• LIFE & CULTURE
• AUGUST 13, 2011
Repressing the Internet, Western-Style
By EVGENY MOROZOV
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576502214236127064.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLE_Video_Top
Technology has empowered all sides in the London skirmish: the rioters, the
vigilantes and the government.
Did the youthful rioters who roamed the streets of London, Manchester and other
British cities expect to see their photos scrutinized by angry Internet users,
keen to identify the miscreants? In the immediate aftermath of the riots, many
cyber-vigilantes turned to Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites
to study pictures of the violence. Some computer-savvy members even volunteered
to automate the process by using software to compare rioters' faces with faces
pictured elsewhere on the Internet.
The rioting youths were not exactly Luddites either. They used BlackBerrys to
send their messages, avoiding more visible platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
It's telling that they looted many stores selling fancy electronics. The path
is short, it would seem, from "digital natives" to "digital restives."
Technology has empowered all sides in this skirmish: the rioters, the
vigilantes, the government and even the ordinary citizens eager to help. But it
has empowered all of them to different degrees. As the British police, armed
with the latest facial-recognition technology, go through the footage captured
by their numerous closed-circuit TV cameras and study chat transcripts and
geolocation data, they are likely to identify many of the culprits.
Authoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely. Chinese state
media, for one, blamed the riots on a lack of Chinese-style controls over
social media. Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set
by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies. They
hope for at least partial vindication of their own repressive policies.
Some British politicians quickly called on the BlackBerry maker Research in
Motion to suspend its messaging service to avoid an escalation of the riots. On
Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government should consider
blocking access to social media for people who plot violence or disorder.
After the recent massacre in Norway, many European politicians voiced their
concern that anonymous anti-immigrant comments on the Web were inciting
extremism. They are now debating ways to limit online anonymity.
Does the Internet really need an overhaul of norms, laws and technologies that
gives more control to governments? When the Egyptian secret police can purchase
Western technology that allows them to eavesdrop on the Skype calls of
dissidents, it seems unlikely that American and European intelligence agencies
have no means of listening the calls of, say, a loner in Norway.
We tolerate such drastic proposals only because acts of terror briefly deprive
us of the ability to think straight. We are also distracted by the universal
tendency to imagine technology as a liberating force; it keeps us from noticing
that governments already have more power than is healthy.
The domestic challenges posed by the Internet demand a measured, cautious
response in the West. Leaders in Beijing, Tehran and elsewhere are awaiting our
wrong-headed moves, which would allow them to claim an international license
for dealing with their own protests. The yare also looking for tools and
strategies that might improve their own digital surveillance.
After violent riots in 2009, Chinese officials had no qualms about cutting off
the Xinjiang region's Internet access for 10 months. Still, they would surely
welcome a formal excuse for such drastic measures if the West should decide to
take similar measures in dealing with disorder. Likewise, any plan in the U.S.
or Europe to engage in online behavioral profiling—trying to identify future
terrorists based on their tweets, gaming habits or social networking
activity—is likely to boost the already booming data-mining industry. It would
not take long for such tools to find their way to repressive states.
But something even more important is at stake here. To the rest of the world,
the efforts of Western nations, and especially the U.S., to promote democracy
abroad have often smacked of hypocrisy. How could the West lecture others while
struggling to cope with its own internal social contradictions? Other countries
could live with this hypocrisy as long as the West held firm in promoting its
ideals abroad. But this double game is harder to maintain in the Internet era.
In their concern to stop not just mob violence but commercial crimes like
piracy and file-sharing, Western politicians have proposed new tools for
examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to
simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also
affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how
European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of
sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of
those who use social media in the Middle East.
Should America and Europe abandon any pretense of even wanting to promote
democracy abroad? Or should they try to figure out how to increase the
resilience of their political institutions in the face of the Internet? As much
as our leaders might congratulate themselves for embracing the revolutionary
potential of these new technologies, they have shown little evidence of being
able to think about them in a nuanced and principled way.
—Mr. Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the author of
"The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom."
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