So, it seems this whole democratic revolution thing is getting out of hand. First we had Tunisia. Then there was Egypt, which I wrote about here. Now Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Iraq and other countries are having what we might call civil unrest, ranging from protests to days of rage.
Oh yea, and lets not forget about China and Iran.
It seems that one of the great equalizers between autocratic power and democratic reformer has been the power of the internet to somewhat level the PR and organizational playing field. The point has been made so many times already I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but sites like Facebook and Twitter have made organizing and publicizing events much easier, even in the face of censorship, disruptions of service (as in Egypt), and journalist brutality. The images (and raw video) that world citizens are now shown on a daily basis have put significant pressure on democratically elected leaders to DO SOMETHING. Individual people are being shown brutal images (and video) of police crackdowns on peaceful demonstrators on their evening news. During dinner. With their kids watching.
The pressure on elected officials to make strong statements, both in condemnation of dictators and in support of revolutionary/resistance movements has been heavy. John McCain and Joe Liebermann (reporting from Cairo) called on Obama to institute a no-fly zone and to provide the resistance "with the arms to defend themselves" in Libya this last weekend. This has obviously put western leaders in a bit of a bind, seeing as how they've been dealing with (or tolerating) these same autocratic regimes for a while now...and that they are still heavily dependent on and working with others (Saudi Arabia in particular). If Obama really were to arm the resistance of Libya, what about the protesters (rebels) in Oman, Bahrain (where the 5th Fleet is stationed), Iraq (really? arm rebels in IRAQ?!), or Saudi Arabia (our oil rich BFFs?).
Being able to post a picture or image online, get it out in circulation without censorship, has not only caused stronger responses by elected leaders and helped protesters organize, it has spawned the copycat phenomenon we see now. Without the spread of pictures of a burning man in a square, and of millions assembling in Tahrir Square just weeks later, the anger and hope of other oppressed peoples (not a big fan of that category, but we'll go with it here) have been awakened. One of the reasons the situation in Libya is so vague is that we are getting few real images or news at all (although we are getting more and more as rebellion forces establish control). One of the first things that Egypt did was shut off the net, and china has been proactively censoring the internet and proactively arresting people posting to blogs trying to organize protests.
Publishing images also strengthens the resolve of protesters as people begin to sense that the world is behind them, that their fight is just and approved of, and that others are paying attention. Protesters in Bahrain, for instance, are worried that the unrest in Libya will "steal their thunder", so to speak. Revolutions are now competing for air time (this puts a grim new spin on the old television journalism addage "if it bleeds, it leads").
This poses the question: How do we get the pictures (and video) out of the country in the face of governmental control of communication networks and the internet?
Answer: Why not pass out some of these? This could be a fun exercise for our intelligence communities: find journalists (or maybe just random people) and give them these things, teach them to use them. Tell them, that when the internet and cell phones (and maybe even landlines) go down, to bust the thing out and start sending pics. Maybe this isn’t a job for the government; maybe news corporations should do it instead. Imagine BBC or CNN or Al Jazeera handing these things out to activists they come across; the company could pay for the transmission and device, but gets the content provided to them by citizen journalists. The things only cost $2,700 a piece, and I'll bet we could get a bulk discount. Obviously the quality of journalism isn’t the issue here: it’s the images we want!
The images of everyday people risking their lives to stand up to authoritarian systems they find unjust in the name of democratic freedom. In your (and everyone's) living room, at dinner time, in front of your kids.
Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:
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2) Recipients' risk: People who start/join a revolution are betting on its success to prevent reprisals. Even if you could hand them out secretly, and only to the right people, the recipients would be putting themselves at risk of treason *before* a revolution had even started, so they'd be holding evidence against them without even having a revolution to bet on. It's like depositing your life savings with a bookie before you even know when the race is gonna be or which horses are gonna be in it. You gonna take that bet?
3) Legitimacy: Although I get that it would just be facilitating what people would want to do anyway, that kind of support would make it very easy to portray a revolutionary movement as a foreign puppet show. That never goes down well.
4) Micro-Blowback: Let's drop the assumption that you hand them out only to the 'right' people and those people are able to keep them and stay on the 'right' side. Wouldn't the Taliban in Afghanistan just love to have a (bigger and cheaper) satellite comms network? Even if you hadn't given it to them directly, they could just go house by house and nab the devices from those who did have them, as they already do with cds.
5) International blowback: While distributing the devices would certainly sell better at home than arming them, it's not like the oil rich BFFs and panicky Israel would just stand there impotently cursing your resourcefulness a la Mentos commercial. They're gonna be effin pissed.
From the perspective of the powerful, it's pretty much never a good policy to arm the Helots. It's not always easy to identify what counts as a weapon and who counts as a helot. Discretion is the better part of valor.
I posted my response as a new post on the board because the formatting possibilities of this little response box are a joke..
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