New Media Politics : Rethinking Activism and National Security in Cyberspace [1 ed.] 9781443883160, 9781443877107

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New Media Politics

New Media Politics: Rethinking Activism and National Security in Cyberspace Edited by

Banu Baybars-Hawks

New Media Politics: Rethinking Activism and National Security in Cyberspace Edited by Banu Baybars-Hawks This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Banu Baybars-Hawks and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7710-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7710-7

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., a journalism historian and legal scholar. Dr. Teeter passed away on February 27, 2015. His academic career spanned fifty years and included teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His last home institution was the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he served as dean of the College of Communications from 1991 to 2002 and continued to teach as a professor until he retired at the end of 2014. Dr. Teeter had a major impact on the lives of so many of his students and colleagues. With the announcement of his death, countless messages of mourning were shared at an interpersonal level and via social media. Some of the words or phrases used to describe Dr. Teeter were “witty,” “genuine,” “honest,” “incredibly smart,” and “class act.” Many expressed how Dr. Teeter went beyond being an educator and was also a friend who often extended a helping hand and provided words of encouragement. Dr. Teeter genuinely cared about the well-being of others, and it was a great joy for him to see his students and mentees find success in life. Dr. Teeter was passionate about the issues of press freedom and government transparency. In the 13th edition of his textbook Law of Mass Communications, Dr. Teeter expressed deep concern about the recent expansions of government secrecy and intrusions into privacy by the government, law enforcement agencies, and private businesses. This was a topic that he was looking forward to researching upon retirement. It is unfortunate that we will never have the opportunity to read the scholarly work that this brilliant scholar would have produced. Perhaps we may comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the many individuals inspired by Dr. Teeter’s writings will in some way continue his work by asking difficult but important questions pertaining to the free flow of information and press freedom. Research that sought to reveal social injustices and protect vital social and political freedoms always brought a smile to Dr. Teeter’s face. That smile will be profoundly missed, but fondly remembered.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables ........................................................................... x Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Part I. Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Introduction—Occupying Cyberspace: Cyberactivism, Cyberterrorism and Cybersecurity Banu Baybars-Hawks Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15 Resistance from within Hegemony: The Rise of Semi-Anonymous Resistance in the New Media Environment Sarphan Uzuno÷lu Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 34 Electronic Intifada: Platform for Conflict Transformation Eser Selen Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49 Cyberactivism in Syria's War: How Syrian Bloggers Use the Internet for Political Activism Yenal Göksun Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 63 The Multitudes: From Ideological Disease to Conceptual Cure Cristina Ivan Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 78 Activism, Transmedia Storytelling and Empowerment Eloisa Nos Aldas

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 95 The Dynamics of a New Mediated Protest Cycle: Networked, Transitional and Radical? Pantelis Vatikiotis Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 112 The Internet's Impact on Social Movements: The Role of Facebook in the January 25 Revolution in Egypt Hussni Nasr Part II. Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 134 Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror Aúkn ønci Sökmen Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 155 The Social Media OSINT Challenge to US Intelligence: Culture not Gigabytes Abdelrahman Rashdan Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 173 Legitimizing Securitization of Cyberspace by using "Risk" Discourse Sevda Ünal Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 186 Opinion Production by UGC: An Analysis of Readers' Reviews about Online News related to Al-Qaeda Bilge Narin and Bahar Ayaz Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 198 Technology, Surveillance, and National Security: Implications for Democracy Catherine A. Luther Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 215 The Dialectics of Internet Censorship: A Mouffian Analysis of Resistance and Subversion in the Case of Turkey Ça÷r Yalkn

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 229 From the “Worst Menace to Societies” to the “Robot Lobby”: A Semantic View of Turkish Political Rhetoric on Social Media Suncem Koçer Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 244 Internet Surveillance and Censorship: Discourses of Security, Privacy and Morality ørem ønceo÷lu Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 257 At a Critical Crossroads: New Media, Government and Society in Turkey Banu Baybars-Hawks Contributors ............................................................................................. 269

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Fig.6-1. International social movements (Darnton and Kirk, 2011) as regards international NGDOs and the communicative realities of activism ........................................................................................... 83 Fig. 6-2. A meme on natural gas................................................................ 87 Fig. 6-3. A meme with a Spanish politician involved in allowing fracking as the main character ............................................................................ 87 Table 8-1. Numbers of posts and comments on Facebook pages. ........... 120 Table 8-2. Frequency of thematic frames in posts and comments on Facebook pages ............................................................................. 123 Table 8-3. Frequency of topic of posts and comments on Facebook pages. ................................................................................................. 124 Table 8-4. Comparison of frequency of posts and function of comments on Facebook pages. ............................................................................ 125 Table 8-5. Frequency of types of textual links included in Facebook posts and comments. .......................................................................... 126 Table 9-1. World map indicating the locations of nuclear power stations, 2006 ................................................................................................... 142 Fig.10-1. How social media can be divided in terms of social presence . 158 Fig. 11-1. Three Cyber Security Discourses. ........................................... 177 Fig. 12-1. Number of readers’ comments in the samples. ....................... 192 Table 12-1. The subjects of readers’ comments. ..................................... 193 Table 12- 2. Instances of hate speech ...................................................... 193 Table 12-3. Emphasis on Islamic Terrorism ........................................... 194 Table 12-4. Relevance to Islam ............................................................... 195 Fig. 16-1. An image of an individual with a laptop sitting comfortably as she surfs the Internet http://www.hotspotshield.com/ [Accessed May 2014] .......................................................................................... 253 Fig. 16-1. The Turkish version of the website offering a different image and emphasis http://www.hotspotshield.com/tr/ [Accessed May 2014] .......................................................................................... 253

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This edited volume is based on selected papers presented at a conference titled “New Media Politics: Conflict, Activism, and Security” (held at Kadir Has University in Istanbul in April 2014). I appreciate all the support I received from Kadir Has University, as well as my colleagues at the Faculty of Communications. I would also like to thank all of the participants of the conference, as their presentations and discussions played a crucial role in shaping the structure of this edited volume. Very special thanks to all of the contributors for the quality of the chapters and for their timely and kind responses to our every request, as well as their willingness to share their ideas with us while I was working on the volume. I would like to extend my gratitude to each, in order of appearance: Sarphan Uzuno÷lu, Eser Selen, Yenal Göksun, Cristina Ivan, Eloisa Nos Aldas, Pantelis Vatikiotis, Hussni Nasr, Aúkn ønci Sökmen, Abdelrahman Rashdan, Sevda Ünal, Bilge Narin, Bahar Ayaz, Catherine A. Luther, Ça÷r Yalkn, Suncem Koçer, and ørem ønceo÷lu. I greatly appreciate the assistance I received from Mark D. Wyers with proofreading the chapters. And of course, I would like to thank Michael Dean Hawks, Derin Kyle Hawks and the other members of my family for always being there for me.

PART I.

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION— OCCUPYING CYBERSPACE: CYBERACTIVISM, CYBERTERRORISM AND CYBERSECURITY BANU BAYBARS-HAWKS

A lot has changed in the world since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The US, which has been held up as a leading advocate of fundamental freedoms, was attacked in the heart. This act of terrorism targeting the US raised many concerns and questions and created difficult ethical and professional challenges for democracies. The main concern was how to achieve a balance between state control and basic rights and freedoms, and whether such a balance is necessary. These issues are still discussed today at a time when societies are facing new threats and attacks in light of developments in technology, which has offered new alternatives for terrorist activities. As Yonah Alexander has noted: This threat has become much more decentralized as it now emanates not only from established organizations, but also from freelance individuals with the motives, means, and opportunity to visit harm upon civil society. As a result of these developments, contemporary terrorism presents a multitude of threats to safety, welfare, and civil rights of ordinary people; the stability of state systems; the health of national and international economic systems; and the expansion of democracies. (2011, x)

The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” have been called the first war of the Internet age (Glass 2002). Terrorism today is at the intersection of radicalism and technology. In the past, enemies could be defined or confined geographically but now there are no clear geographical boundaries separating “us” from the enemy because they are able to take advantage of technology: “Non-state actors with their

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asymmetrical force structures have overstepped the state boundaries and became global with the advent of information technologies and globalization” (Aydn, Hurriyet Daily News, January 15, 2015). With this new face, terrorism is more dangerous than ever because its origins may not be known and it may not be bound up with any given nation-state. Today’s terrorists do not need planes, bombs and other such weapons to carry out attacks. They can infect important computer systems with viruses and paralyze the military, political and economic resources of a country, even a continent. Cyberspace is an attractive venue for people hoping to carry out acts of terror because it is cheaper and more anonymous than traditional methods of terrorism. The variety of targets is also quite large, as is their number, and cyberterrorists can operate remotely: “Cyberterrorism requires less physical training, psychological investment, risk of mortality, and travel than conventional forms of terrorism, making it easier for terrorist organizations to recruit and retail followers” (Wiemann 2004, 5). Since cyberterrorism has a direct influence on a larger number of people than conventional terrorism, it generates more publicity and receives more media attention, which is precisely what terrorists seek. Cyberspace is a key aspect of modern life, but the growing dependence of society on information technologies has created new vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks: “The more technologically developed a country is, the more vulnerable it becomes to cyberattacks against its infrastructure” (Wiemann 2004, 2). Cyberterrorism has been acknowledged by most governments as a serious national security concern. Jonathan Matusitz (2008) describes seven types of cyberterrorist activities: attacking infrastructure, commandeering nuclear power plants or hazardous waste facilities, using computers to control dam flows, hacking into power grids, using technology to commit sabotage, initiating protests that involve hacking government computers, and illegally compromising information accessed through computers. One of the most important cyberterrorist attacks was the Stuxnet computer worm incident, which occurred in July of 2010. During the attack, Iranian computers were hacked with the aim of destroying plutonium enrichment plants, thus hampering the country’s alleged efforts to develop a nuclear bomb. It was widely rumored that the attacks were engineered through a joint effort between the United States and Israel. Allegedly, Iran responded by launching a cyberattack on US financial institutions. In 2007, the Eastern European nation of Estonia was hit with a massive DoS attack that affected government and corporate websites. Estonia blamed the Russian government, which denied responsibility.

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The products of popular culture have helped expand on fears of cyberterrorism. In June of 2003, the Washington Post published this frontpage headline: “Cyber-Attacks by Al Qaeda Feared, Terrorists at Threshold of Using Internet as Tool of Bloodshed, Experts Say.” In a movie titled War Games dating from 1983, a young hacker breaks into a US military supercomputer and sets in motion a chain of events that have the potential to start World War III. The theme of GoldenEye, a James Bond film, was also cyberterrorism. Swordfish, Die Hard 4.0 and the TV series 24 are other examples. Novels about cyberterrorism include Tom Clancy’s Net Force series, Winn Schwartau’s Pearl Harbor.com, and James Dashner’s The Eye of Minds and The Rule of Thoughts. Mass media is also likely to label hacking activities as acts of cyberterrorism. Therefore, it is important to separate “hacking” from “cyberterrorism,” even though their borders are difficult to define. Hacking has been described as covert activities conducted online that seek to reveal, manipulate, or otherwise exploit vulnerabilities in computer operating systems and other software. While the aim of cyberterrorists is to kill or spread terror, hackers only seek to wreak havoc. However, the distinction between hacking and cyberterrorism sometimes blurs, such as when terrorist groups are able to recruit or hire hackers. Hackers can be turned into cyberterrorists, and this transition can be motivated by money or prestige. As young and educated people are brought into the fold of terrorist groups, this new generation will have the means to execute acts of cyberterrorism (Baybars-Hawks and Akser 2012). As cyberspace is increasingly used for a variety of purposes by terrorists and hackers, different terms have arisen such as “hacktivisim.” Hacktivism can be defined as “the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in the pursuit of political ends.” Hacktivist activities span many political ideals and issues. Freenet is a prime example of translating political thought (that anyone should be able to speak) into code. Hacktivism is an offshoot of the Cult of the Dead Cow, and its core belief is that access to information is a basic human right (Karatzogianni 2006). Hacktivism is a controversial term, and can often be misconstrued as cyberterrorism, just as hacking. What separates hacktivism from cyberterrorism is a distinctly political or social cause behind the “haction.” Some argue that it was coined to describe how electronic direct action might drive social change by combining programming skills with critical thinking. Others use it more or less synonymously with malicious, destructive acts that undermine the security of the Internet as a technical, economic and political platform.

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Essentially, the controversy reflects two divergent philosophical strands within the hacktivist movement. One side argues that malicious cyber-attacks are an acceptable form of direct action (black hat hackers). The other side claims that all protests should be peaceful, refraining from destruction (white hat hackers) (PCtools.com, accessed October 12, 2014). A major form of hacking called “denial of service” (DoS) attacks paralyze websites, financial networks and computer systems by transferring data to them from outside computers. A fifteen-year-old Canadian boy carried out the first documented DoS attack in 2000 against several ecommerce sites including eBay and Amazon, shutting some down and disrupting others at an estimated cost of $1.7 billion dollars. Computer hackers have also targeted government and private web networks. For example, in 2006 the Pentagon reported six million attempts to break into its networks. This number has increased yearly, including a successful attempt supposedly originating in China to hack into the $300 billion dollar Joint Strike Fighter project and copy data about its design and electronics systems. According to computer experts, computer criminals in China and Russia have infiltrated the US electrical grid and installed software capable of damaging the system. In 2011 alone, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) responded to more than 106,000 cyber security threats and released more than 5,000 viable cybersecurity alerts to public and private sector partners (Burghardt 2013). Private sector organizations and companies are often targeted by cybercriminals for both financial gain and political reasons. In November of 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment suffered a massive data breach that froze its computer systems. In the days following the initial attack, the hackers who claimed responsibility for the breach posted data to an anonymous Internet posting board. The information leaked to the public included salary information, internal passwords, employee social security numbers, executive presentation slides, and a number of unreleased films (Savov 2014). In early 2015, a major leak occurred when information belonging to the account holders of HSBC Bank’s Swiss branch was put online. Hackers target ordinary citizens as well. On a regular basis news stories report about hackers raiding computer networks for social security numbers, banking and credit card information, and other information used for identity theft. In 2005, hackers breached the University of California’s computer system and stole the social security numbers of 97,000 students, and the same happened again in 2009 (Dearen, August 5, 2009). Social movements have increasingly been using advanced forms of communication technology as a means of mobilizing. These new forms of

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technology are redefining political struggles by providing the resources and environment necessary for activist movements. It has been argued that the Internet is potentially “more persuasive and effective in diffusing social ideas and actions within a global community of interest than any other communication technology in history” (Castells 2001). Also, “Information on the Internet, not necessarily available in the mainstream press, and coming from alternative sources that otherwise may not be heard, enhances the resources available to actors in social and political struggles” (Meikle 2002; Pickerill 2003, in Carty & Onyett, 238). This has led to rapid, creative and universal action among activists. Although these new technologies make it easier to access information and resources to bring about social change, their role in helping movements grow has been questioned (Carty & Onyett 2006, 240). Advances in technology have also given rise to new social movements (NSMs): “NSMs are based on identity-issues and operate at the grassroots level. These are differentiated from previous, or ‘old’, movements that focused exclusively on classbased issues at the structural level” (Carty and Onyett 2006, 231). Redefinitions of the concept of activism are indicative of the fact that activism has grown around issues selected by a group of individuals (Illia 2003, 326). These players include traditional pressure groups that go online, as well as spontaneous aggregation and individuals (327). Activist movements do not necessarily end up in actual protests, but cyberspace often serves as the initial platform for protest activities, as happened during the Arab Spring. Cyberactivism, in other words, political activism on the Internet, often includes online activist strategies “from online awareness campaigns to Internet-transmitted laser-projected messaging” (McCaughey & Ayers 2003, 2). Cyberactivism has thus brought about new challenges regarding political organizing and social change: “For example, hacktivists conduct online sit-ins and deface Webpages as a form of protest” (McCaughey & Ayers, 5). Whether this action can be framed as a new form of political direct action or just a national security breach is an important question. According to Sandor Vegh (in McCaughey & Ayers, 71), cyberactivist tactics can be categorized in three ways: awareness/advocacy, organization/mobilization, and action/reaction. An undeniable fact is that the Internet is increasingly being used in acts of resistance. Since cyberspace has become a platform for activist movements, governments and corporations have taken steps to ensure that they are prepared to deal with these threats: “As in the case of traditional resistance movements, by framing online activism as criminal activity or a national security threat, they reinforce their hegemonic grip on dissent” (Ibid. 93). Several chapters

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in this book elaborate on the struggle between hegemonic structures and activist movements from different perspectives. The ubiquitous nature of communication technologies has resulted in a variety of discussions regarding the regulation of cyberspace. One side argues that cyberspace should be a free democratic space, while the other focuses on cyberspace as a platform for crime, espionage, fraud, and even war and hence argues that it should be regulated (Kremer 2014, 220). During the early years of Internet in the mid-1990s, many users believed and argued that the world of cyberspace should be free from all governmental regulation. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which was authored by John Perry Barlow, suggested that national governments should not play a role in governing cyberspace. He argued that the community existing in cyberspace would create its own rules and manage conflicts outside the jurisdiction of any particular country. Particularly important was the protection of free expression and exchange among the “bodiless” personalities of cyberspace: “The Internet can be used as place of freedom and of political activism, and can enable new forms of political participation and organization of democracy” (Kremer, 226). Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), of which Barlow was a cofounder, were established with the aim of protecting cyberspace as a location for the free sharing of knowledge, ideas, culture and community. Such organizations pursue this goal through a variety of activities, including opposition to legislation seen to be in conflict with the free use of technology, launching court cases to preserve people’s rights, and initiating publicity campaigns to inform and engage the public on issues of cyberspace and technology (Bussell 2007). The main argument used to justify regulating cyberspace is the protection of national security. The fear that cyberspace can be used by extremists, terrorists and organized crime affiliates has driven technologically vulnerable societies to enact laws limiting access to cyberspace. Since state governments believe that threats to the security of their citizens and the stability of their regimes may arise from within cyberspace, they take measures to control both access and content. With this aim, they have developed new standards of safety as well as new forms of surveillance (Kremer 226). A few of the chapters in this book discuss these new forms of security challenges regarding cyberspace in terms of control and surveillance strategies that are being used in different countries. These include both state regulations and international agreements concerning the character of cyberspace. For example, the Chinese government, as with the Turkish government, maintains controls on who is able to access the Internet and what content is available. The US

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government has placed restrictions on certain online activities, such as the sharing of digital data, through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other legislation, and it has also developed a strategy to ensure the security of cyberspace in order to prevent and respond to attacks on Internet infrastructure (Bussell 191). Shortly after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered a review of government efforts to defend US information and communications systems. According to Cyberspace Policy Review, the goal was to come up with an organized and unified response to future cyberthreats, strengthen public and private partnerships, find technological solutions to enhance US security and prosperity, and invest in cutting edge research and development. They also called for a campaign to promote cybersecurity awareness and digital literacy from boardrooms to classrooms and develop a twenty-first century digital workforce. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched the National Cyber Security and Communications Integration Center, a twenty-four-hour watch and warning center; it is also the country’s principal hub for organizing cyber-response efforts and maintaining a comprehensive national outlook. In 2010, the DHS and the Department of Defense signed an agreement by the terms of which they will jointly counter threats to critical military and civilian computer systems and networks. The agreement embedded Department of Defense cyber analysts within the DHS and DHS personnel within the Department of Defense’s National Security Agency (Bussell 2007). Just as states have attempted to regulate cyberspace, international regulations regarding the control of cyberspace exist as well. One of the first international treaties on cybercrimes is the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, Budapest, 23 November 2001, ETS no.185). The Convention lists the crimes that are committed in cyberspace, including “computerrelated fraud, forgery, system interference, computer misuse, child pornography and copyright infringements, [and] it attempts to bind states to include specific countermeasures within their legal systems,” while at the same time it obliges states to “ensure the legal and factual possibilities for searching computers, real-time collection and also intercepting data” (Kremer, 234-35). Kremer points out that there are dangers in the criminalization of malicious acts in cyberspace since it could create opportunities for security agencies to expand their surveillance capabilities (235). The chapters in this volume explore many of the questions surrounding the new challenges that have arisen as a result of the emergence of cyberspace, including cyber activism, cyberterrorism, and cyber security.

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They provide case studies across an array of geographies as they debate questions regarding conceptual issues in cyberspace, the relationship between politics and cyberterrorism and cyber activism, state and international regulations concerning cyberspace, resistance movements in cyberspace, and media frameworks concerning terrorism, civil liberties, and government restrictions. By bringing this collection together, we hope to provide a venue for discussions of the diverse issues around the theme of new media politics from international and interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume is divided into two parts. The first part of the volume focuses on how cyberspace has been involved in activism, acts of resistance and protests. The second part of the volume investigates issues related to how online media is used in terrorism and how governments have sometimes perceived cyberspace as a threat, leading at times to regulations which threaten to curtail liberties in the name of protecting the “security” of the state against enemies that may be seen as “internal” or “external.”

Part I In Chapter 2 Sarphan Uzuno÷lu focuses on the use of cyberspace by political activists and proposes that the secure and anonymous use of new media will be needed to replace the existing practice of surveillance in many democracies. In his analysis, he suggests that anonymity is a new means of organizing direct democracy in communities of various sizes, meaning that anonymity and semi-anonymity can provide citizens with secure access to political decision-making processes. In this way, the use of anonymity and semi-anonymity through hegemony may create a new and more democratic environment for both resistance and contemporary daily politics. Eser Selen in Chapter 3 discusses the politics of resistance and reaches conclusions that in many ways support Uzuno÷lu’s arguments about the increasing usage and importance of new media tools in activist movements. Her case study is The Electronic Intifada, which is an online resource for media analysis, criticism, and activism focusing on Palestine, its people, politics, culture and place in the world, and which has played a significant role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its transformation. Selen concludes by noting the effectiveness of EI in building a counterhegemonic community: “...the real challenge in the kind of resistance that EI poses for the occupation is to transform the conflict through the global solidarity they generate while sustaining the resistance in order to achieve more concrete political results.”

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Similarly, Yenal Göksun in Chapter 4 investigates online political activism and how the Internet is being used as a tool for advocacy. He takes as his case study Syrian bloggers. Highlighting the Syrian government’s strict control of cyberspace since the beginning of the uprising in the country, Göksun argues that blogging has given Syrian bloggers a non-violent space for expressing their opinions as the violence in society rages around them. The conflict in Syria motivated bloggers to focus on political issues and start discussions on topics which were previously seen as taboo. He concludes that Syrian blogs have shaped a new public sphere and helped create a civil society which will be necessary in the future. In Chapter 5, Cristina Ivan focuses on the concept of hyper-reality and its implications in the area of activism. She argues that the complexities of the virtual online environment overlap “reality as we know it” and within this context she sees hyper-reality as one of the major catalysts and effects of globalization. Ivan also notes that active citizenship will not be possible in the absence of technology and hyper-reality. She concludes by arguing that real and simulated interactions between individuals, real world activism and virtual statements blend in a continuum, offering up a taste of future social patterns and behaviors as we witness the emergence of a new master-narrative of active citizenship in the search for meaningful causes. Eloisa Nos Aldas in Chapter 6 explores new media activism by applying narrative power analysis and story-based strategies for social change. She reviews the cultural consequences of communicative innovations and the successes of engagement with the 15M movement in 2011 in Spain (the #SpanishRevolution) as well as around the world in digital networks. Aldas points out the potential and power of viral storytelling and cultural memes as a recent trend of social movements together with the options of information and participation made possible by transmedia as key elements in scenarios of social change. She argues that they have broken the spirals of silence described by Noelle Neumann (1974) and started a new era for social action and communication. In Chapter 7, Pantelis Vatikiotis examines the dynamics of new mediated protest cycles and questions their dimensions in terms of: a) the “networked” structure of movements, b) their “(trans)national” echoes, and c) their “radical” perspective. This chapter emphasizes the need for an integrated approach to contemporary mediated forms of contention through the prism (concepts and tools) of media studies and social movement studies research. Vatikiotis points out the challenges that have been addressed by analyses of the interplay between protest movements

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and media as a whole at the state and transnational levels in relation to constructions of the politics of conflict. Hussni Nasr in Chapter 8 elaborates on the Internet’s impacts on social movements. He specifically analyzes the role played by Facebook in the revolution in Egypt in 2011. By using content analysis, Nasr examines how Facebook posts and comments were framed to mobilize and advance an online revolution that activated an offline movement in Egypt. In conclusion, the author emphasizes the role of social media including the use of Facebook for posting citizen journalism accounts and the importance of interactivity among users via Facebook features such as the ability to “like” a comment or respond to another’s comment. Nasr argues that these features contributed to the transition of the Egyptian movement from the online virtual realm to the offline real world.

Part II In Chapter 9, Aúkn ønci Sökmen discusses the importance of globalization and the impacts of the information revolution on society, as well as their roles in changing our definitions of crime and conflict. She argues that netwar may well be the dominant mode of societal conflict in the new era, and points out that the distinguishing element of netwar is the network, not technology. Because networks motivate ofcials to build their own networks as well as hybrids of hierarchies and networks to deal with networked organizations, doctrines, and the strategies of their information-age adversaries, Netwars and counter-netwars have become pressing issues. Abdelrahman Rashdan in Chapter 10 focuses on the problem that rapid developments in information technology have created for the Intelligence Community (IC). He observes that the main issue is not so much about using sophisticated technology effectively to keep a close eye on the open source information boost, but rather it is an “educational problem.” Rashdan lists four main kinds of challenges that have been posed by social media as regards Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): knowledge management, the nature of data in terms of language and cultural context, access to data, and IC’s “educational problem.” He then offers strategies that could be used to solve those issues. In Chapter 11 Sevda Ünal discusses the securitization of cyberspace. She claims that states have employed an argument of “risk” to justify practices of control and surveillance in cyberspace. She further observes that securitization in the name of preventing “risks” brings along problematic issues such as privacy, regulation, surveillance, censorship,

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and Internet regulation while also creating tension in the international system. Her study concludes with a discussion of the state laws and regulations which have been developed in the name of ensuring security. In Chapter 12, Bilge Narin and Bahar Ayaz offer conclusions regarding their content analysis of readers’ comments for news related to an ISIS attack that was carried out in Turkey. The main aim of their research is to analyze user-generated content in online Turkish news about terrorism. Narin and Ayaz’s study reveals that the narrative discourses used by readers of online news differ from reviews of traditional news about terrorism. Readers of online news both criticize and support terrorists’ motives as well as the government’s policies of security. Their comments conclude with the various new ways that terrorist acts can be linked to other events. Catherine A. Luther in Chapter 13 discusses the types of surveillance activities that have been adopted in the name of national security in various democratic nations, including the United States. She then goes on to present a historical overview of US intelligence-gathering operations. Her chapter concludes with a discussion of the increase in new media usage by terrorist groups and its implications with regard to the future of state surveillance, and in turn, democratic governance. In Chapter 14, Ça÷r Yalkn shifts the focus to surveillance practices that have been used by the Turkish government as regards cyberspace. According to Yalkn, social media constitutes a politically charged space and this contested space thus provokes authoritarian governments to intervene in or censor the use of such platforms, which, in turn, triggers (politically charged) reactions and resistance. Within this context, she conceptualizes social media and the use and censoring of Twitter in Turkey as a public sphere in which agonistic pluralism is enacted, and she concludes that the way in which this destabilization pluralizes the public sphere in the case of Turkey is agonistic, as demonstrated by the two Twitter cases investigated in her study. In Chapter 15, Suncem Koçer similarly dwells on the reactions of governments when social media is seen as posing a threat to the legitimacy of their existence. In response to the question of how political powers seek to retain hegemonic constructions of social and political life that are breached by the widespread use of social media, she argues that in order to contain dissent and the free-flow of information via social media, governments tend to produce discourses that criminalize the medium of popular mobilization. Additionally, she provides a semantic analysis of the president of Turkey’s rhetoric on social media and notes the particular mechanisms of criminalization he uses.

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ørem ønceo÷lu in Chapter 16 elaborates on the arguments that have been used to discuss re-constructions of the Internet in accordance with its usage for various purposes. Within this context, she examines how the issues of security, individual rights and freedoms have been constructed as attempts to control the Internet and its users. ønceo÷lu’s analysis covers the case of Turkey from the year 2011 onward and discusses Internet censorship and surveillance, as well as the counter-culture that has arisen in response. In Chapter 17 Banu Baybars-Hawks focuses on the interactions occurring between new media, government and society in Turkey as a result of the increasing use of social media by young users. She discusses the latest regulations drafted by the government regarding new media and points out that the restrictions on new media in Turkey amount to censorship. Baybars-Hawks further claims that limitations introduced by laws on new media should be proportional and in line with the requirements of democracy.

Works Cited Alexander, Y. 2011. Foreword. In If It was not for Terrorism- Crisis, Compromise, and Elite Discourse in the Age of “War on Terror, eds. Banu Baybars Hawks & Lemi Baruh, ix-x. NE: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Akser, M and Baybars-Hawks, B. 2012. Media and Democracy in Turkey: Toward a Model of Neoliberal Media Autocracy. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5: 302-321. Aydn, M. 15 January 2015. The Challenge of Non-state Extremism. Hurriyet Daily News. Burghardt, T. 2013. The dark road from the clipper chip to Prism reveals ‘Crypto Wars’ never ended. http://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2013/11/18/thedark-road-f.php Bussell, J. 2007. Cyberspace. In Encyclopedia of Governance, ed. Mark Bevir, 190-192. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Carty, V. and Onyett, J. 2006. Protest, cyberactivism and new social movements: The reemergence of the peace movement post-9/11. Social Movement Studies 5(3): 229-249. Castells, M. 2001. Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, Budapest, 23 November 2001.

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Dearen, J. 2009. Hackers breach US Berkeley computers. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/30645920/ns/technology_and_sciencesecurity/t/hackers-breach-uc-berkeley-computers/ Accessed February 23, 2015. Glass, A.J. 2001. The war on terrorism goes online: Media and government response to first post-Internet crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Illia, L. 2003. Passage to Cyberactivism: How dynamics of activism change? Journal of Public Affairs 3(4): 326-337. Karatzogianni, A. 2006. The Politics of Cyberconflict. New York: Routledge. Kremer, J. 2014. Policing cybercrime or militarizing cybersecurity? Security mindsets and the regulation of threats from cyberspace. Information & Communications Technology Law 23(3): 220-237. Matusitz, J. 2008. Cyberterrorism: Postmodern State of Chaos. Information Security Journal 17 (4): 179-187. McCaughey, M. and Ayers, M.D. 2003. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Meikle, G. 2002. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York: Routledge. Pickerill, J. 2003. Cyberprotest: Environmental Activism. New York: Manchester University Press. Savov, V. 2014. Sony Pictures hacked: The full story. http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/8/7352581/sony-pictures-hackedstorystream. Accessed January 22, 2015. Wiemann, G. 2004. Cyberterrorism: How real is the threat? Special Report No.119, United States Institute of Peace, December. —. What’s a blackhat hacker? http://www.pctools.com/security-news/ hacking/. Accessed February 12, 2015.

CHAPTER TWO RESISTANCE FROM WITHIN HEGEMONY: THE RISE OF SEMI-ANONYMOUS RESISTANCE IN THE NEW MEDIA ENVIRONMENT SARPHAN UZUNOöLU

Introduction Starting in the 1990s, the Internet became an extraordinarily important means of organizing and constructing political activism on the web. From the Zapatista movement in South America to the protests in Cairo, Tehran and Istanbul, year by year the Internet has been used more effectively by political activists and the structure of political organizations has changed. As in Belarus and Thailand, various countries have regarded the Internet as a political instrument; from election campaigns to surveys, the Internet has been used by political organizations. Yet, the most significant aspect of new media use has been its position within mass movements as a tool for mobilization. Anti-war and anti-globalization movements have used the Internet for communicating within their own groups as well as for promoting their ideas to others. Yet, all these political developments are not limited to NGOs’ (Non-Governmental Organizations) or political groups’ existence on the Internet. The Internet has changed both the nature of democracy within these groups and activists’ methods of protesting all over the world. By scrutinizing the way that anonymity influences ingroup practices of democracy and public politics, this article suggests that secure and anonymous new media usage represents a means for replacing existing democratic practices that are maintained under surveillance. This chapter takes up the conceptualization of anonymity in its various forms because anonymity itself has been a political strategy in both conventional and digital activism in the contemporary world. Newly emerging forms of leaderless and less competitive types of political activism and resistance are analyzed in this study based on the personal

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and collective experiences of activists who have used anonymity in various ways for political aims. In addition to proposing that forms of anonymity are instruments for radical democracy, this essay addresses the issues of social conditions and technical layers in order to bring to the surface activists’ misperceptions about their levels of anonymity. This study hypothesizes that day by day there are increasing numbers of people who feel that they are threatened by surveillance and try to create measures to oppose it. By drawing on techniques such as pseudonymity and anonymity (protecting personal information on the web), people have started to create individual means of opposing control, and these mechanisms of resistance will be discussed in the following pages.1 This essay addresses two dimensions of these reactionary anonymous uses of the Internet. By exploring these dimensions and forms of anonymity, the second part of this study will take up the issue of pseudonymous, semi-anonymous and anonymous users in Turkey's new media environment. The first dimension is referred to here as the technical and theoretical dimension of anonymity, while the second, anonymity, is addressed as a social preference and a method of resistance. In the first part of this study, background information about anonymity and semianonymity will be provided, and the various layers and definitions of anonymity will be described. Perceptions and technical methods of providing anonymity will also be discussed in this regard. Those dimensions are based on the social and political experiences of anonymity and its various practices in Turkey’s new media environment. In addition, the essay analyses the results of in-depth interviews in terms of the theoretical background. In the conclusion, based on my research I propose that semi-anonymity represents a new way of establishing a radical democratic and secure political network.

Theoretical background of anonymity and semi-anonymity To begin with, it will be useful to clarify the technical, practical and theoretical definitions of anonymity, semi-anonymity and identifiability. Starting with the layers and conditions of anonymity, I will cover surveillance mechanisms in Turkey's new media environment and the various technical and social methods that have been used to grant anonymity to users. Based on technical and social methods and a theoretical background, I will propose a distinction between anonymity, semi-anonymity and pseudonymity.

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Layers and definitions of anonymity Anonymity is a condition of both users and types of communication, and hence there are various forms and definitions of anonymity. It will be helpful here to briefly discuss the terminology that is used regarding the anonymous use of new media in order to categorize the various forms of anonymity that exist. Naturally, the first of these is anonymity itself. The word “anonymous” is derived from the classical Greek stem onyma (name), combined with the prex a- (the absence or lack of a property) (Clark et al. 2005, 12-13). In short, it is possible to interpret anonymity as the opposite of being identifiable. Baggio and Beldarrain (2011, 2) have noted that “deciding to trust in cyberspace is not without risk, as anonymity protects those who are honest as well as those who intentionally deceive.” This suggests that anonymity has both positive and negative connotations. Therefore, being anonymous should be seen not only as a form of resistance, but also as individual or collective action. Palme and Berglund (2004) state that anonymity is possible when the real author of a message is not indicated and anonymity can be implemented to make it impossible or very difficult to find out the real author of a message. They point out that that anonymity is sometimes thought to be synonymous with pseudonymity, i.e. when a name rather than the real one is visible. Anonymity, however, should not be limited to the protection of detailed data concerning users as the Internet is composed of different structures and in the new media environment people disseminate various types of information about themselves via media applications and networks. According to Hansen et al. (2001, 2) “anonymity is the state of being not identifiable within a set of subjects.” They recognized anonymity as a situation in which transmission of a message occurs and they divided it in two different subcategories: sender anonymity, in which a particular message is not linkable to another, and recipient anonymity. In the case of relationship anonymity, it is untraceable who communicates with whom. In other words, the sender and recipient (or recipients in case of a multicast) are unlinkable. Relationship anonymity is weaker than both sender anonymity and recipient anonymity because the person who sends messages may be traceable and it may also be possible to trace who receives messages, as long as the relationship between sender and recipient is not known. There is an additional set of possible categorizations of layers for defining anonymity. The first is sender and receiver anonymity, the second is connection and message anonymity, the third is the anonymity set and the fourth is unlinkability. In terms of anonymity, this research focuses on these four categories that have been proposed by Joss Wright, Susan

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Stepney, John A. Clark and Jeremy Jacob (2005, 14). Hansen et al. (2001, 33-34) initiated a new discussion of other terms such as unlinkability and unobservability, which refer to information hidden within terminology. Also, they argue that the unlinkability of two or more items (e.g., subjects, messages, events, actions, and so on) means that within this system, these items are no more and no less related than they are related concerning apriori knowledge (Hansen et al. 2002, 1-3). The connection between social media accounts or links between senders of different messages on the Internet can be considered to be a linkability while unobservability may refer to today’s coding and encryption technologies by which senders of messages stay completely anonymous but the relationships themselves do not. The terminology mostly depends on the conditions existing in the Web 1.0 environment in which interactivity had not yet penetrated deeply into people’s lives. But the terminology they provide can be still used for explaining the “complete” anonymity of relationships in terms of senderreceiver interactions. Accordingly, a sender’s anonymity is a precaution taken to protect the relationship’s anonymity but for them the recipient’s anonymity is another issue that grants anonymity to the relationship. In the contemporary world, complete anonymity can be considered to be a truly “radical” condition in which relationships are no longer anonymous as receivers are not and observability is higher than ever because of the technologies mentioned above. The relationship’s observability is based on technical applications such as dummy traffic, steganography, which can be defined as hiding messages in a way that cannot be detected, and a spread spectrum (Hansen et al. 2002, 5). The technical- and interaction-based definitions of the term “anonymity'” provide users with certain advantages. For instance anonymity allows for the masking of handicaps and accentuating certain individual characteristics, which might lower inhibition (Döring 2003, 460). One can create an identity for oneself free of all biases and legal constrains within society. Fuchs (2008, 322) states “anonymous identity is not free from the social past of a human being as social experiences and the individual history of an individual influence and shape his or her online behaviour.”

Social and technical methods used for anonymity Software and other technological means can be used for a user to remain anonymous. The first focus point of anonymity is dividing social networks from one another. Someone who desires to be anonymous will generally create new aliases because a large number of aliases makes it more difficult to pinpoint the identity of the individual. For local security

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there are several sharewares that limit possible physical control of information. However, in terms of surveillance, the methods used to avoid control are different. To be totally anonymous, one should know that technology itself won't make a person fully anonymous or secure. There are certain anonymity types deployed which are categorized as Type-0 (anon.penet.fi), Type-I (Cypherpunks), Type-II (MixMaster), Type III (MixMinion), JAP, TOR and FREENET. As seen above, there are different types of software and methods used to provide anonymous connections to the Internet and for sending and receiving messages anonymously such as HTTPS everywhere, OTR and TOR.

Semi-anonymity versus pseudonymity It will be useful to define a category for users who are unable to create the necessary conditions for using a totally anonymous avatar. Here, I propose semi-anonymity as a level of anonymity while pseudonymity is a layer of both anonymity and semi-anonymity. Semi-anonymity may be defined as being included in a social network through different names and images rather than the real names, locations and registered e-mail addresses of the users. Manipulation of an IP is not necessary for them, but IP manipulation is still considered to be a type of semi-anonymity as anonymousness not only prevents discovery by the state or corporations but also it also prevents them from seeing or obtaining content. What differentiates a semi-anonymous user from an anonymous user is the success of IP manipulation methods which are thought to be used by both groups. First of all, anonymity needs to be available in the network and the content created should be anonymously sent and received to be completely anonymous. For instance, the Turkish Hacker group RedHack's connections to specific news channels such as Hayat TV, Ulusal TV and Halk TV are non-anonymous as the receiver’s common details are available. People using nicknames and avatars which do not reveal their own names on social networks that are not established by themselves can be considered to be semi-anonymous users as they are still detectable by the state and corporations through their profiles. “Semi” as a prefix is used for this preference of anonymity or identifiability since people using such profiles reveal various characteristics such as trolling or political activity. It is possible to define semi-anonymity as a manner of political behavior rather than a preference about the name, avatar, and so on. So what is the difference between semi-anonymity and pseudonymity? There is no simple and unified definition of anonymity. Pseudonymity is just a

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subcategory of semi-anonymity while it is a subcategory of anonymity at the same time. It is a preference based on giving away some types of information to users and it is a necessity in today's surveillance society. In other words, it is resistance within a state of hegemony. On this point we need to define hegemony and resistance as key terms which will help us describe the relationships between anonymity, resistance, surveillance and the system.

Resistance and hegemony There are various definitions of hegemony. Gramsci was the first to clearly conceptualize hegemony as an interpretation of daily life and political practices. For him, education, political parties, working unions and all such institutions were established to be resources of consent. His originality in terms of hegemony studies is based on his extended definition of hegemony which not only involves administrative, executive and coercive apparatuses of government but also the underpinnings of the political structure in civil society. Gramsci provided analytical usefulness for the categories of civil society and the state (Cox 1983, 52). His studies of hegemony led to a qualitative difference between the operations of hegemony by regressive authoritarian groups on the one hand and progressive social groups on the other. For him, while regressive hegemony involves imposing a set of non-negotiable values upon people chiefly through the use of coercion and deceit, progressive hegemony develops by way of democratically acquired consent in society. This means not only empowering unions by bringing them together, but also involving all strata of society’s opposition in the movement, drawing out the connections between all forms of “political oppression and autocratic arbitrariness” (Brown 2009). Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony, however, is not limited to understandings of power and the control of the ruling class. While Martin Clark (1977, 2) defines hegemony as “how the ruling classes control the media and education,” Lenin (1963, 86-87) stated that the “the Bolsheviks needed to come to occupy a hegemonic position within the struggle against the Tsarist regime.” His emphasis on hegemony was about the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution. Gramsci’s conception of hegemony is different from Lenin’s and Clark’s understanding of hegemony due to its civil, daily and more comprehensive basis. A more contemporary, politically useful and Gramscian definition of hegemony was proposed by Raymond Williams. Williams (1977, 110) defined hegemony not only as “the articulate upper

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level of ‘ideology’ nor its forms of control of those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination,’” but also “a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world.” According to this and Gramsci’s perspective, new media as a hegemonic environment is a sphere in which the dynamic nature of hegemony can be observed. Accordingly, “hegemony equates consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily is abstracted as ideology” (Williams 1977, 109-110). As Williams argues, …a static hegemony, of the kind which is indicated by abstract totalizing definitions of a dominant “ideology” or “worldview,” can ignore or isolate such alternatives and opposition, but to the extent that they are significant the decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate them. (Williams, 1977, 112)

He emphasizes that any hegemonic process must be especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and opposition which question or threaten its dominance (Williams, 1977, 113). Williams states that hegemony has to reconstruct itself continuously just as people shape and change themselves accordingly. This is a positive factor that can provide opportunities for resistance from within hegemony and this is why Williams’ definition of hegemony is useful for defining a given political struggle from within hegemony or the new media environment. In terms of his non-technodeterminist approach, culture as a network does not take technology as the primary power that can be used for foreseeing or inspecting all that happens. However, Williams still insists that it can be useful (Williams 1977). In today’s academic environment, it can be said that technology itself is limited to a means of surveillance but there is still hope that technology can be used for the good of people resisting mechanisms of governance. Williams’ understanding of hegemony provides a theoretical basis for handling the new media environment with a less pessimistic perspective, as the focus of contemporary new media studies is mostly based on surveillance and security systems enabled by corporations and governments around the world, and most academic studies focus on a given geography or country in which that study is carried out (see Alternative Informatics Association 2013; Aytar and Çavdar 2013). However, studies have also been done which focus on ongoing forms of resistance in terms of users’ activism strategies (See Akin and Zraman 2013). This essay aims to contribute to such academic work.

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The political and legal necessity of anonymous uses of the Internet “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted” was the first in a series of blog posts published by Andrew Sullivan for The Atlantic a few hours after news about the protests in Iran broke out (Morozov 2011, 1). Also, in Turkey’s Gezi Protests one of the most common graffiti statements was “The Revolution will not be televised.” Both approaches promote a form of “competition” between television and new media (especially Twitter). In such an environment of government-controlled media outlets, it becomes less possible to make scholarly statements and understandings of convergence and alternative media are completely ignored. From corporate accounts to personal accounts, or from one personal account to another, what really matters in revolutionary processes is not only the media used, but also the way that users or organizations use it. So we cannot evaluate a new media application as being revolutionary. Likewise, television is a counter-revolutionary device, as seen in the case of Turkey when the government sought to ban the broadcasts of Hayat TV, a television channel available on satellite which was followed by protesters and thousands of others during the resistance. But rather than focusing on the revolutionary character of the medium, it might be more useful to look into the abilities of hackers and the ways they construct their methods of personal or organizational security through their preferences of identifiability or anonymity in new media. Going back to the role of new media in social movements, even in democratic countries people claim that certain political opinions are persecuted, as is clear from the existing mechanisms of oppression which have been used by the Turkish government. There are numerous examples of how new media has been used for political activism, but each new form of media activism has a different nature. Failure and success are two possible outcomes of social media movements. The failure of the new media-based protests in Belarus was an important example of how anonymity may prevent users from being sentenced by a regime. People have been arrested and sentenced to prison in Turkey because of messages they posted on social media, and this is an example of how important anonymity can be for new media activists or ordinary new media users. In order to analyze the political use of semi-anonymity and propose it as a method of resistance, we can turn to the Zapatista movement, whose members identified themselves with a mask which over time became the symbol of the movement itself.2 Marcos’ famous statements about his identity can provide an understanding of semi-anonymity in today’s

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political culture based on the egocentric decisions of the individual, as he identified himself with all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities in capitalist modernity.3 Rather than focusing on his identity, he turned attention to the political struggle at hand.

Semi-anonymity as a proactive method of resistance To understand the usage of semi-anonymity as an aspect of resistance, it is necessary to understand the use of new media as a tool of resistance. The information age is identified with new systems of production and the new methods it created, but it is also important to underline how it changed the social and political relationships within the new media environment and daily life. As debates arose about the Arab Spring, new media technologies were increasingly referred to as the primary actors of the revolutions, especially in Egypt where guides were distributed in 2011. The guide started by saying, “Do not use Twitter or Facebook to distribute this note” and ends with the same admonition (Madrigal 2011). It is still debatable how effective social media was in the Arab Uprising, but it is notable that the uprising against Mubarak was countered by cutting off the Internet, and subsequently people had to go out onto the streets to find out what was really happening. According to Appelbaum et al. (2012), contemporary revolutions have occurred with varying degrees of success and users of Twitter or Facebook have not yet been victims of their social networking activities. However, such a case was experienced in Belarus in 2006. After the failure of the street protests which were mostly organized online, President Alexander Lukashenko became even more determined to control social media. The Red Shirt uprising in Thailand experienced such a failure as well, and ended with the deaths of dozens (Shirky 2011). The anonymity of identities is a key factor in the security of rebellions and resistance processes, as mechanisms of control create risks.

The political identification of semi-anonymity From the ethnical to the ideological, political groups emerge on the basis of common concerns. They share profile pictures, sources of news and a particular language, and some of them may identify themselves as members of Leninist organizations or other hierarchical models. However, their concerns regarding the shared values of the group do not result in barren discussions or monotype discourses. Semi-anonymity offers a

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means of security even within the democratic organizations they are involved in rather than the state they are opposed to. This approach is used by many people to protect their positions in daily life. It is also possible for those who have been expelled from political groups in social media networks to use these networks with new accounts, and they only reveal themselves to people they trust. This is significant as it points to the authoritarian structure of new media groups regardless of whether they are political or not.

The necessity of anonymity in Turkey's new media environment Aside from professional concerns, users may avoid using visible profiles to protect their privacy from their parents or other family members. So, by taking family, state, and professional life, in addition to political activism, as categories, the cases below will be analyzed to gather categorical data about the attitudes of interviewees. Bodle (2013, 22) states that “Democratic and totalitarian alike nationsstates monitor citizens’ online communication and amass big data on citizens. Law enforcement agencies seek to lower the legal threshold to use information technology to track and convict criminals (e.g., GPSenabled ubiquitous surveillance).” In this regard, it becomes clear that communication in both totalitarian and democratic states is a risky endeavor. Even if it is still possible to communicate anonymously, day by day the powerful ad-funded Internet industry advocates for real name-only policies that are shaping an online environment that prohibits anonymous, non-identifiable communication by design. For instance, today it is difficult to create mail accounts via personal computers without confirming your phone number or some other information which can be used as a reference for your identity. It should also be noted that “Studies about anonymity systems typically assume that the anonymous users wish to be anonymous. This assumption is partially due to the natural view of anonymity as a method of somehow protecting users, and partially due to the sheer number of sources of information leakage in all but the most restrictive systems” (Stepney and Wright 2008, 3-4). Anonymity and pseudonymity are expressly prohibited on Facebook per the Terms of Use, and the company suspends and deactivates accounts based on its strict real name-only policy. And this is not limited to Facebook as a social network. Google Plus is another company that seeks to prevent users from using pseudonyms when they register their accounts (Markmann and Scott 2005, 23). While the restrictions of Facebook seek

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to prevent users from providing false personal information or creating an account for somebody else, people cannot create more than one personal profile and it is not possible to create another account once his/her account has been disabled by Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, finds positives in Facebook's counter-anonymity approach. He states that this approach limits the differentiation between working life and daily life. Zuckerberg has been accused of being privileged since he is a wealthy, white, heterosexual male – in other words, someone who has nothing to fear from being transparent about his life and has no need to maintain two different identities (Ingram 2010). This statement seems to hold true as even legal political parties’ fan pages are disabled by Facebook4 and individuals have been put on trial for the messages they shared. Criminal proceedings and practices of surveillance are not limited to corporations, however. In Turkey, during the Gezi Resistance Tekin Beyaz, who had previously worked for Kocaeli Municipality, reacted to the rampant police violence which affected his mother by writing a message on Facebook, and he was firstly demoted from his position in the municipality and then fired.5 Also, Alev Toprako÷lu, who is a scriptwriter, was fired from the copywriting team with which she was involved because of the messages she posted on Facebook regarding the policies of the prime minister.6 In all these examples, it can be seen that Facebook’s policies of transparency and counter-anonymity serve as mechanisms of control for both states and companies. So, through social networking experiences, we can easily say that the de-anonymization of social network profiles can be defined in one way as a systematic attempt to hinder political activism movements that can arise through these networks, and from political parties to less political citizens, people without anonymous profiles can be controlled by these social or technical mechanisms in Turkey. In order to prepare oneself for such conditions, semi-anonymity is a necessity for activists and even slactivists in order to preserve their freedom of expression in Turkey’s new media environment which exists under various forms of surveillance.

Experiencing various forms of anonymity and identifiability in Turkey's new media sphere In order to create a broader perception of the uses of anonymity in Turkey’s new media environment, eight Twitter users tweeting mostly in Turkish were included in an online ethnography in order to understand why people who create content on social networks in Turkish prefer

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profiles that do not reveal personal information about themselves or their motives behind their non-visible use of social networks. In addition to online participatory observation of content generated by users in public and private, secondary sources were used to create a theoretical basis for this research. To ensure that users’ preferences of identity were protected and to enable the utmost objectivity while observing their judgments of themselves and the content they produced in public, all the interviews were carried out in a digital environment. The eight semi-anonymous users in this study agreed to participate in semi-structured interviews which were done via Google Hangout and email. The reason why those venues were selected is because this research focused on users who try to provide relative invisibility for themselves and conceal their identities on social networks. Open-ended questions were used through the interviews. One of the most important outcomes of the study was that the identities of two of the users who identified themselves as partly anonymous had previously been revealed by other activists because of political competition and lack of security in their anonymity levels. All of the interviewees involved in the study were all aware that their identities could be found in several ways such as company-state cooperation and searching their linked social media accounts. Six of eight users defined themselves “partially” anonymous as they were aware of the control and surveillance mechanisms in place on their Internet use and their lack of security in connecting to others. Only one of the interviewees stated that he was anonymous in terms of using a nickname rather than a real one. The others had varying definitions of anonymity for themselves such as 70% anonymous, 25% anonymous, used to be anonymous, and semi-anonymous. With the exception of one, they all expressed concerns about the privacy of their accounts and their security against mechanisms of repression. As mentioned in the interviews and the background information of the interviewees, these means of repression revealed the weaknesses of semi-anonymity. Complete anonymity provided by network anonymity was not possible for the interviewees, as it was experienced in the case of @demet_kuzey, who had previously been a semi-anonymous user who had only used her first name without a profile picture or any revealing information. Melih Gökçek, the mayor of Ankara, revealed her real identity after obtaining that information through people that she followed. This revelation of identity was brought about because of political postings, and is indicative of the problem of anonymity of networks.

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Another example is the case of @Narlaincir, a prominent pro-Kurdish militant figure on Twitter. Her tweets and statements lead to the creation of so-called “agendas.” She was one of two interviewees whose names were revealed by “political rivals.” Ceng Sa÷nç, a pro-Kurdish politician living in Israel, was firstly criticized by Narlaincir and the community to which she belonged. Following such critiques, Ceng Sa÷nç revealed Narlaincir's name and surname as well as her position in the political organization. This was not, however, the first time her real identity was revealed. Another example occurred on the 15th of March in 2013 when @AybikeHatemi reported that she was organizationally involved with her in 2012. After her identity was revealed, @Narlaincir opened another semi-anonymous account and she says she only lets people she trusts follow her.

Reasons for semi-anonymous use of social media Political reprisals and state surveillance are not the only reasons why some people prefer semi-anonymous use of social networks. @Przykzn, a female user, defined her motive for anonymity within the category of social pressure. She stated that she would have also been fired if she had not used the Internet anonymously. According to her, people need an additional social media account so they can keep themselves anonymous from their primary friends and family circles. @AugustusHill was another interviewee who stated that the primary reason for his anonymity was state pressure which is enforced with surveillance systems such as DPI and censorship. He became actively involved in social media as a semianonymous user after he faced some problems with his family members because of his political ideas. @Kuntakinteden was another semi-anonymous user who defined his desire to remain anonymous within the scope of pressure caused by commercial links, but he stated that his concerns were linked to other categories as well. His name was revealed through the website Ekúi Sözlük and he was threatened and insulted by the users who revealed his nickname. Because of these insults and threats, he defined the advantage of being semi-anonymous as a means of protection from physical attacks. He also stated that his semi-anonymous personality is much braver than he is in “real life.” Overall, the eight in-depth interviews carried out through the scope of this study revealed that there are political, economic, family and organizational reasons that prompt users to be semi-anonymous. The political and technical opportunities made feasible by anonymity and

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semi-anonymity will be further discussed in terms of the means of repressions stated above in the following section.

Conclusion The three main focus points of this study are a lack of consciousness about unclear motives for anonymity, as well as the technical practices and terminology of anonymity. By concluding these three themes using the findings of the research, I suggest anonymity can be a new medium for organizing direct democracy in communities of various sizes.

Semi-anonymity is a social preference Starting with the idea that resistance arises from within hegemony, this study explored how Twitter is both a space of resistance and oppression at the same time, and social media was discussed without denigrating nor subliming the media itself. The focus of this chapter has been on the characteristics of Web 2.0, methods of controlling content, and users’ preferences regarding anonymity. A categorization of motives can be elucidated from the interviews that were carried out and they revealed the necessity of anonymity. The determining factors were economic, in-group (NGOs, political parties, etc.), family/private life, and legal- or state-based forms of pressure, and these were the dominant forms of repression that made users feel a need to resist. Moreover, several kinds of motivation could be added to this categorization such as Internet-usage habits acquired in the 1990s and the need for a collective identity. Such categories of motives should be expanded in further studies in a more detailed framework.

The political implications of semi-anonymity The debate about anonymity is also a debate about the clarity of the new political structure and how communicational structures will be influenced by new media technologies. In order to analyze semianonymity’s political aspects, it is necessary to use the terms of new politics as well. The opacity of relationships and the formation of leaderless communities create a necessity for non-hierarchic communicational and political structures, and this study proposes that its communicational methods can serve new models of democracy, as argued by Hardt and Negri (2012). They state that:

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We need to empty the churches of the Left even more, and bar their doors, and burn them down! These movements are powerful not despite their lack of leaders but because of it. They are organized horizontally as multitudes, and their insistence on democracy at all levels is more than a virtue but a key to their power.

That statement was a political motivation for this study, as anonymity and semi-anonymity should be seen as methods for providing horizontality, which can be defined as one of the political outcomes of anonymity. Social networks are spaces of expression and organization rather than spaces of action. Activists come together, organize and discuss through the spaces of new media. However, new media is an instrument which reorganizes the forms of relationships between activists. The term “leaderless movement,” which is associated with new social movements mostly because of the evolution of Web 2.0, is thought to be a democratic communication-based revolution. Anonymity’s role in the establishment of these relationships precipitates the elimination of biases, prestige advertisements, image cultivation, and hierarchic statuses. Therefore, after establishing a collectivist, horizontal and secure definition of anonymity, it is necessary to define “commoners,” a key term for establishing a connection with anonyms or semi-anonyms. According to Hardt and Negri (2012), “Commoners’ task is not only to provide access to the fields and rivers so that the poor can feed themselves, but also to create a means for the free exchange of ideas, images, codes, music, and information” and it is not limited to the access to and self-management of shared wealth but also the construction of forms of political organization. Here, anonymity is offered up as a means of commonality which can be regarded as a form of making the experience of political communication more collective and participatory. Through the elimination of biases, a more liberated form of decision-making will be possible. Through this study it becomes clear that people can eliminate many forms of control in their lives through their semi-anonymous use of the Internet. From voting to discussions in forums, anonymity’s uses have always helped people express themselves more directly and free from the manipulation of the control mechanisms in their lives. The forms and definitions of anonymity provided here are not proposed only for the use of activists but also the daily political practices of states and citizens. As seen during the Gezi Protests, plebiscites can be a means of political and collective decision-making. However, in Turkey, it is well known that the voting behavior of citizens is shaped by political parties and voting is a condition of being served by local governance or government at the higher level.

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Many people feel that they are under pressure because of voting statistics’ possible impacts on their daily lives, and this is not just limited to voting. Self-expression is another problematic aspect of capitalist modernity that we experience today. While discussing a topic, interpersonal or economic relations create pressure. The main paradox of capitalist democracies, which could be defined as the conflict of political interests and economic interests, should be solved by putting anonymous expression and voting services into practice. Anonymous or semianonymous users, as commoners, could participate as role models of ideal participatory and radical democratic forms, and their use of the Internet would thus not be limited to forms of activism, hacking or security protocols. Anonymity and semi-anonymity ensure citizens’ access to political decision-making processes in a secure, unlinkable and unobservable way, and this has the potential to eliminate the conflicts that capitalist structures bring about in political or non-political decision-making processes that people experience regularly. Therefore, the use of anonymity and semi-anonymity within and outside hegemony is expected to create a new and more democratic environment for both resistance and contemporary daily politics. This environment is no longer anticipated to be identified just with illegal forms of resistance. Moreover, anonymity and semi-anonymity as forms of political self-representation will likely acquire a stronger reputation, as well as garner increased interest and popularity among users.

Notes 1

The word anonymous is used here as a term with reference to levels of identifiability rather than the transnational hacker organization Anonymous. The references in this study to anonymous users are not necessarily members of the group Anonymous. Studies by Gabriela Coleman, who is known well for her articles on Anonymous, have nonetheless been utilized to reveal the political potential of anonymity and its further impacts outside the organization (see Coleman, 2011). 2 http://www.heureka.clara.net/gaia/zapatistas.htm [Access date: 07/11/2013] 3 http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/259994-yes-marcos-is-gay-marcos-is-gay-insan-francisco [07/10/2013] 4 http://www.Internethaber.com/facebookta-gezi-mesaji-isinden-etti-556149h.htm [Access Date: 08/11/2013] 5 http://www.Internethaber.com/facebookta-gezi-mesaji-isinden-etti-556149h.htm [Access Date: 08/11/2013] 6 http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/magazin/televizyon/23598748.asp [Access Date: 08/11/2013]

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Works Cited Alternatif Biliúim Derne÷i. Türkiye'de ønternetin Durumu. Accessed February 20, 2013 http://bit.ly/14Sxjcd —. 2013. Veri Korumaya Giriú. Accessed December 12 2013. http://ekitap.alternatifbilisim.org/files/veri_korumaya_giris_edri_paper _06_tr.pdf Akin, A. and Emrah Z. 2013. Türkiye çevrimiçi alannda güç mücadelesi ve üç tarz-i muhalefet: redhack, alternatif biliúim derne÷i ve youtube yasa÷ karút bireysel giriúimler. Karaburun Bilim Kongresi: Sosyal Medyada øktidar ve Dayanúma Oturumu, 5 September 2013. Assange, J. and Muller-Maguhn, A. 2012. Cypherpunks - Freedom and the future of the Internet. New York: Or Books. Baggio, B. and Beldarrain, Y. 2011. Anonymity and Learning in Digitally Mediated Communications: Authenticity and Trust in Cyber Education. IGI Global., Berglund, M. and Palme, J. 2009. Anonymity on the Internet. Retrieved August, 15. http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/classes/tech-soc/2006Spring/may-31-p3.ppt Castells, M. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope. Cambridge: Polity Books. Clark, M. 1977. Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Clark, J.A., Jacob, J., Stepney, S. and Wright, J. 2005. Designing Anonymity: A Formal Basis for Identity Hiding. http://bit.ly/16eQmNwAccessed July 29 2013. http://bit.ly/16eQmNw Coleman, G. 2011. Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action. Accessed July 20 2013. http://www.rezoanonymous.eu/IMG/pdf/anonymous_from-the-lulz-tocollective_action.pdf Cox, R.W. 1983. Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: an essay in method. Millennium-Journal of International Studies 12 (2): 162175. Crosswell, J. 2003. Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches. London: Sage Publications. Döring, N. 2002. Studying online-love and cyber-romance, Online social sciences, ed. Bernard Batinic, Ulf-Dietrich Reips, and Michael Bosnja, (Göttingen: Hogrefe) 333–356. Freeland, R. 1985. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948. New York: New York University Press.

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Fuchs, C. 2012. Implications of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) Internet Surveillance for Society. Accessed 25 February 2013 http://bit.ly/NwosT4 —. 2009. Information and communication technologies. European Journal of Communication, 65-87. Google Transparency Report, 2013. Accessed November 24 2013 http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/TR/ Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, eds. & trans. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hansen et al., 2001. Anonymity, Unobservability, Pseudonymity, and Identity Management – A Proposal for Terminology. Accessed 20 December 2013. http://dud.inf.tu-dresden.de/literatur/Anon_Terminology_v0.18.pdf Hardacker, C. 2010. Trolling in asynchronouscomputer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions. Journal of Politeness Research 6: 215-42. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. 2013. Duyuru. østanbul: Ayrnt Yaynlar. Hood, C. 2006. The tools of government in the information age, in The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Eds. Goodin, Roberte; Moran, Michael; Rein, Martin. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingram, M. 2010. Are Facebook’s views on privacy naive and utopian? GigaOM. Accessed 20 November 2014 http://gigaom.com/2010/06/01/facebooks-views-on-privacy-are-naiveand-utopian-prof-says/ IPIS KMG, 2012. Türkiye’nin ønternet Kullanm Haritas. Landau, S.E. 2010. Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lenin, V.I. 1963. What is to be Done? trans. S.V. Utechin & P. Utechin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyon, D. 2009. Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance. London: Polity Press. Madrigal, A.C. 2011. Egyptian Activists' Action Plan: Translated. The Atlantic. Accessed March 26 2013. http://bit.ly/XXFQGz> Marcuse, H. 1972. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press. Markmann, K.M. and Markmann, C.R. 2005. Anonymous Internet? Examining Identity Issues in Email Addresses. Accessed March 20 2013 http://bit.ly/18JBIOz Morozov, E. 2012. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs; Reprint edition.

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Murthy, D. 2009. Social research digital ethnography: An examination of the use of new technologies for social research, Sociology (42): 5. Nail, T. 2013. Zapatismo and the global origins of Occupy, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 12 (3): 20-35. Penny, L. 2013. Out with the old politics, The Guardian. Accessed March 15 2013. http://bit.ly/18HtgPa Shirky, C. 2011. The political power of social media, Foreign Affairs, January/February. Accessed 12 December 2013 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-politicalpower-of-social-media TÜøK. 2012. Hanehalk Biliúim Teknolojileri Kullanm Araútrmas. Accessed February 20, 2013. http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreHaberBultenleri.do?id=10880 Webster, F. 2006. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER THREE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: A PLATFORM FOR CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION ESER SELEN

Introduction This paper focuses on The Electronic Intifada, which is a contemporary “independent online news publication and educational resource focusing on Palestine, its people, politics, culture and place in the world” (The Electronic Intifada 2014). Intifada is an Arabic term meaning rebellion or uprising, but it carries particular significance in Israel as regards the Palestine conflict and its transformation, which is elaborated on in this chapter. The Electronic Intifada (hereafter EI) has served as an online resource for media analysis, criticism and activism since February of 2001. The four original co-founders of EI were Ali Abunimah, Arjan El Fassed, Laurie King, and Nigel Parry. The founders and founding editors of EI started the website as an electronic platform with associates in the West and East, including the inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (hereafter OPT), Palestinians in Israel, Palestinians in exile and supporters around the globe. The aim was to offer a “quick window” (The Electronic Intifada 2014) onto the lives of the Palestinian people, who for decades have been under attack and occupation, through an archive of articles, blogs, reviews and other related media sources. EI is an electronic initiative based in Chicago and currently the content is produced by twenty-five writers and numerous bloggers from all around the world. In terms of the transformation of the Israel-Palestine conflict, EI has deftly traced the shifts in the concept of Intifada from an armed rebellion into a sustainable cyber-resistance that generates discourses and analysis about the conflict on a daily basis. It would appear that by using the term “Intifada” in its title, EI has not only transformed the meaning of the

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Intifada but also its forms of resistance through its editorial content, analysis and communication design. The website is both a source of recent news and an archive of past events, and IE sends out daily and/or weekly newsletters with fresh coverage.

Narratives on the history of the Palestinian Occupation, colonization and determination With roots going back to the nineteenth century, the ongoing IsraeliPalestinian conflict has made the lives of people from both nations dispensable as they live in a region wracked by violence, fear and terror on a daily basis. A brief look at the history of the occupation of Palestine reveals prominent keywords such as colonization, determination and resistance. The current occupation started in 1916 when Great Britain occupied Palestine after World War I and “promised” parts of Palestine to the European Zionist movement as a “gift” so they could establish an Israeli state along the lines of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (Pappé 2009). By 1918, Palestine had become a British mandate colony and Jewish immigrants had started settling the land (Ibid.). In 1919, the “Jaffa Revolution” prompted Palestinian resistance to the unlawful occupation of land by settlers, and two more uprisings followed in 1929 and 1931-1936. By 1948, 600,000 Zionist settlers had immigrated to Palestine (www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org). It is crucial to note that the current conflict between Israel and Palestine was further fuelled in 1947 and exacerbated even more with the Nakba of 1948 (Pappé 2011, 14). In Arabic “nakba” means “disaster” or “catastrophe,” and it refers to the Palestinian exodus when approximately 726,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1947-1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.1 In addition to being forced from their homeland, Palestinians also witnessed the destruction of their villages in this war. The remaining Palestinian settlements in historical Palestine in 1948 were located in the West Bank, Gaza and three other areas. Visual documentation of the massacres of 1948 has remained as powerful depictions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and been held up as representative of the numerous other conflicts that have broken out in the Middle East.2 As an eight-year old child, I was exposed to many images of this nature, and they are still deeply embedded in my memory to this day. At the time, my grandmother lived near the Iranian embassy in Ankara, Turkey and on my way to school and back I would look at the window

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where the embassy displayed photographs of the casualties of the war. Almost all of the images depicted the mutilated bodies of men, women and children. The ongoing exhibit sought to demonstrate the brutality of the Iran-Iraq war, but that showcase of carnage led to disidentified information about the dead and what was left of their bodies. They were put on volatile display, and those stark images were presented for consumption without a context of humanity. As I look through images from 1948 in light of the information and contexts they convey, I can only wonder how those images would affect people who have no historical background about the events that transpired. EI seems to hold to a silent code not to display carnage – if they can help it – although it does use a plethora of images accompanying articles and blogs, some of which I aim to elaborate on in this chapter. As I thought about how I would evaluate those images, it became clear that I needed more context such as the narratives penned by scholars, writers and activists like historian Ilan Pappé, who also writes for EI, writer Susan Abdulhawa and Manar Makhoul, who is in charge of networking and advocacy. These scholars and writers use their skills to transform the conflict as they continue to write and take action in the name of Palestinian identity, narratives and culture; they do this, however, not just through research but by being in the midst of the conflict. Ilan Pappé, who often brushes aside claims of uniqueness, is one of the very few Israeli Jews who has expressed a wish “to free the Palestinians of Israel from their role as a case study and tell their history” (Pappé 2011, 11). In The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (2011), Pappé states: I feel such affinity with the Palestinian minority on Israel. This has led me to undertaking intensive learning of Arabic, with constant reading of Arab literature and listening to Arab media, but more importantly to developing [an] intimate relationship with many members of the community, and sensing a strong affinity and solidarity to the point of becoming a pariah in my own Jewish community. (Pappé 2011, 12)

Pappé claims that he never regretted his solidarity with the Palestinians even when several young Islamic activists tried to shout him down on the basis of his Jewishness at a ceremony in 2009 mourning the killing of thirteen Palestinian citizens in the Palestinian village of Arabeh (Pappé 2011, 12). His exemplary archival research along with his self-declared support for the Palestinian presence inside and outside of Israel first garnered attention in 2006 with the publishing of his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

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Susan Abdulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin, which was published in 2010, is a semi-fictional narrative with autobiographical aspects based on the fact that she was born to refugees of the Six Day War of 1967. Her novel starts with El Nakba (the Nakba) and is narrated through a Palestinian girl’s point of view; she survived the events with her parents but had to flee her homeland, leaving a brother behind in the process. Almost every character introduced in the novel has pivotal significance for the occupation. Amal, the main character of the narrative, always thinks about where all those people around her came from, perhaps out of an instinctual move to keep her memories from disappearing. In one section she thinks about Haj Salem who “seemed inconceivably old” with his “toothless grin” (Abdulhawa 2010, 79): I never knew from where he came, which town or village because he knew so much about nearly every part of Palestine. Mama never told me and Yousef wasn't sure. It was said that his family was killed in the Nakbe3 of 1948—although he never told us that story. He lived alone, no wife, no children, no brothers or sisters. This was quite remarkable since Arab society revolves around the extended family. No one had “no family.” But Palestinians, who became scattered and dispossessed following the Nakbe, proved so many exceptions to Arab society. […] Haj Salem was also the first person to tell me about my brother Ismael, who had disappeared as an infant in the fateful mayhem of 1948. “The baby just vanished,” he said in one of his narrated exhumations of history. “Your mother was never same after that.” (Abdulhawa 2010, 80)

Abdulhawa’s book gives the reader a context for the conflict, starting with the Nakba, but more significantly it also provides a sense of space and culture in which the Palestinian people lived, are living and will continue to live. The “exhumations of history” (Abdulhawa 2010, 79), as Abdulhawa has Amal remember in the novel, function as an act of reclaiming Palestinian culture, history and dignity which were ravaged during the events of 1948, and the author provides layers of context in depicting the violence of the narrative. In “Palestinian Identity in Israel since the First Intifada: Un-erasing the Nakba,” Manar Makhoul, a researcher and an activist working for Badil,4 states: The erasure of Palestinian existence from Palestine has taken several forms. Ideologically speaking, the Zionist movement depicted Palestine as “a land without a people” long before the establishment of Israel, and the clearest physical manifestation of this approach was ethnic cleansing (“demographic erasure”) of the minority of Palestinian society from

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Makhoul is quite on the point with reference to the erasure of Palestinian existence both in Israel and Palestine. He refers to the Palestinian citizens of Israel as “the indigenous people of Palestine living in Israel,” as “present-absentified” and “present-erased” (Makhoul 2012, 13). The erasure he stresses here is not just a matter of citizenship, but also the erasure of the “folklorification of the Nakba” (Makhoul 2012, 13) which according to him is a deliberate attempt to erase the Palestinian people’s historical, socio-cultural and linguistic identity, thereby stripping a nation of its rights to “freedom, liberation and dignity” (Makhoul 2012, 16). The uprising against the Nakba and the twenty years of Israeli military occupation that started in 1918 bears the historical traces of the first Palestinian Intifada which broke out in 1987 and “swept through the West Bank and Gaza Strip” (Makhoul 2012, 13). The first Intifada was grassroots-based and it lasted almost a decade. As a result of the first Intifada, and perhaps because of it, the United Nations confirmed that many countries recognized Palestine in 1989. The well-known slogan of Palestinian existence, “Resist to Exist,” emerged at the same time. The second Intifada broke out in 2000 as a result of the continuation of the occupation and loss of confidence in the Oslo agreement. Just like the first one, the second Intifada also started as a grassroots movement, and it continued as a non-militant revolution for three months. Between the First (1987 to 1993) and Second (2000) Intifada, both of which started in refugee camps and spread to other parts of the OPT, some may have believed that armed rebellion would not put an end to the occupation. However, the two Intifadas served as a warning to the Israeli government that there could be another Intifada in the near future that could take on any form such as armed rebellion, terrorist attacks and suicide bombers. An Israeli website, My Jewish Learning, which is a glamorous and pop version of EI, seeks to inform readers about Jewish culture and the history and politics behind Israeli claims: [T]he first Intifada was characterized by Palestinian youths throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, [and] the second Intifada took on the aspects of armed conflict, guerrilla warfare, and terrorist attacks. The devastating effects of suicide bombings within Israel proper increased the pressure to find a solution to the ongoing conflict, and polarized those with differing views about what that solution might involve. (My Jewish Learning 2014)

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This time, however, Israeli occupation forces responded brutally and killed around 150 Palestinians. According to Makhoul, “the outbreak of the second Intifada marked a transformation in Palestinian political participation in Israel evidenced in the local demonstrations held in solidarity with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories” (Makhoul 2012, 13). Suicide bombings were indeed a problematic aspect of the conflict for both sides. However, Ziv Hellman’s piece “Suicide Bombings in Israel” reviews the wave of suicide bombings with the high-handed stance of the occupier. Hellman claims that “[p]erhaps the most frightening aspect of the suicide bomb attacks Israel has suffered, [which] reached their height during the Second Intifada, is the banality and ease with which dozens of lives can be taken within seconds” (Hellman 2014). While there was nothing “banal” about someone taking one’s own life along with those of a number of others, Hellman’s narrow-minded view of the second Intifada as a mere threat by Palestinians against Israeli civilians is quite reductive. The occupation leaders’ response to the second Intifada was brutal; on November 16, 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated, “If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force.” (Stop the Wall 2014). Construction on the apartheid wall began soon after. The wall, which has been expanded upon regularly, serves not only to separate two nations, two cultures and two lands but also geo-spatially bring about the deterioration of Palestinian lands in the OPT. The villages, towns and cities in Palestine have been increasingly ghettoized, cut off by the wall, and access to electricity and water are under Israeli state’s control as well as other vital matters such as communications, travel and identification. Laurie King (one of the co-founders of EI) commented on this in her article “Hitting the Wall”: Most salient is the wall of apathy. If you haven’t been to the Middle East, if you’ve never known a Palestinian who’s been dispossessed, occupied, and dehumanized, if you’ve never heard an Israeli express horror at his or her army’s actions, you probably haven’t had the occasion to be outraged by the daily violations of international humanitarian law in the West Bank and Gaza. (King 2009).

The forms of dehumanization that King addresses are precisely what EI tries to reverse. King’s article was the first piece I read on EI; written in an autobiographic tone, it was published in the “Diaries: Live from Palestine” section of EI, and it pulled me in. As I read, I witnessed her journey into Palestine and Israel, places I too have visited. She starts her piece by telling us about a vivid dream she had in which “a long line of young

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Palestinian men ran up and forcefully threw their bodies against the towering concrete barrier, followed by dull thud after dull thud” (King 2009). Although her dream is quite clear and needs no interpretation, it is a manifestation of her frustration with the way they can tap into her wish to tear down the wall just as she genuinely reported on it to her readers. A recent editorial in EI titled “Recognizing Palestine, BDS and the Survival of Israel” by Joseph Massad clarifies, among other issues, the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) debate in terms of Palestine’s perpetual non-recognition as a state in Europe with the exception of Sweden (Massad 2014). Aimed at institutions, not individuals, BDS is a risky but necessary movement by which “Palestinian civil society issued a call for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel in 2005, until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights” (bdsmovement.net 2014). The BDS movement demands an end to the unbearable status quo for the Palestinian people and the cessation of international support for Israel as it attempts “to colonize more and more Palestinian land, [and] entrench its apartheid system,” while also calling for the end of Israel’s “regular massacres” (Ziadah 2014). Massad lays out the details of this “necessary evil” as he questions if BDS is a means to an end in itself. He claims that BDS has proven to be successful as a means for achieving recognition, but he also notes that globally its power has been limited. He writes: Rather than call on the international community to adopt BDS without an explicit commitment to its goals, Palestinians must insist that those in solidarity with them adopt BDS as a strategy and not as a goal, in order to bring about an end to Israel’s racism and colonialism in all its forms inside and outside the 1948 boundaries. (Massad 2014)

The BDS movement runs the risk of bringing generous returns for Zionist lobbyists since even though the Middle Eastern Studies Association’s members voted “to grant themselves the right to debate BDS [...] in the process [they] unwittingly granted the Zionists one full year to lobby and prepare to defeat a BDS resolution on which members may be asked to vote next year” (Ibid.). Currently, there are only two academic organizations, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and the Association for Asian American Studies, which have fully endorsed their support for the demands of BDS. Aside from these, Massad has pointed out that the American Anthropological Association voted to defeat an anti-BDS resolution (Ibid.).

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What else is there? There are numerous and diverse online sources that report about the conflict and the occupation from both Israeli and Palestinian points of view, but very few address the core issues which have the potential to transform the conflict for the betterment of the people who live in the region on both sides of the conflict. Stop the Wall is one widely known website which draws upon a “grassroots movement uniting the struggle of the popular committees in the villages, refugee camps and cities struggling against the Wall and the settlements and the efforts of Palestinian civil society” (Stop the Wall 2014). The website provides visitors with a variety of media such as a PowerPoint presentation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with images, maps, data, quotations and other relevant information. End the Occupation: US Campaign to End the Occupation is a US-based version of Stop the Wall, and both websites share similar links but operate under different headings. Similar to EI, The Jerusalem Fund: For Education and Community Development is an independent, non-profit, non-political, non-sectarian organization based in Washington, D.C. There is also notable website called Crisis Guide: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is run by the Council of Foreign Relations5 (CFR), an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank and publisher. In the section about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are several documentaries with narrative timelines about the history of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict and the occupation. However, the website does not state a clear aim concerning the transformation of the conflict. A website mentioned above, My Jewish Learning, published a piece by Rachael Gelfman Schultz titled “The Law of Return: An Immigration Policy to Ensure a Jewish Majority in the State of Israel” in which Schultz takes up the “law of return,” a major issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the author clearly defines just what is at stake: Many pro-Palestinian advocates criticize the Law of Return as discriminatory, because Israel does not grant a similar right of return to Palestinian refugees who wish to return to their former homes in Israel, after being displaced in the 1948 War of Independence and the 1967 SixDay War. Today, the number of Palestinian refugees and their descendants is estimated to exceed four million. Many Israelis worry that granting the Palestinians right of return would lead to an Arab majority in Israel and the eventual dissolution of the Jewish state. The right of return has been a contentious topic of negotiation in the Israeli-Arab peace talks. (Schultz, 2014)

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Similar takes on this issue have been published in EI, but with a different angle. As a frequent visitor of the site, I have observed that EI maintains a consistent point of view on these issues. Although it is not possible to find content that concedes that the Israeli state has any rights regarding the occupation or its decisions made on behalf of the Palestinian people concerning Israel or Palestine, it is also not possible to find any content which is anti-Semitic in any way. This is indicative of the significant resolve of the editorial board. This decisiveness indicates that EI respects the Jewish faith and Jewish people and is not against their existence, but EI takes a firm stance regarding the Israeli government, Zionism and policy makers as they impact the Palestinian right to existence and the OPT. Through this alone EI has made significant contributions to the transformation of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To maintain this stance it is imperative for the writers, editors and bloggers to work together to keep up resistance to the occupation, the wall and the injustice and inequality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without alienating Jewish people who are in solidarity with their cause. When analyzing the Palestinian resistance as a concept with regard to the occupation, it is also imperative to contextualize the idea of resistance as a form of existence. Lila Abu-Lughod argues that even a small shift in how we see resistance can have major consequences. She suggests, “We should use resistance as a diagnostic of power” (Abu-Lughod 2009, 42). Abu-Lughod draws upon Foucault’s analytics of power to detect the surges with which resistance flows. She notes, “where there is power, there is resistance” (quoted in Abu-Lughod 2009, 42; Foucault 1978, 95-96) and “yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (Ibid.) Understanding the repressive nature of power would give us not only the tools to analyze the negating aspect of its undoings but also equip us “to produce forms of pleasure, systems of knowledge, goods, and discourses” (Ibid., 42). According to Abu-Lughod, Foucault’s insight about resistance is especially provocative, but she argues that the first part of the proposition needs to be inverted so we can fully appreciate its significance: “Where there is resistance, there is power” (Ibid.). Abu-Lughod claims that this is “both less problematic and potentially more fruitful for ethnographic analysis because it enables us to move away from abstract theories of power toward methodological strategies for the study of power in particular situations” (Abu-Lughod 2009, 42). More specifically, when resistance becomes nothing more than a signification in the abstract, the resistance and power interwoven in these strategies matter all the more.

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And yet there is nothing illusory in relation to the locales of power, resistance, and occupation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What makes EI different? The content of the website is based on documented evidence and factchecking. The editors’ mission statement notes that they produce “news from leading human rights organizations, activists and news agencies with strong records” (The Electronic Intifada 2014). Their editorial choices are informed “by the commitment of its cofounders and editors to universal principles of human rights, international law, anti-racism and equal justice” (Ibid.). EI utilizes resources to raise information to the surface or, as Foucault put it when he himself advocated this inversion, one can then use resistance “as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their points of application and the methods used” (quoted in Abu-Lughod 2009, 42; Foucault 1982, 211). The significant diversity of viewpoints expressed in EI is one of its strengths. A rather generic disclaimer, however, notes that the “articles published by the Electronic Intifada represent the views of their authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the publication or its editors” (The Electronic Intifada 2014). The editors select and publish news based on information from leading human rights organizations, activists and news agencies that have strong records, and their editorial choices are informed “by universal principles of human rights, international law, anti-racism and equal justice” (Ibid.). In the “About EI” section of the website, the website’s monetary policies are clearly defined. The site is financed by donations from individuals and private foundations, and the site claims that they receive no funding from governments or political parties. At the moment of writing, there is an online fundraising campaign underway for EI and notifications about donations have been sent out via e-mails signed by Ali Abunimah, the executive director of EI. The priority of EI’s management is to maintain the site as an independent outlet which ensures that its users can participate, although writers are generally not paid for their articles. However, there is a clause which states that EI may sponsor original works that need funding. Nonetheless, the website promotes its writers’ articles and secures copyrights for them, and images, whether still or moving, are also protected by the site, which does not publish images without proper copyright declared in writing. Unsurprisingly, standalone secondary information is almost nonexistent in the content, and EI strongly discourages submissions of content under a pseudonym. This is a means of

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maintaining solidarity among writers who do not enjoy the luxury of being able to use a pseudonym and the use of real names fosters accountability and verifiability despite death threats that may be made. The editors state, however, that “[a]uthors may only use anonymous sources in exceptional cases” (The Electronic Intifada 2014). EI editors must be able to verify all sources even if the published version of an article protects the identity of that source as EI holds to a strict policy against plagiarism. EI also does not publish content that has been published elsewhere and they prefer links be set up with EI if content needs to appear in another publication. Additionally, they do not publish content that encourages discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The editors claim, “[w]hile we are committed to conveying the realities experienced by people in Palestine, we generally avoid publishing images that gratuitously depict violence or violate the dignity of any person” (The Electronic Intifada 2014). IE publishes their finances on the site, and hence that information is easily accessible. Financial information related to EI is also included in public 990 forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service by the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society, Inc. (MECCS), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and is included in MECCS’ audited financial statements (The Electronic Intifada 2014). Based on the information available in those statements, it can be seen that EI uses the majority of their funds for the design and maintenance of the website (Ibid.), hence the website’s smooth functioning and interface. Although somewhat flat, EI’s design is user-friendly and does not have distracting ads or banners. The links function flawlessly and the search button is active. As all content is layered within the website categorically and historically, the division of headings and subheadings is adequately differentiated. Upon entering the site, a photo essay welcomes you, which changes monthly and sometimes weekly depending on the incoming content. While writing these lines I surveyed a current photo essay which informs users about the Israeli order to demolish a school which was built through community effort in the village of Samra. The photo essay reports that the demolition of the school will leave numerous children without access to education. The photographs are large and sharp and each is tagged with information about how the school was built by the villagers starting in May of 2012 (Al-Bazz 2014). Another important element of the website is EI’s logo, which is an example of strong communication design. The typeface is reminiscent of a typewriter font and hence is indicative of the editorial quality of the website. The lower-case letters used in the design of the logo (ei) suggest

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that the content of the website is communicated through a voice understandable by the masses. The texture of the letters inside a white circle gives an unfinished but progressive look. The white area is surrounded by a semi-thick grey line that could signify global processes of communication, echoing the editors’ claim in the “About EI” section. The space between the white circle inclusive of the letters and the grey circle enclosing the overall logo says much about the geo-spatial nature of EI’s content, and the grey area could represent the past, present and unknown future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although the logo could have been enlarged, the lettering could have been sharpened and the site could use a facelift along with current communication design trends especially in terms of its layout, the overall design of EI functions well in conveying the visual, textual and factual information that such an “Electronic Intifada” is expected to deliver with regard to the resistance and existence of Palestinians.

Conclusion Lila Abu Lughod argues that resistance can make effective contributions only if it is analyzed carefully (Abu-Lughod 2009, 53). Such an analysis should be applied in the strategies of various local or global cases of resistance and especially how they exist within structures of power. Romanticizing resistance runs the risk of emptying it of content and turning it into a floating signifier. In staking out claims of dignity and heroism for a society under oppression, we need to think through the various complex interworkings of historically, politically and culturally changing structures of power. The most important theoretical and practical question facing EI in its goal to enact change and transformation is the website’s display of power in terms of relations to resistance locally and/or globally; there must be a means of ensuring that it is capable of acting as a counter-hegemonic bloc in the hegemonic community within global politics and achieving global effectiveness in the transformation of the conflict. EI currently seems to be effective in building up a counter-hegemonic community, but can EI alone carry the burden of political integrity in such a broad, global movement and keep up the pace in working towards achieving coherence in content, agenda and action? Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, will EI become something more than a website that is a platform for resistance? Can it be a hub for education, functioning as a place of networking and developing strategic policies to counter those of the leaders of the occupation?

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The real challenge in EI’s resistance to the occupation is to transform the conflict through the global solidarity they generate while sustaining resistance in order to achieve more concrete political results. Perhaps it is the diversity of ideas published on the site and the editors’ insistence on participation, inclusiveness and autonomy that gives the Electronic Intifada its true strength. However, these same qualities can also easily become a sticking point leading to unforeseen problems of political representation and organization within the politics of resistance.

Notes 1

The MidEastWeb reports “the war that ensued was won by Israel, creating a large number of Arab refugees. Estimates vary from about 520,000 (Israeli sources) to 726,000 (UN sources) to over 800,000 (Arab sources) refugees, Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced out of their homes during the fighting. This number has grown to include over 4.6 million displaced persons, about 3.7 million of whom are currently registered as refugees with the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees)” (http://www.mideastweb.org/refugees1.htm). 2 I chose not to display these images in the text. 3 Susan Abdulhawa’s own transcription of Nakba, which has several different spellings when translated into English or other languages. 4 Badil is “an independent, community-based non-profit organization mandated to protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons” (Badil 2014). 5 In the website it is noted that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) “is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. CFR members, including Brian Williams, Fareed Zakaria, Angelina Jolie, Chuck Hagel, and Erin Burnett, explain why the Council on Foreign Relations is an indispensable resource in a complex world.” See http://www.cfr.org.

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist, 17 (1): 4155. Accessed 27 August 2007. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00940496%28199002%2917%3A1%3C 41%3ATRORTT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S Al-Bazz, A. 2014. In photos: Palestinian school threatened by Israeli bulldozers. The Electronic Intifada. Accessed December 22, 2014. http://electronicintifada.net/content/photos-palestinian-schoolthreatened-israeli-bulldozers/14128

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BADIL: Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. Accessed: 22 December 2014. http://badil.org. Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Accessed December 22, 2014. http://www.bdsmovement.net/. Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). Accessed December 22, 2014. http://www.cfr.org/ End the Occupation: US Campaign to End the Occupation. Accessed: December 22, 2014, http://www.endtheoccupation.org Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House. —. 1982 Afterword: The subject and power. In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halamish, A. Israel studies, an anthology: The Yishuv: The Jewish community in mandatory Palestine.” Accessed: December 22, 2014, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ Hellman, Z. Suicide bombings in Israel. My Jewish Learning. Accessed December 22, 2014. http://www.myjewishlearning.com/israel/Contemporary_Life/IsraeliPalestinian_Relations/Second_Intifada/Wave_of_Violence.shtml?ISCL King, L. Hitting the wall. The Electronic Intifada. Accessed January 10, 2009. http://electronicintifada.net/content/hitting-wall/7954 Makhoul, M. Un-erasing the Nakba: Palestinian identity in Israel since the first Intifada. Al-Majdal, 51 (2012): 12-16. Accessed December 22, 2014. https://www.academia.edu/7261970/Unerasing_the_Nakba_Palestinian _identity_in_Israel_since_the_first_Intifada Massad, Joseph. 2014. Recognizing Palestine, BDS and the survival of Israel. The Electronic Intifada. Accessed December 22 2014. http://electronicintifada.net/content/recognizing-palestine-bds-andsurvival-israel/14123. Palestinian Refugees. MidEastWeb. Accessed December 22 2014. http://www.mideastweb.org/refugees1.htm Palestinian-Israeli Relations: The ongoing struggle and the Middle East peace process. My Jewish Learning. Accessed December 22 2014. http://mobile.myjewishlearning.com/israel/Contemporary_Life/IsraeliPalestinian_Relations.shtml Pappé, I. 2011. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. —. 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Kindle Edition). Oneworld Publications: London.

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Stop the Wall. 2014. Accessed December 22 2014. http://www.stopthewall.org/resources/presentations Schultz, R.G. The Law of Return: An immigration policy to ensure a Jewish majority in the State of Israel. My Jewish Learning. Accessed December 22 2014. http://www.myjewishlearning.com/israel/History/19481967/Building_the_State/law-of-return.shtml The Electronic Intifada. Accessed: 22 December 2014. http://electronicintifada.net/about-ei The Jerusalem Fund: For Education and Community Development. Accessed December 22 2014. 2014. http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ Ziadah, R. 2014. Emailed newsletter. Let’s hold Israel accountable – Support BDS. Accessed December 22 2014. [email protected]

CHAPTER FOUR CYBERACTIVISM IN SYRIA’S WAR: HOW SYRIAN BLOGGERS USE THE INTERNET FOR POLITICAL ACTIVISM YENAL GÖKSUN

Introduction This research aims to explore Syrian bloggers’ motives for online activism and how they use the Internet as a tool for advocacy. Since the beginning of the uprising in Syria in March 2011, citizen journalists and online activists have played a crucial role in documenting the uprising and violence in the country. As the violence continues on the ground, online activism has gained importance as a tool for political activism. Blogging creates an opportunity to exchange ideas, raise public awareness and form public opinion within the limits of the available tools and conditions. This paper discusses how the uprising has had an impact on Syrian bloggers’ agendas and asks if it has led to any changes in the methods and motivations of political bloggers. It is hoped that the outcome of this research will clarify the effects of the conflict on online activism and the prospects for the future of the Syrian blogosphere. The uprising in Syria is widely considered to be the most documented conflict in history. Citizen journalists and online activists have played a crucial role in documenting the uprising and violence in the country. Every day, hundreds of videos from all around Syria are uploaded to video-sharing websites, along with hundreds of posts that are shared through blogs. Yet, claims have been made that online activism is difficult in Syria. Rami As-Sayed, a key provider of images of the clashes in Homs, died after being wounded while covering the bombardment of Syrian forces. Fidaa al-Baali and Basil As-Sayed are other citizen journalists who were killed by security forces. Many online activists who criticized the government and supported the uprising in Syria are reported to have been

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arrested. A well-known Syrian blogger, Razan Ghazzawi, was arrested twice and charged with trying to incite sectarian strife, spreading false information and weakening national sentiment. Cyberactivists play a crucial role in documenting and disseminating information about serious human rights violations and atrocities. Blogging creates opportunities to exchange ideas, raise public awareness and shape public opinion. It also makes a very significant contribution to the construction of the virtual public sphere. Moreover, blogging helps focus the attention of public opinion in the world on catastrophes and mobilize civilians and decision makers to take active involvement. Thus, blogging is not only a tool of advocacy, but at the same time an effective device for shaping and/or mobilizing latent public opinion. Syrian activists have used a wide range of tools and outlets such as textual materials, photos, videos and social media links to report on the bloodshed. In sharing their daily experiences, they cover different aspects of their lives in different ways. Although they utilize various tools to raise awareness and mobilize public support, this study will be limited to the activities of bloggers. In other words, the aim of this paper is to explore Syrian bloggers’ motives for online activism and how they take advantage of the Internet as a tool for advocacy.

Research questions and methods Online activism, or cyberactivism, involves using the Internet for different types of activism such as advocating for political participation via blogs or online protests by e-mail bombardment. Political blogging is one of the tools used for online activism that allow users to express their personal opinions without restrictions. In this way, blogging is considered to be a new public sphere for citizens. Blogging gives individuals the chance to present opinions that cannot find a place in mainstream media. Political blogging itself takes much time and effort because activists must collect and organize data for their articles. Under harsh conditions, including insecurity and a lack of basic needs, blogging becomes even more difficult. These challenges make it all the more important to understand the living conditions of Syrian bloggers, their motivations for blogging, their agendas and their discourses on democracy and violence. In Syria, where the Internet is an alternative to government-owned media, blogging creates a space for discussion and the distribution of diverse ideas. Since the beginning of the uprising in Syria in 2011, blogs have been a platform particularly for those who are not affiliated with any of the armed groups fighting on the ground. As the intense fighting rages on,

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blogging has become even more challenging, as the personal opinions of bloggers come into conflict with both oppositional groups and the government. Taking up the concerns outlined above, the aim of this research is to find answers to the following questions: - How do Syrian bloggers use new media for activism? - What are their motives for activism? - How did the uprising change their agenda? - How might blogging affect the future of the conflict in Syria? Data was collected through structured interviews with eight Syrian bloggers inside and outside of Syria, either through Skype or in person. The group of bloggers was selected from among activists who support the uprising against the Syrian government. Therefore, this research doesn’t claim to represent the whole Syrian blogosphere but aims to contribute to our understandings of the impact of blogging on the uprising. It is hoped that the findings will shed light on the role of new media throughout the conflict in Syria on the one hand and explain how bloggers have struggled as activists on the other.

Online activism The authoritarian character of some Middle Eastern states raises questions about the condition of civil society and political participation. Some argue that the democratizing role of civil societies in the region shouldn’t be overestimated as civil society is not inherently a source of democratic change (Hawthorne 2004). On the contrary, Richard Norton (1993, 216) claims that: Although the region continues to be marked by regular encroachments upon the dignity of individuals, the trajectory of Middle Eastern politics is clearly toward an increased emphasis on the right of the individual to be free from the arbitrary abuse of the state.

The recent wave of uprisings in the Middle East have clarified that despite the existing restrictions and repression the masses can find different ways to build networks. Consequently, new forms of activism can have an impact on democratization. According to Asef Bayat (2002, 3):

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With the help of technological developments and the proliferation of Internet usage, new forms of activism arose across the region. For instance, as seen in Egypt during the demonstrations of the Arab spring which led to the “revolution” in 2011, online social networks were used by activists to communicate and organize anti-government protests. Employing online tools for participation creates a new form of activism. Yet, defining online activism is as difficult as defining activism before the advent of the Internet: “Cyberactivism refuses to define the boundaries of online activism or to determine what counts and does not count as legitimate online activism” (McCaughey and Ayers 2003, 14). Sandor Vegh (2003, 71) defines online activism as a politically motivated movement that relies on the Internet. According to Vegh, “Internet activists take advantage of the technologies and the techniques offered by Internet to achieve their traditional goals.” So online activism differs not only from traditional social activism but also from digital activism: “While digital activism is used to discuss all instances of social and political campaigning practices that use digital network infrastructure, online activism or cyberactivism is used when someone is exclusively interested in the use of the Internet for activism” (Joyce 2010, IX). In Syria and other authoritarian states, traditional channels of information are kept under the control of the institutions of the state. Under these circumstances, the Internet has gained importance as an alternative source of information and news. Manuel Castells (2009, 417) is optimistic about the use of ICT’s by nongovernmental organizations and citizens as he speaks of an “empowerment for grassroots groups using the Internet as an instrument of information, communication and organization.” The Internet creates a space where users can access information and become publically aware, and it functions as a channel for the exchange of ideas and coordination. But this does not mean that cyberspace is a sphere where virtual conflicts replace struggles on the ground. Cyberspace is important because “it is a medium within which terrestrial struggles can be made visible and linked to one another” (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 121). Online and offline activism don’t have to replace each other, but they can work together to create a larger impact. Syrian bloggers usually participate in offline activism such as demonstrations and campaigns on the streets but they also use blogs to share their knowledge and experiences, facilitate

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activism, document the uprising and spread information about their causes. All these activities are carried out despite government surveillance and the difficult circumstances brought about by the conflict. Blogs can be used for different purposes but basically they serve as “an online diary that has a public character and hence break down the border between private and public” (Fuchs 2008, 130). According to Coleman (2005, 277), blogs have three democratizing characteristics: -

-

They provide a bridge between the private, subjective sphere of self-expression and the socially fragile civic sphere in which publics can form and act. They allow people to express incomplete thoughts. They lower the threshold of entry into global debates for traditionally unheard or marginalized voices.

Blogs have many advantages compared to traditional media. For one, “blogging doesn’t require as much money capital as an established newspaper does. All citizens can, in principle, become journalists by political blogging” (Fuchs 2008, 134). This kind of freedom gives activists the opportunity to go beyond media censorship and break the information monopoly of dominant powers. In this way, blogging creates a space for free information flow and the negotiation of different “incomplete thoughts,” providing an opportunity for marginalized voices to be heard. Although blogging offers a variety of opportunities that challenge the domination of media corporations which operate under certain rules determined by the market and the state, discussions are ongoing about the impact of blogging on the public. During the demonstrations which led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, bloggers played an important role in promoting public change and putting pressure on the authoritarian regime (El-Nawawy and Khamis, 2013). Nonetheless, we are witnessing differing experiences in Arab countries in the struggle of the people for democratic rights and each experience should be analyzed in its own particular context.

The Internet and blogging in Syria In an interview Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad had with the panArab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat in 2001, he defined the limits of media freedom: “The existence of open information does not mean that issues would be out of the control of the Ministry of Information, and this indicates clearly that the state wants people to possess means of

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knowledge including information. Otherwise, the State would have prevented [satellite] dishes and this is not difficult for the State.” This statement is evidence of Al-Assad’s approach to freedom of speech and its limits. Beside satellite television and international media, the Internet was seen as a threat to state control of the flow of information. Jashua Landis, who has been blogging on Syria since 2004, has stated that “the Syrian security services perceived the Internet before 2000 as a Zionist plot to infiltrate the state” (Loewenstein 2008, 96). Because of this distrustful attitude towards the Internet, Syria delayed investments and always kept the Internet under close surveillance. In 2000 when the Internet became available to the public, the number of Internet users was around 30,000. Today that number has increased to 5 million, with a 22.5% penetration rate in the Syrian market (http:// www.Internetworldstats.com/stats5.htm). Through the Internet, Syrians have had a new chance to circulate new topics and issues which were not covered in the state-controlled media. By the end of 2005, there were over 100 bloggers in Syria writing in both English and Arabic, and that number reached nearly 500 in 2010 (Loewenstein 2008, 100; Taki 2010, 125). Blogging was a new tool in Syrian cyberspace, and it has been under surveillance by the government as with other online activities. In 2007, Maan Abdul-Salam, a Syrian activist, emphasized that connecting to the Internet is not enough for democratic reforms if the people don’t have free access to information or freedom of speech: The Internet is really important, but it doesn't make any change in the end, because the hand of security is still so strong. People can get information now, but they can't do anything with the information. Maybe you have a window on the world, but you don't have a window on what's going on inside, and that makes you blind. (Taylor 2007)

Under the rule of Bashar Al-Assad, bloggers and online activists have come up against a number of obstacles. The government established a licensing body under the jurisdiction of the security police which required that citizens who wanted to buy a PC or modem, or register as an Internet user, have to obtain government clearance. As a result, Syrian citizens had to sign a contract with the Syrian Internet Society before carrying on activities on the Internet (El-Gody 2007, 225). According to a Human Rights Watch report, the Syrian government has extended the restrictions it imposed on print media to online outlets, reversing early hopes that AlAssad’s role as the chairman of the Syrian Computer Society prior to his appointment as president would make him more receptive to online freedom of expression (HRW 2010, 13).

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As the uprising broke out, the Syrian government tightened security measures not only on the streets but also in cyberspace by deploying various systems to prevent the spread of news. Although the government reopened access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which have been periodically blocked, the Internet was still under close surveillance. The government has been monitoring blog posts, e-mails and any other news or messages which are being circulated on the Internet, and it has taken preventive measures to crush the rebellion. As a result of the goal to control the flow of information in Syrian cyberspace, the government broadened its crackdown on bloggers. At 17, Tal Al-Mallohi was the youngest Syrian blogger to be arrested by Syrian security forces. She was arrested in 2009 and then found guilty of “revealing information to a foreign country” and sentenced to five years in prison. After the uprising, Razan Ghazzawi was arrested twice and charged with trying to incite sectarian strife, spreading false information and weakening national sentiment, common accusations brought against activists. Many other bloggers were detained, interrogated, threatened and forced to stop blogging or forced into exile. Bloggers who decided to stay in the country and continue their campaign against the Al-Assad government had to take security measures such as writing under a pseudonym or hiding from security forces. Others who had to leave the country created blogger communities abroad and continued their campaigns. The bloggers inside and outside of Syria have different ideological stances and their own personal experiences and reasons for starting blogging and joining campaigns against the Syrian government.

Syrian bloggers’ motives and agendas The Syrian bloggers who were interviewed during the course of this research are mostly involved in offline activism and most of them were detained or threatened with detainment because of their oppositional activities. Their positions vary on the ideological spectrum, ranging from “leftist” to “western liberal.” Five of the eight bloggers who were interviewed stated that they had started blogging before the uprising “to express their feelings and thoughts and to share them with other people,” “to express their opinions about social and historical issues” and “to express a variety of ideas which cannot be represented in the Syrian media.” Ammar Abdulhamid was one the first bloggers in Syria, and he has been blogging since 2001. According to Abdulhamid, a lack of access to traditional media channels led people to take advantage of the Internet:

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Chapter Four With the advent of the Internet it was an opportunity to bypass all of these restrictions and to reach not only national audiences but to international audiences [as well]. Those who saw the revolution of [the] Internet from the early days they knew that this will not stay only with us but this is going to be global. So we realized that if we are early and take advantage of using the Internet, eventually we will reach international audiences and make an impact.

Before the uprising, although they had the chance to freely express their ideas on the Internet, bloggers were limited by the government and society. The uprising gave bloggers the chance to start speaking about taboos. Ibrahim Al-Assil started blogging before the uprising and he said that writing is a great way to translate your feelings and thoughts, to share them with other people, and to take part in the change. He says: So if you want to bring change, I think writing is a very useful means to do that. The Syrian uprising changed the conditions. It gave me and other bloggers a bigger space to express ourselves. Because people are more willing to discuss ideas, they have the courage now and they are even more interested in discussing everything. So before the revolution you could discuss ideas but also many people were even afraid to visit your blog. … [T]he Kurdish issue in Syria was a taboo before. But now, nobody asks you if this is a red line. Whatever you write about, people even who disagree with you, they go and discuss it with you. They are not afraid anymore. People want to discuss more about ideas, [whether they are] social, political or religious.

Mass demonstrations and public campaigns led some Syrians to start blogging. They started blogging during the uprising “to document the revolution” and “to create awareness about the current situation.” As they did not have any previous experience, they followed other Syrian bloggers and learned from other Arab bloggers’ experiences. Mora Yafa from Damascus, who wanted to stay anonymous because of security reasons, says she was inspired by Egyptian bloggers and was following their methods: “I wanted to document the Syrian revolution. When I first started in 2011, I wanted to document. This was the first time I went into the streets, [as] I wanted to speak with a voice from the ground.” In an atmosphere of violent clashes, blogging gave Syrian bloggers a non-violent space for expressing their opinions. For Salim Salamah, who was living in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, June of 2012 was a turning point. In September of 2012, when the situation started to radically change in terms of resistance and activism, staying in Damascus became difficult for him. He does not define himself as a non-violent activist but

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also he didn’t choose to take up arms. Blogging was the only way for him to express himself: “I started blogging, first of all to create a space for expression where I’m the editor of myself. No one can edit or monitor my way of writing, expression.” For Salamah, it was important at that time to start documenting every single moment regardless of its political importance. Another Syrian blogger, Mo’nis Bukhari, had been writing mostly about art, science and food. The uprising changed his agenda too: “Now most of my blogs are about politics, history and religion. Because there is so much fake Islam growing in Syria, I feel that I have a part of the responsibility to fix that.” Most Syrian bloggers are not only active online, but also participate in campaigns and activities on the streets. Razan Ghazzawi is one of the most well-known female bloggers, and she has remained active in Syria despite the threats that have been made against her life: “Something is changing for the whole country. So you have to talk about it and to be involved in it.” Ghazzawi has focused more on what the regime is doing to the people who led the uprising. She also blogs about the grassroots level, about how people are organizing and using social media. She used to blog much more before the uprising, but because of a lack of time and all the work she does as an activist she doesn’t have time to reflect. She said that she cannot spare enough time for writing: “Sometimes it becomes very difficult for you to even think, because of urgency, because of war; a lot of things are happening at the same time, [so] it’s difficult to set aside time for blogging.” On the one hand, the Syrian uprising encouraged bloggers to write about more sensitive topics and created a space for free discussions; on the other hand, it has created new tasks for activists and limited the amount of time they can spend writing. The lack of basic needs, insecurity, government crackdowns and surveillance have had a negative impact on bloggers, and often they do not have Internet access or electricity. They always have to be cautious about their safety by keeping their identities and/or activities secret. Syrian blogger Rabie Al-Arabi, who has been living in Beirut for fifteen years, wanted to remain anonymous after the interview, as he was afraid that he could receive threats even outside Syria. While many Syrian bloggers who reside abroad feel safer, they still receive threats. Despite the restrictions and difficulties they face, however, Syrian bloggers have continued writing and revising their strategies according to the unfolding of developments in Syria.

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Discourses on democracy and violence Most Syrian bloggers work for a “more democratic Syria” but they utilize different tools and methods to bring about change. Ibrahim Al-Assil concentrates on changing society as he thinks democracy is a social issue: “The main thing we are working [on] now is to have a democratic, pluralistic state and society. Democracy is not a political issue. It’s a social issue.” According to Salamah, if you want to build democracy you need to change the whole society, including the mentality, how people think, how they deal with each other and how they listen to each other. “That’s what we are working on, as bloggers and activists,” he adds. This kind of approach keeps Syrian bloggers out of daily political discussions over the battle on the ground and gives them the opportunity to focus on promoting the idea of democracy among people so that they will not support extremist groups in the future. According to Ammar Abdulhamid, democracy is a long-term issue because Syria needs to develop a democratic culture, a body of historical and practical experience that actually sees democracy as a solution: I think what we are going through is a learning experience and ... a certain cadre of people, intellectuals, activists, [and] people on the ground [must] remain connected to promoting democracy, transforming their ideas. If we can do that, in the longer term, within a generation or two, we definitely can emerge as democratic society. Democracy is learnt by the collective experience so we need time for this.

The methods to be used for revolting against the regime remain a matter of discussion among Syrian bloggers. According to Ghazzawi, Syrians just want to live freely and respect a rule of law in which basic civil rights are guaranteed and protected by the state for all irrespective of their social, ethnic or religious backgrounds. Her method for getting it right is not to commit crimes: We are a people who have a cause, we protect this cause, we have paid blood for this cause, we should not commit crimes. We are a people who are protesting and revolting because we want [a] free Syria, justice for Syria.

Despite all the violence in Syria, Ibrahim Al-Assil is also a non-violent activist: I think violence can change the head of the state, it can change the regime, but [it] cannot change society into a better one. You cannot build

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democracy and a pluralistic society by violence. But of course if you want to blame anyone, it’s the regime who first pushed people into violence after a year of non-violent revolution.

Blogging itself is a non-violent act of revolting but the messages disseminated in the blogs may have an influence on readers. This potential effect places a certain responsibility on bloggers as they can promote either non-violent or violent struggle. Blogs can be used to call on people to join demonstrations in squares or campaigns on the Internet, but also to invite people to take up arms and fight against security forces. Salamah is one of those who think violence can be used as a way to struggle against the Syrian government: “Violence is very logical against the brutality of the regime. It was a very normal evolution of events.” For Abdulhamid, when he is blogging in English, his purpose “is to create a desire among certain circles in the international community to intervene and support democracy activists and secular forces. It is very clear that politics is not going where you want it [to go].” It should be noted, however, that Syrian bloggers’ different approaches to methods for overthrowing the regime have led to fragmentation among civil society groups.

The role of bloggers during the Syrian uprising It is difficult to answer the question about whether bloggers have had an impact on public opinion or whether blogging has played a role during the uprising. The impact of blogging depends on media literacy and Internet users’ habits. Blogs in Syria remain as sources of information for a small group that is familiar with the Internet and reads or writes blogs. According to Mark Lynch, rather than focusing on whether blogs alone can deliver democracy or a political revolution, analysts should explore the variety of ways in which blogs might transform the dynamics of Arab public opinion and political activism (Lynch, 2007). Syrian bloggers are aware of their capacity to reach the public, so they focus on creating an alternative public space as a counter-voice to mainstream institutions. Al-Assil writes that blogging does have an effect on the public. He claims that by blogging and other means of activism, he hopes the local and international community will hear about the alternatives in Syria. He thinks that this is the fastest way to “topple the regime” and to create an alternative for the people: People know what they don’t want, but they don’t know exactly what they want. They say they don’t want violence but Assad has convinced them that he is the only option for them except for al-Qaeda. So we try to create

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Chapter Four an alternative. By blogging we are trying to let people hear about alternatives because there are alternatives! There are great people doing great activism inside Syria but these alternatives are unheard.

Ammar Abdulhamid emphasizes that blogging is only one of the tools that is used for activism. It’s a way to exchange information and to create awareness. He claims that blogging is an important tool but it’s not the only one: So we cannot just lose ourselves in one aspect. People who are good bloggers should stick to this and people like me should connect blogging and action. But we have to realize that it is only one tool, we need to create more systematic efforts in order to direct this change process in [the] right direction. So it’s not all about blogging. Blogging is only one of the elements for effecting change. But there are also a lot of things to do.

Most Syrian bloggers participate in offline activism in and out of Syria. They establish communication channels between activists on the ground in Syria and in the outside world to create an alternative agenda for regional and international media. Despite all the efforts of Syrian bloggers, videos of fighting and killing occupy the news bulletins. But Salim Salamah says that the real effect of blogging will be seen after the uprising: “Blogging makes a lot of people interact, especially when the blog is open for others to contribute. It shapes peoples’ ideas and impressions. It makes them think about what they think of daily life. But in so many aspects the main outcome I think will be after the revolution.”

Conclusion The Syrian conflict has been growing and becoming more complicated since its beginning in 2011, and violence and bloodshed in the country have obstructed the initiatives undertaken by cyberactivists. As the conflict turned the country into a battlefield, Syrian bloggers began to consider the contributions they could make and their prospects for the future of the conflict. The Syrian uprising has led bloggers to focus on political issues and start discussions on topics which were previously seen as taboo. Bloggers have created a public space in opposition to the dominant discourse of the Syrian government and also undertaken efforts to create an alternative voice against groups that are fighting. This alternative public space makes it possible for Syrians to join discussions and contribute to the evolution of thought. As the Syrian uprising

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transformed the Syrian blogosphere, new people were encouraged to start blogging and take part in online and offline activism. However, Syrian bloggers have faced a variety of difficulties, and this has led them to be more careful during their online and offline activism. These difficulties and restrictions have pushed Syrian bloggers to find new methods of activism and prompted the creation of civic awareness. In the first year of the uprising, street demonstrations and other campaigns were organized through social media channels. After the crackdown by Syrian forces, activists were obliged to withdraw from the streets. Cyberactivists focused on documenting human rights violations and covering events which were ignored by the mainstream media. Bloggers created an alternative agenda and an alternative public space for discussions of ongoing events. Current debates on Syrian political blogs and social media are opening up a space for a new public sphere and constructing a civil society which will likely play a role in the future of Syria. As democracy is a long-term goal for Syrian bloggers, creating awareness and establishing an understanding for democracy are their priorities. Despite the ongoing war, they have focused on establishing a democratic culture in Syrian society.

Works Cited Bayat, A. 2002. Activism and social development in the Middle East, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 34: 1-28. Castells, M. 2009. The Power of Identity. UK: Blackwell Publishing. Coleman, S. 2005. Blogs and the new politics of listening, The Political Quarterly. 76: 272-280. Dyer-Witheford, N. 1999. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. El-Gody, A. 2007. New media, new audience, new topics, and new forms of censorship in the Middle East. In New Media and the New Middle East, ed. Philip Seib, 213-234. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. El-Nawawy, M, and Khamis, S. 2013. Egyptian Revolution: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement, and Citizen Journalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fuchs, C. 2008. Internet and Society. New York: Routledge. Hawthorne, A. 2004. Middle Eastern democracy: Is civil society the answer?. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Human Rights Watch. 2010. A wasted decade: Human rights in Syria during Bashar al-Asad’s first ten years in power.

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Joyce, M., ed. 2010. Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change. New York: International Debate Education Association. Loewenstein, A. 2008. The Blogging Revolution. Australia: Melbourne University Press. Mccaughey, M., and Ayers, M.D., eds. 2003. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Mortenses, T., and Walker, J. 2002. Blogging thoughts: Personal publication as an online research tool. In Researching ICTs in Context, ed. Andrew Morrison. 249–72. Oslo: InterMedia Report. Norton, A.R. 1993. The future of civil society in the Middle East, Middle East Journal, (47): 205-216. Taki, M. 2010. Bloggers and the Blogosphere in Lebanon & Syria: Meanings and Activities. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Westminster. Taylor, G. 2007. After the Damascus spring: Syrians search for freedom online. Reason. Vegh, S. 2003. Classifying forms of online activism: The case of cyberprotests against the World Bank. In Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, ed. Martha Mccaughey and Michael D. Ayers. 71-96. New York: Routledge.

Interviewees -

Ammar Abdulhamid, USA, via Skype, (http://www.syrianrevolutiondigest.com). Ibrahim Al-Assil, Turkey, (http://www.madina-blog.net). Mo'nis Bukhari, Germany, via Skype, (mudawanatmonis.wordpress.com). Mora Yafa (pseudonym), Damascus, via Webex, (http://thedearyasmeenblog.wordpress.com). Rabab Al-Bouti, Turkey, via Skype. Rabie Al-Arabi (pseudonym), Lebanon (http://newdawnnn.blogspot.com). Razan Ghazzawi, Damascus, via Skype, (http://razanghazzawi.org). Salim Salamah, Sweden, via Skype, (http://jidar3azel.wordpress.com).

CHAPTER FIVE THE MULTITUDES: FROM IDEOLOGICAL DISEASE TO CONCEPTUAL CURE CRISTINA IVAN

Introduction Some twenty years ago in a journalistic triptych published in the French newspaper Liberation (Baudrillard 1995), Jean Baudrillard daringly announced the victory of hyper-reality over our lives. His articles questioned the idea of live journalistic coverage of wars. He drew attention to media strategies employed to create simulated versions of reality that kept audiences away from real facts by creating the visual simulacra of a technologized, videogame-like narrative of war that removed carnage, victims and death and promoted a “clean” targeting of abstracted victims in tune with the rhetoric of the state. As Childs (2006) notes in a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of Baudrillard’s texts, the focus was the advent of a new paradigmatic approach based on the suppression of the real and the imposition of the virtual. The conclusion was rather gloomy, predicting an epoch in which technological choreography would eliminate direct interaction with events and lead to the creation of purely mediated and therefore manipulated public perceptions (Kelner 1992, Virilio 2002, Zizek 2002). As we know, this has led to a line of doomsday criticism in the 21st century, one in which alienation and isolation becomes viral, affecting the behavior of citizens around the world. Critics of globalization tuned in, announcing deviant social patterns and projecting fears concerning the dissipation of social cohesion and increasing extremism, terrorism and dystopian versions of the future. Such fears indeed rely on facts, as has been extensively argued.1 Robert Govers and Frank Go, for example, stated as recently as 2009 that “the emerging network society raises

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questions about the expanding digital divide and increasing social exclusion” (Govers and Go 2009). The two authors also cite Hallowel who, a few years earlier in 1999, declared in more plastic terms that ...society should safeguard the “human moment,” the “high touch,” “face to face contact between people” as [people] “enjoy and need social and sensual contact; they do not want to be disembodied.” (Hallowel apud Grabes and Go, 2009)

Some fourteen years later, however, we can better see the complexities of the highly technologized virtual online environment overlapping “reality as we know it,” and as a result we may arrive at different conclusions. Hyper-reality remains one of the major catalysts and effects of globalization, and for that reason recent critics of hyper-reality have focused more extensively on its relation to the larger paradigm of globalization, nuancing their approaches and understandings of its effects around the world. Childs notes, for instance, that ...globalization operates at local and international levels, producing both cultural fragmentation and homogenization, connection and interaction, dispersal and dislocation in one connective and unifying but highly differentiated system. (Childs 2006)

The ambivalent nature of globalization has also been well expressed by Robert Rolandson, who noted that “...globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson, 1992). Following Robertson, we can conclude that the “compression of the world” was a specific feature that led critics to react with anxiety concerning its development. Compression causes the annulment of natural, agreed-upon rhythms of change and disruptions in flows of information and territorial boundaries in the way that simulacra imprint perceptions. Uneasiness is felt particularly at the level of the mind, as cognitive processes become altered through exposure to new frames and artificially constructed boundaries. This brings about negative reactions to hyper-reality and its practices, whether they are social, cultural, televisual, digital or otherwise. The second element of Robertson’s description of globalization has been celebrated by promoters of globalization themselves. What he called the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole has been used to announce a celebration of global participatory democracy and a new strand of humanism in the form of active citizenship, which, as we

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shall see, cannot exist without advanced technology and hyper-reality. But first, it will be useful to look into what the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole might mean. First, an entire array of new collective individualities emerge that are loosely linked, flexible and changing. Ideologists and philosophers at the turn of the 21st century drew attention to the challenge represented by the many identities of citizens that a global world must constantly embrace, negotiate or annul if they are to survive. French philosopher Jacques Derrida claimed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that global terrorism represents nothing less than the symptom of an autoimmune disease affecting Western civilization, the very existence of which is threatened by an increasingly inefficient mode of governance (Borradori 2003). Other writers and philosophers from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds have attempted to see beyond this “disease” in the quest for a conceptual cure. Amartya Sen (2007), for instance, in Identity and Violence speaks of a need to permanently negotiate between our multiple identities in terms of citizenship, ethnicity, cultural production and gender while refusing to give predominance to a unilateral strand of our enlarged personality in a global context. Amin Malouf, a French journalist and writer of Lebanese origin, speaks in similar terms through a deconstruction of identity and its path to extremist violence in On Identity (2000). The common rhetoric is that of embracing diversity within and around us, an echo of the currently declining ideology of multiculturalism that animated thinkers at the end of the 20th century. Beyond this remains a hope advocated by those who see in multiculturalism more than the much discussed “federation of communities” once hailed by Biku Parekh (2000), with its proven inability to promote interaction outside insulated ethnic singularities and the now equally outdated logic of sovereign nations inherited from the Enlightenment. An alternative (and in my opinion valid) answer was offered up by Hardt and Negri in “The Empire” (1999) and “Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of the Empire” (2004). They articulate a new vision of future democracy based on the concept of multitudes. Hardt and Negri oppose the idea of multitudes to the existing and experienced realities of crowds, masses or mobs whose “collection of differences remains inert and can easily appear as an indifferent aggregate” and “who cannot act by themselves but must be lead” and therefore “are susceptible to external manipulation” (Hardt & Negri 2004). In contrast, the multitude ...designates an active social subject, which acts on the basis of what the singularities have in common... [It] is an internally different, multiple

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The implications are far-reaching, as the multitudes challenge the entire system of sovereignty and democracy by the proxy through which leaders rule and citizens perform tasks in the hierarchical organization of society. If viable, the model introduced by Hardt and Negri would produce new forms of active citizenship: The challenge of the multitude is the challenge of democracy. The multitude is the only social subject capable of realizing democracy [and] that is the rule of everyone by everyone. (Hardt & Negri 2004)

This theory is likely to stir dissent in the coming decade among fervent supporters and equally fervent opponents. And since it predicts a major shift in the current Western-centric conceptual paradigm and an ambitious new world order, its fate can be either that of a much-applauded prophecy or an extravagant failed utopia. The dice are only starting to roll, so the outcome will likely take time to emerge.

From ideological diseases to conceptual cures Given the major issues and implications at stake, it is not the aim of this chapter to assist in the philosophical conceptualization of multitudes or the shaping of what I see as an emerging paradigm. Rather, my aim is to produce a means by which we can seek out the possible instantiations of the concept. My main motivation is based on a personal observation that the concept of multitudes seems to be over-theorized at the moment but, unfortunately, still underspecified. Therefore, my goal is to articulate it in a specific context and test its construction to see whether it can maintain sense and coherence into the future. In doing so, I hope to help generate a more realistic and nuanced approach to a new paradigm of thought based on actual rather than idealized or ideologized practices and behaviors. In light of Jacques Derrida’s claim that terrorism represents “a symptom of the autoimmune disease our society suffers from” (Borradori 2003), my intention is also to demonstrate that other types of socially aggregated movements can represent signs of cures in the new logic of multitudes. I should also point out that this analysis is part of a larger project aimed at providing an analysis of a more comprehensive series of cultural productions and social movements that have come to transgress previous forms of thinking by putting forward what seems to be now the seeds of an

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emerging cultural and political postmodernity and multiculturalism.

paradigm

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Civic movements and social networks By looking closely at the various possible manifestations of multitudes at the turn of the millennium, I have come to the conclusion that one of the most coherent and powerful instantiations of the concept, and therefore adequate for close scrutiny, is that of extended civic movements arising and being shaped in a virtual environment. From the Arab Spring, which swept across the Middle East throughout 2011 and left in its wake a geopolitical configuration marked by turmoil, to the recent Turkish protests in 2013 that ignited public dissent against the government, we have witnessed major citizenship and protest movements around the world that were simultaneously sparked on social media sites. And through this we can return to hyper-reality and its effects on our social practices and cultural productions. Just ten years ago we began living in a time of mass communication in which mainstream channels and more or less fixed authorities were still guiding the mappings of public choices and attitudes. In marketing studies, for example, this process was referred to as “the one way push process of mass communication” (Molenaar apud Graves & Go 2009) in which opinions circulated towards public audiences in a rather unilateral direction. What we see today is a push and pull process in which opinions circulate freely to and fro with citizens taking action, creating their own ad hoc alternative media channels and sharing information, opinions and facts while reflecting on, selecting and debating experiences via social networking sites which create an info-sphere with porous and lax boundaries. The shift from the traditional push model to the push and pull alternative media model of today presupposes a significant shift. According to Molenaar, “a new lifestyle is emerging, characterized by mobility, fast pacedness, polyscriptedness and parallelization of experiences” (Molenaar apud Graves, Go 2009). This shift, inherent to globalization, has been brought about by the emergence of social networking services which, as Peter Mika notes, broke forever the passive usage patterns of the “web of the 1990’s, which was a combination of a phonebook and the yellow pages” (Mika 2007). Mika pointed to the results of polls dating from 2007 which indicated that social networking sites have dramatically increased users’ abilities to maintain social contacts and networks despite existing fears of isolation and alienation. The impacts of social networking sites came about mostly because they

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facilitate active engagement and turn ratings into a form of social capital. In addition, sites like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to create groups and share interests, and a sense of simultaneous social presence and cohesiveness have cemented active partnerships. In addition, a sense of multitudes united by interests that is able and ready to take action not only in the virtual but also in the real world seems to be the newest most relevant result of social networking, as indicated by the widespread street protests in the Middle East in 2011-2012 and in the following year in Turkey. We seem to have come to a point where citizens can quickly come together and dissolve parallel experiences and communities of practice in light of interests and social context. And more importantly, we seem to be able to shift with increasing ease from the virtual to the real and vice-versa. The polarity described by Baudrillard in the 1990s concerning the real and the virtual no longer exists. In 2008, Larry Johnson predicted that in the next fifteen years, we will experience the virtual world as an extension of the real one. According to Johnson, five years ago virtual worlds were …already bridging borders across the globe to bring people of many cultures and languages together in ways very nearly as rich as face to face interaction. They [were] already allowing the visualisation of ideas and concepts in three dimensions [and] that is leading to new insights and deeper learning. (Johnson apud Reveron 2012)

This similarity to the realistic quality of online interaction has turned simulacra into a real experience in a textual mesh in which the real and virtual no longer oppose each other and compete but rather defer to the realization of a “fifth element” or dimension in our lived experiences. As Pinocchio becomes a “real human” fiction body, so are we, as individuals and communities of practice, growing new flesh in a reflection of a human-robot entity, the boundaries of which are already vague. And again we need to consider the fact that something which five years ago seemed to be mere prophecy, namely the turning of virtual reality into an extension of the real, has not in the meantime been successfully accomplished and has actually been transformed into something else. To better understand this paradigmatic shift, it will be useful to take a look at another powerful prediction made by Michel Foucault back in 1967: The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a

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moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. (Foucault 1977)

Foucault’s early definition of space as the central element mapping individual and collective identities out of time and into spatial simultaneities and juxtapositions accounts in a striking way for how contemporary experiences of identity are structured in a virtual environment where presence is articulated into the now of the “post” and “share” regardless of the geographical or temporal distances between subjects. Another striking similarity exists between Foucault’s invented term of heterotopia and hyperspace. In short, he identified heterotopia,1 the other space or ultimate alterity, as being ...real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (Foucault, 1997)

Heterotopias are both real and imagined places governed by principles that contradict, contest and invert reality in all other real sites. A close look at the way Foucault describes these places and their functions across different epochs provides a telling illustration of how space itself evolved and changed its functions in hyper-reality. According to Foucault, heterotopias evolved in locations at the margins of society where crises could be consumed beyond their borders as locations of places designated for lepers, dying people and menstruating women into extensions of social space enclosing deviations from the rule of reason (from brothels to the asylum, and from the cemetery to the penitentiary). In a similar way, hyper-reality evolved in a location of deviation at the margins of social space, isolating (and alienating) individuals who spent time entertaining themselves in a parallel universe with suspended laws and from there transformed into an extension of social space, an emplacement of inverted rigors where the rule of law could be abolished for the creation of parallel productions. Here we have fan fiction in which readers become authors and manipulate classic texts as well as computer games in which wars are fought by average individuals in much the same way they were televised for their entertainment.

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More recent theoreticians of human geographies have drawn attention to the fact that at the turn of the millennium, heterotopias were changing in terms of its configuration. No longer part of a grid or network in which it functions as an extension containing deviation, the emerging heterotopias have been acknowledged as functioning like places in which normality can be reclaimed from the abnormal continuum of postmodernist communities. Following human geographers like Dehaene and De Cauter, we can state that in today’s post-civil world, heterotopias engulf, emplace and give rise to the experience of place in the non-place continuum that megacities create: “Rather than interrupting normality, heterotopias now realize or simulate a common experience of a place” (Dehaene, De Cauter 2008). In other words, a heterotopia, as a simultaneously real and imagined place, exists at the junction of non-space continuums, simulating places where there is only fluid space, creating and dissolving boundaries that function on imaginary maps. They are emplacements like a mall, cinema or virtual world that simulate spaces of home, privacy, freedom and community and thus influence individuals’ and multitudes’ experiences of the world. It is my belief that the concept of heterotopia will therefore prove crucial in understanding present cases of multitudes by shedding light on their place and space in the geographies of sameness and difference, as well as on the way contemporaneity can shape a new paradigm of thought.

An emerging multitude: The case of Rosia Montana or the “Romanian Autumn” To be able to test the validity of the concept of the multitude, in addition to its production of a heterotopic hyper-space and its impact on the social fabric, we can take up a relevant issue that is less known than the Arab Spring or Turkish summer of protests but seems to represent a significant move forward regarding paradigms. The case under discussion is that of the Rosia Montana protest movement (RM) which started in September 2013 in Romania. In the 1990s a number of NGOs and civil society representatives were concerned about the ecological effects of a surface mining gold exploitation project proposed by the Canadian Company Gabriel Resources at Rosia Montana in Transylvania, a region with a gold mining tradition that dates back to the Roman Empire. The movement took on new dimensions in the beginning of September in 2013 when the Romanian parliament approved a bill giving the green light to the Canadian company, granting it expropriation rights in local villages as well as the right to use large-scale cyanide-based techniques of extraction. The bill sparked street protests across the country which have lasted for a

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month and a half. The reaction was surprising because Romania had not been confronted with protests of such magnitude that spread across the country and beyond, uniting the diaspora on four continents. Another significant reason for my choice of RM for analysis is the fact that, unlike the Arab or Turkish protest movements which were also spontaneous and simultaneously driven by social networking sites, the Romanian case did not occur in reaction to suppression and so far has remained peaceful. The protests have been carried out via weekend street marches attended by thousands of people. They have been referred to as “Sunday for the family” cultural manifestations and include tango flash-mobs, music concerts, ad-hoc theatre plays, marathons, subway artistic sit-ins and street plaza reading sessions. The phenomenon is unique in character and unprecedented in Romanian society in terms of magnitude and means of expression. It was sparked on the social networking site Facebook, which offered the right tools for the creation of a new type of agency, the multitude (as defined by Hardt and Negri). My intention here is to show how the creation of the multitude is inextricably linked with the successful creation on Facebook of a set of narratives collectively authored and developing into a masternarrative of the present. The narratives that sparked the protest and active citizenship were circulated almost exclusively online, and mainstream media, taken by surprise by what was labeled “extreme ecological movements,” reacted slowly and largely ignored the issue for weeks. In this context, public debates, documents, scientific reports, legal arguments, ecological facts and data were mainly circulated online where they were read and debated by an increasing number of citizens. The movement grew exponentially and diversified accordingly. On a single weekend in early October, street protests and alternative events were organized in almost a hundred cities on four continents, attended mostly by representatives of the Romanian diaspora. For the first time since the revolution in 1989, Romanian citizens acted together and contributed to the creation of a national narrative which invoked the right to constitutional freedoms, as well as dignity and the power to choose. As we shall see, the pattern instantiated with this national event on a global scale suggests that there is an urgent need to rethink traditional assumptions about the capital of power and its habitus as advanced by Bourdieu (Bourdieu apud Richardson, 1986) and his followers. What we are witnessing, I believe, is the emergence of new forms of power-making, imagining and experiencing, as well as an increasing agency taken over by networks of citizens, or, in other words, multitudes. It is interesting to note that so far the movement has had no political affiliation, and attempts by

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various parties and politicians to moderate events have all been rejected by the protesters. Other attempts on behalf of the government to identify the leaders of the movement and start negotiations have also failed, as the protesters claim to have no leaders and have stated that they are not ready for negotiations as long as what they called “the unconstitutional bill” is supported by the parliament. Critical slogans have also been circulated slamming the entire political class. In order to understand the mechanisms legitimating such an unprecedented large leaderless movement in the Romanian civic landscape, I will turn to an analysis of narrative productions starting with social science views on narratology. As translation expert Mona Baker notes, following narratologists such as Somers and Gibson, in social theory …narrative is not conceived as an optional mode of communication but as the principle and inescapable mode by which we experience the world. Thus, everything we know is the result of numerous crosscutting storylines, in which social actions locate themselves. (Baker 2005)

It is the emergence and creation of these various cross-cuttings that I shall focus on in the case of the Rosia Montana protests. The Facebook narrative of the RM protests started with individual posts reflecting personal testimonials, the “I’ve been there and seen that” mode of communication. Such narratives spoke about the beauty of the place, the amount of planned destruction and the irrecoverable damage that would be inflicted on the community and the environment. These testimonials, which were emotionally charged, sparked interest. One of the most circulated of these was a short movie made by a group of amateur film-makers who were born and raised in the area. The film was intended to be a statement of belief about ecological damage and the need to learn from our mistakes. It was circulated extensively on Facebook as a word of warning and a reminder of the cause and a motivational boost, and it was viewed by 119,786 users in just two weeks after it was posted on You Tube. The film was even broadcast by National Television Channel 1 (TVR 1), and one of the producers commented on it in debates with the owner of the advertising company responsible for the RMGC’s own advertising campaign. We can thus see how virtual space was facilitated and catalyzed in an unprecedented way, inspiring both active citizenship and individual agency, and it came to compete on equal footing in the mainstream media for power capital via a powerful corporation and its advertising apparatus. Such texts or storylines (be they Wordformat, visual representations, movies, art or verbal performances) are referred to in the social sciences as

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ontological narratives, stories about ourselves, stories that we tell ourselves and each other about our place in the world. They create a horizon of expectation and, when linked, as is now happening through shared interests via social networking sites, they help create a collective narrative conveying a sense of closeness and community, as well as the sharing of values, interests and a cause. They give a larger meaning to personal feelings and contribute to the validation of one’s value and social capital via the “like” and “share” functions. Once interest was sparked and the number of online friends across the country and the world expanded, people who previously had had no physical encounters were brought together and they empowered each other’s stories. In a matter of days, via “likes” and “sharing” individuals became brands that were followed and therefore they were legitimated in the act of posting on behalf of a growing hyper-textualized community. As the community grew larger, experts began to contribute to the narrative, building upon the legal, economic, historical and culturally cross-cutting storylines in the making of the shared narrative which slowly turned into a collective ontological narrative adhered to by people in search of a model of national identity. Explanations were offered, circulated and debated on the social platform, building up cumulatively as history lovers, artists, ecologists and others interested in cultural heritage tuned in. Their motivation was expressed in terms of dignity, solidarity and a shared interest in preserving a common cultural heritage 2,000 years old, along with a need to prevent an ecological disaster that potentially could affect half of the country. Once subscribed to, these stories created what I call a growing national narrative which has guided the actions of thousands of people as they took to the streets with unexpected resilience. Its impact and power comes from the fact that in a highly technologized world in which people expect events and public positions to be at least partially if not completely shaped by advertising and PR specialists in a setting in which political positions are mediated and forged by multiple interests, including electoral ones, social media is still perceived as unmediated, spontaneous and impossible to forge. And we should bear in mind that two decades ago, when television dominated, the news show “No Comment” and the “World in Pictures,” a well-known photo reportage program on CNN, were successful for precisely the same reason. They conveyed the impression of real life, unmediated reality and the objective transfer of events from the heart of the “event” into the sitting room of the average citizen. The emergence of digital photography ended its instrumentalization as a powerful and neutral mirror of reality and made perceptions of televisual choreography even more acute. In this

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context, social media, with its tools that make it possible for the average individual to tune in and contribute to the shared orchestration, have produced, and I suspect will increasingly produce, instances of citizen agency and empowerment in unprecedented forms and intensity. In the particular case of the protests in Romania, the collective ontological narrative created the premises for the emergence of the first major national public narrative elaborated by and circulated among nonstate structures and even in spite of the state. This is all the more significant as narratologists advocate that “social organization, social action and social identities” are constructed “through both ontological and public narratives” (Baker 2005). The implications are all the more significant as once coherence is reached, such narratives help in the embedding of the meanings of future events in a shared framework of perception in which previous models can be rapidly delegitimized with significant consequences for social formations. The narrative of RM crossed national boundaries in less than two weeks and was reclaimed in an equal sense by representatives of the diaspora that organized ad hoc events of solidarity in Europe, Canada, the US, Australia and Hong Kong. This again was an unprecedented reaction, as no other event, call for action or cause had attracted such coherent participation from the diaspora in the last twenty years. Photographic and filmed testimonies, along with motivational postings, were quickly shared among FB users, contributing to the enlargement of the target audience. Object-specific slogans such as “United we save Rosia Montana,” “We want culture, not cyanide” and “We want clean water, not cyanide pollution” turned increasingly to emotional identification with the RM cause within the country and the world. Starting in week three, when the diaspora increased in visibility, slogans such as “Rosia Montana is Romania,” “The hands of our future,” “Rosia Montana is the World” and “The Future has a collective author” arose from a local cause and in a remote location on the borders of Europe as the center of an aspiringly global stand against pollution, the economic suppression of ecology and corporate intervention in law-making. We can therefore see how in less than a month the individual ontological narrative of a small number of people turned into a global theme promoted and embedded in the interstice of a varied number of social contacts and networks. Subsequently, the RM cause was shared by individuals affected by similar cases of exploitation as well as those fighting similarly perceived dangers (e.g. the Slovak movement “Kremnica nad zlato,” “Kremnica beyond gold”).2

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Its force can be traced to the successful embedding of a number of different strands of discourses, from the ecological to the legal, from the historical to the cultural, and from the defense of constitutional rights to the expression of national identity across borders. An analysis of individual postings before and after the RM protests shows that those participating in it are obviously motivated in different ways and have different views on life. Some are devout nationalists, some advocate for an eco-friendly future, some are historians and some fight for the preservation of cultural heritage. Most, however, seem to be average citizens caught up by a sense of urgency and immediacy, of irreparable damage affecting important strands of individual and collective identity.

Conclusion The Save Rosia Montana movement is a clear example in which one story has come to encompass multiple significances beyond its initial configuration. As David Herman notes, …storyworlds are global mental representations enabling interpreters to frame inferences about the situations, characters, and occurrences, either explicitly mentioned or implied by a narrative text or discourse. (Herman apud Heynen and Sommer, 2009)

At this point it will be possible to move forward in this analysis and stake the claim that narrative has the potential to create worlds. Narrative seems to have a significant capacity to weave complex reading grids and therefore offer a model of thinking that will undeniably guide interpretations of future events. A model is emerging with increased clarity. Social networking sites create an environment, the illusion of space in the non-place continuum, making it possible for individual and collective agency to express desires and ideals about home, patriotism, freedom, purity and so on. Once emplaced, these features of a once hyper-real architecture begin to grow a body of their own, moving at the will of everyone and the multitude at the same time. This power to evolve rather unpredictably is the one that opens up space, blurring contours between what is simulated and what is real, allowing for hybridizations and cross-fertilizations, as in the case of the Rosia Montana movement. Real and simulated interactions between individuals, real world activism and virtual statements blend in a continuum and give us a taste of future social patterns and behaviors. What we will witness in the near future will most likely be the emergence of a new master-narrative of active citizenship in search of meaningful

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causes. Ecology seems to be one of the most promising, as is the new democracy of the multitudes. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the dice are only starting to roll, and the outcomes have yet to be determined. It remains to be seen how intelligence agencies will be affected in this process. For now, we can note that there is an urgent need to rethink patterns of risk, improve our understanding of factors of change in the emerging conceptual paradigm and learn how to train our abilities to detect story-lines’ potential to create master-narratives of change, those which are likely to rapidly cross geographical boundaries and affect the lives of everyone.

Notes 1 2

From gr. heteros = other and gr. topos = place. Information available at https://www.facebook.com/events/199558763549124.

Works Cited Baker, M. 2005. Narratives in and of translation, Skase Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 1(1), 4-13, www.skase.sk. Baudrillard, J. 1995. The Gulf War will not take place (first publ. in Libération, 4 Jan. 1991), The Gulf War: Is it really taking place, (first publ. in Libération, 6 Feb. 1991) and The Gulf War did not take place (first publ. in Libération, 29 Mar. 1991) in Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War did not take place, 23-87. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Borradori, G. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P. 1986. The forms of capital, in J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241-258, New York: Greenwood Publishing Book Incorporated. Childs, P. 2006. Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dehaene, M. and De Cauter, L. 2008. Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-civil Society. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. 1977. Of Other Spaces in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, 124-127. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Govers, R. and Go, F. 2009. Place Branding, Global, Virtual and Physical Identities, Constructed, Imagined and Experienced, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of the Empire, New York: Penguin Press. Herman, D. 2009. Narrative ways of worldmaking, in Narratology in the Age of Cross-disciplinary Research, ed. Heynen, Sandra and Sommer, Roy, 71-87. Berlin: Walter de Gryuter. Malouf, A. 2000. On Identity. Haberville: Panther. Mika, P. 2007. Social Networks and the Semantic Web. New York: Springer. Parekh, B. 2000. Defining British national identity, The Political Quarterly, 1 (71): 4–14 Roland, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London, Sage Publications. Reveron, S.D. 2012. Cyberspace and National Security: Threats, Opportunities and Power in a Virtual World. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Sen, A. 2007. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER SIX ACTIVISM, TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING AND EMPOWERMENT ELOÍSA NOS ALDÁS

Introduction This chapter explores activism in new media by applying narrative power analysis and story-based strategies for social change. Through an interdisciplinary and international theoretical and methodological framework based on peace research, communication theories and cultural studies, this chapter pulls together a number of criteria to critically analyze and assess the new media politics of social movements. Specifically, it reviews a selection of present-day activist discourses to propose a communication model defined through culturally effective practices aimed at peace cultures, cultural wisdom and empowerment for conflict transformation. This analysis elaborates on previous empirical research (Pinazo and Nos Aldás 2013) which tested protest communication scenarios to see if they are useful for boosting social justice, engagement and empowerment. This chapter therefore takes as a case study good practices of transmedia storytelling for social change and, through discourse framing analysis, it explores how activist-empowering frameworks, values and emotions of social change for social justice are an effective cultural alternative to hegemonic negative frameworks. All in all, this chapter intends to further advance conclusions on new media politics for social justice from the experience of new social movements and communicative scenarios of social empowerment through transmedia storytelling. This study approaches new trends in communication for social change in the context of present-day transmedia activism as a scenario of political engagement. Specifically, it reviews the cultural consequences of communicative innovations and the successes of engagement of the 15M

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movement in 2011 in Spain (the #SpanishRevolution) and the numerous initiatives that occurred around it (such as the Platform of the Affected by Mortgages, the PAH) in digital networks and in the world since its inception. Coincidentally, as I am finishing up this study, a new political party called Podemos (meaning “we can”), which in part was inspired by the 15M open code and boosted by its grassroots politics philosophy, has attained surprising results in the European Elections in Spain, winning five seats in the European Parliament in their first elections. The proposals developed in this study are in dialogue with contemporary activist discourses as culturally effective practices aiming for cultures of peace through cultural wisdom and empowerment for conflict transformation, ideas which I will further develop in the study. The main aim here is to gather up and share a series of criteria (as a work in progress) to critically analyze the new media politics of social movements and learn from them so their achievements regarding the needs of other civil society organizations and organizing initiatives can be shared. This research springs from concerns about the effects of symbolic constructions in real life, the power of stories and myths of control that maintain the hegemonic position of certain groups over others, of certain ideas over others, and of certain cultures over others. In other words, this chapter focuses on the symbolic ties that facilitate and legitimize certain political actions and the educative (transformative) effects of certain narratives and communicative scenarios and dynamics. Hence the focus is on the capacities and potential of storytelling (primarily transmedia storytelling) for social change. As described by the Center for Story-based Strategy (CSS), “story-based strategy links movement building with an analysis of narrative power and places storytelling at the center of social change” (http://www.storybasedstrategy.org/). To deepen this field of study, narrative power analysis and story-based strategies for social justice will be explored along with an interdisciplinary methodology that draws upon peace research, critical communication theories and cultural studies. Additionally, the study will employ communication and discourse analysis, social psychology, critical education and ethically committed epistemological approaches that have been tested previously in empirical research centered on the potential of protest communication models to increase people’s engagement with social justice (Pinazo and Nos Aldás 2013). The case study for this work will be present-day scenarios in which new social movements are proving to be truly active as they achieve real changes in public opinion and the political engagement of the citizenry; at the same time, there have been numerous cases of violence committed by

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the police as well as protesters (as failures of peaceful activism). Specifically, this chapter will explore a selection of good practices of transmedia storytelling as carried out by structured civil societies (such as the Center for Story-based Strategies (CSS) and the film project Interferences in Spain (which has an anti-cooperation narrative) as well as social movements’ work (such as a video for a call to the 15O United for Global Change protests in 2012 and the strategies of the Platform of those Affected by Mortgages in Spain). By sharing and analyzing these stories, my aim is to advance knowledge about the possibilities of communication for citizens’ empowerment for conflict transformation.

Towards a cultural wisdom based on social justice engagement and peace activism This study is constructed around three considerations: firstly, the core of its theoretical framework is peaceful activism (as the 15M and its actions have been regularly defined by the movement); secondly, the strength of stories and memes in transmedia scenarios as a network for collective imaginaries that support our cultures (approached here from the era of transmedia online and offline communication and its options and characteristics); and thirdly, social justice and civic and communicative engagement are taken up as the ultimate aim. The theoretical framework employed here is Peace Studies and Peace Research. Galtung’s concept of “cultural peace” (1990) has led to a focus on the positive transformation of “cultural violence” as a long-term goal for activist communication. Peace activism through transmedia storytelling seeks to transform “cultural violence” (the violence embedded in language, symbols and metaphors) into “cultural peace” and social justice in all layers of society (including symbolic ones which legitimize and foster other types of direct and structural violence and injustice). In this way, my aim is to look into the social and cultural effects of communication by linking justice and development to a culture of peace (taken to mean much more than the absence of war) and propose a global concept of cultures of peace involving all variables ranging from respect to different identities (including ethnic identities and gender identities) and freedom of access to basic needs in their symbolic, structural and interpersonal aspects. These communicative responsibilities are translated into concepts of “cultural efficacy” and “cultural efficiency” as part of a social change communication strategy (Nos Aldás 2013). They constitute the working criteria for thinking about communication in terms of the aforementioned

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long-term social and cultural aims and consequences. My aim is thus to embed these as part of communication planning cultural transformation indicators so we can better anticipate advances or undercuts through communication towards equality, collective justice and peaceful collective action. I argue that it is not only necessary to incorporate social and cultural aims in advocacy, awareness and educative campaigns but also in institutional and promotional campaigns. Every communicative move, regardless of the source, contributes to the kind of collective imaginaries and frameworks we live by (whether peaceful and conciliatory or violent and discriminatory). For this reason, civil society actors need to incorporate into their communication policies and responsibilities contributions to positive frameworks of justice, attitudes of engagement and peaceful values. A general indicator for assessing the cultural efficacy of communicative actions is the extent to which they add up to a collective political “cultural wisdom” (as a cross final goal). I define “cultural wisdom” as a process that starts from an “illusion to be informed” (Alfaro 2005) and as a starting goal for empowerment communication. This is conceived of in terms of awakening in citizenry a motivated demand for information and, as a result, a will to learn more about the economic and political system in terms of all the different cultures involved in it with their strengths and weaknesses. This social, political and cultural knowledge forms the basis for facing, fighting, transforming and eradicating inequality and injustice through their application in transforming violent policies, structures and actions; the means of achieving this are responsible and ethical consumption, political participation (formal and non-formal) and ethical professional activities. In other words, when we learn how to apply this new political knowledge to improve our lives, we acquire a form of cultural wisdom that is founded on peaceful political engagement stemming from collective concerns. Such cultural wisdom includes conflict transformation and non-violent communication skills (Nos Aldás and Pinazo 2013). This complex learning process which is geared towards a transformative and peaceful cultural wisdom has as one of its main elements social justice engagement, and it is not only linked to knowledge as content or reasons but also to emotions and feelings. Therefore, this study attempts to strike up a dialogue between social engagement for peaceful activism and the social psychology concept of “moral sensitivity.” Engagement has a lot to do with developing an ethical sensitivity that allows us to see injustice as an ethical dilemma demanding that we take action. “Moral sensitivity” refers to an individual's personal

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engagement with injustice and immorality. Specifically, it can be traced to Jonathan Haidt’s (2003) and James R. Rest’s (1983) empirical studies on cognitive psychology in terms of an individual’s ability to detect an ethical dilemma and foresee how our actions in relation to it will affect others. Thus it will be useful to test moral sensitivity2 as regards how certain scenarios of communication can prompt ethical judgments that arise from empathic emotions (such as compassion) and empowering emotions (such as indignation). This is one of the reasons I chose to take 15M in Spain and the PAH as case studies; they drew upon indignation sparked by injustice and the violation of civil, economic and political rights were taken up as a cause for their recovery through a plan of action. As protest scenarios, they approached social problems as unethical or unjust from a perspective of human rights framing and the factors that increase social action (whether economic or political). That is, protest scenarios highlight the social condemnation of unjust behaviors and decisions that have caused suffering and poverty. That condemnation involves the judgment of the receivers, which leads to engagement (based on a combination of emotions and beliefs). Moreover, engagement increases when we realize the effects our actions have on others and we see others (re)acting to the consequences of injustice (Pinazo and Nos Aldás 2013). This engagement, the stimulus result of realizing that my fellow citizens are involved in social justice actions, can be fostered both by communicative scenarios such as street protests or, in the digital arena, through online viral actions based on ethical denunciation (justice frames) in which I realize that my fellow internet users are engaged in certain topics or campaigns. In light of these issues, I draw a comparison with the field of international social movements as researched by Darnton and Kirk (2011) as regards international NGDOs and the communicative realities of activism. They studied how the transformative long-term inefficacy of the communication of these Third Sector organizations (approached in part through development education) relates to the widespread current frameworks based on the superiority of the Global North and charity and aid relations (see chart below). At the same time, they proposed a series of alternative frameworks for work as a basis for social engagement in the eradication of poverty, which can also be compared to those issues necessary for increasing engagement with a broader sense of social justice and which are found in present day discourses of peaceful social movements:

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Fig. 6-1. International social movements (Darnton and Kirk, 2011) as regards international NGDOs and the communicative realities of activism

However, these alternative frameworks come up against barriers in the general public because society has repeatedly been exposed to images of poverty framed in terms of pity and need of assistance instead of being framed as structural violence or injustice; in other words, they have been educated in a culture of charity (Smith 2004, 661). People do not have the tools to relate to messages of condemnation of poverty (for instance, among other social justice issues) designed along the lines of a model of political pedagogy for public engagement (Pinazo and Nos Aldás 2013, 16). The same logic can be applied to the repeated framing of social action as dangerous and undesirable. People are constantly reminded in the mainstream media of the negative sides of social movements, of street action as a battle full of dangers, instead of recovering the positive aspects of active, peaceful and creative protest as a social dialogue that can be used to collectively improve social conditions.3 Mesa et al. (2013) carried out a very timely study that applies and broadens Darnton and Kirk’s model (2011) by presenting an interesting proposal on the values that need to be spread through innovative transmedia storytelling. This study develops and translates the different categories of values proposed by Schwartz (1992; Schwartz and Boehnke 2004) as inclusive, universal and emancipated issues into graphic discourses that show the difference between the use of certain metaphors and symbols or others by framing female activists as strategic actors for peacebuilding. The profiles of these activists, therefore, are represented as an interesting model through ideas associated with values of collectivity, dynamism, movement, creativity, resistance and change, hence having a

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positive effect and empowering others. Therefore, I also need to counteract those frameworks that depict social movements as radical, violent, undesirable and opposing the system (as depicted in the mainstream media and government constructions) by spreading positive frameworks and inclusive, universal and emancipated values that reflect their solidarity and networking implied as a plurality and dialogic openness. Through this conceptual and methodological framework I would now like to turn to the experiences of organizations and movements as they took action as communicative actors for peaceful social change by anticipating the relevance of how they frame the issues they work on and the emotions they inspire as a way to achieve social justice collective engagement.

Stories make history: Justice transnarratives Engagement communication points to frameworks of activist empowerment as well as values and emotions as effective cultural alternatives to hegemonic negative frameworks (as a continuation of earlier research by Benford and Snow, 2000) and therefore suggests a starting path towards collective cultural wisdom. In terms of the positive frameworks that are needed for these social engagement processes to take place, I refer to frameworks and beliefs that activate social condemnation and peaceful activism, and those are injustice, indignation, equality and social change. In other words, they are collective action frameworks (Sireau in Darnton and Kirk 2011) that are in dialogue with certain values, beliefs, emotions and resulting behaviors. Due to the connections that exist in the ways people frame reality and how they consequently act based on the beliefs and values associated with the frames and emotions that communicative experiences activate within them, thinking about social communication and foreshadowing the frames and stories behind it becomes a key issue. Nonetheless, according to earlier literature on framing, social movements, culture and social movements (Jaspers 2007), another relevant element that needs to be taken into account in effective social movement framing is “cultural resonance” (Benford and Snow 2000, 618). As these authors developed the idea of the “variable features of collective action frames,” they pointed out that there was a “degree of resonance.” This “resonance” involves “two sets of interacting factors” which influence frame resonance in terms of the “credibility of the preferred frame and its relative salience” (619-622). Apart from activating people’s ethical sensitivity by presenting the unacceptable side of an issue as an

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injustice, I want to link it to what has been remarked on in the previous literature as a key element for engaging the majority in a social movement, and that involves dealing with an issue through a determinate frame that connects very closely to people’s interests, beliefs, values and concerns in a certain moment. If we put all the previous reflections and proposals in dialogue, we find in the different traditions that have searched for justice narratives certain discourse strategies effective in calls for sensitivity and cultural resonance regarding indignation, action and empowerment. Some of the discourse elements and strategies extracted from awareness communication theories include irony, polyphony, adopting a perspective close to the subjects of the issue (through techniques such as personalization, life stories, daily routines, and comparing and combining different times and spaces) and conveying the complexity of realities (Nos Aldás 2013, 104-113). These discourse strategies, extracted mostly from the strength and sincerity of testimonies, support processes of engagement by increasing the understanding of others’ experiences by distant receivers and their involvement in the cause by making them feel closer and more connected to the subjects who speak of it (mostly thanks to an ethical connection). If we add to these rhetorics of justice the main traits of transmedia narratives, that is, contemporary transmedia logics, we come face to face with all the necessary ingredients for implicating interlocutors in the story through different engagement strategies. Transmedia discourses are comprised of dialogue, polyphony, information, infotainment, participation and experience, among other communicative and learning experiences. As Jenkins (2010; 2014) highlights, in present-day transmedia communication scenarios new prosumers jump from media to media and interpret facts and situations by listening to the story through different media, and also by contributing to it. In the same way, movements, organizations and brands plan and spread their discourses through transmedia storytelling, which has much to do with a move from mere creativity and persuasion to content and interest, to interaction and dialogue. These discourse contexts acquire even more communicative energy for engagement when they are the means for “interconnected multitudes” (people from all over the world sharing interests and concerns as they join forces and interact to achieve a common goal by using the same code) and, therefore, build a “network consciousness” that results in global action, as exposed and proposed by the research group on the technopolitics of 15M coordinated in IN3/UOC (#15mp2p) by Toret (2013). The heritage of distributed politics through transmedia communication before 15M was a central part of the emergence of the socio-communicative fact known as

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15M (Toret et al. 2013) and a main variable in the bolstering of platforms of citizens connected to it such as with PAH. By combining multimedia, discourses, networks and emotion analysis, their study shows the success of 15M in terms of connected multitudes as a main goal and approach for social justice engagement and peace activism. In the period “between 2007-2011, in a context of increasing unrest in Spain connected to the crisis, there were innovation and learning, reappropriation and creation of digital tools and networks for communication, organization, and collective action...[in a] rise of what we call technopolitical practices” understood as the “tactical and strategic use of digital tools and online collective identities for organization, communication and collective action” (Toret et al. 2013, 17-18) as a basis for network consciousness (20). To clarify these activist communicative scenarios and further explore their potentialities for peace activism and social justice engagement as a way to contribute to a collective communicative toolbox, I will briefly review a series of good practices or challenging examples of cultural efficacy: a meme, a short media piece, an experimental film (also fragmented into chapters and part of a comprehensive online project) and some of the communication actions of the PAH in Spain.4 The first example is one of the case studies of the CSS: a meme on the dangers of natural gas for the environment as the result of fracking. This is part of a broader communicative action used in the building of the climate justice movement. I chose this example to start with as a discursive framework that exemplifies the story-based strategies mentioned before. This meme (see Fig. 2) appeals to a frame that represents natural gas as a clean and safe energy and establishes an intertextual dialogue with the TV series Breaking Bad in order to change that story (“control myth”) to one that denounces and condemns. To denounce the dangers of fracking, they build a metaphor (allegory) between natural gas companies and drug cartels selling methamphetamine, and the methane as contamination for the environment and the dangers of drugs for the body. By applying storybased strategies, they choose as their point of intervention the “point of destruction” (in this case the point of extraction), which at the same time appeals to the point of assumption (the underlying belief of people who see gas natural as the cleanest and safest energy).5 The new story refers to the dangerous and contaminating extraction method and activates frames used for drugs, cartels and illegal businesses through a link to natural gas. Apart from the connection with frames of popular culture (the Breaking Bad TV series) and therefore the fact that it starts a dialogue with TV and mass media fiction, this campaign travels through transmedia scenarios by including two hashtags (#BreaktheAddiction #FrackingBad)

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that link the message as well to Twitter and its rhetoric and logics. However, one of the more important elements here is how this specific meme links to broader stories and how the action exploded when it was linked in Twitter to the broader and transformative hashtag #PowerShift. This instance incorporates a trend of reappropriation, the cultural resonance at a time when the TV drama Breaking Bad was a mass phenomenon and the focus on changing the story by putting into question and substituting an established frame by a transmedia and multilayered meaningful communicative process that asks for people’s involvement by sharing it and making it viral. It is possible to find different versions of the meme applied to the fracking issue in different geographical areas and as applied to local and specific situations (see Fig. 3 which depicts a Spanish politician who supports fracking as the main character).

Fig. 6-2. A meme on natural gas

Fig. 6-3. A meme with a Spanish politician involved in allowing fracking as the main character

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This dialogue and the addition of hashtags in Twitter for transmedia have become a constant in most of the media materials of new social movements as a means of interconnection and networking. In this sense, this case study appeals to ethical sensitivities and cultural wisdom by focusing on the effects of supporting natural gas (“cooking our planet”) and also by appealing to others’ involvement through viral campaigning, and hence we see others taking action which in turn increases our engagement. The second example (a short media piece distributed on YouTube to call for 15O, the event of 2012 United for Global Change), which was already connected to 15M as a reference movement in this chapter, reflects very well the communicative characteristics of 15M and the other calls of similar social movements for dignity.6 In this video, the hashtags #15o, #15, #razones15o (#reasons15o), #spanishrevolution, #greekrevolution, #worldrevolution, #occupywallstreet and #15octchile appear as a steady text on the upper side of the image. Connecting as well with the rhetorics of memes, this video shows in the first seconds of its narrative slogans that were shouted, written and shown during the 15M protests from the beginning, and they were the ones that framed its discourse (“Our dreams don’t fit in your ballot boxes,” “You don’t represent me,” “System failure” and “Power to the people,” among others), as well as shots showing the values and principles that were defended: “Non-violent resistance,” “In defense of the social rights we have inherited,” “Our lives or their profits?” and “15O from indignation to peaceful action.” The way this video tells the story presents the daily life of a woman who participates in the Plaza Cataluña camp of 15M. The narrative focuses on the elements of that woman’s routine before she goes to work, elements that would be shared with other “ordinary” people, without lapsing into the stereotypes used by the media to depict 15M protesters (which try to focus on a young “crusty” or “gutter punk,” a hippie). The video avoids simplifying or opposing positions, as the media tends to do. On the contrary, this story shows a common woman in parallel with a common man, a young journalist, who decides to join the gathering in the camp so he can better know what is happening, to experience, to share, to understand the situation. It is a very brief story but contains all the elements of storytelling, including suspense and resolution. It arouses interest and also extends an invitation to join the street mobilizations, while depicting the plurality of identities (by showing tens of different people smiling, people of all ages, cultures and styles), and with the very clear message “peaceful action” on the screen in the final scenes.

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At the same time, by using a repeating soundtrack composed of the song “Why does my heart feel so bad?” by Moby, it appeals to emotions and the lyrics encourage reflection on the “Why?” of ethical feelings, of feeling bad for not participating, of feeling bad because of what is happening to others. In a simple and creative way, the story goes from a private daily space (common) to public space. In this case study, appeals are again made to ethical sensitivity and cultural wisdom by focusing on the effects that not joining a peaceful protest for global change has for others (police violence, but also showing how the people in the camps take care of each other, support each other, work together and engage in dialogue) and again by showing others’ involvement by including images of peaceful protests that have occurred all over the world. The third example, which is from the Third Sector (structured civil society), was created by the Catalan Foundation Quepo and the Observatory of Debt in Globalization (ODG). It is a collaborative film under Creative Commons License; “Interferences” (#interferencias, #interferències) represents a good practice of “anticooperation” narratives and justice storytelling in the logic of transmedia scenarios.7 It deals with the global crisis through a human rights approach that deconstructs the traditional approach to foreign debt. This media project represents and interacts with people’s doubts concerning international cooperation and development, questions people’s dilemmas and gives them resources and tools to act in response by showing their same doubts and fears in the actors of the play reproduced in the film (individuals like them reflecting on and discussing the human and political implications of their work backstage). Through its rhetoric, it contributes effectively to cultural wisdom through irony, polyphony and condemnation of political and economic practices that create hunger, violence and inequality. It shows all the different ways of becoming involved and engaging with the necessary structural changes that can precipitate social transformation. All of this is done by means of a theatrical metanarrative that reflects on the feelings and values involved in activism engagement (or the lack thereof), such as responsibility versus guilt and the massive challenge of communicating such topics through adequate discourses to make a broader swathe of society more aware of these topics and urge them to become engaged in solutions. Along the same lines, one of the major victories of PAH was connecting with the worries of the majority of society through their feelings and beliefs (in essence, achieving the “cultural resonance” I mentioned before). This social platform has focused on stopping evictions

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in Spain and changing the related legislation to improve such situations through a global social justice transformation. With this aim, they have combined all of the different means of communication for social justice strategies: firstly, they have promoted direct nonviolent action in the streets (including general protests and marches, protests during evictions, the occupation of buildings and “escraches” in front of the houses of the politicians who were against the legal changes proposed to transform such violence and injustice). Secondly, they have worked with an institutional focus to achieve political and legislative results (advocacy actions along with the representatives of local, national and international political entities and institutions, and participation in national and European parliaments). Thirdly, they have put a lot of energy and organizational strategy into supporting the people who have been affected (by means of empowerment processes that combine self-esteem and cultural/political/ legal technical capacities). Together with this, they have “made strategic use of the media, including the mass media, conscious of its importance in making problems visible” (Romanos 2014, 6). All in all, the gains of PAH have much to do with combinations of activism, collective advice and nonviolent civil disobedience (Mir Garcia, França, Macías and Veciana 2013). These good practices support and apply these ideas, both through structured civil society initiatives which acknowledge the influence of the 15M (this is mentioned on the webpage of the “Interferences” film) and the communication strategies resulting from the 15M communicative style itself (horizontal communication, cooperative learning, a culture of sharing, nonviolent communication, creativity, ethics of care and a focus on empowerment). In light of these examples and trends, new (political) strategies emerge through transmedia storytelling which involve framing, memes and story-based strategies and in the process they work communicatively, consistently and collectively (from all different social spheres) in the transformation of cultural violence into peacebuilding.

Conclusion: Sharing communicative criteria and indicators towards social engagement for social justice As mentioned above, the communicative philosophy and communicative basis for social change explored in this paper share strategies and codes with previous social movements and the online networking and organizing of 15M (Haro Barba y Sampedro 2011). This is also connected to the events themselves which are related to 15M and all the consequent social movements and actions. The aforementioned transmedia network

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consciousness, both online and offline, leads me to the following preliminary conclusions of this work in progress. I would like to conclude this chapter by sharing some indicators for assessing and addressing forms of communication which compare all the previous ideas with successful methods of mobilizing, engaging and empowering in light of the effective communicative experiences of the PAH in Spain as a good practice which we can see as a collective identity in itself that shares communicative elements with the rest of the examples analyzed in this paper as part of an activist social justice and nonviolent communication tradition. *

* * *

*

* * *

Visibility (media, streets, digital scenarios, networks): memes such as “Sí se puede (pero no quieren)” (“Yes, it is possible, but they don’t want it,” referring to the political and economic powers). Collective (social) goals and strategies: a non-(political) party character, cross topics and open ideological frames. Equal participation (horizontal communication, distributed politics and network consciousness). Cooperative learning: hacker ethics (shared and open code) and a culture of sharing (sharing information and knowledge, building wisdom cooperatively). Peace activism/peaceful protest bases and nonviolent communication strategies (from creative street protests to actions in all other transmedia scenarios, including humor and the arts). Focus on empowerment and care ethics: spreading frames and values linked to the idea that “change is possible.” Specific demands and steady success (focalization): emotions of hope and possibilities and beliefs. Structural, institutional and cultural goals: advocacy, demands and new visibility frames.

These represent just some of the criteria apparent in present-day social movements. Of course there are limits and challenges that we must keep exploring in the networks of researchers, activists and professionals of communication and other sectors (which can be followed via the hashtag #comunicambio or #comm4change). We need to further explore ways to counteract and displace the frames of violence linked to street protests and protest scenarios and change them into frames of recognition and dialogue. For instance, the technique of “escraches” has opened a major debate regarding the peacefulness of 15M and PAH activism. However, in Spain, the Court of Law of Madrid officially defined them as a democratic practice of participation and an expression of pluralism.

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To sum up, the potential of viral storytelling and cultural memes has been proven through the recent trends of social movements along with the information and participation options of transmedia, a key element in these scenarios of social change. They have cracked the spirals of silence described by Noelle Neumann (1974, 1993; Martín Galán 2013) and launched a new era for social action and communication.

Notes 1 This paper is the result of team research carried out in three different research programs: CSO 2012-34066 “Evaluation and Indicators of Moral Sensitivity in present day communication of social movements” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; P 1·1 A2012-05 “From victims to indignated: media visibility, images migration, conflict as a media show and social transformation processes towards a culture of peace” funded by the UJI Research Plan (Jaume I University of Castellón-Spain) and the EuropeAid/ 131141/C/ACT/Multi “Network Communication for Development (Devreporter Network)” funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the Catalan Federation of NGDOs. 2 From this point on I will substitute “ethical” for “moral” to avoid connections to an imposing moral concept. 3 For more on that aspect of protests, see the collective work Boyd, A. and O. Mitchell, D. 2012. Beautiful Trouble. A Toolbox for Revolution. OR Books. 4 They are sequenced here not based on the producer (social movement or structured civil society) but on the length and complexity of the discourse (from shorter to longer or more complex). 5 This methodology of analysis and communication production can be found at http://www.storybasedstrategy.org/sites/smartmeme.drupalgardens.com/files/2013 06/CSS_POINTSINTERVENTION_WORKSHEET.pdf. Accessed November 3, 2014. 6 Originally, this was accessed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4YExuTJffk. However, today it can only be found on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/30461995. 7 The film and the complete project can be accessed via the following link: http://www.interferencies.cc/en.

Works cited Alfaro, R.M. 2005. Sociedades en movimiento: desafíos comunicativos a la sociedad de la información. In Solidaridad en red. Nuevas tecnologías, ciudadanía y cambio social, eds. J. Echevarría et al. Bilbao: Hegoa.

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Benford, R.D., and Snow, D. A. 2000. Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (1): 611–639. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611 Darnton, A. and Kirk, M. 2011. Finding frames: New ways to engage the UK public in global poverty. Bond for International Development. Accessed March 12 2013. http://www.findingframes.org/report.htm Galtung, J. 1990. Cultural violence, Journal of Peace Research, 27 (3): 291-305. Haidt, J. 2003. The moral emotions. In Handbook of Affective Sciences, eds. R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer and H. H. Goldsmith, 852-870. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haro Barba, C. and Sampedro, V. 2011. Activismo político en Red: del Movimiento por la Vivienda Digna al 15M. Revista Teknokultura 8(2): 157-175. Jaspers, J. 2007. Cultural approaches to the study of social movements. In Handbook of Social Movements across Disciplines, eds. Bert Klandermans and Conny Roggeband. New York: Springer. Jenkins, H. 2010. Transmedia storytelling and entertainment: An annotated syllabus. Continuum, 24 (6): 943-958. doi:10.1080/10304312.2010.510599 —. 2014. Rethinking “rethinking convergence/culture.” Cultural Studies, 28(2): 267-297. doi:10.1080/09502386.2013.801579 Mesa, M., Alonso Cano, L. and Couceiro, E. 2013. Visibles y transgresoras. Narrativas y propuestas visuales para la paz y la igualdad. Madrid: CEIPAZ. Accessed November 3, 2014. http://www.ceipaz.org/visiblesytransgresoras/ Martín Galán, J.I. 2013. Communication, Cultural Violence and Alliance of Civilizations after September 1lth: From Neumann's Spiral of Silence and Gebner's Cultivation to the Cultivation of Chaotic Spirals of Peace and intercultural understanding. PhD dissertation. Universitat Jaume I of Castellón, Spain. Mir Garcia, J., França, J., Macías, C., and Veciana, P. 2013. Fundamentos de la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca: activismo, asesoramiento colectivo y desobediencia civil no violenta. Educación Social: Revista de Intervención Socioeducativa (55): 52-61. Noelle-Neumann, E. 1974. The Spiral of Silence: A theory of public opinion. Journal of Communication 24 (2): 43-51. —. 1993. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2nd edition).

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Nos Aldás, E. 2013. Public discourses for nonkilling societies. In Nonkilling Media, ed. J. Evans Pim, 93-117. Honolulu, Ha: Center for Global Nonkilling. Nos Aldás, E. and D. Pinazo Calatayud. 2013. Communication and engagement for social justice. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 25(3): 343-348. DOI: 10.1080/10402659.2013.816552 Pinazo Calatayud, D. and E. Nos Aldás. 2013. Developing Moral Sensitivity through Protest Scenarios in International NGDOs’ Communication. Communication Research, first published on June 18. DOI: 10.1177/0093650213490721. Rest, J. 1983. Morality. In Handbook of Child Psychology, eds. J.H. Flavell and E.M. Markman, vol. 3 (Cognitive Development), 556-629. New York: Wiley. Romanos, E. 2014. Evictions, petitions and escraches: Contentious housing in austerity Spain. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 13(2): 296-302. Schwartz, S. 1992. Universals in the content and structure of values: theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. M. Zanna, vol. 25, 1-65. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Schwartz, S. and Boehnke, K. 2004. Evaluating the structure of human values with confirmatory factor analysis. Journal of Research in Personality 38: 230-255. Smith, M. 2004. Contradiction and change? NGOs, schools and the public faces of development. Journal of International Development 16(5): 741-749. DOI:10.1002/jid.1125. Sireau, N. 2009. Make Poverty History: Political Communication in Action. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Toret, J. 2013. Tecnopolítica: la potencia de las multitudes conectadas. El sistema red 15M, un nuevo paradigna de la política distribuida. IN3 Working Paper Series, 1-178. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. Accessed November 3, 2014. http://in3wps.uoc.edu/index.php/in3-working-paperseries/article/ view/1878 Toret et al. 2013. Summary in English of Technopolitics: the power of connected multitudes. 15m network-system and the new paradigm of distributed politics. Accessed November 3, 2014. http://datanalysis15m.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/technopoliticsslides.pdf

CHAPTER SEVEN THE DYNAMICS OF A NEW MEDIATED PROTEST CYCLE: NETWORKED, TRANSITIONAL AND RADICAL? PANTELIS VATIKIOTIS

Introduction The wave of social protests that spread across the world in recent years has renewed interest in new media politics. In particular, the decisive role of social media in the protest movements of 2011 has been a popular topic on the research agenda of media and social movement studies. Competing accounts have assessed the emancipatory potential of social networking practices, emphasizing accordingly the prospects for social change (“the revolution will be Twittered”) or the vanity of media liberation (“zero social and political impact”). On the other hand, less deterministic approaches have pointed out relational aspects of the interplay between social and media activism. On this point, the role of new media in the mobilization and organization of movements, the context of the implementation of diverse forms of media activism and the character of the contestation of these social struggles are crucial parameters that should be taken into consideration. By evaluating the dynamics and contradictions of the new mediated protest cycle, this chapter critically reflects on three dimensions of new media activism: a) the “networked” structure of movements, b) their “(trans)national” echoes, and c) their “radical” perspective. In particular, it investigates the usage of communication infrastructure in activism in different contexts, acknowledges the structural aspects of the implementation of contemporary mediated protest movements, and it reflects on the prosecution of acts of political dissent as terrorism. For this purpose, the chapter draws on secondary sources and related studies about protest movements in the social media era from 2011 onwards.

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Accordingly, this chapter points out issues with regard to the evaluation of the networked, transnational and radical aspects of new media activism. It addresses the need for an integrated approach to contemporary mediated forms of contention through the prism (i.e. concepts and tools) of media studies and social movement studies research, and highlights the challenges that have been addressed through an analysis of the interplay between protest movements and media on the whole at both the national and transnational levels in relation to constructions of the politics of conflict.

Media, networking and activism The history of the interplay between media/technology and activism is long and vibrant, and it has been written along the lines of the dialectical process of (re)appropriating means of communication both as a means and an end in itself in the staking of political claims. The field of social movements has been a vital resource for activist media practices and projects. The emergence of new social movement theory challenged the theories of classical collective behavior and resource mobilization on social movements, shifting the focus of research from (irrational) crowd and (rational) organizational behavior to the actions and practices of the agents of social activism (Diani and Eyerman 1992). In this regard, new social movement theory has enriched our understanding of the role of communication channels beyond their instrumental role in preparing a movement and mobilizing support for it, acknowledging the “extensive and sophisticated uses of media and information technologies not just as tools or channels for relaying information to participants or the wider public but as the actual field of action where movement concerns are articulated and struggles played out” (Lievrouw 2011, 53-54; citing Rucht 2004). The relevance of media and communication technologies for social movements has been largely acknowledged by the alternative media tradition. A number of approaches have been used to evaluate different aspects of the intersection between social and media activism in terms of diverse action repertoires. This prolific realm includes: actions directed against hegemonic institutions and dominant ideological frameworks in terms of radical media (Downing 1984; 2001); practices of resistance in everyday culture, including zine culture (Duncombe 1997) and alternative media (Atton 2002); activities originating in the nooks and crannies of civil society, such as community media (Rennie 2006) and civil society

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media (Hintz 2009); processes that facilitate participants’ empowerment, such as participatory media (Servaes 1999) and citizens’ media (Rodriguez 2001); and, projects anchored in the dynamics of activist alliances, including tactical media (Garcia and Lovink 1997, 1999), autonomous media (Langlois and Dubois 2005), and social movement media (Downing 2008; 2010). These activist media initiatives have expanded and multiplied spaces for political action. The recent approaches of social movements and mobilizations have markedly shifted the focus on the dimension of communication and media usage. Networked communication patterns and the use of social networking sites are considered to have a significant impact on protest dynamics. In this point of view, the organizational structure of collective action is technologically mediated, conveying a different logic. For Castells (2009), it is the logic of networking that prescribes another type of political participation which is horizontal, autonomous and leaderless. Juris (2012) points out the logic of aggregation that social media conveys in terms of creating crowds of individuals (Ibid. 297). Bennett and Segerberg (2012) evaluate the logic of connective action constituted on the basis of sharing personalized content across media networks (digitally enabled action networks). On the other hand, Milan (2013a) uses the metaphor of the “cloud” to highlight the emergence of individualized collective action. In addition, various scholars have reflected on the potentialities of technology and networked media practices in the wake of the recent uprisings, and they have developed arguments that cover a broad spectrum of perspectives, from the enthusiastic to the skeptical. Some analysts celebrate “liberation technology” in terms of its ability to increase citizens’ participation and expand freedoms (Shirky 2008; Diamond 2010), while others question newer media as agents of social change in terms of their commercial nature and dubious political impact (Meijas 2011; Morozov 2011). Among these there are approaches that evaluate the interplay between social and media activism along the co-articulation of physical/offline and digital/online practices (Jurgenson 2012; Gerbaudo 2012). Regardless, the Internet has been yet another vibrant terrain of social struggle itself: “[The] Internet is no longer just a tool for activist networking and mobilizing but has become the main platform for action, recruitment, and identification” (Milan 2013b, 41). A variety of projects have declared open access to information and the use of information technologies as necessary for citizens’ political, social and cultural participation in contemporary societies which are highly mediated and

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networked. Open-source free software activism, alternative communicating infrastructures, electronic civil disobedience and hacking have revitalized the values of openness, decentralization and not-for-profit by sharing and (re)using knowledge, culture and content. Non-commercial, citizen-led social networking projects include *Diaspora, Lorea, SocialSwarm, Crabgrass, Freedombox and Luum. The activist nature of these “alternative computing practices” is reflected through three main features: they are interventionist, heterotopic and small-scale in conception and execution (Lievrouw 2011, 117, 118). In one way or another, discussions on media and activism have raised critical issues about respective communication and action repertoires. By taking into account the new waves of protest of 2011 (in North Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe, and USA), 2013 (in Turkey), and 2014 (in Brazil and Hong Kong), we can see that a “large number of similarly disaffected social actors seized upon opportunities to organize collectively and protest on the streets” (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 744, citing Howard and Hussain 2011). A significant dimension of these forms of collective action is the prominent role played by social networking sites in processes of mobilization and organization: Social media, an integral aspect of all these movements, is not a mere “tool” that is external to the organizational and cultural structure of these movements. Instead, it has become increasingly seen that communication is a form of organization, and the form of communication strongly interacts with the form of organization. (Tufekci 2014)

Moreover, a hybrid of cyberspace and urban space seems to constitute the new arena for networked social movements, what Castells (2012, 222) calls “the space of autonomy.” Nonetheless, the extent to which these struggles share similar practices and strategies, forming a global cycle of contention, is an issue open for discussion.

Transnational cycles of protests The spread of the Internet in the 1990s and creative uses of information communication technologies fostered the interaction and collaboration of groups of activists dispersed across the world. The potential of Internet technologies was firstly demonstrated by the Zapatista resistance movement in Chiapas, Mexico, through which a network of communication was created among people engaged in struggles and resistance (Hamm 2005), providing a long-term perspective on global social movement politics (Chadwick 2006).

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The coordination of communication and action across borders gained prominence in the formation of the global justice movement, which was organized at the transnational level and targeted supernational institutions (della Porta and Turrow 2005; Juris 2008), launching a “new kind of politics” that was impressive in its capacity to “continuously refigure itself around shifting issues, protest events, and political adversaries” (Bennett 2003, 143). The protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle in 1999 have been a reference point for a succession of demonstrations and counter-summits in the struggle against the neoliberal, globalizing order (Pianta 2001; Van Aelst and Walgrave 2002). A decisive tool of the evolution of global activism has been the creation of Independent Media Centres (IMC) and the open-publishing platform of Indymedia (Downing 2003; Morris 2004) which enable the collaboration and networking of a diverse range of activist groups, making it possible for anyone to report from the field of social struggles. This global independent information network has been a laboratory for the transnational interplay between social and media activism by which activists meet and initiate joint projects (Kidd 2003) and set up a radical way of doing journalism (Platon and Deuze 2003; Atton 2004). The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the emergence of the so-called “war on terror” radically changed the trade-off between social control and dissent (Stahl 2008). Consequently, an increasing “criminalization of dissent” surrounding the global justice movement followed. The pre-emptive and coercive actions of the police (resulting in arrests and the curtailing of civic liberties) prior to and during the summit protests are indicative here (Fernandez 2008). Moreover, independent information networks came under threat of repression; agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation seized two Indymedia servers in Britain in 2004 following terrorism allegations (Milan 2013b, 36; 2004). Furthermore, what the “war on terror” rhetoric mainly enabled was “frame bridging,” ...the linking of specific ideas behind dissent with a master narrative of the threat of terrorism... [The] potential threat (to the State, cultural hegemony and the status quo) of radical and revolutionary ideas was intentionally equated with perceived threats emergent in feelings of fear and insecurity in the wake of 9/11 (Salter 2011, 116)

Still, the Internet eloquently entered the realm of political activism, constituting a vibrant terrain for social and communication struggles. Further coalitions of civil society groups were formed transnationally, organizing anti-war protest movements such as the case of the global day

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of action against the Iraq war on February 15, 2003. In the years that followed, the use of the Internet and mobile media were an integral part of protest movements across the world (such as the “Ukrainian Orange Revolution” in 2004 and the “candlelight (Ghotbul) protest” in Seoul in 2008). A crucial matter, however, has been the use of social media in the uprisings taking place in the last five years in different parts of the world. The first “moments” of social media (Twitter) integration in setting the scene of protest movements were experienced in Moldova and Iran in 2009, and there has been an upsurge of protest movements mediated by social networking since 2011. It began with the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in late 2010 and early 2011, and spread soon after to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, followed by the “Indignados Movements” in Southern Europe and the “Occupy Movement” in the USA during the spring and autumn of the same year. In last two years, additional protest movements have been networked in Turkey (the Gezi Park protests in the spring of 2013), Brazil (in the summer of 2014), and Hong Kong (in the fall of 2014). The 2011 cycle of contention opened up discussions about the extent to which we experience the emergence of other transnational or global social movements. The relevant literature has evaluated this aspect along the lines of the development of “networked social movements” (Castells 2012), as well as “responses to the adversities of neoliberal global capitalism” (Tejerina et al. 2013; Mason 2012). From the first perspective, the “network” is a global movement actor: “The new subjectivity appeared in the network: the network became the subject” (Castells 2012, 129), and political leadership has been replaced by “horizontality” in terms of the fusion of communication and organization. In the second perspective, the current wave of protest movements is the result of resistance to global financial capital: “The wave of protests of 2011 that spread from the Middle East to Europe and to the USA can be seen in terms of the culmination of accumulated grievances, many of which had fueled earlier protests and/or actions seeking economic, political, social, and/or environmental justice” (Benski et al. 2013, 543). While both approaches recognize the role of the national/local context of protests (historical roots, social structures and cultural traditions), they do not reflect analytically on these aspects. Taking up recent protest movements, Postill (2013) acknowledges the relevance of both national and global contexts and the interplay between social and media activism. In this respect, he proposes an alternative theory that takes into consideration the “growing convergence of the global movement for digital freedom with local forms of social unrest” (Ibid., 1). Technology experts (hackers, copyleft lawyers

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and journalists), other knowledge specialists (artists, teachers) and the general population of a country (citizenry) contribute to this convergence, mediating respectively (whether or not they join forces successfully) the perspectives of struggles.

Radical dissent The struggles for social change and social justice in the latest wave of protests have numerous facets. Nevertheless, the acts of political dissent deployed are under the same threat of being prosecuted as terrorism. The social construction of terrorism is often employed in periods of increasingly strident struggles: “It is in those periods in which state capital has something to be concerned about. No longer are attempts to get to the roots consigned to the margins of social discourse, but that is what power seeks: to stuff it back into a place of control and regulation” (Shantz 2013, 2). State scrutiny, intensive surveillance, repressive policies, the populist rhetorics of terrorism and cyberterrorism, and anti-terrorism legislation all have made significant contributions to an authoritarian climate of controlling dissent, marginalizing social movements and discrediting social actors. Practices of “political policing” have been exercised during recent protest movements in different contexts. By taking the leading role in the “war on terror,” the US government’s fight against “terrorism” has also been applied to a wide range of oppositional political activities, and this has resulted in the stigmatization of particular groups and communities, undermining the legitimacy of their political expression: Recent revelations about government spying on the Occupy movement in more than 15 cities demonstrates, once again, that DHS and the FBI labeled homegrown protestors as terrorists. FBI memos refer to “domestic terrorism” and note local Joint Terrorism Task Forces helped in “counterterrorism preparedness” and “WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] preparedness.” In Los Angeles, the social control explicitly was articulated after a legal, nonviolent Occupy protest in the subway system. (Greenberg 2013, 6)

Moreover, politicians employ the populist rhetoric of terrorism to justify their repressive practices, and a radical change occurs in the tradeoff between security and civic liberties: At the height of the protests, then-EU minister Egemen Ba÷ú announced that whoever entered Taksim Square during police raids would be

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Also, the growing politicization of the Internet itself, the development of effective cyber disruption and electronic acts of disturbance have come under attack in terms of conflating hacking with cyberterrorism. Akser and Baybars-Hawks (2009) point out that it is important to make a distinction between hacking (disruptive activities) and cyberterrorism (terrorist activities in cyberspace) at a time when the threat posed by cyberterrorism is often exaggerated by politicians and the mass media. Hacktivism became popular in late 2010 and early 2011 after the release of thousands of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks and the subsequent mobilization of the Anonymous network to attack the websites of companies (including PayPal and Master Card) which had taken action against WikiLeaks and brought down (through denial of service attacks) the official websites of repressive regimes. These tactics were regularly used during the 2011 protest movements as an aspect of social struggles: “Anonymous soon went on to become directly involved in the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world, Spain, the US and elsewhere, including Occupy Wall Street where it carried out ‘IT work for the various encampments and helped publicize instances of police brutality against the movement’” (Postill 2013, 7, quoting Fell Brown 2013). Online activism has increasingly been a dynamic terrain for political protests and resistance. In addition, the issue of the “criminalization of dissent” has been explicitly raised in the proliferation of anti-terrorism legislation. According to Human Rights Watch (2012a), more than 140 countries have enacted or revised one or more counterterrorism laws since 9/11. Many of these laws justified repressive practices that violate or undermine the fundamental freedoms of the people. The case of demonstrations is notable here: “In 2006 the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism noted ‘with concern the increase of infringements upon the exercise of the right to freedom of assembly and association in the name of counter-terrorism’” (Ibid., 48). Similar concerns were raised during the recent protest movements of 2014 as regards the use of antiterrorist laws in the suppression of anti-government protests in Brazil during the World Cup (Watts 2014) and Occupy Central in Hong Kong (Young 2014). As Letta Tayler, a senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch, puts it: “Together, the counterterror laws enacted around the globe represent a dangerous expansion of powers to detain and prosecute people, including peaceful political opponents” (Human Rights Watch 2012b).

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In addition, the construction of the meaning of the word “terrorism” involves hegemonic processes and discursive strategies in an “us versus others” schema: “The term ‘terror’ was initially used to designate state violence against anyone deemed to be a threat to instituted authority, to the state” (Badiou 2011, 17). Only later, as an outcome of hegemonic struggle, did terror come (for state powerholders) to designate the actions of civilians – even actions against the state (Shantz 2013, 3). Moreover, the lack of consensus in governmental politics (including the United Nations) about what terrorism involves and how it can be classified (Brulin 2011) has allowed for the build-up of a broad open-ended category that covers a wide range of controversial political expressions. Overall, the issue of “radicalism” is at stake. Activities and practices of resistance (uprisings, insurrections and direct oppositional actions) that challenge and contest dominant power structures, relations and interests are seen by states and regulation as being destructive. In this regard, the popular “conveyor belt” metaphor of radicalization is employed, “implying that activism leads easily to radicalism and that most radicals emerge from activism” (Moskalenko and McCauley 2009, 239) and suggesting that there is a direct trajectory to terrorism. Hence, radicalism is associated with extremism (disorder, violence) and increasingly with terrorism (disruption of the public order and the endangering of public safety). However, the very term “radical” has a constructive value, that of critically questioning dominant assumptions and thus expressing alternative approaches to social change and social justice; and this is what activism conveys in process. Jeff Shantz (2013, 1) eloquently reflects on the distortion of the idea of radicalism: Radicalism is a perspective, an orientation in the world. It is not, as is often mistakenly claimed, a strategy. To be radical is to dig beneath the surface of taken for granted assumptions, too easy explanations, unsatisfactory answers, and panaceas that pose as solutions to problems. Radicalism challenges and opposes status quo definitions – it refuses the self-serving justifications offered up by authority and power.

Therefore, the issue of radicalism is inevitably set in the course of social struggles and mass mobilizations, and it becomes part of the (de)legitimization of political resistance.

A diversified field of struggle for analysis The unfolding of new mediated waves of protest movements reveals a diversified field of struggle which is reflected in the dynamic interplay

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between social and media activism in terms of the different contexts of their implementation and the contested nature of political dissent. Both media studies and social movement studies have explored specific aspects of these articulations. However, the development of a comprehensive framework of analysis is essential to grasp their complexity. First, a broader focus is needed that will facilitate research on collective action in relation to media as a whole. Most of the literature focuses on a particular aspect of the interaction between activists and communication technologies. As such, these approaches pay no attention to the multiple interactions of social movements with diverse media formats that subscribe to different purposes and relations in the realm of contemporary protest movements. Critics of “this persistence in privileging the analysis of one medium over the others,” what Emiliano Trére (2012, 2362) calls the “one-medium bias,” have developed a “holistic” approach to protest movements in relation to the complex media landscape in which they are performed and experienced. Accordingly, new approaches address protest movements in the context of a whole array of communication technologies, including “360-degree communication tactics” (Padovani 2010), “new media ecologies” (Lievrouw 2011; Tufekci and Wilson 2012), “information ecologies” (Trére 2012), and the “hybrid media systems” (Chadwick 2013) with which they interact. The synergy of different media formats has been evident in the uprisings of 2011. Interpersonal communication and social networks (friends, families, schools and workplaces mobilized large sectors of the population), mass media (the means of repression in the Arab world, on the one hand, and the mobilizing role of Al-Jazeera in the Egyptian movement on the other), traditional alternative media (the original call for the Occupy Movement in the US was launched by the alternative news media magazine Adbusters), and hacktivism (WikiLeaks’ reports on corruption in a number of Arab regimes and Anonymous operations against government sites) were also employed, along with popular social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) and other new media practices (blogs, web forums, live streaming) in mobilizations and occupations. Moreover, consideration of the technological mediations of protest movements beyond an instrumental prism, conceiving of media as political agents, not simple tools that movements use to pursue their predefined goals (Trére 2012, 2362), sets further challenges for research: “[T]here is a need for systematic sociological studies on the emergence of media and technology activism, mobilizing frames, identity building and action repertoires” (Milan 2013b, 9). Though it is questionable whether a

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third wave of social movements has emerged (after the traditional workers’/socialist movements and the “new” identity-based social movements) (Lindgren and Lundström 2011), mobilizations through media and technology (decentralized cyberactivist tactics and projects) are definitely part of the multifaceted process by which social actors are organizing and acting collectively, and as such they become integrated into the dynamics of contemporary protest movements. As regards the perspective and orientation of the recent uprisings, several accounts have highlighted the emergence of a global cycle of contention in terms of the popular nature of the movements, their snowball-effect inspiration, their similar repertoires of actions and communication (protest camps, social media), and their reactions against different facets of capitalist globalization. Furthermore, it is conventional structural factors that form the social, political and cultural contexts of activism, providing political opportunities for social subjects to engage in “contentious politics” (Tarrow 1998). This means that the practices and strategies of the recent wave of mediated protest movements have to be viewed in their local context, and societal issues, dislocations and histories of contention figure decisively here. During the Arab Spring, social demands took on a national character in opposition to economic, political and social repression, as well as dictatorial styles of rule, and protesters demanded political reforms and pro-democratic changes for their countries. Also, in the case of Turkey, the Gezi Park demonstration was initially about specific governmental policies and subsequent protests were transformed into a battle against the state and its repressive practices; in this process, issues concerning the ecology, Kurds and gender took on a central position. In the European “Indignados” movements, social demands had both an international character (in opposition to global/IMF and regional/EU policies) and a national character (in opposition political corruption and national elites). Lastly, the Occupy Movement was characterized by strong resistance to practices of neo-liberalization and offered up a critique of the decreasing quality of representative democracy. Accordingly, pre-existing repertoires of actions and collective imaginaries in each case influenced the emergence and the prospects of the protest movements. Traditional forms of protest, general strikes, union-led demonstrations, university students’ strikes, sit-ins, civil disobedience actions, ad hoc opposition practices, urban struggles and alternative media practices constitute a dynamic reservoir of activism at the local/national level. Approaching the transformative potential of the recent protest movements requires taking into consideration earlier mobilizations, activities, practices and events of

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activism that have been experienced in domestic terms, and in doing so we can trace the continuities and discontinuities. Lastly, a social scientific study of the rather controversial issue of political violence is needed. Social movement theory is an appropriate tool for such an endeavor through the contextualization of political violence. It provides a consistent framework for analyzing conflict escalation within the broader social and temporal context, as well as evaluating its historical, social and political preconditions. Moreover, political violence has been approached as one of many possible tactics in the broader process of political contention, taking into account dynamics that developed within social movements themselves as well as in relation to systemic policies and state practices, thus affecting the experience of activism. From this perspective, political violence, as another feature of radicalism, is determined by and in specific contexts: “Within an SMT framework, violence is studied as one aspect of movement dynamic, and never in isolation” (Gunning 2009, 161). In this respect, both the spatial and temporal aspects of political violence as a tactic have to be taken into account by drawing on the constructions, processes and relationships of political contention. Here, a multi-level approach that acknowledges the dynamic interplay between the socio-political context (macro-level), organization dynamics (meso-level) and individual motivations (microlevel) (della Porta 1995) is a sufficiently productive means of addressing the relational dynamics of contentious politics.

Conclusion Overall, an integrated approach to the new mediated protest “cycle” through the prism of media studies and social movement studies research will allow researchers to evaluate collective action in relation to the media as a whole, as it is constituted in different contexts (at the national and transnational level) and through competing conceptualizations of radicalism. The benefits and challenges of employing a comparative analysis of contemporary mediated protest movements include the contextualization of the dynamics of political contention, including their networked structures, (trans)national echoes and radical perspectives.

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Shirky, C. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together. New York: Penguin. Servaes, J. 1999. Communication for Development: One World, Multiple Cultures. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Stahl, R. 2008. A clockwork of war: Rhetoric of time in a time of terror. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 94 (1): 73-99. Tarrow, S. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tejerina, B., Perugorría I., Benski, T and Langman, L. 2013. From indignation to occupation: A new wave of global mobilization. Current Sociology, 61 (4): 377-392. Trére, E. 2012. Social movements as information ecologies: Exploring the coevolution of multiple Internet technologies for activism. International Journal of Communication, 6: 2359-2377. Tufekci, Z. 2014. Capabilities of movements and affordances of digital media: Paradoxes of empowerment. DML Central. Accessed March 11, 2014. http://dmlcentral.net/blog/zeynep-tufekci/capabilitiesmovements-and-affordances-digital-media-paradoxes-empowerment. Tufekci, Z. and Wilson, C. 2012. Social media and the decision to participate in political protest in Egypt: Observations from Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication, 62: 363-379. van Aelst, P. and Walgrave, S. 2002. New media, new movements? The role of the Internet in shaping the ‘anti-globalization movement. Information, Communication & Society, 5 (4): 465-493. Watts, J. World Cup 2014: Brazil’s plans for anti-terror law alarm rights groups. The Observer, April 19. Accessed October 01, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/apr/19/world-cup-brazilanti-terror-law-alarms-human-rights-groups. Young, S. 2014. Occupy has nothing to fear from anti-terror law. South China Morning Post, July 01. Accessed October 01, 2014. http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1543767/occupy-hasnothing-fear-anti-terror-law.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE INTERNET’S IMPACT ON SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE ROLE OF FACEBOOK IN THE JANUARY 25 REVOLUTION IN EGYPT HUSSNI NASR

Introduction In January of 2011, Egypt witnessed a series of simultaneous events that soon became known as the January 25 Revolution, and mass protests in Egypt challenged the repressive, anti-democratic nature of the regime (International Crisis Group, 2011). The revolution called for an end to corruption, improved living conditions, democracy and the protection of human rights. Startling and dramatic scenes of the “Day of Anger” (25 January) followed by the “Day of Rage” and culminating in the “March of the Millions” (1 February), which forced President Hosni Mubarak’s departure from power, pulsed through satellite and international news coverage. As many commentators have noted, one of the early facilitators for the January 25 Revolution in Egypt was a Facebook page created in honor of Khaled Saeed, a young man who was brutally beaten and killed by the police. This page became a focal point around which 470,000 “fans” organized their dissidence while a YouTube video about his murder was viewed by more than 500,000 people, fueling further public outrage. For more than a decade before the revolution, Egypt had been witnessing increased levels of collective action involving broad segments of society. Between 1998 and 2008, industrial workers mounted thousands of protests, numerous strikes and sit-ins. The broadening of the agenda for change came with the first call for a general strike by textile workers on April 6, 2008, which drew wide attention and support from a cross section

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of society. Using Facebook, the movement publicized events and mobilized social circles. Importantly, the activists and supporters of the movement were open to members of diverse political groupings, including the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement’s concerns were focused on broad social issues of equality and social justice, and on the protection of freedoms and civil liberties. Citizens’ daily experiences of humiliation on the streets, growing social disparities–whereby a small elite has monopolized the wealth and resources of the country–and the blockage of formal political avenues have all been factors driving the organization of independent opposition to the regime and the widespread mobilization to bring it down.

Literature and theory Broadly defined, forms of “activism” include the actions of a group of like-minded individuals coming together to change the status quo and advocating for a cause, whether local or global, and whether progressive or not (Cammaerts 2007; Kahn and Kellner 2004; Lomicky and Hogg 2010). Activism can encompass social movements and moments of collective action. Social movements involve a prolonged contestation of authority with interactions between the challengers and power holders (Tarrow 1998; Tilly 1978), with the end goal of ultimately achieving some kind of social change. Collective action, which Tilly defined as “joint action in pursuit of common ends” (1978: 84), such as a protest or petition campaign, can be employed as part of a social movement, or it can be a one-time event. Whether a long-term social movement or an outburst of action, successful mobilizations depend on the extent of a group’s common interests and shared identity, as well as its resources and political clout, and the level of governmental repression (Tilly, 1978). In today’s digital era, access to and familiarity with technology have become an important resource for such movements (Rolfe, 2005). In Egypt, what started as an online and offline protest organized via Facebook evolved into a more general pro-justice and anti-violence movement. The way in which Egyptians rallied via Facebook to demand justice is characteristic of what Castells (2001) called the “networked social movement” of the information age. This networked social movement was based on cultural values (justice), and it was a loose and semi-spontaneous coalition relying on internet technologies (Facebook) as a locally based movement with global aims (Castells, 2001). Even as Egyptians protested in downtown Cairo City, Facebook users in the United States and Europe organized their own demonstrations, hoping that global attention would

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prompt the US government and the United Nations to get involved. What made this networked social movement unique, however, was that it was not simply a case of activists turning to the internet to assist a pre-existing movement. Instead, the movement originated entirely online and then moved offline–a concept for which much of the social movement literature does not account. To better understand how Facebook users mobilized millions of people to participate online and offline, this study employed a framing approach. Entman (1993) has suggested that media frames, derived from Goffman’s (1974) notion of schemas, define an issue through selection, exclusion, emphasis and elaboration; in other words, frames tell the audience how to think about something. Framing studies typically consider frames at an issue-specific (i.e. topical or episodic) or generic level, including thematic frames such as those based on values, adversaries, consequences, or human interest (Iyengar 1991; Matthes 2009; Price et al. 1997). However, frames are more than just categories–they organize and structure, helping illuminate meanings embedded within the text (Reese 2007). In the social movement literature, Gerhards and Rucht (1992) identified three collective action frames: diagnostic, which define a problem or assign blame; prognostic, which detail possible solutions; and motivational, which incite individuals to act or mobilize. McLeod and Hertog (1999) referred to a “protest paradigm” means of framing wherein news stories’ themes and a reliance on official sources de-legitimize protesters.

The Internet’s impact on social movements According to a 2009 survey by DigiActive, social networking sites are the most common entrance to online activism, despite the fact that SNS were not created with activism in mind (Brodock et al. 2009). Considering the fact that much still must be learned about how the Internet is effecting mobilization (Rolfe, 2005; Wojcieszak 2009), this study is important for exploring what SNSs, particularly Facebook, mean for social movements (Cleaver 1998; Diani 2000). Scholars tend to view the Internet’s role in social movements in a twofold manner: the internet can facilitate traditional offline activism, enhancing a movement’s existing repertoire by adding email campaigns, online petitions and even virtual sit-ins to activists’ existing toolboxes (Castells 2001; Juris 2005), or it actually can create new forms of activism and resistance (Cardoso and Pereira Neto 2004; Rolfe 2005; Van Laer and Van Aelst 2009). When it comes to supporting the traditional techniques

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of social movements, whether protests or signature drives, the Internet, unlike any other medium, allows for fast, easy and cheap transnational action that is not limited by time, space or distance (Castells 2001; Juris 2005; Ribeiro 1998). One perpetual problem of social movements has been how to draw in enough highly motivated individuals to initiate mobilization and attract more participants and resources (Opp, 2009), but with SNS, all it takes is a click of the mouse for participants to be recruited globally. Quite prophetically, Oliver and Marwell identified the need for “some social mechanism that connects enough people who have the appropriate interests and resources so that they can act” (1988: 6). Still, if it is so easy to click “Join Group” or “Sign Petition,” it is worth considering whether members of online social movements truly are dedicated to the cause or just jumping on the bandwagon. Van de Donk et al. (2004) argued that the Internet will complement, not replace, existing social movement tactics. In fact, it is the widely lauded simplicity of online activism that scholars have suggested could undercut a movement’s value, creating a half-hearted, meaningless form of activism, or ‘slacktivism’ (Morozov 2009a; Van de Donk et al. 2004). Furthermore, while Morozov (2007, 2009b) acknowledged that the Internet can facilitate mobilization and collective action, and that the latest generation of activists and protesters might as well be based out of Facebook, but he cautioned against technological determinism that glosses over the importance of offline participation. Some have found that virtual ties alone, without “real” face-to-face interaction, are likely not strong enough to successfully mobilize or sustain a social movement, as real relationships are considered to be more valuable and effective than impersonal electronic communications (Diani 2000; Ribeiro 1998). Wojcieszak’s study of online neo-Nazi and radical environmentalist groups found that collective identity was strengthened through these online groups, resulting in online participation being the “strongest predictor” of offline political action; as participation in these online discussion groups increased, involvement in political activities increased as well (2009: 573). Hara (2008) likewise showed in a study of MoveOn.org's political actions during the 2004 US presidential campaign that the sense of community that members felt–even without face-to-face communication–actually contributed to offline mobilization.

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Online and offline activism Sandor Vegh’s (2003) classification of online activism includes: (a) awareness/advocacy, and (b) organization/mobilization. First, when it comes to awareness and advocacy, the web allows a social movement to bypass traditional media gatekeepers. For example, anti-neo-liberal activists created a network of Independent Media Centers to provide alternative news coverage of the World Trade Organization protests in 1999 (Atton 2003). Postmes and Brunsting (2002) also found that “alternative” news disseminated via the Internet influenced mobilization. Second, Vegh (2003) argued the Internet facilitates organization and mobilization by three means: a) calling for offline action via email or a website; b) calling for online action for something typically done offline, such as sending emails to Congress members instead of letters; and c) calling for online action that is possible only via the Internet, such as a computer spam campaign. Vegh’s conceptualization of online activism, however, does not go far enough. In the Egyptian revolution, what emerged was not a movement merely “relying” on the Internet. What developed in Egypt was an activism born online in which offline activity was dependent on what happened online. In contrast, Vegh’s classification limits the Internet to a purely supplemental role in offline activism. Schussman and Earl (2004) criticized much of the existing literature, maintaining that it was wrong to conclude that the Internet was not creating new modes of activism when most research was based on the ways in which already existing social movement organizations were incorporating web-based techniques rather than examining movements that are born online. This study takes up this concern, examining how Facebook posts and comments helped push an online movement offline. Still, when considering this new electronic repertoire of action, is the Internet functioning as the cause or merely a catalyst for online activism? Castells (2001) said dramatic events or crises are what tend to trigger social change. Jasper posited that “moral shocks,” defined as events or pieces of information that “raise such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined toward political action,” are a prerequisite for mobilization of a social movement (1997: 106). Similarly, a “suddenly imposed grievance” or a “critical event” can motivate ordinary citizens to become politically active (Opp 2009: 96). New social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, as well as mobile telephony distributing SMS (short message service) messages, images and live video streams, and internet bloggers have all played a key role in the recent uprisings though in differing permutations across the different countries

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concerned. Inflated claims about the power of new social media to provoke protests and revolutions lend themselves to the charge of media centrism and technological determinism, theoretical optics that obscure the preceding social and political forces at work as well as the purposive actions of human beings prepared to confront state intimidation and violence in pursuit of political change. Equally, however, claims that simply deny the important role of new media in merging broad-based, non-hierarchical political movements and coordinating and channeling their demographic weight into real democratic power fail to take into account the changed nature of today’s media and communications environment or how this can now be harnessed by activists and protestors and creatively infused in political struggles (Cottle and Lester 2011). Harlow (2012) studied two of the most active Facebook groups that were created after a video surfaced in May of 2009 in which prominent lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg accused Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom of murdering him. Using interviews and a content analysis of Facebook comments, the study found that the social network site was used to mobilize an online movement that moved offline. Users’ protest-related and motivational comments, in addition to their use of links and the other interactive elements of Facebook, helped organize massive protests demanding justice and an end to violence. Zhang et al. (2010) examined the roles of social networking in engaging people in democratic processes. They drew upon a telephone survey of southwest residents to examine the extent to which reliance on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube has engaged citizens in civic and political activities. More specifically, the study looked at the extent to which social networking sites influence political attitudes and democratic participation after checking for demographic variables and the role of interpersonal political discussions in stimulating citizen participation. The findings indicate that reliance on social networking sites is significantly related to increased civic participation, but not political participation, and that interpersonal discussions foster both civic participation and political activity. Generalizations about the role of social media in the uprisings, for the present at least, must be shunned: “the importance and impact of social media on each of the rebellions we have seen this year, concludes one media observer, ‘has been defined by specific local factors (not least how people live their lives online in individual countries and what state limits were in place). Its role has been shaped too by how well organized the groups using social media have been” (Beaumont, 2011: 2). Even more fundamental in this respect is the varying penetration of these new

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technologies into daily life within and across different Arab societies (Ghannam, 2011). In Egypt there are 10,609,900 Facebook users, which makes it number 20 in the ranking of all Facebook statistics by country. Facebook penetration in Egypt is 13.18% in terms of the country's population, and 62.19% in relation to the number of Internet users. In the last six months, the number of FB users has grown by more than 1,680,160. A comparison of the figures for penetration of Facebook users shows that Egypt has 0.69% higher FB penetration than Mongolia and 0.30% lower FB penetration than Honduras. The largest age group of users is currently 18-24 with total of 4,243,960 users, followed by users aged 25-34. 65% of users in Egypt are male and 35% are female, compared to 46% and 54% in Australia and 47% and 53% in Venezuela (Egypt Facebook Statistics 2012).

Methodology Based on the literature regarding mobilization, framing, the Internet’s impact on social movements, and online versus offline activism, this study raises the following research questions: RQ1: Who were the organizers of Egypt’s Facebook political movement, and what were their motivations and expectations? RQ2a: When considering Gerhards and Rucht’s (1992) three collective action frames, were Egypt's Facebook users more likely to employ diagnostic, prognostic or motivational frames? RQ2b: Which thematic frame was most stressed among Facebook posts and comments: an agency frame, values frame, adversarial frame or a reflective frame? RQ3: What topical and functional sub-frames emerged from Facebook posts and comments? RQ4: How is the frequency of users’ posts related to the frames and sub frames of a post and a comment? RQ5: What kinds of news did Egyptian Facebook users post? RQ6: What kinds of interactive comments and interactivity between the “real” world and “virtual” world did Facebook engender? By using content analysis of posts and comments posted to two Facebook pages created in light of the January 25 Revolution and interviews conducted with the page creators, this research examines how Facebook posts and comments were framed to mobilize and advance an online revolution that activated an offline movement. In addition to the framing of posts and comments, this exploratory study also considers what role the various interactive Facebook features, such as the ability to “like” or respond to another user’s post or comment, played in the online “virtual” revolution and the offline “real” protests that took place in the

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downtown areas of Egyptian cities. Such research is important because while researchers have studied the development of traditional offline social movements (Gerhards and Rucht 1992; Gitlin 1980) and looked at how the Internet facilitates social movements (Atton 2003; Ayres 1999; Castells 2001), little has been written about how social media is used to organize online activism that moves offline (Wojcieszak 2009). Furthermore, much is unknown about who uses social network sites and to what end (Boyd and Ellison 2007). A survey of US Facebook users, which suggested Facebook could encourage youth civic and political participation, called for more research into Facebook “in other contexts and diverse communities” (Park et al. 2009, 733). Few researchers have content-analyzed user posts on social network sites or interviewed the sites’ creators, which would provide a unique opportunity to explore this relatively new interactive medium in the context of Egypt. To understand the social movement that began online and moved offline, two research methods were used: in-depth interviews and content analysis. The interviews took place in Cairo in March of 2012 and were held with two leaders of the Facebook movement. The interviews were followed up with emails sent in March and April of 2012. Content analysis was used to examine posts and comments posted to two Facebook pages that led the revolution, “We are All Khaled Saeed” and “January 25: The Day of Revolution on Torture, Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment.” The first page was created on June 10, 2010 while the second was created on January 14, 2011. These pages were chosen because they were created before the revolution, their “friends” lists were most substantive, and their “walls” contained more postings than other similar Facebook pages. Although most content analyses of social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace have studied standard profile information, i.e. the input used when an account is created, this study examined the posts and comments that users posted (Stern 2007; Waters et al. 2009). The total number of posts on the two pages was 43, while the total number of comments was 117,662 as shown in Table 8-1. In-depth interviews were used to answer RQ1, which asked who the organizers of Egypt’s Facebook revolution movement were and looked into their motivations and expectations. During the interviews, the administrators of the pages were asked why they decided to get involved with the call for revolution, where they got the idea to use Facebook, and what they believed the outcome of using Facebook would be.

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Table 8-1. Numbers of posts and comments on Facebook pages. Page

Posts Comments Like Share Photos Videos

WE ARE ALL KHALED SAEED (18-62010 to 11-22011) 25 115550 123892 512 288 5

JAN. 25 THE DAY OF REVOLUTION (14-1-2011 to 28-12011)

Total

18 2112 2275 34 4 1

43 117662 126167 546 292 6

The content analysis took up Facebook users’ posts and comments as the unit of analysis. A census of all posts and comments posted to the “We Are All Khaled Saeed” and “The Day of Anger” pages from June 10 to February 12, 2010 was analyzed. This time frame was chosen because the first page was created on June 11, and the revolution achieved its goal by deposing President Mubarak on February 11, 2011. To answer RQ2a, which asked whether Facebook users were more likely to employ diagnostic, prognostic or motivational frames, comments were placed into one of Gerhards and Rucht’s (1992) collective action frames: diagnostic (how did the comment define the problem?), prognostic (what solutions were suggested?) and motivational (was the post or the comment a call to arms or motivating?). For RQ2b, comments were coded according to thematic frames: an agency frame (related to participating or inciting action), a values frame (related to the high-level abstraction of ideals of justice, democracy, national security, patriotism, familial safety, or good of the community), an adversarial frame (portraying the movement as good versus evil, or specifying heroes and villains), a reflective frame (related to discussions of antecedents, consequences or media coverage), or other (Matthes 2009; Noakes and Johnston 2005). To answer RQ3, which asked what topical and functional sub-frames emerged from the Facebook posts and comments, those posts and comments were placed into the following topical categories: protest/action related, anti-president/government, petition-related, specifically mentioning revolution, media coverage/article/blog, justice/impunity, related to other crimes/problems in Egypt, solidarity with Egypt, Facebook/Twitter related, general encouragement/support for the movement, and other. Approximately 100% of the posts and 1% of the comments were reviewed

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randomly to identify frequent topics (Poindexter and McCombs 2000). The coding categories represent the topics that appeared most frequently. To determine function, coders specified whether the comment primarily conveyed information, called for action, referenced past or future participation in a protest, stated an opinion, sought information or generally offered support/encouragement. For RQ4, how frequently users posted comments, comments were coded in terms of how many times the user posted a comment that same day. Users then were divided by how often they posted comments. Those who posted once a day were considered low-frequency posters, those who posted two to three times a day were medium-frequency posters and those who posted more than three comments in the same day were considered to be high-frequency posters. To answer RQ5, which asked what kinds of news information Egyptian Facebook users posted, the media coverage topic variable was combined with a variable coding how many and what kinds of links users posted. Posts and comments that included audio, visual or textual hyperlinks were counted. To answer RQ6 about the kinds of interactive posts and comments and interactivity between the “real” world and “virtual” world Facebook engendered, posts and comments were coded for unique variables unavailable for analysis in static newspaper content. For example, posts and comments were coded as an original post or comment or as a response to a comment. Such responses to an original post are easily identifiable on Facebook pages, as they are broken out in smaller type size. Another interactive element Facebook offers is a feature allowing users to click a “thumbs-up” icon to “like” or endorse a comment that another user has posted. As such, posts and comments that other users “liked” also were recorded. Additionally, posts were coded as citizen-journalist comments if the Facebook user provided an eye-witness account or photos from a protest.

Results In answer to RQ1 regarding the organizers of the Facebook movement and what were their motives and expectations, the interviews revealed that the organizers were young males in their 20s who had been educated at the country’s public universities. When they created these Facebook pages, they did not intentionally set out to mobilize the Egyptian public to launch a revolution. Instead, they wanted to inform the public about injustices and the violations of their rights they suffered under the Mubarak regime by

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highlighting events such as the killing of young Alexandrian Khaled Saeed by the police on June 6, 2010. He had been beaten and dragged to death in front of a number of eyewitnesses. Another driving factor was the death of another young man named Syed Bilal; he was killed during detention in Alexandria after being tortured in the aftermath of the bombing of the Saints’ Church in Alexandria. As thousands of people began joining the various Facebook pages, the organizers realized that the public, fed up with the escalating violence of the police, was ready to take to the streets in protest. One organizer, a 26-year-old male, said Facebook was the obvious tool as it has “become a common communication means among much of the youth in Egypt. It has been converted into part of ordinary life” and “from there surged and formulated the idea to take to the streets.” Another organizer, a 30-year-old male who said he grew up using computers, said SNSs have become one of the main ways he communicates and interacts with others. So when he found out about the murder of Khaled Saeed via YouTube, he decided to form a Facebook group to share everything he had learned, and to give himself an outlet for the “indignity” he felt: I was curious to see if other people were interested in what I had to say…. It surprised me so much to see in the first days dozens and then hundreds of people joining…and it gave me a certain sense of responsibility. I never thought Facebook would end up being such an important tool in this revolution.

The responses of organizers thus show the surprise they felt at how quickly Facebook mobilized so many people. Initially they created the Facebook pages because they were shocked by Saeed’s death and frustrated with the violence and disregard of the state. The movement that emerged, they contended, was unplanned and organic but made possible by Facebook. While some organizers were hopeful that Facebook could be utilized similarly again, others were less optimistic, seeing the Khaled Saeed case as unique.

Collective action and thematic frames In answering RQ2a, which asked whether Facebook users were more likely to employ diagnostic, prognostic or motivational frames, the results showed that when posts and comments were placed into social movement theory’s collective action frames, (54%) of comments and (51%) of posts were motivational or a call to arms. One motivational comment posted by

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a male said, “Yes we can do it, let’s go Egypt, let’s continue in the fight.” About 27% of posts and 25% of comments were prognostic (suggesting a solution), and 22% of posts and 21% of comments were diagnostic (defining a problem). In a prognostic comment, one male wrote, “What we want is for the president to resign from office.” A diagnostic comment, also posted by a female, said, “We want our country to change for [the] better without corruption, without torture. We need freedom, democracy, justice, mercy and love.” Table 8-2. Frequency of thematic frames in posts and comments on Facebook pages Thematic frame Agency (action related) Reflective (media coverage, thoughtful) Values (ideals, like justice) Adversarial (heroes versus villains)

Frequency in comments (%) 66

Frequency in posts (%) 42

6

14

15

29

10

12

Furthermore, when comments were coded according to thematic frames per RQ2b (see Table 8-2), the majority (66%) of comments and 42% of posts fell into the agency frame (related to participating or inciting action). For example, one comment with an agency frame posted by a female on a post about a video of a security officer beating a female student at Al Azhar Islamic University, said: “If nobody asked this officer about what he did, we have to take revenge with our hands.”

Topics and functions In answer to RQ3, which is about the topical and functional sub-frames of the Facebook posts and comments, the most frequent topics of users’ posts (see Table 8-3) were “protest or action related” (30%) and “support for the movement/general encouragement” (21%). For example, the admin of “We all are Khaled Saeed” page posted the following “protest or actionrelated” post: “July 15, 2010: We have a brilliant idea. We will print the Egyptian constitution or will buy copies of it and we will read it during our stand-

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off so we know our rights. Each one of us will also make 10 copies of Article 54 of the constitution which gives us the right to demonstrate and hold public meetings. We will give these copies to police officers who try to detain us and let them tear up the constitution.... It will be a scandal.” Table 8-3. Frequency of topic of posts and comments on Facebook pages. Frequency (%) 30 21 5 4 11 8 10 3 2 6

Posts and Comment topic Protest/action-related Support movement/general encouragement Media coverage/article/blog Petition-related Anti-president/government Solidarity with victims of the police Demand for justice/end to impunity Specifically mentioning revolution Facebook/Twitter related Other crimes/problems in Egypt 100 (1,220 valid cases)

As regards the function of the comments, most called for action (30%), conveyed information, stated an opinion, and referenced protest attendance. 21% of posts and comments supported the movement. The first action the page called for was published on Friday, June 18 with a call for stand-in marches in Cairo and Alexandria. The number of people invited was 12,400 fans, 1,647 of which said they would attend and 664 said they might attend. The call, which was written in very clear language, said: “Next Friday all over Egypt we will be dressed in black to express sadness for our brother Khaled Saeed and to wipe the tears from his mother eyes.” Most comments on this post asked the page administrators to expand the event to include other areas in Egypt, not just Cairo and Alexandria. Among the comments that called for action, approximately 21% were for general action/encouragement, 4% related to signing a petition, 11% encouraged others to spread the word about the movement, and 6% were “other.” About 7% of the comments provided important tips for demonstrators in their dealings with security forces during the protest, such as: “Don't be afraid of security forces, they will not touch you if you stay away from roads and traffic.”

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Frequency of posts Examining how frames and sub-frames varied according to how often a user posted comments, per the terms of RQ4, most users (50.9%) were classified as low-frequency posters who posted just once a day. About 27.5% were medium-frequency posters who posted two-three comments a day, and 21.5% were high-frequency posters who posted four or more times a day. While high-, medium-, and low-frequency posters were equally likely to post comments with a protest/action-related topic, more high-frequency (24%) than low-frequency posters (22%) conveyed information. However, more low-frequency (14%) than high-frequency posters (6%) supported the movement or offered encouragement. The function of comments also varied according to how often the user posted in a day (see table 8-4). High-frequency posters (45%) were more likely than low-frequency posters (29%) to call for action. Table 8-4. Comparison of frequency of posts and function of comments on Facebook pages. Function

Low-frequency (%)

Mediumfrequency (%)

Call for action Convey information State an opinion

29 22

22 31

Highfrequency (%) 45 24

17

19

11

Reference past/future participation in a protest Seek information Support movement/general encouragement Other (621 valid cases)

4

5

7

14 9

11 8

4 6

5 (336 valid cases)

4 (263 valid cases)

3

Frames also differed by frequency of posts. Among collective action frames, more high-frequency posters (48%) than low-frequency posters (32%) wrote comments with a motivational frame. For thematic frames, more comments from high-frequency (69%) than low-frequency posters

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(51%) received an agency frame. Also, more comments by low-frequency posters (13%) than high-frequency posters (6%) had a values frame.

Informational links In answer to RQ5 regarding kinds of information Egyptian Facebook users posted, 21% of comments contained links, of which 35% were linked to textual information, such as newspapers or blogs. Of the textual links, 31% were linked to online mainstream news articles, such as from the Egyptian newspapers Al-Masry, Al-Youm and Al-Ahram (see Table 5). Approximately 15% were linked to non-mainstream/alternative news articles. Table 8-5. Frequency of types of textual links included in Facebook posts and comments. Type of link Mainstream news article Facebook link Non-mainstream news article Petition link Blog Twitter link Other (1220 valid cases)

Frequency (%) 31 27 15 10 5 3 10

Approximately 20% of links were to still photos, such as photos of previous protests uploaded to Facebook photo albums. About 11% were linked to videos, such as those on YouTube. Just 1% contained audio links, such as reports on a radio station’s website. Males were more likely than females (29% versus 18%) to post links. Also, comments from highfrequency posters (40%) were more than twice as likely as those from low-frequency posters (20%) to include links.

Interactivity and citizen journalists The results for RQ6 as regards the kinds of interactivity between the “real” and “virtual” world that Facebook engendered were determined by whether the comment was a “response” to another comment, whether other users “liked” the comment and whether the user acted as a citizen journalist, such as by posting eye-witness accounts. Approximately 55%

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of comments were a “response” to another comment, many of which were written in the form of Egyptian Arabic used among friends. About 17% of the comments had a thumbs-up symbol indicating it was “liked” by another user. More comments by high-frequency posters (38%) than lowfrequency posters (7%) were “liked.” Also, more low-frequency posters (34%) than high-frequency posters (28%) wrote responses to other users’ comments rather than posting an original comment. Approximately 8% of comments were coded as being from users acting as “citizen journalists” providing eye-witness accounts of news events and demonstrations, or photos and videos from protests. Citizen journalist comments were two and a half times more likely than non-citizen journalist comments (53% versus 21%) to contain links. Males were as likely as females to act as citizen journalists (6% versus 5%).

Discussion and conclusion Through in-depth interviews and content analysis of Facebook posts and comments, this study explored how Facebook pages mobilized an online revolution in Egypt. Because of the way posts and comments were framed and the way Facebook’s interactive features were utilized, a sense of community was created that moved offline onto the streets of Egypt. The in-depth interviews with the movement organizers showed that young educated males who used Facebook to express their frustration with the government did not foresee that the site would prove to be such a powerful force for uniting hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in protest and prompting a “networked social movement” (Castells, 2001). Without Facebook, they argued, such a large movement never would have been mobilized. The content analysis showed the framing, topics and functions of the online posts and comments that prompted offline action by emphasizing protests and calling on others to participate and spread the word. Adding further support to Gerhards and Rucht’s collective action frames, the study showed that posts and comments were framed in such a way as to motivate others to get involved in the revolution and participate in offline activities, whether by attending protests or signing petitions. Furthermore, the topical sub-frame of most Facebook users’ comments was protest-related and the functional sub-frame was a call for action, again illustrating that the online component of the revolution was focused on generating offline participation. Rather than simply using Facebook as a forum for talking about justice or criticizing the government, users instead posted comments to mobilize an online and offline movement, organize protests, showcase

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photos of protests and actively show their support for the revolution. Because of Facebook, millions of Egyptians regularly took to the streets starting on January 25, 2011, protesting, marching or demonstrating in front of government buildings until the collapse of President Mubarak's regime on February 11, 2011. Although few Facebook users acted as citizen journalists by offering their own protest coverage or commentary on the news, arguably this is because the use of social network sites to publish eyewitness news accounts is still a relatively new way of thinking about online social media. Additionally, in a country with a history of repression, perhaps Facebook users were wary of acting as journalists. Still, for those users who did post citizen journalism comments, Facebook provided the means to bypass traditional news gatekeepers, allowing movement participants to publish their own information and publicize activities that a traditional newspaper might deem un-newsworthy. Such first-hand accounts of Facebook users who participated both online and offline indicate that online citizen journalists, much like the Facebook interactive features, also contributed to the transition of the online movement to offline action. This study adds to our understandings of the recent phenomenon of online social media social movements. While the previous literature has focused on how the internet facilitates existing movements, this research shows how the internet was used to create offline activism. Additionally, as this is an analysis of a movement in the under-studied Arab World, it brings a new cultural perspective to social movement theories, demonstrating that the presence of collective action frames is not country specific, as the three collective action frames (diagnostic, prognostic and motivational) all emerged in the Facebook comments in Egypt. Also, by examining how often comments were made, what kinds of informational links were posted, the interactive features of Facebook, and the kinds of comments citizen journalists made, this study contributes to the burgeoning literature analyzing social network sites’ impacts on social movements. As this was an examination of just two of several of Egypt’s Revolution-related Facebook pages, further studies could consider differences among the various pages. Future research also could compare other social media social movements in the Arab region and the world, exploring Facebook’s role in the success of these movements. Also, further research could look at the digital divide in online movements and how social media impacts the knowledge gap. This study suggests that the Internet has the capacity to actually create– not just enhance–political activism in the Arab World. This was not a

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movement organized offline in which the internet served merely as a tool to facilitate mobilization. Instead, the interviews and content analysis demonstrated that it was via the union of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians on Facebook that a reform movement was born online and then moved offline. Collective action and thematic frames, the inclusion of links, interactivity among users via Facebook features such as the ability to “like” a comment or respond to another’s comment, and the use of Facebook to post citizen journalism accounts all seem to have contributed to the transition of the Egyptian movement from the online, virtual realm to the offline, real world.

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PART II.

CHAPTER NINE NETWORKS AND NETWARS: THE FUTURE OF TERROR AùKIN øNCI SÖKMEN

Introduction Globalization has brought into existence a whole new set of contacts between societies and changed the political, economic and social processes that characterized the pre-modern world. The information revolution and the diffusion of the Internet in particular have become the most salient features of globalization, increasingly affecting states and societies around the world. Crucially, this revolution altered the nature of the state, both broadening its responsibilities and weakening its control over outcomes. The result is that the old power-politics model of international relations has become outmoded. In many respects, that revolution and the Internet have given individuals, organizations and nations incredible new sources of power based on constantly developing networking technologies. Force has become less usable, states have had to negotiate with other actors to achieve their goals and the very identity of the state as an actor has been called into question. States are no longer closed entities and they are no longer in full control of their economies. In short, the nature of sovereignty and the processes of government have changed, and communications have fundamentally revolutionized the way we deal with the rest of the world. Electronic communications alter our notions of the social groups we work with and live in. The operations of criminals and other non-legitimate groups have become more complex, spreading out over a wider geographical area and increasing in scale because improvements in communications have made it much easier to move people, money, weapons and ideas on a transnational basis. Terrorism, which previously tended to focus on individual countries, has taken on transnational aspects and is now often carried out by groups in

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transnational networks, but it should not be considered to be a single political force. Networks have become the basic units of modern society, and individuals, groups and organizations are now linked by such networks. A network can be defined as a collection of links between the elements of a unit. These elements in turn are called nodes, and units are often referred to as systems; they have no center, just nodes which increase their importance for the network by absorbing more relevant information and processing it more efficiently (Castells 2004). Networks are the mode of organization of complex systems in nature and society. Manuel Castells in The Rise of The Network Society (1996) argues that this network society extends further than the information society that it is often proclaimed to be. A network society is a society whose structure is made up of networks powered by microelectronics-based information and communication technologies. According to Castells, real power is located in the networks rather than being confined to global cities (Castells 2011). The ability of networks to introduce new actors and new content in the process of social organization with relative independence from power centers has increased over time through technological changes. The information revolution is bound to erode hierarchies and redraw the boundaries around which institutions and their offices are normally constructed, and this revolution favors organizational network designs. Contemporary network organizational structures have gradually emerged as a challenge to those that are hierarchical. These new structures are characterized by cell/nodes, information channels, ease of connectivity and flat information integration. Free floating cells and nodes replaced rigid hierarchical tiers in this type of organizational structure. They are linked together via mutually beneficial information channels which form a weblike pattern between the various cells and nodes of the entity in question. These channels benefit from ease of connectivity which allows them to be established and terminated as required. As cells and nodes are linked to each other directly, middle layers are done away with, resulting in flat information integration. These characteristics offer direct utility for situations of conflict and war. The information revolution has thus transformed the nature of warfare by giving rise to new forms of close-in combat. Some terrorist organizations and organized crime groups have already moved from hierarchical to new information-age network designs. In this way, terrorism has taken on a new dimension that has been described as netwar. This consists of an asymmetrical mode of conflict and crime at societal levels that involve measures which go beyond conventional techniques of

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war, and these are carried out by using network-based forms of organization and related strategies, as well as information-age technologies, to carry out attacks (John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt, and Michele Zanini 2003, 101). Through netwar, numerous widely dispersed small groups can use the latest communication technologies to act conjointly across great distances. The individuals involved in netwar usually connect in small groups which communicate and coordinate their activities but generally lack an organized central command. This model is a powerful example of the networking of international terrorists in the creation of an interconnected system linking groups with common goals. Al-Qaeda terrorist organizations’ financing systems are based on an informal Islamic banking network called Hawala which links brokers around the world (Napoleoni, Cooley and Magnus 2003, 123-24). The leaders of this expanded terrorist network use the Muslim pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia as a cover for recruiting new members and to pass cash from one member to another. Evidence of al-Qaeda cells emerged in more than forty countries after the September 11 attacks, and the focus of counter-terrorism measures has been on tracking this money in order to determine the extent of networks of terrorism and their financial support structures. In this netwar, the operations of al-Qaeda affiliates have made visible the extent of this conflict. In sum, the societal changes associated with the accessibility of information technologies that stimulate networked organizational forms are changing the nature of conflicts and crime. Non-state actors are adapting to these circumstances and altering the global political landscape. This chapter reviews the potential interaction between terrorism and crime in order to describe the changes that have occurred in the organization of global conflicts. I first discuss in some detail the theoretical underpinnings of cyberspace and international relations, and then I define cyberwar and netwar with concrete examples.

Cyberspace and International Relations The global interconnections made possible by cyberspace have challenged traditional understandings of international relations, power politics, boundaries and borders. The growing dependence of actors in international relations on the infrastructure and instruments of the Internet and the penetration of cyberspace into all fields of their activities have brought about the concept of the cyberization of international relations (Kremer and Müller 2003). In terms of state security, issues such as power positioning, interest achievement and diplomatic activity have been

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affected by the process of cyberization. Its main features challenge traditional understandings of contemporary international relations theories, policies and practices. The global international system consists of sovereign states and all the other actors and organizations that operate across sovereign boundaries. Cyberspace has led to the expansion, enablement and proliferation of actors and networks, resulting in a remarkable density as regards networks of interests. While traditional systems of international relations could be realized in hierarchical power relations (such as bipolar, multipolar or unipolar), the systems that exist in cyberspace may differ radically. Cyber power refers to the ability to use cyberspace to create certain advantages and influence events in the entire operational environment (Kuehl 2009, 24-43). With this type of power, technology is the main determinant. Control over Internet technologies and resources translates into control over discourses on global issues and events, and the superpowers have retained this advantage. Those technologies are constantly changing and at times non-state actors may be able to leap over old technologies to deploy new ones to dramatic ends. Moreover, the key features of cyberspace are manmade, based on the capacities of organizations and people (Rattay 2009, 253-275). The expansion of cyber access has already challenged the Westphalian state-based international system. Some of those impacts include the following: 1. The cyberspace capabilities of state or non-state actors are also a source of vulnerability, posing a potential threat to national security and a disturbance of the international order. As a new dimension of security, cyber security has rapidly become a fundamental feature of national security. Cyber threats coupled with uncertainty have achieved an indisputable place in post-Cold War security thinking. States must now protect the security of their own cyber systems and capabilities as well as defend against uses of cyberspace to undermine their stability and security (Choucri 2012, 49-71). 2. New types of international conflicts have been arising from activities in cyberspace. When the activities of one state threaten the sovereignty, stability and security of other states, then cyberspace becomes a critical variable in international relations. Cyberspace is now a domain of war, and anarchy and power struggles among states exist in that domain. The lead role played by the United States in the construction and management of the Internet is entirely consistent with realist theory which focuses on

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state power and national security, as well as challenges from ascending states. China and Russia have also been implementing cyber doctrines and practices, and these challenge current US practices (Thomas 2009). Just as in the Cold War, both China and Russia are quickly building up their capacities. As the destructive capacities of this field are equal to that of nuclear weapons, the current situation may be called “a cyber-Cold War” (Silver 2014). 3. For weaker actors, cyberspace provides new opportunities for them to threaten stronger ones, and asymmetrical attacks can be developed. The increasing diversity of actors may exert influence in the context of decentralization, as well as asymmetry in modes of advantage, power, and influence. RAND analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt concluded that netwar prompts technological and organizational changes that benefit relatively small actors and fuel asymmetric threats (Arquilla and Ronfelt 1997, 5). 4. Empowerment has affected new actors such as national entities, terrorist groups and organized groups. Participation in cyber venues, whether individually or in groups, can seriously threaten an established authority in unprecedented ways. For instance, Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange made many classified digital records universally accessible, and cyber venues bolstered the revolutions of the Arab spring in 2011 through mobilization. In this regard, states are still typically seen as being the single most important potential enemy, and cyber venues are able to effectively neutralize the critical infrastructures of a country (for example, by shutting down telecommunications), but non-state actors are gaining attention as well. 5. The transformative effects of cyber access permeate all levels of analysis in international relations including the individual, the state, the international system and the global system. While the creation of cyberspace is the result of the activities of a large number of individuals operating according to the rules of the state, the utilization of cyberspace is cross-national in scope and hence cyber activities have become a major site of interaction taken up in all levels of analysis in international relations. In short, the Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. In The Future of Power (2009), Joseph Nye argued that the diffusion of power away from governments is one of this century’s great political shifts, and Hedley Bull proposed a similar notion in 1977. He posited that the five elements – the regional integration of states, the disintegration of

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states, the restoration of private international violence, transnational organizations and the technological unification of the world – of his “new medievalist” model of world order were evidence of the decline of states, in the sense that they are “other associations” making inroads on the sovereignty and supremacy of a state over its territory and citizens and its ability to decisively influence world politics (Bull 1977, 264). In other words, these five elements are evidence of a fundamental shift in power toward non-state actors. On the world stage, the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be in the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer to it individuals. The spread of connectivity, particularly through Internet-enabled mobile phones, is certainly a powerful driver of this shift in power. In terms of cyberspace, major countries like the US, Russia, Britain, France and China have a greater capacity than other states and non-state actors in controlling the sea, air and space, but this has little relevance for dominance in cyberspace. Dependency on complex cyber systems for support in military and economic activities creates new vulnerabilities for large states that can be exploited by non-state actors (Nye 2012 [web]).

Cyber security Cyber security, the fourth dimension of state security, is external, internal and environmental, and it has rapidly become a fundamental feature of overall national security. It refers to a state’s ability to protect itself and its institutions against threats, espionage, sabotage, crime, identify theft and other destructive e-interactions and e-transactions. National security must be seen as a function of four distinct but interconnected dimensions. In other words, a state can be secure only to the extent to which all dimensions of security are strong. Each of the major categories of cyber threats pose problems for national security, and they all have a different time horizon; cyber war and economic espionage are largely associated with states, while cybercrime and cyber terrorism are mostly associated with non-state actors. Over the next decade, cyber war and networked-based terrorism could become greater threats than they are today, and they pose a new and perhaps serious threat to national security. Until recently, cyberspace2 was considered largely to be a matter of low politics. Matters of interest in high politics were seen as dealing with national security issues critical to state interests. Conflicts and war were also major concerns of high politics. In recent years, however, issues

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connected with cyberspace have taken on unprecedented importance in the upper echelons of high politics. Also, the cyberspace capabilities of state and non-state actors are also a source of vulnerability, posing a potential threat to national security and creating disturbances in the international order. This vulnerability has been dramatized by the specter of a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” (Hermida 2001). If such an attack did take place, it would have the potential to destroy most of a nation’s information infrastructure, just as an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon causes destruction, displacement and large-scale loss of life. Cyber conflicts involve threats to national security and generally revolve around the issue of the militarization of cyberspace, the conduct of cyber warfare, cyber threats to critical infrastructure, various types of cyber-crimes and espionage. In a cyber conflict, territorial distances can be irrelevant because everyone is a next-door neighbor in cyberspace. The most powerful weapons are not based on strength but on innovation, and cyber-attacks are limited only by the terrain of cyberspace. Basically, tactical victories amount to the successful reshuffling of bits – the ones and zeros of a computer. In the cyber world, actors are diverse (and sometimes anonymous), physical distance is immaterial and some kinds of attacks are inexpensive. Because the Internet was designed for ease of use rather than security, attackers currently have the advantage over defenders. States’ sub-state groups, terrorists and individuals have new and profound opportunities to shape the political outcomes of conflicts in cyberspace. In light of this situation, conventional military conflicts may no longer be the most useful means of winning wars. The proliferating networks of globalization make asymmetric conflicts more likely and considerably more dangerous. Asymmetrical threats are best understood as stemming from a relationship between strategies and tactics that exists outside accepted international norms and this is often implemented by non-state actors. Asymmetrical tactics are employed to strengthen a weak actor as it pursues a strategic gain. The increasing appeal of asymmetrical tactics as a tool of warfare is due in part to networks of globalization that facilitate the proliferation of technology and can allow for devastating asymmetrical attacks in cyberspace. The term “cyber attack” encompasses a wide variety of actions, ranging from simple probes to defacing websites, denial of service, espionage and destruction. They are operations carried out with the intent to disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy information on computers and computer networks, or compromise the computers and networks themselves (Franklin 2010). Computer network attacks have the potential to lead to unanticipated cascade effects.

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In cyberspace, there are various computer-based weapons. These include viruses, which are designed to erase data, software programs and memory in order to interrupt the actions of a given computer, and worms, the aim of which is to consume computer resources and/or delete data. Additionally, Trojan horses are programs that have the potential to destroy or weaken an enemy’s ability to fight. In 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm disrupted Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technologies which were suspected of being involved in the creation of nuclear weapons. Stuxnet went after specific industrial control systems, such as gas pipelines and power plants. The ultimate goal of the Stuxnet was to sabotage the facility by reprogramming programmable logic controllers to operate as the attackers intended them to. It is thought that they destroyed one-fifth of the 5,000 centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility (Mauro, 2013). Stuxnet may have been more effective than a conventional military attack and prevented a major international crisis over collateral damage (see also Nicolas Falliere, Liam O Murchu and Eric Chien 2011). If attacks such as those carried out by Stuxnet were to occur on a more widespread basis, critical modern infrastructures such as electrical grids, financial systems and air traffic control could be the main targets. In the literature on cyber security, the main focus has been on cyber attacks against electrical power infrastructures rather than nuclear power plants. Some observers declared such sabotage to be the harbinger of a new form of warfare. Indeed after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, a programmed computer worm like Stuxnet targeting nuclear reactors could be more dangerous than nuclear missiles. In 2014, IT administrators at the Monju nuclear power plant in Japan discovered that a malware-based attack had infected a system in the reactor control room (Paganini 2014). Security experts who investigated the incident concluded that the vector of the infection could have been a software update on the compromised machine; according the network logs on out-bound traffic, it seems that the malicious code stole data and sent it to a command and control server located in South Korea. In a worst-case scenario, such an attack has the potential to result in what has been referred to as a “digital world war” (Bowden, 2011). According to the map given below, such a threat or vulnerabilities in the safety systems of nuclear reactors could cause catastrophic damage in a “cyber Armageddon” in the United States, Europe, China and Japan (Bentley 2013 [web]). As with nuclear radiation, a cyberwar can destroy a modern state without drawing blood.

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Table 9-1. World map indicating the locations of nuclear power stations, 2006.

Additionally, the origin of a cyber attack can remain unknown. This facilitates the use of cyber weapons for covert operations among countries engaged in power struggles (Murphy 2012). China is already a cyber competitor of the United States, and Russia, like China, has been accused of carrying out cyber activities against foreign states. The US claimed that a series of incidents occurred between 1998 and 2000 which came to be known as Moonlight Maze. These intrusions were reportedly traced to a mainframe in Russia, but Moscow denied any involvement. As discussed above, Iran’s nuclear program was damaged by covert operations as well, and although no one has acknowledged being the culprit, evidence suggests that the virus was an American-Israeli project. The New York Times reported on two instances which may have been cyber attacks against Pakistan’s radar installations during the CA by Seal Team Six against Osama bin Laden and a similar proposed CA against Libya’s air defense system (Schmitt and Shanker 2011 [web]). Both claims were brushed aside by the US government. It thus becomes clear that using cyberspace in asymmetrical conflicts and power struggles is easier than real-world attacks. After the Cold War, US conventional military dominance led adversary states and sub-state groups to use asymmetric means such as dirty bombs, information operations and terrorism. In this way, cyber threats have taken on an indisputable place in

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post-Cold War security thinking. Critical infrastructure protection, information warfare, information covert operations, cyber terrorism and revolutions in military affairs are prominent issues in the security doctrines of the early twenty-first century. If cyber attacks play a lead role in future wars and the fight is largely over ownership of IT infrastructure, it is possible that international conflicts will be shorter and cost fewer lives.

Cyber war and netwar Networks of globalization allow for the proliferation of entirely new concepts of technology which can radically shape the dimensions of battle. In short, we are being driven to a new era in warfare and fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war. Who can make war is changing as a result of weapons proliferation and the fact that the tools of war are increasingly becoming marketplace commodities. By extension, these affect where, when and how war occurs. Warfare in the 21st century involving opponents possessing a modicum of modern technology is hardly possible without access to cyberspace, and entirely new operational concepts such as network-centric warfare or fighting in an “informationized battle space” would be impossible without cyber-based systems and capabilities. The ability to reprogram targeting data in a weapon on its way to a target and then rely on real-time updates from a global positioning system satellite to precisely strike the target is only possible through the use of cyberspace (Halpin 2006). The information revolution is leading to the rise of network-based forms of organization. These networks have, in effect, become part of the modern battlefield. The growth of these networks is related to the spread of information technologies that allow dispersed groups and individuals to conspire and coordinate across considerable distances. The rise of networks means that power is shifting to non-state actors such as transnational organized crime groups and terrorist movements. They are able to develop multi-organizational networks more readily than traditionally organized hierarchical state actors. They wield a considerable amount of power and influence in international relations. Death, destruction and intimidation on such a massive scale has led governments to become fearful of more destruction as they consider capitulating in foreign or domestic policy changes. In this situation, a new form of war could be waged between a state and a terror network. In The Transformation of War (1991), Martin Van Creveld described the worldwide dimension of present conflicts as follows:

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Van Creveld notes that many of the wars fought after 1945 were lowintensity conflicts (LICs) which powerful states ended up losing. In his book The Rise and Decline of the State (1999) he argues that we are seeing a decline of the nation-state without a comparable decline in organized violence. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as an active Jihadist militant group, is a case in point. It has the potential to cause a regional sectarian war in the Middle East and bring about the decline of states such as Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as it claims territories across the region and stakes out claims for more of the Levant, including Lebanon (Lister 2014). Its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has transformed a few terror cells into the most dangerous militant group in the world. The technical realm of information-based warfare can be divided into two major areas: cyberwar and netwar. Cyberwar consists of militaries conducting operations according to information-based theories and principles. This includes computer-assisted warfare and computer network attacks, and corresponds to the notion of networks applied to military warfare (Ventre 2011). Cyber warfare is a new mode of war that will call for new approaches to plans and strategies, as well as new forms of doctrine and organization. It depends less on geographical terrain than on the nature of electronic “cyberspace” which is open to domination through advanced technological applications. While cyber warfare is unlike traditional warfare, it does include traditional tactics such as aerial bombardment, submarine warfare, special operations forces and even assassins. Specifically, it can inflict painful, asymmetric damage on adversaries from a distance or by exploiting the element of surprise (Parks and Duggan 2011). As such, it is an attractive means of carrying out “nonkinetic warfare.” In other words, it can be used within a narrow definition of cyber war: a bloodless war among states that consists solely of electronic conflict in cyberspace. Some of the most notable features of such warfare are low entry costs, blurred traditional boundaries, expanded roles for perception management, a lack of strategic intelligence, difficulties of tactical warning and attack assessments, and problems with building and sustaining coalitions (O’Hara 2004). One paradox of the cyber battlefield is that both super powers and relatively weaker entities can take advantage of it. The potential number of non-state actors capable

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of launching cyber warfare against a nation-state is incalculable. The other dilemma is that it is not easy to determine the attacker. If you don’t know who has attacked you, then how do you respond to the incident? For example, it could not be determined who sent denial of service attacks targeting Estonia web sites in April of 2007. The Estonian government was unable to establish a clear connection with Russia (Paulsen 2007). The cyber-attack on Estonia has intensified international concerns that hostile governments could preemptively launch computer-based attacks on critical national or regional systems. Cyberwar also refers to high-intensity information-age conflicts. It is based on network-based conflicts and crimes instead of hierarchical organizations and the carrying out of military operations according to information-related principles. In brief, knowing who and where the enemy is and what it can do involves turning the “balance of information and knowledge” to a state’s favor, especially if there is an imbalance of power. Cyberwar may also involve developing new doctrines about what kinds of force are needed, where and how to deploy it, and how to strike the enemy. Cyberwar may be applicable in low- and high-intensity conflicts, in conventional and non-conventional environments, and for defensive and offensive purposes. The case of Georgia in 2008 is a prime example: Russia was involved in a 10-day war but before hostilities started there was an attack on Georgia’s networks. Government sites were either defaced or hit with distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), news, media, and financial institutions were attacked with DDoS, and malware was uploaded onto Georgian websites. This marked the first time that a cyber-attack coincided with traditional military action (Tikk, Runnimeri, Kert, Taliharm and Vihul 2008). It should be noted, however, that cyber-attacks are unlikely to have the lethality of a strategic bomber, and for that reason they have been considered to have strategic consequences. Cyber attackers have demonstrated the capability to manipulate and disrupt the Internet for a wide variety of political and military purposes. Cyber-attacks were conducted during the Kosovo war in 1999 when the NATO Internet infrastructure and US and UK computers came under attack. Because the dynamic nature of the Internet offers advantages to both attackers and defenders, it would seem that cyber wars will be won by the side that uses cutting-edge technologies the most effectively. All things considered, the current balance of cyber power favors the attacker, so for the foreseeable future, the best cyber defense is a good offense. The concept of netwar was notably developed by RAND researchers John Arquilla and Ronfeldt in 1993.3 For them, war is no longer a state-to-

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state affair. There is no formal hierarchically-based enemy like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Modern war is netwar, a lower-intensity battle waged by terrorists, criminals and extremists that have a networked, organizational structure. These networked structures are often leaderless and are able to attack quickly. They take pains to distinguish their concept of netwar from its purely military homonym, which they prefer to designate “cyberwar.” Netwar refers to a form of low-intensity conflict, crime and activism carried out by actors using social network services as platforms to build social networks or social relations among people who share common interests. As a new type of conflict, it spans economic, political and social as well as military forms of war. Netwars may be largely non-military, but they have dimensions that overlap military endeavors (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997, 28). They are not real wars yet they have the potential to be transformed into instruments for trying, early on, to prevent a real war from breaking out. The main features that favor netwar as a new form of conflict are: -

-

-

Modes of conflict or crime at the societal level; The use of network-based forms of organization; Actors that might include non-state actors such as transnational terrorists, criminal organizations, activist groups and social movements; Little to no hierarchy; The existence of multiple leaders, or no leader at all; Decision-making and operations are decentralized, allowing for local initiative and autonomy; It may be waged via high-, low- or non-technological manners; It is not solely about Internet wars and is not simply a function of the Internet, and it takes place in both cyberspace and the real world; and, It is a challenge that nation-states must contend with.

Indeed netwar is essentially an organizational phenomenon. Civil and non-civil society networks maneuver by using variants and hybrids of three basic network forms: chains in which there is very limited communication with fellow network members; hubs (or stars) which radiate out as a series of spokes from a central (but not centralizing) node; and all-channel networks in which every member is linked directly with the others. Taking up this issue in more detail, Arquilla and Ronfeldt point to three basic types of networks that may be used by netwar actors (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 7-8):

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1. The Chain or Line Network: As with a smuggling chain where people, goods or information move along a line of separated contacts, and where end-to-end communication must travel through the intermediate nodes.

2. Hub, Star or Wheel Network: As with a franchise or cartel in which disparate actors are connected to a central node, and all communication travels through that node.

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3. All-channel or full–matrixes: Every individual actor is able to communicate fully with all the other nodes in the network.

Netwar may take various forms, depending on the actors. Many terrorists, criminals, fundamentalists and ethno-nationalists are developing netwar capabilities, but some forms of netwar may occur between the governments of rival nation-states. For example, in some respects the US and Cuban governments are already engaged in a netwar which was realized through US broadcasting and Cuba’s jamming of Television Marti and Radio Marti, as well as in the activities of pro- and anti-Castro groups in the US (Ronfeldt, Arquilla and Fuller 1998, 126). Recently, a Cuban Twitter program known as the ZunZuneo network allowed users to send and receive text messages, but users of that network system did not know it was created by the US government, and American officials said that the program was in line with the US Aid mission (Guardian 2014 [web]). The case of ZunZuneo is yet another example of the ongoing netwar between the governments of the US and Cuba. Other forms of netwar may arise between governments and non-state actors. For example, these may be waged by governments against groups and organizations involved in terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and drug smuggling. For instance, Chechen networks of crime and the resistance to the Russian occupation have been developed on an essentially network-based structure, in contrast with the more

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traditional unified organized guerrilla army which successfully drove the Russians out of Grozny in 1996 (Galeotti 2005, 177-78). During the first Chechen war in 1994, the Chechen separatist movement used the Internet as a tool to spread pro-Chechen and anti-Russian propaganda. Al Qaeda has also adopted all the attributes of a network, and it has launched attacks on two major superpowers of recent times, the US and the Soviet Union. In contrast, netwars can be waged against the policies of governments by groups and movements as regards human rights and religious issues. Another kind of netwar may erupt between rival non-state actors as governments maneuver on the sidelines to prevent collateral damage to national interests and at times support one side or the other. The new organizational form of terrorist organizations and organized crime groups has been based upon networks and not upon traditional hierarchies (see also Aúkn ønci Sökmen and Taner Altnok 2009). In recent times, terrorists have increasingly operated in a networked form, with relatively autonomous cells operating much like market-driven businesses. They are different from hierarchical, state-sponsored entities in terms of characteristics such as leadership and organizational structure. The networked Islamist Jihadi networks pioneered by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and its affiliates are centrally inspired but not centrally directed, and they have been recognized as a worldwide insurgency. They view their struggle as a global intifada, and jihadi networks are waging a concerted and protracted global insurgency to dominate the post-modern geopolitical landscape. These terrorist groups share the principles of a networked organization, decentralization and delegation of decisionmaking authority, and they are based upon loose lateral ties among dispersed groups. As such, they act as an umbrella organization of radical extremist groups. Taking into consideration transnational terrorist networks, each node in the diagrams given above may refer to an individual (such as a suicide bomber), a group or organization (terrorist networks) or even a state (e.g. state-sponsored terrorism). In these terms, a suicide bomber is a temporary node. The task of the terrorist is to establish nodes and a degree of connectivity that allows for the completion of acts of terror. The suicide bomber is more likely to be peripherally located along a linear network, while the financial node is situated at the center of a “hub and spoke” model. To extend the network, new members must be recruited and negotiations must be carried out with other networks. The leadership of Boko Haram, known as the Congregation of the People for Proselytism and Jihad, is based in Africa but has international connections to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the al-Qaeda core, Al-Shabab, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s

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factions, and other militant groups outside Nigeria.4 Of the three network types, the all-channel has been the most difficult to organize and sustain due to the need for dense communications. Communications among alQaeda’s members are carried out through a “hub and spoke” structure in which the nodes can communicate with each other without reference to the leader of al-Qaeda. This terrorist network organization appears to have adopted information technology to support its networked operations. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt have identified several implications that nation-states must consider. First, the response to hostilities and aggression against network-based terrorist and organized crime groups does not necessarily have to be along hierarchical lines. Second, they believe networks must be used to counter and defeat other networks. Third, they conclude that those who are first able to master the network will be in the strongest position. In short, they have argued that the netwar waged by al-Qaeda can be countered by another netwar. The concept of the netwar makes it clear that it takes a network to fight a network and that institutions can be defeated by networks. Social network analysis (see Ressler 2006 and Roberts and Everton 2011) provides notable insights on the characteristics of terrorist organizations, ranging from issues of network recruitment to network evolution and the diffusion of radical ideas. This form of analysis is typically used to identify organizers which function as command and control nodes and to show levels of contact and trust within the network. Additionally, it can form the basis of more effective counter-measures to netwars. Modeling has been developed as a means to better understand and improve the capability of counter-insurgency networks.

Conclusion The impact of globalization has become visible in many of the conflicts that have erupted in recent years. In News and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Mary Kaldor has suggested that categories of new wars “are typically based around the disintegration of states and subsequent struggles for control of the state by opposing groups” (Kaldor 1999). With wars becoming increasingly intra-state and non-state, state-based sovereignty and traditional politics are no longer of the same importance they once were. War may break out between competing forms of social and political organization as a means to determine what type of state forms will guide humanity. It thus takes on the character of a nation-state and successors opposing all non-state

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competitors: transnational organized crime groups, drug cartels and descendent networks. A new generation of revolutionaries and militant radicals is also emerging and they have their own doctrines, strategies and technologies. As a result, netwar will likely be the dominant mode of societal conflict in the new era. It may be defined as the use of network-based forms of organization, doctrine, strategy and technology that can be used to engage in conflict. Netwar was originally conceptualized as a means of discussing the vulnerability of computer networks to attacks by individual hackers as well as hostile states. Network forms of organization provide an advantage over hierarchical forms and in this process of transformation power is shifting to non-state actors. This means that conflicts may increasingly be waged by networks, perhaps to a greater extent than by hierarchies. Typical network actors might take on the nature of transnational terrorists, criminal organizations, activist groups and social movements that employ decentralized, flexible network structures. In the end, the distinguishing element of netwar is the network, not technology. Netwar is a new reality of warfare that disrupts the established rhetoric of warfare within the modern geopolitical imagination because of the need for interstate cooperation and the potential for domestic unease and tension. It is a reflection of the many threats we face that are asymmetric, networked and adapted to the information age. Within this setting, terrorist networks have become firmly embedded in security discourses. Hierarchies have a difcult time ghting networks. As a result, the concepts of netwar and counter-netwar have attracted interest because they have the potential to motivate ofcials to construct their own networks, as well as hybrids of hierarchies and networks, to deal with the networked organizations, doctrines, and strategies of their information-age adversaries.

Notes 1

Cyberspace has been defined as “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the independent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems and embedded processors and controllers” (Franklin 2010). 2 According to the World Nuclear Association, there are currently 435 operable civil nuclear power reactors around the world. http://www.world-nuclear.org/ Nuclear-Basics/Global-number-of-nuclear-reactors/ 3 They first developed the netwar concept in their article “Cyberwar is Coming” (1993) and then provided a full exposition in the RAND report titled “The Advent of Netwar” (1996).

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4

The list established and maintained by the Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee with respect to the individuals, groups, undertakings and other entities associated with Al-Qaida. The United Nations Security Council, Retrieved 22 May 2014. http://www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/pdf/AQList.pdf

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Roberts, N. and Everton, F.S. 2011. Strategies for Combating Dark Networks, Journal of Social Structure, Vol. 12. http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume12/RobertsEverton.pdf Ronfeldt, D., Arquilla, J., and Fuller, G. 1998. The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico, RAND. Paganini, P. 2014. Malware-based attack Hit Japanese Monju nuclear power plant, Security Affairs, (10 January 2014). http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/21109/malware/malware-basedattack-hit-japanese-monju-nuclear-power-plant.html Paulsen, K. 2007. Estonia “cyberwar” wasn’t, WIRED, (06.01.2007) http://www.wired.com/2007/06/estonia_cyberwa/#previouspost Parks, C. and Duggan, P.D. 2011. Principles of cyber warfare, IEEE Security & Privacy, Vol. 9, No. 5, Sept-Oct, 30-35. Ressler, S. 2006. Social network analysis as an approach to combat terrorism: Past, present and future research, Homeland Security Affairs, 2 (2), July, http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=2.2.8 Schmitt, E. and Shanker, T. 2011. U.S. debated cyberwarfare in attack plan on Libya, The New York Times, (17 October 2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/world/africa/cyber-warfareagainst-libya-was-debated-by-us.html?_r=0 Secret “Cuban Twitter” program poses challenge for bloggers and exiles. 2014. The Guardian, (5 April 2014) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/05/secret-cuban-Twitterchallenge-bloggers-exiles Silver, J. 2014. Is the US headed toward a Cyber Cold War with China? In Ars Technical, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/is-the-usheaded-toward-a-cyber-cold-war-with-china. Sökmen, ø., and Altunok, T. 2009. The examples of cyber terrorism in the world, in Cyberspace at the Triangle of Crime, Terror and War, ed. Haydar Cakmak and Taner Altnok, Ankara: Barú Platin Pub., 85-113. Thomas, L.T. 2009. Nation-state cyber strategies: Examples from China and Russia, in Cyberpower and National Security, ed. Franklin D. Kramer, Stuart H. Starr and Larry Wentz, Dulles: Potomac Books. Tikk, E.R., Kadri Kaska Kristel, Kert, Mari, Taliharm and Anna-Maria and Vihul, Liis. 2008. Cyber Attacks Against Georgia: Legal Lessons Identified. Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence, Tallinn Estonia.http://www.carlisle.army.mil/DIME/documents/Georgia%201 %200.pdf Ventre, D. 2011. Cyberwar and Information Warfare, Wiley Pub. World Map of All Nuclear Power Stations 2006, http://www.euronuclear.org/1-information/map-worldwide.htm

CHAPTER TEN THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE: CULTURE NOT GIGABYTES ABDELRAHMAN RASHDAN

Introduction In 2000, John Gannon, US Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), said, “[The] community can succeed only if it exploits the changes taking place in the larger information industry” (Gannon 2008). Seven years later, the US Director of the Open Source Center (OSC), Doug Naquin, admitted a lack of deep understanding in the Intelligence Community (IC) about how open source relates to intelligence. Naquin said that the mission of intelligence is to “win football games” rather than “pass the ball” (Central Intelligence Retirees' Association 2007); indeed, the mission is not merely about “stealing secrets” and goes beyond that. Although the IC has come a long way concerning the usage of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), rapid developments in information technology pose a challenge to the IC. The challenge is not so much about the effective use of sophisticated technology to keep a close eye on the OS information boost, but based on evidence up to the year 2007, it is rather the “educational problem” that made Naquin refer to some IC members in 2007 as “folks internally who are still wondering why I am sitting at the same table they are” (Ibid.). The same problem dates back to the 1990s as Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, who would become the assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, noted: “OSINT has been treated as something that gets absorbed as part of one’s professional development or something that is obtained during one's free time by reading a newspaper or browsing the Internet” (George and Kline 2006, 276).

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The unprecedented pace of technological development gave birth to new forms of OS information which have become increasingly influential over time. The development of the Internet made social media a more powerful tool of communication and information dissemination. In a world in which civil society and non-state actors are gaining more power, the lack of trust among some IC members for OSINT and the effective engagement of social media imperil US national security and undermine its foreign policy interests. To put it succinctly, those reluctant IC members represent a stronger challenge to the effectiveness of the IC than the rapid technological changes in OS information and social media. Some recent indications, however, show that the IC has moved a long way forward in bypassing the obstacles to managing the volume of OS information and dealing with the educational problems therein.

Background The industry of OSINT – defined as “intelligence that is produced from publicly available information and is collected, exploited and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purpose of addressing a specific intelligence requirement”1 – suffered historically for different reasons. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a general tendency to reduce the intelligence budget and this was coupled with the unfamiliarity of the political leadership with OS information. Thus, the OSINT’s main arm at the time, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) – which was established in 1941 under the name of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) – was forced to reduce its staff by almost half and shed a sizable percentage of its foreign national staff (Central Intelligence Retirees' Association 2007, 6). Unexpectedly, the cuts in the budget of the FBIS came at a time when the IC needed OSINT most because of the nature of the threats that started arising after the end of the Cold War. Attention was shifting from the sophisticated military programs of the Soviet Union to relatively smaller threats represented by hostile states and non-state actors (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 5). Such potential and actual threats demanded intense collection of information that was in fact openly available but needed to be collected and analyzed. The 1996 Aspin-Brown Commission recommended that the IC should make more effort to “harness the vast universe of information now available from open sources” (GPOAccess 1996). The rise of the Internet called into question the traditional equation of sources of intelligence. The estimated ratio of classified to unclassified

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information on Russia, for example, was reversed from a ratio of 80:20 during the Cold War to 20:80 in the post-Cold War era (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 4). A red flag was raised by two commissions, in addition to Aspin-Brown. Investigations into 9/11 concluded that the IC had overlooked OS information that referred to an impending attack by alQaeda. The 9/11 and WMD Commissions stressed the need to utilize OSINT more and recommended the establishment of the Open Source Center (OSC). The 9/11 Commission called on the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to “establish an intelligence center for the purpose of coordinating the collection, analysis, production and dissemination of open source intelligence to elements of the intelligence community” (Jane's Intelligence Digest 2007). In 2005, the OSC was established under the office of DNI to take over the functions and resources of the FBIS and widen its scope and duties.

FBIS and OSC As early as 2000, FBIS was planning for an “open source portal” that would act as a “one-stop shop for all open source intelligence, whether collected by FBIS or not” (Gannon 2008). The initiative built upon previous efforts carried out through the collaboration of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and the Directorate of Intelligence to create the Office of Advanced Analytical Tools (AAT) (Ibid.). The AAT utilized cognitive and analytical tools to facilitate the management of large volumes of information and present it in an accessible format to the CIA's officers. The analytical advanced tools included clustering, which facilitates early warning functions, linking analysis that helps detect patterns of activities, visualization to display complex data in various formats, and automated database population to reduce the man-hours spent on the system (Ibid.). In addition, the FBIS was able to recognize the importance of engaging with the broader non-IC community to enhance its own performance and products. In-Q-Tel was established in 1999 by the CIA to “bridge the gap between the technology needs of the [IC] and new advances in commercial technology,” according to its mission statement on the nonprofit corporation’s website (In-Q-Tel “Our Aim”). In-Q-Tel works to develop unconventional information technology solutions for strategic problems facing the IC and to fuel private research into information technologies that would benefit all partners by orchestrating the work of its partner organization (Gannon 2008). Bearing in mind that all those relatively complex functions were running under an under-funded and understaffed FBIS in an environment

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that was much less active when it comes to interaction with new media, one can guess the complexity and sophistication of OSC today.

Internet and social media While the Internet represented a challenge to the IC in the 1990s and drove calls for the reform and development of OSINT, the relatively new platform of social media now represents yet a new challenge. Recent statistics indicate that the number of internet users has reached 2.4 billion and in 2012 there were approximately 2.2 billion email users (Pingdom 2013). Furthermore, in 2008 there were over one trillion unique URLs (Google Official Blog 2008), over 200 million blogs in 2010 (Kolsky 2010), about 1.23 billion monthly active Facebook users (Sedghi 2014) and more than 200 million active monthly Twitter users sending more than 500 million tweets per day (US Securities and Exchange Commission 2013). In addition, Flickr hosts over six billion photographs (Emspak 2012), and websites like YouTube have more than 100 hours of content uploaded every minute (YouTube Official Blog 2013). Overall, about 73% of adults online use social media, according to 2013 statistics (Duggan and Smith 2013). Social media, as a complex term that involves different kinds of media, can be defined as “a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow for the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (Ibid.). Social media can be divided in terms of social presence – acoustic, visual or physical contact – and self-presentation, as shown in figure 1 below (Duggan and Smith 2013).2

Fig.10-1. How social media can be divided in terms of social presence.

From an intelligence perspective, the most useful information might be that which the OS user feels most comfortable with and secure in expressing his or her views. A user’s interactions with others can also be a

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target for an OSINT collector; however, depending on the nature of the collection task assigned, the importance of the social presence differs. Thus, blogs, social network sites and virtual social worlds should represent the main focus of OSINT on social media. Based on the availability of collection and analytical tools, as will be discussed later in this chapter, the burden of dealing with sophisticated virtual social worlds might exceed the benefits, leaving social media OSINT with the more tractable targets of blogs and social networking sites.

Challenges and solutions While the classic function of OSINT as performed by the FBIS was to monitor and translate foreign media, the evolution of social media complicated and multiplied the tasks required by OSINT. Four main kinds of challenges are posed by social media sites for OSINT: knowledge management, the nature of data in terms of language and cultural context, access to data and the IC’s “educational problem.” OS information – defined as “publicly available information that anyone can lawfully obtain by request, purchase or observation” (National Open Source Enterprise 2006) – falls into three categories: a) general open source information, b) open proprietary information and c) closed proprietary information (Jane's Intelligence Review 2000). While the first is almost of no legal or ethical cost, obtaining the third type of information involves a high cost since it is available only within the securest area of the target. Blogs and Twitter are mostly accessible to everyone, while Facebook and Skype do have some privacy measures that have to be addressed for OSINT to function. To be able to exploit such information, after developing the methods to access it collectors and analysts should be able to understand the value of the raw information, comprehend the context in which it exists, assess its timeliness, maintain a watching-brief for unexpected information that can be hidden later and divide the collection-management requirements into easily-grouped tasks (Jane's Intelligence Review 2000). It is clear that when applying such steps to OSINT, especially social media, the vast amount of data would overwhelm collectors and analysts. Thus, the role of advanced computer technology and professional private contractors is of utmost importance.

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Knowledge management The accumulated knowledge in a given OSINT entity would multiply rapidly since raw social media intelligence is added to sifted ones every second, and collectors and analysts must constantly contend with a constant build-up of knowledge and experience. Hence, techniques of Knowledge Management (KM) can be quite useful in this regard. Techniques of KM, which previously were used primarily in the private sector, can play an important role in the management, manipulation, presentation, filtration, retrieval and storage of information and intelligence gathered from the social media of OSINT (Jane's Intelligence Review 2000). KM techniques combine human expertise with computer-based solutions that can facilitate the OSINT process and deal with the influx of different kinds of data constantly inputted into the OS. Meanwhile, because the scope of US intelligence after the Cold War has been widened to include various locales around the world, plain off-the-shelf software might not be the best choice. For example, take a hypothetical case. If the son of a local leader from among the Libyan rebels was conducting a Facebook chat with someone in the office of the Libyan Permanent Representative to the United Nations at the beginning of the 2011 revolution and the hypothetical conversation was: A: Elga2ed ayyamo ma3dooda B: 3ambetreedo mosa3da? A: Fakkar 3ammi be3awaylo To be able to interpret those three sentences, an analyst would need to clarify the identities of the two parties through their Facebook accounts, know not only Arabic but the local Libyan dialect and techniques of Arabic chat typing using English letters, as well as the history of the tribes in Libya and the different rivalries that exist. In other words, the analyst needs to have profiling abilities, language skills and knowledge of the cultural context. Accordingly, the brief chat would lead the analyst to understand that the local Libyan leader is about to stir civil disorder against the Libyan president and he is asking for international backing from the Libyan mission to the UN. The second reply from side A literally means “remind the head of the mission of his tribal affiliation,” but for an analyst to be able to interpret this he/she would have to search for the historical relations between the tribe to which the UN official belongs and

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that of the Libyan president to see if they are rivals. Thus, the final report for this brief chat would be: A: We will initiate a revolution against Qaddafi B: Do you need help? A: Give us international backing Further complicating matters is the fact that there has to be a way to identify such conversations when they take place. About eight months following its establishment, the OSC was able to routinely monitor “300 jihadist websites, [and] around 500 television stations” in addition to a larger number of newspapers and radio broadcasts by mid-2006 (Jane's Intelligence Digest 2007). Yet, monitoring such conversations on social media is a different challenge. With 1.23 billion active Facebook users constantly inputting data through their accounts, not to mention Twitter, MySpace and other online social media sites, human abilities and simple software will inevitably fall short. Hence, the development of sophisticated and advanced computer software becomes fundamental to the day-to-day operations of OSINT. Software must be able to develop the classic function of translation performed by FBIS in order to cater to the different languages and dialects in regions where the US has policy interests. A fundamental part of the progress of the IC’s utilization and exploitation of social media OSINT is partnerships with the private sector. “We need outside help, and we know it!” Gannon said in 2000 in reference to the community's need to stay on top of the information technology curve (Gannon 2008). As explained above, the IC's investment in new technologies is based on partnerships with topnotch software developers like IBM and academic institutions such as Columbia University and John Hopkins University, which was granted $48 million by the Defense Department to “develop technology that is capable of automatically translating and analyzing speech and text in multiple languages” (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 7). Such investments and partnerships were made through direct interaction between the IC and the private sector or through the research arms of the IC such as In-Q-Tel. In 2009, for example, In-Q-Tel announced its strategic partnership with Visible Technologies, which is one of 15 different investments and partnerships established by In-Q-Tel in 2009 alone. The privately-held company is, according to its website, a leading provider of Social Intelligence solutions designed to improve and accelerate business outcomes (Visible Technologies "Company Overview"). Through the

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partnership, In-Q-Tel can easily acquire actionable insights from social media conversations through a platform that “delivers clear and comprehensive views of complex information, integrating real-time data into a navigable and easy-to-use application that understands the context and tone of online dialogue” (In-Q-Tel 2009 “Visible Technologies…”). In a white paper published on the company's website, the components of social intelligence are explained. It starts by monitoring and capturing social networks for specific keywords, phrases or content, and then this data is processed and mashed up with existing information to create the needed insight, and in the last phase combined manual and automated processes make the insights actionable (Kolsky 2010). Per day, Visible ingests millions of posts coming from hundreds of millions of social and mainstream media websites (Visible Technologies “FAQs”). Customers such as In-Q-Tel get their customized real-time feed, which is based on a series of keywords, about the conversations taking place on these social media websites. Ultimately, In-Q-Tel can harness intelligence coming out of social media to use it strategically or tactically in the production of OSINT products through its constant collaboration with the IC.

Language and culture The Defense Department is already heavily invested in programs that facilitate language challenges. Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE), for example, is a program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). GALE was created to develop “computer software technologies to absorb, translate, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages” (DARPA). Through an automatic system, the engines convert data into information that is easily understandable by monolingual English-speaking analysts. The input format include blogs, talk shows and published news items which are put through the process of collection, transcription, translation, word alignment, placement into XBanks, distillation and finally resource distribution (Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania). Hence, GALE is most useful for the interpretation of OSINT social media including YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and others. The development of GALE was carried out in partnership with entities such as Columbia University's Natural Language Processing (NLP) research through grants. The NLP states on its webpage, “We are participating in the DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program, a five-year federal initiative that is seeking to go far beyond search engine technology to answer complex questions from

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multilingual, multimodal sources…” (Neutral Language Processing: Columbia University). The initial steps of the program were taken by IBM “under the auspices” of DARPA to deal with Arabic and Chinese (Soltau et al. 2007). Similarly running under the DNI, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) operates the Socio-Cultural Content in Language (SCIL) program which “intends to explore and develop novel designs, algorithms, methods, techniques and technologies to extend the discovery of the social goals of the members of a group by correlating these goals with the language they use” (IARPA). In other words, SCIL is doing linguistic analysis to “predict power, influence and rifts in social groups” as Columbia's NLP, which is participating in the program, describes it (Neutral Language Processing: Columbia University). In the same manner, this program can be utilized effectively in OSINT work on social media. In addition to SCIL, other social media sources can interpret culture. There has been an increasing investment in connecting IC analysts and collectors all over the world through social media tools which help in the interpretation of culture and improving the overall intelligence product. Intellipedia, formally launched in 2006, is a collaborative online intelligence repository built on Wikipedia software with which members of the IC with the needed clearance can create their entries about different intelligence topics, and the same Wikipedia process of editing and revising follows. The project, which was developed on the basis of a CIA paper released in 2004, operates on three levels: unclassified, secret and topsecret versions. In January of 2014, Intellipedia had a total of about 269,000 content pages, 597,000 registered users and 11.1 million edits (MuckRock 2014). This IC's version of social media applications improves upon the final intelligence product, allows for speedier interactions and reviews, and “really brings our expertise right to the war without [us] leaving our desks,” as one CIA officer put it (MuckRock 2014). The KM process is also made easier and more effective through Intellipedia; the classic tedious process starts with a supervisor assigning a topic to analysts, who then scan through a massive amount of information, write the product, and then send it to the supervisor who shares it with reviewers until the product is in an acceptable form. Lastly, it is then published on the organization's website. After some time, the product becomes irrelevant and another process of production is needed so it can be updated. What Intellipedia brought to the table was revolutionary because it allowed the analyst to update an already existing entry which numerous other analysts had already worked on or may be concurrently

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working on, which is a major step away from the classic “stovepipe” model. It makes the same product accessible to analysts based in different locations around the world, making it possible for those who have more cultural interaction with the target to add their perspectives. The accumulation of intelligence is thus made more centralized in a way that allows for healthy discussions and improvement of the product while the product is still in its original location.

Access to data Another main challenge that faces the IC as regards OSINT is access to data. As explained in the case of the In-Q-Tel partnership with Visible Technologies, partnerships with the private sector with the aim of monitoring and providing intelligence on social media can work smoothly if the information is publicly available and does not require invasions of privacy to be obtained. However, some social media applications do protect the rights of their users, and this has the potential to push the kind of OS information to a higher level of privacy. In such instances, the IC’s legal argument is most effective. The Department of Justice's Office of Legislative Affairs, for example, routinely files hundreds of applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Accord (FISA) with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) demanding the release of information for thousands of users. FISA surveillance is allowed if the target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, regardless of whether criminal activity was committed or not (Electronic Privacy Information Center “Foreign Intelligence…”). In 2012, the Department of Justice submitted 1,789 applications to the FISC seeking authority to conduct electronic surveillance (none of which were denied), while the FBI sent 15,229 National Security Letters requesting information concerning 6,223 different US citizens (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2013). Such FISA applications and FBI requests reached their peak in the years 2007 and 2008, respectively (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2014). At the same time, some social media organizations accept a subpoena as a justification to reveal their clients’ personal information, while others volunteer the needed information for patriotic reasons. Through investigations, Christopher Soghoian, a privacy researcher and activist with a PhD in the field of informatics, noticed that some corporations proudly share the personal information of their clients without any legal claims, not even emergency claims put forward by the government, requiring no complicated legal paperwork for the urgency of the cases

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involved. The chief security officer of MySpace told Soghoian that “it is a matter of pride that the company does not charge for the tens of thousands of requests they get per year” (Hacking Conferences, Information Security, how to's 2010). Sources refer to about 10 to 20 daily requests Facebook received in 2009 when the corporation had one-sixth of its current number of users, as reported by Newsweek (Summers 2009). It is worth mentioning that all such personal data obtained through government requests does not include the intelligence requests that usually slip through public records. Some mediators work on facilitating such contact between the government and social media organizations. Over 740 internet service providers have their legal contact information available on an online database which is used to “serve subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants” (Search). Companies sometimes choose to inform their users about the possibility that their information will be revealed to third parties for various reasons, such as through direct clauses in their privacy statements. The privacy statement of Facebook, for example, clearly allows for the IC's legal monitoring; it states (Facebook 2009): We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you [the user], if it is reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so. […] We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.

The statement “when legally required” is broad enough to include any legal document passed by the IC to Facebook indicating the IC's right to surpass individual privacy to gather necessary information, even if it is a general law that allows for the gathering of information about individuals who are suspected of potentially posing a future threat. “When we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent…” is an even broader claim making it possible to share users’ information in the absence of a legal basis with entities that go beyond law enforcement and the judiciary.

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The same legal statement can be found in the privacy policy of Skype, a software application that allows users to make voice/video calls and chat over the Internet. Skype hosted about 2 billion minutes per day of connections in 2013 (Skype: Big Blog 2013) and had 663 million registered users in 2010 (Telecom Paper 2011). Skype’s privacy statement says that the company can provide “personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information” and “Skype will provide reasonable assistance and information to fulfill this request” (Skype 2014).

The “educational problem” However, a fundamental problem persists; the IC has been “slow” in recognizing the value of OSINT, based on a 2008 report submitted to Congress (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 4). As explained in the report, this is because relying on OSINT counters the principle IC mission of discovering and stealing secrets, and because the IC views clandestinely collected information as being more valuable because it is more difficult to collect. This “cultural philosophy,” as another 2007 report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence described it (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 2006), becomes harder to combat when it comes to social media. If members of the IC were downplaying the importance of newspapers and talk shows on TV stations, it is more likely that they would not place much value on a status update on Facebook or an amateur video on YouTube.

Improvements Practical steps have been taken to try to change this culture which is prevalent among certain groups of IC members, and these include engaging IC members themselves in social media. Shifting the work-flow process to Intellipedia, for example, would be an incentive for those reluctant IC members to get online and join the community, and thus they would become more appreciative of the importance of social media.

Social media staff orientation A-Space, or Analytic Space, is another social media application used by the IC. Under the sponsorship of the DNI, the ManTech International Corp. developed under contract an online collaborative environment that

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was launched in 2008 (Bain 2008). Much like the classified version of MySpace, A-Space is designed to foster a sense of community among analysts in a secured worldwide online environment that is only accessible through public key infrastructure. It allows analysts to use shared and personal workspaces, wikis, blogs, widgets, RSS feeds and other tools (Ibid.). Such a social media application allows for the sharing of atmospherics that are experienced by analysts deployed around the world, and this improves the final intelligence product. However, part of the cultural resistance to Intellipedia and the like is based on the possibility of the system being hacked (Vogel 2009). This legitimate concern is actually shared by almost all companies working online. There is always a possibility of hacking and that is why companies continue to build stronger firewalls and hire the most talented people in cyber security, including white-hat hackers. For example, In-Q-Tel, which has strong connections with the private sector, has addressed such IC concerns. In 2009, FireEye Inc., a leader in malware protection systems, managed to secure a strategic investment and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel. Ashar Aziz, the CEO of FireEye, said that this agreement allows FireEye to “provide the US Intelligence Community with a technology solution to help defeat cyber threats, and to directly address critical national security needs” (In-Q-Tel 2009 “In-Q-Tell Invests…”). MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, faces a similar cultural problem but has dealt with it via a different approach. To keep with pace with developments in social media, MI5 has managed to avoid spending cuts and has advertised for new intelligence officer positions that are to be filled by young operatives who “have a better grasp of internet trends than the old Whitehall hands” (O'Neill 2011).

Indications of improvement It is important to note that although OSINT sources are increasingly being defined as the most modern tools of communication, US has policy interests in places where classic forms of media are still prevalent. As Naquin puts it, “What does it matter if something's on the Internet if only two percent of the people of Country X have access to the Internet? They may get their information somewhere else” (Central Intelligence Retirees’ Association 2007). In 2010, the US government spotted such problem in Cuba, a country where the US has key policy interests. Hence, a government program was designed to broaden nation-wide internet usage by helping to secure the

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needed infrastructure and at the same time gain access to a critical segment of the population through which needed policy interests could be fostered. A USAID program was secretly established to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society,” as one USAID document put it (Butler et al. 2014). Although there was no direct evidence to link the IC with the “Cuban Twitter” covert operation, Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project, said that “if this is what USAID is doing in Cuba, what has the CIA been doing there all this time?” (Democracy Now 2014). A 2014 Associated Press investigation based on more than 1,000 pages of documents details the steps of a secret plan drawn up by the US government “to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government” (Butler et al. 2014). ZunZuneo, or “Cuban Twitter,” which seemingly bypassed congressional review, was launched in 2010 with the help of USAID in Cuba and was developed through front companies that “would distance ZunZuneo from any US ownership” (Butler et al. 2014). The operation went through several stages which included collecting the phone numbers of half a million Cuban youth subscribers, building a subscriber base through “non-controversial content,” and then introducing political content that aimed at inspiring “smart mobs” of Cubans to resist their government (Butler et al. 2014). Kornbluh, who is the author of several books including Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (1998), explained the possible link between Zunzuneo and the IC: Back in the mid-1980s, the CIA was banned from supporting the Contras in Central America by Congress and it passed the operations to the National Security Council so that they could be conducted from there. And here we may have a situation where covert operations have simply been passed to USAID, where there isn’t very much scrutiny. [...] I think there’s quite a bit of programming and operations that we don’t know about directed towards Cuba. (Democracy Now 2014)

If the IC is connected to ZunZuneo, then it is clear that it has moved a long way, not only in collecting intelligence through open sources but utilizing it to undertake covert actions. Indeed, more partnerships and projects remain classified since the IC's aim is to stay on top of innovations in information technology. However, based on the available data and the examples explained above, it is safe to say that the IC is not taken by surprise by rapid innovations in social media. The work of the OSC in collaboration with other IC research institutions such as In-Q-Tel allows the IC to overcome most challenges

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and thus exploit the available information to improve the intelligence product. In addition, the creation of IC's own social media site allows for information sharing, fosters a sense of community, sharpens the final product and, most importantly, helps overcome the “educational problem” in the IC. The world's increasing dependence on the Internet and social media is an advantage for the IC as long as the latter remains on top of the rapid developments in the field. Admiral Hillenkoett, who directed the CIA from 1947 to 1950, once said that the role of intelligence is like working on a “gigantic jigsaw puzzle” that finally becomes a “picture” (Hilsman 1952). Joseph Nye, who headed the NIC in the 1990s, took this one step further and said that “open source intelligence is the outer piece of the jigsaw puzzle, without which one can neither begin nor complete the puzzle” (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 5). The steps that the IC as a whole is taking towards active engagement with social media OSINT might indeed make the statement of Lt. General Samuel V. Wilson, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a reality; he said, “The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond” (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 4).

Notes 1

As defined in Sec. 931 of Public Law 109-163, entitled “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006.” 2 Skype and Twitter were added by the author and were not included in the original table.

Works Cited Bain, B. 2008. A-Space set to launch this month. Federal Computer Week, Sep. 3. http://fcw.com/articles/2008/09/03/aspace-set-to-launch-thismonth.aspx. Best, J., Richard, A., and Cumming, A. 2008. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress. Open Congressional Research Service, Jan. 28. https://opencrs.com/document/RL34270/2008-01-28/. Butler, D., Gillum, J. and Arce, A. 2014. US secretly created “Cuban Twitter” to stir unrest. AP, Apr. 4. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ussecretly-created-cuban-Twitter-stir-unrest. Central Intelligence Retirees' Association. 2007. CIRA Newsletter. 32 (4): 7. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/naquin.pdf DARPA. Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE).

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http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Global_Autonomous_ Language_Exploitation (GALE).aspx Democracy Now. 2014. Is USAID the New CIA? Agency secretly built Cuban Twitter program to fuel Anti-Castro protests. Apr. 4. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/4/is_usaid_the_new_cia_agency Duggan, M. and Smith, A. 2013. Social media update 2013. Pew Research Internet Project, Dec. 30. http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/social-media-update-2013/. Electronic Privacy Information Center. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/#Overview. —. 2013. 2012 FISA orders up, national security letters down, no surveillance request denied. May 2. http://epic.org/2013/05/2012-fisaorders-up-national-s.html. —. 2014. Foreign intelligence surveillance act court orders 1979-2014. May 1. http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html. Emspak, J. 2012. What a world without Facebook would be like. TechNews Daily, Feb. 7. http://www.technewsdaily.com/3758-worldfacebook.html. Facebook. 2009. Facebook's privacy policy - 5. How we share information. October 29. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=+322339455300. Gannon, J.C. 2008. NIC chairman address to Washington College of Law. Central Intelligence Agency, June 20. https://www.cia.gov/newsinformation/speeches-testimony/2000/gannon_speech_10062000.html. George, R.Z., and Kline, R.D. eds. 2006. Intelligence and the National Security Strategist. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Google Official Blog. 2008. We knew the web was big... July, 25. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html. GPOAccess. 1996. Commission on the roles and capabilities of the US intelligence community: Executive summary. Mar. 1. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/int/int003.pdf. Hacking Conferences, Information Security, how-to's. 2010. Defcon 2010 - Your ISP and the government best friends forever - Christopher Soghoian.mov. YouTube, Dec. 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJDCxzKmROY. Hilsman, R. 1952. Intelligence and policy-making in foreign affairs. World Politics 5 (1): 3. http://www.jstor.org. IARPA. Solicitations - office of incisive analysis: Socio-cultural content in language (SCIL) program. www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_scil.html. In-Q-Tel. Our Aim. http://www.iqt.org/mission/our-aim.html.

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In-Q-Tel. 2009. In-Q-Tel invests in FireEye to advance cyber security in the U.S. intelligence community. Nov. 18. http://www.iqt.org/newsand-press/press-releases/2009/FireEye_11-18-09.html. —. 2009. Visible technologies announces strategic partnership with In-QTel. Oct. 20. http://www.iqt.org/news-and-press/press-releases/2009/Visible_ Technologies_10-20-09.html. Jane's Intelligence Digest. 2007. US embraces open source intelligence. Apr. 11. http://search.janes.com/Search/documentView.do?docId=/content1/jan esdata/mags/jiwk/history/jid2007/jid70079.htm@current. Jane's Intelligence Review. 2000. Managing information overload. Mar. 1. http://search.janes.com/Search/documentView.do?docId=/content1/jan esdata/mags/jir/history/jir2000/jir00120.htm@current. Kolsky, E. 2010. The evolution of enterprise social intelligence. ThinkJar and Visible Technologies. http://cdn.visibletechnologies.com/wpcontent/uploads/2010/10/Defining-Social-Intelligence.pdf. Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE). http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/gale/ MuckRock. 2014. FOI request: Intellipedia usage statistics. Feb. 10. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america10/intellipedia-usage-statistics-10058/#1017757-responsivedocuments. National Open Source Enterprise. 2006. Intelligence community directive number 301. Federation of American Scientists, July 11. https://www.fas.org/irp/dni/icd/icd-301.pdf. Neutral Language Processing: Columbia University. Projects. http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/projects.cgi O'Neill, S. 2011. If the intelligence service… News International Associated Services Ltd, Jan 29. Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. 2006. Intelligence authorization act for fiscal year 2007. US House of Representatives, Apr. 6. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-109hrpt411/pdf/CRPT109hrpt411.pdf. Pingdom. 2013. Internet users in numbers. Jan. 14. http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/internet-2012-in-numbers/. Search. ISP list. http://www.search.org/resources/isp-list/. Sedghi, A. 2014. Facebook: 10 years of social networking, in numbers. The Guardian, Feb. 4.

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http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-innumbers-statistics. Skype: Big Blog. 2013. Thanks for making skype a part of your daily lives – 2 billion minutes a day! Mar. 4. http://blogs.skype.com/2013/04/03/thanks-for-making-skype-a-part-ofyour-daily-lives-2-billion-minutes-a-day/. Skype. 2014. Skype Privacy Policy. Jan. http://www.skype.com/en/legal/privacy/. Soltau, H., Saon, G., Povey, D. 2007. The IBM 2006 GALE Arabic system. IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/78020/icassp07_arabic.pdf Summers, N. 2009. Facebook's “porn cops” are key to its growth. Newsweek, Apr. 30. http://www.newsweek.com/facebooks-porn-copsare-key-its-growth-77055. Telecom Paper. 2011. Skype grows FY revenues 20%, reaches 663 mln users. Mar. 8. http://www.telecompaper.com/news/skype-grows-fy-revenues20-reaches-663-mln-users. US Securities and Exchange Commission. 2013. Twitter S-1 Statement. Oct. 3. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001193125133903 21/d564001ds1.htm. Visible Technologies. Company overview. http://www.visibletechnologies.com/about/ —. FAQs. http://www.visibletechnologies.com/product/visible-intelligence/faqs/ Vogel, S. 2009. For intelligence officers, a Wiki way to connect dots. The Washington Post, Aug. 27. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2009/08/26/AR2009082603606.html. YouTube Official Blog. 2013. Here’s to eight great years. May 19. http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2013/05/heres-to-eight-greatyears.html.

CHAPTER ELEVEN LEGITIMIZING SECURITIZATION OF CYBERSPACE BY USING “RISK” DISCOURSE SEVDA ÜNAL

Introduction Over the course of more than two decades cyberspace has had an enormous impact on all aspects of society. This new space is woven into the fabric of our daily lives and the world is more interconnected today than ever before. We can see its implicit and explicit effects on our daily lives, fundamental rights, social interactions/relations and state economies which depend heavily on information and communication technologies and networks. Cyber space has been seen as an uncontrollable, borderless place where citizens can freely interact with each other. As such, it has been described as a rich source of information enabling public interaction and information sharing, and as a means of providing the basis for the revitalization of the public sphere and democracy. Cyberspace, as an indispensable component of political, social and economic power worldwide, represents a special category of risk (Deibert and Rohozinski 2011, 15) because it has brought about serious concerns for states concerning potential breakdowns of the network which would affect society, the economy, the military and the government. Adding to concerns is the fact that it is operated as a combination of public and private networks. The governance of cyberspace, just like its structure, is broadly distributed and does not have a singular form or point of control (Dutton and Peltu 2007). Reliance on this vast array of networks to communicate, travel, provide electricity, run the economy and provide government services has raised concerns about cyberspace as a potential problem as regards national security. States have sought to coordinate policies and generate regulations to make cyberspace a more “secure,” “safe” and

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“predictable environment” while recognizing its strategic importance for economic and social development. In this chapter I argue that the securitization of cyberspace is justified through the use of “risk” discourses which bring along with them mechanisms of control and surveillance. By providing an overview of the literature on this issue, I aim to show how developments in cyberspace, risk management, national security and securitization have facilitated the securitization of cyberspace, as well as forms of legitimation of control and surveillance.

Cyberspace: Definitions and evolution There are ongoing debates about how to define cyberspace and how to distinguish it from related concepts. There is no single definition of cyberspace, and the most common misunderstanding is that it is the same as the Internet (Klingova 2013, 13). However, cyberspace in fact encompasses the Internet, which is the most important aspect of cyberspace. In recent years, especially in the field of security, the term “cyber” has been used to describe almost anything that has to do with networks and computers. Cyberspace, which is a portmanteau word that combines “cybernetics” with “space,” refers to the fusion of all communication networks, databases, and sources of information into a vast, tangled and diverse blanket of electronic interchange (Cavelty 2012a, 4). It is a biolelectronic domain characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures. Cyberspace is not only a virtual domain, but it is also grounded in physical reality. Over the years, many different definitions of cyberspace have evolved. According to the US Cyberspace Policy Review (the US has been the dominant actor in identifying new threats and shaping cyber threat discourses), Cyberspace is dened as the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, and includes the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries. Common usage of the term also refers to the virtual environment of information and interactions between people.

According to the European Commission, “Cyberspace is the virtual space in which the electronic data of worldwide PCs circulate.” The International Telecommunication Union offers the following definition:

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“Cyberspace describe systems and services connected either directly to or indirectly to the Internet, telecommunications and computer networks.” Clearly, it is not easy to describe cyberspace. It is a vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous place. But perhaps it can be best understood as referring to the global network of computer processing systems, interdependent information technology infrastructures and telecommunications networks in which online communication takes place. In addition to the benefits and convenience that cyberspace offers, we are confronted with threats arising from cyberspace. These threats can be classified in terms of cyber crimes, cyber terrorism, cyber war and threats to critical infrastructure in general. Cyber crimes can be listed as the hacking of computer systems and networks, cyber pornography (involving the production and distribution of pornographic material, including child pornography), financial crimes (such as the siphoning of money from banks, credit card fraud and money laundering), online gambling, intellectual property crimes (such as the theft of computer source code, software piracy, copyright infringement and trademark violations), harassment (such as cyber stalking, cyber defamation and indecent and abusive mails), cyber fraud (such as the forgery of documents including currency) and the launching of viruses, worms and Trojans, as well as denial of-service attacks. Cyberspace, which connects more than half of all humanity, is an indispensable component of political, social, economic and military power worldwide. And it is generally accepted now that it is a domain that is equal to air, land, sea and space (Deibert and Rohozinski 2010, 16). Because of these properties and its constant state of flux (Cavelty 2008, 10), cyberspace has become a concern for national security. As such, it has brought about the “militarization of cyber space.”

Cyber security: Definition, history and security discourses Cyber security, like cyberspace, lacks a common definition, and it refers to a vast range of concerns such as the security of national infrastructure, the security of Internet infrastructure, the security of applications and services, the security of users, and the stability of the state and political structures (Kovacs and Hawtin 2013, 2). Discourses on cyber-security originated in the US in the 1970s, gained momentum in the late 1980s and spread to other countries in the late 1990s (Cavelty 2012a, 7). Cyber security discourses began with the introduction of personal computers as people learned how to take advantage of the flaws in emerging computer networks. Throughout the 1980s, there was an

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increase in computer security breaches. At first, the main concern was government information systems, especially classified information stored therein. However, debates about cyberspace security changed with the spread of computer networks into daily life. Issues concerning the security of information and communication technologies have long accompanied discussions on cyberspace. Even though significant changes have occurred regarding countries’ concerns about the issue since 1980, the cyber security debate appeared as a part of national security policies in the US in the second half of the 1990s. After 1995, discussions about cyber security took the form of official documents which established a clear link between cyberthreats and critical infrastructure. The early stages of cyber threat discourses can be traced back to the 1980s in the US when the Reagan administration was in power. The main concern was about preventing the disclosure of classified information and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ªV&RPPLVVLRQRQ&ULWLFDO,QIUDVWUXFWXUH3URWHFWLRQ3&&,3 LQ ZKLFKZDVWDVNHGZLWKUHSRUWLQJRQWKHQDWXUHRIYXOQHUDELOLWLHVDQGWKUHDW VWRWKHQDWLRQªVFULWLFDOLQIUDVWUXFWXUHSULPDULO\F\EHUWKUHDWV DQGSURWH FWLQJFULWLFDODVSHFWVRILQIUDVWUXFWXUHVXFKDVJDVRLOWUDQVSRUWDWLRQZD WHUDQGWHOHFRPPXQLFDWLRQV ,WVKRXOGDOVREHQRWHGWKDWXQOLNHLQWKH VPLOLWDU\LQYROYHPHQWEHJDQVKDSLQJWKUHDWSHUFHSWLRQVLQWKHV$IW HU6HSWHPEHUDVWDWHRIH[FHSWLRQZDVLQLWLDWHGDQGXQGHUWKH%XV KDGPLQLVWUDWLRQSURWHFWLRQRIFULWLFDOLQIUDVWUXFWXUHEHFDPHSDUWRIKRPH ODQGVHFXULW\ In fact, this threat perception was the result of the larger strategic context that emerged after the Cold War. The new Cold War era was characterized by more dynamic geostrategic conditions, numerous areas of concern and smaller, more agile enemies that were more diverse. The difficulties involved in locating and identifying enemies in this new

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environment brought about changes in policy. The focus of security policies shifted away from actors, capabilities and motivations to the general vulnerabilities of society as a whole (Cavelty 2012b, 145). Cyber security, which started in the US, then spread to other technologydependent countries and their security programs. Discussions about cybersecurity always were and still are influenced by the ongoing information revolution, which the US is shaping both technologically and intellectually. Scholars have come up with various classifications for the history of cyberspace discourses. Cavelty refers to three different but closely interrelated and reinforcing discourses in terms of specific threat imaginaries, security practices, referent objects and key actors that have impacted the development of cyber security (Cavelty 2012a, 7). Technical

Main actors

Main referent object

CrimeEspionage

Military/civil defense

Computer experts, anti-virus industry

Law enforcement, intelligence community

National security experts, the military, civil defense establishment

Computers, computer networks

Business networks, classified information (government networks)

Military networks, networked armed forces, critical (information) infrastructures

Fig. 11-1. Three Cyber Security Discourses.

Technical discourses are concerned with malware (viruses, worms, etc.) and system instructions, and they focus on computer and network disruptions caused by various types of malware. The crime-espionage discourse deals with cyber crime and cyber espionage, while the military/civil defense discourse is driven primarily by the US military. This discourse focuses on cyber-war and the protection of critical infrastructure. Deibert et al. (2011, 14-15) approach the history of cyber security as a process of regulation, and they posit four phases of cyber regulation. The first phase is referred to as the “open commons phase” which continued up until 2000. In this phase, emphasis was on the Internet’s liberating effect

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as it was expected that the Internet would inform, empower and liberate citizens via a noisy but robust web of support for global civil society. The second phase, referred to as “access denied,” lasted from 2000 to 2005. In this phase, states like China and Saudi Arabia put filters in place to block access to information. The third phase, “access controlled,” lasted five years, from 2005 to 2010. In this phase, states developed more variable, sophisticated and aggressive interventions, including registration, licensing and identity regulations to facilitate online monitoring and increase self-censorship. In the last and current phase, “access contested,” cyberspace is normalized as a terrain in which states, companies, citizens and groups come into conflict, compete and even collaborate, as evidenced by the militarization and attempted “nationalization” of cyberspace. Today the concept of critical infrastructure is a key point in militarized cyberspace. The term “critical infrastructure” is now common, particularly in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Critical infrastructure has developed differently across time and space. But the main sectors of critical infrastructures are information and telecommunications, financial services, energy and utilities, transport and distribution. Most of these sectors depend on software-based control systems for their operations. Information infrastructure serves as an intermediary between physical assets and physical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure systems spread out even further by bridging and interlinking information pathways (Cavelty 2011, 53).

Security and securitization Security can be briefly described as an “absence of threats or vulnerabilities to scarce values.” These threats can be military threats as well as non-military threats such as potential hazards for economic security and the trade interests of a state (Pickin, 2). In other words, freedom from all threats means complete security (Evans and Newnham 1998, 490). According to Hallsworth (2011), security issues can emerge in three areas: the transition from welfare to workfare and risk management; new measures taken to combat terrorism and organized crime; and the blurring of warfare and crime control. According the Copenhagen School, any issue can be securitized through a specific set of stages, meaning that a concern can be framed as a security issue and shift from the politicized to the securitized end of the spectrum through an act of securitization (Collins 2010, 139). These stages can be seen as creating urgency and setting political priorities, as well as

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identifying existential threats that justify emergency-politics outside the normal framework of governance. Through securitization, a given sector becomes a matter of national security, whereupon militarization takes place. Subsequently, governments develop offensive capacities for dealing with the problem (Pickin, 3). This process is the same in the securitization of cyber space. Once cyberspace represents a threat or states perceive a “threat capacity” to national security, existential threats are identified that justify emergency measures and precautions are taken in order to thwart potential attacks. According to Deibert, the securitization of cyberspace involves the transformation of the domain into a matter of national security. Today the most important force shaping global communications is the framing of cyberspace as a security issue (Deibert 2012, 45). Legitimizing the securitization of cyber space by resorting to a discourse of “risk to society” has become a routine matter for “good” public policy. Today, cyberspace represents a special category of risk especially when it is identified as a catalyzer for conflict. Starting in the 1990s (particularly in the US), states prepared numerous official documents to justify their securitization policies of cyberspace. In addition, legislative and institutional initiatives were launched, and analyses were carried out concerning means of securing critical infrastructures. The main argument therein was that “securing critical infrastructure means securing the nation.” Today, both developed and developing countries have created new institutions or re-tasked existing ones with the mandate of either overseeing critical infrastructure security andor making recommendations about how security can be ensured.

A risk society Ulrich Beck, who coined the term “risk society,” described its formation and as Renn (1998) has emphasized, as with cyberspace and cybersecurity, there is no commonly accepted definition of the concept of risk. It can, however, refer to the possibility of human actions or events that can bring about change, and as such, risk means anticipated catastrophes, potential dangers and so on. Society has been increasingly preoccupied with discussing, preventing and managing risks that it itself has produced, and this has transformed modern society into a “risk society” (Beck 2006, 332). In other words, manufactured uncertainties which cannot be perceived signify the existence of a risk society. And the range of potential catastrophes and

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uncertainties grows with technological and scientific progress and increased industrialization. In defining risk and risk perceptions, Beck emphasizes the role of the media in the use of visual and symbolic forms to convince people of risks and the role played by strong economies in this approach. According to him, risks are not real, but they are becoming “real.” Terrorist attacks can be taken as an example of such risks. If these attacks can’t be foreseen, then they become real and cause catastrophes; there is no limit in such risk perceptions. Risks can be anywhere, and the anticipation of further attacks can bring about inflation, new markets, wars and the reduction of civil liberties. Mass media, techniques of visualization and symbolic forms are ways of showing possible risks. Beck also argues that defining risk is itself a power game because Western governments and powerful economic actors define risks for others (2006, 332-333). World risks can be identified in terms of three features: delocalization, incalculability and non-compensability. With delocalization, the causes and consequences of risks are not limited to one space and they are omnipresent. With incalculability, the consequences cannot be foreseen and involve “hypothetical” risks. The concept of non-compensability is used to argue that in contrast to modernity’s principle of “security” in the world in a risk society, there are new risks which cannot be taken into account. The delocalization of risks occurs on three levels: 1. Spatial: new risks spread over national borders. 2. Temporal: new risks have a long latency period (e.g. nuclear waste) so their effects over time cannot be reliably determined and mitigated. 3. Social: due to the complexity of problems and the length of chains of effect, the assignment of causes and consequences is no longer possible with any degree of reliability (e.g. financial crises) (Beck 2006, 332-333). Beck’s primary target is the modernist “illusion” of control through risk-based expertise. According to Beck, a collapse of language occurred on September 11th which expresses our fundamental situation in the 21st century; this concerns living in what he calls a “world risk society” (Beck 2002, 38). He also focuses on the “concept of control” which arises from “risk” as the main argument employed by modern governments in legitimizing their activities, and this has also been seen in the securitization of cyberspace. He claims that there are two forms of “surveillance states” in which democracy and freedom diminish and

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“cosmopolitan states” that are founded upon the recognition of the otherness of the other: Risk inherently contains the concept of control. Pre-modern dangers were attributed to nature, gods and demons. Risk is a modern concept. It presumes decision-making. As soon as we speak in terms of “risk,” we are talking about calculating the incalculable, colonizing the future. World risk society does not arise from the fact that everyday life has generally become more dangerous. It is not a matter of the increase, but rather of the debounding of uncontrollable... We have to distinguish between two forms of multilateralism as well: surveillance states and cosmopolitan states. Surveillance states threaten to use the new power of cooperation to build themselves into fortress states, in which security and military concerns will loom large and freedom and democracy will shrink. Already we hear about how western societies have become so used to peace and well-being that they lack the necessary vigour to distinguish friends from enemies. And those priorities will have to change. And...some of our precious rights will have to be sacrificed for the sake of security.... [The] other has already sprung up in every country and will only increase in the years to come. It is the sort of phenomenon out of which a democratic authoritarianism might arise, a system in which maintaining flexibility towards the world market would be premised on increasing domestic rigidity. (Beck 2002, 40-49)

As we can see in today’s global world, risk mitigation has become: -

a routine matter of politics; good public policy; and, a major market segment in its own right.

Politicians use risk discourse to justify their policies, ranging from economic and social development to national security and international aid.

Means of securitizing cyberspace Risk assessment is one way that states attempt to secure cyber space. According to states’ points of view, traditional security threats are foreseeable and necessary measures can be taken. But threats from cyber space can’t easily be categorized and it is difficult to get verifiable information on the intentions of possible attackers, the kinds of attacks that could occur and the possible results of attacks. The narrative of an “incalculable future and uncontrollable forces” drives states to justify their precautions.

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Deibert and Rohozinski define two approaches to the conceptualization of cyberspace security. These are risks to cyber space and risks through cyberspace. Risks to cyberspace are those in the physical realm of computer and communication technologies, and risks through cyberspace mean those that arise from cyberspace and are facilitated or generated by its technologies. But these risks do not directly target the infrastructure per se. As regards “risks to cyberspace,” there is strong international consensus concerning the precautions that should be taken. But when it comes to “risks through cyberspace,” states cooperate in just some arenas of policy. Cooperation declines in politically contestable areas and where national interests vary. These contestable areas are the nature of political opposition and include the right to dissent or protest, minority rights, independence movements, religious beliefs, cultural values and historical claims. According to Deibert and Rohozinski, the aim of “risks to” is the securing of a friction-free, distributed and resilient global communications network, while the aim of “risks through” is to introduce friction and disruption through filtering, surveillance and computer network attacks (Deibert and Rohozinski 2010, 17). While the dominant metaphor of Internet regulation was often “hands off,” today the dominant descriptors involve intervention, control and increasing contestation (Deibert and Rohozinski 2012, 29). When addressing cyber security, states usually focus on the protection of critical infrastructure which includes information systems and telecommunications, energy and utilities, transport, and finance (Hart 2011, 4). It should be noted that focusing on the link between cyber-threats and critical infrastructure greatly politicizes the term. In the 1990s when the Internet started to be used commercially, it was thought to be an uncontrollable, completely free and democratic platform. Today, states employ strategies to deal with risks through cyberspace and these include internet filtering, electronic surveillance and control. The attacks of 9/11 were a watershed in mass electronic surveillance and control. Following upon revelations that the hijackers employed cyberspace as an organizational domain to carry out the attacks, there was widespread support for more enhanced monitoring powers for law enforcement and intelligence. The United States quickly adopted wideranging legislation in the form of the Patriot Act, which expanded the scope for electronic surveillance. Numerous countries around the world then passed legislation similar to the Patriot Act, requiring lawful access provisions for law enforcement which were to be undertaken by private ISPs. Some non-democratic countries have also used the excuse of the war on terror and followed the normative lead of the United States to

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legitimize their surveillance of the opposition and minorities. In short, via attempts to neutralize risks through cyberspace, states are turning to filtering and blocking. The militarization of cyberspace has created a new economic sector in the military field. A military-industrial complex has emerged that encourages extravagant defense spending and the placing of industry interests before public interest. The securitization of cyberspace may also be encouraging the creation of a cyber-industrial complex. As we have seen, defense industries in the cyber-security sector have a special interest in increased spending and the regulation of cyberspace. Politicians and government officials have also urged an increase in cyber security spending, as it is seen as a way to increase their funding (Pickin, 3). Beck claims that the varieties of this ironic risk are virtually endless; in order to protect their populations from terrorism, states have increasingly limited civil rights and liberties, thus doing away with an open, free society, but the terrorist threat has by no means been averted. The dark irony here is that general risk-induced doubts about the benevolence of the promises of governments to protect their citizens have led to “criticisms of the inefficiency of scholarly and state authorities, and critics are blind to the possibilities of erecting (or expanding) the authoritarian state on this very inefficiency” (Beck 2006, 330).

Conclusion The securitization of cyberspace, which changes and has impacts on daily life, is a growing concern that has numerous implications. Securitization in the name of preventing “risks” brings with it issues such as privacy, regulation, surveillance, censorship and internet regulation, and it also increases tension in the international system. Today, in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, cyberspace has become a sphere in which states want to establish their sovereignty through control and regulation. As we have seen, the myth of cyberspace as “an uncontrollable area” is rapidly being laid bare. In the name of neutralizing risks, states are turning to filtering, blocking, surveillance and tactics of information warfare. Also, the political economy of the Internet is driving governments to take on greater roles, particularly as regards keeping Internet revenues at home. For these purposes and in the name of national security, numerous laws and executive orders are affecting our everyday lives and the enactment of civil rights.

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Works Cited Beck, U. 2002. The terrorist threat: World risk society revisited. Theory Culture Society, 19: 19-39. Accessed April 12, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0263276402019004003 Beck, U. 2006. Living in the world risk society. Economy and Society 35: 329-345. Accessed March 14, 2014. DOI: 10.1080/03085140600844902 Cavelty, M.D. 2008. Cyber Security and Threat Politics: US Efforts to Secure the Information Age. USA: Routledge. —. 2011. The dark side of the net: Past, present and future of the cyberthreat story. AIIA Policy Commentary 10: 51-62. —. 2012a. Cyber-Security. In Contemporary Security Studies, ed. Allan Collins, 2-32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2012b. The militarisation of cyberspace: Why less may be better. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Cyber Conflict, Tallinn, Estonia, June 5-8. Collins, A. 2010. Contemporary Security Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cybersecurity Strategy of the European Union: An Open, Safe and Secure Cyberspace. Joint communication to the European parliament. The Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. JOIN (2013) 1 Final. http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/cybersecurity (accessed 11 January 2014). Deibert, R.J. and Rohozinski, R. 2010. Risking security: Policies and paradoxes of cyberspace security. International Political Sociology, 4: 15-32. Accessed January 7, 2014. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00088.x. Dutton, W.H. and Peltu, M. 2005. The Emerging Internet Governance Mosaic: Connecting the Pieces. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. Accessed January 7, 2014. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1295330 Evans, G., and Newnham, R. 1998. Dictionary of International Relations. London: Penguin Books. Hart, C. 2011. Mobilizing the Cyberspace Race: the Securitization of the Internet and its Implications for Civil Liberties, Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life. Presented at an International Workshop. University of Toronto. May 12-15. Hallsworth, S. and Lea, J. 2011. Reconstructing leviathan: Emerging contours of the security state”. Theoretical Criminology 15: 141-157. Accessed March 15, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/1362480610383451

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Klingova, K. 2013. Securitization of cyber space in the United States of America, the Russian Federation and Estonia. Master’s thesis, Central European University Department of Political Science. Kovacs, A. and Hawtin, D. 2013. Cyber security, cyber surveillance and online human rights. Presented at Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Bali, Indonesia, October 21. O’Malley, P. 2011. Security after risk: Security strategies for governing extreme uncertainty. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 23: 5Accessed February 8, 2014. http://search.informit.com.au/ document Summary;dn=250571492904160;res=IELHSS>ISSN:1034-5329. Ortwin, R. 2008. Three decades of risk research: Accomplishments and new challenges. Journal of Risk Research, 49-71. Accessed February 28, 2014 DOI:10.1080/136698798377321. Pickin, M.G. What is the securitization of cyberspace? Is it a problem? www.academia.edu/3100313/What_is_the_securitization_of_cyberspa ce_Is_it_a_problem (accessed March 12, 2014). ITU. 2011 National Cyber Security Strategy Guide. Accessed January 11. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/cyb/cybersecurity/docs/ITUNational CybersecurityStrategyGuide.pdf. US Cyberspace policy review: Assuring a trusted and resilient information and communications infrastructure. http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/Cyberspace_Policy_Rev iew_final.pdf (accessed 11 January 2014).

CHAPTER TWELVE OPINION PRODUCTION BY UGC: AN ANALYSIS OF READERS’ REVIEWS ABOUT ONLINE NEWS RELATED TO AL-QAEDA BILGE NARIN AND BAHAR AYAZ

Introduction UGC (User-Generated Content) has been an important component of the news since the advent of Web 2.0. Although UGC is one of the main innovations of new media, it remains a neglected area of new media studies. UGC can be simply described as content created by the consumers or end-users of an online system or service that is publically available to other consumers and end-users. The main aim of this research is to analyze UGC in online news about terrorism. In this context, reader reviews about news regarding the attacks of al-Qaeda affiliate ISIS in Turkey are taken as a sample. Many countries have designated both al-Qaeda and ISIS as terrorist organizations, and they have also been designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations, European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In light of this, the main question of this study is: How do users express their views about the sources and the causes of terrorism after reading online news? ISIS carried out a terrorist attack in Turkey on the 20th of March in 2014, opening fire on three members of security forces in the southern province of Ni÷de. The attack resulted in the deaths of a police officer and a soldier. Two of the assailants were captured alive and later the incident was linked to ISIS and al-Qaeda. Soon after, a third perpetrator was also captured. ISIS was established during the Iraq War and has changed its name several times, but it is widely known as the “al-Qaeda of Iraq” because of

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the group’s alliance with al-Qaeda. The group is active both in Iraq and Syria. Although al-Qaeda has claimed that they are separate entities, according to many sources it has ties with ISIS. The news items which were selected for this study also claim that ISIS has connections with alQaeda. In this study, readers’ comments about these news stories are analyzed through content analysis, which is a commonly used qualitative research technique for compressing text into a smaller number of content categories based on explicit rules of coding. In this way, the main arguments and views expressed by users will be determined and categorized. In addition, the varying opinions of users regarding al-Qaeda will be revealed and hence opinion production through UGC will be brought to light. Reader comments from three online newspapers based in Turkey (Hürriyet, Milliyet and Habertürk) are examined in this study. The comments concerning news related to the ISIS attack in Turkey are analyzed through content analysis with a focus on words, meanings, pictures, symbols, thoughts, themes and messages. Content analysis can be used to reflect the emotional states of readers, identify their intentions and demonstrate the existence of propaganda. Through this method, we intend to examine readers’ attitudes regarding the terrorist group, the stance of the Turkish government and the media. Hate speech will also become apparent through content analysis.

Al Qaeda and ISIS Al-Qaeda is a global terrorist organization, but it was originally created during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1988, and ISIS subsequently came into being during the Iraq War. Al-Qaeda has attacked both civilian and military targets, and is well known as the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks. After those attacks, the US launched a large-scale operation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime was sheltering the al-Qaeda network and its training camps. This first reaction, however, reflected a particular political climate and in the end those advocating an offensive against Saddam Hussein succeeded in imposing their views and finally got their Iraq war (Chaliand and Blin 2007, 414). American efforts ultimately resulted in the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, but in the meantime al-Qaeda continued attacks after 9/11 in Tunisia, Bali, Yemen, Kuwait, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and numerous other countries. Al-Qaeda still represents a major security problem. The situation in Syria is now getting worse, reaching the point of threatening Western security, particularly because of the entrenchment of al-Qaeda affiliates

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there (Baczko, Dorronsoro and Quesnay 2013, 4). The Arab Spring also strengthened al-Qaeda’s position and weakened US control over the Arab world. It is debatable, however, whether the killing of Osama Bin Laden weakened the power of al-Qaeda, but still that remains an important question. According to many sources, al-Qaeda is facing an uncertain future, but a report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Services suggests three scenarios for the future of Al Qaeda: gradual decline, incremental growth or rapid growth (CSIS Report 2013). It is clear from the report that there are many possibilities, but it is quite likely that alQaeda will continue to be a major threat in the near future.

Al Qaeda and the use of communication technologies Many developments have occurred regarding communication technologies, and as with many other groups, terrorist organizations also make use of them. The Internet facilitates media exposure, which is an important goal for terrorists. Evidence strongly suggests that terrorists used the Internet to plan their operations for 9/11 (Timothy 2003, 112), and al-Qaeda has created a highly mobile media wing called al-Sahab which has the specific aim of connecting with the world at large (Ciovacco 2009, 853). Al-Qaeda uses satellite television and ubiquitous usergenerated content on the Internet to reinvigorate a pan-Muslim identity via a vengeful, defiant underdog narrative in which Islam is under constant and global attack by a monolithic adversary (Venhaus 2010, 6). Internet users can easily create accounts with national firms such as America Online (AOL) or create an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account on a short-term basis. In addition, anonymous logins are possible for many of the thousands of chatrooms on the net (Timothy 2003, 115). In short, the Internet offers numerous opportunities for terrorist groups to operate in the online environment. The Internet can also be used to spread disinformation, send threatening personal messages and post horrific images (Timothy 2003, 116), and terrorists can create misperceptions through the use of the Internet. In this way, without revealing their own identities terrorists can exert influence over people and hence evaluating user reviews is a useful endeavor.

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Media coverage of Al-Qaeda In addition to terrorist groups, the media itself can create misperceptions. As pointed out by Entman (1993), Iyengar (1991), and Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007), framing effects refer to how the presentation of an issue in news stories can influence the way audiences understand the issue (Fahmy and Emad 2011, 217). An example of this is the Iraq War. Sources indicate that there were many misperceptions before the war, and a critical situation arose after the war when the US failed to find any WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) or even solid evidence of a WMD program (Kull, Ramsay and Lewis 2004, 572). The US misled world opinion about its decision to go to war and how it opted to deal with the problem of terrorism (Ibid., 573). One explanation for this is the way that the media reported the news. The large amount of variation in the extent of misperceptions suggests that numerous media sources may have gone to great lengths to disabuse their audiences of misperceptions they may have had so as to distance themselves from their implication in the outbreak of the war (Ibid., 592). The Iraq War, however, is not an exceptional situation. The media plays an important role in all news about terrorism. In Turkey, there are different approaches to discussing the PKK, and while it has been designated as a terrorist organization by some, others refer to it as an advocate of Kurdish rights. Media coverage of the PKK inevitably differs, but this is not an exception. Countries have come up with varying designations for such organizations; the EU, US, Russia and other countries have taken different stances, with some calling certain groups “terrorists” and others not. In the Arab world, media coverage of Bin Laden’s videos and the Iraqi insurgency led influential American officials to denounce Arab media as a collaborator with the jihadist movement. But the jihadists themselves have decried the Arab media for being unreliable (Lynch 2006, 51). Al-Jazeera has been an important source regarding al-Qaeda, but data suggests that even the English and Arabic outlets of Al-Jazeera have had differences while covering the conflict between the US and al-Qaeda (Fahmy and Emad 2011, 226). In short, different media organizations are likely to cover news regarding al-Qaeda in rather different ways, and hence coverage of al-Qaeda in the US, EU and Middle Eastern countries varies. As seen in the case of Al-Jazeera, different media organizations in the same country or even from the same media organization can cover stories in very different ways.

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The concept of UGC A portmanteau of the words “Internet” and “citizen” resulted in the term “netizen,” meaning a member of the network society. Netizens can easily access web-based information and communication technologies, and they have developed a habit of expressing their opinions in the virtual world through blogs, social networks and community forums. Their aim may be simply to share their ideas, whether casually or consciously, in response to any number of events and topics of interest. Such postings have become a trend among social acquaintances in the virtual world through the help of postings and counter-replies (Tanase 2010, 28-29). UGC is a potentially useful source for feedback. A local government or a terrorist organization for instance may be interested in finding out more about the responses of citizens after a new policy is announced or a major terrorist event occurs based on comments gleaned from the Internet: As users are free to post anything under the sun, the format is not in formal writing (unlike official letters); slang may be used and they differ from culture to culture. On the brighter side, netizens are responsive to new posts and new events. For example, any world news, such as earthquakes, terrorist attacks or economic crises that rock the world would attract them to proactively post and counter post on each other’s messages. They share their views in different emotions pertaining to the subject that they are commenting about. The online messages come in very different types of wish-making, suggestions, political opinions, critiques and praise, or dissatisfaction to share among friends and the rest of the world. (Fong 2012: 60)

UGC allows for a two-way flow of communication that blurs the difference between sender and receiver. It is expected that UGS will be extensively used for constructing “social dialogues” in future years.

UGC and internet journalism UGC is also an important feature of Internet journalism although it has a broader meaning which is relevant to the definition of the public sphere. According to Larsson (2012, 253-254), when we talk about interactivity scholars commonly point out two fundamental distinctions, one of which is about human interaction, and this is used to define users in communication with each other (Downes and McMillan 2000). Chat rooms and discussion forums are examples of human interactions that occur within the context of online newspapers. The other type is medium interaction, which allows users to control a technical interface (e.g. a web

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page). User-generated video clips and news graphics of online newspapers are examples of this group of interaction. Further research (Chung 2008; Chung and Nah 2009; Chung and Yoo 2008) suggests two relatively new types of interaction made possible through the development of medium definitions. One of these is the human-medium type and it delineates users’ personal opinions. The invitation of audiences to contribute photos, videos and blog posts to online newspapers is one example of this type, and the medium-human format makes it possible for users to customize news to their liking. Some scholars have argued that interactivity is not traditionally linked to democracy, especially in mainstream media because mechanisms of framing control and news selection are not decided upon by users: There is also a clear political economy of UGC. UGC provision in mainstream media to a great extent addresses users-as-consumers and is part of a context of consumption. Users-as-citizens are placed in a mostly reactive position (“We write, you read” becomes “we write, you read and possibly comment”). [...] Users are identified as consumers but approached as citizens. (Jönsson and Örnebring 2010, 140-141)

On the other hand, even if comments are moderated, the participation of users occurs now on a much broader scale than ever before (Jönsson and Örnebring 2010, 141). Because of user participation, some scholars have defined the Internet as a highly democratic medium (Siudikiene 2014: 14). In other words, social production on the Internet is still a powerful force. Despite existing limitations, users are active creators of meaning in the Web 2.0 era, and UGC is both a complementary element of online news and also an independent tool for constructing meaning. But when we consider UGC, are editorial boards or other censorship mechanisms necessary? How can we improve the amount of UGC and also the quality of content? What criteria define high-quality and lowquality media content? These problems have been recognized by both scholars and media companies around the world (Siudikiene 2014, 14). Videos of rapes, murders or terrorist attacks are also uploaded by users, so we need to think about regulatory policies as well. Media codes of ethics should not cover just the work of professional media workers but rather should be redefined to include UGC. Today, analyzing media content is not possible without taking into consideration UGC. Both the amount of UGC and the structures of meaning embedded within it have emerged as objects of analysis in the social sciences.

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Findings Three online newspapers, Hürriyet, Milliyet and Habertürk, were utilized as samples in this research. They are all independent newspapers with different owners. Hürriyet belongs to the Dogan Media Group, which is the largest broadcasting group in Turkey; approximately thirty percent of national newspapers belongs to this group. Milliyet, which was once owned by the Dogan Media Group, is now a part of the Demiroren Group. Unlike the other two newspapers, Habertürk started as a news portal and later started releasing in print, and it belongs to the Ciner Media Group. All of the holding companies have investments in other sectors besides media. According to Comscore, which is a global source of digital business analytics, Milliyet, Hürriyet, Mynet News and Habertürk are the most widely followed online news sites. Milliyet, Hürriyet and Habertürk are both online and have print versions. Because Mynet News is not released in a print version it was excluded from the study. Newspaper http://www.hurriyet.com.tr http://www.milliyet.com.tr http://www.haberturk.com TOTAL

Number of Readers’ Comments 331 17 8 356

Fig. 12-1. Number of readers’ comments in the samples.

As seen in Figure 1, the total number of readers’ comments in the samples was 356, and most of them appeared in www.hurriyet.com.tr. As indicated in Table 12-1, readers’ comments concerning the news about al-Qaeda reflect varying perspectives. The most common theme was criticism of the terrorists, with 50% of people making comments in this regard. The Turkish government and security policies were also criticized by many readers. Critiques of foreign policy, the claim that the government supports terrorism, the question of how the terrorists could enter the country and Islamist parliamentarians’ rhetoric are salient discourse in the readers’ comments. Thirty percent of the readers who posted comments supported these negative opinions. Only five percent of readers expressed positive ideas about the Turkish government and its security policies, and they claimed that the government’s counterterrorism policy is adequate and successful.

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Table 12-1. The subjects of readers’ comments. The Subject of the Readers' Comments

2% 0% 0%

0% 3% 5%

1%

3% Criticisms of the terrorist

6% 50%

Criticism of the national government and security policies Criticism of the opposition parties

30%

Criticism of the other nations' governments and security policies

Five percent of the readers blamed other nations’ governments and security policies for supporting terrorism. In this context, Syria and President Bashar Hafez al-Assad were most criticized. Readers claimed that the US and other western countries were also supporters of terrorism, and three percent of the readers conversely supported other nations’ counter-terrorism policies. Table 12-2. Instances of hate speech

3%

Hate Speech

27%

Yes No

70%

Coding Unavailable

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In this study we attempted to reveal narratives containing hate speech, as indicated in Table 12-2. We found that twenty-seven percent of the opinions contained hate speech, the basis of which was focused on race and religion. The readers defined the terrorists as “degraded,” “Middle East oriented,” “Arab,” “inhuman,” “bigoted,” “evil” and so on. The high proportion of hate speech suggests that in Turkey we need to reconsider media ethics and codes of media ethics should encapsulate readers’ reviews as well. Table 12-3. Emphasis on Islamic Terrorism Emphasis on Islamic Terrorism

4%

41%

Yes No

55%

Coding Unavailable

Fifty-five percent of the comments included emphasis on “Islamic terrorism.” This and similar expressions were used to identify terrorist events. Statements such as “extremist terrorism” and “religiously motivated terrorism” would make more sense than targeting a religion as a whole.

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Table 12-4. Relevance to Islam Relevance to Islam 0% 12% Relevant Not Relevant Coding Unavailable 88%

A large proportion of readers (88%) thought that acts of terrorism were not in accordance with Islam even though the terrorists claim that they carry out such attacks in the name of God. The main concern of these comments was an inaccurate and incomplete representation of Islam, but the readers rarely used the concept of “Islamophobia” in their comments and they preferred to use a non-academic terminology.

Conclusion The structures of meaning constructed by readers differ and they represent important and integral parts of online news. On the other hand, the contents of readers’ reviews often go beyond the news topics and exceed them. In this study, we examined readers’ opinions about online news items related to al-Qaeda. The narrative structures of the readers’ reviews can extend beyond the common forms of meaning in news about terrorism, and readers can both criticize and support the terrorists and security policies. In doing so, they can produce new and various meanings by linking the terrorist act to other events. This study also indicated that some of the readers’ reviews included hate speech, and hence we argue that the ethical guidelines of media must be restructured to include readers’ reviews.

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In conclusion, user-generated content has both positive and negative dimensions, and UGC is a neglected component in media research at the present time. Nonetheless, it will likely take on an increasingly important role in media studies because of its utility in the dissemination of news. .

Works Cited Baczko, A., Dorronsoro, G. and Quesnay, A. 2013. Between Al Qaeda and the Syrian regime: A path out of the current crisis, New America Foundation: 1-17. Chaliand, G. and Blin, A. 2007. The History of Terrorism from Antiquity to Al Qaeda. London: University of California Press. Chung, D.S. 2008. Interactive features of online newspapers: Identifying patterns and predicting use of engaged Readers, Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 13 (3): 658–79. Chung, D.S. and Yoo, C.Y. 2008. Audience motivations for using interactive features: Distinguishing use of different types of interactivity on an online newspaper, Mass Communication and Society, 11 (4): 375–97. Chung, D. S. and Nah, S. 2009. The effects of interactive news presentation on perceive user satisfaction of online community newspapers, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14 (4): 855-874. Ciovacco, C.J. 2009. The contours of Al Qaeda’s media strategy, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 32: 853–875. Downes, E.J. and J. McM. 2000. Defining interactivity: A qualitative identification of key dimensions, New Media & Society 2 (2): 157-179. Fahmy, S.S and Al Emad, M. 2011. Al-Jazeera’s Al-Jazeera: A comparison of the network’s English and Arabic online coverage of the US/Al Qaeda Conflict, The International Communication Gazette, 73 (3): 216–232. Fong, S. 2012. Measuring emotions from online news and evaluating public models from netizens’ comments: A text mining approach, Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, 4 (1): 60-66. Jenkins, B.M. 2006. Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves, Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Jönsson, A.M. and Örnebring, H. 2011. User generated content and the news, Journalism Practice, 5 (2): 127-144. Kull, S., Ramsay, C. and Lewis, E. 2004. Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq war, Political Science Quarterly, 118 (4): 569-598.

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Larsson, A.O. 2012. Understanding non-use of interactivity in online newspapers: Insights from structuration theory, The Information Society, 28: 253–263. Lynch, M. 2006. Al-Qaeda's media strategies, The National Interest, 83: 50-56. Siudikiene, D. 2014. Playing and creating audiences: Media usergenerated content quality assessment, Vezetéstudomány: 14-21. Tanase, S. 2010. When web 2.0 sneezes everyone gets sick, Engineering & Technology, 5 (5): 28-29. The future of Al-Qaeda: Results of a foresight project. 2013. Ottawa: CSIS Report. Timothy, L.T. 2003. Al Qaeda and the Internet: The danger of “cyberplanning,” Parameters 23 (1): 112- 123. Venhaus, J.M. 2010. Why youth join al-Qaeda. United States Institute of Peace Special Report.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN TECHNOLOGY, SURVEILLANCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY: IMPLICATIONS FOR DEMOCRACY CATHERINE A. LUTHER

Introduction Unfettered public discussion is understood to be a core necessity in establishing and sustaining democratic forms of governance. Philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote that for a democracy to thrive, it is vital to have an educated citizenry who is fully engaged in public discourse (Caspary 2000). Social theorist Jurgen Habermas contended that free discussion and rational debate in the public sphere (assembly halls, social clubs, newspapers, journals, etc.) are critical components of any democracy (Habermas 1989). As the Internet became more accessible to members of the public, many observers heralded the online world as the new public sphere (Bohman 2004; Carty 2010; Kellner 1997). The hope was that the web would provide opportunities for individuals to be exposed to and contribute to a broad spectrum of opinions and ideas. It was seen as possibly encouraging greater civic participation. When considering the role that the Internet and, more specifically, social media platforms have played in enhancing communication between individuals and serving as virtual spaces in which communities can be built (Zappavigna 2011), it could be argued that these earlier prognosticators were correct. In fact, social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter have proven to be valuable communication tools for not only mundane everyday observations, but for serious political deliberations and collective action (Lim 2012). Social movements in recent years have taken advantage of freely provided social media. Among the first movements that demonstrated the

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potential power of social media was the movement that occurred immediately following Iran’s 2009 summer elections. After incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the elections over his popular opponent Mir-Huseein Mousavi, members of the public began protesting on the streets of Tehran. A large number of young protestors shared via Twitter (a microblogging site), Facebook (a social networking site) and even Flickr (a photo sharing site) information about demonstration locations and areas to avoid due to the police presence (Mayfield III 2011). When a gunman who was reportedly a member of the pro-government militia shot and killed a female protestor, images of the young woman’s death were captured by video and posted on YouTube (a video-sharing site). From there, the video link circulated through other social media platforms and provoked international support for the protestors and condemnation of the Iranian government. In essence, social media helped mobilize the protestors and garner voices of support on a global scale. Other examples of differing scale and purposes (e.g., the Arab Spring that began in 2010; the Gezi Park protests of 2013 in Turkey; the Hong Kong protests of 2014) also exist in which social media appear to have played a significant role in helping individuals mobilize against social inequities, political unfairness, and/or oppressive regimes. With the rise in global Internet access and the enhancement of computer software programs, social movement organizers have continued to take advantage of social media as valuable communication tools. The power of the web as a new public sphere, however, has not gone unnoticed by governments. Concerned about the potential threats that messages transmitted via the web pose to political stability, governments have imposed measures, including draconian ones, to squelch oppositional voices and subversive activities online. Arguing that such surveillance is necessary for citizenry protection and national security, governments have been using filtering systems that use Internet nodes as gateways for filtering out certain information. Both exclusion filtering that restricts access to blacklisted websites and inclusion filtering, which authorizes access only to those websites deemed “safe,” are being used (Deibert, 2009). Authoritarian regimes have also used social media to counter the messages of protestors by posting their own oppositional messages and they have used digital communications to track down anti-government bloggers (Ghannam 2011). Increasingly aware of the usage of new media by terrorist groups, even governments of democratic countries have taken steps to control the Internet and implement surveillance systems designed to thwart possible national threats. Included among these is the United States government.

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Although the United States has long touted the importance of maintaining Internet freedom (Clinton 2010), it has taken advantage of the very same technologies that have allowed free and efficient communication between people to monitor individuals residing not only outside the United States but within the nation’s borders as well. This chapter will provide a discussion of the types of surveillance activities that various democratic nations have adopted in the name of national security and then focus on the specific surveillance actions of the United States. The chapter ends by discussing the increase in new media usage by terrorist groups and its implications with regard to the future of state surveillance, and in turn, democratic governance.

Government electronic surveillance operations Increasing concerns over terrorism together with technological advancements have led governments to use whatever available cyber technology might be at their disposal to control publicly available digital information and eavesdrop on communications between ordinary individuals. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States on September 11, 2001, the quest to carry out electronic surveillance activities designed to detect communication patterns that might uncover terrorism plots intensified (Lyon 2003). Many countries quickly moved to pass legislation that would allow their law enforcement and intelligence communities to implement intrusive surveillance measures, often with minimal judicial oversight (Hiranandani 2011). The United States Congress quickly passed the expansive US Patriot Act that provided government officials with greater authority to engage in wiretapping and data mining of Internet communications (Alexander 2006). The Canadian government followed suit with its own Anti-terrorism Act that granted the government greater surveillance powers. Britain’s Parliament enacted the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 in order to strengthen the one already in place, the Terrorism Act of 2000. It allows law enforcement to deal harshly with those suspected of planning or abetting in terrorist attacks. These pieces of legislation and other anti-terrorism laws established in other countries opened the gates to broader governmental electronic surveillance activities. It appears that with every act of terrorism that results in civilian casualties and the spread of public fear, law enforcement and government officials are given greater latitude to implement new measures to prevent similar attacks. For example, after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India in

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2008, in which members of the terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba killed a total of 164 individuals including women and children (Henderson 2013), the Indian government swiftly created new programs designed with the specified goal of enhancing counterterrorism. Among the programs initiated was the Unique Identity Project (UID), which requires all residents of India to hold a national identity card. It provides the government with a way to collect biometric data and other personal information from each person. Although UID has been called intrusive, the Planning Commission Government of India’s Unique Identification Authority of India’s official website cheerfully describes the program’s purpose as follows: “To empower the residents of India with a unique identity and digital platform to authenticate anytime, anywhere” (Planning Commission of India 2014). Another example of the impact of large-scale terrorist attacks on the enactment of stringent governmental measures to fight terrorism is the 2005 suicide bombing attacks in London, England. Four terrorists associated with Islamic extremists detonated bombs in three underground trains and a public bus in the heart of London, England. Over 700 individuals were injured and 52 were killed (“July 7 2005 London” 2013). Subsequent to the attacks, members of the United Kingdom’s parliament drafted a new piece of legislation that granted further anti-terrorism powers to the British government. The legislation received Royal Assent the following year to become the Terrorism Act of 2006. A part of the law gives authority to the government to censor any form of information that either “glorifies or incites” terrorism (Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, and Zittrain 2010, 360). The law allows law enforcement to hold Internet Service Providers (ISPs) liable for allowing terrorism-related content to remain on the Web after the ISPs become aware of the content via internal monitoring or government notification. As a consequence of this new law, there has been an increase in the British government’s monitoring of the Internet. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai and London spurred many other governments to further strengthen their own surveillance capabilities and programs. Prompted by the UK’s initiatives, twenty seven member states of the European Union agreed to a directive requiring that telephone and Internet companies preserve electronic communications data for sixth months and give intelligence agencies, law enforcement and courts access to the data (Mattelart 2010). The United States also continued to fortify its surveillance activities. The nature and degree of these undertakings, however, did not become widely known until a computer analyst by the

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name of Edward Snowden stepped into the public limelight and revealed classified US National Security Agency documents.

The United States and surveillance On December 1, 2012, journalist Glenn Greenwald received a cryptic e-mail from Edward Snowden who at the time was employed as a systems analyst for Booz Allen Hamilton, a technology consulting firm working for the National Security Agency (Greenwald 2014). It was the first point of contact between the two men that eventually led to Snowden revealing to Greenwald in June of 2013 classified documents he had obtained from the NSA’s electronic files. Snowden had been able to access and download those documents using his clearance as a contract system administrator to take on the identities of high-ranking NSA officials who had security clearances for accessing top-level secret documents (“Edward Snowden” 2013). The documents pertained to the covert global surveillance programs that were being carried out by the NSA as well as governmental agencies in other countries including Britain. Among the revelations, it was disclosed that communication monitoring by government or state agencies went beyond the collection of large-scale metadata (i.e., information regarding which system or person was communicating with another system or person). It also included the gathering of the actual content being relayed through the usage of Deep Packet of Inspection (DPI) technologies (Fuchs 2013; Stalla-Bourdillon, Papadaki, and Chown 2014). DPI allows for real-time monitoring of datagrams being delivered via the Internet and, based on content, it can activate notifications to those surveilling the network. Also revealed was the cooperation the NSA was receiving from technology companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Skype and YouTube (Greenwald 2014). With such support, the governmental agency was able to access not only the content of phone calls, but also e-mail messages, social media posts and videos. Public outcries regarding the extensive surveillance activities by the United States government were palpable. The actions were seen as an affront to the long cherished democratic right to privacy embodied by the US Constitution’s fourteenth amendment which includes the statement that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and the fourth amendment, which reads: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by oath or

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affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (Legal Information Institute 2014)

Many viewed the activities as also epitomizing the hypocrisy of the United States given that its government has consistently criticized other governments for infringing on Internet freedom and citizen rights. Several leaders from around the world voiced outrage at the revelation that the NSA was collecting the communications of their own country’s citizens as well as their senior government officials. In her address to the United Nations general assembly a couple of months following Snowden’s revelations, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff accused the United States of breaching international law and bitterly remarked, “A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation. The right to the safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating the fundamental human rights of citizens of another country” (Borger 2013). When considering the United States’ history of secret intelligence, however, Snowden’s recent revelations should not come as terribly surprising. Since the beginning of the nation’s founding, the gathering of domestic and foreign intelligence has been viewed as tantamount in national defense. In his role as the first president of the United States, George Washington requested Congress to set up funds to finance the government’s intelligence operations. Congress obliged and the “Secret Service Fund” was created on July 1, 1790 (Andrew 1995, 11). This small budget eventually grew in size in order to finance substantial intelligence expenditures by the United States government. Intelligence agencies and legislation to allow those agencies to conduct covert operations were also created. The first formal US government agency that was established in order to conduct secret service operations was the Bureau of Investigation, which was launched under the auspices of the Department of Justice. It was created in 1908 and when the United States entered World War I, its responsibilities increased to include espionage and sabotage investigations (Andrew 1995). The bureau further expanded to become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. Following World War II, the National Security Act of 1947 was signed into law and effectively established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which was charged with gathering and evaluating intelligence concerning external threats to the nation’s security (Weiner 2008). The National Security Agency, an offshoot of the US military’s cryptography operations during World War II, was officially established in 1952 by a secret presidential decree (Andrew 1995). With its director reporting to the Secretary of Defense, the NSA was created

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with a stated responsibility of intercepting and analyzing communication signals for intelligence gathering purposes (SIGINT) as well as to prevent unauthorized access to and tampering of national security information and systems (Howe n.d.). In the early 1970s, it came to light that part of the activities these agencies had engaged in at certain periods of time went beyond their stipulated operational boundaries. Much of those operations stemmed from the government’s post-World War II Cold War obsession. The FBI initiated in the 1950s a counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against members of the Communist party (Stone 2004; Weiner 2013). Authorized by the director of the FBI at that time, J. Edgar Hoover, the program entailed not only the surveillance of these individuals, but also harassment and character assassinations. With support from US Army intelligence and by using electronic surveillance tools, the FBI’s domestic intelligence activities expanded in the 1960s to include the monitoring and investigation of anti-Vietnam war protestors as well as individuals associated with the civil rights movement. Among those who were closely monitored were students, professors and religious leaders, including pastor and activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The CIA also initiated domestic surveillance programs during the same period of time, which was in violation of the agency’s establishing charter prohibiting the agency from taking part in internal security operations. In 1967, the agency created a program, Project RESISTANCE, which was responsible for collecting information about antiwar protestors. In the same year, Project MERRIMAC was also launched by the agency to allow its agents to infiltrate antiwar organizations and monitor organizational members (Stone 2004; Theoharis 2005). At the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson and later President Richard M. Nixon, both of whom were convinced that the antiwar movement was being spurred on by foreign entities, the CIA began Operation CHAOS, which was designed to investigate if communists and non-US citizens were taking part in the antiwar movement for subversive purposes (Theoharis 2005). The NSA was also taking part in domestic surveillance of antiwar protestors. Under the direction of President Johnson, in 1967 the NSA began intercepting telephone communications among individuals associated with the antiwar movement who were residing in the United States. The activities were in clear violation of the legal statute prohibiting the NSA from spying on American citizens. Later dubbed MINARET, the program lasted until 1973. By the early 1970s, stories regarding illegal US surveillance activities began to emerge. In 1970, Christopher Pyle divulged information that he

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had attained while serving in the US Army which implicated Army Intelligence and other US intelligence agencies with spying on Americans who were protesting against the Vietnam War (Jensen 1991). The following year, a group of antiwar activists broke into an FBI office and stole sensitive documents that provided evidence of the bureau’s surveillance operations against antiwar dissidents and political organizations. The group mailed the documents to newspaper reporters and soon stories regarding the FBI’s activities were published. Among the papers to publish reports were The New York Times and The Washington Post. The activist perpetrators were never caught and the case was dropped in 1976. In 1974, journalist Seymour Hersch wrote a story for The New York Times in which he disclosed that the CIA had been spying on American antiwar protestors and wiretapping reporters to gain information on possible subversive activities (Ashby 2008). These revelations regarding the illegal activities of the government’s intelligence agencies led the US Senate to establish a Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1974, which began conducting a 17-month long Congressional Senate Committee investigation beginning in 1975 (Ashby 2008). The House of Representatives also created its own investigative committee, but it was short-lived due to internal disputes. It was the Senate select committee, which became known as the “Church Committee” named after Committee Chair Senator Frank Church, that uncovered disturbing evidence supporting accusations about the illegal surveillance activities of the FBI, NSA and CIA. The committee’s investigation revealed a number of significant abuses that had been carried out by the intelligence agencies including the surveillance of US citizens who were not suspected of any criminal activities but were deemed to be in opposition to those in power or their policies. It was also discovered that no oversight existed and that questionable methods were used to carry out investigations. The final report that was generated by the Church Committee resulted in the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Made up of seven federal district judges appointed by the United States Chief Justice, the court was designed as a safeguard against future intelligence abuses that would provide judicial oversight of foreign intelligence investigations (Federal Judicial Center 2014). Many were hopeful that FISA and the new surveillance court would ensure that illegal covert operations carried out under the pretext of national security would never again occur. The terrorist attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001, however, proved that such a hope was naïve.

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Under the umbrella of the Patriot Act and without court backing, President George W. Bush secretly gave the NSA authority to tap into fiber optic cables carrying electronic data including Internet and telephone communications. This was done with the knowledge that the authorization would allow the NSA to intercept data being sent by or to Americans, something the agency is prohibited from doing. The data was then sent to the FBI for further investigation (Weiner 2013). The Bush administration dubbed it the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). The public became aware of the TSP’s existence in 2005 when former telephone technician Mark Klein, who had worked for telecommunications company AT&T, divulged to The New York Times that the NSA had installed a computer at AT&T’s San Francisco key switching hub center (Braun, Flaherty, Gillum and Apuzzo 2013). President Bush immediately defended the program by stating that as president of the United States he had the constitutional power to authorize the surveillance program to protect the nation. Members of Congress and others, however, argued that such a power only came into play during times of “a genuine national security emergency” and could only be executed for a limited period of time (Seamon 2008). Under a continued “war on terror,” the president needed to receive approval from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The TSP was officially shut down in 2007, but in order to allow for further warrantless wiretapping, the Bush administration presented the Protect America Act to Congress, which was soon signed in to law. The law granted the NSA authorization to engage in communications interceptions without acquiring individual FISC-ordered warrants as long as the agency could show to a FISC federal judge that the person or group was “reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States” (Seamon 2008, 23). The internal government documents that Edward Snowden revealed indicate that this new law opened the door for a more expansive surveillance program called Prism. The Prism program, named after the computer data tool PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management) but officially labeled US 98XN, allows the National Security Agency to collect Internet data from telecommunication companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) in a streamlined and manageable manner (Dreyfuss and Dreyfuss 2013). The approval process works as follows: -

A classified document specifying how the government plans to gather intelligence on non-U.S. citizens is presented to the Federal

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-

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Intelligence Surveillance Court on an annual basis. The plan can be broad and does not need to identify specific targets. A federal judge from the secret court either rejects or approves the plan. If approved, the government can issue directives to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide the requested data. (Records indicate that the secret court’s approval rate has been around 99.97% (Clarke 2014). Thus, the NSA has experienced but a modicum of denials in its requests for surveillance gathering.) Data is collected. (Sensors have been installed at some collection points to allow data to be collected in real time.) Analysts examine routing information and look for patterns in the communication flow. (By monitoring and analyzing the routing information, analysts can build a picture of an individual’s personal network.) The collected information is saved in a database to allow for later access if deemed necessary.

At the time of writing, the PRISM program is still operating. US Congressional debates have continued with regards to how far legislation should go in curtailing the NSA’s mass data collection program (Nakashima and O’Keefe 2014).

Conclusion The complexity of maintaining an unrestricted online world that can provide a voice to those seeking political and social liberties while staving off potential threats that such a world could pose to the security of nations cannot be overstated. Freedom rights watchdog groups have increasingly been ranking democratic nations, including the United States, Britain and France, lower in Internet freedom in comparison to past rankings due to each nation’s implementation of stricter Internet controls and surveillance systems (Freedom House 2013; Reporters Without Borders 2014). Requests have been made to the governments of these countries to rein in their restrictive powers. In making these appeals, Article 12 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is frequently brought to attention: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. (United Nations 2014)

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While governments have acknowledged such calls, the increased usage of the Internet by individuals and groups for nefarious purposes has made it less likely that these governments will curtail their Internet restrictions and electronic surveillance activities. New media have become valuable tools for terrorists not only for spreading their militant messages but also for recruiting and instructing on how to carry out terrorist acts. Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, have become the platforms of preference for such groups (Rivers 2013; Telegraph Reporters 2014). This reliance on user-generated websites, blogs and forums is nothing new. Now, however, terrorists are openly presenting their messages on Facebook pages or Twitter accounts in multiple languages. The sites acquire large numbers of followers with many not hesitating to “like,” “reply” or “retweet” the terror groups’ posts. Moreover, gone are the days when such material consisted of grainy pictures and poor audio recordings. The audio is often clear and the images are slick, appearing to be professionally produced. Social media are vehicles of choice for terror groups because they are interactive, user-friendly and able to target the demographic group that is of primary interest to the groups, namely disenfranchised young males (Weimann 2014). The content that is disseminated to the public through these platforms includes instructions on how to build bombs, use and maintain weaponry, and organize terror attacks. Propaganda videos that often glorify death are also posted and links to more hard-core extremist forums are provided in the hope that followers will become further drawn into the objectives of the terror groups. New media have also heightened the capabilities of terrorists to communicate in real time while carrying out acts of terror. As an example of this, during the Mumbai terror attacks the terrorists used Google Earth to help them to learn the locations of major landmarks in the city and coordinate their maneuvers during the attacks (Schneier 2009; Weimann 2014). Reports also indicate that during the attacks, the terrorists used Twitter to acquire information and communicate with each other. As terrorist groups ramp up their new media usage and reach out to possible recruits using social media, government authorities are increasingly worried that homegrown terrorists or lone wolf terrorists will increase in number (CBC News Staff 2014; CNN Wire Staff 2010; Markon 2014; Napolitano 2010). Individuals no longer need to travel to training camps to be indoctrinated and receive terror instruction; they can receive the knowledge and motivation for carrying out terror through their own home computers and social media access. This trend does not bode

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well for those who are working to place pressure on governments to suspend their electronic surveillance activities. Protecting the democratic rights of citizens while also defending against militant groups driven to do harm to those very same citizens is a daunting task. With continued advances in surveillance technologies, governments will no doubt continue to devise methods to monitor and cut short the activities of terrorists, and those methods will most likely infringe in some manner on citizens’ rights to privacy. Ironically, capitalistic incentives might be a determining factor in curtailing government surveillance efforts. Technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, after having lost business due to the revelations made in documents provided by Edward Snowden which implicated them as accomplices in governmental surveillance operations, have added default encryption features to their services to make it more difficult for information flows to become available to third party monitoring systems (Miller 2014; Stalla-Bourdillon, Papadaki, and Chown 2014). In other words, driven by profit, these businesses have made it more difficult for governments to continue to engage in large-scale surveillance. If governments do find a way to navigate around corporate restrictions and find new ways to conduct surveillance activities, it is important that they do so, at the very least, in a transparent fashion. When examining the various surveillance programs that have been established in democratic countries, what comes to light is the fact that many of these programs were established under the shroud of secrecy and without much public debate, which is critical in any democratic country. To the extent they can do so without compromising required security strategies or tactics, governments need to keep their citizens abreast of whatever surveillance actions they plan to implement. In an essay dating from 1906 on societal structures and secrecy, sociologist Georg Simmel wrote: We [in modern civilized life] rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of conceptions, the majority of which presuppose confidence that we have not been deceived. Hence prevarication in modern circumstances becomes something much more devastating, something placing the foundations of life much more in jeopardy, than was earlier the case. (Simmel 1906, 446)

Perhaps now is the time to heed the words of Simmel and not forget that a crucial basis of any democratic nation is trust. Citizens of a democracy must be able to trust those who govern the nation. Consistently engaging

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in actions that break that trust will only pave the way for the disintegration of democracy.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE DIALECTICS OF INTERNET CENSORSHIP: A MOUFFIAN ANALYSIS OF RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN THE CASE OF TURKEY ÇAöRI YALKIN

Introduction Although a large percentage of its citizens have Internet access, Turkey has had a troubled relationship with the Internet and this relationship has been clouded by government-imposed censorship policies akin to those enacted in China, Iran and Korea. Increasingly implemented in a period that has been shaped by other restrictions on freedom of speech, Internet censorship reached its peak amidst leaks on Twitter alleging that the prime minister and a majority of the cabinet had been taking part in corruption and fraud for years. Taking these issues into account, this chapter will focus on the understanding of citizens concerning Internet censorship and their tactics of resistance as well as the parameters that have recently reshaped the online interactionscape. In light of uprisings against the government and the deterioration of the democratic environment, this study will examine how these issues have dialectically impacted the actions of citizens and the government from a Mouffian perspective of agonistic plurality (Mouffe 1999). Building on Rahimi’s (2011) work regarding the formation of dissent and consolidation of state power in post-election Iran, this chapter takes up social media and the use and censorship of Twitter in Turkey by conceptualizing it as a public sphere in which agonistic pluralism is enacted. Traditional debates on the intersection between state and media have focused on who controls the messages and what the messages contain. The public sphere exists between the state and society in the form of “a network for communicating information and points of view” (Habermas 1996, 360). Likewise, Castells has pointed out that

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On this issue of the public sphere, there are two main schools of thought: Habermas’ deliberative democracy and Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism. Mouffe’s post-structuralist view of democracy critiques Habermas’ defense of rationality, positing that it is inimical to pluralist societies: The central claim of deliberative democracy is that collective decisions are more legitimate to the extent that they are the outcome of public reasoning among free and equal persons. On this view, democracy is not simply about aggregating private preferences according to a particular decision to rule in order to ascertain what the will of the majority is. Rather, citizens are called on to justify their policy preferences in terms that all those who will be affected by a decision they might reasonably accept. Agonistic democrats, by contrast, draw attention to and affirm the centrality of conflict within democratic politics. While there are significant differences among theorists of agonistic democracy, what they share is a principled desire to leave more up to politics in the sense that citizens should be free to contest the terms of public life and the conditions of their political association. (Schaap 2006, 259)

According to Mouffe (1999) the type of political theory currently in use is dominated by an individualistic, universalistic and rationalistic framework which does not fit all societies. Mouffe argues that liberal democracy misunderstands the problems of ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts because of its inadequate conception of politics (Mouffe 2005), while Castells (2008) notes that the concept of the public sphere has heuristic value because it is inseparable from both the civil society and the state. As Kapoor (2002) notes, little work was done to relate these theories to the political challenges in the Third World. Convey and Singh (2011), however, have examined Mouffian radical democracy in post-colonial settings. Using a “modernity/coloniality” framework, they contrast traditions of radical democracy along three main axes: 1) the logic of articulation among diverse struggles and movements; 2) the orientation towards, and aspirations with respect to, the state; and 3) the relation to the global scale and vision of the “pluriverse.” Following Mouffe, I argue that as Turkey is a pluralist society the online public sphere is a space of agonistic democracy, not deliberative democracy. As such, in opposition

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to Habermas’ view of deliberative democracy, agonistic pluralism is more suitable for analyzing the dialectics of Internet censorship in Turkey. The agonistic conception of democracy provides fertile ground for the politics of reconciliation (Schaap 2006). Since Turkey has been through three military coups and experienced the ever-shifting tension between secular and conservative Islamist views of everyday life, the politics of reconciliation have become increasingly important for the public sphere. Schaap (2006, 255) argues: “Against this tendency, an agonistic perspective suggests the possibility of retrieving the concept of reconciliation from a state-sanctioned project of national building for a radical democratic politics centered on the possibilities for collective action and solidarity among citizens divided by a history of state violence.” However, we have seen that in the online public sphere in Turkey, the state does not allow for reconciliation beyond its own terms. The government regularly intervenes in how, why and where groups debate with each other online, at times restricting the debates and agonistic plurality through censorship of social media such as YouTube and Twitter. In the digital era, the public sphere includes the Internet and wireless communication networks (McChesney 2007). As Castells (2008, 79) notes, “the public sphere is not just the media or the sociospatial sites of public interaction. It is the cultural/informational repository of the ideas and projects that feed public debate.” The global public sphere is built around media communication systems and Internet networks, particularly in the social spaces of Web 2.0 (see Castells 2008). McKenna et al. (2002) have pointed out that the Internet has become the main platform for social interaction. Scholars have also argued that the Internet is a vehicle that promotes global democracy (e.g. Birdsall 1996) by allowing for the rapid dissemination and retrieval of information. The Internet also assumes the role of a space in which collective dissent can be articulated (Aouragh and Alexander 2011). Deibert and Rohozinski (2012, 21) have noted that states around the world have “moved rapidly to regulate, shape, intervene, and exercise power in cyberspace across all its spheres.” I am proposing, however, that it is necessary to move beyond Marxist vs. liberal and similarly dystopian vs. utopian views concerning the function of the Internet and examine the evolution of the dialectics of strategies used to resist censorship and how this is co-constituted by the nature of Twitter as a contested space of public opinions. Rahimi (2011, 158) has pointed out that “online social media are agonistic arenas where information, ideas, values, and subjectivities are contested between (uneven) adversaries, and where new contexts could potentially emerge for new ways of doing politics.”

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Turkey as an authoritarian state According to Brouwer (2008), authoritarian states can be based on simple repression or be legitimized by religion, secular ideologies or tradition. Jackson and Rosberg (1982) point out that in authoritarian states, the ruler dominates the government and the state without having to share power. Although on the surface Turkey is a secular democracy, it shares many of the properties of the authoritarian states described by Brouwer (2008) and Jackson and Rosberg (1982). Morozov (2011) contended that when faced with the threat of revolution, embattled governments simply try to pull the plug on the Internet. A case in point is the Internet censorship applied by the Justice and Development Party government in Turkey. This, however, did not prevent the Gezi protests in 2013 nor online uprisings that broke out as the result of tape leaks of fraud and corruption, and citizens continued to communicate with their global peers. It is possible to view the increase of such Internet censorship as the present government’s broader lack of a commitment to democracy. The government’s non-democratic practices such as the violation of press freedoms and the jailing of journalists, as well as the unlawful detainment of university students, support this argument. For example, Researchers Sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders) ranked Turkey 154th among 179 countries in the 2014 press freedom index: Despite its regional aspirations, Turkey (154th) registered no improvement and continues to be one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists. The Gezi Park revolt highlighted the repressive methods used by the security forces, the increase in self-censorship and the dangers of the prime minister’s populist discourse. In view of the upcoming elections and the unpredictability of the peace process with the Kurdish separatists, 2014 is likely to be a decisive year for the future of civil liberties in Turkey.

There were more than sixty journalists in jail as of 2013 (Reporters Sans Frontieres 2014) and Turkey has the world’s highest number of detained university students. There are between 770 and 2,824 students currently being held without convictions (Hurriyet Daily News 2012; Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting 2012). Furthermore, a reporter for the Turkish newspaper Milliyet faces up to 2.5 years in prison for criticizing the sentencing of a police officer who beat a woman in custody (Index on Censorship 2014). The European Commission Report (2012) indicated that Turkey is deteriorating in certain areas of democracy, such as minorities’ rights to express themselves, freedom of speech and freedom

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of the press. Furthermore, the 2012 Committee to Protect Journalists reported on the current practice of jailing journalists and noted that the democratic arena in Turkey is fundamentally flawed, with Internet censorship being one aspect of the non-democratic practices currently in use. Castells (2008) notes that the public sphere, as a space of debate for public affairs, is increasingly constructed around global communication networks. The global public sphere is built around media communication systems and Internet networks, particularly in the social spaces of Web 2.0, as exemplified by YouTube and Twitter (Ibid.). As noted in the Index on Censorship’s piece “Erdogan Tightens the Digital Screws on Free Expression,” The wiretapped phone conversations featured what appeared to be the voices of Prime Minister Erdogan and people close to him, and pointed to their implication in an ongoing corruption scandal. Other recordings ostensibly showed Erdogan’s meddling in the judiciary and with owners of major media outlets. In March, a leaked recording from a meeting at Turkey’s foreign ministry detailed the government’s considerations for military involvement in Syria. Shortly after that recording was posted on YouTube, access to the platform was blocked entirely in Turkey.

Consuming the Internet (or the lack thereof) Aouragh and Alexander (2011, 1344) “reject the false polarization of utopian/dystopian views of the Internet and recognize that the Internet is both a product of imperialist and capitalist logics and something that is simultaneously used by millions in the struggle to resist those logics.” Sharma and Gupta (2006) summarize these discussions of the possible weakening of the nation-state in terms of two key areas of concern: territoriality and sovereignty. The government of Turkey, as seen in the application of censorship in particular and restrictions on freedom of speech in general, sees the Internet as a threat to its sovereignty. This is because the Internet provides resources such as sites or platforms where people can discuss political issues (e.g. Russell and Echchaibi, 2009; Zhou, 2009) and the ruling government tolerates only very limited points of view. While politicians use social media platforms to distribute messages, global citizens discuss politics, including political processes and decision-making. In this way, politics is regularly created, performed and consumed on Twitter, which in turn makes it a target of authoritarian states. As also exemplified by news updates on Twitter concerning developments in social movements such as the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring and

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the Gezi Protests, social media constitute a politically charged space. This contested space provokes authoritarian governments until they intervene and censor the use of such platforms, which, in turn, triggers (politically charged) reaction and resistance.

Resistance The Internet has also been seen as being vital in contemporary strategies of social resistance (e.g. Shirky 2008). This mobilization of movements through the assistance of the Internet suggests that people are subverting oppressive structures through everyday practices (cf. De Certeau 1984). Foucault (1988, 94) notes that domination is inscribed in power, which, in turn, provokes resistance: “Where there is power, there is resistance… this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.” Dominance in the form of censorship introduced by the government can also be conceptualized as limiting citizens’ freedom to use social media such as Twitter. Hence, citizens can be expected to engage in resistance. As Yalkin et al. (2013) note, resistance to Internet censorship has taken two forms in Turkey: technology-based resistance and irony/humor. It is proposed here that examining the dialectics of censorship and remedies to censorship is necessary, and this can be done by postulating that citizens are consumers of social media and the authoritarian state acts as the agent that removes the consumption, production and re-production of politics and its discourses. As noted by Reporters without Borders (2012), the latest wave of censorship in Turkey involved the blocking of Twitter prior to municipal elections in an effort to prevent citizens from accessing leaked tapes about the fraud and corruption scandal. The tapes were leaked as a result of a clash between the Gülen movement and then-Prime Minister Erdo÷an regarding issues ranging from battles over which side would control the legal system to the shutting down of private tutoring schools run by the Gülen movement. The blocking of Twitter and the government’s alleged request that Twitter management disclose certain users’ IP addresses (which Twitter did not do, citing its policy of opposing censorship) raised the ire of Twitter users. Management at Twitter stated: We’d like to emphasize that at no point during this blockage have we given the Turkish government any user data like email or IP addresses, consistent with our commitment to user privacy. With all announced bases for the access ban addressed, there are no legal grounds for the blocking of our service in Turkey. Furthermore, with positive developments today concerning judicial review of this disproportionate and illegal

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administrative act of access banning the whole of Twitter, we expect the government to restore access to Twitter immediately so that its citizens can continue an open online dialogue ahead of the elections to be held at the end of this week.

In contrast to Google and YouTube’s limited liability for what their users say (see Gillespie 2010), Twitter took a different stance on the clash between the Twitter users in Turkey and the Turkish government. Citizens from different camps such as the Gülen movement, supporters of the Justice and Development party and opposition movements fought over their opinions to a large extent on Twitter, and the ban exacerbated the social dynamics of the battle in tandem with the technological one. In Turkey, although the Justice and Development Party promised democratization by way of conservative democracy, the past decade has seen further deterioration in democratic practices and in the application of rights such as freedom of speech, lawful trials, and so on. In addition to bans on Twitter and YouTube, parliament passed a new law granting the government broad authority to censor the Internet, which was met with criticism particularly from the European Union (New York Times 2014). Although having promised the opposite, the Justice and Development Party’s administration has been weakening plurality by endorsing political Islam as the only acceptable way of everyday life, both online and offline (European Union Report on Turkey 2012). The censorship of Twitter indicates that the government tolerates only one opinion even to the extent that their supporters should not be able to use Twitter if it means opening the way for voices of opposition. This, however, does not bring about the uniformization of society. Such resistance can be partly attributed to the mechanism of dialectics that provides leeway for countering each new act of suppression on its own terms. Technology provides but one of the mediums facilitating this particular form of dialectics. Citizens react and resist censorship within an agonistic pluralist setting, and as noted by Mouffe (1999), such settings are far from the idea of deliberative democracy as they are not solely based on dialogue through reasoning, which is the central tenet of deliberative democracy.

Methods The extended case method (Burawoy 1998) is used here as a guideline for data collection and analysis since interpretive case analyses can be used to enrich existing theories and develop new theoretical concepts that can inform subsequent research. A format compatible with the extended case method was selected, and cases were chosen that allow the author to

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analyze the agonistic clashes in the pluralistic Twitter environment to see how these clashes fit with or depart from a Mouffian framework. Two Twitter eruptions (events) at two different points in time were chosen to showcase how the Turkish Internetsphere, shaped by real-politics and censorship, resembles an agonistic pluralist public sphere rather than one in which deliberative democracy is practiced.

Twitter Eruption 1: The 2010 Referendum and Jailed Journalists The Justice and Development Party positioned the 2010 constitution referendum as a step that would allow for a settling of accounts with the 1980 coup and its perpetrators, employing discourses of “reconciliation among the people” and “trials of perpetrators” to shape public opinion. Schaap (2006, 259) notes that “what is common in metaphors such as ‘settling accounts,’ ‘healing nations’ and ‘restoring community’ that are often invoked in reconciliation talk is a presumption of unity as a social good.” This was voiced by opponents on Twitter, again leading to an agonistic pluralist contestation of whether changing the constitution meant an opportunity to face the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état or whether it was a design in disguise to change the constitution to eradicate basic freedoms centered on secularism. Also, some opponents feared that the way the referendum was being carried out would mean that the real perpetrators of the coup d’état would not be tried as promised, as the majority of Justice and Development Party’s voters saw the referendum as a test of support for Prime Minister Erdogan. This was the result of Erdogan’s framing of the issue in terms of “us” versus “them”: The package includes measures to bar gender discrimination, bolster civil liberties and protect personal privacy. But these, the opposition charges, were no more than “bubble wrap” used to conceal more invidious changes. The core of the package is a major overhaul of the judiciary. This gives the president and parliament greater say over the appointments of senior judges and prosecutors, and expands the size of the constitutional court and that of the judicial body in charge of appointments. The opposition claims [that the AKP] will use the changes to pack the courts with Islamists, paving the way to religious rule. Some mutter darkly about an impending “civilian coup.” (The Economist 2010)

The opposition viewed the change of the constitution as a major alteration to the legal system which would allow the Justice and Development Party to stay in power (Al-Jazeera 2010) and open the way

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for trials as seen fit by the government. Soon after the constitutional changes were approved, journalists Ahmet ùk and Nedim ùener were detained (without clear charges) for allegedly being part of the Ergenekon plot. Ergenekon was the term used by the Justice and Development Party to refer to a “deep state” and the ruling party positioned itself as the main driving force behind eradicating the power of the generals. Twitter again was the battleground for competing opinions: left-wing Ahmet ùk was actually an investigative journalist who penned a book on the Ergenekon case and Nedim ùener was an investigative journalist who was trying to shed light on deep government links in the Hrant Dink assassination. Opposition parties and the left decried the arrests, stating that the journalists had nothing to do with plotting coups, but the proponents continued to give opinions based on unreleased court charges and alleged information leaks from people in key positions. The jailing of these two journalists would mark the beginning of a new era of practices of imprisonment in which the police prepared court documents without necessarily consulting prosecutors, and students and journalists have been jailed for years before being charged with crimes. The agonistic clashes in the online public sphere were tumultuous: the daily newspaper Taraf, which was established during the Justice and Development Party’s rise to power and took an anti-militarist stance, supported the government and the police with provocative headlines such as “They were not detained because they are journalists.” Such attempts to de-legitimize ùk and ùener’s roles as journalists were met with agonistic opposition and plurality. Taraf’s editor-in-chief at the time urged the public not to deem anyone innocent until the indictment documents were made public. Such claims caused even more agonistic clashes among Twitter users, with some members of the opposition concluding that Taraf’s editor-in-chief was a police mole. In essence, Twitter became a battleground in which accusations and dark humor were used to establish opposition through increased cultural capital, with opponents inventing new linguistic tactics for slamming their adversaries, and those in turn were mimicked by the supporters of the government. Through cultural jamming with a political twist, this online public sphere actually mimics agonistic plurality. As Cammaerts (2007, 4) notes, “jamming the political should also be seen as a way of dealing with the messiness of reality, as subverting meanings, and thereby using humor, mocking, satire and parody.” One of the ways that agonistic plurality is enacted and attained is through the use of cultural-political jamming. Modifying and reproducing the codes of the state/government makes it possible for parties within the agonistic plurality to actually communicate.

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As Schaap (2006, 259) argues, “the agonistic pluralism perspective guards against a certain complacency that occludes the political nature of reconciliation by construing it in moral, juridical, therapeutic or religious terms,” and that appears to parallel discourses that arose around the 2010 Referendum. Schapp (2006) argues that democracy tends to merge moral and political communities and represents conflict as being already communal. An agonistic theory, however, allows for reconciliation not as a state-sanctioned project of nation-building but as an act of democratic politics with possibilities for self-determination and solidarity among citizens divided by a history of state violence. These nuances seem to be very present in the burst of messages on Twitter over the referendum for constitutional change. One of the main concerns of the opposition was that reconciliation among the citizenry and the trial of the perpetrators of the coup d’état were state-planned activities not necessarily designed to attain either goal but rather were proposed as a façade to change the legal system and de-legitimize the opposition for being “anti-democratic.”

Twitter eruption 2: Fraud and corruption scandal and leaked tapes Internet censorship reached its peak when leaked tapes were distributed on Twitter and YouTube. These tapes allegedly proved that the prime minister and the majority of the cabinet had been taking part in fraud and corruption for years. The tapes were leaked by a former ally of the Justice and Development Party, the Gülen movement, following clashes over the movement’s privately-run prep schools which were also linked with dormitory-style housing for students known as Iúk Evleri (“homes of light”). These establishments had long been seen as a catalyst in the rise of political Islam in Turkey following the coup of 1980 and it has been argued that they helped establish social cohesion for certain strata of society (see Çelik 2010). The battle over the closure of those establishments was but one façade of the battle over the legal system and the media, which had previously become manifest in various other ways. Upon realizing that the members of the cabinet did not know about the arrests made on claims of corruption and fraud, the government modified the code in a way that would require the investigators/prosecutors to consult a top level supervisor before going ahead with the investigation. The High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, largely run by Gülenists, maintained that this was against the constitution. Prime Minister Erdogan argued that these corruption and fraud investigations were attempts carried out by traitors to usurp his legitimate power as prime minister. Various

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media outlets that were known to have close ties with the Justice and Development Party backed the prime minister’s claims, and this discourse was one among many that was fought over on Twitter. Twitter again became a battleground for competing opinions: reasoning, humor, shaming, accusations and practices of de-legitimation were often used to steer the war of perceptions that was raging between at least three parties: the opposition (in its various forms), the government and its supporters, and the Gülen movement and its supporters. Legitimacy in this case does not refer to the Habermasian (1976) crisis of legitimacy that results as a blockage in communication; rather, the blockage was imposed on citizens in the public sphere by the government. After two months of such discussions, a ban on Twitter was announced after the elections. Hailed as the “one hashtag [that] flaunted Turkey’s ugly face to the world (#TwitterisBlockedinTurkey”) (Hurriyet Daily News 2014), the block was lifted in April after a ruling by the Constitutional Court. Having battled the blocking of YouTube in 2007 with technology, the citizens battled the blocking of Twitter by using VPNs. Just as with the censorship of YouTube in 2007, opponents of the government used humor and sarcasm to achieve greater amounts of cultural capital and delegitimize the ban. Previous studies have noted that in Turkey “citizenconsumers engage in two types of resistance strategies against such domination by the state: using irony as passive resistance, and using the very same technology used by the state to resist its domination” (Yalkin et al. 2013). Such strategies were repeated in face of the Twitter ban in 2014, and people developed knowledge and skills in the use of VPNs as a means of defying the ban.

Conclusion As Dahlgren (2006) points out, the Internet both enters into and contributes to the destabilization of political systems of communication. This destabilization can be a catalyst for positive developments, such as pluralization of the public sphere. In the case of Turkey, this occurs in an agonistic manner, as demonstrated by the two incidences above. As Habermas (2006, 413) argues, The deliberative paradigm offers as its main empirical point of reference a democratic process, which is supposed to generate legitimacy through a procedure of opinion and will formation that grants (a) publicity and transparency for the deliberative process, (b) inclusion and equal opportunity for participation, and (c) a justified presumption for reasonable

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We can see that neither of the Twitter cases discussed above possess any of those conditions. The transparency needed for the deliberative process in the fraud and corruption investigations were prevented by Twitter censorship, which also violated condition (b). In the fraud and corruption investigation case, the government was not able to produce a reasonable outcome for censorship. In the case of the referendum, even though it was lauded as a transparent attempt to put the perpetrators of the “coup d’état” on trial, deliberation was carried out by the political elite, not by members of the public sphere, which violates principle (b). Therefore, we can see that both of the cases discussed in this study are far from fitting the deliberative democracy framework. Although the reactions of Internet users have been explored regarding the government-imposed ban on YouTube in 2007, the rise of social media, especially the utilization of social media during the Gezi uprising and in election preparations amidst cabinet members’ leaked corruption and fraud tapes, required that we re-chart the territory of censorship yet again. Previous studies on Internet censorship in Turkey have questioned understandings of and reactions to government-imposed censorship; however, those studies did not take into account the role of a politically charged movement and how the government and the citizens act and react in a dialectical fashion. Following Foucault’s (1980) suggestion that where there is power there is resistance, this study focused on analyzing the reactions to the government’s recent impositions of censorship from an agonistic pluralist perspective. Previous studies on Internet censorship in Turkey (see Yalkin et al. 2014) moved beyond the neo-liberal vs. neoMarxist battles over the need to reduce or increase the role of the nationstate in regulating (online and offline) social spaces. Lastly, as Lasch (1987) points out, technology is a mirror of society, not something that can be used for good and evil in itself. As the above analysis indicates, the use of technology in Turkey mirrors society as a contested space where pluralism is played out agonistically.

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http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/11/kemal-goktas-chargedcriticize-police-turkey/ (accessed on 5 January 2014). Letsch, C. 2012. “Dozens of Kurdish journalists face terrorism charges in Turkey,” The Guardian, 11 September. Available at: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/10/kurdish-journaliststerrorismcharges-turkey (accessed 5 January 2015). Mouffe, C. 1999. Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism. Social Research 66 (3): 745-758. —. 2005. The return of the political (Vol. 8). Verso: London. Rahimi, B. 2011. The agonistic social media: cyberspace in the formation of dissent and consolidation of state power in postelection Iran. The Communication Review, 14 (3): 158-178. Reporters Sans Frontiers. 2014. Press freedom index. Available at: en.rsf.org/press-freedomindex-2011-2012,1043.html (accessed 5 January 2015). Reporters Sans Frontieres. 2014. Press freedom report. Available at http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf (accessed 5 January 2015). Schaap, A. 2006. Agonism in divided societies. Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (2): 255-277. Turkey's constitutional referendum: Erdogan pulls it off. 2010. The Economist. Available at http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/09/turkeys_constitut ional_referendum (accessed 5 January 2015). Turkey lifts ban on Twitter. 2014. The New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/world/middleeast/turkey-liftsban-on-Twitter.html?_r=0 (accessed on 5 January 2015). Twitter Blogs. 2014. Challenging the access ban in Turkey. Available at https://blog.Twitter.com/2014/challenging-the-access-ban-in-turkey (accessed on 5 January 2014).

CHAPTER FIFTEEN FROM THE “WORST MENACE TO SOCIETIES” TO THE “ROBOT LOBBY”: A SEMANTIC VIEW OF TURKISH POLITICAL RHETORIC ON SOCIAL MEDIA SUNCEM KOÇER

Introduction The critical role played by the media in the organization of social movements has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars working in diverse geographies and in disciplines ranging from film studies to anthropology. From the Iranian revolution (Shereberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994) to Aboriginal identity politics in Australia (Ginsburg 1998), and from leaflets and audio cassettes (Hirschkind 2006) to documentary films (Turner 1991; Ginsburg 2002; Whiteman 2004), media have constituted a transformative public space for social and political organizations in the wake of social protests and subsequently invited academic scrutiny. With new media technologies becoming more widespread than ever, the Internet has become perhaps the most efficient public sphere for the organization of social and political movements. Recent mass protests which discursively became united and, to some extent, were organized through social media, such as those in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, the US and Brazil, stimulated new critical writing on the intersections of media and politics (e.g. Castell 2012; Gitlin 2012; Yldrm and NavaroYashin 2013). In this emergent literature, while one train of thought has assigned social media a transformative role in the forms of social and political organization that transcend the immediate context of the protests, another line of thought has remained rather critical in terms of evaluating the lasting effects of new media on social movements (e.g. Gitlin 2012).

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A common thread in the literature, however, is noteworthy: certain forms of media (whether they are referred to as new, small-scale or alternative) are categorically and unquestionably identified with resistance against hegemonic constructions of political life, the flow of information and the formation of public space. Audiocassettes and leaflets, which played a significant role in the overthrow of the shah in Iran, or indigenous video among the Kayapo, which served as a tool of cultural preservation against the homogenizing discourses of the state, certainly deserve scholarly attention. Similarly, new media and particularly social media, which have been transformative in social protests, need to be approached recursively as alternative public spheres to traditional and hegemonic political spaces. However, approaching certain media exclusively through the lens of resistance, breaches and protest would prove to be short-sighted as newly emergent smaller-scale alternative new media could function, for example, as platforms and channels through which hegemonic discourses are reproduced and enlivened. In this chapter, I aim to refocus attention on the following critical questions: when new media, more specifically social media, pose a threat to the legitimacy of power centers, how do they react? In other words, how do political elites seek to retain the hegemonic constructions of social and political life that are breached by the mass use of social media? Within the context of my larger research on media discourses in Turkey, I have noted three general ways that power centers react to social media as a platform of protests. First, governments devote resources to form their own teams to utilize cyberspace in reinstating their power. In the Turkish case, we can see that the imposition of state hegemony over the Internet is currently underway. After the Gezi Park protests in June of 2013, for instance, social media teams were created by the Turkish government. In September of 2013, the government of the Justice and Development Party (known as the Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi in Turkish (AKP), as it will be henceforth referred to) set out to recruit a social media team of 6,000 young techsavvy individuals to monitor and participate in online discussions (Albayrak and Parkinson 2013). The government-sponsored media team has been active especially on Twitter in the circulation of the government’s official take on issues heatedly debated by the public. Secondly, governments develop new policies restricting individuals’ use of the Internet in a variety of ways. Again in Turkey, a new piece of legislation which permits the Telecommunications Directorship (TIB) to take down websites without a court order is a case in point. According to legislation passed by the government and signed in February of 2014 by Abdullah Gül, who was president at the time, the TIB has the power to

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block a URL based on complaints filed for breach of “privacy of persons,” and that block is then to be carried out by Internet service providers within four hours. TIB then must seek a court order within twenty four hours after a URL is blocked and the webpage remains offline until the court issues a decision (Uras 2014). The recent bans on Twitter and YouTube were direct outcomes of this law. In addition to regulating Internet use through legislation and forming social media teams to monitor public discussions, political elites tend to produce discourses that criminalize the medium of popular mobilization with the aim of containing dissent and the flow of information via social media. Such discourses can be used to legitimize policies that restrict citizens’ rights to use social media. In this chapter, I focus on this third tendency of power centers, the discursive criminalization of the Internet, which has been observed frequently in the Turkish political context. For instance, while Twitter was a popular platform for obtaining information on the Gezi Park protests and organizing for action, the prime minister of Turkey at the time, Recep Tayyip Erdo÷an, claimed that it was “the worst menace to society.” Erdo÷an spoke on national television on June 2nd, when protestors took control of Gezi Park. He called the protesters “extremist fringe” and said: “There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society” (Letsch 2013). His reference to Twitter as “the worst menace to society” was by default based on Twitter’s transformative function of helping the masses organize protests on the streets and channel their discursive and actual reactions in opposition to the Erdo÷an government. Erdo÷an’s comments about Twitter are a reflection of a particular media ideology. That ideology has been defined as “the metalanguage that emphasises the technology or bodies through which we communicate” (Gershon 2010, 283). As Gershon notes, media ideologies are linked to language ideologies as well as semiotic ideologies (Gershon 2010). Here I argue that in order to unpack the complicated relationship between the discourse of resistance through media and the discursive reaction to media as alternative public spheres by hegemonic powers, we must analyze media ideologies that are enacted by power centers through language ideologues which are performed in discourse. What kinds of rhetorical mechanisms do power holders, in this case the Turkish president, utilize in order to accomplish the social and political goal of discrediting and criminalizing social media and the Internet? How are they put into operation? What do these rhetorical strategies mean for the relationships between politics, discourse and ideology? Based on an analysis of Tayyip

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Erdo÷an’s political rhetoric about the Internet and social media, I have noted that “the Internet and social media” surface as an ideological sign whose very definition is a battlefield for societal groups with differential social powers and diverse political ends (Volosinov 1973). Erdo÷an resignifies social media and the Internet in a particular way with the aim of reassigning new meanings to them. His media ideology also feeds back into a particular construction of society, history and politics. As Volosinov notes, “no cultural sign, once taken in and given meaning, remains in isolation: it becomes part of the unity of the verbally constituted consciousness” (1973, 15). If we are to understand the mechanisms of the signification of social media in Turkish political rhetoric, we need to carry out an analysis of that verbally constituted and discursively performed consciousness.

A semantic approach to political rhetoric on social media and the internet During the AKP’s campaign for local elections held in 2014, Tayyip Erdo÷an, prime minister at the time, delivered over a hundred speeches at gatherings and in parliament as well within the immediate context of the corruption scandals that broke out as the result of a police operation and tape recordings that circulated on social media.1 During his campaign for the presidency in August of 2014, Erdo÷an gave several other speeches. Once he was elected as president, Erdo÷an built upon his earlier speeches utilizing stylistic consistency and textual coherence. Despite the diverse subjects he discussed, from the equality of men and women to the discovery of Americas, Erdo÷an reiterated his take on the Internet, social media and the new legislative restrictions during several of these mediated performances. His election campaign speeches expanded on earlier proclamations about Twitter and Facebook which Erdo÷an made during the Gezi protests. On June 2nd in 2013, at the end of the first week of the Gezi protests, Erdo÷an bashed Twitter as a “menace” and on March 7th in 2014, Erdo÷an said, “we will not leave this nation at the mercy of YouTube and Facebook.” On March 21st, he said, “we won’t allow the people to be devoured by YouTube, Facebook or others.” Erdo÷an’s presidency speeches were harsher at times, although he always discredited the Internet and social media with similar discursive mechanisms. In a meeting with journalists held on October 3rd in 2014, Erdo÷an said that he is becoming increasingly anti-Internet. Erdo÷an’s rhetoric about social media and the Internet invites critical analysis. His words, signifying Twitter as a menace, for instance, have

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reverberated in the public sphere in one way or another. Psychological explanations have been offered to explain his utterances and especially their wide circulation and somewhat positive reception. Political and pragmatic readings have also gained currency. According to sociologist Gülay Türkmen-Derviúo÷lu, for instance, Erdo÷an’s drive to control the psychology of his electorate shapes his rhetoric, including his stance on social media. By polarizing his base against the base of the political opposition, he seeks to consolidate his existing votes against a backdrop of a shaky and tense political atmosphere, especially after the Gezi protests and the following corruption scandal in December of 2013 (TürkmenDerviúo÷lu 2014). Political speech acts are performances that constitute vantage points on culture. Based on a performative take on discourses (Bauman and Briggs 1990), I suggest a semantic take that is informed by cultural and ethnographic approaches to examine Erdo÷an’s rhetoric in its own terms by grounding it in cultural analysis. As Greg Urban notes, the ways in which cultural elements, in this case social media, are discursively framed reveal the metadiscursive practices that shape and are shaped by those discursive formulations (Urban 2001; Briggs 1996). Political discourse theorist Teun van Dijk writes that “discourses are in principle characterised by an overall meaning or macrostructure that formalises the theme or topic of the discourse as a whole… Without a semantic macrostructure, even a fragmentary one, there is no overall coherence and hence no point to the discourse” (1985, 107). An understanding of the local coherence of Erdo÷an’s social media rhetoric from this perspective is possible only through an analysis of the semantic macrostructure and an analysis of the interconnections between the local, immediate and global, hence macrostructural, contexts of discourse (van Dijk 1985). In the local and immediate context of Erdo÷an’s speeches referring to social media and the Internet, particular mechanisms of criminalization are noteworthy. These mechanisms, which I will illustrate below, also critically bridge particular utterances on the Internet with the global context of Erdo÷an’s political discourse. One of these mechanisms is what linguistic anthropologists Judith Irvine and Susan Gall call “fractal recursivity.” Fractal recursivity is the linguistic and rhetorical projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level (2000). As Irvine and Gal explain, with fractal recursivity “the dichotomising and partitioning process that was involved in some understood opposition recurs at other levels, creating either subcategories of each side of a contrast or super categories that include both sides and oppose them to something else” (2000, 38). Thus, fractal recursivity

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functions as a mechanism that ensures coherence both within and between the local and the global contexts of discourse in addition to its function to multiply binary oppositions in discourses. For fractal recursivity to work and maintain itself as a rhetorical strategy, it needs to exist with another semiotic process, iconization. Irvine and Gal explain: Iconization involves a transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked. Linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social a social group’s inherent nature or essence. This process entails the attribution of cause and immediate necessity to a connection that may be only historical, contingent, or conventional. The iconicity of the ideological representation reinforces the implication of necessity. By picking out qualities supposedly shared by the social image and the linguistic image, the ideological representation—itself a sign— binds them together in a linkage that appears to be inherent. (2000, 37-38)

Iconization thus functions to create dichotomies and polarization between groups, and fractal recursivity helps multiply and maintain the dichotomies between groups in the longer run. Another semiotic process, which Irvine and Gal call erasure, is both an outcome and generator of these processes. Erasure is “the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons and activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible. Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away” (Irvine and Gal 2000, 38). In his rhetorical performances, Erdo÷an skillfully uses unique techniques of iconization to create a partisan polarization between his supporters and his opponents. He then transposes this polarization onto other areas through fractal recursivity. One of these techniques of partisan polarization is self-victimization followed by the construction of the AKP government as an icon of the national will (known in Turkish as milli irade). Through the victimization and iconization of the AKP, Erdo÷an is thus able to frame any attack, intervention or question posed about the AKP government’s actions as attacks on the nation itself. By virtue of this formulation, social media websites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, which constituted an important public sphere for debates about the corruption scandal and for the circulation of information during the media blackout at the time of the Gezi protests, appear to be the means of an attack on the AKP government and, by default, on the national will. Discursive criminalization of social media is thus both a prerequisite and

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an outcome of the local semantic structure which is based on maintaining this state of fractal recursivity built upon and through the process of iconization. To illustrate this, below I provide an analysis of the semantic dynamics of Erdo÷an’s verbal performance during a speech he gave on February 25th in 2014 in parliament. Although not unique, that particular speech is especially rich for analysis; Erdo÷an delivered it the day after alleged recordings implicating him in a wide-reaching bribery scandal were released online. On the recorded conversation, the prime minister appeared to instruct his son Bilal to hide several million Euro at Bilal’s residence. The alleged conversation was recorded on December 17th 2014, the same day a corruption operation was launched against government officers and businessmen. In the following days, several other tapes of conversations between the prime minister, journalists and media bosses circulated widely on social media and created further indignation. The local elections nearing in March had the potential to be a turning point for Turkish political life, and for that reason the particular speech Erdo÷an gave that day was a critical performance. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo÷an opened his speech by referring to the anniversaries of three events. First, he commemorated the Hocal massacre, the killing of ethnic Azeris by Armenian armed forces on February 26th, 1992 during the Nagorno-Karabakh war: My dear parliamentarian friends, tomorrow, which is February 26, will be the 22nd anniversary of the Hocal massacre. On February 26th in 1992 Armenian forces unfortunately undertook inhumane massacres in Karabakh. Among those massacres, the biggest and the most tragic occurred in the town of Hocal. 613 people, including 106 women and 83 children, were martyred. Those who died in Karabakh, and especially those who died during the Hocal Massacre, are our children just as much as they are Azerbaijan’s children. We carry the great pain our Azeri brothers are experiencing in our hearts and commemorate our martyrs who were massacred in Hocal with God’s compassion one more time.

Then he noted the anniversary of the death of Necmettin Erbakan, the president of the Islamist Welfare Party and the ideological predecessor of Erdo÷an’s AKP: My dear friends, in two days on the 27th of February there will be another sad anniversary. One of our ex-prime ministers, a valued man of state, a valued politician, and a scientist, Prof. Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, passed away three years ago on the 27th of February. On the third anniversary of

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Lastly, he talked about the indirect military intervention of February 28th, 1997, also known as “the postmodern coup,” which forced Prime Minister Erbakan to step down: My dear parliamentarian friends and dear guests, this week on Friday will be the 17th anniversary of a dark day, an unfortunate date and a black stain on the history of our democracy: the February 28th intervention. It will be remembered as a coup in the post-modern style and one targeting not only elected politicians and politics but also our citizens, officers and business life. The intervention of the February 28th will never be eradicated from our memories, especially as it was an intervention that prepared the ground for the economic crisis in 2001 in an attempt to scavenge orphans’ rights, cast a shadow over the future of the nation and squander Turkey’s gains.

Positioning his performance within the arc of this historical precedent laden with ethnic national concerns (the issue of Karabakh against a backdrop of the Armenian issue in Turkey) and political Islamist reference points (with the historical symbol of Erbakan Hodja for the Islamist political movement in Turkey), Erdo÷an posited and immediately identified himself within a framework of self-victimization. Holding to this framework of victimization throughout his speech, he posited the February 28th “postmodern coup” as an event that directly affected himself as a political victim. The deliberate process of fractal recursivity between Armenians and Azeris in the context of Karabakh, between the enactors of the postmodern coup and the politicians who were the targets of the coup, and between the enemies of the nation and the nation itself, is notable. Self-victimization, on the other hand, helps the performer to put the semiotic process of iconization into operation alongside fractal recursivity. In 1997, Erdo÷an was the Istanbul metropolitan mayor. In the wake of a military intervention against the coalition government, he was condemned to ten months in prison based on a poem he read at a gathering in Siirt which glorified Islamist militarism. When he was released from prison in 1999, Erdo÷an and several of his colleagues began efforts to launch the Justice and Development Party (AKP) from within and against the Welfare Party of Erbakan. The nascent organization appeared to represent the younger and modernized face of the Islamist political movement in Turkey (Çnar 2008). Erdo÷an’s imprisonment served as a reference point in consolidating liberal support for the organization. When the AKP came to national power in 2001, his time served in prison progressively turned into

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a pragmatic tool of self-victimization to be used against the construction of the secular state which has historically denied people the right of free expression (Cizre 2008; Cizre-Sakallo÷lu and Çnar 2003; Hale and Özbudun 2009).2 In several of his speeches Erdo÷an mentioned the significant date of February 28 and it appears as a rhetorical repetition that is strategically put into operation. In the parliamentary speech under discussion, Erdo÷an signified the coup as an intervention targeting not only elected politicians but the nation as a whole when he said, “the coup was to scavenge orphans’ rights [and] cast a shadow over the future of the nation.” The interchangeability between elected politicians and the nation itself sits at the core of the construct of the national will, or what we could call the sacred state. The ideal of the nation ruling itself was interrupted not only by military coups but also because the elected parties, in Erdo÷an’s words, “did not share their power with the nation itself but with elites, gangs, certain media, certain members of civil society and certain figures in the business world.” The AKP put an end to discussions of who would run the country: “With the AKP, the nation has come to power. With the AKP, the nation has seized control. And no one can take this will and power from the nation.” Returning for a moment to Irvine and Gal’s discussion of semiotic processes, we can see that Erdo÷an is performatively able to construct an iconic relationship between his electoral power and the nation as a whole by binding them together “in a linkage that appears to be inherent” (Irvine and Gal 2000, 38). As Teun van Dijk notes, in political argumentation it all comes down to the ideological balance of positive self-representation and the negative representation of others (van Dijk 1995). The key to successful political rhetoric is the ability to maintain that ideological stance by constructing a coherent semantic world. Holding to such semantic coherence, a metapragmatic parallelism between February 28th and the political context, which was marked by the Gezi protests and the emerging corruption scandal, animated Erdo÷an’s political performance. This parallelism was manifested through a code of honor and shame, of losing and saving face. Erdo÷an said: “Those who inflicted this cruelty on our nation on February 28th should not be able to walk publicly on the street today. Looking in the mirror they should see their faces reddened by shame… Yet these circles started to humiliate the national will once again. These circles gave their support to the attempted coup on December 17. The ones who want to seize power from the nation with this plot are shameless.” Based on earlier utterances, the iconization of the AKP government as the nation was put into operation when Erdo÷an stated, “What they tried to

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do on December 17th is not attack Tayyip Erdo÷an, not attack the AKP. This was an attack on the nation itself, on the national will, and on national values and institutions…” The AKP government thus becomes the protector of itself and by default of the nation: The plot of December 17th was a plot to steal the will of the nation. Those who could not share power with us during the twelve years of the AKP era wanted to steal power from us with this last move. At that point, we said stop. At that point, we prevented this from happening.

Here Erdo÷an was referring to the Gülen movement, which indeed has been an illegal and unofficial shareholder in the AKP power base for the last decade. The alliance between the Gülen movement and the government was disturbed when the government took steps to outlaw private schools, called dersanes, in 2012. Then came Gülen’s response in the form of the anti-corruption operations and the leaking of tapes. Yet in his performance Erdo÷an did not put emphasis on the name of Gülen but highlighted a malign agency composed of a variety of constituents which were attacking the AKP government and thus the nation itself. He said: “Look, I will say this openly here; the fact that the nation is strong by virtue of the AKP’s power is quite disturbing not only to one group but to quite a few.” Here, the tense opposition between the Gülen movement and the AKP government is transposed by the performer onto another dichotomy between “the nation” which has power by virtue of the AKP’s strength and “them,” the ones who are disturbed by this fact, through a poetic utilization of the semiotic processes of iconization and fractal recursivity. The fact that the AKP was allied with Gülen for more than a decade until the alliance broke down is simply eradicated from the semantic structure. But who are “those people” that attack the nation “with cruelty” by cooperating with the “shameless”? As a continuation of fractal recursivity, which is the dichotomizing process that transposes an existing opposition onto other levels to create either recurring subcategories of each side of a contrasting or super-category that includes both sides and opposes them to something else (Irvine and Gal 2000), the answer comes as a list of lobbies, which, in Erdo÷an’s words, were going after the national will, including the “interest lobby.” He argued that such a lobby would derail the economy of the country, and an international lobby would then condemn and criticize Turkey on various points: The interest lobby both inside and outside was disturbed because they could not make profits as they had before. The terror lobby and the war

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lobby were disturbed because they were losing profits as terror comes to end. The CHP and MHP were disturbed because the nation did not pamper them and they could never win an election. Capital was disturbed because it could not benefit from its interests like before, could not form cartels like before, and could not act as if it is a power without an alternative in Turkey. The media was disturbed because they could not lead Turkey along with headlines.

Next in line in Erdo÷an’s list of lobbies was a “preacher lobby” which would attack the nation through the country’s judiciary organs. The implication was that the preacher lobby is in fact the Gülen congregation: There is also the preacher lobby which is disturbed because the nation is now in power. The preacher lobby could not organize things as it wished, and it penetrated the state like a tumor, trying to capture the state, but its conspiracies, treacheries and ugly scenarios have been uncloaked, and it is disturbed by the nation’s power.

The fact that there was a functional alliance between what Erdo÷an called the preacher lobby and the government was eradicated through the semiotic process of erasure in this part of the performance. Following the list of lobbies, Erdo÷an skillfully harnessed fractal recursivity and iconization one more time when he uttered the following: On December 17th all the disturbed people came together; the lobby of those who the nation does not spoil and the lobby of the ones who are always losing [in elections]; they came together once more and became allied on December 17th. Now they say they will govern the country. And we tell them no; the nation will govern the country.

Within the immediate context of the corruption scandal, the attack on the nation and national will was detailed as such: My brothers, as you know last night they served up a piece of theatre which they constructed and dubbed themselves. Look, I have called on them for weeks now; I have told them to bring on whatever they have. But they go and do some montage and serve things up ingloriously. Well, you might make things up. But there should be a sense of morality, of decency, even when making things up… They came up with a perfect scenario. The preacher lobby would lash out with the legal system and security. The media lobby would hit headlines and TV shows. The robot lobby on social media would send out tweets. And they would tell them to increase the tweets. The interest lobby would make a fuss about the economy going

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Conclusion A few months before that speech, Erdo÷an had referred to Twitter as “the worst societal menace” during a TV interview within the context of the Gezi protests. Without a semantic analysis of his verbal performance, the dichotomy might appear to be between an unlikely opposition: social media and society. Yet the dichotomy is being established as a recurring partisan polarization between AKP and non-AKP walks of life. While the AKP appears to be the icon of the national will in that binary opposition, other walks of life remain as the total sum of several lobbies including the robot lobby, porn lobby, interest lobby, preacher lobby, media lobby and all kinds of international lobbies. These lobbies seem to be invisible or difficult to locate, yet eager to do harm, divide the country and devour the nation’s will. So when the Erdo÷an says, “We won’t allow the people to be devoured by YouTube, Facebook, or others,” his utterance functions metapragmatically to maintain this polarization based on contrastive meanings. I started this chapter by questioning how political powers seek to retain hegemonic constructions of social and political life that are breached by the mass use of social media. I argued that governments tend to produce discourses that criminalize the medium of popular mobilization to contain increasing dissent and the free-flow of information via social media. By taking political speech acts as performances, I offered a preliminary semantic reading of Erdo÷an’s rhetoric and noted the particular mechanisms of criminalization he uses. One of these mechanisms is “fractal recursivity.” By virtue of partisan polarization maintained by fractal recursivity, social media websites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are presented as media used in attacks on the AKP government and by default on the national will. While an analysis of the rhetorical tools used by the Turkish president to criminalize the Internet is revealing, there is a more important task at hand: deciphering the interconnections between rhetoric and the enabling capacity of discourses. Discourses are the means used to normalize a state of affairs which paves the way for judicial/parliamentary/penal decisions that have overt physical consequences. During the Gezi protests, social media constituted a public haven beyond the reach of the state’s repressive censorship apparatuses. Twitter was immediately demonized by the Turkish prime minister as “a scourge.” In parallel with this, hundreds of

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people have been taken to court for their online activities. A few months later, in the wake of the corruption scandal that erupted with the online release of recordings implicating the prime minister directly, the prime minister referred to the Internet as “a nest of lobbies.” Soon after, a bill restricting online space was passed in parliament. In the speech under discussion, Erdo÷an said: Why did we bring the Internet law before you? That’s why. Why did we bring the new law about the National Intelligence Service to you? That’s why. If it were not for them, there would not be this regulation.

On March 23rd, during his election campaign Erdo÷an stated, “We now have a court order. We will eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” Within hours, access to Twitter was blocked in Turkey. As Volosinov notes, “no cultural sign, once taken in and given meaning, remains in isolation: it becomes part of the unity of the verbally constituted consciousness” (1973). The ways by which cultural elements, social media in this instance, are discursively framed reveal the metadiscursive practices that shape and are shaped by those discursive formulations (Urban 2001).

Notes 1

The corruption operation that was allegedly launched by the Gülen movement on the 17th of December in 2013 targeted businessmen as well as politicians and their families. Three top ministers whose sons were implicated resigned in the following days. One of them said that Erdo÷an should step down as well (Arango 2013). Another police operation occurred on the 25th of December. The tapes of alleged recorded conversations implicating Erdo÷an and his family in the corruption scandal appeared in social media sites in February of 2014. In one of these recordings, Erdo÷an instructed his son Bilal to get rid of millions of lira that were at their home. In the months following the scandal, the investigation was discredited, arrestees were released, and the case went cold; the only work concerning the case was carried out by a parliamentary research team, but their investigation was legally bound to remain unpublicized in the press. The Gülen operation has gradually been purged from the state. 2 For an account of vernacular politics and the emergent Islamist movement in Turkey, see White, Jenny (2002), Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. University of Washington Press.

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Works Cited Albayrak, A. and Parkinson, J. 2013. Turkey's government forms 6,000member social media team. Wall Street Journal, September 16. Accessed on March 15 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873235270045790791 51479634742 Arango, T. 2013. Corruption scandal is edging near Turkish premier. New York Times, December 25. Accessed on March 15 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/world/europe/turkish-cabinetmembers-resign.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19: 59-88. Briggs, C. 1996. The politics of discursive authority in research on the “invention of tradition.” Cultural Anthropology, 11 (4): 435-69. Cizre-Sakallo÷lu, Ü. and Menderes, Ç. 2003. 2002: Kemalism, Islamism, and politics in the light of the February 28 process. South Atlantic Quarterly, 102 (2/3): 309-332. Cizre, Ü. 2008. Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of Justice and Development Party. New York and London: Routledge. Hale, W. and Özbudun, E. 2010. Islamism, Democracy, and Liberalism in Turkey: The Case of AKP. New York and London: Routledge. Gershon, I. 2010. Media ideologies: An introduction. Linguistic Anthropology, 20 (2): 283-293. Ginsburg, F. 1998. Instituting the unruly: Charting the future for visual anthropology. Ethnos, 63 (2): 173-201. —. 2002. Mediating culture: Indigenous media, ethnographic film, and production of identity. In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, eds. K. Askew and R. Wilk. New York: Columbia University Press. Gitlin, T. 2012. Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirschkind, C. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Irvine, J. and Gal, S. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, ed. P. V. Kroskrity. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Letsch, C. 2013. Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM. The Guardian, June 3. Accessed on March 15 2014,

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/02/turkish-protesterscontrol-istanbul-square Sreberny-Mohammadi, A. and Mohammadi, A. 1994. Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Uras, U. 2014. The new Internet law in Turkey sparks outrage. AlJazeera, February 25. Accessed on March 15 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/02/new-internet-lawturkey-sparks-outrage-201422312144687859.html Urban, G. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Turner, T. 1991. The social dynamics of video media in an indigenous society: The cultural meaning and personal politics video-making in kayapo communities. Visual Anthropology Review, 7 (2): 68-76. Türkmen-Derviúo÷lu, G. 2014. Yolsuzluk iddialar AKP seçmenini neden etkilemedi? T24, April 7. Accessed on March 15 2014 http://t24.com.tr/haber/yolsuzluk-iddialari-akp-secmenini-nedenetkilemedi,255368 van Dijk, T. 1985. Semantic discourse analysis. In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Teun A. van Dijk, vol. 2, 103-136. London: Academic Press. Whiteman, D. 2004. Out of the theaters and into the streets: A coalition model of the political impact of documentary film and video. Political Communication, 21 (1): 651-69. Volosinov, V. 1973 [1929]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Boston: Harvard University Press. Yldrm, U. and Navarro-Yashin, Y. 2013. An impromptu uprising: Ethnographic reflections on the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. In Cultural Anthropology, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/391-animpromptu-uprising-ethnographic-reflections-on-the-gezi-parkprotests-in-turkey

CHAPTER SIXTEEN INTERNET SURVEILLANCE AND CENSORSHIP: DISCOURSES OF SECURITY, PRIVACY AND MORALITY øREM øNCEOöLU

Introduction In this chapter I will examine the discourses surrounding Internet technologies, which have become a regular part of our everyday lives. This study aims to provoke thought on the ways in which the issues of security and individual rights and freedoms have been invoked in attempts to control the Internet and its users. The Internet is a rather controversial technology, and one aspect of that controversy is the fact that it could be considered a work in progress. It has been argued that the Internet creates an empowering space and tool for political communications, especially as regards Web 2.0 in relation to the anti-authoritarian uprisings of the last few years, or even electoral campaigns in the “developed world.” On the other hand, sceptics have also pointed out that the Internet has become an extension of global capitalism in all its forms, transforming that space into a massive shopping mall in which consumer patterns are continuously collected as big data. A third approach, which is more cautious in nature, posits that the Internet abounds with opportunities for an uncontrollable flow of information, and this is a matter of concern for state security discourses which argue that the Internet facilitates illegal activities, including terrorism. Arguments about the nature, benefits and limitations of the Internet are based on the history of the creation of this inseparable feature of our generation. The narrative of the history of Internet technology and its usage has been shaped and re-shaped in relation to the hegemonic discourses of the era in question. Therefore, in order to discuss the opportunities as well as limitations of the Internet today, it will be useful

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to trace the historical context in which the concepts of the Internet and security have come to the surface as related issues. In other words, we must bear in mind the discourses embedded within Internet technologies as they continually shape how we engage with it.

The history of the Internet as a tool for national security The Internet, which is in fact a rather chaotic communication system, was indeed revolutionary in terms of national defense. The concept of decentralized packet-switching networks was experimented on by RAND in collaboration with MIT and UCLA for a number of years until the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) decided to fund a large, ambitious project. ARPA initially introduced ARPANET “as a way of sharing expensive computer time” (Curran, Fenton, and Freedman 2012, 36). The nodes of the network were to be (high-speed) super-computers. These rare and expensive machines needed continuous networking to enable advanced research and development projects. ARPANET – arguably the first iteration of the Internet – was born with the connection of four nodes. More or less half a century ago, the RAND Corporation, the leading Cold War think-tank in the US, faced a strategic problem: they needed to find a way to enable a contingency plan for communications in the case of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. A command and control network linked from base to base would be needed in the face of such an attack. However, the researchers were well aware that such a control center would be the first target of an enemy attack. RAND came up with a daring solution to this challenge, which was made public in 1964. First of all, the network would not be centrally organized, and furthermore it would be designed to operate in segments. The basic principle of the solution was based on the assumption that the network could be susceptible to problems at any given time, and hence it was designed to be able to transcend its own unreliability. Each node of the network would have equal status with its own authority to create, send and receive messages, which would be divided into packets. The packets would then take any route possible until they reached their destination. In this way, if pieces of the network were destroyed, the packets would still be able to travel through the surviving nodes, and hence the network was practically indestructible. Along with the intended outcome, the ARPANET project also achieved another outcome, as computer networking would facilitate “the development of sophisticated military command and control systems capable of

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withstanding a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union” (Curran, Fenton, and Freedman 2012, 36). The true nature of this technology, however, eluded the people engaged in coming up with plans of defense. They likely did not imagine that this technology would one day be used as a means to disseminate civil information, including that which could be used against the state, to such widespread audiences. Subversive uses of the Internet can be traced back to the initial stages of its use. The four computers enabled researchers and scientists to share each other’s computer facilities over long distances. However, interestingly enough the highly skilled and privileged users of ARPANET transformed the computer network into a sharing platform for personal and group messages. Despite the fact that many mailing lists (such as Sci-Fi SF Lovers) had nothing to do with the work at hand and were condemned by computer administrators, they continued to be used. This was probably the first case of online disobedience in which the predefined uses of the Internet were transgressed. Until the 1980s, networked computers were very much the private property of a privileged few. But advances in technology made it possible for numerous social groups to come into possession of powerful computers. And when a sophisticated network standard replaced the NCP (network control protocol) of ARPA, the TCP/IP (Transmission control protocol/internet protocol) of the Internet was democratized. Curran et al. (2012) argue that the counterculture of the 1980s influenced the uses of the Internet for the good of humanity. The ethos of communitarianism aspiring for global togetherness and sub-cultures hoping to transform society by passing the power on to the people led to optimistic experiments on Internet technologies. The creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN was a milestone for the Internet as we know it. Berners-Lee, who came from a welfare-based background, introduced this innovation which democratized the Internet with the intention of opening up access to public service and enabling communication among people. Created in 1991, the world wide web code was released for public use in 1993 (Ryan 2010; Curran, Fenton, and Freedman 2012). As Sterling (1992) states, the Internet can be defined as a platform that resists institutionalization, and indeed it is based on the notion of public property. The new standard TCP/IP was public domain, and hence the technology of the Internet was decentralized and rather anarchic; as a result, it would be rather difficult to stop ordinary people from linking up at one node or another. The commercialization of cyberspace was another influential factor that shaped the trajectory of the Internet. Following the removal of bans on the

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commercial use of the Internet in 1991, browsers and search engines were introduced, and in this way the discourses of the era already promoted consumerism as an aspect of democracy and freedom. For that reason, critical evaluations of the commercialization of the net were not carried out. Quickly, the number of users increased. The nodes of the growing network of networks (the Internet) were assorted according to their functions. The initial six domains were .gov, .mil, .edu, .com, .org and .net. Those domains represented acknowledgement of a variety of uses for the Internet. In fact, the Internet rapidly initiated so many commercial, educational and recreational uses that until the turn of the twenty-first century, the subversive nature of this technology far outweighed any military applications. However, following 9/11 national security once again became the priority, which prompted increased state surveillance and the uses of new technologies for military purposes. Today, the ubiquity of the Internet has turned it into a powerful tool for the new kinds of wars being fought. Military uses of the Internet based on the discourse of national security can be broadly categorized as offensive- and surveillance-based uses. Digital weapons such as the Stuxnet virus, which halted progress at an Iranian nuclear power plant, represent strictly offensive uses of the Internet. Such technologies have the potential for major physical impacts merely through cyber-wars. The use of Internet technologies for surveillance has been a debatable issue especially in countries like the US and UK which promote individual rights and liberties as the principles of democracy. Therefore, surveillance, even for reasons of national security, is a contested issue. However, when Snowden leaked information regarding the NSA’s activities, it became obvious that surveillance is not as innocent as it sounds. As Boghosian (2013) points out, both corporations and governments carry out surveillance and militaristic counterintelligence operations not just on enemies but on their own citizens. The main mission of the NSA was supposed to be the defense of American communication networks but this goal was sidelined after 9/11, as compiling metadata on as many people as possible became top priority. Since terrorists and guerillas are by their nature secretive and elusive, they are difficult to identify so NSA wiretapping projects were brought into full swing across the world. Using their privileged position as an American government agency, the NSA installed numerous network taps between data centers, and the extent of that surveillance is still not fully known. Although the nature and the extent of their operations have come to light to a certain degree, we still don’t know how they used the data they collected.

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Surveillance and data-mining for commercial purposes It would not be an exaggeration to say that the commercialization of the Internet has helped bring about a new world order. Initially, that was the main drive behind the Internet as it rapidly became more widespread and affordable. With the adoption of standard protocols for credit card transactions in 1997, the Internet was transformed into an online mall where trade constituted a determining factor for many people going online (Feenberg and Friesen 2011; Curran, Fenton, and Freedman 2012). The commercial Internet was an ideal solution in terms of customized commerce. It also drove companies to monitor online patterns and the tendencies of their clientele so they could engage in targeted marketing. Lessig (2006, 219) states that according to reports published in 1998, about 92 percent of commercial websites collected personal data from web users, and this data was later sorted and used to classify and profile users. This supports the argument that the dominant activity of commercial websites is data collection. As Curran et al. argue, data-mining through digital surveillance of websites is a more restricted commercial technology of surveillance in comparison to online advertising and the imposition of property rights on computer software. When the Internet was in the hands of a few privileged computer experts and when it was a public good, access and usage were limited. At the same time, however, optimism ran high. Subsequent commercialization provided many more user-friendly tools for individuals as they went online, and laptops, tablets and mobile phones are now traveling with us everywhere we go. Hence, we are almost uninterruptedly connected and being online is a natural state of being for many of us. It is almost automatically done, and takes little to no effort. However, this also results in a situation in which many users of the Internet are less aware of the implications of constantly being online, as the convenience of the technology no longer requires informed consumers. The danger of this convenience is that consumers/citizens are more vulnerable to the manipulation of governments, corporations and hackers. There are times, however, when ordinary citizens need to take more control of their connectivity. We have seen cases of authoritarian threats when citizens learn about means of counter-surveillance and utilize the opportunities afforded by the Internet as a tool of global communication and networking. On that issue, I would like to focus on the case of Turkey and discuss the means of Internet censorship and surveillance that have been used, especially after 2011, and discuss the counter-culture that has arisen to challenge these.

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Governmental control of the internet and public resistance According to a Freedom House report, by 2011 the government of Turkey had taken “considerable legal steps to limit access to certain information, including some political content” (Sanja Kelly, Sarah Cook, and Mai Truong 2012, 525) and the government controlled and maintained a content filtering system. In addition, Turkey has been listed in Google Transparency Reports as a top requester for content removal. This attitude towards Internet regulation and censorship goes hand in hand with the alarming state of affairs as regards freedom of expression and the press in the country. Turkey was ranked 154th in a list of 180 countries in the World Freedom of Press Index of 2014, and with around sixty journalists in detention by the end of 2013, unsurprisingly Turkey gained the reputation of “being one of the world’s biggest prisons for media personnel” (Reporters Without Borders, 2014, 22). There are two sets of laws that place restrictions on the content of online material in Turkey. Law No. 5651 on the “Regulation of Publications on the Internet and the Suppression of Crimes Committed by Means of Such Publications,” which is based on moral judgments, is concerned with the content of websites on child pornography or drug sales and also more subjective issues like insulting Ataturk or the propaganda of terrorist groups. Law No. 5846, on the other hand, is an intellectual property rights (IPR) law, and it regulates issues concerning copyright, piracy and so on. Although the IPR law is not specific to online content, the Internet has been powerfully affected by this law. The two authorities in charge of monitoring compliance with these laws are the Telecommunication Directorate (TIB) and the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK); however, it is also possible for public prosecutors and individuals to file cases based on these laws. Despite the fact that the authorities have never announced any official figures, ...according to the EU’s latest report on Turkey’s Progress in Access to the European Union, 32,000 websites are estimated to have been censored for various reasons based on these laws. According to Engelli Web (Impaired Web), a civil initiative seeking to determine the number of restricted websites and the content therein, more than 50,000 websites have been blocked in Turkey. Of these, only 4.1% have been blocked via court decisions, whereas 91.4% have been blocked directly by The Telecommunication Directorate. (Tavmen 2014: 6)

Altintas (2014, 250) reports that the situation in Turkey is becoming even more alarming, as she notes that the debate on protecting citizens

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from excessive government surveillance only takes place “among civil society groups, rights organizations and academics.” The laws on Internet restrictions were passed overnight in parliament without public debate. In February of 2014, Law No. 5651 was extended to give full authority to the TIB, and the president of the TIB can restrict access to any website s/he sees as “interfering with privacy” without a court order (Tavmen 2014, 7). Even before the aforementioned law regulating the Internet became effective in November 2007, there was the infamous case of the YouTube ban which was introduced based on the law on crimes against Ataturk. The three-year ban was bypassed by some citizens in Turkey by changing DNS servers. This ban of the popular site raised consciousness about Internet rights, especially among the younger generation. When the Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK) decided to establish a countrywide mandatory filtering system which was argued to aim for the protection of citizens from “harmful content,” which includes but is not limited to sexually explicit content and terrorist propaganda, public dissent became more visible and resulted in street demonstrations in May of 2011 (Sanja Kelly, Sarah Cook, and Mai Truong 2012). The most salient example of online censorship occurred during and after the Gezi Protests of 2013. The Gezi Protests, one of the largest popular uprisings ever to occur in Turkey, brought censorship, surveillance and criminalization of Internet-based activities to new levels. Firstly, the mainstream media took a stance of self-censorship regarding the events, and none of the major news providers broadcast the protests which were attended by thousands of people despite the violent police crackdowns that were occurring around the country. During that period, the main source of information for many people was social media, especially the micro-blogging site Twitter (Inceoglu 2014). Shortly after, the prime minister at the time, Erdogan, referred to Twitter “a menace to society.”1 Already prepared for the worst-case scenario of censorship, the residents of Turkey started implementing newly discovered means of bypassing censorship and protecting their identities. Virtual Private Network (VPN) services were extremely popular in June of 2013 in Turkey, and the CEO of Anchorfree, a company which provides HotspotShield, one of the most popular VPN software platforms, reported 120,000 downloads of the software over a single weekend during the protests (Acohido 2014). Gorodyanksy also has pointed out that the company did not need to carry out any marketing strategies, as people in need of protection and tools to by-pass censorship will find the products they need. On the other hand, another VPN provider, TunnelBear, provided free unlimited service to

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users in Turkey during Gezi Resistance and then introduced a special discount of 60% for them to promote free Internet access (TunnelBear 2014).

The Virtual Private Network (VPN) and the discourses of privacy and uncensored Internet It is clear that both of these companies are selling their services in a market that is rapidly growing. The Virtual Private Network (VPN) was initially a service for company networks that offered a secure means of communication and a convenient connection to an organization’s centrally secured network from any other point. A VPN is the extension of a private network that encompasses links across shared or public networks like the Internet. In more technical terms, VPN connections allow users working at home or on the road to connect in a secure fashion to a remote corporate server using the routing infrastructure provided by a public internetwork (such as the Internet). From the user’s perspective, the VPN connection is a point-to-point connection between the user’s computer and a corporate server. The nature of the intermediate internetwork is irrelevant to the user because it appears as if the data is being sent over a dedicated private link. (Microsoft TechNet 2001)

However, as concerns over privacy have increased in the last decade, VPN services have become popular among individuals as well. In fact, VPN provider TunnelBear, which was founded in 2011, has pointed out that their mission is to provide VPN connections to everyday individuals. The company website states, “TunnelBear wants to bring the benefits of VPN to everyone with its incredibly simple applications for PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices. We think the internet is a much better place when everyone can browse privately, and browse the same internet as everyone else” (TunnelBear 2012). Moreover, HotspotShield, the world’s most popular free VPN provider, argues that their software “addresses an increasingly relevant need for users around the world – maintaining privacy, security, and freedom online” (HotspotShield 2014). VPN services are promoted to provide: i) security by encrypting communications to protect personal information over public and private Wi-Fi networks, as security holes make it possible for hackers to retrieve data concerning passwords, usernames, bank accounts and other confidential data; ii) protection by hiding the public IP address of the user to shield against malicious attacks; iii) privacy by hiding IP addresses

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from hackers as well as commercial data collection tools; and, iv) accessibility by tunneling web access via more liberal geographical locations so that blocks on certain websites can be circumvented as long as the Internet is still accessible (HotspotShield 2012; OpenVPN 2014). It is clear from the statements of service provider companies that shielding online privacy, expressing ideas anonymously and protecting oneself against cyber-thefts have been a major concern for the citizens of relatively liberal, capitalist countries such as the UK and US. On the other hand, the need to bypass authoritarian restrictions on the use of the Internet has become an increasing concern for the citizens of countries such as Turkey which do not have such strong liberal democracies. In this way, various categories of concern that have arisen the digital era have provided opportunities for companies providing VPN services. On the one hand, in countries deemed to be democratic such companies can promote privacy and individual protection against hackers without mentioning government surveillance and publically be opposed to cyber-crimes, and on the other hand they can encourage liberties and support civil disobedience against authoritarian governments by providing access to “unlawful” sites. This paradox became apparent in the marketing strategy of HotspotShield published on the company’s website in 2014. The website offered services in various languages, including English and Turkish. In the English version of the page, there is an image of an individual with a laptop sitting comfortably as she surfs the Internet (Figure 16-1). The accompanying message reveals that the emphasis of the service is on individual privacy and the protection of private data in public areas. Conversely, the Turkish version of the website offers a different image and emphasis (Figure 16-2). This image is composed of silhouettes of people, some of whom are protected by a shield. In this image, the individuals themselves are not of primary importance; in fact, the image is suggestive of a crowd taking part in a protest. In accordance with this image, the explanation of the service suggests protection during civil disobedience; it states “Yasakl Sitelere Giriú. IP Gizleme” (“Access to banned sites. Hiding IP”), affirming that the service is to be used to bypass governmental blocks and online censorship as well as offer anonymity for those could be in danger of arrest otherwise.

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Fig. 16-1. Ann image of an inndividual with a laptop sitting ccomfortably as she surfs the Internet hhttp://www.hotspotshield.com/ [Accessed Mayy 2014]

Fig. 16-1. Thee Turkish version of the websiite offering a diifferent image and a emphasis httpp://www.hotspootshield.com/tr/ [Accessed Mayy 2014]

Conclu usion The histoory of the Intternet represen nts a narrativee of technolog gy that is constantly ree-constructed and is in factt appropriatedd into various situations s by users in w ways that trannscend its initiial purpose. T This is an extreeme story of re-approppriating technnology for vaarious requireements and situations. s Initially devveloped as a computer c sharring system am mong scientissts during research intto defense strrategies durin ng the Cold War era, it was then transformedd into a platfoorm for the public p good iin which the ethos of sharing infoormation and communicatin c ng with the reest of humanitty evoked optimism. Foollowing the privatization p and a commerciaalization of cy yberspace, it took a diifferent turn. The liberal communicatio c on environment of the Internet beccame vulnerabble after 9/11,, which the ggovernments of o the US

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and its allies used to justify the suspension of individual rights to privacy. Intelligence services were given broad-sweeping authority to monitor citizens and collect data. In addition to governmental surveillance, ongoing data-mining is used for commercial purposes. All these issues together are alarming for citizens of the modern digital age who have often been promised more democracy and liberty. Surrounded by cyber-thieves, corporations and governments, individuals in the digital era have become distressed by fears of surveillance. The issue of being monitored by state authorities without justification is a crucial issue, but in relatively liberal countries people seem more willing to opt out of their liberties due to concerns for national security (Lessig 2006). On the other hand, in cases like Turkey, discourses of Internet control and restrictions are justified through morality. The argument is that citizens must be protected by the authorities against immoral and provocative hazards that come from outside the country. On the other hand, as indicated by the NSA surveillance scandal, the line between protecting national security and suspending individual rights and liberties is such a fine one. The GIS Watch report states that ...internet users and the global public are increasingly more sensitive about unchecked government surveillance, particularly following Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance – which was not a secret for many concerned with surveillance prior to Snowden’s leaks. Now world governments seem to be finding ever more intrusive ways of intercepting communications. Globally, we can forget about privacy. (Altintas 2014, 250).

In situations like this, a culture of individualism and consumerism offers a solution for those who care and can afford it. VPN services are a tool that was conceived within such a cultural heritage, and personal security on the Internet has been so heavily emphasized that it is not even seen as a problem that needs to be dealt with in a collective manner. However, when authoritarian governments block certain websites, more radical solutions may arise as people collectively stake out their demands. In this situation, it seems that commercial services provided for individual solutions may merely sustain the underlying cause of the issue at hand.

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Notes 1

“Erdo÷an: Twitter denilen bir bela var” 2 June 2013 http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/id/25446690/ [accessed November 2014]

Works Cited Acohido B. 2014. Turkey citizens use VPN to air grievances. Accessed December 8. http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/06/05/turkeyprotestors-vpn-social-unrest/2390977/. Altintas, E.B. 2014. Turkey: So you want a surveillance state? In GIS Watch 2014: Communications Surveillance in the Digital Age, 248–51. Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries (Hivos). https://www.createspace.com/4956490?ref=1147694&utm_id=6026. Boghosian, H. 2013. Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers. Curran, J., Fenton, N. and Freedman, D. 2012. Misunderstanding the Internet. Routledge. Feenberg, A., and Friesen, N., eds. 2011. (Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies. Rotterdam; Boston: Sense Publishers. HotspotShield. 2014. About Hotspot Shield. http://blog.hotspotshield.com/about/. HotspotShield. 2012. Benefits of VPN: Privacy protection, unblock sites & Wi-Fi security. http://www.hotspotshield.com/benefits-of-vpn. Inceoglu, I. 2014. Unification of Discourses of Social Media during the Gezi Resistance. In Digital Diversities: Social Media and Intercultural Experience, edited by Malgorzata Zachara and Robson, Garry, 246–55. Place of publication not identified: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lessig, L. 2006. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books. Microsoft TechNet. 2001. Virtual private networking: An overview. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742566.aspx. OpenVPN. 2014. OpenVPN - open source VPN. https://openvpn.net/. Reporters Without Borders. 2014. World Press Freedom Index 2014. Reporters Without Borders. http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php. Ryan, J. 2010. A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. London, England: Reaktion Books.

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Sanja K., Cook, S. and Truong, M. 2012. Freedom on the Net 2012: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media. Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2012. Sterling, B. 1992. Short history of the internet. http://www.angelfire.com/oz/janica_214/catherine.htm. Tavmen, G. 2014. Internet Rights That Went Wrong in Turkey | GISWatch Special Report. Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries (Hivos). http://www.giswatch.org/global-information-society-watchspecial-report-2014-internet-rights-went-wrong-turkey. TunnelBear. 2012. Announcement: TunnelBear mauls iOS… with a brand-new TunnelBear app!” TunnelBear. https://www.tunnelbear.com/press/announcement-tunnelbear-maulsios-with-a-brand-new-tunnelbear-app/. —. 2014. TunnelBear hearts Turkey (in Turkish). TunnelBear. April 23. https://www.tunnelbear.com/company/bearheartsturkey/.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN AT A CRITICAL CROSSROADS: NEW MEDIA, GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY IN TURKEY BANU BAYBARS-HAWKS

Introduction Whenever new media platforms are introduced, they are generally met with skepticism mostly because of the fear that they might be capable of ousting governments from power. New media have not only become a means of reasoned decision-making, but also a platform for political contestation. Therefore, new media have almost always been subject to strong regulation as governments ban certain content from print publications and from being broadcast on radio and television. The belief was that these mediums may have detrimental effects on the stability of government structures and society. With the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, governments feared the power of this borderless new medium and they began imposing restrictions on its use (OSCE Report on Freedom of Expression on the Internet). Today, information is widely available on the Internet, meaning that states have experienced a loss of control over digital content: The increasing popularity of user-driven interactive Web 2.0 applications and services such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter seem to eliminate virtual Internet borders even further by creating a seamless global public sphere. This inevitably complicates state-level efforts to find an appropriate balance between the universal right to freedom of opinion and expression, which includes the right to receive and impart information, and the prohibition on certain types of content deemed illegal by nation-state authorities or intergovernmental organizations. (OSCE Report on Freedom of Expression on the Internet 2011)

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As a result of the spread of information online, the regulation of online content has become a pressing issue. Some countries such as Turkey have enforced policies to block access to Internet content that it has deemed illegal. It appears that restricting access to materials on the Internet is becoming increasingly common in a number of countries in attempts to limit users’ access to the Internet and Web 2.0-based social media platforms which are outside their jurisdiction. In such countries, accessing information is deemed to be equal to activism. With the spread of online news sites, blogs, Facebook and other platforms, it has become increasingly difficult to control the circulation and content of information that is spread online.

New media in Turkey In Turkey today, new media is under siege, and there has been an unprecedented escalation of legal restraints and pressure. In terms of traditional media, politics and the state have long influenced journalistic practices in Turkey, and the existence of media bosses, political and/or economic pressure have very often worked against the independence of journalists. However, the mainstream media in Turkey now operates under a new political economy of censorship in which big business and media conglomerates can only challenge the government and its repressive tactics in the news when their economic interests are threatened, while at other times they stay silent. The recent Gezi Park protests are an example of such a situation, as the heads of mainstream media often chose not to report on the protests or if they did, they provided scant coverage. In contrast with the Justice and Development Party’s (in Turkish, AKP) call for “more democracy” in 2002 when it first came to power, the situation has worsened, particularly after the AKP’s second election victory in 2007 (Akser and Hawks 2012, 308). The current transformation points in a different direction regarding the media in Turkey, as there has been an unprecedented increase in the use of executive and judiciary power to deflect criticism of the government. The AKP government has used legal, economic and political-discursive means to control the flow of information, thereby favoring a neo-conservative, controlled and censored view of news media. The repression of information through court orders and censorship by the state telecommunication agency are examples of the legal tools that the government has at its disposal. There are also politicaldiscursive means used by the government to control big media, and direct discursive attacks have been carried out by politicians seeking to turn public opinion against critical news media.

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In 2008, an investigation referred to as Ergenekon was launched which resulted in the arrests of journalists and members of the military and civilian bureaucracy who were charged with being involved in illegal activities aiming to overthrow the government (Rainsford 2008). During the investigation, the state used new information and communication technologies to gather evidence, including the bugging of homes and offices, traced cell phone lines and laser technology used to eavesdrop. The arrests started in 2008 continued in waves. Police surveillance became so widespread that Prime Minister Erdo÷an declared that even his phone was tapped (Hürriyet Daily News 2011a). In 2009, Internet blackouts and bans began. Opposition parties and NGOs opposed to the governing party often used YouTube videos of AKP leaders to condemn their anti-secular discourses during the 2007 election campaigns. Afraid that the videos might lead the Constitutional Court to close down the AKP, the government requested that the Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) regulate and block websites that ran contrary to the party’s interests (Hürriyet 2007). The YouTube ban was not lifted until the AKP-supported president-elect, Abdullah Gül, personally intervened in 2010 (Akser and Hawks 2012, 308). Since 2007, there has been a consistent decrease in Turkey’s rankings in global human rights watch lists concerning freedom of the press. According to the Freedom House 2014 Report on Internet freedom, the press freedom status of the country was defined as “not free,” and the report stated that user rights are violated, users are blocked from reading and writing content, and there is “substantial political censorship” (Freedom on the Net 2014 Report). The latest restrictions covered in the report are as follows: ƒ Access to both Twitter and YouTube were blocked prior to local

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elections held on March 30, 2014. After individual petitions were submitted to the Constitutional Court, it ruled that the bans violated the freedom of expression of all users and the blocking orders were subsequently overturned. Amendments to Law No. 5651 on regulating the Internet were made in February 2014. Among many additions, the changes extend the liability of hosting and access providers, introduce one- to two-year data retention requirements for providers, establish an Association for Access Providers to centrally enforce blocking orders, and allow URLbased blocking of websites for cases involving a violation of personal rights or privacy infringements. Social media platforms were widely used during the Gezi Park protests in May 2013, when mainstream Turkish media failed to report on

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widespread civil discontent. In the aftermath, at least 30 people were detained and investigated on the basis of their tweets and other online postings. Osman Garip was sentenced to over a year in jail for defaming Prime Minister Erdogan on Facebook, while an individual with “Allah” in his Twitter handle was jailed for 15 months for offending religious values. Similarly, two staff members at a popular Turkish website were given lengthy suspended sentences for offending religion, while renowned pianist Fazl Say received a 10-month suspended sentence in a September 2013 retrial related to “offensive” tweets. A law passed in April 2014 allows the Turkish intelligence agency (MIT) to request user data from ISPs without the need for a court order, while setting out broad circumstances in which the agency may intercept communications. MIT officials were also given some degree of immunity over their actions.

Paris-based Reporters without Borders published its 2014 annual index chronicling Turkey’s decline to 154th of the 180 countries in the list. Turkey fell behind even Iraq and Mexico, both of which had previously been ranked below Turkey (Freedom Index 2014). Through political rhetoric, the AKP government insists on calling the current administration “the most liberal government of Turkey to date,” but the media autocracy that the AKP administration has created are comparable to previous autocratic periods in Turkish political history. Yet never in the history of the media in Turkey did the redistribution of media power and the silencing of journalistic expression reach such an extent. The means employed by this autocracy have eventually led to certain conclusions about the qualities of this media environment: “it is a historically conservative, redistributive, panoptic and discriminatory media autocracy” (Akser and Hawks 2012, 302).

Regulations on new media in Turkey The government maintained a hands-off approach to regulation of the Internet until 2001, but it has since started limiting access to certain information, including political content. According to Freedom on the Net 2014 Report, in the past 12 months alone access to around 11,000 additional websites was blocked. This figure included numerous sites that were blocked for political or social reasons, such as news outlets or online communities that report on LGBT issues, ethnic minorities or events in the southeast of the country, which is home to a decades-long separatist conflict with Kurdish militants.

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All Internet traffic passes through Turk Telecom’s infrastructure, allowing for centralized control over online content and facilitating the implementation of decisions to block material. The AKP government attempts to regulate the Internet with bans put into place by government regulatory bodies such as the Turkish Information and Communication Technology Authority, and the recent Internet law, which became effective in February of 2014. The blanket ruling of these agencies led to the banning of YouTube, first in 2010. The 2010 YouTube ban came into effect after the release of several videos related to anti-secular speeches made by several prominent AKP figures, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo÷an and President Abdullah Gül. The ban was lifted several times by different courts but enacted by other district courts. People found ways of bypassing the ban by using proxy sites and the prime minister even declared that he could access YouTube. The ban was lifted just before the general elections of June 2011. However, the government quietly introduced a blanket filter in August 2011 that affected every Internet user in Turkey (Today’s Zaman 2011). It was argued that the government wanted to protect children from sex, drugs and violence on the Internet but protesters interpreted the move as being anti-democratic because it would operate as a blanket ban affecting everyone without their consent. Due to protests against the ban, the government took a step back and made filtering voluntary (Hürriyet Daily News 2011b). Nonetheless, today there are thousands of websites that can be accessed in the rest of the world but not in Turkey because government agencies have blocked them. In December of 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Law No. 5651 violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, a ruling that is legally binding for Turkey as a signatory. When Internet use appeared to threaten its rule, the government made attempts to change the law, but in ways that ran contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. An anti-corruption operation carried out from the 17th to the 25th of December resulted in the arrest of influential figures close to the government, and this will go down in history as a major political event. The government saw the investigation, along with Gezi Park protests, as a coup attempt allegedly staged by the Gülen movement. After the operation, thousands of police and prosecutors around the country were reassigned. When dozens of recordings of wiretapped conversations allegedly revealed top government officials engaging in corruption and manipulation of the media appeared on Twitter and YouTube, the government blocked numerous online news sites. For example, the online news site VagusTV was blocked in January under the auspices of Law No.

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5651 for more than a week under unclear legal circumstances; another news site, T24, was ordered to take down coverage of the corruption investigation (Nate Schenkkan 2014). On the 24th of January in 2014, the government cut access to the SoundCloud website after a user named “haramzadeler” (meaning “illegal ones” in Turkish) uploaded seven secretly recorded tapes of phone calls between the Prime Minister Erdo÷an and others, including Erdo÷an Bayraktar, local politicians, businessmen, the PM's daughter Sümeyye Erdo÷an and his son Bilal Erdo÷an (Hogan 2014). In January and February of 2014, Turkish Parliament passed amendments to Law No. 5651 which strengthened the powers of the Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB). Hosting providers are now required to retain user information for one to two years, and a new blocking measure was also added under Article 9 allowing the TøB to issue blocking orders which hosting providers must implement within four hours. Twitter, Facebook and other platforms defined as “hosting providers” under the law will also be required to obtain a certificate in order to operate in Turkey (Nate Schenkkan 2014). On the 20th of March in 2014, access to Twitter was blocked as the result of a court order stating that “protection measures” be applied to the service. This followed remarks made by Prime Minister Erdogan who vowed to “eradicate Twitter” amid allegations of corruption in his inner circle (PC World 21 March 2014). At around the same time, Google Public DNS was also blocked, and as a result Turkey became the first country ever to ban Google DNS (Arl & Özçelik 2014). A week later on March 27th, YouTube was blocked yet again because of the leak of a secret national security meeting attended by Hakan Fidan, head of Turkish intelligence, ex-Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto÷lu and others as they allegedly planned “false flag” operations in Syria. Prime Minister Erdo÷an argued that the leak was “villainous,” and Davuto÷lu called it “a cyber attack on the Turkish Republic” and “a declaration of war against the Turkish state and our nation” (Today’s Zaman 27 March 2014). The Twitter ban was lifted by the constitutional court of Turkey on April 2nd, ruling that “the block is a violation of freedom of expression and individual rights.” Erdo÷an commented on this move by saying that he did not respect the court’s ruling. The YouTube ban remained in effect in until June 1st, 2014.

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The Internet law of Turkey On the 5th of February in 2014, parliament passed a new Internet law seeking to further regulate the Internet in Turkey. The law ...allows the telecommunications authority (TIB) to block any website within 24 hours without first seeking a court ruling and requires Internet providers to store all data on web users’ activities for two years and make it available to the authorities upon request. (Letsch 2014)

Crimes committed via the Internet are regulated by the older law, Law No. 5651. The law, which is entitled Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Suppression of Crimes Committed by Means of Such Publications, was enacted on May 4, 2007. With this law, Turkey provided extremely broad legal measures for blocking access to websites by specifying eight content-related crimes, as will be discussed below. Users of the blocked websites have petitioned the European Court of Human Rights after unsuccessfully appealing the ban in local courts. In addition to RTÜK (the Radio and Television Supreme Council), which has also been used as a means of controlling media, a new governmental association known as the TIB (Telecommunications Communication Presidency) was created. The TIB can impose bans on Internet sites without prior judicial approval if the offending website hosts content that is illegal under Turkish law and is hosted outside Turkey, and it can also block websites depicting the sexual abuse of children and other acts of obscenity when the host is located in Turkey. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority and the TIB, which it oversees, act as regulators for all of these technologies. However, the fact that board members are government appointees undercuts the authority’s supposed independence, and its decision-making processes are not transparent. The TIB also oversees application of the country’s website-blocking law and has often been criticized by pressure groups for a lack of transparency (Freedom on the Net 2011 Report). Through Law No. 5651, the Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) was granted the power to implement court orders to block websites and issue blocking orders for content providers in or outside Turkey for committing crimes listed in Article 8 of Law No. 5651. The law prohibits: x crimes against Atatürk (Article 8/b) x offering or promoting prostitution x facilitating gambling

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x x x x x

unauthorized online gambling and betting the sexual abuse of children encouraging suicide supplying dangerous drugs facilitating the abuse of drugs

Web sites are also blocked for the following reasons: x x x x x x

downloading of MP3s and films in violation of copyright laws insults against state organs and private persons crimes related to terrorism violation of trademark regulations unfair trade regulated under the Turkish Commercial Code violation of Articles 24, 25, 26, and 28 of the Constitution (freedom of religion, expression and thought) (Wikipedia 2013)

The new Internet law was enacted as a result of multiple recordings that surfaced on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which alleged that Erdogan and his ministers were trying to illegally influence politics, business and media affairs. In one recording, Prime Minister Erdo÷an purportedly spoke to his son telling him to hide millions of Euros of cash, while in another he berated the editor of a major newspaper for running negative coverage of the AKP. Following the emergence of the recordings, Erdogan denied the accusations and called them “fake,” and threatened to shut down social networks in Turkey (rt.com 2014). Critics claim that the Internet law violates citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy rights. Özgür Uçkan, a professor of communications, has also noted that it makes censorship and surveillance legal in Turkey, which runs contrary to the constitution and to all international conventions to which Turkey is party. Andrew Garner, a researcher for Amnesty International, also expressed concern and said, “It is worrying that the law puts control over the Internet further in the hands of the government and away from judicial oversight. And the government has already shown itself to have very little tolerance towards dissent and opposing opinions.” He also added that the law would facilitate more targeted censorship, such as of individual Twitter profiles (Letsch 2014).

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A balancing act: State interest in regulating new media and users’ rights Everyone should be able to exercise the right to access information in democratic societies, and states are responsible for ensuring that citizens’ access to the Internet is guaranteed. Internet access policies defined by governments should be in line with the requirements of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and (where applicable) with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. While certain countries and international organizations, such as the United Nations, may recognize Internet access as inherent to the right to free expression, some other governments have adopted policies to block access to the Internet. As regards speech- and content-related laws and legal measures, restrictions must comply with international and regional human rights laws. According to the European Court of Human Rights, the first and most important requirement of Article 10 of the Convention is that any interference by a public authority in the exercise of the freedom of expression must be carried out in a lawful manner. If the interference is in accordance with law, the aim of the restriction should be legitimate by being based on Article 10(2) and concern limitations in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of the health of morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Furthermore, restrictions must be proven to be necessary in a democratic society and state interference should correspond to a “pressing social need.” State responses and limitations instituted by law should be “proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued.” As has been noted, “the Article 10 compatibility criteria as set out by the European Court of Human Rights should be taken into account while developing content related policies and legal measures” (OSCE Report on Freedom of Expression on the Internet). It should be noted here that regulations drawn up for traditional media platforms cannot and should not simply be applied to the Internet. In light of this, some countries have developed new measures dealing only with online content: “This increased legislation of online content has led to challenging restrictions on the free flow of information and the right to freely impart and receive information on and through the Internet” (OSCE Report on Freedom of Expression on the Internet). Access to information should be seen as a right and freedom and governments should not make

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distinctions between traditional and digital media, and blocking mechanisms that could restrict users’ access should be avoided.

Conclusion Understanding restrictions in the sphere of media is an indispensable part of discussing how new media are governed. The increasing use of online platforms has pushed governments to draft new measures with the aim of controlling online content. It is an undeniable fact that freedom of expression applies to all means of communications, including the Internet. Any restrictions should thus be weighed against public interest. Governments need to take action to ensure that the Internet remains an open and public forum for freedom of opinion and expression. States should keep in mind the borderless nature of the Internet when developing online content regulation policies. As I have argued here, restrictions introduced by law should be proportional and in line with the requirements of democracy. The media in Turkey have long been under economic and political restraints. The restrictions imposed on new media further violate freedom of expression and free speech, and they have led to a weakening of democracy. The banning of social networking sites such as YouTube, Google Sites and others raises questions about the functionality of democracy, since these platforms provide a venue that is widely used around the world to express alternative and dissenting views. According to the Strasbourg Court, while political and social news “might be the most important information protected by Article 10, the freedom to receive information does not extend only to reports of events of public concern, but covers in principle also cultural expressions as well as pure entertainment.” If such blocking practices continue, there will be more cases raised against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights in terms of censorship. Blocking access to websites also represents a serious infringement on freedom of speech and does not befit a democratic society. In short, the restrictions placed on new media in Turkey amount to censorship. The regulation of the free flow of ideas and information on the Internet is not just a technical matter; on the contrary, it is one of the leading challenges to civil liberties in recent history. If the role of the media is to provide checks and balances and operate as the fourth estate, often by criticizing the government, then the denial of this basic right can lead to a breakdown of democracy, a concept that political leaders have long professed to cherish themselves.

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Works Cited Akser, M. and Baybars-Hawks, B. 2012. Media and democracy in Turkey: Toward a model of neoliberal media autocracy. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5: 302-321. Arl, K. and Özçelik, S. 2014. Turkey becomes first country ever to ban Google DNS. Today's Zaman, March 23. Accessed 25 March 2014: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-342851-turkey-becomes-firstcountry-ever-to-ban-google-dns.html Freedom House. 2011. Freedom on the Net 2011 Report. Accessed 17 July 2013: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/turkey. Freedom House. 2014. Freedom on the Net 2014 Report. Accessed 4 February 2015: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/turkey. Hogan, M. 2014. Has Turkey Banned SoundCloud? Spin. Accessed 30 January 2014: http://linkis.com/en.wikipedia.org/wik/A00KO. Hürriyet. 2007. YouTube tartúmas. Accessed 18 March 2012: http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/goster/ShowNew.aspx?id=6082796, 8 March 2007. Hürriyet Daily News. 2011a. Erdo÷an’s Bedroom Talks Illegally Taped: Minister. Accessed 9 May 2013: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/erdogans-bedroom-talks-illegally taped-minister.aspx?pageID=238&nID=8277&NewsCatID=338, 1 December 2011. —. 2011b. Action against Turkey’s Internet ban demanded in Europe. Accessed 12 August 2014: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid =438&n=member-of-the-european-parliament-asks-europeancommission-to-take-action-against-the-Internet-ban-in-turkey-2011– 05–24, 24 May 2011. Letsch, C. 2014. Turkey pushes through new raft of “draconian” Internet restrictions. The Guardian, February 6. Accessed 7 February 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/turkey-Internet-lawcensorship-democracy-threat-opposition. PC World. 2014. “We'll eradicate Twitter”: Turkey blocks Twitter access. Accessed 22 March 2014: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2110760/turkey-appears-to-haveblocked-Twitter.html. Rainsford, S. 2008. “Deep state” plot grips Turkey. BBC News, Feb 4. Accessed 22 April 2013:

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7225889.stm. —. 2011. OSCE Report on Freedom of Expression on the Internet. Accessed 11 February 2014: http://www.osce.org/fom/80723. Reporters without Borders. 2014. World Press Freedom Index 2014. Accessed 12 January 2015: http://rsf.org/index2014/en-middle-east.php. Schenkkan, N. 2014. May 2013 - July 2014: Turkey’s long year of content restrictions online. Freedom House. Accessed 11 February 2015: https://freedomhouse.org/report/struggle-turkeys-Internet/may2013-july-2014-turkeys-long-year-content-restrictionsonline#.VPbNjvmsWCk. Today’s Zaman. 2011a. Filter options not a threat to Internet freedoms, says BTK. Accessed 9 August 2014: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-242950–filter-options-not-a-threat -to-Internet-freedoms-says-btk.html. Today's Zaman (Reuters). 2014. Turkey says Syria security leak “villainous” as YouTube blocked. Accessed 30 March 2014: http://www.todayszaman.com/news-343175-turkey-says-syriasecurity-leak-villainous-as-youtube-blocked.html. —..2014. Turkey’s constitutional court: Twitter ban violates free speech. Accessed 2 April 2014: http://rt.com/news/turkey-Twitter-speechcourt-921/. Wikipedia. 2013. Censorship in Turkey. Accessed 4 February 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Turkey#Laws.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eloísa Nos Aldás, PhD, is a tenured lecturer at the Communication Sciences Department at Jaume I University in Castellón, Spain (UJI). She is the head of the Interuniversity Institute of Social Development and Peace at the same university. She is also a member of the academic committees of the university’s MA and PhD programs in International Studies in Peace, Conflict and Development Studies. Her courses and research focus on communication, social discourses, social change and cultures of peace. Bahar Ayaz is a research assistant in the Department of Journalism at Gazi University. She is also a PhD student in the same department. She concluded her master’s thesis, which was about the identity problems of Turkish migrants, at Middle East Technical University in the International Relations Department. She has worked as a reporter for the Turkish Grand National Assembly for three years. Her undergraduate degree was in journalism. Her research interests are international communication, migration, identity problems and social media. Banu Baybars-Hawks received from PhD from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2002. Professor Baybars-Hawks is the chair of the Public Relations Department in the Faculty of Communications at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her research interests include media studies, media law, political economy of media and terrorism. She is the author of Freedom’s Razored Edge: Terrorism and Media Controls in the United States and Turkey (2010, Lambert Academic Publishing), the co-editor of If It Was Not for Terrorism: Crisis, Compromise, and Elite Discourse in the Age of “War on Terror” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), and the editor of New Challenges, New Opportunities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Reputation Management (Reputation Management Institute, 2013). Yenal Göksun is a research assistant and PhD candidate in the School of Communications at Marmara University. He received his BA degree from Istanbul University in the Faculty of Political Sciences and his MS from the Institute of Middle East Researches at Marmara University. His

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Contributors

research interests include media language and discourses, media in the Middle East and international communications. Irem Inceoglu completed her PhD in the field of media and cultural studies at the University of Surrey-Roehampton in the UK. She completed her BSc in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and her MSc in gender and women’s studies at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She taught at Middlesex University in London between 2007 and 2012 and she has been teaching at Kadir Has University in the Faculty of Communications since 2012. She is also involved in civic engagement projects coordinated by Anadolu Kultur. Dr. Inceoglu's fields of research include social movement activism, digital culture, radical democracy and discourse theory. Cristina Ivan is a researcher with the National Institute for Intelligence Studies of the Mihai Viteazul National Intelligence Academy. She is currently enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Bucharest’s School of Literary and Cultural Studies, where she is researching intermedia translations of violent religious extremism imagery in British discursive space. She completed a program in British Contemporary Studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and attended the course Understanding the Impact of Terrorist Ideology jointly offered by the George C. Marshal Centre for Security Studies and the Jordanian National Royal Academy. In the past six years she has specialized in applied research on radicalization, terrorism, participatory democracy and active citizenship, and she has also taken part in various state- and EU-funded projects. Suncem Koçer is an assistant professor of public relations and information at Kadir Has University. She received her double PhD in anthropology and communication and culture from Indiana University in 2012. Her research interests include the culture of news making, transnational publics, identity politics, censorship, documentary cinema, media production and circulation processes. She teaches courses on persuasion and propaganda, news culture, media policy and politics, communication campaigns, public speaking and documentary cinema. Catherine Luther is a professor and the associate dean of the College of Communication and Information at the University of Tennessee in the United States. She completed her PhD at the University of Minnesota with a primary concentration in international communication and a secondary

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focus on political psychology. In addition to having her research appear as books and book chapters, she has published in such journals as the Journal of Communication, Surveillance & Society and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Bilge Narin works as a research assistant at Gazi University’s Faculty of Communication in the Department of Journalism. She received her PhD in journalism from Ankara University. She is also a student at Middle East Technical University in the Graduate School of Social Sciences’ Department of Science and Technology Policy Studies. She worked as a press analysis specialist for the Turkish Army’s communication department from 2005 to 2010. Her main research areas are new media studies, hypertext theory, online journalism and data journalism. Hussni Nasr is a professor of journalism and new media in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, and in the Faculty of Mass Communication at Cairo University. He received his PhD in mass communication and journalism in the School of Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park and Cairo University (Channel Systems) in 1996. He has published fifteen books in Arabic and English on issues concerning mass communications, communication theory, new media, global communications, media laws and ethics, Arab media systems, investigative journalism and news reporting and editing. Abdelrahman Rashdan is an academician of political science at Future University in Egypt and an internationally-published columnist. He holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University with a specialization in international security policies and the Middle East. His research interests include national security, Arab world politics and US foreign policy. Eser Selen is an assistant professor in the Communication Design Department at Kadir Has University. She received her BFA and MFA from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and completed her MA in 2002 in the field of performance studies at New York University. She completed her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University in 2010. Her research interests include feminisms, performance studies, gender and sexuality, and contemporary art and design. Together with Palestinian and Israeli artists, she is working on an ongoing research project that began in 2012 about ways to explore alternative forms of peace building and conflict transformation.

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Contributors

Aúkn ønci Sökmen is an assistant professor at Gelisim University in the Department of International Relations and Political Science. She received her PhD from the Turkish Military Academy’s Defense Institute in the International Security and Terrorism Department. Her main areas of research and teaching are international security and politics, terrorism, anthropology and security, theories of international relations and Turkish foreign policy. She is also the head of the Political and Social Research and Practice Center at Gelisim University. Sarphan Uzuno÷lu is an advisor for the Turkish Grand Assembly and a lecturer at Kadir Has University. He is currently a PhD candidate at Galatasaray University’s Department of Media and Communication Studies. His research focuses on precariousness and risk society. He received his MA from Kadir Has University’s New Media Department and his BA from Izmir University’s Department of Economics Public Relations and Advertising. He has published articles in magazines such as Mesele, Evrensel Kültür, Kaos GL and newspapers such as Taraf, Evrensel and Akúam. Sevda Ünal is a PhD student at Ankara University’s Communication Faculty in the Department of Journalism. Her main research areas are new media studies, security studies, cyber space security, online journalism and data journalism. Pantelis Vatikiotis is an associate professor in the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics where he is the coordinator of the MA program for media and communication studies. He teaches courses on the sociology of media for both undergraduate and graduate programs. His research interests include digital media and social theory, social media, alternative media, social movements/activism, and the political economy of media, and he has published on such issues as media and democracy, alternative/citizen media, new media and the culture of cyberspace. Ça÷r Yalkn is an assistant professor at Kadir Has University where she teaches courses on advertising. She previously lectured at King’s College London where she taught courses on marketing and consumer behavior. Her research covers several aspects of marketing with an emphasis on creative industries marketing, on- and offline consumer resistance, and consumers and socialization.