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THE REVOLUTION WILL BE BROUGHT TO YOU BY TEXT MESSAGING
by Garrett Jones
March 19, 2008
Garrett Jones is a senior fellow of FPRI. A 1993 graduate of
the U.S. Army War College, he served as a case officer with
the CIA in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He retired in
1997 and now lives in the northwestern United States.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE BROUGHT TO YOU BY TEXT MESSAGING
by Garrett Jones
During the 2007 protests in Myanmar, the media reported that
the opposition was coordinating their protests by text
messaging and getting video out of the country through
wireless internet connections. These tactics were so
successful that the government limited international internet
access; it later shut down all wireless connections for a
period. Eventually the government was forced to restore
service, as the shutdown incapacitated government forces as
much as the opposition. We have now seen similar such
phenomena in Tibet, China, and Kenya.
In most of the third world before the coming of wireless
connection–the internet and the cell phone–there were very
few telephone lines, mostly to government officials and a few
wealthy individuals. Service was poor, with frequent outages
and poor line quality. Costs were exorbitant. Waits for
installation of new telephone lines were typically measured
in years, not days, even for the wealthy and well connected.
The telephone company was usually a government ministry or
parastatal noted for its corruption and inefficiency. This
made even the overseas telephone call beyond the reach of the
average citizen and a long-distance call within the country
something of an event.
There was normally one television channel, state owned, which
broadcast to the capital city and a few other urban areas.
Every newscast, everyday began as follows: `Today the
president of the
lency (insert local
dictator’s name here) (show picture of dictator) reviewed/met
with (cut to film of local dance group, tractor factory,
etc.) to the sounds of the cheering citizens.’ The radio
stations were of a similar ilk, but at least you could
normally dance to the music. Anyone with any wealth or
interest in the truth listened to the shortwave broadcasts of
the BBC, Voice of America or Radio Netherlands (or, for
French speakers, Radio France and the French versions of the
BBC etc.). Newspapers were normally a little more informative
about overseas news, but they were easily shut down if they
began to annoy the local politicos.
This technological bottleneck led to a situation where the
government could control to a substantial degree what the
local population knew of events in the world at large and
>From relatively inaccessible parts of their own country. This
control was never absolute, but with a largely poor and
illiterate population, control of information was a powerful
tool in a government’s hands. The opposition viewpoint was
largely confined to rumors and foreign shortwave news
broadcasts, which might or might not be heard by the average
citizen. Landline telephones were easy to disrupt or monitor,
and newspapers, with their bulky infrastructure, were always
operating on government sufferance. The `facts’ were what the
government said they were, more or less.
Today, cell phone providers in Kenya estimate that 10 million
Kenyans either own their own cell phone or have easy access
to one. This is in a country of about 31 to 34 million
people. Kenyans like to talk, a lot. These are modern cell
phones with state-of-the-art text messaging, Bluetooth,
internet and video capability. There are services available
to the average Kenyan that have not yet made there way into
some regions of the United States. Access to the phones and
airtime can be anonymous, and as with most things in Africa,
where paperwork intrudes, money will make anythi
he country and
outside urban areas. A farmer can now have good quality
internet access if he lives near a major highway or in one of
the many cell footprints across the country. The cell towers
and systems are state of the art and well maintained. Airtime
is expensive, but not exceedingly so. The poor are somewhat
shut out by the cost, but sharing someone’s phone if you are
buying the airtime is a common practice. Thus, one cell phone
in a slum may have hundreds of different users in a month.
Wireless connectivity has become a necessary service for the
Kenyan middle class. Unlike other places, many Kenyans rely
on their cell phone as their primary internet access device
and link to the World Wide Web. With regard to government
control of services, as in the United States, Kenyan
telecommunication regulation is organized to `encourage
political giving’ for politicians and revenue for the
government, rather than promote technological advancement.
The technical competence of most incumbent politicians is
low, their primary concern being revenue and political
funding. The result is a free-for-all for providers on the
services they offer, and the long-term impact of these
services in the political arena is little understood, much
less constrained by the government.
What this means to the average middle class Kenyan is that
the truth is now what CNN in New York, or the BBC in London,
says, or what comes from a chat with Uncle Achmed in
Mombassa. This news comes with pictures, video and blogs that
run the gamut from political to rap music. The government no
longer controls the flow of information. Anyone with an
airtime card and a camera phone can document anything,
anywhere. Kenyans are receiving and reacting to events before
the government is even aware something has happened.
Embarrassing footage of a policeman killing an unarmed
protester? Before it has made it to broadcast on the local
television station, it has been shared on cell phone videos
foreign journalists so a potential problem can be minimized
or denied? Not likely! I-Reporters are sending reports by
text message to the capital and beyond as the event unfolds.
Blogs of all types are reporting real-time developments and
rumors, with the bloggers’ own analysis. Government and
opposition statements are mocked and dissected with a vigor
that demonstrates that at least the computer-literate portion
of the population trusts neither side. An equivalent
development in the West may have been translating the Bible
>From Latin to the local language. Now the local population
will decide what it believes, not a ruling priesthood of
vested interests.
I will leave it to others to describe the socioeconomic
impacts of the communication revolution and the many
technical aspects thereof. It does, however, strike me that
there are several unforeseen consequences on the political
situations common to any society that is rapidly acquiring a
freedom of communication its citizens have not until recently
been allowed.
The first common aspect is that the political opposition is
almost uniformly better at exploiting the advantages of the
technological developments than the governments in power.
This may be generational or the natural conservatism of those
in power, but it does seem to be a common theme. In Kenya,
the opposition has slick and attractive blogs and websites,
and their use of text messages and phone trees is freely
acknowledged. The Kenyan government’s original media reaction
after the riots was clumsy and relied on full- page ads in
the traditional press. The opposition responded with timely
blogs and text messages. The electronic version of events was
soon seen to overwhelm government media efforts. Crude pro-
government blog sites finally sprung up about a month into
the current election crisis, as the incumbent government
tacitly acknowledged that it was losing the media war.
The government, early on in the crisis, banned live radio
d what the
population was told. This was an ineffective action, as the
connected parts of the population simply switched to
international news sources and live blogging to follow
breaking developments in their own country. The political and
tactical effect of this use of technology puts the general
population, and the political opposition specifically, inside
the government’s decision loop. The wired population is
reacting to an event before the government had learned of it
or formulated a response. No government can win that battle.
The best they can hope for is a talented spokesperson to spin
the situation. The Kenyan government had no such luxury.
The second common theme to telecommunication advances is that
the government is also as fully entwined in the wireless and
internet infrastructure as the political opposition. As far
as I am aware, no authoritarian government has tried to
duplicate the wireless infrastructure with a government-only-
system, nor have they placed any serious restraints on intra-
country interoperability. This being the case, simply
shutting down the general wireless or internet capacity
cripples the government as thoroughly as it does any
opposition group.
The third common thread is the exponential expansion of the
problem of monitoring communications when wireless and
internet systems are introduced. Rather than thousands of
individuals who were well documented by their landline
telephone accounts, an authoritarian government is now
looking at millions of individuals with no fixed location or
identifiable characteristics. One could argue that software
and hardware advances make monitoring easier, but such a
program is still very expensive and technically intensive.
Monitoring modern wireless and internet networks is
exponentially harder and more expensive than monitoring
landline systems. Governments that face this expensive and
technically challenging task are almost by definition new to
modern telecommunications, nt has the capability to mount
wireless intercepts on a large scale, a very serious second
part of these technological challenges is how to analyze the
buckets of information intercepted into something meaningful
and useful. The best first-world intelligence services are
still wrestling with that particular dilemma. In a third-
world situation, this means opposition communications are,
with a little care, unfettered and largely unstoppable.
At first blush, the Chinese with their Great Fire Wall
limiting international access to certain international
internet sites seems an exception. The Chinese government
seems on the surface to have devoted enormous resources and
funds to establishing an effective censorship of external
Worldwide Web sites. While the technical effectiveness of the
Great Fire Wall can be argued, the Chinese may have missed
the point. The threat of wireless and internet communication
to an authoritarian government is not by their contaminating
the local citizens to seditious foreign ideas; it is that
they establish an efficient means by which the local
population can organize in opposition to the government.
All the evidence available indicates that Chinese official
communications intra-country are largely maintained through
the civilian network. Thus turning off wireless, text
messaging and internet access would paralyze both the
civilian economy and the official government communications
system. In China’s example, by establishing an effective
internal communication system that cannot easily be disabled,
the Chinese Communist Party has doomed the itself in the long
term. The Great Fire Wall may well be viewed in the future as
the 21st century’s electronic Maginot Line. It appears to be
a common thread that the political implications of modern
wireless internet telecommunications are wrongly perceived,
if noticed at all by authoritarian governments.
While Kenya struggles through one crisis, and may have been
changed forever by telecommunications crisis of its own making
within the next six to eight months. The 2008 Beijing Summer
Olympics should provide an opportunity to see the first signs
of how an internal political organization uses communication
technology and the effectiveness of the Great Fire Wall in
moderating internal dissent. Tibetan opposition organizations
have already begun activities to put forth their views, and
are likely just the first of many to do so. All of these
groups will enhance the effectiveness of their protest by
using telecommunications methods beyond the effective control
of authoritarian governments.
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