 and I've worked at the Institute for a few years. And when there's something particularly interesting, I think I have to open my desk. Ah, very good, well I have your book in my desk. So we had a real eye-opener maybe two, three years ago. You were chairing Jonathan's, a train came in, and he stunned everyone in the room by saying, in preparation for the Olympics in China, the Chinese government had a system where they could identify everyone, at any point in the stadium using their mobile phone. And this was explained to a US congressman who was visiting just his jaw dropped because of the implication. Well, the question I am is, in a sense, when you say what you're saying, you're going up against a very powerful, within the tech world anyway, very powerful consensus of utopianism. And one great thing that's happened is that there's been a lot of publicity around your argument. But behind the scenes, what kind of responses has it elicited? Are you now officially the black sheep and people overturn your calls? Or are they being a bit more mature and have things moved on a bit? Well, it's my main, you know, frenemy, if I may use this ill-American term, has been the US State Department, where in part it's not because I fantasize America or think that they're the most important player, but in part because when it comes to internet freedom agenda, as I call it, they've been the only player that has put forward any kind of strategy. Until very recently, European governments have mostly been missing from this space. And now with an exception of maybe Sweden and the Netherlands and partly Denmark, I didn't see anyone entering this space with any sort of forward-thinking internet freedom agenda. I mean, the Brits are doing something, but it's mostly in the cybersecurity domain. It's not at all smart thinking about what should we do to promote the interest of Chinese dissidents or any dissidents or whatnot. So when it comes to the State Department, I've been very critical of certain parts of it and receptive to others. They don't have a monolithic structure. There are, there is a lot of infighting going on there. And some people are more receptive to my message, particularly those working in human rights, than, say, those working on innovation. But just to give you an example of how great that infighting and misunderstanding is, last December, the Department of Dulls with Economic Development and Innovation within the State Department, the Bureau, gave an innovation award in recognition of corporate excellence, the Cisco, the company that the other part of the State Department hates really passionately for supplying censorship technology to China and others and would never recognize its contribution to any sort of corporate excellence. So there is a lot of infighting, but I think the State Department, in a sense, complimented me very nicely by hiring one of my research assistants for the book to become part of the Internet Freedom desk, actually. So I have now a spy. But I'm better than the enemy. But I wouldn't say there are also many other issues here. I mean, there is definitely an intellectual and cultural argument, who is me arguing with many people in Silicon Valley who think about digital culture and technology. But there is also an argument on the policy level. There is an argument within policy makers in Washington. There is an argument with companies and Google and Facebook and others because there are certain policies, not to mention all those companies selling surveillance technology. I mean, I don't get Christmas cards from them either. But with regards to Google and Facebook, there are certain policies that can change there that will definitely benefit dissidents all over. Facebook, for example, has this very tough and to me, inexplicable stance on anonymity or do you sub-sudenance on the site, right? So if you're a Chinese dissident who uses a pseudonym to communicate with others, even if everyone in your country knows you by the pseudonym, but you cannot produce the first page of your ID that shows that that's your real name, Facebook will disable your account, right? Which does not exactly help Chinese dissidents. And which happens regularly. Last year there was an interesting and bizarre case when someone complained about the Facebook account of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, you know, the Russian olivar who was in Siberia in prison and Facebook demanded that Khodorkovsky sends the first page of his passport to prove that it's actually him. I'm not sure how he managed that, but there are certain issues, right? Within players who are not as bad as, say, Cisco, that also need to change and some companies are more receptive than others. I found that Google was generally very receptive and they eager to listen and they eager to learn. So is Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter are less so. In Facebook, I don't know for how long they'll be able to get away. It was a very, I think, juvenile stance on this issue. They still haven't joined this thing called the Global Network Initiative, which has a consortium of various groups, companies and players including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that basically said we want to abide by a certain set of rules when it comes to freedom of expression and human rights. And Facebook said we can't join it because we don't have the money to pay $250 fee. We know the gravity of almost the bill in a year. So I mean, and they managed to get away with it by telling us how great they are at promoting things and ideas like frictionless sharing and whatnot, which for me is just a nice euphemism for Big Brother, but that's a different point. So I mean, it's hard to say. Different people in different groups have different agendas and some of them find my arguments receptive. Some of them hate them. Some of them would rather I not make that argument because it will result in more regulation on all their businesses. But no, people do return my calls. I mean, you're in a camp with maybe, Jeremy Laney, it's not necessarily, you would say the same thing that he says, but you're kind of traveling in that maybe circle of engineers or engineer like people who tend to be utopian. And when one or two people who should be listened to, Jim Bupendem and say everyone else's wrong, it's a sign of maturity maybe that everyone else is actually receptive and that you're not being frozen out and that your problems with the corpus. So it's actually, this is a better answer than I thought. I thought you said, well, you know, everyone says I'm totally wrong and those relationships have broken down. But if they haven't, maybe. Well, they haven't. I've been surprised as well. I'm not even talking about the popular audience. In Europe, in America less so, but in Europe in certain countries, there is a particular discipline in this message. Some of it may have to do with people's anxiety about privacy, which essentially stems from my broader argument. I haven't talked about it today at all, but I have a very big argument about, say, the future of facial recognition technology, right? About facial recognition technologies and how- Facial hair. No, no, no. Well, that's not used for authoritarian purposes yet. But facial recognition technologies, for example, right? The way in which you can, what the Iranians did in 2010 after the Green Revolution, right, or 2009, right? What they did was to basically should collect all the photos from the protests that were uploaded to Flickr, right? And YouTube and elsewhere. And they would publish those photos from the protests on government-run news sites. And they would circle the faces of people they don't know and read. And they would ask any visitors and any people to identify the people in the photos. And if you believe Iranian news agencies, they identified and arrested more than 40 people based on the tips that they received from people who saw those photos on government-run news agencies' websites. What you can actually do if you're smart enough is, and if you have the right technology and if you happen to be on Facebook, is instead of asking people to do it manually and use the practice of crowdsourcing, as people would call it, you can actually start comparing photos from the protests with the much broader set in the universe of photos that have been uploaded to Facebook from parties, sports events, you name it, and then start comparing faces and those photos with photos in the protests and thus manage to identify who those people are based on the photos that those very people uploaded to their Facebook profiles. Right, again, so there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. And a lot of people who don't think about the future of China or Iran grasp that argument very easily, and they see that there is a huge privacy issue here and they see how it can be abused by the employers, by the insurance companies, so there is generally sensitivity to that passage as well. I was calling it learning in the Irish Times. Really interesting presentation and about surprising people who find it shocking and appalling, you know, shocked that this is happening because it seemed to me to be an obvious counter approach to what's been happening. And just the point that you were making with the facial recognition fits into the question that I have, which is, how would you fit in what happened with the riots in Britain over the summer? Because to me, the initial response out in the lobby sphere was an awful lot of people who had really been the champions of social media saying, oh no, they're not using social media in quite that way. They're just using blackberry texting or something and trying to somehow say it's really only ever used for good causes and it seems to fit into some of that argument that you're making and also the use of the police to identify rioters and posting those publicly fits in kind of status. So there's kind of, it seems to be used on either side. So there are, you know, I had a very short time today, so I didn't really go into all of my arguments at all, but there are two layers to my argument at least as I explain it in the book. One is what I talked about today and it's broadly what the internet does to authoritarian states, right? They're purely engaged with some empirical data and adding those and facts and trying to make sense of what's actually happening on the ground. The other way to my argument is how we talk about what the internet does and why we talk about it in a certain way and why we tend to prioritize some features in disregard others when we talk about the internet, right, and this is a much more intellectually and culturally happy layer because you really have to understand the cultural background in which we understand the internet and try to understand the meaning of the internet. For example, one of the arguments I make in the book is that you could not understand the current excitement about the power of social media in Washington if you do not understand how all of those experiences relate to the similar experiences that senators had when fighting the Cold War with radio broadcasting or the smuggling of propaganda or some is that technology and photocopiers and then fax machines and whatnot. There is simply no way to grasp it because the very metaphors that policy makers in Washington use to talk about the political power of social media, a metaphors that essentially come from that whole world. So they describe blogs in terms of fax machines. They describe bloggers in terms of dissidents. They describe firewalls in terms of the Berlin wall. It's all documented. I have a quote after quote showing that that's the vocabulary that they operate with. So on a broader level, I think the reason why this argument sounds obvious, because I do find it obvious that the internet is primarily a platform for collecting, gathering, sharing information. And if you think about it very, you know, not even very deeply, you will see that say an institution like Stasi or KGB was all about collecting gathering information and manipulating it in one way or another. So it's very obvious, but it's not obvious yet for many people in part because I think they have a certain cultural bias and a certain set of assumptions that guide their thinking about the internet and they immediately prioritize its one feature and that one feature is spreading information by dissidents against powerful structures, right? They don't see all those other features because a certain dominant, I would say, American vision driven strongly by commitment to First Amendment on free expression has taken over our imagination. And if you think about it historically and culturally, most of the thinking that has been done about the political and cultural consequences of the internet in the last 15 years has been done by lawyers, has been done by professors of law, people like Laura Lasek or Jonathan Zittray and Ahoy Benkler or others, who are very smart, but they all come from the legal background and the legal background just tends to stress the questions of First Amendment in America above everything else, right? So, I mean, there are many issues. Why, you know, there are many reasons why I think a certain narrative dominates. That's one of them, but again, there is also duplicity in the very set of the internet freedom agenda as they argue in the book because it's not just pundits or social media experts who tend to see the bright side and not engage with the dark side in the foreign policy context. That's very important to understand. When you listen to Barack Obama address domestic audience, so he would go and talk to high school students or university graduates in America, somewhere in the Midwest, he would say, oh, you know, we are bombarded with information. It's all information junk. We need to make sure that we know how to discriminate against different sources and we know how to understand and we need new media literacy and iPads and Xboxes and the internet and mobile phones. They result in us basically having some kind of overexposure to information and information overload. And it's almost the direct quote from one of his pictures that he gave in 2010. Nine months before Barack Obama went to Shanghai, he painted a completely different picture. You know, the freer information flaws, sooner authoritarian governments will fall. Access to information on the internet allows us to mobilize and organize and hold our government in check. It's a completely different story and the same goes for Hillary Clinton. When she's secretary of state, she talks about internet freedom and how blocks undermine dictators. When as a senator, she talked to her constituents and she talked to people who would elect her, she would say that, well, we need to limit access to the internet to kids beyond 12 because they would see all those horrible things and play computer games and the internet is evil. I mean, that's the kind of mass issue here. So there is definitely a discrepancy there and it's very hard for us to imagine that say people in China or Russia, I mean, not to defend their governments can have similar concerns about the disinformation or overload or all those other issues that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have when they speak to domestic audiences. Remember the Atlantic magazine had this cover story two years ago, is Google making us stupid? Well, you cannot imagine that cover that would say, is Google making China stupid? I mean, that's not the question that anyone would ask, right? Because the only thing that Google does in China is liberate them, right? But that's what the Chinese would think, right? So there are some very bizarre cultural issues here that need exploring and it's equally unimaginable that we would acquiesce to say, Russian or Chinese internet company driving through our towns and taking photos of every single building in every single three-quarter, right? It would never be acceptable to America. All the senators would just be screaming that it violates our privacy and national security. You know, when an American company goes to China to do essentially the same, it's like, hey, it's great, you know? Promotes economic growth and what's wrong? Hi, I'm Tara in YouTube. I didn't mean that American company. So, I mean, I suppose, the tagging up in the London way of the thing, I guess, I've just spoken about all these censorship, different filtering and cyber-taps and DDOS and everything. And obviously, they're having quite a longer handle than what about things that some Western governments, like London, the UK government, is making the light of the human rights, saying that we're going to look into the possibility of shutting down that free messenger of such an event as to happen again. And I also then had a question, the point raised about what companies could basically do at, you know, a policy level. And I think with the arts brain, what we're still seeing out in Syria, the team I work with see that at the front line as it comes in, like, after two minutes of load, we see that. How are we to know what's the best way to know is this being uploaded by, you know, Assad supporters, or by, you know, unconstruing the truth, or how do we know if it's legitimate activists giving honest account of what's happening. And that's a difficult position for us to be in. Sure, I know it's not an easy position to be in. You chose to be in it, right? So I'm sure we'll figure it out. But to go back, I do want to say a few words about the London riots and sort of the broader question of whether we have a way to turn off social media, the internet and jail. You know, what bothers me within many of the debates I participate about the future of the internet is that there is a lot of, and again, a lot of this happens because, as I said, lawyers have dominated the conversation, but there is a lot of First Amendment extremism on this issue. So people think that if we find a way to turn off the internet, that would just be terrible. And, you know, very well, maybe, but I can imagine many more things that would be even more terrible. I'll give you one little example. So think about the Rwandan genocide, right? And the way in which radio was used by different ethnic groups to communicate with each other, oh, no, no, to spread ethnic hatred, right? And to incite violence, to basically call on their supporters to go and start killing another ethnic group. The debate that emerged during the Rwandan genocide was something around the concept called information intervention. That was very popular in the mid-90s, but people don't really talk about it anymore. And the idea behind information intervention was that, well, if this were to happen again, the West should go and find a way to jam Rwandan radio stations, in part because the conventions and laws guiding and banning the genocide would always overrule whatever laws we have about the free flow of information, which to me seems, by the way, reasonable. I do think that laws that prevent and ban genocide do overrule the rules about the free flow of information. And all of that was fine, and that debate was somehow forgotten, but imagine if this were to repeat today and instead of broadcasting through radio stations, those ethnic groups will be using online text messaging or some other means of communication. And text messaging, by the way, is used to fool ethnic violence in Africa regularly. We saw it in Kenya, we saw it in Nigeria, we see it happen very often where different ethnic groups would start basically asking their supporters to go and murder fellow citizens. And what are we to do then? So if a Rwandan ethnic group starts using online radio, and I know it may seem like a very hypothetical situation, but imagine that that's the case. So they start using this new technology that's advertised in every newspaper, this internet in a box solution, right? Which the State Department has been funding. The idea is that you wouldn't actually need to connect to the program internet, you'll have a mesh network, so people would be able to use gadgets and devices to communicate with each other, even though they may not connect more broadly. Aren't we supposed to investigate ways in which we would actually want to limit those activities? And again, I'm just putting it as a question because once that moment comes and Western politicians and policy makers have spent hours and days and months talking about ways in which we need to preserve the way in which the internet functions, and they will set such a high standard for themselves that they will fall short of it because they'll have to make a choice. And that will make them look hypocritical, just like they already look hypocritical when they're trying to promote internet freedom in the Arab world, while at the same time pushing through all sorts of extremely bizarre and silly legislation in America or the West itself to limit piracy or many other things, right? So I just want to debate that issue. And it is the same on the somewhat similar level you have this debate about the use of cyber attacks. You have Hillary Clinton in one of her internet freedom speeches basically say that countries who engage in cyber attacks deserve to be punished and deserve to be condemned. She didn't add a footnote to that speech to say that actually America is one of those countries and has been doing it very systematically. To give you an example, two years ago, the CIA set up an internet forum aimed at Iraqi jihadists. They basically wanted jihadists and Iraq to start communicating with each other and plan and discuss terrorist attacks. And America would of course, as the operator of that website, would have inside knowledge, told the attacks. So in a sense it was some kind of a honeypot where one part of the US government saw that they need that site to function for intelligence gathering purposes. Another part of the US government, people in the defense department were not particularly happy with that website because it was used to plan real attacks on American soldiers. So after two years of squabbling, they actually decided that the only way to take down that website would be to launch a cyber attack. And they launched a cyber attack and removed and damaged that website, damaged many other websites in the meantime, and that site was gone. If we go ahead and start decrying cyber attacks as Clinton did, we are more or less losing that option. If you want to remain credible in the eyes of people in the Arab world or elsewhere, we need to be careful with the language. So otherwise it just makes American and Western governments look like hypocrites. And it undermines their credibility with the Arab bloggers, the Chinese bloggers, Iranian dissidents that they want to defend, as bad as it is. Well, sorry, yes. Dennis Pottsman was my name. And it's the argument you're making. Yes, pretty obvious to me. Just like I'm sure that whatever technology was available before the governments tried to use it to help and control those who are against them. But it's two ways, three. Yes. And one of the examples, for example, you were talking about Belarus a lot. And a couple of months ago, the Russian activists redirected the website of KGB.by to Gestapo LV. And the Russian government wasn't able to do anything with it because it was online itself. And at the same time, like 5S, it's a very short period of time in history. When the printing press was invented, it took like 100 years before the first scientific article was published. And the whole examples, you're talking about those corporations which made aim to make money out of business like Facebook or whatever they are. And of course, like they're talking closely to the governments. My question is, what prevents us from, like right now, for example, from Occupy Wall Street Movement, there is open assembly, I'm sure that you've seen it. Like there is a technology and development which will encourage people to discuss ideas, to organize around issues, and to collectively engage with like different entities. And it's a question like why, what stops us, for example, from developing such a platform which owned by people, run by people, and founded by people? You mean as a means of communicating, as an alternative to Facebook or? Yeah, basically. All right. Several remarks here. I know that it sounds obvious, but you have to understand the intellectual sort of force I'm fighting against. There are lots of people in Silicon Valley and outside who think that the internet is somehow more than the sum of its parts. Who think that it's not just about facial recognition technology or the packet inspection of censorship, but there is a core set of ideas that were embedded in internet architecture that will result in a certain reshaping of political and social norms. And those are people who are basically making an argument that the fact that the internet is built in such a way as to make the information, the passage of information very easy and hard to block, that feature of its design will eventually lead to a certain feature, a new change in how we design our political and social institutions. All right, so what I've been arguing in a sense is saying that that's not bound to happen or that you completely misunderstand the internet and you actually, one of the things I'm arguing at the moment actually is that we need to stop thinking in terms of the internet as this huge cultural phenomenon and start talking about particular technologies. Because I think that when people operate with terms like technology or the internet, they tend to make so many generalizations that and they rely on so many ideological assumptions that are not obvious to them that eventually clouds their thinking and the results in very bad policymaking, right? So for me, to talk about the internet on a such a great scale is misleading because when people do it, they usually start by assuming that the internet is just a collection of various technological things. It's the domain names, the protocols, the tubes, through which information flows and travels. But the argument they end up making is about the internet as a cultural phenomenon, as a collection of all sorts of technologies like facial recognition, like the packet inspection and you name it, to various practices like social networking and chatting to corporations like Facebook and Google. So in a sense, the internet subsumes all of it but it means nothing to be arguing about those technologies as the internet, right? So in a sense, what happens is that people start making columns. In one column, they put all the good sides caused by this huge cultural monster they call the internet and that will be the spread of information, the empowerment of dissidents and bloggers and so forth. In another column, they'll put all the costs at surveillance and censorship and monitoring and cyber attacks. They will try to sum up whatever it is in each column and then they will arrive with an answer whether the internet is a little bad for promoting democracy. I just think that's a very intellectually bad and harmful way to go because you never know what exactly is on those columns, you would never come up with a definitive answer. But once you arrive at an answer and that's where the real problem begins, you go back and start re-evaluating each of those components in each column individually and you start thinking that, hey, as long as the internet is good and as long as it empowers people, we can overlook surveillance and propaganda issues and I don't want to do that. I would rather go and examine each of those technologies, work on them individually and actually have a moratorium on using the word internet for the next five or 10 years until we resolve all the issues. On the question of platforms, the easy answer here is that unless you ban a nationalized Silicon Valley and ban private actors to build social networking sites or to build video sharing sites, the private sector will do a much better job in terms of innovation and in terms of providing everything else, there are alternatives to Facebook. I mean, you have this diaspora site which people, but again, they're not taking off in part because you already have this huge entrenched players which satisfy many of the needs, but in part because you just don't understand the amount of resources you need to operate them effectively. I mean, just ask Google how much money they pay for their electricity bills. It's probably more money than GDP of some countries, right? So again, that's not something that you can do in a decentralized manner. I mean, there are certain uses to such commonly shared platforms and Wikipedia would be one of them as an example of a project that's not driven by commercial ethic and logic that managed to survive and do good. I just don't think that it will work for projects that require heavy use of data, individual profiles, that require things that the private sector is generally good at. So, I mean, I'm all for alternatives and equivalents. I'm just skeptical as to whether they will pose a real challenge. It's a little difficult with this kit, but it's not about today. It's about tomorrow it's going to be better. It's a younger generation who is now studying in school and going to university who are much more comfortable with technology to connect with each other, to organize with each other, to mobilize. Yeah. Well, you see, that's the kind of critique that falls under my cyber-utopian chapter book. Because I start, a lot of my arguments and a lot of the stuff in my book is driven by very real existing policy mega concerns. I know that there is a current policy in the State Department, say, on Iran or China. And I don't think that policy is terrifically effective, but I think it can get much worse if the thinking about technology is not skeptical enough or is not realistic enough. And this is where, you know, I would deal with different, different slides. I mean, I'm all for experimenting and thinking positively. I just don't think that those are the right attitudes you want to look for in a policymaker. That's skeptical as it sounds. But in a private life, sure, you know, let's be as you're talking as possible.