CA: In the way that this has been described, there’s suspicion cast that this is actually work authorized by the Chinese government. Did you have, apart from an assumption about motivation, did you have any actual evidence as to who was behind it?

SB: I don’t actually think the question of whether this was the Chinese government or not is all that important. I know that seems strange. The Chinese government has tens of millions of people in it, and if you look at the associated army and whatnot it’s even larger. It’s larger than most countries by far. So even if there were a Chinese government agent behind this, it might represent a fragment of policy, as it were. There are many people there, and they have different views.

If you look at when we entered China with our Chinese operation in 2006, I actually feel like things really improved in the subsequent years. And I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding it, when we had to self-censor a fair amount, but we were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less. We from the outside provided notification when the local laws prevented us from showing information, and the local competitors followed suit in that respect. So I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. And there’s been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. And so the situation really took a turn for the worse.

CA: Since that incident, have you now stopped self-censoring results in China, or is it just a statement of intent and you’re involved in negotiation now?

SB: We have made a statement of intent that we intend to stop censoring, and if we can do that within the confines of Chinese law and policy, we’d love to continue Google.cn and all of our operations there. And if we cannot, then we’ll do as much as we can, but we don’t want to run a service that’s politically censored. We’re not talking about porn and gambling, things like that, but really the political stuff.

CA: You’re willing to self-censor the porn and stuff that might be culturally inappropriate?

SB: I think there’s a range of things, and the US also has a set of laws about the variety of kinds of content.

CA: There’s probably some people here who wouldn’t mind you doing that in the US as well. (Laughs) But look, you’ve got a mission to bring information to the world, the light of information. You know, there’s hundreds of millions of people in China on the web. I mean, they’re going to feel completely abandoned — aren’t they? — if you leave?

SB: Well, once again, look: I’m an optimist. I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information. So, I think a lot of people think I’m naive, and that may well be true, but I wouldn’t have started a search engine in 1998 if I wasn’t naive in that way.

(Laughter)

CA: So, what’s your guess?

(Applause)

CA: I mean, do you think that there’s a real chance the negotiations may be successful, and you find a working relationship and a way of staying?

SB: I mean, I’m not going to put odds on it. I’m always optimistic, and it’s not always … and perhaps we won’t succeed immediately, tomorrow or not, but we will in a year or two.

CA: You know, when this story broke, you got huge credit for, from a lot of people from around the world for your saying this is part of “Don’t be evil.” I mean, there’s a familiar tale out there of young idealists who start something; they really believe in it, they put their ideals on public display: “We’re going to hold to the true way.” And then as a … You become a giant global corporation, all these shareholders and demands on you. You’re inevitably forced to compromise. I mean, really? “Don’t be evil”? Can you really hold onto that? Does it mean anything now?

SB: Perhaps people don’t believe this, but all throughout the discussion of originally entering China in 2006 as we did, and the announcement last month, our focus has really been what’s best for the Chinese people. It’s not been about our particular revenue or profit or whatnot. And I think there are many potential answers there. And it’s really a difficult question. But …

CA: What do you hold inside, Sergey. You know, you’re a multi-billionaire. Doesn’t at some point all the opportunities for you kind of tug away at some of that young, naive idealism?

SB: Look, I hope not. I do think that often companies end up being short-sighted with respect to their decisions, and perhaps they’re motivated by the next particular earnings and whatnot. In particular, actually, as we’ve gone though this investigation, it turns out that a number of companies were aware of certain attacks on their systems, and yet they didn’t come forward, and as a result other companies couldn’t be better prepared. Now, I should give a lot of credit. Some companies have, and I would point you for example to Northrop Grumman, that had a significant intrusion where the details of the … terabytes of data about the F-35 fighter were stolen. That’s recently … That’s public, and that’s in congressional reports and was actually very useful to our investigation. If more companies were to come forward with respect to these sorts of security incidents and issues, I think we would all be safer.

CA: All right, Sergey. So, look: Thank you for Google. Thank you for all you’ve done for TED over the years. I admire you wrestling with this issue. I wish you the wise and right outcome on it. Thank you so much.

SB: Thank you very much.

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5 minutes ago: For an alternate perspective on how Google can fulfill it’s mission while serving the interests of it’s shareholders I humbly submit the following observations:

Google stated it’s mission publicly: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. There’s no reference to financial aspiration in this statement. Investors have the right to expect Google to work toward the achievement of it’s stated mission. To compromise it’s mission for the sake of profit would be a breach of it’s responsibility to is shareholders.

The problem is that there’s an assumption that shareholders invested in Google exclusively for profit. I think this is almost entirely correct. If so, they invested in a firm who’s goals are not aligned with their own. As partial owners, they could potentially rally to realign their firms priorities, but that hasn’t happened. It seems to me that Google owes its shareholder an earnest pursuit of it’s stated goals.

So here’s a provocation: We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.

I don’t mean that internet censorship systems don’t work. They do – our research tested several popular circumvention tools in censored nations and discovered that most can retrieve blocked content from behind the Chinese firewall or a similar system. (There are problems with privacy, data leakage, the rendering of certain types of content, and particularly with usability and performance, but the systems can circumvent censorship.) What I mean is this – we couldn’t afford to scale today’s existing circumvention tools to “liberate” all of China’s internet users even if they all wanted to be liberated.

Circumvention systems share a basic mode of operation – they act as proxies to let you retrieve blocked content. A user is blocked from accessing a website by her ISP or that ISP’s ISP. She wants to read a page from Human Rights Watch’s webserver, which is accessible at IP address 70.32.76.212. But that IP address is on a national blacklist, and she’s prevented from receiving any content from it. So she points her browser to a proxy server at another address – say 123.45.67.89 – and asks a program on that server to retrieve a page from the HRW server. Assuming that 123.45.67.89 isn’t on the national blacklist, she should be able to receive the HRW page via the proxy.

During the transaction, the proxy is acting like an internet service provider. Its ability to provide reliable service to its users is constrained by bandwidth – bandwidth to access the destination site and to deliver the content to the proxy user. Bandwidth is costly in aggregate, and it costs real money to run a proxy that’s heavily used.

Some systems have tried to reduce these costs by asking volunteers to share them – Psiphon, in its first design, used home computers hosted by volunteers around the world as proxies, and used their consumer bandwidth to access the public internet. Unfortunately, in many countries, consumer internet connections are optimized to download content and are much slower when they are uploading content. These proxies could get the homepage at hrw.org pretty quickly, but they took a very long time to deliver the page to the user behind the firewall. Psiphon is no longer primarily focused on trying to make proxies hosted by volunteers work. Tor is, but Tor nodes are frequently hosted by universities and companies who have access to large pools of bandwidth. Still, available bandwidth is a major constraint to the usability of the Tor system. The most usable circumvention systems today – VPN tools like Relakks or Witopia – charge users significant sums annually to defray bandwidth costs.

Let’s assume that systems like Tor, Psiphon and Freegate receive additional funding from the State Department. How much would it cost to provide proxy internet access for… well, China? China reports 384 million internet users, meaning we’re talking about running an ISP capable of serving more than 25 times as many users as the largest US ISP. According to CNNIC, China consumes 866,367 Mbps of international internet bandwidth. It’s hard to get estimates for what ISPs pay for bandwidth, though conventional wisdom suggests prices between $0.05 and $0.10 per gigabyte. Using $0.05 as a cost per gigabyte, the cost to serve the Internet to China would be $13,608,000 per month, $163.3 million a year in pure bandwidth charges, not counting the costs of proxy servers, routers, system administrators, customer service. Faced with a bill of that magnitude, the $45 million US senators are asking Clinton to spend quickly looks pretty paltry.

There’s an additional complication – we’re not just talking about running an ISP – we’re talking about running an ISP that’s very likely to be abused by bad actors. Spammers, fraudsters and other internet criminals use proxy servers to conduct their activities, both to protect their identities and to avoid systems on free webmail providers, for instance, which prevent users from signing up for dozens of accounts by limiting an IP address to a certain number of signups in a limited time period. Wikipedia found that many users used open proxies to deface their system and now reserve the right to block proxy users from editing pages. Proxy operators have a tough balancing act – for their proxies to be useful, people need to be able to use them to access sites like Wikipedia or YouTube… but if people use those proxies to abuse those sites, the proxy will be blocked. As such, proxy operators can find themselves at war with their own users, trying to ban bad actors to keep the tool useful for the rest of the users.

I’m skeptical that the US State Department can or wants to build or fund a free ISP that can be used by millions of simultaneous users, many of whom may be using it to commit clickfraud or send spam. I know – because I’ve talked with many of them – that the people who fund blocking-resistant internet proxies don’t think of what they’re doing in these terms. Instead, they assume that proxies are used by users only in special circumstances, to access blocked content.

Here’s the problem. A nation like China is blocking a lot of content. As Donnie Dong notes in a recent blogpost, five of the ten most popular websites worldwide are blocked in China. Those sites include YouTube and Facebook, sites that eat bandwidth through large downloads and long sessions. Perhaps it would be realistic to act as an ISP to China if we were just providing access to Human Rights Watch – it’s not realistic if we’re providing access to YouTube.

Proxy operators have dealt with this question by putting constraints on the use of their tools. Some proxy operators block access to YouTube because it’s such a bandwidth hog. Others block access to pornography, both because it uses bandwidth and to protect the sensibilities of their sponsors. Others constrain who can use their tools, limiting access to the tools to people coming from Iranian or Chinese IPs, trying to reduce bandwidth use by American high school kids who’ve got YouTube blocked by their school. In deciding who or what to block, proxy operators are offering their personal answers to a complicated question: What parts of the internet are we trying to open up to people in closed societies? As we’ll address in a moment, that’s not such an easy question to answer.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we could afford to proxy China, Iran, Myanmar and others’ international traffic. We figure out how to keep these proxies unblocked and accessible (it’s not easy – the operators of heavily used proxy systems are engaged in a fast-moving cat and mouse game) and we determine how to mitigate the abuse challenges presented by open proxies. We’ve still got problems.

Most internet traffic is domestic. In China, we estimate (Hal’s got a paper coming out shortly) that roughly 95% of total traffic is within the country. Domestic censorship matters a great deal, and perhaps a great deal more than censorship at national borders. As Rebecca MacKinnon documented in “China’s Censorship 2.0“, Chinese companies censor user-generated content in a complex, decentralized way. As a result, a good deal of controversial material is never published in the first place, either because it’s blocked from publication or because authors decline to publish it for fear of having their blog account locked or cancelled. We might assume that if Chinese users had unfettered access to Blogger, they’d publish there. Perhaps not – people use the tools that are easiest to use and that their friends use. A seasoned Chinese dissident might use Blogger, knowing she’s likely to be censored – an average user, posting photos of his cat, would more likely use a domestic platform and not consider the possibility of censorship until he found himself posting controversial content.

In promoting internet freedom, we need to consider strategies to overcome censorship inside closed societies. We also need to address “soft censorship”, the co-opting of online public spaces by authoritarian regimes, who sponsor pro-government bloggers, seed sympathetic message board threads, and pay for sympathetic comments. (Evgeny Morozov offers a thoroughly dark view of authoritarian use of social media in How Dictators Watch Us On The Web.)

We also need to address a growing menace to online speech – attacks on sites that host controversial speech. When Turkey blocks YouTube to prevent Turkish citizens from seeing videos that defame Ataturk, they prevent 20 million Turkish internet users from seeing the content. When someone – the Myanmar government, patriotic Burmese, mischievous hackers – mount a distributed denial of service attack on Irrawaddy (an online newspaper highly critical of the Myanmar government), they (temporarily) prevent everyone from seeing it.

Circumvention tools help Turks who want to see YouTube get around a government block. But they don’t help Americans, Chinese or Burmese see Irrawaddy if the site has been taken down by DDoS or hacking attacks. Publishers of controversial online content have begun to realize that they’re not just going to face censorship by national filtering systems – they’re going to face a variety of technical and legal attacks that seek to make their servers inaccessible.

There’s quite a bit publishers can do to increase the resilience of their sites to DDoS attack and to make their sites more difficult to filter. To avoid blockage in Turkey, YouTube could increase the number of IP addresses that lead to the webserver and use a technique called “fast-flux DNS” to give the Turkish government more IP addresses to block. They could maintain a mailing list to alert users to unblocked IP addresses where they could access YouTube, or create a custom application which disseminates unblocked IPs to YouTube users who download the ap. These are all techniques employed by content sites that are frequently blocked in closed societies.

YouTube doesn’t take these anti-blocking measures for at least two reasons. One, they’ve generally preferred to negotiate with nations who filter the internet to try to make their sites reachable again than to work against them by fighting filtering. (This attitude may be changing now that Google has announced their intention not to cooperate with Chinese censorship.) Second, YouTube doesn’t really have an economic incentive to be unblocked in Turkey. If anything, being blocked in Turkey (and perhaps even in China) may be to their economic advantage.

Sites that enable user-created content are supported by advertising traffic. Advertisers are generally more excited about reaching users in the US (who’ve got credit cards, more disposable income and are inclined to buy online) than users in China or Turkey. Some suspect that the introduction of “lite” versions of services like Facebook are designed to serve users in the developing world at lower cost, since those users rarely create income. In economic terms, it may be hard to convince Facebook, YouTube and others to continue providing services to closed societies, where they have a tough time selling ads. And we may need to ask more of them – to take steps to ensure that they remain accessible and useful in censorious countries.

In short:
- Internet circumvention is hard. It’s expensive. It can make it easier for people to send spam and steal identities.
- Circumventing censorship through proxies just gives people access to international content – it doesn’t address domestic censorship, which likely affects the majority of people’s internet behavior.
- Circumventing censorship doesn’t offer a defense against DDoS or other attacks that target a publisher.

To figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” In other words, do we have a “theory of change” behind our desire to ensure people in Iran, Burma, China, etc. can access the internet? Why do we believe this is a priority for the State Department or for public diplomacy as a whole?

I think much work on internet censorship isn’t motivated by a theory of change – it’s motivated by a deeply-held conviction (one I share) that the ability to share information is a basic human right. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The internet is the most efficient system we’ve ever built to allow people to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, and therefore we need to ensure everyone has unfettered internet access. The problem with the Article 19 approach to censorship circumvention is that it doesn’t help us prioritize. It simply makes it imperative that we solve what may be an unsolvable problem.

If we believe that access to the internet will change closed societies in a particular way, we can prioritize access to those aspects of the internet. Our theory of change helps us figure out what we must provide access to. The four theories I list below are rarely explicitly stated, but I believe they underly much of the work behind censorship circumvention.

The suppressed information theory: if we can provide certain suppressed information to people in closed societies, they’ll rise up and challenge their leaders and usher in a different government. We might choose to call this the “Hungary ‘56 theory” – reports of struggles against communist governments around the world, reported into Hungary via Radio Free Europe, encouraged Hungarians to rebel against their leaders. (Unfortunately, the US didn’t support the revolutionaries militarily – as many in Hungary had expected – and the revolution was brutally quashed by a Soviet invasion.)

I generally term this the “North Korea theory”, because I think a state as closed as North Korea might be a place where un-suppressed information – about the fiscal success of South Korea, for instance – could provoke revolution. (Barbara Demick’s beautiful piece in the New Yorker, “The Good Cook“, gives a sense for how little information most North Koreans have about the outside world and how different the world looks from Seoul.) But even North Korea is less informationally isolated than we think – Dong-A Ilbo reports an “information belt” along the North Korea/China border where calls on smuggled mobile phones are possible from North to South Korea. Other nations are far more open – my friends in China tend to be extremely well informed about both domestic and international politics, both through using circumvention tools and because Chinese media reports a great deal of domestic and international news.

It’s possible that access to information is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for political revolution. It’s also possible that we overestimate the power and potency of suppressed information, especially as information is so difficult to suppress in a connected age.

The Twitter revolution theory: if citizens in closed societies can use the powerful communications tools made possible by the Internet, they can unite and overthrow their oppressors. This is the theory that led the State Department to urge Twitter to put off a period of scheduled downtime during the Iran elections protests. While it’s hard to make the case that technologies of connection are going to bring down the Iranian government (see Cameron Abadi’s piece in FP on the limitations of using Facebook to organize in Iran), good counterexamples exist, like the role of the mobile phone in helping to topple President Estrada in the Philippines.

There’s been a great deal of enthusiasm in the popular press for the Twitter revolution theory, but careful analysis reveals some limitations. The communications channels opened online tend to be compromised quickly, used for disinformation and for monitoring activists. And when protests get out of hand, governments of closed societies don’t hesitate to pull the plug on networks – China has blocked internet access in Xinjiang for months, and Ethiopia turned off SMS on mobile phone networks for years after they were used to organize street protests.

The public sphere theory: Communication tools may not lead to revolution immediately, but they provide a new rhetorical space where a new generation of leaders can think and speak freely. In the long run, this ability to create a new public sphere, parallel to the one controlled by the state, will empower a new generation of social actors, though perhaps not for many years.

Marc Lynch made a pretty persuasive case for this theory in a talk last year about online activism in the Middle East. It’s possible to make this case by looking at samizdat (self-published, clandestine media) in the former Soviet Union, which was probably more important as a space for free expression than it was as a channel for disseminating suppressed information. The emergence of leader like Vaclav Havel, whose authority was rooted in cultural expression as well as political power, makes the case that simply speaking out is powerful. But the long timescale of this theory makes it hard to test.

The theory we accept shapes our policy decisions. If we believe that disseminating suppressed information is critical – either to the public at large or to a small group of influencers – we might focus our efforts on spreading content from Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. Indeed, this is how many government forays into censorship circumvention began – national news services began supporting circumvention tools so their content (painstakingly created in languages like Burmese or Farsi) would be accessible in closed societies. This is a very efficient approach to anticensorship – we can ignore many of the problems associated with abusing proxies and focus on prioritizing news over other high-bandwidth uses, like the video of the cat flushing the toilet. Unfortunately, we’ve got a long track record that shows that this form of anticensorship doesn’t magically open closed regimes, which suggests that increasing our bet on this strategy might be a poor idea.

If we adopt the Twitter Revolution theory, we should focus on systems that allow for rapid communication within trusted networks. This might mean tools like Twitter or Facebook, but probably means tools like LiveJournal and Yahoo! Groups which gain their utility through exclusivity, allowing small groups to organize outside the gaze of the authorities. If we adopt the public sphere approach, we want to open any technologies that allow public communication and debate – blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and virtually anything else that fits under the banner of Web 2.0.

What does all this mean in terms of how the State Department should allocate their money to promote Internet Freedom? My goal was primarily to outline the questions they should be considering, rather than offering specific prescriptions. But here are some possible implications of these questions:

- We need to continue supporting circumvention efforts, at least in the short term. But we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that we can “solve” censorship through circumvention. We should support circumvention until we find better technical and policy solutions to censorship, not because we can tear down the Great Firewall by spending more.

- If we want more people using circumvention tools, we need to find ways to make them fiscally sustainable. Sustainable circumvention is becoming an attractive business for some companies – it needs to be part of a comprehensive internet freedom strategy, and we need to develop strategies that are sustainable and provide low/zero cost access to users in closed societies.

- As we continue to fund circumvention, we need to address usage of these tools to send spam, commit fraud and steal personal data. We might do this by relying less on IP addresses as an extensive, fundamental means of regulating bad behavior… but we’ve got to find a solution that protects networks against abuse while maintaining the possibility of anonymity, a difficult balancing act.

- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences. In doing so, we may gain those publishers as a valuable new set of allies as well as opening a new class of technical solutions.

- If our goal is to allow people in closed societies to access an online public sphere, or to use online tools to organize protests, we need to bring the administrators of these tools into the dialog. Secretary Clinton suggests that we make free speech part of the American brand identity – let’s find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission. We need to address the fact that making their platforms unblockable has a cost for content hosts and that their business models currently don’t reward them for providing service to these users.

- The US government should treat internet filtering – and more aggressive hacking and DDoS attacks – as a barrier to trade. The US should strongly pressure governments in open societies like Australia and France to resist the temptation to restrict internet access, as their behavior helps China and Iran make the case that their censorship is in line with international norms. And we need to fix US treasury regulations make it difficult and legally ambiguous for companies like Microsoft and projects like SourceForge to operate in closed societies. If we believe in Internet Freedom, a first step needs to be rethinking these policies so they don’t hurt ordinary internet users.

The danger in heeding Secretary Clinton’s call is that we increase our speed, marching in the wrong direction. As we embrace the goal of Internet Freedom, now is the time to ask what we’re hoping to accomplish and to shape our strategy accordingly.

Thanks to Hal Roberts, Janet Haven and Rebecca MacKinnon for help editing and improving this post. They’re responsible for the good parts – you can blame the rest on me.

Have a look at these two stories, both from the same news website, about the same country, on the same day. The first looks at the much-discussed “Twitter Revolution” in Iran, and discusses how demonstrators were able to use technology – SMS, blogs, Youtube, Twitter – to mobilise demonstrators and expose human rights abuses by the authorities.

The second article looks at the flipside – MEPs issuing a stinging attack on Nokia-Siemens Networks who, they said, supplied technology hardware to the Iranian authorities that was used in the “persecution and arrests of Iranian dissidents”.

Technology, particularly Internet and telecommunications technology, provides ‘the good guys’ with new tools to help them do their job: documenting human rights abuses, telling as many people as possible about it, mobilising people to try to stop them. But it also provides ‘the bad guys’ with new tools to do their job too – bugging people’s conversations, snooping on their emails, tracking their location.

Some commentators also question how effective online activism can be. If we’re outraged about a story we read on a blog, how many of us now retweet the story, join a Facebook group and then sit back and congratulate ourselves for doing something about it? I can say from experience that social networks have proved really helpful in mobilising people who care about an issue – but doesn’t someone then have to translate that community of concern into action in the real world?

It’s these issues that we’ll be debating at an Amnesty event on Monday 22 February, entitled Is technology really good for human rights? We’ve assembled a great panel: Susan Pointer, Google’s Director of Public Policy & Government Relations; Andrew Keen (via video), author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture; Kevin Anderson, blogs editor of the Guardian; and Annabelle Sreberny, Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies with a special interest in Iran, bloggers & social media (see her article here, for example). Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology Correspondent for the BBC, will chair the event.

The audience – it’s invitation only I’m afraid, we’re short of space – will be largely made up of bloggers and keen social media users, and we’ll have interaction from outside the auditorium via Twitter, using the #aitech hashtag. I’m anticipating some lively discussion of Google’s role in China, the use of Twitter and other social media in Iran’s ‘Green Movement’, the role that the Internet and social media will play in the forthcoming UK general election, issues around ‘citizen journalism’, plus a host of other topics. We’ll be live tweeting from the event at @newsfromamnesty.

We’re very keen to have a debate that reaches way outside the auditorium, so if you have a question or a comment, please leave it on this blog or tweet it using #aitech. We’ll put as many of them to the panel as we can. No promises to shut down the Amnesty website if the “No’s” win the evening, though…

The emotive impact of civilian casualties has been graphically shown during the current offensive in Afghanistan to capture the Marjah region from Taliban forces. Twelve civilians, 10 of them from one family, were killed when two Nato missiles overshot their targets and hit a family home.

General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, immediately issued a public apology and the use of the missile system involved in the deaths has been suspended. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who had warned Western forces about civilian casualties before the mission was launched, has demanded an inquiry.

As well as the propaganda campaign, cyber-warfare can be used to target vital strategic communications and defence systems. Both Russia and China have been accused of using the new technology as offensive weapons to hack into targeted computer systems.

In a keynote speech at the International Institute for Strategic Defences, Sir Stephen urged military planners to focus on the “operational environment that is increasingly becoming the ‘vital ground’ in 21st-century conflict”.

The Air Chief Marshal’s address was one of a series by the heads of the three services as they make their pitch for resources before the impending Strategic Defence Review. It follows the case for the Army made by General Sir David Richards and the Navy by Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope. General Richards had stressed that the land-based counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is the shape of wars to come, while Admiral Stanhope argued that the UK must look “beyond Afghanistan” in his bid to keep naval assets, including two new aircraft carriers. However, Sir Stephen declared that, instead of fighting the battles of the past, the British military should be looking to the high-tech defences of the future.

He said: “The exponential growth in the availability of information means that we must understand how to deliver and protect our national interests in the cyber domain and, although this is clearly a cross-government issue, defence has a legitimate interest in the development of offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities.”

In future the enemy “may use sophisticated air defence systems, like the Serbs did in the 1990s and the Iraqis in 2003; or small arms and ground fire, like the Taliban use today”, he said.

“But we must not get fixed. In the future our adversaries may use cyber-attack against our networked systems; indeed our national computer systems are under constant and intensifying attacks today. But our current enemies are already using effective information operations and propaganda (via the internet) about civilian casualties to try and influence our public’s opinion and thus constrain our activities. In short, they’ll use every possible means at their disposal to try to deny our freedom to use air- and space-power as we choose, because they understand that, if and when it is used effectively, it’s our comparative advantage.”

In a controlled society with extreme censorship, where satellite television channels have already been blocked, opposition supporters have grown adept at harnessing new media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to communicate and spread images of demonstrations and unrest.

These sites have become the new battleground in a no-holds-barred cyberwar. While the government seeks to impose an information blockade by shutting down outlets perceived as supporting the opposition, overseas hackers are busy sabotaging government networks. Some 30m Iranians are believed to have access to the internet. A few months ago it was about 20m. The increase shows the hunger for information.

Although there is no admitted link with the regime to prove the Iran Cyber Army is an official group, the type of site brought down and the language used suggest it is connected to the government.

The opposition suspects it is a subsidiary of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the force that has played the key role in suppressing dissent.

“We do not know for sure but we all assume it is an offshoot of the guard, which has its own cybercrime unit,” one Tehran source said last week.

With so many opposition figures jailed, all independent newspapers closed and many journalists arrested, the internet is fulfilling the role of newspapers. Iran is holding 62 journalists in prison; three more were arrested last week.

It has hanged two men in public for alleged anti-government activities and sentenced nine more to death. The crackdown has left the opposition in permanent fear of arrest. Thursday’s failure to mount any significant protest while the government filled a huge square with cheering supporters has dented their morale.

The opposition had hoped that last Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution, would be the high point in a struggle that has been going on since last summer in protest at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent election. “What is lost is a battle and not the war,” an opposition supporter said.

Iranian experts believe the government’s ability to stop the protests on Thursday has meant that both Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, and the system of clerical authority in force since the 1979 revolution are safe.

“After Thursday the supreme leader has got enough people to commit themselves that the system stands and he stands atop of it,” said Professor Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham. “We are not going to see a move to change the system of ultimate clerical authority now.” Ahmadinejad’s position was much less secure, he added.

Having issued one of his most damning statements only a few days earlier, MirHossein Mousavi, the de facto leader of the opposition movement, remains under threat. There are rumours that his wife was assaulted during the protests and a number of his close advisers are languishing in jail.

Nevertheless, the regime has so far ignored calls from supporters of the president to imprison him and Mehdi Karroubi, his fellow opposition leader. The two men have promised to continue their crusade to bring down Ahmadinejad.

The government rally in Azadi Square, complete with Iranian flags and pro-government slogans, was carefully orchestrated to ensure its success. Supporters were bused in and given food. Many were government employees who were not paid unless they attended.

It was capped with Ahmadinejad’s declaration that Iran had started the process of producing 20% enriched uranium and was now a “nuclear state” capable of making its own weapons-grade uranium.

His remarks were an escalation of the nuclear crisis and will hasten western plans for tougher sanctions. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, is in Qatar and Saudi Arabia this weekend to build the American case for new sanctions in meetings with key Arab and Muslim leaders.

She is expected to press Saudi Arabia to offer increased oil supplies to China to win Beijing’s support. China imports much of its oil from Iran and is seen as the last opponent of sanctions among the five veto-wielding members of the United Nations security council.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, will arrive in Israel today amid renewed speculation that the Israelis may be preparing for a strike on Iran.

Mullen is expected to urge Israel to hold off from attacking Iran and to give the new round of sanctions a fair chance. It could be imposed around the end of March, western diplomats said.

Iran, meanwhile, is braced for further protests. The next target for the opposition will be mid-March, a time of great public celebration.

Once more Mousavi and Karroubi will be encouraging their supporters to take to the streets. Once more, cyberwarfare will be part of the struggle. “I’m optimistic. I’ve lived in Iran all my life and I’ve never seen this much courage from the Iranian people,” Amir Abbas Fakhravar, an exiled Iranian dissident, said in an online interview given to FrontPage Magazine.

“This is their last chance for freedom and they don’t want to give it up.”

Brief Synopsis

Terrorist attacks today are often media events in a second sense: information and communication technologies have developed to such a point that these groups can film, edit, and upload their own attacks within minutes of staging them, whether the Western media are present or not. In this radically new information environment, the enemy no longer depends on traditional media. This is the “YouTube War.” This monograph methodically lays out the nature of this new environment in terms of its implications for a war against media-savvy insurgents, and then considers possible courses of action for the Army and the U.S. military as they seek to respond to an enemy that has proven enormously adaptive to this new environment and the new type of warfare it enables.