NOAM COHEN - ESSAY


Among international outrages, depriving citizens of personalized maps seems far down on the list. Still, that was the condition put on the introduction of Apple’s 3G iPhone in Egypt. The government demanded that Apple disable the phone’s global- positioning system, arguing that GPS is a military prerogative.


The company apparently complied, most likely taking a cue from the telecom companies that sell the phone there, said Ahmed Gabr, who runs a blog in Egypt, gadgetsarabia. com, and wrote about the iPhone’s release there.“The point is that using a GPS unit you can get accurate coordinates of any place and thus military bases and so on could be easily tagged,”he wrote in an e-mail message.


I met Mr.Gabr last summer in Alexandria, Egypt, at the worldwide conference for Wikipedia. He was typical of the young Egyptians in attendance? hungry for new technology, hopeful about what it would mean for their country.


As much as any country, however, Egypt illustrates the nature of technology under an oppressive government. Young people flock to Facebook in a way I never could have imagined. For the largest Arab country in the world, it was a way for the educated elite to reach out to one another and to those who had left the country for an even more elite education.


Andrew Bossone, an American in Cairo who writes about technology, said that despite its expense, the iPhone in Egypt was“really popular? everyone knows the iPhone.”


But thus far, each time technology has promised to help introduce democracy to the country, young people’s hopes have been dashed. A movement for reform that used Face book to organize protests was shut down. The authorities jailed many of its organizers. Recently, a blogger affiliated with the radical group Muslim Brotherhood was arrested for his writings, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights.


It is enough to make one ask if new technologies? the personal computer, the World Wide Web, the all-powerful smartphone? will help set us free or merely give us that illusion.


Apple modified its phone without any public acknowledgment. In a series of e-mail exchanges and brief telephone conversations, an Apple spokeswoman detailed the success of the iPhone rollout around the world? a total of 13 million phones shipped since it was introduced in June 2007, and more than 200 million applications downloaded.


But she did not answer how the iPhone came to be disabled and whether Apple had a policy it followed in modifying its products to meet the demands of governments worldwide.


This issue remains keenly relevant as Apple negotiates the introduction of the iPhone to China.


Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights program of Human Rights Watch, placed the issue in a larger context.


First, he described freedom of information as part of the broader, better known, freedom of expression.


And second, he argued that it was important for technology companies to set principles and follow them.“Here is the big question for Apple: Is this an adhoc approach or is there a fundamental policy, balancing the freedom of expression and information with the demands of the government?”


It is easy to get swept up in the utopianism embedded in new technologies. Even those like Mr. Ganesan, who see technology abused, are cautiously hopeful.“Technologies do not hold people accountable. They give people the tools to hold people accountable.”But he added:“We believe as a human rights group that the Internet can have an opening and transforming effect.”


When Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978, he said, people were “smuggling letters by hand from the Soviet Union? that was how the world found out about a dissident.”Today, there is a range of tools for spreading the word, from blogs to e-mail to YouTube .


“We may not know what the maximum impact of openness is,”he said. “But we do know that in the most closed places the worst things happen.”