Antony Loewenstein

My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald newspaper:

There Goes the Neighbourhood
Michael Wesley
(New South Books, $32.95)

Australia’s insecurity in the Asia-Pacific region is legendary. Over decades prime ministers and commentators have urged a close relationship with Washington while remaining open to romance with leading powers such as China to buy security and stability. Wesley challenges this outlook, asking policy makers to take far more seriously countries such as South Korea and the Philippines and recognise that the 21st century has already forced challenges to established doctrine. However, any serious human rights agenda is absent – a blind spot that’s shared by many.

A company that should be named, shamed and shunned (via the Sydney Morning Herald):

Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people.

Dan Ward, of US law firm Ward & Ward, has brought the case on behalf of Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi, Liu Xianbin and ten unnamed others. He compared Cisco’s actions to “IBM’s behaviour in Nazi Germany”.

Cisco has rejected the allegations as baseless but has failed to respond to serious questions stemming from an internal company presentation.

“Cisco has, for years now, knowingly aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to stifle the free speech and discourse of its citizenry,” Mr Ward told Fairfax Media.

“Dating back to the early 2000s, Cisco competed for contracts with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to help design, develop and implement the ‘Golden Shield Project’ – a rather Orwellian euphemism for the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing effort to monitor, track and censor all internet traffic into and out of China.”

According to court documents, Mr Du spent three years in jail, Mr Zhou is currently a prisoner in his own home and Mr Liu has served two months of a 10 year sentence. All three claim to have been tortured and abused over articles they published online.

In 2008 my second book, The Blogging Revolution, was released. It told the story of the internet in repressive regimes.

Now, post the Arab uprisings, I’ve updated the title and it’s been released globally this week as an e-book via Melbourne University Press:

Smart:

S. Pandiyarajan was fiddling around with his shortwave radio set one hot summer evening at Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, when he stumbled upon a strange station.

At first listen, it was a language he couldn’t identify. It sounded like Tamil, but spoken in an accent he could not recognise. He listened on, straining his ears. To his surprise, he discovered that the voices were coming from faraway China.

“I could hear two Chinese people speaking in perfect Tamil!” he said. “And this was Sentamizh [classical Tamil], which you never hear anywhere, anymore, even in Tamil Nadu.”

That evening, Mr. Pandiyarajan became the latest member of China Radio International’s fast-growing overseas fan base. The station, run by the Chinese government, has, for more than six decades, been tasked with carrying news from China — from politics to arts and culture — to boost the country’s image overseas.

With humble beginnings in the civil war-torn China in the 1940s, CRI today is at the centre of a massive multi-billion dollar effort to boost rising China’s “soft power” overseas, sending out daily broadcasts in 63 languages, 24 hours a day, from its expansive multi-storey headquarters in west Beijing.

Remarkably, CRI’s Tamil station enjoys the widest reach of all its channels. Its popularity underscores the quiet success China’s “soft power” push is having in unlikely locations. The Tamil station, which broadcasts every day from a modest 12th floor office, has more than 25,000 registered listeners — besides thousands of others who tune in casually every day — in Tamil Nadu and the rest of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Germany, the United States and Japan.

Leaking is not the same as hacking. And they’re not all created equal.

Bradley Manning allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US documents to Wikileaks showing a litany of criminality in the “war on terror”. His act, should it be proven true, was a noble attempt to alert the world of wrong-doing and violence.

Cyber hacking, however, is rather different. And hacktivism is growing as a way to challenge corporate and political power:

Cyber attacks used to be kept quiet. They often went undiscovered until long after the fact, and countries or companies that were hit usually declined to talk about attacks. That’s changed as a steady flow of brazen incursions has been exposed. Last year, for example, Google (GOOG) accused China of spying on the company’s workers and customers. It said at the time that at least 20 other companies were victims of the same attack, nicknamed Operation Aurora by the security firm McAfee (INTC). The hacked included Adobe Systems (ADBE), Juniper Networks (JNPR), and Morgan Stanley (MS). Joel F. Brenner, the head of U.S. counterintelligence until 2009, says the same operation that pulled off Aurora has claimed many more victims over several years. “It’d be fair to say that at least 2,000 companies have been hit,” Brenner says. “And that number is on the conservative side.”

Dozens of others, ranging from Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Intel (INTC) to the Indian Defense Ministry, the International Monetary Fund, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have suffered similar assaults. Earlier this year hackers raided the computer networks of RSA (EMC), a marquee security firm that protects other companies’ computers. They stole some of the most valuable computer code in the world, the algorithms behind RSA’s SecureID tokens, a product used by U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, and major banks to prevent hacking. It was like breaking into a heavily guarded locksmith and stealing the master combination that opened every vault in every casino on the Las Vegas Strip. This month the Pentagon revealed that it, too, had been hacked: More than 24,000 files were stolen from the computers of an unnamed defense contractor by “foreign intruders.”

Is there any nation on earth the Jewish state won’t sell weapons to? Unlikely:

Israel’s defense industry racked an unprecedented $7.2 billion in exports in 2010, up on the $6.9 billion achieved in 2009.

That put the Jewish state among the world’s top four arms exporters but declining military budgets around the world are likely to reduce sales over the coming years.

“We recognize the challenges but we’re working hard to maintain the level we’re currently at and even to increase it,” said Reserve Brig. Gen. Shmaya Avieli, head of the Defense Ministry’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Department.

The Israelis are hoping to secure big-ticket deals at the Paris Air Show, a major international defense industry showcase next week at the Le Bourget exhibition center.

Government figures indicate Israeli defense companies sold military hardware worth $9.6 billion in 2010, $2.4 billion of it to Israel’s military.

But meantime, China, once a promising market for Israeli weapons and electronic systems, remains off-limits, largely because of Israel’s ally, the United States.

His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips:

The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.

He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.
‘Completely wired’

Mr Schmidt said he believed the “problem” of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to “get worse”.

In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”

“The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”

“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he added.

I’m proud to have signed the following statement, just released publicly, that asks the Chinese regime to release famed artist Ai Weiwei:

This is an open letter from members of the Australian creative community to the Chinese Ambassador in Australia about the disappearance of artist and activist Ai Weiwei

To Chen Yuming, Chinese Ambassador to Australia,

We write to you today in relation to Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

As you may know Ai was detained on 3 April 2011 at Beijing airport by Chinese police. His studio was then sealed off and his staff and wife interrogated. All this occurred without any given reasons or charges lain.

When on 7 April the Chinese ministry announced that he had been arrested for alleged economic crimes no proof was given and no official charge made.

His studio was then searched again and on 9 April his accountant, driver Zhang Jingsong and studio partner Liu Zhenggang disappeared. Ai Weiwei’s assistant Wen Tao has also been missing since Ai’s arrest on 3 April.

It has now been 39 days since the disappearance of Ai. 9 May was the date that Ai should have been released unless there is an official charge. No official notifications have been given regarding his whereabouts or reason for detainment.

The EU and US have protested Ai’s detention and the international arts community has rallied behind his cause. The international Council of Museums has collected more than 90,000 signatures and countless petitions have been organised.

We are deeply concerned about the kidnapping and disappearance of Ai Weiwei and his colleagues. We call on the Chinese government to carry out fair and open legal proceedings.

We believe the arrest of Ai Weiwei represents a watershed. His arrest came days after his Twitter comments about the Jasmine revolution and the arrest of such a high profile figure in China spreads the concern of human rights, freedom of speech and artistic expression.

We the creative community of Australia as friends and neighbours of China call for the immediate release of Ai Weiwei.

Signed
John Connell, author and filmmaker
Jane Campion, filmmaker
David Malouf, author
Lisa Havilah, director, Carriageworks
John Maynard, filmmaker
Chrissy Sharpe, director, The Wheeler Centre
Bridget Iken, filmmaker
Delia Falconer, writer
Natalie Wood, fashion designer
Professor Stuart Rees AM, director, Sydney Peace Foundation
Duncan Graham, playwright
Anna Schwartz, gallery owner
William Yang, photographer
Tony Ayers, filmmaker
Jeff Sparrow, writer, editor Overland literary journal
Tom Zubrycki, filmmaker
Gabrielle Carey, author
Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist and author
Debra Adelaide, vice president, PEN Sydney
Robyn Martin-Weber, art consultant
Paola Morabito, filmmaker
Professor Wendy Bacon, University of Technology, Sydney
Jodie Passmore, filmmaker
Ben Ferris, director, Sydney film school
Annette Shun Wah, writer, actor, producer
Dr. Nicholas Ng, composer
Kevina Jo Smith, artist
Benjamin Law, writer
Mark Bradshaw, composer
Professor Rónán McDonald, Australian Ireland Fund Chair of Modern Irish Studies
Helen Bowden, producer
Mark Walkley, author
Xu Wang, artist
Daniel Stricker, musician/label manager
Helen Fitzgerald, art director
Kirin J Callinan, musician
Jenna Price, journalist and academic
Danielle Zorbas, producer
Billy Maynard, photographer
Larin Sullivan, filmmaker
Vivian Huynh, copywriter/musician
Jack Jeweller, curator and writer
Jiao Chen, filmmaker
Chi Vu, writer director
Tom Cho, author
Benedict Andrews, theatre director
Andrew Santamaria, musician and environmental engineer.
Tristan Ceddia, publisher
Rebecca Conroy, director billandgeorge
Hana Shimada, artist
Jonathan Zawada, designer/artist
Amelia Groom, author
Robert Milne, publisher
Matthew Hopkins, artist
Charlie Sofo, artist
Jeff Yiu, photgrapher
Caterina Scardino, stylist
Brami Jegan, activist
Russell Smith, lecturer ANU
Hugo O’Connor, producer
Sam Bryant, filmmaker
Dr Tseen Khoo, grant developer
Cinnamon van Reyk, museum curator
Brent Clough, broadcaster
Dr Simone Lazaroo, writer, senior lecturer, Murdoch University
Nicole Bearman, producer, cultural programs and events
Luke Bacon, composer
Trischelle Roberts, musician
Miska Mandic, musician
Morry Schwartz, publisher
Kath Shleper, filmmaker

Here is the devastating Channel 4 in Britain documentary on the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. Assisted by China, Israel, India and the US, Colombo murdered over 40,000 Tamil civilians. We will not forget. And we will demand accountability:

The US is unsurprisingly worried about cyber attacks from hackers, Russia, China or even a friendly nation. The future of warfare may well be fought in a different space altogether.

But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed. Is Wikileaks in the same category? Clearly not, but Washington’s counter-attack may be far too draconian for a supposed democracy:

The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

The twin efforts show how President Barack Obama’s administration is racing on multiple fronts to plug the holes in U.S. cyber defenses.

Notwithstanding the military’s efforts, however, the overall gap appears to be widening, as adversaries and criminals move faster than government and corporations, and technologies such as mobile applications for smart phones proliferate more rapidly than policymakers can respond, officials and analysts said.

A Reuters examination of American cyber readiness produced the following findings:

* Spin-offs of the malicious code dubbed “agent.btz” used to attack the military’s U.S. Central Command in 2008 are still roiling U.S. networks today. People inside and outside the U.S. government strongly suspect Russia was behind the attack, which was the most significant known breach of military networks.

* There are serious questions about the security of “cloud computing,” even as the U.S. government prepares to embrace that technology in a big way for its cost savings.

* The U.S. electrical grid and other critical nodes are still vulnerable to cyber attack, 13 years after then-President Bill Clinton declared that protecting critical infrastructure was a national priority.

* While some progress has been made in coordinating among government agencies with different missions, and across the public-private sector gap, much remains to be done.

* Government officials say one of the things they fear most is a so-called “zero-day attack,” exploiting a vulnerability unknown to the software developer until the strike hits.

That’s the technique that was used by the Stuxnet worm that snarled Iran’s enriched uranium-producing centrifuges last summer, and which many experts say may have been created by the United States or Israel. A mere 12 months later, would-be hackers can readily find digital tool kits for building Stuxnet-like weapons on the Internet, according to a private-sector expert who requested anonymity.

“We’re much better off (technologically) than we were a few years ago, but we have not kept pace with opponents,” said Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “The network is so deeply flawed that it can’t be secured.”

“IT’S LIKE AN INSECT INFESTATION”

In recent months hackers have broken into the SecurID tokens used by millions of people, targeting data from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3 and almost certainly others; launched a sophisticated strike on the International Monetary Fund; and breached digital barriers to grab account information from Sony, Google, Citigroup and a long list of others.

The latest high-profile victims were the public websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate – whose committees are drafting legislation to improve coordination of cyber defenses.

Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour.

Promoting web freedom is a noble idea, especially since so many autocratic regimes and Western multinationals are working together to stop citizens accessing the glories of information on the internet.

But this idea is full of potential problems (via the New York Times), not least because Washington has a shocking record of supporting dictatorships at the expense of democracy and this won’t stop anytime soon. It’s called hypocrisy. Besides, being funded by the US to challenge US-backed regimes will likely end in tears, torture or worse:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

…

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THE NET DELUSION
Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane,
408pp, $29.95

As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost irrelevant.

Born in Belarus, Evgeny Morozov collects mountains of evidence to claim the internet isn’t able to bring freedom, democracy and liberalism.

Sceptics would tell him to watch Al-Jazeera and see the power of the Facebook generation in action.

In fact, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe, he argues, because countless regimes are using the same tools as activists – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and email – to monitor and catch dissidents.

He writes that “the only space where the West (especially the United States) is still unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda is in.”

Morozov condemns “cyber-utopians” for wanting to build a world where borders are no more. Instead, he says these well-meaning people “did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance” and the increasingly sophisticated methods of web censorship.

Furthermore, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Nokia and web security firms have all willingly colluded with a range of brutal states to turn a profit.

The Western media are largely to blame for creating the illusion of web-inspired democracy. During the Iranian uprisings in June 2009, many journalists dubbed it the Twitter Revolution, closely following countless tweets from the streets of Tehran. However, it was soon discovered that many of the tweets originated in California and not the Islamic republic. The myth had already been born.

None of these facts is designed to lessen the bravery of demonstrators against autocracies – and Morozov praises countless dissidents in China, the Arab world and beyond – but lazy journalists seemingly crave easy and often inaccurate narratives of nimble young keyboard warriors against sluggish old men in golden palaces.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen was right when he wrote in January that “the internet’s impact has been to expose the great delusion that has led Western governments to buttress Arab autocrats; that the only alternative to them was Islamic jihadists”.

But most protesters in the streets of Egypt had no access to the internet or any use for it and the main gripes were economic rather than ideological. However, it is undeniable that many of the young organised through online networks and clearly surprised the former Mubarak regime with their ability to harness a mainstream call for change.

Morozov, hailing from a country that knows about disappearances and suppression, urges the West to “stop glorifying those living in authoritarian governments”.

One of the Western fallacies of web usage in non-democratic nations is the belief that people are all looking for political content as a way to cope with repression. In fact, as Morozov proves with research, an experiment in 2007 with strangers in autocratic regimes found that instead of looking for dissenting material they “searched for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears”.

I noted similar trends in China when researching my book The Blogging Revolution and found most Chinese youth were interested in downloading movies and music and meeting boys and girls. Politics was the furthest thing from their minds.

This would change only if economic conditions worsened. A wise government would pre-empt these problems by allowing citizens to let off steam; Beijing has undoubtedly opened up online debate in the past decade, though there are certainly set boundaries and red lines not to cross.

Morozov sometimes underestimates the importance of people in repressive states feeling less alone and mixing with like-minded individuals. Witness the persecuted gay community in Iran, the websites connecting this beleaguered population and the space to discuss an identity denied by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ultimately, The Net Delusion is necessary because it challenges comfortable Western thinking about the modern nature of authoritarianism.

This year we have already been left to ponder the irony of the US State Department deploying its resources to pressure Arab regimes not to block communications and social media while the stated agenda of Washington is a matrix of control across the region.

These policies are clearly contradictory and a person in US-backed Saudi Arabia and Bahrain won’t be fooled into believing Western benevolence if they can merely use Twitter every day.