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Good evening

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This is the Digital Age and I am Jim Zirin

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Secretary of State Clinton wants to harness the Internet to further the objectives of America foreign policy

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Freedom and Democracy

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Our guest tonight takes the contrarian view

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He sees the Internet as an instrumentality used by repressive regimes

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To crackdown on dissidents

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So, what is this Internet?

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Is it a Techno-Utopia or is it a Digital Dictatorship?

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Here to discuss this issue with us is Evgeny Morozov

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Evgeny Morozov teaches at Georgetown and is a seminal thinker

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On political implications of the Internet

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He recently wrote a full page thought-provoking Op-ed

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Which appeared on The Wall Street Journal

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in which he dealt with this precise question

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Evgeny, Welcome!

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Thanks so much for having me

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We are delighted to have you

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To kick things off, is Hillary a techno-utopian?

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Did you coined the term?

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Actually, I didn't coined the term.

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I think there has been a lot of fascination with what technology can help us accomplish

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Throughout history, people looked at the radio, people looked at the telegraph

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With a lot of expectations

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As to how they can ??? the world peace, for example

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There has been a lot of enthusiasm about the telegraph

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And now I think a lot of that enthusiasm is also talkable when it comes to issues like blogging

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Or social networking

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Or things like Twitter.

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And I do think there's a certain degree of cyber-utopianism or techno-utopianism, if you will

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in Secretary Clinton's thinking, particularly in her recent speech

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About the Internet Freedom

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Well, the idea is, I suppose that Twitter and Facebook will help dissidents to organize

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And exchange ideas and...

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Will eventually bring about reform in places like Iran.

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Do you agree with that logic?

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Well, yes you can certainly and I do agree with that logic

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It's just that there are a lot of other hidden costs which are not necessarily obvious

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To us sitting in the west and thinking that the Internet is only for the dissidents

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Or for the young people to play around and to topple the regimes

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As it turns out the regimes themselves are actually very active users

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Of those technologies

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Rather it is to actually map out who the dissidents are and see how they connect to each other

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Which now has become very easy to do

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Thanks to Facebook which organizes all of the data for the regimes

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They don't have to do any of the drawing boards

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All of that is automatically presented to them through Facebook

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Or alternatively for propaganda purposes

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For trying to push their talking points through anonymous bloggers

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Or by trying to upload fake videos, fake tweets, which will then split the oppositional movements

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As also happened in Iran

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Well, policy wonks in the US and certainly statesmen,

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Kind of see the net as a great hope. I mean

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Nicholas Negroponte argues ... blogger argues the net will demolish the nation state

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Gordon Brown says that - Prime Minister of England - we should listen to bloggers

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Before we elaborate foreign policy

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Are these examples of cyber-utopians?

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I would say so

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Again

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We did see Nicholas Negroponte writing a very popular book

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"Being Digital" in the mid 90's

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Where he actually predicted the demise of The Nation State

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And that there will be as much room for nationalism in this world as there is for smallpox,

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For example.

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Right? And of course, none of that has played out as we are begining to see

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Some nationalist communities have actually become much stronger because of the Internet

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Because they managed to find each other online

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Because they have access to various materials

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Which perpetuate their myth

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It was very hard to go and find the book

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That could deny the Armenian genocide or

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The holocaust or ...

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Hunger in Ukraine in the United Soviets

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Now all of those books have been digitized, put online

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And there a lot of nationalistic minded thoughts

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Who actually are finding those books and then are propagating many of these myth around us

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So again, this vision of the Internet

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As the cosmopolitan...

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New cosmopolitan paradise

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Where people will transcend all borders

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And be very tolerant

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I think that's just very premature

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Well, I wanna get back to how regimes use the net in order to repress dissidents

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You wrote - I guess you spoke recently in England - you said - and I quote

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"In the past it would take weeks if not months to identify how Iranian activists connect with each other.

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Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at Facebook page.

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KGB, not just KGB, used to torture to get this data - now all available on line."

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So. Isn't that a little exaggerated "The KGB used to torture people to get the information"

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That is readily available on a Facebook page?

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They certainly did use to torture people.

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So I am not... I am sure that part is not overstated.

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When it comes to what they can actually learn from the Internet

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About the nature of dissent, and their actions, where dissent is coming from

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I think it's quite a lot

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You can look at, for example, Twitter and try to do a word analisys

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You can actually see which terms are being used and now that Twitter also has

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Locational data you can actually see where people are tweeting from

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So you can actually map various political sentiments and feelings against the geographic location

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Which again is something which turns entire nations

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Into giant focus groups

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Where all you have to do is just sit and watch this data in real time and then make adjustments

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And make sure that you actually act preemptively

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Again we tend to forget that one of the reasons the soviet empire collapsed was because it just had

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??? information about what was going on in their country and the region as a whole

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They really were not sure as to the nature of the popular sentiment at that point

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If there had been Twitter and Facebook we might still have Soviet Union

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And I think you might still have The Berlin Wall

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If the east germans were all on Twitter

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Tweeting how much they hate the regime, the regime would have known how really unpopular it was

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And would have taken measures much sooner

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I think we have to be aware of the power that this information also gives to the regimes themselves

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So that when you go on Twitter or you go on Facebook, in a sense you're spying on yourself

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Yes, you know? And you join groups...

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Again someone who works in this area and who comes from Belarus,

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Which is more or less still an authoritarian country, perhaps the only one in eastern europe

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I actually know that a lot of dissidents and a lot of people who are often

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Democratic, oppositional politics see nothing wrong with connecting with their western funders

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And western supporters on Facebook

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This creates all sorts of curious situations where

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It actually gives evidence that there is foreign support coming to these dissidents

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Because well, they are connected on facebook

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Why else would someone in Washington DC be connected to some random activist

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In Proventional Belarus or Iran or China for that matter?

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So, yes, we are creating a lot of that evidence ourselves

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You used a term in the past "Spinternet".

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Is that a term you coined?

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This is actually a term I coined

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Yeah, finally.

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What is "Spinternet"?

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Tell us about it

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In my research on how authoritarian governments themselves use the internet

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I've been really fascinated by how they have embraced it for propaganda purposes

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So you look at a country like China and the chinese government actually trains

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And pays close to 280,000 people

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Who go online identify policatlly sensitive discussions and then start arguing, trying to push

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The government messages to other bloggers

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They are called 50 cent party

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And 50 cent here stands for how much money they get paid

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For each comment, pro-government comment of course,

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That they leave on the internet

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In Russia it takes a slightly different form

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Instead of this very distributed network of almost 300,000 contributors

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They have a handful of people they really trust

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Who there own their own media startups

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Who are creating their own propaganda

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So they are creating social networks.

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They are creating their own political websites

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But this is all done through a handful of trustful operators

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Propaganda dot com

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Yes.

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We are in some sense beginning to see this very comfortable marriage between spin

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on the one hand and the Internet

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So this is Spinternet

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Let's just get back to Iran and the demonstrations of the green movement

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That recently appeared in Iranian television and images

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Of the supreme ruler Aiatola Ali being photographed as burning in effigy

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There's reason to believe those are not ...

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By protesters

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There's reason to believe that was really not an authentic photograph

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And was used by the regime to divide the protesters

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That's one of the tricks which, again, is very common

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Disinformation

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There's also this woman, Neda, who was shot.

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In Iran it became a symbol of the Iranian opposition

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The Iranian government actually made a number of documentaries

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Which try to argue that she actually wasn't shot

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That she died on her way to the hospital

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And that was actually staged

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In order to garner support in the west

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So, there are are ...

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Even the facts which are very hard to deny like the death of this woman

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They are trying to spin them and they are also trying to spin them in order to split the movement

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Because if one part of the movement sees that another part is burning

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Portraits of the supreme leader of course it raises a lot of questions

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And sometimes it does go through television

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Often goes through Youtube and social networking sites

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So no one really knows how much you can trust this

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And who made that video

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So people spend a lot of time in doubt, trying to investigate

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Whether they are authentic or not

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The State Department is certainly relying heavily on the new media

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At the time of the demonstrations in Iran they asked Twitter to defer

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A scheduled maintenance program

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Presumably, so that dissidents and members of the green movement could tweet each other

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Well, they did.

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Which they did.

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And I think the logic here is exactly what you said was to make sure that people inside Iran

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Can continue communicating

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Again it's a logic that has not yet been quantified

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But you've argued there's a downside to this because it makes it appear that Twitter

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Is a tool of the United States Government

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This is what you wrote on the subject. You said

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"It is certainly a good thing that Obama's youthful bureaucrats

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Have bonded with the brightest creative minds of Silicon Valley.

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However, the kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world -

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i.e. that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions

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Of the U.S. State Department - may simply endanger the lives of those

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Who use such services in authoritarian countries."

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Now, if regimes crackdown on Facebook in its entirety

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Or political Facebook users

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They run the risk - To single out Facebook - They run the risk that social uses of the site will be angered

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Against the regime, because their favorite networking site

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No longer exists, so there's a risk in that, isn't it?

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Sure. Let's try to compact this

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Because there are several layers here

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Yes, if we had 50 million iranians who are all very

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Actively communicating on Twitter and the State Department

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Was absolutely sure that by... You know

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If Twitter goes down, then those people wouldn't be able to communicate

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I would see a lot of logic to them reaching out to the Twitter founders

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And actually asking them to delay their maintenance

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What actually happened is that we are not sure that

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There were millions, even hundreds of Iranians on Twitter

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Al Jazeera tried do a fact checking during the protests to verify

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How many people were on the ground on Twitter in Iran

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And how many of them were twittering

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And they could only locate sixty accounts

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And that number fell actually to six once they started

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Cracking down on communications

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A lot of twittering was done by Iranians in the diaspora

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Those who are not in Iran and those who sympathizing with Iran

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From the outside

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So, given that, I find it really troubling

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That the american government actually endorsed the use of Twitter

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For such political uses

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Because it creates a lot of very uncomfortable links

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Which then the Iranian government and the Chinese government

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Also are exploiting for their own purposes

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They say that it was you who funded Twitter and who asked

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Twitter to stay active because that's how you wanted to

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Foment another revolution in Iran

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Yes. Let's move on to China

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In January, Hillary Clinton said she thought we ought to... Policy of the United States

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To have a single Internet and it was the cornerstone of a

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Her foreign policy agenda

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You read the statement

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She can ??? america foreign policy into the digital age

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And she said there ought to be an investigation of China's attacks on Google

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Or chinese based attacks on Google

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Which was doing business in China

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And which had said would no longer filter

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Search requests

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What do you make of all that?

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Well, I think...

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Again, it's very rare to put the Internet ahead of other

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Foreign policy interests that United States has

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Because trying to campaign on behalf of a single Internet

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Means that we do want to have democracy and strong freedom of expression

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Laws... First amendment everywhere

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And we know that simply is not going to happen

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It's not going to happen in countries like Egypt, or countries like Jordan

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Where we do have legitimate interests and we are not going to simply

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Abandon people we have been supporting there for decades

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in order to promote rule of law

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That's just not gonna happen

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Whether it is a matter of tweets, a matter of blogs,

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A matter of social networks

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So, it was actually very interesting that

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In the same way that Hillary Clinton made her Internet Freedom speech

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Jordan announced a new internet censorship law

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Which Hillary Clinton didn't at all mention in the speech

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So I think a lot of that will just be a continuation of

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Politics as usual and trying to figure out which states are

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More conducive to american foreign policy interests

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??? and then trying to see how the Internet would fit

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But I don't think that they would be able to convince

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The chinese government

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That they should stop censoring, they should stop filtering

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Because the chinese have, as they think, legitimate interests

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And frankly speaking, the kind of movements that are happening

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In the space of western europe, or in countries like Australia

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Which are begining to censor and filter the Internet much heavily

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Actually play to China's advantage

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Because they point their fingers to Australia, France, Jordany and Britain

0:17:03.558,0:17:06.561
Who are also now beginning to censor ???

0:17:06.561,0:17:09.297
They say "well, everyone is doing that, everyone has an interest ...

0:17:09.297,0:17:10.687
... why can't we do it?"

0:17:10.687,0:17:12.934
About five years ago, Google,

0:17:12.934,0:17:16.571
Although it's management was divided over the issue

0:17:16.571,0:17:20.809
Decided to enter China, they formed google.cn,

0:17:20.809,0:17:22.744
The chinese operation and

0:17:22.744,0:17:25.681
China doesn't actually censor them, am I correct?

0:17:25.681,0:17:29.184
They rely on the countries doing business there

0:17:29.184,0:17:31.620
As a condition of doing business to filter

0:17:31.620,0:17:34.156
And that was the deal that Google made

0:17:34.156,0:17:38.460
Now Google said that they don't want to filter anymore

0:17:38.460,0:17:44.266
And that preceded quite closely the attacks, the hacks

0:17:44.266,0:17:49.839
On Gmail, particularly dissidents who happen to have Gmail accounts

0:17:49.839,0:17:56.522
Did Google make a mistake in going to China in the first place?

0:17:56.537,0:18:02.385
Well, I think they did make a mistake, however

0:18:02.385,0:18:05.765
They should have been more cautious and more realistic

0:18:05.765,0:18:08.124
As to what to expect from the chinese government

0:18:08.124,0:18:12.062
They thought that they had entered the deal

0:18:12.062,0:18:16.066
Where the chinese government would stick to their part of the contract

0:18:16.066,0:18:19.303
And would leave Google alone, to make money and

0:18:19.303,0:18:22.806
Capitalize on the most profitable market in the world

0:18:22.806,0:18:25.442
They have 36% of the market share there

0:18:25.442,0:18:28.579
Yes, but there are news services,

0:18:28.579,0:18:31.494
They are very active in the music business, for example in China

0:18:31.494,0:18:34.533
??? the music business elsewhere

0:18:34.533,0:18:38.356
They had a lot of hopes for their new mobile phone

0:18:38.356,0:18:39.857
Which could be sold in China

0:18:39.857,0:18:42.994
But the bottom line is that the chinese government itself

0:18:42.994,0:18:47.231
does not have a very fixed coherent strategy

0:18:47.231,0:18:49.334
When it comes to controlling the Internet

0:18:49.334,0:18:51.741
Because the Internet itself is in flux

0:18:51.741,0:18:56.041
New services keep appearing, people find different ways to organize

0:18:56.041,0:18:59.978
And the chinese government always has to find new ways to control them

0:18:59.978,0:19:05.673
So, every month, they have been imposing new demands on Google

0:19:05.673,0:19:09.288
I think that at some point, particularly when the cyber-attacks happened

0:19:09.288,0:19:12.658
Google just ran out of patience and said "that's enough!"

0:19:12.658,0:19:15.661
We either want to get the US Government behind us

0:19:15.661,0:19:18.264
And try to frame it as a political issue

0:19:18.264,0:19:21.967
To gain more grounds in negotiating, or

0:19:21.967,0:19:24.249
We'll just get out of China altogether

0:19:24.249,0:19:30.843
In your view is the flap a comercial issue, a human rights issue

0:19:30.843,0:19:32.578
Or a national security issue?

0:19:32.578,0:19:33.980
For the United States ?

0:19:33.980,0:19:35.615
For the United States I think

0:19:35.615,0:19:39.586
There's definitely this layer of spionage

0:19:39.586,0:19:45.193
Where, yes, Google does traffic into a lot of sensitive data

0:19:45.193,0:19:48.295
Because it runs the most popular email service in the world

0:19:48.295,0:19:51.598
And that will continue no matter what, whether they are in China

0:19:51.598,0:19:54.267
Whether they seize their operations there completely

0:19:54.267,0:19:57.571
So I think that the spionage layer will be there forever

0:19:57.571,0:20:02.342
In terms of Human Rights issue it's very hard to say

0:20:02.342,0:20:07.181
Again, look at Google in India, where also there are also a lot of laws

0:20:07.181,0:20:10.451
And Google actually runs a very popular social network

0:20:10.451,0:20:11.986
In India called Orkut

0:20:11.986,0:20:13.554
Which they do censor heavily

0:20:15.456,0:20:17.358
And a lot of people working on freedom of expression in India

0:20:17.358,0:20:22.700
Actually accuse Google of censoring much more heavily in India than the Indian newspapers do, right?

0:20:22.700,0:20:27.778
Because they just want to make sure they don't break any laws

0:20:27.778,0:20:31.386
And I guess it all boils down to how they interpret the local laws

0:20:34.132,0:20:35.905
Or whose ox is being gored?

0:20:35.905,0:20:37.679
Evgeny, you have quite a gift for the political satire

0:20:37.679,0:20:41.650
And in a London speech you recently brought down the house with this one.

0:20:41.650,0:20:44.152
Which I want to share with our viewers

0:20:44.152,0:20:45.936
This is what you said:

0:20:45.936,0:20:50.492
I think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cyber-utopians made

0:20:50.492,0:20:52.327
Is when it comes to digital natives,

0:20:52.327,0:20:53.896
People who have grown up online

0:20:53.896,0:20:56.664
You often hear about cyber activism

0:20:56.664,0:20:59.218
How people are getting more active because of the Internet

0:20:59.218,0:21:01.370
You rarely hear bout cyber hedonism, for example

0:21:01.370,0:21:02.972
How people are becoming passive

0:21:02.972,0:21:06.442
Why? Because they somehow assume that the Internet is going

0:21:06.442,0:21:09.745
Be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets

0:21:09.745,0:21:12.448
When in fact it will actually be the new opium for the masses

0:21:12.448,0:21:15.551
Which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography

0:21:15.551,0:21:20.857
Now, do you believe that the Internet "is going to become the new opium for the masses..."

0:21:20.857,0:21:24.946
"... which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography"?

0:21:24.946,0:21:27.030
Or you're just being provocative?

0:21:27.030,0:21:29.266
I think it is definitely an option

0:21:29.266,0:21:31.067
And I think...

0:21:31.867,0:21:37.206
When we talk about the role that the Internet plays in authoritarian states

0:21:37.206,0:21:42.479
We tend to forget our own national discourse about the Internet

0:21:42.479,0:21:46.401
When you talk about the Internet in the context of the United States

0:21:46.401,0:21:52.035
We do raise concerns whether is Google making us stupid,

0:21:52.035,0:21:54.760
Whether young people are getting politically disengaged,

0:21:54.760,0:21:57.828
Whether they are reading less and less political news

0:21:57.828,0:22:02.366
There's a very elite debate about the social and political implications of

0:22:02.366,0:22:06.184
The Internet and a lot of people are voicing legitimate concerns

0:22:06.184,0:22:10.175
When we try to transpose that debate to the context of China and Iran

0:22:10.175,0:22:14.126
We completely forget about this negative social and political concerns

0:22:14.126,0:22:15.947
We are raising in our own context

0:22:15.947,0:22:19.684
In things that the only role for the Internet in China would be

0:22:19.684,0:22:23.822
To liberate people and make them read reports from the Human Rights Watch

0:22:23.822,0:22:29.828
And download them everyday instead of downloading films, clips

0:22:29.828,0:22:31.163
and, yes, pornography

0:22:31.163,0:22:33.445
But that's what also happens on our own Internet

0:22:33.445,0:22:36.468
So maybe they prefer pornography than Human Rights Watch

0:22:36.468,0:22:39.572
I think that's a legitimate thing to say, yes

0:22:39.572,0:22:41.907
That's just how interest works. And that's...

0:22:41.907,0:22:45.077
The problem in countries like China or Iran is

0:22:45.077,0:22:49.699
A lack of strong civil society and any kind of political culture

0:22:49.699,0:22:54.887
And you can't build a political culture just by letting people do

0:22:54.887,0:22:56.723
Whatever they want to do online because chances are

0:22:56.723,0:23:00.159
They may actually run away from that political culture altogether

0:23:00.159,0:23:03.463
And it will be much harder to reach for exact those dissidents

0:23:03.463,0:23:04.631
That we were so concerned about

0:23:04.631,0:23:08.568
Chinese may feel that if there were a free and open Internet

0:23:08.568,0:23:11.638
A single Internet, what is what Secretary Clinton wants to see

0:23:11.638,0:23:16.209
That what they are being exposed to is simply anti-China propaganda

0:23:16.209,0:23:20.547
Generated by United States or someone else and they won't be interested

0:23:20.547,0:23:23.083
I think so, again

0:23:23.083,0:23:27.087
Because a lot of media conceptions still happens through traditional media

0:23:27.087,0:23:28.923
Who do still play a significant role

0:23:28.923,0:23:32.059
And those are to some degrees still controlled in China

0:23:32.059,0:23:34.895
And they do manufacture a lot of program messages

0:23:34.895,0:23:36.882
There's this culture of suspicion

0:23:36.882,0:23:40.504
And I think the more Google's tries ???

0:23:40.504,0:23:45.873
the National Security Agency, the more concerns people in China and Iran will have

0:23:45.873,0:23:50.349
About what actually is the role that Google is playing in all this

0:23:50.349,0:23:52.981
And I think some of those concerns are legitimate

0:23:52.981,0:23:57.452
Suppose Google goes out of China, do you think they would

0:23:57.452,0:24:00.589
Still be exposed to cyber-attacks?

0:24:00.589,0:24:03.260
That are chinese based?

0:24:03.260,0:24:04.092
For sure

0:24:04.092,0:24:08.664
The reason for cyber-attacks is not the fact that Google

0:24:08.664,0:24:10.265
Is not censoring enough

0:24:10.265,0:24:13.769
The reason for cyberattacks is because they have become

0:24:13.769,0:24:19.328
A repository of sensitive emails for all over the world

0:24:19.328,0:24:22.021
Because they simply offer the most reliable email service

0:24:22.021,0:24:25.781
Which is comercially available for free

0:24:25.781,0:24:28.987
Well, there were other US companies who were attacked as well,

0:24:28.987,0:24:30.659
Some doesn't even do business in China

0:24:30.659,0:24:33.089
At about the same time, is that right?

0:24:33.089,0:24:38.294
Sure, we don't know whether it was part of the same attack

0:24:38.294,0:24:40.597
Whether they were separate groups

0:24:40.597,0:24:44.916
It's very hard to say whether those attacks have anything in common

0:24:44.916,0:24:50.073
But again, it was done, as far as I can understand, for spionage reasons

0:24:50.073,0:24:55.245
Stealing sensitive data, and they were trying to sell it,

0:24:55.245,0:24:58.849
And the case of the chinese dissidents, people stealing their data

0:24:58.849,0:25:01.727
We don't know if any of the private emails

0:25:01.727,0:25:04.521
Of american diplomats were also targeted

0:25:04.521,0:25:07.825
They just didn't come out, it may as well be the case

0:25:07.825,0:25:11.862
We don't even know that it was the Chinese government

0:25:11.862,0:25:13.097
That launched these attacks

0:25:13.097,0:25:15.099
It may have been private interests in China

0:25:15.099,0:25:17.401
That wanted to steal intelectual properties

0:25:17.401,0:25:23.474
And again, it looks that the attacks were not very sophisticated

0:25:23.474,0:25:28.713
They targeted particular employees who were working for Google China

0:25:28.713,0:25:35.487
And it seems that some of them were really just doing some ??? intelligence

0:25:35.487,0:25:39.925
And they knew what are the kind of emails that those people likely to open

0:25:39.925,0:25:41.760
And click on links

0:25:41.760,0:25:44.196
It is social engineering

0:25:44.196,0:25:49.735
Evgeny Morozov, we have to wrap up and I have a question for you

0:25:49.735,0:25:56.041
Are we heading for techno-utopia or to a digital dictatorship?

0:25:56.041,0:26:00.246
I think we already live in techno- utopia, so I think we are already there

0:26:00.246,0:26:05.164
But I think those two are not mutually exclusive

0:26:05.164,0:26:08.387
So yes, the governments will continue doing their evil thing

0:26:08.387,0:26:11.757
While we will continue thinking that everything is rosie

0:26:11.757,0:26:13.359
And we shouldn't be concerned

0:26:13.359,0:26:17.030
Evgeny Morozov, thank you so much for coming by

0:26:17.030,0:26:18.197
That was perfectly wonderful!

0:26:18.197,0:26:19.265
Thanks for having me

0:26:19.265,0:26:21.415
And thank you for coming by

0:26:21.415,0:26:22.773
Tune in next week

0:26:22.773,0:26:24.866
For more on the Digital Age

0:26:24.866,0:26:26.501
For the Digital Age

0:26:26.501,0:26:28.787
I am Jim Zirin, good night

0:26:28.787,0:26:30.499
And all the best