The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [11]
The authorities, however, did not dismiss technology outright. They, too, were more than happy to harvest its benefits. They turned to text messaging—on a rather massive scale—to warn Iranians to stay away from street protests in the future. One such message, sent by the intelligence ministry, was anything but friendly: “Dear citizen, according to received information, you have been influenced by the destabilizing propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating. In case of any illegal action and contact with the foreign media, you will be charged as a criminal consistent with the Islamic Punishment Act and dealt with by the Judiciary.”
In the eyes of the Iranian government, the Western media was guilty of more than spreading propaganda; they accused CNN of “training hackers” after the channel reported on various cyber-attacks that Ahmadinejad’s opponents were launching on websites deemed loyal to his campaign. Recognizing that the enemy was winning the battle in the virtual world, one ayatollah eventually allowed pious Iranians to use any tool, even if it contravened Shari’a law, in their online fight. “In a war, anti-Shari’a [moves] are permissible; the same applies to a cyberwar. The conditions are such that you should fight the enemy in any way you can. You don’t need to be considerate of anyone. If you don’t hit them, the enemy will hit you,” proclaimed Ayatollah Alam Ahdi during a Friday Prayer sermon in 2010.
But the campaign against CNN was a drop in the sea compared to the accusations launched against Twitter, which the pro-Ahmadinejad Iranian media immediately took to be the real source of unrest in the country. An editorial in Javan, a hard-line Iranian newspaper, accused the U.S. State Department of trying to foment a revolution via the Internet by helping Twitter stay online, stressing its “effective role in the continuation of riots.” Given the previous history of American interference in the country’s affairs—most Iranians still fret about the 1953 coup masterminded by the CIA—such accusations are likely to stick, painting all Twitter users as a secret American revolutionary vanguard. In contrast to the tumultuous events of 1953, the Twitter Revolution did not seem to have its Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson and the coordinator of CIA’s Operation Ajax, which resulted in the overthrow of the nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. But in the eyes of the Iranian authorities the fact that today’s digital vanguards have no obvious charismatic coordinators only made them seem more dangerous. (The Iranian propaganda officials could not contain their glee when they discovered that Kermit Roosevelt was a close relative of John Palfrey, the faculty codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a think tank that the U.S. State Department had funded to study the Iranian blogosphere.)
Other governments also took notice, perhaps out of fear that they, too, might soon have a Twitter Revolution on their hands. Chinese authorities interpreted Washington’s involvement in Iran as a warning sign that digital revolutions facilitated by American technology companies are not spontaneous but carefully staged affairs. “How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about?” pondered an editorial in the People’s Daily, the chief mouthpiece of the Communist Party. “It was because online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter microblogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up, and sowed discord between the followers of conservative reformist factions.” Another major outlet of government propaganda, Xinhua News Agency, took a more philosophical view, announcing that “information technology that has brought mankind all kinds of benefits has this time become a tool for interfering in the internal