It's Mystery CompSci Theater 460: Tunisian Edition

Ohai readers,

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Computer Science 460: Intro. to Computer and Network Security (an old website from the course is linked in for reasons I'd rather not get bogged down in). It covers exactly what the description says it covers, and one of the things we have to do in this class is give a short presentation on a recent security vulnerability. I took a break from my usual hunting grounds to give this presentation on Tunisian Javascript injection shortly before the "Jasmine Revolution". It was kind of rushed, and putting Javascript code on a PowerPoint slide seemed like a better idea before I gave the presentation, but I think it's a cool illustration of the kinds of tricks that are possible in an authoritarian regime where all of the IT infrastructure is under strict state control.

Yes, I know there was a presidential election in Kyrgyzstan. I will probably blog about this when I go home for Thanksgiving Break.

Cultural learnings to make benefit glorious headquarters of minutebear, or The Trip to Kazakhstan

Oh, come on. I had to put a Borat reference in somewhere!

My two months in Central Asia ended, as all good things should, with a four day trip to Kazakhstan. I don't know if I have as much to say here as I did about the trip to Uzbekistan. Part of this is due to the fact that, given the size of the country and the way SRAS structured the visit, I saw a much less of Kazakhstan than I did of Uzbekistan. When I went to Uzbekistan, I almost circled the entire country. In Kazakhstan, we never left Almaty. Furthermore, since we spent the whole time in one city, we stayed with one host family the whole trip and didn’t have nearly as much of a chance to go out and meet people. All of that said, let’s start with the first full day in Almaty.

That morning, after a bus ride that must have taken at least two hours, we arrived at the Asian Winter Games sports complex:

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a wider angle. You can’t see the main walking trail in this photo. The place slopes up between two very large mountains with a staircase that takes the average person about an hour to climb up. I’d go on for a while about the complex, but I’m really only mentioning it because of the conversation we had at the top of the staircase with our host-sister. She was a student at the University of International Business, and, given that I had just written a paper discussing the telecom market in Uzbekistan (see “Odds and Ends from CA-202”), we got to talking about smart phones in Kazakhstan. The average Kazakh makes about 60,000 or more tenge per year, and an iPhone 3GS with a plan costs about 80,000 tenge. I think I saw two people with a tablet or smartphone in Kazakhstan, and they were both at the airport. Just as in Uzbekistan (where I saw just as few people with a smartphone), most people use cheap Nokia phones.

After a visit to the Central State Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan (which was right across the street from one of Nazarbayev’s palaces) and a stop at a nearby shopping mall (where I had my first glass of delicious ayran in a year), we got to talking with a Kyrgyz woman as we waited for a bus/taxi back to our host family’s house about, of all things, bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. The story she told us was a much more mixed bag than what you usually hear. A friend of her’s and this friend’s boyfriend were talking about getting married anyway, and they had talked about bride-kidnapping and the obvious psychological damage it causes. However, the boyfriend’s family pressured him into it, and she was kidnapped a few weeks before we had this conversation. The woman who told us this (let’s call her Jodie Foster from now on) said she thinks they’ll be ok, “because they love each other”. From her perspective, they had a good relationship before the kidnapping. This helps illustrate two things I’ve learned about Kyrgyz society. First, family ties (both in what we would call “the nuclear family” and in the extended family) are a kind of social black hole. In business, courtship, and politics, they exert a force so strong that even ideas like individuality and self-determination as we understand them in the West can’t escape. Second, there is a spectrum of cases, ranging from consensual eloping to abduction by force that leads to rape, that are all labeled “bride-kidnapping” by the Western press. While Azamat’s post in Cyber Chaikhana is absolutely right, there do exist mixed cases like the one I just described, where a healthy relationship was forcefully turned into a marriage by the timeandapacewarpingpowers of Central Asian family pressure. The conversation in Kyrgyzstan (where they have a saying, “Love comes after the wedding”) seems to be taking these cases into account, but I don’t see similar nuance in the Western media.

We also ate dinner that night with Jodie Foster and our host-sister. We got to the topic of Kazakh politics, and I asked our host-sister what she thought of Nazarbayev. She likes him, and she thinks people are better off in the cities. There is a problem in the villages, however, where people can’t find work. Drawing on my own observations of Almaty, the place generally looks nicer than Bishkek (yes, there are some bad parts of the city). I’ve had this idea going all the way back to a research paper I wrote for Politics of Eurasia in the spring of 2008, but a neo-Communist, authoritarian, jabroni beatin’, pie eatin’ SOB like Nazarbayev could win a fair election in this country if one were held.

I then asked Jodie Foster about Kyrgyz politics. I was curious to know what she thought of the politicians that I understood to be the frontrunners in the upcoming presidential election: Almazbek “Let’s Stage a gas crisis to show people I can work with Russia” Atambayev, First Deputy Prime Minister Omurbek Babanov, and Kamchybek Tashiev, the head of the nationalist Ata-Jurt party. “I like Babanov, and I like his plans, “ she said. “But he is involved with crime. My father had a business, and he ran into trouble with Babanov’s men. I like Atambayev but he is linked to crime too.” I then asked about Tashiev, and she nearly, for lack of a better term, ROFLMAO’ed. “He definitely has links to crime. You know, I like Putin. I think he is the greatest president in the world. Presidents like Putin and Nazarbayev, they take and they have corruption, but they give back to their country. In our country, all of our politicians just take. I think we need a strong ruler like Putin.” I think most Americans can’t really imagine what a strong argument for a strongman looks like, but in the current state of Kyrgyz politics, Jodie’s statement makes a lot of sense. To make a comparison with American politics, I think that, if Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry or Mitt Romney gets elected president, it would be a disaster for this country. However, I have no reason to believe that any serious candidate for president has ties to the drug mafia. When you consider that Bakiyev eliminated the Kyrgyz version of the DEA, Kyrgyz voters do not have this luxury. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that all of the presidential candidates in America looked the same. “There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego”. For an increasing number of Kyrgyz, there isn’t a potentially serious candidate this year who couldn’t pass for an underboss in the Bishkek branch of a Russian mafia family. If all of the candidates look like the same corrupt oligarchs that were ousted in 2005 and 2010, how can you not at least consider someone who will crack down on the drug trade, make the proverbial trains arrive on time, and unite the forty tribes under a single ruler (hmm, where have I heard that before?)

Oh yeah, this post was about Kazakhstan. The next day, we took a cab into the city and toured Kazakh State University, or KazГУ. Now that was a nice campus. Most of the buildings looked as nice (if not better) than the ones at UMass. We stopped by a small museum on campus devoted to the history of the university, and I’m sure it looked exactly the way it was supposed to: clean, modern, and with a giant mural / exhibit on Nazarbayev across from a giant mural/exhibit on Al-Farabi. The message is clear: the exhibition on Al-Farabi is a celebration of Kazakhstan’s past, and if you turn around, you see Nazarbayev leading Kazakhstan into the great shining future. Kazakhstan greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls…

As the tour progressed, we stopped by the philology department and, instead of a meeting with a political scientist like the schedule said, we met with the Dean of the department. I tuned out about five minutes after she started talking, because it quickly became clear that she only intended to give us the official government song and dance routine. Everything has been great since independence under the wise leadership of Nazarbayev. Enrollment has risen to X students at our universities, Y thousand students have studied abroad, we collaborate with Z universities around the world and have students from N countries. Kazakhstan #1 exporter of potassium / All other countries have inferior potassium.

That night, I was invited over to our host-sister’s aunt’s house for tea. She turned out to be fluent in German, and given that I still had a good amount of German in my head from Middlebury Deutsche Schule , I had a chance to practice it…in Kazakhstan. While I sometimes lapsed in and out of Russian, she told me (in a language, I forget which) that she lived in Frankfurt and one or two other cities in Germany and used to teach Неме́цкий язык here in Kazakhstan. We also learned that her grandson’s first birthday (which in Kazakh culture is almost as big an event as a bar mitzvah) was tomorrow, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The next day, our first stop was a trip to the Association of Kazakhs, an NGO that does a lot of outreach work with the Kazakh diaspora. The president of the organization, of course, is Nazarbayev. In addition to a whole bunch of magazines that I wasn’t able to fit into my luggage once I flew back to America, we were given several CDs and DVDs of Kazakh music, and a documentary on Nowruz celebrations from two years ago. Thus we spent most of the day lugging around a big fat bag of Kazakh cultural swag, never mind the brochures we were given at a visit to another university. We toured the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research (KIMEP), a university focused on the social sciences that, like KazГУ, looked just as nice as UMass (if not better) with one serious exception that I’ll describe later.

That night, we were invited to the birthday party I mentioned earlier. The family had rented a floor in a nearby dance hall a few minutes walk from our host family’s house. This was as extravagant as a Sweet Sixteen party in the U.S. There were fancy tables and chairs, catering, a DJ, a birthday cake with fireworks, an obnoxiously loud sound system, the works. There were at least 35 guests at this party. Not as much as a Tajik wedding, but still a lot of guests by American standards. Around the time I was watching some teenage kid dancing the robot to Pitbull and T-Pain’s “Hey Baby”, it dawned on me that the little toddler at this party is going to look through the family album years from now, see two exhausted-looking Americans, and have little idea what they’re doing there. It was one of the most surreal moments in my two months in Central Asia.

While we were there, I excused myself to use the bathroom, and by this point in the story I had experienced three things I would wish on my worst enemy, Mohammed Esteban Al-Sexfaci. First, that he have a 40 minute commute to work in a marshrutka.. Second, that the only toilets near the place he works be “squatties”, as I discovered at the dance hall. There’s something about trying to take a piss while standing in a puddle of someone else’s urine as the noise from a nearby loudspeaker drills through your ears that extinguishes all hope for the existence of a loving and benevolent creator. Third, that if he ever does find a Western-style toilet, all the toilet paper dispensers turn out to be empty, and he would have to leave the bathroom to find the materials necessary to finish the paperwork. That was the one exception I found at KIMEP.

Later that night, I submitted all the Kazakh reports on Herdict dated July 27th. Coming to that with experience from the trip to Uzbekistan, I decided to be a little more comprehensive this time. I didn’t test any websites for circumvention tools last time, but I discovered that torproject.org wasn’t blocked. At least the domain names for several news sites are unblocked, and the only sites that appear to be blocked are Livejournal (which perhaps has to do with Rakhat Aliyev's blog, note that, while his livejournal appears to be accessible from the U.S., I'm not seeing the kind of things that a Kazakh dissident would write) and possibly the Blogspot platform this blog is hosted on. I say possibly for the same reason that I don’t think specific URLs on news sites are blocked, because I think I didn’t need to be in Kazakhstan to test its internet filtering system. As Christoper Schwartz points out on neweurasia, Kyrgyzstan fell prey to what Computer Science types call “upstream filtering” after the Kazakh government blocked Wordpress. However, while in Kyrgyzstan I never encountered a block while looking for articles on eurasianet, RFE/RL, registan.net, etc. that were often critical of the Nazarbayev government. I would have conducted some more tests that night in Almaty, but I didn’t largely because they all happened at about 10pm, and I was more exhausted than on most of the nights I spent in Uzbekistan.

On the last day of the trip, the other student I went with was sick, and I went alone with the in-country coordinator for the trip to a memorial to the Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ (which people in the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan increasingly refer to as WWII), a Russian Orthodox church, and a Kazakh music museum in quick succession, but I don't have much to say about any of that. Afterwards we tried to take a tour of Kazakh-British Technical University (which advertised itself as a big Petroleum Engineering school), but since our coordinator didn't call ahead and everyone was busy dealing with prospective students fresh out of their entrance exams, we just walked around the campus.

After that came the weirdest moment of the entire trip, beyond standing on Arthur Conolly's unmarked grave, beyond not knowing if I was hearing small talk or a veiled political statement about the Arab Spring, and certainly beyond going to the birthday party of a 1 year old kid I had met the day before. Our coordinator, at least twice during the trip, interrupted it with a short visit to some of the clothing stores in the city...and I'm using the term “clothes” in a very general sense. Not long after we left Kazakh-British Tech, she didn't pay close enough attention to the sign outside (which clearly said “Lingerie”), and there I was, walking into the equivalent of a Victoria's Secret with a woman I barely knew in Almaty, Kazakhstan...bras and panties as far as the eye could see...and the walls were painted red...

After the longest minute ever, she realized that the store was just lingerie, and we alked over to another store from there. We later visited an NGO called The Global Monitor Group. They mostly do studies of Kazakh society and the economy, and they could use a better translator. I still have the business card of the person we had a short Q&A session with, and the tagline on it reads “Researches | Interrogations | Examinations”. During the session, I naturally began to ask about the state of the Kazakh IT sector. Back when I had my midterm in Central Asian studies, I had a question that went something like “Define 'Dutch Disease'. Does the Kazakh economy suffer from it? Why or why not?” I bs'ed the following:

“Kazakhstan may suffer from 'Dutch disease' to a certain extent , but that is at least slightly offset by the fact that the country has some industry and manufacturing. Dutch disease is an economic pattern whereby exploitation of mineral or energy wealth leads to an increase in the value of a country's currency. Then exports become difficult due to high prices, which leads to more of a focus on energy. Kazakhstan has made a progress in combating Dutch disease through the creation of free trade zones (ex. the zone on the Chinese border), and it may be able to develop a significant (if tightly controlled IT sector. I don't believe that Kazakhstan will be able to diversify its economy due to the fact that there can only be more interest in its energy resources, although there may be some promise in the IT sector due to the 'reverse brain drain'.”

This was before I came to Kazakhstan. The person we spoke with agreed that there has been an effort to build the IT sector, and she pointed to the creation of the Alatau IT Park there in Almaty as an example (which, unfortunately, I didn't get to see). A look at the park's website indicates that it has certainly gotten off the ground, and there are numerous projects in development at the park. Only 5 out of 36 projects seem to be related to the energy sector. Now seems like a good time to introduce the last stop on the tour: the trip to the University-IT. It was mostly a tall, 10 or 12-story building that had a fairly nice view of the city. Sadly, we ran into the same problem there that we had at Kazakh-British Tech (minus the Kazakh Victoria's Secret), but I did notice that most of the signs advertised English language coursework and online journalism. There was little to no talk of system administration or any of the other things we geeks think of when we think IT. Their website doesn't have as much information as what you could get from a CS department at an American university, but it was only built in 2009. As the person we spoke with at The Global Monitor Group said, like so many things in Kazakhstan, the IT sector and the educational system that trains it is just getting started.

Just across from the front doorstep of our host family's place, there was a shed that had some of the windows covered over with newspaper. On one of the windows, there was a Hallmark card-sized picture of Nazarbayev staring back at us every time we walked out the front door during the trip. When I was in Uzbekistan, I was constantly looking over my shoulder looking for Islam Karimov. But for all the propaganda billboards I saw (the fact that they were in Uzbek probably helped), I didn't see him until I walked into a cybercafe, got right in his face, and asked him questions about what sites I could and couldn't visit on his Internet in his capital. By contrast, I think I spent the entire trip in Nazarbayev's shadow. His picture wasn't everywhere, but it was everywhere it needed to be. It's morning in Kazakhstan! Things are so much better than they were 20 years ago, come grasp the mighty...yeah, I'm not quoting the end of the Borat theme. There was enough of…that during the trip.

"When I find myself in times of trouble, Nazar Nazar Cat comes to me...": The Trip to Uzbekistan

(If you don't know what Nazar Nazar Cat is, click here.)
Around the end of June, I went on an eight day trip to Uzbekistan covering Tashkent, Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. I went with one other student from the London School, but that was it. Names will, of course, be changed to protect the innocent and perhaps not-so-innocent, but I'm going to draw my fake names from my now not-so-secret guilty pleasure: 80s and 90s professional wrestling. Any blogger will talk about how A said this or B said that. Where else are you going to read a sentence like "Hulk Hogan told us that he knows people in Bukhara who can read and speak Arabic"?

Our trip began with a flight from Bishkek to Tashkent. Once we arrived at the airport, I was watching the commercials on these big plasma screen TVs on the walls while we waited to get our visas processed, and I saw a commercial for UCell, one of the local telecom companies, offering an Internet plan with the Samsung Galaxy Tab for 500,000 Uzbek som (about $280). Being new to international travel in Central Asia, I didn't immediately get that ads at the airport are a good way to gauge the highest of the high end in the local electronics market. This was the kind of stuff only tourists and members of the nomenklatura (the ruling elites surrounding President Karimov) could afford. After going through customs, we were met by our guide, Hulk Hogan, and rode to the youth hostel where we spent the night. When he asked where in America we were from, I explained that I was from Boston, since almost no one knows about Maine in this part of the world. "Oh, Boston," he said. "Boston Bruins, eh? CHAMPIONS! They say their prayers, take their vitamins, and eat their vegetables. They're real Americans!" I didn't really know what to say about that, since I don't follow hockey much.

We finally arrived at the hostel where we ate a late dinner and stayed the night. Our host was Nature Boy himself, Ric Flair. He was stylin', profilin', and used to be a history professor before he started the hostel. We were eating dinner around 10pm as he played the dutar when this college-aged girl came out into the courtyard and started chatting with us in Russian. She was a Kazakh student studying there (or visiting, it wasn't clear), and she had been to America the same year Borat came out. I gave a nervous laugh when she told us this and tried to shy away from the subject, but she didn't seem as offended by it as I think most of us Americans would assume.

As Nature Boy played the dutar, we got to talking about pre-Soviet Uzbek history and Uzbekistan's Islamic past. He told us that "I know people in Bukhara who can read Arabic and speak it, Whoo! but it's not good that they can do that", and he switched back to playing the dutar. As all the articles say, Islam in Uzbekistan is tightly regulated and generally discouraged. Only a few madrasahs are open, and I think I heard the call to prayer once during the entire trip.

The next day, we visited a few sites around Tashkent with Hulk Hogan. We started talking about Western music, and he told us he likes some Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Led Zepplin, and other bands that the Soviets didn't want people to hear back in the day. I asked him how many people listen to Western music, and he said "Let me tell you somethin', brother. Everyone listens to Western music." For all of the press about the government railing against rock and rap, it's only rhetoric. Uzbekistan may be more inward-looking than Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan, but Western pop culture isn't going anywhere.

That afternoon, we left Tashkent and flew to Urgench on the other side of the country before taking a cab to an inn at Khiva Castle. We arrived about two hours before sunset, and decided to take a walk around the city. As we walked alongside the old walls, the other student I was traveling with pointed out a used syringe I luckily stepped over, and we found a used condom further down the road. We did talk in Central Asian studies about how Khiva is in one of the poorest parts of Uzbekistan (admittedly using data from 2001, see page 35). To be honest, there wasn't much to write home about outside of the various mosques and madrasahs around the city. Very few of them seemed to be used as mosques/mardrasahs, and the majority had been turned into tourist traps. We visited the Muhammad Amin Khan mosque and madrasah, and there was a sign out front advertising a cybercafe and copier center on the first floor.

It was also in Khiva that I worked up the nerve to start testing the local Internet filtering system. I started with the mobile phone I had from the London School that had a SIM card from MTS Uzbekistan. I could access a Blogspot-hosted blog and the English-language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Islam Karimov and the Andijan massacre without any trouble. I would go on to test a variety of sites as the trip went on, but I'll go into details later.

After we left Khiva, we had a seven hour cab ride through a giant stretch of desert between Khiva and Bukhara. For the first two hours or so, we chatted with our driver, Stone Cold Steve Austin. "You're from America?" he said, "Oh, I love Jodie Foster. I like Sylvester Stallone and I used to like Mike Tyson, but then he converted to Islam when he was in prison. Now he talks about his Quran and his surahs. Austin 3:16 says he lost his fighting spirit. He needs to buy himself a bottle of vodka, and drink back some of that courage he had in his prime!" Once again, I didn't know what to say to that. After a while, I started to get a little bored, and I kept trying to submit reports to Herdict from my cell phone. However, Herdict thought I was reporting from Kuwait, and even though I changed the country selected in the form, it still didn't show up on their website. So there we are, two American students on a long roadtrip between the Karakum and Kyzyl-Kum deserts, passing the occasional road crew operating Chinese and German equipment, with the occasional view of the banks of the Amu Darya to our right. About four or five hours in, we reached a part of the desert that was really barren. It was the kind of desert that you could hide a dead body in and it wouldn't be discovered for some time. This was a fun thing to think about given that I had spent the past few hours trying to learn about what the Uzbek government didn't want its people to know, and I knew almost nothing about The Texas Rattlesnake driving the car. If this seems a little paranoid, it's because it is, and I realized that during the trip.

This theme of coming to terms with my own neuroses followed me into Bukhara, but we'll come back to that later.
On our second day in the city, we met an American grad student in the lobby of the hotel in which we were staying. He was traveling from India up through Central Asia and eventually to Beijing after having completed a research project for the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. He asked me what I was studying and what I, a Computer Science major, was doing in Uzbekistan. A few minutes earlier, I had seen a guy in camouflage walk into the big courtyard in back of the lobby, so I looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't within earshot. When I explained my interests in Internet censorship and surveillance, he asked me if Google Maps was blocked here, because he tried to access it in a cybercafe in town, and it redirected to MSN. When I later had access to a wired connection in Gijduvan, a town about a half hour's drive away, I could access it just fine. The only possible reason I can think of as to why it would be blocked is to make it harder to organize street protests. If a big protest breaks out in Bukhara, it's an obvious problem for Tashkent, but who cares about a little trouble in Gijduvan?
Also on the second day of our trip, we stopped by one of the holiest sites in the Church of The Great Game of Latter-Day Social Scientists: the Ark Fortress.

Somewhere outside this gate, British officers Arthur Conolly (who coined the phrase "The Great Game") and Charles Stoddart were executed by the emir of Bukhara in 1842. Stoddart was imprisoned by the emir when he came to Bukhara to negotiate a peace treaty after the first British invasion of Afghanistan, and Conolly was imprisoned when he tried to negotiate Stoddart's release. The visit to the Ark Fortress was a big event for me not just because I had read all about this in Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, but because of something that happened the day after I got back from Uzbekistan. It bears an eerie resemblance to something that happened to Conolly a few months before he left for Bukhara. I don't want to say much more about it here, because of what I learned from both of our experiences. Hopkirk speculates that Conolly, who was deeply hurt by the event, may not have cared if he never came back from his mission, and therefore took an unreasonable risk. He let personal considerations influence his political calculations. As I think some of my friends know, whenever my personal life has gotten caught up in my political adventures, the result has never been good. I hope I've learned my lesson from this, because Conolly certainly didn't.

The night before we left for Gijduvan, we were both exhausted and spent most of the late afternoon and night watching Uzbek TV, which was incredibly boring and unbelievably entertaining at the same time. It was incredibly boring, because there were only a few more than half a dozen channels, all in Uzbek, and some of them had the same content. I can't tell you how many times I saw the same ad for a local driving school or heard parts of the most popular American pop song at the time: J-Lo and Pitbull's "On the Floor". It was unbelievably entertaining because of what else we saw that night: an Indian action movie. It's easy in America to not notice that Bollywood is successfully competing with Hollywood in numerous parts of Asia. There was an article a few years ago about one of the most popular TV programs in Afghanistan, a soap opera produced in India (which, by the way, the Ministry of Information and Culture tried to ban). They're not watching Jersey Shore over there, although that might be a good thing. In some places where American soft power has penetrated South/Central Asia, it has produced a frothy mix of curry and stupid that I couldn't make up if I wrote this post on acid. A Punjabi-language music video starring a boyband dressed like the Backstreet Boys in the early-mid 90s came on late that night. They were singing something to the tune of Justin Bieber's "Baby". The only fragment I remember is the chorus, where the band sings "Gore Gore Gore" (It's pronounced "goo-ree". I say Punjabi because I looked at a couple Indian pop music websites trying to find a video, and the same word pronunciation has been used in other songs), and then something like гулять, the infinitive of the Russian verb "to walk". Джа́стин Би́бер такую красивую лесбиянку!

After that run-in with Indian (American?) soft power, we took a cab to Gijduvan, and it's here that I was able to send some reports to Herdict that finally showed up on their website. That first batch is the data from June 28th on this page and clicking "Raw Data Feed". Like I said, I was able to access Google Maps just fine, but I made the mistake of not sending in a report. Looking back at the data, Facebook and the Russian Wikipedia article on the Andijan massacre are freely accessible, but two articles I singled out on corruption were blocked. I might say some more on this when I get to my post on Kazakhstan, but the Uzbek filtering system is (or perhaps was) slightly more transparent than the Kazakh system. All requests for blocked sites in Uzbekistan (that I found) redirected to MSN, but if you try to access a blocked site in Kazakhstan, the transaction will take a really long time, and you might get an HTTP 504 error or a generic "page not found" error. It's much harder to tell if there's a problem in the network or if the site is being deliberately blocked. I'll have some more to say about the internet in Uzbekistan when we get back to Tashkent.
After Gijduvan, we went to Samarkand and spent about two days there. Honestly, the fact is it was one of the nicest places in the entire trip. I will say this: if you go to some historic site in the area and somebody says "откуда вы?", say you're from Moldova unless you're absolutely sure you can pass as a Russian. Money was starting to run low by that part of the trip, and when we were buying tickets for tours, we tried to pass ourselves off as students from a poor East European country where people likely have Russian as a second language (no offense to any readers from Moldova) instead of wealthy American tourists looking to be relieved of some excess cash. However, by our second day in Samarkand we were pretty well exhausted (thanks to the heat) and had largely given up on touring the city.

The last leg of our trip led us back to Tashkent and a long afternoon with Hulk Hogan. One of our first stops was a place in Tashkent where you can study Arabic and not have a nice chat with the SNB. We went through the usual routine of seeing this or that monument built by so-and-so in the nth century, and we got to talking about how the West views the "stans", but then, once we got to a small courtyard with no one in earshot, Hulk looked around and checked around all the corners to make sure no one was listening. He leaned in and said "You know, brother, in Chechnya they're Muslims and they wanted independence from Russia, but Chechnya has only 500,000 people, and Russia has 150 million people. They were crazy! What'cha gonna do when the biggest and baddest country in the world runs wild on you?" Hulk then flexed his arms as if posing for a photo. The tour continued from there as usual, and just after we left, Hollywood Hulk looked back at the front gate, again presumably to make sure Mr. 38-Inch Pythons wouldn't be overheard, and he might have started discussing politics again. "Listen up, Mean Gene," he said. "I've watched the news, and you know how the people went out in Egypt and the Middle East and destroyed things [keep in mind that the Arab Spring was still very much in the news at the time of this conversation, even if the Uzbek media was presenting a very biased version of the events.] Well, the Hulkster watches the streets, and they don't have trees on their sidewalks like we do here. They give us Hulkamaniacs shade, and you know, it gets hot here during the summer." This was one of the weirdest moments of the trip. I couldn't tell if Hulk was making an innocent comment comparing the sidewalks in the Middle East to those in Uzbekistan, or if I was hearing a veiled political statement. I tried to tease out a clearer picture by observing that some of the trees in Uzbekistan "had been up for a long time", but I wasn't sure if he heard me. If it was a political statement, what was it? Is Karimov a strong tree that gives the country shade unlike in Egypt, where Mubarak was "cut down"? Why would Hulk Hogan need to disguise a statement like that? Once I got back to Bishkek, I was lucky enough to get a copy of Cyber Chaikhana, and I read Borderless Borderguard's post on how and why people don't openly discuss politics in Uzbekistan. He writes:

"Politics is obviously a very well guarded territory where people of the country have no access to. Moreover it is for the many seen the same like crime, if people enter political territory, they are being criminals."

Has politics become so taboo that you can't even reference events like the Arab Spring, even if your statement supports the president, without checking to see who's looking?

After that big Turkic question mark, I asked if we could stop by a cyber cafe for half an hour, because, I said, the other student I was with told me he wanted to check something. It was here that I generated the July 2nd reports in Herdict's raw data feed. I remember trying to think up what I would say if I got caught looking up stuff that the Uzbek government didn't want me to see, but fortunately the whole thing went off without a hitch. The censorship in this cybercafe was much more heavy than what I saw in Gijduvan. Entire domain names were blocked (e.g. Eurasianet), and blogs relating to the Andijan massacre were blocked, but I could still get to Wikipedia to read up on it. My overall reading of Uzbek internet censorship is that the government was, at the time, concerned about a possible spillover from the Arab Spring, and so potentially damaging information and access to online organizing tools was blocked on a location-specific basis (e.g. the blocking of Google Maps in Bukhara). The government appears to have changed its approach as we get closer to the 20th anniversary of independence, but see my comment on the topic at neweurasia.

We left Tashkent for Bishkek that night. Looking back at what Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold said about America, whenever we talked about American pop culture, everyone referenced celebrities or films from the early to mid-90s. If I include my conversations with various people in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, there seem to be two big demographics in Central Asia when it comes to demand for American media. There's the people in their 40s and 50s who remember when American TV and music was the "naughty stuff" that the Soviets didn't want them to see (see also this video from Belarus), and for whom, due to the turmoil of the post-Soviet period, time stopped in 1991. Then there's the younger demographic in their late teens and twenties who listen to whatever is on the Top 40. This is the best explanation I have for why, while at the airport waiting for our flight, we saw an Uzbek music video, B.o.B and Bruno Mars' "Nothing On You", and well, this. Yes, I will watch my videocassettes.


In the next post, I'll talk about my visit to Kazakhstan, *makes thumbs up like Borat* greatest country in the world! In the meantime, train, say your prayers (but not too much), take your vitamins, eat your plov, support President Karimov, and be a real Uzbek! *flexes* Foo!

Odds and Ends from CA 202

The paper below was my term paper for the Central Asian Studies class I took while in Bishkek. It would have been a lot longer and covered other technologies such as wireless mesh networks if I had more time, but it does a reasonably good job with respect to Tor. The tl;dr version goes like this: while there has been some good work done to port Tor to various smartphone platforms, the mobile market in Uzbekistan is still using much older phones with far less memory and computing power. Also check out this presentation I gave for CA 202 on Berdymukhamedov and post-Turkmenbashi Turkmenistan.

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Internet Censorship Circumvention Technology in the Uzbek Political and Economic Context

“I think that there is no necessity to convince you in the fact that the Internet era has begun. At the same time, considering the issues surrounding us in far and near regions, we must NOT forget about the fact that destructive forces that are eager to confuse the youth and “feed” the with incorrect information and thus use Internet as a tool.” - Uzbek President Islam Karimov (“Islam Karimov: I Believe That Journalists Are My Strongest and Trustful Support.”)

As President Karimov hints, part of America’s master plan to promote instability in Central Asia is to foster color revolutions in the region by spreading destructive misinformation via the Internet. The Arab Spring was only a prelude to our designs on Central Asia. However, the Uzbek government has created a sophisticated filtering system to block most people’s access to content relating to political prisoners, corruption, the “massacre” in Andijan, and a variety of other content. After a brief overview of the political context in which Uzbekistan’s filtering system developed, this paper will look at the popular Tor software package and examine whether this technology can be realistically employed in the national political and economic context to successfully corrupt and misinform the youth of Uzbekistan.

To begin, even as President Karimov consolidated his grip on power in the first decade after independence, the Internet in Uzbekistan was relatively free “with the exception of some limited filters for pornography that were implemented on UzSCINET [an Uzbek research network]...the turning point in the state’s relationship to Internet freedom began following a series of attacks in Tashkent in 2004 blamed on the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Hit) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan” (Deibert et al. 267). At present, while private ISPs can and do operate in Uzbekistan, the state-owned telecommunications company Uzbektelecom JSC has a monopoly on access to Uzbekistan’s IT infrastructure. In this way “operators and providers are entitled to access international telecommunication networks exclusively through the infrastructure of Uzbektelecom JSC, which facilitates control over Internet content and hinders active competition on the communications market (Deibert et al. 267). However, Uzbektelecom’s monopoly is not absolute. A handful of ISPs “have their own international satellite connections...A growing trend among ISPs is using UzPAK’s [the Uzbek Internet and its filtering system] lines to send messages and satellite networks to view or download information. This solution allows the providers to circumvent UzPAK’s monitoring network and channels’ low capacities” (Deibert et al. 269). All ISPs do still practice self-censorship, especially when pressured by the National Security Service (SNB). “There is no mandatory government publication review, but ISPs risk having their licenses revoked if they post ‘inappropriate’ information” (Deibert et al. 271).

As for the types of websites that are blocked and how they are blocked, “The SNB’s censorship is selective and often targets articles on government corruption, violations of human rights, and organized crime. Usually, it affects URL-specific pages instead of top-level domain names. Uzbek ISPs block entire web sites or individual pages upon SNBs unofficial request. Accessing a blocked page redirects the user to a search engine or to an error message such as ‘You are not authorized to view this page’” (Deibert et al. 271). Furthermore, not only does the SNB monitor the Uzbek Internet, but it also conducts surveillance in collaboration with other regimes, as the agency “regularly exchanges data with Russian intelligence sources and allegedly collaborates with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Academy” (Deibert et al. 271).

All of this said, it is important to keep in mind that “Internet censorship in Uzbekistan is very easy to circumvent...For every blocked website, there are hundreds of mirrors, proxies, cache services, virtual private networks or just something like SESAWE with simple handy tools to bypass any censorship online” ("Neweurasia.net » Uzbekistan: Internet Censorship Is Overrated."). However, not only has the Uzbek government taken steps to expand the extent of its censorship and monitoring (as is the case on the mobile web, where “Uzbek regulators have demanded mobile operators notify the government about mass distributions of SMS messages with ‘suspicious content’” ("Uzbekistan Tightens Control over Mobile Internet”), but numerous questions still exist as to whether some circumvention tools can reasonably be used by a significant segment of the population. This is especially true when the current political and economic situation in Uzbekistan is taken into account.

We will address these questions as they relate to the popular Tor circumvention program. Tor provides anonymous browsing “by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you--and then periodically erasing your footprints” ("Tor Project: Overview."). In order to provide confidentiality through encryption and to circumvent local filtering, “the user’s software...builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays [computers running Tor that can forward traffic] on the network” ("Tor Project: Overview."). This is a generally effective solution on a traditional computer with (by Western standards) low-end hardware and a reliable Internet connection. However, most Uzbeks do not own their own PC. While Internet penetration in Uzbekistan has jumped from 8.8% in 2009 (Deibert et al. 268) to 26.8% in 2011 ("Asia Internet Facebook Usage and Population Statistics."), 12.5 million Uzbeks (by 2009 numbers (Deibert et al. 268)), or 46% of the population, own a mobile phone. With the growth of the mobile web in Uzbekistan and recent efforts to port Tor to mobile platforms, will a larger segment of the population beyond those wealthy enough to afford a personal computer be able to access blocked content through mobile versions of Tor?

Part of the answer lies in the current state of the effort to make Tor run on mobile devices. As Tor user and researcher Marco Bonetti describes, Tor has been ported to several mobile platforms, including the Android OS, the iPhone, the Nokia N900, and the Chumby One embedded computer system (“Mobile Privacy: Tor on the iPhone And Other Unusual Devices”). However, even on these relatively high-end platforms, significant technical and economic issues remain. Much of the cryptographic programming required to run Tor can create a severe drain on a mobile device’s battery. While the exact reasons are beyond the scope of this paper, it can be said that some instructions to a device’s CPU require more of the hardware (and therefore more electricity) than others. In addition, there is an added problem on mobile phones of making sure that Tor knows which device it is communicating with. For a traditional PC, the system’s IP address (the unique 32-bit number that distinguishes it from all other devices on the Internet) generally stays the same and is only occasionally changed by the user’s ISP as new users go online and old users remove their accounts. But on a mobile device which can rapidly change location in a very short time, the devices’ IP address can just as rapidly change. Thus Bonetti claims that developers are still trying to adequately adapt Tor to these new platforms.

Beyond these technical concerns, there remains the question of whether the majority of mobile users in Uzbekistan use the kinds of phones that can currently run Tor. According to Opera Software’s “State of the Mobile Web” report for April 2011, the ten most popular mobile phones in Uzbekistan are all, by Western standards, relatively slow devices with little memory such as the Nokia 6300 (which tops the list) that mostly run Nokia’s proprietary Series 40 operating system and not Google’s Android OS or Apple’s iOS ("Opera: State of the Mobile Web, April 2011."). While these hardware and software limitations can be overcome in the near future (especially as more powerful devices become more affordable in the region), the fact remains that little work has been done to date to bring Tor to these platforms.

In conclusion, there is still much work to be done before America’s corrupting influence can circumvent the Uzbek filtering system and misinform the nation’s youth. What began as a system to block access to pornographic websites on the national scientific and research network has evolved over the last decade into a sophisticated system of censorship and surveillance that takes full advantage of the state monopoly on IT infrastructure, self-censorship due to pressure from the SNB, and collaboration with foreign intelligence services. While numerous circumvention technologies exist (mirrors, proxies, etc.) the technological cat-and-mouse game between the information libertarians and authoritarians of the world also plays out in Uzbekistan as the government considers strategies to monitor the mobile web. If we look at some circumvention technologies such as Tor, it appears that the authoritarians are winning. Not only do serious technical concerns such as power usage and rapid changes of IP address persist, but developers in the West have not yet developed software for a telecom market that is still strikingly less affluent than that of the West, and where smartphones have yet to become widely used.

Sources:
Anons.uz. "Islam Karimov: I Believe That Journalists Are My Strongest and Trustful Support." Published 28 June 2011. Accessed 20 July 2011. .

Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain. Access Controlled: the Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. Print.
Pravdin (blogger on neweurasia.net). "Neweurasia.net » Uzbekistan: Internet Censorship Is Overrated." Neweurasia.net. 29 Sept. 2009. Web. 20 July 2011. .

Sadykov, Murat. "Uzbekistan Tightens Control over Mobile Internet | EurasiaNet.org." Eurasianet.org, 15 Mar. 2011. Web. 20 July 2011. .

"Tor Project: Overview." Tor Project: Anonymity Online. The Tor Project, Inc. Web. 20 July 2011. .

"Asia Internet Facebook Usage and Population Statistics." Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics. Miniwatts Marketing Group. Web. 20 July 2011. .

Bonetti, Marco. “Mobile Privacy: Tor on the iPhone And Other Unusual Devices”. Defcon.org. Web. 20 July 2011

"Opera: State of the Mobile Web, April 2011." Opera Browser | Faster & Safer Internet | Free Download. Opera Software ASA, Apr. 2011. Web. 20 July 2011. .

Kalashnikovs and Kumys Part 2: Foreign Policy, or An Untuned Piano

These are my notes from a guest speaker session we had with Osmonakun Ibraimov, who was the Secretary of State (which seems pretty close to our Secretary of State) under the Akayev administration. Fortunately, since only Ibraimov was speaking, this post should be a lot easier to follow. Again, note that what's below is the best I could write down based on a translation of what Ibraimov was saying, and it is often phrased in my own words. My comments are in brackets. The talk was divided into four parts. They were:

1. Foreign policy under the Soviets
2. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan under Akayev
3. Bakiyev
4. Kyrgyzstan today

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Part 1:

Nobody could enter the Kyrgyz SSR back then. Everything was controlled by the Kremlin. There were lots of streets with Russian names. People didn't know about Kyrgyz history before the Soviet Union. It was as if it all began when Lenin took over [note that the capital was named Frunze after the famous Bolshevik leader Mikhail Frunze].

Kyrgyzstan started hearing about the West, and there was interest in the West and Western democracy. The intelligentsia thought we were far behind. Gorbachev introduced glastnost and perestroika and the USSR collapsed. Everyone wanted independence.

Part 2:

I [Ibraimov] was working in the president's office, and became press secretary. Most of the new ministers were university professors. We started thinking about policy, especially foreign policy. The West helped a lot, but we didn't know how to prioritize, and we didn't understand what a market economy was. Jeffrey Sachs and Jim Baker visited. [George H. W.] Bush visited three times. Al Gore visited later. Democracy wasn't possible back then. Even a few years ago, it was unthinkable that American students could come here to study Russian. But we wanted to help somehow after 9/11, so we gave the U.S. Manas Airbase. The idea was to be friends with everyone who would help, but the priority was given to the West.

Kyrgyzstan was the first country to make radical changes. It became an “island of democracy”, but we ruined it ourselves by the end of the 90s. Akayev's foreign policy reached out to both Moscow AND Washington, and Beijing, too, built relations with everyone. It wasn't either/or or “multi-vector” [my phrase, the implication was that Akayev didn't try to play one Great Power off against another]. Real money came in from this, and we had a chance to not starve. Money came in from Moscow too for roads, etc. that decayed after the Soviet collapse [Something just came to mind while typing this up. If you look at the manhole covers on a typical street in Bishkek, the older ones say “кгсср”, which is an abbreviation for Kyrgyz SSR in the Cyrillic alphabet. The newer ones, unlike what Ibraimov's implies, are not in Russian. They're in Chinese.]

Still, there was pressure from Moscow. Note Putin (and Medvedev too) wanted to start Russian neo-imperialism [I’m not sure if that last sentence is from me or him].

Part 3

Bakiyev was the biggest mistake of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan [gee, I'm so surprised he said that]. He wasn't good at foreign policy, because he was a typical Soviet bureaucrat. He ruined our relations with the U.S., he declared some people persona non grata to make Russia like him (and to get money for government/private interests). He promised Putin he'd kick the Americans out of Manas airbase, but since the Americans invested a lot of money in the airbase, it wasn't possible. Half of Kyrgyzstan's external debt is held by America [I'm not sure if this was a mistake on my part, the translator's, or Ibraimov's, but somebody probably meant Russia]. He threw out two U.S. diplomats; even the USSR wasn't that aggressive. Bakiyev promised the U.S. and Moscow that he would keep his word, but he was the perfect representative of a Silk Road bazaar trader. He sold to the highest bidder. He turned Maxim [his son] into the most influential person in Kyrgyzstan.
You can't ruin relations with any of the three Great Powers, and you can't act under only one. If you only side with one, you piss off the other two. By April 2010, he had pissed off Russia and the U.S. [and presumably China wasn't crazy about him either]. It's no big secret that Moscow wanted to get rid of Bakiyev. The U.S. basically agreed. The 2005 revolution was a huge drama. Bakiyev was brought to power by people in power. They knew he was corrupt, but clan politics won. It wasn't a happy ending. Having a revolution every five years causes a lot of damage, looting, etc. These two revolutions were a direct result of our foreign policy. This fall, there will be a presidential election and I hope there will be American / Russian election observers.

Part 4: An Untuned Piano

Now we have to rebuild our relations. Moscow doesn't like [President Rosa] Otunbayeva. The U.S. likes her; she received an award from the U.S., but Moscow openly dislikes her and thinks she's an American puppet. [Prime Minister Almazbek] Atambayev wants to be friends with Moscow, and is willing to give a little for respect from Moscow and Turkey. This is a situation where we have lost our principles. We used to want to be friends with everyone, now it's going everywhere. We have candidates begging for Russian approval. No one is going to the U.S. The U.S. did invite Otunbayeva and [Ata-Meken party leader Omurbek] Tekebayev before, and they are the two the U.S. might possibly support. Everything depends on who [among the three Great Powers] helps out. China is silent, and we don't know what they think. They seem to be only interested in economic influence. Kyrgyzstan is a headache for the U.S. because the Manas airbase is so important, and problems in Kyrgyzstan are problems for the U.S. in Central Asia. Russia is working in Kyrgyzstan and has its own plans. There's a Russian military base not far from Bishkek.

If America helps out, we're ready to be friends, even if it means becoming enemies with Russia. Some candidates promise to change the constitution, and Moscow wants two things: (1) no parliamentary system, and (2) no American airbase.

We have also had bad relations with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan said last year that we couldn't protect the Uzbeks, and that's true. Kazakhstan doesn't like our parliamentary system. It's a dangerous possibility for Nazarbayev, since he wants to be president for life. Kazakhstan has influence due to [cultural] similarities and there are a lot of Kazakhs in Kyrgyzstan. Last year Kazakhstan caused this country a lot of [economic] damage when it closed its borders [during the June riots, although he might have been referring to Uzbekistan.]. We take in a lot of goods from China and export them to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Obama is headed in the right direction, even though last year we hated America. Now it's much better, and they really like Obama here [Just months after the “revolution”, they opened a bar and grill named after him]. If America had a Post-Soviet Marshall Plan, it would have been very different. After the USSR collapsed, the U.S. forgot about the place. The money given out wasn't controlled, it was often a one-time event, and it just went to bureaucrats' pockets.

[Returning to the idea of a Post-Soviet Marshall Plan,] Russia couldn't stop such a plan, but America had other problems. Bush Jr. was trying to “export democracy”. He had no idea what he was doing. Americans shouldn't be too aggressive. This is diplomacy. The bottom line is the U.S. was overextended thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is really bad for Kyrgyzstan because we wouldn't want America to leave the Manas airbase. Kyrgyzstan doesn't know what Russia will do, but it doesn't want Russia to dominate here.

But Obama spent all that money to kill Osama Bin Laden, and the war in Afghanistan and the impact of the global recession damaged the U.S. and therefore Kyrgyzstan. The som is pegged to the dollar, and this has hurt the som significantly. From very good concepts we went to horrible results, because we betrayed all our allies.

I don't know who likes us, and I can't predict the outcome of the October elections. If there's no sure winner, the south will be unhappy, and the north is still pissed over Bakiyev [who was from the south]. Now people in the south want their southern candidate, and the north wants its candidate.

[Returning to the October elections, ] Tekebayev altered the constitution and criticized Otunbayeva in Moscow. He basically cursed her. There's no clear answer on what to do going forward. Washington will leave Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan, and we need money badly. The world financial situation is no better, and foreign aid is drying up. The IMF and the World Bank can only do so much. China is building a huge road. It helps a lot, and there is the Shanghai-Paris railroad too. On all sides, China is winning the New Great Game. Although there is Russian aggression, and Russia is also having its own presidential elections. However, Russia needs to concentrate on the Caucasus and not Central Asia.

We're afraid of China. There's so many of them; we're afraid of demographic expansion [my phrase]. For many years we were at war with China [I think he’s referring to the various wars the Kyrgyz have fought with ethnic groups that are now on the Chinese side of the border], but we're not really afraid of Russia.

If Obama and Putin would settle things, it would be much better for Kyrgyzstan. Washington thought things would get better after 2005, but it didn't happen. In 2010, it's the same for Russia. In the fall, there will be some tension over the change of government. It will most likely be a Russian puppet. Right now, the U.S. position is much weaker, the U.S. is less aggressive and more passive, so others can be more aggressive.

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[I asked whether Turkey could have any influence on the presidential election]. I [Ibraimov] don't think they'll have much influence. Turkey has its own goals, and a shared language [I can say myself that, with half a semester of Turkish under my belt, I can make sense of small bits of Kyrgyz, but they're not mutually intelligible]. They want influence in Central Asia, but they're not good at getting it.

[Someone asked about the role of NGOs.] NGOs can have a great role, but there's a stereotype that they work for the West. It's really a mixed picture. If they're civil enough, there is a chance of influence. The biggest danger here is political Islam. Note nobody here liked the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, even though we were glad the U.S. went there, because it changed the balance of power.

It's the same in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In Russia, anti-American policy is at the top of the list. It's the official policy of Russia. Many people think China has it right, but the financial crisis has left a giant question mark. NINJA loans [my phrase, No Income, No Job or Assets] fucked up everyone. Now America is printing money, and China is printing its money so that you can buy yuans. It's also really hard to understand how China grew so fast. Kyrgyzstan is just a small part of an unclear picture. That's why we're glad you're here. Everyone is interested in other places, and we feel lonely. But America is being spoiled by populist politicians. In Kyrgyzstan, a politician who says “You are going to have to work day and night to raise this country” can't get elected. [As I recall, he also implied that a statement like this isn’t politically feasible in America either, and I agree.]

[Someone asked about the current president, Rosa Otunbayeva.] Otunbayeva was the biggest hope for Kyrgyzstan, but she wasn't what we thought she'd be. Everyone was hoping for change. First, she was supposed to find the April 2010 shooters and stop the robberies. $60 million disappeared and nobody knows where it went. Where are the surveillance tapes that would have recorded this? Second, when the June riots happened, we wanted help, but nothing was done. She's a professional diplomat, she's supposed to take all intelligence into account, but she didn't do that. Corruption grew, and lots of people didn't support the parliamentary system. Most politicians would rather become regional governors than deputies, and the system of regional government is very corrupt. She was supposed to bring Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan together. She shouldn't have pissed off Russia so much, and she should have been more careful with corruption. Right now there are criminals in parliament, and we have a speaker [Akhmatbek Keldibekov] with criminal ties. A lot of Bakiyev's old friends are in power again. All of this was for nothing. Osh is one of our most ancient cities. There might be tension in Kyrgyzstan soon on a regional basis.

Otunbayeva's problem is she hates the opposition too much. She's not diplomatic enough. From the outside, she seems so nice. She's Central Asia's first female president, and she gave some nice speeches, but she hasn't been that great. What about the people who distributed weapons during the June riots? How could she let that happen? She lost a lot of respect and trust. Still, she's the least bad of the people who were in power, and now she's a really weak president.

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Before I end this post, I want to add one observation that doesn’t fit well in any of my posts, but it fits best here given the discussion of the presidential election. In my last life as a Democratic activist in southern Maine (specifically York County 2004-2008), we had a difficult split within the county-level organization. Gallia York County Est Omnis Divisa in Partes Tres: the blue-collar, rural, Republican-leaning area north and west of I-95, the slightly better-off, strongly Democratic mill towns of Biddeford (pronounced “Biddefehd”), Old Orchard Beach, and Saco (which are usually lumped together with towns in Cumberland County and labeled “the greater Portland area”), and finally the much better off tourist towns southwest of greater Portland (this includes the town of Kennebunkport and Walker’s Point, where George H. W. Bush has a summer home). Whenever there was a discussion between activists from different regions, people didn’t always take into account basic differences of organization, political strategy, and PR. You can’t hold a $50-per-ticket wine and cheese fundraiser in a town of 6,000 people where the one place everyone in town visits and shoots the breeze is the town transfer station, aka the dump. Joe Sixpack, a registered undeclared (as independent voters are called in Maine voting records) from Berwick, Maine in the rural northwest who makes $35,000 a year and does construction and repair work in the area can be won over by a state representative candidate just as much as Joseph N. Sixpackington III, who owns a fancy restaurant / gift shop in Kittery, which is about an hour’s drive from Boston. However, the two voters require a completely different choice of body language, rhetoric, and even clothes.

The greater Portland people, who were the most active and vocal members of the county organization, were generally unaware of these differences and sometimes made strategic assessments that did not take into account the political environment that their allies on the other side of the Turnpike were working with. My point is that regional differences don’t just translate to differences in ideology. They can lead to differences in the basic assumptions about the political context in which you’re operating. During my whole time in Bishkek, I kept hearing that Atambayev was going to win the presidential election, largely because he was backed by Russia. Unfortunately, I think I spent my whole time in Kyrgyzstan’s “greater Portland area”, and I have little feel for what folks think in Sanford Osh or Berwick Jalal-Abad. Personally, I agree with this article on how the election is likely to play out.

We're going to take a break from Kyrgyzstan in the next post, where I'll talk about the week I spent touring Uzbekistan and all the sights, sounds and (blocked) websites I saw.

Kalashnikovs and Kumys Part 1: Ethnic Policy, or Why There is Too Much Freedom in Kyrgyzstan

These are my notes from a discussion session we had at the London School called “The April Revolution 1 Year Later: Transition to Democracy or 10 Years Back?”. It was in a question and answer format with some questions submitted from the participants, and we had four Kyrgyz participants and about as many Americans. After struggling with how to present this narrative (as it quickly jumps from person to person), I've decided to present my notes more or less as is. The // symbol is where one person stopped talking and another person started, but note that I only started keeping track of this about halfway through the session. Until the third question, I'm reconstructing the flow of conversation from memory. My comments are in brackets.

What triggered the violence?

It was very unexpected, it started as a small conflict/protest in Talas, and it was thought that the government would stop it. It terrible for folks at university. At the time, no information was available. The phone services stopped working.

// The people who protested were more like drunk/high rioters. If you want change, change yourself. It can't be just a person who demands stuff. For some, the revolution was fake. What has changed? We have tribalism and everything that was associated with the old government.

Who started the revolution?

Remember that the opposition leaders were in prison. It was started in part because they were jailed.
// The idea is we need more control in Kyrgyzstan. It's too free. Here it's easy to get a visa. [At this point in the conversation, I was too distracted by what I was hearing to write it down. The best I can remember goes something like “It's very easy to get a visa, and there's a lot of drugs moving in from abroad. It's like there's too much freedom and we need someone powerful to solve our problems”.]

There was no organization, no stated goal/aim to the revolution, just complaints. When the first revolution happened, I was more positive. The second set us back 10 years. I lost hope in people, our civic consciousness hasn't formed. They can form a mob, but if there's no agreed agenda, it's a failure. Now parliament is arguing and can't share.

Why wasn't there much coverage of the revolution? [The question was interpreted to refer to outside coverage.]

Kyrgyzstan? Where's that? [That was my snarky comment in the notes. I didn't actually say that.]

The U.S. does have bases here, but Kyrgyzstan isn't Egypt, and it's not an important U.S. ally.

When did you realise this was a revolution?

While away [at a university in the U.S.], I heard there was a revolution. Once I came back, there it turned out not to be a revolution. [Between these two sentences, the conversation switched back to the claim that some of the protesters were drugged] In the U.S., first it was mass street protests. Then, at the end, it was half and half, the protesters were paid well and in some ways organized. // In some cases they added drugs/alcohol to make people more rowdy. // My dad came home from work and saw the revolutionaries. They were really drunk. Some filmed mobile phone videos where they looted stores. // Some of them said “They gave us water and I don't remember what happened.” Now some of them are heroes and are buried near Chingiz Aitmatov. This is a crazy idea and I don't accept it.

What was accomplished?

Flats for families of the victims. Is anyone better off than they were a year ago? // There has been some movement to a parliamentary system, not certain it's ready yet. It's hard to change the real social structure. There was good reason for a revolution, but it didn't succeed.

Is there potential for change?

It's awful soon to say anything about that, but if you think of the term “revolution”, I don't see it here. // I see possible outcomes, for example Kyrgyz C-SPAN [my phrase, the parliament sessions are now being broadcast on the national radio stations], everyone can hear that. // [Returning to the protesters again,] Not all of them were drunk or high, some were good people. At least half of them were good. // People who shot at the protesters, it was their job. I would have done the same and died for my country. Then once the revolution got inside, they were more violent. It wasn't revolution, it was mass craziness. // Some shooters were reported mercenaries // Some people were injured.

Can Ata-Jurt build support outside the south? [I submitted a two part question, and this was part 1]

Some people don't think in terms of north and south. Ata-Jurt does have some support outside the south, // but not much. There is a popular former mayor of Bishkek who is in Ata-Jurt.

What does the nationalist trend in Kyrgyz politics mean for the future of Kyrgyz-Uzbek relations? [This was part 2]

Nationalism has become overblown. Amnesty International expected new violence after the first anniversary of the June violence. Kyrgyzstan has been tolerant, and not Kyrgyzstan is accused of being genocidal. I think it's important to remember that people weren't being killed on the same scale as the Germans killed the Jews. We do deserve to develop civic nationalism, Kyrgyzstani nationalism, where we can speak our local language, but not Kyrgyz ethnic nationalism. We studied Kyrgyz for years, and if you like your language, your culture, and your nation, you want to help your people. There were “Soviets” who lost their identity in 1991. // Everything in Turkey is in Turkish. Why don't we speak Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan? We need to develop our own love for our language alongside other languages. North/South, Uzbek/Kyrgyz, were all constructs and need to be changed.

Has the revolution inspired other countries?

Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia are all afraid, they saw it as a means of instability. How do you negotiate with a parliament? Yes, there's a Prime Minister, but classic West Wing politicking [my phrase] means meeting with multiple stakeholders.

Could there be another revolution in the future?

There will perhaps be some tensions after the elections [in October] and squabbling over the results // For some people, revolution is an easy solution. Some deputies work hard, and some don't. Hopefully parliament will get some change done.

What's the way forward?

We need to toughen up on our borders. We have large mountains that are hard to patrol, and bribes. // Corruption is so much of a part of our system that if you remove it, you destroy it. // I'm only glad Bakiyev is gone if a good person replaces him. The June events cast a long shadow over the Provisional Government. Lots of people from the Bakiyev era are still here. The problem is people haven't gotten involved.

Sam Rayburn once said “Any jackass can kick over a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one”. Now that Bakiyev is gone, the Provisional Government hasn't built anything to better in its place. Now the presidential elections are two and half months away, and all of the candidates look like corrupt members of the same old clan-based power structures that Bakiyev used to dominate. If you're Kyrgyz and you're not part of that system, and (as we'll see in a later post) you look across the border at Kazakhstan and see people doing comparatively better under Nazarbayev, how can you not want to see a strongman take over?

In the next post, we'll switch from domestic politics (kumys) to foreign politics (Kalashnikovs) where we'll see how Kyrgyzstan's disorganized clan structure has led to a disorganized foreign policy.

6-14-11: Send Uzbeks, Guns, and Money

(Author's note: Even though I revised this after I got back to the U.S., I still don't like how this post turned out. Still, I'm uploading it because it introduces a lot of the themes that I would have more interesting things to say about later in the trip. It was only in the second week of an 8-week stay in the country.)

Wow, Istanbul did somewhat prepare me for Bishkek, but I certainly didn’t expect some things in my first week here. While there was no Internet at my host family’s place, I’m not disturbed by that. What has been difficult is the on again, off again power and electricity. I couldn’t shower at night since that is when everyone waters their gardens. The fact that local food is at least 5 times oilier than anything you can find in America is a problem too. Also, anyone who has been to Bishkek probably knows about or has been in a маршрутка. These are large vans used as minibuses and there is no such thing as personal space on those things. Insert your favorite statement about how we take so much for granted back in the США here.

White whining aside, I’d like to acknowledge two derps I made in the last post. Derp #1: The adjective is “Kyrgyz”, not “Kyrgyzstani” (or is it? we’ll talk about this in the next post). The source I got “Kyrgyzstani” from was pretty legitimate, but everyone (including people in Kyrgyzstan) says Kyrgyz. Derp #2: I think I, and perhaps the KIC report, overemphasized the ethnic component of the June 2010 riots. There are a few common narratives into which it is all too easy to unwittingly pigeonhole complex political developments that we Americans often know little about. It’s as easy to read what happened last year and the current nationalist rhetoric in Kyrgyz politics as “Ethnic Group A hates Ethnic Group B” as it is to read the “Arab Spring” and the “Green Revolution” as “Youngsters fighting Crotchety Old Dictators with their Youtubes and their Facebooks and their Tweety-Twitters”. In reality, all factors need to be considered to fully understand the “sexy” headlines the media throws onto our TVs and web browsers every minute, and I hope to better explain here what is going on in Kyrgyzstan and where this country might be headed.

In my first week here, there was a guest lecture by Orozbek Moldaliev, who at the time worked with (I might have the name wrong) the President’s Department of Strategic Analysis, which seems to be close to our White House Chief of Staff. The lecture mainly focused on explaining last year’s riots, and overall it was a very good talk. I’d like to walk through my recollection of Moldaliev’s talk and comment on a few points. Keep in mind that my Russian was not yet good enough to listen directly to Moldaliev, and I can only talk about what the translator said.

Most explanations of the June ’10 riots have blamed a shady coalition of Uzbek separatists, drug smugglers, and the Bakiyevs for triggering the violence, and I can see some decent evidence for the second factor. It’s a well-known fact that tons of opium travel through Kyrgyzstan from Afghanistan and Tajikistan on their way to Russia and Western Europe, and there’s some evidence (e.g. the fact that Bakiyev disbanded Kyrgyzstan's Drug Control Agency (DCA)) that the Bakiyevs cultivated ties with the drug mafia. Once they were gone, there was no one left to pocket the drug money, and a rearranging of the proverbial chairs was inevitable. This was one point that was briefly discussed in the KIC report, and I think it needed some attention in this post. What has made me seriously reconsider how I think about Kyrgyz politics is his discussion of the real and perceived situation of the Uzbek community. Moldaliev claimed that, while the Uzbeks may have believed they were being discriminated against by the Kyrgyz, in reality the whole system is corrupt. If you're an Uzbek businessman in Osh, and there are Kyrgyz criminals collecting protection money, corrupt Kyrgyz tax officials collecting fines (read bribes), and a corrupt court system (dominated by ethnic Kyrgyz) that does not provide a place to appeal, then you might think that this thoroughly corrupt system is out to cheat Uzbeks. This, of course, raises the question of why there are so few Uzbeks in government. Moldaliev claims that most Uzbeks studied in the Uzbek language schools set up in the 90s that were mentioned in the KIC report, and as a result most Uzbeks are not fluent in Kyrgyz or Russian, the two languages in which all governing bodies conduct their business. Thus Uzbeks have not been purposefully shut out of their government. It's “just the way things are”. Why not make Uzbek and official language? Moldaliev also discussed this. The fact is that only Uzbeks, who make up 14% of the population, speak Uzbek. If people from post-Soviet countries who came to America wanted to make Russian an official language, how popular would that be here in the U.S.? I added in my notes that there's already no shortage of debate over the user of English and Spanish here in the U.S., and our Latino community is at least as large as the Uzbek community in Kyrgyzstan.

Overall, I liked Moldaliev's lecture, even though he was likely giving us talking points put together in the Kyrgyz White House. He was a lot fairer than what many people would say about last year, he didn't repeat the claim that the Uzbeks wanted autonomy last year, and he did state that most of the cafés and restaurants there were destroyed in the riots were Uzbek. What I'm still uncertain about is his point, repeated several times, that Uzbeks were not shut out on purpose, but that “that's just how things were”. I'm going to go out on a limb here and chalk that up to a poor translation. The fact that at least Akayev's government did take some steps to promote Uzbek language schools and culture as mentioned in the KIC report probably rules out a full-blown unofficial government policy of discrimination. However, if there was no problem of inter-ethnic relation in Kyrgyzstan before riots, there certainly is one year later. An article on RFE/RL paints a fairly dire picture of Osh one year after the riots. While the Kyrgyz have a generally negative opinion of these folks who is from away and vice versa, they haven't reached the point where they're willing to take up arms against their neighbors...yet. If a nationalist like Jyldyz “Sarah Palin on Steroids and Armed with Tactical Nukes” Joldosheva wins the presidential elections and takes Kyrgyzstan in a more authoritarian direction, expect a lot more ugliness in the next few years. I'll have more on this later in the post, but right now I think I'm missing something. Oh yeah, this blog is supposed to be about politics AND TECHNOLOGY in the former Soviet Union.

One of the first ads I saw coming out of the baggage area at Manas International Airport was an ad for Beeline KG, one of the phone companies in Kyrgyzstan and a few other Central Asian countries. To give you an idea of what kind of phones people use here, the sign read (in English and Russian) “Experience new 3G technologies!” I looked into what kind of service Beeline offers (given my one year of Russian), and it brought up something I hadn't thought of regarding circumvention technology: while the Tor Project, for example, has done some good work to port its software to smart phones, there has been nothing that I can find about work on the lower-end models that are, unfortunately, ubiquitous in some states that are more inclined to censor the web. I plan to discuss this in more depth as part of a research paper I have to write in my Central Asian Studies class, and I plan to post said paper in this blog.

I've been reading on Eurasianet about arms proliferation in Kyrgyzstan, the brawl in parliament two months ago, and on how the country is increasingly falling under “the law of the crowd”...

Nope, nope, nope, stop the post. At this point in the writeup, I made an ivy-tower argument drawing from Plato's Republic that Kyrgyzstan's experiment with parliamentary democracy is failing rapidly, and it won't be long before an authoritarian strongman of a radically different character from the two oligarchs who used to rule the country takes over. I still agree with this assessment, but I have loads of material in later posts that talks about it, and what's left in this post just isn't of a high enough quality for this blog. Stay tuned for “Kalashnikovs and Kumys” a two-parter on Kyrgyzstan's foreign and domestic policy where I come face to face with some native authoritarians in their natural habitat.

ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzermhmhmhm...Huh? What? I have a blog? Well, maybe I should update it.

Looking over some of my old posts, I realised I could do a better job of explaining what it is I'm trying to do with the subject matter of this blog. Fortunately, someone asked me recently why I'm studying abroad this summer in Kyrgyzstan (more on that later), and I wrote this as a response:

"There is an ongoing debate in foreign policy circles regarding what role, if any, the Internet can play in democratisation. On one extreme you have people who think that, especially after the "Arab Spring", if you throw enough web apps and censorship circumvention tools at the Internet users of authoritarian states, they'll link up through Facebook and Twitter, find all their government's dirty laundry through Wikileaks, and work around government censorship through tools like Tor. Let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom, because the information libertarians of the world will eventually win out over the information authoritarians. I'd like to keep this relatively short, but not only is the situation in the Middle East far from over, but I would also argue that the case of Egypt makes it too easy to overlook the ways in which dictators can use the Internet to better spread propaganda, monitor their citizens, and even co-opt the opposition. Everything I've learned over the past few years tells me that, despite what Justin Timberlake's character in The Social Network said, while we used to live on farms and then cities, we can never "live on the Internet". The Internet lives on us, and the ways in which pro-democracy activists in authoritarian states and the governments that oppress them can use this technology is far more influenced by the local political/social/cultural/religious context than I think most policy makers, pundits and tech gurus are aware of. I want to finish up here at UMass not just with the technical expertise to write useful software in this field, but with enough understanding of the political realities of the more authoritarian parts of the former Soviet Union to know what makes sense politically as well as technically."

It's with this viewpoint that I'm going to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for the Central Asian Studies program at SRAS. All of this said, I have a confession to make: In the three years that I've been following this part of the world, I have paid less attention to Kyrgyzstan than, say, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan because, well, the country doesn't have any oil and he who controls the spice does control the universe. However, after some catch-up, I figured I should talk a little about the recent political developments in Kyrgyzstan (WARNING: The following is a paper for a Political Science class masquerading as a blog post. You may get very bored. Peter would like to make up for this with a funny video.)

I just recently finished reading the Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission's report on the riots in Osh and Jalalabad last June, which I encourage everyone to at least skim, and I'll summarise it here. The best place to start is probably to describe the status of the Uzbek minority in southern Kyrgyzstan and its place in Kyrgyzstani politics. After similar riots in Osh in 1990, "concessions to the Uzbek communities were made. One of them was the creation of the Uzbek National Cultural Centre (UNCC) at the national level, with branches in all significant areas of Uzbek settlement. The centres became the main outlet for Uzbek political participation and the expression of minority demands" (KIC par. 81). However, throughout the Akayev (1990-2005) and Bakiyev (2005-2010) administrations, there was at least some informal discrimination against Uzbeks. For example, "There are limited numbers of Uzbek officers in the police force, the army and the national security service. Uzbek numbers are even lower in the judicial and prosecution services. Of the 110 judges in the 28 courts of southern Kyrgyzstan, only one is Uzbek. In December 2010, only one Uzbek investigator held a position at the national security agency" (KIC par. 87). After Bakiyev was ousted in early April 2010, not only did a new group of Uzbek community leaders (notably businessman and former deputy Kadyrjan Batyrov) emerge and begin to demand a greater role in Kyrgyzstan public life, but a new group of Kyrgyzstani leaders opposed to Interim President Rosa Otunbayeva's Provisional Government emerged in southern Kyrgyzstan, some of whom were former Bakiyev supporters. In the days after the Bakiyev clan definitively lost its power base in the south (when Uzbek AND Kyrgyzstani supporters of the Provisional Government retook the administration building in Jalalabad on May 14), relations between the Uzbeks and the southern Kyrygzstanis began to deteriorate. When a crowd of Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marched on the Bakiyev's home village of Teyit, "While some information suggested that Batyrov led the march to Teyit and gave orders to loot and burn the houses, he denied it...According to Batyrov and other Uzbek witnesses, known criminals were present and Bakiyev‟s house was already on fire when they arrived. Subsequent accounts suggested that the national flag of Kyrgyzstan had been burned and trampled upon, but the KIC has no evidence to that effect" (KIC par. 64). The situation was exacerbated when held a rally at the all-too-ironically-named University of People's Friendship calling for Uzbeks to become more politically active. His statements were misread by the southern Kyrgyzstani community as a call for autonomy and "an act of aggression against Kyrgyzstan and the statehood of Kyrgyzstan" (KIC par. 66). This led to counter-demonstrations by the southern Kyrgyzstanis, and by the beginning of June southern Kyrgyzstan had become an ethnic powder keg. Add in some significant crisis mismanagement by Provisional Government authorities and you have the riots in Osh and Jalalabad of April 2010.

Most of the violence was in Osh, and while the Uzbeks certainly committed some crimes, the Kyrgyzstanis were better-armed and far more systematic. Some college kids relax and play Modern Warfare 2 over the summer. I read through about a dozen cases of the same pattern: "First, the removal of the barricade, usually
with an APC*. This phase was often accompanied by “sniper” gunfire from a lone gunman (or woman) on a multi-storeyed building nearby. Second, an advance into the mahalla [Uzbek neighborhood] by armed men and the APC. Third, the looting and burning of houses. The looting was sometimes co-ordinated by groups of women. Looted goods were often removed en masse in dedicated vehicles. Many Uzbeks were beaten and/or killed in their houses, or as they attempted to extinguish fires or flee. Some Uzbek women and girls were subjected to particularly violent sexual assault. Witnesses consistently stated that some of the attackers wore camouflage clothing while others wore civilian clothing, irrespective of whether they were traveling in a military vehicle or walking" (KIC par. 148). By the Kyrgyzstani government's own numbers (KIC par. 205), 426 people were killed, 105 were Kyrgyzstani, and 276 were Uzbek, and the UNHCR puts the number of displaced persons at close to 300,000 (KIC par. 314). In spite of all this, Uzbeks make up the majority of those prosecuted for crimes related to the riots. Of the 5,162 investigations related to the riots launched by December 2010, 79% of the accused were Uzbek, and 18% were Kyrgyzstani (KIC par. 202).

As for what I think of the situation almost a year later, the KIC report mentions two factors that contributed to the violence that I think are key to the current situation in Kyrgyzstan. First, during Bakiyev's last years in power, "increasing global energy and food prices had rendered purchasing power stagnant. The financial crisis slowed economic growth and remittances received from Kyrgyzstani workers employed in Russia and other foreign destinations dropped" (KIC par. 53). If you think the economy is tough у нас в Aмерике, try to imagine 20% inflation. Second, Kyrgyzstanis and Uzbeks don't seem to be getting along any better than they were last year. Not only are some formerly Uzbek businesses in Osh now magically operating under new Kyrgyzstani ownership, but there is a serious problem of land distribution in the province that has already begun to take on an ethnic dimension. Furthermore, the newly free press environment in Kyrgyzstan, while a nice change from the Akayev/Bakiyev era, has also led to a proliferation of xenophobic "journalism", and Osh TV, the formerly Uzbek-language network, now broadcasts in Kyrgyz. It's going to be interesting to see the media coverage (well, what I can translate from Russian or find in English) leading up to the presidential elections this fall. Finally, a lot of people who were in the Provisional Government last year and either didn't see the shit on its way to the fan or were more concerned with removing the Bakiyev clan from power are still in the Provisional Government. When all of these factors are taken together, I am, as usual, not optimistic about the near-term outlook for this country.

Since I've talked so much about Turkish Internet censorship in previous posts, and it has been almost a year, I'd like to follow-up on my discussion of the subject from last summer. Oh boy, first the government unblocked and then re-blocked Youtube (oh Deniz Baykal sex tape, why must you be so scandalicious?), and then they proposed a far more comprehensive filtering system with an interesting choice of banned words (more on that later). Maybe I'm missing something here, but I really don't think this would have led to protests that were significantly larger than what we saw last year if the BTK wasn't trying to close the DNS loopholes that (including, not too long ago, Prime Minister Erdogan, also, thank you CHP for taking the right stance on this issue) have been using for some time. This almost goes without saying, but I think these protests will increase in direct proportion to how much the AKP (and perhaps the ultra-nationalist MHP) presses the issue. Let's hope that, as Yusuf Kanli said in a recent op-ed, "depending on the outcome of the June 12 polls the climate in Turkey will improve as well and some of the oddities of advanced democracy will be corrected with some regular applications of a regular democratic mindset".

Ok, this post has been serious for way too long. It's time to make this site 9 kinds of illegal in Turkey using the banned words listed on Eurasianet: You can't beat 31 homemade glasses of lemonade on a hot June day for free, even if there's some stupid teen pop music playing in the background and you have to escort those lousy kids off your property. Justin Bieber is so gay and anal.

Feel free to try this in the comments.

*This was not, as I imagined when I first read the report, something like a Hummer or a large Jeep. The two models mentioned were the BTR-80 and the BMP-1. The KIC report points out that these were too expertly driven to have been operated by civilians.