The World Cracks Down on the Internet
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It seemed like our world was looking more like Huxley's. There is so much crap in cyberspace that justice is hidden from view (but its out there...).
But the what-seems-like-de-facto centralization of mainstream internet makes Orwell's fantasy seem all too real. That China uses "strategic, timely" censorship is only one side of the coin. Surveillance too, whether from browser cookies or 'telescreens,' is driving us towards an even deeper conflation of these two nightmares.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world....
"Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World."
The United States CIA attempted (and nearly succeeded) in inciting a revolution against Castro by pretending to be a series of grassroots movements on Twitter and inciting anti-administration feelings within the Cuban population. That was earlier this year.
"USAID effort to undermine Cuban government with fake ‘Twitter’ another anti-Castro failure" [1]
The United States has an ongoing effort to use Internet media to 'deradicalize' the next generation of Middle Easterners and actively manipulates public opinions in Jordan, Cairo, Syria and other Middle Eastern states. Here are some quotes from one DoD MINERVA paper:
"...it is imperative that we develop empirically-based procedures for countering messages that promote violent extremism and anti-Western beliefs..."
"...Neural predictors of Twitter impact in Cairo (UCLA & Egypt). Our prior work (Falk et al., 2012), indicates that neural responses of a small group can predict which persuasive messages will be more successful in mass media campaigns..."
"... Defense Group Inc. already tracks Twitter trends specific to Egypt and will identify which of the selected Twitter topics went on to be highly influential over the next month and which did not..." - Matthew Lieberman, UCLA, September 30, 2012, Department of Defense MINERVA Initiative [2]
Here's one US company that does it. MARAYA MEDIA - "Driving Intelligent Dialog". [3]
The United States engages in targeted mass media and social manipulation to stir dissent in target nations, and to quell dissent where destabilization would hurt policy objectives.
The DoD's MINERVA project specifically looks to understand the cultural components of stability of various countries and mechanisms to encourage or disrupt that stability. Among a great number of social studies you will find DoD research on how to seed information inside of specific Asian countries, including China, for the targeted introduction of instability. I will leave speculations of possible connections to the Hong Kong protests to the reader. [4]
This should not come as a surprise given the history of the US: The United States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc.
But now with global interconnectedness it is easy to set up 'foreign media', blogs and other politicizing content to influence other nations' populations.
In the past decade it has become a global issue.
This year Egypt sentenced Al Jazeera journalists that they believed were partnered with geopolitical interests of other states. Putin's administration is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail international influence. China blocks many American services including Facebook and Google. The usual story in America is that they are censoring free speech. The truth is that they do not want foreign influence to destabilize their population and that they do not want their citizen's data in America's PRISM program (there's a reason it's called the FISA "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" court).
The Snowden revelations showed us how intelligence agencies are involved in PsyOps - the term for 'psychological operations' used by the CIA and others.
The GCHQ's BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM/ETC and partnership with the NSA are used to influence online polls, discussion forums and to vote up and down content that aligns with policy goals. [5][6][7] The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target selection). It's why metadata matters. A nice illustration of this is the article "Finding Paul Revere."
And so we have issues here with the use of targeted social influence in America as well. First there are instances where other countries are trying to incite disruption in the US - the US wants to study and curtail it. [8]
A number of journalists have called out that the state has been extremely aggressive to dissenting opinions, even to go so far as labeling current policy on the issue "War on Journalism". American officials have exported a number of journalists with Middle Eastern descent and journalists like Ayman Mohyeldin have been pulled from Gaza and other conflicts when reporting has erred on the side of other state interests. The crackdown on journalism is worth another post I don't have time to write.
Just look at how central a role controlling internet dialog is for running a modern US presidency. A Google search for "Obama internet campaign" [9] results in headlines "How Obama's Internet Campaign Changed Politics", "How Obama won the internet", "Barack Obama and the Facebook Election", "Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency" - this isn't because of grassroots discussion but because both Obama and McCain (and Romney before him) had cyber centers in control of internet PR engaging tens of millions of dollars in Twitter messages, etc.
You can nudge public opinion by bombarding them with an influx of the same message, slightly disguised in one way and then another. The MINERVA program has plenty of good reading with regard to this. Anyway, the USG does this overseas. It is not merely an excuse these other countries have 'to be evil.' How Jingoistic.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-t...
[2] http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf
[3] http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php
[4] http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html
[5] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...
[7] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...
[8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unw...
So there are hundreds of highly-trained Western agents on the internet swaying conversation, many who have this as their full time job. Combine that with agents from every semi-sophisticated country in the world...east or west, including thousands from China's "50 cent army" alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
If you didn't believe things you read on the internet previously, now might be a good time.
If you go on Reddit, for example, you'll find plenty of highly upvoted articles discussing Chinese or Russian "propaganda", and an outright rejection of any suggestion that the US or its allies engage in the same behaviours themselves, despite there being overwhelming evidence supporting it.
It must be nice to be so efficient at propaganda that the very people you're targeting with it digest it so well that they'll promote the same agenda without second thought wherever they possibly can.
I dont question their existence - I just don't think it matters because I don't assume the people who disagree with me are dumb or malicious or paid and I could never confirm their employment status anyway so I choose not to smugly write people off as shills.
http://www.gekaufte-journalisten.de/ (german)
https://ersjdamoo.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/bought-journalism... (english blog article about it)
http://theagendadaily.com/gekaufte-journalisten-german-book-... (english news article)
There was a radical shift in American dialog around the turn of the 20th century (the first revolution of Cuba and the Spanish War) when America's principles of self-determination and representation were directly challenged and contradicted by its interests in expanding and obtaining control over certain areas of the world (Cuba, Philippines).
The language of inalienable rights and of governments of people, by people for people - of rights to govern coming from the people who are governed - were morphed into republican imperalist language 'we are bringing those who do not have democracy/technology/western life what they need, even if it doesn't come with self determination.' (Neither the people of the Philippines nor Cuba wanted American rule).
It was ruled by American courts that America could control these regions but did not need to give the people governed there the full porfolio of rights garunteed by the Constitution, nor the right to vote.
You see this play out today where the US government will side with authoritarian regimes against democratic uprisings of their people when the regimes in question align with Western strategic and diplomatic goals and the democratic uprisings do not.
It's really hard to actually point and say "yes, this is a place where America is liberating people and allowing democracy to shine." America is a soft-power imperalist and has been for around 100 years. This is justified by the narrative you mention - that America brings with it democracy, etc - but in the details America pursues its interests first and its ideals later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
But this isn't IMHO unique to the Anglo-American countries; nations have been doing this sort of thing for centuries going back to ancient times.
What do you mean, "We"? The submitted article purported to be about a worldwide phenomenon, and on a worldwide basis, what the Western countries and their democratically elected governments are doing for Internet freedom looks quite good. On a worldwide basis, regarding Internet freedom, the performance of China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and a lot of other countries and their governments is much worse than that of the Western countries, and yet some participants here who enjoy Western freedom are trying to shut down the broader discussion here by pointing only to the wrongs of Western governments. We know a lot more about what the Western governments are doing than we do about what the other governments are doing precisely because we live in an environment of much more free press in the West than elsewhere. This bias in availability of information shouldn't bias all of our discussions of worldwide issues on Hacker News. (Disclosure: I speak and read languages other than English and have lived in a non-Western, non-English-speaking country before, so I don't have a narrow national perspective on this issue, but rather attempt to have a worldwide perspective on it.)
And you are using some of the very same techniques that they do when you try to downplay the importance of it.
When Twitter is being used by competing nations as a means to incite riots in your people, what would you do if you were in power?
Looking to America's present: Fusion Centers track various political groups including the Tea Party, Occupy was dismantled by federal agent intervention, access to stories, interviews and meetings is given to journalists and news corporations that 'play ball' with the government and several extremely important political stories have been repressed (Risen's first NSA surveillance story circa second Bush election) or pushed (including false stories, such as the Fallujah Psyop and the partnership with journalist Judith Miller to falsely justify the invasion of Iraq). But we don't even need to look at that. We can look at the link included in the very first post - the US government wants to be able to study radicalizing Twitter messages targeting Americans.
Looking to America's past you'll see that both Red Scares burgeoned the state with extra-Constitutional capabilities to restrict American speech, as it was believed that dangerous ideas coming from the last domino of revolutions in Europe (the Soviet Union) where more extreme versions of populist ideas (the Bolsheviks) threatened the system and the status quo so fully it could foment in the end of the US government (as it had already done repeatedly in Europe). Take the Mayor of Jersey City Frank Hague during the Red Scare: "We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.' You never hear a real American talk like that."
That is to say America does do and has done the same sort of restrictions of free speech this article, and others in this thread, would import into a sense of 'evil'.
Yes, there's been a global crack down on the internet. A global one. In Western states, there has been too. It's just inequitable to attribute the crack down in non-Western states to 'evilness' and the crack down in Western states to 'practicality'. And to ignore the pressures and leverages on non-Western states placed on them by America/allies. That's what this part of the thread of the discussion is about.
As far as the discussion specifically of Western governments and their use of realpolitik, I think it was mostly spurred by the comment suggesting it might be justified by Western 'spreading of freedom' (the thread then focused on analyzing this, and correctly identified IMHO that Western states don't have that track record of spreading freedom attributed to them in myth).
Reminds me of an interview with Chomsky where he talks about internal US policy:
> But there was a more serious and considered answer given by the National Security Council, the highest planning agency. They pointed out that there's a perception in the Arab world that the United States supports status quo regimes which, of course, are brutal and oppressive, and does so in order to secure its own interests in obtaining oil, and then they said, well, it's hard to counter this perception because it's correct. They said it's natural for the United States to link itself up with the status quo regimes and try to sustain them and to pursue its interest in obtaining oil. So the end result is that there's a campaign of hatred against us among the people who we're basically robbing and on whom we're imposing harsh, brutal, repressive and corrupt regimes, and it's pretty difficult to counter that campaign.
The notion that the US actively fights corrupt, despotic regimes and supports radical movements for democracy doesn't rhyme with US history of the past few hundred years. Look at support for Cuban Batista, or support for Chilean Pinochet, support for Iraqi Hussein, for Indonesian Suharto, Spanish Franco, Iranian Mohammed Reza etc. The list is very long.
Anyway I don't want to get into too much of a political discussion. But this notion that US foreign policy (or any country's foreign policy for that matter, by the way) is dictated by good will, trying to curb radical movements that sweep away freedom, rather than geopolitics, is clearly missing something. US has practiced realpolitik for a long time now, first under the guise of fighting ideologically different communists, now under the guise of fighting ideologically different islamic extremists. It's simply the enemy of the week now, the product of the whole neoliberal clash-of-civilizations movement. The real motivation has always been geopolitics. The US isn't unique in this by the way, it's just easy to pick out as it's been the most successful at this the past 200 years and therefore it has the most stories of supporting crap regimes for its own good will.
The U.S. Constitution includes strong protections for free speech and freedom of the press. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court held that internet speech was entitled to the highest form of protection under the constitution, and lower courts have consistently struck down attempts to regulate online content. Two federal laws also provide significant protections for online speech: Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996) provides immunity for ISPs and online platforms such as YouTube and Facebook that carry content created by third parties. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 provides a safe harbor to intermediaries that take down allegedly infringing material after notice from the copyright owner. These statutes enable companies to develop internet applications and websites without fear that they will be held liable for content posted by users.
Source: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/united-stat...
That Russia, Thailand, China, The Middle East, etc use the rule of law isn't suprising. It's how these countries work. They have strong leaderships, and those leaderships do the enforcing.
Western "liberal" nations are ruled via the invisible hand of capitalism, and that censorship is coming accidentally from these organisations. A popular website switches off comments. Social Media Companies pull users away from distributed systems like email and IRC to heavily managed systems like Twitter and Facebook. Seemingly unrelated light-touch legislation (e.g. copyright) is used by individuals and corporates to ensure transgressive individuals are denied a voice and are threatened with job losses and other punishments.
"The world cracks down on the Internet". I'd be a fool to assume that this is happening everywhere else but where I am.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is.