111th CONGRESS Printed for the use of the 

1st Session Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

TWITTER AGAINST TYRANTS: NEW 

MEDIA IN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Briefing of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

Washington: 2012


big-LOGO.EPS
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Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

234 Ford House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515

202–225–1901

csce@mail.house.gov 

http://www.csce.gov

Legislative Branch Commissioners

HOUSE SENATE

ALCEE L. HASTINGS, FLORIDA,

Co-Chairman 

EDWARD J. MARKEY, MASSACHUSETTS

LOUISE MCINTOSH SLAUGHTER,

NEW YORK

MIKE MCINTYRE, NORTH CAROLINA

G.K. BUTTERFIELD, NORTH CAROLINA

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, NEW JERSEY

ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, ALABAMA

JOSEPH R. PITTS, PENNSYLVANIA

DARRELL E. ISSA, CALIFORNIA

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, MARYLAND,

Chairman 

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, CONNECTICUT

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, RHODE ISLAND

TOM UDALL, NEW MEXICO

JEANNE SHAHEEN, NEW HAMPSHIRE

SAM BROWNBACK, KANSAS

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, GEORGIA

RICHARD BURR, NORTH CAROLINA

ROBERT F. WICKER, MISSISSIPPI

Executive Branch Commissioners

MICHAEL H. POSNER, DEPARTMENT OF STATE

MICHAEL C. CAMUN ̃ EZ, DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

ALEXANDER VERSHBOW, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

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ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Helsinki process, formally titled the Conference on Security and Cooperation in 

Europe, traces its origin to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in Finland on August 

1, 1975, by the leaders of 33 European countries, the United States and Canada. As of 

January 1, 1995, the Helsinki process was renamed the Organization for Security and 

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The membership of the OSCE has expanded to 56 participating States, reflecting the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. 

The OSCE Secretariat is in Vienna, Austria, where weekly meetings of the participating States’ permanent representatives are held. In addition, specialized seminars and 

meetings are convened in various locations. Periodic consultations are held among Senior 

Officials, Ministers and Heads of State or Government. 

Although the OSCE continues to engage in standard setting in the fields of military 

security, economic and environmental cooperation, and human rights and humanitarian 

concerns, the Organization is primarily focused on initiatives designed to prevent, manage 

and resolve conflict within and among the participating States. The Organization deploys 

numerous missions and field activities located in Southeastern and Eastern Europe, the 

Caucasus, and Central Asia. The website of the OSCE is: <www.osce.org>. 

ABOUT THE COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki 

Commission, is a U.S. Government agency created in 1976 to monitor and encourage 

compliance by the participating States with their OSCE commitments, with a particular 

emphasis on human rights. 

The Commission consists of nine members from the United States Senate, nine members from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments of 

State, Defense and Commerce. The positions of Chair and Co-Chair rotate between the 

Senate and House every two years, when a new Congress convenes. A professional staff 

assists the Commissioners in their work. 

In fulfilling its mandate, the Commission gathers and disseminates relevant information to the U.S. Congress and the public by convening hearings, issuing reports that 

reflect the views of Members of the Commission and/or its staff, and providing details 

about the activities of the Helsinki process and developments in OSCE participating 

States. 

The Commission also contributes to the formulation and execution of U.S. policy 

regarding the OSCE, including through Member and staff participation on U.S. Delegations to OSCE meetings. Members of the Commission have regular contact with 

parliamentarians, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and private individuals from participating States. The website of the Commission 

is: <www.csce.gov>. 

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TWITTER AGAINST TYRANTS: NEW MEDIA IN 

AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

OCTOBER 22, 2009

COMMISSIONERS 

Page 

Hon. Sam Brownback, Ranking Member, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe ............................................................................................................................................... 2

Hon. Robert B. Aderholt, Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe ............................................................................................................................................... 7

PARTICIPANTS 

Kyle Parker, Policy Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe .................. 1

Daniel Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs, Freedom House ............................................ 3

Nathan Freitas, Adjunct Professor, NYU Interactive Telecom Program ................................... 5

Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! Fellow, Georgetown University; Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy ................................................................................................................................................. 8

Chris Spence, Chief Technology Officer, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs ............................................................................................................................................... 10

Shiyu Zhou, Deputy Director, Global Internet Freedom Consortium ........................................ 12

APPENDICES 

Prepared statement of Nathan Freitas ......................................................................................... 30

Prepared statement of Evgeny Morozov ....................................................................................... 35

Prepared statement of Shiyu Zhou ................................................................................................ 39

Material submitted for the record by: 

Oleg Brega, filmmaker, journalist, civil society activist from the Republic of Moldova ........ 42

Mark Belinsky and Emily Jacobi, Co-Directors, Digital Democracy ...................................... 44

Mary Joyce, Andreas Jungherr, and Daniel Schultz, Working Group on Sanction Reform 

for the Digital Age [DigiActive.org] ........................................................................................ 48

Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping and Partnerships, Ushahidi ................................ 50

Merici Vinton ............................................................................................................................... 53

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TWITTER AGAINST TYRANTS: NEW MEDIA IN 

AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES 

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

Washington, DC

The briefing was held at 2 p.m. in room 1539, Longworth House Office Building, 

Washington, DC, Kyle Parker, Policy Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation 

in Europe, moderating. 

Commissioners present: Hon. Sam Brownback, Ranking Member, Commission on 

Security and Cooperation in Europe; and Hon. Robert B. Aderholt, Commissioner, 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. 

Panalists present: Kyle Parker, Policy Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! Fellow, Georgetown University; Contributing 

Editor, Foreign Policy; Chris Spence, Chief Technology Officer, National Democratic 

Institute for International Affairs; Shiyu Zhou, Deputy Director, Global Internet Freedom 

Consortium; Daniel Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs, Freedom House; and 

Nathan Freitas, Adjunct Professor, NYU Interactive Telecom Program. 

Mr. PARKER. Folks, we’re going to go ahead and start. Thank you for coming to 

today’s Helsinki Commission briefing on new media in authoritarian regimes. I apologize 

for starting late—we are expecting the possible presence of some of our Commissioners, 

so if they do come, we’ll turn the floor over to them. This is a briefing, it’s being transcribed and I think televised on the HouseNet. Unlike an official hearing, we will be 

taking questions from the audience, so as you listen to the presentations please be 

thinking about good questions so we can have a good, lively, informative, and somewhat 

informal conversation today, and that also goes for the panelists. We can certainly talk 

amongst the panel as well. 

I’m not going to spend too much time introducing the topic. The Helsinki Commission 

is an organization going back to 1976. We monitor the implementation of the Helsinki 

Accords, the Helsinki Final Act across 56 participating States. The United States is one, 

all of Central Asia, Europe and Canada as well. And one of the fundamental freedoms 

enshrined in the act is of course the freedom of media, and of course it’s often through 

that, either freedom of media or freedom of speech, freedom to communicate, that we 

learn of other infringements or other issues, be it religious freedom or freedom of 

assembly. Obviously, if you don’t have a telephone or a newspaper or an e-mail, it’s hard 

to hear about those things. 

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Another thing we do quite often is election observation; in this past year, two very 

prominent cases, Moldova and Iran, where technology such as Twitter played quite a 

major role. And I’m happy to have Senator Brownback. Senator Brownback, ladies and 

gentleman. Take a seat. 

Mr. BROWNBACK. Sorry to come in late, I apologize about that. 

Mr. PARKER. No problem, no problem. [Inaudible, off mic.] 

Mr. BROWNBACK. If you don’t mind letting me make a quick statement. I apologize 

to people for arriving late on a very important topic, and my apologies for doing it. I have 

a brief opening statement I’d like to make and then hear the panel presentation. I’m 

delighted to see this hearing taking place. I think we saw this demonstrated in real-life 

form in the Iranian elections and the follow-up afterwards, of how Twitter turned against 

the tyrants in Tehran. 

Chairman, I want to thank the committee and the Commission for holding this very 

important and timely hearing on the crucial role that new media plays and will continue 

to play in closed authoritarian societies. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 

breaking of the Berlin Wall, we must gather our strength and commit ourselves to finding 

ways to tear down the new walls of the 21st century, the cyber-walls, the electronic censorship technology used by tyrants to repress the free expression of millions and millions 

around the world. I look forward to learning from these distinguished panelists how we 

can move forward on this issue. 

I’d first say a quick word about the freedom of information, and specifically Internet 

freedom. If information is the adrenaline of democracy, then our Internet-driven society 

is on high endorphins. Individual citizens have never before had so much access to realtime political, economic and social information affecting their lives, and generally this has 

led to increased accountability and better outcomes. Recently, we’ve seen the other side 

of the information spectrum. In Iran, this past summer, the real battle took place and 

is still taking place on blogs, Facebook and Twitter as Iranians struggle to tell their story 

while the regime desperately tries to block access to the Internet. The same was true for 

the Burmese opposition in 2007, where the junta struggled to contain the fallout from its 

bloody crackdown. Before that, text messaging played a crucial role in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. 

One thing is clear: While physical brutality will always be the tool of oppressors, 21st 

century authoritarianism has already been defined by the lengths to which autocrats will 

go to limit online access to information. The Iranian dictatorship, the Chinese Communist 

Party, the Burmese junta, the Castro regime and other regimes worldwide all derive a 

large share of its power through media suppression and rigorous Internet censorship. 

Before we discuss how to tackle this problem, I think we must understand its cause. 

Why do regimes monitor, limit or even block the use of the Internet? Surely allowing open 

use of the Internet, a modest investment, would make life for residents of these societies 

more bearable and more efficient. And the answer, clearly, on the regime’s parts is control 

and survival. Free and open access of the Internet would allow unfettered criticism of 

regimes that sustain themselves only by forcibly perpetuating the appearance of perfection. These dictators not only shield their population from their own brutality but also 

block information about the basic freedoms enjoyed by millions worldwide. 

Leaders of these oppressive regimes disdain criticism and challenge because it pushes 

back against this fiction of success they pedal to the masses. As the fiction crumbles, their 

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grab on power dissolves. Like with the Polish Solidarity Movement, the defiance of the 

people eventually cracked the defiance of the government. This is why we must focus our 

efforts on promoting the freedom of information, specifically Internet freedom. As individual information exchanges become effortless through wireless communications, authoritarian regimes must devote ever-more resources to maintain their electronic wall. If 

information is power, then it is time to help bring the power to the people. 

We must ensure that all closed-society residents have free and open access to the 

Internet. This is the surest and most cost-effective way to jumpstart liberty. Indeed, the 

more the oppressed see and understand the real nature of their regime and the more they 

share with the outside world, the more power they will have to determine their own 

future. This is a key effort on our part to open up the Internet to regimes and to the 

people in these regimes that suppress their action and their access to it. 

So it’s my hope that hearings like this one today, will help us in getting funding for 

groups that provide access to Internet, to Twitter, to Facebook, to other social media, that 

we can provide that and help these, in many cases, very difficult operations that people 

are putting together on private dollars to open up the Internet to people that don’t have 

access to it themselves. So I hope that we can do that. I want to thank the panel very 

much for allowing me to come in a little bit late and put forward that statement, and 

I look forward to hearing some of the comments from other individuals here. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Senator. We can proceed with the panel, starting with 

Daniel Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs at Freedom House, and I might add that 

the—more extensive biographies should be on the table outside and will be posted on our 

Web site, but we’ll just—given the fact that we have five panelists, we’ll go ahead and 

start with the discussion. So Daniel, please. 

Mr. CALINGAERT. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Kyle, and many thanks to the Commission for inviting me, and Senator Brownback, we very much appreciate your interest and 

leadership on this issue. New media has created significant opportunities for advancing 

freedom in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. It has expanded the space for free 

expression and facilitated civic activism. But authoritarian regimes have pushed back. 

They have restricted Internet freedom in a variety of ways, and they are likely to further 

limit the space for free expression and civic activism on the Internet unless the U.S. 

Government works proactively and vigorously to keep that space open. 

The impact of digital media on authoritarian regimes was evident in Iran following 

the rigged Presidential election of June 12th. Digital media made important contributions 

to the Green movement of post-election protests. The movement’s leader, Mir Hossein 

Mousavi, communicates to Iranians primarily through his blog and Facebook. Protests are 

announced and organized largely via the Internet, and images of police crackdowns and 

of defiance by protestors often are transmitted across Iran and to the outside world 

through Facebook and Twitter with the help of anti-censorship technology. 

The Green movement was sparked by public anger over the blatant electoral fraud 

committed by supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but it is kept alive in large 

part by the use of new media. Citizens in the former Soviet Union have used new media 

to assert their rights and to challenge abuses of power. In Russia, for example, the Internet was the primary means for drawing attention to fraud in this month’s local elections. 

When observers in the Moscow district of Zyablikovo found a group of individuals hired 

to vote for United Russia multiple times, they used Twitter and Livejournal blogs to 

spread the news immediately and to publish photos of the violators. 

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A member of that district’s electoral commission, Andre Klukyn gave an online interview to describe in detail the plan behind this fraud. The interview was widely viewed 

on Russian YouTube and covered by several traditional media outlets. Another group of 

observers published video footage of a polling-station chairman in the city of Azov as he 

tried to mix fraudulent ballots which had already been filled in for United Russia with 

legitimate ballots. This video became a hit in the Russian blogosphere and prompted a 

criminal investigation of the polling-station chairman. Digital media spread the news of 

voter fraud in Russia’s local elections and contributed to a real-world response. The news 

triggered a public demonstration on October 12th in Moscow’s Pushkin Square and 

prompted all three opposition parties to walk out of Parliament in protest. 

In Belarus, traditional media is highly restricted. In the Freedom House ratings of 

freedom in the press, Belarus is near the bottom; it’s ranked 188th out of 195 countries. 

But the Internet actually provides extensive space for free expression and activism. Most 

Internet users in Belarus turn to non-state sources for news. In fact, of the top 20 news 

and information Web sites, only 3 are state-run sites, 12 are independent or pro-opposition 

and the rest focus on sports or other non-political subjects. 

I can also point to another example of online activism in Kazakhstan, where there 

was a new law passed in July to restrict the Internet, and while that law was being 

considered, a local free-speech group, Adil Soz, organized an online campaign that used 

blogs and Facebook and Twitter to mobilize opposition to the bill. And there was also, 

obviously, international criticism of the bill and criticism in other places in Kazakhstan. 

The bill eventually passed, but one of the key provisions, which would have given prosecutors the authority to suspend media outlets without a court order, that provision was 

removed from the law. So I think the online campaign had some effect. 

While new media plays an important role in expanding free expression and facilitating citizen engagement, it does not drive political change. New media alone cannot 

undermine authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes in the former Soviet republics 

and elsewhere continue to repress their citizens, and this repression extends to digital 

media. In Russia, for example, Internet freedom has declined significantly in recent years, 

as bloggers have become subject to hacker attacks, legal prosecution and physical violence. 

Although there is no technical filtering in Russia, officials often make phone calls to pressure web hosts or Internet service providers to remove unwanted content. The director 

of a leading hosting company, Master Host, admitted that his company gets about 100 

requests a day to remove content from inconvenient—so-called ‘‘inconvenient’’ Web sites. 

In Belarus, authorities conduct surveillance on Internet users, and they require cyber 

cafes to register each user’s browsing history. Kazakhstan’s Government, as mentioned 

before, introduced a law in July to regulate, but really to restrict, the Internet, and this 

law makes all forms of Internet content, whether Web sites, blogs, chat rooms, subject 

to the same restrictions that are in place for traditional media. 

The restrictions on the Internet are likely to increase unless citizens in Russia, 

Kazakhstan and elsewhere struggle to keep the Internet open, and this struggle requires 

U.S. support. Authoritarian regimes use a variety of methods to limit online freedom of 

expression. The United States therefore has to respond in multiple ways. This response 

should consist of, first, preventing the use of U.S. technology in violations of Internet 

user’s rights, second, building effective coalitions among democratic governments in 

defense of Internet freedom. Third, investing in technology to circumvent censorship and 

strengthen user privacy and fourth, but certainly not least, supporting indigenous efforts 

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in the country’s where the Internet is restricted, supporting their efforts to expand the 

space for free expression online. 

The Internet is a medium for communication. Its impact on authoritarian regimes 

ultimately depends less on the medium itself and more on the messages it conveys and 

on the messengers who use it to drive progress toward democracy. Therefore, we should 

not only invest in anti-censorship technology, but also support the creation and distribution of pro-democracy content and back the courageous and creative activists in repressive 

environments who are struggling to bring about political change. Thank you. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Daniel. We will now move onto Nathan Frietas, who is 

adjunct professor at NYU, interactive telecom program and leading protest software developer. Nathan? 

Mr. FRIETAS. I’m going to try to walk the walk and use my mobile phone. So I greatly 

appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing, Senator Brownback, the Chairman of the Commission. 

For me, I come as a representative of the countless technology and new media advocates who believe that the most amazing and groundbreaking innovations of our generation should be used for more than the acquisition of wealth or distraction or entertainment, but should be used to really do good in the world. 

I’m also a long-time member and former board chair of the international group, Students for a Free Tibet—working with Lhadon Tetong and Tenzin Dorje. What I’ll share 

with you today is some of my experiences as an activist-practitioner, on the ground, 

employing these technologies both in the United States and abroad. 

A bit of history on Twitter—the roots of this new media technology wave and specifically, Twitter, began in 2004 with an open source Web service called TXTmob. TXTmob 

was developed by MIT’s Institute for Applied Autonomy and used at the 2004 DNC and 

RNC conventions, specifically, RNC in New York. I was part of a team that utilized this 

to broadcast tens of thousands of messages to thousands of people on the street to let 

them know what was going on, what the breaking news was. 

Later this same technology was used in the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine to 

create flash mobs and coordinate sit-ins. In 2005, two of my colleagues who worked with 

TXTmob were employed by the company that became Twitter. And they began showing 

this technology around the office to see the power of short-message broadcasting. So 

Twitter was born out of an activist movement, so it’s no surprise that it’s come full circle 

and is being used that way again. 

My specific area of work is focused on Asia, specifically China, Tibet and India. I’ve 

been employed in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley. I developed patented technology and 

was a student at the University of California, where I worked on DARPA and NSF-funded 

research. So I’m a product of the both government-funded and private-funded efforts to 

develop new technologies. Now, I’m fortunate to be teaching at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the course titled: ‘‘Social Activism using Mobile Technology.’’

This is a one of the first of its time courses and I believe more education opportunities like this should be given to students to understand the alternative opportunities they 

have coming out of school. My path might seem novel, but it comes from a long history 

of geeks, nerds, and engineers who want to apply their skills to helping their country and 

their community. During the Second World War and the cold war, inventors, mathematiVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:18 Sep 14, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 3194 Sfmt 3194 U:\WORK\102209.TXT KATIE
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cians used the first digital computers to play a critical role in the Allies’ efforts to stay 

in front of the Axis. 

During the Civil Rights movement the use of telephones, telegraphs, and traditional 

social networks in churches and universities created a foundation to mobilize supporters 

throughout the South. And in recent years, hackers, nerds and geeks like myself have 

gravitated toward the social justice, environmental and human rights movements. 

So the idea of two guys in a garage in Silicon Valley has translated into teams of 

activists around the world using Skype, Facebook, and Twitter to innovate and develop 

new systems to use the same grassroots organizing and non-violence techniques that have 

come from Gandhi, but in a new era. 

We already mentioned Burma and I believe it will come up again. The fascinating 

thing about what happened in Burma in 2007 was the emergence of the video journalist. 

Someone with a very cheap digital camera broadcasting their message using the Internet: 

instant messaging, FTP file transfer—and ending up on the BBC. So the official view—

and this is, sort of, the early days of YouTube and they didn’t use that. The idea that 

they could do that to cover their movement and even though the Saffron Revolution wasn’t 

successful, the impact they left in the world of activism about the possibility was very 

successful. 

A similar model is being used in Iraq through a video channel called Alive in Baghdad which, what that does, is represent an alternative option for Iraqis to express themselves and their situation rather than turn to violence. The power of the moving image 

is unavoidable. And with the low cost of distributing videos online, the ability to easily 

stream it live from mobile phones or satellite data networks means that its reach and 

impact has come to rival broadcast television. 

In many cases, authoritarian states’ powers prove too formidable for new media technology. We saw this with Tibet in the uprisings last March. The only view that the world 

had of the uprising was from the Chinese state media. Internet was cutoff, phone was 

cutoff, and reporters from around the world were blocked from accessing an area the size 

of Texas. So in that case, the type of infrastructure that China has been able to put in 

place is overwhelming. 

And working with American companies such that they do not provide the technology 

to censor, filter, surveil, and block is an important outcome that I would like to see from 

these discussions. The other way technology has been used for activism is when outsiders 

move into a country—activists, human rights workers, fair election advocates—to use 

technology in a place that allows them to be more efficient. 

So election monitoring, or for instance, last year during the Beijing Olympics when 

all protest was not allowed, over 70 activists traveled there with camera-phones, small 

portable computers, high-definition video cameras—and were able to protest and document their work—more on that in my statement in this paper. 

Finally, last year during the Presidential election, I worked on a project called 

Twitter Vote Report. This was a nationwide Web 2.0-style project for election monitoring 

that allowed people using SMS, iPhones, or standard telephone in English or Spanish to 

report in problems that they had at the polling place. We had a real-time Google Map, 

a real-time alerting system for any delays or ballot issues. That was a very successful 

project that’s being replicated in Afghanistan, recently, and elsewhere. 

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So as you can tell, I’m a very enthusiastic and active participant in the use of new 

media tools for social good. However, the use of these tools brings serious risk to the user, 

their friends, family, and broader movement. As a friend of mine said, you cannot Twitter 

your way out bludgeoning by security goons. Mobile phones are unique identifiers that 

track their user. Laptop computers are full of incriminating documents. Digital viruses 

deliver powerful espionage tools such as GhostNet. One slip and your entire e-mail box 

and social network can be revealed. 

So we need to spend more time focusing on protecting activists, protecting these 

generations that take 20 years to rebuild if they’re decimated. And while the free world 

is enamored of these tools and we’re here with this hearing, our own Federal, State, and 

local law enforcement are often quite fearful of their use at home. So just recently, Elliot 

Madison, a 41-year-old social worker, was arrested in Pittsburgh and charged with hindering apprehension for prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime. 

He was found with a computer and was using Twitter. This is a contradiction that 

we must address and come to term with. We do want to protect our homeland from violent 

terrorists and we do want to apply these tools fairly. But we need to make sure that we 

understand their impact on the domestic front. 

So there are constructive steps that we can take. We continue to support the freedom 

of media and extend that to the conduits of the Internet and mobile phone in which they 

operate. We should develop policy and programs that recognize and fund education and 

the development of new software tools. We should also guide and motivate the corporation 

startups and venture capitalists who build these amazing technologies. 

I’m happy for tools like Twitter, that they can be used just as well to cover the daily 

lives of Ashton and Demi or break the news of Michael Jackson’s death. But the fact that 

they can be used to broadcast updates from the streets of Iran or spread the news of political prisoners in Tibet being executed is a very weighty obligation and responsibility that 

they’ve taken on. 

And last, we need to look at embargoes of technology and understand that when we 

embargo a country, we remove the possibility for the people that need these tools the most 

to have access to them. Thank you very much and my full statement’s in the paper. 

Mr. BROWNBACK. I want to recognize Congressman Bob Aderholt has joined as well. 

Bob, do you have a comment that you’d like to make? 

Mr. ADERHOLT. Thank you, Senator. No, I just want to say it’s good to have this 

hearing today and I’m glad to be here and to listen to our experts on this issue. It’s an 

issue that certainly is, I think, the up and coming issue of the day. So thank you for 

having the hearing today and thanks everybody, pleased to be here. 

Mr. BROWNBACK. Appreciate that. I’m going to have to slip out, shortly, for another 

meeting. I think this is a very important issue and we’ve got some funding coming forward in the appropriation bills to do some of the things that are being talked about here. 

But the accumulation of a policy record, I think, would be most helpful from the panelists 

and what you think it is that we ought to be doing and what we ought to focus on—both 

in the appropriation process and the authorization system. And so I welcome the record 

to be developed and to be able to use that. And with that I’m going to turn it back to 

Kyle to run the overall panel. 

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Mr. PARKER. Thank you very much, Senator, for joining us today. And we will continue with the discussion with Evgeny Morozov, who is Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown 

University and contributing editor to Foreign Policy Journal. Evgeny? 

Mr. MOROZOV. Hi. I’d like to thank the Commission for convening a hearing on such 

an important subject. While I share many of the recent enthusiasm about the positive role 

that new media can play in opening up authoritarian societies, I’m increasingly concerned 

with both how well some of the societies have themselves managed to adapt to the Internet threat and how poorly some of the digital activists, journalists and even some policymakers understand the risks of trying to promote democracy via the Internet. 

So let me outline some of my most pressing concerns today. First, you have to 

remember that new media will power all political forces, not just the forces we like. Many 

of the recent Western funding and media development efforts have been aimed at creating 

what’s known as, new digital public spaces, on the assumption that these new digital 

spaces would enable the nascent actors or civil society to flourish on blogs, Twitter and 

social networks. 

While this does sound reasonable in theory, in practice, we have to be prepared that 

groups that are often anti-democratic, both their nature and rhetoric, would probably benefit from existence of this net spaces as well. So in a sense, promoting this new digital 

spaces entails similar risks to promoting free elections. It’s quite possible we may not like 

the guys who win. For example, research into the blogospheres in Egypt, Palestine, Russia 

suggest that these organizations like Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and various groups of 

Russian nationalists that are making the habits, use of blogs and social networks, in particular, because they are blocked from access to traditional spaces where they could 

operate. 

So both support for promoting blogging and social networking may actually have a 

lot of negative and unpleasant consequences as well. Second, we have to realize that 

authoritarian governments themselves have developed extremely sophisticated strategies 

to control cyberspace and often those go beyond censorship. It’s a mistake to believe that 

these governments wouldn’t be able to manipulate these new public spaces with their own 

propaganda or use them to their own advantage. Many authoritarian governments are 

already paying bloggers and Internet commentators to spin the political discussions that 

they do not like. 

It varies from the Russian approach, where the government is cooperating with several commercial startups which are creating ideological, social networking, and blogging 

sites that support the pro-Kremlin ideology. To the Chinese approach, where the party 

has created a decentralized network of what’s come to be known as 50 Cent Party, which 

is almost 300,000 people who are being paid to leave comments onsites and blogs that 

the government doesn’t like and thus, try to spin those discussions. 

Even the Iranian clerics have been running blogging workshops, particularly aimed 

at controlling religious discourse targeting women. And they’ve been doing it, actually, 

since 2006, much before we began talking about the Twitter revolution. Third, authoritarian governments are increasingly eager to build short-term alliances with digital 

groups that sometimes their goals. For example, one of the reasons why Russia has 

emerged as the most feared player in the field of cyber warfare is because it always acts 

indirectly, usually by relying on numerous, nimble, underground gangs of cyber criminals. 

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Most of the time those gangs perfect the art of stealing credit card details of foreigners. But when the geopolitical pressures requires, they could be easily mobilized to 

assist the state. Just think of the recent cyber components to conflicts with Estonia and 

Georgia, with a communication networks of both countries have them crippled. Arguably, 

the fact that these networks of criminals who plan and execute these attacks rather than 

the government, actually, leaves Kremlin and Moscow more space for maneuver. So we 

have to remember that. 

Another example, which I think is equally disturbing, is recent attempts to try to 

legitimize some of the Internet control by involving bloggers and Internet personalities 

themselves. For example, in the suggestion of the speaker of the upper chamber of the 

Russian Parliament, Kremlin may soon be creating what’s known as the blogger’s 

chamber, which will probably be another one of those state-controlled fake representatives 

of the civil society that will invite prominent Russian bloggers to set their own standards 

of what can and cannot be discussed on Russian blogs and on the Russian Internet, in 

general. 

That’s probably just another example where the supposed ceding of state power 

would probably only reinforce the Kremlin’s control over the Internet. Fourth, we do not 

fully understand how new media affects civic engagement. And we don’t have to pretend 

that we do. We still assume that established unfettered access to information is going to 

push people to learn the truths about human rights abuses or the crimes of the governments and thus make them more likely to become dissidents. 

Most likely, lifting the censorship lid, at least in the short term, would result in 

people using this opportunity to fill in other gaps in their information vacuum. Those may 

have to do with religion, culture, socializing and so forth but not necessarily with political 

dissent. Political activism and active citizenship would probably only come last in this pyramid of cyber needs, if you will. 

The creators of tools like Syphon and Tor which do allow anonymized access to the 

Web, often report that many users in authoritarian states actually use those tools to 

download pornography and access sites which that government doesn’t want them to 

access—not necessarily political ones. 

In fact, there is a growing risk that hundreds and thousands of these digital natives 

in these countries would actually be sucked into this endless cycle of entertainment, 

rather than have their political commitment increase and full political life. Finally, what 

I should mention is that current U.S. Government restrictions on the export of technology 

to sanctioned countries often actually thwart and impede the adoption of new media technologies. 

I would like to point out that the current sanctions against governments like Cuba, 

Iran, North Korea, and several others make it significantly difficult for other ordinary citizens, as well as well established activists and NGOs, to take full advantage of the 

opportunities that the Internet and social media offers. American technology companies 

face fairly complicated process of obtaining and renewing licenses and waivers to be able 

to export their technology to the sanctioned countries. 

The rules are not 100 percent clear and some technology companies decide not to take 

any risks and withdraw from this market altogether. For example, some American hosting 

companies refuse to deal with customers from Zimbabwe, Belarus or Iran altogether. And 

this inevitably leads to implicit censorship, where activist groups that actually supported 

10

and were often recognized by the U.S. Government have to justify their activities to Web 

administrators of these companies. So I think I would stop here and you can turn to my 

full paper. I have two more additional points in it. Thank you. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Evgeny. We will now move on to Chris Spence who is Chief 

Technology Officer the National Democratic Institute. Chris, your statement? 

Mr. SPENCE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Commission. Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the role of new media in authoritarian 

states. For the last 15 years, NDI has employed technologies as components of many of 

our democracy strengthening programs. A wide range of technologies and associated 

strategies have been used to support activists, political parties, legislatures, women in 

politics, and civic groups around the world as the partners struggle to strengthen the 

democratic institutions in their country, increased space for broad participation in political 

life and safeguard their elections. 

In this period we’ve been able to see the transformational potential of new technologies applied to democratic development. The new media and mobile technologies that 

have evolved over the last several years, while in many ways still exploratory in their 

application to politics, have been put to particularly good use in support of political campaigns and other forms of democratic expression. 

But introduction of new media and other technologies should not be seen as a panacea for democratic development nor goal in and of itself. These technologies, paired with 

effective methodologies, can help organizations make significant contributions toward 

advancing the democratic process in authoritarian states. 

Democratic development is a long-term commitment and a process. And the effective 

use of technologies by activists, political parties, candidates, civic groups and others can 

support and even accelerate the process when the tools are well used. Activists and civic 

groups have demonstrated remarkable ability to adapt new technologies and when combined with traditional organizing principles, can create moments of opportunity for democratic gains and enhanced channels for political engagement in authoritarian states. 

The key is not only to employ effective technologies but to pair the technologies with 

strategies and approaches that are developed for the political environment in which the 

technologies are being used. This approach can help activists get out ahead of authoritarian regimes and make relative gains and even game-changing democratic gains when 

periods are identified where such innovations can rapidly be put to use. 

While regimes may quickly catch up or clamp down by employing technologies and 

other techniques to bolster their regimes, gains made during the gap between early adoption and governmental response can have long-term, positive consequences for democratic 

activists. The strengths of the early uses of new media for activism have been in communication and in sharing information about political developments. However, thus far, we 

would argue that the tools have been less effectively utilized for the organizing required 

that can lead to constructive political outcomes. 

In some situations, information has been produced by citizens using innovative new 

media tools that initiate the process of change, but the process is stalled due to a lack 

of the organizations or institutions in the country required to capture the interests and 

channel the process toward purposeful, strategic and peaceful direct action. Assisting 

organizations in these countries to build this capacity is an important component in 

leveraging new media tools toward political reform. 

11

For example, those that followed the Iran election on Twitter may have felt frustration as a fantastic amount of information was captured and posted on the Internet during 

the election protests. But the pro-reform political organizations and institutions in the 

country were limited in their ability to channel the information and the energy of the 

crowds into a process that led to a reform based outcome. 

One of the institutions that are particularly well-suited to this role, but often overlooked—sorry, I’ll let that——

Mr. PARKER. It’ll pass. [Laughter.] 

Mr. SPENCE. How many—is that done? 

Mr. PARKER. Something to do with voting in the House. 

Mr. SPENCE. Great. 

Mr. PARKER. Please continue. 

Mr. SPENCE. One set of institutions that are particularly well-suited to this role but 

are often overlooked in international circles are political parties. Relatively little attention 

is paid to the important role that parties play in aggregating citizen interests and channeling them into constructive and peaceful means toward democratic reform. One area of 

opportunity, with tremendous potential in countries where NDI works, is to provide more 

new media technology assistance to political parties, especially in autocratic states where 

the regime often has access to considerable state resources and controls the organs of 

state communication. 

NDI’s work with domestic election monitoring groups provides an illustrative example 

of combining these new technologies with effective methodologies and strong organizations 

toward impactful, political purposes. A common approach to domestic election observing 

involves deploying citizen election observers, with their mobile phones, to a representative 

sample of polling stations around a country on Election Day. 

These observers are trained to identify election irregularities or record observations 

and results. The observers transfer information from paper reporting reforms to a centralized national data base via text message or voice message. And the information is then 

aggregated and analyzed by the organizational leadership to make an assessment of the 

overall quality of the process, or accuracy of the election result. And then this information 

is shared with the public. 

This approach is a way to collect substantial evidence to detect and deter fraud while 

building public trust in the process and adding legitimacy to election if things go well. 

The uses of these new media tools and related election activities have been very effective 

for our partners. Due to the rapid and accurate reporting provided by the tools and the 

data-driven analysis, this methodology has professionalized the way civic groups use 

quantitative election information in real-time on election day. And has been central to the 

ability of NDI partners to give the public a non-partisan view on the quality of the election process in their country. 

In many cases, we believe our partners have made contributions that have prevented 

post-election violence or identified and raised important concerns about the electoral 

process that have led to more democratic and peaceful outcomes. The field of domestic 

election monitoring has improved significantly in the last several years, partly due to 

improved methods and strategies and certainly enabled by these new technologies and 

replicated by the role of international organizations. 

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Citizen reporting is another method by which citizens have been able to communicate 

various aspects of their Election Day experiences using new media tools, usually text messages and Tweets. The information reported by citizens is typically collected and made 

accessible to the public on a Web site or online map in raw form. The value of this 

approach is to increase citizen participation in the election process. 

But to date, the challenge has been putting the information to good use. Tools are 

being developed to evaluate the authenticity and filter this incoming information so that 

organizations can then be prepared to put this powerful crowd-sourcing methodology to 

work during election periods. However, even as the tools and methods improve, citizen 

reporting promises to be a useful tool toward some electoral goals but won’t be a substitute for election monitoring in situations where assessing the overall legitimacy of an 

election is required. 

The last component of success for activists struggling for democratic reform involves 

the political environment in which they live and conduct their work. The challenges faced 

by activists in autocratic nations are immense. And these challenges are not only technical in nature but also legal and political. Authoritarian regimes typically put in place 

legal mechanisms such as laws that not only limit the activities of international and 

domestic NGOs and political parties but also subversion and libel laws against citizens 

who try to express their views and opinions online or publicly—laws against intermediaries of communication such as ISPs and telecommunications providers and legalized 

surveillance of citizens, including their online activity, and a wide range of technologies 

that they use to enforce these legal tools, including the Internet filtering and surveillance 

technologies that we’ll be discussing today. 

International community can help to create a more enabling environment for activists 

to utilize new media and tools in pursuit of democratic reform by implementing programs 

that foster greater access and affordability to technologies that seek more openness of 

these regimes, that advocate for increased freedom of expression and that protect the 

rights of privacy of citizens in these countries. 

So to conclude and summarize, windows of opportunities for political reform can be 

created by the use of new media in authoritarian states with a combination of good technology tools, effective strategies and methodologies—put into use by organizations or 

institutions that can channel the energy of the public and the information they produce 

toward constructive and peaceful political activities. 

The political environment provides the playing field under which all this occurs and 

we all have a role to play in creating an enabling environment, which activists and groups 

seeking democracy reform can work to build democratic societies without fear using new 

media tools. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Chris. We will now proceed to Shiyu Zhou, Deputy Director 

of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium for your statement. 

Mr. ZHOU. Thank you. So the Internet is a vast, fast, and also inexpensive way to 

access information and to communicate. While authorities in closed societies can easily 

shut down newspapers, block TV channels, jam short-wave radios, and ban books, the 

Internet is far more elusive. 

It has become the greatest hope for global information freedom and democratization 

and for peaceful progress of the sort the Helsinki Process made possible. On flip side, however, the Internet has also become the biggest target of information censorship for all 

13

repressive governments who have put tremendous resources into beefing up their cyber 

war systems over the past decade. 

The Internet censorship firewalls have become the 21st century Berlin Walls that 

separate our world. Amid the darkness of the Internet censorship in closed societies, a 

thread of light still remains. It is the Internet life lines offered by the anti-censorship systems like that of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, GIF for short, which has been 

providing millions in closed societies for free access to the Internet for years. 

GIF consists of small team of dedicated Chinese-American engineers who are brought 

together by a common practice of Falun Gong. Many of us were also among the students 

on Tiananmen Square during the 1989 massacre. Through the events of the Tiananmen 

massacre and the Falun Gong suppression, we have personally experienced how frightening the state controlled media can be. It confounds right with wrong overnight, inciting 

hatred in the society to pave the way for oppression. 

It is our firm belief that free flow of information is the most effective and powerful 

way to peacefully transform a closed society and promote human rights and civil liberties. 

This conviction has driven us to spend countless sleepless nights contending with tens of 

thousands of Internet monitors and censors in China and around the world, so that the 

citizens inside those repressed countries may safely communicate with each other and 

with the world. 

The men and women of GIF maintain operations out of own pockets but we provide 

our products and services to the citizens of closed societies entirely free of charge. After 

years of hard work, our anti-censorship system has attained global reach. It is used by 

people from almost every closed societies in the world and has been supporting the largest 

user bases in the world’s most censored countries like China, Iran, and Burma. 

During the Saffron Revolution in Burma, in late August 2007, we experienced the 

threefold increase in average daily traffic from Burma. Many Burmese use our system to 

post photos and videos of the crackdown to the outside blogs and Web sites. The Burmese 

government had to entirely shut down Internet to stop the outflow of information about 

the oppression. 

Before the Beijing Olympics, when uprisings in Tibet led to thousands of arrests and 

large-scale human rights abuses, we saw our traffic from the region increased by over 400 

percent in the first few days. Perhaps, the best example of the role of GIF software was 

during the Iranian election this past June, when our traffic from Iran increased by nearly 

600 percent in 1 week. 

On the Saturday of June 20th, an estimated 1 million Iranians used our system to 

visit previously censored Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google. The 

Iranian users posted videos, photos and messages about the bloody crackdown. GIF systems have also been of benefit to U.S.-based organizations such as Human Rights in 

China, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia and even companies like Google and Yahoo!, 

who self-censor since we’re bringing the uncensored version of their services to closed societies. 

In fact, when the U.S. Internet companies are criticized for complying with the censorship demands of dictatorships, they often claim that they have few options but to do 

so. However, powerful anti-censorship systems make it effectively impossible for the 

regimes to demand censorship of those companies’ in-country sites. This is because the 

more in-country sites compromise by censorship demands, the more likely people in those 

14

countries will be to ignore them and to hook up to the uncensored overseas sites through 

anti-censorship systems. 

The services GIF provides are invaluable and their impact goes far beyond the Internet. There are people in closed societies getting a taste of freedom and are given a way 

to share information. They will no longer acquiesce to tyranny and injustice. Internet 

freedom has the potential of transforming the closed societies in a peaceful but powerful 

way that must not be underestimated. The operation of our system is very efficient. It 

only needs a few dollars to support a user in closed societies for an entire year. 

Moreover, for every dollar we spent, China and other censors will need to spend hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars to block us. The information warfare over the Internet has now boiled down to the battle of resources. We have technology and the commitment. With a modest amount of resources, there is capacity to tear down the 21st-century 

Berlin walls. 

When Congress passed the Internet Freedom Provision in the fiscal year 2008 appropriation act, it declared that, quote, ‘‘ensuring the freedom of Internet communication in 

dictatorships and autocracies throughout the world is a high and critical national interest 

priority of the United States,’’ end quote. Thanks to this hearing and the bipartisan efforts 

now being made in Congress, I hope that the time has now come for the United States 

to make that priority come alive in a committed and robust fashion. Thank you. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Mr. Shiyu. We have one more panelist, who actually could 

not be with us physically today, Oleg Brega, who is a prominent Moldovan blogger who 

is actively involved in the post-election coverage and protest and demonstrations that took 

place in Chisinau. We do have, I believe, his written statement here available for the 

audience, as well currently on our Web site as well as our YouTube channel, which is 

just—I guess you go to YouTube/helsinkicommission, all one word; you should be able to 

find Mr. Brega’s presentation there that he did prepare for today’s hearing, and I would 

like to specifically thank Vlad Spanu and the Moldova Foundation for helping us out with 

that. We would love to have been able to telecom him in, or teleconference him in, but 

due to some logistical issues we weren’t able to do that. 

With that, I’d like to thank the entire panel for your excellent statements and also 

for keeping to time. We now have a fair amount of time for questions, which I like to 

think are really the best part of these types of discussions. And again, we don’t need to 

limit you—the panelists can question other panelists or disagree, and certainly people 

from the audience. The only thing I would like to ask is if you could just keep your 

remarks in the form of a question and identify yourself. We do have a makeshift station 

over there, a microphone, and although we probably can all hear, it’s helpful if you do 

speak into the microphone for the benefit of the transcribers, who will transcribe your 

question for the written record of today’s event. 

So with that, first to the audience, and we probably will take a few at a time and 

then let the panelists respond as appropriate. So sir, yeah, if you wouldn’t mind stepping 

up to the mic, and maybe we’ll take two or three to get it started and let the panel 

respond. 

QUESTIONER. Good afternoon, my name’s Andrew Deming. I’m from the State Department and I’d like to thank the panel for holding this briefing today. My question was 

directed particularly at Mr. Spence, but any of you feel free, please, to answer it. I had 

the opportunity to observe the Moldovan elections earlier this year, and it was my first 

15

observation mission, so I learned a lot, but one of the things I noticed was that a lot of 

the atrocities that would sort of make an election un-free or unfair sort of occurred in the 

months leading up to the elections. 

And I really like the idea of using citizen observers and giving them the tools and 

technology to sort of go out there and report things on election day, but—and I know that 

they are the missions do go out there and observe any sort of foul play beforehand, but 

is there planning to do any activities or any ongoing activities right now to sort of utilize 

the same sort of strategy before the elections? Because I know a lot of the stuff doesn’t 

happen on Election Day. Thank you. 

Mr. PARKER. Do we have another question or two to sort of load the panel up here? 

Sir? 

QUESTIONER. Thanks, I am Ben Bain. I’m a reporter with Federal Computer Week 

magazine. I was curious how important it is to avoid the appearance of interference. It 

was brought up a couple of times in the panel, but particularly with Iran, I mean, there 

was a lot of back-and-forth into what the appropriate role for the State Department was 

to play in interaction with Twitter and some of these other services, and I’m just curious 

about the take on how you avoid some of those concerns, and if it’s important to in the 

first place. Thanks. 

Mr. PARKER. One more? 

QUESTIONER. My name’s Robert Guerra, I’m the Project Director of Freedom House’s 

global Internet freedom program. I have a question. There’s the issue of measures and 

what specifically can be done, both from a technological point of view but also non-technological, human resource could be done, so there was specific comments on changes in legislation or others or hosting providers in the United States. It would be good to have a bit 

more details than were mentioned, but also the non-technical aspect that helps supplement opening up the Internet that could be useful to address the human skills that are 

needed. Thank you. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. With that, please, maybe we can just start from this side 

to side, left to right or right to left, however you’re looking at it. Please, Daniel? 

Mr. CALINGAERT. Right. In answer to the first question, how do you gather information on pre-election violations? I think Chris made a very important point that it’s not 

just the technology, but it has to be part of a larger strategy. And I think the same goes 

with [inaudible] for election monitoring or anything else. And so in principle, the same 

kind of technology that was used to get citizen input on Election Day can certainly be 

used in a pre-election period, provided you have the systems in place, and especially the 

people know about this opportunity and feed it in. 

And there’s a very critical component, also mentioned by Chris but often overlooked 

in these kinds of programs: The information needs to be verified. It is useless or even 

counterproductive to simply be passing around rumors, and rumor-mongering is very big 

in elections, and especially Election Day. So it’s important as part of the structure that 

you have qualified people to sort through the information and call what is credible 

reporting from citizens from very unsubstantiated information. 

In terms of the question about avoiding the appearance of interfering, the question 

on Iran, a lot has been said about the U.S. role. I mean, I think one of the most significant 

roles of the outside world was actually the diaspora community of Iranians, that a lot of 

the information got out via sort of personal networks to Iranians outside the country. 

16

There were photographs from the days immediately following the election of Basij 

beating up student protesters and the like that might have been posted or passed around 

among a few people inside Iran, but they really only got—brought exposure because Iranians inside the country had friends or family outside who then would post that material 

on YouTube or elsewhere to get it broad exposure. 

So the—Shiyu mentioned the importance of the anti-censorship technology. I mean, 

it was obviously critical that that technology was available and in fact in wide use within 

Iran so that there were—even though there were significant blocks on the Internet immediately following the June 12 elections, enough Iranians knew how to get around that to 

get the information out. 

Mr. PARKER. Thanks. Please, yeah. And if any of the panelists don’t have anything 

to say on a particular question, we can just move on. It just helps for everybody to have 

a shot. 

Mr. FREITAS. I’ll be terse. Regarding election monitoring, I want to just call out the 

Ushadihi—U-S-H-A-D-I-H-I. It’s a crisis-mapping platform that has grown out of the 

movement in Africa after the Kenyan elections. It’s akin to a blog system, but for mapping 

crisis, and what’s unique about it is it allows you to capture unverified and verified 

information. So you—it starts to realize that just because something is tweeted, it’s not 

true, and there’s sort of posturing and deception. When we build systems that say, that 

is a type of data we’ll have, let’s figure out how to deal with it, you get something better. 

And what’s interesting, I think we’ve seen the first round, the 1.0 of a lot of this election monitoring. As these systems come in place, they’ll be running all the time, and 

they’ll be used in local elections and in state-level elections and the movement for—these 

tools will be easier, just like blogs. Everyone blogs; in a few years, everyone’s got their 

own crisis-mapping platform. 

I think in terms of avoiding interference, the role of groups developing proxy, 

amazing proxy software, independent activist groups, technologists, universities, these are 

groups that can kind of act without the national players getting involved, and that’s the 

world I’m in, and in terms of the State Department asking Twitter to turn their servers 

off, that’s a very interesting position that, where does it end? Do they keep asking more, 

can they change their SSL port so that Gmail is now accessible, do you just keep doing 

these things? I’m not sure. 

And finally, in terms of what to do, I’ll just give one example that I brought up in 

my opening statement—I think in the university system in the United States, we need 

to have more opportunities to educate students that they can have a career in using technology to support a variety of causes, and not just focus on Wall Street or going to work 

at Google. So I’m working on that, and I hope some of you will as well. 

Mr. MOROZOV. I think the interference question is actually a very serious issue, and 

I think there is, more and more, a realization by many authoritarian leaders that there 

is a sustained effort by the U.S. Government and Western European governments and the 

foundations to try to undermine democracy via the Internet. Whether or not that is actually being made or not is a secondary issue. 

And I think whatever the U.S. Government and its agencies can do to minimize that 

perception would actually be extremely useful. So from their perspective I think that 

reaching out to Twitter was the most terrible thing that the State Department could have 

done at that point, in part because it did confirm the thesis of David Inoshoradis that 

17

Twitter is being used as a platform for fomenting the next revolution. And I think if certain things are done, at least, you know, it could at least be done privately. 

But even beyond that, I think we see, now, looking at the trials happening in Tehran, 

that the authorities do perceive the information technology as a threat. Whether it is actually a threat or not doesn’t really matter; they do think that Twitter and Facebook—and 

if you saw, you know, the trial of Kian, you know, the article in the New York Times 

yesterday, even the membership on the mailing list is already possibly an implication in 

being in some sort of spy network. So I think we do have to do a lot to minimize any 

kind of perception of interference. 

So on the question of what’s to be done, you know, looking broader than just what 

kind of laws we can pass and what we can do with companies, I think there is still an 

assumption that we have to go and start funding the creation of new digital networks and 

new websites and new blogs. And you know all of the media development has to change 

and to sort of target outputs and products to the media sector. 

And as someone who has worked for a new media NGO trying to do some of that 

and who has advised some of the foundations on this, I can tell you that it doesn’t really 

work that way in new media development the way it works, in old media development. 

You can’t just go fund a project, wait for 2 or 3 years, and expect that it will either work 

or not, because in most of those projects, you know whether it is going to work or not 

in 2 or 3 weeks or 2 or 3 months. 

So what happens is that because of all these bureaucratic models that we have, we 

keep waiting for 2 or 3 years. In the meantime, all of the people who could have been 

working on their own entrepreneurial projects lose any kind of entrepreneurial drive 

because they’re all doing it either for the government or the government-funded NGOs, 

in those countries. 

So my advice would be to actually focus on creating networks of people and focusing 

on conferences, exchanges, getting people out of Belarus, Turkmenistan, or Kazakhstan 

and hooking them up with bloggers in the Baltics, Central or Eastern Europe and then 

expecting them to go and create something, rather than just giving them, you know a 

check and expecting them to come up with the next Twitter because it’s not realistic that, 

that’s going to happen. 

Mr. SPENCE. OK, I’ll address a little bit of the election monitoring and the Moldova 

question to the best that I can. In terms of Moldova, in the July snap elections, I know 

that NDI was working with NMO—a regional international election monitoring group—

and a domestic group. We had some problems and NMO was harassed and kicked out of 

the country and the NDI program largely shut down. We’ve seen a lot of positive changes 

in Moldova since then. 

I don’t have any information on our current program. I know that there was almost 

a Presidential election this week and that situation is a little bit fluid. And I don’t have 

any information on our future programming in Moldova, although I would anticipate that 

we would support our domestic partners in very similar ways. In terms of addressing the 

long-term observing piece of that question, it’s very, very common for domestic partners 

to conduct long-term observing, which is in the election period leading up to the election. 

It isn’t usually what makes the headlines on election day when we’re making our 

statements, but almost always, whether we do an election-day observation or a long-term 

observation or both, we always do our best to capture what happened in the pre-election 

18

period as part of our political statements about improving the process and coaching our 

partners on how to really take a look at that and include that in any statements that 

are made. 

So pre-election period is very, very important, and whether we program around it or 

not and have the opportunity to work with partners in that period is something that’s 

always considered. Media monitoring and other techniques are used to track election 

irregularities in the pre-election period. 

In terms of the bigger question about election monitoring and the quality of data, one 

thing that I would say as a broad point—and I mentioned it briefly in the talk—is that 

the professionalization of civic groups in their election monitoring has really amplified and 

magnified in the last 3 or 4 years, and we attribute that to these tools. 

Monitoring groups—and this kind of gets to the threshold questions about Ushahidi 

and some of the platforms where you’re getting a lot of interesting information from citizens, but at the end of the day, you’ve really got to decide, have thresholds been reached 

which call into question the legitimacy of the process? And that’s really the political question that election observers and the groups that we work with have to grapple with. 

And there’s so much involved in that methodology that one of the concerns about the 

crisis mapping or the crowdsourcing is that the public can then draw interpretations 

about the outcome of elections without necessarily having the filter required. You know, 

you can look at a map of some city and see 4 or 5 or 10 or several violations of election 

law reported by citizens who—you know, you have to deal with the verification problem—

but is that significant in the big picture? If there’s 110,000 polling stations in a country 

and you have a sort of a random grouping of reports, it’s really dangerous to draw—it’s 

a scale area to draw conclusions—about what conclusions can be drawn from irregularities 

that are reported. 

So the observation process is a science, and the method of drawing those conclusions. 

And so it’s really important that, as these tools get better—and we like the tools; Ushahidi 

and the other platforms are great—but we need to make a distinction between what can 

be expected out of a professional monitoring exercise and what can be drawn from unsolicited inputs from citizens. And I think there are good things that can be taken from both. 

I’ll leave it there, I guess. 

Mr. ZHOU. Yeah, I would just like to make one comment about this interference issue. 

So I guess it’s mostly because of the State Department comment on Twitters, and I agree 

with Daniel that we should make the technologies available for the people in the closed 

societies. Whether we need to make that comment or not, that’s a different issue. Because 

I am from one of such countries, so we understand the pain, you know, of the people in 

those societies. And they are very hungry for free information. 

Just take this Iranian election as an example. So the usage—the traffic—coming from 

Iran on June 20th was so large and it soon consumed all our resources and crashed our 

servers. So we had to shut down the servers for maintenance—for cleaning—for a few 

hours. And we got so many messages and human phone calls from there. So when we 

restored the services, we somehow had to restrict the Iranian services, because otherwise 

our servers just cannot take that kind of traffic. 

By accident, we curbed some of the video services because that consumes more bandwidth. And in particular, we stopped the YouTube services. And we got so much complaint 

from Iran and people even made calls to ask for YouTube service, so we restored that. 

19

So from this, we can see that once we have this kind of tools available for the people, 

then you’ll find and use it. We didn’t do any promotion to Iran at all because, you know, 

we are a Chinese group; mostly we do Chinese Web sites and services. But they found 

our services by themselves and there were millions of users in Iran using this service. 

So I think for a peaceful change in the closed societies, if we have the technologies 

available, whether it’s Twitter, Google, Facebook, plus the anti-censorship systems, the 

people really will pick them up and that will be good for the society there. Thank you. 

QUESTIONER. Hi, thank you for taking my question. My name is Matt BrownerHamlin. I also serve on the board of Students for a Free Tibet, formerly with Nathan. 

My question is, going off of both the discussion of interference and dovetailing off of the 

third question about what can actually be done, I think the question of interference cuts 

both ways in that, while I think there’s very clear consensus about how states should 

relate to technology in closed states, there isn’t the same degree of consensus on how corporations, technology companies in countries like the United States can behave with 

authoritarian states. 

And obviously, companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft, and Yahoo! come to mind in 

the case of China, but there are many other less prominent examples that are probably 

even more pervasive in terms of the impact of speech within a closed society. So I wonder 

what can be done specifically in the United States relating to the behavior of American 

technology companies toward authoritarian states and their products. Thank you. 

QUESTIONER. Hi, I’m a program officer at the Academy for Educational Development, 

and I’ve been managing civil society program in Moldova, now, going into the third year. 

Mr. PARKER. And what is your name? 

QUESTIONER. Kristen Farthing. I was very excited by the events in April and they 

continued to the summer with the re-election in August. And my question is how, as a 

development professional, managing programs, how can you channel that energy and sustain the protest in a way that then becomes a concerted political action by youth? 

Mr. PARKER. We’ll take one more and then we’ll take two more, if we have them. 

QUESTIONER. Hi, my name is Mark Palinsky with Digital Democracy. There’s a sort 

of lumping of tools under one, sort of, big header—this new media tools. But each tool 

is different, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, and the responsibility that each tool sort 

of takes onto themselves for the security and privacy of their users is also different in 

each specific case. So I’m curious if there are tools or methods that you would encourage—

whether open-source or otherwise—that we really start to focus on, contra other tools that 

might be good for social networking but, particularly under authoritarian regimes, can be 

really dangerous because it doesn’t protect the individual users. 

QUESTIONER. Hello, my name’s Will DeKerna. I’m with the State Department. I guess 

my question builds off the second question, here. You mentioned how important it is to 

couple the impact of these new technologies with the institutions—the political parties 

that are needed to make that into real change. And I’d really just like to hear any of the 

ideas any of the panelists have about how you can do that, given, I feel, the room to 

operate for information technology is often much greater than to deal with political 

organizations and things that the regimes are more afraid of than the technology itself, 

and how the panelists feel you might reconcile that gap. 

20

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. With that, we have, certainly, more than enough to begin 

responding. And why don’t we start from this side with Zhou, if you would like to respond 

first. 

Mr. ZHOU. So I would just make a comment on the third question, about the opensource and security issue. So you know, for Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, those 

kinds of services, it’s very different from the anti-censorship services. Those services are 

basically a kind of service provided, you know, for whether it’s in the closed society or 

in the free society for public use. So for that, of course, there are privacy issues; there 

are security issues and others. But it’s not as acute as for anti-censorship technologies. 

For anti-censorship technologies, you know, we’re basically being attacked, traced and 

reverse engineered and studied extensively and fiercely by the censors. And so the user 

safety is the biggest priority of ours. Also we have to penetrate the firewall. We have to 

enable the users to pass through the firewall censorship safely. 

So for that, it’s a problem that there are certain technologies that do not work well 

and that has potential big problems. We do not want to address the details of the technology here, but we do have such issues. But for the technology like ours, for example, 

it’s been working quite well because, you know, if we can protect the people—especially 

those dissidents in China—pretty much, we can protect everybody in the world. But it 

does need a lot of work so it’s not an easy job. 

Mr. SPENCE. OK, let’s see—the question about how to channel the energy. What are 

the strategies and methods that are used to take the information that’s coming out of 

these new media tools and put it to productive use? And I think that there’s a whole lot 

of ways to get at this, and one thing I would say generally is, it’s political-environmentcontextual. So you have to sort of build the solutions based on the political environment 

you’re working in—the relationships in the country, the politics of the country and some 

of these other constraints around security and safety of your partners. 

One of the tried-and-true ways that we do it at NDI is work through NGOs and political parties that are reputable and have the public trust of the citizens. So as the information comes through these channels, it can be looked at, it can be reviewed, it can be analyzed. And then someone can get on television or get on the Web or get wherever they 

need to get to and say things that are useful and practical for the citizens to sort of act 

upon. 

And the idea here is, in a lot of situations for us, it’s try to form your statements 

in ways that prevent violence, that talk about using legal channels to vent your frustrations. There’s often a judicial or some sort of adjudication process. And really, in these 

activist environments, it’s really important that the message is, identify the legal channels, use them, use partners that people can identify with and trust so that they can take 

the lead from those kinds of partners. 

You know, if you look at what the Obama campaign did, you know, there are all 

kinds of strategies that you can look at depending on, you know, the environment, and 

books are being written on all those that are relevant to the U.S. political scene. But generally speaking, it’s context-specific and it’s really not—it doesn’t have to be rocket 

science. Just get good people who understand the environment to design the programs. 

In terms of tools, you know, the ones that NDI partners use are the ones we’re 

talking about. Skype is huge. Skype is a really important technology. I don’t know if it 

sort of meets the threshold of new media, but it’s very important. It’s relatively secure 

21

and it’s easy to use and it’s cheap or free. The Tor and the GFI technologies and you 

know, all of these onion routing-type things are important. 

I don’t have a firsthand knowledge of how much our partners use those. I think they 

are important in some countries, and certainly, widely utilized, especially in these mass 

movements. And then there are, of course, Facebook and Twitter. So the strategies differ 

from tool to tool, but I would think those are the ones that I would say we think about 

and we see people using. 

And I think I addressed the two questions. I guess I’ll call it quits. Did I address 

your question? 

QUESTIONER. More or less, I was just interested in knowing what happens when a 

country kind of lets outsiders come in [inaudible] increase access to technology but doesn’t 

allow anyone to interfere with the political process [inaudible]. And how do you get around 

that? So I just [inaudible]. 

Mr. SPENCE. Well, I guess we’re talking about the tools and strategies around that. 

I guess what I would say is that whenever activists are in these countries and they’re 

getting ready to think about decisions about using these tools and their own personal 

safety is at risk, what NDI would do is, to the best of our ability, coach on the parameters 

of the tools and how they might be used and what the risks are. And then everybody is 

going to have to make a personal decision about how they’re going to use the tool. 

In a lot of ways, the Internet tools that we’re talking about are black boxes to a lot 

of people. They don’t know if, OK, I’ve got this image on a phone or got this video on 

a phone, what am I going to do now? I have a decision to make. Is it safe for me to 

transfer it? Is it safe for me to put it up on YouTube? You know, how am I connecting 

to the Internet? All of those decisions have to be made on a very personal level and I 

think that’s one part of the discussion that gets a little bit missed, when you think about 

these people using these tools. 

It’s easy for us to sit around and talk about using the tools, but if you’re in that position where, you know, you can see the riot police coming at you, you can see the stones 

and you make those decisions as an activist—but if you have to sort of deal with the technology and it’s a bit of a black box, those decisions are hard. And activists around the 

world will have to deal with that challenge. 

Mr. MOROZOV. I think I’ll tackle the question about companies—investment companies, more specifically. First, I think we tend to lump different corporate activities 

together here. I mean, first you do have companies which provide technology for monitoring of traffic and surveillance and censorship. And then you have companies who provide basic services, like e-mail or social networking, and under pressure, may actually disclose the personal details of their users. 

And I think we should [inaudible] too, because it’s important to understand that a 

certain category—you know, provision of services—if we antagonize or, you know, sort of 

push Western companies from this [inaudible] to this market, their places will be quickly 

taken by the local companies, who often are much easier to manipulate and actually pressure and are releasing all sorts of personal details. 

So while we may think that Google mail or Yahoo! mail are terrible and those companies—but the government—I’m not sure that they are that worse, ethically, than the 

majority of the companies in China, who probably often do that without even disclosing 

it to the media. So we have to make sure that we do not necessarily, you know, push the 

22

Western companies out and ensure that the locals take their place, because they would 

probably be much easier to manipulate. I mean, if you look at censorship on Chinese 

blogs, Chinese Web platforms are, increasingly, very eager to self-censor. 

I mean, research by Rebecca McKinnon last year showed that when she went and 

created controversial content on dozens of Chinese blog platforms, her content disappeared within 24 hours from most of them, right? And it’s considered normal by their 

standards. If you had that page pulled from BlogSpot or MySpace, it would probably be 

a scandal of international proportions. 

That said, the first category—the companies which do provide technology for filtering 

and surveillance—I think they would be much harder to replace, yet, by domestic competition because some of that technology is fairly sophisticated. Even there, if you look at how 

the Chinese tried to implement the Green Dam censorship package that put a limit to 

what you can do on your computer, you actually see that they did steal some of the technology, apparently, from Western companies. 

I do think that even if we try to limit what the Western companies are doing, you’ll 

still have some of that knowledge already out there, and the locals, particularly paid or 

funded by the government, will build on that. But that said, I think the crucial question 

here is transparency. And that’s a question of whether we have to do it through some 

legal norms by requiring companies that do export any sort of technology to those countries to disclose exactly what it is. 

At this point, I’m still not sure whether or not Nokia-Siemens is supplying any 

packet-inspection technology to Iran despite, probably, a dozen press releases from them, 

right? And I think we do have to achieve a standard under which we do actually know 

what’s going on. And then, you know, I expect civil society and the NGOs will actually 

step in and try to mobilize boycotts or protests, just like they do against other corporations who engage in unethical practices. So I think I’ll just——

Mr. FREITAS. I would like to actually point out there were domestic versions of 

Twitter that were created in China that actually haven’t lasted, and now they’ve been 

shut down entirely. So there are some strange cases where this does happen—where 

someone says, we’ll make the Chinese Twitter—and maybe it’s—you can’t even censor it, 

you know; it just gets completely turned off. 

I think there’s another class of technology that has emerged, which is sort of the 

camera-surveillance technology. What’s interesting about that is, it’s sort of globally 

accepted in this war on terror—you know, I live in New York downtown and I understand 

why we want surveillance cameras. I understand why London wants surveillance cameras. When authoritarian regimes get the power of surveillance cameras and they can 

decide who are domestic terrorists—you know, Tibetans are terrorists; the Uighurs are 

terrorists—you know, the power of that is scary. 

And Naomi Klein wrote a great article looking at Shenzhen and Lhasa and some of 

the areas in China with surveillance camera and image recognition and things like that. 

In terms of channeling energy, I think a lot of my work is looking at connecting nonviolence practice with new technology. And I think about, how do I know who Lech 

Walesa was, thinking that he said let’s not charge down and take to the streets; let’s sit 

in this factory and work the phones and work the media and the press and sue these 

communication tools to get our story out. And that kind of thought process and, in the 

new media age, needs to be encouraged. 

23

So looking at, again, something like the Alive in Baghdad or numerous other projects 

that use social media tools to create citizen-journalists out of people that might otherwise 

be frustrated rioters, so to speak. So I would call to the news media organizations to look 

at working with local citizen-journalists on the ground instead of sending in your correspondent—your embedded correspondent. 

Finally, Skype is a great tool. And it’s an interesting trend in telephony, in which, 

our phones are becoming more and more virtual. You know, Google Voice is the latest 

craze. You know the phone system is becoming this very malleable, open-source thing 

where, during—you know, in some work I’ve done, I’ve set up banks and banks and banks 

of virtual phone numbers that all go to the same line so that you can’t trace the person 

by the phone number that they call. And you could change; you could have a hundred 

new phone numbers a day. There are things you can do with the phones that are amazing 

that are what we think of the Web, we’re going to start thinking of with the telephone. 

So keep an eye on that. 

Mr. CALINGAERT. I’d like to add some comments on the question about U.S. companies. Obviously, there are efforts through the global network initiative for the companies 

to raise their own standards on human rights issues, and in collaboration with the human 

rights organizations. And my sense is that will only take them so far. 

And part of the problem, even in that initiative, is that it’s currently limited to three 

companies and it doesn’t include Web 2.0 companies and it doesn’t include any foreign 

companies. And I think if there’s going to be discussion about raising the human rights 

standards of companies, we should not just be looking at United States, but also European, Japanese, and other companies working or based in democratic countries. 

Obviously, Evgeny’s distinction, I think, is very good between those who are providing 

basic services and can be more easily replaced by local companies in China or elsewhere, 

versus those who are developing technology. I think we need to do a lot more regarding 

the companies that produce censorship and surveillance technology. 

And you know, the Nokia-Siemens case—you know, obviously more information is 

needed, but it looks pretty clear that they exported a surveillance system which would 

be pretty standard in any country, but the fact that it’s in Iran strongly implies that it’s 

used to track down peaceful dissidents. And you know, similarly, there are indications—

not enough research, but strong indications—that a lot of the censorship technology used 

in the Middle East is basic sort of Net Nanny software that is used in the United States 

and elsewhere. 

And again, you can use it in the United States, where we have legal safeguards and 

court systems and protections for individuals; if you take that into countries where you 

don’t have rule of law, chances are pretty good it’s going to be used to censor political 

content and criticism of the government and the kind of free speech that we ought to 

encourage. And so I think this is an issue that really requires some government action. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. Please. 

QUESTIONER. Hi, Erica Moratt from Voice of America, Russian Service. And I have 

one question to whoever wants to answer and one to Evgeny Morozov. First question—

I’m going to use the buzzword terrorists, but this also includes criminals and organized 

criminals and groups—to what extent can they use those open sources? Because I mean, 

you know, Osama bin Laden can’t have a Twitter because obviously he’s going to be 

tracked. 

24

And my second question is to Evgeny Morozov: Russia has invented Gogul search 

engine, allegedly for kids, but it does figure what information you can search. Do you see 

it as one of the tools to censor Internet, or it’s just another search engine? Thank you. 

Mr. MOROZOV. I can start the second question. I mean, those efforts are pretty 

common, particularly in Western Europe now, where there is a strong push to make the 

Internet safe for kids and to make sure that it’s safe from child pornography. 

And I think the bigger problem that I see with this current rhetoric is that we need 

to start blocking access to those Web sites is that people who really want to access them 

still access them, because what’s happening is, we are not eliminating the content; we are 

not going after the actual sites. We are just preventing access to them. So the content 

is still there. If you’re really smart, you can actually figure out how to access them. 

What I see as the downside here is that you get more and more countries—Russia 

and China included—who point to the West and say that look, guys, you are having your 

own campaigns to limit freedoms online, whether it’s because of child pornography or 

something else; why aren’t we allowed to do the same in the same fields, or maybe in 

the field of politics. 

There was a crackdown on pornography earlier this year in China where they blocked 

several thousand Web sites. And at least several of them were not exactly clear-cut cases 

of pornography; you could actually make a case that several of them were sites which 

write about culture and often write about sensitive problems for the country. And the fact 

that, now, we see more and more crackdowns like this, sort of, or often this rhetoric of, 

let’s keep the children free, is a little bit terrifying. And I think that, at root, it’s not very 

effective because the real criminals are still using those networks. 

And to your first question about terrorists and who else is using the Web, I mean, 

it doesn’t make sense for any group which wants to remain invisible and unseen and 

which doesn’t have any resources to organize and mobilize to use the Web—first, to 

communicate and then to do outreach. So of course it’s happening. But the question is, 

how do you define terrorists, first, right? And then exactly, are they going to be more 

powerful than people fighting for freedom? And here, it’s not a question of technology; it’s 

a question of politics and social forces. So I don’t think we should stop promoting those 

tools simply because terrorists are going to use them because you know, that would simply 

be counterproductive. 

Mr. FREITAS. I get asked this question a lot as well because I’m building, like, an 

encrypted phone and people are like oh man, the Mafia is going to love that, or something. 

So it is—and my students ask me this as well—and I don’t, from an engineer perspective, 

I don’t want to be the guy that said yeah, just, I made the AK–47 and you know, it’s a 

great gun. [Laughter.] So you have to be careful. You need to inject morality into these 

things, but it’s a slippery slope. 

So I think ultimately, the use of tools for positive gains outweighs them for criminal. 

And criminals already have plenty of tools at their disposal for corruption and money 

laundering and things. 

Mr. PARKER. Any other questions? 

QUESTIONER. Might I ask a followup on that topic? 

Mr. PARKER. Please, Neil. Neil Simon with the——

QUESTIONER. I’m sorry; I should go to the microphone. I’m Neil Simon. I am the 

Communications Director for the Commission, but I want to followup on that question, 

25

looking at who is more developed right now in the use of this technology. And we’ve seen 

a lot of great examples from civil society, but are terrorists and other negative groups 

more advanced, in some countries, than even civil society and activists? We see this in, 

you know, border drug wars and whatnot. We always see people getting a step ahead of 

law enforcement; do we see the other side getting a step ahead of activists? 

Mr. MOROZOV. I mean, I can answer it quickly. The problem is, we never see the most 

successful acts of either activism or terrorism online because if you really want to be effective, the last thing you want to do is to publicize your networks. And that’s why I’ve been 

somewhat skeptical in the ability of Facebook and Twitter to be very useful in planning 

and organizing a revolution, because those platforms, by default, are open to anyone. 

You know, they’re open to anyone to watch. And probably, they can be very useful 

in publicizing what has already been planned, but they are extremely visible. And there 

are a lot of people on both sides who actually would want to watch them. So I think we, 

and analysts of this technology, are always one step behind because the moment technology attracts attention and becomes public, it stops being useful for people who are 

actually using it. 

I’ll give you an interesting example. You know, Iranian activists used to conceal and 

hide their political discussions on a social networking site for book lovers called 

Goodreads. And you know, a lot of people use it for purposes that have nothing to do with 

Iranian politics, and that was the whole point, that you can actually carve out a little 

space on that site and actually carry on the discussions and people seeing—the Iranian 

secret services—would never guess that those discussions are going on. Now, the moment 

the Los Angeles Times published an article about it, I’m sure it stopped being useful, 

right, so they had to move on somewhere else. 

So that’s the tension that I have, for example, as an analyst: Even if you know the 

tools are being used, to what extent can you disclose that they are actually being successful? So it’s very hard to answer that, in short. 

Mr. ZHOU. I want to make a comment on this terrorist issue because I’ve been asked 

similar questions many times. So there is a difference between anonymization tools, which 

I believe some of us mentioned, and also, anti-censorship tools. There is a difference 

between those two concepts. Anonymization tools, I would say—let’s not be so absolute—

but almost all the other tools except ours are anonymization tools. And they’re used for, 

mostly, communications that hide the user’s identity. And they cannot be used with targeted blockage by the censors. So in other words, if a censor wants to target this to the 

target and tries to trace—you know, break the security, then there is a potential danger 

for them to succeed. 

Anti-censorship tool is to use in the hostile environment that is targeted by the censors. So they know your tool and they know where your proxies are and try to block you. 

So in other words, it’s used for a massive effort to bring down the firewall. And the other 

tools are mostly for private use and small-scale use and are unscalable in a lot of senses. 

And for those kinds of anonymization tools, indeed, it is possible for misuse, frankly 

speaking. 

But for our tools in particular—the anti-censorship tools—it’s probably the last choice 

for terrorists to use. It’s because their encryption is only between the users in the 

censored countries to the proxy server, but once you get to the proxy server, you get, from 

proxy server to the destination is completely open. So it’s just like using the normal InterVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:18 Sep 14, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00029 Fmt 3194 Sfmt 3194 U:\WORK\102209.TXT KATIE
26

net. So they can do anything in the, so there is no advantage for using our tools for the 

terrorists. So it’s just like using the usual Internet. So there is a difference between those 

two concepts. 

QUESTIONER. Hi, I’m Emily from Digital Democracy. One thing that I heard 

emerging, which is something that I think is really important, is the idea of how citizenjournalists, how activists, can learn how the different new media tools can be used and 

how to use them effectively—so what I would call new media literacy. 

Just as media literacy was critical to the 20th century, I think new media literacy 

is critical to the 21st. And I’m curious if you can share any case studies of, maybe, how 

people on the ground have learned how to use the correct tools and use them effectively, 

particularly in terms of addressing security concerns. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. And I’d also just like to possibly add to that question a question of mine: Again, the notion of, you have these tools available—the very nature of these 

tools—they’re things we couldn’t have thought about years ago. And there’s the assumption that anything’s possible and who knows where we’ll be in a few years. So if somebody 

gives me a flash drive preloaded with Tor or something and I’m a civil society activist 

in Ashkabad and they say I can browse the Internet or communicate or send e-mail to 

people in Washington or friends in Europe or whatever safely, how do I have the confidence? And how do I know that—you know, some of it’s like, well, I can put a really 

serious lock on my door but if my door is a pinewood door, then the lock doesn’t have 

to be broken; you just break the door. 

Or if I have an encryption key that’s very serious but the stick-it is right there, or 

someone’s in the room with me in an Internet caf`e or, who knows, is there an internal 

camera in the computer keystroke monitoring? And it seems like, how fast this technology 

changes, can the end user, who’s not a computer nerd or whatever—or geek or whatever—

somebody who’s really technical about this, but a simple—someone’s who’s someone else—

a journalist, a citizen. Can it ever get to the point where there’s adequate confidence, 

particularly in societies where the price or being discovered can be serious? It could be 

prison. It could be worse. And I think that’s part of illiteracy as well, and can you sort 

of round that square or whatever? How do you address that? 

Mr. CALINGAERT. Yeah, it’s a very critical issue. And let me put it this way: Freedom 

House works with activists in many repressive environments and I can think of at least 

a couple cases—well, several—with activists from very repressive environments who were 

very sophisticated as activists and they were, frankly, very naive about the security of 

their online communications. 

And there was one in particular who, her e-mail was tracked and it turned out that 

her e-mail was literally firstname.lastname@yahoo.com. So things that we would find 

pretty obvious aren’t necessarily that obvious to even, sophisticated activists. And you 

know, we’re talking about the basics in this example. I mean, once you get into using different anti-censorship tools or Tor or you know, Hushmail, Vaultlet—those kinds of 

things—it takes training, frankly. I mean, there probably are some users in places like 

Iran or Saudi Arabia or wherever who can kind of learn it themselves, but in many cases, 

they’re more likely to learn it if they come into, let’s say, face-to-face contact with people 

who understand it and can explain it to them. 

Mr. FREITAS. I’ve learned an important lesson in working with the Tibetan independence movement and others: It’s that we can’t presume what people are willing—are or are 

27

not willing to do for their own freedom and liberty and democracy. We can’t say, oh, if 

they do that, they might get arrested or go to jail or get killed and we can’t do that. These 

are people, as we saw in Iran, who are willing to take to the streets and die for their 

freedom, and you know, it’s an important fact to remember to not presume that you want 

to protect them. 

As far as a case study, a good friend of mine is part of TextPower in the Philippines. 

And I really like this model because it’s very simple. Tony Okruse is his name, but there’s 

a whole group of people in the Philippines that have used text messaging not to go to 

Twitter, or the Internet—not to be centralized. We get so caught up on having all these 

people out here texting to the middle and going back out. 

What they figured out in the Philippines is, this is about your phone going to other 

phones going to other phones; you know, this is kind of edges and use of messaging built 

on top of the constructs of society, and using what they already knew how to do. Like 

everyone in the Philippines knows how to take a text and forward it to their address book. 

So they used that technique, as opposed to forcing new behavior and saying, oh, what you 

should use is Twitter. You know, when Twitter came out in the Philippines, it wasn’t a 

big deal, and they said, well, why should we use that? It’s centralized. So I think there 

are cases where you look at the behavior of what users are already doing and help them 

do it better. 

Mr. MOROZOV. Well, I think the question of literacy is actually very important, and 

I think there should be more ways to train activists not only in the use of tool, but also 

raise awareness about the vulnerabilities and risks that even such basic activities as 

social networking, for example, bring, even if you are perfectly anonymous. If you do have 

accounts on several social networks, for example, but just overlapping those different 

social networks, you actually can learn quite a lot, if not about yourself than about people 

in your networks. 

It is actually a little [inaudible] security research going into this question of the social 

graph, right? And there are scientific studies which do prove that you can glean a lot of 

information simply by overlapping the presence of people on various sites like Flickr or 

YouTube or Facebook, right? So I want to make sure that activists have heard that, right? 

They think that just because I use Tor, just because I use Gmail I’m untraceable, right? 

And in that sense, they don’t realize that by joining any of the Web 2.0 Web sites, they 

kind of give up part of their anonymity and they give up part of their sovereignty or whatever you want to call it, and I’m not sure they realize that. 

The second point I want to make here is that there will always be the human factor 

involved here, and you would never, no matter how secure your technology is and no 

matter how many trainings you run, you still run into basic problems, particularly in 

authoritarian regimes, where torture is much cheaper than hacking. It is much cheaper 

to go and torture an activist and asking for his passport than to hire 10 hackers, who 

will then go and crack his inbox, right? And as long as that’s the case, I think we can 

be building all sorts of tools, but the reality on the ground will be that, well, either you 

stamp out the e-mail and your e-mail inbox self-explodes in 2 weeks or you just act more 

securely. 

So I feel these emerging threats are not yet fully understood, and I think we need 

to start looking into them and sort of going beyond these tools discussions that we’ve been 

having. 

28

Mr. SPENCE. I would just add a couple quick things. On the library toolkit question, 

I think absolutely. We think that the tools are evolving, and they’re generally moving in 

the direction of easy to use and easy to sort of get your head around. So the strategies 

are what it’s all about. It’s about identifying the levers of power in a country, understanding the political environment, the law, the legislative process, et cetera, et cetera and 

then designing strategies, using toolkits if you can to sort of get the general idea, and 

then designing strategies that can effect change using those levers. 

And so yeah, so absolutely, and then you have to find good partners in these countries who can really sort of get their head around this and move it forward, and I think 

those are the keys to success. On the question of confidentiality and anonymity, I think 

we, or at least me and my team, we’re pretty conservative on this with our staff and our 

partners. I generally sort of use the analogy of locking the doors but leaving the windows 

open, similar to what Kyle was saying. The technologies—you’re never very—all that certain how secure you’re going to be. 

We think our real vulnerabilities are in our physical offices, where people print something off the Internet or they download something or they have cookies on their machine 

or they do any number of things, and when NDI finds itself in difficult situations, it’s usually—an unfriendly knocking at the door—it’s usually not some kind of a surveillance—

especially—surveillancing technology—especially in countries that aren’t as—China and 

Russia, absolutely, that’s an issue, but a lot of the smaller countries with less resources, 

we really view our vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of our partners in this issue 

related to how they choose to use the information that they happened to find on the web, 

and leaving paper in the trash, and all the more obvious things. So do that first and then 

think about the technical things. 

Mr. ZHOU. Just to make a quick comment about Kyle’s saying that, indeed, for a lot 

of users in closed societies, they are not sophisticated or computer-savvy users. So from 

my experience over the past, for a computer-savvy user to get around a firewall is not 

difficult at all, because all the circumvention ideas are based upon the proxy-server idea. 

So as long as you can find like a—for example, I’m in Beijing, I want to go to cnn.com, 

I cannot go. I find a third-party, called proxy, server in the free country and hook to that, 

and that’s like a detour, and that server can get information from CNN and pass it to 

me. So that’s the basic fundamental idea of circumvention. So even for the computer-savvy 

user, this is not a hard thing for them to do at all. So for a small-scale operation to penetrate firewall is—it has the existings when the Internet started, so it’s widely used for—

in the computer circle, the computer scientist circle. 

However, so what we are talking about now is to make a decisive and massive effort 

to tear down the wall. So that is, for any user, an every-day user has no computer knowledge at all, even. As long as he knows how to get Internet, then he can use the little tool 

and double-click it, and then he can penetrate the firewall. So that’s the very, very challenging work. So that’s the—first of all YouTube needs to be designed specifically for the 

computer ignorant users, and also has to protect their safety. So that’s the work that we 

are aiming at. 

Mr. PARKER. Well, we’ve come to the end of our time today. It’s obvious we intended 

this to sort of be a survey discussion. There’s so many facets of this, I can see us exploring 

further the technical side, sort of a how-to, what’s available, the state-of-the-art, sort of 

a cookbook for activists and citizens, the policy side, addressing the issue of terrorists 

29

using these technologies or other questions, and then hearing from people who’d really 

put this to use on the ground, sort of the pragmatic. 

So I can see that we will be discussing this further, and like I said, this will be published and become an official government product, and when we had the idea to do this, 

we looked in CRS, in Congressional Research Service, no readymade product on it. As far 

as I can tell, there has been no other congressional hearing specifically on this yet, and 

I expect that all to change. In the coming future, there’ll be a lot as there’s a lot of 

pending legislation. So it’s certainly something this particular audience here on the Hill 

is very interested in and we will continue to discuss. 

I’d like to thank the audience and all of you for the questions, for coming today. To 

our distinguished panel, for your excellent presentations and all the work you’re doing, 

and also to Chris Doughton and Max Duiz for basically putting this event together, and 

I’d like to thank you all also for putting up with the uncivilized buzzers that we have. 

It sort of comes with the venue, but with that we’ll adjourn the discussion here. 

[Whereupon, at 3:54 p.m., the briefing ended.]

30

APPENDICES

PREPARED STATEMENT OF NATHAN FREITAS, ADJUNCT 

PROFESSOR, NYU INTERACTIVE TELECOM PROGRAM 

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing. 

Thank you to the members of the commission, Chairman Cardin and Co-Chairman 

Hastings, for the invitation to appear here today, and for your interest in this very important topic. I come to you as a representative of the countless technology and new media 

advocates, experts and educators who believe that the most amazing and ground-breaking 

innovations of our generation should be used for more than just the acquisition of wealth 

or as new channels of entertainment and distraction. I am also a longtime member and 

former board chair of the international non-profit group Students for a Free Tibet, led by 

Tibetan activists Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Dorjee. What I will share with you today 

are some of my experiences working with new media technology as an activist practitioner, and my ground-level perspective, so to speak. 

First, a small bit of history. The roots of this latest wave of new media technology, 

specifically Twitter, began in 2004, with an open-source web service called TXTMob. 

TXTMob was first developed by MIT’s Institute for Applied Autonomy for use by protesters at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican 

National Convention in New York. I was part of a team that utilized TXTMob to broadcast thousands of short messages to over 10,000 people on the streets of New York, letting 

them know what was happening moment by moment. Later in 2004, during the Orange 

Revolution in the Ukraine, students utilized the same service to coordinate spontaneous 

protests also know as ‘‘flashmobs’’, strikes and sit-ins. In 2005, two of my colleagues who 

had been involved in TXTMobs use during the RNC went to work for the company that 

became Twitter, where they demonstrated the power of short message broadcasting to 

their coworkers around the office. It was in those times and in those moments, that the 

idea for Twitter was born. It is not an accident that things have come full circle, with 

Twitter now being the standard go-to tool for activists around the world. 

In my activism work, my areas of focus and expertise is Asia. I have specific experience traveling in and working with organizations focused on China, Tibet and India. I 

have also been employed in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, developing patented technology focused on the exchange of data between mobile devices over wireless networks. 

As a student at the University of California in the mid 90s, I worked on a DARPA and 

NSF-funded research effort known as the Digital Library Initiative. Today I am an 

instructor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, teaching a 

new graduate course entitled ‘‘Social Activism using Mobile Technology’’. 

My personal path in this sphere, as a developer, practitioner and instructor in the 

use of new media technologies within social movements, may seem novel, but is in fact 

built upon a very long tradition of geeks trying to good. 

During the second world war Second World War and the Cold War, inventors, mathematicians and the earliest digital computers played a critical role in helping the allies 

stay one step ahead of the axis. 

During the civil rights movement, the use of telephones, telegrams and traditional 

social networks within churches and universities, helped build a foundation to mobilize 

supporters throughout the south. In recent years, open-source hackers, nerds and geeks 

31

have gravitated towards the social justice, environmental and human rights movements, 

creating unique alliances and very rich opportunity for innovation. 

The idea of two guys in a garage in Silicon Valley has translated into global teams 

of activists communicating in realtime through Twitter, Skype, Facebook through their 

laptops, iPhones and Blackberries, working to weave together the grassroots organizing 

and non-violence tactics of Gandhi with freely available, open-source software, cheap 

internet bandwidth, cloud servers and mobile devices. 

Take the case of Burma in 2007. Video journalists and I.T. (Internet technology) student organizations teamed up to provide their own coverage of the Saffron Revolution. 

Using SMS, instant messaging technology, digital video cameras, internet-based file 

transfer services, combined with old fashioned ‘‘sneaker nets’’, a network was able to 

present an uncensored view of the protests as they unfolded. 

As their footage began reaching the outside world, appearing on the BBC and elsewhere, the journalists became more bold and increasingly targeted by the state security 

forces. When the revolution never fully materialized, the monks, activists and journalists 

involved paid a very heavy price, facing imprisonment, torture or worse. However, the 

innovative work of the video journalist teams made a lasting impact and was largely 

considered to have been successful due to the global attention the protests received. A 

similar model is being used in Iraq, through the award-winning online video channel, 

‘‘Alive in Baghdad’’, that works to cover and disseminate stories of the every day lives of 

Iraqis. We have also seen this model used with simple camera phones in the Kashmir and 

most recently in Iran, when a single video clip of video of an innocent dying girl instantly 

clarified the issue for a global audience and brought overwhelming sympathy and support 

to the side of the Iranian people. The power of the moving image is unavoidable, and with 

the low cost of distributing video online, the ability to easily stream live over mobile and 

satellite data networks, its reach and impact has come to rival broadcast television. 

In many cases, the authoritarian states’ power proves too formidable for new media 

technology to have a meaningful impact. While we can instantly know about the smallest 

conflict in any part of the planet, there is often very little that the Internet can do to 

help those in harms way. In Tibet, the largely peaceful uprisings in March 2008, were 

perceived by the outside world as being ‘‘riots’’, due to China’s ability to control the story 

by severely restricting news media access and blocking telephone and internet communication. Thousands of Tibetans were detained, many died, and hundreds were given 

lengthy sentences, many convicted through evidence gathered via close-circuit security 

cameras, use of mobile phones, PCs and the Internet. Just yesterday, four Tibetan political prisoners were executed after being hastily convicted of crimes related to the March 

uprising. There are countless stories of Chinese, Tibetan and other activists within China 

being incriminated through their use of email, Skype and other tools. 

The evidence gathered by the state is often done in collaboration with the technology 

providers—Yahoo!, eBay/Skype, and so on. 

In August of 2008, over seventy activists from around the world traveled to Beijing 

to protest for Tibetan human rights and independence during the Olympic games. New 

media tools played a major role during this effort, providing a loosely coupled link 

between the various independent activists who were traveling to Beijing to participate in 

protests. The tools also enabled a team of citizen journalists to document the many different protests and press conferences that occurred, using techniques evolved from what 

the Burmese students accomplished in 2007 and a bevy of new technology—solid-state HD 

32

digital video cameras, handheld tablet computers, live streaming camera phones. Their 

photos and footage were broadcast around the world, appearing in the NY Times and on 

the BBC and CNN International. Mainstream press was unable to cover the majority of 

these events due to the close monitoring and scrutiny they faced. The Beijing authorities 

eventually caught on, arresting and detaining for a week, six American citizens who had 

been documenting the protests. 

During their detention, they were told that the crimes they were guilty of, documenting and spreading media of protests, were a far worse a crime than actually participating in the protest itself. 

Fortunately, due to their American passports and support from the White House, 

they were treated fairly and made it home. Chinese and Tibetan activists, bloggers and 

journalists who have been arrested for similar acts have faced far worse treatment and 

sentences. 

During last year’s presidential elections, I was a member of a diverse team of software developers and open government activists who came together to build ‘‘Twitter Vote 

Report’’, a nation wide web 2.0-style election monitoring system that tied together google 

maps, wikis, and iPhones with human resources on the ground from watchdog groups and 

the media. Over 30,000 citizens reported from outside their polling places, providing a real 

time view and instant notice of any long lines, hanging chads and potentially voter fraud. 

The data captured that day was released freely to the Internet for analysis and research 

by academic institutions. The open-source code from this project, as well as a few others, 

has been utilized in India and Afghanistan, and we hope to see it become a standard tool 

in the fight against election fraud. It is important to remember that using technology to 

promote civic engagement and democratic participation is as important as its use for 

active dissent. 

As you can tell, I am very enthusiastic and active participant in the use of new media 

tools for social good and in the fight against authoritarianism. However, the use of these 

tools also brings about the possibility of serious risk to the user, their friends, family and 

broader movement. As a friend of mine said, ‘‘You cannot twitter your way out of a bludgeoning by security goons’’. Mobile phones are unique, always broadcasting personal identifiers; changing SIM cards does nothing, phones are tracked easily tracked by their hardware IDs. 

Laptop computers are often full of incriminating documents, web caches and email 

addresses. Digital viruses that deliver powerful espionage-ware such as GhostNet are 

common and becoming more powerful and more invisible every day—one slip and your 

entire email inbox can be copied by an adversary. Use of new media and social networks 

reveal one’s ‘‘social graphs’’, buddy lists, friends & followers—in a free country, these provide benefit, amplifying your ability to communicate and connect. In an authoritarian 

state, these same tools can make clear loose connections between activists, which make 

the job of cracking down on dissent much easier and more efficient. It often takes an 

entire generation to rebuild when an activist network is decimated. The protests of 2007 

and 2008 in Burma and Tibet were at level not seen since 1988 and 1989. That twenty 

year gap is no accident. Rather than just focus on the use of technology as a better megaphone, we need to consider how it can be used to safeguard and protect the identities and 

well-being of dissidents. The Tor Project is a successful case of technology that provides 

anonymity to web surfers and the ability to route around state-sponsored censorship. 

33

While the free world is easily enamored of applications of new media tools within 

dictatorships and authoritarian states far way, our own federal, state and local law 

enforcement are often quite fearful and hostile towards their use within domestic movements. I raise this point not to say that we do not enjoy great freedoms in this democracy, 

but in order to make clear that tools which provide a more powerful platform for dissent 

are universally threatening to those in power. Tad Hirsch, creator of TXTMob, is the subject of a subpoena by the City of New York in connection with several active lawsuits 

against the City that allege police misconduct during the 2004 Republican National 

Convention. Elliot Madison, a 41 year old social worker, was been arrested in Pittsburgh 

on Sept. 24 and charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a 

communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania State 

Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and police scanners while using 

the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements. Just this 

week it was announced that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, has invested in a 

company whose technology is capable of powerful data mining from any information 

openly published on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. In summary, 

measures taken to secure our homeland from violent terrorists often have similar justifications to those taken by authoritarian governments to squelch dissent and democracy. 

We all must be mindful of these contradictory positions on the benefit of new media 

within our own democracy.

In summary, there are constructive steps that can be take today by policy makers, 

NGOs and technology developers. We need to support the development of a Global Technology Bill of Rights that extends freedoms of speech and the press to the tools needed 

to communicate using the Internet and mobile phones. Congress should develop policy and 

programs that recognize and fund new media technology as a fundamental component to 

the promotion of human rights, liberty and democracy. There also must be guidance and 

motivation for corporations, startups and venture capitalists who are building these technologies to consider their global impact on human lives, and not just on the bottom line 

or their stock price. I am all in support of entrepreneurs being rewarded for their risk, 

and am happy that tools such as Twitter can be used just as well to cover the daily lives 

of Ashton and Demi or break the news of Michael Jackson’s death, as it can to broadcast 

updates live from the streets of Iran or spread the news of the execution of four Tibetan 

political prisoners this morning in China. I just hope that MBA students at Harvard and 

Stanford will consider the Humanity Quotient of their work while dreaming up the next 

big thing.

Finally, I would like to briefly emphasize the comments from Mary Joyce of 

DigiActive, who could not be here today, on the topic of embargoes. In the digital age, 

where a ‘‘good’’ is a string of code that can be delivered anywhere in the world with the 

click of a mouse, even today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough. By preventing access 

to blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media, current embargo 

policies harm the very activists who are furthering our common goals of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian governments free to spread propaganda through a 

range of state-controlled media outlets.

Referenced web resources of note:

TXTMob: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob

Alive in Baghdad: http://aliveinbaghdad.org/

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TwitterVoteReport: http://twittervotereport.com Beijing Olympics Protest Coverage: 

http://freetibet2008.tv

GhostNet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostNet

Tor Project—anonymous web browsing—http://torproject.org

35

PREPARED STATEMENT OF EVGENY MOROZOV, YAHOO! FELLOW, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, 

FOREIGN POLICY 

I want to express my appreciation to the Members of the Helsinki Commission for 

holding a hearing on such an important subject today and for giving me the opportunity 

to share with you some thoughts drawn from my research into how authoritarian states 

are dealing with the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age in general 

and new media in particular. 

While I share much of the recent enthusiasm about the positive role that new media 

could play in opening up and democratizing authoritarian societies, I am increasingly concerned with both how well authoritarian governments have managed to adapt to the 

Internet threat and how poorly some digital activists, journalists, and even policy-makers 

understand the risks of trying to promote democracy via the Internet. Let me outline several of my most pressing concerns. 

I. New media will power all political forces, not just the forces we like. Many of the 

recent Western funding and media development efforts have been aimed at creating ‘‘new 

digital public spaces’’, on the assumption that these new digital spaces would enable the 

nascent actors of civil society in places like Egypt or China to flourish on blogs and social 

networks. While this does sound reasonable in theory, in practice we have to be prepared 

that groups that are often anti-democratic, both in their nature and rhetoric, would probably benefit most from the existence of such new spaces. In a sense, promoting these new 

digital spaces entails the same risks as promoting free elections: it’s quite possible we may 

not like who wins them. For example, research into the blogospheres in Egypt, Palestine, 

Russia suggests that Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and various groups of Russian 

nationalists and fascists have been one of the heaviest users of blogs and social networks 

(in part because they are often blocked from any access to traditional media, so for them 

these spaces are the only platforms). Blind support for promoting blogging and social networking may have a lot of very unpleasant unexpected consequences. 

II. Authoritarian governments have developed extremely sophisticated strategies to 

control cyberspace. It is a mistake to believe that authoritarian governments wouldn’t be 

able to manipulate these new public spaces with their own propaganda or use them to 

their own advantage. Many authoritarian governments are already paying bloggers and 

Internet commentators to spin the political online discussions that they do not like. 

Strategies to build what I have dubbed ‘‘the spinternet’’ vary from country to country. The 

Russians outsource it to new media start-ups who then create ideological social networking/blogging sites that promote a pro-Kremlin ideology. The Chinese have created a 

decentralized and 280,000-people strong contingent of what is known as ‘‘50 cent party’’—

50 cent refers to how much they get paid for each comment they leave online—whereby 

its ‘‘blog’’ soldiers are tasked with identifying sensitive online discussions and trying to 

hijack the conversation in directions favorable to the government. The Nigerian government has been reported to be working on an ‘‘Anti-Blogging Project’’ that would fund hundreds of pro-government voices to counter the growing influence of the oppositional 

bloggers—and pay them in cyber-caf`e vouchers. Even the Iranian clerics have been running Qom-based blogging workshops—particularly targeting women—to control much of 

the online discourse about religious issues (they obviously do not want any competing 

interpretation of Shia to take hold online). 

36

III. Authoritarian governments are increasingly eager to build short-term alliances 

with digital groups that share their goals. One of the reasons why Russia has emerged 

as the most feared player in the field of cyberwarfare is because it always acts indirectly, 

usually by relying on numerous nimble underground gangs of cyber-criminals. Most of the 

time these gangs perfect the art of stealing credit card details of foreigners. However, 

when the geopolitical pressure so requires, they could be easily mobilized to assist the 

state (just think of the cyber-component to the recent conflicts Russia had with Estonia 

and Georgia, when the communication networks of both those states were crippled). 

Arguably, the fact that it’s networks of cyber-criminals who plan and executive the 

attacks—perhaps, with barely concealed toleration and even tacit encouragement by the 

Kremlin—gives Moscow a different kind of power. Now, it can deny its direct involvement 

in the cyber-attacks (as it has done), while sending a clear message that anyone who 

wants to argue with it would have to be ready to deal with its cyber-gangs. Equally disturbing are recent movements by the governments to legitimize Internet censorship by 

involving fake institutions of civil society in the deliberation process. For example, on the 

suggestion of the speaker of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, Kremlin may 

soon create a ‘‘Bloggers’ Chamber’’—another one of those state-controlled fake representatives of the ‘‘civil society’’—that would invite prominent Russian bloggers (but almost certainly bypassing those that disapprove of the Kremlin’s policies) to set their own standards of what can and cannot be discussed on Russian blogs. That’s just another example 

where the supposed ceding of state power would probably only reinforce the Kremlin’s control over the Russian Internet. 

IV. Cyber attacks have become an important form of exerting indirect psychological 

pressure on civil society. Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks—whereby servers 

of a given Web site are overloaded with bogus requests to ‘‘serve’’ a page—don’t only make 

important content temporarily inaccessible, they also put a huge drain on staff and physical resources of an NGO or a newspaper. While the media tend to focus almost exclusively on cyber attacks against military and government targets—the overblown coverage 

of ‘‘cyberwars’’ in Estonia and Georgia have brought such dramatic terms as ‘‘cyberKatrina’’ and ‘‘electronic Pearl Harbor’’ into public use—civil society organizations are hit 

the hardest. If left unchecked, DDOS attacks, which are increasingly cheap to organize 

and can be rented on the black market, may erase all the social capital that NGOs and 

even bloggers have cultivated online. The oft-quoted story of CYXYMU, a popular blogger 

from Georgia, is a case in point. A refugee from the earlier war in Abkhazia, CYXYMU 

emerged as one of the most visible and consistent critics of how both the Russian and 

Georgian governments handled last year’s war in South Ossetia. Blogging in Russian, he 

has cultivated a relatively large following in both countries, particularly among the users 

of LiveJournal, one of the most popular blogging platforms in post-Soviet cyberspace. 

However, in October 2008, somebody got angry at his writings, and his blog—also hosted 

by LiveJournal—fell victim to a massive wave of cyber attacks, so severe that millions 

of other LiveJournal blogs became inaccessible for more than an hour. We should recognize CYXYMU for what he is—a ‘‘digital refugee’’ and a victim of geopolitics playing out 

in cyberspace, where free speech is possible in theory, but increasingly unavailable in 

practice. 

CYXYMU is not an isolated case. On the first anniversary of the monks’ uprising in 

Burma, a similar fate befell the three major Web sites of the Burmese exiled media—

Irrawady, Mizzima, and the Democratic Voice of Burma. Administrators of the Web sites 

37

speculated that the attacks were launched by the junta to limit expected demonstrations. 

Oppositional Web sites in Kazakhstan and Mauritania have recently experienced similar 

problems, quite possibly at the hands of their own governments or agents affiliated with 

them. Nonpolitical Web sites are becoming regular targets of cyber attacks as well: in February 2009, virtually all major gay and lesbian Web sites in Russia were unavailable for 

more than a week, as a result of a massive wave of denial-of-service attacks. In other 

words, that many anti-government discussions have moved online doesn’t mean that these 

discussions would become any louder. 

V. We do not fully understand how new media affects civic engagement. We shouldn’t 

assume that establishing unfettered access to information is going to push people to learn 

the truth about human rights abuses/other crimes of the regime (and thus, make them 

more likely to become dissidents). Most likely, lifting the censorship lid would result in 

people using this opportunity to fill in other gaps in their info vacuum—those may have 

to do with religion, culture, socializing, and so forth. Political activism/active citizenship 

would probably only come last in this ‘‘pyramid of cyber-needs’’. The creators of tools like 

Psiphon and Tor, which allow for anonymous access to banned resources, report that 

many users like these tools because it gives them access to downloading pornography, 

which is not as easy to do in tightly-controlled societies. In China, two-thirds of the 

respondents to one opinion poll agreed with the proposition that ‘‘It’s possible to have real 

relationships purely online,’’ compared with one-fifth of Americans who felt the same. Just 

because a handful of young activists are turning to Twitter and Facebook to push for political change, we shouldn’t automatically assume that thousands of others would follow. In 

fact, there is a growing risk that they would be sucked in into an endless cycle of 

infotainment, and their commitment to political life would be significantly eroded. 

VI. The losses in online privacy may not be worth the gains in online mobilization. 

The emergence of new ‘‘digital spaces’’ where dissenting conversations can occur inevitably 

leads to the emergence of new ways to track those conversations. The proliferation of 

social networking has inadvertently made it easier to gather intelligence about whole networks of activists at very low costs. Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one’s 

Facebook profile may compromise the security of many others. While many established 

activists take the necessary precautions to remain undetected, it’s the amateur, ‘‘spontaneous’’ activists who are at greatest risk. Selective intimidation of bloggers—coupled with 

a real (or perceived) ability to track online conversations—erodes the trust that aspiring 

activists place into ‘‘social media’’ and eventually makes them less likely to partake in protest movements. The old, ‘‘analogue’’ model of activism was arguably much safer: if one 

node of the network got identified/de-activated, there was little or no damage done to 

others, because they were much harder to trace in physical space. The new, ‘‘digital’’ 

model puts entire networks at risk, because getting access to an activist’s inbox can put 

all of his interlocutors at risk. Moreover, by overlapping different ‘‘social graphs’’—an 

Internet jargon for ‘‘one’s connections on a social network’’—it may be possible to reveal 

identities of people who have taken all precautions to remain anonymous. It’s also important to remember that obtaining that password may not require any sophisticated knowledge of technology; as the prominent Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah 

once remarked to me ‘‘when torture is cheap, you are not as concerned with what they 

can do to you technologically’’. 

VII. New media development is an extremely complicated business that often has 

adverse unexpected consequences. Many of the latest attempts to create new ‘‘digital 

38

public spheres’’ from abroad/with foreign funding might have adverse effects on their 

future health/sustainability. The very business of ‘‘new media development’’—so eagerly 

embraced by Western governments and foundations—at this point looks very dubious (I 

am speaking as someone who has directed new media activities at a media development 

NGO funded by most big donors and as someone who now sits on a foundation board 

investing into new media). The injection of cash into foreign-based NGOs who are then 

expected to promote ‘‘social media’’ in a given authoritarian country usually means that 

they make smart, entrepreneurial new media whizzes of this country addicted to grant 

money; soon they become unwilling to work for free or don’t bother creating their own 

unprofitable projects. New media is usually a low-investment/high-reward business and 

the reason why we have so many interesting new media sites in the US or Western 

Europe is because it’s cheap to start, experiment, fail and move on to the next project. 

When you look at a grant-driven new media environment in a country like Belarus, what 

usually happens is that projects last for longer than they need to—they are not driven 

by business realities but rather by the bureaucracy of grant-reporting—and they usually 

commit the brightest minds who may otherwise be working on something else. In other 

words, the business of ‘‘new media development’’ suffers from all the classical pitfalls of 

economic development—and many more pitfalls of its own. 

VIII. Current US government restrictions on the expert of technology to sanctioned 

countries thwart the adoption of new technologies. I would also like to point out that the 

current sanctions against many authoritarian regimes—such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea 

and several others—make it significantly difficult for their ordinary citizens (as well as 

well-established activists and NGOs) to take advantage of all the opportunities that the 

Internet and social media offers. American technology companies face a fairly complicated 

process of obtaining and renewing licenceses and waivers to be able to export their technology to the sanctioned countries. These rules are not 100% clear and some tech companies decide not to take any risks and withdraw from these markets altogether. For 

example, some American hosting companies refuse to deal with customers from Zimbabwe 

or Belarus or Iran; this inevitable leads to implicit censorship, where activist groups—that 

are actually supported and recognized by the US government—have to justify their activities to Web administrators of these companies. What has not been widely discussed during 

the recent events in Tehran is that these protests succeeded, to a large extent, despite 

all the hurdles that the US government has imposed in terms of accessing these new 

media technologies. 

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Co-Chairman, members of the Commission, thank you for giving 

me the opportunity to address you today.

39

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SHIYU ZHOU, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, 

GLOBAL INTERNET FREEDOM CONSORTIUM 

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, members of this Commission, ladies and gentlemen: 

The Internet is a vast, fast, and inexpensive way to access information, to communicate, and to organize. It is perhaps the greatest hope for global information freedom and 

democratization, and it provides an important vehicle for the development of civil societies. 

While authorities in closed societies can easily shut down newspapers, block TV channels, jam short-wave radios and ban books, control of the Internet is far more elusive and 

difficult to attain. But this is not for lack of effort. In the past decade, repressive governments around the world have invested heavily in censorship and surveillance of the Internet. 

China is perhaps the best example of systematic control of the Internet. Tens of thousands of cyber police engage in monitoring and surveillance of Internet users, some of 

whom end up in prison for voicing their opinions online. China’s ‘‘golden shield’’—censorship technologies developed with the help of western corporations like Cisco—blocks many 

websites completely, and filter out topics deemed too politically sensitive by the ruling 

party. 

China’s model of Internet censorship is now being emulated elsewhere. The repressive governments such as that of Burma, Cuba, Iran, and now some Central Asian states 

of the former Soviet Union, are increasingly adopting technologies to stifle dissent, control 

information, and prevent citizens from communicating with the outside world. The Internet censorship firewalls have become the 21st century Berlin Wall that separates our 

world. 

Yet amid the darkness of the Internet censorship in closed societies, a shred of light 

still remains. It is the Internet lifeline offered by the anti-censorship systems like that 

of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium—GIF for short, which has been providing millions in closed societies with free access to the Internet for years. 

GIF consists of a small team of dedicated Chinese-American engineers, including 

myself, who were brought together by our practice of Falun Gong. Many of us were also 

among the students on Tiananmen Square during the 1989 Massacre, and we watched 

in the days and weeks that followed the massacre as the government began to rewrite 

history and distort the truth. We relived a similar experience in 1999, when the Chinese 

regime banned the Falun Gong spiritual practice and engaged in a campaign of misinformation and censorship to turn public opinion against Falun Gong, and to suppress 

news of the brutal persecution being carried out. 

Through these events, we have personally experienced how frightening the state-controlled media can be—it confounds right with wrong, incites hatred, and institutionalizes 

ignorance. It is our belief that free flow of information is the most effective and powerful 

way to peacefully transform a closed society and promote human rights and civil liberties. 

This conviction has driven us to spend many sleepless nights contending with the 

tens of thousands of Internet monitors and censors in China and around the world so that 

the citizens inside those repressed countries may safely communicate with each other and 

with the world. The men and women of GIF maintain operations out of our own pockets, 

40

but we provide our products and services to the citizens of closed societies entirely free 

of charge. 

We have developed a series of software programs—most notably FreeGate and 

UltraSurf—that provide users with encrypted connections to secure proxy servers around 

the world. We constantly switch the servers IP address at a rate of about 3,000 times per 

hour in the earlier time, now about 10,000 times per hour, so it makes the censors more 

difficult to block. 

After years of hard work, our anti-censorship system has attained a global reach—

it is used by people from almost every closed society in the world, and has been supporting 

the largest user base in the world’s most censored countries like China, Iran, and Burma. 

Today approximately over 90% of anti-censorship traffic comes through our servers. 

During the Saffron Revolution in Burma in late August 2007, we experienced a threefold increase in average daily traffic from Burma. Many Burmese used our system to post 

photos and videos of the crackdown to the outside blogs and websites. The Burmese 

government had to entirely shut down the Internet to stop the outflow of information 

about the suppression. 

Before the Beijing Olympics, when uprisings in Tibet led to thousands of arrests and 

large-scale human rights abuses, we saw our traffic from that region increase by over 

400%. 

Perhaps the best example of the role of GIF software was during the Iranian elections 

this past June, when our traffic from Iran increased by nearly 600%. On the Saturday 

of June 20, an estimated over 1 million Iranians used our system to visit previously 

censored websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google. The Iranian users 

posted videos, photos, and messages about the bloody crackdown. 

GIF systems have also been of benefit to US-based organizations such as Human 

Rights in China, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia—and even companies like Google 

and Yahoo who self-censor, since we bring the uncensored version of their services into 

closed societies. 

In fact, when the U.S. Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft are criticized for complying with the censorship demands of dictatorships, they often claim that 

they have few options but to do so. However, powerful anti-censorship systems make it 

effectively impossible for the regimes to demand censorship of those companies’ in-country 

sites. This is because the more in-country sites are compromised by censorship demands, 

the more likely people in those countries will be to ignore them and to hook up to the 

uncensored overseas sites through anti-censorship systems. 

The services GIF provides are invaluable, and the impact goes far beyond the Internet. When the people in closed societies gain a taste of freedom and are given a way to 

share information, they will no longer acquiesce to tyranny and injustice. Internet 

freedom has the potential of transforming the closed societies in a peaceful but powerful 

way that must not be underestimated. 

Imagine what it would mean, for instance, if the Pope were able to conduct a webbased service with half a million house church Catholics in China. Imagine if the President of the United States could hold interactive town hall meetings with hundreds of 

thousands of Iranian students, or for Burmese, Syrians, Cubans, Tibetans, others to have 

full, free and real-time ability to communicate with each other and with supporters 

throughout the world. Imagine, if you will, how much safer the world could be, how much 

41

better we could understand each other, and how quickly authoritarianism and repression 

would collapse when confronted with an engaged, educated, and free citizenry. 

This may sound far-fetched, but consider this: for every dollar we spend on anti-censorship technologies, repressive governments must spend hundreds—perhaps thousands—

of dollars to block us. 

Congress is now considering a $30m appropriation for Internet freedom that, if 

passed, could allow us to increase our current user capacity from 1.5 million people per 

day up to 50 million per day, and allow us to greatly enhance the rate at which our technology switches users’ IP addresses. These developments would make it prohibitively 

expensive for any repressive government to counter our efforts. 

The information warfare over the Internet has now boiled down to the battle of 

resources. We have the technology and the commitment. With a modest amount of 

resources, we will have the capacity, and together we will be able to tear down the 21st 

century Berlin Wall.

42

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY OLEG BREGA, 

FILMMAKER, JOURNALIST, CIVIL SOCIETY ACTIVIST FROM 

THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA 

I’m Oleg Brega, 35 years old, a filmmaker and journalist from the Republic of 

Moldova. I represent civil society of this country, because I’m involved in several different 

NGOs, the most known of which, here and abroad, is the Hyde Park Association, a group 

of young people promoting freedom of expression, human rights in general. 

7 years ago we organized a popular radio talk-show with the same name, which was 

closed down by the authorities. 

After that we acted as an officially registered NGO, organizing weekly meetings in 

the central park of Chisinau, issuing a small newspaper with people’s opinions. We have 

received grants from Norway and USA for supporting our activities. 

But two years ago we decided to dissolve officially the organization because of the 

pressure from the authorities. It was a form of our protest against the permanent harassment, arrests, and illegal ceasing of the peaceful demonstrations, and interminable trial 

processes. In the same time, we stopped all our public activities on the streets, and we 

continued to be active only on the Internet, through the public blog Curaj.Net. There anybody could and still can express opinions, make announcements, report abuses. 

In April 2009, I was employed as cameraman by a local private and independent television outlet, Jurnal TV, broadcasting only on the Internet. 

I assisted at the vote counting on the Election Day and I also filmed the first protests 

against the results of the elections. 

My brother, Ghenadie, another filmmaker, freelance journalist, former president of 

the Hyde Park, was one of the organizers of the public demonstrations on the next day 

after the elections. He, together with other young people invited everybody to come with 

candles at 6 PM on 6th of April in the central square of Chisinau, to show our disappointment and disagreement with the election results and against the way the election was 

conducted. 

They used, in those available 6 hours, not only Twitter (some not at all, i.e. I made 

a Twitter account only after the so called Twitter Revolution) but all other available social 

networks and new media: Facebook, Netlog, especially Russian Odnoklassniki (my brother 

had there groups of thousands of subscribers, which he announced immediately about the 

intentions to protest), but the most important was the instant mobile messaging service. 

I send many SMSs and received during that day some SMSs from unknown persons, 

inviting me to the protest. Some were sent from the websites of the mobile companies, 

which some permit to send unlimited or others at least 20 messages per day for free. Also, 

the internet messaging as, Skype, MSN, Meebo were fully used. My list of friends on 

Yahoo Messenger, for example, has at least 500 addresses, and I used it to send in one 

minute short information with a link to the message about the demonstrations. It was 

spread instantly by my friends to other thousands of addresses. 

These tools, together with many blogs, online forums, mailing lists and e-groups permitted to inform the most active people in Moldova about the action. This explains why 

a huge crowd was gathered on 6th of April in the center of the city. Most of the population 

couldn’t accept that a political party (the communists), after 8 years of bad governing was 

able to take a half of the votes, to have again the majority in the Parliament. 

43

But, probably, not only that initiative group, called ‘‘I’m anti-communist!’’, was a real 

organizer. In the same day, after the closure of the peaceful demonstration, when the 

organizers invited people to go home and prepare for the next day’s meeting (initiated by 

the opposition parties), there were many provocations and violent actions. Nevertheless, 

the meeting ended before midnight, without damages, without arrested or injured people. 

On the next day, on 7th of April, the organizers came late in the central square, with 

only megaphones and a small acoustic instillation. But, somebody else took control of the 

crowd, influence its behavior, and in a few hours, the Presidency and Parliament 

buildings, also some police cars, fire trucks, TV station’s car were destroyed, a lot of 

policemen, especially unprepared, inexperienced soldiers were injured in the street 

fighting, and it was almost impossible for the real organizers of peaceful protests (from 

the opposition parties) to stop the violence. 

The authorities, police chiefs did nothing to stop violence, instead gave contradictory 

orders, provoked protesters, and, finally, after midnight, they ordered violent mass 

arrests. Hundreds of persons, even those who did not participated at protests were beaten. 

At least, three persons have died during that operation as a result of injuries. 

In the following days, the Moldovan Government decided to close borders with 

Romania, to limit access of the foreign press, and to initiate in the state controlled media 

a campaign of accusation against the opposition and leaders of civil society. 

Although demonstrations on 6–7 April didn’t change the results of elections, the 

behavior of the authorities made it impossible any collaboration within the Parliament 

between the Communist Party and the opposition parties. Communist MPs lacked one 

vote to elect a new president of the country, and, according to the electoral code, this triggered new parliamentary elections. 

On July 29th, Moldova voted for a non communist majority, which formed a new 

governmental coalition, more democratic and pro-western, pro-Europe. It holds now most 

of the executive power in the state, and these days they are trying to elect a new, democratic president.

44

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY MARK BELINSKY 

AND EMILY JACOBI, CO-DIRECTORS, DIGITAL DEMOCRACY 

Commission members, we want to begin by thanking you for calling upon this 

briefing. We greatly admire the Helsinki Commission’s tireless commitment to international diplomacy and universal human rights, and we commend your support for citizen 

movements using new media to challenge authoritarian regimes. As the use of these tools 

increases worldwide, it is critical for policy-makers to understand how they can be used 

to empower communication and collaboration among civil society activists. 

THE PROBLEM

Repressive regimes thrive on the distortion of truth. They rule through misinformation and fear. New media tools pose a challenge to this culture of fear, providing an opportunity for increased transparency. However deploying these tools in repressive environments brings significant hurdles: 

1) New media technologies are often hardest to access within repressive regimes, 

where their use is restricted or censored. 

2) New media technologies pose risks to users by potentially identifying them and 

their contacts as targets in places where dissent is criminalized. 

3) Combined, these challenges can be life-threatening. When fewer people use social 

media, those who use it for political engagement are easier to track, trace, and punish. 

Bloggers from Burma, Facebook users from Iran and Twitter users in Moldova have 

all been jailed for their use of new media in the past year. Social media, by making 

information more accessible, can lower the bar for participation, while increasing the risk 

of blowback to participants. 

THE CASE OF BURMA

In March 2007 we met ‘‘Stanley,’’ a Burmese computer programmer living as a refugee in Thailand. In the mid-90s, he was targeted by the regime for his political affiliations and sentenced to seven years of hard labor. He witnessed many friends die before 

a harrowing escape to Thailand in 2005. After crossing the border, he founded an 

organization, the All Burma IT Student Union, dedicated to using Internet and Communications technologies to support democratic change inside the country, and develop the 

capacity of civil society. Based on his own experiences suffering from misinformation and 

human rights abuses from the Burmese regime, he has devoted his life to helping his 

people access information and tools while creating the critical technology infrastructure 

that community organizations for civil society to develop. 

Stanley was one of nearly a hundred youth from Burma whom we interviewed for 

the Center for Peace Building International report Overcoming Obstacles, Creating 

Opportunities. Surveys with these youth revealed a correlation between internet access 

and self-identification as activists. In the interviews, the young people explained how 

internet access decreased the isolation of refugee life, inspiring hope by connecting them 

to the larger world. Explained Joseph Win, one of the young activists interviewed in the 

report: 

45

‘‘In my community we don’t know about human rights. We cannot get any information about human rights, the government controls all information. So that’s what I’m 

interested in.’’

At the same time that we were observing the empowering potential of Internet 

access, we also worried about the risks. Many young people who were beginning to sign 

up for Facebook and other social networks travel back into Burma frequently, and didn’t 

understand how revealing personal information via social networks could endanger their 

safety. In further research, we’ve found that many Burmese civil society groups are aware 

that government might use new media for surveillance, but do not know the best ways 

to protect themselves from potential surveillance. These tools default on open access to 

information and make it difficult if not impossible to set different privacy settings. 

In September 2007, both the power and danger of new media and Internet technologies came into sharp relief. Burmese citizens, led by Buddhist clergy, took to the 

streets in the largest protests in a generation. Despite less than 1% mobile phone and 

internet penetration at the time according to OpenNet Initiative, these tools were used 

to coordinate the protests and broadcast images of them internationally. Monks hid 

camera phones in their robes, and citizens took pictures from balconies and rooftops. 

Stanley, who was helping to disseminate this information later explained: 

‘‘During (this time), most of my time was spent on the Internet and mobiles in order 

to get real-time information from inside Burma to the international (community). Mobiles 

were used in taking images, movies and communication, but mostly used for reporting and 

networking among activists and politicians.’’

The images and footage taken by Burmese citizens graced the covers of international 

newspapers and became reports on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and others, as people wondered 

how this was possible in a country where in protests just 20 years prior few photos had 

escaped the country and thousands were quickly beaten, jailed and even killed. 

THE DANGER

On Sept. 27, 2007, nearly two weeks after the start of protests, the Burmese military 

forcefully responded to the peaceful protesters, attacking them with tear gas and then bullets, and raiding monasteries. The ongoing media coverage sparked international outrage. 

On Sept. 29, the military cut off all internet and mobile phone connections for five full 

days—a blackout on international coverage. During this time the military forces were able 

to quell remaining protesters, and jail still unknown numbers of dissidents. By the time 

limited internet access resumed, international attention had shifted. 

The Burmese junta’s actions have set a frightening precedent for other authoritarian 

regimes. In June of this year, the Iranian government throttled mobile phone and internet 

access to crack down on citizens protesting for their votes. In countries where the government controls mobile phone and internet service providers, it is all too easy for them to 

shut down and otherwise manipulate information channels. Governments have also been 

savvy about tracking through new media sources to find and punish protesters. In the 

year following the 2007 protests, the Burmese military tracked down and imprisoned protesters using images and video, and the Iranian government has used Facebook profiles 

to identify—and punish—networks of dissent. In countries where torture is commonly 

used in interrogation of protesters, a Facebook ‘‘friends list’’ can provide a road map for 

authorities to find other people to target. 

46

American corporations are also culpable. US corporations sell software to authoritarian regimes that allows them to monitor and censor information. In September 2005, 

Jerry Yang, co-founder and senior executive of Yahoo Inc., the global Internet giant, confirmed that his company gave Chinese authorities information later used to convict a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, stating ‘‘To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the 

world, we have to comply with local law.’’ A lack of legal infrastruture prevents US corporations from protecting new media users in repressive regimes. Site owners are culpable 

for content in foreign states, even when data is physically housed on US soil in data 

farms, and legal frameworks have not yet been fully established for US companies to protect end-users. 

THE POTENTIAL

Despite these very real dangers, new media technologies represent great potential. 

Take the case of Stanley, whose All Burma IT Student Union is now teaching computer 

skills to dozens of Burmese youth a year, and who is developing open-source tools that 

allow for collaboration and dialogue of community groups from his country. Open-source 

tools have great potential because they can be worked on collaboratively with developers 

from around the world and have higher security standards because, as the name suggests, 

the code is open to the public. This democratic software development process has been 

embraced by the United States Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and emerging 

government websites that encourage increased transparency and accountability, such as 

Data.gov and endeavors being pursued by the New York State Senate. These examples 

can be heralded as models for democratizing societies. 

In Zimbabwe, another repressive society, new media has been used to document elections and strengthen civil society groups. In March 2008, elections were held. The lead 

opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, used camera phones to document 

the posted voting results in different precincts. Compiling totals, this evidence helped 

them demonstrate their share of the vote, a move that led to runoff elections and the current power-sharing agreement between the opposition and Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF 

party. In October 2008, we spent time doing research in Zimbabwe, interviewing civil 

society groups in Harare about their use of new media technologies in their work. From 

journalists to student activists, they spoke of the way Internet tools and mobile phones 

were helping them better organize and coordinate their work. One young woman, who had 

miscarried a baby when attacked by police in a protest, was excited about the potential 

for new technologies as demonstrated by the Obama campaign, and their use of new 

media to mobilize volunteers. She is part of a vibrant civil society inside Zimbabwe that 

uses social networking and multi-media to share information and keep people motivated, 

despite the continuing outrage at Mugabe’s continued rule. 

On security issues, there are also many positive developements. Tools now exist to 

help citizens circumvent government repression and censorship. In repressive regimes 

across the world ordinary citizens are learning how to use proxy servers to access 

censored information, VPN tunnels to share information while protecting their identities, 

and encryption techniques including chat and email that protect individuals right to privacy. 

47

THE SOLUTION/OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

New media tools foster the dialogue and collaboration that are critical to engaged, 

empowered communities. How can US policy support this? 

Support should be given to help community groups assess their needs and apply new 

media strategically to meet their goals. This support should not only come through official 

government channels, but through civil society actors across national boundaries. In 

Ambassador John McDonald and Louise Diamond’s landmark book Multi-Track Diplomacy, they outline nine tracks of diplomacy: conflict resolution professionals, business, 

private citizens, media, religion, activism, education and philanthropy. Each track works 

in concert with the others, and all affect international diplomacy. 

When considering policy that affects new media use in repressive societies, we urge 

US lawmakers to keep in mind: 

1) Security: Understanding security and safety risks is critical to the successful 

application of new media under authoritarian regimes. 

2) Local partnerships: When new media tools are built with local partners from 

repressive societies, they can incorporate local security concerns and address the cultural 

context, while developing the skills of local partners. 

3) Grassroots media and technology trainings: Media literacy needs to be coupled 

with powerful media stories to develop a thoughtful civil society. Technology serves as the 

infrastructure to this and needs to be supported. emerging tools and solutions through 

trainings that are context specific. Encourage on-going skill and 

4) Emphasis on education, communication and civic participation: Knowledge is 

power, and new media tools that educate, inform and motivate civil society are those that 

achieve the greatest impact. 

In closing, it is critically important for decision-makers today to understand the ways 

in which new technologies are shifting the social, political and economic landscapes. This 

understanding can support and embolden projects which use technology and new media 

to foster education, communication and participation. We would like to end with the words 

of U Pinya Zawta of the All Burma Monks Alliance: 

‘‘ In Burma, the military controls all communications technology. But technology 

is very important to change. The Burmese military is trying to hide human rights 

abuses inside (the country). To show human rights abuses we need technology. People 

who are doing bad deeds need to be afraid.’’

48

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY MARY JOYCE, 

ANDREAS JUNGHERR, AND DANIEL SCHULTZ, WORKING 

GROUP ON SANCTION REFORM FOR THE DIGITAL AGE 

[DigiActive.org] 

Chairmen Cardin and Hastings, and Members of the Commission: 

Thank you for granting us the opportunity to present written testimony on the role 

of new media in authoritarian regimes. Mr. Jungherr, Mr. Schultz, and I are representatives of DigiActive, an online organization that studies and promotes the use of digital 

technology by grassroots activists around the world. In our testimony I will relate several 

cases of digital activists living under authoritarian regimes whose pro-democracy activities 

are being thwarted. I will then identify the surprising source of this persecution, and offer 

a solution. 

A WAVE OF ATTACKS ON THE WORLD’S DIGITAL ACTIVISTS

In the winter and spring of this year, a wave of attacks on digital activists began. 

In Zimbabwe, the web site of one the nation’s strongest pro-democracy groups, Kubatana, 

was threatened with being shut down. In Belarus, another pro-democracy web site, this 

one representing the Belarussian American Association, received the same threat. In February bloggers in Iran received a similar notice that their blogs would be suspended, this 

in spite of research by the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society that the Iranian blogosphere is a vibrant arena for both supporters and opponents of the current 

regime. In Sudan, aid workers are unable to download Google Earth and its ‘‘Crisis in 

Darfur’’ map, which would give them important information on sites of violence. In April 

users in Syria were temporarily blocked from using the social network LinkedIn, though 

social networks have played an important role in organizing grassroots citizen movements 

in countries from Egypt and Morocco to Colombia. 

• Perpetrated by United States’ Embargo Policies 

Who was behind this wave of attacks? Was it President Mugabe? President 

Lukashenko? President Assad? No. The perpetrator of these attacks on pro-democracy 

activists was none other than the United States government and American companies 

adhering to its embargo regimes. 

The United States has several embargo regimes related both to particular products 

(such as encryption software) and to individuals. These sanctions were designed to protect 

US interests while limiting the effect of these measures to our nation’s enemies. Yet in 

the digital age, where a ‘‘good’’ is a string of code that can be delivered anywhere in the 

world with the click of a mouse, even today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough. By 

preventing access to blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media, 

current embargo policies harm the very activists who are furthering our common goals 

of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian governments free to spread propaganda through a range of state-controlled media outlets. 

• With American Firms Caught in an Untenable Position 

These embargo policies leave American firms in a difficult position. Overwhelmed by 

a mass of overlapping sanctions, many take the most conservative position and simply cut 

off all clients in targeted countries, even though sanctions target only a few individuals. 

This was the policy of the Utah-based company Bluehost, which was responsible for cutVerDate 0ct 09 2002 11:18 Sep 14, 2012 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00052 Fmt 3194 Sfmt 3194 U:\WORK\102209.TXT KATIE
49

ting off users in Zimbabwe, Belarus, and Iran earlier this year. Especially in light of 

potential fines, Bluehost decided to play it safe by cutting off all users in embargoed countries, rather than constantly cross-check their users against Specially Designated 

Nationals (SDN) lists. 

Though activists may be frustrated with this kind of corporate decision-making, it is 

consistent with the firm’s role as a profit-making entity. American companies may choose 

to promote ethical activity and protect activists in foreign nations, but this is hardly their 

purpose. When protecting activists means potentially running afoul of the US government, 

it is not surprising that many firms choose to cut off activists to protect shareholder 

interests. 

NEW EMBARGO POLICIES FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

In light of these private-sector realities, responsibility for protecting foreign democracy activists falls to the US government. DigiActive’s Working Group on Sanction Reform 

for the Digital Age recommends the following steps in order to bring about this reform: 

1. Creation of a Single Body of Software Regulations: Members of the government 

bodies responsible for promulgating sanctions should conduct a thorough review of all 

regulations and legislation related to embargoes on software including, but not limited to, the Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations and the sanctions programs maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets 

Control. This review would result in the creation of a single volume of software policies which, at a minimum, will make it easier for US firms to abide by current rules 

and, by clarifying their responsibilities, would allow them to follow the letter of the 

law rather than taking the unnecessarily conservative positions they are currently 

applying to avoid the risk of transgressing unclear embargo regulations. 

2. Stakeholder Review of Software Regulations: Once this single body of regulation 

is created, stakeholders should be invited to comment and suggest modifications to 

the existing rules. This stakeholder group should include, but not be limited to, representatives of the agencies responsible for promulgating and enforcing the sanctions, 

representatives of American firms who must abide by the sanctions, and experts in 

digital activism and democracy promotion. 

3. Promulgation of New Regulations: Based on this stakeholder review, DigiActive 

suggests that a new set of sanctions be promulgated that recognize 1) that software 

embargoes function quite differently than embargoes on physical goods 2) that any 

software embargo is highly susceptible to failure because of the ease in circumventing 

online blocks to digital goods and 3) that access to new media tools is a great benefit 

to democracy activists, who lack other means of organization and message dissemination, while being of little use to authoritarian regimes, who have entire state 

apparatuses at their disposal. 

We at DigiActive have great faith in the Commission on Security and Cooperation in 

Europe and in the United States government to reform the current sanction system and 

offer our continuing assistance during this process.

50

1This testimony is submitted on behalf of the entire Ushahidi Team. Contact Email: 

Patrick@Ushahidi.com ≥ Phone: 617.440.4442 ≥ Twitter: @Ushahidi 2 Cited in Meier, Patrick (2008). ‘‘The Role of New Media and Digital Technology in Popular Resistance 

against Authoritarian Regimes.’’ (PhD Dissertation Proposal, The Fletcher School, Tufts University). Available 

at: http://www.iRevolution.net 3 Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information. Available at: http://www.Ushahidi.com 

4See in particular comments made by panelists Nathan Freitas and Chris Spence. 

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY PATRICK MEIER,1

DIRECTOR OF CRISIS MAPPING AND PARTNERSHIPS, USHAHIDI 

The information revolution, like any revolution, has the potential to change the balance of power between the have’s and have not’s. The question is: Does the information 

revolution empower the coercive control of repressive regimes at the expense of nonviolent 

resistance movements, or vice versa? Does the change in the means of, and access to, 

information significantly threaten authoritarian control? 

We ask these questions because scholars and policymakers recognize that the ‘‘techniques associated with strategic nonviolent social movements are greatly enhanced by 

access to modern information communication technologies, such as mobile telephony, short 

message service (SMS), email and the World Wide Web, among others.’’ 2

This explains raison d’eˆtre of Ushahidi 3 which was referenced several times during 

the Congressional Briefing on October 22nd.4 Given that some of the comments made 

about Ushahidi were rushed due to time constraints, we wish to take this opportunity 

afforded to us by the Helsinki Commission to provide additional context on Ushahidi. 

WHAT IS USHAHIDI?

Meaning ‘‘witness’’ or ‘‘testimony’’ in Swahili, Ushahidi is a free and open source platform that combines Twitter, SMS, smart phone apps, email and dynamic maps such as 

Google Maps to crowdsource crisis information. This includes information on human 

rights violations and election fraud violence perpetrated by authoritarian regimes. The 

aim of Ushahidi is thus to document information that would otherwise go unreported. 

Since information is power, Ushahidi believes that a ‘‘crowdsourcing’’ approach has the 

potential to shift the balance of power in favor of greater transparency and accountability 

with respect to human rights and democratic freedoms. 

Ushahidi was launched in January 2008 to document the post election violence in 

Kenya. Various partners have since deployed Ushahidi to document human rights violations and/or election irregularities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Gaza, 

Lebanon, Mexico, Afghanistan and Mozambique. A number of new partners have already 

signaled their intention to use Ushahidi in 2010 to document repression in several important countries under authoritarian rule. In addition, major humanitarian organizations 

like the United Nations and global media groups are partnering with Ushahidi to leverage 

the crowdsourcing of crisis information. 

Finally, Ushahidi has received a number of prestigious awards and also important 

media coverage from the BBC, Reuters, The Economist, Forbes and several other 

respected sources. This is an important way to get the word out on Ushahidi so that 

would-be users are aware that the tool is freely available for them to download and use 

at any time. 

51

5For more information on Swift River, please see: http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/accuratecrowdsourcing-hr 

REFERENCE TO USHAHIDI AT BRIEFING

Some of the comments made by panelists at the Congressional Briefing on October 

22, 2009 reveal a number of misconceptions about Ushahidi. This section of the testimony 

is an effort to redress these misconceptions. 

Ushahidi, the tool, is deployed by other organizations interested in citizen-based monitoring. This means that Ushahidi, the organization, does not take the lead in implementing the platform around the world. This is done by other organizations such as 

human rights groups and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Whether these 

groups choose to completely open the platform to the public (open crowdsourcing) or not 

(bounded crowdsourcing) is always their decision. 

This is important to note since one recurring misconception of Ushahidi is that the 

tool is always used for open crowdsourcing. Not so. The platform has been used by 

organizations with known and trusted networks to ‘‘crowdsource’’ crisis information. In 

any case, the purpose of the tool is to collect and aggregate both verified and non-verified 

information. Indeed, as panelist Nathan Freitas noted in his comments at the Congressional Briefing, Ushahidi is ‘‘akin to a blog system, but for mapping crisis, and what’s 

unique about it is it allows you to capture unverified and verified information.’’

But what actually is the difference between these two types of information in the first 

place? In general, unverified information simply means information reported by ‘‘unknown 

sources’’ whereas verified tends to be associated with known sources of reporting, such as 

official election monitors. 

The first and most important point to understand is that both approaches to information collection are compatible and complementary. Official election monitors, like professional journalists, cannot be everywhere at the same time. The ‘‘crowd’’ in crowdsourcing, 

on the other hand, has a comparative advantage in this respect. 

The crowd has many more eyes and ears than any official monitoring network ever 

will. So discounting any and all information originating from the crowd is hard to justify. 

One would have to entirely dismiss the added value of all the Tweets, photos and 

YouTube footage generated by the ‘‘crowd’’ during the post-election violence in Iran, for 

example. 

This in no way implies that information verification is not important. Indeed, some 

groups that deploy Ushahidi decide to limit the information collection to known entities 

only. In addition, Ushahidi and partners are developing a platform called Swift River to 

verify crowdsourced information in near real-time.5 That said, the purpose of the Ushahidi 

platform is to collect as much information as possible. 

In other words, the purpose of Ushahidi is not replicate what other groups already 

do very well, such as official and statistically driven election monitoring. That said, the 

data generated by Ushahidi can nevertheless serve as corroborating evidence for the official data collected. Unfortunately, because of some misconceptions about Ushahidi, many 

experts overlook this. 

Contrary to remarks made in the Briefing, users of Ushahidi to date do not seek to 

‘‘reach certain thresholds’’ in order to make statistical statements about certain trends in 

human rights violations or election irregularities. That is not, and never was, the stated 

52

purpose of Ushahidi. Nor do groups deploying Ushahidi purport to be the only source of 

information for human rights or election monitoring. Like any serious research, a mixed 

methods approach drawing on a diversified set of sources is often the most prudent way 

forward. Only then is the process for rigorous data triangulation a legitimate possibility. 

In sum, crowdsourced data can be an important repository for triangulation. The 

more crowdsourced information we have, the more self-triangulation is possible and the 

more this data can be used as a control mechanism for officially collected information. 

Yes, there are issues around verification of data and an Ushahidi powered map may not 

be random enough for statistical accuracy but, as Ushahidi co-founder Ory Okolloh notes, 

‘‘the data can point to areas/issues that need further investigation, especially in realtime.’’

Another relevant point worth noting is that many times official groups, whether for 

election monitoring or otherwise, often get shut down or deported. When these groups are 

no longer able to operate, citizens are often the only actors left and able to document 

human right abuses and election violence. Without official systems in place to report such 

incidences, what is really happening may go completely unreported. Ushahidi seeks to fill 

this gap, one that is all too often common in countries under authoritarian rule. 

Take the case of the election violence in Kenya. There were thousands of official election monitors in country but when it came to sharing data on polling observations, these 

official actors (the EU and IRI) reneged on sharing their data because it was considered 

too ‘‘political’’. IRI eventually released there data but some 8 months later even though 

they were supposed to act as the filter—the verifier of election data. 

As Ushahidi’s Ory Okolloh states, ‘‘At a time when some corroboration could have 

prevented bloodshed, the ‘professionals’ were nowhere to be seen, so if we are talking 

about verification, legitimacy, and so on . . . lets start there.’’

One more misconception revealed during the Congressional Briefing is that crisis 

mapping and crowdsourcing are one and the same. Crowdsourcing is a (relatively new) 

methodology for information collection. This information can then be mapped using various crisis mapping platforms and data visualization techniques. It is important not to 

confuse the two. 

CONCLUSION

To conclude, Ushahidi would like to submit for the record that the different 

approaches that exist for human rights and election monitoring are complementary and 

not incompatible. We need diverse methods and platforms in order to document, understand and respond to complex dynamics. Ushahidi, for it’s part, represents only one of 

many different possible approaches that can add transparency and accountability in countries under authoritarian rule.

53

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY MERICI VINTON 

Thank you to the Helsinki Commission for inviting me to speak today. It is truly an 

honor to be able to speak on such a prescient topic about how new media tools can help 

foster civic participation and strengthen the political process. Investing in new media is 

an investment in the relationship between government and citizens, political candidates 

and citizens, but most importantly, in citizens and citizens. 

I wanted to share a bit of my background, as it provides the lens through which I 

will address the various issues facing us. I recently completed a fellowship with the Sunlight Foundation, where I assisted with the launch of two online advocacy campaigns. I 

joined the Obama campaign in the spring of 2008, first as a field organizer and then later 

I moved to the New Media team. I was the North Carolina Director of New Media for 

the general election and oversaw a team that used video, text messaging, blogging, 

facebook and MySpace (and countless other social networking sites), email and the 

my.barackobama.com organizing site to engage supporters and push them to action. With 

the exception of my.barackobama.com, none of these tools are new. Nor are they especially 

special. What is unique was how the campaign used the tools. I apologize if you have 

heard the following information about the Obama campaign; I include them because I 

have learned that how we used new media is still new to the vast majority of people. And 

many of these concepts are exportable. 

When Senator Barack Obama decided to run for President, he wanted to run a campaign that would leave the political process better off, even if he lost. That decision set 

the tone for a campaign that was open to new ways of organizing, new technologies and 

new ways of communicating its message to the country. The campaign motto for staff and 

volunteers was ‘‘Respect. Empower. Include.’’ This motto and campaign ethos spoke to 

many—the campaign included over six million volunteers, five million individual donors 

and five thousand staffers spread out over all 50 states. When we said, ‘‘this campaign 

is about you,’’ we meant it—and people truly felt as though their efforts, however large 

or small, were making a difference. Having a presence in all 50 states was important, as 

we wanted to be able to engage individuals nationwide. 

The campaign was a blend of national and local messages—and two-way communications. What set our campaign apart was that we listened. We told your story. We told 

Obama’s story. We let you tell your neighbors why Obama’s policies are going to have a 

positive impact in your neighborhood (and probably made a youtube video of it). The campaign structure was designed to have the various teams share the same message, just tailored for their appropriate outlets. If the message of the week was why Barack Obama’s 

economic policy is good for your community, the field team would organize economic house 

parties, the communications team ensured that this message had local surrogates on the 

nightly news and the new media team was everywhere else. We came to you and lived 

where you lived—social networks, your mobile phone (if you opted-in to campaign text 

messages), email and even video game advertising. We wanted to reach people directly 

to let them know there was room for them on our campaign. This allowed the campaign 

to go around the traditional media to bring its message to the people. On November 3, 

2008, the new media team had uploaded 1792 videos totaling 18.5 million views. My 

comparison, John McCain’s team uploaded 329 videos with just over 2 million views. 

The website behind the campaign’s online organizing might is my.barackobama.com, 

or mybo. [It is interesting to note that several architects behind mybo were members of 

Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign. His campaign demonstrated that 

54

people were ready—even hungry—to use the internet to self-organize via meetup.com] 

Mybo was a self-contained social network that allowed users to online phone bank, organize events, blog, fundraise and create affinity groups that served as listservs for likeminded individuals (for example: North Carolina Women for Obama or soccer players for 

Obama). 

At the end of the campaign, over 2 million mybo profiles had been created, 200,000 

offline events were planned and about 400,000 blog posts were written. The campaign 

revolutionized online fundraising, bringing in over $500 million and approximately 90% 

of total funds raised. 

Obama’s election changed citizens’ expectations of government—the campaign’s supporters expected a more transparent government, while technologists expected a digital 

transformation with regards to government websites and innovation. President Obama’s 

first memorandum to Federal employees outlined three principles of open government—

government should be transparent, participatory and collaborative. And much of this 

change is internet-driven. 

This is key—following the campaign, people now expect this from government. The 

campaign changed behavior and expectations of government. This is by no means a new 

concept, but hits at the core of ways the Helsinki Commission can foster change. 

Government communications have taken a dramatic shift. Instead of relying on traditional media sources to spread news, government agencies and departments have taken 

to the Internet to directly engage citizens. It’s not uncommon to see Cabinet level officials 

speak into a flip cam en route to a meeting. Suddenly government managers are training 

their employees on ways to use the Internet to engage citizens. Cabinet Officials and 

Departments have started popping up on social networking sites—you can be among the 

35,000+ fans of NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on facebook.com or follow the Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) on twitter. Don’t mistake this for transparency, but rather these are attempts at making government more engaging and accessible. 

Transparency efforts have increased dramatically and suddenly data is, well, kind of 

exciting. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation argue that government data should 

be online and accessible for everyone. Ellen Miller and Michael Klein of the Sunlight 

Foundation write, ‘‘More transparency in politics will enable a healthy dynamic of rising 

public attention and engagement in demanding more accountability from government. 

Improved transparency is not a threat to public trust; it is the very basis for restoring 

that trust.’’ By shining some ‘‘sunlight’’ on campaign donations or lobbyists, we can begin 

to build trust. 

Now what to do what that data . . . Government holds data on everything from 

environmental quality to food safety to infrastructure spending. To be brief, if government 

releases data in machine-readable formats, developers can take that information and 

make it interesting to non-geeks. An example is Washington, DC’s Apps for Democracy 

contest—they launched an initiative that took city data and opened it up to developers 

to see who could come up with the most innovative way to repackage this data and turn 

it into a tool. Some examples include overlaying bus transportation times on a smart 

phone based mapping program or databases that make government data easy to search 

for researchers and/or students. 

55

I tell this story because, while it begins with a Presidential candidate, it only succeeds because of the efforts of millions of individuals. ‘‘New Media’’ does not challenge 

authoritarian regimes, people do. 

The Helsinki Commission could find and support programs that train individuals in 

new media tools. At a new media forum in Tbilisi, Georgia, I worked with journalists and 

students on how to use new media tools to help foster a free press. Common problems 

cited by the conference attendees were lack of an independent press and little government 

transparency. Together we brainstormed to find ideas that would promote journalistic 

integrity and some easy ways to hold their government accountable—all ideas used free 

new media tools to help spread their message. 

The Helsinki Commission has a strong commitment to building and strengthening 

democracy—by supporting programs that foster nascent civic participation, the Commission would be building the early foundations of democratic participation. From a technology perspective, the Commission could find and invest in in-country technologies that 

build community. 

Based on this information, I recommend that the Helsinki Commission: 

1. Invest in new media channels to better enable open and transparent dialogue 

between citizens and the state and between citizens themselves 

2. Seek opportunities to work with existing new media channels and online communities to build on strong civic foundations to generate dialogue, collaboration and action within civic society 

3. Provide a range of clear and transparent support and tools to enable people to 

better engage online, such as best practice guidance and web tools 

4. Support individuals and organizations developing new websites, tools and techniques for engaging online, potentially drawing on initiatives such as Washington, 

DC’s Apps for Democracy 

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