The New Digital Age

by Jared Cohen

  Given that the Egyptian government already controlled the few physical connections to the outside world—like the fiber-optic cables housed in one building in Cairo—the shutdown was a straightforward matter of closing these portals and contacting the big carriers and contractors with their demands. It was later revealed that the regime made it clear to companies like Vodafone that if they did not comply with the shutdown, the Egyptian government would, through its state-owned company Telecom Egypt, physically cut their service through the telecommunications infrastructure in the country (which would damage Vodafone’s ability to operate and take a considerable amount of time to undo). The ISPs and the telecom companies were caught completely off-guard—the government had long been a supporter of the expansion of the Internet and mobile services throughout Egypt—and therefore none had made contingency plans. It was a move unprecedented in recent history; other states had interfered with their population’s Internet services, but none had ever orchestrated such a coordinated and complete disconnection.

  The move backfired. As a number of Egyptians and outside observers later noted, it was the shutting down of the network that truly electrified the protest movement because it brought so many more outraged people to the streets. Vodafone’s CEO, Vittorio Colao, concurred. “Hitting one hundred percent of the population on something that everyone thinks is essential, and actually taking it out, triggered a much more irritated and negative reaction than what the government expected,” he told us. Several Egyptian activists reiterated this, saying, in effect, I didn’t like Mubarak, but this wasn’t my fight. But then Mubarak took away my Internet and he made it my fight. So I went to Tahrir Square. This galvanizing act lent the movement a considerable momentum; had it not occurred, it’s possible that events in Egypt would have turned out very differently.

  When the regime’s request to shut down the network came through, Colao said that Vodafone’s first move was to “make sure, from a legal point of view, that we were confronted with a legitimate request. It could be questionable, but it needed to be legal.” All telecommunications providers were required to have licensing contracts with the state, so once Vodafone determined that the request was legitimate, it had no choice: “We might not have liked the request, but not honoring it would be a breach of the law.”

  Soon after, while Internet and mobile-phone service was suspended in Egypt, Vodafone faced another test: The government approached it and other operators in the country to send out its messages over the companies’ short-message-service (SMS) platform. This, Colao told us, was where Vodafone played a positive role. At first, he said, the government’s tone was procedural: Tonight there will be a curfew from six to nine. “This is one command you can do,” Colao explained. The second type of message was patriotic, saying something like, Let’s all be friends and love our nation—also fine, said Colao. “But at a point it became incredibly political and one-sided, and that is where you can’t ask the local Vodafone staff to say to their own government, We can’t comply with Egyptian law. We raised the issue with the Egyptian embassy, Hillary Clinton, and the U.K. government, and then Vodafone Group PLC”—the parent company—“put out a statement saying that we [would refuse the government request]. That’s what stopped the SMS messages. We were stopped for twenty-four hours for voice calls and four or five days for SMS. SMS is what they considered the threat.”

  Governments and operators alike will take a lesson from Egypt’s failed shutdown tactic. Inside the country, it mobilized masses, and outside, it enraged the international community. Within days of the shutdown, external companies and activists had developed alternative ways for Egyptian citizens to connect again, albeit patchily. A Paris-based nonprofit, French Data Network, opened up Internet access through dial-up connections (available to anyone with an international landline), while Google launched a tweet-by-phone service called Speak2Tweet, which allowed callers to dial one of three numbers and leave a voice mail, which would then be posted as a tweet.

  Vittorio Colao told us that after the events in Egypt, major telecom carriers came together to discuss how to prevent such a thing from happening again, and how to take a common position in case it does. Ultimately, he said, “We decided that this has to be discussed within the International Telecommunication Union”—the United Nations special agency for global telecommunications—“to exactly define the rules of engagement.” In the future, other governments will surely look to the Egyptian shutdown episode and reevaluate their own odds of survival if they disrupt the connectivity of their populations. Moreover, with peer-to-peer and other connection platforms that operate without a traditional network gaining in popularity, the impact of shutting down communications networks is drastically reduced. Irrational governments, or regimes in a panic, might still consider the extreme step of literally severing the connections at the borders: disconnecting fiber cables, destroying cell towers. But this step would incur such serious economic damage to the country—all financial markets, currency markets and businesses that use external data to operate would fail—that it’s very unlikely any regime would take it.

  Repressive governments, though, are nothing if not resourceful, and they will find ways to create leverage and exploit loopholes in the face of restive populations and revolutionary challenges. States will develop new methods that are more subtle and insidious. One strategy that many will employ is the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em plan, whereby instead of trying to limit the Internet, they infiltrate it. As we discussed earlier, states stand to gain a significant edge over citizens in the data revolution because of how much of citizens’ information they’ll have access to. If a government is worried about an uprising, it could ramp up its Internet-monitoring efforts by trawling social-media networks to look for vocal activists; impersonating dissidents to lure in and capture others; hacking into and adding misinformation to prominent mobilization websites; commandeering the webcam on a laptop or tablet to listen to and watch a dissident’s actions without his knowledge; and paying close attention to the inflows of money over electronic platforms to identify outside support. Early-stage infiltration might make the difference between a small demonstration and a national rebellion.

  Even if the nature of virtual crackdowns changes, however, physical crackdowns will remain a constant in the repressive-state security playbook. Technology is no match for ground-level brutality, as the horrific examples in Syria’s multiyear crackdown have shown. Impossible as it seems in the beginning, the international community can become desensitized to violent and graphic content, even when the flow of nightmarish images on videos and photographs actually increases over time. All told, for those governments that are still trying to protect their credibility and deny such crimes, brutal crackdowns will become a much riskier endeavor in the digital age. Increased visibility through global online platforms does protect citizens, and this will, we hope, become even more the case as tools like facial-recognition software improve. For an army officer, the knowledge that one well-timed picture from a citizen’s handset could identify and shame him internationally—or lead his own government to throw him under the bus—might encourage him to show restraint or even defect. The same could be said for informal civilian militias that engage in violence on behalf of a regime, like the Zimbabwean gangs that fight for Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.

  Instead of infiltration (or at least in addition to it), we expect that many states will adopt a strategy we’ll call virtual containment. To relieve the pressure of an agitated, informed public, states will calculate that rather than deny services altogether, it’s better to crack a window to allow citizens to vent their grievances in public on the Internet—but, more important, only to a certain degree. Regimes in the future will allow some online dissent, whether by reforming the law or simply not prosecuting the speech, but only on their terms, through specific channels they control. After all, giving a Bolivian environmental activist space to complain about the risks of deforestation is unlikely to substantively
threaten the strength of the government.

  At first glance, the creation of virtual “venting” spaces will seem like a win-win: Citizens will feel a deeper sense of engagement and perhaps a new degree of freedom, while the government will win points for embracing reform (while avoiding or at least stalling an outright rebellion). Perhaps some repressive states will sincerely see the value in reform and offer policy changes without guile. Many won’t; not only would the gestures not be genuine (those governments would be uninterested in citizen feedback), but the state would view such spaces as opportunities for intelligence-gathering. Regimes already understand the strategic value of allowing online activity that can lead to arrests. A decade ago, the Egyptian police’s vice squad would troll chat rooms and Internet forums with false identities to entrap gay citizens, then lure them to a McDonald’s in Cairo to ambush and arrest them.4 In 2011, following the Tunisian revolution, several Chinese dissidents responded to an online call for a Chinese version of the protests in front of popular American chains like Starbucks. The mobilization calls spread throughout Chinese social media and microblogs, at which point the police became aware of them. When activists arrived at the prescribed date and time, they were met with an overwhelming police force that arrested many of them. Had the government crushed this online activity immediately after noticing it, the police would not have been able to follow the virtual activity to find the physical dissidents.

  As part of their virtual containment strategies, states will undertake a series of transparency gestures, releasing crumbs but withholding the bulk of information they possess. These states will be congratulated for exposing their own institutions and even their own past crimes. Perhaps a government known for its internal corruption will want to appear to turn over a new leaf by publicly disclosing the graft of its judiciary or of a former leader. Or a regime in a single-party state will release some information that is accurate but not particularly damning or useful, like its health ministry’s budget statements. Designated straw men will emerge to take responsibility and bear the brunt of public anger, and the regime will survive intact. Manufacturing transparent-looking documents and records will not be difficult for these regimes—in the absence of contradictory information (such as leaked original documents), there’s little hope of proving them false.

  The real challenge for states that adopt the virtual containment approach will be distinguishing between public venting and real opposition online. Computer engineers use the term “noise” to describe data that can be very loud but does not convey a useful signal. Authoritarian governments will encounter a political version of this as they begin to allow freer online discussion. In open societies, laws regarding freedom of speech and hate speech largely define the boundaries for citizens, but in closed countries that lack legal precedents for allowable speech, the government is operating somewhat blindly. It will be very difficult for states to determine the intent behind people’s words online—if they’re not known dissidents, have no ties to opposition groups and don’t stick out in any particular way, how does a government newly committed to open dialogue respond without going too far? This unknowable quality will make digital noise the big wild card for authorities as they struggle to first assess and then react. Getting it wrong, by overreaction or underreaction, could be lethal for a regime. Neglect of an online swell could turn it into an off-line storm, and harshly cracking down on online banter could give a nascent online movement with no real momentum something to rally around.

  There are a number of present-day examples of state overreaction to online content, though none have yet resulted in revolution. Two examples from Saudi Arabia in 2011 stand out, and they suggest a model for the escalation path we will see in the future. The first involved a group of conservative clerics who, angered by the Saudi king’s decision to grant women the right to vote in the 2015 municipal elections, immediately retaliated against a group of women who had participated in a Women2Drive Campaign (during which several women openly defied Saudi law and got behind the wheel). The clerics decided to make an example of one of the women and sentenced her to ten lashes. As news of her sentence spread, ordinary Saudis took to the Internet to protest and stand up for her, sharing the news far beyond the country’s borders. The virtual retaliation of hundreds of thousands of people both in and outside of Saudi Arabia led the government to revoke the decision less than twenty-four hours later. In this instance, the Saudi king’s quick reaction stemmed a rising tide, but his very responsiveness suggests a genuine state concern about the threat posed by clamorous online mobs.

  The second example comes from a decision to ban a satirical short film about Saudi Arabia’s expensive housing market. As with most officially prohibited material throughout history, there is no surer way to drive public interest and demand than by government ban, and this case is no different. The film, Monopoly, appeared on YouTube within an hour of the ban, and in just a few weeks had accumulated more than a million views. If the flogging story highlights the importance of swift action to reverse mistakes, this one speaks to the importance of regimes’ picking the right battles. They will never be able to predict the trigger that transforms online venting into street protest, so every decision to react or ignore is a gamble. Saudi Arabia has not seen large-scale public protests to date, but as a country with one of the most active social-media populations in the region (with one of the highest rates of YouTube playbacks of any country in the world, no less), it will surely encounter more small battles like those described above, and a miscalculation on any one of them could lead to a much larger problem.

  No More “Springs”

  As more societies come online, people will look for signs of regional revolutionary epidemics. Some argue that Latin America will be next, because of its serious economic disparities, weak governments, aging leaders and large populations that speak the same language. Others make the case for Africa, where state fragility is the highest in the world, while mobile-phone adoption is skyrocketing and creating the fastest growing mobile market anywhere. Or perhaps it would be Asia, which has the largest number of people living under autocratic rule, runaway economic growth and myriad widespread social, economic and political tensions. There have already been nascent attempts to organize mass protests and demonstrations in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, and surely this will continue to build with time.

  But even though these regions are becoming more connected and their populations are increasingly exposed to events and the shared grievances of other nationalities, we don’t yet have evidence that there will be another iteration of the contagion effect the world saw in the Arab Spring. (It is worth noting, though, that a contagion of protests and demonstrations will be easier to achieve, as illustrated by the September 2012 reactions to the infamous video Innocence of Muslims in several dozen countries throughout the world.) The Arab world has a unique regional identity not shared by other regions, which has been solidified by historical attempts at unification and pan-Arab sentiments over the decades. And, of course, shared language, culture and similar political systems contributed. As we said earlier, modern communication technologies did not invent the networks that activists and protesters in the Middle East made use of—they amplified them.

  In addition, there were established religious networks, which, in the absence of a strong civil society under autocratic rule, were by default the most organized and often most beneficial nongovernmental entity for citizens. All of the Arab leaders who lost power in this wave of revolutions—Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak, Libya’s Gadhafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen—built and operated political systems that stifled the development of institutions, so religious houses and organizations often filled that void (in doing so, they earned the enmity of these dictators; the most prominent groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia, were either banned outright or mercilessly persecuted by the state because they constituted such a threat). Over the course of the rece
nt revolutions, mosques became gathering points, imams and other clerics lent legitimacy to the protesters’ cause in some cases, and religious solidarity for many people was an important motivation for mobilization.

  In other regions, these components are missing. Africa, Latin America and Asia are far too heterogeneous and diverse in culture, language, religion and economics to mirror the Arab model. Regional identity does not exist to the extent that it does in the Middle East, and social, business and political networks are more localized.

  However, it’s impossible not to see changes on the horizon in all of these regions. They might be country-specific and include a broader range of outcomes than regime change, but nonetheless they will be profound on a political and psychological level. Every country in the world will experience more revolutionary triggers, but most states will weather the storm, not least because they will have the opportunity to watch and learn from other countries’ mistakes. A collection of best practices will emerge among states to deflect, diffuse and respond to the charges presented by newly connected publics. (This is a reasonable assumption since the interior ministers in repressive states, responsible for policing and national security, visit with each other to share knowledge and techniques.) Issues like income inequality, unemployment, high food prices and police brutality exist everywhere, and governments will have to make preemptive adjustments to their policies and messages to address public demand more responsively than in earlier times. Even in comparably stable societies, leaders are feeling the pressure of a connected citizenry and recognizing the need for reform or adaptation in the new digital age because no government is invulnerable to these looming threats.