Pushing Back against State and Corporate Internet Surveillance and Censorship

Berlin.
The second day of the Berlin Symposium begins with a keynote by Rebecca MacKinnon, who begins with the story of an arts installation, the Berlin Twitter Wall, which reflected on the fall of the Wall in 1989 through the medium of Twitter. As it happened, though, the hashtag #fotw (fall of the wall) was taken over by Chinese Twitter users, protesting against the continuing censorship in China; this cold war view of state censorship as an ‘information curtain’, and of digital media as the samizdat of the day, continues to permeate today.

But this ‘iron curtain 2.0’ view of the Internet has also been criticised – there are more complicated problems that mere barriers to access, and more complex divisions than those commonly perceived to exist between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’ countries. We may be succumbing to historicism, even to technological determinism, blinding us to what’s actually going on. Where, in fact, are we going, then?

There’s been great euphoria about the role of the Net in the Arab Spring, but also some degree of scepticism about the direct role of technology in all this; mere Internet access does not bring down dictatorships, and does not guarantee the establishment of democratic regimes in the wake of successful revolutions. The fight for a democratic system in Egpyt still continues. Indeed, technology also helps countries spy on their citizens.

The new Tunisian leadership has now reinstated state censorship of online content (targetting pornography and incitement of violence, for example); it remains to be seen how the newly elected leadership will approach these issues. In post-dictatorial Tunisia as much as in other countries, the differences between good and evil are a lot more subtle, and require a great deal of further debate. (These developments merely mirror what has happened in and after previous revolutions and regime changes, of course – for example in post-Soviet Russia, where democratic deficits persist, too.)

Rebecca notes the RosPil Website which aimed to combat corruption in Russia and sought donations from the general public for its work; donor information, however, was leaked via the state security bureau FSB to the members of a political youth organisation, who made threatening phonecalls to RosPil donors in order to undermine the Website. Russia is now also exploring the use of online content monitoring systems in order to combat rumours about state officials and organisations, which will have further chilling effects.

This is further complicated by the rise of ‘private sovereignties’ – major social media providers – in addition to state sovereignties; these private operators, sometimes holding information about userbases the size of major countries, are able to exert immense power and surveillance over communicative activities as well, and may do so in concert or conflict with state authorities – China is blocking Facebook, for example, while forcing other Internet companies to carry out (self-) censorship activities on behalf of the government. Indeed, the government even gives out annual ‘self discipline’ awards for the companies implementing government directives most effectively.

There are frightening parallels between such self-censorship in keeping with government directives, and intermediary liability in western legal systems, Rebecca says – giving Chinese authorities an opportunity to depict their approaches as merely mirroring ‘international practice’.

Rebecca now discusses the case of ‘dog poop girl’ in South Korea: where a woman who refused to clean up after her dog in the Seoul subway was hounded and harassed by Internet vigilantes, leading ultimately to the establishment of comparatively ill-defined laws against the spreading of rumours in Korea. These laws were also used to effectively silence government critics, for example.

In the UK, the digital economy bill has moved to employ Internet service providers to police user behaviour – mainly around copyright issues at this point – and such approaches create serious dilemmas of balancing citizen rights and protecting society from real problems. The French HADOPI three-strikes law against ‘IP theft’ is similarly problematic; in the U.S., the PROTECT-IP act would enable the government to take down domain names without due process or a right of appeal; and even without such laws in place, several commercial enterprises have engaged in self-censorship around their provision of hosting and financial services to WikiLeaks, for example. What further secret surveillance activities are taking place – e.g. as authorised by the Patriot Act – we can only guess; the Act authorises the government to engage in what would otherwise be considered to be illegal activities intruding on citizens’ rights.

Returning to the Arab Spring: when asked about what the west can do to help activists in the Middle East, the answer is often ‘get your own house in order first’ – so that western models cannot be used by local authorities as justification for their own surveillance and censorship activities. Additionally, of course, technologies provided by western companies are often used very directly in these surveillance and censorship activities.

There are strong movements against government censorship and surveillance in many western nations, too; the international Internet Rights & Principles Coalition is one group attempting to connect these individual movements, while the Global Network Initiative attempts to sign on companies to support these principles (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have done so to date). The principle for users in engaging with companies here must be ‘trust, but verify’ – Google, for example, now issues transparency reports which document the number of data access and take-down requests it receives from governments around the world, and how it has responded to them.

Scholars need to be engaged in developing best practice models here. They should be able to advise newly democratic governments on the development and governance of their communicative systems, for example (but they don’t seem to have those answers yet); they need to develop a roadmap for multi-stakeholder, international Internet governance models that involve state authorities as well as the now almost state-like Internet platform providers.

If the relationship between Internet providers and governments is opaque and unaccountable, this may seriously undermine our ability to hold governments themselves, as well as companies, to account – we do not have good answers at this point, and we owe it to the world to find those answers before it’s too late and problematic models become too entrenched.