Internet, Democracy, and Internet Censorship in Authoritarian States

There have been three great technological revolutions in history. About 12,000 years ago, in the late Neolithic period, humans began to move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. Then 6,000 years ago they learned how to fashion metal tools and weapons during the so-called Bronze Age. About 300 years ago, the Industrial Revolution began, with the first early steam engines and textile mills, followed in due course by railroads, gasoline and electrical motors, nuclear power, and jet and rocket engines. All of these revolutions have "irreversibly altered the course of human history and fundamentally refashioned human societies" (McClellan and Dorn, 2006, p. 275). At the same time, there has been an intellectual and scientific revolution led by luminaries like Newton, Darwin, and Einstein that fundamentally changed humanity's view of the universe and its place within it.

In one sense, computers and the Internet are just a continuation of the communications revolution, starting with the printing press and then continuing with the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, radio, and television. Could this be leading to a more fundamental change in history on the same level as the agricultural and industrial revolutions? This is a more problematic proposition. The idea of a post-industrial economy based on services and high technology dates back to the 1960s, although some visionaries had an inkling of it even in the nineteenth century. Skills and education that were valuable in an industrial economy have become obsolete in the new system, although this has happened before in the history of capitalism. In an economy and society increasingly based on virtual realities and interactions, there will certainly be some major changes in human culture and psychology (Barglow, 1994). Although today "no one would design a bridge or a large building without using computers," many people seem to forget that high-quality construction and engineering was accomplished without the benefit of computers fifty or one hundred years ago (Baase, 2009, p. 4).

People in the past could also socialize and communicate without the benefit of email and the Internet; they could obtain news without blogging, and consult encyclopedias without Wikipedia. Despite all the great increases in the speed and efficiency of communication, "citizens normally pursue a lifestyle that would be broadly recognizable to their ancestors 50 years earlier" (Walsham, p. 3). Apart from the computer industry, there has not been a new industrial revolution equivalent to that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its radical break from traditional agrarian society and the unprecedented changes in "food, clothing, housing, or transportation" (Agre, p. 5). Society has changed relatively little from the era before the computer age, with only a few exceptions, such as the use of computers to speed up financial transactions and in scientific efforts like the search for extraterrestrial life through SETI@Home and the determination of the human genome. On the Internet, "valuable and worthless [content is] indiscriminately mixed," with racist and pornographic websites among the most popular (Rosenberg, 2004, p. 18). In a society where more transactions were being carried out online, a new type of cybercriminal developed with the special skills necessary to steal electronically.

In the past thirty years, new technological developments in personal computing and the Internet were routinely heralded as opening up a liberal New World Order in which individuals and businesses would have free access to more information than ever before in history. Supposedly, these new technologies would be the death knell of repressive authoritarian and totalitarian regimes everywhere, and would open the door to a new liberal-democratic culture of global capitalism and universal human rights. In 1989–91, the fall of the Iron Curtain seemed to confirm that this new era was finally at hand. Needless to say, this has not happened, and authoritarian governments like those in Iran and China are well able to monitor, censor, and control the Internet. They may never be able to accomplish this perfectly and completely, but their powers of censorship, control, and intimidation of individual users and Internet companies are considerable indeed.

Some people — like the "self-explorers" described by Kinsman — have been at the cutting edge of experiencing the libertarian side of the new technology (Kinsman, 1990). On the other hand, inequality has actually increased during the new era of high technology and computers, both within and among nations. By the year 2000, just 358 billionaires had more wealth than the bottom half of the entire world's population combined, a concentration proportionally far greater than in 1960, or even the 1920s and 1890s (Walsham, p. 24). In Class Warfare in an Information Age, Michael Perlman made it clear that the age of high technology is hardly going to mean the end of social classes or class conflict. Distinctions between those who own and control the new technology versus those who work for them and consume their products will continue as always, and those who cannot afford to access the new technology will be relegated to lower-class status as well (Perlman, 2000). There is a growing gap between information and knowledge workers and those who still perform more traditional tasks.

For decades, workers have been rightly concerned about what would become of them in an economy increasingly taken over by computers and automation. This is not a new issue, however, since the tendency to replace human labor with machines has been constant since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Early-nineteenth-century Luddites and machine-breakers were often hand-loom weavers displaced by the first-generation technology of the factory system. Then as now, workers feared a future in which jobs would no longer have any place for "human comprehension and judgment" and would become "increasingly isolated, routine, and perfunctory" (Zuboff, 1988, p. 7). Working at home has become far more common in the Internet age as well, at least for those workers with the skills and abilities to benefit from these new technologies. In many ways, though, the new high-tech workplace — with employees confined to cubicles and performing routine tasks under continual supervision — is not fundamentally different from the old Fordist factory, except that the skill levels are higher, the shop floor quieter, and the work centered on processing information rather than parts and raw materials.

Managers of large corporations and the national security state can and do use the new technologies for surveillance and control. New developments in technology create an environment in which "chronic monitoring and utilization of knowledge can create existential anxiety in the individual, or even a sense of personal meaninglessness" (Walsham, 2001, p. 15). Throughout the twentieth century, there was a pervasive sense that society was controlled by managers, experts, and technicians over whom the individual had no control, and the new technology has made these elites seem even more distant and omnipotent. Even among many computer professionals, there has been a growing fear of the potential for using the new technologies for repression and control — and indeed this happens every day in countries like Iran and China (Agre, 1997, p. 10).

News spreads more rapidly than ever before via cable, satellite, and the Internet, and anyone with a cell phone can become an instant amateur journalist. Even highly repressive societies like China, Iran, and Egypt could not completely control this new medium, although during every surge of revolutionary activity the first targets of repressive regimes were always the Internet and wireless communications — along with foreign reporters. Cyber-democracy truly came into its own during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, particularly among young, technically savvy protesters. Even in relatively poor nations, pro-democracy rebels were able to take advantage of the communications networks in major cities to organize revolution at the grassroots level (Tsagarousianou, 1998). Political parties, NGOs, and labor organizations now use these technologies routinely, and in Egypt and Tunisia, leaders of the new high-tech industries also became revolutionary political organizers, while journalists from the Internet and satellite news networks openly took sides with the pro-democracy movements.

Even if the new technologies do not fundamentally change social and economic structures, they had certainly come into their own by 2011 and proved their usefulness as an organizing tool with the potential to bring down authoritarian regimes very quickly. When the Internet began, "the first cybernauts certainly expected that virtual communications spaces would be exempt from state interference," but this has definitively not turned out to be the case (Hamelink, 2000, p. 140). Pervasive Internet censorship is the norm in countries that still have totalitarian regimes of the left and right, such as China, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Cuba, and Vietnam (Zuchova-Walske, 2010, p. 101). China and Iran also stand out as having "the most sophisticated state-mandated filtering systems in the world" (Khiabany and Sreberny, 2009, p. 208).

China has 330 million Internet users and 70 million bloggers, but also one of the most stringent systems of Internet censorship in the world, with 30–40 people serving prison sentences for writing about politically sensitive topics online. China always claims that censorship is "necessary for social stability" and to block pornography and other "harmful content," and rejects all foreign criticism as "interference in China's domestic affairs" (Figliola, 2010, p. 4). Censorship of the Internet began as early as 1996, when the government banned the websites of the Tibet Information Network, Playboy, most U.S. newspapers, and nearly 100 others. It also required all Internet users to register with the state and "sign a declaration that they will not visit forbidden sites" (Hamelink, p. 141). Since President Hu Jintao came to power in 2003, censorship has been increasing along with "a steady crackdown on the Internet."

The Chinese government employs tens of thousands of people to monitor and censor the Internet, overseen by the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), the State Council Information Office, and the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 3). These agencies use website blocking and keyword filtering, actively monitor Internet cafes, ISP providers, and university bulletin boards, and require all websites and blogs to be registered — a system that "creates an undercurrent of fear and promotes self-censorship." The government also hires thousands of writers to create websites and blogs for its own propaganda purposes (Figliola, p. 5). All nine Internet Access Providers (IAPs) are licensed by the state, and the hardware and software to block content and keywords is configured directly into the Chinese Internet down to the router level (MacKinnon, p. 10). All Internet Content Providers (ICPs) are licensed and registered by the state as well, and must agree in writing to block or censor content to which the government objects (MacKinnon, p. 12). Search engines are also designed to filter out certain keywords and maintain blacklists of forbidden websites (MacKinnon, p. 13). Chinese journalists use foreign websites for information on major news stories — even though these are censored and difficult to access — and are very "skilled" at using proxy servers (Yu, 2009, p. 183n).

U.S. companies like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo cooperate with censorship in China rather than risk alienating the government in such a lucrative market. Yahoo has provided email addresses of account holders to the Chinese authorities, resulting in political dissidents being sent to prison, while Microsoft shut down blogs and blocked words like "democracy" from MSN Spaces (Figliola, p. 6). Google held the second-largest search engine share in China after the Chinese company Baidu, and cooperated with censorship by posting messages on websites indicating that they had been blocked due to "local laws, regulations, and policies." On the other hand, it moved its search records out of the country in 2006 and did not host Gmail and Blogger services there. Cisco Systems, Nortel, and Juniper Networks have all sold infrastructure to China to facilitate filtering, surveillance, and monitoring of the Internet (Figliola, p. 7). In 2009, the Chinese government ordered Green Dam Youth Escort software installed on all computers, allegedly to block pornography and other "harmful content," but massive protests at home and abroad prevented this (Figliola, p. 8).