Minutebear HQ

My Tor Project/OpenITP Hackathon Live Blog Day 2: Circumvention Boogaloo

2012-06-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

1st report back: Come up with set of recommendations for future projects, and possibly follow-up steps

1. Get user input from design phase
2. Lots of orgs out there do training (gipi.kg, for example), can have some extra functionality where they let devs know what they need to fix/enhance, and should include in funding requests et. al
3. Idea that peer-to-peer training is how software will get used, users teaching users, and similar for bugs. The tool should give you an opportunity to send in bug reports, which may be over the tubes or send to someone else via ex. email or conversation. Needs to originate in the tool.

------------------

GAME THEORY OF CENSORSHIP

"The mathematics of conflict. Typically fails when you do the math wrong, and often people have bad models, so they say that it's bad people don't conform to models.

Player 1: Govt trying to control access to information
Player 2: Narod/People

Listed possible moves, Mada (sp?) model that tries to predict govt reaction to various moves, can also help with investment decisions, list what might not lead to crackdowns.
There is an academic who has two or three papers on this (name of academic will be on the public wrapup).

----------------------------

ANONYMOUS PUBLISHING

We talked anout probs of publishing services, talked about how to get users to learn about what (Iranian address?) is.

TOR Anonymous Packet Execution Framework - Framework that makes hidden servies more useable (GOOGLE THIS)

---------------------

BROKEN CERT AUTH PROBLEM

Listed a bunch of technologies that are trying to resolve existing problems. Rough concensus was that we will need several of these to tackle probs with existing models. Each solution seemed to add some problems that were mitigated by others.

One main question was how to put user in control without overwhelming them (convergence.io has been a prob like this I (Peter) think). Trouble with Dane is it concentrates power in the DNS hierarchy, which is where a lot of Internet abuse has occured. But Convergence and a bunch of other tools could help. Another thing is you now need a persistent client, which can be HUGE problem if somebody seizes it.

In addition to Convergence there's a similar plugin built by somebody at UNLV

Programming, muthafucka!

ONE TIME PAD HACK SESSION (READ: Developer presents what he has and folks poke at it to look for problems)

google one time pad open source
(version 2.0 won't be backwards compatible with earlier)

Not trying to fix key management.

Somebody suggested encrypting twice, e.g. encrypt with AES and then do one-time-pad, then if somebody flips bits or does plaintext attack, you could catch it.
Could add headers not visible until after decryption.
Ex:
Content type(?)
Mime-type
Filename
Bzip headers
Original file name

(First bit of feedback is that it's pointless)

eh, might not be perfectly random. Any time you can have expected plaintext results, it can help you with figuring out the key.

Why punt on the most difficult part, key mgmt? Because some people have volunteered to handle this themselves. But is the extra complexity worth it? I for one think it's pointless.
Dayum, somebody did some tests and found that 1st 20 bytes of bzip are predictable.

Entropy is hard to come by, and can be easily drained.
If you bring in random data from /dev/rand, and you drain the entropy, and you know where in the stream they are, then what? (well, I need to read up on random data in Linux!)

Idea here is:
BASE64ENCODE( OTP( AES( BZIP( X ))))
^
And what is the key here? Can be a problem if rand. num. generator is broken.
s/AES/"Something Dan Bernstein wrote"

AES there to make things looks random even if you get through the pad
One thing that's really important here, is some update systems download a file with a hash attached, so you have to parse whatever you downloaded before you can verify integrity. DERP!!!

(btw, /dev/urand is garbage, guy in front and Applebaum disagree about whether it and /dev/rand are garbage or not.)
^---Prob is very little data generated from other devices on embedded sys., no mouse/keyboard.

Linux will often add something to the pool by hashing without crediting it.

This could be an argument for encrypt then MAC, Mosh uses this

Seems almost disingenuous to offer this and punt on where to get random data.

Given that some people think they can or can't get random data, should we supply a tool for that, too?

OTHER PROBLEMS

Whole bunch of stupid quirks here

Another fundamental problem, in the header there's a pad ID, it's a checksum of the first ~512 bytes of the pad. That's sitting out there in the open, which is ok if you can't reverse it. There is a risk (didn't quite get this) that you can give away the AES key.

(we went over a possible bookkeeping nightmare, if something gets mixed up, how do we know which pad to use? Can cycle through, but can be a usability prob without some shell scripts)

PROGRAMMING, MOTHERFUCKER!!!
(this is a good talk, but I do have code to write)

SUMMARY

Is a goal to have a very small amount of code that you can audit and say "oh it's just XORing"? Ok, then maybe we don't need all these func. calls.
And boy has this gotten complex, so we're telling users not to roll their own crypto while we roll our own crypto. BUT it's very easy to scrutinize the way this has been structured.

What's the point of compression? If you boil everybody's data down to bzip, becomes not-so-random.

AND WE'RE DONE WITH THAT PANEL

--------------------------------------------------

WHAT GOOGLE CAN DO TO LOOK AT LEAST MEH

Promoting HTTPS (its slogan: "Hey, we're better than Telnet!")
Let's just stop supporting HTTP (still not a bad idea)

--------------------------------------------

AFTER LUNCH

Check out Torbirdy. It's Tor for Thunderbird!

TELEX: ANTICENSORSHIP IN THE NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

Operates in the network infrastructure - place a proxy in the core, not on some end host. We use an end-to-middle proxy with a "pretend connection" at some ISP. Doesn't provide anonymity, but more circumvents detection
Works on a form of DPI, no secrets involved (+5 points for you on that).

Threat model:
assumes
1. Threat censor controls all network infrastructure INSIDE (sound familiar?)
2. Blocks according to a block list
3. Allows HTTPS connections to unblocked websites
This is awesome
|
A---|--------proxy connection at friendly ISP*---------------notblocked.com
| ^
| |
BLOCKLIST

*invisible tag placed, but only visible to A, who has a private key. At ISP
shared secret gets shared between client and proxy
request for blocked.com gets shoved into the connection.
This looks like an innocuous connection to notblocked.com. In order to block such a proxy, the censor would have to block all possible notblocked.coms. But we could install this on, say, the Trans-Eurasian Fiberoptic cable, which was built in part by Soros Foundation.

TEST DEPLOYMENT

CURRENT STATUS
Scaling to ISP line speeds (up to 10 gbps)
Looking to deploy to small-scale ISP

SOCIAL MIRRORING
How do you connect mirrors and folks with censored content?
Mash it up with Reddit, and have community of hosters decide what gets hosted.
Can also do this by crawling file sharing sites. There is a proof of concept out there. See mirrorparty.org

My Tor Project/OpenITP Hackathon Live Blog Day 1: Lots of talking, no coding

2012-06-05T11:01:00.001-07:00

At the end of Rightscon proper and for a day after, there was a hackathon sponsored by the Tor Project and the New America Foundation's Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP). As you can tell, I came expecting to hack some things out with the OONI folks, but it was really just a bunch of discussion groups. Still the discussion groups covered some fascinating topics. Once again, errors are mine, opinions are my own, yada yada yada
----------------------------------------
INCREASING THE COST OF CENSORSHIP

Telex: Add proxy in the core that can be used to make a connection to any site look like a plain HTTPS connection to websites that would be too costly to block (e.g. credit cards, Google)

Cost can be political as well as economic. Since Google withdrew from China, now in Hong Kong, so Chinese GOOG traffic goes through there. Chinese traffic still censored since it goes thru Chinese web, which can be damn annoying. What GOOG did in the past couple days, is they add reminder where if you search for X, it'll alert you if you'll running into blocking. The Chinese govt would rather folks didn't know about this, so GOOG is increasing popularity cost of this.

Internal alternatives (Muloqot/Weibo), financial sense depends on whether there's enough of a domestic market (although I can see, ex. the Uzbek govt picking up the loss)

One thing that does increase the cost if it's more transparent.

What costs are there?
1. Econ. costs - bad for business
2. Soc. costs - I can't get to best sites thnx to filter
3. Pol. legitimacy from blocking things people think inappropriate to block

4. Retaliatory cost
Some Iranian group got in trouble for airing an interview with someone who had been tortured, and there has been some discussion of retaliatory measures (cutting of banking things).

5. Forcing regimes to brute force and individually identify things like ex. bridge nodes and have trouble with dissecting protocols
Ex. DPI plus cryptanalysis

[HAD TO GO WORK ON SOMETHING ELSE]
At this point, about all we can hope for is to make it [censorship] more expensive.
Maybe $$$ isn't so much the issue, maybe it's more about efficacy
[ANOTHER BLOCK]

Back on increasing cost, a simple way might be just deploying more proxies on popular websites. If you have a ton of IP addresses, just run lots of proxies. Then there's OnionSpace mirroring.

Is there enough naming and shaming of companies that enable these actions? Many of us think there is nowhere near enough.

In Iran, there was a bandwidth throttling event and there's always one such event when there's a big event, and some guys told us it wasn't normal bandwidth throttling event, but they're adding lots of "Halal Internet" infrastructure. ZTE was around the same time importing much of this equipment, or it looked like it.

WHERE WE GO WITH THIS

I missed all of this, and this is where I gave up on trying to code during a "hackathon", or find my baggage (!!)

--------------------------------------------

NEXT SESSION:

OONI-PROBE SESSION

It's basically a system for detecting what is being blocked in which countries and how it's happening. It gives you the system around which you can build your own tests and deploy them in various countries
[AND IT WAS DELAYED UNTIL TOMORROW]

CRYPTO IN JAVASCRIPT

There's a browser standard being worked on at W3C that creates a standard API for Javascript crypto that can all work in the browser (hashes, AES encryption, etc.). The uses for this are so broad that, for example, Netflix is on the committee and they want this for DRM.
In fact, PEOPLE LIKE GOOGLE could use this in their CHAT PROGRAMS

How far along is the W3C work? Pretty far along.

What are problems of Javascript crypto? Why don't you trust it?

Well, no private data/functions, someone else can perhaps change data in the function.

One thing Cryptocat does is
I. Wait for W3C to finish (tho functions still need to be called, and who calls them can be problem).
II. Simply use browser apps. They run inside the browser, and works much better on Chrome than on Firefox.
If you solve the problem this way, can develop whatever you want for the browser, and it becomes part of the browser saving you loading from server each time.

THREAT MODEL

NSA gets somebody to serve slightly diffrent Javascript to a specific user, which has a backdoor that can be used to spy on somebody
aaaaaaand I'm exhausted
Type without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm.

POSSIBILITIES IN JAVASCRIPT CRYPTO

really getting tired here, but now we switch over to...

SURVEILLANCE/CENSORSHIP IN AMERICA
[They did ask for a Russia expert, but I was too wiped out. And then, have I just not focused enough on it?]

First we brainstorm about threats we see in the U.S.

1. Double-standard about whether subpoena or not required for law enforcement to install malware.

2. NSA wiretapping. Classified FISA memo goes legal justification for it, and it's classified interpretation of secret law.

3. CISPA, which would legalize this framework in transparent way, but still doesn't declassify FISA court memo (???)
Also interesting how they tried to co-opt Silicon Valley by offering immunity from prosecution by going along.

4. Internet surveillance of companies.

5. Difference between DMCA/DHS takedown
DHS: They take your domain, could use DMCA as method, or they just send a national security letter.
DMCA has some transparency to it, however.

6. Citizen/consumer complacency

7. ISP port blocking/exclusivity agreements - "Net Neutrality"
If you had only two or three options for connectivity, you can regulate, but more competition incentivizes against exclusivity/blocking.

SOLUTIONS?

2nd amendment, because THAT makes sense in a nuclear state.

(why daf*q didn't I go to the Iran panel? This could be much more useful for what I'm trying to do)

and the consensus was that we're screwed

8. Apple-Disney-Fox/Pravda --- or the fact that there are only so many media companies out there now.

9. Where we get our $$$ from, possible link to #8

Agh, both my laptop and I are running a low battery. I'm going to turn this off and try to get my baggage.

My Rightscon Rio Live Blog Day 1: Conclusion

2012-05-31T18:49:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: The views and errors here are my own and do not represent anyone else, for one thing, they're likely 20% snarkier.]

Access Innovation Prize announced, focusing on gaps in human rights space

1: Blackout resilience - $25K for best blackout resilience tech.
2: Crypto - Proper integration into existing sys., encrypt. edu., or building community for use by default
3: Bounty for best patch of known/unknown platform used by activists
4: Golden jellybean - Other really cool things. Great training program/research idea/censorship circumvention = $20K
5: Access Facebook award - Best idea to promote human rights/development on Facebook

App. process starts now and goes until August 15th. Looking for things that are impactful, idea that has real impact for real life people and will likely turn into something real. Also cool stuff that's new, but grounded and is measurable/sustainable.

Putting together judging panel, includes McLaughlin, for Facebook award, rep. from Facebook will come up.
*biting my tongue here on how sincere about privacy* Brett says can also apply ideas to change Facebook platform (stop real name policies much??!!)
This is not government money (thank God/the Interwebz/Science)

And now, some info on party after conference (addresses were given, we had some lime cocktails that were the best booze I've ever had. Yes, I'm slightly drunk while editing these notes. Don't do that, boys and girls. Drink school, stay in drugs, and don't do milk.)

Some background on FGV, pretty much Brazil's Berkman Center/Gipi

Thoughts on regulation of Internet in Brazil. Today no laws that regulate it today. So people think "OK, no rules, we're free!", well instead it means many problems due to fact that there is no legislation. One problem is proliferation of lawsuits. One judge starts taking one decision, and other judges take other side, there's no precedent yet, Supreme Court puts out contradictory rulings. Youtube was taken off air for a few days due to lawsuit. Caused by "intimate conversation" involving Brazilian celebrity in Spain, vid was totally removed, Youtube was taken off air for a few days.
Lawsuits against bloggers also common, blogger got comment posted and was sued for it, no clear standard.

Data requests and content removal also a problem. Google transparency report, Brazil is world leader in data requests coming from government bodies, above U.S. China we don't know since they didn't provide the data.

Some years ago there was a child protection commission built to hinder and punish pedophilia.

Cybercrime commission: "azeredo law" vaguely worded law that would criminalize jailbreaking phones (4 years in jail!). You don't wanna spend 4 years in a Brazilian jail. After 1st vote in Senate, huge backlash which led to broader discussion. There was a petition with tons of signatures, and before this there was talk of an Internet Bill of Rights.
Origin here is idea of protecting rights instead of direction of criminalizing. So civil framework is collaborative law, made in very transparent way through the Internet ("consent of the networked' and all that jazz), so here Minister of Justice was present for deliberations on this.
Key provisions were
1. Privacy
2. Limits to data retention
3. Rights of Access
4. Intermediaries' liability
5. spam
6. spam
7. spam (not a fast typer)

Lots of comments were processed, took almost a year. This all went like Icelandic constitution.

Had some repercussions in Eur. Parliament, France, Germany, model is being used in other legislative initiatives (damn, can you even imagine Amer. politics working like this?)

Congress will vote on the "Marco Civil" (Internet Bill of Rights) hopefully in the next few weeks.

Next speaker: Sorry, I have something else on my mind.

We also don't want to be researched without our knowing about it, this is in executive protection, but we want to detail it more. Second point is about net neutrality, we want to learn from other countries experiences and detail what neutrality is all about, we need a regulation that doesn't unconsciously impact that netutrality...out of power. I've been running on adrenaline and caffeine all day(s). All I can do now is listen.

Still bugging me is McLaughlin's reasoning, I'm a little uncertain about exact terms:

Internet is democratizing and decentralizing access to information
Information is power
----------------------------------------------------------------
Internet is democratizing and decentralizing access to power

(In the unlikely event you're reading this, Mr. McLaughlin, feel free to critique)

Simple, Discrete Math inductive logic. I forget the name of the inference used. Will come back to this later. We're done, now cocktail party.

My Rightscon Rio Live blog Day 1: Privacy and Data Protection Online: How Companies, Governments, and Users Can Promote Online Privacy

2012-05-31T13:35:00.001-07:00

[Disclaimer: This is meant to be completely separate from Access' Live Blog. This is all my notes and my perspective of what was said, with at least 20% more snark.]

Privacy and Data Protection Panel

[Gap in English translation] The major issue to deal with here is building of new methods and regulations and technical solutions to protect and enforce protection provisions on the Web.

Start with Prof. Nelson and theoretical discussion of privacy, how it has changed recently, and later broader issue of online privacy.

The major issue is relevance. I think that historically we had two reasons for data protection: (1) human rights, [brain fart], (2) circulation of data, econ integration, since the 70s we have seen laws originally from Germany....7 countries with privacy laws that follow European model, and
strategies to foster data protection.

Education is of course important, how to use laptops, etc.

Companies need to know that this is an important asset (the translation overlaid on the Portuguese is distracting here)

[btw, many Skype server nodes are run by MSFT, learned over lunch]

Morozov, why couldn't you make it here?

Sarah Altschuler: First, I work through a corp. social responsibility law practice. When we talk to companies about policy, we put it in a human rights practice. For many companies, this stuff is about compliance, not human rights. Ex. trying to push UN human rights criteria for online privacy
We work on how comps protect privacy as a human rights concern. If the company has developed certain principles around protection of user data, then they are understood all up and down the chain of command, board to code monkeys.

We also talk about biz practices on what data you need to collect and how long, and where is it stored. We frequently talk about location of data stores and do due diligence on countries where that data stored (Goog and Kazakhstan much?), and when it's ok to say we can't put a data center in country X.

Comm. for users, edu. component is key. How are users engaged with platform, understand terms of service/their obligations/options.

How we make sure that requests for data are compliant with local law, and how/where they can push back.
Here there can be a large role for public sector, so U.S. can say back up dialogue with repressive regimes. Still not dealing with repression from "the East" (Russia/Ukraine)

Q: We've been seeing some companies getting and abusing data, can you comment on some strategies that have tried to tackle that?

This is one of those where it's incredibly important for dialogue across the company about policy on user data protection, because they're trying to monetize it (predictive analytics). But can be a problem of "What's our 3/5 year plan?" and other parts "how can we minimize disclosure and sharing?" Can't be in separate compartments. Some of this is what users are willing to tolerate, some of it is regulation (there was an allusion to "do not track" we'll get to later)

Bruno Magrani: Mario, We've been seeing a number of strategies adopted by companies about downloads and self-regulation. There's some criticisms (not enough!), but what I'd like you to comment on is what are the self-regulation strategies out there now. Are they efficient or not?

Mario: I represent the insurance industry, which is very used to dealing with information, which is very vital to it and how it does business. There's a number of databases involved, re: vehicles, customs, delicate information. So the insurance sector has been dealing with data forever, and of course the volume of data has exploded of late. So this sector--we have to view the consumer all the time, and s/he isn't passive anymore, they want information, they want to participate. When you deal with insurance [not liking this translator, or maybe it's just me], so we decided to try to take a step ahead and get ahead of the legislation. We're all in favor of it...now the insurance sector can't just wait for legislation, we have to deal with a situation that already exists, so we have some kind of regulatory framework (something like PCI-DSS? yes, exactly like PCI-DSS), and if you don't comply, you can be subjected to various sanctions (loss of business, bad press, etc.)
In Brazil, the insurance biz. wants to be a pioneer in self-regulation practices, even ahead of the government.

Back to Magrani: In the distinction between regulation and self-regulation, can you say some more on this topic in terms of FTC trying light "we don't want to break it" approach, or whether this has been effective in protecting user's privacy online and [something about business models]

Altschuler: It's hard to tell if this User's Bill of Rights thing has been effective. I'm a Washington lawyer, I don't expect Capitol Hill to make sense, and we're dealing with an institution that doesn't understand these issues all that well. Also a problem, since the biz. community would rather self-regulate than deal with "series of tubes" people. We work a lot with GNI, where you commit to principles, but it isn't one size fits all. Do you have practices/processes out for ind. review and assessment, and are you engaging with civil society groups on this? I see that as part of the effort to get companies on board with self-regulation. We have another practice in our firm on sec. and data privacy specifically. We're working very much on compliance and data breach policy, and there you have a lot of significant fines for data breaches. I'm not one to think that tech. isn't the full answer, but we really don't have a lot of legislators who understand this, and so I very much prefer self-regulation.

Magrani: More technical approach to data protection?

JAKE APPLEBAUM!!!: First I think everyone has right to speak freely and to read. So we have to talk about privilege a little bit, so to talk about privacy, we have to talk about how companies are incentivized to do what we want. In some cases, insurance industry is surveillance industry, they surveill an area to determine rates. Facebook can be recontextualized as Stasibook, given opportunities for snitching and spying. In the case of Skype, my understanding is that when MSFT acquired Skype, they agreed to add lawful intercept (read: spy) capabilities. But when your tech. is reduced to whether or not you have due process, you have failed (WIN!). So there have been several cases where Skype has been weakened (ex. CALEA), so for Skype to comply with these laws, they leave everyone in a vulnerable state, and instead of making these kinds of compromises, companies like Skype should be pushing for end-to-end secure communication. We should have something like Diaspora, and maybe that will work, but the $$$ really comes from surveillance, and it's very hard that way to get Facebook to throw away its pool of money. We need to recontextualize this like safe sex, we have a responsibility to ourselves and others for secure communications, and when we don't use it, there is a transitive danger to others.

Look these up, he recommends them, therefore they're cool
ZRPT
OSTel - can install on your phone tomorrow
TechSecure from Moxie Marlinspike (a little Googling and looking at Marlinspike's site (which is worth a visit regardless) didn't show anything. Post a comment if you know what he was referring to)
RedPhone
CryptoPhone
Gipsi (sp? Again, not sure what he was referring to)

J.A: Companies can still make money on this, and with tech. like this
First, we have to admit there's a problem, first the police and later the state.
For the FBI to intercept my phone calls, her phone has to be insecure, and then someone can track her and all her calls
For that to happen, we all have to have the same problem. We can stop this, at the cost of not listening to my phone calls
This can't happen without large econ. incentives to change the way we look at this stuff. OSTel has built a full telecom system with full secure encryption. We all need to make a decision that all being secure, including the bad guys beats all insecure with some bad guys caught.

Magrani: How can we convince governments/ incentivize them to demand more security protections?

Other guy: We are in a society with different players. How many of you have decided to accept ?????? another thing, that issue of self-regulation...[sorry, the double speech (Portuguese and English translation) is a huge problem here.]Claims there are no borders on Internet and now very self-

[Network made my computer barf for a sec, not much lost in interim]

Not sure if I'm not paying close enough attention, or he's not actually saying anything. Happens all the time with lawyers.
From what I am getting, he's talking completely past what Applebaum said
yup, if you want all of this, see the legit liveblog. So, who's here? Yeah, I got nuthin'.

How long has this guy been talking? 30 minutes? Made mention of national sec. exceptions

after notes on paper from Applebaum: 1st, we should question idea that state has power to suspend rights. Ex. in Greece '06 & Vodafone PM & several pols were tapped, guy behind it found suicided. Creates real risk of abuse that previously belonged to the military. Internet challenges the national security state If Google can be compromised by the Chinese, no one can do better. To me it's very scary to hear people talk about state as if it's perfect. How many cops who have committed police brutality on Internet? Lots more than child pronographers. If we want to give privacy, we have to give to the bad guys as well.

Response: ...yeah..

Questions: From developer, question for Applebaum, I understand need to keep Tor intact, but where does the line need to be drawn for privacy? Should we go further and say cops can't follow people in the street? CCTV? Cameras?
Applebaum: I'll see your trolling and raise you. It's important to point out we're talking about expansion of police powers. History with FBI has not been exclusively that they will be used as sold. Does cop have right to follow you? Maybe. Should you have right to impersonate a cop and follow? Maybe on halloween.
From analog sense, it's like every road should have cameras and mics, and only some people have access to that equip. This is not a world I want to live in. I don't want a world where cops can do covert surveillance. We should not allow the Internet to go in ways that society should not have gone but has gone anyways. Not building backdoors is a matter of accountability. Prob. here is sec. agencies get a free pass. We don't know from facts that they're being honest. With technology, we can equalize much of this (this is a big leap from the way I've thought, but I kinda like it).

What is a best practice for an insurance company that does surveillance? It's not clear that beyond regulations, corporations have any incentive to make a decision to keep data private

A. Altschuler: I do see a role for regulation. Large fines for data breaches have incentivized beefing up on data security. I think in some of the more iterative conversations. I think there's a lot of a role for multi-stakeholder approach (take a shot, we've expanded the drinking game now beyond mentions of the Arab Spring)

Question: From judge from state of Rio de Janeiro, concern in terms of privacy. Is there any means to virtualize a page with false data in false social network, e.g. web page with false data?

[Here the double-speak plus probably my own exhaustion took over.]
END

My Rightscon Rio Live Blog, Day 1

2012-05-31T11:39:00.001-07:00

[Disclaimer: This is meant to be completely separate from Access' Live Blog. This is all my notes and my perspective of what was said, with at least 20% more snark.]

Here's my notes from the first conference panel I attended at Rightscon, "Open Empowerment - How Digital Natives are Changing the World and What it Means for Democracy, Human Rights, Criminality, and Security ". It's a little scattershot, but there's some fun stuff in here.

Creating rule of law in cyberspace

Open empowerment

[tak dali = Russian for etc.]

World Bank study of countries since the 50s,
level of econ. development, everything below blue line can be based
on "human factors", rest is "leveraging" information, sci. progress, claim is
individual empowerment good for business (yeah, we'll need the slides).

For those from rights community, ICT really broke info. monopoly (soviet
graphic up there)
again comparison to Guttenberg

and now space is being contested (yes, a certain kind of dictatorship
died in 1991).

Open global commons vs. corporatized/state-dominated space is key battlefield here.

first item: technological change, "has outpaced ability of regulators to act proactively", uhm, no, Misra anecdote.
well, example of cloud computing...ehhhhh....
raises significant issues of rights, ex. in Canada, 30% of Google's cloud hosted there, who's jurisdiction (recall Kazakh example a year back).

90% of Canadian email cleaned by company in Portland, Ore., now grey area question, still being tackled by int'l law.

MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES
Eh, Tajikistan is "the global north', #itsforlatinamerica

THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IPv6 + NATs)

Cloud computing + mobile + internet of things = Inet is now completely generative limited by only "intellect" and "capital" (as if there's no relation there)

Demographics of Cyberspace

U.S. 15% of Inet population, center of gravity being pushed to South and East, out of Silicon Valley.

3 in 5 poor users in failed states, median age of 18, significant youth cultures, so demands to practice what you preach + upward mobility
Think Malenkaya Vera (a very important late Soviet film that captured the full extent to which the USSR had failed to meet its promise of a classless society) and tak dali, Nazarbayev knows.

Globalized cybercrime

Ah, those old KGB thugs. Much less risky to steal somebody's credit card number in New York than to fight over Rubles in Petropavlovsk.
Forming new underclass of cyberspace that will force us to face certain basic social issues.

Take a shot each time someone mentions the Arab Spring #rightscondrinkinggame
New form of protest possibly forming with the Internet. Picket lines were illegal until the 20s in the U.S. Should DDoS be a 21st century picket
line? EEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH..........

BORDERS IN CYBERSPACE

[Many things we know from CIS research/Morozov]

RELATION TO LATIN AMERICA

Open empowerment, two extremes (one photo, iphones, one photo a gun)

empowerment has taken Econ. rather than political forms. Damn I should have tried the mobile conference.

Latin America one of the faster growing ICT markets. 60% users located in Brazil and Mexico. 4% through mobile phones (!!!), not like CIS AT ALL
2/3rds under 35, 1/3rd under 24. Only just now beginning to worry about adult things (family, etc.). Reasons for engaging in cyberspace only
now starting to reach forefront. Latin American also most overrepresented in social media. 84% of Internet users use Facebook, which has overtaken
Orkut (maybe explains those fake friend requests I keept getting), almost certainly identityy theft. In Costa Rica, phishing sites have jumped 14,000%

Arms/narcotrafficking has taken advantage, too.

QUESTIONS
Is there some uniformity in how "digital natives" are pursuing their econ./soc. agendas?
What gov. reaction will occur? Securtitization (large and disproportional) of cyberspace?
Role of civil society?
What tools should we in civil society groups should build?

PANEL:
Rafal Rohozinski : CEO, SecDev Group
Robert Muggah : Fellow, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
Misha Glenny : Writer & Professor, Columbia University
Camino Kavanagh : Senior Programme Coordinator & Fellow, NYU Centre on International Cooperation

Case of Mexico
Gangs that have taken to the Internet/gang culture, comment please?
Drug traffickers have dominated social media until recently, they're the ones who for the last 8-10 years have been able to almost
systematically control entire communities (sound familiar?). They have millions of dollars invested in human intel, for buying off govt's.
This could be helpful for tackling heroin trade in C. Asia.
20 years ago, an AS/400 was intercepted, imagine what they have now

Where do they get their cyber-capabilities?
Anywhere from 10-20K people disappeared in Mexico thnx to cartels. Many of these people (cartel folks) came from high-tech backgrounds.
Also in control of toll roads, so by the time you arrive they know who you are.

Have they tried to buy into ISPs? Ex of Anonymous vs. Mexican cartels seems to be tie-in
There does seem to be one, it seems like they could buy in to get info on two bloggers who were disappeared, and possibly through 4 generals
who were arrested for their connections. It's still a developing story.

#YoSoy132 demonstrations, 1st time folks using tech. (and offline too) against the cartels, comments?
When you live in this kind of destruction and see this movement of students essentially reclaiming lost territory, it's an exciting thing.
Popular image going around on Twitter is a pic of a dove pooping on Televiso (Mexican media network).

[Where's the key special sauce here that could be applied to C. Asia? I can't help but think it's in the political culture.]

We're talking about several Latin Americas here, let's talk about Argentina. Could you talk a little about key challenges of cyber security rights
vs. legit gov. functions?

[Gap due to switch to Spanish/Portuguese headphones]

That has precisely to do with use of agents for criminal, like child porn for instance and other things which are considered pending, for example in Eur. Council.

These are offenses that are transnational, so we need int'l support, and possible chance for int'l agreements for extradition. We're working
very intensely with regulation of service networks. And I do believe that there is lack of development of Argentina's legislation, not only lack of
knowledge from operators but also lawyers, and mea culpa, we (judges, lawyers, etc.) all have to be more informed #fortheolds. Also necesssary to
emphasize lack of IT experts,

Budapest Convention as potential model, very Eurocentric in some ways. Defends interests more for developed north. Is there Latin American sawse here?

In the questions we ask, BRIC countries are not going to add to these conventions, since they weren't invited, so they have the option to not adhere
(well, Russia would skip in the first place, but anyway...). So it will be very difficult to fight cybercrime, there have been some advances within
the UN (hahahaha), and that could be excellent, but we have to take long-term view, not easy to do due to red tape.

Gustavo/Roberto - Open Empowerment (ok, I forgot the question)
There's a paper on Open Empowerment on the SecDev website. Int'l level, no Latin American country has signed on to Budapest Convention.
Some Eurocentric perspective and less relevance to local realities, no country has signed on since 2004 (!!!). Limited Latin American role, which
will hopefully change with more awareness. OAS Comprehensive Inter-American Strategy for Cybersecurity Threats (for terrorism, telecom, collaboration)
has helped out tho (U.S. dominated? They have their place, I guess). At least 4 kinds of responses adopted:

1. Aligning and codifying legal frameworks for cybersecurity/cybercrime. Legis. action, including Brazil revisions to penal code.

2. Specialized police units for cybercrime (phishing, ident. theft, etc.) not much for cartels and narcotrafficking

3. Computer search teams usually outside of government

4. Exec. branch entities, for managing internal infrastructure within governments.

Some observatories on cyberbullying too, issue of militaries involved too, not much militarization of cyberspace yet. Only Brazil has Cyber
Defense Command est. 2010. Not as much as America/Eastern Europe/China.

Only official filtering policy in Cuba (well, we know about isolated decisions in Venezuela, elsewhere via court order).

what about Central America? Largely recovering from conflicts and drug trade, lots of security aid. What do you think about securing that region?

Good question, really understudied. Point is levels of penetration, great heterogeneity. Brazil/Argentina well above global average. Honduras/El Salvador/ Carribean < 20%
Important to recognize variation. On those challenges, speaker has been working on tracking changes across the region.

Murder rates very, very high in Central America/Latin America/Carribean - El Salvador/Carribean/Brazil (!!!) etc.
Threat often from gangs, nobody really knows how many. What we've seen is "heavy handed" responses for at-risk youths, heavy deployment of police.
Started in 2003 and has spread. U.S. assistance has come in to help with this, billions of $ poured in for sec. initiatives (alphabet soup of initiatives)
So we have a climate of securitization in parts of Central America. What is clear is that there is a significant lack of capacity to deal with this
threat. So we're at a real transition moment of low capacity and high potential.

So paradox now is movement of empowerment for pol. purposes started here with original Rio conference (Earth Summit?), first solidarity networks came from here, now being taken over by criminal groups and attempts to contain neg. aspects of mobilization online. So Turkmenistan/Uzbek. might find allies in Latin America who do this for economic reasons.

QUESTIONS

Isn't answer to gangs on Internet to deal with gang crime rather than using the tech. against them?
John Dillinger once said he robbed banks because that's where the money is. Criminality in the culture, won't disappear. Since transnational,
tech. comes in and countries will respond. That doesn't mean we go into root causes [brain fart, missed end]

Gangs in previous forms to transnationals today often used as pretext for strong heavy handed response (aka the boogeyman. Uzbekistan has the IMU,
Latin America has gangs).

There's a big difference between gangs and cartels. A cartel is much more sophisticated, very much state capture, a la Bakiyev and drug agency abolition.

GO GO GADGET PORT. TRANSLATOR

Guy here looks like Zuckerberg with glasses. Maybe he's here in disguise

(for all the Internet boosterist-sounding comments, damn I'm glad I came). Also, I have no idea what the question was, no translation. Maybe it was a comment.

When you say that pols are more and more under influence of cartels, and you say we should try to fight more with tech. means, aren't we actually giving more power to cartels if they control the gov't?

(ME: AYUH). In some ways this is the paradox of state capture, there's no simple answer to that. Where does regulation/empowerment come from? Tech. or laws? In many ways from both, cyberspace is synthetic domain built by engineers and can be influenced by laws. So responsibility of engineers to understand the pol. consequences of their design decisions. There's no true and right path, just several tricky and haphazard experiments.

[I missed the question, it's just before lunch.] - But it was LLOOOONNNGGGGGG

Guiana, we've seen cartels buying into cartels for money laundering and other criminal activities.

Conventional sec. reform approaches are often state-bound, but with cyberspace it gets interconnected with military and intelligence concerns. A lot to do with information sharing and tak dali.

Issue of stigmatization and youth important here. Many youth groups clustered together as gangs, need to meake sure that sec. response doesn't expand beyond gangs proper.

We've seen communities if not in full control by cartels then severely intimidated (hanging bodies have that effect). That's why YoSoy132 is so important, also old and young people, and expanding all throughout Mexico.

END

The Pete B. Awesome Show, Great Job! Starring Evgeny Morozov, Epic Sax Guy, and Scumbag Zuckerberg

2012-01-07T03:26:00.000-08:00

"Когда переехал не помню,
Наверное был я бухой,
Мой адрес не дом и не улица,
Мой адрес сегодня такой."
-WWW by Leningrad

Words cannot express the sheer amount of epic contained in this picture:

I remember, way back in the summer of 2009, I had just finished my first degree at UMaine, and I was trying to find some theoretical framework or just an overall guidepost into the hazey crazy world of the Eurasian Internet. A little bit of digging around UMass' Computer Science and Political Science department web pages pointed me to Jane Fountain and her book Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change. In fact, it led me to a whole special issue of the Social Science Computer Review devoted to articles discussing said book. I remember seeing one critical view, Donald Norris' "Building the virtual state...or not? A Critical Appraisal", and thinking I'd read it and get started on the book before I came to UMass. I read through all of Norris' article (yes, I have to admit I still haven't read Fountain's book) and I got to this passage at the end:

"In addressing the Internet and the World Wide Web and their relationships to governmental organizations, Professor Fountain (2001) made a number of claims about their potential effects that are contrary to the relatively settled findings of the field. In particular, she argued that 'the reorganization of government as a consequence of the Internet signals an institutional transformation of the American state' (p. 10)...The predominant view from the social sciences, based on empirical research over a number of years, is just the opposite. Although IT may have the potential to be transformative, the history of IT and government shows that it has not been transformative. As Kraemer (1991) observed: 'Rather, information technology has tended to reinforce existing organizational arrangements and power distribution in organizations. Moreover, information technology will have the same effects in the future because of fundamental relationships between technology's use, control of technology, and interests served by the technology.' (p. 167)" (Norris p. 421-422)

Maybe American/first world politics is a different space where Fountain's claims hold or Norris was misrepresenting what she was saying, but when I read that (and not noting a key distinction I'll spell out at the end of this post), everything I had been reading about the Caucasus and Central Asia for the past year stood up and sided with Norris' take on the role of IT in government. Having finished Norris' article, I took a break, looked over the CNN website, and found Evgeny Morozov's TED Talk. I was blown away; he had, in the space of 10 minutes, spelled out everything I had been thinking for the past 4 hours in much more detail. So a few months ago I saw that he and Jonathan Zittrain, whose The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It I've waded a few dozen pages into were speaking at the Mass Humanities 8th Annual Symposium "Cyberspace and Civic Space: The Impact of the Internet on Our Democracy", I rented a car for that weekend and drove out to Boston with a friend. Now in past posts I've used American names for people in Central Asia when I'd rather not use their real names, so let's use Central Asian names here in America and call my friend Murat. Before we left, I figured that a conference like this would dearly need more of an international flavor, so I brought my Kyrgyz kalpak, a going-away present from my host family back in Bishkek, and I offered to loan Murat the Uzbek tyubiteika I bought at a museum in Khiva, which we both wore more or less throughout the conference.

After a mix-up with our Australian-accented GPS fairy, we finally made it to Robsham Theater at BC just as the first session, the one on the political impact of the Internet, was wrapping up. Thus I only have notes from the second session in its social impact and the third session on its cultural impact. Everything I have to say about the first panel (which, unfortunately, was the one with Morozov) comes from having only watched the video and not having been there in person. Rather than summarize the discussion, I'm going to walk through my reaction to what was said at each session, so go ahead and follow along as you read.

After everyone is introduced, Mike Klein starts talking about the Sunlight Foundation, and I don't have much to say about his spiel except that I think it ties back to the quote I wrote above from Norris. As Kline notes, a lot of this transparency work used to be done by investigative reporters, but now we have these shiny new applications that publicize the same information...and it is handled by the same old actors in American politics, and this point is a great transition to somebody like Morozov, who tells us that he's been writing for the past few years about how authoritarian governments have adapted to the challenges posed by these new technologies. I also don't have much to say about his opening statement, largely because I had already read and grokked The Net Delusion about eight months before this symposium, but I want to take what he said about how it might not be possible to use various web sites without providing information like your real name a step further. We already know that the Uzbek government rolled out their own social networking site a few months ago. If we even forget that and look at a more successful site like Vkontakte or Odnoklassiki, can you imagine localized alternatives to Spotify or Pandora or Amazon emerging in these countries and being used to gather data on the opposition and make predictions about potential future members of the opposition? I can't see any reason why this wouldn't happen if it hasn't happened already, but feel free to disagree with me in the comments. He then goes on to talking about how we need to think about what an Internet that meets the needs of citizens as well as consumers would look like. He seems to have dropped hints about this kind of thing in various speeches and talks on Youtube, stating that it will be the subject of his second book. All I can say is I hope I'm not in Bishkek when it's published.

Eli Pariser more or less sets the stage for Charles Steelfisher's remarks and boy do I have a rant about what he said, well, a few disagreements, well, a few quibbles. First, while the voter file doesn't say who you voted for, it can be reasonably assumed that if you have somebody who shows up to vote in primary, then they did vote for a candidate whether or not said candidate had an opponent. Yes, there is the phenomenon of "ballot fatigue" where voters sometimes vote in only a few races and leave the rest of the ballot blank, but you can estimate it by comparing vote totals. Second, access to the voter file varies according to state laws. In Maine, you can pay a fee to get a copy of the voter file, and the definition of the kind of organization you have to be affiliated with is so broad that you don't have to be affiliated with either of the 2 major parties to get it. The third quibble I have is with Steelfisher's comment that the use of "Big Data" for electioneering purposes means that you spend very little time actually talking to voters, or only to the specific voters you're trying to influence most. To this I respond:

Now I come from a very low-level background when it comes to electioneering. The largest campaign I've ever had a major role in was for a Maine State Senate seat with about 30,000 people. Maybe it's different in the Big Leagues, but in the Peter Bourgelais School of Political Organization, you use "Big Data" to prioritize the same ol' analog voter outreach tactics (canvassing, friendbanking, house parties, etc.) that have been used for decades, and you can get a spillover that doesn't occur online. Anyone who has canvassed a typical suburban or rural neighborhood for any appreciable amount of time knows that knocking on one person's door, even if they're home, does not always mean that you only talk with that one person. You can reach that person, their spouse, their kids (who might be of voting age or have teachers/friends of voting age, and teachers can be extremely useful for political organizing), and even the folks next door and across the street! On that note, I have said way too much about American politics on a blog that's supposed to be about the Eurasian Internet and the politics it lives on. It's only just now, having seen the video for this panel, that I realize the symposium was focused on the Internet IN AMURRICA. I still have some more things to say that, I think, are applicable outside the U.S., but none of them come from the remainder of this panel, so let's go to an intermission.

During the break, Murat and I met up with Kasym, another old friend from UMass. We shot the breeze for a little while until the second panel got started, and first Lois Brown, then Cullen Murphy, and then Kate Crawford started to put me to sleep. That's a little harsh. I'm sure they all know their stuff, but by then I was starting to figure out that most of the panelists were crafting their message to a very general audience, and not <nose position="raised"><accent type="British" class="Upper">those of us in the Techno-Intelligentsia</accent></nose>. Then Virginia Heffernen woke me up.

I want to respond to her statements by describing my formative experiences with the Internet, how it influences the problems I grapple with today, and how that affected my reaction to Kasym's question at the end of the panel. My first experience with the Web, although I'm not sure if it was outside of a proprietary network, was from roughly 1990-3. My mother had a Compuserve subscription with some Internet access for medical research on an IBM AT clone running MS-DOS 3.0, and every month I'd get an hour of play time on some simple text-based dungeon crawler games. There was a sense that the Internet was something you logged on to, spent a very limited amount of time on, and then disconnected from to retreat back to the world of hard drives and floppy disks. Then, from 1993-8, we got Windows 3.1 and Internet Explorer, and I began to get a sense of an outside Internet that had Web pages that took forever to load on a 28.8k modem, chat rooms and the trolls that inhabited them (yes, it was a simpler time and nobody thought of sexual predators), and, yes, at a young age, I mostly used it for games. Then, from 1999-2005, several things happened. We got broadband, with my new interest in programming I started spending some of my new found Internet time on sites like Qbasic.com and RPGDX, and one manifestation of the usual teenage clique nonsense was that all the kids I knew were on sites like IMDB as I was geeking out. Then, in the summer of 2005, just before my first year of college, somebody pointed me to Facebook, and it was only until much later that I really appreciated what had been diminished by that last transition into social media. On the one hand, if I had been in junior high/high school in the mid-late 2000's, I might have felt like a little less of an outcast than the other kids, because instead of spending all of our time on separate sites that dealt with different subject matter and never interacted, we would have swapped bad Youtube clips and bad song lyrics like the youngsters do these days on their Twitter-pods. On the other hand, I think I learned a lot from my old programming haunts, and if you'll forgive the use of an old 90's cliché, it was a lot easier back then to take an exit on the Information Superhighway and get on to a back road. Thus the way I've often thought about these problems of Internet censorship, surveillance, and propaganda have been in terms of creating "a space" where opposition activists can securely communicate and organize in the face of a Big Brother adversary that is interested in monitoring, stopping, and/or co-opting their activities. I can certainly understand what she means by "losing my fighting spirit", but I'm not as bothered by it. I don't care if Pandora selects the right song in my playlist, but I do care about how the SNB could make use of sites like Muloqot. I don't think that these spaces are "magical" in any way (and this, perhaps, is in part influenced by the fact that my old Internet haunts were involved in such "magic"), or that they can in any way greatly supercede many offline political/social/economic realities, but it is certainly important that they be preserved.

This is why I agree with Siva Vaidhyanathan that we need to collectively back off from the "Internet is Magic" hype, although I think he ultimately shot himself in the foot by praising the folks at Google so much. Wait, the Blogspot platform that this blog is hosted on is owned by Google. Uhhhhmmm....they're all brilliant wizards out there at Mountain View. I love Google App Engine! Praise be to Goooogle, Aaaaaaammmeeeeeennnn...

It was around this time I was really starting to disengage with what the panelists were saying. This wasn't because of the focus on the States, but because it was all just so much skimming over the surface. Yes, I know the Facebook like tag can be used to track users even when they're not on Facebook. Yes, I know about the iPhone tracking controversy. Oh ja ja ja, "attach big responsibilities to big data". I stopped paying attention to the discussion and had a look at the folks seated nearby. Sitting next to me on my right were Murat and Kasym. Murat had pulled out his laptop, and Kasym was fiddling with his iPhone. To my left was some hipster-looking guy (well, he had those black, thick-rimmed glasses associated with hipsters) doing something on a laptop. I remember my eyes wandering, and I caught a glimpse of what looked like Python or Ruby code. Who was this guy? Let's call him HipsterGlasses for now.

Anyway, I had a really visceral, reflexive reaction to Kasym's question, and so did HipsterGlasses. When Vaidhyanathan mentioned that protesters were being tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed in Tahrir Square, the mic didn't pick it up, but HipsterGlasses interjected "and shot!" as he was speaking. I looked over and enthusiastically nodded. While there was (and is) a community of nerds on RPGDX and the intense mystical experience of seeing the code I dream up manifested in the screen (often after a few hours of debugging), I still had a home and school life outside of it at least, and at most parallel to it. Likewise, there's some really good writing out there about how the overthrow of Mubarak can be explained as part of a movement over the course of millenia against the pharaohs and an excellent interview with Stephen Cohen on how the protests in Russia aren't just about Putin's long-term attempt to become a tsar, but also about the failure of privatization in the 90's. How do you get to a point where an address isn't a house or a street, but a website? Any talk of a "Facebook revolution" only serves to make Mark Zuckerberg look far more like a humanitarian than he actually deserves.

Scumbag Zuckerberg is no Internet Park Ranger.

Finally, and maybe this is just my 90's-centric view of the Internet talking, but I just don't see the big deal with the #Guyscallmethings tag. With that, we're at the end of the panel and another intermission sponsored by the Brisco Shortening Comedy Hour

Once we got back to the theater holy shit HipsterGlasses, aka Chris Csikszentmihályi was there on the stage! Then first Perry Wu and Charlie Kravetz started talking and I began to zone out again. For all the talk about how the Internet has transformed our culture, I kept thinking of online entities like 4chan *pause*, Anonymous *pause*, and OnionSpace. I also couldn't get the Avenue Q tune "The Internet is for Porn" out of my head, and my notes say "We're listening to Bach, just for the lulz". I could go on a long anecdote about how the facial recognition software Kravetz talked about could perhaps be used on the opposition in authoritarian regimes, but I think that dead horse has been beaten enough already, and I think a lot of dead horses were being beaten by this third panel. Here, I think, was a problem with the way this symposium was structured. I think whoever structured this symposium was going for a "Three Blind Men and an Elephant" approach: consider three different categories of influence on "meatspace" by "cyberspace" and put them together to grasp the all-important Big Picture. But with the format we were given, we kept getting a short introduction to the same problems with different window dressing over and over and over. If you'll forgive a tangent about political philosophy, in ancient and early modern political thought, none of these distinctions existed. There was the polis, which sometimes meant the ancient Greek city-state but more generally meant any community of humans living together, and all of the things we call "society" and "culture" were discussed as political phenomena, and it looks like one consequence of partitioning them out like this is that we get a superficial treatment of all. If I were the tyrant of the Mass Humanities board, I would have reorganized the whole symposium around a series of problems or themes like anonymity, dialogue, etc. But if I were the tyrant of Mass Humanities, I wouldn't be writing this blog post.

Thus it was no surprise to me when Chris C. got up and explained, it a lot of good, solid detail, that technological innovation is an inherently political act in the broad definition of politics that I just described, because it either inherently disrupts or (more often than not) reinforces the way humans live in community with each other.

Then we get to the final boss of the symposium, aka the Chuck Norris of Internet policy, aka Jonathan Zittrain. Zittrain starts to describe Amazon Mechanical Turk to us, and I agree with his prediction about its future use. I can, of course, see this exact technology used in various parts of the CIS, especially as smart phones become more affordable. Never mind whether a private investigator or the Boston Police use a gamified system. What if the SNB uses it? I think, at least in this context, you can't respond to that kind of development without at least a diplomatic response (setting aside the steaming pile of fail that is the State Department's Internet Freedom policy) that takes into account American technologies are being used in authoritarian regimes, and now I think I'm starting to bore myself. There were a lot of other things said during this panel, but I think I'm going to wrap up my discussion of the symposium proper, as I think the boredom I experienced while sitting through it has crept on to this blog post.

After the last session concluded, we all went out to the lobby, where we could buy the various panelists' books and get them signed. Murat bought a copy of The Net Delusion, and, as Murat mentioned to Morozov that I was "your biggest fan", Morozov signed two copies of his book, one from a kid in an Uzbek tyubiteika, and another already read cover to cover and extensively commented on by some long-haired twenty-something wearing the rare combination of the xkcd Linux cheat sheet T-shirt and a Kyrgyz kalpak.

Was that it? I had been trying to think of a good question to ask Morozov for a while before this symposium, and, especially having missed the political session, I guess I was too starstruck at the book signing to ask the one question I had. The book signing took very little time, and as best as I can recall, a little while later he was over near the entrance to the theater chatting with somebody. I walked over and said something like "Mr. Morozov, if you have a minute [he said he did], I've been a fan since the TED talk you gave back in 2009. I'm a second bachelor's student in Computer Science at UMass-Amherst, and I have a BA in Political Science already, and I've been trying ot work towarfds a career related to Internet censorship and surveillance in the former Soviet Union, and more specifically in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Now I'm not asking you for contacts, but I'm wondering if you have any advice on how I could turn this interest into a career path, and what kind of career path that would be given that the State Department is what it is." "Well, it's not so much the State Department, but first you should get a graduate degree," he said. "Would that be a law degree?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, "or something like Science and Technology Studies, or STS. You might have a little trouble explaining your interests, but that would be a good way to get the intellectual background necessary. As far as careers go, there are more or less two paths you could take. There's the policy analyst role at a think tank like the Brookings Institute, especially as Internet censorship becomes more mainstream. Then there's more of an activist role, in which case you work in the region." "So with an NGO like the Civil Initiative on Internet Policy?" I asked. He paused for a second. "Do youe mean Gipi?" he asked. "Yeah, " I said. "Гражданская Инициатива..." "Yeah yeah, " he said. "We fund them through Soros..." I mentioned that I was interning there next semester (stay tuned for updates on this starting in early February) and we talked about Gipi for a little bit. I thanked him, he wished me luck, and just as I was walking away, I passed Chris C., "I like your shirt", he said. Somewhere behind me, Morozov laughed and said "Yes, and he a hat from Kyrgyzstan as well." That moment alone made the entire trip worth it. After two years in the soul-crushing, bureaucratic meat-grinder that is UMass-Amherst (with a few exceptions), somebody had seen and, I'm sure, appreciated the importance of Computer Science inside the yurt. I've tried my best to keep the fanboy level of this post to a minimum, but what Kasym said when I went over to the exit to meet him and Murat was too good to leave out: "Dude, you look positively post-coital."

After sleeping over at Murat's place where I also shrugged off my peculiar strain of Beatlemania, we had an uneventful drive back to Amherst. As the car rental place was relatively close to the UMass campus and the buses were running on a weekend schedule, I took a good 20 minutes to walk back. On the way, I passed Gordon Hall. It's a relatively small building on the edge of campus and just a few doors down from Fraternity Row proper. There was a sign out front with a whole bunch of interesting-sounding research groups I had never heard anything from, like the "National Center for Digital Government", the "Center for Heritage & Society", "Something something Science, Technology and Society", and "General Specific's Secret Military Base"...on second thought that last one might not have been there, but it might as well have been there for all I'd heard from these places. Although it was Sunday, the front door was unlocked and I figured I'd have a look around. Most academic buildings on campus have all kinds of fliers for different lectures and talks related to what people are doing in whatever department is based there...and there was nothing. Maybe I just needed to go to a different floor, but all I saw was bare walls and a lounge with a giant plaque with a list of donors. I did, when doing some research for this post, look up the NCDG and some associated content, and I drew two conclusions from it. First, Jane Fountain doesn't appear to be what I interpreted as a "cyber-utopian". Most of her research appears to be focused on how IT operates "behind the desk", or how bureaucracies are affected by ICT. I'm not saying that that's bad, but my background is in Political Science, not Public Administration, and we do deal with separate questions. Second, even outside of that distinction, the dictatorships that researchers associated with the NCDG don't appear to be the same kind of regimes I'm studying. Their website has a list of "Recent Publications by NCDG Affiliates" which includes Phillip Howard's The Internet and Islam: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Again, I haven't read the book, but he did give this talk where, just in the last two minutes, he says that the countries that don't fit his model are the ones that don't have an open Internet, but have taken steps to restrict it and use it as a propaganda tool. I'm here at UMass to get my CS degree, and after this spring I have one more semester left. Then I can't go back to the CIS soon enough.

It's Mystery CompSci Theater 460: Tunisian Edition

2011-11-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

Ohai readers,

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Computer Science 460: Intro. to Computer and Network Security (an old website from the course is linked in for reasons I'd rather not get bogged down in). It covers exactly what the description says it covers, and one of the things we have to do in this class is give a short presentation on a recent security vulnerability. I took a break from my usual hunting grounds to give this presentation on Tunisian Javascript injection shortly before the "Jasmine Revolution". It was kind of rushed, and putting Javascript code on a PowerPoint slide seemed like a better idea before I gave the presentation, but I think it's a cool illustration of the kinds of tricks that are possible in an authoritarian regime where all of the IT infrastructure is under strict state control.

Yes, I know there was a presidential election in Kyrgyzstan. I will probably blog about this when I go home for Thanksgiving Break.

Cultural learnings to make benefit glorious headquarters of minutebear, or The Trip to Kazakhstan

2011-09-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Oh, come on. I had to put a Borat reference in somewhere!

My two months in Central Asia ended, as all good things should, with a four day trip to Kazakhstan. I don't know if I have as much to say here as I did about the trip to Uzbekistan. Part of this is due to the fact that, given the size of the country and the way SRAS structured the visit, I saw a much less of Kazakhstan than I did of Uzbekistan. When I went to Uzbekistan, I almost circled the entire country. In Kazakhstan, we never left Almaty. Furthermore, since we spent the whole time in one city, we stayed with one host family the whole trip and didn’t have nearly as much of a chance to go out and meet people. All of that said, let’s start with the first full day in Almaty.

That morning, after a bus ride that must have taken at least two hours, we arrived at the Asian Winter Games sports complex:

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a wider angle. You can’t see the main walking trail in this photo. The place slopes up between two very large mountains with a staircase that takes the average person about an hour to climb up. I’d go on for a while about the complex, but I’m really only mentioning it because of the conversation we had at the top of the staircase with our host-sister. She was a student at the University of International Business, and, given that I had just written a paper discussing the telecom market in Uzbekistan (see “Odds and Ends from CA-202”), we got to talking about smart phones in Kazakhstan. The average Kazakh makes about 60,000 or more tenge per year, and an iPhone 3GS with a plan costs about 80,000 tenge. I think I saw two people with a tablet or smartphone in Kazakhstan, and they were both at the airport. Just as in Uzbekistan (where I saw just as few people with a smartphone), most people use cheap Nokia phones.

After a visit to the Central State Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan (which was right across the street from one of Nazarbayev’s palaces) and a stop at a nearby shopping mall (where I had my first glass of delicious ayran in a year), we got to talking with a Kyrgyz woman as we waited for a bus/taxi back to our host family’s house about, of all things, bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. The story she told us was a much more mixed bag than what you usually hear. A friend of her’s and this friend’s boyfriend were talking about getting married anyway, and they had talked about bride-kidnapping and the obvious psychological damage it causes. However, the boyfriend’s family pressured him into it, and she was kidnapped a few weeks before we had this conversation. The woman who told us this (let’s call her Jodie Foster from now on) said she thinks they’ll be ok, “because they love each other”. From her perspective, they had a good relationship before the kidnapping. This helps illustrate two things I’ve learned about Kyrgyz society. First, family ties (both in what we would call “the nuclear family” and in the extended family) are a kind of social black hole. In business, courtship, and politics, they exert a force so strong that even ideas like individuality and self-determination as we understand them in the West can’t escape. Second, there is a spectrum of cases, ranging from consensual eloping to abduction by force that leads to rape, that are all labeled “bride-kidnapping” by the Western press. While Azamat’s post in Cyber Chaikhana is absolutely right, there do exist mixed cases like the one I just described, where a healthy relationship was forcefully turned into a marriage by the timeandapacewarpingpowers of Central Asian family pressure. The conversation in Kyrgyzstan (where they have a saying, “Love comes after the wedding”) seems to be taking these cases into account, but I don’t see similar nuance in the Western media.

We also ate dinner that night with Jodie Foster and our host-sister. We got to the topic of Kazakh politics, and I asked our host-sister what she thought of Nazarbayev. She likes him, and she thinks people are better off in the cities. There is a problem in the villages, however, where people can’t find work. Drawing on my own observations of Almaty, the place generally looks nicer than Bishkek (yes, there are some bad parts of the city). I’ve had this idea going all the way back to a research paper I wrote for Politics of Eurasia in the spring of 2008, but a neo-Communist, authoritarian, jabroni beatin’, pie eatin’ SOB like Nazarbayev could win a fair election in this country if one were held.

I then asked Jodie Foster about Kyrgyz politics. I was curious to know what she thought of the politicians that I understood to be the frontrunners in the upcoming presidential election: Almazbek “Let’s Stage a gas crisis to show people I can work with Russia” Atambayev, First Deputy Prime Minister Omurbek Babanov, and Kamchybek Tashiev, the head of the nationalist Ata-Jurt party. “I like Babanov, and I like his plans, “ she said. “But he is involved with crime. My father had a business, and he ran into trouble with Babanov’s men. I like Atambayev but he is linked to crime too.” I then asked about Tashiev, and she nearly, for lack of a better term, ROFLMAO’ed. “He definitely has links to crime. You know, I like Putin. I think he is the greatest president in the world. Presidents like Putin and Nazarbayev, they take and they have corruption, but they give back to their country. In our country, all of our politicians just take. I think we need a strong ruler like Putin.” I think most Americans can’t really imagine what a strong argument for a strongman looks like, but in the current state of Kyrgyz politics, Jodie’s statement makes a lot of sense. To make a comparison with American politics, I think that, if Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry or Mitt Romney gets elected president, it would be a disaster for this country. However, I have no reason to believe that any serious candidate for president has ties to the drug mafia. When you consider that Bakiyev eliminated the Kyrgyz version of the DEA, Kyrgyz voters do not have this luxury. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that all of the presidential candidates in America looked the same. “There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego”. For an increasing number of Kyrgyz, there isn’t a potentially serious candidate this year who couldn’t pass for an underboss in the Bishkek branch of a Russian mafia family. If all of the candidates look like the same corrupt oligarchs that were ousted in 2005 and 2010, how can you not at least consider someone who will crack down on the drug trade, make the proverbial trains arrive on time, and unite the forty tribes under a single ruler (hmm, where have I heard that before?)

Oh yeah, this post was about Kazakhstan. The next day, we took a cab into the city and toured Kazakh State University, or KazГУ. Now that was a nice campus. Most of the buildings looked as nice (if not better) than the ones at UMass. We stopped by a small museum on campus devoted to the history of the university, and I’m sure it looked exactly the way it was supposed to: clean, modern, and with a giant mural / exhibit on Nazarbayev across from a giant mural/exhibit on Al-Farabi. The message is clear: the exhibition on Al-Farabi is a celebration of Kazakhstan’s past, and if you turn around, you see Nazarbayev leading Kazakhstan into the great shining future. Kazakhstan greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls…

As the tour progressed, we stopped by the philology department and, instead of a meeting with a political scientist like the schedule said, we met with the Dean of the department. I tuned out about five minutes after she started talking, because it quickly became clear that she only intended to give us the official government song and dance routine. Everything has been great since independence under the wise leadership of Nazarbayev. Enrollment has risen to X students at our universities, Y thousand students have studied abroad, we collaborate with Z universities around the world and have students from N countries. Kazakhstan #1 exporter of potassium / All other countries have inferior potassium.

That night, I was invited over to our host-sister’s aunt’s house for tea. She turned out to be fluent in German, and given that I still had a good amount of German in my head from Middlebury Deutsche Schule , I had a chance to practice it…in Kazakhstan. While I sometimes lapsed in and out of Russian, she told me (in a language, I forget which) that she lived in Frankfurt and one or two other cities in Germany and used to teach Неме́цкий язык here in Kazakhstan. We also learned that her grandson’s first birthday (which in Kazakh culture is almost as big an event as a bar mitzvah) was tomorrow, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The next day, our first stop was a trip to the Association of Kazakhs, an NGO that does a lot of outreach work with the Kazakh diaspora. The president of the organization, of course, is Nazarbayev. In addition to a whole bunch of magazines that I wasn’t able to fit into my luggage once I flew back to America, we were given several CDs and DVDs of Kazakh music, and a documentary on Nowruz celebrations from two years ago. Thus we spent most of the day lugging around a big fat bag of Kazakh cultural swag, never mind the brochures we were given at a visit to another university. We toured the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research (KIMEP), a university focused on the social sciences that, like KazГУ, looked just as nice as UMass (if not better) with one serious exception that I’ll describe later.

That night, we were invited to the birthday party I mentioned earlier. The family had rented a floor in a nearby dance hall a few minutes walk from our host family’s house. This was as extravagant as a Sweet Sixteen party in the U.S. There were fancy tables and chairs, catering, a DJ, a birthday cake with fireworks, an obnoxiously loud sound system, the works. There were at least 35 guests at this party. Not as much as a Tajik wedding, but still a lot of guests by American standards. Around the time I was watching some teenage kid dancing the robot to Pitbull and T-Pain’s “Hey Baby”, it dawned on me that the little toddler at this party is going to look through the family album years from now, see two exhausted-looking Americans, and have little idea what they’re doing there. It was one of the most surreal moments in my two months in Central Asia.

While we were there, I excused myself to use the bathroom, and by this point in the story I had experienced three things I would wish on my worst enemy, Mohammed Esteban Al-Sexfaci. First, that he have a 40 minute commute to work in a marshrutka.. Second, that the only toilets near the place he works be “squatties”, as I discovered at the dance hall. There’s something about trying to take a piss while standing in a puddle of someone else’s urine as the noise from a nearby loudspeaker drills through your ears that extinguishes all hope for the existence of a loving and benevolent creator. Third, that if he ever does find a Western-style toilet, all the toilet paper dispensers turn out to be empty, and he would have to leave the bathroom to find the materials necessary to finish the paperwork. That was the one exception I found at KIMEP.

Later that night, I submitted all the Kazakh reports on Herdict dated July 27th. Coming to that with experience from the trip to Uzbekistan, I decided to be a little more comprehensive this time. I didn’t test any websites for circumvention tools last time, but I discovered that torproject.org wasn’t blocked. At least the domain names for several news sites are unblocked, and the only sites that appear to be blocked are Livejournal (which perhaps has to do with Rakhat Aliyev's blog, note that, while his livejournal appears to be accessible from the U.S., I'm not seeing the kind of things that a Kazakh dissident would write) and possibly the Blogspot platform this blog is hosted on. I say possibly for the same reason that I don’t think specific URLs on news sites are blocked, because I think I didn’t need to be in Kazakhstan to test its internet filtering system. As Christoper Schwartz points out on neweurasia, Kyrgyzstan fell prey to what Computer Science types call “upstream filtering” after the Kazakh government blocked Wordpress. However, while in Kyrgyzstan I never encountered a block while looking for articles on eurasianet, RFE/RL, registan.net, etc. that were often critical of the Nazarbayev government. I would have conducted some more tests that night in Almaty, but I didn’t largely because they all happened at about 10pm, and I was more exhausted than on most of the nights I spent in Uzbekistan.

On the last day of the trip, the other student I went with was sick, and I went alone with the in-country coordinator for the trip to a memorial to the Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ (which people in the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan increasingly refer to as WWII), a Russian Orthodox church, and a Kazakh music museum in quick succession, but I don't have much to say about any of that. Afterwards we tried to take a tour of Kazakh-British Technical University (which advertised itself as a big Petroleum Engineering school), but since our coordinator didn't call ahead and everyone was busy dealing with prospective students fresh out of their entrance exams, we just walked around the campus.

After that came the weirdest moment of the entire trip, beyond standing on Arthur Conolly's unmarked grave, beyond not knowing if I was hearing small talk or a veiled political statement about the Arab Spring, and certainly beyond going to the birthday party of a 1 year old kid I had met the day before. Our coordinator, at least twice during the trip, interrupted it with a short visit to some of the clothing stores in the city...and I'm using the term “clothes” in a very general sense. Not long after we left Kazakh-British Tech, she didn't pay close enough attention to the sign outside (which clearly said “Lingerie”), and there I was, walking into the equivalent of a Victoria's Secret with a woman I barely knew in Almaty, Kazakhstan...bras and panties as far as the eye could see...and the walls were painted red...

After the longest minute ever, she realized that the store was just lingerie, and we alked over to another store from there. We later visited an NGO called The Global Monitor Group. They mostly do studies of Kazakh society and the economy, and they could use a better translator. I still have the business card of the person we had a short Q&A session with, and the tagline on it reads “Researches | Interrogations | Examinations”. During the session, I naturally began to ask about the state of the Kazakh IT sector. Back when I had my midterm in Central Asian studies, I had a question that went something like “Define 'Dutch Disease'. Does the Kazakh economy suffer from it? Why or why not?” I bs'ed the following:

“Kazakhstan may suffer from 'Dutch disease' to a certain extent , but that is at least slightly offset by the fact that the country has some industry and manufacturing. Dutch disease is an economic pattern whereby exploitation of mineral or energy wealth leads to an increase in the value of a country's currency. Then exports become difficult due to high prices, which leads to more of a focus on energy. Kazakhstan has made a progress in combating Dutch disease through the creation of free trade zones (ex. the zone on the Chinese border), and it may be able to develop a significant (if tightly controlled IT sector. I don't believe that Kazakhstan will be able to diversify its economy due to the fact that there can only be more interest in its energy resources, although there may be some promise in the IT sector due to the 'reverse brain drain'.”

This was before I came to Kazakhstan. The person we spoke with agreed that there has been an effort to build the IT sector, and she pointed to the creation of the Alatau IT Park there in Almaty as an example (which, unfortunately, I didn't get to see). A look at the park's website indicates that it has certainly gotten off the ground, and there are numerous projects in development at the park. Only 5 out of 36 projects seem to be related to the energy sector. Now seems like a good time to introduce the last stop on the tour: the trip to the University-IT. It was mostly a tall, 10 or 12-story building that had a fairly nice view of the city. Sadly, we ran into the same problem there that we had at Kazakh-British Tech (minus the Kazakh Victoria's Secret), but I did notice that most of the signs advertised English language coursework and online journalism. There was little to no talk of system administration or any of the other things we geeks think of when we think IT. Their website doesn't have as much information as what you could get from a CS department at an American university, but it was only built in 2009. As the person we spoke with at The Global Monitor Group said, like so many things in Kazakhstan, the IT sector and the educational system that trains it is just getting started.

Just across from the front doorstep of our host family's place, there was a shed that had some of the windows covered over with newspaper. On one of the windows, there was a Hallmark card-sized picture of Nazarbayev staring back at us every time we walked out the front door during the trip. When I was in Uzbekistan, I was constantly looking over my shoulder looking for Islam Karimov. But for all the propaganda billboards I saw (the fact that they were in Uzbek probably helped), I didn't see him until I walked into a cybercafe, got right in his face, and asked him questions about what sites I could and couldn't visit on his Internet in his capital. By contrast, I think I spent the entire trip in Nazarbayev's shadow. His picture wasn't everywhere, but it was everywhere it needed to be. It's morning in Kazakhstan! Things are so much better than they were 20 years ago, come grasp the mighty...yeah, I'm not quoting the end of the Borat theme. There was enough of…that during the trip.

"When I find myself in times of trouble, Nazar Nazar Cat comes to me...": The Trip to Uzbekistan

2011-09-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

(If you don't know what Nazar Nazar Cat is, click here.)
Around the end of June, I went on an eight day trip to Uzbekistan covering Tashkent, Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. I went with one other student from the London School, but that was it. Names will, of course, be changed to protect the innocent and perhaps not-so-innocent, but I'm going to draw my fake names from my now not-so-secret guilty pleasure: 80s and 90s professional wrestling. Any blogger will talk about how A said this or B said that. Where else are you going to read a sentence like "Hulk Hogan told us that he knows people in Bukhara who can read and speak Arabic"?

Our trip began with a flight from Bishkek to Tashkent. Once we arrived at the airport, I was watching the commercials on these big plasma screen TVs on the walls while we waited to get our visas processed, and I saw a commercial for UCell, one of the local telecom companies, offering an Internet plan with the Samsung Galaxy Tab for 500,000 Uzbek som (about $280). Being new to international travel in Central Asia, I didn't immediately get that ads at the airport are a good way to gauge the highest of the high end in the local electronics market. This was the kind of stuff only tourists and members of the nomenklatura (the ruling elites surrounding President Karimov) could afford. After going through customs, we were met by our guide, Hulk Hogan, and rode to the youth hostel where we spent the night. When he asked where in America we were from, I explained that I was from Boston, since almost no one knows about Maine in this part of the world. "Oh, Boston," he said. "Boston Bruins, eh? CHAMPIONS! They say their prayers, take their vitamins, and eat their vegetables. They're real Americans!" I didn't really know what to say about that, since I don't follow hockey much.

We finally arrived at the hostel where we ate a late dinner and stayed the night. Our host was Nature Boy himself, Ric Flair. He was stylin', profilin', and used to be a history professor before he started the hostel. We were eating dinner around 10pm as he played the dutar when this college-aged girl came out into the courtyard and started chatting with us in Russian. She was a Kazakh student studying there (or visiting, it wasn't clear), and she had been to America the same year Borat came out. I gave a nervous laugh when she told us this and tried to shy away from the subject, but she didn't seem as offended by it as I think most of us Americans would assume.

As Nature Boy played the dutar, we got to talking about pre-Soviet Uzbek history and Uzbekistan's Islamic past. He told us that "I know people in Bukhara who can read Arabic and speak it, Whoo! but it's not good that they can do that", and he switched back to playing the dutar. As all the articles say, Islam in Uzbekistan is tightly regulated and generally discouraged. Only a few madrasahs are open, and I think I heard the call to prayer once during the entire trip.

The next day, we visited a few sites around Tashkent with Hulk Hogan. We started talking about Western music, and he told us he likes some Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Led Zepplin, and other bands that the Soviets didn't want people to hear back in the day. I asked him how many people listen to Western music, and he said "Let me tell you somethin', brother. Everyone listens to Western music." For all of the press about the government railing against rock and rap, it's only rhetoric. Uzbekistan may be more inward-looking than Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan, but Western pop culture isn't going anywhere.

That afternoon, we left Tashkent and flew to Urgench on the other side of the country before taking a cab to an inn at Khiva Castle. We arrived about two hours before sunset, and decided to take a walk around the city. As we walked alongside the old walls, the other student I was traveling with pointed out a used syringe I luckily stepped over, and we found a used condom further down the road. We did talk in Central Asian studies about how Khiva is in one of the poorest parts of Uzbekistan (admittedly using data from 2001, see page 35). To be honest, there wasn't much to write home about outside of the various mosques and madrasahs around the city. Very few of them seemed to be used as mosques/mardrasahs, and the majority had been turned into tourist traps. We visited the Muhammad Amin Khan mosque and madrasah, and there was a sign out front advertising a cybercafe and copier center on the first floor.

It was also in Khiva that I worked up the nerve to start testing the local Internet filtering system. I started with the mobile phone I had from the London School that had a SIM card from MTS Uzbekistan. I could access a Blogspot-hosted blog and the English-language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Islam Karimov and the Andijan massacre without any trouble. I would go on to test a variety of sites as the trip went on, but I'll go into details later.

After we left Khiva, we had a seven hour cab ride through a giant stretch of desert between Khiva and Bukhara. For the first two hours or so, we chatted with our driver, Stone Cold Steve Austin. "You're from America?" he said, "Oh, I love Jodie Foster. I like Sylvester Stallone and I used to like Mike Tyson, but then he converted to Islam when he was in prison. Now he talks about his Quran and his surahs. Austin 3:16 says he lost his fighting spirit. He needs to buy himself a bottle of vodka, and drink back some of that courage he had in his prime!" Once again, I didn't know what to say to that. After a while, I started to get a little bored, and I kept trying to submit reports to Herdict from my cell phone. However, Herdict thought I was reporting from Kuwait, and even though I changed the country selected in the form, it still didn't show up on their website. So there we are, two American students on a long roadtrip between the Karakum and Kyzyl-Kum deserts, passing the occasional road crew operating Chinese and German equipment, with the occasional view of the banks of the Amu Darya to our right. About four or five hours in, we reached a part of the desert that was really barren. It was the kind of desert that you could hide a dead body in and it wouldn't be discovered for some time. This was a fun thing to think about given that I had spent the past few hours trying to learn about what the Uzbek government didn't want its people to know, and I knew almost nothing about The Texas Rattlesnake driving the car. If this seems a little paranoid, it's because it is, and I realized that during the trip.

This theme of coming to terms with my own neuroses followed me into Bukhara, but we'll come back to that later.
On our second day in the city, we met an American grad student in the lobby of the hotel in which we were staying. He was traveling from India up through Central Asia and eventually to Beijing after having completed a research project for the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. He asked me what I was studying and what I, a Computer Science major, was doing in Uzbekistan. A few minutes earlier, I had seen a guy in camouflage walk into the big courtyard in back of the lobby, so I looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't within earshot. When I explained my interests in Internet censorship and surveillance, he asked me if Google Maps was blocked here, because he tried to access it in a cybercafe in town, and it redirected to MSN. When I later had access to a wired connection in Gijduvan, a town about a half hour's drive away, I could access it just fine. The only possible reason I can think of as to why it would be blocked is to make it harder to organize street protests. If a big protest breaks out in Bukhara, it's an obvious problem for Tashkent, but who cares about a little trouble in Gijduvan?
Also on the second day of our trip, we stopped by one of the holiest sites in the Church of The Great Game of Latter-Day Social Scientists: the Ark Fortress.

Somewhere outside this gate, British officers Arthur Conolly (who coined the phrase "The Great Game") and Charles Stoddart were executed by the emir of Bukhara in 1842. Stoddart was imprisoned by the emir when he came to Bukhara to negotiate a peace treaty after the first British invasion of Afghanistan, and Conolly was imprisoned when he tried to negotiate Stoddart's release. The visit to the Ark Fortress was a big event for me not just because I had read all about this in Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, but because of something that happened the day after I got back from Uzbekistan. It bears an eerie resemblance to something that happened to Conolly a few months before he left for Bukhara. I don't want to say much more about it here, because of what I learned from both of our experiences. Hopkirk speculates that Conolly, who was deeply hurt by the event, may not have cared if he never came back from his mission, and therefore took an unreasonable risk. He let personal considerations influence his political calculations. As I think some of my friends know, whenever my personal life has gotten caught up in my political adventures, the result has never been good. I hope I've learned my lesson from this, because Conolly certainly didn't.

The night before we left for Gijduvan, we were both exhausted and spent most of the late afternoon and night watching Uzbek TV, which was incredibly boring and unbelievably entertaining at the same time. It was incredibly boring, because there were only a few more than half a dozen channels, all in Uzbek, and some of them had the same content. I can't tell you how many times I saw the same ad for a local driving school or heard parts of the most popular American pop song at the time: J-Lo and Pitbull's "On the Floor". It was unbelievably entertaining because of what else we saw that night: an Indian action movie. It's easy in America to not notice that Bollywood is successfully competing with Hollywood in numerous parts of Asia. There was an article a few years ago about one of the most popular TV programs in Afghanistan, a soap opera produced in India (which, by the way, the Ministry of Information and Culture tried to ban). They're not watching Jersey Shore over there, although that might be a good thing. In some places where American soft power has penetrated South/Central Asia, it has produced a frothy mix of curry and stupid that I couldn't make up if I wrote this post on acid. A Punjabi-language music video starring a boyband dressed like the Backstreet Boys in the early-mid 90s came on late that night. They were singing something to the tune of Justin Bieber's "Baby". The only fragment I remember is the chorus, where the band sings "Gore Gore Gore" (It's pronounced "goo-ree". I say Punjabi because I looked at a couple Indian pop music websites trying to find a video, and the same word pronunciation has been used in other songs), and then something like гулять, the infinitive of the Russian verb "to walk". Джа́стин Би́бер такую красивую лесбиянку!

After that run-in with Indian (American?) soft power, we took a cab to Gijduvan, and it's here that I was able to send some reports to Herdict that finally showed up on their website. That first batch is the data from June 28th on this page and clicking "Raw Data Feed". Like I said, I was able to access Google Maps just fine, but I made the mistake of not sending in a report. Looking back at the data, Facebook and the Russian Wikipedia article on the Andijan massacre are freely accessible, but two articles I singled out on corruption were blocked. I might say some more on this when I get to my post on Kazakhstan, but the Uzbek filtering system is (or perhaps was) slightly more transparent than the Kazakh system. All requests for blocked sites in Uzbekistan (that I found) redirected to MSN, but if you try to access a blocked site in Kazakhstan, the transaction will take a really long time, and you might get an HTTP 504 error or a generic "page not found" error. It's much harder to tell if there's a problem in the network or if the site is being deliberately blocked. I'll have some more to say about the internet in Uzbekistan when we get back to Tashkent.
After Gijduvan, we went to Samarkand and spent about two days there. Honestly, the fact is it was one of the nicest places in the entire trip. I will say this: if you go to some historic site in the area and somebody says "откуда вы?", say you're from Moldova unless you're absolutely sure you can pass as a Russian. Money was starting to run low by that part of the trip, and when we were buying tickets for tours, we tried to pass ourselves off as students from a poor East European country where people likely have Russian as a second language (no offense to any readers from Moldova) instead of wealthy American tourists looking to be relieved of some excess cash. However, by our second day in Samarkand we were pretty well exhausted (thanks to the heat) and had largely given up on touring the city.

The last leg of our trip led us back to Tashkent and a long afternoon with Hulk Hogan. One of our first stops was a place in Tashkent where you can study Arabic and not have a nice chat with the SNB. We went through the usual routine of seeing this or that monument built by so-and-so in the nth century, and we got to talking about how the West views the "stans", but then, once we got to a small courtyard with no one in earshot, Hulk looked around and checked around all the corners to make sure no one was listening. He leaned in and said "You know, brother, in Chechnya they're Muslims and they wanted independence from Russia, but Chechnya has only 500,000 people, and Russia has 150 million people. They were crazy! What'cha gonna do when the biggest and baddest country in the world runs wild on you?" Hulk then flexed his arms as if posing for a photo. The tour continued from there as usual, and just after we left, Hollywood Hulk looked back at the front gate, again presumably to make sure Mr. 38-Inch Pythons wouldn't be overheard, and he might have started discussing politics again. "Listen up, Mean Gene," he said. "I've watched the news, and you know how the people went out in Egypt and the Middle East and destroyed things [keep in mind that the Arab Spring was still very much in the news at the time of this conversation, even if the Uzbek media was presenting a very biased version of the events.] Well, the Hulkster watches the streets, and they don't have trees on their sidewalks like we do here. They give us Hulkamaniacs shade, and you know, it gets hot here during the summer." This was one of the weirdest moments of the trip. I couldn't tell if Hulk was making an innocent comment comparing the sidewalks in the Middle East to those in Uzbekistan, or if I was hearing a veiled political statement. I tried to tease out a clearer picture by observing that some of the trees in Uzbekistan "had been up for a long time", but I wasn't sure if he heard me. If it was a political statement, what was it? Is Karimov a strong tree that gives the country shade unlike in Egypt, where Mubarak was "cut down"? Why would Hulk Hogan need to disguise a statement like that? Once I got back to Bishkek, I was lucky enough to get a copy of Cyber Chaikhana, and I read Borderless Borderguard's post on how and why people don't openly discuss politics in Uzbekistan. He writes:

"Politics is obviously a very well guarded territory where people of the country have no access to. Moreover it is for the many seen the same like crime, if people enter political territory, they are being criminals."

Has politics become so taboo that you can't even reference events like the Arab Spring, even if your statement supports the president, without checking to see who's looking?

After that big Turkic question mark, I asked if we could stop by a cyber cafe for half an hour, because, I said, the other student I was with told me he wanted to check something. It was here that I generated the July 2nd reports in Herdict's raw data feed. I remember trying to think up what I would say if I got caught looking up stuff that the Uzbek government didn't want me to see, but fortunately the whole thing went off without a hitch. The censorship in this cybercafe was much more heavy than what I saw in Gijduvan. Entire domain names were blocked (e.g. Eurasianet), and blogs relating to the Andijan massacre were blocked, but I could still get to Wikipedia to read up on it. My overall reading of Uzbek internet censorship is that the government was, at the time, concerned about a possible spillover from the Arab Spring, and so potentially damaging information and access to online organizing tools was blocked on a location-specific basis (e.g. the blocking of Google Maps in Bukhara). The government appears to have changed its approach as we get closer to the 20th anniversary of independence, but see my comment on the topic at neweurasia.

We left Tashkent for Bishkek that night. Looking back at what Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold said about America, whenever we talked about American pop culture, everyone referenced celebrities or films from the early to mid-90s. If I include my conversations with various people in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, there seem to be two big demographics in Central Asia when it comes to demand for American media. There's the people in their 40s and 50s who remember when American TV and music was the "naughty stuff" that the Soviets didn't want them to see (see also this video from Belarus), and for whom, due to the turmoil of the post-Soviet period, time stopped in 1991. Then there's the younger demographic in their late teens and twenties who listen to whatever is on the Top 40. This is the best explanation I have for why, while at the airport waiting for our flight, we saw an Uzbek music video, B.o.B and Bruno Mars' "Nothing On You", and well, this. Yes, I will watch my videocassettes.

In the next post, I'll talk about my visit to Kazakhstan, *makes thumbs up like Borat* greatest country in the world! In the meantime, train, say your prayers (but not too much), take your vitamins, eat your plov, support President Karimov, and be a real Uzbek! *flexes* Foo!

Odds and Ends from CA 202

2011-08-31T18:10:00.000-07:00

The paper below was my term paper for the Central Asian Studies class I took while in Bishkek. It would have been a lot longer and covered other technologies such as wireless mesh networks if I had more time, but it does a reasonably good job with respect to Tor. The tl;dr version goes like this: while there has been some good work done to port Tor to various smartphone platforms, the mobile market in Uzbekistan is still using much older phones with far less memory and computing power. Also check out this presentation I gave for CA 202 on Berdymukhamedov and post-Turkmenbashi Turkmenistan.

----------------------------------

Internet Censorship Circumvention Technology in the Uzbek Political and Economic Context

“I think that there is no necessity to convince you in the fact that the Internet era has begun. At the same time, considering the issues surrounding us in far and near regions, we must NOT forget about the fact that destructive forces that are eager to confuse the youth and “feed” the with incorrect information and thus use Internet as a tool.” - Uzbek President Islam Karimov (“Islam Karimov: I Believe That Journalists Are My Strongest and Trustful Support.”)

As President Karimov hints, part of America’s master plan to promote instability in Central Asia is to foster color revolutions in the region by spreading destructive misinformation via the Internet. The Arab Spring was only a prelude to our designs on Central Asia. However, the Uzbek government has created a sophisticated filtering system to block most people’s access to content relating to political prisoners, corruption, the “massacre” in Andijan, and a variety of other content. After a brief overview of the political context in which Uzbekistan’s filtering system developed, this paper will look at the popular Tor software package and examine whether this technology can be realistically employed in the national political and economic context to successfully corrupt and misinform the youth of Uzbekistan.

To begin, even as President Karimov consolidated his grip on power in the first decade after independence, the Internet in Uzbekistan was relatively free “with the exception of some limited filters for pornography that were implemented on UzSCINET [an Uzbek research network]...the turning point in the state’s relationship to Internet freedom began following a series of attacks in Tashkent in 2004 blamed on the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Hit) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan” (Deibert et al. 267). At present, while private ISPs can and do operate in Uzbekistan, the state-owned telecommunications company Uzbektelecom JSC has a monopoly on access to Uzbekistan’s IT infrastructure. In this way “operators and providers are entitled to access international telecommunication networks exclusively through the infrastructure of Uzbektelecom JSC, which facilitates control over Internet content and hinders active competition on the communications market (Deibert et al. 267). However, Uzbektelecom’s monopoly is not absolute. A handful of ISPs “have their own international satellite connections...A growing trend among ISPs is using UzPAK’s [the Uzbek Internet and its filtering system] lines to send messages and satellite networks to view or download information. This solution allows the providers to circumvent UzPAK’s monitoring network and channels’ low capacities” (Deibert et al. 269). All ISPs do still practice self-censorship, especially when pressured by the National Security Service (SNB). “There is no mandatory government publication review, but ISPs risk having their licenses revoked if they post ‘inappropriate’ information” (Deibert et al. 271).

As for the types of websites that are blocked and how they are blocked, “The SNB’s censorship is selective and often targets articles on government corruption, violations of human rights, and organized crime. Usually, it affects URL-specific pages instead of top-level domain names. Uzbek ISPs block entire web sites or individual pages upon SNBs unofficial request. Accessing a blocked page redirects the user to a search engine or to an error message such as ‘You are not authorized to view this page’” (Deibert et al. 271). Furthermore, not only does the SNB monitor the Uzbek Internet, but it also conducts surveillance in collaboration with other regimes, as the agency “regularly exchanges data with Russian intelligence sources and allegedly collaborates with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Academy” (Deibert et al. 271).

All of this said, it is important to keep in mind that “Internet censorship in Uzbekistan is very easy to circumvent...For every blocked website, there are hundreds of mirrors, proxies, cache services, virtual private networks or just something like SESAWE with simple handy tools to bypass any censorship online” ("Neweurasia.net » Uzbekistan: Internet Censorship Is Overrated."). However, not only has the Uzbek government taken steps to expand the extent of its censorship and monitoring (as is the case on the mobile web, where “Uzbek regulators have demanded mobile operators notify the government about mass distributions of SMS messages with ‘suspicious content’” ("Uzbekistan Tightens Control over Mobile Internet”), but numerous questions still exist as to whether some circumvention tools can reasonably be used by a significant segment of the population. This is especially true when the current political and economic situation in Uzbekistan is taken into account.

We will address these questions as they relate to the popular Tor circumvention program. Tor provides anonymous browsing “by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you--and then periodically erasing your footprints” ("Tor Project: Overview."). In order to provide confidentiality through encryption and to circumvent local filtering, “the user’s software...builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays [computers running Tor that can forward traffic] on the network” ("Tor Project: Overview."). This is a generally effective solution on a traditional computer with (by Western standards) low-end hardware and a reliable Internet connection. However, most Uzbeks do not own their own PC. While Internet penetration in Uzbekistan has jumped from 8.8% in 2009 (Deibert et al. 268) to 26.8% in 2011 ("Asia Internet Facebook Usage and Population Statistics."), 12.5 million Uzbeks (by 2009 numbers (Deibert et al. 268)), or 46% of the population, own a mobile phone. With the growth of the mobile web in Uzbekistan and recent efforts to port Tor to mobile platforms, will a larger segment of the population beyond those wealthy enough to afford a personal computer be able to access blocked content through mobile versions of Tor?

Part of the answer lies in the current state of the effort to make Tor run on mobile devices. As Tor user and researcher Marco Bonetti describes, Tor has been ported to several mobile platforms, including the Android OS, the iPhone, the Nokia N900, and the Chumby One embedded computer system (“Mobile Privacy: Tor on the iPhone And Other Unusual Devices”). However, even on these relatively high-end platforms, significant technical and economic issues remain. Much of the cryptographic programming required to run Tor can create a severe drain on a mobile device’s battery. While the exact reasons are beyond the scope of this paper, it can be said that some instructions to a device’s CPU require more of the hardware (and therefore more electricity) than others. In addition, there is an added problem on mobile phones of making sure that Tor knows which device it is communicating with. For a traditional PC, the system’s IP address (the unique 32-bit number that distinguishes it from all other devices on the Internet) generally stays the same and is only occasionally changed by the user’s ISP as new users go online and old users remove their accounts. But on a mobile device which can rapidly change location in a very short time, the devices’ IP address can just as rapidly change. Thus Bonetti claims that developers are still trying to adequately adapt Tor to these new platforms.

Beyond these technical concerns, there remains the question of whether the majority of mobile users in Uzbekistan use the kinds of phones that can currently run Tor. According to Opera Software’s “State of the Mobile Web” report for April 2011, the ten most popular mobile phones in Uzbekistan are all, by Western standards, relatively slow devices with little memory such as the Nokia 6300 (which tops the list) that mostly run Nokia’s proprietary Series 40 operating system and not Google’s Android OS or Apple’s iOS ("Opera: State of the Mobile Web, April 2011."). While these hardware and software limitations can be overcome in the near future (especially as more powerful devices become more affordable in the region), the fact remains that little work has been done to date to bring Tor to these platforms.

In conclusion, there is still much work to be done before America’s corrupting influence can circumvent the Uzbek filtering system and misinform the nation’s youth. What began as a system to block access to pornographic websites on the national scientific and research network has evolved over the last decade into a sophisticated system of censorship and surveillance that takes full advantage of the state monopoly on IT infrastructure, self-censorship due to pressure from the SNB, and collaboration with foreign intelligence services. While numerous circumvention technologies exist (mirrors, proxies, etc.) the technological cat-and-mouse game between the information libertarians and authoritarians of the world also plays out in Uzbekistan as the government considers strategies to monitor the mobile web. If we look at some circumvention technologies such as Tor, it appears that the authoritarians are winning. Not only do serious technical concerns such as power usage and rapid changes of IP address persist, but developers in the West have not yet developed software for a telecom market that is still strikingly less affluent than that of the West, and where smartphones have yet to become widely used.

Sources:
Anons.uz. "Islam Karimov: I Believe That Journalists Are My Strongest and Trustful Support." Published 28 June 2011. Accessed 20 July 2011. .

Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain. Access Controlled: the Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. Print.
Pravdin (blogger on neweurasia.net). "Neweurasia.net » Uzbekistan: Internet Censorship Is Overrated." Neweurasia.net. 29 Sept. 2009. Web. 20 July 2011. .

Sadykov, Murat. "Uzbekistan Tightens Control over Mobile Internet | EurasiaNet.org." Eurasianet.org, 15 Mar. 2011. Web. 20 July 2011. .

"Tor Project: Overview." Tor Project: Anonymity Online. The Tor Project, Inc. Web. 20 July 2011. .

"Asia Internet Facebook Usage and Population Statistics." Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics. Miniwatts Marketing Group. Web. 20 July 2011. .

Bonetti, Marco. “Mobile Privacy: Tor on the iPhone And Other Unusual Devices”. Defcon.org. Web. 20 July 2011

"Opera: State of the Mobile Web, April 2011." Opera Browser | Faster & Safer Internet | Free Download. Opera Software ASA, Apr. 2011. Web. 20 July 2011. .

Kalashnikovs and Kumys Part 2: Foreign Policy, or An Untuned Piano

2011-08-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

These are my notes from a guest speaker session we had with Osmonakun Ibraimov, who was the Secretary of State (which seems pretty close to our Secretary of State) under the Akayev administration. Fortunately, since only Ibraimov was speaking, this post should be a lot easier to follow. Again, note that what's below is the best I could write down based on a translation of what Ibraimov was saying, and it is often phrased in my own words. My comments are in brackets. The talk was divided into four parts. They were:

1. Foreign policy under the Soviets
2. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan under Akayev
3. Bakiyev
4. Kyrgyzstan today

--------------

Part 1:

Nobody could enter the Kyrgyz SSR back then. Everything was controlled by the Kremlin. There were lots of streets with Russian names. People didn't know about Kyrgyz history before the Soviet Union. It was as if it all began when Lenin took over [note that the capital was named Frunze after the famous Bolshevik leader Mikhail Frunze].

Kyrgyzstan started hearing about the West, and there was interest in the West and Western democracy. The intelligentsia thought we were far behind. Gorbachev introduced glastnost and perestroika and the USSR collapsed. Everyone wanted independence.

Part 2:

I [Ibraimov] was working in the president's office, and became press secretary. Most of the new ministers were university professors. We started thinking about policy, especially foreign policy. The West helped a lot, but we didn't know how to prioritize, and we didn't understand what a market economy was. Jeffrey Sachs and Jim Baker visited. [George H. W.] Bush visited three times. Al Gore visited later. Democracy wasn't possible back then. Even a few years ago, it was unthinkable that American students could come here to study Russian. But we wanted to help somehow after 9/11, so we gave the U.S. Manas Airbase. The idea was to be friends with everyone who would help, but the priority was given to the West.

Kyrgyzstan was the first country to make radical changes. It became an “island of democracy”, but we ruined it ourselves by the end of the 90s. Akayev's foreign policy reached out to both Moscow AND Washington, and Beijing, too, built relations with everyone. It wasn't either/or or “multi-vector” [my phrase, the implication was that Akayev didn't try to play one Great Power off against another]. Real money came in from this, and we had a chance to not starve. Money came in from Moscow too for roads, etc. that decayed after the Soviet collapse [Something just came to mind while typing this up. If you look at the manhole covers on a typical street in Bishkek, the older ones say “кгсср”, which is an abbreviation for Kyrgyz SSR in the Cyrillic alphabet. The newer ones, unlike what Ibraimov's implies, are not in Russian. They're in Chinese.]

Still, there was pressure from Moscow. Note Putin (and Medvedev too) wanted to start Russian neo-imperialism [I’m not sure if that last sentence is from me or him].

Part 3

Bakiyev was the biggest mistake of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan [gee, I'm so surprised he said that]. He wasn't good at foreign policy, because he was a typical Soviet bureaucrat. He ruined our relations with the U.S., he declared some people persona non grata to make Russia like him (and to get money for government/private interests). He promised Putin he'd kick the Americans out of Manas airbase, but since the Americans invested a lot of money in the airbase, it wasn't possible. Half of Kyrgyzstan's external debt is held by America [I'm not sure if this was a mistake on my part, the translator's, or Ibraimov's, but somebody probably meant Russia]. He threw out two U.S. diplomats; even the USSR wasn't that aggressive. Bakiyev promised the U.S. and Moscow that he would keep his word, but he was the perfect representative of a Silk Road bazaar trader. He sold to the highest bidder. He turned Maxim [his son] into the most influential person in Kyrgyzstan.
You can't ruin relations with any of the three Great Powers, and you can't act under only one. If you only side with one, you piss off the other two. By April 2010, he had pissed off Russia and the U.S. [and presumably China wasn't crazy about him either]. It's no big secret that Moscow wanted to get rid of Bakiyev. The U.S. basically agreed. The 2005 revolution was a huge drama. Bakiyev was brought to power by people in power. They knew he was corrupt, but clan politics won. It wasn't a happy ending. Having a revolution every five years causes a lot of damage, looting, etc. These two revolutions were a direct result of our foreign policy. This fall, there will be a presidential election and I hope there will be American / Russian election observers.

Part 4: An Untuned Piano

Now we have to rebuild our relations. Moscow doesn't like [President Rosa] Otunbayeva. The U.S. likes her; she received an award from the U.S., but Moscow openly dislikes her and thinks she's an American puppet. [Prime Minister Almazbek] Atambayev wants to be friends with Moscow, and is willing to give a little for respect from Moscow and Turkey. This is a situation where we have lost our principles. We used to want to be friends with everyone, now it's going everywhere. We have candidates begging for Russian approval. No one is going to the U.S. The U.S. did invite Otunbayeva and [Ata-Meken party leader Omurbek] Tekebayev before, and they are the two the U.S. might possibly support. Everything depends on who [among the three Great Powers] helps out. China is silent, and we don't know what they think. They seem to be only interested in economic influence. Kyrgyzstan is a headache for the U.S. because the Manas airbase is so important, and problems in Kyrgyzstan are problems for the U.S. in Central Asia. Russia is working in Kyrgyzstan and has its own plans. There's a Russian military base not far from Bishkek.

If America helps out, we're ready to be friends, even if it means becoming enemies with Russia. Some candidates promise to change the constitution, and Moscow wants two things: (1) no parliamentary system, and (2) no American airbase.

We have also had bad relations with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan said last year that we couldn't protect the Uzbeks, and that's true. Kazakhstan doesn't like our parliamentary system. It's a dangerous possibility for Nazarbayev, since he wants to be president for life. Kazakhstan has influence due to [cultural] similarities and there are a lot of Kazakhs in Kyrgyzstan. Last year Kazakhstan caused this country a lot of [economic] damage when it closed its borders [during the June riots, although he might have been referring to Uzbekistan.]. We take in a lot of goods from China and export them to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Obama is headed in the right direction, even though last year we hated America. Now it's much better, and they really like Obama here [Just months after the “revolution”, they opened a bar and grill named after him]. If America had a Post-Soviet Marshall Plan, it would have been very different. After the USSR collapsed, the U.S. forgot about the place. The money given out wasn't controlled, it was often a one-time event, and it just went to bureaucrats' pockets.

[Returning to the idea of a Post-Soviet Marshall Plan,] Russia couldn't stop such a plan, but America had other problems. Bush Jr. was trying to “export democracy”. He had no idea what he was doing. Americans shouldn't be too aggressive. This is diplomacy. The bottom line is the U.S. was overextended thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is really bad for Kyrgyzstan because we wouldn't want America to leave the Manas airbase. Kyrgyzstan doesn't know what Russia will do, but it doesn't want Russia to dominate here.

But Obama spent all that money to kill Osama Bin Laden, and the war in Afghanistan and the impact of the global recession damaged the U.S. and therefore Kyrgyzstan. The som is pegged to the dollar, and this has hurt the som significantly. From very good concepts we went to horrible results, because we betrayed all our allies.

I don't know who likes us, and I can't predict the outcome of the October elections. If there's no sure winner, the south will be unhappy, and the north is still pissed over Bakiyev [who was from the south]. Now people in the south want their southern candidate, and the north wants its candidate.

[Returning to the October elections, ] Tekebayev altered the constitution and criticized Otunbayeva in Moscow. He basically cursed her. There's no clear answer on what to do going forward. Washington will leave Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, and we need money badly. The world financial situation is no better, and foreign aid is drying up. The IMF and the World Bank can only do so much. China is building a huge road. It helps a lot, and there is the Shanghai-Paris railroad too. On all sides, China is winning the New Great Game. Although there is Russian aggression, and Russia is also having its own presidential elections. However, Russia needs to concentrate on the Caucasus and not Central Asia.

We're afraid of China. There's so many of them; we're afraid of demographic expansion [my phrase]. For many years we were at war with China [I think he’s referring to the various wars the Kyrgyz have fought with ethnic groups that are now on the Chinese side of the border], but we're not really afraid of Russia.

If Obama and Putin would settle things, it would be much better for Kyrgyzstan. Washington thought things would get better after 2005, but it didn't happen. In 2010, it's the same for Russia. In the fall, there will be some tension over the change of government. It will most likely be a Russian puppet. Right now, the U.S. position is much weaker, the U.S. is less aggressive and more passive, so others can be more aggressive.

-----------------------

[I asked whether Turkey could have any influence on the presidential election]. I [Ibraimov] don't think they'll have much influence. Turkey has its own goals, and a shared language [I can say myself that, with half a semester of Turkish under my belt, I can make sense of small bits of Kyrgyz, but they're not mutually intelligible]. They want influence in Central Asia, but they're not good at getting it.

[Someone asked about the role of NGOs.] NGOs can have a great role, but there's a stereotype that they work for the West. It's really a mixed picture. If they're civil enough, there is a chance of influence. The biggest danger here is political Islam. Note nobody here liked the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, even though we were glad the U.S. went there, because it changed the balance of power.

It's the same in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In Russia, anti-American policy is at the top of the list. It's the official policy of Russia. Many people think China has it right, but the financial crisis has left a giant question mark. NINJA loans [my phrase, No Income, No Job or Assets] fucked up everyone. Now America is printing money, and China is printing its money so that you can buy yuans. It's also really hard to understand how China grew so fast. Kyrgyzstan is just a small part of an unclear picture. That's why we're glad you're here. Everyone is interested in other places, and we feel lonely. But America is being spoiled by populist politicians. In Kyrgyzstan, a politician who says “You are going to have to work day and night to raise this country” can't get elected. [As I recall, he also implied that a statement like this isn’t politically feasible in America either, and I agree.]

[Someone asked about the current president, Rosa Otunbayeva.] Otunbayeva was the biggest hope for Kyrgyzstan, but she wasn't what we thought she'd be. Everyone was hoping for change. First, she was supposed to find the April 2010 shooters and stop the robberies. $60 million disappeared and nobody knows where it went. Where are the surveillance tapes that would have recorded this? Second, when the June riots happened, we wanted help, but nothing was done. She's a professional diplomat, she's supposed to take all intelligence into account, but she didn't do that. Corruption grew, and lots of people didn't support the parliamentary system. Most politicians would rather become regional governors than deputies, and the system of regional government is very corrupt. She was supposed to bring Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan together. She shouldn't have pissed off Russia so much, and she should have been more careful with corruption. Right now there are criminals in parliament, and we have a speaker [Akhmatbek Keldibekov] with criminal ties. A lot of Bakiyev's old friends are in power again. All of this was for nothing. Osh is one of our most ancient cities. There might be tension in Kyrgyzstan soon on a regional basis.

Otunbayeva's problem is she hates the opposition too much. She's not diplomatic enough. From the outside, she seems so nice. She's Central Asia's first female president, and she gave some nice speeches, but she hasn't been that great. What about the people who distributed weapons during the June riots? How could she let that happen? She lost a lot of respect and trust. Still, she's the least bad of the people who were in power, and now she's a really weak president.

----------------------

Before I end this post, I want to add one observation that doesn’t fit well in any of my posts, but it fits best here given the discussion of the presidential election. In my last life as a Democratic activist in southern Maine (specifically York County 2004-2008), we had a difficult split within the county-level organization. ~~Gallia~~ York County Est Omnis Divisa in Partes Tres: the blue-collar, rural, Republican-leaning area north and west of I-95, the slightly better-off, strongly Democratic mill towns of Biddeford (pronounced “Biddefehd”), Old Orchard Beach, and Saco (which are usually lumped together with towns in Cumberland County and labeled “the greater Portland area”), and finally the much better off tourist towns southwest of greater Portland (this includes the town of Kennebunkport and Walker’s Point, where George H. W. Bush has a summer home). Whenever there was a discussion between activists from different regions, people didn’t always take into account basic differences of organization, political strategy, and PR. You can’t hold a $50-per-ticket wine and cheese fundraiser in a town of 6,000 people where the one place everyone in town visits and shoots the breeze is the town transfer station, aka the dump. Joe Sixpack, a registered undeclared (as independent voters are called in Maine voting records) from Berwick, Maine in the rural northwest who makes $35,000 a year and does construction and repair work in the area can be won over by a state representative candidate just as much as Joseph N. Sixpackington III, who owns a fancy restaurant / gift shop in Kittery, which is about an hour’s drive from Boston. However, the two voters require a completely different choice of body language, rhetoric, and even clothes.

The greater Portland people, who were the most active and vocal members of the county organization, were generally unaware of these differences and sometimes made strategic assessments that did not take into account the political environment that their allies on the other side of the Turnpike were working with. My point is that regional differences don’t just translate to differences in ideology. They can lead to differences in the basic assumptions about the political context in which you’re operating. During my whole time in Bishkek, I kept hearing that Atambayev was going to win the presidential election, largely because he was backed by Russia. Unfortunately, I think I spent my whole time in Kyrgyzstan’s “greater Portland area”, and I have little feel for what folks think in ~~Sanford~~ Osh or ~~Berwick~~ Jalal-Abad. Personally, I agree with this article on how the election is likely to play out.

We're going to take a break from Kyrgyzstan in the next post, where I'll talk about the week I spent touring Uzbekistan and all the sights, sounds and (blocked) websites I saw.

Kalashnikovs and Kumys Part 1: Ethnic Policy, or Why There is Too Much Freedom in Kyrgyzstan

2011-08-16T10:54:00.001-07:00

These are my notes from a discussion session we had at the London School called “The April Revolution 1 Year Later: Transition to Democracy or 10 Years Back?”. It was in a question and answer format with some questions submitted from the participants, and we had four Kyrgyz participants and about as many Americans. After struggling with how to present this narrative (as it quickly jumps from person to person), I've decided to present my notes more or less as is. The // symbol is where one person stopped talking and another person started, but note that I only started keeping track of this about halfway through the session. Until the third question, I'm reconstructing the flow of conversation from memory. My comments are in brackets.

What triggered the violence?

It was very unexpected, it started as a small conflict/protest in Talas, and it was thought that the government would stop it. It terrible for folks at university. At the time, no information was available. The phone services stopped working.

// The people who protested were more like drunk/high rioters. If you want change, change yourself. It can't be just a person who demands stuff. For some, the revolution was fake. What has changed? We have tribalism and everything that was associated with the old government.

Who started the revolution?

Remember that the opposition leaders were in prison. It was started in part because they were jailed.
// The idea is we need more control in Kyrgyzstan. It's too free. Here it's easy to get a visa. [At this point in the conversation, I was too distracted by what I was hearing to write it down. The best I can remember goes something like “It's very easy to get a visa, and there's a lot of drugs moving in from abroad. It's like there's too much freedom and we need someone powerful to solve our problems”.]

There was no organization, no stated goal/aim to the revolution, just complaints. When the first revolution happened, I was more positive. The second set us back 10 years. I lost hope in people, our civic consciousness hasn't formed. They can form a mob, but if there's no agreed agenda, it's a failure. Now parliament is arguing and can't share.

Why wasn't there much coverage of the revolution? [The question was interpreted to refer to outside coverage.]

Kyrgyzstan? Where's that? [That was my snarky comment in the notes. I didn't actually say that.]

The U.S. does have bases here, but Kyrgyzstan isn't Egypt, and it's not an important U.S. ally.

When did you realise this was a revolution?

While away [at a university in the U.S.], I heard there was a revolution. Once I came back, there it turned out not to be a revolution. [Between these two sentences, the conversation switched back to the claim that some of the protesters were drugged] In the U.S., first it was mass street protests. Then, at the end, it was half and half, the protesters were paid well and in some ways organized. // In some cases they added drugs/alcohol to make people more rowdy. // My dad came home from work and saw the revolutionaries. They were really drunk. Some filmed mobile phone videos where they looted stores. // Some of them said “They gave us water and I don't remember what happened.” Now some of them are heroes and are buried near Chingiz Aitmatov. This is a crazy idea and I don't accept it.

What was accomplished?

Flats for families of the victims. Is anyone better off than they were a year ago? // There has been some movement to a parliamentary system, not certain it's ready yet. It's hard to change the real social structure. There was good reason for a revolution, but it didn't succeed.

Is there potential for change?

It's awful soon to say anything about that, but if you think of the term “revolution”, I don't see it here. // I see possible outcomes, for example Kyrgyz C-SPAN [my phrase, the parliament sessions are now being broadcast on the national radio stations], everyone can hear that. // [Returning to the protesters again,] Not all of them were drunk or high, some were good people. At least half of them were good. // People who shot at the protesters, it was their job. I would have done the same and died for my country. Then once the revolution got inside, they were more violent. It wasn't revolution, it was mass craziness. // Some shooters were reported mercenaries // Some people were injured.

Can Ata-Jurt build support outside the south? [I submitted a two part question, and this was part 1]

Some people don't think in terms of north and south. Ata-Jurt does have some support outside the south, // but not much. There is a popular former mayor of Bishkek who is in Ata-Jurt.

What does the nationalist trend in Kyrgyz politics mean for the future of Kyrgyz-Uzbek relations? [This was part 2]

Nationalism has become overblown. Amnesty International expected new violence after the first anniversary of the June violence. Kyrgyzstan has been tolerant, and not Kyrgyzstan is accused of being genocidal. I think it's important to remember that people weren't being killed on the same scale as the Germans killed the Jews. We do deserve to develop civic nationalism, Kyrgyzstani nationalism, where we can speak our local language, but not Kyrgyz ethnic nationalism. We studied Kyrgyz for years, and if you like your language, your culture, and your nation, you want to help your people. There were “Soviets” who lost their identity in 1991. // Everything in Turkey is in Turkish. Why don't we speak Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan? We need to develop our own love for our language alongside other languages. North/South, Uzbek/Kyrgyz, were all constructs and need to be changed.

Has the revolution inspired other countries?

Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia are all afraid, they saw it as a means of instability. How do you negotiate with a parliament? Yes, there's a Prime Minister, but classic West Wing politicking [my phrase] means meeting with multiple stakeholders.

Could there be another revolution in the future?

There will perhaps be some tensions after the elections [in October] and squabbling over the results // For some people, revolution is an easy solution. Some deputies work hard, and some don't. Hopefully parliament will get some change done.

What's the way forward?

We need to toughen up on our borders. We have large mountains that are hard to patrol, and bribes. // Corruption is so much of a part of our system that if you remove it, you destroy it. // I'm only glad Bakiyev is gone if a good person replaces him. The June events cast a long shadow over the Provisional Government. Lots of people from the Bakiyev era are still here. The problem is people haven't gotten involved.

Sam Rayburn once said “Any jackass can kick over a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one”. Now that Bakiyev is gone, the Provisional Government hasn't built anything to better in its place. Now the presidential elections are two and half months away, and all of the candidates look like corrupt members of the same old clan-based power structures that Bakiyev used to dominate. If you're Kyrgyz and you're not part of that system, and (as we'll see in a later post) you look across the border at Kazakhstan and see people doing comparatively better under Nazarbayev, how can you not want to see a strongman take over?

In the next post, we'll switch from domestic politics (kumys) to foreign politics (Kalashnikovs) where we'll see how Kyrgyzstan's disorganized clan structure has led to a disorganized foreign policy.

6-14-11: Send Uzbeks, Guns, and Money

2011-08-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

(Author's note: Even though I revised this after I got back to the U.S., I still don't like how this post turned out. Still, I'm uploading it because it introduces a lot of the themes that I would have more interesting things to say about later in the trip. It was only in the second week of an 8-week stay in the country.)

Wow, Istanbul did somewhat prepare me for Bishkek, but I certainly didn’t expect some things in my first week here. While there was no Internet at my host family’s place, I’m not disturbed by that. What has been difficult is the on again, off again power and electricity. I couldn’t shower at night since that is when everyone waters their gardens. The fact that local food is at least 5 times oilier than anything you can find in America is a problem too. Also, anyone who has been to Bishkek probably knows about or has been in a маршрутка. These are large vans used as minibuses and there is no such thing as personal space on those things. Insert your favorite statement about how we take so much for granted back in the США here.

White whining aside, I’d like to acknowledge two derps I made in the last post. Derp #1: The adjective is “Kyrgyz”, not “Kyrgyzstani” (or is it? we’ll talk about this in the next post). The source I got “Kyrgyzstani” from was pretty legitimate, but everyone (including people in Kyrgyzstan) says Kyrgyz. Derp #2: I think I, and perhaps the KIC report, overemphasized the ethnic component of the June 2010 riots. There are a few common narratives into which it is all too easy to unwittingly pigeonhole complex political developments that we Americans often know little about. It’s as easy to read what happened last year and the current nationalist rhetoric in Kyrgyz politics as “Ethnic Group A hates Ethnic Group B” as it is to read the “Arab Spring” and the “Green Revolution” as “Youngsters fighting Crotchety Old Dictators with their Youtubes and their Facebooks and their Tweety-Twitters”. In reality, all factors need to be considered to fully understand the “sexy” headlines the media throws onto our TVs and web browsers every minute, and I hope to better explain here what is going on in Kyrgyzstan and where this country might be headed.

In my first week here, there was a guest lecture by Orozbek Moldaliev, who at the time worked with (I might have the name wrong) the President’s Department of Strategic Analysis, which seems to be close to our White House Chief of Staff. The lecture mainly focused on explaining last year’s riots, and overall it was a very good talk. I’d like to walk through my recollection of Moldaliev’s talk and comment on a few points. Keep in mind that my Russian was not yet good enough to listen directly to Moldaliev, and I can only talk about what the translator said.

Most explanations of the June ’10 riots have blamed a shady coalition of Uzbek separatists, drug smugglers, and the Bakiyevs for triggering the violence, and I can see some decent evidence for the second factor. It’s a well-known fact that tons of opium travel through Kyrgyzstan from Afghanistan and Tajikistan on their way to Russia and Western Europe, and there’s some evidence (e.g. the fact that Bakiyev disbanded Kyrgyzstan's Drug Control Agency (DCA)) that the Bakiyevs cultivated ties with the drug mafia. Once they were gone, there was no one left to pocket the drug money, and a rearranging of the proverbial chairs was inevitable. This was one point that was briefly discussed in the KIC report, and I think it needed some attention in this post. What has made me seriously reconsider how I think about Kyrgyz politics is his discussion of the real and perceived situation of the Uzbek community. Moldaliev claimed that, while the Uzbeks may have believed they were being discriminated against by the Kyrgyz, in reality the whole system is corrupt. If you're an Uzbek businessman in Osh, and there are Kyrgyz criminals collecting protection money, corrupt Kyrgyz tax officials collecting fines (read bribes), and a corrupt court system (dominated by ethnic Kyrgyz) that does not provide a place to appeal, then you might think that this thoroughly corrupt system is out to cheat Uzbeks. This, of course, raises the question of why there are so few Uzbeks in government. Moldaliev claims that most Uzbeks studied in the Uzbek language schools set up in the 90s that were mentioned in the KIC report, and as a result most Uzbeks are not fluent in Kyrgyz or Russian, the two languages in which all governing bodies conduct their business. Thus Uzbeks have not been purposefully shut out of their government. It's “just the way things are”. Why not make Uzbek and official language? Moldaliev also discussed this. The fact is that only Uzbeks, who make up 14% of the population, speak Uzbek. If people from post-Soviet countries who came to America wanted to make Russian an official language, how popular would that be here in the U.S.? I added in my notes that there's already no shortage of debate over the user of English and Spanish here in the U.S., and our Latino community is at least as large as the Uzbek community in Kyrgyzstan.

Overall, I liked Moldaliev's lecture, even though he was likely giving us talking points put together in the Kyrgyz White House. He was a lot fairer than what many people would say about last year, he didn't repeat the claim that the Uzbeks wanted autonomy last year, and he did state that most of the cafés and restaurants there were destroyed in the riots were Uzbek. What I'm still uncertain about is his point, repeated several times, that Uzbeks were not shut out on purpose, but that “that's just how things were”. I'm going to go out on a limb here and chalk that up to a poor translation. The fact that at least Akayev's government did take some steps to promote Uzbek language schools and culture as mentioned in the KIC report probably rules out a full-blown unofficial government policy of discrimination. However, if there was no problem of inter-ethnic relation in Kyrgyzstan before riots, there certainly is one year later. An article on RFE/RL paints a fairly dire picture of Osh one year after the riots. While the Kyrgyz have a generally negative opinion of these folks who is from away and vice versa, they haven't reached the point where they're willing to take up arms against their neighbors...yet. If a nationalist like Jyldyz “Sarah Palin on Steroids and Armed with Tactical Nukes” Joldosheva wins the presidential elections and takes Kyrgyzstan in a more authoritarian direction, expect a lot more ugliness in the next few years. I'll have more on this later in the post, but right now I think I'm missing something. Oh yeah, this blog is supposed to be about politics AND TECHNOLOGY in the former Soviet Union.

One of the first ads I saw coming out of the baggage area at Manas International Airport was an ad for Beeline KG, one of the phone companies in Kyrgyzstan and a few other Central Asian countries. To give you an idea of what kind of phones people use here, the sign read (in English and Russian) “Experience new 3G technologies!” I looked into what kind of service Beeline offers (given my one year of Russian), and it brought up something I hadn't thought of regarding circumvention technology: while the Tor Project, for example, has done some good work to port its software to smart phones, there has been nothing that I can find about work on the lower-end models that are, unfortunately, ubiquitous in some states that are more inclined to censor the web. I plan to discuss this in more depth as part of a research paper I have to write in my Central Asian Studies class, and I plan to post said paper in this blog.

I've been reading on Eurasianet about arms proliferation in Kyrgyzstan, the brawl in parliament two months ago, and on how the country is increasingly falling under “the law of the crowd”...

Nope, nope, nope, stop the post. At this point in the writeup, I made an ivy-tower argument drawing from Plato's Republic that Kyrgyzstan's experiment with parliamentary democracy is failing rapidly, and it won't be long before an authoritarian strongman of a radically different character from the two oligarchs who used to rule the country takes over. I still agree with this assessment, but I have loads of material in later posts that talks about it, and what's left in this post just isn't of a high enough quality for this blog. Stay tuned for “Kalashnikovs and Kumys” a two-parter on Kyrgyzstan's foreign and domestic policy where I come face to face with some native authoritarians in their natural habitat.

ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzermhmhmhm...Huh? What? I have a blog? Well, maybe I should update it.

2011-05-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

Looking over some of my old posts, I realised I could do a better job of explaining what it is I'm trying to do with the subject matter of this blog. Fortunately, someone asked me recently why I'm studying abroad this summer in Kyrgyzstan (more on that later), and I wrote this as a response:

"There is an ongoing debate in foreign policy circles regarding what role, if any, the Internet can play in democratisation. On one extreme you have people who think that, especially after the "Arab Spring", if you throw enough web apps and censorship circumvention tools at the Internet users of authoritarian states, they'll link up through Facebook and Twitter, find all their government's dirty laundry through Wikileaks, and work around government censorship through tools like Tor. Let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom, because the information libertarians of the world will eventually win out over the information authoritarians. I'd like to keep this relatively short, but not only is the situation in the Middle East far from over, but I would also argue that the case of Egypt makes it too easy to overlook the ways in which dictators can use the Internet to better spread propaganda, monitor their citizens, and even co-opt the opposition. Everything I've learned over the past few years tells me that, despite what Justin Timberlake's character in The Social Network said, while we used to live on farms and then cities, we can never "live on the Internet". The Internet lives on us, and the ways in which pro-democracy activists in authoritarian states and the governments that oppress them can use this technology is far more influenced by the local political/social/cultural/religious context than I think most policy makers, pundits and tech gurus are aware of. I want to finish up here at UMass not just with the technical expertise to write useful software in this field, but with enough understanding of the political realities of the more authoritarian parts of the former Soviet Union to know what makes sense politically as well as technically."

It's with this viewpoint that I'm going to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for the Central Asian Studies program at SRAS. All of this said, I have a confession to make: In the three years that I've been following this part of the world, I have paid less attention to Kyrgyzstan than, say, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan because, well, the country doesn't have any oil and he who controls the spice does control the universe. However, after some catch-up, I figured I should talk a little about the recent political developments in Kyrgyzstan (WARNING: The following is a paper for a Political Science class masquerading as a blog post. You may get very bored. Peter would like to make up for this with a funny video.)

I just recently finished reading the Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission's report on the riots in Osh and Jalalabad last June, which I encourage everyone to at least skim, and I'll summarise it here. The best place to start is probably to describe the status of the Uzbek minority in southern Kyrgyzstan and its place in Kyrgyzstani politics. After similar riots in Osh in 1990, "concessions to the Uzbek communities were made. One of them was the creation of the Uzbek National Cultural Centre (UNCC) at the national level, with branches in all significant areas of Uzbek settlement. The centres became the main outlet for Uzbek political participation and the expression of minority demands" (KIC par. 81). However, throughout the Akayev (1990-2005) and Bakiyev (2005-2010) administrations, there was at least some informal discrimination against Uzbeks. For example, "There are limited numbers of Uzbek officers in the police force, the army and the national security service. Uzbek numbers are even lower in the judicial and prosecution services. Of the 110 judges in the 28 courts of southern Kyrgyzstan, only one is Uzbek. In December 2010, only one Uzbek investigator held a position at the national security agency" (KIC par. 87). After Bakiyev was ousted in early April 2010, not only did a new group of Uzbek community leaders (notably businessman and former deputy Kadyrjan Batyrov) emerge and begin to demand a greater role in Kyrgyzstan public life, but a new group of Kyrgyzstani leaders opposed to Interim President Rosa Otunbayeva's Provisional Government emerged in southern Kyrgyzstan, some of whom were former Bakiyev supporters. In the days after the Bakiyev clan definitively lost its power base in the south (when Uzbek AND Kyrgyzstani supporters of the Provisional Government retook the administration building in Jalalabad on May 14), relations between the Uzbeks and the southern Kyrygzstanis began to deteriorate. When a crowd of Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marched on the Bakiyev's home village of Teyit, "While some information suggested that Batyrov led the march to Teyit and gave orders to loot and burn the houses, he denied it...According to Batyrov and other Uzbek witnesses, known criminals were present and Bakiyev‟s house was already on fire when they arrived. Subsequent accounts suggested that the national flag of Kyrgyzstan had been burned and trampled upon, but the KIC has no evidence to that effect" (KIC par. 64). The situation was exacerbated when held a rally at the all-too-ironically-named University of People's Friendship calling for Uzbeks to become more politically active. His statements were misread by the southern Kyrgyzstani community as a call for autonomy and "an act of aggression against Kyrgyzstan and the statehood of Kyrgyzstan" (KIC par. 66). This led to counter-demonstrations by the southern Kyrgyzstanis, and by the beginning of June southern Kyrgyzstan had become an ethnic powder keg. Add in some significant crisis mismanagement by Provisional Government authorities and you have the riots in Osh and Jalalabad of April 2010.

Most of the violence was in Osh, and while the Uzbeks certainly committed some crimes, the Kyrgyzstanis were better-armed and far more systematic. Some college kids relax and play Modern Warfare 2 over the summer. I read through about a dozen cases of the same pattern: "First, the removal of the barricade, usually
with an APC*. This phase was often accompanied by “sniper” gunfire from a lone gunman (or woman) on a multi-storeyed building nearby. Second, an advance into the mahalla [Uzbek neighborhood] by armed men and the APC. Third, the looting and burning of houses. The looting was sometimes co-ordinated by groups of women. Looted goods were often removed en masse in dedicated vehicles. Many Uzbeks were beaten and/or killed in their houses, or as they attempted to extinguish fires or flee. Some Uzbek women and girls were subjected to particularly violent sexual assault. Witnesses consistently stated that some of the attackers wore camouflage clothing while others wore civilian clothing, irrespective of whether they were traveling in a military vehicle or walking" (KIC par. 148). By the Kyrgyzstani government's own numbers (KIC par. 205), 426 people were killed, 105 were Kyrgyzstani, and 276 were Uzbek, and the UNHCR puts the number of displaced persons at close to 300,000 (KIC par. 314). In spite of all this, Uzbeks make up the majority of those prosecuted for crimes related to the riots. Of the 5,162 investigations related to the riots launched by December 2010, 79% of the accused were Uzbek, and 18% were Kyrgyzstani (KIC par. 202).

As for what I think of the situation almost a year later, the KIC report mentions two factors that contributed to the violence that I think are key to the current situation in Kyrgyzstan. First, during Bakiyev's last years in power, "increasing global energy and food prices had rendered purchasing power stagnant. The financial crisis slowed economic growth and remittances received from Kyrgyzstani workers employed in Russia and other foreign destinations dropped" (KIC par. 53). If you think the economy is tough у нас в Aмерике, try to imagine 20% inflation. Second, Kyrgyzstanis and Uzbeks don't seem to be getting along any better than they were last year. Not only are some formerly Uzbek businesses in Osh now magically operating under new Kyrgyzstani ownership, but there is a serious problem of land distribution in the province that has already begun to take on an ethnic dimension. Furthermore, the newly free press environment in Kyrgyzstan, while a nice change from the Akayev/Bakiyev era, has also led to a proliferation of xenophobic "journalism", and Osh TV, the formerly Uzbek-language network, now broadcasts in Kyrgyz. It's going to be interesting to see the media coverage (well, what I can translate from Russian or find in English) leading up to the presidential elections this fall. Finally, a lot of people who were in the Provisional Government last year and either didn't see the shit on its way to the fan or were more concerned with removing the Bakiyev clan from power are still in the Provisional Government. When all of these factors are taken together, I am, as usual, not optimistic about the near-term outlook for this country.

Since I've talked so much about Turkish Internet censorship in previous posts, and it has been almost a year, I'd like to follow-up on my discussion of the subject from last summer. Oh boy, first the government unblocked and then re-blocked Youtube (oh Deniz Baykal sex tape, why must you be so scandalicious?), and then they proposed a far more comprehensive filtering system with an interesting choice of banned words (more on that later). Maybe I'm missing something here, but I really don't think this would have led to protests that were significantly larger than what we saw last year if the BTK wasn't trying to close the DNS loopholes that (including, not too long ago, Prime Minister Erdogan, also, thank you CHP for taking the right stance on this issue) have been using for some time. This almost goes without saying, but I think these protests will increase in direct proportion to how much the AKP (and perhaps the ultra-nationalist MHP) presses the issue. Let's hope that, as Yusuf Kanli said in a recent op-ed, "depending on the outcome of the June 12 polls the climate in Turkey will improve as well and some of the oddities of advanced democracy will be corrected with some regular applications of a regular democratic mindset".

Ok, this post has been serious for way too long. It's time to make this site 9 kinds of illegal in Turkey using the banned words listed on Eurasianet: You can't beat 31 homemade glasses of lemonade on a hot June day for free, even if there's some stupid teen pop music playing in the background and you have to escort those lousy kids off your property. Justin Bieber is so gay and anal.

Feel free to try this in the comments.

*This was not, as I imagined when I first read the report, something like a Hummer or a large Jeep. The two models mentioned were the BTR-80 and the BMP-1. The KIC report points out that these were too expertly driven to have been operated by civilians.

8-13-2010: Epilogue, All my best friends are Turkish...I mean metalheads

2010-08-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

* yawn *, I probably should be writing this a little earlier in the day. Since arriving back in Phillips, my internal clock has been slowly adjusting to EST. Just like my trip to Istanbul, I couldn't sleep on the plane. Unlike my trip to Istanbul, I couldn't sleep the night before.
I'm afraid I don't have much to say about headlines in Turkey (although there is a cool article here on Turkish-Russian relations). To be honest, I was too preoccupied with finals and homework. I didn't do as well as I would have liked in Operating Systems, but the credit will transfer, and I'll have one more pre-requisite to the Networks class at UMass out of the way. Also, I did get an AA (the highest grade possible) in Turkish History for Foreigners. Finally, I do plan to order Cellat through Onar Films and donate it to the Cinema Snob.
On another note, I'd like to talk about some of the work I did as part of Operating Systems. As homework for the course, we had to write two Linux kernel modules and some appropriate documentation. My laptop crashed not long after I wrote this section, but I was able to recover the source code, the makefiles, and one of the README files I wrote for the class. The first module, for those of you who use Linux, replicates part of the functionality of the pstree command. For those of you using Windows, it generates a list of all the programs running on your machine. The second module is supposed to run after an I/O bound program (proc2) and a CPU-bound program (proc1) have already started execution. It then collects some statistics on their use of the CPU. To run this module, run proc1 and proc2 in separate terminals, and then insert the proctest module using the same sudo command described in the mypstree module. You can then find the statistics that proctest collected in your /var/log/messages file. If you want to play around with it, try interacting with the I/O bound program while proctest collects data and see how the data changes. IF YOU WANT TO TRY EITHER MODULE, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND DOING SO ON A VIRTUALIZED LINUX DISTRO! Go to VMWare, download VM Player, and insert the module on a virtualized Linux distribution. I developed both modules on an image of Ubuntu version 8.04 using kernel version 2.6.20. The proctest module will likely not work on a more recent kernel, because it references members of the Linux kernel's task_struct structure that have since been phased out. I am not responsible for any damage to your computer caused by these modules.
To wrap this all up, I remember reading something in UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, with a bunch of jokes about the kinds of people who write op-eds in student newspapers. One of them was the self-explanatory Mr. “I studied abroad and it changed my life”. While I have been beginning quite a few sentences with “In Turkey...” these past few days, I wouldn't categorize the last few weeks as a life-changing event. First, I have been learning about this part of the world ever since the Eurasian Politics course I took at UMaine in the spring of 2008. Part of my mind has been there for the past two years, and so I wasn't shocked by, for example, pictures of Atatürk everywhere, seeing the inside of a mosque for the first time, and...well, finding whoopie pies in Istanbul was a little surprising.
Second, one thing that four years of study in the social sciences teaches you is that, while we may all have different languages, histories, religions, and cultures, people are people. I think a lot of Americans, especially college kids, look at foreign countries as so foreign that they forget that they are inhabited by human beings. It's probably a bad idea to conclude this journal with a quote from an OK late 90's ska song, but it's the most concise way I can think of to make my point:

“Do you think it's strange
That there's a way
Of how you looked and how you act and how you think
pretend they're not the same as you?”
-Less than Jake, “All My Best Friends are Metalheads”

sudo rmmod travel_journal

7-31-2010: Cola Turka is far better than Moxie, and I think I just lost my “from away” certification

2010-08-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

I meant to write this entry last week, but my own laziness coupled with the fact that I had midterms in both of my classes on the 22nd and the 27th got in my way. Let's just say I'm aiming for quality over quantity in this journal.
Unfortunately, I don't have any updates on Cellat. However, a few weeks ago, there was a protest in Taksim Square (which is only a short bus ride from Boğaziçi) of the current censorship laws. It obviously wouldn't be appropriate to participate, and it only occurred to me the next day that I could just go and watch. That is probably my biggest regret about my entire trip to Turkey. Anywho, I do have a couple comments regarding the protest based on what I've read in the news.
First, a comment about numbers. The OpenNet Initiative's post on the protest claims that “thousands” of people were involved in the protest. While there doesn't appear to be a source in the post for that number, it may well be from a post in Cyberlaw Blog (which is on ONI's blogroll) where a reporter at the protest states that there were “approximately 2000” protesters at the march. However, the articles in Hürriyet and Today's Zaman say that the number of protesters was close to a thousand and in the hundreds, respectively. I'm not trying to minimize the protest, but I am more inclined to believe the numbers from these two newspapers, especially Hürriyet's. Doğan Media Group (which owns Hürriyet) has had quite a feud with the Turkish government, and I can't see any reason they'd want to downplay the size of the protest.
Second, I'm a little concerned about the way the protestors seem to view their side of this issue. The press statement read at Galatasaray Square stated that “The Internet is the good news of a full attentive utopia of democracy being possible without a hierarchy.“ I hope that this does not reflect how the anti-censorship people plan to “organize” their movement. Just because the new Web 2.0 platforms have made it much easier to organize large-scale grassroots protests does not mean that fundamental facts about leadership and movements are now obsolete. Evgeny Morozov made this point much more eloquently than I just did in a talk at re:publica 2010 and, to paraphrase him, everyone can't be Atatürk. If Turkey is going to stop blocking parts of the internet, it will take something like what Joost Lagendijk described at the end of a really good op-ed in Hürriyet: “Why not think out of the box and imagine a coalition between the platform, President Abdullah Gül,...and main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu who...could take the lead for once in defending freedom of speech and make Internet freedom one of his campaign promises?”
When it comes to real-life internet usage in Turkey, I just spoke with one of my Turkish friends, and I mentioned that I could access Youtube without a proxy. I also passed on the rumor that the Telecommunications Bureau (TIB) has an exemption for university networks. She hadn't heard anything about this. When Lagendijk calls the TIB “an opaque body that is difficult to control”, this is just another example.
I'd like to finish this post with a little discussion about the use of the headscarf as I have observed it here in Turkey. Journeyman Pictures has a short video on the use of the hijab in universities, and while it doesn't name Boğaziçi as the school where a short-lived headscarf ban was relaxed after student protests 2 years ago, it's obvious from the footage. I want to speak to one of the arguments made in the video in favor of the ban, that essentially allowing the hijab in a country that is 99% Muslim will cause young women who don't wear the hijab to wear it due to peer pressure. As I said, it has been two years since the headscarf ban was lifted at Boğaziçi, which, by the way, had never had a headscarf ban before. While I only just started paying attention to this when I saw the Journeyman Pictures video a few days ago, of the approximately seven girls in my Operating Systems class; I have never seen one come in wearing a hijab. While there are girls on campus who wear it, they seem to be fairly well mixed in with those who do not. I for one am glad that I came to a university where all students can come together in support of religious freedom...and the BBC would like to apologize for how sappy that statement sounded. The appropriate people have been sacked.

I'm roasting here. Constant 80+ degree weather is no fun when you don't have ac.

PS. Since I had way too much time on my hands, I looked up the fan pages of a couple political/religious figures on Facebook to compare them with Atatürk's following. Keep in mind, this was done somewhat quickly and in some cases (poor Ike) I'm sure I didn't find the page with the most fans. Here I have the figure and the number of fans

Sarah Palin: 2,015,560
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: 1,835,170
Martin Luther King, Jr.: 790,990
Jesus: 148,097
Ronald Reagan: 59,189
Abraham Lincoln: 31,419
Bobby Kennedy: 24,962
George Washington: 18,829
John F. Kennedy: 8,825
Franklin D. Roosevelt: 6,254
Dwight Eisenhower: 597

First, I see this as just one way to look at the fact that there is no figure in American political history that can be even remotely compared to Atatürk. George Washington was only one of the Founding Fathers, and he has been dead since 1799. Second, let's hope Atatürk catches up to Sarah Palin.

PPS. Non-Mainahs can click here for an explanation of being "from away".

7-9-2010: It followed me here...

2010-08-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I took two weeks to update. My bad. Anyway, international travel is nowhere near as exciting as it sounds. You sit down, stand up, wait, get in line, later, rinse, and repeat until arriving in Istanbul. I took a cab to Boğaziçi and crashed in my new dorm after a very small amount of unpacking. I had been traveling for about 20 hours (counting car and air travel), and I barely dozed on the flight from Boston to Paris. I went to sleep at about 9pm, and I didn't feel even remotely rested until I woke up at about 5:30 pm. However, by the time the weekend rolled around, my internal clock had adjusted and I went with a couple friends for a trip around Istanbul.
I could talk about a lot of things from that trip, but the thing that sticks out the most is when we visited several mosques on the Asian side of the Bosporus, including the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque. It is one thing to understand that in most Muslim traditions, iconography is prohibited. It is one thing to see video footage of a Muslim prayer service on the news and know that everyone is bowing down in the direction of Mecca and to understand the significance of that city in Islam. It is a completely different experience to actually take off your shoes, wash up at a nearby fountain, and see the inside of a mosque for the first time. Robert Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts about his visit to Mosque of Mustapha Pasha in Skopje “My eyes became lost in the arabesque wall designs. The patterns went on and on, indecipherably, in a linear fashion. Like the contours of the desert, Islam is a world of abstraction, mathematical in severity, fearsome and alienating to the most mystical of Eastern Christians.” (p. 50) I was raised Catholic, and I've known Protestants who shied away from iconography, and I've known Eastern Catholics who encouraged much more elaborate displays than I could find in rural Maine. Even then, I still had to take a minute to adjust to the abstract nature of a mosque that Kaplan describes.
Ok, down to business. I can access Youtube through my wired connection on Boğaziçi's network. Rumor has it that the telecommunications ministry has granted an exemption to universities, but I haven't been able to find anything in the news to back that up. I submitted a report to Herdict, and the reports are mixed as to whether the site is accessible. As of this writing, there is one other report from a university network: Doğu Akdeniz University in Northern Cyprus, which is technically not part of Turkey. Hey Berkman Center (more specifically, Herdict), it wouldn't hurt to add separatist territories to your list of countries. In addition to Northern Cyprus, it would be interesting to see what's accessible in Nagorno-Karabakh and compare the results with Armenia. Anyway, the report from Northern Cyprus states that Youtube is inaccessible. Furthermore, I have been able to access richarddawkins.net (which, as we saw in my link in the last post, was banned after Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar argued that he has been defamed on the site) and metacafe.net (which was banned (article in Turkish) after a video that allegedly caught former CHP leader Deniz Baykal with his pants down was posted to it). I'm not surprised that universities may be exempt from the bans, or that enforcement is just inconsistent(1). What I am surprised about is the fact that I haven't found any other source for this possible exemption EXCEPT my own observations and what other students have told me. I've got half a mind to ask one of my Turkish friends about this, and I'll keep you posted.
In less serious news, I heard back from Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones a few days ago. He's all set except for, brace yourselves, Turkish Death Wish, aka Cellat. A little research on my part shows that the film is available with English subtitles from Onar Films for about $25. I might get it later if I can't somehow pick up a copy for less here in Istanbul, although that doesn't seem too likely given the lack of video stores in the neighborhood.
Classes are going reasonably well. I only discovered when I got to Istanbul that International Trade conflicted with Operating Systems, so I replaced it with History of the Turkish Republic for Foreign Students. Operating Systems is...ok. The professor is certainly better than some instructors I've had at UMass, and he's fairly easy to follow. Overall, the academic side of things is working out.
Returning to terrifyingly bad music, while I appreciate the media's place in American soft power, there are some parts of American pop culture that really, really don't need to follow me anywhere I go. While waiting in the lobby a few days ago, I had to sit through about a minute of “Eenie Meenie” by Sean Kingston and...it...Justin Bieber's career can't fizzle out soon enough.

Footnotes:

(1) For example, I just went back (8-15-2010) and looked at the Herdict reports for Youtube in Turkey, and they stand at 26 inaccessible reports and 30 accessible reports.

6-22-2010: Prologue, “Turkey declares 'war on salt'”

2010-08-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

> sudo insmod travel_journal.ko
[root password for peter]: *************

I'm writing this prologue from my mom's house in Phillips, Maine, and, night owl that I am, I should have gone to bed a few hours ago. I've got a travel itinerary that spans one day and 5,000 miles. I'm flying from Boston to Istanbul and the Summer Term at Boğaziçi University, where I'll take two courses in Operating Systems and International Trade. Like every college kid, I'm self-absorbed enough to keep a travel journal and upload it to the interwebz for all to see, but what do I hope to get out of this trip?
It would be cliché to say that I want to experience a different culture or broaden my horizons or blah blah Bob Lablaw Law Blog. I didn't come to Turkey for any of those reasons anyway. Those of you who know me well enough know that I'm trying to combine my interests in politics and computer science and somehow pursue a career related to internet censorship in the CIS. While Turkey was never a Soviet republic, it shares a common Turkic heritage with all but three of the former Soviet countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and it does censor parts of the internet. Youtube has been blocked since 2008 because a couple kids in Greece decided to make some videos poking fun at Atatürk. Also, just last year the Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK) announced that it would develop a national search engine that, unlike other search engines, would not be “deaf to [Turkic and Muslim] country's sensitivities”. Furthermore, the same article describes a national email system, the “Anaposta”, where, according to the chair of the BTK, “Every child will have an e-mail address written on his/her identity card since birth. So, will have a mobile network that can be used thanks to id number match and foreign networks [sic], such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, will not be used anymore”.(1) With the understanding that I'm not here to preach the gospel of free speech, can I learn anything more about how Turkey censors and monitors the internet?
More serious goals aside, I might try to find one of the infamous “remakesploitation” movies from the late Yeşilçam era. Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones did a video review of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, a few months ago and, as I recall, said on a live Ustream that he was thinking of doing a “Turkish month” of said reviews. Being a huge Cinema Snob fan, I emailed him to see if there are any Turkish films he's been trying to find. Expect some updates on how this works out.
And now for some rest...

Footnotes:

(1) I didn't see or hear anything related to these projects in my seven weeks in Turkey. In any case, I think it helps to mention these projects to help illustrate what I knew about Turkey and internet censorship before I came to Istanbul.