Read these two essays, I only need 5 paragraphs, one opening paragraph, three paragraphs of body part and one conclusion. The three pararaphs of body part should be able to answer the teacher’s queations. Each paragraph should have one argument and two quotes. The quotes should be cited from each essay separately. DO NOT use reources from other place. Only from essays I gave. Less summary more analysis, clear arguments. 3 pages for rough draft is enough. Need first one on Oct 2nd, last one you can follow the deliver time.PLEASE DO NOT COPY ANYTHING FROM OTHER PLACE!
democracy_in_cyberspace.docx
fences.docx
requirement.docx
grading_criteria.doc
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“Information technology has demolished time and distance,” Walter Wriston, the former CEO of
what is now Citigroup wrote in 1997. “Instead of validating Orwell’s vision of Big Brother watching
the citizen, [it] enables the citizen to watch Big Brother. And so the virus of freedom, for which
there is no antidote, is spread by electronic networks to the four corners of the earth.” Former
Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have articulated a similar vision, and
with similarly grandiose rhetoric. All have argued that the long-term survival of authoritarian states
depends on their ability to control the flow of ideas and information within and across their borders.
As advances in communications technology — cellular telephones, text messaging, the Internet,
social networking — allow an ever-widening circle of people to easily and inexpensively share ideas
and aspirations, technology will break down barriers between peoples and nations. In this view, the
spread of the “freedom virus” makes it harder and costlier for autocrats to isolate their people from
the rest of the world and gives ordinary citizens tools to build alternative sources of power. The
democratization of communications, the theory goes, will bring about the democratization of the
world.
There seems to be plenty of evidence to support these ideas. In the Philippines in 2001, protesters
sent text messages to organize the demonstrations that forced President Joseph Estrada from
office. In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine, supporters of Viktor Yushchenko,
then the leader of the opposition, used text messaging to organize the massive protests that
became the Orange Revolution. In Lebanon in 2005, activists coordinated via e-mail and text
messaging to bring one million demonstrators into the streets to demand that the Syrian
government end nearly three decades of military presence in Lebanon by withdrawing its 14,000
troops. (Syria complied a month later, under considerable international pressure.) Over the past
few years, in Colombia, Myanmar (also known as Burma), and Zimbabwe, demonstrators have
used cell phones and Facebook to coordinate protests and transmit photographs and videos of
government crackdowns. The flood of words and images circulated by protesters following Iran’s
bitterly disputed 2009 presidential election — quickly dubbed the “Twitter revolution” — seemed to
reinforce the view that Tehran has more to fear from “citizen media” than from the U.S. ships
patrolling the Persian Gulf.
But a closer look at these examples suggests a more complicated reality. Only in democracies -the Philippines, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Colombia — did these communications weapons
accomplish an immediate objective. In Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Iran, they managed to embarrass
the government but not to remove it from power. As Wriston acknowledged, the information
revolution is a long-term process, cyberspace is a complex place, and technological advances are
no substitute for human wisdom. Innovations in modern communications may help erode
authoritarian power over time. But for the moment, their impact on international politics is not so
easy to predict.
There are many reasons why the optimistic view of the relationship among communications,
information, and democracy has taken root in the United States. First, these communications tools
embody twenty-first-century innovation, and Americans have long believed in the power of
invention to promote peace and create prosperity. And with good reason. Admirers of Reagan
argue that the United States’ ability to invest in strategic missile defense sent the Soviet leadership
into a crisis of confidence from which it never recovered. The light bulb, the automobile, and the
airplane have changed the world, bringing greater personal autonomy to many Americans.
Similarly, Americans believe that the millions of people around the world who use the Internet, an
American invention, will eventually adopt American political beliefs, much like many of those who
wear American jeans, watch American movies, and dance to American music have. Champions of
the Internet’s power to promote pluralism and human rights point to bloggers in China, Russia, and
the Arab world who are calling for democracy and the rule of law for their countries, sometimes in
English.
But of the hundreds of millions who blog in their own languages — there are more than 75 million in
China alone — the vast majority have other priorities. Many more of them focus on pop culture
rather than on political philosophy, on pocketbook issues rather than political power, and on
national pride rather than cosmopolitan pretensions. In other words, the tools of modern
communications satisfy as wide a range of ambitions and appetites as their twentieth-century
ancestors did, and many of these ambitions and appetites do not have anything to do with
democracy.
NET NEUTRALITY
A careful look at the current impact of modern communications on the political development of
authoritarian states should give pause to those who hail these technologies as instruments of
democratization. Techno-optimists appear to ignore the fact that these tools are value neutral;
there is nothing inherently pro-democratic about them. To use them is to exercise a form of
freedom, but it is not necessarily a freedom that promotes the freedom of others.
In enabling choice, the introduction of the Internet into an authoritarian country shares something
fundamental with the advent of elections. Some have argued that promoting elections in one
country in the Middle East will generate demand for elections elsewhere there. “A free Iraq is going
to help inspire others to demand what I believe is a universal right of men and women,” Bush said
in July 2006; elections in Iraq would prompt the citizens of Iraq’s neighbors to ask why Iraqis were
now free to choose their leaders whereas they were not. Similarly, some have argued that the
freedom that comes with the Internet will inevitably democratize China. Once Chinese people read
about the freedoms of others, the thinking goes, they will want the same for themselves. The tools
of modern communications will reveal to Chinese citizens the political freedoms they do not yet
have and provide the means to demand them.
But the limited history of elections in the Middle East shows that people do not always vote for
pluralism. Sometimes, they vote for security or absolutism, sometimes to express outrage or
defend local interests. The same pattern holds true for the Internet and other forms of modern
communications. These technologies provide access to information of all kinds, information that
entertains the full range of human appetites — from titillation to rationalization, from hope to anger.
They provide the user with an audience but do not determine what he will say. They are a
megaphone, and have a multiplier effect, but they serve both those who want to speed up the
cross-border flow of information and those who want to divert or manipulate it.
Cyberspace can be a very dark place. In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier argues that the
anonymity provided by the Internet can promote a “culture of sadism,” feeding an appetite for
drive-by attacks and mob justice. In China, the Internet has given voice to wounded national pride,
anti-Western and anti-Japanese resentment over injuries both real and imagined, and hostility
toward Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs, and other minority groups. It has also become a kind of public
square for improvised violence. In an article for The New York Times Magazine earlier this year,
Tom Downey described the “human-flesh search” phenomenon in China, “a form of online vigilante
justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath.” The
targets of these searches, a kind of “crowd-sourced detective work,” as Downey put it, can be
corrupt officials or enemies of the state, or simply people who have made other people angry.
These problems are hardly unique to China. In Russia, skinheads have filmed murderous attacks
on dark-skinned immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia and posted the footage online.
Also in Russia — and in the United States and Europe — hate groups and militants of various kinds
use the Internet to recruit new members and disseminate propaganda. Of course, beyond all this
fear and loathing, many more people around the world use the Internet as a global shopping mall
and a source of entertainment. The Internet makes it easier for users with political interests to find
and engage with others who believe what they believe, but there is little reliable evidence that it
also opens their minds to ideas and information that challenge their worldviews. The medium fuels
many passions — consumerism and conspiracy theories, resentment and fanaticism — but it
promotes calls for democracy only where there is already a demand for democracy. If technology
has helped citizens pressure authoritarian governments in several countries, it is not because the
technology created a demand for change. That demand must come from public anger at
authoritarianism itself.
STATESIDE
Citizens are not the only ones active in cyberspace. The state is online, too, promoting its own
ideas and limiting what an average user can see and do. Innovations in communications
technology provide people with new sources of information and new opportunities to share ideas,
but they also empower governments to manipulate the conversation and to monitor what people
are saying.
The collapse of Soviet communism a generation ago taught authoritarian leaders around the world
that they could not simply mandate lasting economic growth and that they would have to embrace
capitalism if they hoped to create the jobs and the higher standards of living that would ensure their
long-term political survival. But to embrace capitalism is to allow for dangerous new freedoms. And
so in order to generate strong growth while maintaining political control, some autocrats have
turned to state capitalism, a system that helps them dominate market activity through the use of
national oil companies, other state-owned enterprises, privately owned but politically loyal national
champions, state-run banks, and sovereign wealth funds.
Following precisely the same logic, authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the
increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without
threatening their political power. In June, the Chinese government released its first formal
statement on the rights and responsibilities of Internet users. The document “guarantee[d] the
citizens’ freedom of speech on the Internet as well as the public’s right to know, to participate, to be
heard, and to oversee [the government] in accordance with the law.” But it also stipulated that
“within Chinese territory, the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty.” That caveat
legitimates China’s “great firewall,” a system of filters and re-routers, detours and dead ends
designed to keep Chinese Internet users on the state-approved online path.
The Chinese leadership also uses more low-tech means to safeguard its interests online. The
average Chinese Web surfer cannot be sure that every idea or opinion he encounters in
cyberspace genuinely reflects the views of its author. The government has created the 50 Cent
Party, an army of online commentators that it pays for each blog entry or message-board post
promoting the Chinese Communist Party’s line on sensitive subjects. This is a simple, inexpensive
way for governments to disseminate and disguise official views. Authoritarian states do not use
technology simply to block the free flow of unwelcome ideas. They also use it to promote ideas of
their own.
NONALIGNED MOVEMENT
The techno-optimists who hope that modern communications tools will democratize authoritarian
states are also hoping that they will help align the interests of nondemocracies with those of
democracies. But the opposite is happening. Efforts by police states to control or co-opt these tools
are inevitably creating commercial conflicts that then create political conflicts between
governments.
In January, Google publicly complained that private Gmail accounts had been breached in attacks
originating in China — attacks that Chinese officials appeared to tolerate or even to have launched
themselves. In protest, Google announced that it would no longer censor the results of users’
searches in mainland China, which it had reluctantly agreed to do when it entered the Chinese
market in 2006. Beijing refused to back down, and Google automatically redirected searches by
Chinese users to the uncensored Hong Kong version of the site. But much to the relief of mainland
users, mostly students and researchers who prefer Google’s capabilities to its main domestic rival,
Baidu, Chinese officials eventually announced the renewal of Google’s operating license. (It is
possible that they backtracked because they believed that they could control Google or use it to
monitor the online activities of political dissidents.)
As Chinese technology companies begin to compete on a par with Western ones and the Chinese
government uses legal and financial means to more actively promote domestic firms that see
censorship as a routine cost of doing business, there will be less demand for Google’s products in
China. In August 2010, the state-run Xinhua News Agency and China Mobile, the country’s largest
cell-phone carrier, announced plans to jointly build a state-owned search-engine and media
company. In response to these developments, U.S. technology companies will undoubtedly turn to
U.S. lawmakers for help in creating and maintaining a level commercial playing field in China. Far
from aligning American and Chinese political values and bringing the citizens of the two countries
closer together, conflicts over the flow of information through cyberspace will further complicate the
already troubled U.S.-Chinese relationship.
Signs of strife are already visible. When Google first went public with its complaints about
cyberattacks and censorship, Beijing looked past the company, which it sees as a high-tech arm of
the U.S. government, and addressed its response directly to Washington. A Chinese Communist
Party tabloid ran an editorial under the headline “The World Does Not Welcome the White House’s
Google”; it argued, “Whenever the U.S. government demands it, Google can easily become a
convenient tool for promoting the U.S. government’s political will and values abroad.” In response,
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged companies such as Google not to cooperate with
“politically motivated censorship,” further emphasizing the difference, not the convergence, of
political values in the United States and China.
Revealing similar fears about the future of its political control, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi
Arabia took action earlier this year against Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that
makes the BlackBerry, for equipping its devices with encryption technology that authorities cannot
decode. Arguing that terrorists and spies could use BlackBerries to communicate within the UAE
without fear of being detected, Emirati officials announced in August that they would soon suspend
BlackBerry service unless RIM provided state officials with some means of monitoring BlackBerry
messaging. Within two days, Saudi Arabia announced a similar shutdown, although Riyadh and
RIM have since reached a compromise that requires RIM to install a relay server on Saudi territory,
which allows Saudi officials to monitor messages sent from and within the country. The UAE will
probably also make a deal with RIM: there are half a million BlackBerry users in the UAE (about
ten percent of the population), and the country wants to remain the Arab world’s primary
commercial and tourist hub. Yet far from promoting Western values in non-Western police states,
the BlackBerry has sparked a new round of debate over the willingness of Western technology
companies to protect their market shares by making concessions that help authoritarian
governments spy on their citizens.
In fairness to these governments, the world’s leading democracies are no less concerned about
potential terrorist threats posed by unmonitored messaging. The Indian government has also
threatened to ban BlackBerries unless RIM gives it access to certain data, and counterterrorism
officials in the United States and Europe are considering the option as well. Via efforts to amend
the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Obama administration has already taken steps to
help the FBI gain access to “electronic communication transactional records” — recipients’
addresses, logs of users’ online activities, browser histories — without a court order if investigators
suspect terrorism or espionage. Politicians and technology companies such as Google and RIM
will be fighting these battles for years to come.
Of course, authoritarian governments, unlike democracies, also worry that individuals who are
neither terrorists nor spies will use new communications tools to challenge their political legitimacy.
China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian states cannot halt the
proliferation of weapons of modern communications, but they can try to monitor and manipulate
them for their own purposes. That struggle will continue as well, limiting the ability of new
technologies to empower the political opposition within these countries and creating more conflicts
over political values between democratic and authoritarian states.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
The Internet may have changed the world, but now the world is changing the Internet. For 30
years, new communications technologies have driven globalization, the defining trend of the times.
The companies that created these products made long-term plans based on the wants and needs
of consumers, not governments. Their profits rose as they connected billions of customers with one
another; borders became increasingly less important.
But now, the pace of technological change and the threat of terrorism are forcing policymakers to
expand their definitions of national security and to rethink their definitions of “critical infrastructure.”
As a result, governments are turning to high-tech communications firms to help shore up emerging
security vulnerabilities, and high-tech communications firms have begun to think more like defense
contractors — companies whose success depends on secrecy, exclusivity, political contacts, and
security clearances.
As a result, political borders, which the rise of information technology once seemed set to dissolve,
are taking on a new importance: if greater openness creates new opportunities, it also creates new
worries. Unable to match U.S. defense spending, China and Russia have become adept at
information warfare. The Pentagon reported last August that China continues to develop its ability
to steal U.S. military secrets electronically and to deny its adversaries “access to information
essential to conduct combat operations.” In 2007, a massive cyberattack launched from inside
Russia damaged digital infrastructure in neighboring Estonia. The United States’ vulnerabilities
range from its nuclear power plants and electrical grids to the information systems of government
agencies and major U.S. companies. Despite their political and commercial rivalries, the United
States, China, Russia, India, and many other states also share a vulnerability to cyberattacks, and
they have pledged to work together to build a joint cybersecurity strategy. But when it comes to
espionage, governments can never fully trust one another. And of course the Obama
administration does not want to share technologies that would make it easier for security officials in
Beijing or Moscow to track the …
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