Iran was not the first first country to use Twitter as a means of organizing a protest. In April 2009, the people of Moldova used Twitter and Facebook to organize demonstrations against the election results and the state of the crumbling economy. 10,000 people marched through the streets of Chisinau, the Moldovan capital. At the same time in London, activists used the same two social networking sites to organize protests against the G20 summit. Last year protestors in San Francisco used Twitter and Facebook to organize protests against the war in Iraq. In Egypt journalists as well as activists have been using Twitter to organize and exchange vital information.
The rise of these websites and the cloud computing infrastructure that powers them is staggering. And that trend is only set to continue. According to Hitwise, in the past year Twitter has grown by 3,000% and Facebook by 123%. And it hasn’t just been ordinary people showing governments a thing or two about organization. Barack Obama systematically organized his election campaign via Twitter and Facebook before launching his own cloud computer based site. Even now, as President, he puts weekly addresses on YouTube in a bid to reach as many people as possible. And in the last few months the Pentagon has awarded contracts to set up its own cloud computing infrastructure.
This isn’t just a fad. Cloud computing offers some serious strengths over traditional servers that not only makes it more secure from the user’s standpoint, but even more of a headache from an oppressive regime’s standpoint.
The whole point of cloud computing is that the applications being used, and the data being used by them are sitting on servers in data centers scattered around the world. You as the user have no idea which server has which piece of information and neither do you care.
Because cloud providers can ensure that data is stored in multiple locations at once, attacking one part of the infrastructure becomes virtually a waste of time, as redundancy will always ensure access to this data. Couple that with making sure that sites are hosted with multiple cloud providers, and websites can become virtually unassailable, experiencing close to zero downtime. And if that wasn’t enough, by utilizing elasticity, an inherent feature of cloud computing, distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS attacks), which ironically are themselves a form of cloud computing, are in effect rendered entirely impotent.
In short, governments that in the past used their own hackers to try and disrupt sources of information are finding it impossible to attack cloud computing based services in any meaningful way, leaving them with the only option but to shut down all access to certain sites from within their own borders, and even then, as in the case of Twitter, the Iranian regime took days to recognize the threat, days which were readily used by its restless population to air their justified grievances.
Cloud computing has rendered information borderless, and this is going to have profound political implications even for democracies that have assumed they have little to fear. For example, take copyright law. George Orwell’s book 1984 is in the public domain in Australia. It is free to distribute there. However the copyright does not expire in the United States until 2044. What would happen if an Australian company tried to sell a copy of the book from a website that stored the text on servers based within the United States — without even knowing it — and have broken U.S. law?
This isn’t theoretical. In July 2009, Amazon removed an ebook version of 1984 from their servers because although the company that was selling it was based in Australia, the copyright holder in the United States, where copies of this ebook could be purchased — complained.
Both companies were in the right according to their respective national laws. But in a world of borderless information, whose law takes precedence? The political ramifications of borderless information have barely begun to play out and organizing demonstrations is only the beginning.
Related posts: