On the 12th of January, David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, made a startling announcement: Google – and dozens of other companies operating in China – had been the target of concerted online attacks originating from China. Google also claimed that the attackers, targeting human rights activists inside China and around the world, used the activists’ own PCs to take over numerous GMail accounts.

These attacks used ‘0-day’ exploits, hitherto-unknown vulnerabilities in common software applications. In a Wired Magazine interview, security analyst Ryan Olson stated that the code itself was unremarkable, but that ‘the sophistication here is all about the fact they were able to target the right people using a previously unknown vulnerability.’

Businesses and governments face online acts of vandalism and attempts at corporate espionage all the time. Even this attack, which exploited flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Acrobat reader software, was ‘not ground-breaking’, according to security expert Mikko Hypponen.

‘We see this fairly regularly,’ he told the BBC, but ‘most companies just never go public.’

Running against tide of companies flooding into China, Google has retaliated against these intrusions by stating that they will no longer censor google.cn, their Chinese search site. If that can’t be done within Chinese law, wrote Drummond, it ‘may well mean having to shut down google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.’

With annual revenues of around US$150 million (some estimates range far higher), China is a small but significant part of Google’s global operation. Pulling out, however, is commonly seen as passing up on the largest single consumer market in the world. Virtually all large online search providers have quietly acquiesced to China’s diktat regarding search results.

Some, indeed, have gone above and beyond the call. Reporters Without Borders accused Yahoo of becoming a ‘police informant’ following the 2004 arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist. Yahoo had apparently exceeded the strict requirements of the law in granting Chinese authorities access to Shi’s offshore email accounts.

Microsoft, renowned for their winner-take-all approach to business, finds itself in a similarly subservient position. With trademark deftness, China largely de-fanged one of the most effective and brutal corporate negotiating teams in the world. Negotiators got virtually everything they wanted. China pays about 10% per license of what other governments do. They not only negotiated access to the Windows source code, they have to right to alter it to suit their purposes.

Just this week, both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and founder Bill Gates made public pronouncements simultaneously espousing the principle of Internet freedom and respect for Chinese law. They did not elaborate on how they intend to square this circle. Gates characterised Chinese censorship as ‘very limited’ in a recent interview on US network television.

For its part, China angrily denounced Google’s assertions, calling them inaccurate and suggesting they were motivated by outdated, imperialistic notions. They refused to draw any link between their censorship activities and the attacks on Google and others, stating unequivocally that such attacks are just as illegal in China as other countries. IT security experts remain convinced nonetheless that China sponsors such activities.

Despite strong pronouncements from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, most US businesses are holding their fire, according to the Wall Street Journal. Nobody wants to miss out on China’s rapidly growing consumer market.

The principle of Internet freedom is increasingly under attack in other countries as well. When questioned about their complicity in the suppression of Iranian online dissent, Nokia-Siemens’ phlegmatic reply was that they hadn’t done anything unusual. Most European and North American carriers are required to make wholesale surveillance and censorship possible, too.

Australian Minister Stephen Conroy has been steadily advancing an agenda that includes censorship of online material ‘refused classification’ by an Australian ratings body.

Businesses and governments both have reason to feel uncomfortable about the Wild West atmosphere that pervades the Internet. Its organised anarchy and ability to reformulate itself from one day to the next makes it a threat to many traditional business practices as well as to governments leery of dissent.

Increasingly, network carriers and content providers are cooperating to introduce measures to make the Internet a ‘walled garden’ rather than an open range. This implies a top-to-bottom approach encompassing centralised networks and wholesale filtering, copy-protection technologies and the criminalisation of file-sharing as well as computing devices on which only pre-approved software can run.

Yet again, people are seeking technological solutions to problems that are social in nature.
So far, Internet activist Perry Barlow’s affirmation that ‘the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it’ remains true. But with the increasingly evident willingness of corporate and government agents to create and use what MIT researcher Benjamin Hill terms ‘anti-features’, we may soon find that there’s nowhere else to route to.

Copy protection mechanisms included on CDs, DVDs and other media only serve to inconvenience legitimate users. People intent on copying quickly rip new versions and shared them widely. Likewise, content filters on individual networks are easily avoided through the use of relatively anonymous Internet cafés and proxy servers, allowing people to access contentious content even over rigidly controlled networks. Locked-down phones and computing devices are quickly ‘jail-broken’.

But with the imposition of control over the actual cables and connections through which Internet traffic passes, proponents of Internet freedom lose their ability to manoeuvre. Their data can no longer route around censorship. For them, the damage is complete. The Internet has effectively ceased to exist.

Anti-features such as copy protections, filters and firewalls add to the cost of accessing information. They make things harder, not better. It would be far cheaper to rely on people to establish ethical and moral norms than to impose technical solutions which do little to deter the determined and much to inconvenience everyone else.

Often enough, their closed nature makes anti-features more susceptible to 0-day exploits, exactly the kind of attack that left Google and dozens of other companies so exposed.

Such measures have only one significant virtue: Technological solutions don’t require the consent of the people.

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.

NOTE: In a small place such as Vanuatu, it often happens that one has to wear a number of different hats. I work as an IT consultant, offering advice and information to clients in the private, public and civil society sectors. I am also a writer and photographer. I volunteer some of my time to help with local IT projects, and I serve as interim secretary of the Vanuatu IT Users Society. This column is written under those auspices, but from time to time my professional work bleeds into the area of advocacy and awareness-raising. In cases where I have a professional involvement or interest in a particular issue, I will make that clear within the text of the column.

No writer is free from bias. This is especially true of columnists. While I make every effort to ensure that any facts and statements appearing in this space are properly corroborated, I reserve the right to interpret them according to my own experience, judgement and insight. It’s my job to have an opinion. Unless I state otherwise, the views expressed here are my own.

Everyone knows that expression, and many of us have to grapple with its practical implications every day. When we’re tracking down the person who knows how a particular thing works, digging through arcane data in order to become the person who knows, or whether we’re trying to pry special knowledge loose from a reluctant source, we find ourselves operating in an economy of scarcity.

When we trade in knowledge, we also rely on its scarcity to determine its value. If we have a juicy piece of gossip about someone, we don’t tell it to everyone and their dog. Instead, we parse our words and choose our confidants carefully, sometimes teasing them with partial revelation.

Let’s reformulate that initial statement, then:

Scarce knowledge is power.

If we follow the logic of that sentence, we are prone to conclude that widespread knowledge is therefore valueless. In the cash economy, if there’s too much money floating around, we experience inflation. Dollars lose their value because everyone has them. This has led some barstool philosophers to conclude that opinions, too, are of little value because ‘everyone’s got one.’

So why do we value some opinions over others? Well, if we work within the exclusive realm of an economy of scarcity – in a situation, for example, where access to certain kinds of information is limited to a privileged few – then it stands to reason that an expert’s opinion is of more value than a lay-person’s.

That’s why we spend time every Sunday listening to our pastor or priest. If he’s doing his job properly, he’s sharing the wealth of his theological study and understanding with us. In effect, we’re benefiting from our investment in the church by receiving the wisdom of its teaching, derived from long hours of study and contemplation of arcane and sometimes extremely complex issues.

And that leads us to another observation:

The flow of knowledge is wealth.

Isn’t this assertion fundamentally subversive to our initial premise? If scarce knowledge is power, how is it that we are all enriched when that knowledge is no longer scarce?

Throughout human history, a tension has existed between specialised and generalised knowledge. It’s not by accident that one of the first things the trade union movement did in 19th Century England was to educate the workers. An illiterate, uninformed workforce was much more susceptible to the influence of those whose privilege gave them access to information, be it political, social or factual.

One of the reasons the Paris Commune of 1871 failed was its inability to get its message out to the entire population. This allowed the government of the day to isolate and ultimately defeat them. (They also suffered because their lack of access to good information led them to draw dangerously flawed conclusions about what was best for society, and for numerous other reasons as well, but I risk turning this into a history lesson, so let’s leave it at that.)

Many people believe that the nascent Chinese pro-democracy movement was successfully crushed in Tiananmen Square within the space of a few weeks because the government of the day had nearly complete control of the national media.

If scarce knowledge is power, then, enforced ignorance is an exercise of power.

Freedom of speech, especially the right to publish ideas, has been a cornerstone of free societies for centuries expressly because it’s seen as a tool that empowers the general populace. It provides a check to the worst abuses of power.

But every free society puts limits on free speech. There are some things that we as societies just don’t want to allow. In effect, the generalised flow of certain kinds of knowledge creates information wealth for the wrong people. Seditious speech, incitements to violence or hatred and affronts to common decency are all kinds of knowledge that various societies have agreed are detrimental to the public good.

But doesn’t that contradict the assertion that the flow of knowledge is wealth? Only somewhat. The assumption here is that, like Pandora’s Box, once certain kinds of information are released to the general public, they can only be used to act against the interests of society as a whole.

There are some things we just don’t want to know. There are some things that we simply should not see. It’s easy to get lost teasing out the nuance of this statement, mostly because the values of ‘some things’ and ‘we’ vary from one example to the next.

A parent won’t introduce the concept of death to a two- or three-year-old child, because the prospect of mortality is just too overwhelming for them. Likewise, images depicting bloodshed and gore are offensive to many, adult and children alike. A doctor, on the other hand, needs to be able to quickly and accurately identify numerous different injuries. Ignorance, for them, is not an option.

But the doctor is an expert, not only because she has a wider, deeper context she can bring to bear on such images, but because she has learned how to process them and how to use that knowledge to save lives.

When we accept that the flow of knowledge is wealth, we require a different definition of expertise. Expertise is no longer someone who has privileged access to special knowledge; expertise consists of knowing how to process it, knowing what to do with it. The more such expertise is shared, the more we all benefit.

When we invest in this kind of individual expertise, it is accompanied by a covenant that the exercise of knowledge will not be abused. In order to ensure that the covenant is not abused, though, we all need to become knowledge experts.

Widespread distribution of once-scarce information and the changing nature of expertise will inevitably present some challenges to Vanuatu society. It will always be in the interests of some to limit access to certain kinds of knowledge.

This tendency needs to be resisted. No matter what we may feel about certain kinds of information, we cannot afford to act in ignorance.

Now, we as a society might decide collectively that we don’t want to access some information sources. That’s perfectly fine; every society does this. Indeed, the inflationary effect of common knowledge is negated when we pool our collective intelligence and will and apply it to a common cause. It was the universally held idea of independence, after all, that created Vanuatu in the first place.

But when we delegate access to information itself to others, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, they will inevitably come to realise that, the more they enforce scarcity on the information economy, the more their own power is reinforced.

Knowledge is power; the flow of knowledge is wealth. Both belong in the hands of society as a whole.

I don’t often talk about my motives. Newspapers, in my opinion, make lousy confessionals. I’ll make an exception today, because it helps make a point.

I recently experienced a curious moment. I’d spent a sunny Port Vila Saturday at the office catching up on email, news and whatnot. There were a couple of stories in the local newspaper about communications companies setting up shop here, there was a link to a story about ‘eternal’ airplanes – unmanned spy planes that never have to land. There was a story about spy agencies listening to our Skype calls. One about radio tag implants for everyone, so we can be tracked more easily.

I locked my screen, turned off the lights, and headed out of the office. The sun was westering, drifting almost level with the bay. An acquaintance happened by and invited me for coffee.

I found myself curiously disoriented. It’s happened before, and will no doubt happen again. In the course of a few steps, I’d traveled from an echoing data chamber to a sleepy village where strangers don’t exist.

My friend and I talked about trends in communications and IT. Both of us were from the same city, and both of us have worked for years in high tech. He worked the marketing side, and I on the technical side. Now, here we were in Vanuatu, trying to make things better for people.

This guy comes from the world of big things. Big money, big business, big trends. He worked for several large corporations, and even had a stint as an analyst for the Gartner Group.

I like Big Things, too. I tend to find them in small things, though. Rather than read reports containing in-depth, detailed survey results covering Leading Indicators and such, I prefer to watch how people do things and then sit back and wonder ‘So what if everyone did that? Or what if no one did that any more? Or what if they did it this way? Or what if they did this too, as well as that?’

So we chatted. I told him about how cheap and easy it would be to roll out wireless Internet in Vanuatu. Prices for really cool gear have fallen to commodity levels, and enthusiasts have developed some very funky software. As he began to see what I was getting at, he interrupted me and said, ‘You know, you could get tons of funding for that sort of thing.’

Thinking he meant donor money, I nodded and explained that we’d likely need a proof of concept first, and besides, it might be easier to simply fund it one village at a time by developing small-scale commercial services, like a pay-per-use community email service.

He replied, ‘Yeah, but how do you scale that? Just think – you get a mining company to subsidise the roll-out, because it would mean they could control their operations way more easily, right? Then, you bring more industry on board, and… then you sign a licensing deal with Google or Microsoft, who give you a nice fat chunk of cash for opening up a new revenue stream for them. They’d love to lock into something like that.’

I carefully put my coffee cup down. Ignoring how nutty his idea was, I said, ‘It’s true that you could make a decent chunk of money like that, but you’d basically guarantee that the network would be closed to the poorer people.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but you could make a fortune.’

I’d like to report that that was the point when I beat him over the head with a chair. I’d like to, but I confess that I honestly thought that somehow he didn’t understand. I mean, this guy was a volunteer, working for peanuts in a developing nation. And yet the merest whiff of cash was enough for him to unabashedly disavow everything he’d worked towards these last two years.

Perhaps too gently, I asked him what would be the point of creating something so plainly designed to make the rich richer by keeping the poorer folk down. From the look he gave me, I’d just as soon have asked him why math works.

‘Dude,’ he said, ‘you could make a fortune.’

The problem, quite frankly, is that I don’t want to make a fortune like that. If I did, I’d never have left my old job.

But these days, I look at the increasing control that the Powers That Be are gaining over that wonderfully anarchic appendage of modern culture that is the Internet, and I am immediately nostalgic for the 1990′s, a time when they just didn’t get it, but it didn’t matter, because we geeks did, and we could do anything with it.

Well, the 1990s are just about to start in Vanuatu. And I want to live them again. And maybe, just maybe, change the outcome just a little. At least a little. At least here.

It’s nostalgic and foolish, I know. But I really just want us to be free.

Digicel and TVL will very soon be providing us with a level of service that we’ve only dreamed about before. But their job is not to be exciting and innovative. Their job is to be solid, reliable and stable. Both of them have large-scale corporate underpinnings that guarantee the product they provide.

Having two players at the communications table is vastly better than having only one. Especially when the second player is Digicel. Reports coming from the Caribbean, PNG, Samoa and elsewhere indicate that they will make an aggressive play for control of as much of the market as they can get. They are not complacent; they do not compromise or accommodate others unless it serves their goal of market dominance. Their business strategy is to provide better coverage at lower cost than anyone else, and to leverage that into a dominant position in every market they enter.

To be clear: Most observers agree that Digicel’s strategy in Vanuatu is not to keep TVL honest, nor is it to share politely with them. Digicel wants the entire market, and will do what it takes to earn it.

That’s excellent news for Vanuatu. In the short term, we can rely on competition to create a ‘beauty contest’ atmosphere, with each player offering more and more services for less and less cost. It will be exciting to watch, and even more exciting to participate in, especially as we take advantage of these new tools to bring kastom into the information age.

But let’s not pick up our pompoms just yet. First let’s be clear about what we want. The best possible outcome for Vanuatu is a knock-down drag-out fight between the incumbent and the newcomer that goes on more or less forever without a clear winner.

We already know what happens when a company becomes complacent about their services, and starts thinking more about the fortune they could be making and less about the services they could be providing. It will take a while, but that time will almost certainly come again.

Through careful management and regulation, the government of Vanuatu can make sure that such complacency is a long time coming. Above all, Vanuatu needs an environment of continual exploration, not exploitation.