misuse by Russian Microsoft lawyers of the concept of the software license to harass independent media as some sort of inherent evil of copyright that is now helpfully manifesting itself against Russian dissidents so we can all now internationalize the fight against Windoz and the RIAA. I was the first to pick up this issue in the English-language blogosphere long before various human rights and "open Internet" groups picked it up as the ideal club to beat a hated big computer corporation with -- and that's why I cry "foul" when I see the issue being misused this way as some poster-child for the evils of proprietary software.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The harassers of those dissidents exploited the software issue but could have exploited any other issue (like child pornography or taxes -- taxes are most often used). The core of the problem was the ill-will and malice of the lawyers colluding with local administrators, not the fact that Windows sells proprietary software. In fact, if anything, Microsoft gives free licenses to NGOs in a program to support civil society.
I've come to realize something -- if an organization or a movement or a campaign uses the term "open" instead of the word "freedom," they can very well be like the adjective "people's" to the noun "democracy.
IT'S ABOUT POWER AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS, NOT MERELY TECHNOLOGY
The people in Belarus or Egypt are not facing governments or government-tropic large corporations that invoke copyright or child pornography to stop dissent -- although we see that with Russia and any government is capable of this in theory, but not in the blanket way that the left often hysterically portrays (as with Australia). Instead, they are facing governments that do not want to share power and suppress any attempt to legitimately and democratically demand the sharing of power. And no, the people in Belarus don't have a problem with getting help with technology and indeed sought it; if anything, civil society in Egypt berated the U.S. for selectively supporting only milder groups close to the government.
Like the Berkman Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology is taking the line that groups face such savage attacks from government-sponsored DDOS assaults and hacks, that it is too overwhelming to fight and they should strengthen their security outside the narrow circumvention front.
I also think CDT misrepresents State's focus on circumvention, as their Internet Freedom program isn't the only program helping human rights and civil society groups abroad, and is not in fact solely focused on the narrow confines of this technology. It's awfully funny that Silicon Valley and its start-up friends, that definitely include the Berkman Center and others in this circle funded by Internet corporations, are very happy to have the White House fund a Start-Up America program to foster the start-up climate that so benefits big Internet technology companies, yet they aren't willing to have the White House fund a few little dissident groups abroad so they can have laptops and VPN and get their Youtubes up. Honestly, it's disgraceful!
CDT, although it has conveyed its snark already in the headline that was RT'd extensively, ends with a psycho-babble that isn't clear whether they are for the continuation of this policy *if it doesn't change as they think it has to*:
That said, it is right to ask the State Department to better articulate its strategy for how it will realize the vision set out by Secretary Clinton one year ago. On our part, we believe that a single-minded focus on circumvention technology distracts from the very real need to build global constituencies – civil society, industry, and government – who understand the intersection between technology, Internet policy, and human rights, and to find collaborative strategies for promoting the kind of free and open Internet we all want.
I'm fairly certain I don't want the same open Internet that CDT wants, because I'd like to have copyright protection and the rule of law and the service-level agreements to implement the First Amendment -- and I'm also fairly certain I don't want to find "collaborative strategies" but would prefer "free market competition".
And I personally am rather wary of the task of building "global constituencies" of those who understand something as vague (and yet as precise as the sectarian mind might make it) at "the intersection" between diverse fields who will then find those..."collaborative" (collectivist?) strategies. This is Gov 2.0-speak and open source movement-speak and I would dismiss it. The Internet is not a collaborative open space. It's a bloody battlefield, as David Rieff has reported. There are wildly different uses of it and wildly different concepts of it. Some countries are fighting enormous battles to make it their own (Russia, China) and refusing to be dictated to by Western liberal notions; some hard-left sectarians are refusing to allow liberal Western governments even to stop the crime of child pornography of copyright violation due to their constant harangue about "chill on free speech" that never materializes, even as massive amounts of child-trafficking and pirating sure does. There is a concerted sect of people who would like to dismiss corporations and governments completely from the Internet, or at least make a darknet separate from the mainstream commercial Internet.
So, why can't this program have circumvention technology, and why must that be a marker for "failure"? Why deny people abroad what groups in the U.S. and Europe would routinely use for themselves?
BUT IS THIS TECHNOLOGY EVEN VERY HELPFUL?
Here I'll say that I stopped using this technology myself a few years ago because it was cumbersome, and I felt, ultimately, futile. I felt the mere presence of Tor or PGP or other systems were markers to any snooping governments that I was up to something, and a signal to watch closer. I found the different backbones of the Internet didn't adapt to PGP always and created problems and so much fussing that you gave up. Long ago, I realize that the greatest weapon the human rights movement has always had is its openness, and its ability not to have to keep a secret because what it is doing isn't wrong and doesn't need to be hidden: it is lawful.
There was nothing I was saying in an email that I wouldn't say on my blog or in a letter or phone call, for much of what I was doing in any NGO work -- for anything else, there was always the face-to-face meeting, or the message passed verbally through personal contacts. And if that was impossible -- why, it was possible to do less. In this day and age, that almost never seems an option when everone thinks "there's an ap for that," but if there's a choice between giving or getting information, especially about financial or strategy matters that might endanger somebody, if there isn't a safe way to do it, then perhaps refrain.
YOUR LIBERAL NUANCES ARE LOST ON AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS
I speak as someone falsely accused of giving aid to the Belarusian independent web site by a malicious authoritarian leader who has put his political opponents in jail -- something I didn't do, and a charge that is preposterous. I and a long list of other people abroad, as well as opposition figures, are charged with raising a huge war chest to run alternative presidential campaigns against Lukashenka, the incumbent, in ways that were said to be unlawful.
A number of people denied they had anything to do with the charges, but several said, yes, they gave money for education and training -- and so what?! And one has to ask: if Lukashenka really did win 80 percent of the votes, why the need to arrest 600 demonstrators out of the 40,000 people who came to protest the vote as fraudulent, and why the need to select out about 40 opposition leaders for "organizing mass riots" even though their demonstration was a model of peace, and the minor incident of a door being broken down to the elections commission was in fact a police-staged provocation?
My point here is that when abusive governments want to find a way to charge their opponents, they can lie, or they can seize on any kind of aid, from private or public sources, without differentiation, and declare it all as "interference in internal affairs". THEY don't appreciate the nuances; why are we fighting over them?!
They don't care whether the aid was for an anodyne Swedish parliamentary trip or a plucky Polish clandestine emergency cash network -- it's all the same and all suspect so why play their game? *They* don't buy the abstract incremental approach Shirky is preaching -- disgracefully, given the way he whistled for "Everybody" to come "Here". It's not as if you can convince them that the aid from Sweden meant only to compare parliamentary systems is "ok" and the aid from the hostile U.S. that involved training candidates about reaching out to constituents was actually a per-diem handout to the revolution. They don't care! It's all an evil Western intelligence plot anyway.
NO, CIRCUMVENTION TECHNOLOGY DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK
I had to wonder why, in the heat of the election demonstration in Belarus, a Huffington Post blogger, social media booster and anarchist was berating the Belarusian opposition for not using Tor. He was scouring websites to find a Russian-language Tor to inflict on them or "crowdsource" a translation. This was retarded. People already had Tor, and not only in Russian. They already had other circumvention software. But when the regime comes to *turn off the electricity in the entire square" and *turn off the electricity in the entire building* where the independent publication is, your Tor isn't going to work, now, is it. That's not an argument against Tor; it's not an argument for Morozov's evasive skepticism or Shirky's incrementalist development -- it's an argument for more circumvention, and more help of other kinds, in a concerted whole.
Many people used Skype or gmail to try to circumvent the watchers on the State providers and the Russian-controlled mass services like yandex of Vkontake, the Russian Facebook-like site.
Vkontake took care of the Egyptian Facebook-style organizing -- it instantly deleted the campaign group of Andrei Sannikov, with 8,000 followers, the day he was arrested. Thanks, guys! The owner and devs of Vkontake are on the international groove train -- the Silicon Valley and State Department tech dels to Russia invite them to speak at their conferences. Yet these are the people presiding over a system that instantly kills off any political dissent that might threaten the Kremlin.
Those that used Skype or email found that once the KGB, as it is still called, seized people's laptops, it was trivial to get their chat -- the chat didn't even necessarily have to be on their hard-drive, if they had the system set up to log on to Skype when booting up -- the KGB could get it that way -- and it may be that they also somehow hacked into accounts online, because not everyone who had information showing up in the state media in the days after arrests had a laptop confiscated.
Circumvention only works if you can maintain the environment around it that helps it succeed. That means not having your laptop confiscated, or being interrogated and tortured to give a password, or -- more likely -- not having your office or home surreptitiously searched when it might be possible for a KGB agent merely to boot up your pre-set email or find it open, and not even need a password -- or figure out your password from a social hack or see it on the yellow sticky on your computer.
But that environment is a foreign aid program that includes circumvention and a menu of other options that activists abroad should chose on demand, without taking dictation from those that don't REALLY want to support them because they are uneasy or fatalistic about confronting dictators and without taking dictation from those who find the entire subject a surrogate for attacking U.S. foreign policy in any event.
When I saw how the Belarusian movement was shattered December 19 with massive arrests and intimidation, I also saw how people kept the movement alive -- and it wasn't through Tor, although some continued to use it. It was because somebody's aunt could be reached on a land line and tell you what she saw out her window and you could then use your mobile to relay it, or she could tell you what her nephew said when she managed to pass him a package at the prison -- it worked the same way in Egypt. It's because some people could manage to drive or ride a train out of the country and get the news out or get diplomats or journalists visiting involved in getting out news. Circumventions work when you have the comfort of sitting at your computer in an office or walking with your laptop to a cafe without molestation -- but as we saw with Egypt, when they want to, the police drag you out of the Internet cafe and beat you up.
Even so, whether ineffective or only partly effective, circumvention technology, basic "tradecraft" in how to avoid detection, security measures to take, etc. etc. -- these are all good things. They are all part of a normal Internet Freedom program and badgering the State Department over its inclusion of them in planning is getting frankly ridiculous -- again, it is a surrogate for the debate about foreign policy itself that some hard leftists want to have; it's a surrogate for the demolition of the U.S. that some anarchists want to perpetrate, but it has to be deflected because we live in a world of hostile powers trying to take away many people's freedoms -- and these include WikiLeaks bag men, Anonymous.
Private organizations are probably better at delivering this service than governments, but governments can fund a piece of them or build the infrastructure -- a USAID-funded conference abroad where people can meet and form private connections to follow up with non-governmental organizations, for example, or the paying of tickets to get to international meetings such as the review conferences of the OSCE or treaty bodies of the UN.
The New York Times now has a round-up piece on this, which I'll answer with the following points:
o Rebecca McKinnon, once again, must be challenged to say *what she is for, not just what she is against*. She is quoted at the Times as follows, the the program "is going to be effective if it’s couched within a broader set of policies.” What are those broader set of policies? A completely different foreign policy? An agreement not to prosecute WikiLeaks? For Jillian York at the Berkman Center, it means a one-state policy on Israel.
o Critics are claiming "hypocrisy" about calling for freedom for Chinese or Russian bloggers, but prosecuting WikiLeaks. Sorry, but you get to prosecute people who incite or hack your servers with classified government documents and publish them to harm the national security of the U.S. and personal security of individuals. If you can't concede that as a valid concern for a liberal democratic state with elected officials and the most open government probably in the world, then we can't have a conversation because you're in a tiny extremist anarchist sect.
While there's a debate to be had about how open the government must be, whether too many documents are classified, whether WikiLeaks is an instrument or an intermediary, if you can't have that debate while conceding that the rule of law and states get to keep documents secret when delegated to do so by the people, then again -- you're in your mom's basement DDOSing Amazon and I have little to discuss with you.
o Yes, Falun Gong is one of the controversial circumventors, and while the New York Times didn't have the journalistic integrity to at least put "evil cult" in quotation marks in this piece, the Chinese cultists are annoying and aggressive -- but there is an answer to the problem. Pluralism and choice of circumvention technologies, both proprietary and open source. And hey, I'd love to see LOTS more discussion about how the WikiLeaks people eavesdropped on the Chinese dissidents through Tor, hmmm?
How a single human rights organization -- or for that matter the Unaccountable Jacob Appelbaum -- could make WikiLeaks a hero after it did *that* is beyond me. Simply beyond.
o There is constant invocation, especially by Morozov, of the power of governments such as the Iranian regime or the dying Mubarak regime to shut off the Internet (and fallacious moral equivalency with a program that doesn't even exist yet in the U.S., Obama's "kill switch" plan for Internet security against hostile takeovers). The reality is, the Egyptian government was forced to put the Internet back on, even if they slowed uploads (sparking more fake moral equivalencies with the U.S. by "net neutrality" nerds). And the Iranian government goons kill bloggers and tweeters -- but they always killed dissidents at home and abroad and have for 30 years. Now it's different. Now there are eyes on them, and now there is solidarity. The eyes of the world, and the solidarity of the world do matter in how revolutions go, and social media facilitates that. Ending the story with a tale of horror about evil governments shutting of Interwebs is duplicitous -- the story doesn't end, it routes around, it continues, maybe not today, but tomorrow. That's why we need a U.S. government program.
o Yes, government-sponsored thugs simply break the arms of journalists like Oleg Kashin in Russia so that circumvention may not seem like "the point". But frankly, it matters to people in neighbouring countries for whom Live Journal is blocked (like those in Kazakhstan) if they want to read Oleg -- and the story is a diverse and granulated one -- people in Russia still need Tor and use it; people still need an old-fashioned infrastructure of solidarity -- facilitated by Twitter -- that makes sure that things happen like questions to President Medvedev, when he came to Davos to hobnob with the rich and famous, that he was asked if Khodorkovsky's second jailing couldn't harm business?
The Times article concludes with the typical "progressive" moral cop-out and moral equivalence:
Ron Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said that governments had been shifting from blocking the Internet to hacking and disabling it. Even in the United States, he noted, the Senate is considering a bill that would allow the president to switch off the Internet in the event of a catastrophic cyberattack.
Sorry, but if an outside hostile power like Iran or Russia or China attacks the U.S. Internet, attached to everything from hospitals to banks to nuclear power stations, not to mention your blog, you have to have some response available for when it would be subject to a wholesale attack.
I really am disgusted by the facile and ethics-free equivalence that people like Deibert are making between the Egyptian government shutting off the entire Internet connection for a day, and the U.S. president, in a liberal democratic elected country using the power delegated to him, to ensure the opposite, that the Internet stays on, i.e. is capable of repelling a hostile assault to live another day.
All Deibert is doing is the same as Dave Winer -- trying to insist that the Internet turn into a Darknet run by "progressives" with only their views, with the coerciveness of Anonymous DDOS to shut off anyone they don't like.
The State Department's Internet Freedom program has merely become a proxy in a war in cyberspace that is about power, and is about who gets to decide "what kind of Internet we get to have" as Dave Winer put it -- as if he were the one deciding. The policy has to be about enabling many people to decide from as many pluralistic and co-existing models as possible.
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