If dictators are so fond of the Internet, as some claim, why did Mubarak turn the damn thing off?

In the space of its short life, this
column has emphasized the dynamics of the information age as of extraordinary
but poorly understood relevance to skepticism as both a system of thought
and a movement within society. Ongoing events require that this now
be explained in a bit more detail.

Since 2005, I have been involved
to various extents and capacities with the Anonymous movement. For the
past year, I’ve been in communication with several of its most active
participants, including one who had been outed by the Church of Scientology
after helping to launch Operation Chanology, a global campaign intended
to remove that organization’s grip on lives and government agencies
alike. And for the past month, beginning with the Anonymous movement’s
assistance programs to Tunisians, Algerians, and Egyptians who seek
to win their freedom, I’ve become more actively involved in tactics,
messaging, and now legal defense for my fellow Anons. Some have been
raided by the FBI and other agencies, which have been investigating
a campaign involving DDoS attacks against financial companies—those
that had given in to government pressure to deny their customers the
ability to donate to Wikileaks. All of this is now in the public record,
and I confirm it here as a prelude to the subject of this column and
in the interest of full disclosure.

We are coming to the close of a two-decade
debate over whether or not the explosion of communicational possibilities
brought to us via the information age is sufficient to allow a subject
population and its supporters to overthrow a government and perhaps
establish a freer one. In light of the demonstrably key role that the
Internet played in Tunisia and Egypt thus far, and in a certain small
sub-Saharan country soon enough, that debate should be coming to an
end. Nonetheless, it will go on forever, because certain people are
impossible to defeat via argument alone because they are invincible—at
least in a rhetorical and professional sense.

A few months back I argued that Foreign Policy editor Eugene Morozov
was not qualified to assess the above dispute, being incompetent on
the subject and having at any rate committed himself to a certain position
that was silly even before recent events rendered it sillier still.
“Tweets don’t overthrow governments; people do,” Morozov proclaimed
then, thereby dispensing with those who have presumably gone around
claiming that Twitter will gain sentience and begin liberating populations
into a Greater Social Networking Co-Prosperity Sphere. Out of fairness
to Morozov, I’ll note that he does make somewhat more cogent arguments;
out of fairness to everyone else, I’ll note that his arguments tend
to be of the following caliber: “Neither the Iranian nor the Burmese
regime has crumbled under the pressure of pixelated photos of human
rights abuses circulated on social networking sites.” Thus it is that
the infancy of the information age has not yet brought down two of the
world’s most repressive regimes.

As I noted then:

Not only has Twitter failed to
take down either of the two regimes Morozov lists, but one of those
regimes has attempted to use the service for its own ends. Indeed,
the Iranian authorities have been as eager to take advantage of the
Internet as their green-clad opponents. After last years protests in
Tehran, Iranian authorities launched a website that publishes photos
from the protests, urging the public to identify the unruly protestors
by name. We are not told how effective this turned out to be or
why this necessarily cancels out the effectiveness of Twitter in organizing
the protests to begin with or how the fact that dictators use websites
shows that they are not being undermined by the use of Twitter. The
fellows talent is being wasted in socio-political commentary when he
could be writing mystery novels.

Today, I have a better and slightly
less catty answer to Morozov regarding the question of whether or not
the Internet is a greater boon to dictators or to populations. Rather,
I have a question, for him and for everyone else who has spent the past
few years building their careers on this incompetent brand of pseudo-skepticism:
If dictators are so fond of the Internet, why did Mubarak turn the damn
thing off?

Former “President” Ben-Ali of
Tunisia did not turn off the Internet, of course, when Tunisian activists
began coordinating with Anonymous and other parties in taking down the
government’s websites and in some cases replacing them with messages
of support to the Tunisian people, thereby proving that their government
was not so powerful as it seemed; when Anonymous-affiliated journalists
began bringing attention to the nascent protests, in an effort to alert
those around the world who themselves were in a position to help Tunisia
succeed; when guides were written by experts and distributed by Tunisians
and other North Africans to the many among them who had no knowledge
of street confrontation, but who now know as much as any black-bloc
anarchist; or when the great and still-growing network of Tunisians,
Anonymous, and other parties began building darknets and other solutions
to the problem of government censorship and infiltration. Ben-Ali should
have done so, but he didn’t, and even if he had, many of the same
techniques used to reconnect Egyptians during the shutdown would have
been employed in Tunisia with similar results. Tunisia, incidentally,
is not finished with its ongoing troubles, but nor is this coalition
finished with its ongoing work, which will at any rate be ignored by
those whose professional interests coincide with those who would prefer
that we spend less time thinking up new ways to aid subject populations
and more time reading about how such a thing is impossible—despite
the evidence before our very eyes.

Contrary to all the evidence, there
are two general views on this matter: 1) that perpetuated by Morozov
and others like him who believe that such things as Wikileaks, Twitter,
Anonymous, and Facebook are not quite as relevant as many would believe,
and 2) that perpetuated by those of us who have used those very same
dynamics to prove that they are already more relevant than even the
most enthusiastic of us were
predicting not long ago,
when we thought in terms of years rather than the mere months it has
taken to proceed to the current situation. Everyone among the thousands
of North Africans and others who poured into our IRC channels would
seem to agree with the latter view, having consequently watched and
participated in those things which are necessary to making any informed
decision on the matter. When you have seen a teenage Tunisian girl translating
into French and Arabic the guides that were minutes before compiled
by activists living in five different countries and then passing them
on to her family and friends and then asking what else she can do to
help free her country—and receiving a dozen answers, all of them good—it
is difficult to take seriously the output of those whose first instinct
at such a moment is to downplay it in accordance with the opinions they
already held to begin with.

This dynamic will continue and will
have in fact already expanded by the time this piece is read, this being
an age in which events overtake the quickest of mediums (and the slowest
of dictators). Already a number of this column’s readers have worked
to promote such a dynamic, and we hope that more will join us at this
crucial time. Many operations are run out of irc.anonsops.ru in #OpTunisia and #OpEgypt; other efforts are
hatched at irc.freenode.net #projectpm. I may be reached at barriticus@gmail.com or, for secure communications by those facing
surveillance, transistor@hushmail.com. Join us for proof that in such a time as this,
one can act against tyranny in the time it takes to complain about it.

(For Freemary, who earned her name.)