Blocking anti-military blogs may harm military

There have been numerous reports in both the Fijian and international press over the past few of days about the interim government working with FINTEL to censor troublesome blogs. I think that this would be a mistake. In fact, blocking these blogs may actually harm the interim government.

Here are four reasons why Fiji's interim government should reconsider asking FINTEL to block access to anonymous anti-military blogs:

1. Clearly, some of the remarks in Fiji's anonymous political blogs regarding members of the interim government are libelous. Fiji's Defamation Act and supporting Common Law allows for an injured party to ask the court to instruct an Internet Service Provider to turn over records relating to a customer who has published defamatory remarks. No additional legislation or special measures are required. However, some anonymous bloggers cover their tracks and will not be caught by this method.

2. The perception of government tampering in FINTEL, Fiji's pivotal Internet Service Provider through which all Internet traffic flows, would dampen high-tech investment in Fiji. Off-shore service centres rely on the perception of data communications security in order to assure their customers that the confidentiality of their data will not be compromised.

3. Information warfare theory shows that censoring blogs may cost the interim government more than it gains. Power is the ability of a combatant to take an action and have it result in a desired effect. In information warfare, where the weapons are ideas and the battlefields are people's minds, cultures, and ways of life, the power of a combatant is limited by the combatant's perceived legitimacy. Every action that can be perceived as taking the interim government one step further from a return to democracy is going harm the government's perceived legitimacy in the eyes of major international stakeholders - the EU comes to mind here - and in the eyes of at least some proportion of the population of Fiji. This reduced perception of legitimacy then constrains the interim government's future efforts to exercise their power. In an information war, which is certainly what Fiji is currently experiencing, combatants must carefully weigh the consequences of any action before executing it as one's own actions can be more damaging than an enemy attack.

Figure 1.

Any action that weakens Fiji's interim government's perceived legitimacy weakens its power to act.
[diagram from K A Taipale, 2006.]

4. Most importantly, blocking blogspot.com or a hand full of offending blogspot sites will not be effective. Anonymous political bloggers and their readers will simply shift their activities to other available Internet resources, such as:

• A new blog on blogspot.com (unless they just block the whole blogspot domain)
• Any other free blog site such as Wordpress, Livejournal, or countless others
• Any social networking site such as Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, or others
• Any free website provider such as Google Pages, Geocities, or others
• Any instant messaging service from the venerable IRC to jabber, yim, gtalk, or others
• Any group discussion technology from the venerable USENET to Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, or others
• Any p2p technology to circulate files or to chat such as Skype or FWD
• Or users could do any of the above, including reading any blocked blogs, by using open proxy servers, an anonymizing service, or The Onion Router
  

In the final analysis, little or nothing would be gained by the interim government by blocking access to Fiji's anonymous political blogs - Fiji's anti-military bloggers and their readers will carry on regardless - but there certainly would be a price.

Photo by: FelipeArte