Much like Stanley Kubrick's 1971 movie Clockwork Orange, Iranian elections are irresistibly difficult to watch. And this election has all the hallmarks of being more than just another sequel, but rather that rare occurrence where it is even more compelling (and irresistibly difficult) than any of its serial predecessors. One of the smartest - and most principled - Iran experts, my friend Michael Ledeen, explains ably just why this is.

Their [open demonstrators by the thousands] candidate is the former prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, an architect who designed some of the most oppressive features of the Islamic Republic when the Ayatollah Khomeini was the country's Supreme Leader, and who has been absent from public life for twenty years. By all accounts he is an uninspiring figure, a boring speaker, and an ineffective debater (he was beaten badly in a televised debate with President Ahmadinezhad the other night). So what can account for the frenzy on his behalf?

For one thing, he is not Ahmadinezhad, for whom there is a lot of hatred. The current circus is taking place against a background of mounting repression, featuring public executions of many young people (some said to be homosexuals), mass arrests, summary closing of the few remaining quasi-independent publications, increased censorship of telephone and internet communications, and a lot of nasty action against young people who do not meet the strict dress code and decorum rules imposed by the theocratic dictatorship.

That so many people would openly defy such a regime is certainly significant, and it may well be that the reporters who see the current demonstrations as revolutionary, or at least insurrectionary, are quite right.

He is clearly the most popular candidate (and, as Michael further explains succinctly, not nearly as popular as his wife), and Iranians turned out to vote in record numbers, as indicated even by the Iranian regime-run media. This was not a spontaneous surge of support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And, just as it can be reasonably deduced without actually measuring that the sun is more distant than Mars, it can also be reasonably deduced without counting that Mousavi received a plurality if not outright majority of the authentic Iranian votes among the multiple candidates running. Both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, as expected, are claiming victory and fraud by the other.

Nonetheless, drawing upon a personal international arsenal of a pervasive political polling apparatus and keen sense of both the Iranian electorate and candidate platforms, I have been consistently projecting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner for the past week. Either that, or the simple powers of observations of Iranian elections past. The winner is routinely the 'Chosen One' most favored by the regime. The reasons are not always clear, just as Michael Ledeen suggests may be afoot this time with Mousavi. And he may prove correct. Neither of us know, and none of us will until the regime dots the i's and crosses the t's and publishes them with finality in its controlled publications and broadcast media.

But it's hinting - perhaps lofting the trial balloons to see if the landscape rumbles with fury in rejection - by declaring Ahmadinejad the winner. For now.

Before the polling closed Mr Mousavi declared himself "definitely the winner" based on "all indications from all over Iran." He alleged widespread voting irregularities without giving specifics and hinted he was ready to challenge the final results.

Iran's state news agency responded moments after Mr Mousavi spoke, and reported that Mr Ahmadinejad was the victor. The report by the Islamic Republic News Agency gave no details.

With more than 10 million votes counted, Ahmadinejad had 68.8 percent and Mousavi had 28.8 percent, said Kamran Daneshjoo, a senior official at the Interior Ministry.

How can this be, you might ask? There is mass hatred for Ahmadinejad, the embodiment of an even more hated brutal theocratic regime under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. And there were mass demonstrations, oddly not put down in the Iranian thug tradition, screaming support for Mousavi and, most notably, his wife.

For starters, with the reported record turnout - likely as true as it is useful for the traditional mullah 'presidential selection committee' - the polls were kept open for hours after the scheduled closing times. Perhaps understandable with such numbers. But perhaps also understandable if you are aware of what goes on with late voting in Iran.

Mehdi Khalaii explains exactly what this means at the Washington Institute in The Voting Manipulation Industry in Iran.

Voting can be easily manipulated in several ways:



Collecting birth certificates. In previous elections, reports have surfaced that the Imam Khomeini Committee, a large state charity affiliated with the leader (or, as he insists, supreme leader), Ali Khamenei, "rent" BCs belonging to the poor. It has been alleged that after regular voting hours, those engaged in fraud fill out ballots using the rented BCs. In some elections, polls remained open for many hours after the designated closing time, feeding concern that irregular votes were being cast.

The 'Birth Ceritificate' or 'BC' - not issued by hospitals but rather by the regime's National Organization for Civil Registration - is what is required at the poll in order to cast a ballot. Further identification to show the bearer is the actual person on the BC is not required.

In addition, as Khalaii explains in great detail, Iran has no voter registration and no official accurate count of how many voters there really are (a convenient oversight), no voter identification verification, the voter must write the candidate's name on the ballot and 20% of Iran is illiterate, there are 'mobile polling stations' and not exactly impartial poll workers, among other reasons.

We need not even consider that the candidates are each vetted by the Guardian Council, which ensures that no true moderates actually make presidential or parliamentary (masjid) ballots.

With a back end so constructed for corruption, considering the democracy hijacking practices at the front end is merely an academic exercise. Or perhaps it's vise versa.

Unless the Iranian people can in large and unified numbers muster the kind of courage so great that it is rare even among our own military heroes, this election has been decided. And was weeks ago. For unless the murderous regime feels the fear of a mass insurrection among the unarmed populace, the kind that would require genocide to put down, the election is over and the remainder of the weekend will be used by the regime to ensure that they can install the man they want without losing physical control of the Persian masses.

While another Ahmadinejad term as president will not be good for the Iranian people nor reflective of their choice and desires, at least the United States and her president will not be afforded the opportunity to buy into the mirage that there is a new 'moderate' in Iran with whom they can talk and negotiate. For it is the regime of mullahs that dictates policy and directs the terrorism that kills with ferocity and confidence. And they will remain along with their policies regardless who is president.

At least with Ahmadinejad, there is no hiding the true face of the regime. He has done more to make Americans keenly aware of the Iranian threat than the regime's entire murderous, terroristic blood trails through history.

2:55 AM | Permalink | Feedback (2) | Print

With a televised speech on the subject of cyber and infrastructure security (one of the better ones I have ever heard), so begins the Obama administration's foray into the defense and security of cyberspace. Every administration for the past 15 years has done it to one extent or another, yet as pointed out repeatedly we're not all that better off today than we've been since computers became a part of our lives. As a matter of fact, it was recently pointed out that the plan going forward looks a lot like the plan that was offered up six years ago. How much has changed since then? Not much.

Tens of billions of dollars are about to be spent on national cyber security problems. If there is any hope of real change, we need to stop with the platitudes, banal buzz-word boilerplate and take some serious action:

Fire the most egregious violators of security policy. There is no government agency that doesn't make you acknowledge their policy on cyber security. There are also penalties for violating that policy; they are rarely enforced and when they are it is very hush-hush. That has to stop. If you make a mistake, OK, but if you're storing gigs of illicit images or are running your eBay empire off a government PC and Internet connection, you not only need to be publicly dismissed, you should also be aggressively prosecuted. People usually don't break rules when prison is involved.

Hold security and management accountable. It's so much easier to sweep violations under the rug when they're cyber-based, but no agency managers would let the same sort of behavior, if carried out in meat-space, go unpunished. If you treat security like a checklist, you're not a security manager, you're a clerk. If checklist security is all you fund your security shop for, you are not a serious executive, you're an ignorant bureaucrat.

The flip side of the coin: don't view security as a 'deny-all' prospect. Understand - really understand - the risks and plan and operate accordingly. That means changing the way you work to avoid or reduce your exposure to risk. Systems process information and information - no matter how valuable at this moment - has a half-life. If you are designing systems and operating them in a fashion that maximizes your technological capabilities, security really only has to be good enough.

If you're in a leadership position - and pardon my age-ism - accept that you're not going to "get it" and appoint people you trust who do get it to make things happen. Don't be the old geezer shaking his fist at 'those darn kids and their inter-webs!' You are in charge of your agency; you are not your agency. If you're not advancing your agency with the times because you are not comfortable, you are failing those you have sworn to serve.

Hand in hand with that last point: don't run from fear; embrace and exploit it. For all our might in the physical world, the US is regularly used and abused in cyberspace. Like Neo in The Matrix, we have to recognize that in cyberspace our physical prowess counts for naught. Some argue that a nuke is a legitimate response to a sufficiently harsh cyber attack; I say if you're fighting bytes with nukes you've punted dominance of the cyber domain to the malcontents.

The Cyberspace Policy Review says we're "at a crossroads;" past efforts have talked about our hearing "a wake-up call." The fact of the matter is that we're too far down the road - hitting the snooze button all the way - to keep up the pace of talk, half-measures, and failed responses. Serious cyber and infrastructure security comes at a price that is deeper and more expensive (on multiple levels) than what is being budgeted for. Unless we as a nation are prepared to pay that price, we should stop pretending we care about these problems.

6:36 PM | Permalink | Feedback (0) | Print

No matter the product involved, the hype cycle is always the same. First comes excessive adulation and praise, then mass buy-in, and finally critical backlash. Just like a once-hip New York indie rock band, Twitter is suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Mainstream media critics, alarmed by the online panic over the swine flu, are attacking Twitter as a breeding ground for irrational hysteria.

Foreign Policy's techblogger Evgeny Morozov has written the most trenchant Twitter critique, pointing to a horror show of tweets ranging from conspiracist speculations about germ warfare to fallacious "simple cures" for swine flu sufferers.

Don't believe the hype. Mass panics are as old as human civilization and Twitter is neither a cauldron of hysterical ignorance nor a completely neutral technology. Twitter and other social media tools are only one part of a complex and imperfect information ecosystem that nevertheless possesses the potential for positive collaboration.

Facilitated by either stagecoach messenger or Friendfeed, communication can amplify popular fear into mass hysteria. And with every panic comes the same hyperbolic criticism of communication technology, employing imagery of mindless crowds driven into a frenzy by mass media's siren song. Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that popular media constituted a "culture industry" that stresses uncritical obedience, Situationist activist Guy Debord saw media as a tool of mass consumer culture behind the "society of the spectacle," and media critic Neil Postman went as far as to claim that media is slowly "amusing us to death." Countless other critics have derided various forms of the "idiot box" in substantially less articulate language.

No matter the time, place, or ideology, the criticism of media and mass man boils down to the fear that the irrational mob will destroy civilization. It's the same narrative of the barbarians at the gates, except this time the invading Huns have Bluetooth-equipped iPhones instead of battleaxes. But the mass culture critique ignores social media's strengths and misdiagnoses its weaknesses.

Twitter neither originated the swine flu hysteria nor substantially amplified it. Instead, sensationalist reporting by mainstream media outlets stimulates popular hysteria by saturating the public with wave after wave of distorted information. Swine flu undeniably poses a major threat that requires urgent and comprehensive response, but media reports lack any sense of perspective, caution, or restraint. The common cold kills 36,000 Americans a year, averaging out to about 150 deaths per day during the eight months of the flu season. So far, the only casualty of the current crisis outside of Mexico has been a young Mexican boy visiting Texas. But you'd never know this from the tenor of MSM coverage, always on the verge of declaring that a snout-faced horseman of the apocalypse has descended to cleanse the unbelievers. Since blogs and microblogs are parasitic mediums, the MSM tsunami of fear and terror inevitably creates ripples in the social media ecosystem.

But while Twitter isn't the hotbed of hysteria commonly portrayed in the media, it also isn't an entirely neutral medium. If the rise of a globalized world has facilitated the rapid spread of diseases and viruses, viral mediums like Twitter help spread "infodemics." As Carnegie Endowment fellow David Rothkopf argues, these panics are fueled by the complex interaction between differing forms of media:

"An infodemic is not the rapid spread of simple news via the media, nor is it simply the rumor mill on steroids. ...[I]t is a complex phenomenon caused by the interaction of mainstream media, specialist media and internet sites; and "informal" media, which is to say wireless phones, text messaging, pagers, faxes and e-mail, all transmitting some combination of fact, rumor, interpretation and propaganda. It can be rendered more difficult to understand by multiple languages, cultures and attitudes toward the free and open flow of information. It involves consumers of information ranging from officials to private citizens who have varying abilities to see the whole information picture, varying degrees of sophistication about what to do with the information they have, little opportunity to authenticate data before acting on it, and little if any training in understanding or controlling the rapidly changing information picture."

Twitter is merely one element of a media infosphere that emergently constructs infodemics, and infodemics give form to what UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner calls the "media spectacle"--a massive drama that puts societal values, fantasies, and fears on public display. The swine flu plays into the disaster-movie narratives of inescapable contagion, infection, and apocalypse that have been present in global media discourse for decades. Like terrorism, pandemics are cast as annihilating events that demonstrate the inherent fragility of the ordering systems that govern everyday life. The shattering of these protective linkages exposes us to the threat of chaos, predation, and extinction.

Twitter plays a special role in the media spectacle because it is fundamentally a performative medium. Like other social media forms such as Facebook or LiveJournal, Twitter places a high premium on performance and role-play as a means of both individual self-expression and group socialization. The downside is that Twitter also gives fearful individuals the means to both act out individual nightmares on a grand stage and find comfort and community in the mass panic of the crowd. Hashtag groupings are instrumental means for users to share in and co-produce common experiences, a phenomenon first observed in the famously crowdsourced coverage of the Mumbai attacks.

Unfortunately, government action isn't likely to stop infodemics. The global infosphere is too vast and dispersed for the kind of message management that public relations firms excel at. Similarly, President Obama is unlikely to quell the panic by channeling his charisma and popularity into Web 2.0 rehashes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous "fireside chats." The best governmental institutions can do is provide correct information and an appearance of competence, using new media forms to try to shape the narrative and respond to public concerns. As Shlok Vaidya blogs, government has largely impeded effective response by placing its own biodefense visualization tools behind a "secrecy wall."

The cure for the infodemic is likely to come from developers and social media users. Crowdsourcing applications and websites can help make sense of raw data and facilitate positive collaboration between general users, subject-matter experts, and social media developers. These information aggregation, visualization, and collaboration tools can help reduce entropy within the information ecosystem by acting as controlling mechanisms that organize and govern the flow of information. But as Vaidya argues, we need a tool to aggregate productivity as well as help families and communities deal with the crisis by distributing data.

Even without such a system, the current swine flu crisis is an opportunity for users and developers to evolve existing capabilities through trial and experimentation. Let the Twitter haters hate. The most important thing is that we all keep the hand sanitizers at the ready.

3:31 AM | Permalink | Feedback (0) | Print