July 2010, Volume 21, Number 3 $12.00
Afghanistan & Iraq: Taking Stock
Zalmay Khalilzad Scott Worden Adeed Dawisha
Liberation Technology
Larry Diamond
Ukraine: Democracy in Danger?
Henry Hale Gwendolyn Sasse
S.B. Yudhoyono on the Indonesian Experience
Mvemba Phezo Dizolele on the DRC
Juan Pablo Luna & Rodrigo Mardones on Chile
Ephraim Ya’ar & Yasmin Alkalay on Muslim Attitudes
Jacques Rupnik on Václav Havel
Judith Kelley on Election Observation
The Rise of the “State-Nation”
Alfred Stepan, Juan Linz & Yogendra Yadav
liberation technology
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman
Spogli Institute for International Studies, director of Stanford University’s
Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and
founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy.
In March 2003, police in Guangzhou (Canton), China, stopped 27-yearold
Sun Zhigang and demanded to see his temporary living permit and
identification. When he could not produce these, he was sent to a detention
center. Three days later, he died in its infirmary. The cause of death
was recorded as a heart attack, but the autopsy authorized by his parents
showed that he had been subjected to a brutal beating.
Sun’s parents took his story to the liberal newspaper Nanfang Dushi
Bao (Southern Metropolis Daily), and its investigation confirmed that
Sun had been beaten to death in custody. As soon as its report appeared
on April 25, “newspapers and Web sites throughout China republished
the account, [Internet] chat rooms and bulletin boards exploded with outrage,”
and it quickly became a national story.1
The central government
was forced to launch its own investigation and on June 27, it found twelve
people guilty of Sun’s death.
Sun’s case was a rare instance in China of official wrongdoing being
exposed and punished. But it had a much wider and more lasting impact,
provoking national debate about the “Custody and Repatriation” (C&R)
measures that allowed the police to detain rural migrants (typically in appalling
conditions) for lacking a residency or temporary-living permit. In
the outrage following Sun’s death, numerous Chinese citizens posted on
the Internet stories of their own experiences of C&R, and the constitutionality
of the legislation became a hotly debated topic in universities. An
online petition asking the Standing Committee of the National People’s
Congress to reexamine C&R quickly garnered widespread popular support,
and in June 2003 the government announced that it would close all
of the more than eight-hundred C&R detention centers.2
Journal of Democracy Volume 21, Number 3 July 2010
© 2010 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
70 Journal of Democracy
Sun’s case was seen as a watershed—the first time that a peaceful
outpouring of public opinion had forced the Communist Chinese state to
change a national regulation. But it also soon became the case of muckraking
editor Cheng Yizhong, whom local officials jailed (along with
three of his colleagues) in retaliation for their efforts to ferret out the
wrongdoing that led to Sun’s death. The legal defense that Xu Zhiyong
mounted on behalf of the four journalists itself became a cause cél`ebre.
As their fellow journalists launched an unprecedented campaign for their
release, using among other means an Internet petition, Xu established a
website, the Open Constitutional Initiative, to post documents and legal
arguments about the case. All of this reflected a burgeoning weiquan
(“defend-rights”) movement. But while Cheng and his deputy editor were
released from prison without charge, they lost their jobs and the authorities
closed down Xu’s site. Xu continued his work in defense of rights
until July of last year, when his organization was shut down and he was
arrested on politically motivated charges of tax evasion.
Optimists discern in these events a striking ability of the Internet—
and other forms of “liberation technology”—to empower individuals, facilitate
independent communication and mobilization, and strengthen an
emergent civil society. Pessimists argue that nothing in China has fundamentally
changed. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains firmly
in control and beyond accountability. The weiquan movement has been
crushed. And the Chinese state has developed an unparalleled system of
digital censorship.
Both perspectives have merit. Liberation technology enables citizens
to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest,
monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand
the horizons of freedom. But authoritarian states such as China,
Belarus, and Iran have acquired (and shared) impressive technical capabilities
to filter and control the Internet, and to identify and punish dissenters.
Democrats and autocrats now compete to master these technologies.
Ultimately, however, not just technology but political organization
and strategy and deep-rooted normative, social, and economic forces will
determine who “wins” the race.
Liberation technology is any form of information and communication
technology (ICT) that can expand political, social, and economic freedom.
In the contemporary era, it means essentially the modern, interrelated
forms of digital ICT—the computer, the Internet, the mobile phone, and
countless innovative applications for them, including “new social media”
such as Facebook and Twitter. Digital ICT has some exciting advantages
over earlier technologies. The Internet’s decentralized character and ability
(along with mobile-phone networks) to reach large numbers of people
very quickly, are well suited to grassroots organizing. In sharp contrast
to radio and television, the new ICTs are two-way and even multiway
forms of communication. With tools such as Twitter (a social-networking
71Larry Diamond
and microblogging service allowing its users to send and read messages
with up to 140 characters), a user can instantly reach hundreds or even
thousands of “followers.” Users are thus not just passive recipients but
journalists, commentators, videographers, entertainers, and organizers.
Although most of this use is not political, the technology can empower
those who wish to become political and to challenge authoritarian rule.
It is tempting to think of the Internet as unprecedented in its potential
for political progress. History, however, cautions against such hubris. In
the fifteenth century, the printing press revolutionized the accumulation
and dissemination of information, enabling the Renaissance, the Protestant
Reformation, and the scientific revolution. On these foundations,
modern democracy emerged. But the printing press also facilitated the rise
of the centralized state and prompted the movement toward censorship.3
A century and a half ago, the telegraph was hailed as a tool to promote
peace and understanding. Suddenly, the world shrank; news that once
took weeks to travel across the world could be conveyed instantly. What
followed was not peace and freedom but the bloodiest century in human
history. Today’s enthusiasts of liberation technology could be accused of
committing the analytic sins of their Victorian forebears, “technological
utopianism” and “chronocentricity”—that is, “the egotism that one’s own
generation is poised on the very cusp of history.”4
In the end, technology is merely a tool, open to both noble and nefarious
purposes. Just as radio and TV could be vehicles of information
pluralism and rational debate, so they could also be commandeered by
totalitarian regimes for fanatical mobilization and total state control. Authoritarian
states could commandeer digital ICT to a similar effect. Yet to
the extent that innovative citizens can improve and better use these tools,
they can bring authoritarianism down—as in several cases they have.
Mobilizing against authoritarian rule represents only one possible “liberating”
use of digital ICT. Well before mobilization for democracy peaks,
these tools may help to widen the public sphere, creating a more pluralistic
and autonomous arena of news, commentary, and information. The new
ICTs are also powerful instruments for transparency and accountability,
documenting and deterring abuses of human rights and democratic procedures.
And though I cannot elaborate here, digital ICT is also liberating
people from poverty and ill health: conveying timely information about
crop prices, facilitating microfinance for small entrepreneurs, mapping
the outbreaks of epidemics, and putting primary healthcare providers in
more efficient contact with rural areas. 5
Malaysia: Widening the Public Sphere
A crucial pillar of authoritarian rule is control of information. Through
blogs (there are currently more than a hundred million worldwide), blog
sites, online chat rooms, and more formal online media, the Internet pro-
72 Journal of Democracy
vides dramatic new possibilities for pluralizing flows of information and
widening the scope of commentary, debate, and dissent.
One of the most successful instances of the latter type is Malaysiakini,
an online newspaper that has become Malaysia’s principal alternative
source of news and commentary.6
As Freedom House has documented,
Malaysia lacks freedom of the press. The regime (both the state and the
ruling Barisan Nasional [BN] coalition) dominates print and broadcast
media through direct ownership and monopoly practices. Thus it can
shape what Malaysians read and see, and it can punish critical journalists
with dismissal. Repressive laws severely constrain freedom to report,
publish, and broadcast. However, as a rapidly developing country with
high literacy, Malaysia has witnessed explosive growth of Internet access
(and recently, broadband access), from 15 percent of the population
in 2000 to 66 percent in 2009 (equal to Taiwan and only slightly behind
Hong Kong).7
The combination of tight government control of the conventional
media, widespread Internet access, and relative freedom on the
Internet created an opening for online journalism in Malaysia, and two
independent journalists—Steven Gan and Premesh Chandran—ventured
into it. Opponents of authoritarian rule since their student days, Gan and
Chandran became seized during the 1998 reformasi period with the need
to reform the media and bring independent news and reporting to Malaysia.
Using about US$9,000 of their own money (a tiny fraction of what
it would take to start a print newspaper), they launched Malaysiakini in
November 1999. Almost immediately, they gained fame by exposing how
an establishment newspaper had digitally cropped jailed opposition leader
(and former deputy prime minister) Anwar Ibrahim from a group photo of
ruling-party politicians.
From its inception, Malaysiakini has won a loyal and growing readership
by providing credible, independent reporting on Malaysian politics
and governance. As its readership soared, that of the mainstream newspapers
fell. Suddenly, Malaysians were able to read about such long-taboo
subjects as corruption, human-rights abuses, ethnic discrimination,
and police brutality. Now the online paper posts in English about fifteen
news stories a day, in addition to opinion pieces, letters, readers’ comments,
and daily satire (in Cartoonkini), plus translations and original
material in Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Malaysiakini reports scandals
that no establishment paper would touch, such as massive cost overruns
related to conflicts of interest at the country’s main port agency and
ongoing financial misconduct at the government-supported Bank Islam
Malaysia. With the regime’s renewed legal assault on Anwar Ibrahim,
Malaysiakini is the only place where Malaysians can turn for independent
reporting on the legal persecution of the opposition leader. In July
2008, it became Malaysia’s most visited news site with about 2.5 million
visitors per month. Yet, like many online publications worldwide,
it still strives for financial viability.
73Larry Diamond
While Malaysia today is no less authoritarian than when Malaysiakini
began publishing a decade ago, it is more competitive and possibly closer
to a democratic breakthrough than at any time in the last four decades. If
a transition occurs, it will be mainly due to political factors—the coalescence
of an effective opposition and the blunders of an arrogant regime.
In addition, economic and social change is generating a better-educated
and more diverse population, less tolerant of government paternalism and
control. Polling and other data show that young Malaysians in particular
support the (more democratic) opposition. But it is hard to disentangle
these political and social factors from the expansion of the independent
public sphere that Malaysiakini has spearheaded. In March 2008, the BN
made its worst showing at the polls in half a century, losing its two-thirds
parliamentary majority for the first time since independence. Facilitating
this was the growing prominence of online journalism, which diminished
the massive BN advantage in media access and “shocked the country” by
documenting gross police abuse of demonstrators, particularly those of
Indian descent.
Malaysiakini and its brethren perform a number of democratic functions.
They report news and convey images that Malaysians would not
otherwise see. They provide an uncensored forum for commentary and
debate, giving rise to a critical public sphere. They offer space and voice
to those whose income, ethnicity, or age put them on the margins of society.
They give the political opposition, which is largely shut out of
the establishment media, a chance to make its case. In the process, they
educate Malaysians politically and foster more democratic norms. Many
online publications and Internet blog sites perform similar functions in
other semi-authoritarian countries, such as Nigeria, and in emerging and
illiberal democracies. But is it possible for these functions to take root in
a country as authoritarian as China is today?
Opening a Public Sphere in China
The prevailing answer is no: China’s “Great Firewall” of Internet filtering
and control prevents the rise of an independent public sphere online.
Indeed, China’s policing of the Internet is extraordinary in both scope and
sophistication. China now has the world’s largest population of Internet
users—more than 380 million people (a number equal to 29 percent of the
population, and a sixteen-fold increase since the year 2000). But it also
has the world’s most extensive, “multilayered,” and sophisticated system
“for censoring, monitoring, and controlling activities on the internet and
mobile phones.”8
Connection to the international Internet is monopolized
by a handful of state-run operators hemmed in by rigid constraints that
produce in essence “a national intranet,” cut off from anything that might
challenge the CCP’s monopoly on power.
Access to critical websites and online reporting is systematically
74 Journal of Democracy
blocked. Google has withdrawn from China in protest of censorship,
while YouTube, Facebook, and Blogspot, among other widely used sites,
are extensively blocked or obstructed. Chinese companies that provide
search and networking services agree to even tighter self-censorship than
do international companies. When protests erupt (as they did over Tibet
in 2008, for instance) or other sensitive political moments approach,
authorities preemptively close data centers and online forums. Now the
party-state is also trying to eliminate anonymous communication and networking,
by requiring registration of real names to blog or comment and
by tightly controlling and monitoring cybercafés. Fifty-thousand Internet
police prowl cyberspace removing “harmful content”—usually within 24
to 48 hours. Students are recruited to spy on their fellows. And the regime
pays a quarter of a million online hacks (called “50-centers” because of
the low piece rate they get) to post favorable comments about the partystate
and report negative comments.
Such quasi-Orwellian control of cyberspace is only part of the story,
however. There is simply too much communication and networking online
(and via mobile phones) for the state to monitor and censor it all.
Moreover, Chinese “netizens”—particularly the young who are growing
up immersed in this technology—are inventive, determined, and cynical
about official orthodoxy. Many constantly search for better techniques to
circumvent cyber-censorship, and they quickly share what they learn. If
most of China’s young Internet users are apolitical and cautious, they are
also alienated from political authority and eagerly embrace modest forms
of defiance, often turning on wordplay.
Recently, young Chinese bloggers have invented and extensively
lauded a cartoon creature they call the “grass mud horse” (the name in
Chinese is an obscene pun) as a vehicle for protest. This mythical equine,
so the narrative goes, is a brave and intelligent animal whose habitat is
threatened by encroaching “river crabs.” In Chinese, the name for these
freshwater crustaceans (hexie) sounds very much like the word for Hu
Jintao’s official governing philosophy of “harmony”—a label that critics
see as little more than a euphemism for censorship and the suppression of
criticism. Xiao Qiang, editor of China Digital Times, argues that the grass
mud horse
has become an icon of resistance to censorship. The expression and cartoon
videos may seem like a juvenile response to unreasonable rule. But the fact
that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars
to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how
strongly this expression resonates.9
In order to spread defiance, Chinese have a growing array of digital
tools. Twitter has become one of the most potent means for political and
social networking and the rapid dissemination of news, views, and withering
satire. On April 22 at People’s University in Beijing, three human-
75Larry Diamond
rights activists protested a speech by a well-known CCP propaganda official,
Wu Hao. Showering him with small bills, they declared, “Wu Hao,
wu mao!” (“Wu Hao is a fifty-center!”). Twitter flashed photographs of
the episode across China, delighting millions of students who revel in
mocking the outmoded substance, tortured logic, and painfully crude style
of regime propagandists. 	
When Google announced in late March 2010 it was withdrawing its
online search services from mainland China (after failing to resolve its
conflict with the government over censorship and cyber-attacks), the
Chinese Twitter-sphere lit up. Many Chinese were upset that Google
would abandon them to the more pervasive censorship of the Chinese
search-engine alternatives (such as Baidu), and they worried that the
Great Firewall would block other services such as Google Scholar and
Google Maps. Others suspected Google of doing the U.S. government’s
bidding. But the company’s decision provoked a wave of sympathy and
mourning, similar to what happened in January when Google first announced
that it was considering withdrawing: “Citizen reporters posted
constant updates on . . . Twitter, documenting the Chinese netizens who
endlessly offered flowers, cards, poems, candles, and even formal bows
in front of the big outdoor sign ‘Google’ located outside the company’s
offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.”10
Security guards chased
the mourners away, declaring the offerings “illegal flower tributes.” The
term quickly spread in China’s online forums, symbolizing the suppression
of freedom.
The public sphere in China involves much more than “tweets,” of
course. Those often link to much longer blogs, discussion groups, and
news reports. And many thought-provoking sites are harder to block because
their critiques of CCP orthodoxy are subtler, elucidating democratic
principles and general philosophical concepts, sometimes with reference
to Confucianism, Taoism, and other strains of traditional Chinese thought
that the CCP dares not ban. Full-scale blog posts (not subject to Twitter’s
severe length limits) are far likelier to criticize the government (albeit artfully
and euphemistically). Rebecca MacKinnon finds that China’s blogosphere
is a “much more freewheeling space than the mainstream media,”
with censorship varying widely across the fifteen blog-service providers
that she examined. Thus, “a great deal of politically sensitive material
survives in the Chinese blogosphere, and chances for survival can likely
be improved with knowledge and strategy.”11
Despite the diffuse controls, China’s activists see digital tools such as
Twitter, Gmail, and filtration-evading software as enabling levels of communication,
networking, and publishing that would otherwise be unimaginable
in China today. With the aid of liberation technology, dissident
intellectuals have gone from being a loose assortment of individuals with
no specific goal or program to forming a vibrant and increasingly visible
collaborative force. Their groundbreaking manifesto—Charter 08, a call
76 Journal of Democracy
for nineteen reforms to achieve “liberties, democracy, and the rule of law”
in China—garnered most of its signatures through the aid of blog sites
such as bullog.cn. When Charter 08 was released online on 10 December
2008, with the signatures of more than three-hundred Chinese intellectuals
and human-rights activists, the government quickly moved to suppress
all mention of it. But then, “something unusual happened. Ordinary people
such as Tang [Xiaozhao] with no history of challenging the government
began to circulate the document and declare themselves supporters,”
shedding their previous fear. Within a month, more than five-thousand
other Chinese citizens had signed the document. They included not just
the usual dissidents but “scholars, journalists, computer technicians, businessmen,
teachers and students whose names had not been associated with
such movements before, as well as some on the lower rungs of China’s
social hierarchy—factory and construction workers and farmers.”12
Officials shut down Tang’s blog soon after she signed the Charter, and
did the same to countless other blogs that supported it (including the entire
bullog.cn site). But the campaign persists in underground salons, elliptical
references, and subversive jokes spread virally through social media and
instant messaging. One such joke imagines a testy Chinese president Hu
Jintao complaining about the Charter’s democratic concepts such as federalism,
opposition parties, and freedom of association. “Where do they
all come from?” he demands. His minions run down the sources and bring
him the bad news: The troublesome notions can be traced to Mao Zedong,
Zhou Enlai, the CCP, the official newspaper (the Xinhua Daily), and the
constitution of the People’s Republic itself. A flustered Hu wonders what
to do. His staff suggests banning all mention of these names. “You idiots!”
shouts Hu. “If you ban them, you might as well ban me too!” “Well,”
his staff retorts, “People do say that if they ban you, at least the Charter
will be left alone.”13
Monitoring Governance, Exposing Abuses
Liberation technology is also “accountability technology,” in that it provides
efficient and powerful tools for transparency and monitoring. Digital
cameras combined with sites such as YouTube create new possibilities for
exposing and challenging abuses of power. Incidents of police brutality
have been filmed on cellphone cameras and posted to YouTube and other
sites, after which bloggers have called outraged public attention to them.
Enter “human rights abuses” into YouTube’s search box and you will get
roughly ten-thousand videos showing everything from cotton-growers’
working conditions in Uzbekistan, to mining practices in the Philippines,
to human-organ harvesting in China, to the persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran.
A YouTube video of a young Malaysian woman forced by the police to do
squats while naked forced the country’s prime minister to call for an independent
inquiry. When Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez forced Radio
77Larry Diamond
Caracas Television off the air in May 2007, it continued its broadcasts via
YouTube. No wonder, then, that authoritarian states such as Iran and Saudi
Arabia completely block access to that video-posting site.
Across much of the world, and especially in Africa, the quest for accountability
makes use of the simplest form of liberation technology: text
messaging via mobile phone. (Mobile-phone networks have proven particularly
useful in infrastructure-starved Africa since they can cover vast areas
without requiring much in the way of physical facilities beyond some cell
towers.) Around the world, the reach and capabilities of cellphones are being
dramatically expanded by open-source software such as FrontlineSMS,
which enables large-scale, two-way text messaging purely via mobile
phones. In recent years, the software has been used over mobile-phone
networks to monitor national elections in Nigeria and Ghana, to facilitate
rapid reporting of human-rights violations in Egypt, to inform citizens
about anticorruption and human-rights issues in Senegal, and to monitor
and report civil unrest in Pakistan. A Kenyan organization, Ushahidi (Swahili
for “testimony”), has adapted the software for “crisis-mapping.” This
allows anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a
mobile phone, e-mail, or online-contact form, and then aggregates the information
and projects it onto a map in real time. It was initially developed
by citizen journalists to map reports of postelection violence in Kenya in
early 2008, drawing some 45,000 Kenyan users. It has since been used to
report incidents of xenophobic violence in South Africa; to track violence
and human-rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and to
monitor elections in Afghanistan, India, Lebanon, and Mexico.
The largest funder of both Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS is the Omidyar
Network (ON), a philanthropic investment firm established six years ago
by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. It extends into the
worlds of political and social innovation the eBay approach: giving everyone
equal access to information and opportunity to leverage the potential
of individuals and the power of markets. This innovative effort—which
comprises both a venture-capital fund directed at for-profit start-ups and
a nonprofit grant-making fund—has committed more than $325 million
in investments and grants in two broad areas: “access to capital” (microfinance,
entrepreneurship, and property rights), and “media, markets and
transparency” (which supports technology that promotes transparency,
accountability, and trust across media, markets, and government). The
ON supports national partners in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya that are using
information technology to improve governance and free expression.
These include Infonet—a web portal that provides citizens, media, and
NGOs with easy-to-access information on national- and local-government
budgets in Kenya—and Mzalendo, a comprehensive site that enables Kenyans
to follow what their members of parliament are doing.
The ON’s support for transparency initiatives also extends to other
countries and to U.S.-based organizations. These include Global Integrity,
78 Journal of Democracy
which harnesses the Internet and other sources of information in order to
generate detailed assessments of corruption in more than ninety countries;
and the Sunlight Foundation, which utilizes the Internet and related technology
in order to make information about federal-government spending,
legislation, and decision making more accessible to U.S. voters.
Mobilizing Digitally
One of the most direct, powerful, and—to authoritarian regimes—
alarming effects of the digital revolution has been its facilitation of fast,
large-scale popular mobilizations. Cellphones with SMS text messaging
have made possible what technology guru Howard Rheingold calls “smart
mobs”—vast networks of individuals who communicate rapidly and with
little hierarchy or central direction in order to gather (or “swarm”) at a certain
location for the sake of protest. In January 2001, Philippine president
Joseph Estrada “became the first head of state in history to lose power to
a smart mob,” when tens of thousands and then, within four days, more
than a million digitally mobilized Filipinos assembled at a historic protest
site in Manila.14
Since then, liberation technology has been instrumental
in virtually all of the instances where people have turned out en masse for
democracy or political reform.
Liberation technology figured prominently in the Orange Revolution
that toppled the electoral authoritarian regime in Ukraine via mass protests
during November and December 2004. The Internet newspaper Ukrainskaya
Pravda provided a vital source of news and information about both
the regime’s efforts to steal the presidential election and the opposition’s
attempts to stop it. By the revolution’s end, this online paper had become
“the most widely read news source of any kind in Ukraine.”15
Website
discussion boards gave activists a venue for documenting fraud and sharing
best practices.16
Text messaging helped to mobilize and coordinate
the massive public protests—bringing hundreds of thousands to Kyiv’s
Independence Square in freezing weather—that ultimately forced a new
runoff, won by the democratic opposition.
These digital tools also facilitated the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon
(which drew more than a million demonstrators to demand the withdrawal
of Syrian troops); the 2005 protests for women’s voting rights in
Kuwait; the 2007 protests by Venezuelan students against the closure of
Radio Caracas Television; and the April 2008 general strike in Egypt,
where tens of thousands of young demonstrators mobilized through Face-
book.17
In September 2007, the “Internet, camera phones, and other digital
networked technologies played a critical role” in Burma’s Saffron Revolution,
so called because of the involvement of thousands of Buddhist
monks. Although digital technology did little directly to mobilize the
protests, it vividly informed the world of them, and revealed the bloody
crackdown that the government launched in response: “Burmese citizens
79Larry Diamond
took pictures and videos, many on their mobile phones, and secretly uploaded
them from Internet cafes or sent digital files across the border to
be uploaded.” This international visibility may have saved many lives by
inhibiting the military from using force as widely and brutally as it had
in 1988.18
In China, pervasive text messaging has been a key factor in the
mushrooming of grassroots protests. In 2007, an eruption of hundreds
of thousands of cellphone text messages in Xiamen, a city on the Taiwan
Strait, generated so much public dismay at the building of an environmentally
hazardous chemical plant that authorities suspended the
project.19
The impact of the text messages was magnified and spread
nationally as bloggers in other Chinese cities received them and quickly
fanned the outrage. The technology is even seeping into North Korea,
the world’s most closed society, as North Korean defectors and South
Korean human-rights activists entice North Koreans to carry the phones
back home with them from China and then use them to report what
is happening (via the Chinese mobile network).20
In the oil-rich Gulf
states, text messaging allows civic activists and political oppositionists
“to build unofficial membership lists, spread news about detained activists,
encourage voter turnout, schedule meetings and rallies, and develop
new issue campaigns—all while avoiding government-censored newspapers,
television stations, and Web sites.”21
The most dramatic recent instance of digital mobilization was Iran’s
Green Movement, following the egregious electoral malpractices that
appeared to rob opposition presidential candidate Mir Hosein Musavi
of victory on 12 June 2009. In the preceding years, Iran’s online public
sphere had been growing dramatically, as evidenced by its more
than “60,000 routinely updated blogs” exploring a wide range of social,
cultural, religious, and political issues;22
the explosion of Facebook
to encompass an estimated 600,000 Persian-language users;23
and the
growing utilization of the Internet by news organizations, civic groups,
political parties, and candidates.
As incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s election victory was
announced (complete with claims of a 62 percent landslide) on June 13,
outraged accounts of vote fraud spread rapidly via Internet chatrooms,
blogs, and social networks. Through Twitter, text messaging, Facebook,
and Persian-language social-networking sites such as Balatarin and Donbleh,
Iranians quickly spread news, opinions, and calls for demonstrations.
On June 17, Musavi supporters used Twitter to attract tens of thousands
of their fellow citizens to a rally in downtown Tehran. Internet users organized
nationwide protests throughout the month, including more large
demonstrations in the capital, some apparently attended by two to three
million people. YouTube also provided a space to post pictures and videos
of human-rights abuses and government crackdowns. A 37-second video
of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan during Tehran’s violent protests on
80 Journal of Democracy
June 20 quickly spread across the Internet, as did other images of the police
and regime thugs beating peaceful demonstrators. Neda’s death and
the distressing images of wanton brutality decimated the remaining legitimacy
of the Islamic Republic domestically and internationally.
To date, the Green Movement illustrates both the potential and limits
of liberation technology. So far, the Islamic Republic’s reactionary establishment
has clung to power through its control over the instruments
of coercion and its willingness to wield them with murderous resolve.
Digital technology could not stop bullets and clubs in 2009, and it has not
prevented the rape, torture, and execution of many protestors. But it has
vividly documented these abuses, alienating key pillars of the regime’s
support base, including large segments of the Shia clergy. While the regime
has tortured dissidents to get their e-mail passwords and round up
more opponents, the Internet has fostered civic and political pluralism in
Iran; linked the opposition within that country to the Iranian diaspora and
other global communities; and generated the consciousness, knowledge,
and mobilizational capacity that will eventually bring down autocracy in
Iran. A key factor affecting when that will happen will be the ability of
Iranians to communicate more freely and securely online.
Breaking Down the Walls
Even in the freest environments, the new digital means of information
and communication have important limits and costs. There are fine
lines between pluralism and cacophony, between advocacy and intolerance,
and between the expansion of the public sphere and its hopeless
fragmentation. As the sheer number of media portals has multiplied,
more voices have become empowered, but they are hardly all rational
and civil. The proliferation of online (and cable) media has not uniformly
improved the quality of public deliberation, but rather has given
rise to an “echo chamber” of the ideologically like-minded egging each
other on. And open access facilitates much worse: hate-mongering, pornography,
terrorism, digital crime, online espionage, and cyberwarfare.
These are real challenges, and they require careful analysis—prior to
regulation and legislation—to determine how democracies can balance
the great possibilities for expanding human freedom, knowledge, and
capacity with the dangers that these technologies may pose for individual
and collective security alike.
Still the overriding challenge for the digital world remains freedom of
access. The use of Internet filtering and surveillance by undemocratic regimes
is becoming both more widespread and more sophisticated. And
some less-sophisticated efforts, using commercial filtering software, may
block sites even more indiscriminately. Currently, more than three-dozen
states filter the Internet or completely deny their citizens access.24
Enterprising
users can avail themselves of many circumvention technologies,
81Larry Diamond
but some require installation of software and so will not be available if the
Internet is accessed from public computers or Internet cafes; many of the
Web-based applications are blocked by the same filters that block politically
sensitive sites; and most of these means require some degree of technical
competence by the user.25
Not all circumvention methods protect netizens’
privacy and anonymity, which can be a particularly acute problem when
state-run companies provide the Internet service. The free software Tor,
popular among Iranians, promises anonymity by “redirecting encrypted
traffic through multiple relays . . . around the world,” making it difficult for
a regime to intercept a transmission.26
But if it effectively monopolizes the
provision of Internet service, a desperate regime such as Burma’s in 2007
can always respond by shutting down the country’s Internet service or, as
Iran’s government did, by slowing service to a paralyzing crawl while authorities
searched electronic-data traffic for protest-related content.27
Even in liberal democracies, issues of access arise. Recently netizens
worldwide—and the U.S. government—have become concerned over excessively
broad legislative proposals in Australia that would force Internet
service providers to blacklist a large number of sites for legal and
moral considerations (including the protection of children). The Chinese
practice of forcing Internet providers to assume liability for the content to
which they provide access is seeping into European legal and regulatory
thinking regarding the Internet.28
There is now a technological race underway between democrats seeking
to circumvent Internet censorship and dictatorships that want to extend
and refine it. Recently, dictatorships such as Iran’s have made significant
gains in repression. In part, this has happened because Western companies
like Nokia-Siemens are willing to sell them advanced surveillance and
filtering technologies. In part, it has also been the work of dictatorships
that eagerly share their worst practices with one another. A host of new
circumvention technologies are coming onto the market, and millions of
Chinese, Vietnamese, Iranians, Tunisians, and others fervently want access
to them. Rich liberal democracies need to do much more to support
the development of such technologies, and to facilitate (and subsidize)
their cheap and safe dissemination to countries where the Internet is suppressed.
More could be done to improve encryption so that people in authoritarian
regimes can more safely communicate and organize online.
Breakthroughs may also come with the expansion of satellite access that
bypasses national systems, if the cost of the satellite dishes and monthly
usage rates can be reduced dramatically. Western governments can help
by banning the export of advanced filtering and surveillance technologies
to repressive governments, and by standing behind Western technology
companies when dictatorships pressure them “to hand over Internet users’
personal data.”29
And finally, liberal democracies should stand up for the
human rights of bloggers, activists, and journalists who have been arrested
for peacefully reporting, networking, and organizing online.
82 Journal of Democracy
It is important for the United States to have declared, as Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton did in a historic speech on January 21, that “We stand
for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge
and ideas.” But the struggle for electronic access is really just the timeless
struggle for freedom by new means. It is not technology, but people,
organizations, and governments that will determine who prevails.
NOTES
The author thanks Anna Davies, Blake Miller, and Astasia Myers for their truly superb
research assistance on this article; and also Lian Matias, Galen Panger, Tucker Herbert,
Dianna Bai, Ryan Delaney, Daniel Holleb, Sampath Jinadasa, and Aaron Qayumi for their
prior research assistance on this project.
1. Sophie Beach, “The Rise of Rights?” China Digital Times, http://chinadigitaltimes.
net/2005/05/rise-of-rights.
2. Yongnian Zheng, Technological Empowerment: The Internet State and Society in
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 147–51.
3. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
1983), 251.
4. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (New York: Berkley, 1998), 210, 213.
5. For various accounts, see http://fsi.stanford.edu/research/program_on_liberation_
technology.
6. This account draws heavily from a student research paper conducted under my supervision:
Astasia Myers, “Malaysiakini: Internet Journalism and Democracy,” Stanford
University, 4 June 2009.
7. Figures on the growth of Web use in Malaysia and China are available at www.inter-
networldstats.com/stats3.htm.
8. Freedom House, “Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital
Media,” 1 April 2009, 34; available at www.freedomhouse.org.
9. Private email message from Xiao Qiang, May 2009. Quoted with permission.
10. S.L. Shen, “Chinese Forbidden from Presenting Flowers to Google,” UPI Asia Online,
15 January 2010; available at www.upiasia.com/Politics/2010/01/15/chinese_forbid-
den_from_presenting_flowers_to_google/4148.
11. Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s Censorship 2.0: How Companies Censor Bloggers,”
First Monday, 2 February 2009; available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/view/2378/2089. See also Ashley Esarey and Xiao Qiang, “Below the
Radar: Political Expression in the Chinese Blogosphere,” Asian Survey 48 (September–October
2008): 752–72.
12. Ariana Eunjung Cha, “In China, a Grass-Roots Rebellion,” Washington Post, 29
January 2009.
13. “Charter 08 Still Alive in the Chinese Blogosphere,” China Digital Times, 9 February
2009.
83Larry Diamond
14. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Basic
Books, 2003), 158.
15. Michael McFaul, “Transitions from Postcommunism,” Journal of Democracy 16
(July 2005): 12.
16. Robert Faris and Bruce Etling, “Madison and the Smart Mob: The Promise and Limitations
of the Internet for Democracy,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 32 (Summer 2008):
65.
17. Cathy Hong, “New Political Tool: Text Messaging,” Christian Science Monitor, 30
June 2005; Jóse de Córdoba, “A Bid to Ease Chávez’s Power Grip; Students Continue Protests
in Venezuela; President Threatens Violence,” Wall Street Journal, 8 June 2007.
18. Mridul Chowdhury, “The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution,” Berkman
Center for Internet and Society, September 2008, 14 and 4; available at http://cyber.
law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Chowdhury_Role_of_the_Internet_in_
Burmas_Saffron_Revolution.pdf_0.pdf.
19. Edward Cody, “Text Messages Giving Voice to Chinese,” Washington Post, 28 June
2007.
20. Choe Sang-Hun, “North Koreans Use Cell Phones to Bare Secrets,” New York Times,
28 March 2010. Available at www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/world/asia/29news.html.
21. Steve Coll, “In the Gulf, Dissidence Goes Digital; Text Messaging is the New Tool
of Political Underground,” Washington Post, 29 March 2005.
22. John Kelly and Bruce Etling, “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture
in the Persian Blogosphere,” Berkman Center for Internet and Society, April 2008; available
at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Kelly&Etling_Map-
ping_Irans_Online_Public_2008.pdf.
23. Omid Habibinia, “Who’s Afraid of Facebook?” 3 September 2009; available at
http://riseoftheiranianpeople.com/2009/09/03/who-is-afraid-of-facebook.
24. In addition to Freedom House, Freedom on the Net, see Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey,
Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zitrain, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of
Global Internet Filtering (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). For the ongoing excellent work of
the OpenNet Initiative, see http://opennet.net.
25. University of Toronto Citizen Lab, “Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship,”
September 2007; available at www.civisec.org/guides/everyones-guides.
26. Center for International Media Assistance, National Endowment for Democracy,
“The Role of New Media in the 2009 Iranian Elections,” July 2009, 2; available at http://
cima.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/cima-role_of_new_media_in_iranian_elections-
workshop_report.pdf.
27. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Hi-Tech Helps Iranian Monitoring,” BBC News, 22 June 2009.
Available at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8112550.stm.
28. Rebecca MacKinnon, “Are China’s Demands for Internet ‘Self-Discipline’ Spreading
to the West?” McClatchy News Service, 18 January 2010; available at www.mcclatchy-
dc.com/2010/01/18/82469/commentary-are-chinas-demands.html.
29. Daniel Calingaert, “Making the Web Safe for Democracy,” ForeignPolicy.com, 19
January 2010; available at www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/19/making_the_web_
safe_for_democracy.