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Journalism of Courage
SCOTT SHANE
Fear is the dictators traditional tool for keeping the people in check. But by cutting off Egypts Internet and wireless service last week in the face of huge street protests,President Hosni Mubarak betrayed his own fearthat Facebook,Twitter and smartphones could empower his opponents,expose his weakness and topple his regime.
Tunisias uprising offers the latest encouragement for a comforting notion: that the same Web tools that so many Americans use to keep up with college pals and post passing thoughts have a more noble role as well,as a scourge of despotism. It was just 18 months ago that the same technologies were hailed as a factor in Irans Green Revolution,the stirring street protests that followed the disputed presidential election.
But since then,Iran has become a cautionary tale. The Iranian police followed the electronic trails left by activists,which assisted them in making thousands of arrests in the crackdown that followed. The government even crowd-sourced its hunt for enemies,posting on the Web the photos of unidentified demonstrators and inviting Iranians to identify them.
In Minsk and Moscow,Tehran and Beijing,governments have begun to climb the steep learning curve and turn the new Internet tools to their own,antidemocratic purposes.
A new book,The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,by a young Belarus-born American scholar,Evgeny Morozov,has described instance after instance of strongmen finding ways to use new media to their advantage.
The very factors that have brought Facebook and similar sites such commercial success have huge appeal for a secret police force. A dissidents social networking and Twitter feed is a handy guide to his political views,his personal habits and his network of like-thinking allies. A cyber-surfing policeman can compile a dossier on a regime opponent without street surveillance and telephone tapping.
In Belarus,officers of the KGBthe secret police agency has preserved its Soviet-era namenow routinely quote activists comments on Facebook and other sites during interrogations,said Alexander Lukashuk,director of the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Last month,he said,investigators appearing at the apartment of a Belarusian photojournalist mocked her by declaring that since she had written online that they usually conducted their searches at night,they had decided to come in the morning.
In Syria,Facebook is a great database for the government now, said Ahed al-Hindi,a Syrian activist who was arrested at an Internet cafe in Damascus in 2006.
Hindi,now with the US-based group CyberDissidents.org,said he believes that Facebook is doing more good than harm,helping activists form virtual organisations that could never survive if they met face to face. But users must be aware that they are speaking to their oppressors as well as their friends,he said.
Widney Brown,senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International,said the popular networking services,like most technologies,are politically neutral.
Theres nothing deterministic about these toolsGutenbergs press,or fax machines or Facebook, Brown said. They can be used to promote human rights or to undermine human rights.
This is the point of Morozov,26,a visiting scholar at Stanford. In The Net Delusion,he presents an answer to the cyberutopians who assume that the Internet inevitably fuels democracy. He coined the term spinternet to capture the spin applied to the Web by governments.
In China,Morozov said,thousands of commentators are trained and paidhence their nickname,the 50-Cent Partyto post pro-government comments on the Web and steer online opinion away from criticism of the Communist Party. In Venezuela,President Hugo Chávez,created his own Twitter feedan entertaining mix of politics and self-promotion that now has 1.2 million followers.
In Egypt,some activists share Morozovs wariness about the double-edged nature of new media. An anonymous 26-page leaflet that appeared in Cairo with practical advice for demonstrators last week,The Guardian reported,instructed activists to pass it on by e-mail and photocopy,but not by Facebook and Twitter,because they were being monitored by the government.
Then Mubaraks government,evidently concluding that it was too late for mere monitoring,unplugged his country from the Internet altogether.
