Otto von Bismarck, source of inspiration for Kevin Rothrock's A Good Treaty.
I was wondering when Global Voices, Rebecca MacKinnon, Kevin Rothrock, the Russian editor for Global Voices, Evgeny Morozov and their like-minded friends would get around to criticizing the latest threat to the Russian Internet, which they -- unlike even Russians themselves -- love to call "RuNet" as a separate Internet entity. Calling it that, whatever the technicalities, only helps to reify the notion of a Russian sovereign web walled off from the rest of the world. Russians don't speak of "RuNet" for the most part, they simply use the terms "Internet" taken from English or "set'" which means literally "net" in the Russian language. I'm not sure where this fetishization of the term "RuNet" comes from, but it is likely merely to show insiders' knowledge and be knowier-than-thou.
Anyway, finally MacKinnon has linked to a LiveJournal criticism on Twitter, and now today Rothrock has published an essay on Global Voices expressing criticism -- but of course not without accomplishing two other things that always and everywhere accompany his pro-Kremlin agenda: a) bashing Putin critics b) making a moral equivalency between Russia's wrongs and America's wrongs (or what are perceived as attempts at wrongs). It's really distasteful.
I was absolutely appalled when Kevin Rothrock was appointed to this position at GV -- a position ironically several colleagues told me I should apply for but which I utterly rejected, as I would never, ever work for Global Voices in its current form and with its current leadership and with its current Soros funding.
And that's because there is an awful lot to criticize in this operation which has more often been about promoting the American leftist "progressive" line and positions and artificially amplifying them in others abroad than it has really been about serving as an actual representation of diverse "voices" around the world.
Whose Voices?
There is such a halo around Global Voices, like there is around other liberal human rights groups like Human Rights Groups, and the funders are so all-powerful (Soros) that people are hesitant every to speak criticism out loud, especially those abroad who depend on the re-granting, connections to other foundations, invitations to conferences abroad that can give them per diem and consulting fees, and so on. Those that develop any criticism deal with it internally or keep it to themselves. If they do articulate it, they find they have Global Voices cadres chasing them for life and haranguing them speciously for "ideological incorrectness" -- such as David Keyes, head of a competing platform, cyberdissidents.org, has experienced now in debating Jillian York, previously at Berkman and a supporter of GV and now at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And of course as I have found debating first Ethan Zuckerman, then Jillian York, then Rebecca MacKinnon and their friends at Global Voices, whatever good work they may do in actually campaigning for Internet freedom is overshadowed by what appears to be their main objective, which is to bringing to power over the Internet the "progressive" agenda in their narrow interpretation of it -- itself, troubling antithetical to diversity and pluralism and therefore freedom.
Global Voices was founded by MacKinnon, Zuckerman and friends as definitively a left-of-center platform to push for Internet freedom abroad -- and increasingly at home on the lines of the "progressive" agenda, although they are very different things. It had funding from even the US State Department, something that the founders try to downplay today. It was founded and resourced by the Berkman Center at Harvard, although that's another institutional relationship that the founders today claim they are now independent from. And of course it has Open Society Foundation (Soros) funding and funding from simular liberal establishment foundations.
Keyes soon ran into problems with Ethan and Jillian when he said that his organization would focus on the closed Middle Eastern societies and the worst problems in the Arab Internet and not address Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as so many already obsess about it, and the freedom of expression concerns there are simply not on the same scale as in MENA.
That's completely sound reasoning and in fact an application of universality -- if you apply universal standards, you find that some countries have governments that are so far more oppressive than others and with so little remedy that you chose to work on media issues in those countries if your resources are certainly more meager than the "progressive" funded outfits that can do all the Israel-bashing needed for everybody, surely.
It most certainly isn't a lack of even-handedness or a decision that somehow Israel or the US should be "exempt" from criticism -- they're obviously never exempt from criticism, serving in fact as the main targets of the "Internet freedom fighters" of the left. And they are free to make that focus should they chose.
Rather, it's that others are free to worry more about murder and jailing and disappearance and outright blockage of the Internet than the problem of teenagers not being able to download their illegal movie files faster.
And so they do, and then they are opened up to harassment from the "progressives" who feel, like new religious cult recruits, that unless they can bring around everyone to their thinking, their own thinking can't stand.
Then if you criticize them doing *that*, they claim you want to "censor" or "stifle" them. Sigh. It's really such an unconscionable racket, and that's why I keep calling it out, always and everywhere.
Cartoons Vs. Reality
Imagine, using your keynote speech, as Rebecca MacKinnon did, at the Dublin OSCE Conference on Internet Freedom, to complain about the "censorship" of "Ulysses" -- a comic book adaptation of Ulysses that Apple excluded because it had drawings of nude men -- an app that in fact was restored after consumer complaints in the normal process of such things -- while the OSCE space is a place where a government like Azerbaijan's regime can take pictures of a real woman, not a cartoon character, while she is having sex with a partner in a friend's apartment, and put them up on the web in order to intimidate her and incite hatred of her from the conservative society, especially religious believers, because she investigates corruption of this government and publishes it in her articles.
And I don't care, if on their well-funded circuit of conferences mainly among themselves without much debate, the Global Voices contingent can find colleagues in countries like Azerbaijan that they can set up to denounce SOPA as much as they denounce the vicious acts of their own government in a country where five journalists have been murdered in recent years. That's done all the time to make "common cause" -- putting things on an emotional and moral par that they don't belong on -- especially by liberals in authoritarian countries that are eager to show they are part of the liberal world community and not merely one-sided in critiques of their own governments -- even though they are entitled to, just like Americans are.
A Good Blogger?
When Kevin Rothrock was put in charge of the Russia desk for Global Voices, I was absolutely appalled, as were other critics of the Kremlin. One privately answered my expression with outrage by agreeing it was appalling, but noting that it "matters not one wit". Why? Well, because Global Voices doesn't get that much attention. On Alexa, the useful Internet ratings site that geeks love to hate, it's rated at 18,512 internationally, and at about 40,000 in the US. That's not so high although in this niche field, respectable enough and higher than Reporters without Borders and other older groups with similar missions who maybe turned out not to be as web-connected and web savvy as this gang.
But why were we appalled? Well, because Kevin Rothrock has been running a pro-Kremlin website, first under a hidden pseudonym, then with revelation of his own name, for years. It's called A Good Treaty, and itused to contain a mash-up picture of Putin in a helmet to illustrate the importance of Bismarck's quote, "The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia".
Anybody who has been in a treaty with Russia, however, has often found it broken or ignored, especially if related to human rights, and the objective of a "tolerable treaty with bad Russia" would probably be the more pragmatic goal. And even Rothrock has removed his old symbol of Putin adulation now that he's in this job.
But we all know that for ages, he not only ran gushingly pro-Putin material, he busily bashed the opposition who criticized Putin. I remember going many, many rounds with him in defense of Oleg Kashin, on grounds of principle (I don't know Kashin, I've only read his blogs). Kevin would lean of course more toward Navalny, of course, as a neo-opposition single-issue guy, but once he became more broadly oppositional directly to Putin, Rothrock was more inclined to dis him.
Rothrock then wasn't only content to push Putin and dump on dissidents, he would savagely harass anyone who criticizes Russia legitimately for anything. I had never heard of him until I found him as a regular ankle-biter on Twitter for every single critique of Russia that I would mount, especially related to the Jackson-Vanik and Magnitsky Act issues on my blog Minding Russia, a minor niche blog hardly in competition to his. It turns out that he launched and got readership for his blog while at the American Enterprise Institute, using a pseudonym. He worked with Leon Aron, and that made it doubly shocking that he was such a Kremlin-symp giving that AEI and Aron in particular were always critical of the Russian government.
In time, Kevin was not only out of AEI for reasons that are unclear (he wasn't fired or anything but he left), was on paternity leave and moved to another state I believe, but then revealed his real name. I wrote that I was shocked that he was at AEI with the kind of RealPolitik views about Russia he had, as that was not usually characteristic of AEI, but as I noted, pro-Kremlin thinking and sympathy for Putin and reluctance to ever criticize Russia's many human rights problem is increasingly found among commentators on the right and the conservative think-tanks and even some libertarians. I've tallied a lot of them in writing about the curious inability to endorse the Magnitsky List among so many Kremlinologists like Mark Adomanis of Forbes, a Twitter buddy of the creep Joshua Foust and in line with A Good Treaty. Rothrock only argued with me that it simply wasn't true that conservatives were every uncritical of Putin and on his blog, always threatens to block you if you don't agree with him on fake "civility" grounds.
Then, Rothrock seemed to reduce his awful hostility on Twitter for awhile -- I've seldom had someone harass me as nastily on Twitter to the point where I had to wonder who they worked for -- and then seemed to begin something of an about-face on his blog as the massive demonstrations in Russia began to occur.
Nex, Rothrock focused more on providing deeply fact-heavy (or seemingly fact-heavy) pieces with lots of fine print about the various opposition leaders so that he could acquire a reputation as the "go-to-guy" on the Russian blogosphere, but then he was always at least subtly pro-Putin in the end. It was creepy.
Meanwhile, all during the period of these massive demonstrations and arrests and first media freedom surges and then backlashes, Global Voices was not reprinting any Russian bloggers or covering anything particularly critical, but letting a recent college grad who worked there simply publish round-ups that you could get from the New York Times or Radio Liberty anyway. I was once again appalled that here the biggest blogging explosion in Russia's recent history was underway, and the "premiere blogging platform" for those "global voices" was simply having an American round them up and not displaying any of them as is. What happened to those "voices," eh?
Then a few months ago, along comes Kevin Rothrock, having first whited out his Putin graphic on his blog, second, laid low during the election and demonstrations without blogging much at all, or only blogging long factological pieces, and is appointed to this job.
And the very first thing he did in this job is run one of his cunning pieces in which he purported to be reporting on a negative phenomenon that involved vetting NGOs more for their foreign contacts, and the Ministry of Justice's publication of groups that had ostensibly passed their test on their website, but then deliberately exposed a civic group promoting Andrei Sakharov and another group as not on the MoJ list because they had not submitted reports -- as if that meant anything (it doesn't). I saw what you did there, Kevin.
I haven't followed what Rothrock has been up to since, simply because it just doesn't seem that compelling and important even in the Twitter-verse.
But I had to wonder when Global Voices was going to speak up about the increasing threat to the Russian Internet, and I posted a note saying that a few days ago on Twitter.
Threat to Russian Internet Only a Hypothetical
Sure enough, we now have Kevin Rothrock's coverage of the latest threat to the Russian Internet, but not without the known pro-Kremlin barbs that always accompany these efforts, so that the external wrapping remains for the GV gang to claim they are doing the right thing, but the real agenda is accomplished anyway.
First, there's the question mark of the headline. We all know that if this were about America, there wouldnt' be any question. Make denunciations first, then ask questions later.
It seems fairly obvious that this law *is* a threat, as the respected journalist Andrei Babitsky noted because a) the wording is overbroad and b) this is Russia where there is no rule of law or independent judiciary -- see the cases of Magnitsky and Khodorkovsky and hundreds more.
As I've always pointed out, just as "the Internet" should not be separated from the rest of human enterprise in a country with its organic institutions -- it is not special or that different -- so "Internet law" can't be torn from its judicial context in the real world.
These kind of laws represent a real threat in Russia or China or Iran because they are in the hands of bad-faith governments without free media or independent courts. That's why there isn't any fair moral equivalency of laws against piracy or child pornography in the US, where there *is* a free press and adversarial defense and an independent judiciary and remedies that are very weak or don't exist in other countries.
Moral Equivalency
Most Internet Freedom fighters never seem to meet a law against piracy or child pornography that they like and think doesn't chill freedom of speech, and as I keep repeating, the world actually awaits some real jurisprudence from some real national court, particularly US court, or international body, that would really prove that laws against piracy really do harm freedom of expression. So far I simply do not see that they do in the US or the EU, except as a matter of hysterical edge-casing and hypothesis. The edge-cases chosen are all bad cases (dajaz1, for example, or Richard O'Dwyer) that don't prove their point whatsoever.
So predictably, Rothrock focuses on the alleged "similarities" between SOPA and this Russian law, even though there aren't any -- SOPA doesn't make any "collective guilt" of web site owners or Internet service providers, that's ridiculous. It has definitions and procedures and remedies that in fact prevent any such thing and which are evidently not present in the Russian law. Web site owners aren't "presumed guilty" and "face having their entire website closed down" over some infringing content as the SOPA critics claim.
In fact, SOPA never passed, but such actions are only rarely taken under existing law but in fact follow numerous notices of infringement over time, adequate warnings and remedies, and in fact are handled by court orders and lawsuits as MegaUpload is being handled.
By sharp context, the Russian law provides only 24 hours for a response, has no judicial procedure for the shut-down, and takes place in a context where anything in the criminal code, including concepts antithetical to human rights such as the current anti-extremism law, could be grounds for a shutdown and in fact have been in the past for pages, groups, blogs, etc.
So it's hardly any moral equivalency or comparison with the US at all -- that's ridiculous.
A Good Liberal
Then Rothrock bashes Ilya Ponomarev, who is a member of A Just Russia, a party hardly any more guilty than A Just Treaty of wishing to cooperate with the Russian government for pragmatic reasons, and in fact a loyalist party that has become more oppositional from the experience of having their heads cracked by the police in rallies. Ponomarev chairs the Duma committee on the Internet and is involved in Skolkovo, the ill-conceived "Silicon Valley" of Russia, which of course has earned him bashing as insincere from veteran independent journalists like Masha Gessen.
Even so, Ponomarev in fact has comported himself entirely honourably in the last year as he has been at the forefront of protesting election fraud and the crackdown on demonstrations, and has personally gone to the jailhouses to see if arrestees like Udaltsov are going to be let out and has travelled to other cities where anti-Putin demonstrations and crackdowns have taken place.
To be sure, Ilya is more practical than the more utopian opposition leaders -- and it does take all kinds to make a movement inside and outside of institutions. While others having been endlessly blogging and chanting slogans in the streets, Ponomarev has been busy trying to get the Duma, the non-democratic Russian parliament, to perform an official investigation of election fraud. That's ok to do, even with the constraints, because in the end, it will be more compelling. You have to try, and create the record.
Perhaps much of what Ponomarev does is futile in the Duma, with all its ghastly nationalist and xenophobic and oppressive tendencies, but it's important some people attempt to work constructively, even if the notion of "constructive criticism" is not one I personally endorse, nor do I feel that any social movement or individual has to limit themselves, ever, in any situation, to being "constructive" -- it's wrong.
As Rothrock acknowledges in his blog, Ponomarev tried to get the function of "blacklisting" the groups at least in the hands of an independent NGO that might have more credibility than Roskomnadzor, which is partly the heir of the Soviet-era GlavLit state censorship agency.
Well, with a name like "The League for Internet Safety," I don't know how much good-faith this group would have had in handling this, but at least it might be more open to reason from other civil society groupes.
But Ponomarev said he believed the law was "a very good compromise between government intervention and self-regulation" -- and maybe it was in the Russian context. But of course, what Rothrock wants to snicker at here is the idea that any liberal Russian opposition leader do anything that seems to counter the Western "progressive" agenda because if he does, he's a hypocrite -- hence the prefacing of this paragraph by Rothrock with the snide "Readers might experience a minor shock..." to hear Ponomarev is doing this.
Oh, knock it off, Rothrock, the real "minor shock" is that you scrubbed out your Putin graphic, but we can still see it in the wayback...
Law Likely to Curb the Russian Internet
Well, as with other things in Russia, like the "war on terrorism" and the law on anti-extremism, we'll get to see in practice if things that Western liberal democracies either don't put on the books or don't enforce the way they do put on the books and do enforce in Russia in fact lead to human rights abuses.
And history suggests that they will, as liberal dissidents and human rights activists covering things like violence in the North Caucasus or attacks on the media or corruption and fraud will be likely to face more harassment with these Internet laws than the purported targets of pirates and pedophiles, but who knows, even Russia, notorious for giving safe haven to pirates and pedophiles and serving as a source of a lot of the child pornography, piracy, and cyber-attacks in the world, might do a little better in combating these ills.
Meanwhile, Mission Accomplished at Global Voices. The real problem -- the Kremlin -- merely gets a question mark. It is not exposed as the real engine of the problem. Instead, the "real problem" is in fact a liberal MP in Russia who cares about the Internet and human rights and innovation who was trying to make the best of a bad bargain. The "real problem" is that the US has a law, SOPA, it didn't pass. The "real problem" isn't Putin and his administration, from whence this all ensues, but another A Just Russia deputy who says "nobody but pedophiles and drug lords has anything to fear from this law.”
Rothrock even completes this misleading propaganda by making it seem as if there is "really" a fight between the presidential staff and the prime minister's government, you know, Putin=hardliner, Medvedev=liberal, you know? That old chestnut.
"Medvedev's Minister of Communications and Mass Media, Nikolai Nikiforov, tweeted [ru] this morning that the law in its current form is problematic," Rothrock tells us earnestly -- as if that's going to matter one whit.
A Real Chilling Threat on a Journalist
Rothrock's column is filled with cunning and manipulative stuff like this -- and I just don't have the time to expose it all. But take a look at his odious coverage of the Bastrykin affair -- and the "questions" he feel must be raised (!) about a naked terrorizing of a journalist, whatever the patching up after public outrage and international concern -- a threat that doesn't go away:
Was this controversy engineered or fabricated by Bastrykin's enemies within the establishment to weaken the Investigative Committee and empower some other branch of the security services — perhaps its historical rival, the General Prosecutor? Does Novaya Gazeta's eagerness to settle the dispute with Bastrykin indicate that Muratov panicked and betrayed Russia's ‘independent' press? Was Khinshtein a schemer or just another pawn in all this? The answers to such questions either depend on one's political beliefs, or simply do not exist today in any persuasive form. A more poignant question is perhaps: will anyone remember this story in a year? What about in five-and-a-half, when Putin's current presidential term is nearing its end?
Imagine thinking that when the head of the Federal Investigative Committee himself, personally, takes a journalist out to the woods and threatens him, and is publicized accurately as having done so, that this is merely a "plot by his enemies". Insane!
The "forest meme" is one deeply embedded into the East European consciousness. Many is the time that this method has been used on journalists and other activists and dissidents, over and over. (Of course it goes way back to the days of partisans and wars).
I can remember personally working on such cases in Belarus and Russia, and in at least one case, the journalist was found dead (Oleg Bebenin, who had this method used on him years ago before he was then found hanged in 2010). Novaya Gazeta, of course, has had its journalists killed, so it's not just panic.
Khinshtein, a journalist who has been criticized of his handling of this affair, has only been interested in what advances his own career; I recall him from the 1990s -- I had one particularly unsettling personal experience with him. That's Russian journalism for you, it's not for the faint-hearted. Rothrock is hardly any different.
There isn't anything that "depends on political beliefs" about a state-delivered threat like this whatsoever. It's appalling in every way, shape, or form and if it occurred in a Western country would be grounds for dismissal and a permanent scandal for the press. Imagine, if Eric Holder were to take Glenn Greenwald out into the forest and threaten him with assassination. It's inconcievable! Eric Holder has saturation critical coverage in the media and faces even attempts to remove him from office over allegations of misconduct. Hey, Russia doesn't work like that, kids.
That this incident led to some papering over in Russia where murderous threats are all too common and all too real isn't surprising, but sad. (I wonder if the presence of an American delegation headed by DAS Tom Melia for human rights talks with the Russian-American commission also had some affect on the outcome of this awful affair.)
Yet making it seem somehow a dubious matter or not what it is all about -- a naked power strike on the media by Putin's people -- is outrageous. An organization claiming to defend bloggers and free speech and Internet freedom shouldn't be hawking such horrid pro-Kremlin outrages, but then, maybe it's better if they are open about what they are so we can avoid them.
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