Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (13 page)

Although the protection of religion is generally put forward to justify such charges, the real purpose, many argue, is to silence political dissent. On point, our research suggests that similar conflicts are cropping up with increasing frequency across the Muslim
world, particularly in countries facing social unrest. Recently, a Saudi religious cleric objected to women using emoticons, insisting that “a woman should not use these images when speaking to a man who is not her ‘mahram’ [husband, roughly translated] because these faces are used to express how she is feeling, so it is as if she is smiling, laughing, acting shy and so on, and a woman should not do that with a non-mahram man.” These religious pressures have pushed many Islamic countries towards attempting to build a
halal
(permissible under Islamic law) Internet that would cordon off their populations through both technical and regulatory means. In 2012, for example, Iran took several steps towards the creation of its own
halal
Internet, creating new laws, censoring foreign websites, outlawing circumvention tools, and even, for a time, blocking access to all Google services.

In the Far East, the same pattern is emerging. In Thailand, insulting the royal family is forbidden, an ancient crime known as
lèse-majesté
. The law is enforced by the Office of Prevention and Suppression of Information Technology Crimes, which systematically scans the Internet looking for evidence of violations. Thailand threatened to censor all of YouTube, before it reached an agreement with the service to block only those videos that offend Thai law originating from its own jurisdiction. Nonetheless, critics claim that tens of thousands of websites are routinely censored in Thailand, and the law is widely seen to have been applied selectively, often in very harsh ways. In a notorious 2011 case, sixty-year-old Ampon Tangnoppakul was sentenced to twenty years in prison for sending four text messages deemed insulting to the queen.

In an echo of elsewhere, the Thai government downloads policing responsibilities to ISPs and website administrators. Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the former webmaster of a popular Thai website, Prachatai, is on trial and faces a prison sentence of up to fifteen years, not for anything she said or posted, but for not deleting comments
fast enough from the web forum that she operates. In such a climate, website operators are going to err on the side of caution, creating a wide chilling effect. Those who question the journalistic ethics of online anonymity ought to look more closely at such cases.

•  •  •

Netizens in the West
are used to thinking of either the state or corporations as the biggest threat to rights and freedoms online, but in many developing countries non-state and non-corporate actors pose the greatest danger. Although cellphone use is spreading in Afghanistan at a lightning pace, it operates in a regulatory space largely shaped by the Taliban. In the provinces and cities where they dominate, the Taliban has issued threats to cellphone providers to turn off signals at the towers they control, making cellphones unusable. Taliban leaders view this as a defensive measure to prevent informants from calling in Taliban locations to American forces or to keep NATO signals intelligence from eavesdropping on their communications. “Our main goal is to degrade the enemy’s capability in tracking down our mujahedeen,” a Taliban spokesman told the
New York Times
, but as the
Times
report noted, the motivation is just as likely to remind the population that the Taliban, not the government, has control over communications.

In Latin America some of the most innovative uses of information and communication technologies, and the most repressive in terms of their societal effects, have been deployed by drug cartels. In several high-profile cases, authorities have seized cartel-related assets that demonstrate advanced digital and networking capabilities – a giant 100-metre transmission tower, for instance! Today’s cartel member is as heavily wired as a Palo Alto undergraduate student or Manhattan bond trader. Popular YouTube videos in Mexico glorify the lifestyles of the drug trade and are used to issue threats
against rival gangs, and intimidate police and the general public. One of the most alarming innovations has been the use of the Comments section of YouTube video postings to communicate threats from one cartel to another, or from a cartel to the general public.
The cartels have also shown a ruthless ability to employ social media to intimidate watchdogs and others from using those very same tools. One blogger critical of the cartels was beheaded, and then, in a macabre display, the cartels posted a video with her head on a keyboard, next to a cardboard sign warning others not to do the same. Cartel members who murdered a moderator of a social network left a note next to his corpse saying, “This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report on the social networks.” In another case, a sign attached to two dead bodies hung from a pedestrian overpass read, “This will happen to all the Internet snitches.” In yet another case, disembowelled and mutilated corpses were hung from a bridge with a sign that read, “This is going to happen to all those posting funny things on the internet, you better fucking pay attention. I’m about to get you.” Gruesome videos of informants or captured police officers being executed are set to music glorifying one or another gang, some of whom have become popular on local radio, probably as the result of intimidating broadcasters, or of outright ownership of media outlets by the cartels.

Most of us are vaguely aware that there is a seamier, darker side to the Internet, but we tend to assume it is hidden deep in the shadows. While that’s true in some cases, in Mexico (and spreading through other parts of Latin America) the gruesome violence of the cartels is on full display, thriving in the new social media environment, while simultaneously presenting an extraordinary threat to freedom of expression. Barely noticed by the technorati of the industrialized North, Mexico is undergoing its own social media revolution, and it is having a regional, if not global, impact.

•  •  •

In February 2012
, Google broke ground on an experimental super-fast fiber-optic network it launched in Kansas City, Kansas. The city was selected from a list of more than a thousand other American municipalities as the test ground for a one-gigabit-per-second Internet connection that would offer speeds up to 100 times faster for downloads and 1,000 times faster for uploads than a typical U.S. connection point. The Google manager behind the project, Kevin Lo, said that engineers had been busy planning, surveying, and eating “way too much barbecue.”

At roughly the same time, thousands of miles away, two separate freak accidents resulted in the severing of four submarine cables to the African continent, shutting off connectivity to at least nine countries. Ten years ago, there was virtually no Internet access in Africa outside of South Africa and parts of North Africa, and there would have been, as a consequence, no cables to sever, no outages rippling across the region. Since then, the situation has changed, and dramatically so. Although there remain huge regulatory, energy, computer literacy, and other roadblocks, the continent is rapidly coming online, with growth rates approaching 2,000 percent per year, compared to roughly 480 percent for the rest of the globe. Africans, like other populations of the global South, have a growing stake in cyberspace.

Real communities rarely, if ever, emerge by fiat, or by any other artificial means. Rather, they coalesce organically, a result of individuals and interests growing together. Cyberspace may well be a global technological artifact, but it is colonized and inhabited by individuals and communities who have come together spontaneously, empowered by digital technologies and collectively creating its social ethos.

In the 1990s, the users and creators of cyberspace were largely white, prosperous, and clustered in the industrialized North and
West. By the mid-2000s, this was no longer the case. While the highest penetration of users remained in North America and Europe, the bulk of Internet users had shifted south and east. By 2012, two-thirds of all Internet users were located outside of North America and Europe, and over one-quarter were in China.

Images and metaphors of cyberspace are a useful way to portray its dominant characteristics. William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term
cyberspace
, paints a picture of the domain as a virtual-reality matrix in which users physically plug their minds into a world of “endless city lights receding.” The image evokes clean spheres and precise mathematical coordinates, like the contours of 3D computer graphics. Gibson was influenced by his experiences of the game arcades that lit up Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, where he lived. For many cyberspace users today this consumerist abstraction is still the dominant impression.

For the next phase of its evolution, however, the more appropriate image would perhaps be the
favela
, or shantytown, which better describes where the next billion cyberspace users will come from. Most of the next billion digital natives will be under twenty-five years old, and most will live in societies where the chances for local prosperity are relatively slim, and where the political institutions tend to fall on the authoritarian end of the spectrum, if there are political institutions at all. To them, the glittering virtual realities of cyberspace represent a world far removed from their own – a world of wealth, opportunity, boundless creativity, and hope. It is in these back streets of the developing world, with their crowded Internet cafés and burgeoning wireless access points, that the future of the Internet is now being forged.

Western states came late to the game of governing the Internet. Indeed, there were deliberate policy choices made early on to “keep the state out.” Al Gore may not have “invented the Internet,” but he did play an important role in Congress by defining a limited
role for government in structuring how it should be regulated. Not so for most governments in the South and East. They approach cyberspace at a time of heightened concerns around cyber security, where threats are everywhere, and states like Russia and China are offering solutions.

We tend to think of globalization as a torrent of ingenuity originating in the industrialized North and West and spreading outwards. But globalization is a two-way process. The same networks that spread information from London, Tokyo, and New York offer a channel in the other direction from the developing world. With globalization, the local is not so local anymore. Just as online commerce enables small businesses in middle America to reach global audiences, so too has the penetration of communications technologies in Colombia, Somalia, and Uzbekistan given those geographic outposts global reach. For new digital natives cyberspace may offer not only the best means for routing around structural barriers to socioeconomic advancement, but also a chance to access global markets and economic riches far in excess of those available locally. Such access does not require venture capital, leased office space, and a large staff; it requires intelligence, boldness, and Internet connectivity through a cheap consumer device.

As these next billion digital natives come online, Western assumptions about cyberspace will inevitably be challenged. Communications technologies are neither empty vessels nor forces unto themselves. Rather, they are complicated, continuously evolving manifestations of social forces at a particular time and place. Once created, communications technologies in turn shape and limit the prospects for human interaction in a constantly iterative manner. It’s hard to say what cyberspace will look like twenty years from now, but one thing is certain: we won’t be in Kansas anymore.

In June 2012
,
Google’s ongoing acrimonious relationship with China took a new turn. In order to assist users to access information freely from behind the Great Firewall of China, Google created a unique feature on its search engine: when users search for banned keywords, it warns them that their connection will not work and suggests alternative spellings and phrasings that will take them to the same content. In effect, Google’s search engine now facilitates the circumvention of China’s censorship of the Internet.

A second new Google feature, introduced in the same month, sounds a more ominous tone: “WARNING: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now.” Google is tight-lipped about how it determines that a particular attack is state-sponsored, and does not explain to what extent the company would issue this warning to users who might be victimized by states with which Google does not have an antagonistic relationship. In June 2012 the
New York Times
reported that the U.S. and Israel were behind the Stuxnet virus that sabotaged nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran. Would Google give the same warning to Iranians working in critical infrastructure facilities?

The new Google features certainly irritated the Chinese leadership, and the company demonstrated a degree of boldness that few
others are willing to embrace, especially in the scramble to get into the Chinese market. But the issues at play have implications far beyond the ongoing tensions between Google and China. They are part of a larger trend emerging in cyberspace: the growing political importance of the corporate giants who own and operate the technological domain. The decisions they make for commercial reasons often have political consequences, both domestically and internationally. The companies that control huge swaths of cyberspace are at once flexing their political muscles and being deputized with more expansive policing responsibilities. Are we entering a new age of corporate power in cyberspace? Are companies like Facebook and Google examples of a new type of “
corporate sovereignty” as Rebecca MacKinnon, author of
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
, suggests?

•  •  •

The world has come increasingly
to depend on a globally networked information and communications infrastructure, and data on our desktops is now entrusted to servers and networks beyond our control, distributed across territorial jurisdictions and around the planet. The infrastructure for this complex network is primarily owned and operated by the private sector: companies that run our Internet services, telecommunications networks, mobile phones, and satellites. To that market, we have added another: the personal data we give away for free. All of our “likes,” “pokes,” and “tweets” are geolocated and cross-referenced with our purchasing habits, social networks, and professional interests, and sold to companies that can then more accurately target their advertisements. As more and more profit is to be made from exploiting big data, the urgency to acquire, store, mine, and analyze more and more personalized information grows. It is a self-reinforcing business model that
extends the reach of companies ever deeper into our personal lives and, in turn, increases our own dependence on the platforms they provide and control. We can no longer function properly without access to our email accounts, cellphones, and cloud-based data not because we are addicted to them per se (although many of us are) but because we
need
them to live and work.