If the world of non-profit technology had its own stock exchange, I'd recommend buying lots of stock in Haystack, a censorship-circumvention software put together by California-based Censorship Research Center in order to help Iranians evade their government's control of the Internet.

Haystack's story makes for great Hollywood material: Bay Area technologists who serendipitiously discover that there is a bloody and violent world beyond Silicon Valley - the one where people rebel, fight, and die for real and not just as part of some new Facebook game - decide to dedicate themselves to the fight against authoritarian evil with the help of - you guessed it! - the Internet. They are the ones putting "Twitter" into the "Twitter Revolution"! And you too can abet their fight: they've got whole two Donate buttons on their web-site!

Not surprisingly, Haystack has been all over the media in the last few months - most recently in Newsweek -  with its founder Austin Heap getting quite a bit of attention from journalists and policymakers alike. This is, for example, what the ever-modest Heap told Newsweek:“Tomorrow I meet with [Sens. John] McCain, [Bob] Casey, maybe [Carl] Levin, but I don’t know if I will have enough time”. (Apparently, the senators have become much more tech-savvy since I left town; perhaps, this comes with age.) And it's not just American media: The Guardian pronounced Heap to be "The Innovator of the Year" -  personally I would have gone with "The Publicist of the Year" though - just check this photo - but then who am I to judge? (Moi - I am only invited to opine on the Snark of the Year Awards.)

I like Hollywood as much as the next guy - and yet something just doesn't feel right about Haystack. What really bothers me is that one cannot download and examine their software; as far as the Internet is concerned, Haystack doesn't exist. In fact, Heap says that it is only distributed to trusted contacts inside Iran; putting it online would create a situation where the government could easily get hold of it as well  and then reverse-engineer it or ban it or find a way to track its users.

So, in essence, the outside public - including Iranians - are asked to believe that a) Haystack software exists b) Haystack software works c) Haystack software rocks d) the Iranian government doesn't yet have a copy of it, nor do they know that Haystack rocks & works. (And who could fault them for not reading Newsweek? I certainly can't). For someone with my Eastern European sensibilities, that's a lot of stuff to believe in. Even Santa - we call him Ded Moroz - appears more plausible in comparison. 

While I don't dispute Heap's right to do whatever he wants with his software, it still strikes me as a very dangerous approach to empowering ordinary Iranians. First of all, the fact that no one can download and test it means that its flaws and vulnerabilities may remain unexposed for a far longer period of time than otherwise (I'm not trying to pull a Bruce Schneier but it may be useful to check this, for example).I'm not a cryptologist - but I'm yet to meet one who thinks that Heap's approach is justified. On the contrary - I'm in the anecdotal mode - plenty of cryptologists on the mailing lists I am on seem to be extremely cautious/skeptical of what Haystack has (or, as is the case, doesn't have) to offer. 

While I don't doubt Austin Heap's noble intentions, the world is not exactly running short on well-meaning Americans wrecking havoc on everything they touch. I propose that Haystack should first be tested on some friendly people with a nice government - say Canadians. They seem like a good bunch who won't imprison their dissidents; Iran, on the other hand, seems like the worst possible testing ground for Heap's new method - even if it works. So I say - Go Canada! - or stay home.

To me, it seems like a no-brainer: if you want to distribute technology that may endanger lives, make sure that the technology is secure. The only good way that I know of to make sure that it's secure is to let outsiders test it. All this stuff about cats and mice quoted in the Newsweek piece - I am yet to see Patrick Meier quoted in the context of authoritarian states without invoking that zoo-inspired analogy -  does not exactly sound very convincing - especially given that I like to define mice as "animals eaten by cats".

Second - and here I'm only speaking from my own Belarusian experience - it's naive to believe that the human networks that Haystack supposedly relies on to distribute the software won't be penetrated and compromised by the Iranian authorities. What are they - a bunch of losers? Well-funded and powerful NGOs - I'm not pointing any fingers here - have their Iranian offices penetrated and their staff arrested - and here we have some guy form the Bay Area who is building the most secure - even infalliable - network in Iran. Yeah right. Maybe he should go work for the DOD - they need such people to deal with all those (wicked-) leaks. 

So, helping you cut through the cynicism,  the argument that the software needs to be hidden from authorities at all costs strikes me as untenable; the only assumption I'm prepared to tolerate in the context of authoritarian states is that no software will remain hidden. Moreover, if the government does manage to get hold of Haystack and it is, indeed, so easy to break into that it needs to be guarded, then, lives of Haystack users are at risk as well.

So my question to all those journalists penning admiring articles about Haystack: have you guys actually seen the software? Have you tested how it works? Are you sure that those who use it are not automatically getting a free holiday in Evin prison? Or have you all been sweet-talked into covering a fancy piece of code that  - drumroll here - "undermines authoritarianism - without ever bothering to think of its downsides? This may seem like unnecessary moralizing - but it's hard to react otherwise when lives are at stake.

Now, there is no shortage of dumb and incompetent journalists writing about technology - and most politicians have no clue about encryption or censorship-circumvention technologies;  expecting John McCain to show nuance and sophistication in discussing Haystack - let alone Iran - well, let's just say it's not going to happen.

But elected politicians and the media are one thing; bureaucrats are another. The latter are being paid to be experts rather than talking heads who think in tweets or sound bites. And so far, the bureaucrats have failed badly. In particular, what bothers me the most is the way in which the current process by which the US government regulates the export of technologies like Haystack to  Iran ends up confering indirect legitimacy to the software.

To recoup: American entities cannot export most censorship-circumvention technology to Iran without first obtaining a license from the government. Earlier this year Haystack was granted such a license - something that was widely publicized by Haystack and something that even Hillary Clinton mentioned in one of her interviews (curiously, a monthly before Haystack announced it). Score 1 for Internet freedom.

Now, I'd very much like to imagine that Treasury officials who granted Haystack the license also happen to be uber-genious whitehat hackers who subjected the software to all sorts of security tests before making up their minds - and yet, somehow I can't really believe that. Can you? And what kind of world do we live in if we expect technology expertise to be concentrated in US Treasury? Last time I checked they still didn't know why all those flash trades went berserk a few months ago... 

Given how much noise Haystack has made in the media - see this column by Roger Cohen as an example - it's quite likely that the granting of any such license is a process marred by political pressure, especially from the hawkish part of the Washington establishment who would really like to use the Internet become a powerful weapon to be used against the Iranian regime. 

Nothing new here - except the fact that having such a license makes Haystack look like a tool that has been properly vetted by the US government. My fear is that it hasn't been properly vetted at all - not on its security merits anyway - but I doubt that either journalists, who are all too quick to pen another admiring piece about Haystack, or politicians, who finally found a way - they think! - to put Ahadinejad in the corner, get this big picture. The end result is that Haystack gets a very good platform to work in Iran, regardless of how insecure their technology might be. And who gets to pay for all these? Bingo: the Iranians. 

I am even sure there are plenty of conservative - and maybe even some liberal - foundations who would be happy to fund Haystack's work right now - without ever asking to test-drive the software. Good job, guys: it's like funding an automobile where the independent third-party mechanics are not allowed to inspect the brakes. Even the US Treasury folks, patriotic as they are, won't ever drive in this vehicle.

Now, I don't have anything against Austin Heap; for all I care, he may be just another nice guy - apparently, there are many of them in the Bay Area -  who, in between shooting the dragons in his favorite game,  just wants to help Iranians. He's not the first; he's not the last. God bless him. There will always be plenty of entrepreneurs eager to build a business of some kind - whether it pays in reputation or big bucks is another matter - around the needs and demands of the US foreign policy. I don't think even my powerful blog can ever end this practice, so I'm okay with the fact that Haystack will be around as long as Blackwater is around (or XE or whatever other new name they want to stick upon themselves today). 

What I really want to know is this: who in the US government was so smart as to grant Haystack this license? Can we actually see the name of that person somewhere on the Treasury's web-site? Let me break the news: we can't - there is nothing about Haystack on that site. Another victory for transparency in the Obama administration! But this is something that I do want to know - for this person (along with a bunch of irresp9onsible journalists - luckily those still have bylines) should and would be held responsible if some of Haystack's users end up arrested by the Iranian police.

Once again: I've got nothing against Haystack or Austin Heap per se. What irks me is the way in which the limitations of the current discourse on Internet freedom - and the bizarre, completely non-transparent policies that it conceals - end up conferring unneeded legitimacy to Haystack's flawed - for my taste, anyway - approach to fighting censorship. Some things, perhaps, are better left unfought - especially if the fight makes everyone but the fighters considerably worse off. 

p.s. The Newsweek piece also contains this gem of a quote from Austin Heap, which captures what's wrong with Haystack better than I ever could hope for:

“I hope we are ready to take on the next country...We will systematically take on each repressive country that censors its people. We have a list. Don’t piss off hackers who will have their way with you. A mischievous kid will show you how the Internet works."

How do I say "no, thanks"? 

Not long ago I already announced my return to the world of bytes, tweets, and pokes -- only to disappear for another three months. But this time I feel like it's for real: I am back! Spending nearly three months in a Belarusian forest, offline and surrounded by, well, "legacy media" of all sorts, has been a very exhilarating experience. Of course, it was also the worst possible summer to spend in a Belarusian forest -- what's with all those fires? -- but I withstood all the pressure (and no, I didn't meet any partisans).

This summer was full of technology & geopolitical news -- BlackBerry, WikiLeaks, North Korean tweets -- but I wasn't exactly shocked by any of the developments. The recent announcement that Iran is working on their own national search engine did not exactly shock either but it gives your humble blogger a good excuse to reflect on the growing politicization of the Internet in general and of search space in particular.

I've tracked the idea of national search engines for some time -- see my coverage of Russia's plans to do the same here and of Turkey's plans here; this summer we also heard some noises from China on that front.

Now, in the case of Iran, we know very little about this new search enterprise; some fear that it might create some kind of an intranet in Iran -- but that's about it. Let's assume it would be very expensive and very ineffective -- not unreasonable assumptions to make in the context of a sluggish state like Iran, which has a few other things to take care of before exploring the world of Web2.0 in all its glory. (For the record, I can't wait for Tehran to host a delegation from Silicon Valley).

So while the naive folks in Silicon Valley are singing praise to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's new investing behemoth with ambitions of world domination, I bet they have no clue that Kremlin has recently tasked Yuri Milner, DST's CEO and founding partner, with finding a way to police RuNet and cleanse it of all illegal content.

It's not yet clear what shape this would take but official sources inside DST say that Milner would work on consolidating the views of Russian Internet Service Provicers into a common position on how to deal with illegal content (see here for a detailed report in Russian).

The most interesting bit in all of this is that Milner - who is also an investor in two of Russia's most popular social networks, which are, ironically, leading distributors of "illegal content" in Russia, however you define it - has apparently volunteered for the position. Maybe, we should just adopt the Russian approach to content regulation on a global scale and also have Facebook's founder come up with his own laws for how to regulate his company (and wait, Milner is an investor in Facebook, too - maybe he can help there).

But jokes aside, I actually believe that Milner will be extremely effective in his job - much more effective than the lazy Russian bureaucrats. He may simply need a good excuse to purge his sites of weird, political, and harmful content - and what can be better than given carte blanche by the regime? 

That the Kremlin has a history of recruiting smart Internet talent for their own political agenda is not exactly a secret. What bothers me is that no one in Silicon Valley has the guts to start asking questions about Milner's role in what would inevitably become a great purging of the Russian Internet. Milner, of course, knows his way around the Internet universe: just this week, he charmed the tech gurus - and even Charlie Rose - with his grand pronouncements that "Facebook Is Going To Be The Social Graph That Unifies All Civilization" (that is, right before it destroys it through some nasty privacy flaw).

But Milner's high-minded talk is a poor excuse for not challenging the man about his cosy relationships with Kremlin; that a man who - even if somewhat indirectly - controls two of Russia's most popular social networks and has a stake in Facebook, is trusted enough by the Kremlin to help in their censorship efforts (Milner also sits on one of the presidential commissions) should be a cause for concern, not celebration.

But overall I'm kind of glad that Milner is giving Silicon Valley a rope to hang themselves. Privacy-wise, the only thing worse than Facebook is a Facebook owned by a Russian investor with strong ties to the Kremlin. 

Get seriously worried about the Internets. Surround yourself with social media gurus who don't know anything about foreign policy but have a gazillion Twitter followers. Try convincing the world that U.S. technology companies are your new ambassadors, out on a noble mission to spread freedom and democracy around the globe (things not to mention: oil, Iraq, Dick Cheney). Send their CEOs to Siberia, have them play beerpong with the locals. Don't dare mentioning how these very companies abuse freedom and privacy at home, on their own sites. Develop some ambitiously empty buzzword that could make your ridiculous theories sound somewhat convincing (try "21st century statecraft").

Disregard all but the most naïve and dubious assumptions in framing your "Internets problem." Grope for the nearest historical analogy -- the more inappropriate, the better -- and then misread it in a way that would confirm your original thesis. Assume the world hasn't changed since 1989. Remember that "Berlin wall" and "firewall" rhyme; use it to your advantage. Stock up on misleading metaphors that build on "cyber-" and "digital." Commision a few ambitious studies and major conferences to find more non-existing links.  Run a grant competition.

Rediscover the toxic ideas behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom and repackage them under the fancier label of Alliance of Youth Movements. Find a bunch of desperate and cash-strapped bloggers from a harsh authoritarian country of your liking -- you'll score bonus points if these hand-picked bloggers-cum-dissidents are completely unknown to anyone who lives there -- and use them as token symbols of your heroic fight to defend the Internets.

Arrange for POTUS to be interviewed by them. If they visit the United States, make sure they meet with a bunch of fringe neocons, keen on promoting regime change in the home countries of your token cyber-dissidents. Think of ways in which to secure a political asylum for them – for they'll probably need one after meeting all these luminaries. Remember to invoke Sakharov  when introducing them to the press: as in "Sakharov 2.0." The more "2.0 juice" you spread, the better: hence “samizdat 2.0”, "glasnost 2.0," and "Solidarnosc 2.0"  (basically,  any Slavic-sounding words with a 2.0 ending would strengthen your case – use them excessively - but watch the pronounciation!)

Meet a group of weird Chinese engineers who are equally confused about the "Internets problem" but are convinced that they can solve it through more engineering. Don't question the viability of such approaches: engineers know better. Ensure their solution solves the wrong problems, lacks transparency, and will convince everyone in Tehran and Beijing that they need to double their incarceration rates for bloggers. Verify that the engineers are as excited about 1989 as you are, albeit for different reasons. Make sure they have some bizarre political or religious affiliation that would make your partnership look extremely odd and geopolitically suicidal. Toy with the idea of giving them funding but decide otherwise, pissing off everyone and their uncle in DC.

Go visit the usual think-tanks in search of aging conservatives who feel nostalgic for the last years of the Reagan administration. Begin by telling them how much you appreciate their (otherwise non-existent) role in ending the Soviet Union by smuggling a bunch of Xerox machines. Practice your rudimentary Polish and Hungarian. Hold their hands  and salute Reagan's bust on their table. Proceed to enlighten them about blogs, tweets, and social networks. Watch their faces light up when they grasp the full implications of what you are saying. Surprise them by announcing that Cold War is now officialy back in town.

Remind them to go back to their private libraries and dig up that passionate but unpublishable op-ed they wrote in 1987, the one about tearing down the walls and all that. Have them add "cyber-" to every "wall" in that op-ed and advise them to resumbit it to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Act surprised on discovering that the last two paragraphs of their op-ed accuse you of not doing enough to support the revolutionary tweets coming out of Tehran.

Lose control of the nascent but increasingly dangerous debate about your favorite Internets. Convince everyone that you used the Internet to organize the post-election protests in Iran; if it fails, get in touch with Twitter executives and leak your communication with them to the New York Times. Continue telling everyone it was Twitter that caused the protests.

Make no effort to educate the public -- and especially editorial boards and policy-makers --  about the utter idiocy, inappropriateness and outright danger of operating on extremely simplistic assumptions about Internet Freedom. Instead, aggressively embrace those assumptions yourself and turn up the volume on your favorite Cold War songs. Dream up some fancy terms like "information curtain." Let everyone figure out what all that stuff actually means.

Distract everyone by dropping periodic references to the success of technology in rebuilding Haiti and monitoring (sham) elections in Sudan. Benefit from the ensuing confusion -- it buys time. Continue meeting with the weird engineers. Don't debunk any overblown and essentially unverifiable claims about the success of their technology in fostering a "Twitter Revolution” in Iran. Then tell everyone how much you care about Internet Freedom. Wait until your refusal to support the engineers looks extremely hypocritical and doesn't match your own overblown rhetoric. Write a check for $ 1.5 million. Start over.

* Inspired by Lorrie Moore's short story "How To Become a Writer" and the recent announcement that the State Department is about to give $1.5 million to Global Internet Freedom Consortium

Nothing can be more enjoyable than a vacation from blogging: my experience was just great! But now that the book is nearly done, I am beginning to slowly rediscover  the Interwebs. I am not sure how much I’ll last, as the prospect of spending the summer completely away from all the digital noise –offline and in the woods– is too hard to resist (fear not: I’ll be writing and distributing my blog posts through pigeon mail!). Or, since I already have a position on everything, I can just pre-write them in advance.

Anyhow, good news is that nothing important has happened in my absence.  The Internet is still (mostly) evil. Google is still viewed as a sum total of all human goodness on Earth (The New Republic even compared it to Sakharov the other day but here I am comparing them to Hitler for hiding that article under a paywall); “Internet freedom’ is still a buzzword that few people understand – and those who do are not the kind of guys you’d like to send to promote peace in the Middle East; and yes, we are at cyberwar (I’m writing this from a bunker). Below are my mega-vitriolic thoughts on some major developments in all three departments:

Google’s new “censorship transparency” initiative: meh. Given that Google owns different platforms in different countries, making lists of countries with the largest number of requests makes as much sense as saying how many gigabytes of search data (WTF you may ask - me too) are blocked by the Chinese. I have absolutely no clue what it actually means that Brazil leads the world  in Google’s tables of “evilness”.  After all, Google owns Orkut, a social network, and Orkut is extremely popular in Brazil. Social networks face completely different content regulation challenges than search engines. Comparing Brazil to Ireland is not going to make much sense, why even bother? Just because it makes for a nice map mash-up? Or because it further dilutes the public debate and presents Google as the Sakharov 2.0, waging a global struggle for everyone’s rights?

Last time I checked, though, Sakharov was not selling AdWords during his quest for democracy.  After all, tables that lack meaning still make for good PR. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for transparency but – here I speak the unspeakable, so you may  want to stop reading right here -  I also see nothing wrong with certain governments demanding Google to remove certain pieces of content . For you know what? In many cases, such demands are driven by rule of law rather than some vile censorship agenda: lumping all of them in one pile is as irresponsible as it gets, which, curiously, Google almost points out in its own FAQ.  Now, if only the same people who write Google's FAQs also wrote their press-releases.

“Internet freedom” debate:  it’s going south. In just three months, the well-meaning folks over at the State Department have lost all control over their own ill-thought buzzword. Conceptually, it’s no longer just a fancy way to describe defense of “freedom of expression” on the Internet; for all intents and purposes, it’s now seen just as another, cooler, gadget-friendly way to promote “regime change”. That’s how most hawkish conservatives see it – the recent George Bush conference on cyber-dissidents  is just another proof – and that’s how the rest of the world would see it, too. I am still puzzled that people at the State Department were so naïve as to think that “Internet freedom” would not be appropriated by the neocons as a useful banner to disguise their regime change agenda.

Even worse, all of this seems to clash with the rest of the Obama agenda on democracy promotion, which is as cool, remote and rational as you can imagine. Well, it was all Hillary’s fault: invoking the “information curtain” metaphor in her seminal speech on “Internet freedom” was a sure way to frame this discussion as some kind of a Cold War 2.0. And boy don't we know what happens in a cold war: everyone wants to start smuggling faxes and Xerox machines, training dissidents in civic disobedience, and using silly metaphors that don't add up but make us all feel extremely smug and important. Predictably, defending the open and single Internet – the original objective behind Hillary’s speech - is not a priority anymore - at least as far as the public is concerned; why bother, if we can just liberate them all with tweets (but if only we avoid our own PowerPoints!). “Internet freedom” must have been the worst possible Internet-related buzzword to throw at the hungry conservatives.

CYBERBORE CYBERWAR: yes, in case you haven’t noticed, we are losing the CYBERWAR (all caps, no less) – and, unfortunately, we are losing it to a bunch of cybersecurity contractors (especially those that were smart enough to put former government execs on their payrolls).  If, unlike me, you have been anywhere near the Internet in the past few months, you must have heard the news: Mike McConnell – who thinks we are at cyberwar which we are already losing –  wants to re-engineer the Internets (all those tubes will need to be relocated, after all), while Leon Panetta apparently didn’t get the memo announcing that “electronic Pearl Harbor” was no longer a very fashionable metaphor. I’ve got a proposal, too: if we are already at cyberwar – and this must be a war with the highest number of cat videos watched during combat – I propose to declare all Twitter activity – and especially if involved iPads –  to be unpatriotic. Or here’s an even brighter idea: Let’s just nuke the entire Bay Area! That way, the evil Chinese hackers will have nothing to attack: bingo, we won the war.

Given all the fuss, the only person with sensible views on the issue has been Obama’s newly appointed cyber-czar Howard Schmidt, who, as unpatriotic as he is, thinks that the cyberwar does not exist. It’s only because of Schmidt’s sobriety that I retain a glimmer of hope that cybercontractors won’t win the cyberwar. The most overlooked aspect of this “struggled” is that we can’t fight the cyberwar and be promoting Internet freedom at the same time. Re-engineering the Internet, by default, presumes "re-engineering it away" from being “open and single” – and that’s what Clinton kind of wanted to preserve before their magic Internet juice was claimed by conservatives to be used in their own Twitter Agenda. Good luck. My money is on DoD and the contractors: they always win and they’ll win this time. Get used to it: all your Internet freedoms will belong to Booz Allen Hamilton.

I'm still on self-imposed vacation from blogging in order to finish my book manuscript, so my comments on Kyrgyzstan will have to be very brief. Food for thought:

First, for obvious geopolitical reasons, pundits are paying much less attention to protests in Kyrgyzstan than they did to protests in Iran and Burma (or even Thailand). If there were no U.S. military bases in Kyrgyzstan, I doubt that this story would ever have made the front page of the New York Times. But social media couldn care less about geopolitics and military bases. Predictably, we see no significant buzz on Twitter;  unlike Justin Bieber, the Kyrgyz revolution is not "trending" as a popular topic there.

Unsurprisingly, we don't see much eulogizing about the Internet's "revolutionary power" in the Western media either. But this does not mean we have suddenly become more reflective or less cyber-utopian; it only means that "Kyrgyzstan" is much harder to pronounce than Iran and most people couldn't care less about it; there is no critical tweetering mass that could fuel the kind of collective fantasy that was fueled by "#iranelection" on Twitter. Consequently, there is no pressure on the Western media to dream up non-existent (Twitter-powered!) angles to news stories: getting their viewers/listeners/readers up to speed on what/where Kyrgyzstan is would eat up the whole story anyway. In short: why is there no Twitter revolution in Kyrgyzstan? Becuase there is no one to hype it up. 

Second, those who are in the know about Central Asia and could push this story much harder to the fore of public attention are also predictably cautious: Kyrgyzstan's earlier revolution -- the Tulip one -- was not exactly a paragon of democratization.  So whatever role social media is playing in today's revolution is poised to be accompanied by much more cautious and much less celebratory rhetoric, for no one could really be sure that the vector of change we are observing in Kyrgyzstan is  "towards democracy" (that said, I do think that it's hard to outperform Bakiev's regime when it comes to incompetence and lack of respect for human rights).

Iran, too, wasn't really such an obvious case -- after all, Moussavi, a former Iranian prime minister with quite a few dark spots on his resume, made for a very poor "martyr for democracy" -- but at least Ahmadinejad's evil was fully transparent and was thus very easy to hate (go ask anyone in any small American town what they think about Ahmadinejad and Iran; then try the same trick by asking them about Bakiev/Kyrgyzstan). 

Third, based on what I've seen on Twitter -- and I must say I haven't been looking very hard and it's not a scientific sample -- there are quite a few people in the country who are tweeting about what's going on, in Russian/Kyrgyz/English but no one is using Twitter to organize anything (given that the entire revolution was kind of disorganized and spontaneous, it's hard to make an argument that someone organized anything over Twitter).

Besides, all the tweeting/facebooking/blogging that came out of Kyrgyzstan was possible because the previous government was caught by surprise and did not have enough time to cut off all communications. The whole revolution, apparently, appears to be little else but an afterthought: even the opposition was not expecting it to succeed. Obviously, what matters in most revolutionary circumstances is how fast one can disconnect all communications, and, well, the Kyrgyz government has obviously not given much thought to the issue.

Expect that "turn-it-all-off-with-one-click" systems would get really popular with authoritarian rulers (hey, this could be the new "red button"!). At the same time, we'll probably continue seeing the Kyrgyz opposition -- which now technically is no longer in opposition -- rely on Twitter to push their messages to Central Asia watchers/media folks in the West. That's, of course, perfectly rational and I would even say smart. But it's not the kind of spontaneous grassroots-based organizing the pundits were extolling during the events in Iran.

Finally, some pundits have observed that the availability of footage/tweets from Kyrgyzstan would certainly make other dictators rethink their own vulnerability and heed the right lessons. I agree. This is a variation on the "demonstration effect" argument, which, because of the pervasive liberal bias, we usually believe to work only in one direction (example: "Oh, now that the Uzbek activists have seen what's possible in Kyrgyzstan, they too would rise up"; this, of course, can be countered with a completely opposite point: "Oh, now that the Uzbek/Turkmen/Kazakh dictators have seen what's possible in Kyrgyzstan, they too would take preemptive measures"). By this logic, the folks who really learned the most from the Orange Revolution in 2004 were not the anti-government activists in Minsk, but Kremlin operatives in Moscow.

Bottom line: new media played no visible role in organizing the protesters and some role in  broadcasting what was happening to the rest of the world (it's not clear though whether this broadcasting had any real impact on the police's ability to control the unruly protesters). That's a preliminary judgement: I have no clue how well the Kyrgyz opposition was organized in reality; based on media reports, it seems like they were not.

Obviously, I've also omitted any discussion about the regional dimensions to this revolution, for the example, the split between Kyrgyzstan's North and South and how both regions were communicating with the capital, and how what happened in each reinforced/undermined developments elsewhere. I'm well aware of that. But this would get us into a much-longer historical conversation about the role of communications (I'd venture that even faxes/telegraphs would do this kind of job -- no need for Internet media or anything of the kind).

For all the hype about "digital revolutions",  "analog revolutions" are still the norm, not the exception. 

Big news from Russia today: RBK Daily, a respected Russian news agency, reports (in Russian) that the Russian government might soon be launching a "national search engine". According to RBK's anonymous sources inside Kremlin, it would aim at satisfying "state-oriented" needs such as "facilitating access to safe information" and "filtering web-sites that feature banned content." It's going to be an ambitious project: the government is prepared to invest $100 million in this new venture, does not want to allow any foreign funding, and intends to build it in cooperation with the private sector.

RBK mentions several interesting players that have either been already consulted or would be asked to join soon : Rostelecom (Russia's state-owned telecommunications giant), ABBYY (one of the leading software firms specializing in document recognition and translation - the company was actually founded in Russia in 1989!), and "Ashmanov and Partners" (an Internet consulting firm led by Igor Ashmanov, a pioneer of the Russian Internet and a former senior executive at Rambler, one of Russia's first search engines).

The idea to "nationalize Internet search" comes from Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration and the mastermind of a recent plan to modernize the country by building Russia's own Silicon Valley (that project is also advancing very rapidly: Viktor Vekselberg, one of Russia's richest people and Kremlin-friendly oligarch, has been appointed to lead the initiative, while Esther Dyson -- a famed American technology investor - has been named as one of the main candidates to join him as a co-chair  UPDATE: Esther Dyson says that these speculations are not true). The government has warmed up to Surkov's Internet plans -- perhaps, after hearing the recent news from China -- and Victor Shegolev, Russia's Minister of Communications has been appointed to curate it.

To understand why Kremlin might be embarking on such a supposedly doomed project, one has to look at the structure of the Russian market for Internet search. As in China, it's a domestic company that controls it: according to just released estimates from LiveInternet, Yandex holds 62.8 percent of the market, with Google holding just 21.9 percent of the Russian market (two other search engines -- Mail.ru and Rambler -- have 8.4 percent and 3 percent respectively). But these figures conceal the fact that Google's share has been growing very rapidly: until 2006 Google has held only a tiny share of the Russian market (around 6 percent ) but it has significantly expanded since then (in 2009 Google's PR chief in Moscow even said that "Russia is a pivotal country for Google").

Now, Kremlin clearly views Yandex as one of the most innovative Russian companies and keeps a very close eye on its operations. In 2009 Sberbank, a state-owned bank, even bought Yandex's "golden share", which gave the state veto power on the sale of more than 25 percent of Yandex's shares (in a recent interview with Kommersant, one of Russia's leading newspapers, Yandex's president explained such a close relationship with the Kremlin by the need to have "transparent rules" for attracting investment, arguing that Yandex "has become part of a national infrastructure" and such close ties with the state are inevitable). When in late 2009, Yandex shut down its list of most popular blog posts in the Russian blogosphere -- which had often been used by activists to push their causes to the national attention -- some read it as a sign of the state's growing control of its activities.

I believe that Kremlin has no interest in destroying Yandex -- it's one of the few Russian companies that are actually very innovative and well-known abroad and Kremlin has plenty of other means to influence where Yandex is going- so the real target of this "nationalization of search" must be Google. The big question is: How good of a Google competitor can the Kremlin really build, given that they have almost unlimited resources (both financial, technological and legal ones)?

We should not underestimate Kremlin's capacity to adapt to the digital realities: they have cultivated a sprawling community of Internet gurus who work or consult for the government (Konstantyn Rykov and Askar Tuganbayev are good examples) and they do have a lot of private sector expertise to draw on.

Earlier today Igor Ashmanov, one of the people that the Kremlin consulted about the "national search engine", gave an interview to the Echo of Moscow, a liberal Russian radio station, where he shared his views about the growing political role of Google and search engines in general and what a national search engine might accomplish in Russia. Ashmanov is one of the most influential people on the Russian Internet and the first and only person familiar with Kremlin's plans to go on the record so far. Even though he does not work for the government, I think his opinions are not that far from what Russian bureaucrats would make of Google's problems in China and its murky future in Russia. Below is my translation of some of his most illuminating quotes (italics mine):

On Google as an instrument of the US government and on its role in China: Google is just another way [for the US government] to tease China for not being a democracy and to get it to barge on certain economic issues. So if the Chinese don't want to weaken renmibi's exchange rate, we [the US government] would say that, from the perspective of a true religion of democracy -- of which the US is the capital - you are heretics and we'll be teasing you for human rights violations and the like until you weaken the rate...

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, frequently meets with Hillary Clinton, goes to special breakfasts [ at the state department]; the US authorities often say that Google is advancing the causes of democracy in China. How should the Chinese government view this? As an intervention in their affairs. That's exactly what they are doing...Google was founded in a university, it works with intelligence services - the US government would be silly not use it for America's own good.

On the idea of a national search engine: In principle, it's possible to create such a search engine, if you create a strong team, make them co-owners of the project and give them superb technology. It can be Rambler, it can be Aport (an obsolete Russian search engine); those can be revived. Second, the state should make sure there is a [business] environment where such sites can flourish.

A national search engine [may be subsidized so that it] does not need sell any ads in its first few years, which is quite attractive. It has to focus on getting a market share, not making money. Third, it can be installed in all state institutions, on all computers that are assembled in Russia, in all schools, prisons, military institutions, hospitals and so on. This can guarantee it a certain level of traffic; 10-15% is what they can get.

Then one can talk about the owners of Internet resources that are close or loyal to the government -- and we know that there are oligarchs that are socially responsible and close to the state -- and to install this search engine on their own resources. So finally this may lead to a national search engine. This won't help to topple Yandex, but it would help overtake Google, Rambler, and everyone else.

On what would happen if Google wins in Russia: [From a state perspective, if Google wins in Russia], it would be really bad. It would be bad -- and it doesn't matter that some would think that Russia is not a democracy and it does not like it. Even the democratic Europe doesn't like Google's domination...

No one likes it because, first, a search engine is a means of influencing public opinion, and second, it's a source of unique information about what people think and what kind of information they want. Whoever dominates the search market in the country knows what people are searching for; they know the stream of search queries. This is completely unique information, which one can't get anywhere else.

To be fair to Ashmanov, he also expressed some skepticism as to whether the government would be able to pull it off unless they really commit a lot of resources to this project (which, in his view, they aren't doing at the moment.) Nevertheless, his strategy of how such a national search engine might compete with Google seems very realistic to me: if the government does move to leverage the power of the Kremlin-friendly oligarchs -- who own most of the online property on the Russian Internet -- as well as to require all state institutions to make this new search engine their default start page and install it on all new computers sold in Russia -- they may, indeed, gain a significant share of the Russia market. If this is combined with some soft or hard pressure on Google -- think tax raids on their offices or some lengthy litigation of the kind that is now happening in Italy -- it's not unfeasible that a national search engine might steal a significant market share from Google.

This plan for a national search engine is not an isolated development. Earlier this year the government has been debating - without reaching any conclusion -- the plan to give a unique government-run email account to every Russian (supposedly in order to facilitate their access to e-governments services: a unique email account would help to authenticate that the right people are getting the right services).

It also needs to be seen within a global movement launched by many other governments to achieve "information sovereignty" (i.e. distance themselves from Google, which is perceived to be too close to the US government). In fact, I am struck by how much similarity there is between what's happening in Russia, Turkey, and even Iran. In December, I wrote about the Anaposta project launched by the Turkish government in order to do just what the Kremlin wants: build a national search engine and a national email system for every Turkish citizen. In early February, the Iranians announced their own plan for national email (mostly in order to bypass Gmail - which could be interpreted as them just wanting to score propaganda points following the news announcement that Google was talking to NSA).

The idea of national search engines is not new. Europeans have been toying with similar plans for a few years now but to no avail -- there was simply not enough political will in Europe to make that happen (who now talks about Quaero, a much-discussed European alternative to Google that never really took off the ground?). Russia, on the other hand, is a different case: the Kremlin wants to build this new engine for reasons that have nothing to do with national pride or the need to preserve national heritage. All Kremlin wants to do is to establish firmer control over the information flows in the country and given that they have quite a few unfair advantages -- both market-based and legal -- they may as well succeed.

Most interestingly, I am wondering if American diplomats and technology gurus are shooting themselves in the foot by lending their expertise to the likes of Surkov. Wouldn't that be ironic if the result of all those luxurious US State Department-funded (UPDATE:  according to Esther Dyson, the trip was not paid for by the government) junkets to Siberia would be more tax raids on Google's offices in Moscow?

p.s. As it turns out, Estonia already has a national email system, which proves that this is not impossible. For more details, please see this.  The only difference: Estonians have access to any other email services, while Iranians may soon have no choice.

While the whole world is watching what Google is going to do in China, Chinese Internet companies are quietly expanding their global operations. The latest company to do so is AliBaba.com, the country's biggest business-to-business website, which is rapidly increasing its presence in Brazil.

Recently it has partnered with Ludatrade, a Hong Kong company, and expects a growth rate of 30 to 50 percent (disclosure: Yahoo owns 40 percent of Alibaba and my current Georgetown fellowship is endowed by them). Apparently, Alibaba already has 156,000 users in the country.

Earlier this year, we saw another interesting development: In January 2010, Shanda Games, China's largest operator of online games, paid $60 million in cash and $20 million in equity for MochiMedia, a San Francisco-based Flash game advertising network and payments platform.

A question posed on TechCrunch, a technology blog, in relation to that acquisition and the future of relationship between China and Silicon Valley in light of Google's debacle was a good one:

Chinese Web companies are building huge cash hoards and valuable stock currencies and it’s still a comparatively young Web market. Increasingly, these companies could be likely buyers of US startups—not the other way around. Will the Valley’s rhetoric stick then?

By "Valley's rhetoric," they probably meant putting freedom and human rights ahead of business interests.

But that's not at all: check this 2009 map (pdf) that visualizes China's tech expansion (the map comes from Mobinode, a group blog about Asian tech industry). It clearly shows China's investments into India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Russia, Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Brazil, Japan to name just a few (many of them are in the gaming industry). According to this recent article in (the government-owned) China Daily, even Chinese online encyclopedias are now expanding abroad, mostly to target Chinese living abroad (primarily in the U.S.).

Well, let me add a conjecture of my own: if Chinese companies are not allowed to buy oil and transportation firms here in the U.S., they will soon start buying Internet firms. Now, that's a neat way to undermine "Internet freedom" from within. It's only a matter of time before the U.S. Congress starts ringing alarm bells about the Chinese Internet takeover.

To read more about how China's Internet and software companies are trying to expand globally, take a look at this article from Seeking Alpha, this post from MobiNode and SiliconHutong blog. This Jan 2010 piece from Reuters offers some more excellent analysis on the problems faced by Chinese companies seeking global expansion.