Daily EM

As some of you my know, my essay about the Internet in authoritarian states is the cover story of December issue of Prospect. Patrick Meier wrote a long post, raising some issues about my arguments (much of his criticism and my response won’t make sense until you read the piece, which is currently for subscribers only but that will change soon). Here are my responses to all substantial points raised - in the order of appearance in Patrick’s post:

1. There is no connection whatsoever between my remarks on “analogue activism” and “torture vs hacking”. My remarks about the latter were actually used to indicate that by torturing activists, authorities can now get access to their passwords, social networks, inboxes, etc - and thus get hold of the entire networks. This actually only strengthens my argument that analogue activism was much safer.

2. The work that Nathan Freitas and others are doing to make communications more secure is important - no disagreement there. In my essay, however, I did concede that point: “professional” activists/dissidents are, indeed, probably better protected now than ever (which Patrick acknowledges me doing by summarizing my point as “the internet can give dissidents secure and cheap tools of communication”). I doubt that any regular users of the Internet in Russia, China or Iran have ever heard of what Freitas is doing or are going to use those services anytime soon.

3. The reason why I quote from Lohmann’s paper is not because there is nothing more current but because that paper triggered a whole body of scholarship on the use of information cascades in protests (Google Scholar identifies 173 papers quoting it). Most recently, it was invoked by Clay Shirky in his popular book “Here Comes Everybody”. Patrick has completely omitted that fact in his review. Had Clay not based his argument in the book on Lohmann’s paper, I would probably not have mentioned it, as it was brought up in a section about Shirky.

4. Patrick misrepresents what I wrote about the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar groups. The point was not that they are using it in their daily operations- that’s a well-known fact - but that they are filling in the vacuum left by the state, and that one consequence of promoting “civil society 2.0″ would be that these groups, who arguably actually are civil society, will rise to fill in the void. No need to quote any nonsense from RAND here - I wasn’t talking about extremism or terrorism.

5. We can only guess what the results of the attacks on Estonia and Georgia are, as neither government has released exact figures of financial damage caused. We do know, however, that some industries - like online banking - experienced temporary slowdowns. It doesn’t make sense to quibble over the exact magnitude, when the only point I was trying to make is that the state is losing control to decentralized networks.

6. The number of Internet users in China alone is meaningless - and Patrick knows it. If he is that much into data, why doesn’t he quote what % of the Chinese users use Tor on a regular basis or are actually writing all their emails backwards? Again, he completely misrepresents my point: yes, the activists and dissidents can write backwards as much as they like to trick the censors, but the regular folk won’t probably be doing that - and it’s the regular folk which matters most when you need to build a mass movement.

7. The argument about pornography - again, this is not every a crude summary of what I was saying and I am not even going to argue with you here. Patrick needs to read up on rational ignorance and consumption of public vs private information goods.

8. The point about FOSS and Ushahidi is completely irrelevant to what I was saying about NGOs/philanthropy/foundation-supported models. I’d challenge Patrick to go visit offices of NGOs working in new media in Eastern Europe and see how much benefit they derive from the “culture of innovation” unleashed by FOSS. This is a complete misreading of what I was saying, which, to put it crudely, was that donors have no good ways of identifying/supporting talented new media entrepreneurs without ruining their incentives to innovate. How does FOSS fit in here?

Nothing else of substance to respond to there. For someone so obsessed with data, Patrick has produced no data at all to counter any of my arguments. I am all for data, but as long as academics like Patrick don’t produce any, we won’t be talking data any time soon.