This is an important article in that it identifies a crucial element of any PMC 2.0 type strategy. To insure that the opposition of your enemy, has the means to protest your enemy online. To actually insure that there are proxy servers available to the masses, and if not, to provide it. This is a key component of moral warfare, and that is if you are on the righteous side of a conflict, or want to portray yourself to world opinion as the righteous side, then you need to give some power to the people so they can actually show the world how righteous you and they really are.
And on the opposite side of things, I guarantee today’s enemies are using proxy servers to spew whatever crap they want to spit out. So remember the rule of thumb with OODA, because your enemy has the same access to the same stuff as you.(for the most part) Something to think about in today’s social media-centric world. –Matt
—————————————————————–
A Simple Idea to Influence Iran
November 27, 2009
By GERALD F. SEIB
Sometimes the smallest ideas can have the biggest impact. And so it may be in helping to push change in Iran.
Almost without notice, a small initiative to help democratic reformers in Iran is moving through the U.S. Congress. The notion is disarmingly simple: With a small investment of money, the U.S. government can help Iranian citizens get around efforts by the Iranian regime to block their use of the Internet to communicate with each other and the outside world.
The power of this idea became apparent amid the widespread anger in Iran over the country’s disputed presidential election this summer. After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election was announced, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the dubious circumstances, the largest showing of popular unrest since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
The most powerful tools the latest protesters had were the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and text messages they could circulate to organize among themselves and to communicate to the outside world. And so the Iranian government, as part of a general campaign to suppress protest, stepped in to cut off or slow down the freedom marchers’ Internet access, and to monitor traffic as a way of ferreting out leaders.
Throughout the months since the election, the question perplexing U.S. policy makers has been whether and how America might encourage the reform movement in Iran, without being so heavy-handed as to make the protesters appear to be foreign stooges. That was the question a bipartisan group of senators and their staff members began brooding over during the summer.
“One day we began brainstorming: What could we do?” recalls Richard Fontaine, who at the time was an aide to Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and now is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Something’s happening in Iran, and we don’t quite know where it’s going to end up.”
The initial impulse of most observers, Mr. Fontaine notes, was to impose economic sanctions on Iran’s government to register displeasure at its suppression of democracy protesters. But the U.S. already has imposed broad economic sanctions, and there were bills in the hopper to do more. “So we started thinking what can you do on the positive side, not to just bombard Iran with messages from America, but to facilitate the kind of remarkable political discussion the world had seen after these protests broke out,” Mr. Fontaine says. “Not as a regime-change thing, but in supporting the intrinsic values the U.S. stands up for.”
The fruit of those discussions was the Victims of Iranian Censorship Act — or Voice — a piece of legislation that, at its core, authorizes the U.S. government to develop proxy Web servers and Web addresses beyond the reach of the Iranian government, and to deploy technologies that would allow Iranians to go to those sites anonymously to stay in touch with one another and the outside world via the Internet.
The beauty of the Voice idea is that it allows the U.S. to get around the two concerns, both valid in their own right, that have crimped Washington’s ability to support the reform movement in Iran. The first concern was the worry that any overt American help would discredit the protesters in Tehran by enabling the Iranian regime to portray them as tools of a foreign government. The second was the difficulty in pursuing anything that looks like policy aimed at changing the Iranian regime at the very time the Obama administration and all its major allies were road-testing the idea that it’s possible to use diplomatic engagement to change that same regime’s behavior, particularly regarding its nuclear program.
To some extent, Voice skirts both problems. It doesn’t give direct American assistance to the protest movement, but merely stands up for the universally applauded notion of free speech. And while it may give oxygen to the reform movement, it doesn’t amount to anything like a regime-change policy.
So a group of senators from across the spectrum — Democrats Ted Kaufman of Delaware and Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mr. McCain, and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut — introduced the legislation jointly. In late July it passed the Senate as part of a bigger defense-authorization bill.
The next step is to appropriate money to actually pay for the programs the act authorizes. The effort to do that is under way, largely behind closed doors, as the Senate and House work to wrap up a bill that funds the State Department and other foreign operations for next year. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, has taken the lead in trying to ensure that money is put in place. The Senate’s version, congressional aides say, includes $30 million for Internet countercensorship and similar activities, while the House version has $15 million.
The idea is uncomfortable for the Obama administration, largely because some advocates of Internet-freedom legislation have in mind helping Chinese dissidents, not Iranian democracy protesters. Wrangling with China’s leaders, on whom the U.S. is depending for help with, among many other things, putting pressure on Iran, is a much trickier proposition. Still, some simple ideas are hard to resist.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com
Story here.