The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [88]
Belarus is not an isolated case, and other governments are quickly beginning to understand the immense intelligence value of information posted to social networking sites. Some even want to run their own sites, perhaps to save on surveillance costs. In May 2010, having banned Facebook and sensing the unmet and growing demands for social networking services among their population, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications moved in to open their own social networking site, staffed with three hundred computer programmers, graphic designers, technicians, and editors. It is hard to say if it will become popular—with a name like GoOnline, it seems like a long shot—but from a government’s perspective, it is even easier to spy on members of a social network once it knows all their passwords.
Democratic governments have also succumbed to such practices. The Indian police in the disputed territory of Kashmir, for example, are paying close attention to anything Kashmir-related that is posted on Facebook. On finding something suspicious, they call the users, ask about their activities, and order them to report to police stations. (This has prompted many activist users in Kashmir to start registering under false names, a practice that Facebook, keen not to dilute the quality of its superb user base with false entries, strongly discourages.)
Not all social networking is harmful, of course. Being part of a network carries many advantages. For example, it’s much easier and cheaper to reach other members when such a need arises (e.g., before an upcoming protest). But membership in a network is something of a double-edged sword: Its usefulness can easily backfire if some segments get compromised and their relationships with other members become common knowledge. Before the advent of social media, it took a lot of effort for repressive governments to learn about the people dissidents are associated with. The secret police may have tracked one or two key contacts, but creating a comprehensive list—with names, photos, and contact information—was extremely expensive. In the past, the KGB resorted to torture to learn of connections between activists; today, they simply need to get on Facebook.
Unfortunately, there is still a widespread belief that authoritarian governments and their security services are too dumb and technophobic to go on social networking sites in search of such data. In his 2007 book Children of Jihad the U.S. State Department’s Jared Cohen writes that “the Internet is a place where Iranian youth can operate freely, express themselves, and obtain information on their own terms. [They] can be anyone and say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus.... It is true that the government tries to monitor their online discussions and interactions, but this is a virtually impossible enterprise.” This is simply factually wrong, as proven by the aftermath of the 2009 protests; for someone charged with developing effective Internet policy on Iran, Cohen is given to dangerously excessive cyber-utopianism. (One could only hope that it was not Cohen’s Panglossian optimism that Condoleezza Rice, who hired him to work for the State Department’s policy planning unit, was praising when she said that “Jared had insights into Iran that we [in the U.S. government] didn’t have.”) As it turns out, the Iranian authorities did spend a lot of time analyzing social networking sites in the aftermath of the elections and even used some of the information they gleaned to send