The Digital Dictatorship

This is an excellent article that brings to light an illogical conclusion many in the US have about the internet and "democracy." I am doing a research paper on "conspiracy theories" for COM Law. I think it is interesting how the internet can perpetuate false information, specifically the effect that the mass appeal of the internet can have on people. They may think "all of these people believe that..." so the mass of opinion lends credibility to the argument. I think that a lot of people can reason well enough to know that just because a lot of people might think "Elvis was abducted by aliens" doesn't make it true unless there is evidence to support the notion. Apparently, our government does consider conspiracy theories about their activities to be dangerous enough that Cass Sunstein, one of the current administration's czars wrote a white paper in which he said,

Practically speaking, government might do well to maintain a more vigorous countermisinformation establishment than it would otherwise do, one that identifies and rebuts many more conspiracy theories would otherwise be rebutted...

...It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts. Although government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes, too close a connection will prove self-defeating if it is exposed. Link to his paper

 So, regarding theories, the government should run their own establishment and run things behind the scenes? The actions that can be taken by governments Cass talks about in his essay are eluded to in this article. Just because we may see the internet as a tool for people to disseminate information that extols the virtues of liberty does not mean that the tool can not be utilized by governments in order to achieve their goals. It does not matter if "conspiracy theories" or liberty are concerned. I think the one major thing that should be regulated is the government involvement in the internet, period.

 
The Digital Dictatorship
It's fashionable to hold up the Internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. Evgeny Morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.

FEBRUARY 20, 2010
By EVGENY MOROZOV

A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It's not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn't—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google's popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.


Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic's complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran's state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country's communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day). The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization now forms one of the pillars of "techno-utopianism." Continue reading...