This time last year, the US National Security Agency’s PRISM was exposed. We would soon learn the name of Edward Snowden, and would learn about surveillance operations as mind-boggling in their scale as they are in their secrecy and audacity. We’d known our civil liberties were at at risk, even in democracies, where we expect a lot more protection and privacy than we seem willing to fight for. We knew the post-9/11 world was full of security theatre; we just didn’t realise that we were the stars of every show.
The revelations came just after the 2013 Stockholm Internet Forum, a global conference that brings activists, policy makers, technology experts, and civil society together to work on issues of technology and social development. The 2014 conference was last week. The theme was ‘The Internet: integrity, transparency, surveillance and control.’ Good topic, right? Timely, too.
Given that it was the first SIF since we found out about PRISM, and considering the theme, you’d think Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, WikiLeaks and other activists and journalists who exposed these things would play a vital role. And after all, the servers that hosted WikiLeaks are only a few hundred metres away from the conference venue, in a hollowed-out mountain where privacy-sensitive Banhhof keeps its servers. Snowden could have attended via video link, as he did at SXSW, and at the recent TED conference, where he was inside a special ‘telepresence robot’. He spoke today at the Personal Democracy Forum via video. It’s not that hard, is it? But none of these key people were invited to SIF this year.
The organisers argued that they’d worked so hard to balance the gender and geographical distribution of participants that they simply didn’t have room for more white men from the global north. The excuse didn’t fly, not least because one activist, Gayathry Venkiteswaran, had offered her seat to Snowden. The discussion turned out to be a reminder of just how meaningful some absences are. Sweden might have a huge number of advantages and is a society that is extremely privacy-conscious, but it’s up to us to hold the people in power to account when they fail to live up to our standards. If we aren’t using our relative freedoms to ask hard questions, then what are those freedoms even for?
The false dichotomy of oppressive versus democratic governments is even more troubling than most of us imagined, especially given the collusion of so many companies who hold our personal information, or make the equipment that collects it. When we talk about internet freedom in the global north, it’s easy to ignore the real shape of the issue, which is that we’re putting too much emphasis on the word ‘internet’.
It isn’t just the watching, it’s the potential watching
The chilling effect of surveillance doesn’t require actual surveillance to be taking place. We often focus on the amount of information companies and governments have on us, without paying adequate attention to the people who aren’t even safe to be in the conversation at all. For example, on the second day at SIF, a Ugandan LGBT activist stood up and talked about what it’s like to be in the world, and on the internet as an LGBT activist. As soon as people in his life learned this about him, he said, he lost 20 Facebook friends a day.
There are issues of infrastructure, including unequal and politicised access, official censorship, and the network of ‘little brothers’ who make up something a lot worse and at least as much of a threat as an officially-sanctioned Panopticon.
The internet never forgets, and that is certainly a worry, but the internet is also not a proportional representation of the human experience. A diverse space gives us the illusion that everyone has been included, when billions of people are silenced by default, design, or deliberate omission. This has always been a problem, but what’s growing is the illusion that inclusion is happening on a technologically deterministic trajectory toward digital democracy. We have so much data, and we are so constantly overwhelmed by our information management problems that it’s easy to ignore all the things that are not leaving digital traces because they simply can’t.
Regardless of what any of us think of Snowden and other activists, how can we talk about safeguarding privacy, freedom of expression, freedom from persecution, and the increasing convergence of digital rights and human rights without the people who have brought to light just how in peril — or even nonexistent — those rights are for most of the world?
But I have nothing to hide!
Many of us fool ourselves into thinking that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear, that mass surveillance and exploitation of security breaches only affect activists and people who aren’t careful. We think it’s sophisticated stuff doing targeted spying, but in fact, as Quinn Norton has emphasised, mass surveillance is possible because practically everything we rely on is buggy, broken, and full of exploitable holes.
Surveillance is big business, and to get too complacent means ignoring a whole range of serious concerns. One is that while your data doesn’t change, power structures do. Maybe we’re safe to be sloppy today, but what happens if the situation changes? Surveillance and security breaches might not affect you personally, right now, but they do and will have an impact on you, and on people you care about, or people they care about. This isn’t just about blocking activists or intercepting subversive messages from people resisting oppressive regimes.
During the second day of SIF, the news broke that Thailand had blocked Facebook, at least temporarily. To most of us, Facebook is a relatively benign service that concerns us because it makes money from our personal data. Its actual benignity is probably in question, but what is the impact of a government denying access to, or punishing people for their connections on a social network? It’s enough of a crisis when censorship is political, but when entire populations are blocked from even the most prosaic interactions, that is a global disaster. All of a sudden, your selfie is an act of treason. These things are happening every day, and it’s not going to get better by simply adding more internet connections to the world.
Two-thirds of the world don’t have internet access, and that matters, but how that gap is closed matters at least as much. We can talk about capacity-building all we want, but even if a project like Internet.org is well-intentioned, has it been really thought through, and why aren’t we asking more about why there are so many vital connections between so few players?
Even where active censorship isn’t a key issue, a poor foundation of human rights means people self-censor, which also means that they can’t fully participate in the conversations that we absolutely need to have — online and off. What about those meaningful absences? Snowden’s absence was important to talk about because it was such an obvious omission. Why leave out of the conversation some of the very people who have shown us some of the consequences of our complacency?
The amount of information that we have, and the number of tools we have at our disposal give us the impression that we are overwhelmed with platforms to spread our ideas to anyone who can get online. There are organisations like Tor, who help people protect their safety online, and the Tactical Technology Collective, who help activists and offer security kits you can download, and of course, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But these are small organisations trying to do a very big job, including convincing a complacent public (and I count myself among that public) of its urgency.
The business of being a threat to privacy
Most of us are worried about our personal data being sold to marketers, and yes, we should be worried about the impact of the market’s needs superseding our right to privacy. But security isn’t just about changing your passwords, and privacy isn’t about just choosing a privacy-sensitive search engine or disabling cookies on your machine. Imagine what next genocide will look like with the technology we have today. Imagine if it were enabled by some of the prosaic demographic data you can get from an analytics dashboard or buy from a marketing company. Imagine it, and know that it will definitely happen.
We’ll soon be able to go to space on holiday. Hoverbikes and self-driving cars are on their way. Over the next few years, the biggest problems we’re going to face in tech are not those of engineering, hardware, software, or network speeds (5G is coming, and soon), but the way that ethical, legal, political, and even philosophical issues shape and are shaped by the technology we build and use.
Surveillance is big business today, but it creates a privacy problem that limits economic and social development. It’s worrying when people use a business case approach to justify paying attention to human rights, but it’s also still true that human rights barriers are also barriers to healthy and prosperous communities.
The internet started as a big open space that was regulated by its relatively small community of users. But now we run the risk of agreeing to regulations that protect big companies and states from us, rather than the other way around. Moreover, now the internet is not a separate place; it’s the physical and social space we occupy, and where real things happen.
While connectivity can enable social change, it does not create democracy. We have to do that ourselves, partly by protecting our present and future information from present and future misuse. We need to reach out to the people who are being silenced, but we also need to include the problematic ones, even when they’re polarising — especially then.
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