STEALING AND GIVING ODOR.

No, they didn’t, but imagine they did. Imagine your morning ritual–coffee, news, and blogs–suddenly disrupted by the following note: “After being attacked by hackers, Silliman’s Blog is undergoing recovery, and is still not open to readers. At this time, no one will be able to access Silliman’s Blog. Thank you friends and readers for your interest and patience.” You think, maybe Silliman pissed off the wrong tech-savvy poetry junkie. Perhaps operatives of the School of Quietude, secretly sent by the Poetry Foundation, broke into his blogger dashboard and took a digital crowbar to his database. Who knows, it could have been a disaffected Post-Avant! Imagine being a reader and writer in a literary culture where that actually happens….

Well, now that I’ve got your attention, that’s exactly what happened to a prominent Vietnamese webzine over the holidays. Just after the New Year, I typed in www.talawas.org and found the same note mentioned above, except that is was in Vietnamese, of course, and referred not to Silliman but Talawas itself:

Sau khi bị tin tặc tấn công, hiện nay talawas đang được khôi phục, chưa mở cửa cho độc giả và các thành viên. Trong thời gian này, tất cả các thành viên không thể đăng nhập vào talawas. Cảm ơn sự quan tâm và lòng kiên nhẫn của quý vị và các bạn.

A literary and cultural webzine published in Berlin, Germany, Talawas is the premier forum for Vietnamese intellectuals worldwide. From 2002 until March of 2009, its contents were updated daily. Its founder and editor-in-chief is the tireless, heroic writer and translator Phạm Thị Hoài, with her husband, Dietmar Erdmann, acting as webmaster. A round table on Contemporary Vietnamese art in the international context, perspectives on the war, literary recovery projects, and new Vietnamese writing from around the globe–these were just some of the things you could read about on the pages of Talawas. In March of 2009, Talawas became a quarterly journal, but with a regularly updated blog written by Phạm Thị Hoài, Đỗ Kh., Phan Nhiên Hạo, Hoàng Hưng, Lý Đợi, Linh Dinh and others. The newer incarnation is what came under attack by hackers.

I found out more about what went down after visiting the other leading Vietnamese webzine, Australia-based Tienve. Tienve posted an urgent message from the editors of Talawas. On December 21, 2009, according to the message, hackers successfully suspended Talawas’ front page interface and posted the following fake disclaimer: “For technical reasons, Talawas has discontinued operations indefinitely.” Fortunately, all of the contents from Talawas’ main site and blog appear to be safe and recoverable. Right now, the editorial staff is looking for technology, equipment, experts, and donations to help prevent future attacks. They hope to return to work by late January 2010.

Unfortunately, Talawas has seen this kind of tampering before. In the past, Vietnamese operatives have firewalled the website in order to obstruct local access to Talawas. “With the government controlling all media outlets,” as Linh Dinh observed in 2006 at the International Exchange for Poetic Invention, “Vietnamese poets have gone online to publish and to read each other.” It would make sense then for the government to also want to monitor, control, block–or at least disrupt–those places where Vietnamese writers, critics, and intellectuals gather online to publish and read each other. Not to mention ordinary citizens who want to freely discuss pressing issues like AIDS, drugs, and sex, or just to watch a little porn/”debauched cultural products”.

Enter The Administration Agency for Radio, Television and Electronics Information, which was established by the Vietnamese Communist Party in October of 2008 to monitor the Internet (See this article and this article). In Vietnam, Big Brother reads blogs! According to Big Brother, “Blogs outside the country are beyond the blog regulations. We are facing a lot of incorrect information on Vietnam through such blogs.” That’s why Big Brother needs his own pack of watchdogs and army of bloggers, “to provide correct information on our country.” Big Brother is probably the most avid reader of Talawas.

The case of Talawas offers a glimpse into Vietnamese style censorship and intimidation tactics in the age of the internet and globalization: less dramatic than sentencing a dissident writer to 11-years in prison for subversion, as in the deplorable case of China’s Liu Xiaobo, but no less consequential. And while it might not send as overt a message to other writers and intellectuals, though Vietnam has done that too, and might not be as attention-getting and fit for print in the pages of the New York Times and elsewhere in the blogosphere, the disruption of Talawas is a disruption of freedom. Part of that freedom is the everyday practice–coffee, news, and blogs again–of an imagined community outside the policed borders of the nation.

I’ll leave you with these spirited words from Phạm Thị Hoài: “Talawas has pursued the same mission from beginning to end: to contribute to the formation of an independent public sphere for Vietnamese at home and abroad.”