![]() "What's that?" asked the baffled diplomat. He also told an instructive story about how a senior colleague was baffled when a demonstrator appeared in Tahrir Square holding up a placard that contained only a Twitter hashtag. I had a fascinating conversation with a State Department official who related how his colleagues, frustrated by the absence of al-Jazeera on US cable channels, were reduced to streaming it to their laptops. Then came the Arab spring and the agreeable discovery that social networking and mobile phones appeared to have politically useful effects. The U-turn was most painful in the US State Department, where Hillary Clinton had to eat her hat, or at any rate her stirring January 2010 speech about how " information has never been so free" and how "even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable". Western governments that had hitherto viewed modern networked-communications technology as a useful scourge of authoritarian regimes began to have second thoughts. The year began with the reverberations from Wikileaks – first the revelations about US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and then what American diplomats had been writing home.
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