The internet is generally seen as a "green" technology -- emails can cut down on paper waste, teleconferencing can save on CO2 emitted by flying, and smart grids can help reduce overall energy consumption. But, according to the Guardian's series on carbon footprints, the internet releases about 300 million tons of CO2 each year -- as much as all the coal, oil, and gas used for energy in Turkey and Poland.

The British newspaper acknowledges that carbon footprints are, in general, tough to calculate. However, it arrived at this rough estimate by accounting for the power used up by data centers ("buildings packed top to bottom with servers full of the web pages, databases, online applications and downloadable files that make the modern online experience possible") and personal computing devices. Data centers are one of the less visible factors in understanding the global carbon trail left by our emails, blog trolling, and facebooking, but they are quite significant. A Harvard physicist last year estimated that just two Google searches generate about 14 grams of CO2--or enough to bring a kettle to boil.

A recent UK study determined that in 2005, consumer and commercial information and communication technology (ICT) accounted for about 1.2 percent of fossil fuel emissions. The report predicts that ICT's footprint could climb by 60 percent by 2030.

The Guardian feature highlights some other carbon footprints. Among them:

The Iraq War: 250-600 million tons of CO2 since 2003

The World Cup: 2.8 million tons of CO2 ("more than a billion cheeseburgers")

The 2009 Australian bushfires: 165 million tons of CO2

A banana: 80g CO2 each

Following the UAE's recent admonition of BlackBerry smartphones, the country will prohibit three of BlackBerry's web operations starting on Oct. 11 -- e-mail, instant messaging between BlackBerry phones, and the web-browsing program -- citing security concerns. Later this month, Saudi Arabia will also ban instant messaging between BlackBerrys.

A Saudi official revealed that the move is intended to strong-arm Research-in-Motion, BlackBerry's Ontario-based company, into conceding information, which it has already done for Russia and China. In 2007, RIM provided its encryption keys to a Russian telecommunications agency, which then passed it to the Federal Security Service. A year later, RIM's handset came out in China, but was delayed because the company "needed to satisfy Beijing that its handsets posed no security threat to China's communication networks."

The ban won't be lifted "until these BlackBerry applications are in full compliance with UAE regulations;" and it comes at a time when countries all around the world, are attempting to restrict the many freedoms provided by the Internet.

For the second time this week, someone on the Internet has gotten in trouble for expressing respect for the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. CNN Mideast Affairs Editor Octavia Nasr lost her job on Wednesday over a tweet about Fadlallah. Now, Britain's ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, is taking fire from the Israeli government and others over a post on her foreign ministry blog about the late Shiite cleric. The ministry has taken the post down but a cached version is still available on Google. An excerpt:

When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person.  That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith.  Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday.  Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon's shores.  I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right.  If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples' lives will be truly blighted.  The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints.  May he rest in peace.     

Those confused about the source of this controversy would do well to check out my colleague David Kenner's piece on the legacy of Fadlallah,  who is frequently described as the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, but whose views, particuarly on Iran and women's rights, are far more complex. 

The British foreign ministry has been very active, and largely very successful, in encouraging diplomats to blog. But the Guy affair is an example of the tensions that can occur when people representing a government write in a medium generally designed for self-expression. The U.S. State Department got a taste of this recently with the uproar over irrevent tweets written on a trip to Syria by two State Department blog that were reprinted by FP's Josh Rogin. 

Though if Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin's Twitter is any indication, the Russian foreign ministry doesn't seem to worry about this too much. 

Twitter Communications Director Matt Graves writes: 

It's been an exciting morning at Twitter HQ. Russian President Dimitry Medvedev just visited to meet our co-founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, launch two official Twitter accounts for the Kremlin (@kremlinrussia in Russian, and @kremlinrussia_e in English), and send his inaugural Tweets.

The English account appears to be a direct translation of the Russian one. 

The twitter feeds adds to the tech-savvy president's already formidable online presence, including a vlog and a livejournal account.  After only five tweets (Example: "San Francisco is a very beautiful city. Heading to Silicon Valley today to visit Apple, Yandex and Cisco.") Medvedev already 7,842 followers on the English account and 10,201 on the Russian one. 

Barack Obama, with whom Medvedev will meet in Washington this week, has already welcomed Medvedev to the twittersphere. Is it too late to start calling it the "retweet button"?

Quiz question for the week:

Which country spends the most time on social-networking websites?

a) Italy    b) Japan    c) United States 

(For those of you who don't subscribe to the bimonthly print edition of Foreign Policy, you're missing a great feature: the FP Quiz. It has eight intriguing questions about how the world works.)

Answer after the jump ... 

Read on

As promised, the Bolivarian revolution has entered the Twittersphere. President Hugo Chavez's first tweet went up at around midnight last night and already has over 44,000 followers: 

Epa que tal? Aparecí como lo dije: a la medianoche. Pa Brasil me voy. Y muy contento a trabajar por Venezuela. Venceremos!! 

"Hey how's it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I'm off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!"

Chavez has chosen @chavezcandanga as his handle -- candanga is an obscure word for "devil" -- and the feed will be part of what Chavez's allies have called an  "assault" on social networking sites, which are currently dominated by the opposition. 

But what are his thoughts about Justin Bieber?

Google's January investigation into Chinese hacking of over twenty companies and the emails of dozens of human rights activists has highlighted an increasingly potent form of espionage:

"Cyber espionage is the great equalizer. Countries no longer have to spend billions to build globe-spanning satellites to pursue high-level intelligence gathering, when they can do so via the web..."

That is from a joint report released today by the Information Warfare Monitor and Shadowserver Foundation called "Shadows in the Cloud". It details how China-based hackers stole secret documents from the Indian Defense Ministry, the Dalai Lama's offices and the U.N over the past year. Although the report acknowledges no Chinese government link to what they dub the "Shadow Network," the information harvested is unlikely to be of much benefit to individuals. It includes secret assessments of India's security in regions bordering Tibet, Bangladesh and Myanmar; missile systems; information on the domestic Maoist insurgency; and embassy assessments of Indian relations with West Africa, Russia, former Soviet republics and the Middle East.

Reuters neatly summarizes the report's conclusions into how the attackers operated:

"The cyber-spies used popular online services, including Twitter, Google's Google Groups and Yahoo mail, to access infected computers, ultimately directing them to communicate with command and control servers in China"

Although the Chinese government has denied any involvement and made clear that it views hacking as an international crime, it will be interesting to see if it investigates such hacker networks operating from its territory. There is surely enough evidence to do so. On the other hand, it is no secret that the U.S. also hosts a large number of the world' cybercriminals; a recent report from Symantec's Message Labs showed that while the bulk of the world's targetted email attacks (28 percent) originate in China, 14 percent originate in the U.S.

In fact, since the Google-China debacle exploded, grievances in the American media have seemed to focus on freedom of speech and freedom from censorship rather than on issues of espionage. The Indian press also seems somewhat unconcerned -- the report has gotten little attention there and the Chinese government has brushed it off as media hype. It just seems that all parties are resigned to the fact, at least tacitly, that this is the way things work nowadays.

For those of you who don't subscribe to the bimonthly print edition of Foreign Policy, you're missing a great feature: the FP Quiz. It has eight intriguing questions about how the world works. (And, in honor of World Water Day on March 22, check out our special water quiz from last year.)

The question I'd like to highlight this week is:

How many Wi-Fi hot spots are there in the world?

a) 97,000    b) 197,000    c) 297,000

Answer after the jump ...

Read on

Chinese President Hu Jintao has mysteriously given up on micro-blogging before ever really getting started. 

China’s President startled the internet at the weekend by opening a micro-blog – the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Fascinated netizens began signing up at the rate of more than ten people a minute. But a day later the account of Hu Jintao disappeared.

A brief pro-forma note this morning on the empty site, hosted by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily Online, said simply: “This item cannot be found, the author may have erased it.”

That fails to explain the mystery of the president’s missing micro-blog.

Did the famously cautious leader of 1.3 billion people decide he wasn’t ready for such open interaction? Has he joined the ranks of those censored by the Great Firewall of China? Was it a case of identity theft? Had the People’s Daily failed to carry out the proper checks? Or was it a simple computer error.

Hu hadn't even posted a single tweet or adding a picture (see above photo) to his account. This is a rare instance where the Kremlin seems to be more on the cutting edge than Beijing. 

As part of an open-source  assessment of "security, safety, and border control" threats associated with the Winter Olympics, the Department of Homeland Security's National Operations Center has launched "Social Media Event Monitoring Initiative" to see what's being said online. This entails "monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards" to assess possible homeland security threats. Among the many fine online sources the NOC is monitoring, is this blog!

Our Olympics coverage has been pretty minimal this year so I can't imagine we've provided a whole lot of useful intel, but thanks for reading, guys! Have you checked out this cool photo essay yet?

(Thanks to Josh R. for the tip.) 

I was expecting fireworks after reading Leon Wieseltier's 4,250-word attack piece on blogger and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, and the Internet did not disappoint.

Here's the quick and dirty summary: Wieseltier uses a W.H. Auden quote as a framing device for long, tedious, and link-free article that paints Sullivan as an anti-Semite. Sullivan fires back with a rebuttal of Wieseltier's interpretation of the quote and shows the original email exchange that prompted Andrew to use it. He follows up a while later with a 2008 quote from Wieseltier explicitly saying Sullivan is NOT an anti-Semite. More is soon to follow. [UPDATE: Here's Sullivan with more. Much, much more.]

So far, I'm not impressed by any of it. Wieseltier does catch Sullivan writing some weird and sloppy things about Jews, and Andrew should be much more careful in criticizing Israel. But Wieseltier is equally sloppy and careless with his language, sweepingly accusing Sullivan of "venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews." The whole thing is pretty tiresome, and the fracas as it plays out will do little to enhance the discussion about Israel and the Palestinian question (and just wait until Marty Peretz throws his hat in the ring), or either man's image, for that matter.

Having read both TNR and Sullivan's blog for years now, I feel well-qualified to make a few unsolicited observations. First, Sullivan is no anti-Semite. He doesn't really have a set ideology, though he claims to be a conservative. His worldview seems to be determined not by deep, core beliefs, but by an innate sense of what his audience wants to read at any given moment. He's wildly successful as a blogger in part because he shifts with the political winds -- witness his conversion from a fanatical enthusiast for George W. Bush's war on terror to a strident critic of "enhanced interrogations," or his sudden passion for Iranian dissidents. It's probably not an accident, either, that he spent much of 2008 pumping up the ludicrous, but Web-driven Ron Paul candidacy while writing obsessively about the Google-riffic Sarah Palin.

Sullivan's criticism of Israel ought to worry defenders of the Jewish state, then, because he is a bellwether for a broader shift in American media and society that has happened over the last few years. Israel is using up a lot of the goodwill it had built up in the 1990s, when eminent statesmen like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres made good-faith efforts toward peace with the Palestinians. Since then, the country has been governed by a series of unimaginative right-wing leaders who have pandered constantly to their settler base and chosen to solve political problems through the use of force. Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party may have their fingers on the pulse of their public right now, but their agenda is not one that appeals to most Americans, who strongly support Israel's right to exist but have little interest in underwriting the permanent occupation of the West Bank.

Tired old arguments like "but the Palestinians are worse!" may win debate points, but they aren't a good way to rebuild the widespread support for Israel that existed in Bill Clinton's time. Only wise and far-sighted Israeli leadership can do that, and self-styled friends of the Jewish state might want to think about ways they can help nudge the Israeli political class in a more productive direction, rather than publishing 4,000-word essays about ...  bloggers.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldberg chimes in with a few additional thoughts:

What Israel needs is a leader who will step forward and say, "Here is the way things should look," and then present an outline for the creation of a viable Palestine. The settlers will go nuts, but that's what they do. Hamas will go nuts, because that's what it does. But Hounshell is right: What is needed is a Rabin.

Twitter users may have noticed the trending topic "UPS is shipping to" on their side rails. The topic consists almost entirely of the re-tweeted message:

UPS is shipping to Haiti for free today UNDER 50 POUNDS- Clothing and Food Drives at all United Way and Salvation Army

This is not true:

In a blog post Wednesday on UPS's Web site, a spokeswoman debunked the rumor and said that destruction of Haiti's roads and communications networks "means our own shipping services to Haiti are on hold."

UPS is donating $1 million to help the people of Haiti through relief agencies, she said.

There were similar rumors last night about American Airlines and JetBlue flying doctors to Haiti for free and both airlines were flooded with calls as a result. 

My colleague Evgeny Morozov wrote about Twitter's power to misinform during the swine flue epidemic, and with a few exceptions,  the noise to signal ratio seems particularly high during this crisis. 

My colleagues here have been weighing in on Google's "bombshell" revelation that China has been spying on dissidents and human rights activists, trying to crack open their Gmail accounts, presumably with the aim of monitoring and disrupting their activities. A lot of commentary is so far focused on the immediate issue at hand -- China's crushing censorship and Google's controversial policy of accomodating it in the hopes of gaining market share (see Jordan Calinoff's excellent dispatch on how this policy has largely failed). Of course, we already knew China did this sort of thing, but having the details so dramatically thrust into the public sphere is shocking. This is going to be a huge, ongoing story, not only because Google and China are two of the biggest and most widely debated news topics in the world, but also because nearly everyone's going to sympathize with the people whose privacy and peace of mind has been violated.

There's a larger story developing though, of a very tense year in relations between China and the West. Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer made that prediction earlier this year, and it's probably happening even faster than he imagined. In addition to this Google story, which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already jumped on, there's also a brewing U.S.-China fight over arms sales to Taiwan, China's recent missile test in retaliation, and a guerrilla trade war that now seems more likely to develop into a full-blown trade conflict.

By overplaying its hand with the activists, and messing with a huge global company with a massive ability to get its message out, China has foolishly just thrown away whatever goodwill it has built up over the years through its "charm offensive" -- at least in the West. Now, those arguing across a range of issues that China is a bad actor have been handed an enormous rhetorical club to beat Beijing over the head with. It's going to get ugly.

The year's best takedowns, journalistic or otherwise. Put yours in the comments. 

10.  Glenn Greenwald on Jeffrey Rosen's profile of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in The New Republic: "[Rosen's] smear of Sonia Sotomayor's intellect and character -- based almost exclusively on anonymous, gossiping ‘sources' -- is such a model of shoddy, irresponsible, and (ironically enough) intellectually shallow ‘journalism' that it ought to be studied carefully."

9. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic on airport security (from 2008, but timely): "I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a 'Beerbelly'.... which fit comfortably over my beer belly [and] contained two cans' worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government."  

8. Stephen Holmes on Chris Caldwell for The American Prospect: "If Caldwell and his fellow doomsayers are to be believed, Muslims have now done what they failed to do at the gates of Vienna in 1683. They have breached Europe's defenses and created 'beachheads' behind enemy lines....Some may object that this way of seeing Europe's immigration problem is inflammatory, but the more serious problem is that it makes no sense."

7. David Rieff on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen for the National Interest: "It is hard to believe that the erstwhile-Harvard political scientist turned full-time moralist, pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen could have a more devoted admirer than, well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen."

6. Barney Frank at a town hall meeting, responding to a protester who said he supported a "Nazi policy": "On what planet do you spend most of your time?...Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

5. Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs: "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

4. Jacob Heilbrunn on Ban Ki-moon in Foreign Policy: "As secretary-general, Ban's soporific effect has never left him. One U.N. watcher told me that Ban is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to witness its crash-if you don't hear him, does he really exist?"

3. Rory Stewart in the London Review of Books on Afghanistan counterinsurgency jargon: "After seven years of refinement, the policy seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to present an alternative."

2. Betsy Kolbert in The New Yorker on Superfreakonomics: "To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that SuperFreakonomics takes, even as its authors repeatedly extol their hard-headedness."

1. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora: "Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan."

0. A bonus, for this noughty, horrible, wretched, bloody decade: The Awl and Paul Krugman on this noughty, horrible, wretched, bloody decade.

Honorable mentions:

Chris Hayes in the Barnes and Noble Review on Ralph Nader's novel

Conor Clarke on Sarah Palin on cap and trade for the Daily Dish

Jon Stewart with Betsy McCaughey

Jon Stewart with Jim Cramer

Ezra Klein on the Republican budget proposal

Matt Yglesias on Greg Mankiw

U.S. President Barack Obama to CNN's Ed Henry  

The New York Times editorial board on Lou Dobbs

Stephen Walt on the myth of al Qaeda safe havens for Foreign Policy

Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert on Oprah Winfrey for Newsweek

Maureen Tkacik on CNBC for the Columbia Journalism Review

David Rothkopf on the Commerce Department for Foreign Policy