Antony Loewenstein

During research for my book The Blogging Revolution, a great deal of time was spent examining just what companies such as Google actually do in Iran.

The company has posted the latest information:

During the protests that erupted in Iran following the disputed Presidential election in June 2009, the central government in Tehran deported all foreign journalists, shut down traditional media outlets, closed off print journalism and disrupted cell phone lines. The government also infiltrated networks, posing as activists and using false identities to round up dissidents. In spite of this, the sharing of information using the Internet prevailed. YouTube and Twitter were cited by journalists, activists and bloggers as the best source for firsthand accounts and on-the-scene footage of the protests and violence across the country. At the time, though, U.S. export controls and sanctions programs prohibited software downloads to Iran.

Some of those export restrictions have now been lifted and today, for the first time, we’re making Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome available for download in Iran. We’re committed to full compliance with U.S. export controls and sanctions programs and, as a condition of our export licenses from the Treasury Department, we will continue to block IP addresses associated with the Iranian government.

Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information. And we believe that more available products means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for individuals in Iran and across the globe.

Posted by Neil Martin, Export Compliance Programs Manager

We are entering an age where the complicity of internet companies in censorship is becoming clear to many. We have allowed them to become too powerful and now they can act like this. By the way, so much for the Obama administration being any different to the Bushies over human rights, secrets and intimidation:

WikiLeaks said on Saturday the Twitter accounts of four supporters have been subpoenaed in connection with an espionage investigation into the whistleblowing website led by a secret US grand jury.

“Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into Wikileaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.

WikiLeaks said legal action taken by micro-blogging website Twitter “revealed that the US State Department has requested the private messages, contact information, IP addresses, and personal details of Julian Assange and three other individuals associated with Wikileaks, in addition to Wikileaks? own account, which has 634,071 followers.”

It did not name the three other people, but Icelandic lawmaker Birgitta Jonsdottir tweeted overnight: “just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks)”.

She later posted “usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. do they realize I am a member of parliament in iceland?”

In another message she said “just got the request via twitter from a court in the usa”.

WikiLeaks said it also had “reason to believe Facebook and Google, among other organisations, have received similar court orders, and calls on them to unseal any subpoenas they have received”.

“WikiLeaks is opposing the subpoena order and is currently taking action to instruct US lawyers,” it said, urging Twitter to protect its users’ private information.

The CIA, keeping the US safe:

Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking?

The introductory section of this recent essay in the London Review of Books paints a disturbing nexus between the US government and major web companies. They seem worryingly comfortable assisting US foreign policy goals. Putting a nice, sexy face to occupation. Beware:

On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak jackets, had been bundled around Baghdad in an armoured convoy, meeting anyone there was to meet. They’d been introduced to the prime minister’s council of advisers, glad-handed the Iraqi Investment National Commission and spoken to a group of engineering students from Baghdad University; they’d even had time to fit in a visit to the Iraqi National Museum. Among them were several high-ranking engineers from Google, the founder of the community organising tool Meetup, a vice-president of the firm behind the blogging platform WordPress, and an executive from Blue State Digital, the internet strategy firm that had done a fair bit to help Obama to the presidency the previous November.

The person getting all the attention was Dorsey, because by then Twitter was all anyone wanted to talk about. In fact one reason we know so much about the trip is that Dorsey and his colleagues spent much of their time tweeting about it, sending news of their journey in electronic haiku to their followers back home. ‘Lots of helicopters,’ Dorsey observed on his Twitter feed: ‘Met the president of Iraq. Amazing palace.’ In another tweet, he tells his followers that he’s been ‘talking to Iraqis to figure out if technologies like Twitter can help bring transparency, accessibility and stability to the area’. When he finds a wi-fi network in the presidential palace, he says how happy he is to be back online: ‘Catching up on the rest of the world.’ ‘Lots going on out there!’ he writes. Barham Salih’s inaugural tweet was less upbeat: ‘Sorry, my first tweet not pleasant; dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.’

This was the first time the US government had organised a new media delegation to a country in the Middle East. The idea was to introduce the minds behind America’s internet start-ups to the movers and shakers who were going to rebuild Iraq, but as Dorsey’s excitable tweets indicated, the audience back home was just as important.

Some startling facts:

- There are now more than 500 million active Facebook users, with 50% logging on to the site on any given day. Worldwide, users collectively spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook.

- Google’s email service Gmail ended July with 186 million worldwide users, a 22% increase from the same time a year ago. Both Microsoft’s Windows Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo’s email (303 million users) are larger, but aren’t growing as rapidly.

- As of September, Twitter, which launched in 2006, had 175 million registered users posting an estimated 95 million tweets each day.

- There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide. In many regions, penetration exceeds 100%, meaning more than one connection per person. Research earlier this year found that teenagers in American now use text as their main method of communication, with more than 30% of US teens sending more than 100 texts a day.

- More than 25% of the UK’s population – some 16 million people – accessed the internet from mobile phones in December 2009. Nearly half those total minutes online via mobile devices were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn – with Google on 400m in a very distant second.

What words does Google Instant not like?

Wonderful New York profile of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, a program that becomes even more essential as America’s two-party system crumbles before our very eyes (but don’t tell them; they don’t need to realise):

After September 11, Stewart began to employ his newfound anger, becoming a voice of comic sanity in the whirlwind of real and manufactured fear. Segments like “America Freaks Out” and “Mess O’Potamia” punctured the false-patriotic sanctimony being peddled by the Bush administration. Yet as appalled as Stewart was by the politicians, his greater scorn was increasingly aimed at the acquiescent and co-opted news media. “I assume there are bad actors in society,” Stewart says. “It’s inherent in politicians to be disingenuous. And a mining company wants to own the company store—as it is in SpongeBob. Mr. Krabs just wants to make more money. He’s not concerned with SpongeBob’s working conditions—although SpongeBob is putting in hours that are not humane, even for an invertebrate. I assume monkeys are gonna throw shit. I get angrier at the people who don’t go ‘Bad monkey!’ or who create distraction that allows it to continue unabated. The thing that shocked me the most when I first met reporters was the people who would step aside and say, ‘Boy, I wish I could say what you’re saying.’ You have a show! You are a network anchor! Whaddya mean you can’t say it?” Stewart says. “It’s one reason I admire Fox. They’re great broadcasters. Everything is pointed, purposeful. You follow story lines, you fall in love with characters: ‘Oh, that’s the woman who’s very afraid of Black Panthers! I can’t wait to see what happens next. Oh, look, it’s the ex-alcoholic man who believes that Woodrow Wilson continues to wreak havoc on this country! This is exciting!’ Even the Fox morning show, the way they’re able to present propaganda as though it’s merely innocent thoughts occurring to them: ‘What is this “czar”? I’m Googling, and you know what’s interesting about a czar? It’s a Russian oligarch! Don’t you think it’s weird that Obama has Russian oligarchs, and he’s a socialist?’ Whereas MSNBC will trace the word and say, ‘If you don’t understand that, you’re an idiot!’ The mistake they make is that somehow facts are more important than feelings.”

Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov explores the possibility of an Iranian search engine and the “growing politicization of the internet in general and of search space in particular.”

Looks like we’ll have to fight for a truly free internet:

So Google and Verizon went public today with their “policy framework” — better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it.

News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that’s seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling on Google to live up to its “Don’t Be Evil” pledge.

But cut through the platitudes the two companies (Googizon, anyone?) offered on today’s press call, and you’ll find this deal is even worse than advertised.

The proposal is one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet.

Real Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers can’t discriminate between different kinds of online content and applications. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies. It’s what makes sure the next Google, out there in a garage somewhere, has just as good a chance as any giant corporate behemoth to find its audience and thrive online.

What Google and Verizon are proposing is fake Net Neutrality. You can read their framework for yourself here or go here to see Google twisting itself in knots about this suddenly “thorny issue.” But here are the basics of what the two companies are proposing:

1. Under their proposal, there would be no Net Neutrality on wireless networks — meaning anything goes, from blocking websites and applications to pay-for-priority treatment.

2. Their proposed standard for “non-discrimination” on wired networks is so weak that actions like Comcast’s widely denounced blocking of BitTorrent would be allowed.

3. The deal would let ISPs like Verizon — instead of Internet users like you — decide which applications deserve the best quality of service. That’s not the way the Internet has ever worked,and it threatens to close the door on tomorrow’s innovative applications. (If Real Player had been favored a few years ago, would we ever have gotten YouTube?)

4. The deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into “two pipes” – one of which would be reserved for “managed services,” a pay-for-pay platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.

5. The pact proposes to turn the Federal Communications Commission a toothless watchdog, left fruitlessly chasing consumer complaints but unable to make rules of its own. Instead, it would leave it up to unaccountable (and almost surely industry-controlled) third parties to deicide what the rules should be.

Just what the world needs:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

…

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

Sadly, Google has caved to Chinese demands and will once again censor some online content. Principles are clearly flexible for the web giant:

Google, the US internet search company, has agreed to submit to official Chinese censorship.

The Chinese government, on its part, announced the renewal of Google’s licence to operate in the country.

The government’s decision came after the California-based company pledged not to provide “law-breaking content” to internet users in China, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua reported on Sunday, quoting an official with China’s internet regulator, that the licence was renewed for another year for Beijing Guxiang Information Technology Co Ltd, the operator of Google’s China website.

The industry and information technology ministry’s website listed Guxiang among some 200 companies whose licences had been renewed until 2012.

Xinhua said Guxiang agreed to “abide by Chinese law” and “ensure the company provides no law-breaking content” in its renewal application letter.

Foreign Policy features an article about the “geo-politics of the iPhone”.

Perhaps the most revealing section:

The business: If you thought military procurement was all about snapping up hardware like guns and tanks, think again. Increasingly, companies like Raytheon and Knight’s Armament are developing smartphone applications for the armed services. Apple and Google are marketing their respective products, too. And the Pentagon’s buying.

The politics: Normally, military innovation drives advances in the private market. Take GPS satellite navigation, for instance, or the microwave oven. In the case of smartphones, though, the tables have turned. Web-enabled phones are going to war in ever greater numbers, and the U.S. military hopes that such devices, with the help of the Internet, can provide soldiers with reams of live battlefield data. But it isn’t just their passive capabilities that the military finds attractive.

In the same way that civilian third-party apps have greatly expanded the potential of the iPhone and similar hand-helds, the Pentagon’s R&D house, DARPA, bets that a military app store can likewise reshape the way soldiers fight and interact with one another. One such app, BulletFlight, lets snipers plug in variables like windage, distance, temperature, and humidity to help them achieve the perfect shot. Another, the One Force Tracker, plots friendly positions on a map in real time, and a third, Vcommunicator, produces “spoken and written translations of Arabic, Kurdish, and two Afghan languages.” It’s no revolution in military affairs, but the smartphone revolution may still shake up war-fighting in a big way.