Repression 2.0

In the Middle East, censors are hunting not just for political challenges to the established order but also for signs of what they consider social deviancy, such as gay porn. But with so much ground to cover, resources are spread thin. So rather than convey a systematic sensation of surveillance, Middle Eastern governments are louder and angrier in their condemnations. Many Arab Internet service providers reluctantly share data about their clients' habits with authorities, fearing the consequences if they don't. Medhat Zayed owns a two-room Internet café in Cairo with six outdated PCs and one air conditioner. He and other proprietors are pressured to give daily reports on clients' browsing habits. "I don't want to spy," he says. "I don't want to play the role of the police … What I say can send them [to detention]. I hate what I'm doing, and it is haram"—proscribed by Muslim law. Yet he complies because of cases like Hala el-Masry, a 43-year-old woman from Egypt's conservative south who wrote a blog called Copts Without Borders, which chronicled cases of repression. Police detained her, accused her of plotting to kill her father and prosecuted her for undercutting national unity. Then authorities closed the two cafés from which she had posted blog items.

In the Middle East the overall effect is more erratic—it sometimes looks more like Repression 1.0—but no less terrifying than in China. "It's not a soft-power thing; it's imprisonment," says Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, an Egyptian blogger and dissident. In February, a popular Egyptian blogger who calls himself Kareem Amer got four years for insulting President Hosni Mubarak. And, el-Houdaiby warns, "they're still developing the technologies" used by China.

They are. Consider the case of Cairo blogger Wael Abbas, who is known in the Arab world for postings highly critical of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He was well aware of how rough the regime could be on critics (he has posted videos of police torture sessions), but he was surprised one day to find his YouTube account closed—by YouTube. Droves of users had complained, in a short period, about the content he had uploaded. Who were they: The government? Ordinary Egyptians? Nobody really knew. YouTube eventually restored his account when Abbas convinced its operators he'd been targeted by the government. But then anonymous, false reports began circulating online that he had changed his religion three times (Protestant to Orthodox to Roman Catholic) and that he was gay. "You know how a conservative society like ours despises and hates whoever rotates between religions that easily, or an openly gay person," he says.

In China, by contrast, major ISPs are open about complying with directives from the Beijing Information Office to furnish data and ban keywords. In October, hours after Reporters Without Borders issued a report critical of Chinese Internet restrictions, the information office told ISPs to restrict keyword searches that included the group's name, the author's name and several phrases from the report; the ISPs obeyed within hours. Wang Jianzhou, the CEO of China's (and the world's) largest mobile-phone firm, China Mobile Communications Corp., is emblematic. When he was pressed at a news conference about the privacy implications of collecting user data, he said that "we never give this information away [to advertisers]. Only if the security authorities ask for it."

Just to be sure, though, major Chinese blog-hosting sites still censor themselves. The blogger Liu Xiaoyuan posts to blogs on six different hosts, partly to measure their approaches—which include asking him to revise his items, blocking them, deleting them without explanation and sending him notes. One day, a post to Sina, China's most visited Internet portal, came back with a message: "Dear Blogger-friend, Hello! We are very sorry to inform you that due to certain reasons this blog post is not suitable to be publicly shown and has been locked down. You can see the original text and photos through this page. Thank you for your understanding and support."

Everywhere, Repression 2.0 exploits the fact that it is easier to scare users than to filter traffic over the entire network. "We tend to think about the network as the weak point, but it tends to be the endpoints that are most vulnerable," says the Berkman Center's Zuckerman. "It's a whole lot easier to aim a parabolic microphone at a Vietnamese dissident than to hack a network." Even in Zimbabwe, where the repressive state has no means to filter the Internet, people are still terrified enough to avoid banned Web sites, like Zuckerman's own. "A local ISP in Zimbabwe tells me his customers ask to be removed from e-mail lists with jokes [about President Robert Mugabe], because they're afraid they'll be seen as dissidents. That's the panopticon at its best."