ORGcon 2014
Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear?
Some notes from the UK’s biggest digital rights conference, this year focussing on government surveillance
Saturday, 15 November, 2014: Several hundred people interested in digital rights congregate at King’s College London’s Waterloo campus, for the Open Rights Group’s 2014 conference. I am proud to have been elected to the board of ORG in 2013, having been a founding member of the Advisory Council, so I figured I should share some of my notes from the conference.
I’ve already written about Cory Doctorow’s opening keynote, but there were many other sessions across the day. To avoid these pieces becoming too long and unwieldy, I’m covering an individual session in each piece.
Edit: Via Ecodissident Hosting, I have discovered that Indymedia UK are hosting an audio recording of this — and other — sessions.
Midday and nearly lunchtime. Billed in the programme as Survivors of surveillance and experts on privacy will be speaking about their experiences and perspectives on the concept of ‘Nothing to hide, Nothing to fear’, this was a fifty-minute panel discussion chaired by my fellow ORG Board director Milena Popova.
The panel guests were:
- Turkish Internet rights expert Güneş Tavmen, who has recently written a report Internet rights that went wrong in Turkey.
- Merrick Badger from the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, an umbrella group for those who were spied on by Britain’s political secret police.
- Erin Saltman, senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, and co-author of their report Jihad Trending: A Comprehensive Analysis of Online Extremism and How to Counter it (PDF).
- Eleanor Saitta, who, before becoming a nomadic hacker, artist and designer, was principal security engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project and had a long career in the commercial security consulting space.
Güneş Tavmen mentioned that she found, in the UK, a perception that our prevalent CCTV coverage is a good thing and “not ‘real’ surveillance”. When she challenged this perception, the most common response is a ‘helpful’ suggestion that she go back to Turkey(!!)
Merrick Badger spoke about police spies’ relationships with activists, about police collusion with (and cover-up of) illegal blacklists of trades union members and surveillance of elected politicians:
One of the problems discussed by the panel is that the state spies on “domestic extremists”, but how can we be sure we’re targetting the right people, if we don’t have a good working definition of domestic extremism? As Merrick Badger put it:
Eleanor Saitta used to work in commercial security consulting, but left for the NGO world when she realised she had nothing to offer activists to protect them against state surveillance. She also pointed out that everyone has something to hide — even if it’s simply a desire not to be followed to the toilet.
Erin Saltman suggested that state surveillance and censorship of “extremism” is less effective than civil society challenging extremist narratives online. This is particularly the case when people of colour are disproportionately targetted by the police — these communities are especially familiar with having “nothing to hide”.
While people have criticised individuals for failing to value their privacy on social networks, for example, Eleanor Saitta explained that we have no effective choice about whether or not we provide our data to social networks — we either do so or we miss every social event with our friends.
And surveillance of “domestic extremists” does not merely protect the public, it protects the status quo:
Eleanor Saitta said that she was appalled that no connection was being drawn between the Snowden revelations and things like the NYPD surveillance of mosques. The racist bias that’s inevitable from a mainly-white Establishment means that ubiquitous surveillance poses an existential threat to diversity in our societies. There were occasional tweets throughout the day pointing out that the attendees at ORGcon were overwhelmingly white and male, indicative of a diversity problem in our wider community:
We were reminded that the problems caused by surveillance aren’t merely local to our polities:
And we enforce outrageous requirements on people visiting our shores. Güneş Tavmen spoke about the kinds of information she, as a Turkish citizen, needs to provide to get a visa to an EU state — not only her name and address, which we might expect, but even several months’ worth of bank statements. Ms Tavmen also pointed out that the “right to be forgotten” isn’t necessarily of assistance either — for most of us it will only apply to searches within the EU and not elsewhere, such as searches on Google.com. For Mario Costeja González, it will be of no use whatsoever — his court case is now textbook required-reading!
We shouldn’t necessarily be held back by surveillance, however. Merrick Badger made the point that we know the state is spying on our activism. But so what? We can’t let them take away our agency. Güneş Tavmen expanded on that sentiment — during the Gezi protests in Turkey, she was critical of the government in her statements online; nothing happened to her beyond self-censorship. If we let fear of state surveillance prevent us from acting to make the world a better place then we are allowing reactionary forces to win.
Of course, just because she didn’t have any problems that time doesn’t mean she won’t have next time; Güneş Tavmen did emphasise that the fear of state reprisals did lead her to self-censor. That is one of the worst outcomes of heavy surveillance — the chilling effect and self-censorship that it invokes in us:
As a counterpoint to that, however, Güneş Tavmen pointed out that Recep Okuyucu has been gaoled on the basis of state surveillance. Turkey does not have a good record on political freedom, particularly regarding Kurdish peoples in the country’s south-east; the presence of Kurdish news sites in the journalist’s browser history and evidence of having downloaded Kurdish-language songs was accepted by the court as evidence that he was a PKK sympathiser. [Note: This paragraph was expanded in February 2015 to incorporate feedback from Güneş Tavmen]
Erin Saltman suggested that part of the problem is down to a lack of understanding of technology from our legislators:
However, this does rely on the supposition that young people will be more digitally literate than the generation before them, whereas it’s entirely plausible that they might simply be ‘better’ digital consumers.
Eleanor Saitta reminded us that, with JTRIG (the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group), GCHQ have been working to socially manipulate populations across long periods of time. When someone tells us that they have nothing to hide, there are two things we need to remind them:
Edit: A week after ORGcon, Richard King, our project manager, tweeted a great summary:
ORGcon 2014 was generously sponsored by F-Secure and Andrews & Arnold Ltd. The Open Rights Group exists to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age; we are funded by hundreds of people like you.
This article is dedicated to the public domain under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero licence. Please translate, copy, excerpt, share, disseminate and otherwise spread it far and wide. You don’t need to ask me, you don’t need to tell me. Just do it!
