With governments from East to West trying to grapple Internet-fueled speech into submission, at least one expert notes that in many areas, the Net is more of a bogeyman than an actual threat.
"The Internet is grossly overplayed as a force for change in the Third World," says Patrick Ball of the Science and Human Rights Program at American Association for the Advancement of Science. "That's a fact that's entirely not understood in the human rights community."
An itinerant world traveler who visits the farthest corners of the earth to train human-rights workers in the use of information technologies, Ball is not one to downplay the political significance of information technology. Rather than outright dismissing the Internet's role in fomenting Third World uprisings, he is careful to acknowledge that Net-based communications pose a spectrum of dangers to repressive governments.
"Think about places where the resistance is driven by the elite classes -- places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and even China," he says. "Those are the places where electronic communications fuel resistance."
But in other regions such as Latin America and the Middle East, the situation is different. Resistance tends to rise from the ranks of the disenfranchised, fueled by people who don't have telephones, much less computers or ISDN lines.
In places like Mexico and Turkey, says Ball, the Internet has some significance, but nothing to do with organizing local movements. Instead, online communications mobilize the kind of international support that played such a crucial role in the early days of the Chiapas revolt, keeping the Mexican government from crashing down on rebels who might otherwise have been snuffed out without much of the world being any the wiser.
As for Turkey, where authorities slapped a 10-month suspended jail sentence on a teenager who jumped online to criticize rough police treatment of a group of blind protesters, Ball says very few people have access to online communications. "I do know of a few elite NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] which have Internet access, but beyond that there's almost no one," says Ball, who has spent a fair amount of time working in Ankara.
In other words, the teenager, who countered charges that he publicly insulted state security forces with the argument that online comments were hardly public, was absolutely right. The case is the first to pit Internet users against Turkish security forces.
As far as Ball is concerned, the real threat posed by information technologies stems less from the ability to rabble-rouse across borders, and more from the power to crunch numbers. Traveling around the world tracking human rights, Ball recognized the need for information management systems capable of crunching random reports about disparate abuses into comprehensive documents showing meaningful patterns of violence. The systems he's created have been used by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and will be included later this summer in the Commission for Historical Clarification's final report on human-rights abuses that took place during Guatemala's long and brutal civil war.
"The real power of these technologies is analysis," he says.
