Antony Loewenstein

I was interviewed by Sarah Arnold in US magazine The Nation for an article published online on December 23:

According to a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report released December 4, of the 125 media workers in prison – a list that includes Ibrahim Jassam, a photographer held in US custody in Iraq – more of them published online than in any other medium.

The majority of online journalists behind bars come from China, the most high-profile of the many countries where Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have been accused of complicity with human rights violations. CPJ cites the Global Network Initiative as one effort to address this. Developed by these companies in cooperation with investors, academics and human rights organizations, the initiative details a set of principles aimed at protecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. It’s difficult to tell whether the voluntary program will rein in the actions of the corporations.

“They’ve been named and shamed before, and their behavior has not really changed,” said Antony Loewenstein, author of The Blogging Revolution. Participants are asked to assess their impact in new markets and to maintain transparency, but they are not required to break local laws or pull out of offending countries.

Meanwhile, Loewenstein stressed his faith in the motives of, if not Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, then the human rights groups involved. “I’m skeptical only because I’ve seen these companies operating in China, and it’s really ugly,” he said. “I’m happy to be proven wrong.”

Yahoo threw down the gauntlet to bitter rivals Google and Microsoft yesterday by cutting the length of time that it retains information about what its users are doing online.

It will now keep information about online searches for only 90 days – down from 13 months – before ‘anonymising’ the data by getting rid of any information about the computer address of the user.

Democracy Now! is the world’s finest independent news service, based in New York and known for its fearless investigations of the major issues of the day (and many ignored by the corporate media.)

I was interviewed live on their TV/radio program in the studio this morning about my book, The Blogging Revolution:

JUAN GONZALEZ: A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists says more internet journalists are jailed today than journalists in any other medium. At least fifty-six online journalists are jailed worldwide, according to CPJ’s census, a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. The number of imprisoned online journalists has steadily increased since CPJ recorded the first jailed internet writer in its 1997 census.

AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest traveled to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China in 2007 to look at bloggers around the world. He is Antony Loewenstein. He wrote The Blogging Revolution.

Welcome. Talk about blogging in these countries, why people are ending up in jail.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: The bottom line is that many, many people in these countries, of course, can’t rely on state-run media, which is propaganda. Bloggers and blogging is a way of trying to express different views. So in every country I went to, except for Cuba, where the internet is very underdeveloped, you have situations, people blogging about sex, about drugs, about gender issues, about politics. The majority of people in these countries don’t blog politically. They blog about their personal lives, about their boyfriends, their girlfriends. But there is increasingly, as that report states, many, many regimes who are fearful of the fact that you have independent voices, simply put.

In China, for example, I think it said there were thirty-five people who were imprisoned, many of those people—some of those people, I should add, with the assistance of Western multinationals like Yahoo!, who have actually given information to the regime to assist these people being put in jail. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, other security firms, internet firms, have sadly and shamefully been involved in these kind of complicity acts. And [inaudible] one of the things I discuss in the book is to actually have more transparency about how those guys actually operate in those kind of countries.

A place like Iran, say, the most part, the population is very, very young. So what you find is that despite like Ahmadinejad cracking down on dissent, which has undoubtedly happened in the last three years, you still find a very, very vibrant online community, far more vibrant than you get in most of the Western media. So there is, despite the crackdowns and despite the imprisonment, discussion about politics between reformists and liberals and, for that matter, conservatives. And one of the things that comes out, I think, very clearly is that many people in these countries resent how the Western media reports them, New York Times, those sort of papers.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Even in Iran, you noted that there’s an American company there, Secure Computing, that was providing a filter—

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: I did.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —for Iran to be able to filter out information on the internet?

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: The company denies it’s involved, so—but my understanding is that they actually are involved. This is what you find in country after country, that although Western multinationals often talk about human rights and democracy, we’ve seen in the last five years these companies actually operating to make a buck. China is, for example, the biggest internet market in the world, 250 million users, six million users going online every month. America’s got about 230 million people, roughly, online. So, surprise, surprise, they want to make a buck. And what you find increasingly is that companies like that are also moving into other nations.

And one of the things I discuss in the book is, we too much in the West think about these issues happening over there somewhere, China, Iran, somewhere, rather than happening here. And I think what we need to look at more closely is how these companies might operate when they behave in the West and, for that matter, are they exporting their oppression elsewhere, as well?

AMY GOODMAN: What about Saudi Arabia?

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Saudi Arabia made Iran seem liberal in comparison. The online community in Saudi Arabia is not massive, but certainly growing. I spent some time with some prominent bloggers there who are relatively liberal in a Saudi sense. And one of the challenges they have, that censorship actually in Saudi is quite minimal, believe it or not. There are websites that are blocked by the kingdom, but most of them actually are relatively available. What you find there is a great discussion between so-called liberal reformers who actually want to try and make the possibility of a liberal, more open Islam a possibility. And there’s often a great deal of competition online between more hardliners than conservatives who believe in a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and more individuals who believe in a more liberal, open, relatively democratic Islam.

AMY GOODMAN: Egypt?

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Egypt, again, arguably the most vibrant online community in the Middle East. There’s been a great deal of actually change there because of the internet, not least because of torture. Torture videos are increasingly now published on blogs. The government has been forced to respond. Torture still goes on, of course, but it’s becoming a lot less. And one of the things that strikes me is that a lot of social networking sites, Facebook, YouTube, actually are increasingly being used to organize dissent against the US-backed regime.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Antony Loewenstein, I want to thank you for being with us and writing this book.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I know you head back to Australia tomorrow. The Blogging Revolution is the name of his book. He’ll be speaking at Blue Stockings in New York tonight.

My following talk was presented today to a full room at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre:

Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society
Luncheon Series, 25 November 2008

Antony Loewenstein

Internet censorship is something that only happens in non-democratic states. Regimes that want to crush free speech routinely employ automated and human-directed methods to silence dissent and politically uncomfortable material. Jails are filled across the world with bloggers and dissidents who challenge authoritarian rule. These voices are rarely heard in our media, especially if they are critical of Western foreign policy dictates.

If only all this were true.

The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is currently proposing the imposition of a mandatory filtering process to “protect Australian families and kids from some material that is currently on the net”, namely child pornography and ultra-violent sites.

It may sound benign enough, but the country’s leading internet service providers, free speech lobbyists and independent parliamentarians have all responded with outrage that such a proposal might be implemented. Aside from the question of current technology being incapable of monitoring the long list of websites that could allegedly breach Australian law – around 10,000, according to the government – there is the freedom of speech angle.

A number of politicians have advocated blocking online gaming sites, general pornography sites, euthanasia sites and pro-anorexia sites. What next?

It is not hard to imagine a push to block sites that supposedly “support” terrorism. Take Hamas, the democratically elected party in Palestine and yet regarded as a terrorist group by much of the West. For many individuals around the world, myself included, Hamas is not a terrorist entity and should be engaged. But will over-zealous politicians make it illegal to view the organisation’s websites?

The militant Shia political group Hizbollah may find similar problems in years to come, as could Islamist organizations that challenge American foreign policy. These are political freedoms extinguished under the guise of protecting society from terrorism.

Despite these ominous possibilities, Australia is not one of the world’s worst internet freedom abusers. For my book, The Blogging Revolution, I travelled in 2007 to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to examine the role of the web in repressive states and the involvement of Western multinationals in assisting censorship. Most importantly, I wanted to challenge the thesis that the introduction of the web automatically brings Western-inspired, democratic ideals to a society. This is, of course, deluded fantasy and wishful thinking propagated by conservative think-tanks in the US.

I spoke in these nations with writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians, citizens, men and women, activists, conservatives and liberals. How did they view their relationship with the ruling elite? How representative were their voices in the society and how possible was it for minorities to be heard? What was their attitude towards the Western powers, especially America?

In Egypt, for example, the country receives the second highest amount of US foreign aid annually after Israel – money that is predominantly spent on “security” to monitor and subdue the rising Muslim Brotherhood political insurgency – and many bloggers told me they resented this money being given to repress them.

President Hosni Mubarak is highly unpopular yet remains on the White House Christmas list. This is unlikely to change under President Barack Obama. Simply put, true democracy in the Middle East would likely see the election of Islamist parties in virtually every country, hostile to the US and Israel. For this reason alone, the maintenance of the status-quo – dictatorships that provide the West with stability and energy reserves – will continue. Blogger anger towards this Faustian bargain was palpable.

September 11 should have been the perfect opportunity for the Western media to hear the grievances of the Muslim world. With notable exceptions, indigenous voices were excluded then and still remain largely absent from the pages of the world’s leading papers. The underlying belief, rarely acknowledged but undoubtedly true, is that many Western editors only want to hear foreign news reported through a Western lens. Underlying racism? Yes. Unless a place or event is seen and heard by a Western reporter it isn’t legitimate and therefore unprovable. When was the last time we read regular reports from on-the-ground bloggers in war zones or difficult to reach areas, rather than the occasional dispatch from a visiting journalist? It happens all-too-infrequently.

The general consensus across the globe was that political and military meddling by Washington and London was making the job of real democrats much more difficult. Democracy was a term defined differently in every nation, but virtually nobody shunned the idea of more freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press.

As one blogger told me in Tehran: “Most of the people I know are in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution.” I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.

I was reminded of a comment from leading Middle East journalist Robert Fisk who told Australian television in 2005:

“The Arab world…would love some of this shiny beautiful democracy which we possess and enjoy. They would love some of it. They would like some freedom. But many of them would like freedom from us – from our armies, from our influence. And that’s the problem, you see. What Arabs want is justice as much as democracy.”

And we don’t want to give it to them.

In every nation I visited, however, bloggers were starting to unpack issues that remained largely hidden from public view. Women in Egypt were campaigning against the tradition of female genital mutilation. Activists in Cuba were highlighting the repressive nature of the Castro regime and the counter-productive policies of the US administration towards them. Opposition figures in Damascus were blogging about state-imposed web filtering. Saudi Arabian women, blocked from driving or working in the US-backed dictatorship, were using the web to express a desire for greater human rights. Iranian hip-hops were distributing their banned beats via file sharing software. Chinese dissidents were protesting the role of Western multinationals, such as Google, Cisco, Yahoo and Microsoft, in the dubious role of assisting state censorship.

Blogging is not in itself revolutionary, but the act of self-expression online can be. Although the vast majority of bloggers in non-democratic nations are not dissecting politics – due to disinterest or fear of being caught – I was fascinated to hear why certain people courageously risked their scalps to challenge the iron-will of dictators. Like dissidents in the former Soviet Union – who only had limited resources and reached a fraction of the people bloggers can affect – online activists find the medium intoxicating because of its reach and global impact.

Many bloggers I met were conscious of a local and international audience. They wanted their own regime to feel pressure and change policies but also generate noise around the world. It was a realisation that outside influence can, if used judiciously and respectfully, be invaluable in supporting democratic movements in repressive regimes. For example, many bloggers in Saudi Arabia, desperate to convince their own citizens of the benefits of a moderate, political Islam, are using the web to slowly pressure the fundamentalist state to not fear democratic elections and a free press. It’s an uphill struggle, not helped by a Western world determined to keep the oil pumping.

Barely a week goes by when the media is not filled with stories of bloggers being imprisoned by unsavoury regimes. Take the Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt, who recently received over 20 years for possession of a banned video and having a blog to express his concerns about the increasing difficulty of Burmese people in voicing their opinions since the massive protests in 2007. The regime, in a desperate move to stop images and news of abuse leaking to the world, regularly shuts down the entire web system for days on end, effectively cutting off the country from the outside world. This is only possible in places where the internet isn’t central to the running of an economy, like China. Instead, the powers in Beijing have instituted the Golden Shield to filter out unwanted material.

With the collusion of Western companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others in China’s Great Firewall, the role of these multinationals is largely ignored in the Western media. In my book I examine the various excuses, justifications and defences offered by them when explaining their actions in the quasi-Communist state. The real reason is clearly the fact that there around now over 250 million web users and growing at six million every month. Such potential profits make ethical considerations seem quaint in boardrooms across the world.

However, the recent launch of the Global Network Initiative – a code of conduct for corporations on privacy and free speech created by a coalition of human rights groups, media development, research organizations, internet and communications companies such as Google to ensure that companies acknowledge their “responsibility to respect and protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users” – will be a test of necessary transparency. It is no longer acceptable for web companies to claim they are merely complying with laws in a particular country. International laws and norms must be applied, with the pressure from the US Congress, if necessary.

Recently in Melbourne, Australia, a number of individuals gathered to consider a proposal to design an ethical labelling system for media distribution. Ellie Rennie, research fellow at Melbourne’s Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, said the following:

“If you think of Fair Trade coffee for example, we know that behind Fair Trade coffee there’s a very elaborate and trustworthy system of workers’ rights, of ethical farming. So this is similar, in that we need the label on that media in order to determine what kind of media we might be using in the same way that we buy Fair Trade coffee, because we believe in what it stands for.”

Could such standards be applied to web companies operating in authoritarian regimes? While we all rely on Google and related companies, how often do we consider their actions in non-Western nations? And as importantly, is the knowledge they are gaining in such lands likely to be implemented against us some time in the near future?

Aside from the issue of oppressive censorship, my work acknowledges that blogging culture cannot be seen to represent societies as a whole. In the main, they are middle class men and women with access to information and technology far above the average citizen.

One of the dangers with my kind of work is the presumption that repression only occurs in authoritarian states. Increasingly, Western governments are attempting to monitor and filter information on the internet. Politicians in Britain recently announced plans to give security agencies and police unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security.

In Argentina since 2006 over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo Argentina to erase the results of search queries. Judges, public officials, models, actors and world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona have used the law to silence criticism.

US Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman this year successfully pressured YouTube owners Google to remove videos from “Islamist terrorist organizations”.

A recent article in the Economist magazine attempted to explain the fall of independent blogging. The medium, the magazine stated, “has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death”:

“Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers.”

Alas, this thesis may be partly true in the West but utterly inaccurate for the rest of the world. Heralding the death of blogging is both premature and ignores the vast importance of online media in developing nations.

US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that “communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. In other words, it’s only now becoming possible to see and hear online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.

Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. Its culture is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are proudly vague. While many want the right to be critical of the media and political dysfunction, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.

Internet censorship is increasingly occurring in so-called democracies, including Argentina:

Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of country’s most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona.

The following feature, by Pam Walker, appeared in the Hub newspaper on October 13:

Few would now deny the growing power of the internet and its appeal to younger readers who are turning their backs on mainstream media in favour of online content, especially blogs.

Antony Loewenstein, Australian journalist and author of My Israel Question, has just launched his latest book The Blogging Revolution, a revealing account of bloggers around the globe who write under repressive regimes.

Loewenstein decided to check out how these bloggers fared, gathering his material at private parties in Iran and Egypt, internet cafes in Saudi Arabia and Damascus, the homes of Cuban dissidents and newspaper offices in Beijing.

Here he discovered how the internet is threatening the rule of governments and how bloggers are leading the charge for change.

“It was an amazing trip. In every country I visited, except Cuba, the online community is vibrant,” Loewenstein said. “Most countries saw the internet as economic development. It was not seen as a political threat but over the last year governments have noticed and a trend of censoring and blocking websites has emerged.”

He acknowledges his book is critical of the west.

“I wrote it because I sensed in much of the western media a tendency to grossly oversimplify things, to push an unquestioning official line and to see everything through the prism of terrorism. I thought the best thing was to go to these countries and check it out for myself.”

What he found surprised him.

“There was more debate, both online and off, than I had expected, even in places like Iran,” he said. “Iran is amazingly liberal online, and there’s a lot of criticism of Ahmadinajad. Despite censorship and control there are debates going on, some liberal, some conservative, that are more robust than what you get in the west. But yes, there are many blocked sites deemed pornographic or political.

“Saudi Arabia is arguably the most oppressive country in the world but surprisingly, the web is generally unfiltered. There are lines that can’t be crossed but a growing number of Saudi women are going online which is incredibly empowering – one woman has a blog talking about enjoying buying lingerie for her partner.”

And China, which tops the world in internet usage with 250 million people online (the US is next with 230 million) has been opening up in the last five years.

“You find people discussing corruption online. In the cities and in rural areas you find campaigns and public protests against local officials,” he said. “Bloggers have started public online protests which the regime has allowed.”

Loewenstein says the strength of blogs is it allows people to be engaged politically.

“Do blogs change elections? No. Do they have input and influence on what is discussed? Yes,” he said. “Elections are so stage managed. Both political parties have ‘embedded’ journalists so citizen journalists who can write about what they are seeing can be helpful, despite the idea that if a mainstream journo doesn’t write it, it isn’t true.”

And Loewenstein says Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have all been willing to censor their search engines, and Yahoo and Microsoft have even handed over information about users who have then been jailed.

“Look at how some of these companies have operated, how they’ve excused it, posting photos of wanted Tibetans on the yahoo.china homepage. Yahoo US said it had nothing to do with that, so where does responsibility lie?”

In the US and the EU there are now moves to implement some agreement regarding companies like Google to specify that if they operate in countries with authoritarian regimes they don’t have to abide by local laws.

So has the internet advanced the march of democracy?

“Yes and no. The problem is you can monitor what people say online so it makes Big Brother more effective but it also challenges authoritarian regimes and gives people more of a direct voice.”

The following news story and interview, by Rob Bates (photo by Alan Place), appears in this week’s Wentworth Courier newspaper:

My following article is published in this week’s Time Out Sydney magazine:

In the years after September 11, 2001, I was constantly frustrated by the failure of the Western media to examine the real reasons behind the attacks. It was as if only a Western journalist’s filter was allowed to see the post 9/11 world. From the hills of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq, I constantly waited to read indigenous voices from these conflict zones. They rarely came.

The internet has revolutionised the ways in which the world communicates, does business and dissents. In Western societies, such advances are irreversible but what about the rest of the planet? In 2007 I visited Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to examine how the net was challenging authoritarian regimes, the role of Western multinationals such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in the assistance of web filtering and how misinformed we are in the West towards states considered “enemies” or “allies”.

I spoke to writers, journalists, politicians, dissidents and citizens to gauge attitudes towards social and political issues in their countries and what they really thought about taboo subjects. Blogs, websites and online forums prove that state-run media are usually little more than propaganda-producing outlets. In many places, therefore, online media is the only space to find quality and reliable information.

Across the world, young generations are challenging tired state media by writing online about politics, sex, drugs, relationships, religion, popular culture and Brad Pitt. From female Egyptian activists opposed to female circumcision to outspoken, pro-Western women in Cuba, people are being empowered by new technology to create spaces away from the prying eyes of meddling authorities.

My book, The Blogging Revolution, is more conversation than definitive statement. As Western media struggles to adapt to a web future – ironically enough, sales of print media are rising in many non-Western states – it is vital to examine the shifting relationship between reader and writer and journalist and consumer.

In the non-Western world, however, as I extensively examine in the book, expectations towards transparency and democracy are different and necessarily so. Blogs are one way to gain insights into these worlds, away from our current obsession with “terrorism.”

The following review of The Blogging Revolution is published by the Committee to Protect Bloggers:

I told Antony Loewenstein well over a month ago that I would review his book, “The Blogging Revolution.” I’ve put it off not because the book’s no good but because I simply hate reviewing books. It takes forever and, if you’re a freelancer, pays crap. I’ve found various ways of getting around it before, primarily by rambling on without end, as with this review of “Muslims in Spain” on my personal blog.

This time, however, I’m going to try an ongoing review. That is, I am going to expand the review as I go through the book. Each time I write, I will be registering my impressions. Some of those impressions will be qualified, even contradicted, by further reading. Others will not. Not ideal, perhaps, though in keeping with the spirit of blogging, I think. Hopefully, the discussion in the comments will also be extended due to the form. Plus, both Antony as the writer and you as readers will actually get a review out of the deal.

A couple of introductory comments. As far as I know it is the first book on the topic of repression of bloggers. That alone would make it an important book. It’s also got a very cool cover. Antony I met long before he even had the idea for this book and was interested to watch the idea, and then the reality, develop. To know more about Antony, who is an Australian writer and journalist, check out his blog, Antony Loewenstein.

I have to confess straight out to a certain trepidation about the book. Antony’s first is the controversial “My Israel Question,” which I think could be described as a book by a Jewish anti-Zionist. The gravity that things like this book can sometimes produce however, attracts, in addition to critical thinkers, those with a rather problematic relationship to Jews. I’m talking less about anti-Semites than about disengenous anti-Israelis whose racism is couched in an objection to racism, much as some European politicians condone intolerance out of a worshipful relationship to tolerance.

I’m telling you this not to slap Antony upside the head, but so that you can tack your own sails against the direction of my wind if you feel it necessary.

OK, back to the book in question. To write it Antony researched a great deal. He was a blogger to begin with so already had a relationship with the technology, the communication strategy and some of the players. To write it, he visited Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. This is also, chapterwise, how he organized the book.

Introduction.

The thing that irritates me about the introduction, something which I have already seen in everything from blog posts to radio reports on the “progressive” side of the spectrum, is this notion that repression of bloggers in countries like Cuba has the following qualities.

• The United States (gasp!) is responsible for it
• It’s not so bad as The Man would have us believe
• The people in repressive countries are not bad

That the U.S. has an effect on the world is beyond question, but one thing I never see is an expose on how the vast power of the country is responsible for, say, South African music, or love. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the U.S. is responsible for everything, then it’s responsible for everything. And that includes French cinema and dim sum.

To the second and third points, I’m sure there are some people who believe that because Iran’s governing cadre is mostly creepy tyrants, for example, so are its people. But I don’t think there are many. It does make sense to ask the question, however, how much do the people in a given country believe in the philosophy of information their governments express? I think it’s vital to any exploration of repression.

Now, one of the main focii in the introduction is on the role of Western (really, American) companies in providing both the technology of repression as well as the strategy for it. From Google to Microsoft, Cisco to Smart Computing to Facebook, American Internet and social media companies have enthusiastically and repeatedly effected the repression of citizens in other countries and their own. What pisses me off about this even more than normal is that the ideal of America, the ideal whose practice made these innovative companies possible, has been whored off so enthusiastically by these companies NOT to make a fortune, but to make a little bit more money to add to the already-existing fortunes. For the life of me I have never understood this. Wouldn’t the PR benefit of acting decently more than make up for the loss of possible future customers in places like China.

Antony is right to point out that this is an integral element in the repression of bloggers and other practioners of social media. I look forward to more coverage of this as the book goes on. (With Tom Lantos having died, I doubt seriously there is another American politician with the moral uprightness and love of conflict who will hold these companies to task.)

My following interview by Hamid Tehrani for Global Voices was published today:

Antony Loewenstein, a Sydney-based freelance journalist and blogger, has recently published his new book: The Blogging Revolution. This book talks about the impact of blogging on six countries: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China and Cuba.

He says:

I chose the six countries in the book because they are routinely referred to in the West as “enemies” or “allies” of Washington and we were rarely gaining true insights into life for average citizens, away from stories about “terrorism”. I wanted to talk to bloggers, writers, dissidents, politicians and citizens and hear their stories, removed from “official” perspectives.

Antony attended the Global Voices Summit 2008 in Budapest as a panelist. You can find several references to Global Voices in his book.

I interviewed him about the book:

Q: Before starting your trip to Iran, you wrote that you were skeptical that the internet on its own can bring real revolutionary change to this country. What do you mean by revolutionary change? And what do you think now?

The concept of revolution is a fluid term. I met few people in my travels that wanted great shifts in their country. My book profiles a number of dissidents and bloggers across the globe who are striving for political, social and moral change – including Saudi Arabia’s most famous blogger, Fouad Al-Farhan, recently released from prison for challenging his nation’s nepotistic rule – but they recognize that only a tiny minority of citizens would join them in massive upheavals.

The internet cannot on its own bring large change, but it can facilitate and empower people to find their voice and campaign openly. No technology has existed before the web to do this. I don’t idealise the internet, nor believe Western-style democracy is the goal of people in the countries I visited. Foreign meddling is largely resented, though opening up the lines of communication with Westerners is welcomed.

In Iran, after nearly thirty years of revolution, most young people I met were exhausted; what they don’t want is to be bombed by the US or Israel.

Q: You quoted an Iranian journalist who worked with international news agencies, and said that foreign media in Iran are only interested in nuclear issues and Al–Qaida. Don’t you think it is the same in other countries? After all, Iranians are more interested in the US elections than the American health care system. How do you see the role of blogs in covering the less “hot” issues in Iran?

Western media is currently in a massive crisis of confidence. Resources are declining, fewer journalists are being employed and localism is being celebrated. It’s therefore not surprising, though regrettable, that so many stories in our press about a place such as Iran is obsessed with Ahmadinejad, terrorism, Iraq or human rights. These are all vitally important issues, but they don’t define the place.

My book reveals a side of Iran that is rarely seen in our terrorism-obsessed media.

Living in Sydney, Australia, I see daily the obsession with the US election, as if we all have real influence over Barack Obama or John McCain’s campaigns.

Blogs in so-called repressive regimes cover issues that time-constrained and narrow Western journalists usually do not. For this reason alone, they should be discussed and promoted.

Q: Are there any real commonalities between the Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi Arabian blogospheres, or any radical differences?

The Iranian and Egyptian blogospheres are large and growing, and influencing the political process. The regimes, recognizing this, are increasingly imprisoning bloggers and activists to try and silence them. International solidarity, from other bloggers and certain governments, is making the job of repressive regimes more difficult. Imprisoned bloggers won’t be forgotten.

I was impressed with the depth and diversity of the voices in both Egypt and Iran, something I feature extensively in the book, from the left to the right, women, activists and Islamists. Frankly, this scene is far more engaged than in many Western nations.

In Saudi Arabia, the blogosphere is less developed though still remains active. Censorship of “pornographic” sites is limited, though the regime is starting to fear the power of activists. Reading female bloggers – as a gender they’re actively marginalized in society – is refreshing if we want to understand this previously “silenced” group.

Q: What were the biggest challenges you faced writing this book and doing your research?

Gaining full access to some of the countries was challenging. Investigating the role of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Western multinational firms and their collusion in web censorship in a state such as China. Protecting my sources was equally important. I took precautions before I contacted bloggers in most countries and when I arrived there.

A key aim of the book was to move away from the traditional role of Western journalist as a filter of quality. In every featured country, my perspective is unavoidable, of course, but I was determined to redefine my position in relation to the people I was interviewing. Their voices were far more important than mine.

Q: What do you think about the role of Global Voices in helping people learn about unheard voices? Any ideas for how to make Global Voices more efficient?

The strength of Global Voices is its ability to educate readers across the world about different countries and cultures, often issues and perspectives ignored by the myopic Western media. Language remains a key problem, however. More effort should be placed into finding connections between the West and the rest because the internet is currently a space where these two worlds rarely interact.

Vibewire is one of Australia’s finest online youth portals (I used to write a regular column for them years ago.)

I was recently interviewed by one of their writers, Jacqui Dent, about my book, The Blogging Revolution:

Blogging is being used increasingly to speak out against oppression in authoritarian regimes and speak up amidst mainstream media bias in the west. But are we listening? JACQUI DENT talks with author Antony Loewenstein to find out.

“I’m not saying Kevin Rudd should have a blog [but] why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he want to engage with people? I understand that he’s a busy guy…”

It sounds like he’s having a joke but writer, blogger and journalist Antony Loewenstein is not being completely facetious. We’re chatting about his latest book The Blogging Revolution and the question that has prompted this statement is about his interview with Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the former vice-president of Iran. Just one of dozens of politicians, bloggers and journalists Loewenstein met whilst researching his book, what’s interesting about Abtahi is that he maintained a blog throughout his term and still has one today.

Unlike most of the bloggers Loewenstein met, Abtahi wrote from a position of power yet his motives matched those of many dissidents. He wrote out of frustration with the mainstream media. It’s a frustration Loewenstein shares, citing the events of 9/11 and the Iraq war as the wake-up call that for him flagged astonishing media bias in much of the west. Five years and over one million Iraqi casualties after the war in Iraq, the media still refuses to offer Iraqi voices. “Western journalists go to Iraq and they interview Iraqis: one or two lines, that’s it.”

“It’s clearly a belief that unless we report it and see it and explain it in our own words [you haven’t got legitimacy],” says Loewenstein. “If you go to much of the non-western world it’s that kind of bias…that pisses people off.”

Yet with the advent of the internet and blogging, for the first time those people are being given a way to speak up. We all remember the story of Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger who emerged during the Iraq war. “He showed up most of the western media because he had far more access and information and insight because he was Iraqi.” Blogging offers a chance for those who were previously unheard to bypass the mainstream media and offer their own perspective on events in their own countries and overseas, and increasingly we are hearing through the web the voices of those living under authoritarian regimes. And some of it is having an effect.

Loewenstein gives the example of a disturbing tendency for torture activists in Egypt to be arrested and raped by police officers. The horrendous acts were routinely filmed by the police and then distributed in order to frighten and intimidate other activists. In the past couple of years bloggers and dissidents have been able to disseminate the videos on YouTube and elsewhere, ultimately causing the jailing of two guilty police officers. However, Loewenstein is careful not to overestimate the effects of this new medium. “I’m not saying police torture has stopped,” he says. But the story is a good example of, “a relatively small online community… put[tting] on the agenda an issue that was only really whispered about rather than talked about.”

Yet the risks bloggers face for bringing these issues onto the public agenda in some countries can be extreme. Since 2003 sixty-four bloggers worldwide have been arrested and gaoled and many of those Loewenstein met felt they might be endangered simply by speaking to a western journalist. Such examples are not as isolated as you may think. Loewenstein mentions one situation a few years ago when an Iranian blogger was interviewed for a Foreign Correspondent documentary. The blogger “ended up being arrested after that show was aired and was gaoled,” Loewenstein says.

Dissident bloggers in countries like Iran and China also have to contend with increasing internet censorship by the government, blocking websites dealing with undesirable content and excluding certain key words from search engines like Google. Yet it’s the complacency Loewenstein discovered that seems particularly frightening. Loewenstein says most of the people he spoke to were unbothered by the censorship, or unaware of just how many sites were being blocked. Whilst in the meantime the practise of censorship is speading.

It sounds like the kind of thing that would only happen overseas but internet censorship is already being suggested both here in Australia and in other western nations. Multinational corporations such as Google and Yahoo, who collaborate with the Chinese and other authoritarian governments to enforce censorship laws already have the skills and means to import internet filtering into western countries.

“I do not see,” says Loewenstein, with feeling, “how it’s unlikely that …[censorship] could be used in western states.” The Rudd government is already talking about blocking child pornography websites and whilst Loewenstein stresses he does not support child pornography, the question must be asked: once you introduce censorship, where will it end?

“Do we get into a situation where the government says ‘we’re going to start blocking sites that support terrorism’?” The problem with this is that, as we’ve learned from cases such as that of Dr Haneef, ‘supporting terrorism’ is not such a straightforward thing to define. Loewenstein gives the example of Hamas, the elected government in Palestine: “it’s regarded as a terrorist organization by much of the western world, in my view mistakenly. So are we going to have a situation where the Australian government or the US government says ‘well, if you’re accessing the Hamas website you’re breaking the law’.”

It is in such environments that the voices of bloggers become so important. But how to go about finding these voices? Loewenstein seems slightly weary of the question. “People often ask me how do you know which blogs to look at…there’s no simple answer, over time you discover which sites you like, which sites you trust.” After some probing however, Loewenstein does recommend Global Voices Online, a website which provides commentary and translations on various political blogs of many nationalities. A full list of Loewenstein’s recommended blogs can be found at the back of his book, The Blogging Revolution.

Loewenstein also recommends alternative media sites like Crikey!, Salon.com and Slate Magazine for those to wish to read what people not part of what Loewenstein refers to as the ‘old men with beards’ have to say about world events. Loewenstein now has a beard himself, he is quick to point out, but he also has good things to say about Vibewire, which the 33-year-old used to write for, so we won’t hold it against him. “I like what [Vibewire] stands for…getting people who are deemed by the mainstream media to not be interested in the world of politics…to actually engage with issues.”

Of course, it’s easy to take Loewenstein’s views on blogging as a prediction of the future of the media, yet Loewenstein does not intend for blogging to overtake mainstream journalism. “If we’re looking for good investigative journalism, the vast majority of it is still, with exceptions…being done by print media… I’m not going to sit here and say that blogging is about to replace that.” But the point is that with the advent of the web and the opportunities it brings, the media is no longer the only source of information.

It was the writer Douglas Adams who once said that the internet is like being in a room where every door is one of those science fiction devices that transports you to any place in the world. If those doors were blogs, they’d plonk you down into the living room of any man or woman on the planet with an internet connection and something to say. It’s the first time in human history that communication of this sort has been so readily available. We’ve been using it to talk, but now some of us are starting to recognise that we can also use it to listen.

My following article was published by the Washington Post online on September 26:

During China’s milk powder crisis, with tens of thousands of babies affected by the contaminated goods, the country’s blogosphere railed against corrupt officials.

One outraged blogger wrote: “What are the people in the Government doing? They just want mistresses, they want cash, but out here we’re dying!”

Another said: “When they tell us some official is sacked, they are just giving us part of the story. The rest isn’t reported. They just move on to other jobs.”

It was the kind of brutal honesty that the internet has brought to the world’s largest online market. Millions of angry netizens were openly questioning the regime’s ability and willingness to manage the crisis. As it did after May’s Sichuan earthquake, when thousands of citizens used the web to organize protests against shoddy builders, the web is slowly democratizing information flow in the Communist State.

It has become almost accepted wisdom that the web is an automatic democratizer, but I never accepted this doctrine.