Telecom & Technology

Probably the only firm conclusion that emerged from the Global Assets Project and Open Technology Institute's (OTI) standing-room only February 9th event, “Mobile Disconnect: Can Mobile Solutions Really Combat Poverty?” was that expert opinion is divided. It was generally agreed that mobile connectivity is a critical infrastructure of the information age and, as the Arab Spring has exemplified, a solid foundation for a more empowered, connected, and inclusive society. However, the potential of mobile technologies to revolutionize international development was met by cautious optimism by some and outright skepticism by others.

This is the premier episode of The Sidebar, the weekly podcast from the New America Foundation that looks at what's in and what's underlying the news. This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Tamar Jacoby, Katherine Zoepf and Dan Meredith about Syria, privacy and immigration.

In the summer of 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a researcher at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, set up an email system for about 200 string theorists to exchange papers they had written. The World Wide Web was a mere infant—it had been opened to the public on Aug. 6 of that year. The string theorists weren’t particularly interested in making their research widely available (outsiders would have a tough time following the conversation anyhow). Ginsparg’s archive was a way for the theorists to communicate with one another.

Editor’s Note: Contributors to this post will be part of a panel on the topic taking place on Thursday, February 9th in Washington, D.C. Sign up for the event here. This post is part of the Global Innovation Showcase created by the New America Foundation and the Global Public Square.

The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”

Twitter, it is said, has become evil. The company announced at the end of last week that it would censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. If a government really doesn’t like your hundred and forty characters, Twitter may white them out. Tweetavists reacted with outrage and warned darkly of unreported massacres in Syria. A #twitterblackout protest was organized.

With mobile phones spreading like wildfire in developing countries, they are becoming vital tools in the fight to improve health, educational and economic outcomes for aspiring families around the world (as we have pointed out in a variety of contexts). A recent World Economic Forum report, “Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development,” highlights some of the amazing potential and remaining challenges in the field.

It may surprise anyone under 16, but even before the advent of social networking we faced threats to our privacy. A hospital accidentally releasing patient records or a shady marketing firm engaging in Stasi-like data collection — such violations were substantial enough and disturbing enough to make the evening news. Today, however, the “death of privacy” is more like death by a thousand cuts: information leaks out slowly and invisibly, and so routinely that we’re hardly shocked when it does.

Last week, millions of Americans stood up against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate's related anti-piracy bill. Given the public outcry, it is not surprising that all four Republican presidential candidates have come out against them.

But online censorship in the name of fighting piracy is only one of many issues affecting Americans' digital freedom. Americans who care about their online freedoms should also be asking tough questions about the government's expanding surveillance powers.

In late 2010, on the eve of the Arab Spring uprisings, a Tunisian blogger asked Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah what democratic nations should do to help cyber­activists in the Middle East. Abdel Fattah, who had spent time in jail under Hosni Mubarak’s regime, argued that if Western democracies wanted to support the region’s Internet activists, they should put their own houses in order. He called on the world’s democracies to “fight the troubling trends emerging in your own backyards” that “give our own regimes great excuses for their own actions.”