Benefits without borders for tweeters in Tehran

WIRED:24-hour television news is giving way to compulsive viewing live on the internet

WHEN CNN and the other 24-hour news channels first appeared on cable TV in the 1980s, it has difficult not to be gripped. Even when nothing was going on, the endless spool of detailed information and commentary had a fascination all of its own. Suddenly, the news we had seen in an earlier time seemed randomly edited, cut-down, chewed-up. This was the world, direct.

We’re rather more cynical now, perhaps, but some of that cynicism ebbed away for me when I saw the same happen online this weekend. As Tehran wavered on the brink of chaos, it wasn’t CNN that provided the news and the images – it was ordinary Iranians, frantically sending pictures of violence and threats via the internet. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other commercial sites were commandeered in the cause of getting the word out and helping organise in the city.

Students at Tehran University used Twitter to warn each other of militia attacks. Internet picture sites filled with images that no western journalist could obtain – of bludgeonings as they happened, of impromptu protests in the vast suburbs of the city.

The Iranian government’s attempt to control this use simply added fuel to the fire. Facebook was blocked until a few days before the election and filtered shortly afterwards. Mobile phones and landline connectivity was randomly turned on and off.

The internet lived up to its old adage of being able to route around censorship. Iranians passed around the addresses of “proxies” – unblocked net servers that could act as gateways to the rest of the net. Non-wired protesters passed messages on to families and journalists via those who still had connections.

As I write, the Iranian situation still remains precarious. Twitter has just announced that a planned maintenance outage will be rescheduled to avoid clashing with a major strike across the country.

It seems ridiculous that a site that started as a way for urban Americans to keep in touch with each other has grown into vital infrastructure, but that’s the way the internet works.

There were days, not so long ago, when Yahoo! and Google were both part-time student projects. Now they keep students safe from genuine threats of death on the streets of a faraway city.

But the speed by which this new technology can become an integral part of global free expression has its downside.

Such changes can quickly outpace existing laws and regulations. Since the Islamic revolution, the United States has legislated strict sanctions against Iran – most direct trade is banned and what little is permitted often requires explicit licensing from the government.

The sanctions have always had an explicit exemption for the tools of free speech, but the terms are couched in the technology of previous generations. The exemptions are about “books and journals” and “information” and “information materials”, not 140 character “tweets” or complex interactive services like Facebook.

Twitter and Facebook are now large enough to not worry about harassment from the US Treasury Department, which investigates and prosecutes sanction violations, but I’m sure there are new tools and services that are only starting their explosive growth.

The companies that create those new web services will have lawyers poring over them, looking for legal problems. Those new sites will be ripe for uses that we (and their creators) can only dream of and many of the most powerful of those uses will be in countries that the United States currently views as evil.

It’s happened before. Bluehost, a US hosting company, banned Zimbabwean citizens from using its services because of its fear that they could break export rules if anyone from Zimbabwe ran a service from its site. LinkedIn, the popular networking site, blocked itself from the Sudan and Syria, apparently from the same concerns.

Lawyers who are experts in US export regulations have gone on the record to say that they would recommend that services like Twitter and Facebook not offer services to countries under US sanctions, such as Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria – and Iran.

Pause for a moment to consider what that would have meant.

If Facebook and Twitter had listened to such counsel, Iran would not have needed to block them. They would have blocked themselves and, in the pursuit of doling out financial punishment for a foreign state’s bad actions, the US would end up squelching the very dissent that could lead to those country’s reform.

It seems amazing to imagine that, where the Iranian government has failed to block tools of free speech online, the threat of the US government’s disapproval might succeed.

Twitter and Facebook are not the be-all and end-all of the net; they are just two tools for free communication among many.

We’ve only seen the beginning of the internet’s potential across the world for exposing lies, sharing facts, challenging accepted ideas and organising grassroots campaigns.

The Obama administration should make it clear that these tools should not be kept from those who need them most. The net reaps benefits without borders: we should not impose our own upon it.