—hUcU— The Internet and Democracy Alan C. Robles worst threats t9 have come from the Internet, computer security experts would probably list ILOVEYOU, SirCam, Code Red and Nimda. It isn’t likely they'll include “Thong Luan”, “6-4tianwang” or “dassk”. But to Vietnam, China and Burma, respectively, the names represent cyber threats so menacing that to defend against them the authorities have built digital firewalls, strictly regulated Internet use and imprisoned offenders. The three aren’t computer viruses or worms. They're websites which publish political dissent, criticism, and alternative news. In a way, they are viruses because they carry the threat of a dangerous contagion: the notion that citizens are free to access and pass on any information they want. Of course the countries concerned sce it differently, arguing that such sites are threats to “national security”, or “social order” or “morality.” These are shopworn catchphrases traditionally invoked by repressive governments' but the three countries are far from being I f they were asked to identify the alone in trying to contain the Internet. A list of nations which practice, or attempt to implement, internet censorship and regulation shows some strange bedfellows. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Cuba are there, as might be expected. But then so are Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.? Reporters sans Frontigres (RSF) reports that 45 countries restrict their citizens’ access to the Internet and 20 of these nations not only control access totally or partially, but also censor content and take action against users.* The Threat from Cyberspace That governments rich and poor now routinely dedicate resources, infrastructure and legal efforts seeking to police cyberspace shows how, in less than a decade, the Internet has changed from a technology used by a small group of people into a unique means of global communication, truly a worldwide web. Although it was set up in 1969, the Internet really only took offin the late 1990s. In 1996, then USThe Internet and Democracy President Bill Clinton wryly observed, “when I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.”* In 1995, estimates placed the number of people online at between 20-30 million.* The figure is now 513 million people online? (out of a world population of 6.137 billion’) and there are five billion searchable web pages.” While it’s true that despite the Internet's growth theres still a “Digital Divide”! and that the language used on the Internet is mainly English," it’s just as true that activists the world over have at their disposal a communication network of unprecedented perva- siveness. It is a technology which owes its lineage to and combines the capabilities of, the telegraph, the telephone, radio and the computer.” As RSF puts it: With nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection, a single person, in her living room or in a cybercafé, can tell the whole world What she thinks. All she needs to do is set up a web site, take part in a newsgroup or send e-mail messages. This person can even freely denounce human rights violations or repression in her country, no matter how authoritarian or closed itis. In effect, the Internet can help foil the blatant violation of Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This holds that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any 6 media and regardless of frontiers." Because it is decentralized, wide reaching, immediate, empowering, anonymous and interactive, the Internet is not the sort of medium to warm the hearts of oppressive regimes. Ironically, most governments who feel threatened by the Internet can’t do the one thing that will guarantee total protection: cut the connection. Countries around the world have realized that they can’t afford to be left out of the Internet, which among other things has turned out to be a crucial channel for educational institutions, businesses, and non-profit organi- zations to exchange ideas and promote scientific, cultural, and cconomic pro- gress," There are now at least 192 countries connected to the Internet.'* Even the current poster child for repres- sion, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, has Internet access (some mujahedin use email). This reluctance of repressive governments to pull the modem jack provides just enough of an opening for activists and dissidents to exploit. The result is a constant cat-and-mouse game between censors who use firewalls, proxy servers, filters and snoopers, and dissidents who use spoofers, anony- mizers, encryption and tech-savvy nimbleness to stay ahead. Cyber libertarians believe that because of the way the Internet is structured (or unstructured), attempts to throttle it are ultimately fatile, and the only thing these efforts accomplish is the violation of human rights.” They’re not alone in this assessment. A politician as sober as Fidel Ramos, former president of thePhilippines, has noted how technology “particularly that in the information and communications industries, makes more difficult the state’s control of people’s minds and directions. Indeed, the whole post-industrial era, whose key resource is intellectual capital, requires for its evolution in any given country a drastic expansion of individual freedom." Implicit in remarks like this is the idea thata repressive government which opens its doors to the Internet even a crack is also inevitably allowing in “forbidden” material which could ultimately have a “democratizing” effect on the system. In this libertarian framework, “democracy” is a “govern- ment by discussion”, marked by unhin- dered, informed debate of public issues” by a “civil society” The Internet's role in fostering democracy is a fascinating theme, one that has sustained dozens of seminars and conferences over the years and nourished the careers of numerous academicians, However any discussion of its validity first has to put aside the misconceptions and hyperbole surroun- ding this technology. Hypefest or Revolution? The Internet, more than any previous technological breakthrough, has been attended by a lot of hoopla and panegyric. To early boosters, the information superhighway would be the backbone of the latest version of Utopia. There would be a new economy, new politics, new media, a new sense of community. In the words ofan ardent exponent: “The true value The Internet and Democracy of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway is more than ashort cut to every book in the Library of Congress, Itis creating a totally new, global social fabric.” In “A Decla- ration of the Independence of Cyber- space” made in Davos, Switzerland on February 8, 1996 cyber libertarian John Perry Barlow proclaimed: “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” To Nicholas Negroponte, one of the Net’s “gurus” (one critic, less kind, has used the word “ayatollah”), it was the dawn of a new era, a “post- information age” where the limitations of geography would vanish, there would be “place without space”, and the slogan was “information wants to be free? With the dot-com bust that started in 2000 there’s been a backlash against the vision of a Whole Wired World Many saw in the collapse of hundreds of Internet companies, and the evaporation of billions of investment dollars, a well-deserved comeuppance of hypesters. It seemed to confirm that the Internet was actually what it had been sneeringly dismissed as in 1997: “q shallow and unreliable electronic repository of dirty pictures, inaccurate rumors, bad spelling and worse grammar, inhabited largely by people with no demonstrable social skills.”™* One media critic wondered if the Net was really a new medium, or just a carrier, in effect, a telephone dial tone. It's true that, expressed as a financial proposition, the future paintedThe Internet and Democracy out by Internet visionaries has so far failed spectacularly. But in going over what went wrong, BusinessWeek points out: First, the Internet was supposed to change everything, That’s just plain wrong. The reality is, there was no way that a single technology could fulfill such an extravagant promise. Instead, it turns out that the transformative power of the Internet is being felt unevenly2° ‘The magazine goes on to say that while the Net’s impact will probably be incremental on industries such as retailing and manufacturing, it “may” be “revolutionary” on sectors such as financial services, education and government. And despite the dot-com debacle, Internet usage continues to rise across the world. Already it has effected changes which might not look revolutionary, but certainly weren't commonplace (or even likely) a decade ago. The person who “telecommutes”, staying home and sending her work to her office electronically, has already had her life changed by the Net. Anyone who uses the Web to read the world’s leading newspapers on the same day they come out probably doesn’t give much thought to what such a seemingly simple exercise would have cost a few years ago, if it were possible at all. Terms like “home office”, “e-com- merce” and “electronic governance” are part of the lexicon. The revolution that is taking place isn’t about creating a new enlightened civilization in cyberspace. It’s about speed of communication’, of infor- mation distribution and duplication. As one World Bank executive says: 8 Whereas the other revolutions had to do with transforming materials or energy, this one has to do with transforming time and distance.” It also has something to do with transforming the very notion of substance, Negroponte explains that the digital age is all about replacing “atoms” with “bits.” As he notes: “A bit has no color, size or weight, and it can travel at the speed of light. It is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information. It is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white.”® If this sounds altogether too metaphysical it can be put another way. Handling something made out of atoms, a book for instance, bears no resemblance to handling something made of bits, a computer file of the book. In the “old” days reproducing a book would have needed a photocopier, paper and lots of time. To copy a digital computer file of the book needs no more than a few keyboard strokes. The same operation could copy the file once, or a thousand times over, and instantly dispatch it to thousands of recipients. Former Indonesian activist Wimar Witolcar describes the impact of bits like this: When I was student to get anything communicated we had to mi- meograph or print stuff and mail them or courier them and it took two days just to go from one city to another. Now when email came about even in its most rudimentary fashion in the early 90’s people could send email messages so that solved a whole lot of logistic problems. As the web became moresophisticated mailing lists and web sites would come up and a whole political party like the People’s Democratic Party which is a small radical student based party practically was created on the internet. They have mectings, discussions and now that has grown into a legitimate news carrier. Digital technology, the mani- pulation of bits, has no political leanings. It can be used to download MP3s, hold conferences, conduct electronic banking, view smut, make an absurdly cheap international phone call, forward a computer virus, and of course, disseminate _ politically subversive material. It is this part of the communications revolution which challenges repressive governments. In the old days photocopiers could be padlocked and scrupulous logs drawn up of their usage. To regulate a digital world, every terminal would have to be watched and every keystroke logged. The Nature of The Network The Internet was designed to military standards as a communications net that could continue functioning even if various nodes were nuclear bombed." It did this by breaking down signals into small packets and sending them through various surviving nodes until they got to their destination. This robustness is supposed to defy other types of attack as well. Somebody once said, “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”2? Because the Internet is a network composed of many other networks, and even more networks are being added The Internet and Democracy all the time, there really is no way that it can be centrally regulated, Infor- mation doesn’t flow top-down but in all directions and each recipient is also a potential publisher, There isn’t any bottleneck position that can be occupied in order to determine how information will be rationed out. The real transforming effect of the Internet is its breakdown of the information hicrarchy. Historically, the boundary to knowledge dissemination was that it was owned and distributed in an unequal hierarchy, from doctor to patient, lawyer to client, teacher to student, car salesman to buyer, ete. The information owner sets the criteria and price for its dissemination. The Internet has broken this barrier by eliminating impediments to global information sharing, thus equalizing the relationship between those who own information and those who want it.** This lack of order and hierarchy might sccm anarchic. Cyberspace is a teeming morass of information which can just as readily disgorge the plans to an atomic bomb* as a guide to flower arranging. Columnist Howard Rhein- gold wrote, “this decentralization of control means that the delivery system for salacious materials is the same worldwide one that delivers economic opportunity, educational resources, civic forums, and health advice.”** To federal judges in the United States, this anarchy was all to the good. Overturning the Communications Decency Act, a hamhanded attempt to censor the Internet, they explained that “the strength of our liberty depends on the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First AmendmentThe Internet and Democracy protects. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion.” Roadblocks on the Information Superhighway Neither of these considerations, the technical difficulty of censoring the Net and the infringement of free speech or human rights, bothers repressive governments in the least. When one computer company owner in Shanghai sold 30,000 email addresses to a US based dissident website, he wasn’t prosecuted for violating the privacy of the address holders. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for “incitement to subvert the state.”"” ‘There is no personal privacy in China. Protecting the rights of citizens to air their opinions, access any information and voice their dissent is not high in the priority list of repressive states, “On the Internet, information and disinformation are disseminated equally quickly and are not always easy to distinguish,” one Singapore official is quoted, the message being that government will do this distinguishing for the people. On August 2000, China’s president Jiang Zemin in his speech to the World Computer Congress denounced the Internet’s “overflow of trash information that is anti-scientific, sham science and even harmful.” Clearly, Beijing doesn’t intend to Iet the people decide for themselves what information is “trash.” Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Manh Cam gives a good example of the weasel words repressive 10 states use to rationalize censorship. He says that while “information and the right to access information have became an urgent need for all nations...this should not come at the expense of either national sovereignty or the will of the people.” ‘Asan academician from Chile puts it, “in this time, these days, the censors’ desire is to close our eyes, shut our mouths and close our cars, too.”*" ‘Technologically, although repres- sive states can’t control the entire Internet, they can filter the bits that arrive at their national borders, using firewalls based on what is in effect an enormous and ever-changing “Index of Forbidden Sites.” There are thousands of these no-go web addresses. China’s list includes Western media, human rights organizations and Taiwan-based political sites.*? Vietnam blocks political and religious sites and rummages through email.? Of course, porn sites are banned outright by these countries, along with Malaysia and Singapore. Censors use proxy servers and root access to look over their citizens” shoulders as they surf. They employ software that examines email, looking for telltale phrases. The software used by police states for filtering content is the same as that sold in the US for parents to filter out pornographic content for their kids, IT companies are right now developing more sophis- ticated methods of violating personal privacy online — methods which repressive governments will no doubt use in there turn. In this sense the issue of Internet regulation is a seamless garment, of concern to activists and ordinary users.