Control the media. As you can imagine, nervous dictators already know this tactic well. In Freedom House's latest Freedom of the Press assessment, released in May, the 10 worst-rated countries for press freedoms were model dictatorships such as Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Like these autocrats, you should try to prevent the world from discovering what's going on by denying visas to foreign journalists and photographers, cordoning them off in luxury hotels, harassing and detaining them for questioning, and even, on rare occasion, executing them. Naturally, most local media are already on your payroll, or in jail.
Unfortunately for you, the source of news about your regime's misrule increasingly comes from your citizens themselves. Since the protest videos that sparked the revolution in Tunisia in mid-December, blogs, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have amplified and spread dissenting voices and vivid images. If you need advice from an authoritarian colleague on how to block and monitor these tools, you should definitely call Beijing, where U.S. technology companies provide the capabilities to filter what goes into and comes out of China. They don't call it the "Great Firewall" for nothing -- it is truly impressive and inspiring.
MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images
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