"The fax shall make you free."
Albert Wohlstetter, the great Cold War strategist, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said that back in 1990. He was right: The advent of fax machines, Xerox copiers and other then-cutting-edge communications technologies was an enormous boon to the free flow of information. In Communist countries, the Samzidat was transformed: Dissident self-publishers, who previously would sit at typewriters copying banned books page by page, could now, with the push of a button, create dozens of copies and transmit them almost anywhere.
Ever since, there has been not just the hope but the expectation that advancing communications technologies -- personal commuters, the Internet, email, smartphones, satellites and the like -- would inevitably spread freedom while constraining the power of the despots.
This just in: It's not turning out that way.
Instead, Iran's rulers have been using high technology to break the backs of their domestic opponents. My colleagues, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, last weekend reported on tests conducted secretly by nongovernmental technology experts revealing that Iranian security forces have the means to locate mobile phones in Iran to which encrypted messages have been sent -- and to do it within minutes.
The theocratic regime also has been increasing its ability to both monitor and control Internet activity within Iran's borders. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei plans to go further: He has ordered the creation of an "Internet oversight agency" whose mission will be to limit Iranians' access to the Web. The Iranian chief of police, Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam, has derided Google as an "instrument of espionage." A top Iranian intelligence official has called the Internet "a spy."
Last month, President Barack Obama denounced Iran's efforts to erect an "electronic curtain" -- a conscious echo of the "Iron Curtain," Winston Churchill's description of the Soviet Union's efforts to isolate nations living under Communism from the Free World.
Bashar al-Assad, Iran's Syrian handmaiden, also is escalating what Margaret Weiss of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy calls a "comprehensive crackdown" on Internet opponents. With assistance from both Tehran and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Iran's foreign legion, "the operational tempo of the pro-regime Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has increased dramatically," Weiss writes. SEA routinely "defaces what it perceives as hostile news and opposition sites, and has barraged Facebook pages belonging to no less than the European Union, President Obama, the State Department, Oprah Winfrey, Human Rights Watch, and Aljazeera with pro-Assad comments."
On many occasions, Assad's cyber police have simply shut down the Internet and mobile phone reception to disrupt dissident efforts to organize, send photos and videos to the media, and evade arrest. They have been using technology to target victims, too. Weiss notes: "It is widely believed that American journalist Marie Colvin was killed in Homs thanks to Iranian software that pinpointed her satellite phone transmissions."
But that software almost certainly was not developed in Iran. Dubowitz and Dershowitz write that a long list of foreign companies -- Chinese, European and even American -- have been selling the Iranians "the technologies they need to make this oppression possible."
Weiss recommends that the administration should "take a cue from the European Parliament, which recently passed a resolution placing controls on the export of dual-use products, including those that can be used to violate human rights." In Washington, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., has sponsored a bill that would regulate the export of such technology.
Dubowitz and Dershowitz argue that "the entire Iranian telecom and technology industry should be blacklisted and closed to foreign companies unless they can certify to the U.S. government that any sales of technology to Iran will facilitate Iranians' access to safe and open communications."
They note that this is the aim of U.S. legislation that Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., "is looking to introduce as an amendment to an Iran sanctions bill currently under consideration in the Senate." Congressmen Ted Deutch, D-Fla., and Robert Dold, R-Ill., "are working on introducing the same provisions in the House of Representatives. Western firms would be required to certify that they are not helping create and maintain Iranian 'zones of electronic repression."'
In a speech last June, Assad said "the electronic army" has become "a real army in virtual reality." That real army is now being deployed by him, by Iran's theocrats and by other despots against those who dare challenge their power and frustrate their ambitions. It's high time for America and Europe to stopping helping those despots -- and to field an electronic army with a qualitative edge.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Email cliff@defenddemocracy.org.
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