nettime: Data Conflicts and the Hungarian Techno Police State

[Tamas Bodoky <bodoky@caesar.elte.hu>]

Dear nettime,

let me introduce the topic: last December i attended a conference in
Potsdam entitled "Data Conflicts and the Geopolitics of Cyberspace" and
held a speech "Fear and Loathing in Hungary". I posted my text on nettime
as well a few weeks ago. My lecture was succesfull, let me mention that Wau
Holland (Chaos Computer Club) translated it to german language and
presented at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg as well. Last week
i became aware of an article (Data Conflicts and the Hungarian Techno
Police State, http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1101/1.htm) in the german
cyberjournal Telepolis (http://www.heise.de/tp/) by John Horvath, who
heavily criticised my opinion and called me "nothing more than a mouthpiece
for vested political and business interests". As you will see below, he did
not attach my original text to his article, and when i asked him to discuss
his opinion on a public forum he forwarded my private mail to nettime.

Have fun!

At 01:24 PM 1/20/97 +0100, John Horvath scribez:

>On Thu, 1 Jan 1970, Tamas Bodoky wrote:
>
>Wow! Talk about time travel!

The Infinite Improbability Drive is part of my system.

>> my potsdam speach. I wonder how could Telepolis publish this without my
>> original text, i will send it them immediately. Post this stuff on
>
>They don't have to. I was writing the criticism, not them. It is like any
>paper or article; if all works had to publish simontaneously the works
>they referenced, then each small academic paper of 10-20 pages would end
>up being about 1000+ pages. Lord knows how long a fully documented book
>would turn out to be.

Well, it seems to me that your article is longer than my original text, and
you refer to my text in each and every paragraph, mentioning my name 22
times, which would rank your article of the first place in every
search-engine queried for "Bodoky Tamas".  

>> you affiliated with the Soros Foundation in any way? 
>
>No, not at all. In fact, I am sure some Soros people might be a little
>angry with me about an article I wrote criticizing them. Please check
>Telepolis for the article entitled "The Soros Network".

Your nasty elitish style of criticism resembles me of certain Soros people
in Eastern Europe, who are interested in painting the picture dark, but at
the same time they are part of the political elite and cooperate with the
state and certain business groups as well.

>> Let's start a flame war ;-)
>
>Well, if you must. But I prefer to do it on grounds of constructive
>criticism and logical analysis rather than emotional whims. If you are
>interested in merely an emotional barrage of text, forget it. Please
>criticize my article by pointing out the inconsistencies and adding any
>new facts that I have left out or may have overlooked. I am open to new
>ideas and learning about things. My interest is to get at the truth as
>close as possible, not to prove myself right at all costs.

Very nice. I am the emotional type but i can prove your mistakes "on
grounds of constuctive criticism and logical analysis" as well.

>PS: When including text, please only include those that are necessary. For
>instance, in the mail I received from you I had a copy of my article. It
>is a little annoying and time consuming going over and deleting
>unnecessary text. 

Don't teach me the netiquette after you forwarded a private e-mail to a
public mailing list. 

And now lets start "pointing out the inconsistencies and adding any
new facts" to your article:

>http://www.heise.de/tp/te/1101/1.htm
>Data Conflicts and the Hungarian Techno Police State
>
>At a conference held in mid-December in Potsdam, Germany, called Data
>Conflicts - Eastern Europe and the Geopolitics of Cyberspace , Tamas Bodoky
>spoke about the origin and evolution of computer and network technology in
>Hungary. Entitled "Fear & Loathing in Hungary", he concluded that while
>Hungarians share the same concerns as others within the region vis-a-vis
>political influence and control of the new media, the problems that exist in
>Hungary are minimal and can be easily overcome.

False. My conclusion was: "As you might see now, there are several reasons
for fear and loathing in Hungary, but unlike some other countries in the
region our data-conflicts are easy to survive." I highlighted a lot of
problems in my speach, but compared to the main feature of the conference,
which was the ex-yugoslav cyber-situation, i have to say that the conflicts
in hungary are easy to survive. I did not say that they are minimal or easy
to overcome.

>Ironically enough, this
>conclusion in itself is a reflection of the danger that exists in Hungary.
>By underestimating the sophistication and pervasiveness of those that seek
>to control the power and dissemination of information technology (IT),
>Bodoky has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for vested political and
>business interests.

I do not belong to any political party or business group, i work as a young
(25 yrs old) journalist at the independent hungarian weekly "Magyar
Narancs". I wonder how do you dare to criticise the "Hungarian Techno
Police State" from an NIIF (National Information Infrastructure Development
Program) e-mail account, which indicates your close relationship to the
state authority controlling the Internet-development in Hungary, using
_your_ terms i would call it the "Cyber Police of the Hungarian Techno
Police State".

>Bodoky's optimistic outlook is based on the perceived freedom from
>governmental control of both traditional and new media in Hungary. "There is
>no institutionalized state censorship, I have to say that at the moment even
>the german goverment [sic] is taking a more conservative approach towards
>the Internet than ours, which has payed [sic] little attention to it [for]
>so long."
>
>This is clearly false. The problem in Hungary is that state censorship does
>exist and is so well institutionalized that many Hungarians don't realize
>it.

While i am certainly not a crazy fan of the hungarian goverment, i have to
tell you that my state never cared to block out more than 200 usenet
newsgroups on CompuServe in 1995, never censored the hungarian neo-nazis on
the net unlike the german goverment did in the case of Ernst Zuendel, i can
access all xs4all webpages at every hungarian ISP, including the
state-owned one and there was no one hit with a lawsuit in Hungary accused
by putting a hyperlink on her/his homepage like the recent case of
germany's Angela Marquard. 

 At the beginning of last year Freedom House, a Washington based
>organization that annually rates the freedom of the press worldwide,
>labelled Hungary's media as "partly free" (a drop from three years ago when
>it received a "free" rating). This was much to the surprise of the
> [External Link] ægovernment , which subsequently expressed its perplexity
>at the rating by citing the fact that it doesn't own newspapers and doesn't
>interfere with the broadcast media.

>Although the claims of the government may be true, outright ownership and
>interference of the media is only one (and a very simplistic) way of looking
>at things. Partisanship and self-censorship are very much in existence in
>the Hungarian media, and it is on account of these features that makes the
>media not free. Thus, institutionalized censorship does exist and is at a
>much more advanced level in Hungary, making the traditional means of
>censorship that are apparent elsewhere in the region appear obvious and
>crude.

The rating of Freedom House is much to my surprise as well, because as long
as i can remember three years ago there was a nationalist goverment in
Hungary, which tried and in case of the state-owned television succeeded to
control mass-media while the nowadays ruling socialist-liberal coalition
did not.

>In conjunction with this, Hungary's underdeveloped communications
>infrastructure is another form of institutionalized censorship, for it is an
>indirect means by which people are unable to have proper access to
>information. Bodoky argues against this, stating that "there is not such a
>great lag in the field of information-technology that relegates Hungary to
>the information third world." However, he contradicts himself when he
>describes the poor state of Hungary's communication infrastructure, in where
>"the entire international bandwith [sic] of the country is less than ten
>megabits per second, which is used by two dozen national and regional
>Internet Service Providers, with several tens of thousands of users in the
>academic and research sphere using less than one tenth of it." He continues
>to outline the sad state of Hungary's information infrastructure by
>admitting that "there are still only 64 kilobit per second bandwidth copper
>lines between Budapest and the other large cities, the only fiber optics
>cable is a short FDDI ring between four Budapest Universities."

Please compare this situation to the neighbouring countries (especially
ex-yugoslavian countries, romania, slovakia and ukraine) and you will
understand what i am talking about.

>This should be proof enough that Hungary is indeed behind in terms of its
>information infrastructure. With the shoddy state of Hungary's phone system,
>and the fact that the telecom infrastructure will still be in the hands of a
>state monopoly (MATAV) for another 22 years, it can be clearly seen that

At this sentence you forget to point out that i mentioned the MATAV
monopoly as well: "In 1995 about a dozen private Internet Service Providers
started up,  most of them overestimated the growth rate of the market, and
now some of them are facing bankruptcy as the one and only hungarian
telecom, MATAV enters the game. MATAV has a state monopoly for the next 25
years over the wires in Hungary, expiring in 2018. However, MATAV is no
longer solely owned by the state. The major stakeholder of MATAV is
MagyarCom, a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Ameritech
International, which raises the question of the economic recolonisation of
the former Eastern Bloc by multinational corporations. MATAV already
controls the greatest amount of international bandwidth on the Internet and
owns all cable and cable-tunnel in the country. Nowadays in an experimental
phase, officially starting on 1st of January, 1997, MATAV will launch an
Internet Service Provider, MATAVNet, which can easily gain the same
monopoly over Internet Service Providing in Hungary as MATAV already has
over telephony."

>Hungary is definitely not "somewhere between the data-rich and the
>data-poor". Furthermore, there is no such thing as what Bodoky terms a
>"rising data-middle-class", to which Hungary belongs. The state of
>information technology is not static, unlike social class. Technology is
>always changing, thus even the "information-rich" are constantly rising; as
>a result, Hungary will always lag behind, playing catch-up.

The term "rising data-middle-class" intended to be a joke, but i forgive
you this one as you don't seem to have much sense of humor.

>Moreover, the mistake Bodoky and others make is that they equate
>telecommunications infrastructure with that of data-wealth (i.e. being
>data-rich/data-poor). In Hungary, this view is given added weight when
>compared with the telecommunications infrastructure that exists in
>neighbouring countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria. What they fail to
>realize, unfortunately, is that simple infrastructure development is not
>enough as a measure of data-wealth The real measure of a country's
>data-wealth is in the new form of literacy that is evolving vis-a-vis
>information technology - that is, IT literacy. "Indeed", says Christian
>Roger the introduction of the network as a new communications medium is
>rapidly creating a new split into IT literate and IT illiterate people."
>Accordingly, Hungary's IT literacy level is very low, especially when
>compared to the US or Canada, where Web use is commonplace in secondary
>schools and where even primary schools run their own servers. From such
>instances it can be concluded that on a national level Hungary is IT
>illiterate - a rating that, in turn, does not differentiate its data-wealth
>from that of Romania or Bulgaria.

I am the living example of the highly IT-literated people of Hungary ;-)

>In spite of these conditions, computer and network technology is not a
>recent phenomenon in Hungary. As Bodoky mentions, by the end of the eighties
>Hungary already had a limited Internet connection. Nonetheless, this network
>"did not play any crucial role in the political changes as it was only a
>very closed playground for experts, who were too busy stealing technology
>from the the West to take part in opposition movements."
>
>What Bodoky overlooks is that the state of networking in Hungary at the end
>of the last decade was not much different than it was in North America or
>Western Europe.

Seriously???

>In much the same way, the Internet was a very closed and
>elite "playground" for technology experts in the West. Nor in the West did
>networks play any crucial role in bringing about political changes, such as
>the "end" of the Cold War. Even today networks play a limited role in the
>political changes that are happening worldwide, not to mention in more
>regional areas such as Belarus and Serbia.

Please take a look at the Serbian cyber-protest, i would not say it plays
"a limited role".

>It was because the state of hostility between East and West eased at the end
>of the last decade, with opportunities subsequently opened for the
>unrestricted exploitation of the North-South divide, that Internet use
>exploded as it has. During the Cold War years commercialization of the
>Internet posed a threat to Western security; at present, it is indispensable
>in the implementation of the global economy concept, a term used to disguise
>the economic subjugation of the Third World and former East Bloc.
>
>As to the way in which networking developed in Hungary, it was due to what
>Bodoky calls the "theft" of high-technology from the West. Hungary
>specialized in DEC, PDP and VAX machines, producing clones that ran on
>stolen operating systems and software. Accordingly, "these thefts were not
>considered criminal, because they were condoned by the state, and this in
>turn led to a 'lack of morals' in technology and software use in the eastern
>countries, which results in serious copyright infringement cases nowadays."
>
>Yet the "lack of morals" that Bodoky talks about has nothing to do with a
>tradition of "stealing" high technology from the west. Most private
>individuals "steal" software without ever having gone through the
>institutionalized process that Bodoky mentions. Rather, the issue of
>"stolen" software is related to none other than simple economics. Software
>is very expensive in Hungary relative to the wages of a Hungarian compared
>to that of an American or West European. It should come as no surprise,
>therefore, that the use of "illegal" software is so widespread.

Misunderstanding. I said that the "stealing of technology" existed on an
institutional _and_ a private level as well, and the state did not sanction
the private stealing until 1994.

>Also, what is of interest to note is that outside of political and business
>circles many westerners admire the resourcefulness by the way in which
>Central and Eastern Europeans crack programs or acquire "illegal" versions.
>Often, users from the West ask for material from their counterparts in the
>East. Somehow, it does not seem like "stealing" to them when getting the
>same software from someone in the East; in this case, it is more like
>"borrowing". In many ways, it merely reflects the double standard westerners
>apply when dealing with Central and Eastern Europe: at home they are
>law-abiding and "moral"; in the "wild" East their behavior is not restricted
>and they feel free to do what they would not normally do in their own
>countries, such as dump environmentally hazardous waste and disregard
>worker's (and human) rights.
>
>While many deplore the fact that in countries like Hungary the use of
>"illegal" software is rife (the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an
>international organization formed to curb the trade and use of illicit
>software, estimates that about 75% of the software in use in the country is
>"stolen" ), it must also be remembered that the use of unregistered software
>is as much of a problem in the West as it is in the East. What is different,
>however, is the way in which the problem is dealt with. In Hungary, the