By Brigitte L. Nacos
The propaganda war between the power-holders and the reformers in Iran has not been a one-sided triumph for citizen journalism that overcame the silencing of the mainstream media by Iranian authorities. Instead, the same Internet and global satellite phone systems that have transmitted compelling images from the streets of Tehran and elsewhere are also effective venues for the government to spy and crack down on electronic voices of dissent. As Farhad Manjoo writes in an excellent post at Slate (“The Revolution will not be Digitized”),“The crackdown in Iran shows that, for regimes bent on survival, squashing electronic dissent isn't impossible. In many ways, modern communication tools are easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past.”
Ironically, as Christopher Rhoads and Loretta Chao of the Wall Street Journal revealed, European telecommunication companies were instrumental in helping the Iranian authorities to establish “one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.” Rhoads and Chao identified Germany’s multinational Siemens AG and Finland’s Nokia Corporation as jointly providing the Iranian government with the technological monitoring means.
The idea of the global village, brought together by advanced communication technology, in which different peoples would learn about and understand and respect each other, was a utopian pipedream all along. Even in Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic picture about the triumph of democracy in “The End of History and the Last Man,” the communication revolution did not figure at all because he recognized that “communication technology itself is value-neutral.” It can be used by those who fight for freedom and human rights but also by those who deny basic liberties.
Like the well-known practices of the Chinese government, the case of Iran points to the uncomfortable reality: The most advanced communication technologies tend to be more advantageous for oppressive regimes than for dissenters and citizen journalists among them—not the least because of corporations in the West whose profit imperatives trump what one former president called the “value thing.” Siemens and Nokia may have had a particular role in the case of Iran but these two corporations are no exceptions, when it comes to censor the Internet. Just think of Internet providers, such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and their compliance with the People Republic of China’s censorship policies.
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