6 ms·

The World Cracks Down on the Internet

143 points by iKenshu 12y ago

xnull2guest 12y ago
This article misses that the United States and allies do use the internet to spread Western culture and ideas, start revolutions, and kindle insurrection. It is not just some excuse. The United States CIA attempted (and nearly succeeded) in inciting a revolution against Castro by pretending to be a series of grassroots movements on Twitter and inciting anti-administration feelings within the Cuban population. That was earlier this year. "USAID effort to undermine Cuban government with fake ‘Twitter’ another anti-Castro failure" [1] The United States has an ongoing effort to use Internet media to 'deradicalize' the next generation of Middle Easterners and actively manipulates public opinions in Jordan, Cairo, Syria and other Middle Eastern states. Here are some quotes from one DoD MINERVA paper: "...it is imperative that we develop empirically-based procedures for countering messages that promote violent extremism and anti-Western beliefs..." "...Neural predictors of Twitter impact in Cairo (UCLA & Egypt). Our prior work (Falk et al., 2012), indicates that neural responses of a small group can predict which persuasive messages will be more successful in mass media campaigns..." "... Defense Group Inc. already tracks Twitter trends specific to Egypt and will identify which of the selected Twitter topics went on to be highly influential over the next month and which did not..." - Matthew Lieberman, UCLA, September 30, 2012, Department of Defense MINERVA Initiative [2] Here's one US company that does it. MARAYA MEDIA - "Driving Intelligent Dialog". [3] The United States engages in targeted mass media and social manipulation to stir dissent in target nations, and to quell dissent where destabilization would hurt policy objectives. The DoD's MINERVA project specifically looks to understand the cultural components of stability of various countries and mechanisms to encourage or disrupt that stability. Among a great number of social studies you will find DoD research on how to seed information inside of specific Asian countries, including China, for the targeted introduction of instability. I will leave speculations of possible connections to the Hong Kong protests to the reader. [4] This should not come as a surprise given the history of the US: The United States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc. But now with global interconnectedness it is easy to set up 'foreign media', blogs and other politicizing content to influence other nations' populations. In the past decade it has become a global issue. This year Egypt sentenced Al Jazeera journalists that they believed were partnered with geopolitical interests of other states. Putin's administration is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail international influence. China blocks many American services including Facebook and Google. The usual story in America is that they are censoring free speech. The truth is that they do not want foreign influence to destabilize their population and that they do not want their citizen's data in America's PRISM program (there's a reason it's called the FISA "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" court). The Snowden revelations showed us how intelligence agencies are involved in PsyOps - the term for 'psychological operations' used by the CIA and others. The GCHQ's BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM/ETC and partnership with the NSA are used to influence online polls, discussion forums and to vote up and down content that aligns with policy goals. [5][6][7] The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target selection). It's why metadata matters. A nice illustration of this is the article "Finding Paul Revere." And so we have issues here with the use of targeted social influence in America as well. First there are instances where other countries are trying to incite disruption in the US - the US wants to study and curtail it. [8] A number of journalists have called out that the state has been extremely aggressive to dissenting opinions, even to go so far as labeling current policy on the issue "War on Journalism". American officials have exported a number of journalists with Middle Eastern descent and journalists like Ayman Mohyeldin have been pulled from Gaza and other conflicts when reporting has erred on the side of other state interests. The crackdown on journalism is worth another post I don't have time to write. Just look at how central a role controlling internet dialog is for running a modern US presidency. A Google search for "Obama internet campaign" [9] results in headlines "How Obama's Internet Campaign Changed Politics", "How Obama won the internet", "Barack Obama and the Facebook Election", "Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency" - this isn't because of grassroots discussion but because both Obama and McCain (and Romney before him) had cyber centers in control of internet PR engaging tens of millions of dollars in Twitter messages, etc. You can nudge public opinion by bombarding them with an influx of the same message, slightly disguised in one way and then another. The MINERVA program has plenty of good reading with regard to this. Anyway, the USG does this overseas. It is not merely an excuse these other countries have 'to be evil.' How Jingoistic. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-to-undermine-cuban-government-with-fake-twitter-another-anti-castro-failure/2014/04/03/c0142cc0-bb75-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-t... [2] http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf [3] http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php [4] http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html [5] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... [6] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymous http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun... [7] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The... [8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unw... [9] https://www.google.com/?q=obama+internet+campaign https://www.google.com/?q=obama+internet+campaign
- tokenadult 12y ago
  Most of what you actually quote, rather than what you add as commentary yourself, says that most of the United States efforts are designed to use persuasion counter radical movements that would sweep away freedom and democracy where those movements are active. That's a good thing, in my opinion. It would have been very good for the world, for example, if something like that were happening in German in the 1920s. That would have spared the world a lot of trouble.
  - xnull2guest 12y ago
    If you look around the links (especially the MINERVA funded material), although also Cuba is a great example, there is plenty there in direct disruption, rather than "counter-radical" (which would mean what, exactly, when radical means democratic grass-roots self-determined ideas from a people - NOT from a regime?). There was a radical shift in American dialog around the turn of the 20th century (the first revolution of Cuba and the Spanish War) when America's principles of self-determination and representation were directly challenged and contradicted by its interests in expanding and obtaining control over certain areas of the world (Cuba, Philippines). The language of inalienable rights and of governments of people, by people for people - of rights to govern coming from the people who are governed - were morphed into republican imperalist language 'we are bringing those who do not have democracy/technology/western life what they need, even if it doesn't come with self determination.' (Neither the people of the Philippines nor Cuba wanted American rule). It was ruled by American courts that America could control these regions but did not need to give the people governed there the full porfolio of rights garunteed by the Constitution, nor the right to vote. You see this play out today where the US government will side with authoritarian regimes against democratic uprisings of their people when the regimes in question align with Western strategic and diplomatic goals and the democratic uprisings do not. It's really hard to actually point and say "yes, this is a place where America is liberating people and allowing democracy to shine." America is a soft-power imperalist and has been for around 100 years. This is justified by the narrative you mention - that America brings with it democracy, etc - but in the details America pursues its interests first and its ideals later.
idiotclock 12y ago
A friend and I were discussing the Brave New World and 1984 once. We took it for granted that our world resembles one of these dystopias, if not both. She summarized there difference in terms of access: Orwell's universe depended on a restriction of information to keep its citizens ignorant of the very concept of justice; Huxley's world was flooded with information (but only just enough) and so people couldn't sort the important from the pleasurable. It seemed like our world was looking more like Huxley's. There is so much crap in cyberspace that justice is hidden from view (but its out there...). But the what-seems-like-de-facto centralization of mainstream internet makes Orwell's fantasy seem all too real. That China uses "strategic, timely" censorship is only one side of the coin. Surveillance too, whether from browser cookies or 'telescreens,' is driving us towards an even deeper conflation of these two nightmares.
- HarrietJones 12y ago
  You may like this letter Huxley wrote to Orwell: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.... "Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World."
- Umn55 12y ago
  It's entropy at work, most of the population is of average intelligence and many of us come from superstitious primates. It's about the scale of large societies, the advancement of technology and biological costs.
HarrietJones 12y ago
The world is cracking down on the Internet, and each country is bringing its own tool set to achieving that end. That Russia, Thailand, China, The Middle East, etc use the rule of law isn't suprising. It's how these countries work. They have strong leaderships, and those leaderships do the enforcing. Western "liberal" nations are ruled via the invisible hand of capitalism, and that censorship is coming accidentally from these organisations. A popular website switches off comments. Social Media Companies pull users away from distributed systems like email and IRC to heavily managed systems like Twitter and Facebook. Seemingly unrelated light-touch legislation (e.g. copyright) is used by individuals and corporates to ensure transgressive individuals are denied a voice and are threatened with job losses and other punishments. "The world cracks down on the Internet". I'd be a fool to assume that this is happening everywhere else but where I am.
- rtpg 12y ago
  I'm sorry but nothing is stopping you from throwing down $10 a month on a VPN and spinning up an IRC server in the US or in most of Europe and complain about the government or corruption of officials.
  - HarrietJones 12y ago
    You're right. As a wealthy person with technical knowledge, nothing is stopping me from doing this. I'm not entirely sure what your point is.
Shivetya 12y ago
Its good that governments fear their people. The issue at hand is far too many in Western nations fail to see the threat to their intellectual freedom, if not personal freedom.
- Umn55 12y ago
  The enlightenment was wrong about the mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
csandreasen 12y ago
I thought this was interesting perspective from the linked report: The U.S. Constitution includes strong protections for free speech and freedom of the press. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court held that internet speech was entitled to the highest form of protection under the constitution, and lower courts have consistently struck down attempts to regulate online content. Two federal laws also provide significant protections for online speech: Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996) provides immunity for ISPs and online platforms such as YouTube and Facebook that carry content created by third parties. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 provides a safe harbor to intermediaries that take down allegedly infringing material after notice from the copyright owner. These statutes enable companies to develop internet applications and websites without fear that they will be held liable for content posted by users. Source: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/united-states https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/united-stat...

143 points by iKenshu 12y ago

This article misses that the United States and allies do use the internet to spread Western culture and ideas, start revolutions, and kindle insurrection. It is not just some excuse. The United States CIA attempted (and nearly succeeded) in inciting a revolution against Castro by pretending to be a series of grassroots movements on Twitter and inciting anti-administration feelings within the Cuban population. That was earlier this year. "USAID effort to undermine Cuban government with fake ‘Twitter’ another anti-Castro failure" [1] The United States has an ongoing effort to use Internet media to 'deradicalize' the next generation of Middle Easterners and actively manipulates public opinions in Jordan, Cairo, Syria and other Middle Eastern states. Here are some quotes from one DoD MINERVA paper: "...it is imperative that we develop empirically-based procedures for countering messages that promote violent extremism and anti-Western beliefs..." "...Neural predictors of Twitter impact in Cairo (UCLA & Egypt). Our prior work (Falk et al., 2012), indicates that neural responses of a small group can predict which persuasive messages will be more successful in mass media campaigns..." "... Defense Group Inc. already tracks Twitter trends specific to Egypt and will identify which of the selected Twitter topics went on to be highly influential over the next month and which did not..." - Matthew Lieberman, UCLA, September 30, 2012, Department of Defense MINERVA Initiative [2] Here's one US company that does it. MARAYA MEDIA - "Driving Intelligent Dialog". [3] The United States engages in targeted mass media and social manipulation to stir dissent in target nations, and to quell dissent where destabilization would hurt policy objectives. The DoD's MINERVA project specifically looks to understand the cultural components of stability of various countries and mechanisms to encourage or disrupt that stability. Among a great number of social studies you will find DoD research on how to seed information inside of specific Asian countries, including China, for the targeted introduction of instability. I will leave speculations of possible connections to the Hong Kong protests to the reader. [4] This should not come as a surprise given the history of the US: The United States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc. But now with global interconnectedness it is easy to set up 'foreign media', blogs and other politicizing content to influence other nations' populations. In the past decade it has become a global issue. This year Egypt sentenced Al Jazeera journalists that they believed were partnered with geopolitical interests of other states. Putin's administration is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail international influence. China blocks many American services including Facebook and Google. The usual story in America is that they are censoring free speech. The truth is that they do not want foreign influence to destabilize their population and that they do not want their citizen's data in America's PRISM program (there's a reason it's called the FISA "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" court). The Snowden revelations showed us how intelligence agencies are involved in PsyOps - the term for 'psychological operations' used by the CIA and others. The GCHQ's BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM/ETC and partnership with the NSA are used to influence online polls, discussion forums and to vote up and down content that aligns with policy goals. [5][6][7] The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target selection). It's why metadata matters. A nice illustration of this is the article "Finding Paul Revere." And so we have issues here with the use of targeted social influence in America as well. First there are instances where other countries are trying to incite disruption in the US - the US wants to study and curtail it. [8] A number of journalists have called out that the state has been extremely aggressive to dissenting opinions, even to go so far as labeling current policy on the issue "War on Journalism". American officials have exported a number of journalists with Middle Eastern descent and journalists like Ayman Mohyeldin have been pulled from Gaza and other conflicts when reporting has erred on the side of other state interests. The crackdown on journalism is worth another post I don't have time to write. Just look at how central a role controlling internet dialog is for running a modern US presidency. A Google search for "Obama internet campaign" [9] results in headlines "How Obama's Internet Campaign Changed Politics", "How Obama won the internet", "Barack Obama and the Facebook Election", "Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency" - this isn't because of grassroots discussion but because both Obama and McCain (and Romney before him) had cyber centers in control of internet PR engaging tens of millions of dollars in Twitter messages, etc. You can nudge public opinion by bombarding them with an influx of the same message, slightly disguised in one way and then another. The MINERVA program has plenty of good reading with regard to this. Anyway, the USG does this overseas. It is not merely an excuse these other countries have 'to be evil.' How Jingoistic. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-to-undermine-cuban-government-with-fake-twitter-another-anti-castro-failure/2014/04/03/c0142cc0-bb75-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-t... [2] http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf [3] http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php [4] http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html [5] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... [6] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymous http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun... [7] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The... [8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unw... [9] https://www.google.com/?q=obama+internet+campaign https://www.google.com/?q=obama+internet+campaign

tokenadult 12y ago
Most of what you actually quote, rather than what you add as commentary yourself, says that most of the United States efforts are designed to use persuasion counter radical movements that would sweep away freedom and democracy where those movements are active. That's a good thing, in my opinion. It would have been very good for the world, for example, if something like that were happening in German in the 1920s. That would have spared the world a lot of trouble.
- xnull2guest 12y ago
  If you look around the links (especially the MINERVA funded material), although also Cuba is a great example, there is plenty there in direct disruption, rather than "counter-radical" (which would mean what, exactly, when radical means democratic grass-roots self-determined ideas from a people - NOT from a regime?). There was a radical shift in American dialog around the turn of the 20th century (the first revolution of Cuba and the Spanish War) when America's principles of self-determination and representation were directly challenged and contradicted by its interests in expanding and obtaining control over certain areas of the world (Cuba, Philippines). The language of inalienable rights and of governments of people, by people for people - of rights to govern coming from the people who are governed - were morphed into republican imperalist language 'we are bringing those who do not have democracy/technology/western life what they need, even if it doesn't come with self determination.' (Neither the people of the Philippines nor Cuba wanted American rule). It was ruled by American courts that America could control these regions but did not need to give the people governed there the full porfolio of rights garunteed by the Constitution, nor the right to vote. You see this play out today where the US government will side with authoritarian regimes against democratic uprisings of their people when the regimes in question align with Western strategic and diplomatic goals and the democratic uprisings do not. It's really hard to actually point and say "yes, this is a place where America is liberating people and allowing democracy to shine." America is a soft-power imperalist and has been for around 100 years. This is justified by the narrative you mention - that America brings with it democracy, etc - but in the details America pursues its interests first and its ideals later.

idiotclock 12y ago

A friend and I were discussing the Brave New World and 1984 once. We took it for granted that our world resembles one of these dystopias, if not both. She summarized there difference in terms of access: Orwell's universe depended on a restriction of information to keep its citizens ignorant of the very concept of justice; Huxley's world was flooded with information (but only just enough) and so people couldn't sort the important from the pleasurable. It seemed like our world was looking more like Huxley's. There is so much crap in cyberspace that justice is hidden from view (but its out there...). But the what-seems-like-de-facto centralization of mainstream internet makes Orwell's fantasy seem all too real. That China uses "strategic, timely" censorship is only one side of the coin. Surveillance too, whether from browser cookies or 'telescreens,' is driving us towards an even deeper conflation of these two nightmares.

HarrietJones 12y ago
You may like this letter Huxley wrote to Orwell: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.... "Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World."
Umn55 12y ago
It's entropy at work, most of the population is of average intelligence and many of us come from superstitious primates. It's about the scale of large societies, the advancement of technology and biological costs.

HarrietJones 12y ago

The world is cracking down on the Internet, and each country is bringing its own tool set to achieving that end. That Russia, Thailand, China, The Middle East, etc use the rule of law isn't suprising. It's how these countries work. They have strong leaderships, and those leaderships do the enforcing. Western "liberal" nations are ruled via the invisible hand of capitalism, and that censorship is coming accidentally from these organisations. A popular website switches off comments. Social Media Companies pull users away from distributed systems like email and IRC to heavily managed systems like Twitter and Facebook. Seemingly unrelated light-touch legislation (e.g. copyright) is used by individuals and corporates to ensure transgressive individuals are denied a voice and are threatened with job losses and other punishments. "The world cracks down on the Internet". I'd be a fool to assume that this is happening everywhere else but where I am.

rtpg 12y ago
I'm sorry but nothing is stopping you from throwing down $10 a month on a VPN and spinning up an IRC server in the US or in most of Europe and complain about the government or corruption of officials.
- HarrietJones 12y ago
  You're right. As a wealthy person with technical knowledge, nothing is stopping me from doing this. I'm not entirely sure what your point is.

Shivetya 12y ago

Its good that governments fear their people. The issue at hand is far too many in Western nations fail to see the threat to their intellectual freedom, if not personal freedom.

Umn55 12y ago
The enlightenment was wrong about the mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

csandreasen 12y ago

I thought this was interesting perspective from the linked report: The U.S. Constitution includes strong protections for free speech and freedom of the press. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court held that internet speech was entitled to the highest form of protection under the constitution, and lower courts have consistently struck down attempts to regulate online content. Two federal laws also provide significant protections for online speech: Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996) provides immunity for ISPs and online platforms such as YouTube and Facebook that carry content created by third parties. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 provides a safe harbor to intermediaries that take down allegedly infringing material after notice from the copyright owner. These statutes enable companies to develop internet applications and websites without fear that they will be held liable for content posted by users. Source: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/united-states https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/united-stat...