[Chapter-delegates] Statement: The Internet Society on Egypt’s Internet shutdown

[Joly MacFie]

The other side of the story.. from Scott Shane in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/weekinreview/30shane.html

..since that revolt collapsed, Iran has become a cautionary tale. The
Iranian police eagerly followed the electronic trails left by activists,
which assisted them in making thousands of arrests in the crackdown that
followed. The government even crowd-sourced its hunt for enemies, posting on
the Web the photos of unidentified demonstrators and inviting Iranians to
identify them.

“The Iranian government has become much more adept at using the Internet to
go after activists,” said Faraz Sanei, who tracks Iran at Human Rights
Watch. The Revolutionary Guard, the powerful political and economic force
that protects the ayatollahs’ regime, has created an online surveillance
center and is believed to be behind a “cyberarmy” of hackers that it can
unleash against opponents, he said.

Repressive regimes around the world may have fallen behind their opponents
in recent years in exploiting new technologies — not unexpected when aging
autocrats face younger, more tech-savvy opponents. But in Minsk and Moscow,
Tehran and Beijing, governments have begun to climb the steep learning curve
and turn the new Internet tools to their own, antidemocratic purposes.

The countertrend has sparked a debate over whether the conventional wisdom
that the Internet and social networking inherently tip the balance of power
in favor of democracy is mistaken. A new book, “The Net Delusion: The Dark
Side of Internet Freedom,” by a young Belarus-born American scholar, Evgeny
Morozov<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/opinion/05iht-edmorozov04.html?scp=3&sq=The%20Dark%20Side%20of%20Internet%20Freedom&st=cse>,
has made the case most provocatively, describing instance after instance of
strongmen finding ways to use new media to their advantage.

After all, the very factors that have brought Facebook and similar sites
such commercial success have huge appeal for a secret police force. A
dissident’s social networking and Twitter feed is a handy guide to his
political views, his career, his personal habits and his network of
like-thinking allies, friends and family. A cybersurfing policeman can
compile a dossier on a regime opponent without the trouble of the street
surveillance and telephone tapping required in a pre-Net world.


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