How to help dissidents with technology? “Lift all boats”.
Chatting over a little whisky last night, a friend asked my opinion on how to help Chinese dissidents gain access to secure communication. I gave a perspective, and I wasn’t totally happy with how I managed to communicate it at the time, so I’ve written this short essay to clarify my thinking.
The Answer?
My take is that I am not qualified to tell a Chinese (or any other) dissident, what tools they need in order to communicate securely. I lack the necessary perspective on use-cases and risk, although I am informed by a friend / former Soviet dissident, that their approach to life in the worst of times was:
“We wish the Americans would just nuke us because it would be better than this”.
I personally don’t consider this a constructive approach towards life — but then, I am an Atheist and have no heaven to look forward to — however I also took away from that exchange the understanding that if you are a dissident then you likely accept and understand some amount of the risks you are taking, especially if you’re in a pervasive surveillance environment such as the former East Germany / Stasiland.
It strikes me that it’s a bit like being a motorcyclist: you know you’re at considerably increased risk of dying, but you’re driven to do it anyway. The question of whether you can afford decent safety equipment is somewhat disjoint. This is why [many years after a major crash, broken leg/ribs, major organ damage, etc] I am still alive, whereas others might not be.
So how do you effect change in order to benefit dissidents?
Answer: lift all boats.
Normalise privacy for the general population. Normalise encryption. Implement it everywhere, and make it all of good, invisible and boring. Combat every single nannying agency or entity which attempts to quench those goals. Never stop.
How does this help dissidents? By viscous drag. Herd immunity. If the entire world is rushing in the direction of greater security, if “end-to-end” privacy is assumed to be available, then (in a perverse ordering) people start to rely upon it, and then they start to expect it, to demand it, and consequently the technologies that don’t supply it will gradually die off.
In the specific case of China, I have to admit this is a hard argument to make: you are trying to shift a 1.4bn person country that is more than capable of being a complete technological enclave — however: each individual person in the rest of the world, whom you enable with greater privacy, adds to the N-squared “network effect” of value that lives within an assumption of private communication.
China can remain a surveilled technological enclave, but they still use TCP/IP, they still use HTTPS, still use Wifi, all for the reason that the world is bigger than China and if a significant portion of the world goes N-squared with any new technology then it, too, will eventually appear, interoperably, in China.
Of course the converse is also true, and we should watch out for that and protect against it with open standards.
So: overall, I’m hopeful. More platforms are beginning to adopt “end-to-end”. More people care about privacy. We’re on a good path. The important thing is for our norms of deployment to be robust, and for the technology we deploy to serve the people who are communicating, not the provider, nor the state.
There are experts who understand the problems more deeply. There are people who can build tools / motorcycle safety gear that is tuned to the needs of being a dissident within Chinese national borders.
I am happy for them, I support them, but I am not fit to be one of them.*
However: I am a technologist, and I can make choices which help lift all boats, and I recommend that others do the same.
- * I’m not going to post a list of tools, even, but I am sure that recommendations will drop out on Twitter.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
