This post is a response to issues raised by Mr. Klein to my last post on equipping revolutionaries with satellite modems.
Mr. Klein's response:
Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:
1) Non-Interference/Reciprocity: A whack load of international law is based on the idea of non-interference, i.e. that countries don't mess with events inside other countries' borders. That would be a pretty clear violation of that principle (although under R2P, you could probably justify it if the UNSC approved the action and the leader of the target country were attacking his own people). If you did it anyway, what's to stop other countries from messing with your internal affairs? I mean, Congress even prevented DP World from buying Long Beach's port. How could you complain if Iran started handing out bomb-making manuals in Penn Station?
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.
Mr. Klein,
While your Mentos reference put a smile on my face (and made me go watch the foo fighters video again), I think I can (relatively easily) sidestep most of your concerns.
First of all, if undertaken by a government, such an operation would obviously have to be covert and risky by nature; points 1, 3 and 5 are totally valid if a government is stupid enough to get caught doing something like this. Perhaps it would be better (as I suggested) to let multinational media conglomerates try something like this. I think that would, at least to a certain extent, eliminate 1, 3, and 5 as issues: it’s not the British government, but rather a BBC reporter handing the things out to protest leaders. While this may influence point 3 the least, Israel and the Saudis would certainly understand they were dealing with a different beast.
This brings up a topic of particular interest to me: How does International Relations Theory deal with the "fourth estate" role of mass media? One thing that has been interesting for me to see is the zeal with which journalists have been charging into these places trying to get a story or an interview (often at great danger to themselves). While these people may just be acting out of careerist self interest (nothing like warzone reporting to boost your stature as a journalist), many seem to feel a responsibility to get images out and help people gain their right of expression. I could totally see a reporter doing something like I proposed spontaneously themselves...or an ambitious news editor coming up with the idea...
I have a few counterarguments for individual points of contention as well:
1) In addition to what I said above, I'm not sure I agree with the non-interference/reciprocity argument at all as it applies to what we might call rouge regimes (outlaw states?). Doing something like this in China would be dangerous for sure, but in almost any other country I can think that we could want to do this in, I don’t really care that they might get pissed off...in fact, those governments have already proven to oppress their people and have often shown official and direct contempt towards democratic values. If the US government gets caught handing out these kinds of devices in Iran, that’s bad, but they're developing nuclear weapons and funding our enemies anyway, so I don’t see how that changes things much. In an already deteriorating place like Libya I'm even less worried about territorial borders (apparently neither are the British or the Germans, as they landed a few warplanes in the desert a few days ago to airlift people out).
Also, I don't much care about an Iranian passing out bomb making material in New York...that kind of information is available online and in thousands of other places, even if it might be harder to get at since 2001 (glad I printed out my copy of the Jolly Roger Cookbook). And its not like the guys in militias are going to have a problem getting guns or explosives in the US. This might be made part of a larger point of democracies that have freedom of expression need to worry less about fringe views than those that heavily restrict access to information.
2) I guess I was more envisioning this as a tool to be given to revolutionaries in actio. The risk in trying to establish sleeper cells of these things is high. In fact, I think the most difficult logistical issue here is to identify who to give the things to: if you give it to an established protester (who might be able to use it most effectively) he's also the one that's going to get arrested first. If you give it to just any old guy, you might not get any quality images.
Mr. Klein's response:
Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:
1) Non-Interference/Reciprocity: A whack load of international law is based on the idea of non-interference, i.e. that countries don't mess with events inside other countries' borders. That would be a pretty clear violation of that principle (although under R2P, you could probably justify it if the UNSC approved the action and the leader of the target country were attacking his own people). If you did it anyway, what's to stop other countries from messing with your internal affairs? I mean, Congress even prevented DP World from buying Long Beach's port. How could you complain if Iran started handing out bomb-making manuals in Penn Station?
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.
Mr. Klein,
While your Mentos reference put a smile on my face (and made me go watch the foo fighters video again), I think I can (relatively easily) sidestep most of your concerns.
First of all, if undertaken by a government, such an operation would obviously have to be covert and risky by nature; points 1, 3 and 5 are totally valid if a government is stupid enough to get caught doing something like this. Perhaps it would be better (as I suggested) to let multinational media conglomerates try something like this. I think that would, at least to a certain extent, eliminate 1, 3, and 5 as issues: it’s not the British government, but rather a BBC reporter handing the things out to protest leaders. While this may influence point 3 the least, Israel and the Saudis would certainly understand they were dealing with a different beast.
This brings up a topic of particular interest to me: How does International Relations Theory deal with the "fourth estate" role of mass media? One thing that has been interesting for me to see is the zeal with which journalists have been charging into these places trying to get a story or an interview (often at great danger to themselves). While these people may just be acting out of careerist self interest (nothing like warzone reporting to boost your stature as a journalist), many seem to feel a responsibility to get images out and help people gain their right of expression. I could totally see a reporter doing something like I proposed spontaneously themselves...or an ambitious news editor coming up with the idea...
I have a few counterarguments for individual points of contention as well:
1) In addition to what I said above, I'm not sure I agree with the non-interference/reciprocity argument at all as it applies to what we might call rouge regimes (outlaw states?). Doing something like this in China would be dangerous for sure, but in almost any other country I can think that we could want to do this in, I don’t really care that they might get pissed off...in fact, those governments have already proven to oppress their people and have often shown official and direct contempt towards democratic values. If the US government gets caught handing out these kinds of devices in Iran, that’s bad, but they're developing nuclear weapons and funding our enemies anyway, so I don’t see how that changes things much. In an already deteriorating place like Libya I'm even less worried about territorial borders (apparently neither are the British or the Germans, as they landed a few warplanes in the desert a few days ago to airlift people out).
Also, I don't much care about an Iranian passing out bomb making material in New York...that kind of information is available online and in thousands of other places, even if it might be harder to get at since 2001 (glad I printed out my copy of the Jolly Roger Cookbook). And its not like the guys in militias are going to have a problem getting guns or explosives in the US. This might be made part of a larger point of democracies that have freedom of expression need to worry less about fringe views than those that heavily restrict access to information.
2) I guess I was more envisioning this as a tool to be given to revolutionaries in actio. The risk in trying to establish sleeper cells of these things is high. In fact, I think the most difficult logistical issue here is to identify who to give the things to: if you give it to an established protester (who might be able to use it most effectively) he's also the one that's going to get arrested first. If you give it to just any old guy, you might not get any quality images.
In cases like Libya or Bahrain(and Iran as well), however, people have already shown that they are willing to risk their lives even without these things; you have an already established revolutionary movement who is going to be hanged anyway. This strategyis designed to make it easier for the condemned to get their message out, not be the reason they get hanged.
3) I'm not sure how powerful arguments from leaders who have already been de-legitimized by their people claiming outside influence have on popular opinion within the country. While I grant you the point, I don’t think I can give it much weight, especially if we modify my proposal as in point 2 above. And again, while the argument of outside influence can still be made if a media organization is handing these things out, such a situation gives western governments at least a sheen of plausible deniability and complicates the sales job of an embattled regime significantly.
4) Two points here. One, I don’t think there is an application for this in places like Afghanistan in the sense that I'm saying. I'm not trying to get poor people internet to help them build a new life, I'm trying to get the pictures of revolution out. And though the Taliban is leading a revolution, it’s not a democratic one: the images or video they would be posting to the net would appeal to a much smaller audience and not affect international public opinion in their direction. Video of decapitating prisoners and cutting off women’s noses isn't exactly going to win them any friends in the world community.
More specifically, I would be surprised if Taliban and Al Qaida leaders (in particular) don’t already have satellite phones, if not versions of exactly these devices.
5) I think I covered this point mostly at the beginning of this post. Again, if a government got caught doing this it would certainly be bad for them...the idea is to not get caught...
3) I'm not sure how powerful arguments from leaders who have already been de-legitimized by their people claiming outside influence have on popular opinion within the country. While I grant you the point, I don’t think I can give it much weight, especially if we modify my proposal as in point 2 above. And again, while the argument of outside influence can still be made if a media organization is handing these things out, such a situation gives western governments at least a sheen of plausible deniability and complicates the sales job of an embattled regime significantly.
4) Two points here. One, I don’t think there is an application for this in places like Afghanistan in the sense that I'm saying. I'm not trying to get poor people internet to help them build a new life, I'm trying to get the pictures of revolution out. And though the Taliban is leading a revolution, it’s not a democratic one: the images or video they would be posting to the net would appeal to a much smaller audience and not affect international public opinion in their direction. Video of decapitating prisoners and cutting off women’s noses isn't exactly going to win them any friends in the world community.
More specifically, I would be surprised if Taliban and Al Qaida leaders (in particular) don’t already have satellite phones, if not versions of exactly these devices.
5) I think I covered this point mostly at the beginning of this post. Again, if a government got caught doing this it would certainly be bad for them...the idea is to not get caught...
