Is Tehran Turning Its Back On the World Wide Web?

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

For years, the Iranian government has been threatening to pull the plug on the world wide web, sealing the nation and its people off from the rest of the Internet. Officially, Tehran says it wants to create a “halal” Internet, or one free from outside “impurities” or temptations. Unofficially, it’s believed the ruling clerics are uncomfortable with the free flow of news and opinions coming from outside Iran, and how democracy advocates inside the nation have used the web to organize. Periodic cyber-attacks, like the Stuxnet virus, only compound the worries.

Very often these threats would rise and fall in close relation to national events, such as upcoming elections or rumors of national protests. For example, earlier this February, with elections nearing, there were renewed rumblings about pulling the country offline. Additionally, the official Iranian office of cyber-police issued new rules requiring online cafes to install video cameras and ask for identification before letting anyone on the net. The government also stepped up efforts to block social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, and slowed Internet traffic to a trickle. Then once the elections passed, the pressure and rhetoric subsided. Just as in years past.

Google traffic report on Iran showing major, but short-lived constriction of Internet traffic

Now, those threats appear to be ramping up once more. Last week, the government announced a prohibition on all banks, telephone companies and other commercial enterprises from using foreign-based email service for its communications. According to the rule, those firms may now only use email services with the .ir top-level domain, effectively banning Gmail, Hotmail and many others. Then on Monday, the semi-official Mehr news service announced that Iran’s main oil terminal on Kharg Island was being taken offline for an unknown period of time due to a cyber-attack.

A source at the National Iranian Oil Company told Reuters that a virus had been detected inside the terminal’s command and control systems, but offered little other information. Of course it’s been impossible to independently verify what actually happened at the Kharg facility. But given Iran’s experience with Stuxnet, and later with the Duqu virus, a new infection at Kharg is a real possibility.

The larger question is whether this is just another momentary squeezing of the Internet, or a sign that officials are seriously working to take their nation off the web. If they can, that is.

Recently web researcher Collin Anderson unearthed a Persian-language request from the Iranian government for help in building a more robust Internet filtering system. “I believe this clearly demonstrates that the Iranian government does not intend on cutting off access to the external Internet time soon,” Anderson told Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica:

“This might suggest that the government has not been able to acquire the services of foreign companies for planning and optimizing an infrastructure. This is surprising for those, including me, who believe that much of the censorship software and hardware was being developed internally. The RFI seems to imply the desire to move beyond blacklisting sites and keywords, to a more intelligent system of detecting and blocking ‘immoral’ content, such as pornographic or culturally offensive material.”

As frustrating as filtering can be, it’s still a long way off from taking an entire country offline. Only North Korea has severed all ties with the web and built its own intranet, called ‘Kwangmyong’, or ‘bright’ in Korean. And Egypt’s more recent experience with pulling the plug even for just a few days might be enough to persuade Iranian leaders about the potential negative impacts.

It’s a lesson that perhaps even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, could stand to learn. As our colleague Golnaz Esfandiari points out, his recent fatwa against using anti-filtering software in Iran was itself filtered – by Iranian web blocks.

Weibo censorship in the Chen Guangcheng case

Alice Xin Liu

The twists and turns of the fate of blind lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng has had much of China’s online community in its thrall.

wo images featuring blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng are seen during a protest in front of the Chinese central government's liaison in Hong Kong (AP/Vincent Yu))

On April 27 Chen arrived in the US embassy from his native Shandong, where he had escaped from house arrest.  Despite news of the event being censored, Chinese internet users quickly became aware of his situation. This was especially true on Weibo – the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. To bypass the censors, netizens used nicknames concocted for Chen Guangcheng, including “Shawshank” and “Sunglasses.” But even these terms were soon blocked.

On May 2 things took a dramatic turn when he left the embassy under the guidance of U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke to seek medical treatment at Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital. It was said that he had left of “his own volition”.

Charles Custer, who runs blog site ChinaGeeks, explored in the post “Sina’s Softer Censorhip” how “on your own volition” had become a online meme by that evening. In the post, he says that instead of blocking the term, Sina Weibo simply stopped indexing any new posts that used the term. Custer said the maneuver created what he calls “an artificial silence”, where users may think no one is talking about the issue even though there were many posts discussing the matter.

The China Media Project, a media monitoring website set up by Hong Kong University, covered government editorials that ran in Beijing Daily, a State-owned paper that condemned the Chen Guangcheng case. In the editorials, Gary Locke was especially targeted.

David Bandurski, the website’s editor, recently wrote:

“That editorial, which accused U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke of playing “little tricks”, said that blind activist Chen Guangcheng represented not ordinary Chinese but only his “backstage boss, namely the interests of the hostile forces of the West.” It said Chen had become “a tool and pawn by which politicians in the United States blacken China.”

Bandurski tells VOA “The Beijing editorials last week were what I would characterize as a monumental failure. They were panned on Chinese social media as heavy-handed and backwards, until things escalated to the point that Beijing Daily itself became a restricted term on Sina Weibo.”

Blocking on Weibo has been systematic for the Chen Guangcheng case. For example, the term “Chaoyang Hospital” is now an unusable term. When you search for it, Weibo tells you that “according to the relevant regulations, search results cannot be shown.” The same goes for “CGC,” “blind man” and “Linyi”, the town where Chen Guangcheng had been under house arrest.

Bandurski says “China has been in the midst of a progressive tightening of media controls since the February [of] this year. One catalyzing incident, of course, was the Wang Lijun incident in early February, which put party infighting in the spotlight just as the leadership was negotiating the sensitive issue of succession ahead of the 18th party congress later this year.”

Some bloggers attitudes remain similarly pessimistic. “I don’t think much has changed,” said well-known Chinese blogger Michael Anti. “Reports [on sensitive issues] weren’t allowed before, and they’re not allowed now.”

By the way, if you’re interested, you can find a list of blocked terms related to Chen Guangcheng here. But rest assured, this list will only continue to grow.

There’s More Free Stuff Out There Than You May Know

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

May 8, 1977. The setting was Ithaca, New York; Cornell University’s barn-like Barton field house, specifically. On that particular Sunday evening, for the princely sum of $7.50 – $6.50 for students – you could buy one general admission ticket (assuming you could find any for sale) to hear a performance by the Grateful Dead.

For the Dead it was just another gig on an unending tour; the Ithaca stop was sandwiched between New Haven’s Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum and Buffalo’s War Memorial Coliseum.  Fairly to form, the band played 20 songs that night, starting with “New Minglewood Blues” and wrapping with the classic “One More Saturday Night.” Along the way they hit a number of fan favorites like “Fire on the Mountain,” “Not Fade Away” and “Morning Dew.”

At the time, May 8th was just another performance by the Dead, an enduring American band that had long attracted it’s own rolling culture of scruffy fans, hippies, dope-smokers and assorted others who followed the band from show to show. But for true “Deadheads,” it’s much, much more than that. For Deadhead Nation, May 8 is forever known simply as “Barton Hall.”

35 years later to the day, the Dead’s spring 1977 tour is now the stuff of legend, with the Barton Hall show the most celebrated performance of the band’s career. “I started hearing from other Deadheads that the Barton show was famous,” Brad Krakow tells the Cornell Chronicle. One of the lucky attendees that night, Krakow characterized the Dead’s performance as “tight, no mistakes and inspired. It is funny now when friends ask if that is ‘The’ Barton Hall when visiting. It is an icon.”

But don’t take Krakow’s word for it. Download the entire concert and decide for yourself. In fact, why not download every concert the Grateful Dead ever played to compare and contrast? Go ahead – you can do it all for free, and without any copyright worries, thanks to a website called “The Internet Archive.”

A Virtual Library of Alexandria

Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, the Archive is a digital warehouse of just about everything. Photographs, drawings, texts, recorded audio and video, the Archive storehouse is too vast to ever fully explain or explore, and it’s getting larger every day.

Logo for the Internet Archive

Want to see outtakes from the interviews from Glenn Greenwald’s 2004 movie “Outfoxed”? You can find them here on the archive for free. Want to download author Richard Willard Armour’s 1963 memoir “Through Darkest Adolescence”? You can get text, Kindle, .pdf or just about any other version with one easy click. Old movies, live concerts, classic photographs? They and much, much more are stored in the memory banks of  the Archive.

Founder Brewster Kahle says he wanted to create a virtual Library of Alexandria online; a place where much of the stuff of our daily lives could be preserved for future generations, and not lost forever, as much of the content of the ancient Alexandria library was so doomed. Kahle calls himself simply a “digital librarian,” but there’s nothing simple about the Internet Archive or Kahle’s ambitions.

In essence, Kahle wants to build a one-world library: one place where web content of all types can be sorted, stored, and accessed for free. Says Kahle:

“The web is ephemeral. About every 100 days a webpage is changed or deleted. So keeping up with the web is important. Next we started doing television, then movies, and now books.”

Take books, for example. If you want to share a book you own that isn’t int the Archive, you can scan it yourself and upload it, or just take it to one of the Archives hundred-odd scanning locations, where they’ll do it for you. Of course, at least some of those books are still under copyright, but due to special legal provisions regarding the blind and dyslexic, the Archive can store and even ‘lend’ these books, too.

The same is true for other forms of media. IA archivists work to ensure copyright protections where they’re are legitimate, but with the wealth of material that’s fallen out of (or never protected by) copyright, the Archive’s holdings are vast. The items may be mundane, but that’s no matter to Kahle. The more, the better.

One of the most popular features on IA is something called “The WayBack Machine.” Starting sometime in 1997, Archive engineers began trawling the web and grabbing screenshots of millions of webpages. Want to know what VOA’s webpage looked like – and what was news – back on, say, November9 2000? The Archive has it (and boy, have things changed a LOT since then!)

Preserving the Forgettable

Grateful Dead on May 8, 1977 (archive.org)

A lot of the stuff on the Internet Archive may be momentarily interesting, but one could ask about their long term value. For instance, do 100 newsreels from 1940′s America say anywhere as much important as just one classic book like “Death of a Salesman” or “For Whom The Bell Tolls”? Probably. But like with everything, context is all important, and what the Archive is saving is much of the ephemeral context that just ends up in history’s dustbin.

That said, there’s very little forgettable about many of the Archive’s holdings, such as the Dead’s Barton Hall classic. Years ago the band made a decision: rather than block crowd recordings and file thousands of copyright lawsuits, they agreed to make all of their concert recordings taken from the mixing board copyright clear. In other words if you had the right equipment, you could plug into the main soundboard, record any show, and do with it whatever you wanted.

That’s exactly how Barton Hall, May 8 1977 ended up on the Internet Archive; it and over 100,000 other live concerts.

It may soon be forgotten that 35 years ago today, the day of the concert, a freak snowstorm hit Ithaca, leaving hundreds of Deadheads nowhere to go but to break into a nearby dorm to warm up (and for other activities.) But thanks to the Archive, what happened during that concert will live on for decades, or longer.

Thoughts On The Strange World Of Online Ads

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

I’ll admit it. As an organization, we here at VOA can be a rather starchy bunch. Which is usually fitting, given the very serious issues we cover on a daily basis. Still, in general there’s not a lot of laughs to be had on our site.

And that includes this blog. Over the last few weeks we’ve contemplated the hazards of a cashless society, considered the possibility of a cyber-war with Iran and fretted over how much of our lives the Internet is stealing. Whether it’s a crackdown on free speech on the web in Vietnam or a continuing erosion of online privacy, our coverage has tended to see the Internet in serious, if even threatening, terms.

But the web is at least as much about humor, or just plain strangeness, as it is ponderous issues. With few exceptions, it’s a near certainty that any random “cute zoo animal” video or juvenile humor site has more traffic and Facebook “likes” than the most serious of stories from the most august of news organizations.

At times it seems that the Internet was built with funny and weird in mind. Odd and humorous go over well in small doses, which the web readily provides, and they want to be shared with friends, which is what social networks do best.

Correction: Brett Erlich, mid-snark

People hunt the net for this kind of stuff, for that next weird thing poised to go viral. Those that do it well can become something like kingmakers. Take Ray William Johnson for example. A one-time history major and future lawyer at Columbia University, Johnson began recording short videos, offering amusing (at times) commentary on other short videos – the odder the better.

But what started as a knock-off has grown into “Equals Three,” one of the most popular channels on YouTube, generating over 2 billion views. When Johnson (and his staff of writers) mentions a new video these days, its view numbers skyrocket.

All this came to mind while watching Erlich’s’ most recent video, where he spotlights an odd online ad hawking a rather dyspeptic-looking product, the “Crown Crust Pizza.” Less a pizza and more a garbage plate, the CCP is essentially 12 mini cheeseburgers encircling dough with cheese, meat, tomato and “special sauce,” whatever that may be.

But as unlikely as the product – which is under test in several Middle Eastern markets – may sound, the commercial itself is just strange. “May I have the cheeseburger?” asks one young patron, eliciting snorts of laughter from his fellow patrons. That’s immediately followed by what looks like a 14th-Century royal footman bringing in the CCP through blasts of regal trumpets.

For this viewer, it’s not a very effective way to sell food. But this ad has received millions of views online, and led this writer down a rabbit hole of weird online ads, some for food, some for politicians, and some that still have me scratching my head.

For example, the Burger King corporation recently released an online advertisement for…well, we still aren’t sure:

So, OK. Huh?! doesn’t even begin to describe this ad. The unicorn, the dachshunds, the dancers in tutus on the counter? Is this what makes mouths hunger for flame-broiled beef in Russia? We think this is something that would have left even the late director Ken Russell confused.

Speaking of confusing, there were a series of online ads released in 2008 by the campaign of presidential aspirant Sen. Mike Gravel. A former U.S. senator from the state of Alaska, Gravel waged a long-shot campaign against the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the only way he could: through eye-catching, if incomprehensible online campaign ads.

Take, for instance, and ad simply titled “Rock.”

Now just in case you thought you made a mistake, the ad is literally just Mike Gravel silently staring at the viewer for over a minute, uncomfortably close to the camera. Then, without a word, he turns, picks up a rock, tosses it into the nearby water, and walks away. Andy Warhol couldn’t have done any better. But in spite of, or perhaps because of, the weird factor, the ad received millions of views and boosted contributions to Gravel’s campaign.

In fact, some online marketers increasingly believe that if you want to catch eyes on the Internet, you need to give people a jolt of something: humor, shock, or as above, oddness. But there are still limits, as Carly Fiorina learned in 2010.

A republican Senate hopeful from the state of California, Fiorina was locked in a tough primary battle with opponent Tom Campbell. Fiorina’s campaign turned to veteran ad-man Fred Davis, who for pennies put together an ad that’s infamously known as “Demon Sheep.” Take a look:

At 3:22 in length, it’s sort of the “Gone With The Wind” of campaign ads. Except that is isn’t very good. In fact, the red-eyed demon sheep, which is obviously just an actor wearing a bad sheep costume on all fours, was so strangely over the top that it became the subject of great mockery, and contributed to Fiorina’s ultimate loss to incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer. Going viral, it turns out, is not always a good thing.

But fast food and politicians by no means have a corner on creepy online. Recently, in a larger story about the erosion of privacy on the web, we spotlighted an online ad featuring Bill Oberst, Jr.; a talented actor who has grown rich by playing creeps. Viral marketing director Jason Zada wanted to create something that would raise awareness about the sometimes hidden ways Facebook uses personal information, so he fashioned a customizable ad featuring a sweaty, disturbed Oberst obsessing over your very own personal Facebook page:

Everything about this online campaign is designed to make people feel queasy, which Zada says was exactly his intention. Yet somehow it was, for a moment, the most popular thing online. (For his part, actor Oberst says he was genuinely pleased by how “icky” the ad made people feel, and for some strange reason, his on-the-edge portrayal of a stalker won millions of “likes” on Facebook. Go figure.)

There are countless more examples; our most recent find is the “dating site murderer” meme, which takes a threatening looking picture and scenario and turns it on its head, with arguably questionable humor. But however you look at it, marketing executives are clearly getting paid lots of money to craft Internet ad campaigns that touch not on the serious, but on the weird, funny, or just plain creepy.

Rogue “Info Ops” Agents Go After The Wrong Target

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

As many have learned the hard way, protecting your reputation online can be difficult. The way the web works, once just one person publishes something bad or inaccurate about you, it lives forever in the net’s cache. Should you be unfortunate enough to have someone, or even a team of people, who know their way around the Internet writing malicious things about you, it can be impossible to ever fully correct the record. Bad stuff tends to thrive online.

Just ask Tom Vanden Brook or Ray Locker. They’re both reporters at USA Today; Vanden Brook covering the Pentagon for the paper since 2006, and Locker the White House and other agencies. Recently they teamed up to explore what the Pentagon calls “information operations” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. A term of military art, “Info Ops” is frankly just another phrase for propaganda: the transmission of information, factual or not, with the specific goal of changing beliefs. “Winning the hearts and minds,” as President Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying during the Vietnam war.

USA Today reporter Tom Vanden Brook

Vanden Brook and Locker began digging into the effectiveness of current Pentagon information operations in overseas war zones, and their overall assessment was not positive. “U.S. info ops programs dubious, costly” read the headline in the February 29th story. “From 2005 to 2009, such spending rose from $9 million to $580 million a year mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon and congressional records show,” they write:

“Last year, spending dropped to $202 million as the Iraq War wrapped up. A USA TODAY investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports, shows that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won’t make public where the money goes. In Iraq alone, more than $173 million was paid to what were identified only as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

In particular, the reporters ask hard questions about one of the Pentagon’s largest info ops contractors, Leonie Industries. The firm, they write, was founded in 2004 by a brother and sister team “with no apparent experience working with the military.” Of the $130 million dollars in awarded contracts, the reporters conclude there is little to no oversight, and uncertainty about Leonie’s effectiveness. Worse still, the founders Camille Chidiac and Rema Dupont together owed more than $4 million in unpaid taxes.

Leonie responded quickly. “As of March 23, 2012 all tax obligations for Leonie’s owners have been met,” read the curt post on the firm’s blog.

Locker and Vanden Brook kept digging. “Pentagon defends millions to contractor despite unpaid taxes” read the next story on April 16, detailing congressional calls to garnish Leonie’s contracts and increase oversight.

Around the same time, the two reporters began to notice something odd. Twitter accounts purporting to be them popped up, as did Facebook pages, and even websites like www.raylocker.com. These fake accounts began to post messages and stories that, to put it mildly, cast the reporters in a negative light. Needless to say, neither Locker nor Vanden Brook had any connection to these phony accounts.

Then on April 19, in a little noticed story, USA Today reporter Gregory Kane wrote “A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.” Kane and his colleagues worked to track the origins of the campaign: when it began and who was behind it. Kane concluded:

“Internet domain registries show the website TomVandenBrook.com was created Jan. 7 — just days after Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook first contacted Pentagon contractors involved in the program. Two weeks after his editor Ray Locker’s byline appeared on a story, someone created a similar site, RayLocker.com, through the same company.  If the websites were created using federal funds, it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption.”

The websites, fake social media accounts and other mischief, such as altering Wikipedia entries, all painted the journalists in a negative light. Some posts suggested that the two were working in cooperation with the Taliban. In other words, someone with motive was trying to smear Vanden Brook and Locker.

Although a Pentagon spokesman denied any knowledge of any such operation, it didn’t take long for fingers to point back to defense contractor Leonie Industries. Among those pointing were Gawker‘s John Cook:

“Oddly, the USA Today story on the mischief names only “Pentagon contractors” as likely culprits. But a source familiar with the story confirms that the contractor responsible is Leonie Industries, an information operations company with more than $90 million in Army contracts in Afghanistan.”

Cook doesn’t name his source, and says that Vanden Brook told him via email that he didn’t know who was responsible for the smear campaign. Numerous calls and emails from VOA to Leonie went unanswered, however the company on April 24 posted the following to its corporate blog:

“Leonie condemns the activities described in the article. While Leonie has no reason to believe that any employee was involved in this activity, an internal investigation is being conducted to determine whether any employee was so involved. If that investigation determines that there was such involvement, appropriate action will be taken.”

Graphic image from Leonie Industries webpage

At present, the two bogus websites are blocked, and the fake social media accounts have gone dark. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t done damage, or that the story ends here. Vanden Brook called the campaign “creepy” and Ray Locker told the Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple it was “something I’ve never experienced in thirty years.” Since last week, the story has gone quiet, but it’s a guarantee that more reporters now are paying attention to “info ops” and online smears, at home or abroad.

In 2011, the Leonie Group won 12 Defense Department contracts for a total of $92, 324, 165.  They won their first DoD contract in 2008, and since then have been awarded a total of $145, 190, 686 dollars. Of the 2011 contracts, funds were spent in three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. For the first two, services provided were listed as “other professional services” while for Colombia they were “training and curriculum development.”

Leonie describes itself as a “strategic communication and mission support” firm with offices in Washington, Los Angeles, Tampa, Baghdad and Kabul. Among the services offered:

“Consulting with our clients to understand your messaging goals and objectives, we research and analyze how we can best reach your target audience, maximizing effectiveness by intrinsically understanding the environment before coordinating, integrating and disseminating your communications campaign via TV, radio, print, digital media and other creative channels.”

In corporate terms, “strategic communication.” In military terms, “information operations.” In plain English, propaganda.

The Pentagon, like every other military organization, has long used various forms of propaganda, at home and overseas. However, early in the 20th Century, Congress and the White House sought to curb or eliminate any U.S. government propaganda that might be aimed at U.S. citizens.

For example, 5 U.S.C., Section 3107, passed in late 1913, states: “Appropriated funds may not be used to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose.” The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 further defined what types of communications the U.S. government could have with those overseas, and within the United States. [Full disclosure: the Voice of America and its parent organization, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, are also bound by this measure not to actively distribute any material to a U.S. audience.] And further various appropriations measures through the years, like 2004′s omnibus spending bill, prohibit funds to be used “…for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofor authorized by Congress.”

This means that if any U.S. tax funds, equipment or personnel were used, knowingly or not, in constructing the smear against the two USA Today journalists, it would very likely constitute a violation of federal law. Both the Pentagon and Leonie say investigations are underway. In any event, the smear appears to have backfired badly.

So here’s the ironic bow on the package: what began as a story about the questionable effectiveness of propaganda overseas is turning now into questions about its use at home. And what started as an effort to tarnish the public image of two journalists may end up dimming the reputation of those firms that try to control it.

Is Hard Currency Becoming A Thing Of The Past?

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Daniel Suelo is a man who has figured out how to live without money. Making his home in a high cave near the desert outpost of Moab, Utah, Mr. Suelo lives, eats, sleeps, scavenges and does just about anything else he likes, all without any money. (Yes, he even blogs.) In the fall of 2000, Suelo says he took all the cash he had in the world (about $30)  and left it in a phone booth. He’s been walking away from money ever since. “Money represents lack,” Suelo writes in his journal, kept at the Moab Public Library. “Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present.”

Daniel Suelo (Hyoung Chang, AP)

Few of us may have the desire to live as simply, or starkly, as Daniel Suelo. But according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, a growing number of Internet & economic theorists believe the idea of actual physical money – banknotes and coins and such – may be going the way of the typewriter and the buggy whip.

Imagining Money

“There is nothing more imaginary than a monetary system,” writes Harvard professor Susan Crawford in the report. “The idea that we solemnly hand around printed slips of paper in exchange for food and water shows just how trusting and fond of patterned behavior we human beings are.”

In the truest sense, Crawford is correct.  Money itself is imaginary. It can be anything two or more people agree that it is, and it’s worth nothing more than what others are willing to exchange for it. Our paper notes and metal coins are, in fact, just symbols that societies collectively use to represent a complex system of debts, payments and wealth transfers. And being symbols, money can change and evolve. A signed check is a form of contract guaranteeing a future monetary exchange, or a symbol of a symbol. Credit or debit cards are just another, electronic form of that – a digital symbol of a symbol, of a symbol.

The Pew report, “Smartphone Swiping in the Mobil Age,” explores the expanding use of mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets to make payments or transfer funds. This, says report author Aaron Smith, goes far beyond logging in to your bank accounts or making electronic fund transfers. Think of your phone more like your credit or debit card: electronically holding a certain amount of “money” inside that you can use at a store with just a swipe.

A person tries a smart phone loaded with Google Wallet.(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

There are a variety of ways this can be done. Kenya’s M-PESA system has been around for years, allowing users to text payments directly to each others’ accounts. It’s low-tech but highly successful; money totaling 20% of  Kenya’s GDP annually flows through M-PESA. On the other end, Google has been experimenting with its “Google Wallet”, which uses a tiny radio signal – called near field communication or NFC – to “talk” to other nearby devices. Ideally, using NFC, a smart phone user could type in a code or just wave their phone near a merchant’s register and the sale would automatically be logged.

Officials in Sweden have begun a public push for the national adoption of just such a program. Proponents argue a cashless society reduces robberies, limits illegal activity and is just more convenient for everybody. Says former ABBA singer and cashless advocate Björn Ulvaeus, “I can’t see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore.”

Even with the many understandable security worries,  NFC or ‘smart device’ payment services are rapidly expanding in other places, such as Canada, South Korea and other advanced economies. So fast that in the Pew survey a healthy majority – 65% – of participants agreed with the statement:

“By 2020 most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards.“

As surprising as that may be, some even consider that timetable too slow. “This trend is already overwhelmingly clear in many parts of the world,” says David A.H. Brown of Brown Governance, Inc. “Virtually all purchases will be made by hand helds and it probably won’t take ten years to get there.”  Echoes Jerry Michalski, founder of Relationship Economy Expedition, “Cash and credit cards as we know them are on their way out. Automation is here and will keep rushing in.”

Cash, Credit or Crock?

If all this sounds a little too much like science fiction, there’s good reason. For decades, writers like Isaac Asimov in his classic “Robot” series imagined a future where cash didn’t exist; instead people earned “credits” that were traded electronically. In a June 1991 article, writers for Omni Magazine claimed “…cash and credit will soon be obsolete.” A few years later author Joel Kurtzman in his book “The Death of Money” asserted:

“Few people realize that money, in the traditional sense, has met its demise. Fewer still have paused to reflect on the implications of that fact.”

Sounding familiar? Yet, two decades later, cold hard cash money is still very much with us, for a variety of reasons.

Some of it may just be habit: we use cash because we’ve always done so. In our minds we all probably know that banks don’t actually have tiny cubicles where they physically store all the cash we have in our account, but in our hearts we may still wish that it were so. Physical cash, except in times of hyper-inflation, is secure, while NFC technology – we are continually reminded – is less so. A few high-profile instances of people having their bank accounts wiped out, and people would likely shy away from adopting it.

Another reason may have less to do with who loses money than who makes it. At present in many nations, there is a highly complex system of fund transfers in which banks, retailers, manufacturers, customers and electronic networks all try to make a penny or two off every credit or debit purchase.  (In the U.S. this used to be the province of the Federal Reserve Bank, which still has sole authority to clear written checks, but technology changed all that.) In the Pew survey, Microsoft’s Jonathan Grudin opined “The driver here will virtually 100% be whether or not the credit card industry decides it can make more money through changing technologies.”  Flinders University researcher Paul Gardner-Stephen agrees, saying smart-device purchases “introduce(s) costs for retailers that will slow its adoption, especially in light of the lack of a compelling problem for NFC to solve.”

Distrust of banks or technology may be wax and wane, but it hasn’t stopped the relatively rapid adoption of technologies like the ATM, the credit card or the debit chip, embedded in a variety of devices. Radio frequency ID technology like NFC is fairly widespread, monitoring everything from the groceries we buy to our train tickets. Says Microsoft engineer Christian Huitema, “We have already witnessed the transition from cash to debit/credit cards.  The electronic wallet is not much more than a ‘virtual card.’ ”

Perhaps. Yet there’s still something cash can provide that electronic ‘credits’ can’t: anonymity.

There's nothing like cold cash money

My Money, My Life

Björn Ulvaeus may not see the need for cash any more, but many still do.

Think for a moment: in a world where every monetary transfer is logged and recorded and stored in the cloud, anonymity disappears. Every thing you buy or sell, from a car to a gallon of milk, will be marked and recorded. And critics worry that same system that logs and records your every financial move could also, potentially, have the power to block them all. Argues San Jose State University’s Ted Coopman: “This is especially true in the United States where fear of the government has always been part of our political culture.”

Will smart-device purchases made with NFC ultimately replace cash money? Did the Internet replace newspapers, or radio? Not so much. It’s probably less a matter of all or nothing, and more of introducing a new technology living side-by-side with a very old one.

Ultimately, it’s probably impossible to eliminate cash, as anything two people agree upon can become ‘money.’  Says Robert Ellis of Peterson, Ellis, Fergus & Peer LLP: “Cash will never disappear because there will always be a demand for it – for anonymous transactions, illegal transactions, and transactions in far-flung areas where the non-cash technologies haven’t been implemented.”

Daniel Suelo hasn’t had any money in his pocket for years by choice. In the future, we may all soon have the same option. Hopefully, we’ll have the choice.

Sex, Politics, Murder and the Web

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

In other times, the political excommunication of former Chinese rising star Bo Xilai would have been a relatively simple affair. Bo, the party boss of Chongqing, had for years built himself firm control over what happened in his province, along the way winning something of a reputation as a crusader for the people. But his sharp tongue and unconventional ways rankled Party officials in Beijing, and on April 10 he was suddenly demoted. End of story.

Bo Xilai, in a 2011 file image (VOA/Chinese)

But the Internet loves a scandal, and as scandals go, the story of Bo Xilai seems to have it all (much of it detailed here by VOA’s Matt Hilburn and Kate Woodsome.) Soon after his dismissal a flurry of stories from the official party apparatus suddenly linked Bo to a series of business and bribery deals gone wrong. The mysterious death of longtime friend and British business leader Neil Heywood, first blamed on alcohol poisoning, was quickly tied to Bo’s wife Gu Kailai. For her part, rumors began to float that Gu is volatile, depressed, paranoid or worse, possibly even having had an inappropriately close relationship to Heywood. Then came whispers, quickly swatted down by the government, of dissent among high levels in the nation’s military unhappy with Bo’s removal.

Stories like Bo’s, of course, are nothing new. It wasn’t all that long ago that Jiang Qing, perhaps better known as “Madame Mao,” was at the height of political influence as one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution. But with Mao Zedong’s death, it didn’t take long for her to be toppled, landing her in prison with the label “counter-revolutionary.”  Of the many opaque factions within the one permitted Chinese Communist party, there are always winners and losers. Bo Xilai has come out on the losing end of that equation. And that, traditionally, should have been that.

Which is exactly where the Internet comes in.

At first, government higher-ups appeared content to let China’s 350 million Internet users spread all sorts of negative rumors about Bo, Gu, and others associated with the disgraced two-some. But as we’ve often noted, the Internet sword cuts both ways, and soon users on sites like Weibo, Utopia and other popular networks turned the tables, repeating claims of a conspiracy to oust Bo led by party officials who had turned their back on the revolution. Very soon at least 40 websites were shut down, and the popular micro-blog Weibo was heavily censored. An uncertain number of people have been arrested and countless posts have been erased, with Beijing’s “State Internet Information Office” proclaiming the rumors a “very bad influence on the public.”

Yet key-word censorship is a tricky business, as Chinese users have become very adept at learning how to evade the censors by using similar but non-threatening words. Another oft-used tactic in China is shutting down nearly all access to the web in a specific geographic region, such as happens periodically in the ethnically-restive Xinjiang province. That can work to isolate one area for a limited time, but as a technique for stopping a national discussion it seems fraught with downsides. Just ask Egyptian officials.

In any event, as Helen Gao over at the Atlantic notes, the Internet cat may already be out of the bag:

“China’s heavy-handed censorship may now actually accelerate the spread of rumors, which could be seen as more plausible precisely because they are censored. Chinese web users trying to figure out the most likely truth must speculate not only about the rumors themselves, but also about every move the government makes in response. The tug-of-war between the government and the people over truth and rumor happens every day in today’s China. The rise of social media has made the struggle harder and the stakes higher.”

Alice Xin Liu

Every year around this time, China marks the Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day. It’s traditionally marked as a day for the living to celebrate the departed, marked by outings to cemeteries. Celebrants leave tea, burn paper or incense, and generally sweep the tomb down clean and clear.

But this year it was what the Chinese government was sweeping offline that had so many people upset.

Last week, it was revealed the Chinese government had closed 16 websites and detained six individuals for “fabricating or disseminating online rumors.” Many of those rumors center on the latest political scandal: the sacking of Bo Xilai, the popular former Chongqing Communist Party Chief.

They began to spread after his deputy, Wang Lijun, sought political asylum at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.  That resulted in the top leadership of the Communist Party putting the brakes on all the political intrigue surrounding the pair. After the sacking, rumors started swirling that “military vehicles” were marching into Beijing, and that it was the center of a coup. (These turned out to be false.)

Xinhua reported that the websites include meizhou.net, xn528.com and cndy.com.cn, but these small websites have not affected everyday life in China. But then on March 31, users of China’s most popular blog site, Sina microblog, – also known as weibo.com – woke up to find that although they could repost and share, they couldn’t comment on any of the posts. The same thing happened with another large microblog, qq.com; all comments were turned off.

Predictably, shutting off comments riled up many users, but Weibo had an explanation:

“Weibo users: lately, there have been a lot of unlawful and harmful content appearing in the comments section on microblogs, so from 8AM on March 31 to 8AM on April 3 our comment function will be suspended temporarily. After we have finished this round of regulation, we will re-open the function.”

Han Han, China’s foremost blogger, chose the second day of this three-day shutdown period to speak up. He wrote:

“Flowers lose their petals in the winter, and then bloom again in Spring. Some people go, some people come. In 2010, I closed this account, and also wrote an article about the reasons and my worries about keeping a microblog. In 2012, there is CWB (a service that lets you write more characters and then upload to microblog as an image) so I have decided to restart over here.”

From the morning of April 3, commenting on the microblogs had been returned. People today are still in the process of going back to microblogs and enjoying the newly returned function. Chen Qihan said:

“Even though they shut off the microblog [comment function], I still want to come on, this shows how addicted I am!”

‘China Citizen Li,’ a member of the Hebei Writers’ Association with over 3,000 followers, said ironically:

“On May 4, 2012, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, said that China’s internet is free and open, and that netizens enjoy full freedoms… — it’s just that sometimes, microblog commenting will be closed!”

Perhaps the best characteristic of Sina microblog users is how humorous they are. Of course, the closure of commenting fell on a national holiday, when offices, and presumably web monitors, would be off work for three days.

User ‘Decorate Your Dreams’ attached a screen capture of a news item asking people to visit the graves of China’s national heroes or martyrs. He wrote:

“They’ve turned off commenting on microblog, I don’t feel like going Grave Sweeping.. Even if I went and told the Heroes that the same things are happening today, about how landlords are bullying ordinary people again, the forced grabbing of land are coming thick and fast, and there are more cases of trafficking people, more random taxes, and concubines are in fashion… I don’t want to go, if I went the Heroes whose graves I sweep won’t have a good Festival at all…”

A Look At, Or Through, Google’s Latest

Technology and the Internet are all about innovation. Like a shark that must continually swim to pass water over its gills, if a tech company doesn’t innovate, it probably won’t last very long.

Most of the innovations are, frankly, yawns. Some are crazy brilliant, while many others are just crazy. It’s rare that a game changer like the iPhone comes along. And of course, there’s no way of telling if something’s going to be a hit until you give it time to flop.

On Tuesday, Google executives finally unveiled a long-discussed project they’re calling “Project Glass.” Still in its conceptual phase, Google has released a video demonstrating how their glasses might work, hopefully generating a little buzz as well.

In short, “Project Glass” is sort of a smart phone on steroids. The idea is that rather than have a separate device you have to look elsewhere to use, a special pair of wired glasses with a Google interface would allow you to do just about everything your smart phone does without ever having to look anywhere but straight ahead.

So what are people saying? VOA web editor Colin Lovett collected a variety of opinions on Storify, which you can read by clicking here.

So what do you think? Are Google Glasses a hit or a flop?