From Big Brother to Bands of Brothers: Who is watching whom on the Internet?

One of the commonly discussed threats of the Internet’s ever wider use is that of pervasive surveillance of our all activities by the government authorities. As we increasingly rely on the Internet to manage all facets of our life, both personal and professional, and life-supporting databases with our health, financial and judicial information move on line, it becomes possible to track the minutest of our daily movements and actions, to build detailed personal profiles, which then can be used for purposes, the most benign of which is targeted advertising.  Internet makes the nightmare of Orwell’s Big Brother permanent watch quite real and its threat, quite immediate. The threat was made explicit by recent disclosure about NSA’s, FBI’s and CIA’s surveillance programs. And in most cases of electronic surveillance, it is safe to assume that what is known and disclosed by the media is only a tip of the iceberg.

However, all hope is not lost. Internet is a flexible and multiform tool that it allows not only top-down surveillance but also a bottom-up watch of powers to be. And in a similar way that Internet enhances the Big Brother ability, it also enables determined Bands of Brothers to effectively check policies and actions of the big and the powerful. In the last few weeks, I was struck by two instances of such “Band of Brothers” impact.

The first one pitted a loose band of bloggers against the news empire Reuters during the Lebanon war in early August. The lead blogger in the band was Charles Johnson, who runs a blog, whimsically called Little Green Footballs. Johnson may not be a professional journalist but he is at the origin of the CBS Rathersgate debacle in 2004. He showed, using Microsoft Office and screen shots that documents used by Dan Rather, CBS News anchor, in his investigation of George Bush’s service in National Guard, were forged.
Johnson used an identical approach to analyze photographs of the Lebanon conflict taken by a Lebanese free lance, Adnan Hajj, whose pictures were used to document destruction caused by Israeli air force bombardments. Johnson and his friends suspected that many of Hajj’s pictures were staged by Hesbollah for the benefit of Western media, to which Reuters is a privileged conduit. What they discovered that some of the pictures were actually altered, using nothing more sophisticated than Adobe Photoshop. Johnson posted his findings on Little Green Footballs and his post was then picked first by his friends and then by main medias. After just two days of to and fro between Reuters and the bloggers, Reuters announced on August 7, that it was ending its use of Hajj’s services and withdrawing all 920 pictures from its database.
Many media noted that the Little Green Football and its blogosphere were distinctly right-wing, pro-Israeli and anti-Islamist. This is undoubtedly true but the point that the bloggers succeeded in making was Reuters and other “mainstream” media such as BBC World or AP were also biased and somewhat less forthcoming about it.
One of the bloggers, Michelle Malkin, reported, in her blog on Reuters’ capitulation, a keynote speech that Tom Glover, CEO of Reuters, gave to the Online Publishers Association last March on interactions between the blogs and the Old Media. In this speech, Glover recognized that the consumer will increasingly act as editor. He saw the new role of Reuters as that of an aggregator and a filter, enabling users to “spot the gold in the pan of water and dirt.” I am not sure he expected Reuters itself to be subject to the same process.

The company in the center of our second case of bloggers’ power is Microsoft. Maybe because it was never part of the Old Media and for the last ten years it has been engaged in a multifront warfare with private competitors and public regulators, the company came to a keen appreciation of the power of the blogosphere. Its approach to the announcement of Open Specification Promise (OSP), published on September 12, demonstrated a remarkable savvy. OSP is a solemn engagement that no developer or programmer will be harassed or sued for infringement of 35 patents Microsoft holds in the area of web services specifications, if he/she uses those specifications to develop open-source applications. Rather than seeking to give OSP a wide coverage by traditional media, Microsoft took special care to ensure that various Open Source networks and communities were informed, often  in advance about its initiative. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere specialized in Open source, commented extensively on OSP. Some bloggers remained skeptical about true motives of Microsoft but most comments were positive. If nothing else, Microsoft showed its sensitivity and understanding of the mores and concerns of Open Source supporters.  
Those two examples should not be considered as portends of a grass-roots takeover of the Internet.  Rather they should be seen as another demonstration of the remarkable organizational flexibility of the network of networks. Internet is simultaneously top-down and bottom-up, hierarchical and peer-to-peer. It accommodate both the Big Brother and the Bands of Brothers.