flash for today, not only are here to sobering the publication of his book, "the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom," kind of tells you where he came down on that, you know, i might've once again of how circular our conversations are. here we have the would be twitter revolution in tunisia according to andrew sullivan, this very afternoon. so i think i'm looking forward to sort of jumping right into the middle of the conversation with evgeny about these subjects. .. actually instrumental

to get people in the states. later on, some people, myself included, began wondering maybe the actual impact wasn't publicizing what was happening in moldova and getting it on the front page of the "new york times," which happened -- and that that happened because of the computer because it was still a very new technology. it seemed like a very noble event and you fast forward and you see what's happening in tunisia also being widely covered on twitter but it took the "new york times" to run a story in part because twitter is no longer in the news. so it's very hard to think about what a twitter revolution is when we have this very constantly changing definition.

and you look at iran and the twitter revolution and the initial premise again it was instrumental in mobilizing people. that's almost a direct quote from andrew sullivan who made a lot from those events and he publicized them on his blog and he basically shaped the coverage of the events to a great extent, you know, later, of course, many people just like in the case of moldova mobilized their positions but it helped to generate headlines and it made it to cnn. again it was 2009. there are still people watching the events in tunisia via twitter and they're still blogging and they're blogging and they're tweeting everything they see but i haven't seen much proof. and it's not available yet and maybe it will emerge later but twitter or any other technology

was, you know, the driver of events in tunisia. it helped in the fact the government has been constantly hacking into activists. they have been hacking into their facebook accounts and their gmail which was a surprising factor they haven't found before and that social media was playing some role in nukneesia, i'm just not sure it is the driver that many people expect it to be. but it still mattered, it still does. go back in time and tell us why you decided to write the book and, you know, your own journey from cyberutopian was to today. and a much more realistic take on, you know, what the internet can deliver in terms of political freedom? >> sure. well, i was brain and raised in belarus. >> not in chernobyl. >> no. but close. about 200 miles, maybe. in a small mining town, that he

will so we had our own environmental problem. but so i was born and raised there and, of course, the subject of democratization and the subject of democracy promotion was always dear to me in part because i always watched very closely the western response to what was happening in belarus. and to a large extent that response was never satisfactory at least as far as i was concerned. so back in, i would say 2005, there was a lot of buzz in the world about the role that blogs and new media can play in bringing political change. and you remember that was just, you know, a year or so or maybe even less after, you know, the presidential elections here. everyone was still talking about what they managed to accomplish with social media and there was a lot of hope that blogs and

social networks would actually be instrumental in helping people to mobilize and to get out. and also just in terms of the contacts you also have to remember there were still a lot of enthusiasm. at which still political in my part of the world that social media would help -- not social media, the protests, people powers as you say was on the light and that, you know, it happened in serbia, in georgia. people in 2006 expected the same thing to happen in belarus. something happened in killing sedan so there was this excitement that the protests will continue and you put the rising power of social media and their bright future, you know, off the freedom agenda and you end up with a really solid it would seem to me, assumption that social media and new media as such will play a huge role in

democratizing the world. so my first gig after college was actually working with an ngo based in prague, one using new media and to promote new media change and the democratic form in the space and i worked with conditions online and eventually i became their director of new media so my job was actually traveling around the region meeting with bloggers, journalists, who were also in the position and talking to them about the power of media, how they can use blogs, how they can use social networks. to mobilize people -- it was a very optimistic kind of ngoish take on how you can actually put the internet in good use. not necessarily for state protests but also for small things like publicizing corruption or, you know, blogging about the environment. i mean, it's a little different

from country to country. and i stand for years doing that getting to know very closely of the founders who were working in that space and i got to know people who were eager to fund whatever, you know, the freedom agenda whether it was international endowment of democracy and it was open society institute so i got to know a lot of people who back then were making assumptions about the power of the internet that i found reasonable. and, you know, i spent three years doing that. by the end of my, you know, stint, i started seeing that not only where some of us not having the desired outcome and some of them were actually making things worse in part because i think there was very little thought put into the right development models that you need for

creating successful new media project. what happened is that most of the countries had bloggers and new media entrepreneurs who were already on their own and you had the u.s. agents with a lot of money thwarting the incentives to a point where we stopped innovating until they got another grant and they would be innovating at a slightly different speed knowing they can get another grant if they fail in the first place so i started having a little second thought of the viability of model by which, you know, mainly of the ngos and many those that were introduced was the department of the social media and that was the first alarm but then i started looking a bit closely at how the governments themselves were responding to the internet. and if at the very beginning it was very boring standard response of censorship. all they were doing was banning

pages and banning -- banning certain keywords from urls over those three years i started doing this work i realized their response was becoming much more sophisticated and now it involved cyberattacks on the websites of their opponents. it involved hiring and paying new media and bloggers to start their own project. it involved getting information on west to get online surveillance from activists and bloggers, you know, in the case of russia, for example, you actually have an o-ligarg out of russia and it was a shot -- because it was an american company there were a lot of american users and suddenly that happened to many people. i think rightly so began to

expect that there will be a lot of negative changes with new ownership. >> and nobody was chronicling any of this? >> very little of that was chronicled. i mean, the harder part of the depression was croneld. we saw more filtering and censorship. those more sophisticated ways that covered somewhat but i don't think that the worse any systemic view was happening and nobody was examining them on a case-by-case basis and this is more or less how i came to this, you know, subject. and this new set of assumptions because i just realized it was something mentally wrong was a paradigm in which many people in this town were making decisions about the power of new media but also in terms of assumptions that they made, about the government's response because the government's response of the government but ways in which the locals would be using it for what kind of purposes and how it

will actually undermine the norm the existing political regimes so they decided, you know, take focus more on the journalistic more of this who covered the space as much as they could. but also i started working on the book and, you know -- so that's more or less why i came -- it was all through more or less empirical work of me getting to know many of the struggles firsthand as, you know, someone who works for an ngo and some political -- >> do you think it was the green revolution in iran that was sort of key tipping point for your own views, you know, when you really sort of came to see the consequences of getting it wrong analytically? >> it was definitely a tipping point in terms of understanding that there are a war. it's about the internet and it

was definitely understanding that there is something that i found very politically naive in terms of how the u.s. government viewed this case. but, you know, initial doubts about, you know, the power of the internet, you know, much earlier that would be, you know, you would examine the space analytically but i never had much of a connection to the u.s. government's side of this until, i would say, 2009, and then in part because i think there was there was not much u.s. engagement until that. the annual, of course, is the funding and again, you say but, of course, you're active from the since probably year 2000, or earlier. it was never systemtized in any

agenda. and my understanding was they fit into the broader kind of political and social project that we're implementing in the countries. so it was just an add-on, on what they were already doing but with the action with obama and, you know, kind of worship of for all things new media that characterize his campaign i think was much more of a push of trying to explore the digital space for, you know, more strategically. so in 2009, we began seeing the technology delegations of american executives going on trips to foreign countries to try to sell american technology to local leaders. and the first of those -- i think it was in 2009 it was to iraq. it could be a bit earlier and, of course, with the famous outage from the state department to twitter in iran and i also

make a lot of in the book, you know, eventually talking down to the internet freedom picture in january, 2010, which was just the final point that convinced me that, you know, this book and this project it's a second dimension which is not just examining how authoritarian government exploit the internet and how the u.s. government thinks of the power of the internet but also thinks about how to use the internet for, you know, their own agenda. and for their own policy. >> well, that's right. i think there's a lot of sort of -- ed, in your book when you get around this idea that in its own way your argument is, in its own way, the internet freedom agenda is as miscast as bush's initial freedom agenda was. in the sense of the unintended consequences almost certainly of labeling this as a u.s. government policy. i think that's something that most people aren't familiar with that argument but once they start to wrap their heads around

it and they think, wow, has the obama administration succeeded in politicalizing something that up until now sort of all the bad guys around the world they themselves were seeing this as a tool and not as an instrument of national power protection by the united states. >> sure. >> is that how you think of the bad guys look at google and gmail in a way they didn't two years ago. >> i like to expend more remarks because i think you're actually hitting the issue. of course, we all know there was a lot of support that the u.s. government was giving to democracy, freedom, you know, before it became the freedom agenda. >> before you put a label on it? >> and i think more or less i just outlined up until now there was a war of words that the u.s. government and various agencies, you know, foundations were actually doing in this new media before the emergence of

diplomacy. so i think what i think happened inadvertently is that the u.s. government just overshot its mark. they legally thought that, you know, probably the state department says they do have the means to shape the debate by sort of raising their voice and raising the pitch of their voice, also. on this issue. i think, however, it was efforts for numerous things -- for numerous reasons. and also before i get into that i think we also have to remember that freedom agenda itself, internet freedom agenda itself it was never really expounded through any lens other than in that speech and that speech itself is much -- it is much more accurate than actual frame works and policy proposals to that speech but the problem is that that speech eventually --

that's how the public reacts to it but it is examined in conjunction with all the policies of the u.s. government and the state department and which the technology delegation that i mentioned earlier is one. and several or one big dinner clinton hosted, for example, at the state department for ceos for silicon valley companies and there's all these events that are not related to internet freedom agenda but they get lumped into one once you start looking at that time because it's all the same actors involved. and the big cyberattacks in story. it's also google who goes to iraq to digitize the archives of the iraqi national museum. many of the stories they many interconnect in ways that the government did not foresee but my bigger problem, you know, with the agenda if you want to call it that, is that it just --

they just didn't succeed in building, you know, any reasonable connections for the last u.s. government's policy on the internet. and, you know, it became obvious in viewing the u.s. response to wikileaks. and i don't want to be unfair to the u.s. government but wikileaks gets off u.s. servers came from senators and radio talk shows or what not. it didn't come from someone at the state department. but most people in the world still interpreted it as a very hypocritical speech and many people actually for the first time read this speech after wikileaks because it didn't respond. many of the positions expressed in the speech didn't correspond

to the actual actions and the climate of debate in america. and it's not the only element. i mean, if you look at other -- >> just to clarify on wikileaks, 'cause i think people will be interested. >> sure. >> so you're saying that the internet freedom agenda isn't really compatible with how the government has perhaps understandably understood to wikileaks. what's your own view about wikileaks and whether that, you know, represents some disturbing new trend? is that something we should welcome? how should it fit in your analysis? >> you know, it definitely fits into it very nicely from the cyberutopian angle. and that's fair. i must acknowledge it from the very beginning. it's hard very to discuss because it's something of timing analogy now. but it's not -- they do not have a identity and they keep changing in the four years they've been around, they warped the entire conceptual model, you

know, four, five -- i don't know how many times. if you look at the initial approach that was cyberutopian and many others in the business community and the political reason reason that, you know, wikipedia is the guide to success in the modern world. everybody will be collaborating online. people will come together. they all have enough time. they just sit there and they are waiting for documents to be dumped on them. if you look at some of the early statements from assange and now his comments in 2010 describing his views back then, you do feel that he support into this wiki world with collaborative journalists, and people coming together and cooperating and doing the stuff. i think if you look at it now, it's a completely different ideology all the cables are

published by the mainstream media. i mean, some of them are vetted by journalists and so forth. so they have definitely evolved in terms of their approach to the relationship between, you know, information and change, political and social. and i think that change has been in the right direction. from the other hand, i still do not fully understand what value wikileaks as an organization brings to, you know, a problem. i mean, their core asset is technology and allows people to upload documents and technology can be by any newspaper by a matter of days. it wouldn't cost a lot to apply that technology and if you want them to secure a wikileaks section on foreign policy website, it will be very easy to do. >> great, we'll talk. >> so the question then is, you know, whether they have value and you can make the argument

that they have value in having in the networks for which they can contact media and journalists and ngos. and there are probably some global problems on which they can make their argument that they have superior networks to everyone else but for local leaks, you know, if you want to learn something about corruption, chances are, you know, you know what to look at, right? and as we've seen, the fact "the washington post" carries a front page story about corruption it doesn't cause much of a difference but it's a different subject. my point is it's not really clear to me what's the future because i do not see what is the value that wikileaks adds to the process. and here they may be falling the victim of the internet which is more or less, you know, all about disrupting intermediaries and getting them out of bed. so if you compare them to this new emerging model of open leaks, you know, they have -- even though they haven't

properly launched yet, their ideology is that we'll actually build those for newspapers. we will be able to produce ours on the website and have people upload documents and they will play sort of a less prominent role that wikileaks wants to play but the future of wikileaks itself is not certain and that's why -- for example, last week i did a piece for the new york public and i argued assange should probably actually become a leader for a moment of building the internet infrastructure and, you know, making a dependence on commercial confidence and potentially, you know, that movement is already emerging. you do see a lot of projects which you want to remain the dominant management system or they want to make a payment system or they want to make the hosting system. so many of these new projects are emerging, they are emerging to a great extent because of the recognition of the u.s. government to wikileaks.

people have suddenly understood that it's probably not safe to have the u.s. government be the most powerful country on the internet and have american companies be the most powerful intermediaries because once someone processes the powerful interests of the u.s. government. so there are a lot of, you know, interesting bottom-up projects in europe which seek to address that puzzle. so a role for assange, for example, may be to work more on those projects than of the leaks themselves. there are all sorts of options on the table right now, you know, their usefuls in remains to be scene. >> that's right. and you actually point out a very interesting consequence we haven't talked that much about. we talked mostly about the u.s. pieces of this but what are the consequences of looking at the world of internet activism more through this cyberrealist that you prose and a cyberrealization

of the internet so instead of google as a universal neutral, you know, player, fine, analyze they remain a u.s. company. they have u.s. values but there's some potentially negative consequences that come about if you proceed down the road here, you know, does turkey gets its own national email system and that sort of thing? what do you see happening as a result of people being newly conscious of this u.s. role and owning the internet? >> so i think there are two factors here. first as we already stud this, you know, attempt to embrace the power of silicon valley in terms of prompting freedom and democracy. and twitter and facebook there's definitely the fear that, you know, twitter is just a cover out for the governments and again, i'm simple identifying quite a bit but this is how some governments perceive, you know,

american technology at this point. the second aspect here and this brings us back to the inherent contradictions in the internet freedom agenda and american law enforcement and intelligence gathering want the internet and they want to engineer it and its easier to listen in conversations and engage in surveillance and you got the director of fbi recently touring silicon valley asking the same silicon company that's supposed to promote internet freedom around the world to build back doors, you know, into the systems and so what you end up with is, you know, governments concerned about the fact that american technology may simply be unreliable and it may eventually lead to washington. and, you know, their conversations may actually be, you know, monetary. and so as a result, i think what is happening is that there is

definitely an effort and i think it's a trend that i see like russia and china and russia and turkey where you mentioned where they use a lot of talk about trying to replicate some of the key functions and, you know, the information society it's, you know, email search, maybe social networking but email and search, for example, now that it's definitely a push in some of these countries to cultivate, you know, national champions who would be able to do it all domestically and comply to all the local laws and the demands that come from the national government so instead -- and some of this we're also beginning to see was the kind of problems that, you know, research in motion and the black betteries government want to keep that he data at home. they do not want the data to go

elsewhere because they want to have access to it whenever they need. there is definitely this element of the government -- the building of email systems and search engines. the second trend that i'm seeing is growing, you know, uneasiness about using american software so you have, for example -- it was very interesting that, you know, putin in russia, for example, in mid-december signed this very long executive order ordering that all the russian publication systems have open sources by 2015. some is driven by economic considerations because it's cheaper but you have to train people. there are some costs also but such efforts are driven mostly by fears that proprietary software is just, you know, it's harder to monitor its code if you compare it to open source

versions and open source versions just, you know, mini mice, it is. that, you know, it might contain back doors leading to america so now you have the iranian minister of information last week announcing that they want to build an open source operating system because the fear -- they fear for good reason, you know, some of the nuclear facilities may be compromised with own proprietary software because they have this problem with malware in the last year. and it's not russia and china -- russia and iran, you know, i see some signs of that happening in china as well. so -- i mean, the response, i think, of the government says it's pretty logical and straightforward. it's trying to maintain information sovereignty. they want to lessen their

dependence on both hardware and software but the same is happening in america where and in the european union where governments are also reluctant to buy hardware from china's firms because they fear exactly the same thing. they fear there will be back doors. so some of it is driven by just, you know, fears of nationalism but the fact that now we also have this position of regime change kind of factored in the internet freedom agenda. it's an additional fear. it will make it easier for many governments to decide that, you know, they no longer want to go with american technology. >> so just to pull back with the high altitude questions that the book raises. >> yeah. >> this is an american audience. the book is largely pitched to a largely american audience. we are cyber-utopians we've been taught -- this is our second decade that the internet is transforming our world even in good even in perplexing and

disruptive ways. where do you come down at this point and recognizing you might be evolving on your views on this. okay, so what's wrong with having an anticorruption went in russia or a blog in russia or mobilizing people in, you know, outside iran to support the protest movement? this is clearly -- it is a powerful tool for any kind of political expression, organization or activity as we know it here in the united states. so what's wrong with that? i mean, aren't you falling prey to a certain extent to the very thing you're critiquing which is this is a tool after all and it can be good and it can be bad. >> you should say a disclaimer. i also am affiliated of the board of information program. >> you're not --

>> all we do is spend money to try to understand how we use the information and technology to open up many of the companies that need opening up. so to me there is really no question that it can be used for good and for democratization and so many of the initiatives you mentioned, anticorruption websites, websites for environmental and various things of what's happening, all of them are good in themselves. the question really is, from the perspective of someone who's from limited resources -- and someone also who -- here i'm talking about the u.s. government and someone who carries a lot of political baggage that might be interpreted in some countries more than others. any revolution in russia whether or whatever is probably is not a good idea when there's an american person saying that or an american government person saying that. so my question really is, it's not -- you know, how do you as

someone who has good intentions, a relative amount of funding and some space to work in to maximize the internet while minimizing the -- you know, the impact that your own public image or previous history of, you know, foreign policy blunders are likely to have from the strategy? this is why i'm trying to outline this strategy off, you know, cyberrealism in the book because i think right now our entire paradigm of thinking is wrong because it's just full of assumptions which are no longer tenable. and, you know, most of those assumptions are how the internet works in the abstract. yes, it opens up government but if you know something about how a countries -- pick any two

country that is not in the news every day, if you don't know much about the cultural, religious, political and social forces that forms that countries it's unlikely you'll realize the impact the internet is likely to have on it, right. so part of my agenda in the book is to transform the debate from attention on the impact of the internet in the abstract to the impact of the internet of the context and environment and forget theorizing about the logical of the internet. the large extent the logic will be shaped and what's happening locally and it's the local conditions and if you come to a country like russia and you think, you know, there are good guys who are fighting, you know, the government and then there are the bad guys and there's nothing in between, i mean, you just analyze how it empowers the government and how it disempowers the bad guys, it

meet, you know, 99% of the kind of internet isn't introducing in russia. you have to consider how the fact of the role of religion, how the role of nationalism and nationalism versus minorities in religion. i'm actually the guy who is saying it isn't forming anything >> it's not always to the good. >> well, it's not following everything for the good because many of the processes have not been themselves enhancing democratization. so, yes, many of them will be amplified but before we get to this point we can inform the democratization we need to examine the exact political culture and social context it is supposed to form. we are bound to end up with different policies which will never we'll be able to aggregate

into a single agenda and to me that seems straightforward so the problem is that there are differences and there are institutional and procedural differences in terms of how you can approach this space. now, you can get a lot of out of technology who spend their days thinking very hard but how technology will inform russia and tunisia or we can do the exact opposite we can start to know something about russia, tunisia, egypt and think how the internet will do that. and i kind of side with the camp that driving power, there is no experts and the technologies because i don't think there is so much complexity in what the internet does. and how it lower those actions costs and it makes freedom to communicate and that's the information and that said they just don't know how exactly those factors are likely to affect a particular environment unless you know what this environment is like. is there well, you know, that's

almost as good as place as any to bring in your voices as well to hear when you have a to say about this because i think i think it's one of those conversations, you know, we're going to be having five years from now and ten years from now. >> i hope. [laughter] >> well, you know, i'm really struck by, you know, in many ways the parallels of the examples you're giving of sort of the internet facilitates stalin cultists in russia as much as it facilitates or perhaps more than it facilitates western democracy action in russia, right? and look at al-qaeda on the internet, i think, is a good example. that fundamentally challenges our notions here oh, is the internet is a force of good and it turns out to be an incredible effective tool or facilitating the work of a small underground group that wishes to communicate anonymously across countries and continents for their work and i think we've come to the realization of that over the last few years in a way that

probably wasn't immediately obvious in 2003 and 2004. >> uh-huh. >> if we can get your answers as long as we have time. we'll start in the front row and hope to move backwards. please give us your name and -- [inaudible] >> hi, robert. i'm an international investor. thank you for the talk and the book. just today we saw there was a report out that our own government has been requesting the twitter records to see those

that may have been looking for wikileaks information. there was also a report mentioned today that a senate subcommittee is upset that apparently there has been some cyberattacks, some cyberoffense directed by some of our members of intelligence committee against other nations before these tests were conducted. we are undoubtedly seeing that our own government is getting involved in this. do you see that there'll be any efforts made to restrain our own government in the future and how would you say that this balance is out against what you fear other governments may be doing? >> efforts by whom? you mean the u.s. government -- >> congress in some form? [laughter] >> i mean, it's a tough one. i mean, there are definitely

signs that the u.s. government is much more concerned about the impact of the internet on national security than it ever was because up in part was wikileaks in part because now they suddenly discovered there are a lot of people around the globe who just with the help of their computer can launch a cyberattack on a site like paypal and take that down. it's happening in europe and elsewhere and feel passionate about wikileaks so it's definitely the financial threat that the internet, you know, poses. i'm just not sure that the congress is any more -- any less, you know, generous, if you want to put it in those terms, about the internet. you know, the person who actually is extremely, i think,

concerned about the internet and who has been calling for an internet kill switch, they have a button to turn it off. so, you know, to prosecute anyone connected to wikileaks is joe lieberman. i just don't think this change will come, it will come from congress. they appear actually much more aggressive here than the government itself. and they are the ones who are accusing the department of justice of a very wicked action to assange. so i think if anything the change will come probably and the pressure will come from some of the hits that are not part of the companies. i mean, there are still a lot of very influential people in silicon valley who are concerned with the direction we should be going. many of them are speaking out. i don't know if the pressure of

society will be enough. as was cited a few years ago, i mean, all it will take for the rest to pass it is an i-911 and i don't think that changed for the better. if anything it was changed for the worse, you know, so my response is, you know, we have as much power we have as we are to shape the patriot act so i'm not -- but i also don't think there is much pressure that you can expect to come from a vote. it's not, you know, russia or china will be speaking out or, you know, the european union is in a war often with american countries when it comes to data and private policies but they are supportive of the u.s. african war and cyberwarfare. much happens on the middle

level. if you look like a country like astonia they have a volunteer cyber-army. so they have a bunch of geeks who call themselves -- i know it's an official entity as i understand it and they call themselves an cyber-army and if there's cyberattacks it comes to the defense which may not be a bad idea but i don't think europeans are any less, you know, aggressive when it comes to taming the cyberspace of america. >> the next congress action is going to be decried the cyberreserve force. >> yeah. >> more questions, please. >> the cyberpeace corps. >> probably not that one. yes. >> yeah. i'm a correspondent.

now, the most important issue and the controversy is the global one. i would like to you what would be the stretches for the pros or cons group to utilize the internet to their own advantage? and also now the internet has become the national sovereign issue. so that means each country secure in their own information and this is going to be very harmful to the internet relation. thank you. >> well, as far as i understood the initial question was the way in which opponents and, you know, can use the internet to battle us out.

you do see a lot of denialism happening on many significant issues, not just significant change facilitated by new media. some of that -- to debunk that to the end use. some of it is planned deliberately by various think tanks and whatnot. so on the level of information, the misinformation, of course, that is happening you probably remember the biggest, you know, subject of debate in the last 12 months related to climate change was a bunch of emails that, you know, were linked because of a hack on a server, a university server, in england. so you'll definitely -- you'll definitely be seeing more efforts to manipulate that or to present the evidence when it's not. but i think all applies universally on all subjects not just climate change.

and in this new environment you do need to take much more thoughtful and careful protection about your networks and about your information but i think the consequence of this especially as it applies to wikileaks will be the return of the management and there will be new documents on one particular computer. others won't be able to share them. it is an interesting startup which actually raised $30 million just yesterday on the idea of providing documents with a more security digital rights system. so i think some of that will come in but i don't see any specific with regards to climate change per se other than, you know, cloud computing. because, you know, the servers are j rating. but other than that, you know, i do not see much of a connection. >> we have more questions in the back and i can't see all that

well but, yes, right here. >> james sang. i think you agree that the internet is a disruptive technology and it's generally a rule that smaller organizations respond better than large governments and government is an example of large organizations. in what ways in responding to the internet will be disruptive for countries like internally countries like iran and china and russia? >> i think they are actually adapting much better than i think most of us thought in the past and and i won't begin to speculate about software decades ago. i had to go through some of those earlier predictions and i think the assumption was they either, you know, cut down the internet completely and they solve everything the word democracy and human rights.

and something that is threatening to them or the economy collapses and the globalization and you need a network and you need access to technology and information in order to grow. and i think a little bit of discourse realizes up in 2005 and 2006 and up until now. you go and you see the world is flat and, you know, it's still very much -- information, transforming governments and governments unable to cope with the threat. i think the governments have adapted to this world much better and some of it happened because they delegated the cost to the private sector so they have, you know, companies that came to make money in this country, more or less take on the cost of censorship or surveillance. it's chinese private internet companies which a task by law

are sending content from the website so the government itself doesn't really have to hire a staff of 500 people to do that. the companies are the ones who need, you know, to take care of that. but the other thing which i think is happening and which is one of the more provocative ideas in the book is that there is also a greater degree of customizetion and censorship that is happening right now. we are beginning to see smarter systems emerging to basically make a decision on the spot what needs to be censored and what doesn't need to be censored. based not only on the content that is being accessed but also the identity of the user who is trying to access the information. what you will be seeing in a country like china you'll see that investment bankers who do contribute to the growth of the economy. they will be able to access any website they want because, you know, you can actually monitor their internet use.

they access a lot of, you know, financial times and reuters and bloomberg and they have other investors. and if you look at what human rights groups will be able to access because there were suspicious humans and they have other human activists as their online friends and, of course, this will help the government escape this problem of, you know, that's been the dictator's dilemma where the dictators have to allow the internet and basically suffer the consequences. they can still let the internet in but be much more, you know, selective about who get to produces what. and all of that is driven by the same logic that, you know, digital advertising has driven. it's all about customization. it's all about showing you the app that corresponds to your

serving app. and it will be banned access to the page but the logic is more or less the same. and the logic is what drive capitalists right now and it's all about customization and it's one way governments are able to adapt to the management >> you need to be a subversive banker to be a -- >> i think that's the future of change. >> we'll see if they send a letter. i think we have time for probably one or two more questions. yes. >> sam dupont and i write the blog global mobile and i'm nearly done with the book and am enjoying it very much.

my question has to do with the state department's missteps as you described them and i think you do a good job of popping the bubble of utopianism that has surrounded the technology. and i guess my own feeling about the state department's work is that they've -- what they've been trying to do is introduce an old fashion bureaucracy into new technology and their missteps have been called, if anything by an excess of excess of success in bringing this technology to the work of other departments. and i think -- you do a good job of describing the mistakes they've made. and i'm wondering how you would -- if you don't necessarily in the book get too much into proscriptions for further, you know -- >> that's the chapter i haven't released yet. okay. [laughter] >> i want to give you this opportunity if you do have ideas

about how they could do a better job how would they would go about it. >> sure. i think i touched on that briefly when we talked about the area of cyberrealism. to me, you know, i try to be as much government independent nonspecific in the government because i think what we need to get right are the principles, not the particulars to what the governments will be promoting or defending. so, you know, it's not just america that is trying to do that. you also, you know, now have the, for example, the dutch government which is is extremely interested in the problem the internet and to get, you know, many other european governments who are interested in helping to promote it. so the way in which i end up describing it in the book is not a description of the internal bureaucracy in the state department and whom to hire, and whom to fire and how to get more funds. it's a broader kind of abstract

framework and approach. and as i said i do believe much here depends on whether it is a centralized approach in a subject of internet theorem and whether it's the centralized and you have local and regional powers over decision-making, making decisions as to whether the internet is forming china, belarus. and they also have the people who are in a much better position to assess the actual impact of the internet on those countries than people who know everything about the internet. you know, you can read technology blogs all day and still know nothing about the role of nationalism and religion and, you know, in belarus. pick any country in the middle east. all right. so much of it has to do with the kind of internal structuring on how do we actually learn about

the way in which internet is transforming the world because my own experiences that the reason why there is so much cyberutopian is the media -- because of its various, you know, internal structures has just been much more focused on highlighting the areas in russia in china because often it's the prowestern democratic bloggers who are the only ones who want to speak to western media. not necessarily iran until conservative iranian bloggers who want to talk to bbc because that's what gets them in prison and second they denounce bbc as, you know, an agent of imperialist west. so the stories we get to hear about those bloggers all have to do with, you know, bloggers promoting the interest of civil society and secular culture and, you know, what not. so i think, you know, my sort of

overarching point we do need -- whatever framework we end up deciding on, we do need to be extremely careful about the processes by which we learn, by which we decide, by which we make decisions and i think once we have all those in mind we can start thinking who needs to get more funds? who needs to get more power and whether we need actually someone who will be, you know, highlighting the role that the american companies are playing in this or should we just rather let american companies build a job without necessarily publicizing the connection to the u.s. government, right? so that's sort of the mantle -- i mean, there are many problems i find in the book like, you know, the growth in cyberattacks on the websites of dissidents and ngos which are global problems in nature. they do require solutions which will involve multiple internet

producers than can be done by sean religion unit or watching an issue of human rights or what not but i think they will just need perhaps a different mechanism but i do not think that they -- the presence of those four, five, six, whatever, global problems that do require global solutions would justify, you know, an entirely internet-centric as i call it in the book thinking of the political power of the internet. >> i think that's probably a perfect note for us to end on. and i always thought that it was, you know, absolutely rich justice that somebody who comes from belarus and who's thought on deeply about this failed utopia of the 20th century should be guiding us through our -- or i should i pushing us against our on you own utopian impulses when it comes of the big story of the next future.

thank you, evgeny morozov. it's a great book. you can follow him on twitter. you can follow him on foreign policy. he's doing a big book tour coming up. the profile in the guardian tomorrow says that you are leading an entire generation towards a new future of cyberrealism. i don't know if that's true. but i'm sure -- [inaudible] >> right, they missed the headlines and they switched the headlines. but i think this book is as you can see from tonight's discussion going to get a lot of attention. and i think you can pick up copies out there and i hope you'll stay for some wine and thanks once again to our hosts at new america. thank you. applause [applause] >> the afghani's office is a contributor editor to foreign policy and the boston review. for more information, visit his website, evgeny morozov.

♪ >> up next, booktv presents "after words" an hour-long program where we invite guest hosts who interview authors. this week former "wall street journal" reporter leah goodman covers the behind the scenes world of the new york mercantile change and its evolution into an competitive market at the height of sky marketing prices and she talks with a new york reporter jerry dicolo. >> we're here with leah goodman, the author of "the aslightliam" the renegades who highjack the world's oil