Secretary Clinton’s recent speech on Internet Freedom has signaled a strong interest from the US State Department in promoting the use of the internet to promote political reforms in closed societies. It makes sense that the State Department would look to support existing projects to circumvent internet censorship. The New York Times reports that a group of senators is urging the Secretary to apply existing funding to support the development and expansion of censorship circumvention programs, including Tor, Psiphon and Freegate.

I’ve spent a good part of the last couple of years studying internet circumvention systems. My colleagues Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I released a study last year that compared the strengths and weaknesses of different circumvention tools. Some of my work at Berkman is funded by a US state department grant that focuses on continuing to study and evaluate these sorts of tools and I spend a lot of time trying to coordinate efforts between tool developers and people who need access to circumvention tools to publish sensitive content.

I strongly believe that we need strong, anonymized and useable censorship circumvention tools. But I also believe that we need lots more than censorship circumvention tools, and I fear that both funders and technologists may overfocus on this one particular aspect of internet freedom at the expense of other avenues. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies.

So here’s a provocation: We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.

I don’t mean that internet censorship circumvention systems don’t work. They do – our research tested several popular circumvention tools in censored nations and discovered that most can retrieve blocked content from behind the Chinese firewall or a similar system. (There are problems with privacy, data leakage, the rendering of certain types of content, and particularly with usability and performance, but the systems can circumvent censorship.) What I mean is this – we couldn’t afford to scale today’s existing circumvention tools to “liberate” all of China’s internet users even if they all wanted to be liberated.

Circumvention systems share a basic mode of operation – they act as proxies to let you retrieve blocked content. A user is blocked from accessing a website by her ISP or that ISP’s ISP. She wants to read a page from Human Rights Watch’s webserver, which is accessible at IP address 70.32.76.212. But that IP address is on a national blacklist, and she’s prevented from receiving any content from it. So she points her browser to a proxy server at another address – say 123.45.67.89 – and asks a program on that server to retrieve a page from the HRW server. Assuming that 123.45.67.89 isn’t on the national blacklist, she should be able to receive the HRW page via the proxy.

During the transaction, the proxy is acting like an internet service provider. Its ability to provide reliable service to its users is constrained by bandwidth – bandwidth to access the destination site and to deliver the content to the proxy user. Bandwidth is costly in aggregate, and it costs real money to run a proxy that’s heavily used.

Some systems have tried to reduce these costs by asking volunteers to share them – Psiphon, in its first design, used home computers hosted by volunteers around the world as proxies, and used their consumer bandwidth to access the public internet. Unfortunately, in many countries, consumer internet connections are optimized to download content and are much slower when they are uploading content. These proxies could get the homepage at hrw.org pretty quickly, but they took a very long time to deliver the page to the user behind the firewall. Psiphon is no longer primarily focused on trying to make proxies hosted by volunteers work. Tor is, but Tor nodes are frequently hosted by universities and companies who have access to large pools of bandwidth. Still, available bandwidth is a major constraint to the usability of the Tor system. The most usable circumvention systems today – VPN tools like Relakks or Witopia – charge users significant sums annually to defray bandwidth costs.

Let’s assume that systems like Tor, Psiphon and Freegate receive additional funding from the State Department. How much would it cost to provide proxy internet access for… well, China? China reports 384 million internet users, meaning we’re talking about running an ISP capable of serving more than 25 times as many users as the largest US ISP. According to CNNIC, China consumes 866,367 Mbps of international internet bandwidth. It’s hard to get estimates for what ISPs pay for bandwidth, though conventional wisdom suggests prices between $0.05 and $0.10 per gigabyte. Using $0.05 as a cost per gigabyte, the cost to serve the Internet to China would be $13,608,000 per month, $163.3 million a year in pure bandwidth charges, not counting the costs of proxy servers, routers, system administrators, customer service. Faced with a bill of that magnitude, the $45 million US senators are asking Clinton to spend quickly looks pretty paltry.

There’s an additional complication – we’re not just talking about running an ISP – we’re talking about running an ISP that’s very likely to be abused by bad actors. Spammers, fraudsters and other internet criminals use proxy servers to conduct their activities, both to protect their identities and to avoid systems on free webmail providers, for instance, which prevent users from signing up for dozens of accounts by limiting an IP address to a certain number of signups in a limited time period. Wikipedia found that many users used open proxies to deface their system and now reserve the right to block proxy users from editing pages. Proxy operators have a tough balancing act – for their proxies to be useful, people need to be able to use them to access sites like Wikipedia or YouTube… but if people use those proxies to abuse those sites, the proxy will be blocked. As such, proxy operators can find themselves at war with their own users, trying to ban bad actors to keep the tool useful for the rest of the users.

I’m skeptical that the US State Department can or wants to build or fund a free ISP that can be used by millions of simultaneous users, many of whom may be using it to commit clickfraud or send spam. I know – because I’ve talked with many of them – that the people who fund blocking-resistant internet proxies don’t think of what they’re doing in these terms. Instead, they assume that proxies are used by users only in special circumstances, to access blocked content.

Here’s the problem. A nation like China is blocking a lot of content. As Donnie Dong notes in a recent blogpost, five of the ten most popular websites worldwide are blocked in China. Those sites include YouTube and Facebook, sites that eat bandwidth through large downloads and long sessions. Perhaps it would be realistic to act as an ISP to China if we were just providing access to Human Rights Watch – it’s not realistic if we’re providing access to YouTube.

Proxy operators have dealt with this question by putting constraints on the use of their tools. Some proxy operators block access to YouTube because it’s such a bandwidth hog. Others block access to pornography, both because it uses bandwidth and to protect the sensibilities of their sponsors. Others constrain who can use their tools, limiting access to the tools to people coming from Iranian or Chinese IPs, trying to reduce bandwidth use by American high school kids who’ve got YouTube blocked by their school. In deciding who or what to block, proxy operators are offering their personal answers to a complicated question: What parts of the internet are we trying to open up to people in closed societies? As we’ll address in a moment, that’s not such an easy question to answer.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we could afford to proxy China, Iran, Myanmar and others’ international traffic. We figure out how to keep these proxies unblocked and accessible (it’s not easy – the operators of heavily used proxy systems are engaged in a fast-moving cat and mouse game) and we determine how to mitigate the abuse challenges presented by open proxies. We’ve still got problems.

Most internet traffic is domestic. In China, we estimate (Hal’s got a paper coming out shortly) that roughly 95% of total traffic is within the country. Domestic censorship matters a great deal, and perhaps a great deal more than censorship at national borders. As Rebecca MacKinnon documented in “China’s Censorship 2.0“, Chinese companies censor user-generated content in a complex, decentralized way. As a result, a good deal of controversial material is never published in the first place, either because it’s blocked from publication or because authors decline to publish it for fear of having their blog account locked or cancelled. We might assume that if Chinese users had unfettered access to Blogger, they’d publish there. Perhaps not – people use the tools that are easiest to use and that their friends use. A seasoned Chinese dissident might use Blogger, knowing she’s likely to be censored – an average user, posting photos of his cat, would more likely use a domestic platform and not consider the possibility of censorship until he found himself posting controversial content.

In promoting internet freedom, we need to consider strategies to overcome censorship inside closed societies. We also need to address “soft censorship”, the co-opting of online public spaces by authoritarian regimes, who sponsor pro-government bloggers, seed sympathetic message board threads, and pay for sympathetic comments. (Evgeny Morozov offers a thoroughly dark view of authoritarian use of social media in How Dictators Watch Us On The Web.)

We also need to address a growing menace to online speech – attacks on sites that host controversial speech. When Turkey blocks YouTube to prevent Turkish citizens from seeing videos that defame Ataturk, they prevent 20 million Turkish internet users from seeing the content. When someone – the Myanmar government, patriotic Burmese, mischievous hackers – mount a distributed denial of service attack on Irrawaddy (an online newspaper highly critical of the Myanmar government), they (temporarily) prevent everyone from seeing it.

Circumvention tools help Turks who want to see YouTube get around a government block. But they don’t help Americans, Chinese or Burmese see Irrawaddy if the site has been taken down by DDoS or hacking attacks. Publishers of controversial online content have begun to realize that they’re not just going to face censorship by national filtering systems – they’re going to face a variety of technical and legal attacks that seek to make their servers inaccessible.

There’s quite a bit publishers can do to increase the resilience of their sites to DDoS attack and to make their sites more difficult to filter. To avoid blockage in Turkey, YouTube could increase the number of IP addresses that lead to the webserver and use a technique called “fast-flux DNS” to give the Turkish government more IP addresses to block. They could maintain a mailing list to alert users to unblocked IP addresses where they could access YouTube, or create a custom application which disseminates unblocked IPs to YouTube users who download the ap. These are all techniques employed by content sites that are frequently blocked in closed societies.

YouTube doesn’t take these anti-blocking measures for at least two reasons. One, they’ve generally preferred to negotiate with nations who filter the internet to try to make their sites reachable again than to work against them by fighting filtering. (This attitude may be changing now that Google has announced their intention not to cooperate with Chinese censorship.) Second, YouTube doesn’t really have an economic incentive to be unblocked in Turkey. If anything, being blocked in Turkey (and perhaps even in China) may be to their economic advantage.

Sites that enable user-created content are supported by advertising traffic. Advertisers are generally more excited about reaching users in the US (who’ve got credit cards, more disposable income and are inclined to buy online) than users in China or Turkey. Some suspect that the introduction of “lite” versions of services like Facebook are designed to serve users in the developing world at lower cost, since those users rarely create income. In economic terms, it may be hard to convince Facebook, YouTube and others to continue providing services to closed societies, where they have a tough time selling ads. And we may need to ask more of them – to take steps to ensure that they remain accessible and useful in censorious countries.

In short:
- Internet circumvention is hard. It’s expensive. It can make it easier for people to send spam and steal identities.
- Circumventing censorship through proxies just gives people access to international content – it doesn’t address domestic censorship, which likely affects the majority of people’s internet behavior.
- Circumventing censorship doesn’t offer a defense against DDoS or other attacks that target a publisher.

To figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” In other words, do we have a “theory of change” behind our desire to ensure people in Iran, Burma, China, etc. can access the internet? Why do we believe this is a priority for the State Department or for public diplomacy as a whole?

I think much work on internet censorship isn’t motivated by a theory of change – it’s motivated by a deeply-held conviction (one I share) that the ability to share information is a basic human right. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The internet is the most efficient system we’ve ever built to allow people to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, and therefore we need to ensure everyone has unfettered internet access. The problem with the Article 19 approach to censorship circumvention is that it doesn’t help us prioritize. It simply makes it imperative that we solve what may be an unsolvable problem.

If we believe that access to the internet will change closed societies in a particular way, we can prioritize access to those aspects of the internet. Our theory of change helps us figure out what we must provide access to. The four theories I list below are rarely explicitly stated, but I believe they underly much of the work behind censorship circumvention.

The suppressed information theory: if we can provide certain suppressed information to people in closed societies, they’ll rise up and challenge their leaders and usher in a different government. We might choose to call this the “Hungary ‘56 theory” – reports of struggles against communist governments around the world, reported into Hungary via Radio Free Europe, encouraged Hungarians to rebel against their leaders. (Unfortunately, the US didn’t support the revolutionaries militarily – as many in Hungary had expected – and the revolution was brutally quashed by a Soviet invasion.)

I generally term this the “North Korea theory”, because I think a state as closed as North Korea might be a place where un-suppressed information – about the fiscal success of South Korea, for instance – could provoke revolution. (Barbara Demick’s beautiful piece in the New Yorker, “The Good Cook“, gives a sense for how little information most North Koreans have about the outside world and how different the world looks from Seoul.) But even North Korea is less informationally isolated than we think – Dong-A Ilbo reports an “information belt” along the North Korea/China border where calls on smuggled mobile phones are possible from North to South Korea. Other nations are far more open – my friends in China tend to be extremely well informed about both domestic and international politics, both through using circumvention tools and because Chinese media reports a great deal of domestic and international news.

It’s possible that access to information is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for political revolution. It’s also possible that we overestimate the power and potency of suppressed information, especially as information is so difficult to suppress in a connected age.

The Twitter revolution theory: if citizens in closed societies can use the powerful communications tools made possible by the Internet, they can unite and overthrow their oppressors. This is the theory that led the State Department to urge Twitter to put off a period of scheduled downtime during the Iran elections protests. While it’s hard to make the case that technologies of connection are going to bring down the Iranian government (see Cameron Abadi’s piece in FP on the limitations of using Facebook to organize in Iran), good counterexamples exist, like the role of the mobile phone in helping to topple President Estrada in the Philippines.

There’s been a great deal of enthusiasm in the popular press for the Twitter revolution theory, but careful analysis reveals some limitations. The communications channels opened online tend to be compromised quickly, used for disinformation and for monitoring activists. And when protests get out of hand, governments of closed societies don’t hesitate to pull the plug on networks – China has blocked internet access in Xinjiang for months, and Ethiopia turned off SMS on mobile phone networks for years after they were used to organize street protests.

The public sphere theory: Communication tools may not lead to revolution immediately, but they provide a new rhetorical space where a new generation of leaders can think and speak freely. In the long run, this ability to create a new public sphere, parallel to the one controlled by the state, will empower a new generation of social actors, though perhaps not for many years.

Marc Lynch made a pretty persuasive case for this theory in a talk last year about online activism in the Middle East. It’s possible to make this case by looking at samizdat (self-published, clandestine media) in the former Soviet Union, which was probably more important as a space for free expression than it was as a channel for disseminating suppressed information. The emergence of leader like Vaclav Havel, whose authority was rooted in cultural expression as well as political power, makes the case that simply speaking out is powerful. But the long timescale of this theory makes it hard to test.

The theory we accept shapes our policy decisions. If we believe that disseminating suppressed information is critical – either to the public at large or to a small group of influencers – we might focus our efforts on spreading content from Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. Indeed, this is how many government forays into censorship circumvention began – national news services began supporting circumvention tools so their content (painstakingly created in languages like Burmese or Farsi) would be accessible in closed societies. This is a very efficient approach to anticensorship – we can ignore many of the problems associated with abusing proxies and focus on prioritizing news over other high-bandwidth uses, like the video of the cat flushing the toilet. Unfortunately, we’ve got a long track record that shows that this form of anticensorship doesn’t magically open closed regimes, which suggests that increasing our bet on this strategy might be a poor idea.

If we adopt the Twitter Revolution theory, we should focus on systems that allow for rapid communication within trusted networks. This might mean tools like Twitter or Facebook, but probably means tools like LiveJournal and Yahoo! Groups which gain their utility through exclusivity, allowing small groups to organize outside the gaze of the authorities. If we adopt the public sphere approach, we want to open any technologies that allow public communication and debate – blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and virtually anything else that fits under the banner of Web 2.0.

What does all this mean in terms of how the State Department should allocate their money to promote Internet Freedom? My goal was primarily to outline the questions they should be considering, rather than offering specific prescriptions. But here are some possible implications of these questions:

- We need to continue supporting circumvention efforts, at least in the short term. But we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that we can “solve” censorship through circumvention. We should support circumvention until we find better technical and policy solutions to censorship, not because we can tear down the Great Firewall by spending more.

- If we want more people using circumvention tools, we need to find ways to make them fiscally sustainable. Sustainable circumvention is becoming an attractive business for some companies – it needs to be part of a comprehensive internet freedom strategy, and we need to develop strategies that are sustainable and provide low/zero cost access to users in closed societies.

- As we continue to fund circumvention, we need to address usage of these tools to send spam, commit fraud and steal personal data. We might do this by relying less on IP addresses as an extensive, fundamental means of regulating bad behavior… but we’ve got to find a solution that protects networks against abuse while maintaining the possibility of anonymity, a difficult balancing act.

- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences. In doing so, we may gain those publishers as a valuable new set of allies as well as opening a new class of technical solutions.

- If our goal is to allow people in closed societies to access an online public sphere, or to use online tools to organize protests, we need to bring the administrators of these tools into the dialog. Secretary Clinton suggests that we make free speech part of the American brand identity – let’s find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission. We need to address the fact that making their platforms unblockable has a cost for content hosts and that their business models currently don’t reward them for providing service to these users.

- The US government should treat internet filtering – and more aggressive hacking and DDoS attacks – as a barrier to trade. The US should strongly pressure governments in open societies like Australia and France to resist the temptation to restrict internet access, as their behavior helps China and Iran make the case that their censorship is in line with international norms. And we need to fix US treasury regulations make it difficult and legally ambiguous for companies like Microsoft and projects like SourceForge to operate in closed societies. If we believe in Internet Freedom, a first step needs to be rethinking these policies so they don’t hurt ordinary internet users.

The danger in heeding Secretary Clinton’s call is that we increase our speed, marching in the wrong direction. As we embrace the goal of Internet Freedom, now is the time to ask what we’re hoping to accomplish and to shape our strategy accordingly.

Thanks to Hal Roberts, Janet Haven and Rebecca MacKinnon for help editing and improving this post. They’re responsible for the good parts – you can blame the rest on me.

UPDATE. Mowjcamp.com is back up! Friends at EFF were able to broker a conversation between Yahoo, Moniker, Melbourne IT and Access Now. The situation is complicated, and I’m still trying to understand the details of the resolution, but it’s fantastic news that the site is back up. Special thanks to friends at Yahoo! who ended up taking the brunt of the criticism for the downtime. That wasn’t fair, and was in part my fault for not understanding everyone’s role in the situation. Yahoo! worked extremely hard to resolve the situation after being called out and deserve special thanks for their hard work, as does everyone who took action to get this important site back online.

Twitter users may remember recent downtime for the microblogging site that didn’t involve the familiar fail whale. For a couple of hours on December 17th, 2009, Twitter’s home page was replaced with a picture of a green flag and the message “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army”. Twitter’s administrators explained that their domain name records had been “temporarily compromised”, pointing the twitter.com domain to a rogue site rather than to Twitter’s servers. Chinese search engine Baidu was hit with a similar attack on January 12th, also by the Iranian Cyber Army, and regained control of their site within four hours.

Screenshot of hacked mowjcamp.com site by Josh Self, cc.

It’s one thing to recover from this sort of political cyberattack when you’re a well-financed company and something entirely different when you’re a volunteer-run alternative news site. Mowjcamp.com, a popular citizen media site associated with Iran’s green movement, was hijacked the same day as Twitter, by the same attackers, using similar techniques. (A blog post from activist Austin Heap explains that the techniques were probably not identical, which may explain why it’s been harder to restore Mowjcamp.) It’s still down six weeks later. The story behind their struggle to get back online shows how vulnerable the internet is to this new form of attack and how disruptive it can be for a small, grassroots organization.

Mowjcamp has been a major channel for disseminating news and video from the Iranian green movement. Their YouTube channel, filled with videos from university protests, gives a sense for their content, and their English-language site has become a critical resource for journalists covering Iran’s protests. While Mowjcamp is now accessible online in Farsi at mowjcamp.ws, mowjcamp.com, .org and .net remain in limbo, resolving to a NameDrive.com domain parking page.

I’ve been in regular contact with the administrators of Mowjcamp as they’ve tried to regain control of their site. For six weeks, they’ve been getting the runaround from Yahoo! (where they’d originally registered the domain names) and Moniker (where the hackers moved control of the domain name). Yahoo has been informed that the site was illegally moved by hackers who managed to access a Yahoo Mail account and authorize a transfer to Moniker – they’ve told the site administrators that there’s nothing they can do, and the problem’s in Moniker’s hands. Moniker, in turn, tells the administrators that they’ve responded to Yahoo, which will resolve their problem. In the meantime, the site continues to be inaccessible from the URLs by which it is most widely known. (Yes, I’ve contacted friends within Yahoo! So have many other well-connected friends, who’ve put pressure on Moniker as well. That I’m complaining in this blogpost shows just how successful we’ve been so far going directly to the companies involved.)

AccessNow, an online free speech organization born in the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian election, has been working on behalf of Mowjcamp admins to regain control of their domain. (Some of the Mowjcamp administrators are in Iran – some are not. Those in Iran are at constant risk of arrest, which explains their need to remain anonymous and seek help from groups like AccessNow.) I traded email this weekend with Brett Solomon, Executive Director of AccessNow, who explains his frustration with the situation: “The system is clearly broken when multi-million dollar enterprises like Twitter and Baidu can retrieve their sites in a matter of hours, and yet we have been trying to get mowjcamp.org back for more 6 weeks now. We keep getting stonewalled despite the vital role the site plays for the Green Movement in Iran.”

When the “Iranian Cyber Army” attacked Twitter, they embarrassed a prominent technology company and made a striking political statement about the company’s apparent support for the Iranian opposition. (You may remember that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay maintenance to keep the service accessible in Iran during post-election protests.) But ICA’s attack on Mowjcamp is different – it’s a denial of service attack by bureaucracy.

I spoke last week with a Mowjcamp admin who explained that their site has been under near-constant attack for months. They’ve moved the site to Amazon Web Services machines so they can better fend off distributed denial of service attacks. The irony is that the attack that crippled Mowjcamp is far less technical than a DDOS – attackers compromised a webmail account which allowed them to intercept DNS control panel login information and issue an authorization code to move the site. The admin I spoke with tells me that attackers evidently attempted a move half a dozen times before they were successful in hijacking the Mowjcamp domains.

When Twitter was hijacked using similar means, it was easy for Twitter to prove to registrars that they were the legitimate owners of the domain names. That the Mowjcamp administrators are still struggling to regain their domain is evidence that the system doesn’t work for ordinary users, though it clearly accommodates prominent corporations. The hijackers may not have expected their hack to work for more than a few hours. That it remains unresolved six weeks later shows that the system isn’t prepared to handle the phenomenon of political domain name hijacking. Perhaps the dispute resolution process that Mowjcamp, Yahoo! and Moniker is going through will eventually give Mowjcamp control of their site. But the time the process has taken is crippling for a site releasing timely political information. Given the success of this attack, it’s a template for this same sort of harassment against political campaign sites, protest movements and citizen newsrooms – any site that needs to release information in a timely fashion.

At Berkman, we’ve been studying internet censorship for several years, focusing primarily on state-level internet filtering. We’re now seeing a rise in other forms of censorship, attacks that attempt to make websites inaccessible everywhere, not just from within a repressive state. These attacks use DDOS to make sites inaccessible, social engineering attacks to spearfish for critical information, and legal threats to encourage hosting providers to exile targeted websites. It’s been difficult to determine if these new attacks are sponsored by government entities or carried out by nationalist hackers acting independently of the government. In either case, these attacks appear to be on the rise, and Mowjcamp’s experience suggests that they can be devastatingly successful.

What could we do to fend off these sorts of attacks? Everyone running a human rights site needs to double check their security precautions. Ensure your domain is locked at your registrar. Make absolutely sure that no one else is accessing your webmail (check login records to see that no unfamiliar IPs have accessed your account.) Avoid cascading failures by removing login information for other sites from your webmail mailbox. Use strong passwords, and different passwords for different online services.

But there are steps the web community could take as well. If domain name hijacking becomes a common form of attack, groups like Mowjcamp will need help navigating bureaucracy and undoing the damage. The State Department has had a great deal to say about Internet Freedom in the past weeks – perhaps someone at State should be available to groups like Mowjcamp to help them work through bureaucratic red tape when they experience situations like this one. Companies like Yahoo! have made commitments to freedom of expression through their participation in efforts like the Global Network Initiative – perhaps they could back up their commitment to free speech principles by providing a prominent human rights group with some actual customer service? Maybe Yahoo! and other providers need a team that can respond to complex situations like this one and treat them as something other than routine customer service matters?

Mowjcamp’s situation is aggravated by US Treasury regulations that make it extremely difficult for Iranians (and citizens of a handful of other nations) to do business with US companies online. While Mowjcamp wanted to use US servers to host their politically sensitive content, the administrators living in Iran couldn’t directly register their site due to these Treasury restrictions. As a result, the Mowjcamp team is working through intermediaries rather that interacting directly to solve this problem. If Secretary Clinton wants to “to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights”, perhaps she could start by making it legal for Iranian dissidents to register and host sites in the United States. And if she were looking for a tangible way to make good on her rhetoric, perhaps her team at State could lend a hand to the people at Mowjcamp.

Many good friends are in Washington, DC today to hear Secretary Clinton’s speech on Internet Freedom, and will be offering their reactions across a swath of online and offline media. I’m enjoying my own brand of internet freedom, the one that allows me to get the transcript of her speech as it’s delivered and offer my reactions online, while helping Rachel look after the joy and terror of our lives. I’ll link to their posts or tweet them as they come in, but I was asked by friends at the Index on Censorship to offer some thoughts on the speech, and I thought I’d (expand on and) share what I wrote for them.

It was encouraging to hear Secretary Clinton sounding like a dyed in the wool cyberutopian. Her description of the Internet as a “new nervous system for the planet” reflects aspirations much more than reality. Yes, we’re getting information from Hunan and Haiti… but we’ve got a lot of work to do to ensure that these networks allow all people to speak and to be heard. That’s not just a function of open networks and a battle against censorship. It’s a challenge that forces us to consider digital divides, language barriers, parochialism and patterns of news coverage and information flows. (I’ll be talking about these issues in a lecture – delivered online – at Stanford tonight.) I’m excited to hear Secretary Clinton offer her unambiguous conviction that the internet is a force for positive connection, even in the face of dangerous uses by criminals or terrorists – I hope that we can move on from offering the potential of a “new nervous system” into a conversation about the difficult realities of achieving that vision.

I’d been worried that Clinton’s speech might propose a new “charter of internet rights”, an idea that’s been percolating in Washington circles since early in the Obama administration. I’ve opposed the idea that the US should propose a novel set of rights, both because the rights we’d advocate for are well covered in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly in article 19, and because US advocacy for a new set of rights would make it easier for some nations – including nations that actively censor the internet – to claim that the right to information on the Internet was a manifestation of US first amendment freedoms, rather than a universal right. I thought Clinton did an excellent job of connecting her support for a “freedom to connect” in American tradition and history, but rooting it in international law. (I doubt she meant to give such a boost to my friend David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference…) It’s hard for me to believe that the international institutions, like the UN Human Rights Council, will be especially effective guardians of these freedoms, given the embarrasing track record of international agencies like the ITU… but I think she’s wise to challenge international institutions to protect these rights.

I hadn’t heard about major policy initiatives linked to the speech, so I wasn’t especially surprised that there wasn’t much policy meat to the speech. (By the way, the speech had been scheduled well in advance of Google’s China announcements – it wasn’t a response to those developments. That, in turn, raises questions about the logic of the speech, since it wasn’t scheduled to be timely, or to make a major policy announcement. I think it’s simply a priority of her tenure, and a speech she’s wanted to give.) The US government is going to keep sponsoring tools and services that allow people to circumvent firewalls, as they’ve done for years. A number of commenters – and a couple of journalists – responded to my suggestion that Google could become a major player in the internet circumvention space by asking, “Wouldn’t that mean Google was declaring war on China?” If so, the US declared war on China years ago. Support for anticensorship tech is old news. Alec Ross has made clear – in some excellent speeches – that State would engage in diplomacy in the internet medium. The idea of a contest to develop new applications is cool, but not especially new.

What was interesting was hearing Clinton suggest that taking a stand against censorship should
become part of the “American brand”. It’s possible that we’re going to see the Google/China controversy revive discussion of using export bans to prohibit American companies from doing business with countries that censor. I think that’s a bad idea – it punishes a company like Cisco and provides more opportunity for Huawei, who are perfectly capable of building censorious routers all on their own. (A better path is the idea advocated by Tim Wu and others that the US seek trade sanctions against countries that censor the internet as an unfair restraint of trade.) By suggesting that companies embrace the branding opportunity of promoting freedom, I think she’s signalling a hope that companies will do the right thing rather than endorsing new export constraints.

The endorsement of the GNI was encouraging – GNI is a collaboration of major industry players, academics and NGOs (Berkman colleagues are closely involved in GNI, and I was involved in early meetings that led to the group’s formation.) Google’s been a big voice in GNI, and Clinton’s endorsement of the group sounded like like a hearty endorsement of their recent decision to change China business practices, and a challenge to other US companies to reconsider how they engage with nations that censor the Internet. Of course, it’s not clear that challenging companies to embrace their best aspirations is going to have any effect on Microsoft’s engagement with the Chinese market, for instance.

In other words, it’s encouraging to see Clinton and the State Department unambiguously on the right side of these issues. It’s hard to know whether there’s any concrete implications to these words today beyond a worthy set of aspirations. Here’s hoping the next step is a conversation about how we would move from the right intentions to real-world outcomes, not just on censorship, but on the provocative idea of the “freedom to connect” and the vision of a “new nervous system for the planet.”

Yesterday, Google announced a major change in their policy in engaging with China – they will no longer censor search results on Google.cn to comply with Chinese policy. This almost certainly means that Google.cn will be blocked by the Great Firewall and that Google will no longer be able to operate in China.

While this aspect of Google’s announcement is sparking a great deal of conversation online, it comes at the end of a bombshell of an announcement – Google’s decision follows what appears to be a coordinated act of espionage aimed at its servers by Chinese attackers. The attack resulted, Google reports, in a theft of their intellectual property. They also report that a goal of the attack was to access the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and supporters of Chinese human rights around the world. MacWorld reports that the attack targeted an internal system that Google had built to comply with search warrant requests for information on users. When it became clear that this internal system – evidently set up for the benefit of Chinese authorities – was being attacked and used to compromise Google’s internal networks, Google began discussions about disengaging from the world’s largest internet market.

There’s at least four ways to read Google’s decision:

Google decided to stop being evil.
Google has received reams of bad press from their decision to comply with Chinese government regulations and censor search results for Chinese users. It’s never been entirely clear to me why Google’s received more criticism than Microsoft – who admit they censored Chinese bloggers, and whose Chinese-language tools prevent posting of articles about human rights and democracy – or Yahoo, who turned over information on user Shi Tao to Chinese authorities that led to ten years imprisonment for “leaking state secrets”. I suspect we want to hold Google to a higher standard because they’ve put forth an informal motto: “Don’t be evil”, and compromising with the Chinese government looks like a violation of that stance.

Google’s taken steps to minimize the exposure of user data in China – services like Gmail, which contain sensitive personal data, or which permit publishing, like Blogger, are hosted in the US, not China. (This has made it harder for these tools to achieve market share against Chinese competitiors.) They censored in a more transparent fashion than some of their competitors, displaying a message at the bottom of each page, stating that sites had been removed from the results to comply with regulations. Google is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a partnership between industry, academia and the nonprofit community designed to develop best practices for engaging in closed societies like China.

In my opinion – shaped, no doubt, by the fact that I’ve got a lot of friends within Google and have worked closely with the company in a couple of contexts – Google was a lot less evil than some of its competitors. But continued involvement in China continued to be a thorn in the side of Google on the PR front, and I know many people within the company questioned whether engaging in China was worth the compromises it entailed. The move to leave the Chinese market may be an example of Google returning to its core values and demonstrating an unwillingness to compromise.

Google retreated from a very tough market.
Google wasn’t doing all that well in the Chinese search market – they were a distant second to Baidu, and faced extreme challenges in gaining market share. Google’s main properties – google.com and related sites – are frequently inaccesible through the Great Firewall, and Google’s Chinese site – google.cn – was subject to a great deal of scrutiny from the Chinese press and from regulators. CCTV ran an “exposé” on Google.cn, demonstrating – horror of horrors! – that the internet includes links to pornography – this story led to increased oversight of Google’s Chinese site. Friends within Google tell me that it was a constant struggle to respond to complaints from Chinese regulators, and that they believed competitors like Baidu were reporting Google’s alleged violations to regulators, increasing scrutiny on the company.

The situation within Google China was already quite complicated. Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s China chief, quit in September, giving no clear reasons for his departure. His departure started speculation that Google might be discovering that they couldn’t be competitive in a Chinese market without making even larger compromises to corporate ideals.

It’s hard to imagine Google walking away from a market as potentially lucrative as China, even if they were in a tough battle for second place. And they certainly didn’t walk away quietly. By (obliquely) accusing the Chinese government of involvement in corporate espionage and challenging the government to shut the company down for providing uncensored search, “Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it.” (Those evocative words are from top Chinablogger Imagethief.) This isn’t a temporary strategic retreat – this is a retreat where you detonate the bridges behind you.

Google abandoned Chinese users.
Despite its second place in the market behind Baidu, there are millions of dedicated Google users in China, and many of them are deeply disappointed today and worried about losing access to services they’ve grown to depend on. Reading their comments in translation on Global Voices, thanks to Bob Chen, it’s clear the frustration is less with Google than with the Chinese authorities. One translated tweet is especially poignant:

The sin of facebook is that it helps people know who they wanna know. The sin of Twitter is that it allows people to say what they wanna say. The sin of Google is that it lets people find what they wanna find, and Youtube let us see what we wanna see. So, they are all kicked away.

Bob also shares a joke about China in the years after Google’s departure:

People born in 90s: Today I stepped out of the Great Firewall and saw a foreign website named Google. Shit, it is all but a copy of Baidu.
Born in 00s: What do you mean by stepping out of Great Firewall?
Born in 10s: What do you mean by website?
Born in 20s: What is “foreign”?

Perhaps most striking is a campaign to lay flowers in front of Google’s headquarters in Beijing. Rebecca MacKinnon reports that Tsinghua University’s security department has banned students from taking flowers to Google headquarters without permission.

(Here’s a sympathetic view of Google’s decision to pull out from Chinese activist Michael Anti, who’s been censored in the past by Microsoft.)

Google is about to join the front lines of the anticensorship wars.
Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I published a study of tools designed to subvert and circumvent internet censorship a few months back, based on research we conducted over the course of three years. In the course of that research, we ended up with a simple realization about the design of censorship circumvention software:

A robust anti-censorship system has, at minimum, three components:
- Lots of non-contiguous IP addresses, making it difficult for censors to block the entry points into the system
- Huge amounts of bandwidth that can access the public internet, as a censorship circumvention system is basically an ISP
- Multiple methods to feed fresh IP addresses to your users

This isn’t a complete definition, of course – good anticensorship systems use SSL encryption to prevent keyword blocking, but that’s a solved problem. The three components above tend to be very hard for small anti-circumvention projects to solve. It’s very hard to obtain lots and lots of IP addresses, and very expensive to provision sufficient bandwidth… unless you’re Google, in which case, these obstacles should be trivial. There’s still lots of work that needs to be done ensuring that users of circumvention systems get fresh IP addresses, but a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today.

These tools would have a built-in market – the millions of users who were enjoying Google’s tools from within China – and could radically change the landscape of the internet freedom field. An emphasis on internet freedom tools would allow Google to engage with a smaller Chinese market, but would allow them to maintain a toe in the waters while maintaining a stance of disengagement with the Chinese government.

Is Google going to do this? I have no idea. I hope so. They could have done so previously, but it would have been viewed as a shot across China’s bow. Now that they’ve launched a torpedo, that shot across the bow seems more likely.

At Global Voices, we were thrilled that Google chose to partner with us and Thompson/Reuters in offering the Breaking Borders Award “to honor outstanding web projects initiated by individuals or groups that demonstrate courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression.” It would be very exciting to see Google becoming one of those groups using their energy, resourcefulness and resources to combat censorship online… and it would certainly take some corporate courage on their part.

We’ll know a lot more about what Google’s doing in the next few days. Responses are already piling up online. Evgeny thinks Google is bluffing, or simply retreating from an unsuccesful market position. Jonathan Zittrain sees this as a masterstroke, aligning Google’s business with its values, and shares my hope that Google will dedicate major resources to censorship circumvention. Dharmishta Rood links to a bevy of reactions from around the web. I’m anxiously awaiting Rebecca’s analysis, which she promises when she finishes two other articles that are due. (Man, I know that feeling.)

If I had to pick a project that most excited me in 2009, it would be Yeeyan, a distributed translation project focused on making influential English-language media accessible to a Chinese-speaking audience. Yeeyan’s founders built a community that included thousands of translators and struck partnerships with content providers like The Guardian, giving them permission to publish translated content. I was particularly struck by the talk Yeeyan cofounder Zhang Lei gave at the 2009 China Internet Research Conference at UPenn Annenberg – he made it clear that the motivation behind Yeeyan was a desire to use translation as a bridge between cultures, letting Chinese and English-speakers see the world from each other’s perspective.

I was singing the project’s praises to a journalist last week when he pointed out that Yeeyan’s website was down. I hadn’t checked in on the site in the past few weeks – I’ve been a little busy in newborn land – but was disturbed to find that Yeeyan has been mostly offline since early December. The Guardian, who partnered with Yeeyan, reported on the closure, and their editor Alan Rusbridger expressed his unhappiness and concern that the closure of Yeeyan reflected attempts to control the range of ideas and opinions Chinese readers are exposed to.

Danwei’s article on Yeeyan’s closure gives a sense for how abrupt the move was. Translating from Yeeyan’s status page on the closed site, the site administrators say:

Due to our errors in handling some of the articles on the website, we went against the relevant regulations; therefore Yeeyan has to temporarily shut off its server, and adjust the relevant content.

As for closing the website without giving notice, and for causing inconvenience, we are deeply sorry.

Please don’t worry too much, we have saved all users’ data. We will solve the problem we face as quickly as possible, and recover the articles and personal information treasured by everyone.

In other words, Yeeyan ran afoul of one or another group of Chinese internet censors and was told they’d have to stop publishing until they ensured tighter control over their content. The fact that the site hasn’t come back quickly suggests this was more than a couple of controversial stories that were translated – it suggests that Yeeyan may need to review translations to ensure they don’t cross any red lines.

(Censorship on the Chinese internet happens in multiple places – it’s not just a firewall that makes it difficult to access certain web content. Chinese web 2.0 companies maintain internal teams that monitor content and prevent certain sensitive content from being published. These teams have a great deal of discretion in their decisionmaking, and often come to very different conclusions, as this paper from Rebecca MacKinnon, experimenting with the censorship of blog content on 15 Chinese-hosted blogging providers demonstrates.)

I’ve been catching up on my China censorship news from friends who follow that space more closely than I do. It’s been a tough winter for free speech on the Chinese internet. Rebecca MacKinnon has an excellent overview of four troubling developments that have recently unfolded in the Chinese internet:

- A crackdown on pornography on mobile devices
- A focus on eliminating “obscenity” from search engines
- A shutdown of file-sharing websites
- Restrictions on .cn domain names, which can now only be registered by companies, not by individuals

Some of these steps are defensible – Rebecca reports that CNNIC put restrictions on domain name sales because so many domains were being used for phishing and other criminal activities. But as friends at Open Net Initiative have documented for years, a crackdown on pornography almost invariably turns into restrictions on political speech.

It’s hard to see how any of these crackdowns would affect Yeeyan directly – the site made it possible to read The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times and ReadWriteWeb in Chinese, and none of those publication routinely print much pornography. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least one of the authorities that control the Chinese internet – which include the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology – found the prospect of frequent, high-quality translation of US and European media threatening. This is consistent with the history of internet censorship in China – the BBC’s Chinese-language service is blocked far more often than the English-language version, for instance, suggesting that blocking focuses on content that can be easily read by large audiences, and less on potentially sensitive English language content. (That previous sentence is a massive oversimplification – ONI’s most recent country study on China is helpful in understanding some of the nuances of this complex situation.)

So what’s next for Yeeyan? A post on the site today announces that translation will begin again on January 8th. Reading an automatic translation of the most recent post, I believe there’s a new system announced that will audit all translations, holding some up as long as 24 hours before they go live. It sounds like the Yeeyan team has been working hard to review all previously translated content and will launch with about 70% of it, and will work to bring the rest of it online. The post also made clear that Yeeyan’s community had rallied around the founders and that there is a great deal of community support for bringing the project back to life.

Obviously, I’m no fan of censorship – much of my work focuses on testing, improving and disseminating tools that allow unfettered access to the internet and the ability to publish despite firewalls. But there’s something that I find particularly galling in seeing a project like Yeeyan censored. Yeeyan’s not an activist site – they’re not pushing a particular political agenda. They’re trying to open a window on another set of perspectives, to help people in China understand US and UK perspectives on the world. They’ve got a mission analagous to what we’re trying to do at Global Voices… a site that also gets censored fairly often.

So, as sad as I was to see Yeeyan go down, I’m at least as happy to see their community and founders rally around and bring the site back up. I’ll be interested to see if Yeeyan can sustain the energy of volunteer translators now that they won’t be able to see their hard work on screen immediately. It will be interesting to see what stories the community is and isn’t willing to translate, and what scrutiny the site will face from regulators. And I continue to wonder whether we could rally a parallel effort in the US or Europe to translate key Chinese media into English, building on the critical work done by Danwei and by the indefatigable Roland Soong.

So welcome back, Yeeyan – we missed you, even those of us who didn’t know we were missing you.

My Global Voices colleagues have been taking time at the end this year to reflect on the past five years of our joint project. I’ve been rather busy with another joint project, my new son Drew, who is a month old today, and haven’t been particularly reflective. (Moments for reflection are generally spent asleep these days.)

Talking with an old friend today gave me the opportunity to step back and reflect a bit. My friend works for a foundation that supports social entrepreneurs and he’s interested in ways that the projects he’s supporting could work together. How could a set of cool, worthwhile organizations supported financially by the same funder somehow become a coherent movement, working together and learning from each other?

It took me a couple of moments to realize that my friend was turning to me for an answer to this question: how do you build a movement? (I’m sleep-deprived, remember?) He’s right – five years in, Global Voices isn’t just a website, a project, or a community. It’s a movement. Reading reflections from GV folks from around the world, it’s clear that Global Voices is a very different thing to different people – a window into other corners of the world, an alternative to despair, an antidote to stereotypes, a technologically-enhanced pilgrimage, a defender of language and culture, and of Article 19 rights, and an odd sort of family. The people who participate in Global Voices do very different things – mapping online censorship, translating texts, collecting links and offering original reporting – for very different reasons.

Believe it or not, this is by design. But it’s taken five years to get there.

Many nonprofit projects are the manifestation of the vision of one or more dedicated founders. That’s not the story behind Global Voices. Yes, Rebecca and I set the ball rolling five years ago with a meeting at Harvard. And we’ve both done what we can to move the work forward, Rebecca using her unparalleled journalistic skills, me leveraging my hard-earned talent for begging.

But the parts of Global Voices we’re proudest of are the results of other people’s passions and energies. Without Sami ben Gharbia, we’d be on the sidelines of the freedom of expression debate in cyberspace, rather than on the frontlines. Had Portnoy Zheng not started translating Global Voices into Chinese, we’d be a monolingual project, working to bring the world to an English-speaking audience, rather than the complex polyglotism we are today. Without Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen, we’d be writing just for blog readers, not reaching out to audiences through partnerships with newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. Had David Sasaki not challenged us to demonstrate that citizen media wasn’t just the province of the wealthy and well-connected, we’d not know about remarkable efforts in Colombia, Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire and dozens of other parts of the world.

When Rebecca and I invited some dozen bloggers from around the world into a conference room at Harvard in late 2004, our goals were pretty simple – we wanted to see if there was common ground between people from different circumstances and cultures, united by a single, simple practice: writing about their thoughts and lives online. By the end of the day, I was so excited and energized that I wanted our group to produce a detailed plan for world domination, complete with marching orders. I was furious at my friends Jim Moore and Joi Ito, who moderated our closing session, because we came out of it not with a concrete plan, but with a general sense that we had some common values that we could build on.

They were right. I was wrong.

Global Voices – the people, the projects – hold together not through a grand, structured design, but because we share some very simple principles: people have a right to speak and an obligation to listen. (That’s my Twitter-sized summary of the Global Voices manifesto, itself a compact little document.) The people and projects who’ve chosen to flock under the GV banner tend to share a fondness for late-night parties in global cities, a strange sense of humor and a fondness for open source software… but the core values that allow us to work together are extremely simple. More complicated, more tactical and less vague and we’d find ourselves excluding some of the remarkable people and the creative ideas they’ve brought to the table. Had we a plan, an agenda, a schedule, we would have said no to ideas that have shaped us, making us what we are today.

Here’s the thing about a movement as inchoate as ours – there’s no way to know what’s coming next. That’s the challenge for Ivan Sigal – who ably took the reins from Rebecca and me eighteen months ago, and who’s kept our project thriving through the toughest of financial times. I don’t think a project like Global Voices can be steered. I think a leader needs to listen, to discover where the community is going and figure out how to smooth the path ahead. It’s the opposite of what a management textbook might tell you to do, a form of leading by following.

So what’s next for Global Voices? I don’t think anyone can tell you. Not just because we can’t predict the Green revolution, the Fijian Coup or the Malagasy crisis. Not just because we don’t know what comes next after Facebook and Twitter. We can’t predict because a movement isn’t predictable – it’s the product of the passions and energies of the people who’ll stay with us, the new ones who’ll find us, and the continuing influence of those who choose to leave us. Global Voices has never stopped surprising me: what’s worked, what hasn’t, what we’ve done and left undone. Here’s hoping for an unpredictable, chaotic, participatory, passionate future built on the simple foundations of speaking and listening.

Many of my colleagues have featured a favorite recent GV post in their meditations. I wanted to do the same, but couldn’t fit the post I’d chosen into the thoughts above. So here it is as a bonus.

In early December of 2008, Mark Dummett of the BBC reported a wonderful “news of the weird” story from Dhaka, Bangladesh – a life-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built at enormous expense. Global journalists sprang into action, documenting a diplomatic spat between Bangladesh and India over ownership of this cultural treasure, talking about the shocking idea of “pirating” another nation’s national symbols.

None of these intrepid reporters actually visited the Bengali Taj, though. Bloggers did, and they weren’t impressed. Aparna Ray translated their posts for Global Voices and explained that it was a poorly-made tourist trap clad in bathroom tiles, not the diamond-studded wonder those hardbitten AFP journalists credulously reported on.

A critical underreported story? An important victory for intercultural understanding? Nope. But as someone who spent far too much time the past five years answering journalistic questions about the credibility of bloggers, I can’t but help celebrating this inversion.

Breaking news: Pastor Warren has released a video condemning the Ugandan anti-gay legislation. (The video was released December 10th, the day after I posted this piece, and after Reverend Kaoma’s press conference.) I’m very grateful that he’s made this statement, and hope that his unambiguous statement will be heard in Uganda, influencing policy on the ground. More on Warren’s statement here.

Could Rick Warren be the man to stop pending anti-gay legislation in Uganda?

That’s the hope of Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Episcopalian Priest from Zambia, the author of a new report from Political Research Associates, which traces a wave of homophobia on the African continent to the efforts of conservative evangelical pastors in the US. In a conference call with members of the media today, Kaoma declared that, “The US culture wars are being exported to Africa. They’re having an impact not just in the US, but also amongst African Christians.”

The culture wars Kaoma refers to have been particularly intense within the Anglican communion, his (and, as it happens, my) church. After the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, to bishop of New Hampshire, a number of bishops moved to “realign” their congregations outside of mainstream Anglican authority. Two new, more conservative Anglican groups have emerged, and some African congregations have aligned with these new groups.

Kaoma argues that, in the mainline US churches, most congregants and pastors are leaning towards progressive Christianity. The more conservative individuals – in the minority – are aligning with the fast-growing churches in Africa. “Conservatives have gone to Africa because they’re going where the numbers are, and because they’re being legitimated by associating themselves with Christians outside the US.”

These conservative pastors, Kaoma argues, “need to demean the leadership of US mainline churches,” and present their views as the legitimate alternative. It’s become common to present the US mainline churches as imperialistic, and to argue that these mainline churches as trying to export non-African values. “Once you appeal to the post-colonial ethos, people are bound to overreact. The entire gay issue has been put into the post-colonial narrative.” Because the issue of gay rights has been turned into a battle about a purported recolonization of the African continent, Kaoma argues, a struggle for gay rights isn’t seen as a human rights issue, but as an attempt to export “un-African” ideas to the African continent.

Uganda has been a particular battleground for this exported culture war. The wife of President Yoweri Museveni, herself an influential MP, is a born-again Christian, and has been instrumental in bringing abstinence-focused anti-AIDS funding to the country. (Helen Epstein’s “God and the Fight Against AIDS” in the New York Review of Books is an excellent introduction to the spread and politicization of evangelical Christianity in Uganda.) And Uganda, bordering on majority Muslim countries, has become a popular venue for evangelical outreach.

Kaoma argues that conservative pastors from the US are coming to Uganda to campaign against sexual equality using tremendously deceptive materials. His key example is a set of talks given by Scott Lively, who a PRA colleague describes as a “holocaust revisionist”, based on his authorship of a book titled “The Pink Swastika“, which argues that the Nazis were closet homosexuals, that they didn’t exterminate gay people, but secretly plotted a gay takeover of the world. (Southern Poverty Law Center’s quick, but thorough, refutation of the work is a worthwhile read.) Reverend Kaoma reports that Lively came to Uganda in March 2009, spoke at a conference organized by the Family Life Network, met with Ugandan parliamentarians as well as church leaders, and warned them that homosexuality is an international, western agenda, being perpetrated by the UN and by human rights defenders as part of a gay plot to take over the world.

Kaoma has some compelling footage that demonstrates the influence Lively’s ideas are having in Uganda. In the video above, Stephen Langa, the director of the Family Life Network, offers a history of the homosexual agenda, as outlined by Lively. David Roberts, of Ex-Gay Watch, unpacks the video, pointing out that Langa quotes at length from a satirical essay, apparently unaware the essay was satire. The history offered is paranoid, false and designed to inspire a hateful counterreaction.

That part of the plan has evidently been quite successful. Kaoma draws a direct line between Lively’s appearance at the FLN conference and the proposed legislation that would sentence gay and lesbian people who’ve committed the crime of having gay sex to, at minimum, life in prison, and could subject gay people who test positive for HIV to execution. Kaoma tells us that the Christian right groups presenting this fantasy of a gay takeover to the Ugandans expressed their hope that Uganda would fight this agenda and take up the war – evidently, that message was well received. (Possibly too well – Kaoma reports that Lively now says the proposed Ugandan legislation goes to far. When a homophobic holocaust denier says your legislation goes to far, you might want to reconsider your plan…)

So how does Rick Warren fit into all this?

Well, Pastor Warren has a long history in Uganda. He’s worked closely with Pastor Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan activist who is focused on pro-abstinence approaches to AIDS treatment and on marginalizing and criminalizing homosexuality. Ssempa has led workshops at Warren’s Saddleback Church, and Warren has visited Uganda at Ssepma’s invitation, meeting with senior Ugandan officials, including the president. Ssempa is evidently one of the major figures in proposing the anti-gay legislation. And he’s willing to use virtually any tactic in fighting what he sees as a homosexual movement – in 2006, a Ugandan paper printed the names and addresses of 45 people Ssempa identified as gay, leading to threats and harrasment.

Warren has severed ties with Ssempa, but has not yet condemned the proposed Ugandan legislation. Kaoma worries that a statement Warren made in Uganda in 2008 – stating that homosexuality is not a human right – is being quoted and used to justify the current proposed legislation. “Here’s the problem I have with pastor Warren – he’s a friend of Kagame, of Museveni,” says Kaoma. “He knows the politics of Uganda, and he’s respected by the MPs
He’s the one who can influence politicians in Uganda.” While Warren has dissociated himself from one extreme Ugandan pastor, he hasn’t dissociated himself with other anti-gay activists in Rwanda and Nigeria. Kaoma hopes that Warren will realize the potential power and influence his words would have in Uganda and clearly denounce this sort of legislation. “Unless Warren tells fundamentalist groups that gays have rights, which need to be protected, theres no respected religious voice saying this. He needs to complement the voice of human rights activists on the ground.”

While I strongly agree with Reverend Kaoma, and believe the proposed legislation is abominable, I thought he was putting too much weight on international activists and not enough responsibility on people in Uganda. I asked whether it was fair to offer his interpretation, given that the majority of Sub-Saharan African countries have laws against homosexual activities – was it possible that the law in Uganda was simply a manifestation of public will and mood?

Reverend Kaoma explained that a framing of homosexuality as an attack on the family has worked extremely well in bringing activist anger to the forefront. The combination of a neo-imperial narrative, an international conspiracy and classic “the gays are out to get your children” are collectively changing attitudes on the ground in countries like Uganda, he argues. He points out that, in most countries where homosexual behavior is banned by law, very few people are arrested and prosecuted for violating those laws. He also referenced King Mwanda, a ruler of the Buganda in the 1880s, who many historians believe was gay. “Even Pastor Ssempa himself accepts this part of Ugandan homosexual history,” says Kaoma. “Gays are part and parcel of African life. What’s strange now is using the Christian religion as a foundation for persecution around homosexuality.”

While Kaoma believes that Ugandans are more liberal about homosexuality than the current bill would lead one to believe, he acknowledges that the masses are not speaking out or supporting the bill. “There’s been a call to go door to door and tell people that ‘if you love your child, then fight homosexuality’. There is a petition going around Uganda in rural areas, saying that homosexuals are recruiting young children in the schools, using money from America. The petition says that if the Americans get just get two kids per school, Uganda as we know it is gone.”

Kaoma argues that the authoritarian nature of Ugandan politics is also making it easier to carry out this sort of crusade. In his native Zambia, the Vice President urged the arrest of gays, but there were no arrests. In Ghana and Kenya, church leaders have advocated cutting ties with the Anglican communion over gay issues, but many churches have refused to comply. But in less representative societies, these crusades – with the support of political authority – have a much higher chance of success.

There are brave Ugandans standing up for gay rights. Frank Mugisha, the leader of Sexual Minorities Uganda (which uses the wonderful acronym SMUG), has been a visible opponent of the legislation, despite the fact that he will likely need to leave the country or face arrest if the bill passes. The Dean of the prestigious Makerere University has publicly opposed the legislation. Such support entails serious risks – Kaoma tells us about meeting with SMUG at a hotel in Kampala – a woman attending the meeting, who is lesbian, stepped out of the hotel as was immediately arrested, beaten and had her money stolen by the police. “And there was nothing we could do,” says Kaoma.

Reverend Kaoma spoke about this story in a sad but calm fashion. But he got quite agitated when I asked him about the possibility that the Anglican church – hugely influential in Uganda – would condemn the legislation. “The Archbishop doesn’t want to be seen as interfering. After the bill passes and people are getting killed, then we’ll hear his voice? Our friends are being rounded up because people think the bill has already been passed.”

If the Archbishop of Canterbury and Rick Warren won’t step up, are there other paths to leverage the Ugandan goverment? Sure – there’s always money. Up to 40% of the Uganda government budget comes from aid dollars. Kaoma tells us that Sweden has declared that if Uganda passes this bill, Sweden will sever all ties. It’s unlikely that the US would take nearly such a dramatic step. But Kaoma leaves us with a challenge: “Don’t just condemn Uganda – accept responsibility for helping start this on American soil.”

That’s tricky, of course. Gay rights groups in the US condemning the legislation simply add fuel to the fire for those who argue that homosexuality is a western plot. And that’s why the voice of someone like Pastor Warren could be so powerful in affirming the human rights of GLBT people and condeming this dangerous legislation.

It’s interesting to note that Reverend Kaoma isn’t the only one linking US conservatives with anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Jeff Sharlet links The Family, a group of politically influential conservative Christians to the proposed Ugandan legislation. I found it interesting that the figures mentioned by Sharlet didn’t come up in Kaoma’s discussion today, or in his report. Kaoma’s report focuses primarily on the Institute on Religion & Democracy. Had I the time to do some original reporting, I’d be very interested in seeing what links exist between these organizations.

Kathryn Joyce of Religion Dispatches has an excellent interview with Reverent Kaoma – very much worth reading if you’re interested in his arguments.

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (”Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

Christopher Dickey posted an interesting, though somewhat odd, story on Newsweek’s web site yesterday. Odd, because there’s nothing in the story that’s new since he began repsearching the story in late August. My guess is that the story hasn’t run until now because it’s a story that has no real facts. It’s about an absurd, Kafka-esque conspiracy… and I worry that Dickey’s article may not be entirely clear on how absurd the conspiratorial accusations are.

Hossein Derakhshan has been in custody in Iran for over a year – I’ve written about his detention on the blog several times. In August, in the wake of arrests after the Green Revolution, a series of show trials went on in Tehran, where an unnamed “spy” was said to have “confessed” to being involved with a vast, global conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. This conspiracy was widely reported in Persian-language media, and the details of the case made it clear to anyone who knew Hossein that he was the “spy” in question.

Friends who follow Persian media closely alerted me to the testimony because I, along with other individuals, were named in the show trial as Hossein’s collaborators. Investigating the story in August, Dickey contacted me to ask about my interpretation of events. I told him that the conspiracy was absurd, that Global Voices and I certainly knew and worked with Hossein, but that we were in no way involved with attempting to overthrow the Iranian government.

Because the story is completely false and because it makes accusations that are blatantly untrue, we decided not to cover the story on Global Voices and introduce the fabrications into the English-language media. Dickey made a different decision and reprints these imaginings – months after they appeared in Persian-language media, along with my denials that I or Global Voices are involved with anything more than promoting blogging around the globe, and then includes this paragraph:

“There are aspects of the testimony that align closely with reality.” Zuckerman continued. “Hossein participated in the first meeting of Global Voices in November 2004, hosted by the Berkman Center.” Just as the prosecutor said he did.

Let me be very clear about what I was saying in that comment. The aspects of the testimony that align with reality aren’t the ones about me – they’re details about Hossein’s travels and meetings. Yes, I’ve met with Hossein half a dozen times since 2004, when he first came to the Berkman Center’s inaugural Global Voices meeting. That’s not because I’m involved in plotting to overthrown the Iranian regime, but because I’m one of the founders of an international blogging network and Hossein’s a key figure in the Iranian blogosphere.

To understand what’s going on in this case, it’s worth listening to Omid Memarian’s recent story on This American Life. Omid was also a pioneering Iranian blogger, and he was detained in 2004. In his TAL story, Omid describes being forced to write his life story dozens of times, while interrogators attempted to fit details from his life into a paranoid narrative about a CIA plot to destabilize the country. Memarian’s description explains precisely how Hossein’s life story – an unusual and complicated one, to say the least – has been reframed into a spy novel-worthy fantasy. The initial Global Voices meeting at Harvard – memorable mostly because Hossein coined the term “bridgeblog” at the conference – turns from an academic conference into a fantasy vision of an initial planning phase for the green revolution.

Let me just be very clear, because Dickey’s story is not:

- Hossein Derakhshan isn’t an Israeli spy. He’s been unfairly detained for over a year and has likely been forced to issue a “confession” that includes real biographical details as well as fabrications.
- The other people and entities that feature in Derakhshan’s forced testimony – myself, the Berkman Center, Global Voices – have no involvement in Iranian political unrest beyond studying it and reporting on it.
- The Iranian government’s characterisation of my background and ties are as absurd and fabricated as any other aspect of this story.

Dickey gets it right in the last paragraph when he says, “Only a regime as introverted, unworldly, and uncertain as Ahmadinejad’s could believe in the conspiracy theory that’s been pumped up in the Iran show trials.” It’s rather unworldly to be somehow blamed (credited?) with masterminding a plot to overthrow the Iranian government. In reality, my involvement goes no further than sharing my concerns about an old friend who’s been unfairly detained by an unjust regime.

An earlier version of this blogpost suggested that Dickey had acted unethically in publishing our Facebook exchange. Dickey forwarded that exchange to me – which I had deleted – and pointed out that I had not explicitly asked him to keep the exchange confidential. While I still would have prefered that Dickey contacting me before quoting what I had perceived as a background exchange, I retract my earlier accusations and offer him my apology on those grounds.

I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)

If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).

While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.

Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.

This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.

Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional mercenaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)

A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.

Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

So what?

When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.

Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.

Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.

Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.

Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.

So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.

While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.

These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?

I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.

A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)

Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.

A couple of years back, I realized that this was a demand problem, as much as a supply problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.

So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.

And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?