[Infowarrior] - As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue

[Richard Forno]

As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue
By NOAM COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/technology/internet/22link.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

TO censor the Internet painlessly, undetectably, is the dream that  
keeps repressive governments up late at their mainframe computers.  
After all, no users are so censored online as those who never see it.

The Iranian government is carrying out an Internet crackdown in hopes  
of subduing the protest movement that has surged since the disputed  
results of the presidential election on June 12. At the same time, the  
Iranian government has been sending out the police to restrain  
protesters and foreign journalists.

Thus far, however, the Iranian government has learned the difficulty  
of trying to control the Internet in half-steps. Because the  
government’s censorship efforts are so evident — transparent, even —  
there is a battle raging online to keep Iran connected to the world  
digitally, and thus connected to the world. Sympathizers around the  
world are guiding Iranians to safe access to the Internet and are  
hosting and publicizing material that is being banned within Iran.

If only Iran’s leaders had thought through the implications of what  
can be called the Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship, as  
propounded by Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman  
Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His idea is  
deceptively simple: most people use the Internet to enjoy their lives,  
and among the ways people spread joy is to share pictures of cute  
cats. Even the sarcastic types (who, for example, have been known to  
insert misspelled messages under pictures of kittens) seem to be under  
their thrall.

So when a government censors the Internet, it had better think twice:  
“Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites,” Mr.  
Zuckerman wrote for a recent talk. People who could not “care less  
about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government  
fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the  
millions of banal videos” and thereby “block a few political ones.”

As it happens, Mr. Zuckerman said, the Iranian government’s censorship  
task has been made harder because there is a thriving blogging  
community there, which he attributes to an earlier Iranian censorship  
campaign against traditional print media, in 2003. Writers flocked to  
the Internet. This fact, combined with a history of blocking access to  
social media tools since at least 2004, means that a large group of  
computer-savvy communicators “have had five years to figure out” how  
to get their message out.

They have learned about all manner of “proxies,” that is, improvised  
ways of evading censorship — often connecting to a computer outside of  
Iran, which then can connect to the Internet freely. In earlier cases,  
the important news that bloggers had to share on a social network  
might have related to soccer, or a certain favorite pet, but today  
those same tools are used to get the word out about protests and a  
spirit of defiance within Iran.

 From his experience as a founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of  
citizen media from around the world, Mr. Zuckerman says he has learned  
to value the roots laid down by a community of bloggers.

In Kenya, he said, bloggers were important commentators and reporters  
in 2007-8 on a disputed election, and people would ask why there were  
so many bloggers in Kenya.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in  
Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are  
writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent  
capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write  
well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

The Russia-Georgia war, he said, offered a contrast.

“Suddenly a bunch of people flocked to blogging tools,” he said. “We  
had never heard about of lot of those people. A number of people were  
manufacturing blogs from whole cloth for propaganda purposes. It was  
hard to know who they were, if they were credible. In Kenya, we knew  
who they were; we knew their favorite rugby team.”

There are practical benefits to the mainstreaming of political protest  
online. It presents another barrier to censorship.

Mr. Zuckerman said there had been discussion about having a dedicated  
human rights site — “and we realized that it will be the most attacked  
site in the world,” he said.

“The response,” he said, “is to say let’s go in the other direction —  
encourage anyone that has a human rights site to mirror it everywhere,  
including sites like Blogspot.com with lots of noncontroversial sites.  
It is kind of hard for Iran to block Blogger.com well, not that it is  
hard, but it is complicated. They would have close down a lot of  
blogs, including blogs with cute cats.”

Beyond the practical benefits, there is something satisfying about a  
country being assisted by ordinary bloggers who suddenly show their  
skills in organizing and belief in basic political principles. It  
harks back to heroes like the Roman leader Cincinnatus, a farmer who  
had to be persuaded to lead the republic in a time of need and after  
succeeding quickly returned to the farm. Any functioning society needs  
professional politicians, just as any modern society needs political  
blogs, but it is good to be reminded that leadership and political  
voices can come from other ranks.

But, Mr. Zuckerman reminded me, “You have to have the sword at home.  
You don’t want to have to buy a sword at the last minute.”