(photo of Tomline from Mail on Sunday).
Morozov suggests that the commonly held belief that the internet has put power into the hands of activists and democracy supporters, so they can therefore make their voices heard and influence events, is an illusion..
As he points out, protests are very easy to organise and launch from the Internet, but because it's done so openly on sites like Twitter, it's also much easier to monitor - and control. Morozov illustrates this with the recent Iranian protests. Activists used Twitter to get a lot of young people out on the streets - but the authorities now know who those people are.
And in any case, with the increasing availability and use of data mining, can any activist be sure the authorities are not reading their emails or decrypting their internet traffic, how ever well they try to hide their tracks?
It doesn't require much sophistication to obtain a password of one Facebook user, and from that link on to his other social internet connections. The Iranian authorities were well aware that Twitter and Facebook members were behind the 'green revolution' in which thousands of American Twitterers coloured their profile pictures green in sympathy with the democracy lovers out on the streets.
But the fact that the Iranian authorities now have proof that foreigners are interfering in their country's affairs, isn't going to help the home grown young activists much, is it?
The Daily Mail yesterday suggested that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were released to the world via a tiny internet server in Tomsk.
The server, Tomcity, and its parent company Tomline, offer an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs. Other division of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city. The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.
.In 2002 Tomsk students reportedly launched a 'denial of service' attack on a portal whose site material reporting on Chechnya angered the Russian authorities. It was said that they had been used by the Russian secret service, FSB, to shut down the website - an accusation which can be plausibly denied by the government, of course.
Whatever? As far as I'm concerned, in this instance I'm all in favour of the hackers. The climate change issue is a bandwagon, and we're all entitled to know both sides of the argument. So anyone who enables us to get more information about something which will inevitably involve all of us paying even more taxes, is to be congratulated.
So Professor Ross McKitrick doesn't agree with Professor Jones - so what? It's a free country, McKitrick is entitled to disagree and have his views considered - not dismissed out of hand as 'garbage by Jones, who tried to stop his work being published.
Of course, there's more to this story, but it's early hours Monday now, so more on this later.Except to quote from Tom Lehrer, a very funny and clever academic American satirist and singer, who once had a famous number involving Tomsk which begins:
I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk,
Has friend in Tomsk . . .. .
and ends:
To Tomsk, to Omsk,
To Pinsk, to Minsk,
To me the news will run . .. .
So more news on this will run on this site later - and meanwhile you can pick up Lehrer on You Tube, singing about his friend in Tomsk called Lobachevsky.
(And look out for Evgeny Morozov's book on the internet and democracy, due out in 2010 - he's a very interesting writer).
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