You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (33 page)

Authoritarian regimes and organisations do not just censor the Net – they mine it for information. On a scale greater than any other communications technology, the Net offers states the power to spy and to entrap. A traditional secret service that wanted to watch a target could tap his phone and open his mail. The technology was cheap, but listening to every call and reading every letter required agencies to employ teams of eavesdroppers, at considerable expense. If they wanted to hear private conversations, they needed to break into homes and bug them, and send trained agents to shadow the dissident to discover the identities of his contacts.

Now they can simply watch how suspects use the Web. If they can hack into their accounts, they can access all their contacts by monitoring their emails, Facebook friends and Twitter followers. ‘Informants and covert surveillance are no longer required when we have vast databases, telecommunications companies, and Internet service providers who accumulate information on our political interests, hobbies, loves, hates, and fetishes,’ concluded one security specialist as he looked at the new possibilities opening up for intelligence-gathering. Information is not scattered around in dusty filing cabinets, but collected in easily accessible and searchable files. You might object that true underground dissidents would act like al Qaeda terrorists, and send encrypted emails. The main targets of oppressive regimes are not always psychopaths or potential revolutionary leaders, however. Ordinary citizens concern them as much. Letting them fear that they are under surveillance has as much of a chilling effect on their engagement in political debate as punishments for dissident writers. The knowledge that the state is watching you, or might be watching you, is a powerful deterrent against activism.

The misnamed ‘Twitter revolution’ in Iran displayed the oppressive power of the new technologies. The authorities posted pictures of protesters on the Net, and asked supporters of the regime to identify them and hunt them down. They used text messages and email to warn Iranians of the dire consequences of ‘being influenced by the destabilising propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating. In case of any illegal action and contact with foreign media, you will be charged as a criminal consistent with the Islamic Punishment Act.’ At Tehran airport, passport control questioned Iranians who were leaving the country – maybe to go into political exile – about Facebook, and went onto their pages to note down the names of their friends.

In Belarus the state’s agents have developed their own intimidatory techniques. They write threats beneath politically incorrect posts to spread fear, and act as agents provocateurs on the Web. ‘It’s very dangerous to be a blogger who writes against the regime,’ says Natalia Koliada. ‘The Belarusian regime has a special department of people who work at the KGB and Belarusian Republican Union of Youth to monitor the Net.’

Western companies that have supplied China with technology that can track dissidents justify themselves by saying that they sell the same technology to Western governments and organisations. Their implication that the power of the new surveillance technologies knows no borders is correct. In the free and unfree worlds alike, snoopers can accumulate information with a thoroughness that would have made their predecessors salivate.

A Janus-Faced Technology

Let a small incident, which seems trivial when set against the clashes in Belarus, China, the Arab world and Iran, illustrate the Janus-faced nature of the new technologies.

Paul Chambers worked in a car-parts factory in the north of England, and tweeted in his idle moments. His friends and the friends of a young woman from Northern Ireland overlapped. The two did not know each other, and lived far apart. They probably would never have met had not the social network brought them together. Their friends organised a Twitter party in a London pub to which everyone in the ad hoc network was invited. Boy met girl, and boy and girl liked each other very much. Chambers arranged to fly from Robin Hood airport in the East Midlands to see her in Belfast.

Technological advances allow sexual advances. The invention of the bicycle expanded the gene pool of many a remote region, as it allowed young men to cycle beyond their villages to find mates. In the 1950s, teenage couples appreciated the value of cars that took them away from their parents’ homes more than any other demographic. At times today, the sole point of the Web seems to be to allow the dissemination of pornography or, in the case of social network sites, the arrangement of assignations. Chambers was embarking on a romance that Twitter had nurtured and enabled. Just as previously isolated dissidents in Belarus, Iran, Russia, the Middle East and China found that the Web allowed them to make previously impossible connections with political sympathisers, so Chambers found that the Web allowed him to form a connection with a woman he would otherwise never have met.

The joy the Web spread appears plain. But consider the sequel. Before he flew to Belfast, Chambers saw a news report that snow had grounded all flights. ‘Robin Hood airport is closed,’ he tweeted. ‘You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’

I should not need to explain that he was joking; engaging in the mock-bombast people use in private conversation all the time. When a woman says to her friends, ‘I’ll strangle my boyfriend if he hasn’t done the washing up,’ or one man tells another, ‘I’ll kill my boss if he makes me work late and miss the match,’ they are not announcing a murder. The forces of law and order can rest easy. They do not mean it.

Staff at Robin Hood airport once had to patrol its precincts looking out for unattended baggage, and liaise with the police about credible terrorist threats. The Net gave them new sources of information, and they began to search Twitter for mentions of the airport’s name. When a manager came across Chambers’ tweet, he passed it to security officers. They saw no reason to panic. They realised that Chambers had not posted a ‘credible’ threat. But the procedures stated that every ‘threat’ must be referred up the line, and the airport staff had to obey orders.

A plain-clothes detective arrived at Chambers’ workplace and arrested him under anti-terrorist legislation. A posse of four more anti-terrorist officers was waiting in reception.

‘Do you have any weapons in your car?’ they asked.

‘I said I had some golf clubs in the boot,’ Chambers said. ‘But they didn’t think it was funny. I kept wondering, “When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?” Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched.’

The sight of detectives arresting Chambers scandalised his employers. They sacked him. The police realised that he wasn’t a terrorist, just a guy who wanted to see his girl. State prosecutors could not let the matter rest, however, and decided to charge him with sending menacing messages over a public telecommunications network, even though no one took the message seriously, and business had carried on at the airport as usual. The magistrate did not allow common sense to make one of its rare appearances in an English courtroom, and ordered Chambers to pay £1,000 in costs and fines.

Shaken but still determined to give the new relationship a try, Chambers eventually reached Northern Ireland. He and his new friend got on so well that he found work in Belfast and they settled down as a couple. But the case did not go away. The hamfisted behaviour of the authorities caused outrage on the Web. Friends and strangers came together to urge him to appeal. The week before the case went back to court, he told his new employers in Northern Ireland that there could be renewed press interest in the bomb threat that never was when the hearing began. All they heard were the words ‘bomb’ and ‘threat’. They fired him too.

Paul Chambers’ story has become a
cause célèbre
in Britain, because it would once have been unimaginable for a man to lose two jobs for making one lame joke. Security guards at airports could not have listened in to the conversations of random members of the public who had given no reason to arouse suspicion, and would never have wanted to do so. Their employers would never have told them to hang around bars on the off-chance that they might hear someone say, ‘If it doesn’t get its shit together, I am going to blow the airport sky high,’ in a moment of mock rage. Security guards might have spent a lifetime eavesdropping and never heard the offending words uttered.

Suddenly, technology had made the impossible possible, and the possible has a nasty habit of becoming mandatory.

The blessings and curses the Net bestowed on Paul Chambers serve as a wider metaphor. The future may be one of greater information-sharing and informed collective action as people exploit new resources, or one of suspicion as people understand the growing likelihood of surveillance. What happens will depend on where you live, what rights you have, and how persistently you and your fellow citizens engage in political struggles to defend or expand those rights.

All new forms of technology change societies, but how they change them depends on the limits the politics of those societies set.

The Primacy of Politics

Democratic governments are the natural targets for Net activists. It is easier to find and publish information in free societies that offer legal protections for press freedom. Rights to trial by jury ensure that even those writers who have broken the law can be spared punishment if they have taken on the state in the public interest. Sensible jurors do not like their rulers getting ideas above their station, and will acquit the technically guilty rather than do the state’s bidding.

At the most basic level of protecting a writer’s personal safety, democratic countries offer a further advantage. If you steal hundreds of thousands of documents from the Russian state and put them online, the FSB will try to kill you. Steal American secrets, and the CIA will not.

This mismatch between the coercive powers of democracies and dictators produces many morbid symptoms. The most prominent is the tendency of democratic elites to succumb to dictator-envy. Rather than despising their opponents, they despise the free traditions of their own countries. How, they wonder, can their decadent, flabby, argumentative societies defeat an enemy who fights to win and lets nothing stand in his way? They think that they can beat their enemy by imitating him, and do not realise that when they become their opponents they defeat themselves. A craving by the US government to have the same ability Islamist militias and Saddam Hussein possessed to torture suspects and hold them outside the Geneva Convention is the shortest and best explanation for the moral and political disasters of extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo Bay.

On the left side of the argument, Western radicals fall for an equally inane error. Because it is easier to expose abuses of power in democracies, and because Western radicals are most concerned about abuses of power in their own countries, they assume that democratic abuses are the major or only abuses of power worth protesting about. Their parochial reasoning leads to the most characteristic of left-wing betrayals. Radicals either dismiss crimes committed by anti-Western forces as the inventions of Western propagandists or excuse them as the inevitable, if regrettably blood-spattered, consequences of Western provocation. The narcissism behind their reasoning is too glaring to waste time on. (In their minds, Western societies, their corporations and foreign policies remain responsible for the ills of the world half a century on from the end of colonialism. This myopic vision has the flattering consequence of making them – the brave Western opposition – humanity’s dearest friends, because they, and only they, can take on hegemonic power in its Western citadels.)

The duplicity the illusion sanctions ought to be a true cause for liberal guilt. Because they believe the real enemy is at home, Western radicals ignore the victims of dictatorial states and movements, and provide excuses for their oppressors. They see dissidents in countries like Belarus as tainted, because their sufferings cannot be blamed on the West. At their worst, Western leftists will follow through the logic of their position and collaborate with the oppressors.

Given the persistence of the old pathology, no one should have been surprised that the supposedly radical movement for Net ‘transparency’ turned on the victims of oppression.

Transparency purports to be a depoliticised ideal. Its supporters say they want information on what governments are doing and on who is trying to influence them. When they obtain it, they wish to use the Net’s processing power and crowd-sourcing techniques to root out corruption. On a more elevated level, they hope that transparency will create a more democratic system that enables citizens to participate in the decision-making of previously secretive bureaucracies, as governments put data on the Net and allow the public to analyse it. They do not say what decisions citizens should reach once they have the data. They do not discuss wider political questions – how should a good society share its wealth, deal with the rest of the world, protect its environment, care for its sick and educate its children? More pertinently, they reveal their privileged background by taking the democratic state for granted. They assume that the public they address is already living in a society where freedom of information and open government are at least possible, and spend too little time thinking about all those living in countries without democratic rights.

Transparency campaigners accept that their aims are narrow. They make a virtue of their limited and depoliticised ambitions by saying that all they are doing is ‘allowing people to make their own minds up’. They carry no responsibilities for what happens next. Outsiders can judge others by how they use the information they provide, but they cannot judge them. They are the enablers of debates. Where those debates go once transparency has been achieved, and what conclusions the participants reach, is no concern of theirs.