Good evening
This is the Digital Age and I am Jim Zirin
Secretary of State Clinton wants to harness the Internet to further the objectives of America foreign policy
Freedom and Democracy
Our guest tonight takes the contrarian view
He sees the Internet as an instrumentality used by repressive regimes
To crackdown on dissidents
So, what is this Internet?
Is it a Techno-Utopia or is it a Digital Dictatorship?
Here to discuss this issue with us is Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov teaches at Georgetown and is a seminal thinker
On political implications of the Internet
He recently wrote a full page thought-provoking Op-ed
Which appeared on The Wall Street Journal
in which he dealt with this precise question
Evgeny, Welcome!
Thanks so much for having me
We are delighted to have you
To kick things off, is Hillary a techno-utopian?
Did you coined the term?
Actually, I didn't coined the term.
I think there has been a lot of fascination with what technology can help us accomplish
Throughout history, people looked at the radio, people looked at the telegraph
With a lot of expectations
As to how they can ??? the world peace, for example
There has been a lot of enthusiasm about the telegraph
And now I think a lot of that enthusiasm is also talkable when it comes to issues like blogging
Or social networking
Or things like Twitter.
And I do think there's a certain degree of cyber-utopianism or techno-utopianism, if you will
in Secretary Clinton's thinking, particularly in her recent speech
About the Internet Freedom
Well, the idea is, I suppose that Twitter and Facebook will help dissidents to organize
And exchange ideas and...
Will eventually bring about reform in places like Iran.
Do you agree with that logic?
Well, yes you can certainly and I do agree with that logic
It's just that there are a lot of other hidden costs which are not necessarily obvious
To us sitting in the west and thinking that the Internet is only for the dissidents
Or for the young people to play around and to topple the regimes
As it turns out the regimes themselves are actually very active users
Of those technologies
Rather it is to actually map out who the dissidents are and see how they connect to each other
Which now has become very easy to do
Thanks to Facebook which organizes all of the data for the regimes
They don't have to do any of the drawing boards
All of that is automatically presented to them through Facebook
Or alternatively for propaganda purposes
For trying to push their talking points through anonymous bloggers
Or by trying to upload fake videos, fake tweets, which will then split the oppositional movements
As also happened in Iran
Well, policy wonks in the US and certainly statesmen,
Kind of see the net as a great hope. I mean
Nicholas Negroponte argues ... blogger argues the net will demolish the nation state
Gordon Brown says that - Prime Minister of England - we should listen to bloggers
Before we elaborate foreign policy
Are these examples of cyber-utopians?
I would say so
Again
We did see Nicholas Negroponte writing a very popular book
"Being Digital" in the mid 90's
Where he actually predicted the demise of The Nation State
And that there will be as much room for nationalism in this world as there is for smallpox,
For example.
Right? And of course, none of that has played out as we are begining to see
Some nationalist communities have actually become much stronger because of the Internet
Because they managed to find each other online
Because they have access to various materials
Which perpetuate their myth
It was very hard to go and find the book
That could deny the Armenian genocide or
The holocaust or ...
Hunger in Ukraine in the United Soviets
Now all of those books have been digitized, put online
And there a lot of nationalistic minded thoughts
Who actually are finding those books and then are propagating many of these myth around us
So again, this vision of the Internet
As the cosmopolitan...
New cosmopolitan paradise
Where people will transcend all borders
And be very tolerant
I think that's just very premature
Well, I wanna get back to how regimes use the net in order to repress dissidents
You wrote - I guess you spoke recently in England - you said - and I quote
"In the past it would take weeks if not months to identify how Iranian activists connect with each other.
Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at Facebook page.
KGB, not just KGB, used to torture to get this data - now all available on line."
So. Isn't that a little exaggerated "The KGB used to torture people to get the information"
That is readily available on a Facebook page?
They certainly did use to torture people.
So I am not... I am sure that part is not overstated.
When it comes to what they can actually learn from the Internet
About the nature of dissent, and their actions, where dissent is coming from
I think it's quite a lot
You can look at, for example, Twitter and try to do a word analisys
You can actually see which terms are being used and now that Twitter also has
Locational data you can actually see where people are tweeting from
So you can actually map various political sentiments and feelings against the geographic location
Which again is something which turns entire nations
Into giant focus groups
Where all you have to do is just sit and watch this data in real time and then make adjustments
And make sure that you actually act preemptively
Again we tend to forget that one of the reasons the soviet empire collapsed was because it just had
??? information about what was going on in their country and the region as a whole
They really were not sure as to the nature of the popular sentiment at that point
If there had been Twitter and Facebook we might still have Soviet Union
And I think you might still have The Berlin Wall
If the east germans were all on Twitter
Tweeting how much they hate the regime, the regime would have known how really unpopular it was
And would have taken measures much sooner
I think we have to be aware of the power that this information also gives to the regimes themselves
So that when you go on Twitter or you go on Facebook, in a sense you're spying on yourself
Yes, you know? And you join groups...
Again someone who works in this area and who comes from Belarus,
Which is more or less still an authoritarian country, perhaps the only one in eastern europe
I actually know that a lot of dissidents and a lot of people who are often
Democratic, oppositional politics see nothing wrong with connecting with their western funders
And western supporters on Facebook
This creates all sorts of curious situations where
It actually gives evidence that there is foreign support coming to these dissidents
Because well, they are connected on facebook
Why else would someone in Washington DC be connected to some random activist
In Proventional Belarus or Iran or China for that matter?
So, yes, we are creating a lot of that evidence ourselves
You used a term in the past "Spinternet".
Is that a term you coined?
This is actually a term I coined
Yeah, finally.
What is "Spinternet"?
Tell us about it
In my research on how authoritarian governments themselves use the internet
I've been really fascinated by how they have embraced it for propaganda purposes
So you look at a country like China and the chinese government actually trains
And pays close to 280,000 people
Who go online identify policatlly sensitive discussions and then start arguing, trying to push
The government messages to other bloggers
They are called 50 cent party
And 50 cent here stands for how much money they get paid
For each comment, pro-government comment of course,
That they leave on the internet
In Russia it takes a slightly different form
Instead of this very distributed network of almost 300,000 contributors
They have a handful of people they really trust
Who there own their own media startups
Who are creating their own propaganda
So they are creating social networks.
They are creating their own political websites
But this is all done through a handful of trustful operators
Propaganda dot com
Yes.
We are in some sense beginning to see this very comfortable marriage between spin
on the one hand and the Internet
So this is Spinternet
Let's just get back to Iran and the demonstrations of the green movement
That recently appeared in Iranian television and images
Of the supreme ruler Aiatola Ali being photographed as burning in effigy
There's reason to believe those are not ...
By protesters
There's reason to believe that was really not an authentic photograph
And was used by the regime to divide the protesters
That's one of the tricks which, again, is very common
Disinformation
There's also this woman, Neda, who was shot.
In Iran it became a symbol of the Iranian opposition
The Iranian government actually made a number of documentaries
Which try to argue that she actually wasn't shot
That she died on her way to the hospital
And that was actually staged
In order to garner support in the west
So, there are are ...
Even the facts which are very hard to deny like the death of this woman
They are trying to spin them and they are also trying to spin them in order to split the movement
Because if one part of the movement sees that another part is burning
Portraits of the supreme leader of course it raises a lot of questions
And sometimes it does go through television
Often goes through Youtube and social networking sites
So no one really knows how much you can trust this
And who made that video
So people spend a lot of time in doubt, trying to investigate
Whether they are authentic or not
The State Department is certainly relying heavily on the new media
At the time of the demonstrations in Iran they asked Twitter to defer
A scheduled maintenance program
Presumably, so that dissidents and members of the green movement could tweet each other
Well, they did.
Which they did.
And I think the logic here is exactly what you said was to make sure that people inside Iran
Can continue communicating
Again it's a logic that has not yet been quantified
But you've argued there's a downside to this because it makes it appear that Twitter
Is a tool of the United States Government
This is what you wrote on the subject. You said
"It is certainly a good thing that Obama's youthful bureaucrats
Have bonded with the brightest creative minds of Silicon Valley.
However, the kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world -
i.e. that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions
Of the U.S. State Department - may simply endanger the lives of those
Who use such services in authoritarian countries."
Now, if regimes crackdown on Facebook in its entirety
Or political Facebook users
They run the risk - To single out Facebook - They run the risk that social uses of the site will be angered
Against the regime, because their favorite networking site
No longer exists, so there's a risk in that, isn't it?
Sure. Let's try to compact this
Because there are several layers here
Yes, if we had 50 million iranians who are all very
Actively communicating on Twitter and the State Department
Was absolutely sure that by... You know
If Twitter goes down, then those people wouldn't be able to communicate
I would see a lot of logic to them reaching out to the Twitter founders
And actually asking them to delay their maintenance
What actually happened is that we are not sure that
There were millions, even hundreds of Iranians on Twitter
Al Jazeera tried do a fact checking during the protests to verify
How many people were on the ground on Twitter in Iran
And how many of them were twittering
And they could only locate sixty accounts
And that number fell actually to six once they started
Cracking down on communications
A lot of twittering was done by Iranians in the diaspora
Those who are not in Iran and those who sympathizing with Iran
From the outside
So, given that, I find it really troubling
That the american government actually endorsed the use of Twitter
For such political uses
Because it creates a lot of very uncomfortable links
Which then the Iranian government and the Chinese government
Also are exploiting for their own purposes
They say that it was you who funded Twitter and who asked
Twitter to stay active because that's how you wanted to
Foment another revolution in Iran
Yes. Let's move on to China
In January, Hillary Clinton said she thought we ought to... Policy of the United States
To have a single Internet and it was the cornerstone of a
Her foreign policy agenda
You read the statement
She can ??? america foreign policy into the digital age
And she said there ought to be an investigation of China's attacks on Google
Or chinese based attacks on Google
Which was doing business in China
And which had said would no longer filter
Search requests
What do you make of all that?
Well, I think...
Again, it's very rare to put the Internet ahead of other
Foreign policy interests that United States has
Because trying to campaign on behalf of a single Internet
Means that we do want to have democracy and strong freedom of expression
Laws... First amendment everywhere
And we know that simply is not going to happen
It's not going to happen in countries like Egypt, or countries like Jordan
Where we do have legitimate interests and we are not going to simply
Abandon people we have been supporting there for decades
in order to promote rule of law
That's just not gonna happen
Whether it is a matter of tweets, a matter of blogs,
A matter of social networks
So, it was actually very interesting that
In the same way that Hillary Clinton made her Internet Freedom speech
Jordan announced a new internet censorship law
Which Hillary Clinton didn't at all mention in the speech
So I think a lot of that will just be a continuation of
Politics as usual and trying to figure out which states are
More conducive to american foreign policy interests
??? and then trying to see how the Internet would fit
But I don't think that they would be able to convince
The chinese government
That they should stop censoring, they should stop filtering
Because the chinese have, as they think, legitimate interests
And frankly speaking, the kind of movements that are happening
In the space of western europe, or in countries like Australia
Which are begining to censor and filter the Internet much heavily
Actually play to China's advantage
Because they point their fingers to Australia, France, Jordany and Britain
Who are also now beginning to censor ???
They say "well, everyone is doing that, everyone has an interest ...
... why can't we do it?"
About five years ago, Google,
Although it's management was divided over the issue
Decided to enter China, they formed google.cn,
The chinese operation and
China doesn't actually censor them, am I correct?
They rely on the countries doing business there
As a condition of doing business to filter
And that was the deal that Google made
Now Google said that they don't want to filter anymore
And that preceded quite closely the attacks, the hacks
On Gmail, particularly dissidents who happen to have Gmail accounts
Did Google make a mistake in going to China in the first place?
Well, I think they did make a mistake, however
They should have been more cautious and more realistic
As to what to expect from the chinese government
They thought that they had entered the deal
Where the chinese government would stick to their part of the contract
And would leave Google alone, to make money and
Capitalize on the most profitable market in the world
They have 36% of the market share there
Yes, but there are news services,
They are very active in the music business, for example in China
??? the music business elsewhere
They had a lot of hopes for their new mobile phone
Which could be sold in China
But the bottom line is that the chinese government itself
does not have a very fixed coherent strategy
When it comes to controlling the Internet
Because the Internet itself is in flux
New services keep appearing, people find different ways to organize
And the chinese government always has to find new ways to control them
So, every month, they have been imposing new demands on Google
I think that at some point, particularly when the cyber-attacks happened
Google just ran out of patience and said "that's enough!"
We either want to get the US Government behind us
And try to frame it as a political issue
To gain more grounds in negotiating, or
We'll just get out of China altogether
In your view is the flap a comercial issue, a human rights issue
Or a national security issue?
For the United States ?
For the United States I think
There's definitely this layer of spionage
Where, yes, Google does traffic into a lot of sensitive data
Because it runs the most popular email service in the world
And that will continue no matter what, whether they are in China
Whether they seize their operations there completely
So I think that the spionage layer will be there forever
In terms of Human Rights issue it's very hard to say
Again, look at Google in India, where also there are also a lot of laws
And Google actually runs a very popular social network
In India called Orkut
Which they do censor heavily
And a lot of people working on freedom of expression in India
Actually accuse Google of censoring much more heavily in India than the Indian newspapers do, right?
Because they just want to make sure they don't break any laws
And I guess it all boils down to how they interpret the local laws
Or whose ox is being gored?
Evgeny, you have quite a gift for the political satire
And in a London speech you recently brought down the house with this one.
Which I want to share with our viewers
This is what you said:
I think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cyber-utopians made
Is when it comes to digital natives,
People who have grown up online
You often hear about cyber activism
How people are getting more active because of the Internet
You rarely hear bout cyber hedonism, for example
How people are becoming passive
Why? Because they somehow assume that the Internet is going
Be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets
When in fact it will actually be the new opium for the masses
Which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography
Now, do you believe that the Internet "is going to become the new opium for the masses..."
"... which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography"?
Or you're just being provocative?
I think it is definitely an option
And I think...
When we talk about the role that the Internet plays in authoritarian states
We tend to forget our own national discourse about the Internet
When you talk about the Internet in the context of the United States
We do raise concerns whether is Google making us stupid,
Whether young people are getting politically disengaged,
Whether they are reading less and less political news
There's a very elite debate about the social and political implications of
The Internet and a lot of people are voicing legitimate concerns
When we try to transpose that debate to the context of China and Iran
We completely forget about this negative social and political concerns
We are raising in our own context
In things that the only role for the Internet in China would be
To liberate people and make them read reports from the Human Rights Watch
And download them everyday instead of downloading films, clips
and, yes, pornography
But that's what also happens on our own Internet
So maybe they prefer pornography than Human Rights Watch
I think that's a legitimate thing to say, yes
That's just how interest works. And that's...
The problem in countries like China or Iran is
A lack of strong civil society and any kind of political culture
And you can't build a political culture just by letting people do
Whatever they want to do online because chances are
They may actually run away from that political culture altogether
And it will be much harder to reach for exact those dissidents
That we were so concerned about
Chinese may feel that if there were a free and open Internet
A single Internet, what is what Secretary Clinton wants to see
That what they are being exposed to is simply anti-China propaganda
Generated by United States or someone else and they won't be interested
I think so, again
Because a lot of media conceptions still happens through traditional media
Who do still play a significant role
And those are to some degrees still controlled in China
And they do manufacture a lot of program messages
There's this culture of suspicion
And I think the more Google's tries ???
the National Security Agency, the more concerns people in China and Iran will have
About what actually is the role that Google is playing in all this
And I think some of those concerns are legitimate
Suppose Google goes out of China, do you think they would
Still be exposed to cyber-attacks?
That are chinese based?
For sure
The reason for cyber-attacks is not the fact that Google
Is not censoring enough
The reason for cyberattacks is because they have become
A repository of sensitive emails for all over the world
Because they simply offer the most reliable email service
Which is comercially available for free
Well, there were other US companies who were attacked as well,
Some doesn't even do business in China
At about the same time, is that right?
Sure, we don't know whether it was part of the same attack
Whether they were separate groups
It's very hard to say whether those attacks have anything in common
But again, it was done, as far as I can understand, for spionage reasons
Stealing sensitive data, and they were trying to sell it,
And the case of the chinese dissidents, people stealing their data
We don't know if any of the private emails
Of american diplomats were also targeted
They just didn't come out, it may as well be the case
We don't even know that it was the Chinese government
That launched these attacks
It may have been private interests in China
That wanted to steal intelectual properties
And again, it looks that the attacks were not very sophisticated
They targeted particular employees who were working for Google China
And it seems that some of them were really just doing some ??? intelligence
And they knew what are the kind of emails that those people likely to open
And click on links
It is social engineering
Evgeny Morozov, we have to wrap up and I have a question for you
Are we heading for techno-utopia or to a digital dictatorship?
I think we already live in techno- utopia, so I think we are already there
But I think those two are not mutually exclusive
So yes, the governments will continue doing their evil thing
While we will continue thinking that everything is rosie
And we shouldn't be concerned
Evgeny Morozov, thank you so much for coming by
That was perfectly wonderful!
Thanks for having me
And thank you for coming by
Tune in next week
For more on the Digital Age
For the Digital Age
I am Jim Zirin, good night
And all the best