Internet & Democracy Blog

Obama giving live townhall-style meeting online right now. Check it out here. Users email questions to a live video feed of the President, who answers them. For the recent history of White House online forums and their relative worth and transparency, read this round up in the CS Monitor.

Pete Peterson, executive director of Common Sense California, thinks the Obama camp’s revolutionary effort to crowd-source policy (at Change.gov) is not all it’s cracked up to be. These problems, Peterson persuasively argues, stem from the nature of representative government. So far, although there has been much response to the site and at least one presidential briefing book, the results have been less than inspiring. Money quote:

The scope of the issues are often so broad and complex, asking the general public to send in question ideas is a bit like sending Paris Hilton in to ask questions of a brain surgeon during surgery: she might look the part in her scrubs and mask, she might even ask a couple interesting questions, but she’s not really helping the surgical team. She’s just…participating.

In fact, it turns out that the White House forum simply became the next turf for single issue interest groups like the marijuana legalization lobby. The more successful an individual group became in pushing its priorities to the top of the list, the most exposure they got for their cause, again increasing traffic.

Peterson, who is keenly interested in the possibilities of the internet for increasing civic participation, suggests a different direction for the project: either push wiki-policy efforts back to local government, where it is more plausible to have meaningful input, or vet opinion makers on Change.gov forums. The idea, as I understood it, would not be to close off opposing positions, but to limit the public discussion to policy experts and other smart wonks. This, of course, is less democratic, but more in line with representative (small “r” republican) government and with coherent policy making. Peterson suggest that it might also reduce the interest group mongering, what Madison presciently termed “the mischiefs of faction” (Federalist 10).

For readers and netizens living under an iron curtain of internet and political repression (fighting river crabs), anonymous blogging is an important free speech enabler. Like 18th century phampleteers (or even the writers of the Federalist papers), anonymous bloggers are empowered by their aliases to challenge taboos, censors and government power.

This updated guide (edited by Global Voices/Berkman guru Ethan Zuckerman) lays out the best practices of protecting your identity without silencing your voice, including the Tor anonymizer with WordPress and email tricks. The internet is the last bulwark against totalitarian control because of its fluid and democratic character. That is why anonymous blogging is so important. Difficult to trace or gag, it is the kind of speech most likely to impact an increasingly interconnected and web-dependent world.

Of course, be extremely careful. Use these tools at your discretion. Reporters Without Borders has a comprehensive list of jailed cyber-dissidents. This past week, an Iranian blogger died in prison custody, while the Iranian parliament considered passing a chilling law, turning seditious and anti-clerical blogging into a capital offense. And this in a country with millions of internet users and thousands of blogs…

It’s hard to believe. Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, an Afghan journalism student, downloaded some articles critical of the treatment of women under sharia law. He then offered a few copies to other students at his university. For this “blasphemy,” he was sentenced to death, later commuted to twenty years in prison. As I write, he’s waiting on a promised (but undelivered) pardon from Hamid Karzai.

The de-criminalization of blasphemy in the States was a long time coming, but by the fifties (see the Burstyn case, for example), blasphemy laws were largely understood to be an unfair prior restraint on the freedom of speech. In Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban state, the conflict of civil and religious law is still raging. All this despite a fancy Western-designed Constitution that in theory protects expression.

I can only see cases like these multiplying in direct correlation to increased Internet access. It’s much, much harder to gag the web (which is naturally democratic, cacophonous and, by some accounts, blasphemous) than it is to threaten a newspaper or traditional media format. I hope that in that coming war, the Internet is able to out-muscle repressive censors and provincial judges. Until then, I can only hope Mr. Kambakhsh receives his pardon.

I am having trouble expressing how sad and angry I feel over the death of Iranian blogger Omid Rez Misayafi. Bruce’s post this morning announcing it, via Global Voices, left me shaken and upset. I have spent the last hour frantically pouring over the accounts of a writer whom I’ve never met or read (he wrote in Farsi, mostly about traditional Iranian music), but with whom I feel the deepest and most immediate brotherhood. As the Committee to Protect Bloggers put it: “They’ve Killed One of Us.”

I am trying to wrap my mind around how something this cruel and unnecessary could happen. Misayafi, whose chief offense seems to have been a few quickly penned satires, was sentenced in December for insulting religious clerics and opposing the Islamic Republic. That this could merit *two and a half years* in an Iranian gulag, the infamous Evin Prison (listen to this NPR report)… the mind reels in a complex reaction of weary disgust.

The true cause of Misayafi’s death is not yet known. According to official sources, his death was a suicide. Depressed and isolated in prison, the writer simply OD’d on sedatives. Misayafi’s sister is rightly suspicious of this story, especially after the Zahra Kazemi incident. Iranian officials first reported that the detained Canadian-Iranian journalist had died of a stroke while in custody. As it turns out, she was brutally raped, tortured and beaten to death.

Even if Misayafi died by his own hand, he did so under awful conditions and unfair imprisonment. I encourage you to read the statement by Reporters Without Borders, which has demanded a full investigation and detailed autopsy.

Finally, I express my condolences to the Misayafi family. Though you are thousands of miles away, speak another language and come from a different culture, your grief is rawly felt by anyone who believes in free expression. Omid Misayafi, rest in peace.

Increasingly, mistrials are being called because jurors are improperly accessing the internet to do research on a case. The biggest issue is the possibility that jurors would discover prejudicial evidence that had previously been excluded as inadmissible by a trial judge. A juror might discover for instance that John Doe has a prior record for x crime, biasing him toward conviction. The NYT sums it up:

They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence.

One can see how deeply ingrained our collective trust in Internet fact-gathering is. Trial by jury — and the highly complex rules of Anglo-American evidence law that accompany it — is itself a means of information seeking, but one which attempts to exclude unfair or unfairly obtained evidence (as determined by a judge).  By contrast, the sheer openness of the web is naturally more democratic, but also less judicious in what is available for consumption. When it comes to deciding on a high profile case, the potential for outside distortion is much higher, and amplified by an internet bursting with news and speculation. I think defense lawyers have a lot to worry about here.

The only positive thing I liked about this story was that jurors also used smart phones and the internet to look up complicated legal definitions. That kind of fact finding, into the complex procedural rules of our system, strikes me as healthy for an active citizenry. A google search for “legal terms” pulls up results a lot of sources more reputable than Wikipedia and tailored to American law. Why shouldn’t jurors find this?

For a good primer and summary of Chinese internet censorship, including the hilarious alpaca incident, read this TIME magazine piece on the topic.

The justification for sweeping control of the internet has always superficially been to combat vice like child pornography or gambling. What is alarming, but unsurprising, is how often these public reasons are simply cover for political blacklisting. As an author for Wikileaks puts it:

[C]ases such as Thailand and Finland demonstrate that once a secret censorship system is established for pornographic content the same system can rapidly expand to cover other material, including political material, at the worst possible moment — when government needs reform.

I think most people, including most Chinese, understand that the Great Fire Wall is explicitly political as well, uniformly banning discussion of the Party’s opponents: Falun Gong, Charter 08 democracy agitators and foreign journalists.

What seems to me almost as pernicious is the new crop of open Westernized democracies now instituting nanny-filters as well as blacklists. This includes countries like Denmark and Australia, and to a lesser degree Thailand, where a presumption of free speech seems warranted. According to Wikileaks, the Danish blacklist is “generated without judicial or public oversight and is kept secret by the ISPs using it. Unaccountability is intrinsic to such a secret censorship system.”

Thankfully, Wikileaks and others have uncovered some of the blacklists, exposing free speech violations, like the banned anti-abortion site in Australia. The Australian bureaucrats’ solution?

Just ban Wikileaks. And the cycle continues.

I know this sounds like flip-flopping (see my last piece on post-paper journalism), but after 145 years the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has ceased to be a print newspaper today, and that’s not necessarily good news. From the NYT:

But The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting.

Is it a race to the bottom? We can’t all be HuffPo. If the digital commentariat wants anything to analyze (or spin), someone must produce the reporting, vet stories and attempt to be neutral. Volunteer investigative reporting and citizen journalism are interesting phenomena, but I have some misgivings about how they compare in output and training to paid reporters. Does anyone know how much of that staff reduction is editorial?

It just seems as though the mechanisms by which news abroad and local have been professionally produced are being dismantled by a web medium against which there is no possible competition. I hate to sound like a scriptorium monk whining about the printing press, but maybe there is something to fear in the collapse of the MSM, however problematic and elliptical their coverage may be. They form a base layer of information in a world of information technology increasingly impenetrable and filled with subterfuge (witness HuffPo’s embarrassment over FoxNews hoax) and ignorant ideology (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim!).

One by one the giants fall. Readers, am I playing Chicken Little?

Chas Freeman, Obama’s controversial pick for the National Intelligence Council, recently withdrew his nomination after the flurry of protest (and counter-protest) on the web made him too hot to handle. Regardless of how you feel on the issue, I encourage you to read this thoughtful post by David Rothkopf over at FP. Money quote:

I was appalled by the mob mentality generated by the blog debate on the Freeman nomination. It produced some serious misgivings on my part regarding even being involved in the blogosphere because so much of what passes for discourse in this world is undistilled opinion and emotion designed to bind and stir up like-minded audiences. The rest is more like grafitti than thoughtful commentary, designed to leave a wannabe commentator’s mark on the side of a passing issue.

For me, the borking of Chas Freeman illustrates something that goes beyond its own narrow political logic. For a position that did not require Senate confirmation, Freeman was subjected to all the rigors and then some of a politicized Congressional hearing. He was held up, dissected, examined, slandered and defended by a cadre of bloggers, commentators, wonks, pundits and angry voices, left and right.

The sensitive nature of Freeman’s appointment only made the debate more combustible and fervent. Unlike a Senate hearing, he was not given much of a platform to discuss, evade or spin his record. As the pressure of the commentariat’s chorus swelled, Freeman cracked and withdrew. Depending on how you view Freeman, you may be inclined to view this as a triumph either of democratic process or the confirmation of Hamilton’s worst fears of now digital mob rule.

This morning my blackberry buzzed with a link to this gem of an internet censorship story (Hat Tip: Byran Haut). I haven’t had a chance until now to pile on, and of course Andrew Sullivan has already beaten me to the punch.

Regardless, here’s the story. Since China moved to contain the pro-democratic Charter 08 movement by shutting down sympathetic online forums, China’s massive internet firewall has become even more draconian. The government’s public campaign has always about pornography, but this is often convenient cover to censor sites with uncomfortable political content. Bloggers, long burdened by the censorship regime, have even started referring to site takedowns as “harmonizations,” a joke on President Hu Jintao’s constant reference to the “harmonious society” of Confucian social theory.

Chinese netizens, in a move as frankly subversive as it is deeply funny, are striking back. A video released last January plays a seemingly innocuous children’s song about alpacas, or “river-mud-horses”, who fight against a band of “river crabs” (a near homonym to the word for “harmony”) seeking to invade their fields. As it turns out, these mythological creatures sound like something quite else in spoken Chinese. VideoGum has the translation the Times won’t give you:

The children are singing about grass mud horses (“Fuck Your Mother”) who live in a desert (“Your Mother’s C-word”) (ha), and defeat the river crabs (a word synonymous with “censorship.”) Do you know what this means? It means YouTube is IMPORTANT.

At first, it may tempting to see the video as childish, like “Ataturk is gay” and “Thai king monkey” videos which convulsed censors, Turkish and Thai respectively. On the other hand, as those episodes illustrate, where the law punishes open speech about sensitive material, farce may be the only remaining outlet. Make me think of the many vulgar Revolutionary War cartoons printed with gleeful impunity. Also remember that the Internet is much more heavily filtered in China than in either Thailand or Turkey.

As the Times’ writer eloquently puts it:

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

As I have said several times now on this blog, costly censorship regimes like the Chinese will never be successful in the long run. Too costly and too ineffective. The Internet, and indeed language itself, resist this kind of comprehensive control. Nor is this movement a fringe; the joke is rapidly spreading across China, no doubt bristling the country’s zealous censors.

An irony, of course, is that “river crab” was scrubbed from Wikipedia yesterday. Someone seems to think it is a “NON notable neologism.” Only when the “grass mud horses” are victorious, my friend. Only then.