No kidding (and such news should be given to Western journalists who love talking about a “Facebook/Twitter revolution” in the Arab world): Egyptians who turned to Facebook and Twitter to galvanize their revolt against Hosni Mubarak are starting to wonder whether faith in social media as the key to Egypt’s democratic future might be a…
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Ahmadinejad’s Iran looking to isolate itself bit by bit
What a paranoid and fundamentalist regime looks like: Iran has stepped up online censorship by upgrading the filtering system that enables the Islamic regime to block access to thousands of websites it deems inappropriate for Iranian users. The move comes one month after the United States announced plans to launch new services facilitating internet access…
Internet turning into tool of national security state
We see evidence for this everywhere, in both democracies and repressive nations alike. But how many of us in Western states recognise that tools like Facebook can be utilised for both “good” (connecting friends and family) and bad (surveillance)? Freelance journalist Inga Ting interviewed me for this piece in Crikey yesterday: Yet the problem may…
Google head, fond of Chinese censorship, worries about Arab repression
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.…
US official; we love the internet (as long as views approved by State Dept)
Let me get this straight. A web evangelist, working for the US government, admires the ability of the internet to assist Arab revolutions and compares its power to Che Guevera, a man the establishment regards as a terrorist. I guess backing real freedom in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is a bridge too far for this…
Understanding cyber warfare from the other side
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.…
Global dissidents may not want US openly backing them
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 Net Delusion is alive and well
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…
Gazans heart Facebook to connect with the world
Per capita, the largest number of Facebook users in the world is in Gaza.
How Western firms helping repressive regimes monitor Skype
We have been warned: When young dissidents in Egypt were organizing an election-monitoring project last fall, they discussed their plans over Skype, the popular Internet phone service, believing it to be secure. But someone else was listening in—Egypt’s security service. An internal memo from the “Electronic Penetration Department” even boasted it had intercepted one conversation…