Wired's "Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable"

Wired on coercive measures the US government is taking to control the internet
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By David Kravets
March 6, 2012
When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.

EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the “ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state
lawmakers.”

But despite EasyDNS and others’ outrage, the U.S. government says it’s gone that route hundreds of times. Furthermore, it says it has the right to seizeany .com, .net and .org domain name because the companies that have the contracts to administer them are based on United States soil, according to Nicole Navas, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman.

The controversy highlights the unique control the U.S. continues to hold over key components of the global domain name system, and rips a Band-Aid off a historic sore point for other nations. A complicated web of bureaucracy and Commerce Department-dictated contracts signed in 1999 established that key domains would be contracted out to Network Solutions, which was acquired by VeriSign in 2000. That cemented control of all-important .com and .net domains with a U.S. company – VeriSign – putting every website using one of those addresses firmly within reach of American courts regardless of where the owners are located – possibly forever.

The government, Navas said, usually serves court-ordered seizures on VeriSign, which manages domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name, because “foreign-based registrars are not bound to comply with U.S. court orders.” The government does the same with the non-profit counterpart to VeriSign that now manages the .org domain. That’s the Public Interest Registry, which, like VeriSign, is based in Virginia.

Such seizures are becoming commonplace under the Obama administration. For example, the U.S. government program known as Operation in Our Sites acquires federal court orders to shutter sites it believes are hawking counterfeited goods, illegal sports streams and unauthorized movies and music. Navas said the U.S. government has seized 750 domain names, “most with
foreign-based registrars.” VeriSign, for its part, said it is complying with U.S. law.

“VeriSign responds to lawful court orders subject to its technical capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “When law enforcement presents us with such lawful orders impacting domain names within our registries, we respond within our technical capabilities.”

VeriSign declined to entertain questions about how many times it has done this. It often complies with U.S. court orders by redirecting the DNS (Domain Name System) of a domain to a U.S. government IP address that informs online visitors that the site has been seized (for
example, ninjavideo.net.)

“Beyond that, further questions should be directed to the appropriate U.S. federal government agency responsible for the domain name seizure,” the company said.

The Public Interest Registry did not immediately respond for comment.

Bodog.com was targeted because federal law generally makes it illegal to offer online sports wagering and to payoff online bets in the United States, even though online gambling isn’t illegal globally. Bodog.com was registered with a Canadian registrar, a VeriSign subcontractor, but the United States shuttered the site without any intervention from Canadian authorities or companies.

Instead, the feds went straight to VeriSign. It’s a powerful company deeply enmeshed in the backbone operations of the internet, including managing the .com infrastructure and operating root name servers. VeriSign has a cozy relationship with the federal government, and has long had a contract from the U.S. government to help manage the internet’s “root file” that is key
to having a unified internet name system.

Still, the issue of the U.S.’s legal dominion claim over all .com domains wasn’t an issue in the January seizure of the domain of megaupload.com, which is implicated in one of the largest
criminal copyright cases in U.S. history. Megaupload.com was registered in the United States with a registrar based in Washington state.

The United States would have won even more control over the internet with the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. But the nation’s biggest online protest ever scuttled the measures, which would have allowed the government to force internet service providers in the U.S. to prevent Americans from being able to visit or find in search engines websites that the U.S. government suspected violated U.S. copyright or trademark law.

But as the Justice Department demonstrated forcefully with the takedown of Megaupload, just a day after the net’s coordinated anti-SOPA protest, it still has powerful weapons to use, despite the deaths of SOPA and PIPA.

So how does International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the global body that oversees the domain-naming system, feel about the U.S. government’s actions? ICANN declined comment and forwarded a 2010 blog post from it’s chief Rod Beckstrom, who said ICANN has “no involvement in the takedown of any website.”

ICANN, a non-profit established by the U.S., has never awarded a contract to manage the .com space to a company outside the United States — in fact VeriSign has always held it — despite having a contentious relationship with ICANN that’s involved a protracted lawsuit. But, due to contract terms, VeriSign is unlikely to ever lose control over the immensely economically valuable .com handle.

ICANN is also seeking to distance itself from the U.S. government by being more inclusive, including allowing domain names in a range of written, global languages, ending the exclusivity of the Latin alphabet in top-level domains. Still, many outside the United States, like China, India and Russia, distrust ICANN and want control of the net’s naming system to be turned over to
an organization such as the International Telecommunications Union, an affiliate of the United Nations. Last year, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Hamadoun Toure, the ITU’s chief, and said he wanted international control over the internet “using the monitoring capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union.”

“If we are going to talk about the democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange,” Putin said, according to a transcript from the Russian government.Just last week, Robert McDowell, a Federal Communications Commission commissioner, blasted such an idea.

“If successful, these efforts would merely imprison the future in the regulatory dungeon of the past,” he said. “Even more counterproductive would be the creation of a new international body
to oversee internet governance.”

ICANN was established in 1998 by the Clinton administration, and has been under global attack to internationalize the control of the Domain Name System ever since. A United Nations working group in 2005 concluded that “no single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international internet governance.”

But those pressures don’t seem to have registered with President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Hollywood was a big donor to Obama, and Obama reciprocated by naming at least
five former Recording Industry Association of America attorneys to posts in the Justice Department, which has been waging a crackdown on internet piracy. The Justice Department is looking for even more money in next year’s budget to hire more intellectual-property prosecutors.

Without SOPA or PIPA, the Justice Department lacks any mechanism to prevent Americans from visiting sites that are on a domain not controlled by a U.S. corporation. Knowing that, the world’s leading BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, recently switched its main site from a .org domain to .se, the handle for Sweden.

The Pirate Bay’s lead is unlikely to be followed by the millions of non-U.S. companies that rely on .com, which remains the net’s beachfront real estate, even if it is subject to being confiscated by the U.S. But it is possible that the U.S. government’s big-footing over dot-com domains in the name of fighting copyright could add more weight to the arguments of those who want to put the U.N. in charge of the internet’s naming system. While that’s not inevitably a bad thing, it could lead to a world where any .com might be seizable by any country, including Russia, Libya and Iran. Still, don’t expect Uncle Sam to give up its iron grip on .com without a fight.

Bust Reveals Government Runs Hacking Groups

Infowars contributor Kurt Nimo covers the FBI's provocateur project to infiltrate and instigate rogue civil society crackers.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 6, 2012
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The establishment media has characterized the leader of LulzSec ratting out his hacktivist comrades as betrayal, but the incident reveals something far more sinister – government is responsible for creating and unleashing computer hacker groups.

Hector Xavier Monsegur, said to be the leader of LulzSec, worked for the FBI, according to news reports. He was reportedly arrested in Puerto Rico last June, pleaded guilty to hacking charges, and then began working with the FBI – or so the cover story would have it.

Monsequr, aka Sabu, decided what targets to attack and who would participate in the attacks, more than likely at the direction of this FBI handlers. It is believed he participated in the Anonymous effort to hack HBGary, the security firm that works closely with the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the Pentagon.

Sabu’s Lulz Security, commonly abbreviated as LulzSec, claimed responsibility for taking the CIA website offline. It also attacked Fox News, PBS, Sony, and a number of gamer sites. LulzSec claims to have hacked local InfraGard chapter sites, the organization affiliated with the FBI, and released the emails and passwords of a number of users of senate.gov.

LulzSec and Anonymous attacks have provided the government with an excuse to push their cyber security agenda and propaganda campaign, including the proposal for a “kill switch” that would have allowed Obama to shut down the internet (due to public outrage, the proposal was dropped from a House bill in February).

Government and corporate groups cited LulzSec and Anonymous lawlessness last June to push the so-called Protect IP Act (known as PIPA). The introduction of a House version of the bill, dubbed SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act), was met with public outrage and widespread activism that forced Congress to reconsider the legislation.

In October, Mother Jones revealed that the FBI is notorious for
creating supposed terrorist groups from scratch and then framing patsies in
order to claim the government is protecting the United States from terrorists
and also breathe life into an otherwise moribund war on mostly nonexistent
terrorism.

Sabu’s role as an FBI provocateur working inside LulzSec reveals the government is attempting to do the same in order to push its so-called cybersecurity agenda. The establishment is eager to pass a raft of legislation to closely regulate the internet, strip the medium of its anonymity, and close it down as an activism and alternative media tool.

Lawrence Lessig in the WSJ defending piracy + on IP rights

"In Defense of Piracy"

From The Wall Street Journal

TECHNOLOGY

OCTOBER 11, 2008

Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up.

By LAWRENCE LESSIG

(See Corrections and Amplifications item below.)

In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz's 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, "Let's Go Crazy." He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month-old would do -- he accepted Prince's invitation and went "crazy" to the beat. Holden's mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background.

Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can't easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.

Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized "performance" of Prince's music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.

This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal's demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz's video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz.

YouTube sent Ms. Lenz a notice that it was removing her video. She wondered, "Why?" What had she done wrong? She pressed that question through a number of channels until it found its way to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (on whose board I sat until the beginning of 2008). The foundation's lawyers thought this was a straightforward case of fair use. Ms. Lenz consulted with the EFF and filed a "counter-notice" to YouTube, arguing that no rights of Universal were violated by Holden's dance.

Yet Universal's lawyers insist to this day that sharing this home movie is willful copyright infringement under the laws of the United States. On their view of the law, she is liable to a fine of up to $150,000 for sharing 29 seconds of Holden dancing. Universal declined to comment.

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there's some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? "Let's Go Crazy" indeed!

It doesn't have to be like this. We could craft copyright law to encourage a wide range of both professional and amateur creativity, without threatening Prince's profits. We could reject the notion that Internet culture must oppose profit, or that profit must destroy Internet culture. But real change will be necessary if this is to be our future -- changes in law, and changes in us.

For now, trials like Ms. Lenz's are becoming increasingly common. Both professionals, such as the band Girl Talk or the artist Candice Breitz, and amateurs, including thousands creating videos posted on YouTube, are finding themselves the target of overeager lawyers. Because their creativity captures or includes the creativity of others, the owners of the original creation are increasingly invoking copyright to stop the spread of this unauthorized speech. This new work builds upon the old by in effect "quoting" the old. But while writers with words have had the freedom to quote since time immemorial, "writers" with digital technology have not yet earned this right. Instead, the lawyers insist permission is required to include the protected work in anything new.

Not all owners, of course. Viacom, for example, has effectively promised to exempt practically any amateur remix from its lawyers' concerns. But enough owners insist on permission to have touched, and hence, taint, an extraordinary range of extraordinary creativity, including remixes in the latest presidential campaign. During the Republican primary, for example, Fox News ordered John McCain's campaign to stop using a clip of Sen. McCain at a Fox News-moderated debate in an ad. And two weeks ago, Warner Music Group got YouTube to remove a video attacking Barack Obama, which used pieces of songs like the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House." (Spokesman Will Tanous of Warner Music Group, which represents the Talking Heads, says the request came from the band's management.) Around the same time, NBC asked the Obama campaign to pull an ad that remixed some NBC News footage with Tom Brokaw and Keith Olbermann.

We are in the middle of something of a war here -- what some call "the copyright wars"; what the late Jack Valenti called his own "terrorist war," where the "terrorists" are apparently our kids. But if I asked you to shut your eyes and think about these "copyright wars," your mind would not likely run to artists like Girl Talk or creators like Stephanie Lenz. Peer-to-peer file sharing is the enemy in the "copyright wars." Kids "stealing" stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art.

Yet every war has its collateral damage. These creators are this war's collateral damage. The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society -- if it thought about it for just a second -- would allow to exist, legally. In a state of "war," we can't be lax. We can't forgive infractions that might at a different time not even be noticed. Think "Eighty-year-old Grandma Manhandled by TSA Agents," and you're in the right frame for this war as well.

The work of these remix creators is valuable in ways that we have forgotten. It returns us to a culture that, ironically, artists a century ago feared the new technology of that day would destroy. In 1906, for example, perhaps America's then most famous musician, John Philip Sousa, warned Congress about the inevitable loss that the spread of these "infernal machines" -- the record player -- would cause. As he described it:

"When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

A professional fearful that new technology would destroy the amateur. "The tide of amateurism cannot but recede," he predicted. A recession that he believed would only weaken culture.

A new generation of "infernal machines" has now reversed this trend. New technology is restoring the "vocal chords" of millions. Wikipedia is a text version of this amateur creativity. Much of YouTube is the video version. A new generation has been inspired to create in a way our generation could not imagine. And tens of thousands, maybe millions, of "young people" again get together to sing "the songs of the day or the old songs" using this technology. Not on corner streets, or in parks near their homes. But on platforms like YouTube, or MySpace, with others spread across the world, whom they never met, or never even spoke to, but whose creativity has inspired them to create in return.

The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or watching or creating, "media."

Yet our attention is not focused on these creators. It is focused instead upon "the pirates." We wage war against these "pirates"; we deploy extraordinary social and legal resources in the absolutely failed effort to get them to stop "sharing."

This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can't kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them "pirates." And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea.

That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison.

Copyright law must be changed. Here are just five changes that would make a world of difference:

Deregulate amateur remix: We need to restore a copyright law that leaves "amateur creativity" free from regulation. Before the 20th century, this culture flourished. The 21st century could see its return. Digital technologies have democratized the ability to create and re-create the culture around us. Where the creativity is an amateur remix, the law should leave it alone. It should deregulate amateur remix.

What happens when others profit from this creativity? Then a line has been crossed, and the remixed artists plainly ought to be paid -- at least where payment is feasible. If a parent has remixed photos of his kid with a song by Gilberto Gil (as I have, many times), then when YouTube makes the amateur remix publicly available, some compensation to Mr. Gil is appropriate -- just as, for example, when a community playhouse lets neighbors put on a performance consisting of a series of songs sung by neighbors, the public performance of those songs triggers a copyright obligation (usually covered by a blanket license issued to the community playhouse). There are plenty of models within the copyright law for assuring that payment. We need to be as creative as our kids in finding a model that works.

Deregulate "the copy": Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a "copy," that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with "the copy," and focus instead on uses -- like public distributions of copyrighted work -- that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.

Simplify: If copyright regulation were limited to large film studios and record companies, its complexity and inefficiency would be unfortunate, though not terribly significant. But when copyright law purports to regulate everyone with a computer, there is a special obligation to make sure this regulation is clear. It is not clear now. Tax-code complexity regulating income is bad enough; tax-code complexity regulating speech is a First Amendment nightmare.

Restore efficiency: Copyright is the most inefficient property system known to man. Now that technology makes it trivial, we should return to the system of our framers requiring at least that domestic copyright owners maintain their copyright after an automatic, 14-year initial term. It should be clear who owns what, and if it isn't, the owners should bear the burden of making it clear.

Decriminalize Gen-X: The war on peer-to-peer file-sharing is a failure. After a decade of fighting, the law has neither slowed file sharing, nor compensated artists. We should sue not kids, but for peace, and build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid for their work, without trying to stop "sharing."

—Adapted from "Remix" by Lawrence Lessig, to be published by The Penguin Press on Oct. 16, 2008. Copyright by Lawrence Lessig, 2008. Printed by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, and co-founder of Creative Commons.

Corrections & Amplifications

John Philip Sousa's middle name was misspelled as Phillip in a previous version of this article on copyright law in Saturday's Weekend Journal.

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

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The Economist: "A town crier in the global village"

The Economist on technology and protest

Source link.
A cross-border fraternity that strives to be seen, heard and heeded
Sep 2nd 2010 | OTTAWA | from the print edition

NEARLY four years ago, a web-based political movement set itself the modest task of “closing the gap between the world we have and world most people everywhere want”. Calling their group Avaaz, which means “voice” in several languages, the founders aimed to reproduce globally some of the success which their progenitors—like America’s Moveon.org, and Australia’s Getup!—had enjoyed in national political arenas.

By its own lights, the movement, using 14 languages and engaged in a mind-boggling list of causes, has had some spectacular successes. Within the next few months, membership will top 6m. The number of individual actions taken (from bombarding a politician with a well-aimed message, or funding a poster campaign, to helping provide satellite phones to Burmese monks) is estimated at over 23m. Among the recent developments Avaaz claims to have influenced are a new anti-corruption law in Brazil; a move by Britain to create a marine-conservation zone in the Indian Ocean; and the spiking of a proposal to allow more hunting of whales.

But is there any objective measure by which the reach of a global e-protest movement can be assessed? Sceptics use words like “clicktavism” to describe political action that demands nothing more of a protester than pressing a button, which may just imply curiosity; and it is rarely possible to prove beyond doubt that e-campaigning is a decisive factor in a political outcome.

On the other hand, argues Ricken Patel, a co-founder of Avaaz, digital activism rarely ends with the click of a mouse. Avaaz’s campaign against the death sentence for adultery imposed on an Iranian woman asks members to phone Iranian embassies (and provides numbers); members are also being urged to put pressure on the leaders of Brazil and Turkey to intercede with Iran. Avaaz is collecting funds for a campaign in the Brazilian and Turkish press, too.

Avaaz’s other demands range from the simple—close Guantánamo, because it plays into the hands of Osama bin Laden—to the very broad: fight climate change, avoid a clash of civilisations. Despite the risk of blurred signals, the variety of causes is also a strength, says Dave Karpf, an American analyst of the net; it allows the group to act as a hub, attracting members to one campaign and telling them about others. As Evgeny Morozov, a writer on the internet (including for The Economist) points out, Avaaz has lost whatever monopoly it had over the creation of instant, cross-border lobbies; you can do that on Facebook. But the way Avaaz bunches unlikely causes together may be an asset in a world where campaigns, like race and class, can still segregate people, not reconcile them.

The Economist: "A cyber-house divided"

The economnist on Tribalism online

E-communication and society

Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle
Sep 2nd 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition


IN 2007 Danah Boyd heard a white American teenager describe MySpace, the social network, as “like ghetto or whatever”. At the time, Facebook was stealing members from MySpace, but most people thought it was just a fad: teenagers tired of networks, the theory went, just as they tired of shoes.

But after hearing that youngster, Ms Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, felt that something more than whimsy might be at work. “Ghetto” in American speech suggests poor, unsophisticated and black. That led to her sad conclusion: in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world—separation by class and race.

A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.

This summer Ms Boyd heard from a scholar in Brazil who, after reading her research, saw a parallel. Almost 80% of internet users in Brazil use Orkut, a social network owned by Google. As internet use rises in Brazil and reaches new social groups, better-off Brazilians are leaving Orkut for Facebook. That is partly because they have more friends abroad (with whom they link via Facebook) and partly snobbishness. Posh Brazilians have a new word: orkutificação, or becoming “orkutised”. A place undergoing orkutificação is full of strangers, open to anyone. Brazilians are now the second biggest users of the micro-blogging site Twitter; but some wonder whether the dreaded o-word awaits that neighbourhood too.

Facebook’s architecture makes it easy for groups to remain closed. For example, it suggests new friends using an algorithm that looks at existing ones. But simpler, more open networks also permit self-segregation. On Twitter, members can choose to “follow” anyone they like, and can form groups by embedding words and shortened phrases known as “hashtags” in their messages. In May Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, who research the display of social information, looked at the ten most popular hashtags on Twitter and discovered that most were used almost exclusively by either black or white authors. The hashtag “#cookout” was almost entirely black; the hashtag “#oilspill” almost entirely white.

With ideology, the pair’s findings were a bit more hopeful; liberals and conservatives at least communicate—by trading taunts. They do so by appropriating hashtags so as to surface in each others’ searches. By now, only one keyword in American political discourse remains unaffected by such games of tag: #NPR, or National Public Radio, used only by liberals.

All this argues for a cautious response to claims that e-communications abate conflict by bringing mutually suspicious people together. Facebook has a site called “Peace on Facebook,” where it describes how it can “decrease world conflict” by letting people from different backgrounds connect. (The optimism is catching; this spring a founder of Twitter described his service as “a triumph of humanity”.)

Peace on Facebook keeps a ticker of friend connections made each day between people from rival places. Israelis and Palestinians, the site claims, made about 15,000 connections on July 25th, the most recent available day. That is hard to put in context; Facebook does not make public the total number of friendships in any country. But Ethan Zuckerman, a blogger and activist, used independent data to estimate that these links represent roughly 1-2% of the combined total of friendships on Israeli and Palestinian accounts. Using the same method for Greece and Turkey, his estimate was 0.1%. That understates the role of Greek-Turkish friendship groups, or groups dedicated to music or films that both countries like. Among, say, people from either country who are studying outside their homeland (and have a better-than-average chance of becoming decision-makers), the share of trans-Aegean links would be far higher. And their mere existence sends an important moral signal.

But Mr Zuckerman frets that the internet really serves to boost ties within countries, not between them. Using data from Google, he looked at the top 50 news sites in 30 countries. Almost every country reads all but 5% of its news from domestic sources. Mr Zuckerman believes that goods and services still travel much farther than ideas, and that the internet allows us to be “imaginary cosmopolitans”.

Peace on Facebook offers data for India and Pakistan, too. That is even harder to put in context. Pakistan has banned Facebook in the past, and offers too few users to qualify even for independent estimates. John Kelly, founder of Morningside Analytics, a firm that analyses social networks, examined links between blogs and twitter accounts in India and Pakistan and discovered two hubs that link the two countries. South Asian expats in London who self-identify as “Desis”—people from the sub-continent—link freely to each other and to their home countries. And cricket fans in both countries link up spontaneously.

Mr Kelly believes that clusters of internet activity, when they do cross national borders, flow from pre-existing identities. Ethnic Baloch bloggers in three different countries link mainly to each other. Blogs in Afghanistan show some ties to NGOs and American service members, but a far greater number to Iranian news services and poetry blogs. That reflects old reality, not some new discovery. There is also some hope in Morningside’s data. Four websites most consistently account for links between countries: YouTube, Wikipedia, the BBC and, a distant fourth, Global Voices Online. The last of these, launched at Harvard University in 2005 and mainly funded by American foundations, works to create links between bloggers in different countries, and to find what it calls “bridge bloggers”: expats and cultural translators, like London’s Desis, who help explain their countries to each other. (This newspaper has a loose editorial collaboration with the site.)

Onnik Krikorian, Global Voices’ editor in Central Asia, is a British citizen with an Armenian name. He couldn’t go to Azerbaijan and had difficulty establishing any online contact with the country until he went to a conference in Tbilisi in 2008 and met four Azeri bloggers. They gave him their cards, and he found them on Facebook. To his surprise, they agreed to be his friends. Mr Krikorian has since found Facebook to be an ideal platform to build ties. Those first four contacts made it easier for other Azeris to link up with him.

But the internet is not magic; it is a tool. Anyone who wants to use it to bring nations closer together has to show initiative, and be ready to travel physically as well as virtually. As with the telegraph before it—also hailed as a tool of peace—the internet does nothing on its own.

Source:

http://www.economist.com/node/16943885