Digital Rights and the Internet Freedom Agenda

The next AoIR 2018 speaker is Nathalie Maréchal, who focusses on digital rights technology: any kind of hardware or software that improves users’ privacy, access to information, and freedom of expression. This threatens government and corporate control of information flows in an age of surveillance capitalism, and is therefore also controversial; it challenges the networked authoritarianism that is beginning to take hold in many countries around the world.

Even as the U.S. government is itself sliding towards authoritarian governance, it has also been a major funder of the development of such technologies. Current key technologies in this context include Psiphon, Tor, Signal, and Telegram, but the longer history goes back at least to the 1970s; a global civil society incorporating computerisation and the early cypherpunks emerged from the mid-1980s. This was followed by media activism, including the Indymedia movement, but during this time surveillance capitalism also began to take hold; since the early 2000s, liberation technologies also began to emerge. Some of this is bound up with the post-11 September War on Terror and subsequent financial and informational crises, too.

Digital rights movements as well as the Internet freedom agenda – which differ in important ways – emerged during this time; some of the Internet freedom agenda was exposed as blatant hypocrisy by the Edward Snowden revelations, however. This has damaged the Internet freedom idea, and there are now a number of competing conceptualisations of the term.

One of the key events in this space is the Internet Freedom Festival, held annually in Valencia; this brings together human rights defenders, journalists, policy advocates, and freedom technologists, and has some complicated institutional connections to the U.S. Internet Freedom agenda. The people involved here may be best understood as insurgent experts, who pursue their activist agendas by taking on roles in government and industry.