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FORD FOUNDATION PROGRAM OFFICER JENNY TOOMEY: We're really fortunate to have a group for
this next part that really literally represents the front lines in making the Internet access
and freedom a human rights issue. And it's my pleasure to introduce Ethan Zuckerman of
the Berkman Center to moderate the discussion, and he'll be joined by Brett, who you've already
met; Solana Larsen who is from Global Voices; Duy Hoang; and John Palfrey who you've also
met earlier today. So welcome to the stage. [APPLAUSE]
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Thanks everyone. I think one of the things we've learned today is that
Jenny has an amazing ability to bring unexpected and wonderful people into this room. One of
the things that I also didn't realize is that she has amazing control over world affairs.
Because if you think about the timing of this discussion, it's really hard to imagine a
moment in time where it's better to have a conversation about the importance of a free
and open Internet, not just in the United States, but all over the world.
We are quite literally at a pivotal moment. I was in between our wonderful lunch speakers
glancing at my iPhone and trying to keep track on not just the successful revolutions in
Egypt and Tunisia but nascent revolutions literally going on, not just through the entire
Arab world, but as far away as places like Gabon. And these are places where the Net
is deeply non-neutral, which is to say that the people who are trying to use the Internet
to do what people in Sidi Bouzid, a dusty town in Central Tunisia, of 40,000 people,
where people took to the streets, an incredibly-brave act, and then documented their actions - putting
it online on Facebook and other social networks - where Al-Jazeera, banned from reporting
in that country, picked up the story and started amplifying it back to the Tunisian people
allowing this protest movement to move from this small, small town across the whole country.
We're watching people take these incredible actions in parts of the world where it's frankly
incredibly difficult in many cases to get access to the Internet or to get access in
a way that is open, fast, or safe.
So we've got a remarkable group of people here who are going to help us sort through
these issues of what it means to use this Internet, which is far from as open as we
would like it to be in the places that we're talking about, to have access to democracy
and political change. And so I want to introduce these folks but actually Jenny has asked me
to make some slight changes in this, just in the spirit of the thing, so directly to
my left we have John Palfrey, my former boss, quite possibly the best one I've ever had,
at Harvard Law School, who is going to be talking a little bit about his work researching
on the free and open Internet, and as I understood it here he's also juggling, correct?
So we also have to his left, Duy Hoang, with Viet Tan, which is a political party and dissident
organization in Vietnam committed to peaceful democratic change. I understand you're also
playing the accordion. You've met Brett Solomon with Access, an organization that's working
incredibly hard to figure out how to get people access around the world to the free and open
Internet, and he's also going to be growing John Hodgman's mustache, and Solana Larsen
on the very end is the managing editor of "Global Voices," an international citizen
media organization that I'm proud to be the chairman of, and as I understand this, Jenny,
do you have this right? Solana is live on stage going to be selling "Global Voices"
to AOL for $350 million. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] So that's fantastic news and I'm thrilled
to hear that, and I'm sure everyone in this room who's generously supported us in the
past is happy to hear that, too, and don't worry you will get your share.
As we start this conversation, I want to turn first to John who's done some of the best
research in this field on the spread of Internet censorship around the world. So John, give
us a sense just how free and open the Net is in countries outside the U.S. and how that
trend is changing over time.
JOHN PALFREY: Thank you, Ethan. So when we started being involved in the Internet, I
don't know 15 years ago, the sort of broad public Internet discussion, I think the initial
conversation was the idea that the Internet itself was free and open. That it was in fact
the worldwide web, and the discussion was actually "was it possible to regulate the
net?"
There was actually this discussion "is it regulatable," this weird word. And I think
we've gotten to a point, fast-forwarding to today, that it's not "is it regulatable."
Is it more or less regulatable than real space?
So the story that I think is important to tell over the course of that period is we've
gone from a situation in which the Internet was this broad worldwide network to one that
actually is very different from place to place in terms of what you can access.
So starting about 10 years ago, a consortium of us in various universities, in particular,
the University of Toronto Citizen Lab and a group called Sectev(?)(CCTV?) in Canada
started to study what could you see on the Net if you were in other places.
And back in 2002, 2003, there really were about two places. There were a small handful
of places, China and Saudi Arabia, paradigmatically, where the state actually blocked access to
certain sites on the Internet.
What we've seen in the course of the last decade is a growth from those two states to
something more like 4 dozen states. So if you think about the places in which the state
actually chooses what you can and cannot see, ranging from a few sites to very many sites
that are being blocked, and most remarkably in the context of some instances like in Egypt,
we saw of course that a state that wasn't blocking all that much of the Internet in
the moment of crisis decided with six phone calls from the President to shut down the
entire network.
So if you think about it, we've gone from a situation in which the Internet itself was
thought to be a relatively free space to one where the restrictions have grown over time.
And if I might actually flip one more slide, just to give you a sense of where Internet
censorship looks more or less today, we can map Internet censorship around the world in
various ways.
This map shows from the Open Net Initiative Data recently where things that are socially-sensitive
are getting blocked around the world - and the darker the color, the greater the amount
of filtering. If you go to the Open Net Initiative site, you can also see political blocking
or different tools getting blocked and so forth.
I think one important thing to note about this is that while most of the filtering goes
on in the Middle East and North Africa - obviously we're talking about that - the East Asia region
where we'll hear more about Vietnam, but China has been the 800-pound gorilla, but also in
the former Soviet states, the filtering when you're talking about socially-sensitive things
actually happens in the West as well.
So I want to make the argument, too, that even though the state has come to be known
to be blocking things that are politically sensitive, we also do blocking. And you'll
note the United States is lit up here. So why is the United States lit up for technically
Internet filtering, sure enough, the ISPs, if you're at your home, Comcast isn't doing
much blocking of particular sites - although there's obviously the net neutrality discussion.
But what is happening is that in schools and libraries, and so forth, we plainly do filtering
for things we're worried kids seeing.
I would also put in that bucket all of the other kinds of filtering: corporate filtering
for instance that's happening in workplaces. If you expand to a conversation about distributed
denial of service attacks, the instances in which certain sites get brought down in order
to make people not see them at some sensitive moment, we usually have been talking about
the growth of that in other countries and moments leading up to elections. We now have
a conversation about whether or not that's happened in the Wikileaks context, and I think
there are real questions about the United States government and its role in this particular
context.
So I think the basic trajectory here is one where the censorship has gone from a few states,
and ones that one would have guessed don't have great human rights records and so forth,
to a very widespread practice that is happening, not just in scope and scale in that way but
in increased sophistication, and that it happens at many, many layers in the network, and you
get private actors into the mix as well.
ZUCKERMAN: So it's not just China, it's not just Saudi Arabia. It's not just happening
at a national level. It's sometimes happening at the level of a school or a university or
a corporation, and we often analyze this in terms of choke points - possible spots on
the network where traffic can be controlled or choked off in one fashion or another.
Brett, you were talking before this, in this demo, about some of the tools that we use
to try to get around state level filtering. But I know that at the moment you're also
very concerned about how U.S. corporations also can be involved with controlling access
to content in one fashion or another. And you're focusing your efforts with Access,
not just on helping people get around the firewall, but on insuring that they're actually
able to use these tools in a way that allows them to be a functioning digital public sphere.
BRETT SOLOMON: I mean it is about corporations and I think at Access we're really interested
in the engagement between private companies and the positive effect that they can have
on people's political participation and quest for social justice. I mean we just need to
look at Facebook, for instance, and see the seismic changes that have come about partly
- and there's a debate as to how much - but as a result of people's ability to be able
to mobilize on a private platform.
But I think there are kind of three levels. I was trying to think about this morning.
There are companies that are taking positive - deliberative positive actions, like for
instance Facebook. But I would also put them in the second category as well, which is kind
of the blind, turning a blind eye to the capacity and the role that they play.
I mean in a sense Facebook is really on the frontline of social change and human rights
defense. But is kind of reluctantly there. And there are a number of different things
that need to happen, and in fact we're just launching a campaign as we speak, which is
internally called "Facebook stop showing our private parts." [LAUGHTER] But essentially
there are a number of different things that they need to do. For instance, the question
of anonymity, of pseudonymity is absolutely vital for activists. A concierge service so
that activists don't go in the mix of 550 million people when their account gets disabled
because it breaches terms of service.
Converting to HTTPS for instance so that the platform is secure as opposed to HTTP. So
they're kind of the blind turning a blind eye in a sense.
And then there are the companies that are actively negative. And I mentioned them before.
I think Nokia's sale to Iran for instance and their ongoing relationship with trebacorp(?)
is a major issue, but it's being replicated with Vodaphone for instance who said, you
know, we're not really responsible - I mean we're responsible, we had no choice.
Well, I mean I would push back on that, and I think it's absolutely vital that corporations
understand human rights - tech companies understand the human rights implications of the work
that they're doing. And there needs to be new guidelines and principles and laws to
be able to govern them in the U.S. context as well. For example, the ... packing inspection
stuff where you're actually able to intersect data - the government is able to intersect
data - governments are - as a result of this technology.
ZUCKERMAN: So Brett if at this point we can point to someone like Nokia or point to Vodaphone
which was one of the organizations in Egypt that shut off the Internet - quite literally
- from January 20th to about six days later, and if we can look at an organization like
Facebook, which is doing some of the right things but seems to be doing it haltingly
or hesitantly, is there anyone who's sort of emerged as a model for how to do this right?
Is there anyone that we can sort of point and say "this is the direction we want more
people to move in?"
SOLOMON: I mean I think Google's step, very brave step, that came with the announcement
of the hacking of their accounts by the Chinese government or by ... e-hackers and their announcement
that they were no longer going to censor the searches, I mean I think that was a very,
very brave and pivotal moment.
My concern is that other corporations didn't come in behind them. Like for instance Yahoo
or Microsoft. I think that as users, and this is one of the things that we've been doing,
is trying to create a global movement for digital freedom, to influence corporations
so that everytime they're making decisions, they're not just thinking about the business
outcomes, but they're also thinking about the principles.
I think that Twitter's response to the Wikileaks stuff in terms of their not handing over of
data, with their subpoena policy, was really great, and I think it sent a very strong message
that corporations have got this treasure trove of information that we give them. We give
them our names, our credit card details - everything - and they have a responsibility to protect
that.
ZUCKERMAN: So what we're really seeing in some cases is sort of a need to ask corporations,
and often U.S. corporations, to take an actual stance and defend rights. Sometimes it's actually
just asking these corporations to try very hard to make sure that they're actually accessible
in the places that we're talking about.
Duy, we've talked about the fact that Facebook, despite the fact that it's blocked in Vietnam,
manages to be enormously popular. And to the point where there are viral videos asking
people how to access it.
Malcolm Gladwell memorably penned an article a couple of months ago, essentially telling
us not to expect revolution coming from Facebook or from any of these online networks because
what they do is link together. People who are connected only by weak ties rather than
by the strong ties that he believes are necessary for activism.
In the context of Vietnam, which Secretary Clinton pointed to yesterday, as one of the
most dangerous places in the world to be politically-active online, how important, how powerful is something
like Facebook?
DUY HOANG: Yeah, I mean I think Gladwell makes some really thought-provoking points in this
article, but what if in some societies the ties that people have are weaker than social
media? So if you go to social media, maybe that's upgrading ties. And in Gladwell's article
he has a few examples from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and some of his current examples.
But for instance, most of us here join a "Save Darfur" Facebook group. It really doesn't
require much of a sacrifice on our part. We're not doing anything dangerous. We're not really
sticking our necks out. And you know in most cases, it's selectivism, and we kind of forget
that we joined the group.
But in a place like Vietnam, when one joins an environmental group to protest bauxite
mining, or joins one of those protest groups because the government's blocking Facebook,
they're actually sticking their neck out, and they're doing something a lot stronger
than they normally would. So I think social media is galvanizing people.
Another example is Gladwell is talking about how in the U.S. south on a given Sunday, '50s
and '60s, 95 percent of the black population went to church. So the minister wouldn't need
to tweet his congregation. He could just stand up on Sunday morning.
But one of the concerns of society you don't have freedom of association, freedom of assembly.
People don't get together like that, and maybe it's through the public town square Facebook,
that you have a congregation come together.
So I think in some cases where you actually have weaker ties in society, that social media
can be an upgrade. So I think if you look at it that way, it's rising. It's helping
people come together.
ZUCKERMAN: So essentially in a case where social media may be the main space in which
you can organize, social media suddenly becomes a way for - . Give us a sense for - concretize
that risk for us. I mean you basically mentioned that signing up for Facebook is perhaps a
risky activity in Vietnam. Help us understand sort of what these risks that people are taking
in being active online in Vietnam in the current political culture.
HOANG: Sure, I mean just a little bit of context. If you go back to the digital prehistoric
times of the 1990s, people ... who wanted to get information got it from a loudspeaker
on their neighborhood block, through state media, and they'd end up being on a shortwave
radio through the BBC and Voice of America. That's basically information. Nowadays you
have a third of the population online. That's not high compared to Western standards, but
that's a tremendous amount of people online.
And of those people online, about a million are creating their own content through blogs
and so forth. So you have people accessing information and you have people creating content.
That's pretty revolutionary.
And the way the government has been restricting the Internet now is through filters - blocking
various sites. Through hacking because now that people are finding ways to go beyond
the filters, they're actually attacking the sites that people want to access that happen
to be on servers outside of Vietnam, and through arresting, persecuting bloggers.
But that's still a relatively small population because not everyone is a political dissident.
But I think what has changed now in the last year or two is when the government went after
Facebook, they're now looking at basically the normal average young person who uses Facebook,
and that's the same demographic we have here in the United States.
So a lot of times it's the children of the leadership, the grandchildren of the leadership.
And that's a big dilemma for the government, how they can block Facebook.
ZUCKERMAN: And this was the dilemma that Tunisia faced as well where even though Facebook was
obviously becoming a channel of information that was coming out on, Tunisia at a certain
point concluded that with 19 percent of the population on Facebook, they would simply
bring more people out into the streets if they were able to block it at that point.
Secretary Clinton referred to this yesterday as the dictator's dilemma. But in many cases
that seems to be the case that governments are playing through.
Do they want to make these technologies accessible because they know that they're part of a modern
society, or are they finding a way to shut them down because of fear for where they'll
go.
Solana, we were just talking in the green room before this about a very concrete problem
that we're facing. Global Voices has been doing a lot of original reporting on Tunisia,
on Egypt. Now on Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, Gabon, and I apologize for any protests that
I've missed today because there's rather a few going on.
We've been coordinating that coverage through a remarkable woman, Amira al-Hussaini, who
is our Middle East and North Africa editor, who's based on Manama, Bahrain. And you gave
me the rather tragic news that she no longer has any Internet access as of a couple of
hours ago.
SOLANA LARSEN: Yeah, yeah.
ZUCKERMAN: What are we going to do?
LARSEN: I don't know! [LAUGHTER] And I've been clutching my laptop constantly for the
past two months almost. Amira sent out a tweet on Twitter through her cellphone saying please
e-mail the Global Voices Middle East mailing list. Tell them I'm offline, which basically
means that I and several others, especially the Middle East team, is going to try and
pick up the slack, and try and figure out what's going on in Bahrain while the Bahrainians
are offline.
And we don't know how long it will last. Maybe it's just a pickup. For the past several days,
their Internet has been slowed down to a crawl. They haven't switched it off, but they've
made it very, very difficult to access the Internet. And so what we do essentially is
to try and organizations like Brett's will do things to try and help people get online
again, and we'll work with the Middle East team to try and call on the phones or to try
and figure out what information is there.
ZUCKERMAN: So how did that play out, for instance, in Egypt, where really at the height of these
protests we saw 5, 6 days where the Internet was simply entirely shut off - or almost entirely
shut off within the country. Your group managed - one of the six ISPs in the country - managed
to keep some of its connectivity up. How did Global Voices handle a situation like that?
How do you get information out of a country when a country takes a step that acute?
LARSEN: It's hugely complicated, but one of the things, one of the sort of unintentional
advantages of a country switching the Internet off is that the rest of the world's suddenly
becomes very aware of them. It becomes a media story that the country has switched the Internet
off. And a country like Bahrain that has had protests, I'm sure half the people in the
room didn't really know that that was happening or maybe still don't really know where Bahrain
is, but the day that they switched their Internet off, everybody would do a story about it because
we're all interested and curious about it.
So what happens when the media attention grows and the audience for what's happening grows
is that the activists on the ground get incentivized to start posting more information and putting
more stuff out there. So actually Tunisia was uploading things,
protesting, doing things for a whole month before the mainstream media really caught
on to what was happening. On Global Voices, we were covering it since mid-December and
wondering why the media wasn't picking up the story. The minute that the dictator leaves
the building, everybody picks up on the story. Egypt had a different situation, different
place in geopolitics. But also I think a lot of the media didn't want to miss the story
once more because you got a sense, wow, okay, this could be something more.
So when they switched the Internet off, I think the global attention that came with
that actually helped create a lot more activity, both on the ground, but also from other activists
in the Middle East.
So earlier today, we were talking about an activist in New York who could help over the
Internet. But a lot of what we're seeing now and what is also clear from some of the reporting
- you see in the New York Times about how were these protests organized? - is that people
are talking to each other across borders.
I mean let's be clear that people in other countries than the United States know how
to use the Internet, and there are hackers in the Middle East, and there are people who
can help each other and who speak the same language and who are communicating and who
trust each other, who are part of that network.
I mean that network also encompasses people here, encompasses people from the Global Voices
network. And so a lot of what we've built up and what you're also beginning to build
up is a global network of people who know each other, trust each other, and who are
working together. And ours happens to be very, very strongly-based in those countries where
people are.
So the Moroccans picked up the slack when the Egyptians got offline. The Syrians chipped
in. People from Yemen were blogging trying to cover the information that was coming out
through cellphones, through nor(?), through dial-up connections, through all the different
methods that people found to get around those blocks.
ZUCKERMAN: So Brett, talk a little bit about whether this parallels or doesn't parallel
the situation you saw in Iran in 2009, where you got very involved with trying to help
people involved with the Green Movement deal with a situation where there was a great deal
of global attention - the whole world watching, which unfortunately isn't the case on all
of the protests that we're watching at the moment. But in Iran, very much a huge appetite
for that information, but also a really severe slowdown as well as this sort of specter of
surveillance that people were deeply worried about.
SOLOMON: Yeah. I mean I think that we talked about the digital activists and the human
rights defenders around the world learning from each other and supporting each other.
There's actually a narrative that's happening between dictators and between regimes as well.
It's the same kind of - it doesn't happen through Global Voices. [LAUGHTER]
ZUCKERMAN: We try to avoid ...
SOLOMON: Unless there's some serious infiltration. But, so there is certainly lessons that are
being learned, and I think that the Egyptian shutdown was a lesson that was learned from
- there wasn't sufficient response in the Tunisian situation, and I think in the Iranian
example, you just have an incredibly sophisticated Iranian cyber army and surveillance infrastructure
that has been translated from being offline to being online.
I mean it's decades of development and the Iraninan regime of course had particularly
invested in the digital sphere. You also have a population which is 70 percent under the
age of 25. And so I think that - I mean it's different. It's hard to say.
But I think there's many things that are replicated. The censoring of particular pivotal sites
and interdependent news and media and blog sites. The DDoS attacking - you know like
there's 20 or 30 important information sources that run in and out of the country and the
government just attacks them. Like it's extraordinary. You watch those DDoS attacks that come through
the system, and combined with other components as well like the partnership with corporations,
offline intimidation as well. Jailing for instance of bloggers.
So you know, all the dirty tricks they used in various different forms and manners in
different countries.
ZUCKERMAN: John, you want to -
PALFREY: I did, Ethan. I wonder if I might put my former moderator hat on and ask you
a question actually since you know more about this than most of us added up together. So
one way to look at these stories that we've just heard is that they follow roughly-speaking
a pattern. I wonder if the pattern sounds right and if so, what should we do about it?
So the pattern might be that we get very excited about the use of these technologies. High
density populations in certain areas, particularly young people, whichever country activists
get somewhat more savvy. It's still elite, but people do things with it.
The state says no, I don't want this. I crack down varying between some very small amount
of censorship, plus surveillance, plus DDoS and so forth. So a variety of responses, right?
So activists then go to the ways to get around it - proxies and circumvention and so forth.
And then the state comes back and says we're actually going to block the circumvention
tools. Right? Or in the more extreme form, like Burma or Egypt, shut the whole network
down, and so forth, and kind of back and forth.
So is that really the story, that we're just sort of going back and forth, and if so, I
also am just so interested in the back and forth with Evgeny Morozov, someone who's written
a book recently, "The Net Delusion," that's a little like the Malcolm Gladwell thing we've
been talking about, and I think he very heavily is weighing in on the side saying "all of
you excited people are basically deluded," right? "This is more or less better for the
dictator than it is for the activist."
And so I think we kind of keep going back and forth between this "yeah, Internet!" And
this "no, it's better for tyrants." Right?
Is that the story and is that the way to see it?
ZUCKERMAN: Well, so, what John is outlining here is a very technical argument, and I hate
to get sort of deep into the technical terms of it, but we tend to refer to this argument
as wackamole, and essentially what happens is - [LAUGHTER] - everytime governments crack
down and try to constrain speech in one fashion or another, activists find some way to get
around it.
And we see the government escalate, we see activists escalate. We simply move in a stepwise
fashion. I think for several years that sort of idea
dominated the discourse and I think for a long time folks perhaps on our side of the
equation who sometimes are accused of being cyber-utopian, and we certainly are in comparison
to someone like Morozov, believing that the creativity of the people building these cirucumvention
tools are always going to ensure that we're one step ahead.
I would say that in the last couple of years, I've gotten a bit more depressed about this
actually, and one of the things we released a study at the Berkman Center, which I think
you co-authored - [LAUGHTER] - and I think I co-authored, too, that ...
PALFREY: It's a setup, okay, it was a setup.
ZUCKERMAN: Essentially saying that we tried to take a really good guess at what percentage
of people in a country like Vietnam or a country like Iran are using these circumvention tools
to get around Internet filtering. And we came up with a maximum estimate of three percent,
and a minimum estimate that's almost in order of magnitude smaller than that. And essentially
saying that, yes, there's a small group of activists who are finding ways to use these
tools and get around censorship, but it's actually a fairly small group.
I think we might offer that perhaps in defense of Morozov's argument and essentially say,
yeah, there are tools out there, but in fact maybe they're counterbalanced by this ability
to do surveillance, by the ability to watch things.
I think what's so exciting about developments very recently is that what we're figuring
out is that it's a mistake to look at the Internet by itself. What's so interesting
about the Internet is in this larger context of a media environment, the Internet is making
it possible for people who normally don't get heard, normally don't get their voices
on television or into the newspaper, to raise a voice, even if it's through a very, very
narrow channel; even if it's as ludicrous as someone making a phonecall on a land line
on Speak-to-Tweet to try to find a way to raise their voice in Egypt.
Once you have the attention to the situation, you have the possibility that the Internet
ends up being an input into a larger media dialogue.
And we're also starting to see the idea that that larger shift in the media, when you have
the sense that major change is possible, it's possible that that broadcast media environment,
watching a dictator fall on Al-Jazeera, may actually have the impetus of flooding lots,
lots more people into the trying to use these tools.
Now let me say there's immediately sort of two problems that I think we're perhaps not
talking about or not thinking about with this. The first is that it only works if you're
pay attention to it. It only works if people are watching Egypt. It doesn't work so well
in Gabon where we have people taking to the streets and being brutally put down by a government,
which simply knows that no one's going to pay any attention to it.
The second is that it only works if the tools let you do this, and this is maybe one of
the biggest fears that we have out here, Facebook, which deserves a great deal of praise for
the fact that it seems to have been a key technology in this, has a terrible, terrible
track record of taking down groups that were put up by people using pseudonyms, and it
makes perfect sense to use a pseudonym if you're organizing in Syria.
And Facebook at some point is going to have to confront and deal with that.
So my hope is that we're somehow getting beyond that sort of wackamole debate, and we're starting
to get into a new complicated situation that we may not know enough about yet, simply because
these ideas are unfolding in realtime.
But let's use this as a moment to open up the conversation, since you're going to open
it up by shifting the moderator role. [LAUGHTER] Can we get some -
PALFREY: You have it back -
ZUCKERMAN: - some questions to these remarkable folks that we have on stage who are really
trying in realtime to put the promise of this technology into action. I'm going to rely
on you to point to people, Jenny, because I can barely see in the audience at this point.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I'm Jonathan. I work at Global Integrity on the Adabba(?) Project.
Thank you for all coming and I think the last frame of sort of the utopian versus dystopian
vision of this technology, that the stuff that connects us can also be used to hunt
us down and punish us for organizing.
The wackamole I think is largely correct but that also implies that an arms race is on,
and I think just recently governments have realized, well, now we have to pay attention
to this. So I think the countermeasures that we're seeing - DDoS, turning the Internet
off entirely - that kind of thing - is a really crude and early version of what we're going
to see later. And we're going to see things like attacks on reputation systems and trust
networks and basically spamming information flows that are going to be much, much more
sophisticated, more subtle, and more hidden than just turning off an entire country's
Internet.
And then on the other side of that, there's the next phase of countermeasures, and not
just specific like "oh, here's the software that we're going to use," but underlying structural
concerns with how we use technology and how we use networks that are going to tip the
balance back towards the people on the good side of the wackamole phenomenon. And I want
to open it up to you guys as, what do you see as the big structural issues underneath
all these technologies that are going to help keep things on the side where the people trying
to share information and put out good-quality information are winning?
ZUCKERMAN: Great, thanks. So I'm going to break that question up in two actually because
we've got I think the right people to address. I'm going to ask Duy first to sort of talk
about how Vietnam, which is really one of the most aggressive and sophisticated countries
in attacking speech online, give us sort of the state-of-the-art. I mean give us, frankly,
what Viet Tan is experiencing.
HOANG: Well, I mean the government definitely doesn't like free speech online. And so it
resorts to a variety of means. It arrests bloggers. It intimidates bloggers. A lot of
times it will go after the families of bloggers because the blogger will be very stubborn.
But if the blogger's mother or father loses their job or the residency permit, that would
intimidate.
And then now it's starting to use a lot of malwares, spyware. Almost every day I get
an e-mail that is obviously having a virus, for me to load. And these means to basically
monitor people using computers.
But I don't feel like that is creating incremental dangers to us because in closed societies,
government is already watching you. They're watching you through neighborhood wardens.
They're following you.
So this is really an opportunity for us to have the technologies, and I think going back
to his question is this structurally, is the people appear - I mean not me, but you four,
have done a lot of thinking in terms of circumvention technologies, and we could find ways to provide
it to countries such as Iran or Vietnam that's going to go a long way.
ZUCKERMAN: So John, you're as knowledgeable as anybody in this room about the structure
of the Internet and this sort of hope that the white hats in the end are going to win
out. Do you buy it? Do you think the Internet is fundamentally architected in such a way
that this form of control - either by governments or at other chokepoints - is eventually doomed
to failure?
PALFREY: I don't. I don't think there's anything predetermined. I think we've got a series
of narratives that we can understand that have happened, but I also just think it's
Green Fields ahead of us. The number one thing we can do, I think, is
to focus on the human capacity. I think that this is the topic that in some ways is underlying
a lot of these conversations, it's if in fact the skills and the peer-to-peer transmission
of skills and the human network between all of these people who are trying to figure out
what's going on, that's the answer, I think, to this.
And it's in part because the environment itself is not just human beings doing things but
human beings are actually affecting the network itself as we use it, and I think it goes back
to the coders as writers thing. We are scripting and using the technology all the time. So
I'd invest in people.
ZUCKERMAN: So let's take another question. Over here maybe?
. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, it's Gigi Sohn again.
I was wondering if you could comment on a piece of legislation I talked about this morning
that is about to be introduced in the U.S. Senate that would allow the U.S. government
to go into foreign countries and seize domain names and block the resolution of domain name
requests.
And if you could just talk about what are the international implications if the U.S.
government can do those kind of things.
ZUCKERMAN: Brett, do you want to take that one on?
SOLOMON: Yeah. No. [LAUGHTER] I mean again I think it's important to recognize that this
is not just a U.S. phenomenon. It's actually like the European police. The European parliament
is currently considering a directive I think it is to look at ability to disable particular
IPs, particular websites, and often the problem of course is that it's wrapped up in a kind
of national security debate or it's wrapped up in a question around ***.
HOANG: And/or copyright.
SOLOMON: And/or copyright. I think these are the three. And the problem of course that
we have and the problem - in the ... context because the ... was - has on the books and
was almost passed and may still get passed through the national parliament is the mandatory
filtering system.
And the problem that I see is that this is about infrastructure, about creating the infrastructures,
the legal and technical infrastructure to enable this sort of thing to happen, and then
mission creep.
So it starts off being for national security or for copyright or whatever it might be,
and then it almost would be wrong for a government in a national security situation not to use
that infrastructure if it was in place. Like this sort of - it gets turned.
And so my - I'm not familiar with the precise details of the copyright thing. I think I'm
one of those people that kind of runs from it a little. But my response to it is that
we need a movement of users. We actually need to influence parliamentarians or congressmen
or whoever it might be to say that as users that we're not in support of that.
ZUCKERMAN: So let's take a final question. Over here perhaps?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I work on transparency in government accountability here at the Ford
Foundation. I'm struck by how fluid this whole environment is that we're hearing about. In
the work that we're doing, we're seeing great advances in right-to-know legislation in various
countries, particularly in the developing world.
But then we're seeing push backs on right to association, right to form unions.
We're seeing these issues about free speech rights versus the right to have corporate
interests bury your messages because they can buy elections and those kinds of things.
I'm wondering if you're seeing any kind of movement, and I think this follows from the
last comment, and from maybe some of your work, John and Ethan, with this younger generation,
if there's kind of a movement for a right-to-communicate that would feed into accessibility, affordability?
Do you see these people who are digital - who grew up being digital natives kind of having
a different attitude and way of thinking about this so that it becomes perhaps another rights-based
movement in terms of having access to the mechanisms by which people communicate?
ZUCKERMAN: So I'm going to put this question to Solana who on a daily basis is interacting
with about 400 digital natives who are trying to explain this phenomenon in their countries.
Do you see this as a movement? Do you see this as a shift?
LARSEN: Yeah, I mean - I don't think it's been articulated as a movement, but what we
see in a lot of these uprisings, even when they get called sort of overambitiously Facebook
movements or Twitter movements or whatever, is there isn't an ideology attached. There
aren't any figureheads. People don't really understand or know what they want because
they don't have spokespersons.
So what they're doing and what they're trying to achieve is exactly a kind of - an open
process.
I mean they're not even referring to it as democracy which is something I think very
new. It's - they want openness, they want transparency. They're not looking for power.
They're not looking to elevate a certain amount of people. They're even willing to work with
their political rivals in order to achieve those goals, and it's not ideology but it's
a very strong sense of idealism which we'll see if it's proven wrong, if it fails miserably.
I would be very surprised if it had the same outcome in all these countries that we're
seeing, but it's definitely true that they are connecting in the way that they organize,
in the way that they have identified their criteria of success is something new and something
that belongs to this means and way of communication.
ZUCKERMAN: And if I were to put a single term on it, I would put out the word participation.
Possibly the most inspiring and maybe sort of stunning story to me in the last couple
of months has been the story of a good friend of ours, actually a contributor to Global
Voices, Slim Amamou, who on a Thursday found himself arrested for his blogging activities.
On a Tuesday found himself released, and on Wednesday found himself the Minister of Youth
and Culture in Tunisia. - [LAUGHTER] - And needless to say, this is not an easy transition.
- [LAUGHTER] - And it was not in fact a smooth transition for Slim, and many of his friends
in Tunisia gave him a very, very hard time about joining a government that included a
lot of elements of the previous regime. And Slim's response was basically to say, look,
I've been looking for ways to change my country. This is the way in which I can do it.
And his friends in the end ended up saying, "absolutely, and you know what?, the way that
we can change our country is by building an independent media and we're going to watch
you like a hawk, buddy, even if you happen to be our friend."
And what I think is wonderful about what's going on now, and in a lot of the countries
that we're working in, is not necessarily access to data, not necessarily transparency,
but the assumption that we are all moving parts within this. Whether that means taking
to Tahrir Square or whether it means finding ways to write about this and be transparent
about it.
So thank you for this chance to talk about it, and thanks to our wonderful panel. [APPLAUSE]
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