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By Root 1858 0

to do something about each of those three authoritarian pillars. The danger here, of course, is that Western leaders might, once again, frame the solutions in intimately familiar Cold War terms, where the default response to the censorship practices of the Soviet Union was to blast even more information through the likes of Radio Free Europe. This is an urge that needs to be resisted. The strategy behind the existence of Radio Free Europe and other similar broadcasting services during the Cold War was relatively straightforward. By funding more radio broadcasts, Western policymakers wanted to ensure that authoritarian propaganda would be countered, if not weakened; the draconian system of censorship would be undermined; and more listeners would doubt the central premises of communism as a result.

With technologies like the radio, it was relatively easy to grasp how certain inputs produced certain outputs. Thus, when the Soviet authorities were jamming its radio stations, the West reacted by turning up the volume—in part because, being in charge of all the programming, it was confident that exposure to its broadcasts would have the desired effect of politicizing the masses. The Soviets couldn’t just take the Western radio signal and use it to fight back, nor could listeners avoid political programming and opt for entertainment only (as already stated, not all Western radio programs were political, but even lifestyle shows were usually aimed at revealing the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet system).

There is no such certainty about the Internet; the West has far less command over it as an instrument than it did in the case of radio. The Internet is a much more capricious technology, producing side effects that can weaken the propaganda system but enhance the power of the surveillance apparatus or, alternatively, that can help to evade censorship but only at the expense of making the public more susceptible to propaganda. The Internet has made the three information pillars of authoritarianism much more interconnected, so Western efforts to undermine one pillar might ruin its efforts to do something about the other two.

Take one example: While it is tempting to encourage everyone to flock to social networking sites and blogs to avoid the control of the censors, it would also play into the hands of those in charge of surveillance and propaganda. The more connections between activists it can identify, the better for the government, while the more trust users have in blogs and social networks, the easier it is to use those networks to promote carefully disguised government messages and boost the propaganda apparatus. The only way to avoid making painful mistakes and strengthening authoritarianism in the process of promoting Internet freedom is to carefully examine how surveillance, censorship, and propaganda strategies have changed in the Internet era.

chapter four

Censors and Sensibilities

Western propaganda produced during the Cold War may not have been very convincing, but it was effective on at least one level: It cultivated a certain myth of authoritarianism that is hard to dispel a full decade into the twenty-first century. Many Western observers still imagine authoritarian states to be populated by hyperactive doubles of Arthur Koestler—smart, uncompromising in the face of terror, eager to take on existential risks in the name of freedom—while being governed by an intractable array of ridiculous Disney characters—stupid, distracted, utterly uninterested in their own survival, and constantly on the verge of group suicide. Struggle and opposition are the default conditions of the former; passivity and incompetence are the default condition of the latter. All it takes to change the world, then, is to link the rebels with each other, expose them to a stream of shocking statistics they have never seen, and hand out a few shiny gadgets. Bingo! A revolution is already on its way, for perpetual revolt, according to this view, is the natural condition of authoritarianism.

This highly stylized account of modern authoritarianism