The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [116]
While little is known of any Haystack-related arrests in Iran, it’s not so hard to imagine what would have happened if Haystack did go into mass distribution in the country. How many Iranians would learn that Haystack violated many of the good practices that an ideal anticensorship tool should aspire to when the U.S. government happily granted it an export license and Secretary Clinton even mentioned it in passing in one of her interviews?
Many Iranian users may be no more sophisticated about such matters than American journalists who chose to pen admiring reviews of Haystack. Differences between various circumvention technologies are difficult to grasp for nontechnologists; many may mistakenly believe that Haystack is safer than it really is simply because the U.S. government thought it a worthwhile export. Not surprisingly, the endorsement by the U.S. government only raised Haystack’s profile, resulting in even more admiration by the media.
Clearly, the way in which the review process works currently is flawed, and some may even say dangerous. While many have called for the sanctions to be scrapped altogether, there are surely less radical ways in which the process could be driven by the assessment of the actual features of a technology rather than the ability of its founders to generate buzz in the media and among policymakers.
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If this could be of any consolation to Iranians, they are not alone in their predicament; countries like Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe, and certain areas of Sudan also face various sanctions imposed by the U.S. government. Fortunately, some of them are highly targeted, as is the case of Belarus and Zimbabwe, where they cover only dozens of so-called specially designated nationals, mostly current and former government officials (but also entire organizations) who have been known to engage in outrageous abuses of power.
In theory, such targeting sounds like a great way to prevent the effects of sanctions extending to innocent individuals. But the reality is much more complex. Unfortunately, many American Internet companies would rather not take the chance that some crony of Robert Mugabe has covertly or overtly taken virtual residence on their site, as this could lead to fines and even jail time for their executives. The only way to avoid such risk is to extensively vet all new users from Zimbabwe, a practice so expensive and time-consuming that many companies, particularly those that don’t have large compliance budgets, prefer simply to ban all Zimbabwean nationals and even specify that in their terms of service. (The fact that Zimbabwe is not an important profit center also means that such a decision is relatively easy to make.) Besides, it takes a lot of optimism to believe that American Internet companies would all work to address the differences in the nature of sanctions imposed on different countries. Finding how the differences in sanctions imposed on Cuba and Syria should translate into the provision of specific services to their nationals is a task that often requires nothing short of an Ivy League law degree. Most companies simply opt for the lowest common denominator—a blanket ban on all nationals of those countries.
Often this results in rather surreal situations, in which an American company would cite the regulations of the U.S. government to stop providing Internet services to the entities and individuals that enjoy the moral or financial support of the U.S. government. Consider what BlueHost, one of the largest Internet hosting providers in the United States, did to the websites of the Belarusian-American Studies Association, a DC-based nonprofit entity that is frequently consulted by the U.S. State Department on Belarus policy, and Kubatana, one of the leading anti-Mugabe