Emmanuel Dolo is trying to apply on-line for a scholarship, but he’s not having much luck.

“The Internet here is very slow. Sometimes you pay for 60 minutes and you only get to use 20 minutes. It just keeps loading and loading,” Dolo said. “It’s frustrating.”

In Liberia, businesses and internet providers must pay for expensive satellite service, which is far beyond the reach of most Liberians.

Elliott Blidi, a project coordinator in Liberia for the West Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program, said Liberia has the lowest access to internet penetration in the region.

“In West Africa, Africa in general, our penetration is very low – about 0.02 percent. During the civil war years, the cables that were available, the financing and political will were not there to bring it in,” Blidi said.

But eight years out of war after the end of Liberia’s civil war, that is finally starting to change. Last week, a French ship arrived on the Liberian coast, carrying with it a fiber optic cable, two inches thick and 10,000 miles long. The ship is dragging the cable from France to South Africa.

Spectators watch the fiber optic cable being brought to shore in Liberia. (Photo: Bonnie Allen)

The Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) cable system, run by a consortium of telecom operators led by French Telecom, will provide broadband connectivity to more than 20 countries in Africa and Western Europe.

A crowd gathered on a sandy beach near downtown Monrovia, watching as a diver emerged from the sea, pulling a rope. Eventually, the underwater cable popped out of the ocean onto the beach, which prompted cheers from the crowd.

It was a moment of celebration for Ciata Victor. She’s a Liberian businesswoman who returned home after the war ended in 2003, armed with a degree in computer engineering technology. But she said it’s been difficult to work here.

“I moved my company home from America to Liberia and internet access has been extremely challenging. I have paid as high as $449 a month for internet access,” she said.

After lagging far behind, Africa is on the verge of an internet boom, according to a recent World Bank study. As of 2010, there were 12 submarine cables in sub-Saharan Africa and another five under construction.

For Liberia, as well as Gambia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the ACE submarine cable is the first connection to a fiber optic system.

Elliott Blidi is confident that internet use here will increase by 75 percent in the next four years, even though many here have never used a computer.

Blidi said the explosion in cell-phone use proves it’s possible.

“Any illiterate person, any farmer who has never sat a day in school can use a cell phone. Any old mother sitting in the market can use a cell phone. If you can use a cell phone, then it’s just a next step to going online,” Blidi said.

The entire ACE cable must be in place before broadband service can begin in Liberia. That’s expected to happen by mid-next year.

Meanwhile, the Liberian government and local companies must do their part — install wires, cables, and towers to share the technology with the country.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. We’re following news today in Egypt and out of Liberia and Greece. Now, to a story about a place where there are no borders, we’re talking cyberspace. No borders can mean chaos and that chaos is something that cyber criminals thrive on. Journalist Misha Glenny writes about it in his new book. It’s called Dark Market: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You.

Misha Glenny: Dark Market was the premier English language criminal website from 2005 until its closure in late 2008. And it acted as a sort of department store for criminals who could go there, log on, buy stolen credit card details. They could buy viruses, they could download tutorials on what the latest criminal ideas were for the web. And when I was looking at Dark Market I thought this was a really fascinating way to get into the subject of cyber crime and the lives of the people behind something like Dark Market. And this was made a lot easier by the fact that one of the five administrators of Dark Market was in fact an undercover agent of the FBI.

Werman: Right, well that’s what I wanted to ask you next because this was kinda of, Dark Market was one-stop shopping for cyber criminals, but it was administered by an undercover FBI agent, this guy, Keith Mularski, for two years. How did that happen?

Glenny: He had to infiltrate the carding community as it’s known.

Werman: Does that refer to credit card fraud specifically?

Glenny: Essentially, although it’ll take in things like bank account hacking, certain fishing scams, the famous Nigerian 419 scams for example, advanced fee fraud, you know, this sort of run of the mill daily fraud that you get on the web. So the FBI agent, Keith Mularski, had to create a presence in the criminal underworld first of all that was convincing, and he did come up with an extremely convincing back story that he was a major spammer from Poland. You know, he did this very well and was eventually invited on to become an administrator on Dark Market. He was eventually managing the server, which was an incredibly rich source of information for the FBI.

Werman: And briefly, Misha, what happened to Dark Market?

Glenny: Dark Market was taken down. It had to be taken down because Mularski’s identity was exposed, but after that there was the whole series of trying to track down the people involved, trying to arrest them and bring them to trial. And you have to remember that these people involved in cyber crime are all over the world. They come from very different ethnic and social backgrounds. And what was peculiar is despite the diversity of these characters, divergent in every respect except for one, and that was that they were all male, because 95% of hackers are male. They had an incredibly tight community. And when the police started coming after them they actually mounted their own counter intelligence operation across the world to warn carders if they had been fingered by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies such as the Serious Organized Crime Agency in Britain or the Turkish cyber police, because it wasn’t just an FBI operation. It involved about seven or eight major police forces around the world.

Werman: Well, it is an intriguing community and I want you to tell us more about what makes these hackers tick. I mean your book is full of characters with names like Lord Cyric, Iceman, Chao and Matrix 001. Once they start doing their cyber crime what’s motivating them? Are they poor and they want money or are they smart and they just have an ax to grind?

Glenny: It depends where they come from and it depends what their personality type is. The sort of prototype of all the big criminal websites was founded in a desert in Ukraine in 2001. And this was called Carder Planet and there’s no doubt that Carder Planet was about making a lot of money. These were kids growing up in the gangster capitalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they had a technical ability. And they said well, all of these credit cards and banks in the west, which were very poorly secured at the time…

Werman: Right, and as you point out, this is also the time of the great big boom in credit cards when everybody in the United States was getting an offer every day.

Glenny: Everyone was getting credit cards. The amount of credit cards in circulation is rising the whole time, and this is like taking candy from a baby for these young kids in Ukraine and Russia. And so you see cyber crime emerges in the so-called brick countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, particularly Brazil and Russia first of all. But now it is beginning to spread everywhere. Indonesia is now a center. Turkey is a big center. Even countries like Germany and Britain now have very healthy cyber criminal communities, healthy in their own terms as it were.

Werman: Right, now not coincidentally in Odessa in 2002 there was the first conference of cyber criminals that took place. When you heard about this was it clear that something big was starting to happen in the virtual world with crime?

Glenny: This was absolutely wild. It was called the First Worldwide Carders Conference. And these people were so you know, self confident that they invited 400 cyber criminals from around the world to come to Odessa. They held meetings all around the Black Sea port in fancy hotels, in small restaurants. And they discussed things like you know, we’ve got to do more work on JCB and Diners’ cards because you know, we’re concentrating too much on Visa…

Werman: Wow.

Glenny: And there are all these easy cards that we can pick up. And they said we need to spread, we need more diversity, we need to spread it to New Zealand, to South Africa, to Brazil, there are all these people waiting to engage in the trade. Now, what was really critical and interesting about the conference was that the first point they made in their press release which they sent all over the world, was we will not tolerate carders attacking the financial institutions of Russia and the other former Soviet Union states, because what had already happened here was a relationship between criminals and the successor to the KGB, the FSB, the securities services, which as long the Russian criminals were attacking cards in the US and western Europe, they weren’t going to be busted. If, however, the KGB decided that it needed help for whatever reason they wanted, political purposes, security purposes from that hacking community, they would then call upon them and this is a very sinister relationship that we have, certainly in Russia and one or two other countries…a relationship between the security forces and the hacking community where there’s a quid pro quo.

Werman: Hm, how secure is the US compared with the rest of the world to cyber crime?

Glenny: Well, its banking system as we’ve seen recently remains pretty insecure because Citibank was supposedly one of the most secure banks in the United States and yet just a couple of months ago it lost 200,000 account details. That doesn’t look good. And because the United States is so wired and because it was so many digital assets, it is a huge focus for attacks from the rest of the world. And this is both in relation to cyber crime, in relation to cyber industrial espionage, and of course, in relation to cyber warfare and cyber security. And we’ve just seen this this weekend, this extraordinary report coming out about how the drones, which are being used in Afghanistan and Pakistan in which are steered from Nevada, are now infected with a virus which they don’t think is doing anything, but they cannot get rid of it. Now, what if it’s a virus that at some point will actually trigger something that will send those drones where they don’t intend to be sent as it were? This is very disturbing.

Werman: Yeah, indeed. Misha Glenny’s new book is called Dark Market: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You. Misha, very good to speak with you. Thanks a lot!

Glenny: Thanks a lot, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

On Sunday Germany’s little known Pirate Party took nearly 9 percent of the vote in the Berlin state elections – an astounding outcome that surprised not only election observers, but Pirate Party leaders themselves. All of its 15 candidates are now part of the Berlin state government. The youngest one just turned 19.

The party’s base is male software engineers and one of its key goals is expanding the Internet and taking down the many sites in Germany that are controlled and not accessible to the public. But as Miriam Widman reports, the Pirates have more than geek appeal.

A pirate party campaign ad sounds fairly calm and cool, but it is more than a bit shocking. It shows a cop smoking a joint – after marijuana is legalized, of course. And there are two dads holding hands in a park, pushing a stroller.

It all appealed to 48-year-old salesman Thomas Blasik . Though he admits a major reason he voted for the Pirates is that he couldn’t stand the other parties.

“Way earlier I voted for the Greens. And what came out of that,” Blasik said. “We have a Green Foreign Minister. And what does he do? He gets together with you Americans who descend on Afghanistan.”

Blasik is referring to Germany’s former Green Party Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who trumpeted environmental causes, but also supported sending troops to Afghanistan. Voting data shows that the Greens lost thousands of votes to the Pirates.

A campaign commercial of the Pirate Party

But while Blasik complained about Green Party politics, he hasn’t actually voted for them, or any other party, in something like 20 years. As a Pirate Party voter, he is not alone. More than 21,000 votes for the party came from people who hadn’t voted at all in the last five years.

At the Pirate Party headquarters a day after the big victory, there were a lot of empty beer bottles. Newly elected Heiko Herberg, a 24-year-old law student, is the second youngest member of Berlin’s state government. He said the Pirates are big on transparency and plan to tell all when they get into the government.

“We will leak everything that happens there,” Herberg said. “We will show everything that happens in politics. No more closed doors. We will make politics for the people and not over the people.”

“That’s a nice idea,” said retired Free University political science professor Nils Diederich. But Berlin state government meetings are already open to the public and the press. And he said he wonders who would really want to see all the stuff the Pirates would release?

“Most of the committees are not very interesting, which is why the press doesn’t report them,” he said. “But please – go ahead – put everything out there. The only thing that will result is an unbelievable amount of information garbage. But sometimes you can find valuable stuff in the garbage.”

Another Pirate Party idea is to tax all Berliners and tourists to pay for free public transportation. Professor Diederich said that would be an absolute no go legally.

“No matter how nice it sounds, I don’t think this idea doable,” Diederich said. “Raising an extra tax will be exceptionally difficult because municipalities only have limited jurisdiction when it comes to tax law.”

He said it is the federal government that is responsible for transportation and consumer taxes, and that people who don’t take public transport would challenge it in court and win.

Diederich said he also doesn’t think the Pirates have much appeal beyond Germany’s biggest cities, which are not many.

Whether the Pirates have staying power or are just a momentary protest vote will play out over the next couple years. The Party has just two years before Germany’s federal elections to show its stuff.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Is he or isn’t he? Dead that is. The “he” in question is former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. There had been hints in public, online, offline and on T.V. over the past few days, that Jiang has died but no official confirmation. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing, Mary Kay, what is the latest on this mystery?

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: Well the latest is on the 10 o’clock news on China’s central television. The lead story was not Jiang’s death. There’s a lot pf speculation about who is gonna win the 2018 winter Olympics, and Chinese censors are blocking conversation or speculation about Jiang on the official internet here. You can get around that through using a proxy server but many Chinese can’t do that.

WERMAN: hat set off the rumor mill in the first place?

MAGISTAD: Well, for starters, Jiang did not appear at the 90th anniversary of the founding of the communist party of China which was on July 1st and many other formers leaders were there so he would have been expected to have been there. But also there had been rumors for awhile that his health is engraved. This particular set of rumors started very late Tuesday night in Beijing. The media that first went with the story that Juang Zemin had died were a couple media sites that are linked to the spiritual sect Falun Gong which is banned in China. And those sites are not always the most accurate when it comes to what is going on in China. However, there appear to be more credibility to the reports when they came out in Hong Kong both from Asia T.V. and TVB. And Asia T.v. is known to have relatively close links to the party. However they went with a report earlier in the evening that John had died and said that were going to run a very special report at 9:30 p.m. but when 9:30 came around they instead ran South Korean soap opera.

WERMAN: Mary Kate I understand that one hint that something was up, was that certain words were no longer searchable online. Explain that.

MAGISTAD: Well what actually happened- it’s hard to know which came first but I think the rumors came first and then censors stepped in and said : “OK you’re not gonna search for the word Juang”, which is of course Juang Zemin’s surname but it also means “river”. So that makes it difficult to search for the Chinese name for the Yangtze River which is Cháng Jiāng. It all also comes up obviously in many other contexts so it’s a little bit inconvenient. There were also blockages for words like heart attack, party secretary and of course for Juang Zemin’s name. If something like this were to happen and we don’t know that it has, the party likes to control the story. I was here in China in the 90′s when Deng Xiaoping died and the story was released at 2:00 a.m. There had been rumors, there had been concerns and it wasn’t floating around the way this rumor has been because there wasn’t the kind of internet reach that there is now in China. But the party decided to release the information and go, you know, full bore with memorial tributes on television, radio and newspapers starting at 2:00 a.m. And if Jiang Zemin had died, they will release the information when they’re ready to.

WERMAN: You know, I know how the Chinese government can be very protective of information but why control the story of the death of a former president especially if it is true?

MAGISTAD: Because, again, Jiang Zemin is the party’s guide, they want to be able to be out in front of the story. They would actually probably consider someone getting in front of them on the story to be a leaking of state secrets which makes it even more puzzling that Hong Kong media went ahead and reported it.

WERMAN: In other words, if that information were controlled by say Chinese government opposition, they feel like they might be able to manipulate that and they would lose the game?

MAGISTAD: Well there really isn’t Chinese government opposition in any sort of organized form and many of the people who have been most outspoken as social critics or as lawyers have been detained and threatened and silenced in the last few month. So it’s not so much that, it’s that the party is just very   control happy. When there is a story like this: these are their iconic leaders. Even if Juang Zemin isn’t quite on the level of Deng Xiaoping or Mao Zedong, his Three Represents thought is one of the piece of philosophy that communist party members study and the communist party wants to control the narrative whenever a leader like this passes on.

WERMAN: Mary Kate Magistad, The World’s Three Represents corresponded. Mary Kate, thank you so much.

MAGISTAD: Thank you Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

By Matthew Brunwasser

(Photo: Matthew Brunwasser)

The protestors were demanding that the Turkish government take its hands off the Internet.

The demonstrators considered the proposed new filters as just the latest step to tighten the government’s control over the Internet. Turkish officials say the filters are not about censorship. They are meant to protect children and families from harmful content on the Internet. But protestor Melike Ozbek says the authorities can’t be trusted.

“The thing is that people do not know,” said Ozbek. “That’s the problem with the government; they are lying all the time, to their own voters, to their own people. They are lying all the time. It’s a lie that they are not censoring. This is to show people they are being fooled, to be able to create some sort of spark in their head, to check what’s going on so that maybe then they will understand.”

Not all of the protestors were Internet savvy youngsters. Gul Albay, 56, said this was her first protest in more than 30 years. She only uses the Internet for work but feels the filters proposal is scary.

“This is really very very bad, it’s really a big damage for freedom because the Internet is so big and so deep,” Albay said.

Choosing a Filter

The new regulations are set to come into force on August 22. Users will have to choose one of four filters. One is called the family filter and another is for children. The domestic filter blocks all foreign sites. And the standard package will be the default. Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Bilgi University, worries that Turkish authorities will use these filters to step up control of the Internet.

“They are not telling us whether there will be monitoring of everyone’s habits and usage, since everyone will have a user name and password under this system,” said Azdeniz.

The head of the telecommunications regulatory agency, Tayfun Acarer appeared on television and denied that any filters would be mandatory. He said that the measures are meant only to enforce Turkish law.

“Turkey is more transparent than many other countries regarding this issue,” Acarer said. “I want to emphasize this. When you go to a banned site in a European country, you see only a flag or a stop sign. But if a web site is blocked in Turkey, it is always clearly stated when, why and by which institution the page was banned.

Eksi Sozluk

Turkey has closed thousands of websites. One was Eksi Sozluk, or Sour Dictionary, one of Turkey’s first, biggest and freest online communities.

The founder of Eksi Sozluk, Sedat Kapanoglu, says the authorities shut down the site because one user said he liked marijuana.

“They closed the whole website because of one single entry under single topic,” said Kapanoglu. “The ban took two months. We didn’t know about the ban actually because we thought it was a technical problem.”

Kapanoglu said his website has two software developers and five lawyers. He’s bracing for the financial impact of the filters.

“Eksi Sozluk contains adult content, so I don’t think we will make it to family packet or children’s packet,” Kapanoglu said. “I don’t think that will happen. It will impact our revenue as well.”

A non-profit press freedom group has filed a lawsuit. It’s seeking an injunction against the filters, based on administrative and constitutional violations. A court decision is expected by the end of June.

• Bianet, a Turkish press freedom NGO, in Istanbul.
• The OpenNet Initiative reports on Internet censorship and surveillance around the world.

By Shant Shahrigian

When people lose their Internet service, there’s usually a technical problem, like network maintenance or a defective modem at home. A widespread Internet blackout last week in the former Soviet republic of Armenia had a different reason. It seems a 75-year-old woman digging for scrap copper in a Georgian village hit on something arguably more precious: one of two cables that bring the Internet from Georgia to Armenia.

Lilit Melikyan was working at Yerevan’s Institute for Linguistics when the Internet went down.

“I was sitting in my chair and translating some article from Armenian into English,” said Melikyan. “I needed an electronic dictionary,” and suddenly, there was no Internet.

Authorities in Georgia reportedly tracked the suspect down with help from local witnesses, and later released her due to her advanced age. But she could face up to three years in prison on charges of damaging property. Armenian media are calling the woman the “spade hacker.”

Melikyan said she still can’t believe that service was down because of one woman hunting for copper. “But if that’s really what happened,” Melikyan said, “I think she shouldn’t be condemned for that. She’s an old lady.”

Digging up old copper cable to sell as scrap is a common way for people in former Soviet republics to earn some money. But the incident has thrown a spotlight on the state of telecommunications in Armenia, and the Caucasus region. Vahan Hovsepyan, with Armenia’s Union of Technology Enterprises, said he’s worried about Armenia’s near total dependence on Georgia for the Internet.

“The situation with Georgia is really serious,” Hovsepyan said. “When it crashes, almost everyone feels it.”

It’s still not clear how many were affected in last week’s outage. News agencies reported almost everyone in Armenia lost Internet for up to 12 hours. But Armenia’s three Internet providers maintain only half of their customers went web-less, for a few hours. Parts of Georgia and Azerbaijan also lost service.

And it’s not that uncommon.

Hayk Faramayzyan, general director of the Armenian Internet provider GNC Alpha, estimates that Armenia suffers an Internet blackout about once every three months.

“This usually happens,” Faramayzyan said. “It happens in Armenia and also in Georgia. This time it was a funny story with an old woman.”

Faramayzyan said the Georgia-Armenia Internet link stretches some 435 miles, and it’s vulnerable, especially during periods of construction.

“Sometimes they steal, sometimes they deliberately destroy,” Faramayzyan said. “Things happen.”

The latest incident isn’t expected to bring changes in the way Armenia gets its Internet. Hovsepyan of the Armenian tech union said for now, underground cables remain the best way for his country to access the web.

Foreign Policy: Georgian lady accidentally knocks out Armenias Internet

Cartoon by Nikahang Kowsar

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced new initiatives to improve cyber-freedom in countries like Iran. Lisa Mullins speaks with Iranian cartoonist and editor Nikahang Kowsar of Khodnevis.org about what the best use of the money would be and how both Iranian online activists and Iranian authorities use social media to thwart each other. Download MP3

• PBS Tehran Bureau
• Nikahang Kowsar on twitter
• balatrin.com (Persian)
• Videos from Iran on homylafayette.com
• Global Political Cartoons on The World

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today that the United States is giving $25 million this year to help dissidents get around internet repression by autocratic regimes. But she said that governments’ misuse of the internet is only a symptom.

Hillary Clinton: Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition; Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.’

Mullins: That’s Secretary Clinton earlier today. Thousands turned out in Teheran yesterday to protest their government. Nikahang Kowsar [SP] is an Iranian cartoonist in Washington. He moderates an online news site for Iranians who are in and outside of Iran. He has praise for another State Department initiative: a new twitter feed in Farsi.

Nikahang Kowsar: That possibly wouldn’t help exactly those people on the streets but it’s very encouraging and it shows the online activist inside and outside Iran that somebody is actually caring for what they’re doing. It’s very symbolic. Many people in Iran are connected through Facebook and they would like to actually post news materials, videos and everything that they get on Facebook to share. So there could be a lot of internet sources or internet material that could really help people inside Iran. Like for instance, yesterday I got three videos from one of the demonstrators and posted it possibly just half an hour after he had just shot those videos. By that so many people could see what was happening on the streets of Teheran. But through the website that I was working on it in the States and those people were in Iran. It’s a very weird connection and it’s working actually. But we have to find better ways to empower the people who are under a lot of pressure inside of Iran because of firewalls and also being tracked by the Revolutionary Guards and the administrative intelligence.

Mullins: In terms of the Iranian government itself, does it use social networking tools, Facebook, twitter, to its own end?

Kowsar: We’ve had reports that many members of the Basij or the Voluntary Militia and also the Revolutionary Guards are using fake names and appearing on Facebook, becoming members of different fan pages or becoming friends with activists. They try to actually give false information and even sometimes discourage people from going and acting on the streets or performing what they want to do. Or even they try to crack down smaller networks by entering these…I call them ‘viruses, human viruses’.

Mullins: Did any of that happen yesterday preceding or during the protest yesterday?

Kowsar: I’m not sure about that still but when I was posting a few notes on Facebook I got a few comments from members and they didn’t sound right. I felt that one of those people was trying to say that nothing is happening on the streets and people are just listening to the wrong wave. I just cut the guy off because I was actually witnessing what was happening through reliable sources. So I found out that these guys are really active in trying to discourage people.

Mullins: Can you tell who’s one step ahead? The government or the dissidents, the protesters?

Kowsar: There are times that let’s say the activists are saying, ‘We’re going to have this action next week on that very specific time,’ so then the government would be ahead. But on the other hand, when people are using fake identities, pseudonyms and the government cannot detect who’s who it’s working in a way. There are problems for many activists in Iran and they believe that probably the American government or other governments can help them pass through these firewalls and be protected from these human viruses or these hackers working for the government.

Mullins: Thank you very much. Nikahang Kowsar, an Iranian cartoonist and editor. He moderates the website havaees.org [SP]. We’ll make a link on our website, theworld.org. Thank you very much. By the way we also have a few of your own cartoons up there as well.

Kowsar: Thanks, thanks.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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In this week’s podcast, we focus on Egypt’s tech shutdown, and some various tech workarounds. Follow @Jan25voices and @speak2tweet for audio updates from Egyptians on the ground.

Last Friday, the Egyptian government shut down most access to the Internet. It also cut off mobile phone service.

Though cell phone service is slowly being restored, most Egyptians still can’t get online. But that doesn’t mean Egyptians haven’t been able to make their voices heard — with a little outside help.

With Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and text messaging unavailable, printed flyers and word of mouth have become the new ways of organizing. Activists inside the country were not the only ones shocked by the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down most telecommunications.

“That was a very extraordinary move,” said Jonatan Walck, who is part of the volunteer group, Telecomix. “It was nothing you could prepare for.”

Telecomix helps people get around Internet censorship. Last Friday, the group decided to try to re-establish Internet access for Egyptians by asking European Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to free up lines once used for dial-up access.

The European ISPs did so free of charge, and Walck said Telecomix started distributing the access numbers by any means necessary — even by fax — to Egyptians.

“We’ve had nice ISPs around Europe open up those modem pools that are normally closed down, and provide them without any cost.”

John Scott-Railton, a graduate student in urban planning at UCLA, took a different tack. He was tracking events in Egypt via Twitter.

“It’s a place and a people that I have a lot of affection for, but the government has always broken my heart,” he said, “and I know a lot of people of my generation who are inhabiting an ossified system filled with stuff that’s older than stuff in my grandmother’s attic.”

When the Internet went dark, he figured that cell phones would quickly follow, so he called friends and acquaintances in Egypt and got landline numbers for them. When the cell phones were cut, he started calling Egypt — on his own dime.

At first, he would just take notes, and then send out a Twitter message. Then, he said, he realized that there is nothing like hearing the voice of these young people.

“I think that is the real corrective to distant images with a zoom lens of people and police,” Scott-Railton said.

He found an online service that allowed him to record and publish the audio from his phone calls. One voice said, “I’m walking down the street right now, people with sound systems. And they’re going with the same slogans — out with Mubarak.”

Another said, “right now, there are about 20 people on the bridge, and they’re out with brooms and plastic bags, and they’re just cleaning.”

Still another said, “thirty years of corruption has just fuelled this on for the people. Mubarak just doesn’t get it, and he won’t get it until he’s gone from power.”

Scott-Railton is compiling this audio on Twitter at “Jan25Voices.” He said he will continue to do this as long as his studies don’t suffer — or until he gets the phone bill.

• Telecomix official site
• More on Jan25Voices

The Soviet Union doesn’t really conjure up a warm and fuzzy feeling for many. Some of the highlights include banishment to Siberia, gulags, famine, Stalin, the KGB and the complete lockdown of an entire country. But, there’s apparently still nostalgia for the good ol’ USSR.

People like middle-aged business owner Elena Arzumanyan don’t want their world wide web addresses to end in dot-com or “.ru,” Russia’s official address, but in “.su” – as in the Soviet Union.

“Times were different from what we have now,” she said. “People, were more kind, you know, thinking about the country and not their own money. And maybe it will be interesting for our clients that we have this kind of domain. It is something special.”

It’s been nearly 20 years since the Soviet Union dissolved, but that hasn’t stopped some Russians from using an Internet domain called “.su,” which stands for the Soviet Union. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has been trying to get it shut down, but to no avail.

Political analyst Dmitri Trenin said nostalgia for the USSR isn’t as uncommon as you might think.

“Frankly, I think that there are a lot of people here are still beholden to the the Soviet Union in so many ways,”Trenin said. “It seems to be a symbol of great power. It seems to be a symbol of superiority. Uh, it may be a symbol of those who want to reverse things a little bit in some areas.”

It seems that more than 80 thousand people and organizations would like some sort of a time machine. They include businessmen and women, youth groups, bloggers and Soviet sentimentalists.

One of the most famous groups on “.su” is the Kremlin-backed Nashi youth organization. The nationalistic group uses Soviet-era propaganda on it’s website, www.nashi.su to try and recruit new members. Their youth leaders are even called commissars.

Despite the fact that the “.su” domain seems to be relatively popular here in the motherland, not everybody is pleased about it.

Armen Azmeniah thinks it’s a stupid, and not to mention scary, and he said he hopes it will eventually go away.

“I’m not a follower of the trend that the Soviet Union was good. I remember. I’m not a fan of that time. People need to find new trends.”

Meanwhile, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – commonly known as ICANN – has been trying to phase out the domain for quite sometime.

Chris Disspain, chair of the Country Code Name Supporting Organization, a part of ICANN, said, “the problem is that there is currently no policy to deal with retirement. And so it tends to get dealt with, at the moment, as best it can.”

And, Disspain said, since there is no cut and dry rulebook for domain retirement, other authorities would have to get involved and that could get ugly, especially if people are hanging on to the “.su” domain name for nationalistic reasons.

“The United States government has oversight (over domain name designations). So the concept that you would have, in a highly charged political environment, what could be perceived as the US government removing something out of the root, is challenging to say the least,” he said.

So for now, “.su” will be allowed to flourish, at least for the immediate future.

It should also be noted that the Russian organization in charge of the country’s domain name isn’t really helping matters. The organization actually slashed the fee to register “.su” to about 25 dollars, a sixth of the former price; no real incentive there to switch to the new “.ru”.

Here’s a question for you: do you think the Internet should win the Nobel Peace Prize? Well, tomorrow you will find out if those prize-giving folks in Sweden Norway think so. That’s right, the Internet has been nominated for the Peace Prize (Don’t tell the trolls and other haterz out there know about this…). The effort is being backed by a group called The Internet for Peace, who say they’ve realized that “the Internet is much more than a network of computers. It is an endless web of people.” This is true. But I guess we should also point out that currently only 1/6 of the world’s population is connected to that web. That said, the BBC’s Jonathan Fildes and I will tackle this as part of our monthly round-up of top global tech stories.

The rest of the podcast is taken up with three very interesting stories that deal with Iran. First, the Stuxnet computer worm, which has suddenly exploded onto the scene. You can start with Jonathan’s story for the BBC, and a good FAQ on Stuxnet from anti-virus firm F-Secure. To go a bit deeper, try Symantec’s Stuxnet blog.

Next, we’ll talk about a piece of software called Haystack, which was heralded by its makers, the press (including this podcast) and the U.S. State Department as a way for Iranians to see and say what they wanted on the web, without the authorities being able to identify them. Turns out that maybe Haystack wasn’t so safe after all. We’ll talk about what other tools might be available, and about the difficulties of creating this kind of software in the first place.

And our third story is more on the 19.5 year prison sentence handed down by the Iranian authorities to Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan. For thorough and ongoing coverage, I suggest you go over to my friend Cyrus Farivar’s blog.

Remember, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Well, after all that, what do you think? Do the Interwebs deserve a Nobel Prize? Here’s the elevator pitch:

Ah, yes…the human brain. There’s quite a bit of interesting discussion going on in the media these days about what, exactly, our time spent online might be doing to our cerebral circuitry. A lot of that discussion has been spurred by the recent publication of Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains. Well, we here at WTP want to help listeners get a handle on the issue. So, in WTP 301, we’ve got an interview with Steven Rose, a neuroscientist who in 2005 authored the book The Future of our Brains.

Also in this episode, The World’s Jeb Sharp travels to Tanzania to report on a solar energy project called SolarAid. The project itself makes the piece worth a listen, but for real impact, listen to the descriptions of what it’s like to live without reliable electricity. You can also check out a great slideshow made up of photos that Jeb took during her trip.

Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro travels to Scotland to tell us about another interesting project. Imagine what it would be like if everyday objects could tell you their stories. Well, that’s exactly what Oxfam and a University of Edinburgh researcher have done with something called Tales of Things and Electronic Memory (or TOTeM). You can hear more from some of the objects mentioned in Ari’s piece, and you can find out more about researcher Chris Speed as well. Better yet, you can find out how to tell your own stories about your favorite objects.

And we end with a challenge. Can you text faster than Melissa Thompson of Manchester, England?

Also, we’d love it if you could help us with a survey on our science and technology coverage here on The World.

Music in this week’s ‘cast: “Meanwhile, Rick James” by Cake.

(Image: Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator)

• Tech Podcast: What is a ‘cyber-war,’ anyway?
• Estonia leads in cyber-security

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Starbucks recently began offering something for free in the US and Canada. And no, it’s not their tall latte. It’s wireless Internet access. That’s great news for Americans used to paying up to 10 bucks for an hour of wi-fi. But in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, free wi-fi is pretty much the norm. The World’s Clark Boyd reports from the capital Tallinn that Estonians have one man to thank for that.

CLARK BOYD:  First, the requisite clichés about Estonia. Yes, almost all banking is done online. Yes, the country is pioneering Internet voting on the national level. And yes, geeks have dubbed it E-stonia.

TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES:  Well, we’ve gotten to the point where we consider Internet access more or less of a right.

BOYD: Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

ILVES: Which manifests itself in near ubiquitous public access. Estonians tend to get angry when they don’t have wi-fi access.

BOYD: In fact it’s now a running joke in Europe, says Tallinn resident Veljo Haamer.

VELJO HAAMER: An Estonian comes to different state, and first question is “Where is free wi-fi?” Not the food, not the drinks so much, but where is free wi-fi? Do you have free wi-fi?

BOYD: That’s in large part because of Haamer. Back in 2000, Haamer took a trip to New York City.

HAAMER: I visited the Bryant Park on the Broadway. And that was really my first experience with public wi-fi and I saw people around me using computers with free Internet access.

BOYD: When he returned home he decided I’ll blanket the entire country in free wi-fi. It is, after all, a small country. Haamer became a kind of Johnny Appleseed. He went around to cities and towns, touting the virtues of free wi-fi. Most local officials didn’t bite, but individual cafes and bars did, especially in Tallinn. And Haamer enjoys nothing more than showing off his handiwork. The main square in Tallinn’s Old Town is lined with pubs, restaurants, and cafes. In the windows of most of these places, you see little black and orange signs that say, “Free wi-fi.” Haamer pops inside one of these cafes to chat.

HAAMER: In Old Town in Tallinn, yes we have done something like 75 percent of cafes with free wi-fi. You just need to sit down and pay for your coffee, your tea, your cake and don’t spend any coin on Internet access.

BOYD: Haamer just manages to scrape together a living doing this. He charges cafes 300 to 500 dollars for installing wi-fi and he also maintains the connection. The businesses just bill the cost of wi-fi into their food and drink. But Haamer’s not done yet. He’s already installed wi-fi on two long distance bus lines from Tallinn to Riga in Latvia, and to St. Petersburg in Russia. And now that Estonians are increasingly using their smart phones to access the Internet, he’s teamed up with local cellular provider Elisa. They’re testing a fourth generation, or 4G, cellular network that’s designed to carry data at high speed. Anders Karlsson of Elisa networks says his company is happy to work with Haamer.

ANDERS KARLSSON: He’s famous name in Estonia, and has made a lot of good for our people. That’s why we are testing and [INDISCERNABLE] the 4G at the moment.

BOYD: During my stay in Tallinn, Haamer invites me along to a meeting at city hall. He makes his pitch to city officials, telling them how great it would be to use 4g to make Internet access available on the local busses and trams. But no go. One official tells Haamer we tried that on the busses two years ago, and nobody used it. Haamer leaves the city offices disappointed. As we climb up the Old City walls, Haamer looks out over the Baltic to where the ferries are headed to Helsinki, Finland. He says the Finns are already providing wireless Internet service on some trams and busses.

HAAMER: Most people are able to use their iPhones, or Android phones, for wi-fi access. And if such a thing exists in Helsinki and has success, so why not in Tallinn?

BOYD: Haamer says he’ll continue to press Estonian officials. If they don’t get on board, he says, well, he’ll do what he can by himself. For The World, this is Clark Boyd, Tallinn, Estonia.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC profile of ‘Jihad Jane’
• US Department of Justice statement

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  The two female suicide bombers who struck in Moscow were reportedly recruited in Russia’s Caucasus region, but militants bent on Jihad are growing more and more skilled at casting a wide recruiting net.  That includes using websites and social networks on the internet.  That’s how the Pennsylvania woman, known as Jihad Jane, was recruited.  Reporter Susannah George examines how militants recruit online.

SUSANNAH GEORGE:  When Colleen Renee LaRose first started looking online for information about radical Islam, she most likely found a website like this one; alsomod dot org.  Brian Fishman, a counter-terrorism research fellow at the New America foundation scrolls down al-samoud’s sleek, English language home page.  There are neatly organized chat forums discussing issues from current events, to religious doctrine.  And fancy graphics advertise newly released propaganda and recruitment videos.  This video was released earlier this month by Anwar al-Awlaki, a popular Muslim cleric on the run in Yemen.  He preaches violence as religious duty.

ANWAR AL-AWLAKI:  All praise is due to Allah, and may peace and blessings be upon his messenger Mohammed, his family and his companions.

MALE VOICE 1:  This is the sort of thing that is designed to show a pathway to action.  What they are trying to do is they are trying to create role models.

GEORGE: Jihadists sites are getting flashier because they have to compete for viewers just like any other website.

EVAN KHOLMAN:  The message could not be any clearer.

GEORGE: Evan Kholman is with Flash Point Global Partners, a consultancy firm that focuses on terrorism and security.  He says Al Qaeda and its ilk have learned that one of the most effective ways to recruit people in the west over the internet is to promote domestic jihad as exciting.

KHOLMAN: The message is that if you believe what Al Qaeda believes; don’t travel all the way to Pakistan to attend a training camp.  Don’t try to attend a front line in Somalia.  Just do the work you can right in your own back yard because that’s what Al Qaeda really wants you to do.

GEORGE: Kholman says the extremist online recruiting also plays on the possibility of becoming a celebrity.

KHOLMAN: There are a lot of susceptible people out there on the internet.  There are a lot of people looking to become famous.  At least in the world of jihad, this is an opportunity to become like the Bruce Springsteen of that universe.

GEORGE: And that’s exactly what happened with Colleen Renee LaRose, Jihad Jane.

KHOLMAN: She literally has shed her real identity and instead has adopted this virtual identity, this Jihad Jane avatar.  And that’s how you see the transformation of somebody who lives in central Pennsylvania into someone who seems to be a hard core Jihadi.

GEORGE: none of this is entirely unique to jihadist groups.  Missionaries, cults and gangs also offer the allure of being part of a community.  Experts say what makes the pitches for international Islamic radicals unique is that they promote joining a cause more important that yourself or your county.  But one of the strengths of online recruiting is also its weakness; the recruits rarely establish direct contact with Al Qaeda.  In the event that a recruit is captured, this keep Al Qaeda protected.  But it also means the recruits can’t be trained to carry out complex attacks.  Brian Fishman with the New America Foundation.

BRIAN FISHMAN: In many cases I think they don’t know how to act on their own.  They just don’t know what to do.  So though this is a real threat, that threat can be easily overstated.

GEORGE: But while Jihadists recruited over the internet are generally amateurs, they can still pose a serious threat.  As one terrorism expert points out, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to kill someone.  For The World, I’m Susannah George.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Beijing slams Google over censorship issue
• Chinese web users boycott Google
• For more information, check out our weekly Technology Podcast

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  The fact that Google shut down its Chinese search engine doesn’t mean users in mainland China can’t use Google anymore.  Those users are redirected now to the company’s other Chinese search engine in Hong Kong.  That service isn’t required by law to self censor, like the ones inside mainland China are, but its content is censored by the government before mainland viewers can access it.  Still, Google’s move highlights the reality that the internet is vast and hard to pin down to one geographic location, which has its advantages and disadvantages, as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  The internet is everywhere.  The internet is nowhere.  So far, so Hollywood.  Of course there is something to that “internet is everywhere” idea.  One writer a few years ago called our experience online an illusion, a phantasmagoria projected by a vast conglomeration of computers.  The internet brings the feeling of open-endedness.  It has the flavor of a digital sky where data lives in clouds.  Well, not for Craig Labovitz, an internet engineer.

CRAIG LABOVITZ:  I don’t think it’s ever had that flavor to me.  I think to the average consumer, the internet is a very nebulous, abstract, it’s able to survive wars, it’s everywhere, it’s the ether that connects millions of computers.  To those actually in the industry, I think we tend to have a much more concrete notion.

GALLAFENT: Labovitz is Chief Scientist with Arbor Networks, a U.S. based company that supports the infrastructure of the internet.  For industry insiders like him, the internet is a physical geography of pipes and servers, a brittle landscape of technology trying to keep up with demand.  And keeping up with demand also involves geography. It’s fine having a small internet operation in California with all your data on a small local server.  People anywhere can come and visit your site if they’re interested.  But what if everyone, everywhere wants to visit.  You’re going to have to go to them.

jonathan ZITTRAIN: You are going to want to have servers and engineers physically proximate to the countries that you server.

GALLAFENT: Jonathan Zittrain is the author of “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it.

ZITTRAIN: It just turns out that that solves a lot of problems of latency and how fast people can from one place to another.  And that’s what we’ve seen as a dilemma for a company like Google.

GALLAFENT: Google is all about speed, so having servers in China made sense.  But putting them there came at a cost because they were subject to the country’s internet content provider licensing scheme.

ZITTRAIN: It does matter where things are.  If you are located in China, at least the first set of routers your data is going to pass through are Chinese routers.  And because the Chinese government can tell and internet service provider in China let this through, don’t let that through, it can effectuate a real impact on your internet experience.

GALLAFENT: So now Google has pulled out of mainland China, directing Chinese users to its servers based in Hong Kong.  This story is important, says Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks not just because Google is a big, powerful company, it’s because the Googles of the world are increasingly the internet.

LABOVITZ: For an average user, the daily internet experience is really only a handful of companies.

GALLAFENT: There’s also Microsoft, Facebook, Orkut.

LABOVITZ: And the reality is that many of the resources, many of the web pages users are going to are really coming out of many of the same buildings, some of the same data centers.  And increasingly, despite traffic volumes, a smaller and smaller number of companies are providing a greater and greater volume of the internet’s traffic on a daily basis.

GALLAFENT: If those companies are subject to restrictions by countries hosting their data servers, the internet could look a lot less open than it might seem to be.  Right now internet users in places such as China are left to get around the filtering on their own.  But Jonathan Zittrain thinks it might be time for internet companies themselves to work together to keep the internet open using a system of mutual aid.

ZITTRAIN: The internet websites can get together and they can agree that if there is some blockage, maybe its internet filtering, but maybe it’s a cyber-security issue.  Maybe it’s an internet attack against one of them.  If one of them becomes inaccessible for any reason, the other will mirror what used to be there and vice versa.

GALLAFENT: Unfortunately as the internet becomes more centralized, such a system would rely on those big sites being really resilient.  The fewer there are, the more fragile the arrangement.  Still, as some point out, technology might end up being its own solution.  There might come a time when data servers don’t need to be physically proximate to end users.  So even if traffic remains concentrated on a few sites, the internet could yet be everywhere and nowhere.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.