Facilitating Change

Farhad Manjoo wrote an article in Slate: The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized: How the Internet helps Iran silence activists. Consider this:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has one of the world’s most advanced surveillance networks. Using a system installed last year (and built, in part, by Nokia and Siemens), the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point. Through “deep packet inspection,” the regime achieves omniscience — it has the technical capability to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls. The Stasi’s work force comprised 100,000 officers, and estimates put its network of citizen informants at half a million. In the digital age, Iran can monitor its citizens with a far smaller security apparatus. They can listen in on everything anyone says — and shut down anything inconvenient — with the flip of a switch.

…

Other than trying to shut down many parts of the Web, we don’t know what, precisely, Iranian security forces have done in response to the online protest movement. It’s unclear whether they’ve actually planted disinformation online or tried to trace images and videos back to their original posters. But the uncertainty itself breeds fear. Several times over the last couple weeks, rumors have flooded the Web that the government had already gotten wise to Twitter and was actively seeding the movement with fake news. It was a stark example of how the psychological repression characteristic of authoritarian regimes — the constant fear, the inability to trust anyone — finds particularly fertile ground online.

…

On Wednesday, a reader alerted the Lede to an Iranian government Web site called Gerdab.ir, where authorities had posted pictures of protesters and were asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. That’s right — the regime is now using crowd-sourcing, one of the most-hyped aspects of Web 2.0 organizing, against its opponents. If you think about it, that’s no surprise. Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?

Important stuff to think about. Read Darin Barney — this connects to what he writes about in The Network Society:

In the network society, power and powerlessness are a function of access to networks and control over flows. Access to significant networks is an important threshold of inclusion and exclusion, a condition of power and powerlessness…. Control over access to these networks becomes a crucial mechanism of power and domination.

Anonymous blogging is important. But we need more because it won’t help if the whole network is down. Which brings me to Foulab and other hardware hacker spaces, which I got interested in because of Beth’s involvement with a similar group in Seattle. Then I watched her talk at Berkman: User, Hacker, Builder, Thief: Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age. Beyond being fun to hang out at (Liam and I did a Pico Cricket workshop, and I did an intro to basic electronics and Arduino) I think they’re part of Plan B. Could you build an alternate network? Or do we go back to radio? Forgive my ignorance here — just trying to figure this stuff out.

And policy. And just a plain old basic understanding how things work. How do our networks operate? Who controls them? How? Knowing this is essential.