The Cyber War Against Political Oppression & Censorship

In good news, Al Jazeera English reported this past January that Slim Amamou, a Tunisian blogger, was appointed Minister for Youth and Sport in the new Tunisian government. Under the censorship strictures of ex-dictator's Ben Ali's regime, Amamou was an active blogger and a CEO of a Tunisian web development company. According to Al Jazeera, he and several other Tunisian bloggers were circulating news and videos supporting protests in opposition to Ben Ali's government. Their Facebook passwords were hacked, accounts deleted and Amamou, along with another Tunisian blogger, were subsequently arrested and later released with Ben Ali's disgraceful exit from Tunisia.

Although the Internet has brought a tremendous amount of opportunity for the exchange of news, views, and ideas on a global scale it has also proven to be politically ambiguous territory and a more contentious ground for political battles especially in oppressive countries where individual bloggers are transforming into revolutionaries. Bloggers have proven to be a potent political force in countries with stringent censorship policies and state-run media, so much so that they are subject to arrest, threats on their lives, and torture. Amamou is not the first blogger to be arrested in consequence of writing or spreading information criticizing government actions or rallying support for protests. In June 2008, The Guardian reported that that record numbers of bloggers had been arrested by repressive governments, such as China, Burma, Iran and Mubarak-ruled Egypt at the time.

More recently, several Syrian bloggers have been arrested or reported missing in light of the uprisings and protests taking place in the Middle East. They have proven to be courageous and outspoken. According to the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) cited in the last link above, one Syrian blogger, 28 year-old Hadifa (http://ahmadblogs.net/) "appealed... for support for recently detained bloggers and for political prisoners in the Golan Heights (a region that Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981). He had also posted demands to the Syrian authorities, comments about the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and advice on how to circumvent online censorship." The Daily Star also recently reported Lebanese bloggers were subjected to unprecedented crackdowns in 2010. In China, blogger and Guardian contributer, Ran Yunfei, has been arrested on the charge of 'subverting state power.'

Author Robert Greene wrote a particularly timely essay on his blog, The Descent of Power: An Interpretation of the Global Economic Crisis. His essay emphasizes that the Information revolution with the advent of the Internet and its ensuing social networks, forums, and news sharing platforms is devolving traditional centers of power by placing information access into the hands of individuals and in the process empowering them politically. A few relevant excerpts from his essay:

"In anthropology there is a concept known as historic fatality. What this means is that occasionally there emerges a certain idea, a certain way of doing things that is so immensely seductive to human beings that eventually it spreads around the globe and forever changes our way of life... We can make three generalizations at this point. When a group of people is given power, it forms a power center. This means, for instance, that a team of military leaders tends to think in two directions–how to promote the interests of the ruler, while also advancing its own agenda. Things now become political, as their interests will clash with other power centers. The ruler must now manage this growing complexity. The power environment becomes increasingly dangerous. 

Second, once people have been given power on this level, they do not want to give it back or return to an older way of governing. They work to keep what they have and extend their power base. And finally, once power becomes diluted and divided this way, it tends to keep on dividing, like a split atom. More and more people must be brought in to keep the whole functioning. And so over the course of centuries, power slowly became less and less concentrated... To a lesser degree we could talk of modern media as another power center that came to prominence in the 20th century, which in turn acted to dissolve and dilute previous concentrations of influence... Of course there remain concentrations of power and wealth in the world today. But on the other hand, there is no denying the remarkable evolution and dilution of power from that time millennia ago when it was mostly in the hands of one man. 

From this position in the present we can project into the future a period of even greater dilution, as more and more people around the globe feel the right and necessity to have more control over their lives... What interests me here is not the technology, but how it changes our relationship to power and authority, altering in so many ways the social dynamic–how people interact with one another. In this instance, the Internet is flattening out relationships that were once hierarchical and funneled through various centers. This tends to eat away at the prestige and authority of traditional sources of information such as newspapers, or expert opinions. It calls into question the need for so many middlemen in the world, and reveals the dubious source of their power."

The Internet is one of those historic fatalities. Individuals no longer have to go through media "middleman" to get their information and therefore politically bias media bureaus and state-run media are no longer the primary source of information. Moreover, younger generations who have been educated outside their countries are more tech savvy and more likely to figure out ways around government censorship programming and firewalls. In the long run, that means even the most oppressive governments will be unable to control the access individuals have to information. Bloggers, "twitterers", Googlers, and Facebookers all now hold a stake on information - its sourcing, framing, and dissemination - and they have power. This makes the Internet a space of serious political impact and influence and that means that the war against political oppression is not just on the streets in protest but in the cyber sphere against censorship.

It will be interesting to see how the cyber war will develop over time in the century and who will ultimately win. It is not just the philosophical and legal ramifications of freedom of information which must be considered but also the political empowerment of individuals in the face of traditional pillars of information control, namely governments and big corporate media outlets.
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Please visit the Committee to Protect Bloggers and the Committee to Protect Journalists to see what you can do to support politically dissenting bloggers around the world.