Category Archives: iRevolution

Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs (Updated)

Posted on May 9, 2012 | 50 Comments

The Blog is the New CV & Twitter the New Business Card

Next week I will be attending my official graduation from The Fletcher School to receive my PhD diploma. It is—in a word—surreal. I’ve been working on my PhD for almost as long as I’ve known my good friend and colleague Chris Albon, which is to say, a long time. Chris is also a newly minted political science PhD and recently joined the FrontlineSMS team as the director of their Governance Project. Needless to say, our paths have crossed on many occasions over the years and we’ve had many long conversations about the scholar-practitioner path that we’ve taken. With graduation just a few days away, we thought we’d write-up this joint post to share our pearls of wisdom with future PhDs.

First: blog, blog, blog! The blog is the new CV. If you don’t exist dynamically online, then you’re not indexable on the web. And if you’re not indexable, then you’re not searchable or discoverable. You don’t exist! Blog-ergo-sum, simple as that. Chris and I have been blogging for years and this has enabled us to further our knowledge and credibility, not to mention our network of contacts. The blog allows you to build your own independent brand, not your advisor’s and not your program’s. This is critical. We’ve received consulting gigs and keynote invitations based on blog posts that we’ve published over the years. Do not underestimate the power of blogging for your professional (and yes, academic) career. In many ways, blogging is about getting credit for your ideas and to signal to others what you know and what your interests are.

Second: get on Twitter! Malcolm Gladwell is wrong: social media can build strong-tie bonds. Heck, social media is how I originally met Chris. If the blog is the new CV, then consider your Twitter account the new business card. Use Twitter to meet everyone, everywhere. Let people know you’ll be in London for a conference and don’t underestimate the synergies and serendipity that is the twittersphere. Chris currently follows around 1,200 people on Twitter, and he estimates that over the years he has met around half of them in person. That is a lot of contacts and, frankly, potential employers. Moreover, like blogging, tweeting enables you to connect to others and stay abreast of interesting new developments. Once upon a time, people used to email you interesting articles, conferences, etc. I personally got on Twitter several years ago when I realized that said emails were no longer making it to my inbox. This information was now being shared via Twitter instead. Like the blog, Twitter allows you to create and manage your own personal brand.

Third: decide whether you want an academic career, a professional career, or both. The path you chose will require you to take different turns to excel and get ahead. Chris and I chose the combined scholar-practitioner route, which we personally find the most rewarding, flexible and exciting path. If this route appeals to you, then be sure to use the research papers you write for your coursework as an excuse to interview individuals and organizations that you may want to work with in the future. This allows you to learn more about the organizations themselves and to actively network during your studies. Moreover, your resulting papers will be stronger and more interesting, not to mention policy-relevant. This means both your professional contacts who your interview and your professors will gain from your research. Indeed, being in graduate schools gives you more time to think and explore issues in depth—a luxury that many practitioners simply do not have. You get to delve into the literature and fuse those insights with those gained from your interviews and hands-on research. The result is a solid and unique research paper, both academically and policy-wise.

Fourth: Consult on projects outside of academia and be sure to pro-actively identify and attend interesting conferences. And yes, do so even if it means skipping a few classes and getting a lower grade. But do let your professor know why you may be absent. In my case, profs were always supportive of external engagement. In your consulting projects, be strategic and explore how you can combine deliverables with required research papers in your coursework. This will yield both stronger consulting deliverables and research papers. Be sure to blog about your consulting projects and the conference panels that you find most interesting. Going to conferences will set you apart and these events are often important fora for new ideas that have not yet made it to the peer-reviewed literature or even blogs.

Fifth: Teach, whether formally or informally, whether in person or online. The process of creating the ultimate syllabus on the topic you’re most interested in is highly informative and educational. Think about taking an independent study course to do this. Having teaching experience will also set you apart and be good fodder for blogging as well. Like conferences, teaching a course exposes you to others who you wouldn’t otherwise connect with and can thus be an excellent source for new ideas and insights.

Sixth: Selecting a dissertation topic is probably one of the most important steps in the PhD process. We can’t stress enough how important it is to select a topic that you yourself are personally excited about. The topic you select should be one that you are most likely to remain passionate about for years to come. I actually changed dissertation topics after taking my comprehensive exams. And while this may have set me back a year, I have absolutely no regrets given how excited and I’ve been regarding the topic I wrote about. If you’re taking the scholar-practitioner route, than the topic should be one that figures in the media from time-to-time (preferably on a regular basis). Why? Because that ensures you’re working on something that’s relevant and of interest to wider community than just fellow academics. Plus, if you’re doing a PhD on a topic that is of interest to the media, this increases your chances of getting visibility, especially if you’re also blogging. This can be rewarding and a great way to remain excited about your topic. Indeed, be sure to use your blog to flesh out the concepts you’re exploring for your dissertation, especially vis-a-vis the literature review. This is a very productive way to get feedback.

Seventh: The right dissertation committee can make all the difference to the PhD experience. And “right” here can mean different things. Do you want strong hands-on support from your committee or your Chair in particular? Or are you someone who works best with minimal “interruption” from said committee? Obviously, you’ll want to select each committee member carefully. Avoid at all costs any faculty members with attitude problems and those who feel like they have something to prove. What you’re looking for is a real mentor, particularly for the Chair of your committee, and someone who not only approaches the PhD process as a partnership but who will also be your ally long after your PhD. In building your committee, think about diversity. If you’re taking the scholar-practitioner route, be sure to have a good mix of strong academics and policy folks. In other words, be strategic and deliberate. In our opinion, the best committee allows you to do your own thing. The worst shoehorn you into following their career path.

So there you go, some (hopefully) straightforward advice from Chris Albon and yours truly. Best of luck on your career path if you do go for a PhD!

Update: See this excellent article on Mashable: “Four Reasons Why Recruiters Should Stop Accepting Traditional Resumes” and switch to social media! Also, check out this important piece: “The Social Media Recruitment Survival Guide.”

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Posted in iRevolution

Tagged advice, Albon, Chris, PhD

The Best of iRevolution: Four Years of Blogging

Posted on April 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Many thanks to all iRevolution readers who have been following this blog, which turns four years old today. Thank you also for commenting, providing feedback, getting in touch and for sharing my writing! I have published over 500 blog posts to date and have relished the time and your input. To celebrate, I’ve listed below some of my favorite blog posts along with the most popular ones. Onwards!

On Rumors, Repression and Digital Disruption in China: Opening Pandora’s Inbox of Truthiness?

Posted on April 1, 2012 | 3 Comments

The Economist recently published a brilliant piece on China entitled: “The Power of Microblogs: Zombie Followers and Fake Re-Tweets.” BBC News followed with an equally excellent article: “Damaging Coup Rumors Ricochet Across China.” Combined, these articles reveal just how profound the digital disruption in China is likely to be now that Pandora’s Inbox has been opened.

Credit: The Economist

The Economist article opens with an insightful historical comparison:

“In the year 15AD, during the short-lived Xin dynasty, a rumor spread that a yellow dragon, a symbol of the emperor, had inauspiciously crashed into a temple in the mountains of central China and died. Ten thousand people rushed to the site. The emperor Wang Mang, aggrieved by such seditious gossip, ordered arrests and interrogations to quash the rumor, but never found the source. He was dethroned and killed eight years later, and Han-dynasty rule was restored.”

“The next ruler, Emperor Guangwu, took a different approach, studying rumors as a barometer of public sentiment, according to a recent book Rumors in the Han Dynasty by Lu Zongli, a historian. Guangwu’s government compiled a ‘Rumors Report’, cataloguing people’s complaints about local officials, and making assessments that were passed to the emperor. The early Eastern Han dynasty became known for officials who were less corrupt and more attuned to the people.”

In present day China, a popular pastime among 250+ million Chinese users of microblogging platforms is to “spread news and rumors, both true and false, that challenge the official script of government officials and state-propaganda organs.” In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, James Scott distinguishes between public and hidden transcripts. The former describes the open, public discourse that take place between dominators and oppressed while hidden transcripts relate to the critique of power that “goes on offstage”, which the power elites cannot decode. Scott writes that when the oppressed classes publicize this “hidden transcript”, (the truthiness?) they become con-scious of its common status. Borrowing from Juergen Habermas (as interpreted by Clay Shirky), those who take on the tools of open expression become a public, and a synchronized public increasingly constrains undemocratic rulers while ex-panding the rights of that public. The result in China? “It is hard to overestimate how much the arrival of [microblogging platforms] has changed the dynamic between rulers and ruled over the past two years” (The Economist).

Chinese authorities have responded to this threat in two predictable ways, one repeating the ill-fated actions of the Xin Dynasty and the other reflecting the more open spirit of Emperor Guangwu. In the latter case, authorities are turning to microblogs as a “listening post” for public opinion and also as a publishing platform. Indeed, “government agencies, party organs and individual officials have set up more than 50,000 weibo accounts [Chinese equivalent of Twitter]” (The Economist). In the former case, the regime has sought to “combat rumors harshly and to tighten controls over the microblogs and their users, censoring posts and closely monitoring troublemakers.” The UK Guardian reports that China is now “taking the toughest steps yet against major microblogs and detain-ing six people for spreading rumors of a coup amid Beijing’s most serious political crisis for years.”

Beijing’s attempt to regulate microblogging companies by requiring users to sign up with their real names is unlikely to be decisive, however. “No matter how it is enforced, user verification seems unlikely to deter the spread of rumors and information that has so concerned authorities” (The Economist). To be sure, companies are already selling fake verification services for a small fee. Besides, verifying accounts for millions of users is simply too time-consuming and hence costly. Even Twitter gave up their verified account service a while back. The task of countering rumors is even more of a Quixotic dream.

Property tycoon Zhang Xin, who has more than 3 million followers, wrote: “What is the best way to stop ‘rumors’? It is transparency and openness. The more speech is discouraged, the more rumors there will be” (UK Guardian).

This may in part explains why Chinese authorities have shifted their approach to one of engagement as evidenced by those 50,000 new weibo accounts. With this second reaction, however, Beijing is possibly passing the point of no return. “This degree of online engagement can be awkward for authorities used to a comfortable buffer from public opinion,” writes The Economist. This is an understatement; Pandora’s (In)box is now open and the “hidden transcript” is cloaked no longer. The critique of power is decoded and elites are “forced” to devise a public reply as a result of this shared awareness lest they lose legitimacy vis-a-vis the broader population. But the regime doesn’t even have a “customer service” mechanism in place to deal with distributed and potentially high-volume complaints. Censorship is easy compared to engagement.

Recall the “Rumors Report” compiled by Emperor Guangwu’s government to catalogue people’s complaints about local officials. How will these 50,000 new weibo users deal with such complaints now that the report can be crowdsourced, especially given that fact that China’s “Internet users have become increasingly bold in their willingness to discuss current affairs and even sensitive political news [...]” (UK Guardian).

As I have argued in my dissertation, repressive regimes can react to real (or perceived) threats posed by “liberation technologies” by either cracking down and further centralizing control and/or by taking on the same strategies as digital activists, which at times requires less centralization. Either way, they’re taking the first step on a slippery slope. By acknowledging the problem of rumors so publicly, the regime is actually calling more attention to how disruptive these simple speculations can be—the classic Streisand effect.

“By falsely packaging lies and speculation as ‘truth’ and ‘existence’, online rumours undermine the morale of the public, and, if out of control, they will seriously disturb the public order and affect social stability,” said a commentary in the People’s Daily, the official Communist party newspaper. (UK Guardian).

Practically speaking, how will those 50,000 new weibo users coordinate their efforts to counter rumors and spread state propaganda? “We have a saying among us: you only need to move your lips to start a rumor, but you need to run until your legs are broken to refute one,” says an employee of a state media outlet (The Economist). How will these new weibo users synchronize collective action in near real-time to counter rumors when any delay is likely to be interpreted as evidence of further guilt? Will they know how to respond to myriads of questions being bombarded at them in real-time by hundreds of thousands of Chinese microbloggers? This may lead to high-pressure situations that are rife for mistakes and errors, particularly if these government officials are new to microblogging. Indeed, If just one of these state-microbloggers slips, that slip could go viral with a retweet tsunami. Any retreat by authorities from this distributed engagement strategy will only lead to more rumors.

The rumors of the coup d’état continue to ricochet across China, gaining remarkable traction far and wide. Chinese microblogs were also alight last week with talk of corruption and power struggles within the highest ranks of the party, which may have fueled the rumor of an overthrow. This is damaging to China’s Communist Party which “likes to portray itself as unified and in control,” particularly as it prepares for it’s once-in-a-decade leadership shuffle. “The problem for China’s Communist Party is that it has no effective way of refuting such talk. There are no official spokesmen who will go on the record, no sources briefing the media on the background. Did it happen? Nobody knows. So the rumors swirl” (BBC News). Even the official media, which is “often found waiting for political guidance, can be slow and unresponsive.”

So if Chinese authorities and state media aren’t even equipped (beyond plain old censorship) to respond to national rumors of vis-a-vis an event as important as a coup (can it possibly get more important than that?), then how in the world will they deal with the undercurrent of rumors that continue to fill Chinese microblogs now that these can have 50,000 new targets online? Moreover, “many in China are now so cynical about the level of censorship that they will not believe what comes from the party’s mouthpieces even if it is true. Instead they will give credence to half-truths or fabrications on the web,” which is “corrosive for the party’s authority” (BBC News). This is a serious problem for China’s Communist elite who are obsessed with the task of projecting an image of total unity and stability.

In contrast, speculators on Chinese microblogging platforms don’t need a highly coordinated strategy to spread conspiracies. They are not handicapped by the centralization and collective action problem that Chinese authorities face; after all, it is clearly far easier to spread a rumor than to debunk one. As noted by The Economist, those spreading rumors have “at their disposal armies of zombie followers and fake re-tweets as well as marketing companies, which help draw attention to rumors until they are spread by a respected user with many real followers, such as a celebrity.” But there’s more at stake here than mere rumors. In fact, as noted by The Economist, the core of the problem has less to do with hunting down rumors of yellow dragons than with “the truth that they reflect: a nervous public. In the age of weibo, it may be that the wisps of truth prove more problematic for authorities than the clouds of falsehood.”

Fascinating epilogues:

China’s censorship can never defeat the internet
China’s censors tested by microbloggers who keep one step ahead of state media

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Posted in Digital Activism, iRevolution, Social Media

Tagged China, Digital, disruption, Repression, Twitter, weibo

#UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

Posted on March 14, 2012 | 2 Comments

[Cross-posted from the Ushahidi blog]

Invisible Children’s #Kony2012 campaign has set off a massive firestorm of criticism with the debate likely to continue raging for many more weeks and months. In the meantime, our colleagues at Al-Jazeera have repurposed our previous #SomaliaSpeaks project to amplify Ugandan voices responding to the Kony campaign: #UgandaSpeaks.

Other than GlobalVoices, this Al-Jazeera initiative is one of the very few seeking to amplify local reactions to the Kony campaign. Over 70 local voices have been shared and mapped on Al-Jazeera’s Ushahidi platform in the first few hours since the launch. The majority of reactions submitted thus far are critical of the campaign but a few are positive.

One person from Kampala asks, “How come the world now knows more about #Kony2012 than about the Nodding Syndrome in Northern Uganda?” Another person in Gulu complains that “there is nothing new they are showing us. Its like a campaign against our country. [...] Did they put on consideration how much its costing our country’s image? It shows as if Uganda is finished.” In nearby Lira, one person shares their story about growing up in Northern Uganda and attending “St. Mary’s College Aboke, a school from which Joseph Kony’s rebels abducted 139 girls in ordinary level [...]. For the 4 years that I spent in that school (1999-2002), together with other students, I remember praying the Rosary at the School Grotto on daily basis and in the process, reading out the names of the 30 girls who had remained in captivity after Sr. Rachelle an Italian Nun together with a Ugandan teacher John Bosco rescued only 109 of them.”

The Ushahidi platform was first launched in neighboring Kenya to give ordinary Kenyans a voice during the post election-violence in 2007/2008. Indeed, “ushahidi” means witness or testimony in Swahili. So I am pleased to see this free and open source platform from Africa being used to amplify voices next door in Uganda, voices that are not represented in the #Kony2012 campaign.

Some Ugandan activists are asking why they should respond to “some American video release about something that happened 20 years ago by someone who is not in my country?” Indeed, why should anyone? If the #Kony2012 campaign and underlying message doesn’t bother Ugandans and doesn’t paint the country in a bad light, then there’s no need to respond. If the campaign doesn’t divert attention from current issues that are more pressing to Ugandans and does not adversely effect tourism, then again, why should anyone respond? This is, after all a personal choice, no one is forced to have their voices heard.

At SXSW yesterday, Ugandan activist Teddy Ruge weighed in on the #Kony2012 campaign with the following:

“We [Ugandans] have such a hard time being given the microphone to talk about our issues that sometimes we have to follow on the coat-tails of Western projects like this one and say that we also have a voice in this matter.”

I believe one way to have those local voices heard is to have them echoed using innovative software “Made in Africa” like Ushahidi and then amplified by a non-Western but international news company like Al-Jazeera. Looking at my Twitter stream this morning, it appears that I’m not the only one. The microphone is yours. Over to you.

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, iRevolution, Social Media, Ushahidi

Tagged #Kony2012, #StopKony, #UgandaSpeaks, Al-Jazeera, Children, Invisible, Kony, Uganda

Innovation and Counter-Innovation: Digital Resistance in Russia

Posted on March 9, 2012 | 5 Comments

Want to know what the future of digital activism looks like? Then follow the developments in Russia. I argued a few years back that the fields of digital activism and civil resistance were converging to a point I referred to as “digital resistance.” The pace of tactical innovation and counter-innovation in Russia’s digital battlefield is stunning and rapidly converging to this notion of digital resistance.

“Crisis can be a fruitful time for innovation,” writes Gregory Asmolov. Contested elections are also ripe for innovation, which is why my dissertation case studies focused on elections. “In most cases,” says Asmolov, “innovations are created by the oppressed (the opposition, in Russia’s case), who try to challenge the existing balance of power by using new tools and technologies. But the state can also adapt and adopt some of these technologies to protect the status quo.” These innovations stem not only from the new technologies themselves but are embodied in the creative ways they are used. In other words, tactical innovation (and counter-innovation) is taking place alongside technological innovation. Indeed, “innovation can be seen not only in the new tools, but also in the new forms of protest enabled by the technology.”

Some of my favorite tactics from Russia include the YouTube video of Vladimir Putin arrested for fraud and corruption. The video was made to look like a real “breaking news” announcement on Russian television. The site got millions of viewers in just a few days. Another tactic is the use of DIY drones, mobile phone live-streaming and/or 360-degree 3D photo installations to more accurately relay the size of protests. A third tactic entails the use of a twitter username that resembles that of a well-known individual. Michael McFaul, the US Ambassador to Russia, has the twitter handle @McFaul. Activists set up the twitter handle @McFauI that appears identical but actually uses a capital “i” instead of a lower case “L” for the last letter in McFaul.

Asmolov lists a number of additional innovations in the Russian context in this excellent write-up. From coordination tools such as the “League of Voters” website, the “Street Art” group on Facebook and the car-based flashmob protests which attracted more than one thousand cars in one case, to the crowdsourced violations map “Karta Narusheniy“, the “SMS Golos” and “Svodny Protocol” platforms used to collect, analyze and/or map reports from trusted election observers (using bounded crowdsourcing).

One of my favorite tactics is the “solo protest.” According to Russian law, “a protest by one person does not require special permission. So activist Olesya Shmagun stood in from of Putin’s office with a poster that read “Putin, go and take part in public debates!” While she was questioned by the police and security service, she was not detained since one-person protests are not illegal. Even though she only caught the attention of several dozen people walking by at the time, she published the story of her protests and a few photos on her LiveJournal blog, which drew considerable attention after being shared on many blogs and media outlets. As Asmolov writes, “this story shows the power of what is known as Manuel Castell’s ‘mass self-communication’. Thanks to the presence of one camera, an offline one-person protest found a way to a [much wider] audience online.”

This innovative tactic lead to another challenge: how to turn a one-person protests into a massive number of one-person protests? So on top of this original innovation came yet another innovation, the Big White Circle action. The dedicated online tool Feb26.ru was developed specifically to coordinate many simultaneous one-person protests. The platform,

“[…] allowed people to check in at locations of their choice on the map of the Garden Ring circle, and showed what locations were already occupied. Unlike other protests, the Big White Circle did not have any organizational committee or a particular leader. The role of the leader was played by a website. The website suffered from DDoS attacks; as a result, it was closed and deleted by the provider; a day later, it was restored. The practice of creating special dedicated websites for specific protest events is one of the most interesting innovations of the Russian protests. The initial idea belongs to Ilya Klishin, who launched the dec24.ru website (which doesn’t exist anymore) for the big opposition rally that took place in Moscow on December 24, 2011.”

The reason I like this tactic is because it takes a perfectly legal action and simply multiplies it, thus forcing the regime to potentially come up with a new set of laws that will clearly appear absurd and ridiculed by a larger segment of the population.

Citizen-based journalism played a pivotal role by “increasing transparency of the coverage of pro-government rallies.” As Asmolov notes, “Internet users were able to provide much content, including high quality YouTube reports that showed that many of those who took a part in these rallies had been forced or paid to participate, without really having any political stance.” This relates to my earlier blog post, “Wag the Dog, or Why Falsifying Crowdsourced Information Can be a Pain.”

Of course, there is plenty of “counter-innovation” coming from the Kremlin and friends. Take this case of pro-Kremlin activists producing an instructional YouTube video on how to manipulate a crowdsourced election-monitoring platform. In addition, Putin loyalists have adapted some of the same tactics as opposition activists, such as the car-based flash-mob protest. The Russian government also decided to create an online system of their own for election monitoring:

“Following an order from Putin, the state communication company Rostelecom developed a website webvybory2012.ru, which allowed people to follow the majority of the Russian polling stations (some 95,000) online on the day of the March 4 presidential election. Every polling station was equipped with two cameras: one has to be focused on the ballot box and the other has to give the general picture of the polling station. Once the voting was over, one of the cameras broadcasted the counting of the votes. The cost of this project is at least 13 billion rubles (around $500 million). Many bloggers have criticized this system, claiming that it creates an imitation of transparency, when actually the most common election violations cannot be monitored through webcameras (more detailed analysis can be found here). Despite this, the cameras allowed to spot numerous violations (1, 2).”

From the perspective of digital resistance strategies, this is exactly the kind of reaction you want to provoke from a repressive regime. Force them to decen-tralize, spend hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of labor-hours to adopt similar “technologies of liberation” and in the process document voting irregularities on their own websites. In other words, leverage and integrate the regime’s technologies within the election-monitoring ecosystem being created, as this will spawn additional innovation. For example, one Russian activist proposed that this webcam network be complemented by a network of citizen mobile phones. In fact, a group of activists developed a smartphone app that could do just this. “The application Webnablyudatel has a classification of all the violations and makes it possible to instantly share video, photos and reports of violations.”

Putin supporters also made an innovative use of crowdsourcing during the recent elections. “What Putin has done is based on a map of Russia where anyone can submit information about Putin’s good deeds.” Just like pro-Kremlin activists can game pro-democracy crowdsourcing platforms, so can supporters of the opposition game a platform like this Putin map. In addition, activists could have easily created a Crowdmap and called it “What Putin Has Not Done” and crowdsource that map, which no doubt would be far more populated than the original good deed map.

One question that comes to mind is how the regime will deal with disinformation on crowdsourcing platforms they set up? Will they need to hire more supporters to vet the information submitted to said platform? Or will they close up the reporting and use “bounded crowdsourcing” instead? If so, will they have a communications challenge on their hands in trying to convince that trusted reporters are indeed legitimate? Another question has to do with collective action. Pro-Kremlin activists are already innovating on their own but will this create a collective-action challenge for the Russian government? Take the example of the pro-regime “Putin Alarm Clock” (Budilnikputina.ru) tactic which backfired and even prompted Putin’s chief of elections staff to dismiss the initiative as “a provocation organized by the protestors.”

There has always been an interesting asymmetric dynamic in digital activism, with activists as first-movers innovating under oppression and regimes counter-innovating. How will this asymmetry change as digital activism and civil resistance tactics and strategies increasingly converge? Will repressive regimes be pushed to decentralize their digital resistance innovations in order to keep pace with the distributed pro-democracy innovations springing up? Does innovation require less coordination than counter-innovation? And as Gregory Asmolov concludes in his post-script, how will the future ubiquity of crowd-funding platforms and tools for micro-donations/payments online change digital resistance?

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Digital Activism, iRevolution, Social Media

Tagged Activism, elections, Repression, Russia

Cyclones in Cyberspace? How Crowdsourced Cyber Warfare Shaped the Russian-Georgia War

Posted on March 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

“Cyclones in Cyberspace: Information Shaping and Denial in the 2008 Russia-Georgia War” was just published in Security Dialogue, a respected peer-reviewed journal. The article analyzes “the impact of cyberspace on the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia in August 2008.” The authors Ron Diebert, Rafal Rohozinski and Masashi Crete-Nishihata argue that “cyberspace played a significant, if not decisive, role in the conflict–as an object of contestation and as a vector for generating strategic effects and outcomes.”

The purpose of this blog post is to briefly highlight some important insights from the study by sharing a few key excerpts from the study.

Introduction

“Cyberspace is now explicitly recognized in United States strategic doc-trine as being equally as important as land, air, sea, and space [...]. Dozens of states are actively developing military doctrines for cyberspace operations (Hughes, 2010), while others may be employing unconventional cyberspace strategies. An arms race in cyberspace looms on the horizon (Deibert and Rohozinski, 2011).”

“The US Department of Defense (2010: 86) presently defines cyber- space as ‘a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications net- works, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers’. This definition acknowledges the interdependence between the physical and informational realm. It also defines cyberspace as the totality of information infrastructures, which includes but is not limited to the Internet. The constitutive elements of cyberspace can be broken down into four levels: physical infrastructure, the code level, the regulatory level, and the level of ideas. These constitutive elements of cyberspace were all present and leveraged during the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.”

“Operations in and through cyber- space were present throughout the conflict and were leveraged by civilian and military actors on both sides. Russian and Georgian forces made use of information operations alongside their con-ventional military capabilities. Civilian leadership on both sides clearly appreciated the importance of strategic communication, and targeted domestic and international media in order to narrate the intent and desired outcome of the conflict.”

“The Internet played an important role as a redistribution channel for media and communications, including news, influential blogs, and rumors. The impact of this media was so effective in the eyes of the Georgian authorities that they decided to censor Russian television broadcasts in major Georgian cities, and to filter access to Russian Internet sites.”

Information Denial

“Both sides (or their sympathizers) employed computer network operations, consisting of attacks designed to disable or degrade key infrastructure, and exploitation or hijacking of government computer systems. In particular, numerous Georgian websites and a few Russian media sites were subject to large-scale distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) events. The command-and-control (C&C) servers responsible for the DDoS against Georgian systems and websites, as well as other forms of malicious hacking, originated from networks located within the Russian Federation.”

“The Russian government has never claimed responsibility for these activities, and it remains unclear whether these operations were coordina-ted, encouraged, or officially tolerated by Russian authorities. This ambiguity is itself an important emergent property of war fighting in the cyber domain.”

“The DDoS surge and SQL injection-based intrusions against Georgian systems beginning on 8 August were later followed by a series of crowd-sourced DDoS activities targeting Georgian government websites and resources, coordinated on Russian hacker forums. It is unclear whether these activities were sanctioned and organized as a component of a broader political strategy, whether they occurred as a result of informal coordination by the Kremlin’s communications staff and its networks of contacts with the Russian IT community (which includes quasi-criminal groups), or whether they occurred as a result of autonomous third-party actions.”

“In an attempt to mitigate the effects of the DDoS events, Georgian authorities sought assistance from the governments of Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. Reportedly, Estonian officials put Georgia in contact with a community of cyber-security professionals who provided consultations (Stiennon, 2008). Georgia attempted to counter the effectiveness of the DDoS surge by implementing filters to block the Russian IP addresses and protocols used by the attackers. This effort was successfully countered, and the DDoS surge shifted to foreign servers and software to mask the IP addresses (Bumgarner and Borg, 2009). Georgia’s next step was to mirror several government websites, including that of Georgia’s president, on servers located in the countries that came to its assistance, which conse-quently also became the target of Russian DDoS events.”

“US cyberspace was also affected, as components of the Georgian government such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were shifted to Blogspot and the websites of the president and the Ministry of Defense were moved to servers operated by operated by Tulip Systems (TSHost), a private web- hosting company based in Atlanta, Georgia (Swabey, 2008; Svensson, 2008a). The Georgian expatriate CEO of TSHost contacted Georgian officials and offered the company’s services without notifying US authori-ties. Soon after the Georgian websites were transferred to TSHost, the US-based servers were subject to DDoS. The CEO of TSHost reported these attacks to the FBI, but the company never received US government sanction for migrating the websites (Svensson, 2008b). Moving hosting to US-based TSHost raised the issue of whether the USA had violated its cyber neutrality by permitting Georgia to use its information services during the conflict.”

Deliberate or Emergent?

One of the study’s principle research questions is whether the Russian campaign in cyberspace was deliberate and planned. The authors consider there possible scenarios: (1) the actions were deliberate and planned; (2) the actions were ‘encouraged’ or ‘passively encouraged’ by state agents; or (3) the actions were an unpredictable result and dynamic emergent property of cyberspace itself. The resulting evaluation of each scenario’s probability suggests that “Russian citizens, criminal groups, and hackers independently organized and/or participated in a self-directed cyber riot against Georgia out of patriotic sentiments.”

“Civilians have voluntarily engaged in warfare activities without the approval or direction of states throughout the history of armed conflict. What makes the actions of civilians in cyberspace different are the characteristics of the domain, where effects can be generated with ease and at rapid speed. Quite simply, collective action is easier and faster in cyberspace than it is in any other physical domain. If this scenario was the case during the Russia–Georgia war, it would signal the emergence of a new factor in cyberspace operations – the capacity for a group other than the belligerents to generate significant effects in and through cyberspace. The unpredictable nature of such outside participation–global in scope, random in distribution–can lead to chaotic outcomes, much like the trajectory and phase of a cyclone.”

Conclusion

“There was leverage gained in the conflict by the pursuit of information denial. Even in environments where the communication environment is constrained, societies are heavily dependent on cyberspace and feel its strategic importance most acutely by its absence. Information-denial strategies are more closely associated with countries of Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and the CIS–as opposed to the West, which is more comfortable with information projection. Information denial also tends to fit more comfortably within semi-authoritarian or competitive authoritarian countries than democratic ones.”

“The tendencies toward information denial also challenge some of the widespread assumptions about the relationships between new information and communication technologies and conflict. In recent years, a conven-tional wisdom has emerged that links cyber- space with a high degree of transparency around modern wars. Our research suggests that the opposite is more likely to be the case as states and non-state actors aggressively pursue military objectives to shape, control, and suppress the realm of ideas.”

“The tendency toward privateering is very strong in cyber conflict. There is already a large and growing illicit global computer-crime market. This market is attractive to some states because it allows them to execute their missions once removed and clandestinely, thus offering plausible deniability and avoiding responsibilities under international law or the laws of armed conflict. Outsourcing to private actors in cyberspace is an example of what we have elsewhere called ‘next- generation cyberspace controls’ (Deibert and Rohozinski, 2010c). Although we found no direct evidence of cyber-privateering in open sources in this case, it is certainly a possibility. Indeed, some countries may actively cultivate cyber-privateering as a strategy precisely to confuse the battle space and muddy attribution.”

“[…] the scope and scale of contingent effects related to the character of the cyberspace domain present a qualitative difference for international con-flicts. An emergent property related to today’s global information and communications environment, inherent in its complexity, dynamism, and dispersed character, is for acts of cyber warfare to be highly unpredictable and volatile.”

“Although states may plan or ‘seed’ campaigns in cyberspace, such campaigns have a tendency to take on lives of their own because of the unavoidable participation of actors swarming from edge locations (see Der Derian, 1996). We refer to this dynamic as ‘cyclones in cyberspace’ – a phenomenon clearly evident in the August 2008 conflict both in terms of the piling-on of outside participants and the confusion and panic sown in Georgia by its own filtering choices.”

“Cyclones in cyberspace invariably internationalize any cyber conflict. […] As cyberspace penetrates those regions of the world where conflict and instability are ripe and authoritarian regimes prevail, the propensity for more cyclones in cyberspace is high and should concern international security researchers and policymakers.”

For more on cyber war, please see my earlier bog post on “Cyberconflict and Global Politics: New Media, War, Digital Activism.”

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Posted in Digital Activism, iRevolution

Tagged Conflict, cyberspace, cyberwar, DDOS, georgia, Russia, war

The Use of Drones for Nonviolent Civil Resistance

Posted on February 18, 2012 | 11 Comments

In my previous blog post on the use of drones for human rights, I also advocated for the use of drones to support nonviolent civil resistance efforts. Obviously, like the use of any technology in such contexts, doing so presents both new opportunities and obvious dangers. In this blog post, I consider the use of DIY drones in the context of civil resistance, both vis-a-vis theory and practice. While I’ve read the civil resistance literature rather widely for my dissertation, I decided to get input from two of the world’s leading experts on the topic.

The first expert opined as follows: “Whether a given technology delivers strategic or tactical avantage is typically dependent on context. So to the extent that a drone can be useful in getting evidence that delegitimizes a movement’s opponent (i.e. exposing atrocities), and/or legitimizes a movement (i.e. docu-menting strictly nonviolent activities), and/or provides useful intelligence to a movement about an opponent’s current capabilities (i.e. the amount of supplies an adversary has), strengths, and weaknesses, then one could indeed argue that drones could provide strategic or tactical advantages. But contextually speaking, if the amount of human and financial resources necessary to acquire and deploy a drone are a drain on beneficial activities that a movement may otherwise be undertaking, then it’s a cost/benefit analysis.”

As this New York Times article notes, the cost of drones is dropping dramatically and their applications multiplying. Even Professor Francis Fukuyama is getting in on the action. While drones were once exclusively the purview of the military, they are quickly becoming mainstream and being used by civilians. Indeed, the line dividing remote control toy planes and drones is starting to blur. Keep in mind that satellite imagery had a strong military connotation before Google Earth entered the scene a few years ago. Indeed, greater civilian access to satellite imagery has demystified this erstwhile exclusively military technology.

A few weeks ago, a civilian used a simple Hexa Arducopter to film protests in Estonia. Around the same time, protestors in Warsaw used a small Polish RoboKopter equipped with a videocamera to get this drone’s eye view of police movement. Last year, a Hexacopter was used to film Russian protests, as repor-ted by CNN below.

As Wired editor-in-chief and drone-builder Chris Anderson notes, “no more do citizens need to wait for news choppers to get aerial footage of a major event. With drones, they can shoot their own overhead video.” Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman writes that “getting an aerial view is the next step in compelling DIY citizen video. [...] An aerial view gives an entirely different perspective what constitutes a legitimate—and illegitimate—threat.”

The second civil resistance expert I consulted argued that “nonviolent move-ments definitely need good and timely information in order to engage in effective strategic planning, to be able to anticipate regime responses, etc., so we can draw on the strategic nonviolent conflict literature. And we can cite Brian Martin and Wendy Varney on how exposing regime violence (via images) targeting non-violent opposition can produce an important backfire effect, leading to loss of domestic and international support for the regime. Gene Sharp referred to it as political jiu-jitsu.”

Indeed, an arial view could capture a different perspective than state-television cameras might, and thus reveal an illegitimate act on behalf of the regime that is also not captured by cell phone cameras. To this end, an illegitimate act carried out by a repressive regime could backfire if caught on drone cameras and subsequently shared via Twitter, Flickr and/or YouTube. As Sharp writes, too much brutality may result in political jiu-jitsu where the opposition group is able to increase their unity and support while politically throwing the ruler off balance and weakening his/her regime.

I’ve blogged about Gene Sharp’s work several times on iRevolution, so I won’t expand on his bio here. In 1973, he published a book on nonviolent action in which he describes 198 tactics that civil resistance can employ in their campaign. I briefly reviewed these again within the context of DIY drones and have added some relevant ones below together with an explanation.

12. Skywriting and earthwriting: while drones are typically used for sur-veillance, they could be used for skywriting (or sky-graffiti). They could also be used to take pictures or videos of earthwriting.

18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors: just like the above, drones could also be used to fly small flags and banners, which could further spread the message of the movement. This could be safer than other methods.

31. “Haunting” officials: drones could be used to try and follow specific officials or groups of officials, especially as they are moving through the city center. They could also be used to follow military vehicles. These drones could also take pictures of said officials and military equipment, which could be used to further haunt said officials.

32. Taunting officials: in this case, drones could be used to buzz officials up close and personal. Of course, this would make it easier for the drone to get shot down. Perhaps if protestors used a fleet of DIY drones, there would be strength in numbers, creating an annoying wasp effect. For those drones that can carry some payload, leaflet could be dropped from said drones. If the pilots are particularly adept, they could also drop paint or even, well, urine.

161. Nonviolent harassment: basically same as points 31 & 32. Perhaps drones could be used to harass officials trying to give speeches. If some DIY drones are capable of carrying small but particularly loud speakers, they could be used to play music, or play back political speeches in which officials were clearly lying.

169. Nonviolent air raids: the tactics described above qualify as nonviolent air raids. Perhaps a drone could carry some firecrackers and buzz an airbase. Of course, this would likely provoke return fire with live ammunition.

184. Defiance of blockades: buzzing of blockades would demonstrate that while they can block people and cars, they care not impermeable. Those drones capable of carrying payloads could also be used to transport small packages across blockades.

194. Disclosing identities of secret agents: this is certainly more challenging and would require additional reconnaissance and intelligence information. But suspected secret agents could potentially be followed via small, DIY drones, particularly the hexacopter variety.

“At the end of the day,” according to the first expert I consulted, “a drone is a tool, and the strategic advantage it may provide will also depend on the funda-mental unity, planning, and discipline that a movement has or does not have. For example, if a movement is lacking a fundamentally good and unifying message, no amount of technology will substitute for that, and thus the strategic value of that technology is diminished in the context of that movement. On the other hand if a movement has a good and unifying message and levers technology to reinforce that message, then the technology can act as a multiplier and provide substantially more strategic value.”

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Posted in Digital Activism, Humanitarian Tech, iRevolution

Tagged action, civil, drone, gene, nonviolent, Resistance, sharp, UAV

How to Crowdsource Better Governance in Authoritarian States

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 7 Comments

I was recently asked to review this World Bank publication entitled: “The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States Contexts.” I had been looking for just this type of research on crowdsourcing for a long time and was therefore well pleased to read this publication. This blog posts focuses more on the theoretical foundations of the report, i.e., Part 1. I highly recommend reading the full study given the real-world case studies that are included.

“[The report serves] as a primer on crowdsourcing as an information resource for development, crisis response, and post-conflict recovery, with a specific focus on governance in fragile states. Inherent in the theoretical approach is that broader, unencumbered participation in governance is an objectively positive and democratic aim, and that governments’ accountability to its citizens can be increased and poor-performance corrected, through openness and empowerment of citizens. Whether for tracking aid flows, reporting on poor government performance, or helping to organize grassroots movements, crowdsourcing has potential to change the reality of civic participation in many developing countries. The objective of this paper is to outline the theoretical justifications, key features and governance structures of crowdsourcing systems, and examine several cases in which crowdsourcing has been applied to complex issues in the developing world.”

The research is grounded in the philosophy of Open-Source Governance, “which advocates an intellectual link between the principles of open-source and open-content movements, and basic democratic principles.” The report argues that “open-source governance theoretically provides more direct means to affect change than do periodic elections,” for example. According to the authors of the study, “crowdsourcing is increasingly seen as a core mechanism of a new systemic approach of governance to address the highly complex, globally interconnected and dynamic challenges of climate change, poverty, armed conflict, and other crises, in view of the frequent failures of traditional mechanisms of democracy and international diplomacy with respect to fragile state contexts.”

That said, how exactly is crowdsourcing supposed to improve governance? The authors argues that “in general, ‘transparency breeds self-correcting behavior’ among all types of actors, since neither governments nor businesses or individuals want to be caught at doing something embarrassing and or illegal.” Furthermore, “since crowdsourcing is in its very essence based on universal participation, it is supporting the empowerment of people. Thus, in a pure democracy or in a status of anarchy or civil war (Haiti after the earthquake, or Libya since February 2011), there are few external limitations to its use, which is the reason why most examples are from democracies and situations of crisis.” On the other hand, an authoritarian regime will “tend to oppose and interfere with crowdsourcing, perceiving broad-based participation and citizen empowerment as threats to its very existence.”

So how can crowdsourcing improve governance in an authoritarian state? “Depending on the level of citizen-participation in a given state,” the authors argue that “crowdsourcing can potentially support governments’ and/or civil society’s efforts in informing, consulting, and collaborating, leading to empowerment of citizens, and encouraging decentralization and democrati-zation. By providing the means to localize, visualize, and publish complex, aggregated data, e.g. on a multi-layer map, and the increasing speed of genera-ting and sharing data up to real-time delivery, citizens and beneficiaries of government and donors become empowered to provide feedback and even become information providers in their own right.”

According to the study, this transformation can take place in three ways:

1) By sharing, debating and contributing to publicly available government, donor and other major actors’ databases, data can be distributed directly through customized web and mobile applications and made accessible and meaningful to citizens.

2) By providing independent platforms for ‘like-minded people’ to connect and collaborate, builds potential for the emergence of massive, internationally connected grassroots movements.

3) By establishing platforms that aggregate and compare data provided by the official actors such as governments, donors, and companies with crowdsourced primary data and feedback.

“The tracking of data by citizens increases transparency as well as pressure for better social accountability. Greater effectiveness of state and non-state actors can be achieved by using crowdsourced data and deliberations* to inform the provision of their services. While the increasing volume of data generated as well as the speed of transactions can be attractive even to fragile-state governments, the feature of citizen empowerment is often considered as serious threat (Sudan, Egypt, Syria,Venezuela etc.).” *The authors argue that this need to be done through “web-based deliberation platforms (e.g. DiscourseDB) that apply argumentative frameworks for issue-based argument instead of simple polling.”

The second part of the report includes a section on Crisis Mapping in which two real-world case studies are featured: the Ushahidi-Haiti Crisis Map & Mission4636 and the Libya Crisis Map. Other case studies include the UN’s Threat and Risk Mapping Analysis (TRMA) initiative in the Sudan, Participatory GIS and Community Forestry in Nepal; Election Monitoring in Guinea; Huduma and Open Data in Kenya; Avaaz and other emergent applications of crowd-sourcing for economic development and good governance. The third and final part of the study provides recommendations for donors on how to apply crowd-sourcing and interactive mapping for socio-economic recovery and development in fragile states.

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Posted in Crowdsourcing, iRevolution, Social Media

Tagged authoritarian, Bank, fragile, Governance, states, Theory, World, WorldBank

Time to #Occupy my #Holiday

Posted on December 28, 2011 | 9 Comments

I’m about to go offline for what will seem like an eternity. Yes, that’s right, I shall part with my laptop for a record breaking 10 days. The last time this (almost) happend was exactly three years ago (although that was for “just” 6.5 days and I did slip online in-between to write a blog post). In fact, only twice have I left my laptop (and the Internet) alone for more than 72 hours since December 2008, i.e., during the past ~1,095 days. Yes, that is indeed a tragic statistic.

In order to truly enjoy complete peace of mind during these precious 12 days, I shall follow the wise ways of the White African, a.k.a. Hash, a.k.a. Erik Hersman. I shall for the first time in a long time set up an automated email reply message with a link to this post. But wait, there’s more. If you’ve found your way here after receiving said automated reply, here’s why (paraphrasing Hash):

Im off-grid on holiday until January 9th. This means that any communica-tions that come in before Jan 9th will be DELETED upon return. I do this for peace of mind on vacation, not because I don’t value what you have to say. No one wants to come back to an inbox of 2000+ messages. If it’s impor-tant, hit me up (resend) after Jan 9th.

Be well and hug someone. I’m about to Occupy my Holiday.

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Posted in iRevolution

Tagged #OWS, Ciao, Holiday, No, Nobody, Occupy, Wall

Do “Liberation Technologies” Change the Balance of Power Between Repressive Regimes and Civil Society?

Posted on November 15, 2011 | 4 Comments

My dissertation is now available for download. Many thanks to my dissertation committee for their support and feedback throughout: Professor Dan Drezner, Professor Larry Diamond, Professor Carolyn Gideon and Clay Shirky. This dissertation is dedicated to Khaled Mohamed Saeed and Mohamed Bouazizi.

Abstract

Do new information and communication technologies (ICTs) empower repressive regimes at the expense of civil society, or vice versa? For example, does access to the Internet and mobile phones alter the balance of power between repressive regimes and civil society? These questions are especially pertinent today given the role that ICTs played during this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Indeed, as one Egyptian activist stated, “We use Facebook to schedule our protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.” But do these new ICTs—so called “liberation technologies”—really threaten repressive rule? The purpose of this dissertation is to use mixed-methods research to answer these questions.

The first half of my doctoral study comprised a large-N econometric analysis to test whether “liberation technologies” are a statistically significant predictor of anti-government protests in countries with repressive regimes. If using the Internet and mobile phones facilitates organization, mobilization and coordina-tion, then one should expect a discernible link between an increase in access to ICTs and the frequency of protests—particularly in repressive states. The results of the quantitative analysis were combined with other selection criteria to identify two country case studies for further qualitative comparative analysis: Egypt and the Sudan.

The second half of the dissertation assesses the impact of “liberation technologies” during the Egyptian Parliamentary Elections and Sudanese Presidential Elections of 2010. The analysis focused specifically on the use of Ushahidi—a platform often referred to as a “liberation technology.” Descriptive analysis, process tracing and semi-structured interviews were carried out for each case study. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses were mixed. An increase in mobile phone access was associated with a decrease in protests for four of the five regression models. Only in one model was an increase in Internet access associated with an increase in anti-government protests. As for Ushahidi, the Egyptian and Sudanese dictatorships were indeed threatened by the technology because it challenged the status quo. Evidence suggests that this challenge tipped the balance of power marginally in favor of civil society in Egypt, but not in the Sudan, and overall not significantly.

The main contributions and highlights of my dissertation include:

* New dataset on protests, ICTs, political and economic variables over 18 years.
* New econometric analysis and contribution to quantitative political science.
* New conceptual framework to assess impact of ICTs on social, political change.
* New operational application of conceptual framework to assess impact of ICTs.
* New datasets on independent citizen election observation in repressive states.
* New insights into role of ICTs in civil resistance against authoritarian regimes.
* New comprehensive literature on impact of ICTs on protests, activism, politics.
* New targeted policy recommendations based on data driven empirical analysis.
* New lessons learned and best practices in using the Ushahidi platform.

A PDF copy of my dissertation is available here.

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Posted in Crisis Mapping, Crowdsourcing, Digital Activism, iRevolution, Social Media, Ushahidi

Tagged Dissertation, Fletcher, PhD

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