The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [98]
The advantages of such activism are undeniable. Unlike blogging and tweeting, which require an Internet connection, text messaging is cheap and ubiquitous, and it doesn’t require much training. Protesters using mobile phones to organize public rallies have become the true darlings of the international media. Protesters in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Ukraine have all taken advantage of mobile technology to organize and challenge their governments. This technology is not without its shortcomings and vulnerabilities, however.
First and foremost, authorities can shut down mobile networks whenever they find it politically expedient. And they do not have to cut off the entire country; it’s possible to disconnect particular geographic regions or even parts of the city. For example, during the unsuccessful color revolution in Belarus in 2006, the authorities turned off mobile coverage in the public square where protesters were gathering, curbing their ability to communicate with each other and the outside world (the authorities claimed that there were simply too many people using mobiles on the square and the mobile networks couldn’t cope with the overload). The Moldovan authorities made a similar move in spring 2009, when they turned off mobile networks in the central square of Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, thus greatly hampering the communication capacity of those leading the local edition of the Twitter revolution. Such shutdowns can also be on a larger, national scale and last longer. In 2007 the government of Cambodia declared a “tranquility period,” during which all three mobile operators agreed to turn off text messaging for two days (one of the official explanations was that it would help keep voters from being flooded with campaign messages).
Many authorities have mastered the art of keyword filtering, whereby text messages containing certain words are never delivered to their intended recipients. Or they may be delivered, but the authorities will take every step to monitor or punish their authors. In 2009 police in Azerbaijan reprimanded forty-three people who voted for an Armenian performer (Armenia and Azerbaijan are at war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabach territory) in the popular Eurovision contest, summoning some of them to police headquarters, where they were accused of undermining national security, and forced to write official explanations. The votes were cast by SMS. In January 2010, China Daily, China’s official English-language newspaper, reported that mobile phone companies in Beijing and Shanghai began suspending services to cellphone users who were found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy” content, which is the Chinese government’s favorite euphemism for “smut.”
This means that China’s mobile operators would now be comparing all text messages sent by their users to a list of banned words and blocking users who send messages containing banned words. That’s a lot of messages to go through: China Mobile, one of China’s biggest mobile operators, processes 1.6 billion text messages per day. Even though the campaign officially claims to be fighting pornography, similar technology can be easily used to prevent the distribution of text messages on any topic; it all depends on the list of banned words. Not surprisingly, this list of “unhealthy words” comes from China’s police. But there is also plenty of traffic in the other direction—that is, from companies to the state. Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile’s CEO, stunned the attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2008 by claiming that his company provides data on its users to the government whenever the government demands it.
What’s worse, Western companies are always happy to provide authoritarian governments with technology that can make filtering of text messages easier. In early 2010, as American