Twitter, Democracy, and...

Editor’s Note: Richard Fontaine , a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age . Follow him @rhfontaine . Twitter has taken fire in recent days from activists and bloggers who fear that the company’s new censorship policies will muffle online freedom. News reports recall the ways in which protestors have had made use of Twitter to oppose dictatorships, and dissidents express concern that their ability to communicate will be harmed. The more immediate issue, however, may lie elsewhere. Twitter’s new policies demonstrate vividly the complicated relationship between Internet freedom and democratic government. The complications take on greater importance in light of America’s global Internet freedom strategy. The U.S. government began an active policy of promoting Internet freedom in the second George W. Bush term, and its efforts have accelerated in the Obama administration. The State Department devotes tens of millions of dollars to support technology and training for online dissidents, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given a series of major speeches highlighting the issue. In one , she invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous four freedoms, added a fifth — the “freedom to connect” — and observed that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.” It is easy to imagine two sides locked in pitched battle over Internet freedom: The democracies, embracing the freedom to connect for all, and the dictatorships, who censor, monitor, and disrupt. Indeed, pressing the cause of Internet freedom has thus far generally meant taking on autocracies, like Beijing and its Great Firewall, the Mubarak regime when it shuttered Egypt’s Internet during the 2011 protests, or Iran as it systematically monitors domestic dissidents. But it has become increasingly clear that autocracies alone do not challenge Internet freedom; democracies do as well. In the blog post explaining its new policy, Twitter hit on this truth, noting that the company will be active in “countries that have different ideas” than the United States “about the contours of freedom of expression.” All democracies restrict speech to some degree, and the forms of banned expression vary, ranging from child pornography (which is illegal virtually everywhere) to hate speech (banned in Europe and other places but not the United States) to country-specific expression (such as criticism of national heroes or monarchs). America, however, is an outlier. The United States recognizes some limits on free expression – slander, perjury, “fighting words” and certain other forms of expression are illegal online or off – but its commitment to free speech is nevertheless the most absolute of any major country. This puts it in potential conflict with fellow democracies about what constitute legitimate restrictions on online expression. Given Washington’s role as the world’s most active proponent of Internet freedom, it also complicates its efforts to rally fellow democracies behind the cause. The examples of differing democratic practice abound. Witness, for example, the recent request by Indian telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others that they remove content deemed insulting to leaders of the Indian Congress party. Mr. Sibal pledged that his government would take unspecified steps to act if the private sector would not. This month, during a hearing on a related case , an Indian high court justice said that, “like China,” the government could block websites entirely if their hosts do not remove offensive content. Turkey banned YouTube for two years because it refused to remove videos that Turkish courts deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Germany and other countries prohibit Holocaust denial online, and France bans the sale of Nazi paraphernalia over the Internet. Governments in Britain, Italy and Germany have established lists of blocked websites – generally those containing child pornography, hate speech, or online gambling platforms – even though those lists are not always transparent. The differences arise not only in national policy, but in international law as well. A number of European democracies, including Denmark, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, have signed an additional protocol to the European Convention on Cybercrime , which requires them criminalize such acts as using computers to distribute xenophobic material or insult people because of their race, religion, or ethnic origin. The United States faces its own potential contradictions. Secretary Clinton used one of her major addresses on Internet freedom to explain why the notion did not apply when Wikileaks published thousands of classified cables online. A district court recently ruled that, as part of its lawful intercept authorities, the Justice Department can seize Twitter feeds. And then there is the tremendous debate that has emerged over the Stop Online Privacy Act. The truth is that the U.S. government will always enforce some limits on free expression, and our political system will continually wrestle with where the limits should be drawn. But we should not allow this to undermine the important cause of promoting global Internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will inevitably attempt to shield themselves from criticism and pressure by pointing to democracies that ban online expression. Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies. The distinction rests not only in the kind of banned speech, but also in the process by which the decision to restrict it is made. True democracies bar forms of expression based on law and regulation, and they make decisions to do so in accordance with due process. Their pronouncements are generally transparent, with decision makers accountable to the law, to legislatures, and ultimately to the people, who can turn them out of office in periodic elections. There is a world of difference between a democracy banning speech on “security” grounds when the citizens know what the decision is, who made it, and how to change it, and a dictatorship banning its own “security”-infringing speech by autocratic fiat. It is crucial to make that distinction clear. Doing so can benefit America’s diplomatic effort to promote Internet freedom, and it may also help guide policymakers at home. Resolving tough new issues often involves complex considerations of technology, law, and fundamental principle. In remembering what makes a democratic approach to the Internet distinctive, we might avoid falling prey to measures that would suggest we are otherwise.

Is 2012 the Year of Soc...

We hear so much about social media. It’s the this and the that and all things in between of business. You can reach more, do more sell more, relate more etc.etc etc. It’s hard to argue this line of thinking. It makes sense and it is real but is it overshadowing what appears to be a much bigger concern which is less sexy but possibly much more important which is the security of the online space? Earlier we talked about the security breach at Zappos that exposed millions of Zappos customers account information (supposedly not credit card info but time will tell). As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh put it “We’ve spent over 12 years building our reputation, brand, and trust with our customers,” Mr. Hsieh said. “It’s painful to see us take so many steps back due to a single incident.” All of the goodwill, all of the relationships, all of the sales and essentially, all of the hard work of Zappos has been put at risk (I am not saying it has been lost by any stretch so please relax) and why? Not becasue of a rogue employee’s tweet. Not because of some social media miscue but rather to one of the most fundamental yet arguably most overlooked threat to business in the Internet era: good old fashioned online security. This is nothing new. Heck, business espionage and sabotage has existed long before the Internet came along. It just never got the attention it does now because it now has the potential to impact business function like never before. All that said and we still focus on social this and social that. Interesting and extremely risky. It looks like 2012 is off to a rollicking start in terms of security news. How about this one from the SFGate.com about the City College of San Francisco that has been leaking vital information from poorly designed and maintained systems since, gulp, 1999. That is not a typo folks. Personal banking information and other data from perhaps tens of thousands of students, faculty and administrators at City College of San Francisco have been stolen in what is being called “an infestation” of computer viruses with origins in criminal networks in Russia, China and other countries, The Chronicle has learned. At work for more than a decade, the viruses were detected a few days after Thanksgiving, when the college’s data security monitoring service detected an unusual pattern of computer traffic, flagging trouble. Really? REALLY?! Now comes the good news that a hacker is set to release the full code of Norton Antivirus tomorrow! According to Reuters A hacker who goes by the name of ‘Yama Tough’ threatened Saturday to release next week the full source code for Symantec Corp’s flagship Norton Antivirus software. “This coming Tuesday behold the full Norton Antivirus 1,7Gb src, the rest will follow,” Yama Tough posted via Twitter. In the past week Yama Tough has released fragments of source code from Symantec products along with a cache of emails. The hacker says all the data was taken from Indian government servers. So what’s the point here to marketers and businesses in general? Lock the freakin’ doors before you decide to get all social on everyone! It seems inconceivable that this far into the Internet game that large players are still as vulnerable as anyone else to being hacked and all of that data that is being collected for business reasons can be taken for reasons that are for business but not on the right side of the law. Just imagine if this Zappos “problem” takes a turn for the worse and it is revealed that something bigger happened that included financial information etc etc. I AM NOT SAYING THAT IT HAS! Just imagine that if it goes that way what would be the impact on one of the most highly respected online brands on the planet? It could be devastating. So my question is to all the other businesses that are not Zappos but still like to have their customers’ trust, are you doing what you need to in order to protect the data that you so badly want to acquire? How about this for a thought. Want to ruin the largest IPO in a while? Just find a way to get to all the data that Mark Zuckerberg has on all of us. Would people put money in a company wants all the world’s data but can’t protect it? Don’t think online security is sexy enough for your attention? Think again.

India’s Low-Cost Aakash...

Update : it looks more as if the “pre-orders” are no-money-down reservations, not paid-in-full pre-orders. So it’s more like people waiting in line than real orders. And it’s unclear from the Times of India’s report whether they are for the Aakash tablet itself, or for (as the official site suggests) for the updated Ubislate 7 device which is intended to replace the Aakash. Regardless, demand seems to be high for the low-cost device and its slightly-higher-cost successor, more than enough to justify the increase in capacity. The low-cost Indian tablet known as the Aakash , which we have followed in its career over the last year, is finally shipping. In late December they opened up orders for the first batch of 30,000 units, and brought so much traffic to their retail site that an Indian cyber regulation agency called to inform them they were possibly under attack. And in the last two weeks, they’ve racked up over 1.4 million pre-orders — iPad-scale numbers. It’s being sold for Rs2500, which translates to just under $50 . The government then subsidizes sales to students, bringing the cost down to $35. But while the government originally suggested a million devices would be on the ground before the end of 2011, the Indian manufacturer won’t be pushing out devices at a decent rate until this coming April, and at that point the Aakash may find itself an orphan device. Despite the original bluster from the Indian government, which fanned the flames of sensationalism with increasingly absurd price estimates (at one point they were talking about a $10 device), the device has passed trials that have killed many a device, and is in fact finalized, in manufacture, and shipping. But India does not have enough manufacturing capacity to supply the hundreds of thousands of orders that are rolling in. New factories being built by Datawind in Cochin, Noida, and Hyderabad will solve that problem, but in the meantime the Aakash is under attack from other directions. Datawind, which manufactures the device, has begun to push an alternative to the Aakash: a slightly more expensive device with better specs called the UbiSlate 7+ . At Rs2999, it offers a much better processor (700MHz Arm Cortex A8 vs the Aakash’s 366Mhz Arm11), a bigger battery, a newer version of Android, and mobile data (on GPRS). It’s not unthinkable that this device might be embraced by the many institutions that have been waiting patiently for the promised flood of cheap, standardized tablets. The delays on the government’s part may end up making the Aakash an obsolete device that isn’t even much cheaper than the competition. And Problems with the hardware and software, while haven’t stopped the device from pulling in tons of pre-orders, suggest that even after all this time it is still being rushed to market. The tech market is merciless, and even the pro-Aakash contingent may find itself rooting for something more practical after a few months. India’a Aakash experiment has been a long and strange one, and may yet prove to be a success or failure. Either result would be limited, however: a success would be minor as they must still struggle to justify and produce the device in the face of increasing competition, and failure would mean mainly that they would have to scrap the current model and try again fresh for a 2012 launch. And either result is respectable, because the entire idea is respectable, and the rocky road upon which it has traveled was more or less expected. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit moving within the government, and has its roots in a desire to better their population’s lot and to try something new. And at any rate what’s more interesting than the device itself is the continuing investment in an infrastructure in which a national tablet is developed, manufactured, and nurtured. TechCrunch has many readers in India, and their comments on the topic (being closer to the matter) will be appreciated.

Google India Tanjore: B...

This is another beautiful ad from Google. This time, it’s from Google India extending the “The Web is What You Make of It” campaign with a spot about Tanjore, an ancient Indian art form that seems to be fading away from the modern every day world. The ad tells the story of a Tanjore artist Related Digital Buzz Posts: Address is Approximate: Google Street View Film Google: Experiments In Digital Creativity Google Plus Ad: The Muppets

Social Censorship in In...

Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil Another year, another attack on the Internet. Lately, though, it’s not a loose collective of individual hackers sitting in dark rooms trying to wreak havoc. This time, stronger forces and vested interests are stepping into the game. In the U.S., bills that threaten how content is shared online surfaced in Congress. Large media companies are leveraging their power to team up with some elected officials. These forces are being met with resistance courtesy of some of the most esteemed technologists the web has to offer. Whether it was MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito passionately defending the importance of open-source movements in the New York Times , or Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures openly decrying SOPA, or the founders and investors (including USV and John Lilly ) of Tumblr harnessing the platform to encourage users to directly contact their elected officials in opposition to SOPA, influential technology personalities (many with roots in Mozilla) have focused attention on ensuring the web remains open for any consumer self-expression engines that come to pass. As a democracy, the U.S. is in a privileged position to have these public debates. Some countries (like those in and around the Korean peninsula) don’t have that luxury, which is why it was curious to see a high-ranking minister in the Indian government recently make global headlines around a meeting he called with the Indian offices of the major social networking sites to discuss the monitoring. [Read TechCrunch reporter Eric Eldon’s reporting on the story, here .] At issue, according to India’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal (and as reported by the The New York Times ), were messages slandering one of India’s most revered and powerful political individuals, Sonia Gandhi . And there you have it. In a matter of a few weeks, the world’s most powerful democracy and the world’s largest democracy engaged in their own specific battles over the future of how information can be monitored and circulated online. Whereas in the U.S. the fight centers around freedom of expression (through sharing) and copyright, the suggestion made by India’s Sabil tugged at the core of self-expression itself, monitoring potentially disruptive comments generated by social media in the name of preserving the peace within an extremely diverse democratic society. On their own, it’s likely Sibal’s statements and the corresponding kerfuffle are much ado about nothing . India’s mainstream media is expert at drawing out inflammatory statements from persons of interest, and powerful members of the Indian government are oftentimes all too willing to supply those soundbites. In this particular case, it’s possible Ms. Gandhi, someone who is powerful and revered, expressed frustration over seeing her name slandered on social sites and enlisted Sabil to draw attention to it. Naturally, the Minister invoked some arcane laws that could be enforced, yet most recognize India is home to millions of innately expressive people who would be nearly impossible to silence. Or, the negative comments in social media about Ms. Gandhi could be the early foments of a deep-seated, not-often-discussed fear among those with media or government power in India. What if hundreds of millions of citizens, the majority of them young, pick up smartphones (after completely skipping desktops and laptops), sign up for social services, start connecting with others and sharing their views, and begin to express frustration (either with their real names or anonymously) in a manner that amplifies exponentially, to the point where reality is distorted and the status quo is challenged? As any reader of (or contributor to) TechCrunch knows all too well, not many take the time to leave glowing comments. It’s in the comments where the status quo is challenged, and that’s why comments are important for debate and discussion. It’s too easy to mock Sibal as clueless in making these types of statements. Let’s not forget he’s a professional politician in India and, therefore, quite savvy at this game. The Indian government isn’t going to act on these kinds of laws because the people will not allow it — especially those technology enthusiasts currently playing host to Dave McClure and his Geeks on a Plane sojourn to the Indian capital. More likely, Sibal may be using the mainstream media to send a message, a friendly reminder to technology companies headquartered outside its borders, as well as its own citizens, that the Indian government wants its brand of democracy to grow and not face resistance from within. Ironically for India, this all highlights a great paradox it will face: A young, energetic country rising in economic power, continuing to grow in many diverse ways and developing newer technologies by the day. And in pursuit of these large markets, normal citizens will become empowered and have access to tools that make them more productive and relevant, potentially to the point where they could challenge parts of a complex Parliamentarian system that protected them for so long. The fun part is that it’s not a matter of “if,” it’s simply just a matter of “when.” India’s democracy has, so far, been quite remarkable at remaining intact despite the country’s extreme social, religious, and economic diversity, and there’s no reason to think it won’t adapt as the culture changes with new communication devices and channels. Setting India aside, one could look at 2011 as a potentially historic year with respect to governments and each one’s citizenry. Of course, the year began with uprisings in part of the Arab world, spanning from the Middle East to North Africa [related: a great post on human routers by Shervin Pishevar ], and most recently, protesters in Russia taking to the streets to dispute elections and express frustration with its most powerful leader. Here in America, the #Occupy movement, though still largely undefined, has reached mainstream status in terms of name recognition. We don’t know what will happen to it in the next few weeks, or in 2012. This is the nature of the time we live in, combined with the hardware and software tools we have at our disposal. Despite the reams of predictive statements you’ll read over the next few weeks, the only certainty for 2012 is that it’s likely to be as uncertain as 2011, and as a result, those with deep, wide, and entrenched interests — such as the mainstream media, or even government — could continue to see gradual shifts in the balance of power from highly-centralized system to ones that are composed of loosely coupled groups, working in concert, attempting to make the world they want to live in for themselves, no matter what stands in their way. Photo Credit: Flickr /  Dipanker Dutta