A Little Bit of Consistency Please

In its effort to crush the popular uprising and preserve the dictatorship, the Syrian regime is trying to do something that should no longer be possible: blocking the flow of information.

Since the outbreak of civil unrest in the Arab world almost half a year ago, dozens of reports have come in about assaults on journalists, bloggers and other dissidents in Syria. Foreign journalists are not admitted into the country, and civilians trying to escape the disturbances are frisked by security forces looking for mobile phones, cameras and memory cards.

A person who escaped from Jisr al-Shughour says that he had hidden a memory card containing pictures. Security personnel found it and subjected him to 24 hours of severe torture. He was subsequently released with the message to keep quiet about his experience.

In other similar rebellions, the flow of information has been crucial for the fighting spirit and the ability of the protesters to keep the rebellion alive. In Iran, the regime tried to slow down the internet without actually cutting off all information. In Burma it was the same. They tried, but democracy activists found loopholes.

In Syria, no such back doors for information have yet been found. All is quiet. The world doesn’t know what’s happening.

Against that background, I can only raise my bushy eyebrows in admiration when I read about Obama’s latest plan. The president has ordered his intelligence agencies to develop new opportunities to bring the internet to the populations of closed countries.

The New York Times reveals that a small group of sweaty hacker types is sitting in a dingy flat in Washington, developing a gadget the size of a briefcase capable of connecting an area of several square kilometers to the Internet. That would have worked in Syria. One single American agent could have made all the difference. The briefcase would be extremely hard to track down. In other similar projects, tried and tested army technology is used in parallel with methods developed by the global hacker culture.

It’s brilliant. It may help drive the development of democracy in many of the world’s closed countries.

But wait a minute! “Hold your horses,” as the president might have said. Doesn’t something seem wrong here?

The United States is using hacker technology (I repeat — hacker technology) to bring free internet to oppressed people. At the same time, former soldier Bradley Manning is in prison, charged with 22 cases of leaking information about American war crimes to Wikileaks. He may be facing a life sentence.

The same America that’s developing internet for the oppressed is also working to provide its security agencies with an increased ability to scan the internet, read people’s e-mail and infringe on privacy in other ways. Several such propositions were laid before the American Congress last year, measures that James Dempsey at the Center for Democracy and Technology have called “a threat to the fundamental elements of the Internet revolution.”

I’m not saying that Obama should pull the plug on his projects for a free internet in countries like Iran, Syria and Burma. It’s great. Fantastic, even.

But a little bit of consistency wouldn’t hurt.