The new information and communications technologies and social networks like Facebook and Twitter have been described as tools of freedom, helping dissidents in closed or semi-closed societies to communicate with each other and with the rest of the world.
There is a downside however to the proliferation of “new media”: security services, often assisted by technological systems put in place by Western companies, are able to track dissidents and protesters.
As Evgeny Morozov, a researcher based at Georgetown university (Washington), writes in the current issue of Dissent magazine, “as it happens, both Facebook and Twitter give Iran’s secret services superb platforms for gathering open source intelligence about the future revolutionaries, revealing how they are connected to each other. These details are now being shared voluntarily, without any external pressure. Once regimes used torture to get this kind of data; now it’s freely available on Facebook”.
Therefore this security aspect has to be factored in when press freedom or human rights groups get in touch with dissidents. These traceable links can be used as “evidence” by the forces of repression to “prove” their conspiracy theories and harass democratic opponents.
www.dissdentmagazine.org
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