Before I take on the task of rebutting some of the arguments in Mueller’s posts–which, by the way, I agree with in large part–I should note my own biases, for the sake of discussion. First, I have been amongst the throngs shouting opposition to the surveillance-industrial-complex. I have been doing it for about three years, while all the while not taking a particularly strong position toward any of the proposed solutions. Second, I largely oppose regulation of this industry by the United States government. This is for several reasons, but in a nutshell: I don’t trust them. If you require more detail, read this piece I wrote about it. Third, I think a lot of the current discussion/advocacy about this topic is unfocused and chaotic, which is a failure on our part. Though I have–along with other folks at some of the top human and digital rights organizations–coordinated a series of calls on the matter, it is admittedly a messy and complicated subject, and we don’t all agree on the solutions, which lends chaos to an already-chaotic situation.

Now, Mueller’s posts. The first, published on December 20 and entitled “Technology as symbol: Is resistance to surveillance technology being misdirected?“, starts strong with the premise that the movement against the sale of surveillance tech to repressive regimes–which Mueller applauds for both its publicizing of the issue and its awareness-raising of similar issues in democratic countries–has oversimplified the fight against the regimes using such technology, replacing the target (authoritarian regimes) with another, easier target (makers of the aforementioned technology).

As Mueller rightly points out, “It seems obvious, but gets lost in the shuffle: the problem lies in the users and uses of the technology, not in the equipment or software itself.” He continues, remarking that “this is not, at root, a problem of governments having or not having a specific device or piece of software. It is an institutional problem – one of balancing and routinizing social processes in ways that effectively limit, regulate and distribute political power and hold those who exercise it accountable.”

There is nothing disagreeable in either point, and it can certainly be said that some of the actors advocating for regulation in this space have focused heavily on certain regimes (Syria, Egypt, Libya) whilst turning a half-blind eye to the uses of surveillance technology in the United States, the UK, and other nations with the rule of law. Nonetheless, I would argue that the organizations leading the charge on this issue have been fairly even-handed, attacking restrictions on free expression in democratic and authoritarian countries alike.

Mueller then derides the call for regulation of surveillance technology, stating: “The problem with this approach is that information technology, unlike bombs or tanks, is fundamentally multi-purpose in nature.” On this point, I once again must agree. EFF has consistently chosen not to advocate for regulation of sales (by governments) for the same reason, opting instead to push for regulation at the corporate level and issuing a set of recommendations for companies wishing to do so.

Mueller also points out, as I have before:

Thus, there is little appreciation of the extent to which export controls and other restrictions might retard the overall diffusion and development of information and communication technology, cut off access to good people and good uses as well as bad ones, or restrict our own freedom to use the technology as and how we see fit.

Since I agree with Mueller on this, it’s worthwhile to put forth some of the counter-arguments. Essentially, those who argue for regulations tend to favor a licensing-style of such, in which companies must apply for licenses before being allowed to export their wares to a foreign government (or, in some variations, a foreign government on a particular list of “Internet-restricting countries”). This echoes the current sanctions placed on Cuba, Syria, Sudan, North Korea, and Iran to various degrees. Being well-versed in the regulations on Syria, what this means is that a company–such as Google–must apply for a license before it can release a product (either for sale or for download) in the country. Companies that fail to apply for a license but still make their product available can face severe penalties; violating the Commerce Department’s export controls on Syria, for example, can result in 20 years imprisonment and/or a $1 million fine. This, of course, has a chilling effect for Syrians, as many companies with limited resources find it not worthwhile to apply for the license and restrict their products from the country. Incidentally, EFF has also called for revision of export controls.

In the latter variation, as I mentioned, regulation would be restricted to “Internet-restricting countries,” a punishment for countries that block websites from their citizens’ view. This type of regulation has been presented before, multiple times, as the Global Online Freedom Act (for a timeless criticism of an earlier version of the bill, see Rebecca MacKinnon). The problems with such an approach should be, but somehow aren’t, obvious. First, a question: who creates the list of “good” and “bad” countries? Bahrain, a close ally of the United States, pervasively censors the Internet…would it make it on the “bad” list and would sanctions be levied thus? And even if the list were fair and just, what happens when such technology gets regulated? Do citizens of the “bad” countries suffer like Syrians have for years due to labyrinthine bureaucracy and poorly-worded export regs?

The primary concern about regulations should be, however, that they will do extremely little to curb the sale of surveillance tech. What happens when Cisco refuses to sell to Iran? Huawei steps in. And don’t forget all of those companies that have surreptitiously been selling to embargoed countries all along, such as American company BlueCoat to Syria and Israeli company Allot to Iran.

This is the point at which Mueller’s first post starts to annoy me. After his righteous concerns about export regulation are expressed, he goes on to throw up a giant straw man, advising advocates to “Stop focusing narrowly on information technology, and examine the tools of repression and aggression more generically,” and raising examples such as US arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Okay, so perhaps this is not exactly a straw man, but if–as Mueller seems to imply in his second post–his arguments are directed at activists and human rights organizations, rather than say, politicians and journalists, then this is simply unfair. The individual activists taking on this issue–many of whom, I’ve observed, live in the countries where such spyware is being sold–are surely not putting the technology before the arms. And as for the organizations, they’re either semi-single-issue (why would EFF talk about gun sales?) or have been holistically focused, tackling the gamut of human rights abuses, from surveillance to military repression. (I would also add here that current export restrictions on the aforementioned five countries include arms and airplane parts).

The second major argument in the first post is presented next. Mueller criticizes some of the advocacy around the sale of certain products, asking: “If you can blame a video surveillance camera for its misuse by repugnant governments, and argue for blocking the movement of those goods, what about integrated circuits, copper wires and lenses that go into them? What about the plastic housings? What about the shipping services that transported the material there?”

Now, if Mueller’s target here is those calling for regulation, I’m with him all the way. But if we’re talking about targeting companies, if we’re working on naming-and-shaming, then I do believe in a strategy of going after companies for their sale of complete products to governments, when the company has credible concern that the product will be used to commit human rights abuses. The vast majority of highly-publicized cases this year have involved the sale of complete systems to decidedly human-rights-abusing regimes like Libya, China, and Syria. I do see a moral obligation in calling out Cisco for its complicity in the Communist Party’s harassment of bloggers. I do see a moral obligation in calling out BlueCoat for its “oh noes, the embargoes!” response to the news that its products were sold to the Syrian regime (in the end, it turned out that BlueCoat was tracking the devices and was aware of their location, even if the sale was not intentional).

But alas, Mueller was talking about the would-be regulators, and therefore I agree:

If you really want to punish, isolate and sanitize your relationship to a repressive government, you cannot limit the sanctions to specific forms of ICT. There must be a comprehensive system of sanctions that prevents anyone in that country from doing any kind of business with the country involved. Even then, the regime may not change; think of North Korea. Even then, there will be leaks or route-arounds.

But then he concludes:

But activists concerned with real social change must think through this problem more deeply, and come up with strategies that strike more directly at the pillars of authoritarianism, censorship and arbitrary power, rather than lashing out at easy domestic targets.

This is why I accused him (a point he’ll refute in post 2) of taking cheap shots at activists. The assumption here is that those involved aren’t thinking about this problem more deeply, aren’t fighting these regimes from multiple angles. And as I wrote in my accusation, if Mueller’s target here is the journalists and the politicians whose shallow thinking culminates in the conclusion that Cisco is the the real enemy, then I digress. But if it’s the activists (again, many of whom are Egyptian, and Syrian, and Chinese), then I say “meh.”

Since Mueller’s second post starts with a refutation of something I said, I feel obliged to point something out. When Evgeny Morozov’s excellent Net Delusion was released this year, it was dismissed by some who felt that the use of the term “delusion” didn’t apply: after all, hadn’t Egyptians just toppled a dictator with the help of social media? I loved Morozov’s book, and so a point that irritated me throughout readings of both critiques of the book and reads through the man’s own columns was the idea that the main target of his arguments against “cyberutopians” were a very narrow subset of the population: namely, those working in the State Department, or even more specifically, Jared Cohen sycophants.

Mueller’s posts thus strike me the same way: Just as he claims his first post “hit a nerve” with advocates (presumably meaning me, since my comment is in the next line), he then goes on once again to target not the advocates but the journalists. And that’s the thing: Mueller’s arguments are largely ones that I agree with (read: no nerves were hit), but the presumed target is off: his real beef seems to be with the journalists who have kept this story going all year. And in a sense, I get it: after all, we digital rights advocates feed off the news reports, and no doubt we wouldn’t have been so loud on the topic were it not for their reporting. If anything, that’s a call for a more tempered approach (which is part of, I assume, Mueller’s point).

In any case, I have no real problems with the second post. Like Mueller, EFF recognized that the reporting on Israeli company Allot’s sale of their NetEnforcer product to an Iranian ISP was a bit overblown. In fact, the story should have served an even better lesson: Sanctions don’t work. But alas, it did not, for most.

Ultimately, as Mueller reiterates near the end of post #2, the problem with the movement (again, lead in large part by journalists, not advocates), is the transfer of target from regime to corporation:

Western corporations and their shareholders do have a moral obligation to refrain from actively pursuing business opportunities with dictatorships when those opportunities involve supplying products and services specifically designed to aid their crimes and repression. But very few technologies are constructed so as to be only usable for crime and repression.

Post-Script: I wrote this a bit stream-of-consciousness, so if in any way I appear to contradict myself, feel free to point out in the comments. Second, I would note that while I see very different targets in journalists vs. advocates, Mueller does not appear to at numerous points, including journalists in “the movement.” In a sense (as I hinted at above), this is fair, for journalists inform advocates on these topics. In another sense, it feels odd to include the supposedly neutral (though I obviously don’t believe that rubbish) journalist in the makeup of a movement such as this one. But again, therein lies the problem, Mueller might posit: the journalists are establishing a certain policy narrative.

I welcome your comments, discussion, debate, etc, below. Just don’t be an asshole and subtweet me. You know who you are.

I’ve written extensively on the Haystack story, but to quickly re-cap: Circumvention tool comes out of nowhere, built by young, outspoken engineer. Wild claims about efficacy. Media picks up on the hype, young engineer wins awards, media builds the hype even further. Circumvention and censorship experts begin to raise doubts about the tool itself, eventually get ahold of it, tear it apart. Turns out it’s not as secure as the engineer–and by extension, the media–had hyped it to be.

In the case of Amina Arraf, her blog–Gay Girl in Damascus–gained a following amongst bloggers and Middle East enthusiasts, then was quickly catapulted into relative blogger stardom after a series of articles in prominent publications profiled her. Therefore, when on June 6, her “cousin Rania” posted to her blog that she had been kidnapped, the public was quick to believe it. It wasn’t until the next day, when Andy Carvin and others began to question the story, that the details started unraveling as the public quickly jumped in to sleuth the story.

So what made journalists cast aside their usual levels of scrutiny? Or, is it perhaps that journalists are not as careful as we trust them to be?

I would argue that the journalistic treatment of the Haystack story was far more problematic, not least because it was easier to verify: After all, the product’s engineer was based in the US. He was reachable by phone and traveled for several interviews and awards. Numerous journalists met him, and yet not one after questioned the security of the tool. In the case of Amina, the journalists (the pseudonymous “Kathryn Marsh” and Shira Lazar) who first profiled her should have seen red flags when they couldn’t get her on the phone, but they were also dealing with a situation in which digging too much could’ve put an already endangered woman in far more danger.

The Facebook page of "Amina Arraf", before it was removed

Nevertheless, the details laid out on Amina’s blog (parents’ and siblings’ names, place of birth) and her now-defunct Facebook account (over 100 photographs, numerous comments about her life) could have been checked up on. And the details in her blog that numerous Syrians have now picked apart (her father standing up to the mokhabarat, her spotting a Syrian woman in the Umayyad mosque wearing a Star of David) could have been scrutinized early on.

I asked Zeynep Tufekci, a colleague and friend who has written about both cases, for her take: “Arguably, Haystack was verifiable whereas it is never possible to completely verify Amina’s identity without somewhat endangering her. Haystack can and should be avoided and journalists should have done much better job re: Amina. But I’m not sure they can completely avoid a future Amina.”

Now, this is where I need to insert my own role in all of this: While I did not fall for the Haystack story (and was one of the earliest to question its veracity), I very much fell for Amina Arraf. Why? Well, first of all, I had spoken with her numerous times. Her knowledge of Syria stood up to my tests. Her personality in private conversation was consistent with her personality on the public blog. Friends claimed to know her (one even suggested she knew her “in real life” – looking back, the suggestion was rather vague, the boastfulness of someone who wants to get close to a story).

I was also late to believe she wasn’t real, and that, for me, is both easier and more painful to explain. It is also a story I hesitate to share, but one which continues to haunt me, as well as remind me every single day why I do what I do.

In 2009, I wrote a piece for the HuffPost entitled “Blogging in Iran: A Dangerous Prospect.” After writing the story, a young Iranian blogger named Omidreza Mirsayafi emailed me to tell me his story. He wrote:

When I see your post on the mentioned website, I became so happy that a journalist in other corner of world writes about the situations of Iranians journalist & bloggers and is concerned about us.

I don’t want talk about my past experiences because it saddens me. these days I’m so sad and I don’t know what to do. I was sentenced two years and six months in prison just for the contents of my blog. just for explain my ideas. many of journalist and bloggers and human rights activists got into trouble specially in last 4 years.Iran GOV heap scorn on the people of Iran specially the journalists, students, human rights & woman activists. We wish one day write in our blogs & papers trouble-free.

After this initial email, Omidreza and I exchanged a few more emails, and had a few chats. He even called me once. But new as I was to this scene, and owing to my own personal circumstances at the time, I didn’t do as much as I should, as much as he asked. On March 18, 2009, he died in Tehran’s Evin Prison. I wrote about it three days later, confessing my own guilt over having not said enough.

It is very much because of this story that I had–no, have–difficulty letting Amina’s story go. While her story has unraveled almost completely at this point, there’s still a small chance that the girl behind the blog was kidnapped. And even if she wasn’t, there is no doubt that thousands of Syrians have been imprisoned these past few months, hundreds killed. While Amina, if entirely fake, should not be the face of those Syrians, it’s so easy to ascribe her that role. We wanted to believe in her. We saw the beauty and tragedy in her stories and put her on a pedestal. Some have suggested it was because she was a lesbian, others have suggested it was her purported dual American citizenship. I don’t really believe it was either. Rather, it was the sense of courage we saw in her, to tell her story so loudly, that made us believe.

While I suggest you read the paper (or this excellent Wall Street Journal article reporting on it), I’d like to discuss briefly why my blog was categorized as pornography by Websense.  Frankly, I find it utterly fascinating: About a year ago, Helmi Noman–my co-author–discovered that this very blog was blocked in Yemen.  Upon further investigation, Helmi realized that the reason for the blockage was not political content or anything of the sort, but that my blog had been categorized–by Websense–as pornography.

After Websense barred Yemen from future software updates, I thought the problem had been solved until Luke Allnutt–who works at RFE/RL, which uses Websense in its offices–tweeted that he couldn’t get to my blog.

I quickly wrote to Websense, and received a fairly rapid reply, telling me that my blog had been reclassified as a personal site.  Great–I then pushed back a bit, asking how my blog had been categorized as a pornographic site in the first place.  My assumption was that their automated system was based on keywords, and that my blogging about Helmi Noman’s paper (“Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the ‘Arabian Countries‘”) had caused it; after all, it caused “Arab sex” to be the #1 search term for my blog.

Turns out, that wasn’t the case at all.  In fact, what happened was significantly more chilling.  Here’s the text of an email sent to me by Patricia Hogan, Senior Public Relations Specialist for Websense:

Hi Jillian,

Regarding your questions about blog classification, the problem seems to come from the comments, not the posts. Indeed, you appear to be the victim of comment spam (which often contains pornographic links or links to malware).

Look at the comments after this post: http://jilliancyork.com/2008/09/11/blog-strike-for-mohammed-erraji/. The last comment has pornographic links and the one preceding it has links to pharmacy spam, which often leads to malware. This is just one post that we looked at. You may have more.

Comment spam has been hounding bloggers (and more recently Facebook users), so Websense developed tools to help keep blogs and readers safe from spam like this. We offer free plug-ins for many blog platforms to help prevent this type of comment abuse (go to http://defensio.com/downloads for more information). We don’t want you to be victimized again from unscrupulous posts, and our plug-in allows you to control what content you wish to appear on your site.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any more questions.

Sincerely,

PATRICIA HOGAN
Sr. Public Relations Specialist

WEBSENSE, INC.
ph: +1.858.320.9393
fax: +1.858.784.4393
www.websense.com

What Hogan is saying is that anyone can manipulate Websense software by spamming a blog’s comments section with porn outlinks. Let me say that again: Websense can be manipulated by anyone wishing to censor anyone else, just by adding a few links to porn in the comments section.

SmartFilter appears to have similar problems. A few months ago, blogger Sabina England reported that her blog was blocked in the UAE, which uses the software. While she may have a similar issue with “porn spam,” our suspicion at the time was that SmartFilter was detecting keywords, and had blocked England’s blog based on the use of the words “cunt,” “sexy,” and “whores” in a poem she had written.

I find this utterly chilling; now, I will say that Yemen has stopped using Websense and we’re not aware of any other countries–at least in the Middle East and North Africa–that use the software. Nevertheless, plenty of schools, libraries, and workplaces use Websense and other tools, and while their blocking of pornography may be justified, the mis-categorization of URLs by these technologies means that there are chilling effects, even to blocking porn.

I’ve been away from home for over two weeks now with far less Internet and television access than usual, so it’s difficult for me to gauge what the American reaction has been to the strife in Tunisia thus far.  A quick Google search shows me a decent amount of US media coverage of the situation–both online and offline–though considerably less attention than was paid to the Iranian elections of 2009, which were undeniably ubiquitous in all forms of media, garnering widespread awareness of the situation.

Though I don’t like or agree with it one bit, I understand why the US government focuses disproportionately on Iran: fear of nuclear weapons, fear of attacks on Israel, fear of Islam.  I don’t understand, however, why public and media attention is equally disproportionate.  If media is not a mouthpiece of the government, then shouldn’t our outrage be equal?

The online media coverage of the Tunisian events may well be adequate (though is likely not), but where it the outrage we saw in 2009 vis-à-vis Iran?  Where are the ubiquitous hashtags?  Both the Iranian Green movement and the current outrage emanating from Tunisia are homegrown, native, huge, and yet, one garnered widespread international support while attention to the other is limited to a small transnational network, as far as I can see.

I very much understand the current outrage from my Tunisian friends, particularly as it is leveled at the US government in respect to Internet freedom.  While the US stepped forward to help Iranians (whether by fast-tracking circumvention tools for export or asking Twitter to halt its updates), little had been said publicly over the years regarding Tunisian censorship, nor the American companies that make it possible (Tunisia, like several other countries in the region, uses McAfee’s SmartFilter software to block a vast swath of websites, and does so with impunity).  Europe, on the other hand, has spoken up this time around.

Forget the government – where is the media outrage?  Sometimes I think the media has forgotten who it works for.  This isn’t Tunisia, we have a free press.  What’s their excuse?

Now, with the arrest of Slim Amamou, I call on my friends once again to speak out, loudly.  If you have connections to the media, use them.  If you have questions, I can put you in touch with people on the ground in Tunisia.  Don’t let this go ignored.

In the past year since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought Internet freedom to pertinence in her much-lauded speech at the Newseum, the rhetoric surrounding net freedom has continued to focus mainly on Iran and China.

Though Tunisia has always been part of the rhetoric–Clinton mentioned it twice, in reference both to increased filtering and to the effects of censorship on business–it has never been at the forefront of the net freedom discussion, despite evidence that its censors are among the most sophisticated and the most pervasive in the world.  Despite being under the guise of democracy (not unlike Iran) and secularism (not unlike Syria), Tunisia censors media and Internet at the surface level, and also regularly imprisons those who speak out or protest against the regime, including bloggers (in 2009, Tunisia was ranked by CPJ as one of the ten worst places to be a blogger).

The State Department’s Internet freedom policy, to many, appears generally to reflect broader U.S. policy.  We want to overturn Iran’s regime, so we make special requests to Twitter to ensure it’s not shut down during crucial periods, but we ignore the interrogation and arrests of bloggers in our ally, Egypt.  We want to save the Iranians, so we loosen up export controls to allow junk products like Haystack to reach them, while doing nothing about the similar restrictions placed upon Syrians.  When we look to China, we see business opportunities, and so we focus on strengthening those through freeing up the Internet, while secular allies like Tunisia–which do a great job of faking progress to the world–go largely ignored.

And it’s not as if we can pretend we had no idea: In a recently-released WikiLeaks cable, our own diplomats can be seen referring to Tunisia as a “police state,” with “little freedom of expression.”  We’ve known that, and we’ve said nothing.

The State Department is not the media, but when Hillary Clinton calls out a country (as she has done with both China and Iran), the media listens.  And as of yet, the media has barely touched on either the protests or the pervasive censorship happening in Tunisia.  The Guardian‘s Brian Whitaker (who, to his credit, recognizes what a big deal this is) asks whether media coverage really matters (after all, the media coverage given to Iran did nothing to overturn the regime).  Though I think Whitaker certainly has a point, I think what matters more is the awareness that such media coverage creates.  Two years ago, most Americans knew little about Iran: now they know that a large swath of the populace is fighting against their regime.  Most Americans know very little about Tunisia, but the awareness that media coverage would create would teach them.  And perhaps that awareness would then push people to fight harder for an egalitarian Internet freedom initiative from their own government.

And this is why I don’t believe in the Net Freedom agenda anymore.  If we as a nation truly believed in Internet freedom, then we would focus not only on those countries that might benefit us (a free Iran, a capitalist China) but on all of those nations where citizens are restricted from speaking out.  We would loosen the export controls on Syria–not just Iran–to allow Syrian citizens access to communications and circumvention tools, and we would give our ally Tunisia–secular, egalitarian Tunisia–incentive to stop oppressing its citizens.  If the United States of America were still truly about freedom, we would do these things, because an ally that oppresses its citizens is no ally at all.

Nearly four years ago, while living in Morocco, I would receive Embassy announcements every so often detailing this or that protest to avoid, or a crime committed against an American citizen. Mostly, I was appreciative; it’s good to know when a transportation strike is planned, even if it’s not exactly what I would consider a danger.

Around the time of the Mohammed cartoon debacle of 2006, however, I started to grow a bit weary of such warnings. “Demonstrations planned!” shouted the warnings from my inbox, with “anti-American in nature” and other generalizations sprinkled throughout the emails.

I never really checked the State Department’s warnings until last year, while I was planning a trip to Syria. The point of checking, really, was to prove to my naysayers that Syria was perfectly safe. Not so, warned the State Department – “anti-American” rhetoric apparently prevailed in this “axis of evil” country (no, the warning didn’t really use the latter term). I obviously went anyway.

Later that year, a trip to Beirut presented itself. I checked the warnings once again: “The Department of State continues to urge U.S. citizens to avoid all travel to Lebanon due to current safety and security concerns.” Strong language for a country that actually has a U.S. ambassador (Damascus does not). I compared the warning to Syria, a country whose ties with the US have been incredibly weak since the Hariri assassination (the ambassador was pulled shortly after); U.S. citizens are warned about Syria, told to take caution, whereas they’re urged not to visit Lebanon. Interesting.

Downtown Beirut; photo by Luciana.Luciana

In fact, the warning for Lebanon remains the harshest, despite concurrent warnings for Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Iran, the DRC, and Yemen. Here’s a sample of the language used in the first paragraph of each:

• Afghanistan: The Department of State warns U.S. citizens against travel to Afghanistan. The security threat to all U.S. citizens in Afghanistan remains critical.
• Iran: The Department of State warns U.S. citizens to carefully consider the risks of travel to Iran.
• Iraq: The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens of the risks inherent in travel to Iraq and recommends against all but essential travel within the country given the dangerous security situation.
• DRC: The Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the risks of traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) (DRC), and recommends against non-essential travel to eastern and northeastern Congo.
• Yemen: The Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the high security threat level in Yemen due to terrorist activities.  The Department strongly recommends that U.S. citizens defer non-essential travel to Yemen.
• Somalia: The State Department warns U.S. citizens of the risks of travel to Somalia and recommends that U.S. citizens avoid all travel to Somalia.

Now, compare those to Lebanon: The Department of State continues to urge U.S. citizens to avoid all travel to Lebanon due to current safety and security concerns. U.S. citizens living and working in Lebanon should understand that they accept risks in remaining and should carefully consider those risks.

Is this a case of editorial error, foreknowledge of an Israeli (or other) attack, or is Lebanon–modern, developed Lebanon–truly a more dangerous place than lawless Somalia?  The government warns against travel to Somalia, but urges against travel to Lebanon.  All but essential travel to Yemen is recommended against, while we’re not to go to Lebanon under any circumstances.

I’m genuinely curious – what gives?  Maybe there’s a leak out there to explain it…

Photo by Luciana.Luciana made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Blocking Facebook would put Saudi Arabia in a class with Syria, Iran, and China.  Unblocking it puts it on par with Pakistan and Bangladesh, two countries which have pulled the same shenanigans.

It’s not surprising that Saudi would block Facebook; the country’s filtering is already pervasive.  It’s somewhat more interesting that the ban didn’t last–what incentive do authorities possibly have to keep the site online?  One guess is that keeping Facebook online better allows the state to monitor its citizens.

In any case, blocking Facebook would likely have few implications in Saudi, where VPNs seem to reign supreme, whereas keeping it available might just pacify young citizens enough to keep them quiet.

In the piece, Khoury questioned the State Department’s role in promoting digital technologies in the region. Anyone who has ever spoken with me at length about this topic knows how I feel: that the U.S. government cannot be taken seriously in promoting digital tools for democracy until it stops supporting dictatorships and policies that undermine their work, such as export controls.

Khoury, in the following statement, echoes my feelings on the matter:

One cannot take seriously the United States or any other Western government that funds political activism by young Arabs while it simultaneously provides funds and guns that help cement the power of the very same Arab governments the young social and political activists target for change.

When the United States government upholds the tyrannical rule of the likes of Moubarak while simultaneously implementing programs in Cairo to help young activists on the ground, that, my friends, is what we call hypocrisy. When the government implements export controls on Syrians and Iranians that prevent their ability to tap into important communications tools whilst simultaneously sending young State Department employees to Damascus to promote the influx of American business, we know we should be questioning their motives. And when the United States government helps young Iranians undermine their government by urging Twitter to stay open at crucial moments but ignores the pervasive online censorship and myriad protests against it in secular ally Tunisia, you know we have a problem.

At the same time, Khoury’s statement that “all the new media and hundreds of thousands of young bloggers from Morocco to Iran have not triggered a single significant or lasting change in Arab or Iranian political culture” is patently false.

There are various examples to choose from: Iran’s Green Movement might not have sparked a Twitter revolution, but it’s an undeniable fact that Twitter, and the media that covered it, helped create awareness of the nascent movement amongst Americans. In Tunisia, offline protests against online censorship rely on the networks available because of social media. In Morocco, each blogger arrested has been released soon after, undoubtedly with the help of online activists, whose loud online protest most certainly sped up their release. Even the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement could not possibly have gained the ground it has globally without the power of new media.

In Egypt, where bloggers and activists can easily be arrested under emergency law, the beating of young businessman Khaled Said by police sparked an online protest that garnered support from around the Arab world and beyond, resulting in real change. As Egyptian columnist Mona Eltahawy stated in a recent Washington Post piece:

Thanks to social media’s increasing popularity and ability to connect activists with ordinary people, Egyptians are protesting police brutality in unprecedented numbers. On July 27, the two police officers connected to his death stood trial on charges of illegal arrest and excessive use of force. If convicted, they face three to 15 years’ imprisonment.

Of course, protest and civil disobedience were around long before the onset of ubiquitous social media. But what social media offers is the ability to more easily connect–not just with people in one’s own community, but with people outside of it as well. Though Egyptians deserve the credit for the tangible results that came from protesting Khaled Said’s death, the mobilization of fellow Arabs–and others–on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs spurred the media into reporting on it.

Another question remains: Do these activists truly benefit from U.S. government support? Again, the pundits are torn. Fellow blogger and activist Nasser Weddady believes that Arab activists are just fine without it:

My answer is very simple, these activists might actually NOT, I repeat, NOT NEED US government’s funds or support. They have done fine for themselves so far and grew their skills tremendously. most of them factor already in their game plans that there is no cavalry that will be forthcoming from DC to do a job they already figured how to do for themselves, thank you very much…

…As of now, it looks to me like Washington DC politicians need Middle East activists a heck lot more than Middle Eastern activists need them…

Sami Ben Gharbia, Global Voices Advocacy Director, echoed Weddady’s sentiments at the Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this year, stating that some U.S.-backed initiatives, such as those by Freedom House, actually do more to endanger the lives of local activists than they do to help. I’m inclined to agree; in some places, collaborating with the U.S. government, even on an initiative you believe in, is to wear a scarlet letter, often T for traitor.

I’m also inclined to agree with Weddady, at least in part. I attended the the session on funding in Beirut that he ran, and heard the same sentiment: “We’re doing our own thing, leave us alone.”

Native initiatives, meaning those launched by local activists or NGOs, are in most cases the ones most likely to gain local support and succeed, certainly. But, in many cases, such initiatives lack funding. So is there room for funding from foreign governments, particularly the U.S.?

For me, it all goes back to my first point; there is perhaps a place for U.S. funding to back democracy-related initiatives, but first the contradictions in policy must be lowered or eliminated. More efforts must be made to protect the safety of those who take part in U.S.-backed initiatives. And funding must be prioritized for native (or native-partnered) initiatives, rather than those implemented by outsiders.

But in the end, we need to accept that digital activism is real. It may not have effected long-term change just yet, but it has made short-term strides, and in any case, with Facebook celebrating its sixth birthday and Twitter barely a toddler, it’s all too soon to tell.

Yesterday, in a Washington Post op-ed entitled, “The case for spreading press freedom around the world,” he made the case for spreading press (and Internet) freedom globally, a sentiment I typically agree with, assuming it’s done right.

Utilizing a forthcoming “press-freedom manifesto” by Lee Bollinger, Ignatius argues that “‘America’s “Manifest Destiny’ in the 21st century is to extend to the world the standards of our own First Amendment.” Though there are subtleties to that argument that I might disagree with, generally speaking, I agree with Ignatius (and by extension, Bollinger), that it’s in the best interest of the United States to support press and Internet freedom globally.

But as the old adage goes, such sentiments must start at home.

As I’ve written before, the U.S. often acts as a de facto
censor toward other countries when it comes to certain technologies. Recently proposed HR 2278, for example, would block certain satellite TV stations not only from US consumption, but (were the satellite providers to follow U.S. diktats) from their intended audiences as well. And while the Department of Treasury recently loosened restrictions barring certain downloads from netizens in Cuba, Iran, and Sudan, Department of Commerce restrictions still make basic use of certain Internet sites and tools nearly impossible for citizens in Syria.

Ignatius notes that private companies are often affected by other countries’ censorship, but fails to mention how his own government affects private companies’ ability to remain open in other countries.

If you ask me, the U.S. needs to walk the walk before it starts talking the talk.

On December 8, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 395 to 3, a resolution specifically naming three Arab TV stations — Al Manar, Al Aqsa, and Al Rifadayn — as “terrorist owned and operated” channels that broadcast “incitement to violence against the United States.” The resolution stated that any satellite provider that broadcasts these stations, or others to be named later, would be considered a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” under the law. The president would be required to report to Congress each year concerning “anti-American incitement to violence” on TV stations across the Middle East, covering 19 nations from Morocco to Iran.

I’m extremely concerned with the greater implications of this bill. Those channels are carried by NileSat of Egypt and ArabSat of Saudi Arabia, two satellite providers widely available across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. I lived with NileSat for more than two years: it was my entertainment, my news. Beyond those channels, I had access to the MBC and Rotana suites of stations, which encompassed American programming and news, as well as Arab programs and films, often dubbed or subtitled in English. I had access to BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, and France 24, all in English, which is more than I can say for my cable provider here in Boston (I’ve written about the issues surrounding Al Jazeera in the US).

So, the implication of this bill is that, in order for NileSat and ArabSat to avoid being listed as terrorist carriers, they have to stop carrying Al Manar, Al Aqsa, and Al Rifadayn. I’m not going to make this post about defending those channels, which I’ve only briefly flipped past. But regardless of their content, what the House is doing, essentially, is attempting to influence what people watch globally by threatening satellite providers. If those satellite providers decide to comply and rid themselves of those three channels, the United States government will have effectively silenced those voices not just in the United States but in their countries of origin as well. I highly recommend reading eatbees‘ post if you have any interest in going beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the word “terrorism” and learning what the channels actually broadcast.

The second issue is State Department hypocrisy, namely when it comes to sanctions. I’ve written about the sanctions on Syria here, here, and here, and recently gave a quote to the UK’s Times.

My stance is this: The U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions on Syria, Iran, and Sudan, Cuba and North Korea, in terms of the way they affect software exports and downloads, do little to effect change in those countries’ regimes, harm ordinary netizens, and promote piracy.

I’ve done a lot more reading on the Syrian sanctions than on the other countries, admittedly, so I’ll use that as a test case to explain my point. Last year LinkedIn, for whatever reason (my suspicion is a State Department memo) realized they were in violation of the sanctions and that they needed to block Syrian users, by IP address, from accessing their software downloads (software that is designed for networking, job-searching, and resume-building). They errantly overblocked, cutting off all access to their site (read: software is prohibited, but site use is fine, by law). We complained, they restored access (though apparently not to Sudanese users). They still block the software, of course. If they chose not to, they would likely be saddled with a $500,000 fine. The penalty could be worse.

Can someone please tell me how prohibiting average Syrians from accessing networking software will help topple an authoritarian regime, or stop Syria from funding terrorism? No, you can’t. Because it won’t. Instead, it will prevent some average guy from doing something useful. It will make him angry toward the U.S. or its policy (as well he ought to be!). It will alienate him. It will likely lead him to find another way of getting the software, through a mirror site or a friend’s USB key. He’ll get the software anyway, but he won’t pay for it.

If the hypocrisy isn’t apparent yet, how’s this? Last summer, during the alleged “Twitter revolution” in Iran, the State Department sent Twitter a memo asking them to change their hours of maintenance for the sake of the Iranians. Twitter complied. On the surface, it was a very cool example of technology aiding dissidents, and a “free” government stepping in to help. But let’s remember, Iran is also under sanctions, which means ordinary Iranians cannot download software from U.S. hosts and servers. Which theoretically includes anonymity and circumvention tools. Which are exactly what Hillary Clinton promoted in her speech last week.

My guess is, nobody’s cracking down on those tools. And there are legal exemptions to the sanctions. But how is it just to pick and choose what Iranian or Syrian, or Sudanese citizens have access to? How is it okay to hand them “democracy tools” but refuse them Adobe Photoshop?

My conclusion? It isn’t.

Stay tuned for the next edition of “how the U.S. censors Arabs” for an analysis of Bing‘s filtering of search results in what they call the “Arabian countries.”