Ethan Zuckerman Quotes
Had you asked an expert on the Middle East what changes would be likely to tke place in 2011, almost none would have predicted the Arab Spring and none would have chosen Tunisia as the flashpoint.
Even the CIA and the other U. S. Intelligence missed predicting the Arab Spring, but so did the intelligence services of all our allies, Russia, China and even Israel which usually has the best intelligence in the Middle East. One of the reasons he argues is that media and technology played such an important role in facilitating the Arab Spring and the intelligence agencies do not really understand the new media world. The people who do some argue are too young to ever be in enough key positions in these agencies to have much influence.
Ethan Zuckerman, Director, MIT Center for Civic Media, “A Small World After All”, The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Her predictions turned out to have been very prescient. However, there are many who disagree that there IS a “right blend”, and the only solution is a complete separation of church (mosque in this case) and state. That if there is total civil freedom, people are then free to have as much or as little faith as they choose.
Those who have fought against dictatorial governments for their basic human rights, found after victory and the overthrow of the dictator, that there was another force fighting for control which would deny citizens human rights based on a theocracy. They wanted the end of the dictator so they could use their interpretation of a religion as the excuse to deny all citizens basic human rights.
Walters who had been a brilliant military intelligence officer—and is in the Intelligence Hall of Fame—saw the fall of the Berlin Wall coming and had made some preparations. However, no one else in the government paid any attention to his prediction because the CIA and the NSA as well as the DOD Service Military Intelligence units all had nothing suggesting such a possibility in all their reports. They were all relying on spies. But the East Germans and the Russians had no idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a possibility, and their assessments said that it was not possible. Our spies reported that and out intelligence agencies assumed that they knew what they were talking about. Walters, however, based his judgment on reading very thoroughly all the publicly available information, and visited the American Zone of Berlin and inspected the Wall, its culture, the reports from the East Germans who had managed to escape, and it was very clear to him.
Ethan Zuckerman (born 1973) is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. He is now an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.
