The internet equalizer: Why isn’t the Obama administration doing more to promote social media?

Posted By Brian Keeter Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - 5:20 PM

Like father, like son.

Two Syrian dictators, both named al-Assad, brutally attacked their own people. Both started their campaigns of violence in the central Syrian city of Hama. Both caused Syrian deaths. Both followed protests calling for reform and opportunity.

That's where the similarities end. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad's military killed at least 10,000 Syrians, according to conservative estimates. Neither Syria's neighbors, the United Nations, nor the world's democracies protested, barely uttering a sound in reaction to the state-sponsored violence. With its borders tightly controlled, foreign media denied access and Syrian state media complicit in the cover-up, the world was in the dark.

Fast forward almost 30 years. Bashar al-Assad, doing what dictators do, responded to calls for political freedoms with the indiscriminate force of his military. The United Nations estimates as many as 2,700 civilian deaths, although the violence continues. But, unlike his father, the younger Assad earned wide-spread condemnation from world leaders.

The French foreign minister denounced the "extreme violence." European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek bluntly demanded "no more killing, no more torture, no more arbitrary arrests." In the U.S., President Obama condemned the "outrageous use of violence," and Secretary of State Clinton urged a ban on Syrian oil and gas.

To be sure, numerous factors contribute to the difference in international reaction, but one of the most critical is social media. Unlike their counterparts 30 years ago, today's Syrian reformers have new media technologies that enable them to organize and tell the outside world.

The world learned of Bashar al-Assad's atrocities not from international media but first-hand accounts relayed in real time. The first glimpse was through a camera phone photo that rapidly spread on the Internet last March followed by amateur video on Facebook and YouTube.

For Assad and his kindred autocrats, social media threatens their iron-clad control over information, ideas and opinion. Accustomed to disseminating what they want, when they want through state organs, social media equalizes the power to inform, persuade and mobilize. It's power to the people in a modern setting.

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On cyberwarfare, do we need PLA transparency or accountability?

Posted By Mike Green Thursday, August 25, 2011 - 11:16 AM

With exquisite timing, the Pentagon released its annual China military report on Wednesday just as Chinese state television broadcast a documentary trumpeting the PLA's cyberwarfare capabilities. For those following security issues in Asia, there was nothing particularly new in the Pentagon report. It noted the challenges posed by China's new doctrine of maritime power projection, plans for multiple aircraft carriers, the new J-20 stealth fighter, and PLA interest in cyberwarfare (exclamation point helpfully provided by CCTV). Nor was there any real news in the delay of the report, which is also an annual event because of the tedious but necessary bureaucratic process of ensuring the contents are credibly presented.

The fact that the PLA is aggressively pursuing cyberwarfare is also not news, though CCTV's bravado about it did catch some analysts by surprise (visitors to Beijing should make a point of watching CCTV-7, the PLA channel, which provides a steady stream of military propaganda, uniformed game shows, and gorgeous singing colonels in jackboots). Many of us in the national security or Asia fields receive repeat "visits" from Chinese-based hackers. Sometimes these come in the form of crashing Google accounts or targeted "phishing" attacks -- seemingly from other colleagues' email addresses with attached reports on "PLA modernization" or the "Hu-Obama Summit" that contain malware. I have also enjoyed démarches from Chinese officials expressing concern about travel plans to Dharamsala (seat of the exile Tibetan government) or Taiwan. My stern but courteous callers were generally better informed about my itinerary than my own travel agent and made little effort to conceal their knowledge. A Chinese academic friend confided to me a few years back that one of his former students is working with 20,000 other tech-savvy youth for the Ministry of State Security -- and that was just the unit in charge of domestic surveillance. It is hard to maintain operational security when the operation is that massive and the PLA propaganda machine is openly encouraging a culture of aggressive defense of China's "core interests."

The administration refrain is that we must have more military-to-military transparency with the PLA. This may be necessary, but it is hardly sufficient and it carries some negative consequences. For one thing, the administration seems fixated on sustaining mil-to-mil dialogue with Beijing to the point that it is distorting decision-making on arms sales to Taiwan (this because the PLA will routinely cut off military-to-military dialogue in retaliation for the sales). The other problem with a focus on mil-to-mil transparency is that it exacerbates the larger problem of PLA autonomy within the Chinese system. Yes, the Central Military Commission (CMC) ensures that the "Party controls the gun" and the chair and vice chair are Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, respectively. But every other member of the CMC is uniformed military, and Hu and Xi have no independent sources of oversight or expertise on the operational practices of the PLA (particularly the PLA Navy). By pushing for more mil-mil dialogue with the PLA, we risk reinforcing PLA autonomy and further weakening civilian control. Instead, we should put the priority on working collectively with other states to insist that China's leaders be held accountable for the actions of the PLA and that the PLA be held accountable to the leadership. This burden will have to be carried by the president and other leaders since the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is too weak to make a difference on its own.

The China military report and the CCTV cyberattack documentary should also cause U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to begin making the case for reversing the administration's planned cuts in defense spending. Mil-to-mil dialogue is no substitute for necessary recapitalization of our air and naval forces in the Pacific.

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Google's noble withdrawal

Posted By Will Inboden Friday, March 26, 2010 - 10:57 AM

One year ago, who could have imagined that the most significant international gesture of the year on behalf of freedom in China would come not from the United Nations, the United States, or another government, but from an internet search company? Such was Google's principled decision this week to follow through on its earlier threat and withdraw from China rather than acquiesce in continued Chinese government control. Beijing reacted with predictable bluster, but I suspect the Politburo leaders were stunned when Google called their bluff and chose to lose access to the most potentially lucrative emerging market in the world rather than keep censoring itself. Google's concern was not just China's restrictions on its search results but, more ominously as my FP colleague Blake Hounshell highlighted, the co-opting of Google technology to use in surveillance and entrapment of political dissidents (not to mention from a commercial standpoint the potential theft of sensitive intellectual property). No longer was Google just complicit in restricted information flow; it was now potentially a new tool for the persecution of Chinese activists.

This recalls another recent landmark moment in the turbulent encounter between Chinese state capitalism and Western technology companies, but with a less happy outcome. The Chinese Government's overconfident posture towards Google likely drew inspiration from Yahoo's shameful capitulation to the Public Security Bureau in 2004 by turning over Chinese dissident Shi Tao, whose only "crime" was using his Yahoo email account to communicate with overseas Chinese democracy activists. Shi Tao is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence.

Yahoo publicly admitted its role in late 2005. I was working at the National Security Council at the time, and shortly after Shi Tao's arrest, some NSC colleagues and I met with a senior Yahoo executive to get their side of the story. It was a thoroughly disillusioning meeting. The Yahoo exec maintained a defiant, defensive posture, clinging to the talking points that Yahoo was just following the local laws in the country it was working in, couldn't get involved in a "political case" like this, and besides didn't U.S. Government policy encourage economic engagement with China? To which we reminded him that U.S. policy also encouraged human rights and free speech in China, which Yahoo's actions directly undermined. Perhaps even more distressing was that the Yahoo exec made clear that his company felt no obligation, even in private, to remonstrate with the Chinese authorities over the arrest or to do anything to assist Shi Tao or his family. It was not an auspicious moment for the argument that Western technology companies will inevitably bring freedom to China. Following months of bad publicity and Congressional pressure, Yahoo eventually reversed course and expressed remorse.

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Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.