BOOK
REVIEW Internet under their
thumb By Geoffrey Cain
In April 2011, a Vietnamese dissident
explained to me why he had given up blogging
critically about the government. "We have jobs,
motorbikes, nice coffee shops, and big luxury
buildings," he said, pointing to the then recently
opened Bitexco Financial Tower, Ho Chi Minh City's
tallest edifice, with a helicopter landing pad
jutting out of its side. "The Communist Party has
made this blogging unprofitable. If we go up
against them, how do we get a piece of that
prosperity?"
He confided in me during a
touchy juncture for Vietnam, and plainclothes
police could have harassed him for our meeting.
The country's inflation rate was among the highest
in the world just as the Arab Spring protestors
were toppling their respective governments. Three
months earlier, the party's inner circle had
been worried that
opponents would stir up unrest during the 11th
National Party Congress, a widely watched
gathering at which new leaders were voted into the
Politburo. Nervous authorities, trying to keep the
calm, had been stepping up their hunt for
pro-democracy foes and renegade bloggers.
I landed in this sensitive period for the
one-party state as part of a Fulbright grant
researching journalists and bloggers in Vietnam,
and economic coverage in particular. Over 10
months I interviewed about 30 of them, trying to
get to the bottom of some sensitive questions. How
do writers make decisions about how far they'll
push the boundaries, especially on business
coverage, the bread and butter of Vietnam's global
image today? How do government officials decide
when to relax the restrictions and when to crack
down (and how do reporters resist those dictates)?
Most importantly, what forces would explain an
apparent increase in censorship - particularly
through the harassment of bloggers - over the past
five years or so, just as Vietnam was becoming
wealthier as a whole?
Vietnam in 2011 was
the world's fifth-worst jailer of bloggers and
reporters: nine were imprisoned, according to the
New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
There's some irony to that development. Ten years
ago, Western pundits were speculating that the
opposite would occur - that the Internet would
open up a new public sphere for dissent,
unmanageable by repressive regimes.
Those
high hopes have waned somewhat, notes Rebecca
MacKinnon in her timely cyber-manifesto,
Consent of the Network: The Worldwide Struggle
for Internet Freedom. One problem, says
MacKinnon, is that the optimists did not
anticipate how far governments would go to
suppress online subversion, as well as to keep
collusion profitable for private technology
companies.
A conundrum lies at the heart
of her book: we depend increasingly on the
Internet to sustain democracy, but we do not fully
grasp how nation-states and companies wield their
influence in this borderless digital world. The
only way to solve that problem is for Internet
users - "netizens" in her parlance - to take a
more assertive role in protecting their online
freedoms.
MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau
chief in Beijing, speaks with authority on this
topic. Now a fellow at the New America Foundation,
she's best known as a scholar of Internet
censorship in China. She rose to prominence as an
online free-speech activist when, in 2004, she
cofounded Global Voices Online, a non-profit
organization that tracks, translates, and
summarizes trends in the worldwide blogosphere.
[1]
Consent of the Networked reads
like a culmination of MacKinnon's advocacy years,
drawing on personal anecdotes while also tracing
the contours of recent struggles against online
censorship in Egypt, Tunisia, China, Europe, and
the United States. Her chapter on Chinese Internet
censorship is a must-read. It pieces together how
the authorities conduct censorship in association
with a network of compliant universities,
companies, and patriotic hackers that enforce
Internet laws on behalf of the Communist Party.
She describes the Chinese cyber-espionage
network known as Ghostnet, based on the island of
Hainan off the southeastern coast, which attacks
computer systems around the world and has presumed
connections to the Chinese military. "This hacker
netherworld works to the government's advantage,
providing deniability as well as greater
flexibility," she writes, "in addition to being a
ready-made channel for recruitment into real
government jobs in the military and security
services."
Upon broader examination, it
becomes clear that Beijing benefits from outside
help. MacKinnon shows that even though the US
Congress earmarked US$50 million from 2007 to 2010
to fight online censorship around the world, many
monitoring technologies arrive in China by way of
North American companies.
Last July, for
instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that
electronics giant Cisco was in talks to supply
Chongqing, in southwestern China, with equipment
for a surveillance campaign that would connect
500,000 cameras over an area larger than New York
City. The company later claimed it turned down the
offer. Speaking to a reporter, one Hewlett-Packard
vice president summed up his stance on selling
technology to China: "It's not my job to really
understand what they're going to use it for."
With amoral arguments like that, it's easy
for the tech executives to dismiss MacKinnon as an
anti-corporate vigilante who holds misguided views
about the benefits of investment in China and
elsewhere.
Yet on a deeper read, one can
see that her scrutiny is both practical and
moderate. She is merely laying the groundwork for
rule of law so that the arbitrary whims of
Facebook, Google, and government officials cannot
continue to exert feudal rule over cyberspace.
Just as democratic states are legitimate only
insofar as they have the consent of the governed,
so too should they be forced to seek the "consent
of the networked" in a social contract on the
Internet.
Most impressive is MacKinnon's
ability to inject a rich history of classical
liberal thought into what could otherwise be a dry
and technical tome. Her style closely follows the
French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his
1835 classic Democracy in America observed
how the public sphere of "civil society" upheld
America's fresh political experiment.
The
Internet, she says, has given rise to a similar
but underdeveloped space called the "digital
commons" - an arena where anyone can contribute
ideas to sites and services such as Wikipedia,
YouTube, and WordPress. These virtual grounds
resemble the French salons or British coffeehouses
of the Enlightenment, and have already shown their
potency in aiding last year's Arab Spring
protestors.
One takeaway from MacKinnon's
book is that if governments persist in repressing
the free expression of ideas online, and deny the
consent of the networked, then they should brace
themselves for continued upheaval.
Note: 1. I wrote four
blog posts for Global Voices in 2007 and 2008 but
have had scant personal contact with MacKinnon
since. MacKinnon is a member of the Policy
Innovations advisory board.
Consent of
the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet
Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon (Basic Books).
ISBN-10: 0465024424. Price US$26.99, 320 pages.
Geoffrey Cain has covered Asia
for TIME, The Economist, Far Eastern Economic
Review, and others. He researched the press in
Vietnam in 2011 as a Fulbright scholar, and is
currently based in London.
Published with
permission of the Global
Policy Innovations program at the Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
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