Sep 4, 2009

The erosion of privacy in the Internet era - Harvard Magazine September-October 2009

Imagine if you waved to someone and, without your knowledge, a high-resolution camera took a photograph of your hand, capturing your fingerprints. You might be upset. Or—if you were visiting Disneyland, where they already make an image of your fingerprint to save you from waiting in a long line—you might find the novelty of the technology, and the immediate benefits…gratifying. The ambivalence we sometimes feel about new technologies that reveal identifiable personal information balances threats to privacy against incremental advantages. Indisputably, the trends toward miniaturization and mass-market deployment of cameras, recording devices, low-power sensors, and medical monitors of all kinds—when combined with the ability to digitally collect, store, retrieve, classify, and sort very large amounts of information—offer many benefits, but also threaten civil liberties and expectations of personal privacy. George Orwell’s vision in 1984 of a future in which the government has the power to record everything seems not so farfetched. “But even Orwell did not imagine that the sensors would be things that everybody would have,” says McKay professor of computer science Harry Lewis. “He foresaw the government putting the cameras on the lampposts—which we have. He didn’t foresee the 14-year-old girl snapping pictures on the T. Or the fact that flash drives that are given away as party favors could carry crucial data on everybody in the country.”

It’s a Smaller World

Information technology changes the accessibility and presentation of information. Lewis gives talks on the subject of privacy to alumni groups in private homes, and often begins with an example that puts his hosts on the hot seat. He projects a Google Earth view of the house, then shows the website Zillow’s assessment of how much it is worth, how many bedrooms and bathrooms and square feet it has. Then he goes to fundrace.huffingtonpost.com, an interface to the Federal Elections Commission’s campaign-contributions database. “Such information has always been a matter of public record,” says Lewis, “but it used to be that you had to go somewhere and give the exact name and address and they would give you back the one piece of data. Now you can just mouse over your neighborhood and little windows pop up and show how much money all the neighbors have given.” In the 02138 zip code, you can see “all the Harvard faculty members who gave more than $1,000 to Barack Obama,” for example. “This seems very invasive,” says Lewis, “but in fact it is the opposite of an invasion of privacy: it is something that our elected representatives decided should be public.”

Technology has forced people to rethink the public/private distinction. “Now it turns out that there is private, public, and really, really public,” Lewis says. “We’ve effectively said that anyone in an Internet café in Nairobi should be able to see how much our house is worth.” Lewis has been blogging about such issues on the website www.bitsbook.com, a companion to Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, the 2008 book of which he is a coauthor. “We think because we have a word for privacy that it is something we can put our arms around,” he says. “But it’s not.”

One of the best attempts to define the full range of privacy concerns at their intersection with new technologies, “A Taxonomy of Privacy,” appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 2006. Its author, Daniel Solove, now a professor at George Washington University Law School, identified 16 privacy harms modulated by new technologies, including: information collection by surveillance; aggregation of information; insecurity of information; and disclosure, exposure, distortion, and increased accessibility of information.

That privacy would be a concern of the legal profession is not surprising. What is surprising is that computer scientists have been in the vanguard of those seeking ways to protect privacy, partly because they are often the first to recognize privacy problems engendered by new technologies and partly because the solutions themselves are sometimes technological. At Harvard, the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) has become a focal point for such inquiry. CRCS, which brings computer scientists together with colleagues from other schools and academic disciplines, was founded to develop new ideas and technologies for addressing some of society’s most vexing problems, and prides itself on a forward-looking, integrative approach. Privacy and security have been a particular focus during the past few years.

Database linking offers one such area of concern. If you tell Latanya Sweeney, A.L.B. ’95, nothing about yourself except your birth date and five-digit zip code, she’ll tell you your name. If you are under the age of 30 and tell her where you were born, she can correctly predict eight or nine digits of your nine-digit Social Security number. “The main reason privacy is a growing problem is that disk storage is so cheap,” says the visiting professor of computer science, technology, and policy at CRCS. “People can collect data and never throw anything away. Policies on data sharing are not very good, and the result is that data tend to flow around and get linked to other data.”

Sweeney became interested in privacy issues while earning her doctorate at MIT in the mid 1990s. Massachusetts had recently made “anonymized” medical information available. Such data are invaluable for research, for setting up early infectious-disease detection systems, and other public-health uses. “There was a belief at the time that if you removed explicit identifiers—name, address, and Social Security number—you could just give the data away,” she recalls. That dogma was shattered when Sweeney produced a dramatic proof to the contrary.

The medical data that had been made available included minimal demographic information: zip code, birth date, and gender, in addition to the diagnosis. So Sweeney went to the Cambridge City Hall and for $25 purchased a voter list on two diskettes: 54,000 names. By linking the demographic information in the voter database to the demographic information in the publicly available medical records, Sweeney found that in most cases she could narrow the demographic data down to a single person, and so restore the patient’s name to the record. She tried this data-linking technique for then-governor William F. Weld ’66, J.D.’70. Only six people in Cambridge shared his birthday. Just three of them were men. And he was the only one who lived in the right zip code. Sweeney had reidentified someone in a putatively anonymous database of private medical information. The system had worked, yet data had leaked. Newspaper coverage of her testimony to the state legislature about what she had discovered ultimately brought a visit from the State Police. “That was my introduction to policy,” she says with a laugh. (She was recently named to the privacy and security seat of the Health Information Technology policy committee in the Obama administration.)

Later, she proved that her results were not unique to Cambridge. Fully 87 percent of the United States population is uniquely identified by date of birth, five-digit zip code, and gender, she says: “So if I know only those three things about you, I can identify you by name 87 percent of the time. Pretty cool.” In fact, Sweeney’s ability to identify anyone is close to 100 percent for most U.S. zip codes—but there are some interesting exceptions. On the west side of Chicago, in the most populated zip code in the United States, there are more than 100,000 residents. Surely that should provide some anonymity. “For younger people, that’s true,” she says, “but if you are older, you really stand out.” Another zip code skews the opposite way: it is on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York and includes only dormitories. “Here is a tiny population,” she says, pulling up a graphic on her computer. “Only 5,000 people.” But because they are all college students of about the same age, “they are so homogenous…that I still can’t figure out who is who.”

A potentially even more serious privacy crisis looms in the way Social Security numbers (SSNs) are assigned, Sweeney says. “We are entering a situation where a huge number of people could tell me just their date of birth and hometown, and I can predict their SSN. Why is this a problem? Because in order to apply for a credit card, the key things I need are your name, your date of birth, your address, and your SSN. Who is the population at risk? Young people on Facebook.”

Facebook asks for your date of birth and hometown, two pieces of information that most young people include on their pages simply because they want their friends to wish them a happy birthday. The problem is that SSNs have never been issued randomly—the first three digits are a state code, the second two are assigned by region within state—and the process is described on a public website of the Social Security Administration. Starting in 1980, when the Internal Revenue Service began requiring that children have SSNs to be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, the numbers started being assigned at birth. Thus, if you know a person’s date and location of birth, it becomes increasingly simple to predict the SSN.

One way or another, says Sweeney, someone is going to exploit this privacy crisis, and it “is either going to become a disaster or we’ll circumvent it.” (Canada and New Zealand, she notes, may have similar problems.) “But there are many easy remedies,” she adds. She has proposed random assignment of SSNs from a central repository. She has also devised solutions for setting up public-health surveillance systems that don’t reveal personal information, but still work as early-warning systems for infectious-disease transmission or bioterror attacks.

Sweeney believes that technological approaches to privacy problems are often better than legislative solutions, because “you don’t lose the benefits of the technology.” One of her current projects, for example, aims to make sure that technologies like photographic fingerprint capture are implemented in such a way that personal privacy is maintained and individuals’ rights aren’t exposed to abuse.

Scientists have long been excited by the possibilities of using biometric information such as fingerprints, palmprints, or iris scans for positive identification: people could use them to open their cars or their homes. But just how private are fingerprints? With a grant from the National Institutes of Justice, Sweeney and her students have shown that inexpensive digital cameras are already good enough to capture fingertip friction-ridge information at a range of two to three feet, and image resolution and capture speed are improving all the time, even as the cost of the technology keeps dropping. As a result, because it is contactless and very cheap, photographic fingerprint capture could become “the dominant way that prints are captured in a lot of public spaces,” Sweeney explains. That means fingerprint databases are everywhere, and “you don’t have any control over the use of those prints, if somebody wanted to make a false print, or track you. It is like walking around with your Social Security number on your forehead, to an extent. It is a little different because it isn’t linked to your credit report or your credit card”—but it does not require a tremendous leap of imagination to picture a world where credit cards require fingerprint verification.

Sweeney began working with fingerprints because of concerns that, given the huge numbers of fingerprints in linked databases, there would be false positive matches to the FBI’s crime database. “To the extent that fingerprint matching has been successful, it might be because only criminals are fingerprinted and criminals tend to repeat crimes,” she says. But she was “ridiculed a lot by law enforcement for making those statements,” until the Madrid train bombings in 2004. When a print at the scene was falsely matched by the FBI to a lawyer in California, it became clear that the science of fingerprint matching needed to be studied more deeply. (Palmprints ultimately may have a better chance at providing a unique match.) Furthermore, Sweeney points out, “What if someone advocated replacing Social Security numbers with fingerprints? If something goes horribly wrong with my number, I can get a new one. I can’t really get new fingerprints.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Tyler Moore, left, and Allan Friedman

A Legal Privacy Patchwork

As the Facebook/SSN interaction and the ability to capture fingerprints with digital photography illustrate, social changes mediated by technology alter the context in which privacy is protected. But privacy laws have not kept up. The last burst of widespread public concern about privacy came in the 1970s, when minicomputers and mainframes predominated. The government was the main customer, and fear that the government would know everything about its citizens led to the passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. That law set the standard on fair information practices for ensuing legislation in Europe and Canada—but in the United States, the law was limited to circumscribing what information the government could collect; it didn’t apply to commercial enterprises like credit-card companies. No one imagined today’s situation, when you can be tracked by your cell phone, your laptop, or another wireless device. As for ATM transactions and credit-card purchases, Sweeney says “pretty much everything is being recorded on some database somewhere.”

The result is that even the 1974 law has been undermined, says CRCS postdoctoral fellow Allan Friedman, because it “does not address the government buying information from private actors. This is a massive loophole, because private actors are much better at gathering information anyway.”

As new privacy concerns surfaced in American life, legislators responded with a finger-in-the-dike mentality, a “patchwork” response, Friedman continues. “The great example of this is that for almost 10 years, your video-rental records had stronger privacy protection than either your financial or your medical records.” The video-rental records law—passed in 1988 after a newspaper revealed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s rentals—was so narrowly crafted that most people think it doesn’t even apply to Netflix. “Bork didn’t have much to hide,” Friedman says, “but clearly enough people in Congress did.” Medical records were protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in 1996, but financial records weren’t protected until the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. (Student records are protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, passed in 1974, while the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed 1998, prohibits the online collection of personal information from children under the age of 13.) “Legally,” Friedman concludes, “privacy in this country is a mishmash based on the common-law tradition. We don’t have a blanket regulation to grant us protection,” as Europe does.

The End of Anonymity

Friedman co-taught a new undergraduate course on the subject of privacy last year; it covered topics ranging from public policy and research ethics to wiretapping and database anonymity. “If there is a unified way to think about what digital systems have done to privacy,” he says, it is that they collapse contexts: social, spatial, temporal, and financial. “If I pay my credit-card bill late, I understand the idea that it will affect a future credit-card decision,” he explains. “But I don’t want to live in a society where I have to think, ‘Well, if I use my card in this establishment, that will change my creditworthiness in the future’”—a reference to a recent New York Times Magazine story, “What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know about You?” It reported that a Canadian credit-card issuer had discovered that people who used their card in a particular pool hall in Montreal, for example, had a 47 percent chance of missing four payments during the subsequent 12 months, whereas people who bought birdseed or anti-scuff felt pads for the legs of their furniture almost never missed payments. These disaggregated bits of information turn out to be better predictors of creditworthiness than traditional measures, but their use raises concerns, Friedman points out: “We don’t know how our information is being used to make decisions about us.”

Take the case of someone with a venereal disease who doesn’t want the people in his social network to know. “If I go to the hospital and the nurse who sees me happens to live down the street,” says Friedman, “maybe I don’t want her peeking at my medical records.” That particular threat has always been there in charts, he notes, but problems like this scale up dramatically with online systems. Now the nurse could check the records of everyone on her street during a coffee break. He cites a related example: “Massachusetts has a single State Police records system and there have been tens of thousands of lookups for Tom Brady and other local sports stars.” Unlike celebrities, ordinary people have not had to worry about such invasions of privacy in the past, but now computers can be used to find needles in haystacks—virtually every time. There are nearly seven billion people on the planet: a big number for a human brain, but a small number for a computer to scan. “John Smith is fairly safe,” says Friedman, “unless you know something critical about John Smith, and then all of a sudden, it is easy to find him.”

Digital systems have virtually eliminated a simple privacy that many people take for granted in daily life: the idea that there can be anonymity in a crowd. Computer scientists often refer to a corollary of this idea: security through obscurity. “If you live in a house, you might leave your door unlocked,” Friedman says. “The chances that someone is going to try your front door are fairly small. But I think you have to lock your door if you live in an apartment building. What digital systems do is allow someone to pry and test things very cheaply. And they can test a lot of doors.”

He notes that computers running the first version of Windows XP will be discovered and hacked, on average, in less than four minutes, enabling the criminal to take control of the system without the owner’s consent or knowledge (see online Extra at www.harvardmag.com/extras). Botnets—networks of machines that have been taken over—find vulnerable systems through brute force, by testing every address on the Internet, a sobering measure of the scale of such attacks. (Another measure: the CEO of AT&T recently testified before Congress that Internet crime costs an estimated $1 trillion annually. That is clearly an overestimate, says Friedman, but nobody knows how much Internet crime actually does cost, because there are no disclosure requirements for online losses, even in the banking industry.)

The durability of data represents another kind of contextual collapse. “Knowing whether something is harmful now versus whether it will be harmful in the future is tricky,” Friedman notes. “A canonical example occurred in the 1930s, when intellectuals in some circles might have been expected to attend socialist gatherings. Twenty years later,” during the McCarthy era, “this was a bad piece of information to have floating around.” Friedman wonders what will happen when young bloggers with outspoken opinions today start running for political office. How will their earlier words be used against them? Will they be allowed to change their minds?

Because personal information is everywhere, inevitably it leaks. Friedman cites the research of former CRCS fellow Simson Garfinkel, now an associate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, who reported in 2003 that fully one-third of 1,000 used hard drives he had purchased on eBay and at swap meets still contained sensitive financial information. One that had been part of an ATM machine was loaded with thousands of credit-card numbers, as was another that a supermarket had used to transmit credit-card payments to its bank. Neither had been properly “wiped” of its data.

Data insecurity is not just accidental, however. Most Web-based data transmitted over wireless networks is sent “in the clear,” unencrypted. Anyone using the same network can intercept and read it. (Google is the only major Web-based e-mail provider that offers encryption, but as of this writing, users must hunt for the option to turn it on.) Harry Lewis smiled at the naiveté of the question when asked what software the laptop used to write this article would need to intercept e-mails or other information at a Starbucks, for example. “Your computer is all set up to do it, and there are a million free “packet sniffers” you can download to make it easy,” he said. And the risk that somebody might detect this illegal surveillance? “Zero, unless somebody looks at your screen and sees what you are doing,” because the packet sniffers passively record airborne data, giving out no signals of their presence.

Civil libertarians are more concerned that the government can easily access electronic communications because the data are centralized, passing through a relatively few servers owned by companies that can legally be forced to allow surveillance without public disclosure. Noting that the conversation tends to end whenever privacy is pitted against national-security interests, Friedman nevertheless asks, “Do we want to live in a society where the government can—regardless of whether they use the power or not—have access to all of our communications? So that they can, if they feel the need, drill down and find us?”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Harry Lewis

Social Changes

Paralleling changes in the way digital systems compromise our security are the evolving social changes in attitudes toward privacy. How much do we really value it? As Lewis points out, “We’ll give away data on our purchasing habits for a 10-cent discount on a bag of potato chips.” But mostly, he says, “people don’t really know what they want. They’ll say one thing and then do something else.”

Noting young people’s willingness to post all kinds of personal information on social networking sites such as Facebook—including photographs that might compromise them later—some commentators have wondered if there has been a generational shift in attitudes towards privacy. In “Say Everything,” a February 2007 New York Magazine article, author Emily Nussbaum noted:

Younger people….are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reed or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not…. So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.

Some bloggers, noting that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have lived communally, have even suggested that privacy may be an anomalous notion, a relatively recent historical invention that might again disappear. “My response to that,” says Lewis, “is that, yes, it happened during the same few years in history that are associated with the whole development of individual rights, the empowerment of individuals, and the rights of the individual against government authorities. That is a notion that is tied up, I think, with the notion of a right to privacy. So it is worrisome to me.”

Nor is it the case that young people don’t care about privacy, says danah boyd, a fellow at the Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies how youth engage with social media. “Young people care deeply about privacy, but it is a question of control, not what information gets out there,” she explains. “For a lot of teenagers, the home has never been a private place. They feel they have more control on a service like Facebook or MySpace than they do at home.”

She calls this not a generational difference, but a life-stage difference. Adults, boyd says, understand context in terms of physical space. They may go out to a pub on Friday night with friends, but not with their boss. For young people, online contexts come just as naturally, and many, she has found, actually share their social network passwords with other friends as a token of trust or intimacy (hence the analogy to a safe space like a pub).

Teens do realize that someone other than their friends may access this personal information. “They understand the collapse of social context, but may decide that status among their peers is more important,” she notes. “But do they understand that things like birth dates can be used by entities beyond their visibility? No. Most of them are barely aware that they have a Social Security number. But should they be the ones trying to figure this out, or do we really need to rethink our privacy structures around our identity information and our financial information?

“My guess,” boyd continues, “is that the kinds of systems we have set up—which assume a certain kind of obscurity of basic data—won’t hold going into the future. We need to rethink how we do identity assessment for credit cards and bank accounts and all of that, and then to try to convince people not to give out their birth dates.”

Friedman agrees that financial information needs to be handled differently. Why, he asks, is a credit record always open for a new line of credit by default, enabling fraud to happen at any time? “Is it because the company that maintains the record gets a fee for each credit check?” (Security freezes on a person’s credit report are put in place only ex post facto in cases of identity theft at the request of the victim.) Friedman believes that the best way to fight widespread distribution and dissemination of personal information is with better transparency, because that affords individuals and policymakers a better understanding of the risks involved.

“You don’t necessarily want to massively restrict information-sharing, because a lot of it is voluntary and beneficial,” he explains. Privacy, in the simplest of terms, is about context of information sharing, rather than control of information sharing: “It is about allowing me to determine what kind of environment I am in, allowing me to feel confident in expressing myself in that domain, without having it spill over into another. That encompasses everything from giving my credit-card number to a company—and expecting them to use it securely and for the intended purpose only—to Facebook and people learning not to put drunk pictures of themselves online.” Some of this will have to be done through user empowerment—giving users better tools—and some through regulation. “We do need to revisit the Privacy Act of 1974,” he says. “We do need to have more information about who has information about us and who is buying that information, even if we don’t have control.”

There is always the possibility that we will decide as a society not to support privacy. Harry Lewis believes that would be society’s loss. “I think ultimately what you lose is the development of individual identity,” he says. “The more we are constantly exposed from a very young age to peer and other social pressure for our slightly aberrant behaviors, the more we tend to force ourselves, or have our parents force us, into social conformity. So the loss of privacy is kind of a regressive force. Lots of social progress has been made because a few people tried things under circumstances where they could control who knew about them, and then those communities expanded, and those new things became generally accepted, often not without a fight. With the loss of privacy, there is some threat to that spirit of human progress through social experimentation.”

Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.

Archives in Timor-Leste, 2009: Summary update - Timor Archives

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My brief on-the-ground exploration of archival developments in Timor-Leste during August leaves me both encouraged and bewildered.

Encouraged because the interest in archival matters I found in Dili in 2003 continues, unabated, to drive several interesting institutional developments and encouraged by the very strong interest in Timor archival materials being held in Australia.

Bewildered by the funding, building, training and personnel difficulties that all archives in Timor face, the uncertainties of government decision-making processes and what seems, in part, a rather negative competitiveness between some developing archival projects.

More on all that later. For now, here is a taste of what Cecily Gilbert and I managed to learn in a few short days in the very busy run-up to the 10th anniversary of the decisive independence ballot of 30 August 1999.

Arquivo Nacional
The National Archive, created to hold past and current government records, was established in the early years after independence. Since 2003 the Arquivo has been allocated a building, but does not yet appear to be a major government priority. A sizeable collection of Portuguese-era administrative records are held in reasonable storage conditions but the Arquivo does not have sufficient storage space to properly house a large volume of seemingly unexamined Indonesia-era administrative records. Transfers of independence-era government records have just begun. There does not appear to be any available listings of collection holdings and public access to the collection remains in planning stages. A detailed legislative basis for the Arquivo Nacional’s existence and function, in draft form in 2003, has yet to be adopted. It’s too early to know the likely outcome of internal government discussion about possibly co-locating the Arquivo Nacional with the planned National Library; the current Director of the Arquivo doesn’t think much of this idea.

CAVR
Materials collected in Timor as evidence for the monumental ‘Chega’ report form the centre-piece of the archives of East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR). Since CAVR’s wind-up in 2005, the Post-CAVR Secretariat has managed the archive, notably conducting a copy program funded under the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme whereby digital copies of original materials are held in London for preservation and (later) access purposes. Both paper and audio-visual materials are currently housed in reasonable archival conditions. Preservation copying of a large collection of audio-tapes of victim statements and other interviews is an important future task which will require significant resources. Access to the archives is possible with applications considered on a case by case basis but is somewhat hampered by incomplete documentation on collection content. Planning for a successor institution is well-developed but currently stalled by Parliament’s continued delay in formally considering the recommendations of Chega. The proposed institution includes a human rights documentation centre based on the existing archive and acquisition of related material from abroad.

Centro Audiovisual Max Stahl Timor Leste (CAMSTL)
Currently housed in part of the Independence Memorial Hall in Farol and directed by the inimitable Max Stahl. In addition to holding historical footage from the occupation years, CAMSTL maintains an active program of recording, for the historical record, video of current events and interviews on Timorese experience of occupation. Timorese employees are trained in camera work, editing and archival procedures and work with volunteers to transcribe all spoken words in footage held. CAMSTL has created a number of films for sale on DVD. Max Stahl has recently concluded an agreement with INA, the French national audiovisual institute, to house archival copies of Timor footage for long term preservation and access. Detailed public listings of the content of CAMSTL are not yet available. We did not have time to learn more about the funding structure and long-term administrative and viability planning for CAMSTL.

National Library
The ‘new kid on the block’ in archival terms, a National Library is under very active consideration at the highest levels. Part-funded by an international donor, a building site has been allocated (but not yet made public), books and temporary storage space have been acquired, plans for appointing an international advisor, beginning staff training and conducting an international design competition are in progress. Planning is the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Virgilio Smith. It remains unclear to us what the final form of the National Library will be. The archival aspect arises from a declared interest by ministerial advisers to acquire for the Library Australian and other Timor solidarity archival materials from abroad and discussion about the possible co-location of the Arquivo Nacional (and other smaller archives mentioned here) with the new National Library. We found considerable resistance to this idea from some of the smaller archives.

Timorese Resistance Archive and Museum
Opened in 2005, the Timorese Resistance Archive and Museum (AMRT) is located near the current (temporary) National Parliament building and the National University. The building houses a selection of Falintil weapons, radios and other equipment along with informational posters and displays of resistance documents (copies). The archival centrepiece of the AMRT is a large collection of documents gathered from resistance figures and supporters inside East Timor from 2002 to the present. Many of the collected documents are currently held in Lisbon at the Mario Soares Foundation (FMS) which has digitised the materials. With the exception of some politically sensitive materials, the digitised copies are available internationally on the internet through the AMRT website (managed by FMS) and a dedicated standalone computer in the Museum building in Dili. Aware of some questions in Dili about the ownership and management of the AMRT, along with some disquiet about documents being kept in Lisbon, a Timorese representative board of management is under construction. Also under construction is an imminent expansion of the existing building to add secure, archival standard storage and work areas and commercial seminar, bookshop and cafe facilities to assist AMRT funding for the longer term.

There’s more, much more, to say about these and other archival matters inside Timor-Leste today. Keep an eye on the ‘Timorese Archives’ section of this blog over the coming month.

Born Again in the U.S.A. - Foreign Affairs

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The Enduring Power of American Evangelicalism

September/October 2009
Timothy Samuel Shah
TIMOTHY SAMUEL SHAH is Senior Research Scholar at Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs and a co-author, with Daniel Philpott and Monica Toft, of a forthcoming book on religion and global politics to be published by Norton in 2010.

In international politics, religion has been the elephant in the room for most of the modern age. And in recent years, it has only grown larger and louder. Policymakers and political theorists have adopted the mostly unpromising strategies of ignoring it in the hope that rationality and modernity will eventually push it out; using laws, coercion, or public opinion to remove it from the political sphere; or pretending that it is only a matter of culture and treating it accordingly.

The authors of God Is Back are an exception. They admit that religion is here to stay and seek to find out what it is really all about. John Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, its Washington bureau chief, work for a publication that has been notably dubious about religion's long-term viability in the face of modernization and economic globalization. The Economist boldly published God's obituary in its millennium issue, declaring that "the Almighty recently passed into history." Micklethwait and Wooldridge, for their part, were not so sure about God's demise. To investigate God's place in the world today, the two men traveled thousands of miles to talk to religious leaders and ordinary believers across the world and spent hundreds of hours visiting mosques and temples, attending religious services, sitting in on Bible-study groups, and picking the brains of theologians.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge entered dangerous territory. They faced the literal dangers of encountering real live religious radicals and investigating religion's impact in all kinds of tough neighborhoods -- from inner-city Philadelphia to the northern Nigerian city of Kano. And they faced literary dangers by walking into a field thick with theological crossfire between believers and nonbelievers, epitomized on one extreme by Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity and on the other by Christopher Hitchens' atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The confessionally diverse duo of Micklethwait and Wooldridge -- the first is a Catholic and the second an atheist -- steers clear of polemics and focuses instead on reading God's vital signs rather than identifying his virtues or vices. What they find is that many of the forces that were supposed to consign the Almighty to the ash heap of history -- or to a quiet corner of the living room -- have only made him stronger.

Beyond discovering that God still has a pulse, Micklethwait and Wooldridge give a firsthand account of how religious groups all over the world -- from family ministries in the United States and megachurches in South Korea to televangelists in Egypt -- use modern methods to convert people. The result is more Robert Capa than Max Weber: arresting snapshots of bubbling religiosity rather than elaborate theories about the causes and consequences of the global religious revival. But the snapshots support an argument: that the United States' increasingly competitive religious market has incubated a form of entrepreneurial faith -- a religious style that is conservative at its doctrinal core but restlessly innovative in its techniques of organization and communication. Micklethwait and Wooldridge focus on this U.S. brand of religion partly because it has been the key to reconciling God and modernity. It also attracts their attention -- and admiration -- because it is contagious, increasingly winning practitioners and followers across the globalized world.

MUNDUS CONTRA DEUM

A happy marriage between God and modernity was never widely expected. In the eighteenth century, some members of modernity's self-appointed vanguard -- especially those writing in French -- considered traditional faith a skunk at the Enlightenment party and made God persona non grata in their Parisian salons. The revolutionary Jacobins even turned on Robespierre when he pushed his Cult of the Supreme Being further than their Voltairean tastes permitted. These radicals endeavored to displace God, not accommodate him. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet expressed the hope that the French Republic would "take the place of the God who escapes us."

God's partisans returned the favor. In 1864, the Vatican pointedly condemned the idea that the pope should "reconcile himself with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization." Even thinkers sympathetic to the church, such as the historians Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, feared that an unbridgeable chasm was opening up between Christianity and modernity. By 1882, the anticlerical French philosopher Ernest Renan was exulting, "We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions out of politics."

Across the world, the mutual hostility between divinity and modernity deepened further in the century between 1864, when the pope declared God antimodern, and 1966, when Time magazine asked whether he had died. In Europe, the cradle of Christendom, republican and socialist revolutionaries branded God and the church enemies of the people. God was hardly better off under conservative, monarchical, or royalist regimes -- such as Bismarck's Germany, Victorian England, and Franco's Spain -- where the church depended on government largess and kowtowed to those in power.

In the twentieth century, a worldwide march of the Jacobins' heirs attempted to get rid of God once and for all. From the Bolsheviks in Russia to the Kemalists in Turkey, the monarchists in Iran, the Nazis in Germany, the Maoists in China, and the Nasserists in Egypt, secular regimes seized church-held land, destroyed monasteries, evicted missionaries, criminalized religious movements, banned religious symbols, proscribed religious political parties, and even attempted to exterminate entire religious communities.

Over the last two centuries, most observers of world affairs took these partisans at their word. They assumed that truly modern men and women would never welcome God into their polite and educated company. And they assumed God's attitude would remain roughly that of Groucho Marx, and he would think twice about joining a club that would have him as a member. Sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and even theologians all concluded that God and modernity would inevitably go their separate ways.

But God did finally find refuge in the modern world, and Micklethwait and Wooldridge make a fresh case that it was thanks to the United States.

AMERICA BLESS GOD

The revolutionaries who founded the American republic respected God without patronizing him. Despite representing a broad spectrum of religious conviction, ranging from the deism of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the evangelicalism of Patrick Henry and John Jay, the founders welcomed God as an ally and a cornerstone of their ultramodern political revolution. At the same time, they sought to free religion from its historical dependence on state patronage, which they feared would debilitate and corrupt the church and the state alike. Immediately after the American Revolution, Christians squabbled with one another, and some state governments -- unlike the federal government -- kept churches dependent on direct government financing. (The last of these state "mini-establishments," in Massachusetts, was not abolished until 1833.)

At first, Christian ministers in the young republic were much like their European counterparts: indolent wards of the state who nonetheless expected perfect devotion from the masses by virtue of their position in the social hierarchy. This traditionalism initially helped keep more than half of the United States' increasingly freedom-loving inhabitants from joining churches at all.

In time, however, organized religion became part of the fabric of American culture. Micklethwait and Wooldridge draw on the work of such historians of religion as Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, and Mark Noll to narrate God's rapid adjustment to the New World. In the early nineteenth century, churches became less dependent on state support, and in the absence of state sanctions compelling church attendance, they adapted their messages and methods to a society that was increasingly mobile, freethinking, and egalitarian. God rapidly became less European and more American -- less clerical, theological, and communal and more entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and individualistic.

In contrast to the influential interpretations of the historians Henry Steele Commager and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., both of whom viewed the American mind as essentially skeptical and this-worldly, Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue that Christianity became more literalistic and evangelical as it became more American. By 1860, close to 85 percent of the United States' churchgoing population was evangelical, upending Jefferson's famous prediction in 1822 that "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian." Religion in the United States also reflected a powerful affinity between what the sociologist Peter Berger has argued is the individualistic and voluntaristic core of evangelical Christianity and the voluntaristic impulses of American democracy. As Berger has written, among evangelicals, "one cannot be born a Christian; one must be 'born again' to meet that designation," which makes evangelical Protestantism a "peculiarly modern religion." A variety of evangelical churches and movements -- Methodist, Baptist, and others -- were thus well suited to a rapidly modernizing United States.

Over the next 150 years, evangelical leaders such as Charles Finney, Dwight Moody, and Billy Graham used their revivalist techniques to popularize evangelicalism among successive generations of Americans: deploying modern communication strategies and building specialized voluntary organizations. They also succeeded in creating a new entrepreneurial style of religious propagation, which hinged on leaders who began their careers outside of established and respected religious institutions, who saw alienation from religion as an opportunity to be seized rather than a condition to be condemned, who preached a practical and parsimonious message, and who believed that people needed to respond freely and individually to the call for redemption. Their theology has long been well suited to a constantly churning and mobile nation: from a time when static and agrarian communities gave way to an industrialized and urbanized society down to the present day, filled with suburbanites seeking spiritual meaning. The genius of this American-style religion is that it respects individualism while equipping people to survive its excesses.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge are most perceptive and thorough -- and most entertaining -- when they document the continuing vigor of the United States' contemporary evangelical subculture. They take unexpected detours into evangelical vacation spots, such as Holy Land U.S.A., in Bedford County, Virginia, which features a 250-acre replica of the Holy Land in Jesus' time. Although some secular liberals fear that evangelical leaders are harboring a theocratic agenda out of step with mainstream Americans, God Is Back demonstrates that these ministers win large followings precisely because they are attuned to the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people. The Purpose Driven Life, a book by Rick Warren, the pastor at the Saddleback megachurch in Southern California, has tapped into consumerist Americans' undeniable anomie and hunger for spiritual direction. Twenty-five million copies have been sold, making it the second-best-selling hardcover book in U.S. history -- after the Bible. When Warren delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's inauguration, he offered vivid evidence of evangelicalism's continuing influence.

DIVINE DECLINE?

If it is an error to equate God's relationship with modernity to Superman's with kryptonite -- a point God Is Back drives home -- religious triumphalism is also unwarranted. God may be back after a century of attempted deicides, but he still faces stiff resistance. Even in the United States, the most religious nation in the industrialized West, those who choose not to identify with any particular religion -- the "unaffiliated" in pollster parlance -- constitute the fastest-growing "religious group." Rather than flocking to more theologically relaxed denominations, an increasing number of Americans are abandoning organized religion altogether. According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2007, 16.1 percent of the respondents said they were unaffiliated.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that 15 percent of the U.S. population had no particular religious preference, almost double the figure for 1990. In his April 2009 article "The End of Christian America," the Newsweek editor Jon Meacham used the ARIS study to argue that the United States is passing into a "post-Christian" period. "This is not to say that the Christian God is dead," Meacham explained, "but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory."

Meacham is onto something. Evangelical Christians in the United States now find themselves in the political wilderness after one of their own -- George W. Bush -- left the White House with one of the lowest presidential approval ratings in U.S. history. Many of the most politically powerful evangelical leaders of the last two generations, such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and D. James Kennedy, have either died or retired, passing their organizations on to younger and less influential successors. Obama, the man almost all evangelical leaders vociferously opposed during the 2008 campaign, was elected president. And the trends they have fought, such as the rising acceptance of same-sex marriage and abortion, are increasingly entrenched in the country's laws and social mores.

When Dobson stepped down as head of the Christian organization Focus on the Family in April, just after Meacham's article appeared, he gave a decidedly downbeat farewell speech about issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and pornography. "We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict," Dobson reflected. "Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles."

In other countries, too, the armies of God seem to be in full-scale retreat. In the last two years, Islamist parties have fared poorly in electoral contests across the Muslim world, including in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Morocco. In Iran, the hard-line clerical establishment succeeded in retaining power only by blatantly rigging an already skewed electoral process and crushing protests. Fundamentalist terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban are on the run from Iraq to Pakistan, as they lose battles and sympathizers. In India, the coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party received a surprisingly decisive drubbing in national elections held in April and May. As Meacham observed about evangelicals in the United States, the problem is not so much that God is losing popularity as that many of his self-appointed representatives are suffering a palpable decline in social and political authority. Nietzsche may have been right after all: as an unquestioned arbiter of public culture, perhaps God is dead.

But the many attempts on God's life have made him remarkably resilient as an object of private devotion. The same survey that inspired Meacham to pronounce the end of Christian America found that just as many Americans identified themselves as Christian in 2008 as did in 2001 (about 76 percent). Meanwhile, the number of unaffiliated barely grew, remaining around 15 percent. Although the ARIS reported a big decline for Christians and a big jump for the unaffiliated between 1990 and 2001, these changes almost certainly stemmed in part from the increasing willingness of some nonreligious people to identify themselves as such, perhaps induced by a perception that secularism is becoming more socially acceptable. Since 2001, with most secularists already out of the closet, unaffiliated growth has slowed. Micklethwait and Wooldridge note that the link between faith and fertility may also be slowing secular growth: numerous studies, including the World Values Survey, which covers 80 countries, show that secular people go forth and multiply much more modestly than do their religious brethren. Thus, says Ronald Inglehart, director of the World Values Survey, secularization is its own long-term demographic "gravedigger."

A closer look at survey data also reveals that secular Americans remain surprisingly open to God. An analysis by the Pew Forum found that 70 percent of the unaffiliated surveyed believed in God and more than 40 percent said that religion was either somewhat or very important in their lives. Furthermore, a majority of Americans raised in religiously unaffiliated households adopt a religion later in life, giving the unaffiliated population one of the lowest retention rates of all religious groups in the country. Americans are not marching in lockstep toward a singular secular future, nor are they becoming a monolithic Christian nation. Instead, the United States is moving toward an ever more dynamic religious pluralism.

GREENER PASTORS

Micklethwait and Wooldridge are right to suggest that one effect of the United States' vigorous religious pluralism is to make religion in the country even more entrepreneurial and competitive. American evangelicalism has spawned a "church growth" industry driven by a class of preachers -- some of whom call themselves "pastorpreneurs" -- highly skilled in building megachurches that target the religiously disaffected with "seeker-friendly" services and family-friendly facilities, replete with on-site daycare, basketball courts, and fast-food restaurants. God Is Back reports that one of the United States' 1,000 megachurches -- Willow Creek, near Chicago -- is so successful that it has become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

The success of such churches is evident in the survey data: according to the ARIS, nearly half of American Christians now self-identify as "evangelical" or "born-again," and the number of Americans belonging to mostly evangelical and Pentecostal "nondenominational" churches -- which are quintessentially modern and American in their informality, their emphasis on a personal relationship with God, and their indifference to ancient ecclesiastical and theological traditions -- jumped from about 200,000 in 1990 to about eight million in 2008. In its 2007 study, the Pew Forum found that some 3.6 million Americans raised without an attachment to any organized religion converted to evangelicalism later in their lives.

Although God's armies around the world may have suffered a string of political defeats, they will regroup in due course. Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hindu nationalist movement in India are down, but they are not out. Political dynamics are cyclical, and religious parties will regroup in India and Lebanon when the political winds begin blowing in their favor once again. Most important, as God Is Back suggests, these movements are led by organizations that operate in increasingly competitive political and cultural markets. And these markets will force them to adapt -- or they will die.

The Iranian regime's mendacity and brutality after the June presidential election have driven this lesson home, not least in the minds of the Iranian clerics themselves, some of whom have long argued that men of the cloth should endeavor to gain popular credibility by voluntarily relinquishing political power.

God's partisans in Iran and elsewhere would do well to heed Micklethwait and Wooldridge's argument that their political influence will be minimal if they fail to take to heart the deepest lessons of U.S.-style entrepreneurial religion: let God be God by freeing him from both government regulation and government handouts; do not lash him to the mast of a particular government or political party and in so doing make him a hostage to political fortune. God will indeed keep coming back -- especially in those places where he has not been turned into a fawning palace courtier or a shackled political prisoner.

All (Muslim) Politics Is Local - Foreign Affairs

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How Context Shapes Islam in Power

September/October 2009
Charles Tripp
CHARLES TRIPP is Professor of Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

The maxim Islam din wa-dawla (Islam is religion and state) is often said to describe a distinguishing mark of Islam -- the suggestion being that Islam is a religion with a political mission at its core. Both those who repeat the mantra with approving fervor and those who worry about it assert its essential truth and suggest that all Muslims must make it a part of their worldview. Some go so far as to claim that this axiom calls for a particular form of state structure or political behavior.

And yet, of course, the statement is nothing more than a political slogan -- an artifact of its time, its meaning contingent on the setting in which it is used, like any other rallying cry. This quality does not make the slogan any less meaningful for the Muslims who subscribe to it; what it does is highlight the fact that this saying reflects a preoccupation with state power in the modern world. The Muslims who adhere to it, no less than those who do not and no less than non-Muslims, are both the products and the makers of that world. This point is worth stating since much of the present debate about the role of Islam in world politics tends to downplay the political or, at least, display a one-dimensional understanding of what drives political ambition. The political behavior of Islamists, and sometimes that of all Muslims, is often treated as an exotic peculiarity that defies normal analysis and can only be explained as an extension of their faith.

Whatever one's reference point, however, the sometimes sordid business of politics has a gravitational pull that brings lofty ideals and grand sentiments down to earth with a thump. To play the game of politics is to grapple with the practicalities of power. This requires making sense of why people act as they do and when they do: why they respond to certain calls to action -- nationalist, Islamist, whatever -- and why they think their political activities are appropriate, ethically as well as practically, to the ends they imagine worthy of achievement.

Investigating these questions may be an empirical or epistemological challenge, but it does not require singling out religious motivations, Islamic or otherwise. The same searching questions should be asked of the religiously motivated that are asked of liberals, conservatives, Marxists, fascists, nationalists, and any other group that tries to put into practice its imagined notion of the good life. One should not rely only on the players' descriptions of themselves. Yet this is precisely what has happened to the effort to understand the role of religion in shaping the political lives of Muslims. Many members of the Western media, and even many Western academics, have pointed to the most extreme of Muslim political tracts and suggested that these are what Islamism, or even Islam, is really about.

It is all the more refreshing, therefore, to encounter two serious books that avoid this pitfall: Gilles Kepel puts the "politics" back in "Islamist politics," and Ali Allawi explores the often troubled relationship between worldly power and the spirituality of Islamic beliefs. Both books indicate, in their own way, that all Muslims who seek to reshape the world according to Islamic ideals and traditions, whatever they may define those to be, are confronted by the mundane need to bend an often obdurate reality to their will.

RELIGION AND POWER

The exercise of power is bound by time and place, and it depends on the competence of political actors. These conditions determine the political impact of any Islamic ideals. It is worth contrasting, for example, the very different outcomes of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's calls for revolt in Iran in 1963 and in 1978: the first foundered; the second started a revolution. In some cases, the venality of political actors can trigger disillusionment and a reappraisal of Islamic obligations, leading some to turn their backs on an Islamic political program. (Iran might become such a case, after the unrest over the presidential election earlier this year.) A program that does not work -- spectacularly, corrosively, or insidiously -- loses credibility and purchase. It can no longer move people; it has no traction. This may be the result of various factors unrelated to religion or ideology, but these factors necessarily affect the ways in which people understand and act on calls to put their ideals into practice.

Allawi captures this point well in his account of the rise, domination, and decline of secular ideologies and their adherents in the Middle East. Having lived through Iraq's turbulent years of revolution, he witnessed thousands of Iraqis being drawn to the Iraqi Communist Party and thousands of others coming to believe that Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Baathist or otherwise, would bring modernity to Iraq. Unsurprisingly, Allawi is wary of these fallen gods.

For him, the Islamist political movements that originally emerged in Iraq in the 1950s and gained power thanks to the U.S. occupation after 2003, came not simply from the disillusioned secularists. Crucially, he sees them as products of a distinctively Iraqi politics. They certainly identify themselves as Muslim -- Shiite or Sunni -- but they also represent what it means to be political actors in contemporary Iraq: having to deal with Kurdish secessionists, foreign intervention, and oil-based political economies. The resources of Islamist groups may be very different now than when these groups first emerged; demographics and power structures have changed. But the expression of their political imagination, no matter how self-consciously attached to distinctively Islamic markers, is similar to their predecessors'. Thus their attention to defining community and collective loyalties; the importance they attribute to territorial control and administration; their building of coalitions; their ideas of representation; their use of violence; their cultivation, with money, of patrimonial networks; their competing for political leadership -- all are familiar features of political behavior. Self-consciously Islamist movements and parties, no less than the secular nationalist ones, to which they bear a strong family resemblance, are preoccupied with what works and how.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Grounding Islamist organizations and their sympathizers in a local political reality shaped by the histories, predicaments, and preoccupations of the people they seek to mobilize is a central theme of Kepel's wide-ranging study of various Islamic political movements, chiefly in the Middle East. Part of his intention is to demonstrate how political movements that define themselves based on their readings of Islamic traditions are best understood through a close analysis of the contexts that produced them; they are not the generic symptoms of "resurgent" or "radical" Islam.

Looking at Islamist organizations from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Palestine to Lebanon, Kepel gives a convincing account of the failure of what he says are the two "grand narratives" that have dominated common understandings of political Islam over the past decade or so. The first is the narrative of the "war on terror." Put forward by the Bush administration and its circle of ideologues, it implied that the U.S. military would clear the way for the establishment of democratic politics across the Middle East. The second is both the target and the mirror image of the first: propagated by Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, it holds that jihad directed against the "far enemy," is the best way of establishing Islamic rule in Muslim-majority states and elsewhere. As Kepel points out, both theories are delusions, have equally improbable goals, and have inflicted horrific damage -- damage that has often provoked local resistance and left the United States and al Qaeda bogged down in the intransigent politics of place, facing criticism, fragmenting alliances, and isolation.

Quite apart from the ethical revulsion these two narratives have provoked among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, another problem, as Kepel points out, is their remoteness from Muslims' actual, and diverse, experiences. Both narratives so reify religion as to turn political behavior into the mere reflection of an individual's attachment to a timeless set of prescriptions called "Islam," as if these were removed from the contexts in which Muslim principles and identities drive political actors. They also suggest that Muslims' politics can -- or, in the case of bin Laden, must -- be understood in relation to their faith. Yet the truth is more complicated, contested, and contingent than these two narratives allow. Neither can explain why at a given time and place a given group of Muslims chooses the prescriptions it does from Islam's vast and rich tradition to guide its political behavior. And neither can account for why other groups of Muslims act on very different understandings of Islam or why still others see their engagement with power as having only the most tenuous connection, if any, to their religious beliefs.

What does explain these differences is political context. Kepel's account makes sense of the diversity of Muslims' politics, not simply in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia but also in western Europe, where a series of violent incidents and symbolic confrontations over the past decade has prompted talk of a fundamental incompatibility of values and a "clash of civilizations." A cursory glance at political reality makes clear that most of the conflicts involving Muslim immigrants in, for example, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom owed more to the policies pursued by these states' governments than to the Islamic identities or even Islamist proclivities of the protagonists. For Kepel, the policy eschewing integration in the Netherlands ("pillarization," which sees religious communities as separate pillars that help hold together the Dutch republic) and its counterpart in the United Kingdom ("multiculturalism," whereby the state lets people of different cultures regulate their own affairs) created fertile ground for the growth of radical Islamist political sentiments among Muslim immigrants in those two countries.

These approaches have roots in the Netherlands' and the United Kingdom's imperial pasts: overseas, Dutch and British colonists favored ruling indirectly and cultivating native leaders to ensure order locally. In the Netherlands and the United Kingdom today, policies shaped by these traditions have prompted the authorities to be hands-off when it comes to their Muslim communities -- at least until state security is threatened, at which point the state takes clumsy measures that many Muslims interpret as discrimination.

Kepel holds up the contrasting example of France, which has pursued clear and, according to some, highly intrusive policies designed to impose secularism in public life. He does concede that France's "assimilation" policy has been a good deal more successful at integrating Muslim immigrants civically than economically -- hence, the politics of contestation, including riots involving French citizens with Muslim backgrounds, that has erupted periodically. But as Kepel's account makes clear, this is better understood as the rebellion of bored, out-of-work, and marginalized French youths living in dreary suburbs than as anything remotely resembling Islamist politics.

Whether these differences in policy provide the key explanation for the variety of political views among the Muslim immigrant communities of Europe is still up for debate. Some argue, for instance, that the explanation has more to do with these communities' links to the politics of their countries of origin. Nevertheless, Kepel's analysis is valuable for taking the trouble to scrutinize the micropolitics of different groups. He shows that the closer one looks, the more either irrelevant or troubling grand narratives about Islam and civilization become.

THE PRIVATIZATION OF ISLAM

Allawi's otherwise erudite and thoughtful book is, for its part, haunted by the kind of generalization that Kepel eschews. Allawi is writing about Islam as a faith on the stage of world history, and as the book's title suggests, his central concern is "the crisis of Islamic civilization." By this, he means a number of things but principally the fragmentation of authority, the loss of unifying cultural referents, and the divergence between the spiritual and the material in Muslims' conduct. Together, these fractures have deprived Islam of the kind of autonomous, self-rejuvenating drive that Allawi sees in other civilizations (say, China or the West) and have made it more vulnerable to domination by the forces of globalization, be they powerful governments, capitalism, or cultural hegemons. From Allawi's perspective, Islam has become privatized, an article of interior faith nothing like the framework for public life that he believes it has been historically and should continue to be. If for Kepel the privatization of religion is a recipe for social harmony and a goal of the secular state, for Allawi it is the beginning of the end.

This position presents Allawi with something of a dilemma. On the one hand, he pleads for Muslims to reconnect with the powerful spiritual essence of Islam and to reestablish Islam as a major player in world history. On the other, he is intensely wary of, indeed repulsed by the sight of, political Islamists scrambling to use any means available -- graft, corruption, violence -- for political advantage, thereby cutting themselves off from the "wellsprings of Islamic ethics." The targets of his anger include organizations such as al Qaeda and the Islamist parties of Iraq, which he sees as symptoms of the crisis of Islamic civilization rather than as part of the solution. As he rightly says, these groups reflect the politics of those they are fighting in all its ruthlessness, not the spiritual values at the heart of Islam.

The question is, how can one have any impact on the existing order without in some way succumbing to the logic of political practicalities? The harsh truth is that however sublime or spiritual the ideals -- and Islam, no less than any other great religious tradition, can provide a dazzling array of such ideals -- their champions will need to engage with the politics of place in order to realize them. There may be many ways of doing this, and disputes about which ways are best are inevitable, but at the heart of this task lies the old political conundrum of how to engage effectively the existing power structure without compromising one's core ideals. Reflecting on this question, one realizes that political discourse is the very antithesis of civilizational discourse, even if the latter can sometimes be used polemically in political debates. The closer one looks at the multitude of hopes, prejudices, fears, and activities that constitute political life, the harder it is to meaningfully apply to a political order an overarching, homogenizing, and essentializing term such as "civilization."

MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

It should be little surprise, then, that Allawi is at his best when he turns to the particular. Some of his book's most powerful passages concern the corruption of governments in the Middle East and, in his memorable phrase, the "sinister cities" of the Persian Gulf, which have embraced materialism and an "oppressive modernity." These grim facets of globalization form the reality of the modern world, as inhabited and created by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Much of Allawi's concern, in other words, is not really about Islam as a religion, or even about Islam as a civilization, but rather about what has been happening to Muslims. They have had various responses to modernity and in the process have created new ways of being Muslim. Some of these responses -- peaceful or violent, accommodating or rejectionist -- could become an inspiration for millions. But even those will catch on not simply because of Muslims' professions of faith; if they do spread, it will also be because they help Muslims make sense of power, in all its forms.

This is the most important message of these books. Kepel and Allawi are at their strongest when they examine the intellectual and political trends that have shaped the experiences of Muslims across the globe. As Kepel and Allawi demonstrate, these trends have made Muslims full actors in the evolving story of world history, whether they act self-consciously with reference to their Muslim identities or not. To be a Muslim in the modern world is both to be shaped by that world and to take part in its shaping. Modernity, with all its ambiguities and sometimes contradictory impulses, is a composite affair, constantly refashioned by those who engage with it. Kepel's and Allawi's books are reminders that politics is rooted in time and place, and that at the same time it nonetheless follows a remarkably similar logic in all its various settings. Understanding this logic, while also grasping the full significance of context, helps one understand the behavior of political actors -- and not just Muslim ones.

Asia's Role in Global Innovation Networks - EWC

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A New Geography of Knowledge in the Electronics Industry? Asia's Role in Global Innovation Networks

by Dieter Ernst

Policy Studies, No. 54

Publisher: Honolulu: East-West Center
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 978-1-932728-82-8
Binding: paper
Pages: x, 65
Price: $10.00

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Abstract

Debates about globalization are focused on offshore outsourcing of manufacturing and services. This approach, however, neglects an important change in the geography of knowledge--the emergence of global innovation networks (GINs) that integrate dispersed engineering, product development, and research activities across geographic borders.

This new form of globalization poses new challenges and opportunities for research on international economics, economic geography, and international relations and for developing new policy responses. Written by a leading expert, this monograph draws on a unique database of GINs in the electronics industry to explore their drivers and impacts and how integration of Asian firms into these networks affects their learning, capability formation, and innovation. The study shows a rapid expansion of these networks, driven by a relentless slicing and dicing ("modularization") of engineering, development, and research. Asia's role in these networks, quite minor until recently, is increasing. The resurgence of China and India as markets and production sites plays an important role in that increase.

However, the new geography of knowledge is not a flatter world where technical change and liberalization rapidly spread the benefits of globalization. Instead, the offshoring of R&D through GINs creates a handful of new--yet very diverse and intensely competing--innovation offshoring hubs in Asia. A new global hierarchy of innovation hubs juxtaposes global centers of excellence in the United States, Japan, and the European Union and a handful of new--yet very diverse and intensely competing--innovation offshoring hubs in Asia. While integration into GINs has facilitated Asian firms catching up with those in the West, this may become a mixed blessing unless Asian governments can establish appropriate policies for developing absorptive capacity and innovative capabilities both at the firm level and across the industry.

Sep 3, 2009

Denied Dignity - Human Rights Watch

Systematic Discrimination and Hostility toward Saudi Shia Citizens

September 3, 2009

This 32-page report documents the sharpest sectarian tensions in the kingdom in years, set off by clashes between Shia pilgrims and religious police in Medina in February 2009, followed by arbitrary arrests of Shia protesters in the Eastern Province in March. The closing of private Shia halls for communal prayer in Khobar, which began in July 2008 and the arrests of Shia religious and community leaders in Ahsa' in 2009 also have contributed to the tensions.

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ISBN: 1-56432-536-9

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International Crisis Group - Indonesia: Noordin Top’s Support Base

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Indonesia: Noordin Top’s Support Base

Asia Briefing N°95
27 August 2009

OVERVIEW

More than a month after the 17 July 2009 hotel bombings in Jakarta, Noordin Mohammed Top remains at large, but his network is proving to be larger and more sophisticated than previously thought. Not only was it responsible for coordinated bombings at two luxury hotels in the heart of Jakarta’s business district, but it also was apparently contemplating a car bomb attack on President Yudhoyono’s residence. As more information comes to light, it looks increasingly likely that Noordin sought and received Middle Eastern funding. While the extent of foreign involvement this time around remains unclear, recruitment in Indonesia has proved disturbingly easy. The salafi jihadi ideology that legitimises attacks on the U.S. and its allies, and Muslims who associate with them, remains confined to a tiny fringe, but that fringe includes disaffected factions of many different radical groups and impressionable youths with no history of violence.

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Many elements of Noordin’s support base are familiar. Although he broke away from the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) organisation around 2004, Noordin retains an inner circle of JI militants who have been with him for the last four or five years. He can rely on many more, including teachers at JI schools and their students, to provide hiding places or logistical aid as needed. He has made repeated attempts to tap into the leadership of jihadi groups, not just JI but smaller organisations as well. In some cases, militant jihadis who want more action than their leaders may seek him out, rather than vice versa. He often manages to bring in a few family members and neighbours of those who hide him. The more systematic recruitment of foot soldiers seems to be done more by the inner circle than by Noordin himself. They recruit new youths as needed through study sessions in local mosques, or pick up young men radicalised through earlier exposure to jihadi preachers but then left behind when those preachers move on or are arrested. In every one of his operations, the suicide bombers were identified first by Noordin’s lieutenants and only afterwards met the man himself.

There are new elements and new faces in the July attacks. One family has emerged as pivotal, both to the execution of the 17 July plot and other planned attacks, as well as to the contacts with the Middle East. Two brothers, Syaifudin Jaelani and Mohamed Syahrir are on the police wanted list as members of Noordin’s team. One of their sisters married the man who brought the bomb into the Ritz-Carlton and who died in a police siege in Temanggung, Central Java, on 8 August. The other sister was briefly married to a man who booked the Marriott room used by the bombers and whose arrest broke the case open for the police. The network of this one family extends from Yemen, where Syaifudin studied for four years, to Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda, where Mohamed Syahrir worked as a technician. Noordin may still be the commander, but he has some exceedingly well-connected lieutenants who made their debut in the hotel bombings.

Uncovering Noordin’s network is not a question of tracking down a closed group with a defined membership. It seems to be a loosely organised, almost ad hoc collection of people, largely but not exclusively on Java, that can easily adapt to arrests or deaths of members. It relies on friends, friends of friends, families and co-workers, with each person involved a potential recruiter of others.

This briefing examines the linkages among the people Noordin drew on for the 17 July attacks in an effort to understand his support base. It is focused on the local network, mostly on Java, not on the overseas links, as those were still being uncovered as this went to press. It is not about the ongoing police investigation and does not draw on any privileged information from the men arrested since 17 July. It is necessarily an interim study, using the known pieces of the puzzle to help explain why Noordin and his network have not only survived in Indonesia, but in some senses thrived. It is based on press reports and interviews conducted in connection with the current investigation, and extensive reading of documents collected for previous Crisis Group reports.

Indonesian maids in Malaysia to have weekly day off - AFP

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KUALA LUMPUR — Indonesian maids working in Malaysia will be given one day off a week and be allowed to hold onto their passports, the home ministry said Thursday, in a new deal triggered by a string of abuse case.

Indonesia imposed a ban on sending maids to work here in June, after a 43-year-old Malaysian woman was charged with causing grievous bodily harm by beating her Indonesian maid and scalding her with boiling water.

Malaysia's Home Ministry said in a statement that the new terms were agreed by senior Malaysian and Indonesian officials who met in August.

"The meeting has agreed that Indonesian maids will be allowed to keep their passport when they are working in this country," it said.

Currently, employers typically hold onto maids' passports, to prevent them running away or to exercise control over them.

"The Indonesian maids also will be given one day off a week," it added.

The ministry said the committee thrashing out the new working conditions will hold a fourth meeting in Jakarta this Saturday, which will tackle the hotly debated topic of maids' wages.

The issue of wages has remained unresolved despite talks that have been held intermittently since 2007.

Malaysia -- one of Asia's largest importers of labour -- depends heavily on domestic workers, mainly from Indonesia, but has no laws governing their working conditions.

The government in May announced plans for new laws to protect domestic workers from sexual harassment, non-payment of wages and poor working conditions.

Currently Indonesian maids typically work seven days a week for as little as 400 ringgit (113 dollars).

Report Cites Atmosphere of Ethnic Hatred in Suffolk County - NYTimes.com

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By KIRK SEMPLE

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — An environment of racial intolerance and ethnic hatred, fostered by anti-immigrant groups and some public officials, has helped fuel dozens of attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County during the past decade, says a report issued Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups around the country.

“Latino immigrants in Suffolk County live in fear,” said the report, which the law center released at a news conference here. “Political leaders in the county have done little to discourage the hatred, and some have actively fanned the flames.”

The law center, based in Montgomery, Ala., came to prominence in the 1970s for anti-discrimination efforts and its legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan. It started looking at Suffolk County after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death last November in Patchogue. Seven youths, who prosecutors say were driven by prejudice against Latinos, are awaiting trial in that case.

The center’s report is the product of months of investigation on Long Island, including scores of interviews with Latino immigrants and local civic leaders. While it draws heavily on news accounts and public records, center officials said it was the most comprehensive compilation of statements and events showing a pattern of hate crimes in Suffolk that were at least tacitly condoned — if not actively encouraged — by some local leaders.

The center’s investigators made “frightening” discoveries, the report said: “Although Lucero’s murder represented the apex of anti-immigration violence in Suffolk County to date, it was hardly an isolated incident.”

Many Latino immigrants in Suffolk say they have been beaten with baseball bats and other objects, attacked with BB guns and pepper spray, and been the victims of arson, the report said. Latinos, it added, are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles or pelted with objects hurled from cars.

On Aug. 15, after the center’s report had been printed, an Ecuadorean man in Patchogue was attacked by three men who used racial epithets as they kicked and punched him, the police said. The three were arrested, and two were charged with assault as a bias crime, Newsday reported.

On Aug. 20, a man in Smithtown told a mother and a daughter who wore traditional Islamic garb that he was going to “chop you into little pieces and kill you,” the police said. The man was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment, the Associated Press reported.

And on Wednesday, the police said, hate-crimes detectives were investigating a burglary Tuesday night at a Latino evangelical church in Patchogue, in which notes with anti-Hispanic comments were found on the altar.

The law center report, echoing often-repeated statements by advocates for immigrants, accused the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, of helping to create an atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment by taking a hard line against illegal immigration.

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Levy said, “While we can continue to disagree about policies related to the economic and social impacts of illegal immigration, we can all agree that any violence against a fellow human being cannot and will not be tolerated.” In the past, Mr. Levy has repeatedly denied accusations that he has fomented bias.

The report pointed to a statement by Michael M. D’Andre, a county legislator from Smithtown, at a 2001 hearing on a bill to penalize contractors who hire undocumented workers. Mr. D’Andre said that if his town were “attacked” by an influx of Hispanic day laborers, “we’ll be up in arms, we’ll be out with baseball bats.” He apologized the following week for his remark.

The report also highlighted a comment by Elie Mystal, a county legislator from Amityville, who said during a hearing in 2007 that if day laborers started gathering in his neighborhood, “I would load my gun and start shooting, period.” He later apologized and said he had been joking, according to news media reports.

Mr. D’Andre and Mr. Mystal are no longer legislators.

The report said Latinos’ fears were fed by nativist groups like Sachem Quality of Life, a local organization that has disbanded.

After Mr. Lucero’s death, many immigrants in the county stepped forward to describe their attacks to the police and media. In some of the cases, the allegations were reported to the police at the time the assaults occurred, but no arrests were made, in part because language barriers made communication difficult, the authorities have said.

Law center officials said that according to immigrants they interviewed, there may have been another reason for the inaction: police indifference.

Many immigrants told center investigators that the “police did not take their reports of attacks seriously, often blaming the victim,” the report said. “They said there’s little point in going to the police, who are often not interested in their plight and instead demand to know their immigration status.”

The Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, said in a statement, “Some of the report had concrete ideas, most of which we are already implementing, but other parts were rife with inaccuracies due to the law center’s failure to interview the Police Department, the district attorney or elected officials.”

The report urged officials to adopt measures including halting “their angry demagoguery” about immigration, promoting programs that encourage respect for diversity, and training police officers to take seriously all allegations of hate-motivated crime.

“If these measures are taken to combat an increasingly volatile situation,” the report said, “it’s likely that angry passions in Suffolk can be cooled and a rational debate on immigration and its consequences begun.”

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Table of Contents

International Crisis Group - Indonesia: Noordin Top’s Support Base

Indonesia: Noordin Top’s Support Base

Indonesian maids in Malaysia to have weekly day off - AFP

Report Cites Atmosphere of Ethnic Hatred in Suffolk County - NYTimes.com