The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [126]
Adjusting this concept to the Internet era raises many interesting questions. Would Western powers allow foreign radio stations broadcasting ethnic prejudice and hatred over the Internet to continue operating if there was a possibility of another genocidal war? Such was the unfortunate role of the radio in Rwanda and Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, only the media hadn’t yet shifted online. The liberal interventionists in the West probably would want to retain that capability; as Metzl rightly pointed out in 1997, “the free flow provisions of international telecommunications law hardly trump the revisions of the genocide convention that make inciting genocide illegal under international law.” The lack of a quick “off” button that could simply shut down most Internet-based communications in a given region would become apparent the moment a large-scale genocide struck. If anything, the West wants to promote Internet freedom with a few giant asterisks, but the asterisks somehow get lost in translation.
This may seem like an overblown concern—ISPs may simply be down during the next genocide—but we have to remember that Western governments, concerned as they are about terrorism, will always want to preserve the ability to turn parts of the Internet off, if only temporarily or if only to a few foreign websites. Few sane policymakers would endorse a foreign policy that doesn’t provide for such capability. Actually, such temporary Internet shutdowns happen all the time, even when no genocide is taking place. In 2008 the U.S. military launched cyber-attacks against an Islamist Internet forum in Saudi Arabia—ironically, itself first set up by the CIA to learn more about the jihadists’ plans—to prevent the jihadists from collaborating and launching joint attacks on American targets in Iraq.
Cyber-attacks present us with an intellectually complex case that deserves a much more rigorous treatment than is allowed by inherently reductionist concepts like Internet freedom. When Hillary Clinton proclaimed that “countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation,” she forgot to mention that American hackers, too, regularly launch cyber-attacks on the websites of governments they do not like. Most recently, this happened during the Iranian protests, when many Americans and Europeans eagerly joined an extremely well-publicized—mostly over Twitter—campaign to launch cyber-attacks on the websites of the Iranian government and thus thwart their ability to spread lies and propaganda. “The public’s ability to strike back is something that every government should be reminded of from time to time” is how Matthew Burton, a former analyst with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency who participated in the attacks, justified his involvement. But this was not such a good idea after all: The attacks slowed down the Iranian Internet, making it harder to upload photos and videos from the street protests.
The most interesting part about this cyber-campaign was that American authorities did not react to it. The problem with such a seemingly cool stance is that when similar attacks were launched against the governments of Estonia and Georgia—supposedly by Russian nationalists—many officials on both sides of the Atlantic were quick to demand that Russia should stop tolerating its hackers and prosecute them. It sounded like a credible admonishment, but America’s inaction in Iran meant that the United States, at least, ceded that moral ground. It’s hard to avoid accusations of duplicity when America’s own citizens—including former spies like Burton—openly spearhead attacks on the websites of a sovereign country that they happen to dislike. Despite Hillary Clinton’s unambiguous proclamations to the contrary, Western policymakers simply