Technology is bringing the world to the White House in fascinating ways. At a recent press conference with President Barack Obama, a journalist relayed to him a question from an Iranian citizen who had been bold enough to send it by e-mail, knowing full well the price of getting caught in the electronic surveillance system used by the State to curb dissenters.

A situation like this was waiting to happen to a president who uses social networking sites and text-messaging campaigns with a disarming naturalness — he bade a tearful goodbye to his beloved Blackberry when he had to relinquish the device on taking office, and had been full of praise for the way Twitter has shaken Tehran. The Obama administration even urged the founders of the networking site to suspend maintenance work that could interrupt the stream of ‘tweets’ — live updates of events — from Iran. These short messages of less than 140 characters, along with photographs and video footage taken on cell phones, have become the most effective means of letting the world know the atrocities that are being perpetrated on the opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Post 9/11, democracy has become the biggest romance of the West, and anything that helps the cause of freedom is praised to the sky. After Obama’s endorsement of Twitter, one of its founders, Biz Stone, swelled with righteous pride. “It’s humbling to think that our two-year-old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role,” Stone beamed, giving himself a barely-concealed pat on the back. It is easy to get swayed by this rhetoric. Isn’t it simply awesome that technology now has the power to touch our lives in such decisive ways? From the Sichuan earthquake last year to the 26/11 attacks or the crash landing of a plane on Hudson: Twitter always seems to get there first.

It doesn’t take long to crumble this myth of a new dotcom revolution. Scratch the surface and what you meet with is the sinister gaze of consumerism. How exactly do these draconian surveillance systems work? Who are the brains that help the State invade our inboxes, keep a tab on our activities on networking sites, or monitor our phone calls and text messages?

One of the largest sections of the Great Wall was built under Emperor Qin Shi Huang, but the makers of the Great Firewall of China, which regulates the entry of the free world into the lives of the Chinese, come from lands afar. This tyrannical screening of the World Wide Web was made possible by the wonder called ‘deep packet inspection’. It enables the Chinese State to block communication, derive information about individuals, and even tamper with data. And no less than the giants of Silicon Valley — Yahoo, Microsoft and Google — have abetted the use of this technology. Last year, an embarrassing leak of an internal Cisco document revealed that engineers of the company saw the Chinese government’s interest in censorship as a potential scope for doing more business with the repressive regime. Cisco is believed already to have sold routers and switches worth $100,000 to China.

The architect of Iran’s “monitoring centre”, used by the State-owned Irantelecom, is Nokia Siemens Networks, a shared venture between two of the world’s most powerful enterprises. Since Iran has around 23 million internet users compared to China’s 300 million, as well as a more centralized surveillance system based on a single hub, the Euro-Iranian nexus remains splendidly successful.

As with all models of democracy, the one celebrating the triumph of Twitter is also of Western provenance. Not only has it been imported from the West, it has also been cloaked in a garb of virtuousness that only a special kind of self-righteous oratory can inspire. It is a version of democracy laced with teary-eyed sentiments of do-gooding based on noble intentions of improving the quality of life in the former colonies. This same Western world also finds brilliant business sense in keeping alive undemocratic regimes that survive by controlling weapons of mass communication and change. Western governments, too, snoop into the private lives of their citizens. The revelation that American intelligence agencies had secretly accessed e-mail accounts of individuals (including Bill Clinton’s) led to a huge outcry recently. In its defence, the National Security Agency claimed that it had done this in view of the greater common good. Given the constitutional safeguards already in place in America, the NSA’s line of argument would inevitably take a great deal of battering from politicians as well as the public, yet nobody would be killed or imprisoned in the process. It is this difference in attitude that should make the pernicious situation in Iran even clearer.