The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [10]
The historic significance of what may have seemed like a simple email was not lost on the New York Times, which described it as “another new-media milestone” for the Obama administration, attesting to “the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.” The New York Times may have exaggerated the amount of deliberation that the Obama administration invested in the issue (a White House spokesman immediately downplayed the significance of the “milestone” by claiming that “this wasn’t a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff”), but the Gray Lady was spot on in assessing its overall importance.
Contrary to Marc Ambinder’s prediction, when future historians look at what happened in those few hot weeks in June 2009, that email correspondence—which the State Department chose to widely publicize to bolster its own new media credentials—is likely to be of far greater importance that anything the Green Movement actually did on the Internet. Regardless of the immediate fate of democracy in Iran, the world is poised to feel the impact of that symbolic communication for years to come.
For the Iranian authorities, such contact between its sworn enemies in the U.S. government and a Silicon Valley firm providing online services that, at least as the Western media described it, were beloved by their citizens quickly gave rise to suspicions that the Internet is an instrument of Western power and that its ultimate end is to foster regime change in Iran. Suddenly, the Iranian authorities no longer saw the Internet as an engine of economic growth or as a way to spread the word of the prophet. All that mattered at the time was that the Web presented an unambiguous threat that many of Iran’s enemies would be sure to exploit. Not surprisingly, once the protests quieted down, the Iranian authorities embarked on a digital purge of their opponents.
In just a few months, the Iranian government formed a high-level twelve-member cybercrime team and tasked it with finding any false information—or, as they put it, “insults and lies”—on Iranian websites. Those spreading false information were to be identified and arrested. The Iranian police began hunting the Internet for photos and videos that showed faces of the protesters—numerous, thanks to the ubiquity of social media—to publish them on Iranian news media websites and ask the public for help in identifying the individuals. In December 2009 the pro-Ahmadinejad Raja News website published a batch of thirty-eight photos with sixty-five faces circled in red and a batch of forty-seven photos with about a hundred faces circled in red. According to the Iranian police, public tip-offs helped to identify and arrest at least forty people. Ahmadinejad’s supporters may have also produced a few videos of their own, including a clip—which many in the opposition believed to be a montage—that depicted a group of protesters burning a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. If people had believed that the footage was genuine, it could have created a major split in the opposition, alienating vast swathes of the Iranian population.
The police or someone acting on their behalf also went searching for personal details—mostly Facebook profiles and email addresses—of Iranians living abroad, sending them threatening messages and urging them not to support the Green Movement unless they wanted to hurt their relatives back in Iran. In the meantime, the authorities were equally tough on Iranians in the country, warning them to stay away from social networking sites used by the opposition. The country’s police chief Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam warned that those who incited others to protest or issued appeals “have committed a worse crime than those who come to the streets.” Passport control