The Digital Dictatorship

[Commentary] It would be unreasonable for the American government to simply abandon all efforts to use the Internet for promoting democracy abroad.

A good starting point is to stop thwarting America's own technology companies, which currently need a host of waivers from the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to export Internet services to authoritarian countries (often the target of government sanctions). The reason Microsoft's Messenger is unavailable in Iran is not because the Iranian government hates it, but because Microsoft would need to fight an uphill battle in Washington to bypass the numerous restrictions imposed by OFAC to make that happen, and the poor commercial appeal of places like Iran, North Korea or Cuba makes such fights very costly. Similarly, a host of American hacktivists who wanted to assist the Green Movement with anti-censorship and anti-surveillance technology have also found themselves paralyzed by these sanctions. This is certainly not a good way to promote "Internet freedom." Resolving such arcane policy disputes is likely to advance American interests abroad more effectively than the flashy and media-friendly undertakings -- like the U.S. State Department's leaked request to Twitter executives to halt the site's maintenance during the June protests in Iran -- of which American diplomats have grown so increasingly fond. The growing coziness between them and the top executives of America's leading technology companies, epitomized by state dinners and joint trips to countries like Russia and Iraq, is also a cause for concern. It is certainly a good thing that Obama's youthful bureaucrats have bonded with the brightest creative minds of Silicon Valley. However, the kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world -- i.e. that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions of the U.S. State Department -- may simply endanger the lives of those who use such services in authoritarian countries. It's hardly surprising that the Iranian government has begun to view all Twitter users with the utmost suspicion; everyone is now guilty by default.

But there is a broader lesson for the Obama administration here: Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of "open government"; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.