WASHINGTON - Hours before the judge in the latest Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial announced yet another guilty verdict last week, Russia's most prominent political prisoner was already being attacked in cyberspace.

No, Khodorkovsky's Web site, the main source of news about the trial for many Russians, was not being censored. Rather, it had been targeted by so-called denial-of-service attacks, with most of the site's visitors receiving a "page cannot be found" message in their browsers.

Such attacks are an increasingly popular tool for punishing one's opponents, as evidenced by the recent online campaign against American corporations like Amazon and PayPal for mistreating WikiLeaks. It's nearly impossible to trace the perpetrators; many denial-of-service attacks go underreported, as it's often hard to distinguish them from cases where a Web site has been overwhelmed by a huge number of hits. Although most of the sites eventually get back online, denial-of-service attacks rarely generate as much outrage as formal government attempts to filter information on the Internet.

In the past, repressive regimes have relied on Internet firewalls to block dissidents from spreading forbidden ideas; China has been particularly creative, while countries like Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are never far behind. But the pro-Kremlin cyberattackers who hit Kodorkovsky's Web site may reveal more about the future of Internet control than Beijing's practice of adapting traditional censorship to new technology.

Under the Russian model - what I refer to as "social control" - no formal, direct censorship is necessary. Armies of pro-government netizens - which often include freelancing amateurs and computer-savvy members of pro-Kremlin youth movements - take matters into their own hands and attack Web sites they don't like, making them inaccessible even to users in countries that practice no Internet censorship at all.

Cyberattacks are just one of the growing number of ways in which the Kremlin harnesses its supporters to influence Web content. Most of the country's prime Internet resources are owned by Kremlin-friendly oligarchs and government-controlled companies. These sites rarely hesitate to suspend users or delete blog posts if they cross the line set by the government.

The Kremlin is also aggressively exploiting the Internet to spread propaganda and bolster government popularity, sometimes with comical zeal. Just last summer Vladimir Putin ordered the installation of Web cameras - broadcasting over the Internet in real-time - to monitor progress on new housing projects for victims of the devastating forest fires. This made for great PR - but few journalists inquired whether the victims had computers to witness this noble exercise in transparency (they didn't). Russia's security services and police also profit from digital surveillance, using social networking sites to gather intelligence and gauge the popular mood.

The Kremlin in fact practices very little formal Internet censorship, preferring social control to technological constraints. There is a certain logic to this. Outright censorship hurts its image abroad: Cyberattacks are too ambiguous to make it into most foreign journalists' reports about Russia's worsening media climate. By allowing Kremlin-friendly companies and vigilantes to police the digital commons, the government doesn't have to fret over every critical blog post.

One reason so many foreign observers overlook the Kremlin's harnessing of denial-of-service attacks is that they are used to more blatant measures of Internet control. China's draconian efforts to filter the Internet - characterized by Wired magazine in a 1997 article as the "Great Firewall of China" - harken back to the strict censorship of the airways by Communist governments during the Cold War. Back then it was possible to keep out or at least cut down on the influence of foreign ideas by jamming Western broadcasts. The Internet, however, has proven to be far too amorphous to dominate. So its better to co-opt it as much as possible by enabling private companies and pro-government bloggers to engage in "comment warfare" with the Politburo's foes.

Meanwhile, China itself is quietly adopting many measures practiced in Russia. The Web site of the Norwegian Nobel Committee came under repeated cyberattacks after it gave the 2010 award to the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Many Chinese government officials are now asked to attend media training sessions and use their skills to help shape online public opinion rather than censor it.

In assessing the U.S. government's Internet freedom policy - announced a year ago by Hillary Clinton - one sees few signs that U.S. diplomats are aware of growing efforts by authoritarian governments to harness social forces to control the Internet. So far, most of Washington's efforts have been aimed at limiting the damage caused by technological control. But even here Washington has a spotty record: Just a few weeks ago the State Department gave an innovation award to Cisco, a company that played a key role in helping China build its firewall.

The eventual disappearance of Internet filtering in much of the world would count as a rather ambiguous achievement if it's replaced by an outburst of cyberattacks, an increase in the state's surveillance power, and an outpouring of insidious government propaganda. Policymakers need to stop viewing Internet control as just an outgrowth of the Cold War-era radio jamming and start paying attention to non-technological threats to online freedom.

Addressing the social dimension of Internet control would require political rather than technological solutions, but this is no good reason to cling to the outdated metaphor of the "Great Firewall."

Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the author of "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom."

The first Liberation Technology seminar of the winter quarter on January 6, featured Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Zittrain focused his talk entitled, Minds for Sale, on the variety of online platforms that harness the wisdom of crowds today, and closed with a discussion of the implications of these platforms. Categorizing these new tools by the breadth of their user base, Zittrain began by describing the platforms that pay the most money per task, require the most skill, and subsequently have the least participation. Key examples of these platforms are listed below, and organized by their decreasing level on skill.

•  Xprize Foundation attempts to prompt radical breakthroughs through competitions for large quantities of prize money.
• InnoCentive creates a marketplace between engineers and scientists to encourage innovation.
• LiveOps, which bills itself as a contact center cloud, has developed a large set of independent contractors who are designated specific tasks when they sign in to the site. They may be assigned to answer calls placed to a restaurant or emergency hotline or to make political calls on behalf of Liveops clients.
• Samasource offers "dignified digital work for women, children and refugees" located in developing countries.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk (also known as Artificial Artificial Intelligence) allows users to participate in anonymous, minimally paid tasks. These tasks can be submitted by any party and are highly disaggregated among hundreds or thousands of users, each of whom receives a payout of between approximately one to fifteen cents for completing the task.
• Soylent, which calls itself "a word processor with a crowd inside" embeds workers from Mechanical Turk into Microsoft Word. When users install the site's Shortn add-in into Microsoft Word, they can use the tool to have written samples shortened in two minutes. In order to achieve this, the written sample is disaggregated by paragraphs, and each paragraph is shortened within two minutes by a "Turker"-a user who accepts the task on Mechanical Turk.
• Microtask enables disaggregating previously sensitive data to be work processed from a scanned image. The ultimate goal of this group is to put distributed work into video and computer games. For now, they disaggregate larger tasks into two-second tasks that can be distributed across a crowd.
• Games With A Purpose (GWAP) has a game-like platform designed to get users to complete disaggregated tasks for virtual points, rather than for actual remuneration. One of its more popular activities quickly attracted 23,000 players who contributed 4.1 million labels to images they were presented with in The ESP Game. Many players routinely play more than 20 hours a week.

Next, Zittrain moved on to offer some additional examples, hypothetical scenarios and questions that highlight some of his own concerns about the potential of these technologies. One key question is whether this market may be too efficient at linking up solvers and payers, if certain tasks are not in fact beneficial for society. After all, it was highly contentious when Texas governor Rick Perry set up video cameras on Texas' border with Mexico and invited people to watch the video feeds and report if they saw anything suspicious. Similarly, a site called InternetEyes allows users to watch video feed from CCTV cameras in the UK for free, offering the chance to "earn reward money, have a chance at reducing crime, and potentially become a hero and save lives," instead of actual compensation.

In another example, the University of Colorado Police Department recently offered a $50 reward for identification of students shown to be smoking marijuana in photos from a large April 20 gathering. Hypothetically, the Iranian government could use Turkers to identify Iranian protestors through national ID photographs in the very same way; by Zittrain's calculations, this task could be disaggregated and carried out quickly at a cost of only $17,000 per protester identified.

Another cluster of issues relates to the use of anonymous users to carry out disaggregated tasks that may have the effect of exerting influence on others. For example, Turkers were recently offered the opportunity to write a positive 5 out of 5 review for a product on a website, which hundreds accepted and completed for a few cents at a time. Users on SubvertandProfit.com are paid to "Like" something on Facebook, "Digg" something, or show their approval of a site or product via some other social network. The users are remunerated for their effort, and the site also profits. Taking this a step further, these platforms also enable users to pay people to evince opinions on legislative issues they do not actually care about. For example, health insurers were recently caught paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose the health reform bill. By enabling any task to be disaggregated and monetized, these new platforms can have highly controversial and unethical implications.

In mid-September, honors students from the Interschool Honors Programs convened by FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation traveled to Washington, D.C., with their faculty advisors for senior-level meetings and policy briefings. They met with senior U.S. government officials from the White House, State Department, Homeland Security, and the intelligence community, with representatives of international organizations such as the World Bank, and NGOs, think tanks and other policy forums engaged in international affairs.

CDDRL Policy Briefings

Led by CDDRL Director and FSI Senior Fellow Larry Diamond, Deputy Director and FSI Senior Fellow Kathryn Stoner, and FSI's %people5%, CDDRL students engaged in policy discussions with the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, the World Bank, the National Security Council, the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Inter-American Dialogue and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.  Sessions were held at the Open Society Institute founded by George Soros and the Community of Democracies.  Students met at the U.S. State Department with Policy Planning staff and the Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs for frank discussions of U.S. policy priorities, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review and the transformative effects that emerging economic powers, such as China, India and Brazil are exerting on trade, credit, investment, innovation and governance of major and political and economic institutions.

During these sessions, CDDRL students delved into efforts to advance and secure democracy, economic development, good governance, rule of law, corruption control, civil society, and a free media. In the current environment, marked by repression in many countries, multi-pronged efforts to help ensure that the pluralistic institutions of a vibrant civil society are allowed to prosper took on  particular importance.  Another key issue was the role of information technologies, in building and supporting democracy, by creating a robust network of activists and promoting collective action.

“It was eye-opening to see the diverse mechanisms through which one can effect positive social change. I learned that it is possible to successfully bridge the two worlds of policy and academe. The meetings made me think about the many different routes to a possible career in the dynamic world of Washington politics.”
 Kamil Dada ’11, CDDRL

"A key objective of the Washington trip is to expose these talented students to the challenges of policy formulation, implementation, and assessment, as they prepare to write their honors theses this academic year," said Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. For some students, it was a first exposure to the policy process in Washington. Others had interned in policy positions in the nation's capital and overseas, and used their opportunities in September to report back on findings of their previous work, renew contacts and glean new insight and information on evolving issues.

"The discussions we held with senior officials were full, frank, and often, off-the-record to give the students a firsthand opportunity to engage in candid exchange on major issues and to pose probing questions," said Larry Diamond, CDDRL Director. "The players, issues, and dilemmas that arise in the policy process are not always evident from the outside."

CISAC: Focus on Security Issues

The students in CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies-led in Washington by Martha Crenshaw, FSI Senior Fellow and professor (by courtesy) in the Political Science Department; Lynn Eden, Senior Research Scholar and CISAC Associate Director for Research; and teaching assistant Michael Sulmeyer, a CISAC pre-doctoral fellow and third-year Stanford law student-focused on major national and international security issues, including nuclear weapons policy like the new START Treaty to reduce nuclear arms and the Nuclear Posture Review, and counter-terrorism issues such as intelligence gathering and regional analysis. CISAC students first met with four veteran national security reporters at The New York Times, and later with members of the intelligence community, including the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, and the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Christopher Kojm.

“This was my first visit to Washington, and I could not have asked for a more comprehensive or enjoyable introduction to the nation’s capital. The broad array of institutions and people we experienced was a salient reminder of just how diverse this country truly is.” Devin Banerjee ’11, CISAC

Students also met with Paul Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs. Prior to his government service, Stockton had been a scholar at CISAC and had taught CISAC honors students for three years. CISAC students met with Antony Blinken, who serves as National Security Adviser to Vice President Biden. The students also were exposed to research and publication think-tanks like the Brookings Institution, RAND Corporation, the Center for a New American Security and the New America Foundation. At the end of CISAC's first week in the capital, the students met a dozen Washington-based alumni of the program over dinner, where alumni provided valuable research resources and job advice to their younger counterparts.

"The Washington component of CISAC's honors program provides an invaluable opportunity for our students to learn how the policy-making process works, explore the complexities of international security, and test their preliminary ideas about the topic they have chosen for their honors thesis," said Martha Crenshaw. "In turn, the officials we meet invariably wish to spend longer with our students, some even rearranging their schedules (or trying!) to continue a fascinating and candid conversation."

Highlight: The National Security Council

A major highlight of this year's trip, for both the CISAC and the CDDRL students, was a policy discussion at the National Security Council with two leading Stanford political scientists and foreign policy experts serving in the Obama administration. Political Science Professor Michael A. McFaul, former director of CDDRL and deputy director of FSI, is now Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Council and the president's top advisor on Russia, and Assistant Professor Jeremy M. Weinstein, an affiliated CISAC and CDDRL faculty member, serves as Director for Democracy on the National Security Staff.  Students engaged in a lively discussion of U.S. foreign policy priorities, U.S.-Russian relations, democracy, human rights and economic development.

"Our honors students are fortunate to have the chance to engage in high-level policy discussions, especially with Stanford faculty members serving in Washington," said Coit D. Blacker, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who directs the CISAC honors program with Martha Crenshaw and who, under President Clinton, served as special assistant to the President and  Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council. "Direct exposure to the policymaking process, with all its promise and pitfalls, will make them better scholars and future thought leaders."

"I was struck by the innovative ways in which certain agencies approach democracy promotion," said CDDRL honors student Ayeesha Lalji '11. "I think the struggle is often in packaging programs in the right way so that an impervious nation becomes more open to a vital component of social, political, or economic development."

"The discussions with prominent policy thinkers and current and former senior officials made a deep impression on our students," said Larry Diamond, CDDRL Director.  "These young people--who will go on themselves to be leaders in these fields-- got a vivid sense of how the policy process really works, and why service in government and public affairs is, despite the frequent frustrations, an exciting and noble mission."

"CISAC's ten days in Washington provide our students exceptional access to practitioners of various types and at all levels of the policy world, as well as inside knowledge of today's critical issues," said Martha Crenshaw. "The experience also establishes a solid foundation for a year-long intellectual experience in a weekly research seminar devoted to producing a thesis that makes an original contribution to the field of international security."