The key to all this is his failure to distinguish between the network and the protocol. Manjoo says that the Internet helps Iran’s repressive efforts. That’s not true, at least not nearly to the extent he thinks. The network – the physical infrastructure of cables, switching and routing equipment, is what’s trapping people right now. If it weren’t for the end-to-end nature of the software protocols that make up what we conveniently call the Internet, little if any news at all would have emerged from Iran.

Manjoo points out the structural weakness in Iran’s communications systems well enough – they all have to pass through the single point of control. One of the first actions the government took following the announcement of the presidential vote results (widely considered to be false) was to severely limit access all but one of its international data connections.

Interestingly, this disruption was short-lived. Data is flowing across all official (and a few unofficial) paths to the outside world. Traffic volumes, however, are drastically reduced. James Cowie of Renesys Corp. asks the burning question: Why did the regime not cut access completely? He suggests three possible reasons:

1. The cynics. Perhaps the government has left the Internet intact so that they can use it to surveil and round up dissidents. Perhaps they even put bandwidth constraints in place to make it easier to cope with the volumes of traffic that need to be captured and filtered.
2. The optimists. Perhaps the government has realized that a modern economy relies on the Internet to such an extent that it cannot be turned off, for fear of disrupting financial transactions and business communications. Iran’s Internet ecosystem is relatively rich, and the impact on their economy of a sustained Internet shutdown would be significant. Why make it harder for companies to do business in Iran at a time when oil revenues are cratering and foreign investment is looking for reasons to take a walk?
3. The realists. Perhaps the government is too busy with other things to worry about the Internet. Governments aren’t well-suited to run the Internet, and they don’t completely understand how it works. The Internet has never been “turned off” before, and it would take creativity and thoughtful action to figure out who to ask in order to get it done. So it simply hasn’t happened, and probably won’t. Good thing, too, because they might not be able to turn it on again.

[emphasis mine]

I’m inclined to agree with Cowie in his suspicion that 3 is the most likely, although I’d guess that there are likely at least one or two more pragmatic (possibly enlightened or even passively subversive) technical managers who know the importance of keeping the trains running, even if they’re not all on time.

But as long as it continues to function, the Internet will allow private data to flow. Adhering to Mitch Kapor’s famous assertion that the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it, it’s reasonable to conclude that Iran’s Internet is terribly damaged, but continues to function.

So Manjoo’s conclusion is wrong. The Revolution may not be digitised, but it’s not because of the Internet; it’s in spite of it. The most effective anti-information measures taken to date by the ruling junta have been the arrest and arbitrary detention of citizen journalists and attacks by Basiji on anyone seen carrying electronic recording gear, even mobile phones.

The repression being experienced there is brutal and it’s being carried out largely by human beings.

That said, technological dangers do exist. The physical communications network in Iran is centralised by design and controlled by the state. Quelle surprise. If I were a well-funded and resourceful opposition member in Iran today, I’d be investing no small resources in the acquisition of state of the art VSAT and mesh-enabled equipment. Such technologies are much more difficult to control because their interconnection points are decentralised and distributed.

One example: It would be trivially easy to write firmware for the Apple iPhone that allowed mesh networking capabilities. Mesh network protocols are opportunistic, agnostic processes that appropriate and share Internet connectivity on an ad hoc basis. In layman’s terms, anyone with access to the Internet (say, via 3G or a wireless hotspot) can share it with anyone within a reasonable distance. The next person in line can also share that link, effectively extending the range and usefulness of even a nominal Internet connection.

In order to disrupt such a network, you’d have to hunt down innumerable satellite dishes and easily concealed wireless access points.

That’s not at all impossible. In fact, there are already reports of Basiji entering homes in search of satellite dishes. But here’s the thing: given a sufficiently large number of end-points, the measures required to remove them all could prove toxic to the regime. In the best case scenario, private communications remain possible (if not entirely convenient); in the worst case scenario, the crackdown is so widespread that the Khamene’i regime loses the last shreds of its legitimacy in the eyes of the people, possibly leading to actual insurrection instead of protest.

There’s a general lesson to be taken from this: All of our communications networks are susceptible to the very same suppression and censorship as Iran’s. Networks the world over are centralised and designed with control points similar to Iran’s built in. The Wall Street Journal observes:

Countries with repressive governments aren’t the only ones interested in such technology. Britain has a list of blocked sites, and the German government is considering similar measures. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has such capability, which was employed as part of the Bush administration’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” A White House official wouldn’t comment on if or how this is being used under the Obama administration.

The US surveillance of domestic and international traffic is equally intrusive, though not nearly so obstructive as that experienced by Iranians today. It is made easier by exactly the same design vulnerabilities.

But more important than this observation is its corollary: Decentralised networks are critical to the protection of the fundamentally democratic right to communicate. Without communications technologies that reflect this fundamental value, the right to free speech is limited. In the worst cases, it becomes a liability.

Nokia-Siemens, defending its role in the creation of a centralised mobile telecommuncations network, stated recently that:

In most countries around the world, including all EU member states and the U.S., telecommunications networks are legally required to have the capability for Lawful Intercept and this is also the case in Iran. Lawful Intercept is specified in standards defined by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project).

Yes, decentralised communications come at a cost. They make surveillance efforts of all kinds more difficult. The two competing questions we need to ask ourselves are:

1. How far are we willing to compromise ourselves in the pursuit of state security?
2. How much are we willing to compromise state surveillance capability in order to protect our own freedom to communicate?

These are knotty issues with complex and often subtle ramifications on society. They demand a level of public engagement on the principle – and more importantly, the practice – of free speech that we haven’t seen since the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Technology feels like magic to most of us. We don’t – and don’t want to – know how our communications come about. We just want them to happen.

But in order for them to happen, we must inform – and arm – ourselves with the knowledge, understanding, law and policies that make it possible. Facile observations like Manjoo’s do little if anything to support such an effort.

The Revolution will indeed be digitised, but only if we want it enough.

The question as asked comes across as remarkably naive to us geeks. We make it our business to know the difference between the logical (soft) network and the physical (hard) network.

A tension exists between the inherently democratic design of the myriad end-to-end connections that compose the Internet and the centralised conformation of the physical networks themselves. Briefly, the ‘soft’ elements of the network (the software we run on our computers and the protocols they follow) are completely agnostic about how the data they share actually get from one point to another.

On the other hand, the ‘hard’ elements (international satellite links, long-distance cables and the connection between your home and your ISP) are all about how the data moves. Controlling the data flow is their very essence.

From a ‘hard’ network point of view, this idea of ‘beaming down broadband to an entire population’ is little more than a pipe dream. The thing is, it’s pretty easy to receive a signal from a satellite. Sending an answer back is another matter entirely. That requires some pretty sophisticated equipment.

This led a number of geeks to discard the question entirely and to laugh more than a little at the naiveté of the reporter who posed it.

I’m not so sure we should cast it aside it so quickly.

Why indeed can we not just ‘beam’ bandwidth all over the place so that anyone and their dog can use it? There are technical challenges to be overcome, but they’re not as onerous as they might first appear. Or at least, they don’t need to be.

For years now, geeks have been tinkering with what are known collectively as mesh network technologies. The premise of a mesh network is that whenever an Internet-savvy wireless device is turned on, it checks around to see who else is online. If it doesn’t have an Internet connection, it finds someone else who does. Conversely, it willingly shares its own Internet connection whenever it has one.

This design principle adheres more to the ‘soft’ network approach, because mesh-enabled devices don’t particularly care about how they connect to other communications devices. As long as everybody plays nice with each other, they can just connect and go.

There are some inherent weaknesses to this approach. The first is that things get messed up quickly if people don’t play nice. A mesh network looks a lot like a room full of people passing notes to each other. I write a quick message, then hand it to you to pass on to someone else. Eventually the message lands in the right hands.

But what happens when someone else reads the note? What if it’s a love letter? What if it contains information about my bank account, or some other secret?

There’s also the issue of how such networks organise themselves. Currently, once you’ve got more than about 40 points in a mesh network, things start to get messy. Each member of the network spends more time passing other people’s notes than it does actually communicating on its own behalf.

Lastly, mesh network work pretty well over short distances, but the moment you need to transmit something over distance (say, between Vila and Santo), you need pretty powerful equipment. And that comes at a price. So if everybody’s sharing my Internet connection, how do I get them to share the cost of the connection?

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, the potential for ad hoc, self-organising networks is spectacular, to say the least. If people were to embrace them on a broad basis, I don’t doubt that a lot of the wrinkles I’ve described could be reconciled.

All except one: Who pays for it? Internet users have long contended with something known as the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s an age-old story, whenever we share a common resource, be it a patch of garden, a fruit tree or a house, the temptation always exists to take just a little more of it than we’re supposed to.

When I operated a public wireless hotspot service, I frequently had to remind my customers to play nice. There was always someone who wanted to use all of the available bandwidth. I ended up writing the software equivalent of a sin-bin – a penalty box of sorts where people who didn’t share the network nicely with others could be given a ‘time-out’ until they showed they were willing to cooperate.

Centralised networks don’t suffer as much from this phenomenon because the network operator creates a separate connection for each customer. This connection can be controlled from a central location, Unwelcome traffic can be curtailed or simply dropped on the floor. They have a really easy way to answer the ‘who pays’ question: Miss a payment? Lose your service.

In recent years, nearly all communications devices have been designed to adhere to this model. Wireless access points, laptops, iPhones and other ‘smart’ handheld devices could easily be configured to create or join mesh networks on the fly. The code for it exists. But they don’t.

That’s because most consumer devices are designed to integrate into the existing economic model, which attaches individual customers to central networks.

Most of the time, this presents no problem at all. Network owners take care of the headaches of building and managing the infrastructure and we blithely go about our business.

Blithely, that is, until our interests no longer coincide with the network owners’. The result can be petty nuisances like limitations in using Skype or downloading files. Or they can be life-changing, as the people of Iran have recently discovered.

Back in Canada, I had a friend who had escaped from Communist Czechoslovakia. I ventured that he must be grateful for the freedom he experienced in his new home. His answer surprised me.

“If I had known then what I know now, I’m not sure I would have defected. In a Communist society, everything is taken care of. Where you work, what you eat, who you speak to and even what you say. Here, I’m constantly forced to make decisions. Decisions I’d never had to make before in my life. Democracy is harder than I every imagined it would be.”

Right now, we work in an online environment that more closely resembles Czechoslovakia as it was than Canada today. We don’t really need to think much about how things work because others have taken that role on themselves.

If we choose to follow the other path, to rely more on cooperative networks, we will be faced with the same quandary as my Czech friend. Freedom implies responsibility and participation. Problems on the network are no longer someone else’s.

On the other hand, the network would be our own to use as we see fit.

Frankly, I doubt such a cultural change will transpire, except where the alternative is unacceptable. Just as a bird in the nest has no incentive to leave until its parents stop feeding it, we have no incentive to trade in our laptops and modems for more democratic tools. Until, of course, the network stops feeding us.

Thirty years after the Revolution, the June 12th Iranian presidential elections seem to have catalysed a transformational moment in the nation’s history. One Western commentator writes:

The widespread, sustained, peaceful and courageous demonstrations by Iranians this week has been an astonishing and inspiring sight. In a way this feels like the anti-9/11.

Analysts have suggested that the rapid rise in popularity of moderate candidate Mir-Hosain Mousavi caught the theocratic regime’s leaders flat-footed. Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute and long-time commentator on Middle-East affairs, writes:

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi’s spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi’s camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

His narrative is, he admits, largely speculative.

The result, witnessed through countless independent blog posts, photos and videos, has been massive, occasionally violent protest in the streets of the capital Tehran and, according to reports, in Tabriz, Mashad, Shiraz and Rasht as well.

One of the first signs that things were not as they should be was the shutdown of mobile telephone networks, especially SMS services, and blocking of access to social networking sites like Facebook.

A blog post by Renesys Corporation experts, who provide network data collection and analysis services, suggests that access to all but one of Iran’s five major international data connections has been severely degraded. Some have speculated that this is because the Government of Iran, which controls most national telecommunications systems, has imposed a strict regime of Internet filtering on its population.

Notwithstanding these events, activists organised their protest efforts through online messaging sites such as Twitter, which had apparently been overlooked by censors. One message implored activists to climb to the rooftops and give voice to their protest by shouting ‘Allah’u akhbar’ (God is great). By 4:00 a.m. local time on June 13th, the noise of the rooftop protest was deafening. The outcry has only increased since then. Significantly, the same tactic was used at the outset of the 1979 revolution that ousted the US-supported Shah of Iran and ultimately led to the rise to power of the current theocratic regime.

This riveting spectacle provides us with an object lesson in the effects of communications networks on democracy and social movements.

Tehran’s mobile telephone network is a state-controlled monopoly. It ceased to function effectively at the very moment when it would have been most useful to opposition organisers. Internet services, however, managed to struggle on, albeit at a much-degraded level of service. Most interestingly, apparent efforts to limit access to social networking capabilities were thwarted by the variety and nature of the resources themselves.

We can take two closely related lessons from this:

1) Centrally controlled communications resources are, in times of social crisis, extremely vulnerable to compromise; and

2) Information networks that rely on the ‘End to End Principle’ – that is, networks that join two end points without particularly caring how those two points connect – are still subject to compromise, but the damage can be mitigated either by routing around trouble spots or by connecting to different end points.

In short, the core design principle of the Internet, the concept of the ‘end to end’ network, is inherently democratic, empowering the individual at the expense of central control.

There’s a great deal more to be said about how this actually plays out in practice. In particular, the ways in which we store, access and transfer our data and, most importantly, our conceptions about who the data and the network actually belong to both have a direct and visible impact on the ability of our communications structures to survive stresses like the ones currently being imposed in Iran.

At the heart of the issue is an ongoing, unresolved tension between the sometimes anarchistic, sometimes communitarian nature of the Internet and the tendency of networks to be constructed, owned and operated according to centralist principles.

Put most simply, Internet users want to be able to share data as they see fit. Network operators – be they governments or corporate entitities – tend to frame the issue as: ‘My network. My rules.’

The question, ultimately, is: Who should control communications?

Both sides can make compelling arguments within their particular context. Network operators quite rightly want to be sure that they’ll be able to get a return on their investment and to protect the resource against abuse. Network users, again quite rightly, don’t want to be told how ‘their’ data should be handled.

And just in case the conflict wasn’t untidy enough, there’s a third side to this issue: Some information providers want to retain control over their data. It’s expensive and time-consuming to produce, they argue, and they have a right to be rewarded for their efforts.

Major content interests, including media sites, music and video producers, have therefore allied themselves, philosophically at least, with the network owners. They have accurately concluded that if you control the means of transmission, you control who can access your data, and how.

Whatever its inspiration and motivation, such an approach is inherently undemocratic. In the worst-case scenario, as we’re witnessing in Iran right now, it leads to abuses that subvert the right of people to express themselves, individually and collectively. In more generic, consumer-related terms, its effects are more subtle.

An uncomfortable compromise currently exists between the inherently democratic forces of market capitalism and more centralist approaches. While upstart players in the media and communications markets tend to subvert established rules, larger, more resource-rich entities tend toward control. (It’s not unusual to see upstarts move from the first camp to the second as they mature.)

The general trend these days, both philosophically and practically, seems to be toward centralised control. Media sites and media playing software want you to stream video rather than save it (and, heaven help us, share it freely with others). Network operators fight back against so-called ‘peer to peer’ software because it maximises ad hoc network usage on an individual basis and subverts the traditional client/server network, which has clear points of control.

There is a concerted, industry-wide move afoot toward a ‘pay to play’ approach concerning all data transferred over our networks. Rather than selling access to the network, elements of the communications and media industries are increasingly focused on charging for access to the data itself.

This has the (sometimes) unintended consequence of putting a price tag on democracy – at least, on how democracy is expressed via communications networks. If you’re wealthy enough, you can have access to all the information you want. If you’re poor, you’re increasingly limited in what (or how much) you can do on the Internet.

Pacific Islanders, living and working as they do with extremely limited communications resources, would do well to study this phenomenon and to consider its implications.

I’ve been following a few different stories these last few weeks. Thousands of miles apart and separated by decades, they might seem at first to have little in common.

The first is the story of over 500 websites in China that have decided to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by voluntarily taking themselves offline for ‘non-technical maintenance’. The censored are boycotting the censor.

The second story is the ongoing suppression of media in Fiji. In a June 2nd statement, Fiji’s interim Permanent Secretary for Information, Lieutenant-Colonel Neumi Leweni indicated that the current state of emergency would continue into August at least. It’s not clear whether this means that state censorship of media will continue as well.

The last is a story of the Australian movie ‘Balibo’. The recently-released film recounts the story of 5 Australia-based journalists killed by Indonesia during the 1975 invasion of East Timor.

Following decades of patient, determined investigation, the facts of the Balibo case have at last come to light. In the years following the murders, nobody – not even Australia – wanted the full extent of Indonesia’s depredations in Timor to see the light of day. Through a combination of determined neglect and deliberate distortion, countries in the region and across the globe allowed Indonesia to act with impunity against the Timorese people.

All of these stories have one thing in common. Every single one of them has been shaped by our collective complacence. The passive-aggressive self-imposition of censorship by Chinese website operators is more an act of sullenness than outright protest. According to one commentator, the increase in censorship activity in the lead-up to Tiananmen’s 20th anniversary is a “minor annoyance for most, perhaps making them remember, but they don’t care that much.”

I suspect that many Fijians outside of the media establishment feel more or less the same. If media coverage and letters to the editor are any indication, it seems that many of us in Vanuatu and throughout the region concur.

Contrast this with the lavish media attention devoted to the Balibo Five, as the murdered journalists have become known. John Tebbutt, a senior lecturer in media studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, writes that this story has inspired the creation of a feature film, 5 books, 7 reports and an investigation by East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. In addition, he writes, “[t]here are thousands words in newspaper, television and radio reports.”

International coverage of the Tiananmen Massacre was intense at the time. But since then, it’s dwindled significantly. Though it’s trotted out from time to time and used to deliver a rhetorical rap on China’s knuckles (US Secretary of State Clinton did just this recently), the suppression of truth in China continues unchecked. It is, in fact, aided and abetted by numerous US-based Internet companies who, fearful of ‘missing out’ on the lucrative China market, compromise themselves in order to remain in China’s good books.

Some people I’ve spoken with on the Fiji issue have suggested that more pressure might be brought to bear on the Bainimarama regime if it was of any geopolitical importance. But, lacking influence in the outside world, average Fijians are left to cope on their own with the stifling effects of a censor that won’t allow bad news of any kind to circulate.

The flow of information creates influence. The ability to bring significant media resources to bear on an issue – or conversely, the ability to block its scrutiny – has a distorting effect on how we view history.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people died in Beijing’s streets as the People’s Liberation Army advanced on Tiananmen Square, but all most of us remember is a single man who, for a few brief minutes, blocked a column of tanks.

Years of effort have been expended finding out the exact circumstances of the death of the Balibo Five. But nearly 200,000 Timorese people – 20% of the entire population – died as a result of the Indonesian invasion and occupation. Where is their movie?

And what will historians have to say about this period in Fiji’s history? How will daily Fijian life be recorded if nobody cares to see?

The wealth of nations is often measured in monetary terms. I say it should be measured in how that wealth is used.

Investment in media and in the mechanics of free speech and open exchange of ideas creates immeasurable wealth. Such wealth will never appear in economic reports. It will, however, define our history.

In a recent Daily Post story, Minister of Education and local UNESCO representative Charlot Salwai rightly decried poor attendance at the conference on Vanuatu’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. Unless we invest time and effort in recording these critically important aspects of Vanuatu’s culture and kastom, they will be lost.

The tragedy of such a loss may pale in comparison to the others on this page, but that distinction is a matter of degree, not of kind. The lesson in every case is the same: If we do not invest in our history, it will be utterly lost.

Update: Omitted from the print version (for space reasons) is an obvious corollary to this conclusion: If we leave it  to others to invest in our history, it will be as they see fit to record it. A recent post from a China expert on the Huffington Post illustrates this nicely. While the Chinese have invested no small resources in denying or distorting important aspects of the 1989 protests, Western journalistic and historical writing has been quite selective in its interpretation of events as well.

I came across the following exchange (translated from the original Chinese language) on a technical news site today. This series of comments come from Xiaonei, a Chinese blog site, following a post about the recent global economic meltdown. (The writers’ names have been obscured for reasons that will become obvious):

AAA: Well written!! But why can’t I share it [i.e. link it to social media sites like Facebook or LiveJournal]?

BBB: Yeah, I can’t share it either. Must be because it’s today!

000[the author]: Well, I can post it, you guys should be able to share it….

CCC: [a few comments about the actual content of the article]

DDD: I guess Xiaonei is having problems recently. Anything with numbers seems to run into problems.

AAA: Anything with certain numbers runs into problems around this time of year….

EEE: I’m sure this maintenance is perfectly normal, as it is for all other Chinese websites right now. [sarcasm]

BBB: There is no spoon~~! [this in English]

FFF: Wow, nice word choice guys.

Mystified? You wouldn’t be if you had to deal with state censorship on a day to day basis. Today – the day the comments were being posted – marked the beginning of a worldwide observance of the 20th anniversary of the disruption by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army of the pro-Democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students, citizens and onlookers died when soldiers, backed by tanks and other armoured vehicles, advanced on the square, shooting as they went.

While protests had erupted in larger population centres throughout the country and continued for some days after Tiananmen Square was re-taken, the focus of the 1989 protest was in Beijing. Despite the involvement of nearly 1 million people at the height of the protest, most Chinese have little or no access to factual accounts of the events.

Those who remember the events, or who wish to speak about them, are left with few options save the kind of oblique references seen in the comments above.

(The phrase ‘there is no spoon!’ is a reference to the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which a young computer hacker discovers that he is being kept captive in an oppressive computer-generated virtual reality. In this context, the comment appears to be an angry refusal to accept the reality being foisted upon the writer.)

Following a crackdown on so-called Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, MySpace and their Chinese-language counterparts that encourage sharing of comments, photos and links to information of interest between friends and peers, many sites took a novel course. As this column goes to press, over 500 websites are reported to have been brought down for ‘non-technical maintenance’.

One of them, thequietsnow.com, offers the following message on its main page (again, rendered here in English – spelling and grammar per the original translation):

Due to a reason we all know this site is presently under maintenannce.

The site will be under non-technical maintenance from 3. Juin to 6. Juin

[...]

For a harmonious environment, to make an appeal to create a harmonious sociaty, I advice all webmasters and internet users to do the following during maintenance period;

1. Go out for a walk, get some fresh air, due to the hot weather, please wear a white t-shirt

2. Since the current internet is extremely unharmonious, in order to create a healty and harmonious internet environment, please put all your websites into “maintenance state”, in oder to provide a better net environment

3. If you don’t want to put your site into “maintenance state”, please change your site into black and white colors, in oder to provide a better net environment

4. Please put your site onto the maintenance spreedsheat.

The ‘spreadsheat’ in question is a file hosted at Google Documents, listing over 500 social websites and their related ‘maintenance’ messages. Most of them make the same kind of oblique references, implying that they would rather shut themselves down voluntarily than be shut down by the State.

Perhaps the most fascinating element of this protest is its inherent cynicism. Most of the commenters limit themselves to wry observations, similar to the way we might comment that ‘It’s getting a little windy’ as a hurricane approaches. Even the angriest among them resorts to an arcane popular culture reference.

The person who translated the comments above writes of the commenters:

[T]hey’re masters at not using any words censors would find suspicious. But they’re all at least aware of it, even if its a minor annoyance.

“And it will probably remain just that: A minor annoyance for most, perhaps making them remember, but they don’t care that much. The ones that really want to protest will just use text messages or IM anyway, and even the hardcore democracy types know where the line is drawn. For the most part, it seems really unnecessary. If they really wanted to organize protests, they’d have been organized long before the 3 days before the anniversary, and then use texting or cells or IM to expand. I doubt there will be any protests to speak of anyway- the Chinese sort of have a silent agreement here, they know where to draw the line.”

They don’t care that much. They know where to draw the line.

An entire society has adapted itself to living in an environment wherein they can go about their daily lives normally, as long as they do not make themselves or their opinions known to the authorities.

One is inclined to wonder whether Fijians will become similarly inured to the censorship regime imposed by Commodore Frank Bainimarama. Recent reports indicate that the state of emergency will be extended until August at least.

Perhaps the greatest danger of State censorship is its ability to integrate itself into daily life. Provided that its exercise doesn’t affect too many of the people too much of the time, it quickly becomes an environmental factor like mosquitoes, bad weather or the common cold. Just something to be taken in stride.

Because it’s today, because elsewhere in the world people are trained from birth to avoid dissent of any kind, we would be well served to imagine how we would feel, were we in the same boat.

My greatest fear is that most of us would get used to it.

Because it’s today.

Note: Because of public demand for a printable version of this column, here’s a PDF version of this week’s column.

This week, I’m going to give over much of my column space so that other voices can be heard.

Over the last two weeks or so, there’s been an animated and quite fascinating discussion on the VIGNET technical mailing list. VIGNET is a mailing list service provided by the Vanuatu IT Users Society (VITUS) in order to contribute to a public dialogue about all things to do with technology. With over 220 subscribers, it represents a significant number of people working in IT in Vanuatu.

Following the roll-out of Digicel’s GPRS mobile Internet service, concerns have been raised about children and youth in Vanuatu having access to unsuitable content, especially pornography, through their mobile phones.

With nearly 100 messages from dozens of different contributors, the discussion was illuminating, intelligent and remarkably respectful, especially given the delicacy of the topic. What follows is a small but representative sampling….

Some of the commentators suggested that responsibility for what our children are getting from the Internet begins at home. Russell Mujee wrote:

“If a parent is aware of the bad contents their Kids are accessing then they should call customer service to disable their Kids GPRS – And only to allow access later under their Authorization.

“The other option is to buy mobile phone(s) WITHOUT GPRS for their Kid(s).”

Jane Kanas replied to support the idea that, while we can never entirely block undesirable content, we should do everything we can to arm those in our care with the moral and ethical sense to cope with its unwelcome influence. She ended with a pithy and simple sentiment:

“Shape the mind to shape the action.”

Nambo Moses echoed this sentiment:

“The instructions we obey today… the future we create.”

Edward Williams added his voice, and warned against externalising the blame for this content:

“[Y]umi no save ronwe, ko isolatem yumi wetem ol pikinini afta traem blong saed long technology.

“Yumi stap lukluk iko longwe tumas, blame Digicel, olgeta we oli providem internet long fones. Responsibility istat long house fastaem. I gud ia Digicel i allowem blong kat GPRS long ol fones.

“Sam papa mo mama naoia i mas stap long house mo toktok plante wetem pikinini. Irresponsible parents [i letem] pikinini mekem rabis fasen.

“…[T]eachim gud pikinini blong yu…yumitu no save ronwe ia….Fulap istap kam iet.”

Writing from California, one interested observer suggested that we pay close attention to how other countries are dealing with the very same issue:

“Vanuatu is in a unique position as they can learn from other country’s mistakes, observe some of the issues that technology brings, and use knowledge gained as a basis for forming policies, or at the very least be aware of the risks that come with advancements in technology.”

Some people suggested that it’s all well and good to say responsibility begins at home, but that the majority of adults in Vanuatu are largely uninformed on the issue. Replying to Williams, Sum Abiut wrote:

“I don’t think parenting alone can put an end to this thread. Do parents really know who their son/daughters class mates or friends are? I don’t think so, they might be hanging out with some bunch of teens who took advantage of this service to influences other teens to watch porn. No one is blaming Digicel or [any] ISP here. It needs team work to deal with this threat.”

To which Williams replied:

“[T]eam work won’t be very effective if some bunch of lazy people are depending on yumitu mo other people sweating themselves out trying to put some rules in place preventing all these happening, and they don’t take the time to teach their kids.”

Joseph Toara raised the issue of law enforcement. Stating that Vanuatu already has laws prohibiting indecent material, he asks why aren’t they being enforced on the Internet?

“Long internet every thing is there, unless i kat filter. Hemi no mekem sense blong kat wan law we i blockem people blong karem [porn] magasine i kam long country while yu letem internet open nomo olsem.”

Numerous people offered their support for this proposition.

Makatere replied with “two cents worth”:

“Whereas monitoring all traffic at the gateway? Thats a small step towards becoming a Police state. Big Brother anyone?”

The debate swayed back and forth around the issue. One contributor, signing on with the name Big Aussie, reminded us that this problem is a little like trying to squeeze the air out of a balloon:

“Trying to hide or block these things only makes them hide, making it even harder to control access to them.”

I offered a few thoughts of my own. At the core of the issue of enforcement is the legality of the measures taken to protect people from these influences. I worried about constitutional issues, including the rights to freedom of conscience and speech, and the constitutional prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

Furthermore, the license agreements currently in place for our ISPs have no requirement to filter content for any reason. Imposing further conditions on them might create a great deal of concern for their lawyers, especially because of the implications raised about legal liability for the actions of their customers.

Ironically, it would be easier to for them to provide such services voluntarily to those people who wanted to subscribe to them.

More than anything else, though, I worry about the potential for abuse. The problem with installing a filtering system on our core networks is that everything we say and do on the Internet would become visible, and I fear that the temptation to look for material other than pornography might become overwhelming. If experience elsewhere is any guide, it’s not at all unreasonable to fear that political rivals, jealous lovers and people indulging in petty vindictiveness might use these tools to abuse someone’s privacy.

I’m a strong supporter of content filtering in schools, businesses and those private residences that want it. But history teaches us that when such overwhelming surveillance power is given to the state, the worst outcome is the most common.

Kenneth Fakamuria countered with an excellently reasoned response:

“The bottom line is that it is illegal to be bring pornographic material to Vanuatu. In the pre Internet era this law was enforced through customs and immigration. Now of course thanks to internet technologies, pornography is easily accessible in many major centres in Vanuatu. Does this make pornographic access any less legal? No, but it has made the law much more difficult to police.

“It was for this reason that I suggested that further action should come from government – to further enforce this law. And one suggestion was to filter pornographic material from the source. It is much easier to filter from one source than to let it pass 20,000 lines which will require 20,000 filtering actions from the many islands in the country where internet is accessible.”

Joseph Toara offered the following conclusion:

“[L]ong end blong day, yumi man Vanuatu yet bae i dicidem wanem we hemi good blong yumi.”

There is a great deal yet to be said on this topic. VITUS considers it critically important that the people of Vanuatu educate and inform themselves about the new influences – both good and bad – that our newfound levels of access to the Internet introduce to us.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

This statement was first uttered in 1993 by John Gilmore, Internet pioneer and co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Since it was first quoted in Time magazine, it’s become axiomatic, an unanswerable trump card to be played whenever the issue of Internet censorship arises.

There’s a good reason for this. Numerous efforts by governments, institutions and organizations to impede the free flow of information have achieved mixed results at best and, more often than not, failed. Only in places like Tibet and Burma, where the government owns and closely controls the information networks, has any kind of comprehensive censorship been successful.

The Internet was designed as a ‘network of networks’ – that is, a communications medium that effectively had no centre of control. While it never completely achieved that aim, it’s still a vast departure from the monolithic telecoms networks that we used to have.

The presence recently of Sulu Censors (so called for the skirt-like traditional dress many of them wear) in all television, radio and print media outlets has largely neutered Fiji’s traditional media. But the flow of information has simply found a route around this ‘damage’. In recent weeks, Fijians at home and abroad have flocked en masse to the Internet to get their fix of national and local news, uncensored by the Bainimarama regime.

Internet Pioneer Mitch Kapor’s assertion that “[Internet] architecture is politics” has never been more true.

New Zealand journalist David Brooks, writing for Agence France Presse, reports, “With Fijian journalists contributing material, these blogs are filling the gap left by the muzzled media.”

Countless blogs have sprung up like flowers across the Internet in reaction to the media crackdown. With names like Coup Four and a Half, Fiji Coup and Fiji Uncensored, they’ve made their raison d’etre clear. While a few leave no doubt that they have very particular axes to grind, the majority are replete with well-sourced, insightful news, commentary and analysis.

Their posts run the gamut from solid investigative journalism, detailed commentary and analysis to often ambivalent personal narrative and opinion.

Perhaps most surprising is the generally balanced, often quite nuanced understanding of the situation that many of these sites display. There’s relatively little knee-jerk polemic on the most popular sites.

The public seems grateful for the continued provision of useful news. The Pacific remains largely forgotten by researchers studying new media and communications, so there’s little relevant data to be had, but the few available tidbits indicate strongly surging interest in their content. According to the Alexa web analysis service, fijicoup.org has seen a 210% increase in traffic recently. It also reports that the Coup Four and a Half blog (which has been online since George Speight’s 2000 coup) now has over 430,000 incoming links to its material.

Some of the material is attributed to known and reputable commentators, while a good deal more comes anonymously. It’s therefore necessary to carefully parse the data for hidden agendas and bias. But that’s true of nearly all online content, precisely because it’s so much easier to disseminate information through the Internet than by any other means.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is not usually a difficult task. It’s pretty easy to glide past screeds lamenting “typical ignorant … coupsters in their coup coup world…” and on to more rewarding content.

The contrast to engaging and thoughtful analyses by people such as Father Kevin Barr, an economic and social justice coordinator of the Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education and Advocacy, could not be greater. Father Barr’s commentary reflects long familiarity with the events and people that led Fiji to its current impasse.

Interestingly, Fijians’ engagement with the online world seems to be limited to finding news and information.

As I write this column, I’ve seen no indications of uptake by politically concerned Fijians of social media – that is, websites designed to allow friends, relations and like-minded individuals to communicate and collaborate. I could find no coup-related groups on the immensely popular Facebook website. An online petition to voice opposition to the Bainimarama regime had garnered only 99 digital signatures when I visited.

In the short term, at least, it appears that there won’t be anything like the so-called Twitter Revolution, where thousands of Moldovan political activists apparently organised themselves using SMS and the Twitter short message service as they took to the streets in protest.

Indeed, the bulk of the content being posted to the various coup-related blogs is being copied straight from traditional media outlets located overseas. People, it seems, simply want the news they’d been accustomed to getting.

It seldom pays to speculate too much about technology and the countless ways in which people interact with it, but in the absence of anything better than a smattering of anecdotal data, I’m left with few alternatives. With that proviso, I’ll make a few observations about the way in which Fijians seem to be reacting to the sudden dearth of uncensored news via traditional media channels.

First, it seems clear that, far from becoming outraged or even particularly angry, people seem simply to have worked around the Bainimarama regime’s attempts to squelch unwelcome news and then got on with their lives. Scattered reports of discontent in certain locations or among elements of the Fijian Armed Forces notwithstanding, people seem to be willing to acquiesce to the regime, at least for the time being. They do not, however, appear to be willing to tolerate any reduction in the information they use to judge the situation.

The amount of online personal interaction seems to be quite low. I strongly suspect that’s due to the lack of personal computing devices with ready Internet access. If your only source of Internet access is the café down the road, you’ll hardly want to do more than scan a few pages for the latest news. Writing a 500 word screed against the current regime or engaging in heated discussion in an online forum would be too expensive and quite possibly more than a little risky.

Underlying everything, I suspect, is the distinctly Pacific tendency to sit and listen patiently and at immense length to others before venturing an opinion of one’s own. In the decidedly un-scientific survey I made of coup-related content on the Internet, very little of it offered any explicit opinion on events being reported.

I take great comfort and encouragement from the fact Pacific islanders have taken up the communications tools available to them, used them to work around the shortcomings of their environment and – most important of all – made them distinctly their own.

With headlines like ‘Man Gets On Bus’, and ‘Breakfast As Usual’, Fiji’s beleaguered fourth estate is reporting all the news it feels is still fit – or safe – to print. Such stories are a reaction to Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s extensive power grab this week, which included the abrogation of the national Constitution, removal of judges and senior financial figures, expulsion of Australian and New Zealand-born journalists and censorship of domestic media.

One particularly riveting feature, titled ‘Paint Dry’, recounts the couch painting adventure of a man named Max. The paint, he recounts, “went on wet, but after four hours it started to dry…. That was when I realised, paint dries.”

I expect it ran with a four column headline.

In solidarity with my Fijian colleagues, I’ve decided to write about nothing as well. Happily, this is easily done. Even though Port Vila is home to the Melanesian Spearhead Group and PM Edward Nipake Natapei holds the chair this year, I am glad to say that I have nothing to report.

Despite being uniquely positioned to provide sober diplomatic counsel to the increasingly isolated Fijian dictator, despite what our PM describes as a fraternal relationship with one of our closest neighbours, one with whom we have a unique trading relationship, whose culture closely resembles our own, we and our Melanesian brethren have decided to do exactly nothing to prevent Fiji’s descent into constitutional, social and economic crisis.

So, in the space where I might otherwise have observed that, in throwing out the Constitution without so much as a ‘by your leave’, Commodore Bainimarama has left himself with little room to manoeuvre, let me instead tell you just how lovely my frangipani tree is this year. Its fragrant flowers, tinged in the softest rose and yellow hues, have a transient, fragile beauty.

Were this a column of any substance, I might remark on their similarity to Fiji’s tourism industry. Stunning beaches run for miles, uncluttered by tourists. Boutique resorts, once frequented by backpackers, lie picturesque and empty, their charm neglected, their staff sent home.

Instead, I can devote this space to the weather. The gloomy overcast, high winds and heavy rain that beset us this last week have at last cleared away. Were MSG members inclined to do more than bicker over the cost of renting an apartment in Port Vila, I might have been forced to draw an analogy to a ray of light shining across the region after a stormy political setback. Happily, no such comparison is necessary.

I have to admit that I’m glad. It’s so much easier to write about my family’s Easter celebration, which featured much laughter and too much pizza and chocolate, than to venture into the delicate and inordinately complex dynamics of a well-meaning commander who may truly believe himself the defender of his nation, but whose soldier’s philosophy prefers the rule of force to rule of law. I would much rather recount how my 3 year old niece shrieked with delight when she saw her photograph appear on my computer screen than try to explain to an uncomprehending world how this 54 year old self-styled protector of justice has allowed things to come to this pass.

Far better to dwell on the simple pleasures of a walk through Vila’s market house than to wander down memory lane, enumerating the countless failures in democracy and governance experienced by every Melanesian country. Totting up the list alone would take up half my word count. Explaining the many causes, the patchwork quilt of kastom, the tightly raveled web of filialism represented by the wantok system of patronage and support, would require volumes.

Layering on the cross-cultural tensions between ethnic Fijians and their Indo-Fijian neighbours would have been near-impossible. Explaining Bainimarama’s simplistic logic of using arbitrary measures to cast out these inequities and injustices – well, that seems to be beyond the ken of most international commentators. Thank heavens, then, that I can content myself with a pastiche on the variety of life and colour in my garden.

And Heaven help me if I had been left with no recourse but to prognosticate. How could I hope to properly characterise the patient, determined diplomatic dance that represents Fiji’s only hope of escaping economic, political and social collapse? If I had to describe the potential for outright destruction of the very things that the Commodore genuinely wants to defend, to lay out in simple terms just how far from the democratic fold he’s drawn his nation, I honestly don’t know if I’d be up to the task.

How to encapsulate a manageable framework to honestly and positively perform a stock-take on the state of democracy in Melanesia after its first generation of Independence? Engaging in the renewal of political and social engagement, shaped into a uniquely Melanesian form, is truly a place where even our brightest political angels fear to tread.

Small wonder the leadership of the Melanesian Spearhead group would rather issue non-statements, preferring a sincere tut-tutting to action.

Let’s go one better and join our silenced Fijian brethren watching paint dry.

As with all public content-filtering schemes, this idea is well-intentioned, but fatally flawed.

National content filtering is an inefficient and fundamentally faulty technical approach that deputises the nation’s Internet Service Providers to the role of neighbourhood sherriff, something they’re not at all comfortable with. Second, and more importantly, it creates a dangerous legal and moral precedent that is difficult to distinguish from the infamous Great Firewall of China, which is regularly used to stifle social and political dissent.

Indeed, a spokesman for the online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia recently said, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”

The issue of content filtering is, on the face of it, appealing. The idea is that one should be able to block objectionable material in order to make the Web ‘safe’ for children.

In principle, that’s a commendable thing. Indeed, it’s the responsible thing to do in certain circumstances. The Vanuatu IT Users Society strongly supports the Ministry of Education’s decision to use content filtering software in its schools. Adults have a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that their children aren’t endangered in any way, and content filtering is a useful tool in this regard.

But technology alone is not sufficient to protect our children. The number of websites producing content unsuitable for children is immense, and content filters simply can’t block all of them, even if they’re updated every day.

And content filtering comes at a price. One important shortcoming of this technology is that it often blocks perfectly legitimate material as well. Over-sensitive filters applied over-zealously often have absurd results. In one famous case, an online service replaced the letters ‘a-s-s’ with ‘butt’ and ‘t-i-t’ with ‘breast’ every time they appeared on their site. The result looked something like this:

“We have buttiduously canvbutted the industry, buttessed what is available and buttembled the finest selection of contractors for this buttignment. The filters will buttociatively clbuttify all communications and filter then, I can butture you, rebuttemble them with surpbutting exacbreastude in any quanbreasty.”

Jokes aside, content filters have their place, but it is not on public networks. In every pluralistic society, there will be a huge variance about what people consider acceptable and what they do not. To be sure, there are some things that all of us decry, but there are many more that we could never agree on.

Attempting to find a single set of rules to apply to an entire nation is a fool’s errand. It’s certain to create acrimony and accusations of censorship.

Whether intentional or not, there would be censorship, too. Content filtering systems typically mis-identify between 2 and 10% of all content. In strictly numerical terms, this means that millions of websites would be falsely blocked.

Studies conducted while assessing Australia’s national content-filtering scheme found that various candidate services slowed traffic down 18 to 78%. An individual school or household might be able to justify this kind of slowdown, but to enforce it on an entire population would unfairly jeopardise online business activity and make everyone’s surfing experience feel like walking waist-deep in treacle.

Australian Senator Steven Conroy angrily denounced concerns raised by opponents of the plan, saying “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.”

That’s a disingenuous argument at best. And it’s more than a little worrying that the very minister with the power to limit what citizens are allowed to see is so contemptuous of reasoned criticism. With a national content-filtering scheme in place, he would have the ability – and, he might say, the mandate – to block such dissenting views entirely.

The mere principle of the thing is troubling. In order to block illegal content, you have to see what every bit of traffic is doing. In effect, it’s like stopping every driver on every road, every day, just in case one of them is drunk.

Happily, such a thing can’t happen here.

Vanuatu’s constitution explicitly constrains the government from conducting illegal search and seizure. It cannot interfere in the lives of its citizens without cause. Creating a national content-filtering system here would be likely be found illegal, because it amounts to government inspection of all its citizens’ private communications. The Supreme Court would never allow the government to listen to every telephone call, to open every letter or even to read every postcard sent. Content-filtering on a national basis would be effectively the same thing.

In this age of technological innovation, it’s often difficult to fight the temptation to treat every challenge as a technical one. Information and communications technology has done much to simplify our lives, and has made some things possible that we only dreamed of before. It also creates any number of liabilities. It presents new threats to us on a regular basis.

Ultimately, we combat these threats as we always have. We look to ourselves and our community to protect our values, we try with every step to stay on the straightest road. We use our own good judgement.

And the one thing that computers will never possess is judgement. They can never take the place of a strong moral compass, that sense of right and wrong that we learned in the arms of our family, our church, our community. Any attempt to replace this fundamental good sense with a tool loaded up with any number of arbitrary rules is bound to fail.

Freedom comes at a price. We know that some people here look at pornography. We know that criminals conspire over the phone. We know that people write objectionable things to one another. But that doesn’t give us the right to treat the entire nation like potential crooks.

The vast majority of people are law-abiding individuals, and it’s one of the tenets of a free society that we assume every person is innocent until they demonstrate otherwise.

The people who manage our national infrastructure face the constant temptation to peer and poke into our communications, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not. But just because they can doesn’t mean they should. The desire to snoop is a temptation that must be resisted. I am sure that if it came out that one of our telephone companies were eavesdropping on our calls, there would be a national outcry. Listening in to a nation’s Internet communications is just as intrusive, and should be just as vehemently opposed.