Antony Loewenstein

Newly released documents from Wikileaks suggest that the internet giant has an agenda rather different to just a very fast search engine (via Al Akhbar):

Top Google execs, including the company’s CEO and one of Barack Obama’s major presidential campaign donors Eric Schmidt, informed the intelligence agency Stratfor about Google’s activities and internal communication regarding “regime change” in the Middle East, according to Stratfor emails released by WikiLeaks and obtained by Al-Akhbar. The other source cited was Google’s director for security and safety Marty Lev.

The briefings mainly focused on the movements of Jared Cohen, currently the director of Google Ideas, a “think/do-tank” billed as a vehicle for spreading American-style liberal democracy. Cohen was also a former member of US Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and former advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Email exchanges, starting February 2011, suggest that Google execs were suspicious that Cohen was coordinating his moves with the White House and cut Cohen’s mission short at times for fear he was taking too many risks. Stratfor’s vice-president of counter-terrorism Fred Burton, who seemed opposed to Google’s alleged covert role in “foaming” uprisings, describes Cohen as a “loose Cannon” whose killing or kidnapping “might be the best thing to happen” to expose Google.

The Cohen Conspiracy

Stratfor’s spotlight on Cohen began on 9 February 2012 after Burton forwarded to the secure email list a Foreign Policy article discussing Cohen’s move from the State Department to Google Ideas. With this article, Burton noted that Cohen had dinner in Cairo with Wael Ghonim on January 27, 2011 just hours before the Egyptian Google Executive was famously picked up by Egypt’s State Security. (doc-id 1122191)

On the same day, Stratfor’s staff make reference to a Huffington Post article which highlighted Cohen’s role in “delaying the scheduled maintenance on Twitter so the Iranian revolution could keep going” and a Foreign Policy article that noted that Cohen “was a Rhodes scholar, spent time in Iran, [and] hung out in Iraq during the war…”. These casual discovers further perked Stratfor’s curiosity about Cohen. (doc-id 1629270)

The following day, Burton forwarded a message to the secure email list from “a very good Google source” who claimed that Cohen “[was] off to Gaza next week”. Burton added, “Cohen, a Jew, is bound to get himself whacked….Google is not clear if Cohen is operating [with a] State Dept [or] WH [White House] license, or [is] a hippie activist.”

Korena Zucha, another senior analyst on the list, queried, “Why hasn’t Google cut ties to Cohen yet? Or is Cohen’s activity being endorsed by those higher up in the [company] than your contact?”

In turn, Burton replied, “Cohen’s rabbi is Eric Schmidt and Obama lackey. My source is trying to find out if the billionaire owners are backing Cohen’s efforts for regime change.” (doc-id 1111729)

In case anybody still had any illusions about the obsession of the Obama administration to pursue whistle-blowers or anybody who seriously embarrasses them, read on (via the Wall Street Journal):

The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force GoogleInc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

I was recently spoke in Sydney at the University of New South Wales at the conference of the Australian Law Students’ Association on the issues of privacy and censorship in Australia and globally. Here’s extracts from that event (though my comments here are very brief and rest assured I said many other things, including citizens treating web companies such as Google with necessary caution, as their influence in the corners of the globe often involves complicity with repressive regimes):

His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips:

The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.

He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.
‘Completely wired’

Mr Schmidt said he believed the “problem” of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to “get worse”.

In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”

“The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”

“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he added.

My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THE NET DELUSION
Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane,
408pp, $29.95

As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost irrelevant.

Born in Belarus, Evgeny Morozov collects mountains of evidence to claim the internet isn’t able to bring freedom, democracy and liberalism.

Sceptics would tell him to watch Al-Jazeera and see the power of the Facebook generation in action.

In fact, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe, he argues, because countless regimes are using the same tools as activists – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and email – to monitor and catch dissidents.

He writes that “the only space where the West (especially the United States) is still unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda is in.”

Morozov condemns “cyber-utopians” for wanting to build a world where borders are no more. Instead, he says these well-meaning people “did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance” and the increasingly sophisticated methods of web censorship.

Furthermore, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Nokia and web security firms have all willingly colluded with a range of brutal states to turn a profit.

The Western media are largely to blame for creating the illusion of web-inspired democracy. During the Iranian uprisings in June 2009, many journalists dubbed it the Twitter Revolution, closely following countless tweets from the streets of Tehran. However, it was soon discovered that many of the tweets originated in California and not the Islamic republic. The myth had already been born.

None of these facts is designed to lessen the bravery of demonstrators against autocracies – and Morozov praises countless dissidents in China, the Arab world and beyond – but lazy journalists seemingly crave easy and often inaccurate narratives of nimble young keyboard warriors against sluggish old men in golden palaces.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen was right when he wrote in January that “the internet’s impact has been to expose the great delusion that has led Western governments to buttress Arab autocrats; that the only alternative to them was Islamic jihadists”.

But most protesters in the streets of Egypt had no access to the internet or any use for it and the main gripes were economic rather than ideological. However, it is undeniable that many of the young organised through online networks and clearly surprised the former Mubarak regime with their ability to harness a mainstream call for change.

Morozov, hailing from a country that knows about disappearances and suppression, urges the West to “stop glorifying those living in authoritarian governments”.

One of the Western fallacies of web usage in non-democratic nations is the belief that people are all looking for political content as a way to cope with repression. In fact, as Morozov proves with research, an experiment in 2007 with strangers in autocratic regimes found that instead of looking for dissenting material they “searched for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears”.

I noted similar trends in China when researching my book The Blogging Revolution and found most Chinese youth were interested in downloading movies and music and meeting boys and girls. Politics was the furthest thing from their minds.

This would change only if economic conditions worsened. A wise government would pre-empt these problems by allowing citizens to let off steam; Beijing has undoubtedly opened up online debate in the past decade, though there are certainly set boundaries and red lines not to cross.

Morozov sometimes underestimates the importance of people in repressive states feeling less alone and mixing with like-minded individuals. Witness the persecuted gay community in Iran, the websites connecting this beleaguered population and the space to discuss an identity denied by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ultimately, The Net Delusion is necessary because it challenges comfortable Western thinking about the modern nature of authoritarianism.

This year we have already been left to ponder the irony of the US State Department deploying its resources to pressure Arab regimes not to block communications and social media while the stated agenda of Washington is a matrix of control across the region.

These policies are clearly contradictory and a person in US-backed Saudi Arabia and Bahrain won’t be fooled into believing Western benevolence if they can merely use Twitter every day.

This will be fun. I’m about to head across to Perth in Western Australia for the Perth Writer’s Festival.

My events:

Sat 5 Mar, 2.00PM

The invasion of Gaza in 2008 provoked worldwide condemnation and questions aboutIsrael’s right to exist. Some asked why other nations acting unjustly don’t face debate about the validity of their sovereignty. Raimond Gaita and Antony Loewenstein discuss the issue.

Sat 5 Mar, 8.00PM

With the growing global influence of the Asia and Pacific region, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, bigotry, widening inequality and Facebook, Google and Wikileaks, do we have to rethink how democracy will work in the coming century? How do the 19th and 20th century ideals of democracy hold up? Tariq Ali, Ken Crispin, John Keane and Antony Loewenstein share their thoughts on the future of democracy.

Mon 7 Mar, 9.30AM

What capacity is there for information exchange in repressive regimes? Chinese author Yan Lianke has had his novels banned in his home country while freelance journalist and author Antony Loewenstein has looked at these questions in the Middle East. They discuss freedom of expression and the ways restrictive controls can be overcome.

If you’re in Perth and want to avoid the searing heat, you know you want to hear discussions about Wikileaks, democracy and war criminals (not necessarily in that order).

My following article is published by leading Indian magazine Tehelka:

The Middle East is the region where global empires lavishly exercise their chequebook. Since the Second World War, America has bribed, cajoled and backed autocratic regimes in the name of stability.

Israel, self-described as the only democracy in the area, has been insulated from the vagaries of democratic politics by simply colluding with dictatorships across its various borders.

Zionism has thrived due to Arab leader corruption and silence in the face of occupation against Palestinian lands.

But the mass uprisings across Egypt are threatening these cosy arrangements.

The Israeli mainstream is fearful of what Arab democracy may mean, but for the majority in Egypt decades of repression may be coming to an end.

The resignation of President Hosni Mubarak is the first necessary step in restoring dignity to the Egyptian political process, though it is only the beginning.

The millions of demonstrators won’t tolerate a military coup simply replacing one tyrant with another.

We can marvel at the success of a peaceful protest movement and wonder which other western-backed thugs may be next.

Today, the Muslim world sees what is possible with weeks of determined protest; America and Israel no longer control the agenda of who rules the Arab street.

Tel Aviv is already fearful of what true democracy may mean for its position.

While there is no unified message of the protesters for the future, a few key demands are clear; free and fair elections, an orderly transition, an end to torture, better employment opportunities and an end to being manipulated by foreign powers.

Sadly and predictably, many neo-conservative and Jewish commentators in America are whipping up fear of an Islamist take-over of Egypt while the situation remains incredibly fluid.

Besides, the western world has consistently refused to accept to its own detriment the legitimate positions of many Muslims since 11 September 2001 who wants their religion integrated into a democratic system.

Turkey is a model here, an imperfect example of an Islamic democracy.

Former Egyptian President Mubarak, wholly supported by Washington and Tel Aviv for three decades and much of the US corporate press, has shaped a state that routinely tortured its own citizens as well as suspects in the American-led “war on terror.”

New Vice-President Omar Suleiman is implicated in a range of crimes committed since 9/11, including overseeing torture himself against alleged terror suspects.

The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer wrote last week:

“Technically, U.S. law required the C.I.A. to seek “assurances” from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture. But under Suleiman’s reign at the intelligence service, such assurances were considered close to worthless.

As Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. officer who helped set up the practice of rendition, later testified before Congress, even if such “assurances” were written in indelible ink, “they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.””

In the last weeks, Egyptians authorities blocked Internet access and mobile phone services in an attempt to stop information getting out to the world.

It failed spectacularly but far too many western commentators were quick to jump to conclusions and claim this was a Facebook revolution or Twitter revolution.

But, despite Facebook playing a key role in initially organising outrage, the vast majority of Egyptians didn’t need a website to register their anger.

It was pleasing to read Google and Twitter joining forces to launch SpeaktoTweet, a service allowing Egyptians to call an international number and record a voice message that would then be tweeted from a Twitter account.

It is increasingly difficult to silence the masses in a globalised age, though we shouldn’t be seduced by the false belief that free Internet access automatically brings western-style democracy.

The western reaction to the Egyptian protests has been a mixture of awe and confusion.

The internal logic of many westerners is contradictory and hypocritical.

Backing the US-led invasion of Iraq, currently run as a Tehran-friendly police state, was seen as a noble gesture to liberate the oppressed masses but when the citizens agitate themselves without our help they’re lectured about remaining ‘moderate’.

Famed Slavoj Zizek wrote last week in the UK Guardian that the West so rarely sees a revolutionary spirit in its own countries that there is automatic suspicion when it occurs somewhere else, such as Egypt.

Ironically, post 9/11 paranoia about Islamic fundamentalism is due to its presence in nations the West has supposedly ‘liberated’, namely Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither nation has a long history of religious extremism; foreign meddling has allowed these forces to incubate.

Dictatorships in the Arab world don’t just materialise, they are created and sustained over decades.

Washington funds Cairo to the tunes of billions annually (second only to Israel) and yet the results are clear to see; stagnation and political corruption on a vast scale.

This arrangement suits America, Israel and the West just fine; client states aren’t independent thinkers and that’s how their funders like it.

Take former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who told CNN that Mubarak had been ‘immensely courageous and a force for good’ in the Middle East over the Israel-Palestine ‘peace process’.

Blair was merely echoing the standard post 9/11 view of the region; political Islam must never be engaged, even if parties win legitimate elections (witness Hamas after its victory in Palestine in 2006).

But what comes after Mubarak? His infrastructure of terror must be dismantled but this can’t happen unless Western policy fundamentally reviews its attitude toward the Middle East.

Why should only Israeli Jews be allowed freedom in the region? Must Arabs be suppressed for the pleasure of the Zionist state?

Sixty years is more than enough of this paradigm. And Arab people-power has loudly announced that it won’t tolerate decades more living under autocracy.

Egypt provides salutary lessons for other nations, including India.

Mubarak created a highly centralised state of control allowing him to crush potential rivals. But the voice of the people has been bubbling beneath the surface for years – I witnessed it during various visits there, from bloggers, union members and dissidents.

Cairo, however, refused to listen, believing brute force would allow the status-quo to survive.

Responsive, democratic governments work best when the interests of the people, especially minorities, aren’t ignored but acted upon.

Blocking the Internet in a large country is almost impossible in the 21st century due to the economy’s reliance on it but Egypt joins an increasingly long list of nations attempting to shut out modernity (including Myanmar and North Korea).

Although the central government in New Delhi is unlikely to administer such a draconian plan, leaders should be open to robust debate on the most controversial subjects, including Kashmir and the Naxalites.

Mature democracies are ones that welcome disagreement and don’t threaten prosecution for those who dare challenge the mainstream view.

There are disturbing signs in many western nations of overzealous officials wanting to regulate the openness of the Internet in the fight against ‘terrorism’.

This must be resisted.

Likewise in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would be well advised to listen to dissent due to the decentralised nature of his country; ignoring such difficult questions is not the sign of a leader who consults but a man who relies on harsh counter-terrorism techniques to quash dissent.

Hosni Mubarak could inform him of the dangers of this path.

Australian journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, 36, has published a best-selling book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, My Israel Question, and has spent time working and travelling across the Middle East and beyond. His book, The Blogging Revolution, examines the role of the internet in repressive regimes, including Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. He has written for publications such as the Guardian, Haaretz and the BBC World and regularly appears in the local and global media discussing human rights and politics.

Egyptian Google executive Wael Ghonim was a major figure in the uprisings over the last fortnight. A positive thing all around, surely?

Don’t be so sure.

One:

A Google Inc executive who has become a hero of the Egyptian revolution is public relations gold for the Internet power, but analysts say the company must be careful not to overplay its hand.

Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim became the public face of the uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak handing power to the army on Friday.

Ghonim was detained by security forces and came out swinging on his release, calling for Mubarak to step down.

When Internet access was shut down during an early phase of the Egyptian protests, Google engineers hacked together a way to allow Egyptians to use Twitter by dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail message.

Despite its association with the events in Egypt, Google has not commented on the politics of the country’s upheaval.

Instead, it has focused on values surrounding freedom of information and the Internet. “We’re incredibly proud to see Googlers take a stand on those issues,” spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said on Friday, when asked about Ghonim.

That has played well for the company.

“This is going to get Google some positive publicity,” said Rosabeth Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School. But she added, “They have to be careful.”

Consumers and businesses would love the tools for communication that Google supports and provides – but less democratic governments might see Google as a threat.

“Google will not be their search engine of choice,” she said. “You’re going there to sell products and services, you’re not going there to topple the regime.”

Two:

In “How to Handle Employee Activism: Google Tiptoes Around Cairo’s Hero,” the Wall Street Journal has stumbled upon the silliest possible angle on the Egyptian protest saga — the threat to a multinational company’s brand that might accrue when employees get involved in politics.

As the world marveled this week at the remarkable story of Wael Ghonim, the Google manager who helped organize a popular rebellion in Egypt, a great sigh of relief could be heard rising from much of the rest of American business:

“I’m glad,” came the exhale, “the guy doesn’t work for us.”

Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey ends up quoting only one unnamed executive to support his rather dramatic generalization, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, even if despicable. You might think that a charismatic young man willing to die for his country in pursuit of liberty and freedom for his people would resonate with the very core of American values, but the most important insight offered by Bussey, although perhaps unintentionally, is that American corporations do not share American values.

A lot of U.S. companies, which now manage millions of employees abroad, watched with trepidation. Many of them now earn more abroad than they do in America. And much of that income comes from the sale of big-ticket items — power systems, infrastructure equipment, aircraft, telecommunications –that only governments can afford to buy….

Reflecting on Mr. Ghonim’s extracurricular activities, an executive at one big U.S. manufacturer operating abroad was adamant: “Anything that affects the brand — we hate that,” he said. “It wouldn’t be allowed.”

He explains the major role of the internet in the uprisings, the non-existent place of the Muslim Brotherhood in the beginning and how the time to negotiate with the regime is over (when innocents are being tortured and murdered in the streets):

During research for my book The Blogging Revolution, a great deal of time was spent examining just what companies such as Google actually do in Iran.

The company has posted the latest information:

During the protests that erupted in Iran following the disputed Presidential election in June 2009, the central government in Tehran deported all foreign journalists, shut down traditional media outlets, closed off print journalism and disrupted cell phone lines. The government also infiltrated networks, posing as activists and using false identities to round up dissidents. In spite of this, the sharing of information using the Internet prevailed. YouTube and Twitter were cited by journalists, activists and bloggers as the best source for firsthand accounts and on-the-scene footage of the protests and violence across the country. At the time, though, U.S. export controls and sanctions programs prohibited software downloads to Iran.

Some of those export restrictions have now been lifted and today, for the first time, we’re making Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome available for download in Iran. We’re committed to full compliance with U.S. export controls and sanctions programs and, as a condition of our export licenses from the Treasury Department, we will continue to block IP addresses associated with the Iranian government.

Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information. And we believe that more available products means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for individuals in Iran and across the globe.

Posted by Neil Martin, Export Compliance Programs Manager

We are entering an age where the complicity of internet companies in censorship is becoming clear to many. We have allowed them to become too powerful and now they can act like this. By the way, so much for the Obama administration being any different to the Bushies over human rights, secrets and intimidation:

WikiLeaks said on Saturday the Twitter accounts of four supporters have been subpoenaed in connection with an espionage investigation into the whistleblowing website led by a secret US grand jury.

“Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into Wikileaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.

WikiLeaks said legal action taken by micro-blogging website Twitter “revealed that the US State Department has requested the private messages, contact information, IP addresses, and personal details of Julian Assange and three other individuals associated with Wikileaks, in addition to Wikileaks? own account, which has 634,071 followers.”

It did not name the three other people, but Icelandic lawmaker Birgitta Jonsdottir tweeted overnight: “just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks)”.

She later posted “usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. do they realize I am a member of parliament in iceland?”

In another message she said “just got the request via twitter from a court in the usa”.

WikiLeaks said it also had “reason to believe Facebook and Google, among other organisations, have received similar court orders, and calls on them to unseal any subpoenas they have received”.

“WikiLeaks is opposing the subpoena order and is currently taking action to instruct US lawyers,” it said, urging Twitter to protect its users’ private information.

The CIA, keeping the US safe:

Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking?