DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov

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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
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Who are also now beginning to censor ???
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They say "well, everyone is doing that, everyone has an interest ...
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... why can't we do it?"
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About five years ago, Google,
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Although it's management was divided over the issue
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Decided to enter China, they formed google.cn,
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The chinese operation and
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China doesn't actually censor them, am I correct?
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They rely on the countries doing business there
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As a condition of doing business to filter
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And that was the deal that Google made
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Now Google said that they don't want to filter anymore
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And that preceded quite closely the attacks, the hacks
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On Gmail, particularly dissidents who happen to have Gmail accounts
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Did Google make a mistake in going to China in the first place?
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Well, I think they did make a mistake, however
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They should have been more cautious and more realistic
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As to what to expect from the chinese government
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They thought that they had entered the deal
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Where the chinese government would stick to their part of the contract
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And would leave Google alone, to make money and
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Capitalize on the most profitable market in the world
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They have 36% of the market share there
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Yes, but there are news services,
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They are very active in the music business, for example in China
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??? the music business elsewhere
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They had a lot of hopes for their new mobile phone
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Which could be sold in China
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But the bottom line is that the chinese government itself
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does not have a very fixed coherent strategy
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When it comes to controlling the Internet
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Because the Internet itself is in flux
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New services keep appearing, people find different ways to organize
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And the chinese government always has to find new ways to control them
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So, every month, they have been imposing new demands on Google
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I think that at some point, particularly when the cyber-attacks happened
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Google just ran out of patience and said "that's enough!"
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We either want to get the US Government behind us
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And try to frame it as a political issue
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To gain more grounds in negotiating, or
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We'll just get out of China altogether
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In your view is the flap a comercial issue, a human rights issue
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Or a national security issue?
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For the United States ?
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For the United States I think
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There's definitely this layer of spionage
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Where, yes, Google does traffic into a lot of sensitive data
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Because it runs the most popular email service in the world
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And that will continue no matter what, whether they are in China
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Whether they seize their operations there completely
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So I think that the spionage layer will be there forever
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In terms of Human Rights issue it's very hard to say
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Again, look at Google in India, where also there are also a lot of laws
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And Google actually runs a very popular social network
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In India called Orkut
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Which they do censor heavily
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And a lot of people working on freedom of expression in India
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Actually accuse Google of censoring much more heavily in India than the Indian newspapers do, right?
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Because they just want to make sure they don't break any laws
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And I guess it all boils down to how they interpret the local laws
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Or whose ox is being gored?
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Evgeny, you have quite a gift for the political satire
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And in a London speech you recently brought down the house with this one.
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Which I want to share with our viewers
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This is what you said:
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I think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cyber-utopians made
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Is when it comes to digital natives,
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People who have grown up online
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You often hear about cyber activism
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How people are getting more active because of the Internet
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You rarely hear bout cyber hedonism, for example
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How people are becoming passive
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Why? Because they somehow assume that the Internet is going
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Be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets
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When in fact it will actually be the new opium for the masses
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Which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography
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Now, do you believe that the Internet "is going to become the new opium for the masses..."
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"... which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography"?
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Or you're just being provocative?
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I think it is definitely an option
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And I think...
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When we talk about the role that the Internet plays in authoritarian states
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We tend to forget our own national discourse about the Internet
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When you talk about the Internet in the context of the United States
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We do raise concerns whether is Google making us stupid,
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Whether young people are getting politically disengaged,
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Whether they are reading less and less political news
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There's a very elite debate about the social and political implications of
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The Internet and a lot of people are voicing legitimate concerns
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When we try to transpose that debate to the context of China and Iran
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We completely forget about this negative social and political concerns
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We are raising in our own context
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In things that the only role for the Internet in China would be
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To liberate people and make them read reports from the Human Rights Watch
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And download them everyday instead of downloading films, clips
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and, yes, pornography
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But that's what also happens on our own Internet
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So maybe they prefer pornography than Human Rights Watch
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I think that's a legitimate thing to say, yes
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That's just how interest works. And that's...
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The problem in countries like China or Iran is
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A lack of strong civil society and any kind of political culture
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And you can't build a political culture just by letting people do
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Whatever they want to do online because chances are
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They may actually run away from that political culture altogether
23:00 - 23:03

And it will be much harder to reach for exact those dissidents
23:03 - 23:05

That we were so concerned about
23:05 - 23:09

Chinese may feel that if there were a free and open Internet
23:09 - 23:12

A single Internet, what is what Secretary Clinton wants to see
23:12 - 23:16

That what they are being exposed to is simply anti-China propaganda
23:16 - 23:21

Generated by United States or someone else and they won't be interested
23:21 - 23:23

I think so, again
23:23 - 23:27

Because a lot of media conceptions still happens through traditional media
23:27 - 23:29

Who do still play a significant role
23:29 - 23:32

And those are to some degrees still controlled in China
23:32 - 23:35

And they do manufacture a lot of program messages
23:35 - 23:37

There's this culture of suspicion
23:37 - 23:41

And I think the more Google's tries ???
23:41 - 23:46

the National Security Agency, the more concerns people in China and Iran will have
23:46 - 23:50

About what actually is the role that Google is playing in all this
23:50 - 23:53

And I think some of those concerns are legitimate
23:53 - 23:57

Suppose Google goes out of China, do you think they would
23:57 - 24:01

Still be exposed to cyber-attacks?
24:01 - 24:03

That are chinese based?
24:03 - 24:04

For sure
24:04 - 24:09

The reason for cyber-attacks is not the fact that Google
24:09 - 24:10

Is not censoring enough
24:10 - 24:14

The reason for cyberattacks is because they have become
24:14 - 24:19

A repository of sensitive emails for all over the world
24:19 - 24:22

Because they simply offer the most reliable email service
24:22 - 24:26

Which is comercially available for free
24:26 - 24:29

Well, there were other US companies who were attacked as well,
24:29 - 24:31

Some doesn't even do business in China
24:31 - 24:33

At about the same time, is that right?
24:33 - 24:38

Sure, we don't know whether it was part of the same attack
24:38 - 24:41

Whether they were separate groups
24:41 - 24:45

It's very hard to say whether those attacks have anything in common
24:45 - 24:50

But again, it was done, as far as I can understand, for spionage reasons
24:50 - 24:55

Stealing sensitive data, and they were trying to sell it,
24:55 - 24:59

And the case of the chinese dissidents, people stealing their data
24:59 - 25:02

We don't know if any of the private emails
25:02 - 25:05

Of american diplomats were also targeted
25:05 - 25:08

They just didn't come out, it may as well be the case
25:08 - 25:12

We don't even know that it was the Chinese government
25:12 - 25:13

That launched these attacks
25:13 - 25:15

It may have been private interests in China
25:15 - 25:17

That wanted to steal intelectual properties
25:17 - 25:23

And again, it looks that the attacks were not very sophisticated
25:23 - 25:29

They targeted particular employees who were working for Google China
25:29 - 25:35

And it seems that some of them were really just doing some ??? intelligence
25:35 - 25:40

And they knew what are the kind of emails that those people likely to open
25:40 - 25:42

And click on links
25:42 - 25:44

It is social engineering
25:44 - 25:50

Evgeny Morozov, we have to wrap up and I have a question for you
25:50 - 25:56

Are we heading for techno-utopia or to a digital dictatorship?
25:56 - 26:00

I think we already live in techno- utopia, so I think we are already there
26:00 - 26:05

But I think those two are not mutually exclusive
26:05 - 26:08

So yes, the governments will continue doing their evil thing
26:08 - 26:12

While we will continue thinking that everything is rosie
26:12 - 26:13

And we shouldn't be concerned
26:13 - 26:17

Evgeny Morozov, thank you so much for coming by
26:17 - 26:18

That was perfectly wonderful!
26:18 - 26:19

Thanks for having me
26:19 - 26:21

And thank you for coming by
26:21 - 26:23

Tune in next week
26:23 - 26:25

For more on the Digital Age
26:25 - 26:27

For the Digital Age
26:27 - 26:29

I am Jim Zirin, good night
26:29 - 26:30

And all the best

Title:: DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov
Description:: Hillary Clinton and the policy wonks see the Internet as a possible way to democratize repressive regimes such as Iran. Evgeny Morozov, a leading commentator on the political implications of the Internet, argues the opposite. Hear him tell Jim Zirin how dictatorships use the Net for their own selfish ends--and why the cyber-utopians have got it all wrong. Evgeny Morozov is a Yahoo Fellow at the the E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

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Video Language:: English
Duration:: 26:52

	pedropenna2 edited English subtitles for DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov
	pedropenna2 edited English subtitles for DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov
	Chapeleiro Louco edited English subtitles for DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov
	Chapeleiro Louco edited English subtitles for DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov

English subtitles

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DIGITAL AGE - A Techno-Utopia or a Digital Dictatorship? - Evgeny Morozov

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