”SITUACIJA je teška posle ruskog i kineskog veta u UN oko Sirije. Moguće je da se događaji sada pogoršaju. Šanse za političko rešenje su tanke.” Ovako glasi jedna od skorijih tviter-poruka švedskog šefa diplomatije Karla Bilta i samo je jedan od primera kako se međunarodna diplomatija, barem onaj njen deo koji se želi izneti u javnost, uveliko odvija na društvenoj mreži ”Twitter”. Predsednici, ministri, ambasadori.., dobro su se uigrali da sa 140 simbola, koliko staje u Twitter-format, pošalju poruku ne samo masovnoj publici, već i svojim kolegama. I da na ovaj način ostvare uticaj.
Direktor Diplo fondacije i profesor e-diplomatije na Evropskom koledžu u Brižu Jovan Kurbalija kaže za ”Novosti” da je digitalna diplomatija trenutno – u modi.
– Diplomatija se prilagođava digitalizaciji savremenog sveta. Danas je dobro posećen blog ili tvit uticajniji od tradicionalnih medija. Američka i britanska diplomatija su otišle najdalje u korišćenju interneta u diplomatiji, a polako se uključuju i druge države – navodi naš sagovornik.
I TELEGRAM BIO ”KRAJ” TWITTER, kao i internet, treba posmatrati u kontekstu duge evolucije tehnologije i diplomatije – navodi Kurbalija.
– Kada je sredinom 19. veka britanski premijer Lord Palmerston primio prvi telegram, reakcija je bila ”O, moj Bože, ovo je kraj diplomatije”. Diplomatija je preživela uvođenje telegrama, telefona, radija, faksa, pa zaključuje Kurbalija, ništa neće biti drugačije ni sa ”Twitterom”.
Ruski MIP otvorio je nalog na „Twitteru” prošle godine, sa namerom da spoljnopolitičke ocene budu dostupne svima koji se zanimaju za dešavanja u svetu. Već više od 900 američkih diplomata u misijama širom sveta poslušalo je savet da budu ”onlajn”, preneo je Bi-Bi-Si. Stiglo je i dotle da su pojedine zemlje u neke svoje ambasade uvele dužnost: savetnika za digitalnu diplomatiju. Kurbalija kaže, međutim, da nova diplomatska era ovu dužnost nije nužno postavila kao standard, jer internet može biti od pomoći, ali ne može da zameni lični kontakt.
Do koliko široke publike stižu ”tvitovi” ilustruje nalog venecuelanskog predsednika Uga Čavesa sa više od tri miliona ”pratilaca”! Švedskog ministra spoljnih poslova Karla Bilta ”prati” – 138.211 ljudi, američku ambasadorku pri UN Susan Rajs – 166.894… Sve to ne znači da ”tviter- diplomatija” nema mana. Kurbalija ukazuje na to da delikatni politički pregovori zahtevaju diskreciju i da tu ”Twitter“ nije od pomoći. Problem je što ovako poslatim porukama nedostaje kontekst, a u diplomatiji kontekst je često od presudnog značaja.
– Zamislite kako bi izgledali pregovori srpskih i kosovskih pregovarača sa kojih bi se slale Twitter-poruke. Pregovarači ne bi razmišljali o mogućem kompromisu, već o tome koliko će poruka o njihovoj herojskoj odbrani nacionalnih interesa biti poslato domaćoj javnosti – navodi on.
As Michael Goodman and I tried to whimsically note in the sub-title of our edited collection on intelligence and the media – media needs intelligence and intelligence needs the media. The symbiosis of this relationship can be partly found in common expertise and practices (investigative zeal and tradecraft around weeding out hidden empirical detail), but also in the political or normative function of intelligence agencies, namely to constrain and repel certain forms of political discourse and activity deemed to be abhorrent to the majority, but more particularly which is abhorrent to the established political elites. So, at a very basic level media outlets learn much from the activities of intelligence agencies and the business they engage in. Similarly the agencies have both used mainstream media to shape debates (the Cold War and the War on Terror were notable examples), and to position adversaries in a particular way (and this might apply to every conflict since the printing press was invented). But what I want to rehearse here are the particular ways in which mainstream and parallel media sources – with a particular emphasis on the UK – have coalesced and acted within the NSA/Snowden furore, and the lessons we can learn from this.
My first lesson privileges the position of the mainstream press. Put simply, without the mainstream paid-for press there would have been no Snowden-NSA scandal. There is an important pre-caveat when referring to the ‘Snowden material’, which is that virtually none of the stated cache has been made publicly available, much of what we know has passed through the filter of media organisations and as such has been précised or synthesised, and that which has still to make it into the open will not do so in raw form. So, there is an important distinction to be drawn between Wikileaks – for example – which has published redacted raw material, and overlaid analysis with it – and the Snowden material which has almost exclusively been published in synthesised form. Snowden has stated that he did not seek to do damage to US national interests, nor to cause revolution, but instead to provide the framework or opportunity through which the public could make judgements about how this important area of government activity should be framed, or limited. This perhaps helps us to understand his dissemination strategy, but either way it is clear that Snowden would not have been able to achieve his ends without the mainstream media to position stories in the way they have.
It is, however, both ironic and curious that a dissemination strategy premised on withholding the raw material has arguably had a greater impact on the political discourse than the various and transparent Wikileaks stories have had, Cablegateincluded. Part of the causal explanation for this is ‘our’ connection to the story: Cablegate was concerned with diplomatic cables between elites remote from ‘us’. Snowden’s revelations were about ‘our’ electronic communications and signals being interfered with. The other part of the equation sits in the way that this story existed in a reinforcing ecosystem between the print, visual and audio medias, governments (and note the strong use of media messaging by Latin American and European governments, save for the UK) and international organisations such as the EU, along with extensive commentary in independent and social media outlets. A vortex of opinion was created in a way that never happened with similar revelations around Cablegate, or in the late 90s and early 2000s around the antecedent ECHELON programme. Traditional print media was the trigger movement for the spontaneous formation of this ecosystem.
My second lesson demonstrates the power of the geographically bound nature of intelligence and law, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Snowden and those who helped him with dissemination had understood the lessons of Wikileaks well: multi-jurisdictional and synchronised release of information. This is a risk-mitigation strategy, and one that has worked flawlessly well on the occasions it has been used. It removes the problem of a single point of failure and exposes a flaw and tension in globalised communications: that it is virtually impossible to stop communication in another territory. So, if Snowden has chosen only to publish in the UK, it would have been relatively easy to place an injunction on The Guardian preventing publication, and then presumably D-Notice to prevent other UK-based outlets commenting upon it. By releasing across multiple jurisdictions the genie was out of the bottle before any single or multiple interested governments could intercede. Geographical binding was not just a problem for those who sought to contain or suppress this story (and to be clear: suppression was legally justified because the core documents were classified), but is a wider problem for intelligence activity and the oversight and control of it. The stories around rendition and torture, on the one hand, and around surveillance of foreign nationals (and how one can receive information about a foreign national from a foreign agency, which turns out to be a home national, but a legal leap of faith renders this acceptable) are good evidence of how globalisation has presented unparalleled opportunities and threats to the business of intelligence.
My final lesson is that of the media as a regulator. In an exchange of correspondence in the New York Review of Books,The Guardian newspaper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger and the chair of the UK oversight committee, Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, sparred over the role of intelligence regulators. Rifkind’s core argument was that Rusbridger was not sufficiently au fait with the material (and its context) to know whether release was safe or desirable. The sad truth for Sir Malcolm and Parliament is that the Intelligence and Security Committee and the laws governing intelligence activity in the UK, in particular, have failed to keep up with the radical reorientation of intelligence activity in an area of ubiquitous electronic communication, and cheap storage and electronic analytical capability. As such the ‘regulation by revelation’ motif is one that will remain visible in the UK (and to some degree the US) as a check and balance on relatively unrestrained intelligence activity. We might reframe this in the following way: does the public response indicate that this issue is in the ‘public interest’? Almost certainly yes. Was this issue raised and analysed by official oversight mechanisms? No. So, we are left with competing and yet potentially complementary propositions that the official oversight mechanisms are not fit for purpose, that they did not deem this activity to be worthy of attention, or that they were unaware of the activity.
Parliament, backed separately by the courts, should be the appropriate institutions for oversight and check and balance. The media should be a soft-balancer for those exceptional moments of abuse or acts which are ultra vires. This particular balance went out of kilter with Snowden’s revelations, and it will be important for it to return quickly, there having been appropriate actions taken by the UK Parliament. As a footnote to this section it is worth mentioning that the British government has stood obdurately by the US Administration, and senior British figures have made bellicose noises about the impact that the revelations will have on the security of the US and UK. Senior intelligence figures (current and retired) have repeatedly condemned The Guardian in increasingly intemperate terms for publishing what appears to be – to most lay and expert readers – a set of practices that are deserving of public and political scrutiny, and which had been allowed to run loose from the intention of legislators. For reform to occur in the UK there will only need to be one conceptual shift and realisation: the weakening of communications security (by design) potentially makes London a less desirable location as a global finance hub. If finance firms cannot guarantee their communications they will find locations where they can – Germany would look like a good location for this, going forward – and the pattern of British politics is such that only this kind of spur will generate transformative change.
The traditional forms of media have historically been critical friends (but good friends nevertheless) to the intelligence agencies. Since June 2013, this relationship has become a little antagonistic because of the Snowden materials and the rapid (and temporary) formation of the self-perpetuating ecosystem as described above. No matter where one sits on the detailing of the privacy and intervention issues, it should be relatively uncontested that the traditional media has played an essential role in the oversight of this area of government activity, and in positioning the Snowden materials in such a way for international impact. It is a rare corrective to the dominant discourse of the ubiquity of social media.
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Dr. Robert Dover is Associate Dean (Enterprise) and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Loughborough University. Along with Michael Goodman and Claudia Hillebrand he is the editor of the new Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (2013).
The Digital Diplomacy Coalition, in partnership with the UN Foundation, is celebrating its one year anniversary on Thursday, 13 June 2013 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM at 1776 in Washington DC.
The partnership between UT and the US Department of State to engage women and girls from around the world through sports was named one of the nation’s ten best public diplomacy efforts of 2013.
The Public Diplomacy Council ranked the US Department of State and espnW Global Sports Mentoring Program—the flagship component of the Empowering Women and Girls through Sports initiative—as the ninth best diplomatic accomplishment in 2013. The UT Center for Sport, Peace, and Society is the sole implementing partner of the initiative. Other efforts making the list included Pope Francis’s decision to live modestly by paying his own hotel bill and reaching out to the poor, which improves the Catholic Church’s image, and Embassy Jakarta’s high-tech cultural center in an Indonesian shopping mall, which has engaged more than 480,000 visitors since 2010.
“When you set out to do something that impacts people, you don’t dream that it can have the kind of international impact this has had in a short amount of time,” said Sarah Hillyer, director of the Center for Sport, Peace, and Society. “We feel humbled and honored to play a role in something that is so important to our nation’s diplomatic relations with other countries.”
The Center for Sport, Peace, and Society in 2012 was awarded a $1.2 million cooperative agreement to implement the Empowering Women and Girls through Sports initiative. The center is part of the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences.
The initiative aims to engage young girls and women on how athletics can develop important life skills and be used to promote positive social change in their communities. It also is designed to increase cross-cultural understanding between international participants and Americans.
“It’s unique because it’s a public diplomacy initiative that emphasizes the importance of women as athletes and change agents,” said Ashleigh Huffman, the center’s assistant director. “It’s a launch pad for understanding how sports and politics interface and how sports can be used to make a political impact.”
Since June 2012, the program has worked with more than 150 women and girls from more than fifty countries, Hillyer said.
In February, the mentoring program will host a sitting volleyball team. The twelve athletes and two coaches from Mongolia will spend ten days in Oklahoma working with legendary coach Bill Hamiter and the 2012 USA Paralympic silver medal volleyball team.
In April, two programs will be hosted at UT. From March 30 through April 5, a girls basketball team with participants from Nigeria, Lebanon, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Argentina, and South Korea will be on campus. The group will travel to Nashville April 5 through 9 for the NCAA Final Four tournament. Then the last two weeks of April, an eighteen-member women’s soccer team from Brazil will be on campus as part of the State Department’s efforts leading up to the 2014 World Cup.
“We’re pretty excited to bring both those programs through Knoxville,” Huffman said. “When people hear ‘diplomacy,’ they think policy and government. We’re excited for our students to interact with the international athletes that are coming. That is where the real diplomacy takes place—people to people.”
For the list of the ten best public diplomacy efforts, visit the Public Diplomacy Council’s website.
To learn more about the Center for Sport, Peace, and Society and the mentoring program, visit the website.
We’ve published a couple of big updates, both to the Digital Strategy and to the transformation programme. Between them, they’ll give you a picture of just how much we’ve achieved in the last twelve months.
Opening up services to more users
When we first published the digital strategy last year, we’d just launched GOV.UK and were finding out how valuable a user-centred, agile organisation at the heart of government could be. Many of the actions were designed to embed that way of working throughout the civil service.
We’re now adding two further actions to the strategy that will open that work up even further.
The first is about getting more people online. We welcomed the Digital Inclusion team into GDS this summer, and their strategy – to be published early in the new year – will show some of the work we’re doing across the public, private and voluntary sector to get more people online, alongside a set of digital inclusion principles.
The second new action is about opening up what we build. That means APIs and syndication tools for people to access our information and services in more ways. We’ll never be able to imagine all the uses people might have for government information in different contexts and different environments, but we can provide services that make it easier for other people to build those things.
Meanwhile, there are updates on all the work of the last few months, things regular readers of this blog will be familiar with. Lots more work on infrastructure and capability, major breakthroughs for the Identity Assurance team and the technology team, plus the Digital Services Store and the move of more websites over to GOV.UK.
Making progress on every exemplar
The transformation team have continued work with colleagues all over the country to complete discovery on every single exemplar. Congratulations to everyone involved in that because it really is a tremendous achievement.
This has given every team an understanding of what their users’ needs are, and the direction required to make alphas and betas a reality. In one case, it’s revealed that the service isn’t ready for transformation right now. We’ve identified a replacement though, and will share more updates on how that’s going in the new year.
We’ve also been helping our colleagues build and develop those alphas and betas. As mentioned by DWP last week, we completed work on a digital strategic solution of the Universal Credit service on October 3rd. That included a proof of concept – tested with real users – and an outline of the operating model and any dependent technology required. With that delivered, we’re supporting DWP while they develop the digital skills needed to build and operate the full service.
What’s next?
2014 will see more public betas, more live services, and huge leaps forward for teams here and across government. Identity, measurement and analytics, capability within the civil service, levelling the playing field for technology and digital suppliers of all shapes and sizes, not to mention support for those who need help getting online and using the services we’re building.
At the Code for America summit, I said that all this work isn’t about changing government websites, it’s about changing government. All of this work will make it simpler, clearer and faster for people to do the things they need to do with government. We’ve got a lot to do, but I think we can be proud of what we’ve achieved over the last twelve months.
The Explorer covers 17 government departments, and now includes 766 services – an increase of 49 on September’s release.
The number of services fluctuates over time as departments improve their reporting processes, and as new services are introduced and other close or merge. The increase this quarter is largely due to the Department of Health extending the number of services it reports from 48 to 95, making it the department with the largest number of services after the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
What’s the cost and what are we doing with the data?
The latest data release covers the period from July 2012 to Jun 2013, and includes the cost per transaction for over 100 services. Cost per transaction ranges from less than a penny to over £1000 per transaction, with a median figure per service of about £4.
When we set up the Transactions Explorer, one of our aims was to encourage departments to make better use of data to improve their services. Intelligent use of data can indicate if people like your service, if they find it easy to use, how much it costs, and what the potential for savings is; but the availability of performance measures for government services has historically been poor.
A year later, and it’s satisfying to see data being taken more seriously across government. There’s a long way to go, but many organisations are clearly committed to reviewing and improving the way they collect and use data.
What are the challenges?
Unfortunately, these changes have made one of our other aims more challenging. We had hoped to be able to monitor improvements to services over time by now, but as people are still refining the way they collect data, useful quarter-on-quarter comparisons aren’t always possible.
In the coming months, we’ll be looking at how we can address this, and how we can take further steps to integrate the Explorer more closely with other performance dashboards which give a more detailed view of services.
Follow Government Digital Service on Twitter: @gdsteam and sign up for email alerts here.
We love it that you are making GOV.UK work for you. We want the information you need to be easy to find, no matter how you choose to access our digital services.
So, you can imagine how pleased we were to discover that around 137,000 visits to GOV.UK this year were made through a PS3 – it seems that even the draw of the latest game release isn’t enough to keep you from finding the information you need!
However you choose to visit GOV.UK, our team are here to help – join the conversation on Twitter @GDSteam, and sign up for email alerts here.
