The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [131]
Web 2.0 has moved from the periphery of politics in authoritarian states to its very center—not because it has gained in importance or has acquired new abilities to topple governments, but because both leaders and media in the West grossly overstated its role, alerting the dictators to its future significance. But the significance of the Internet, at least when it comes to fostering new public spaces conducive to democratic norms, will only be felt in the long term—and only if the governments are hapless enough to stay out of the process of shaping these spaces according to their own agendas. There is nothing to celebrate here: Seemingly innocuous digital spaces that may have otherwise been left free of government supervision are now watched with more rigor and intensity than antigovernment gatherings in physical spaces. As Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and a career diplomat with decades of valuable experience in international politics, told the New York Times Magazine: “If and when in a particular country ... there’s a perception that Twitter or Facebook is a tool of the U.S. government ... that becomes dangerous for the company, and it becomes dangerous for people who are using that tool. It doesn’t matter what the reality is.... There is some sort of a line there, and we [in the U.S. government] have to respect that line.”
As the world learns about the mysterious but never substantiated role that Twitter played in Iran, about equally mysterious collaboration between Google and the National Security Agency, and about foreign trips that the U.S. State Department organizes for Silicon Valley executives (so far, they have taken such trips to India, Iraq, Mexico, Syria, and Russia), many authoritarian governments are beginning to feel uneasy, even though most of the Internet activities pursued by their citizens are still as silly as they used to be. The only difference is that now the Web is being perceived as some kind of a “made in America” digital missile that could undermine authoritarian stability. When it comes to such sensitive services as email, this is not an entirely irrational reaction. How might the American government react if it learned that the vast majority of its citizens had their email managed by a Chinese company that had extensive contacts with the People’s Liberation Army? A government does not need to be authoritarian to feel threatened when its citizens store all their secrets on foreign servers.
Many governments are only now beginning to realize how tightly their own communication systems are tied to American infrastructure. “The dominance of American companies in the software and hardware industries as well as in web-based services affords US government agencies huge advantages in monitoring what is happening out in cyberspace,” notes the political commentator Misha Glenny. It’s logical that more governments will try to challenge that dominance. Even though the notion of “information sovereignty”—the idea that governments might have legitimate concerns over the nationalities and allegiances of those who mediate their information markets—has been somewhat discredited by the fact that so many Chinese and Cuba propaganda officials like to invoke it in their speeches, it is poised to rise in importance in proportion to the role of the Internet in international politics. (Judging by its nervous response to transnational information powerhouses like WikiLeaks, the U.S. government is increasingly concerned about its information sovereignty as well.)
Given the amount of research and technology money coming out of America’s defense and intelligence