WIRED:There is concern that controls could be misused to impose centralised control on the internet
YOU MAY be able to create a revolution via Facebook, but can you sustain one? It’s been less than six months since the first ousting of a Middle East leader in Tunisia and, while the analysts and the academics are still debating exactly what part the internet played in those unexpected revolts, those involved have moved on to the next question. How can we keep what we won?
The answer seems to be: it’s not easy, even in relatively narrow domain of online activism. Slim Amamou, a blogger who was detained during the protests in Tunisia, only to be appointed a minister in the new government, resigned last week.
He had recently protested the government’s decision to block four websites at the request of the Tunisian army. In post-Mubarrak Egypt in April, a blogger was sentenced to three years by a military tribunal for insulting the military.
There are plenty of challenges in constructing a representative, stable democracy from the ashes of dictatorships, but the problem for internet activists’ narrow needs is relatively straightforward. Laws controlling internet free speech remain on the books, and the machinery of censorship and control remain embedded in the infrastructure of these country’s networks.
That may be why 30 advocacy groups wrote in protest to the organisers of the “e-G8” mini-conference, a meeting organised by the Sarkozy administration to discuss issues of the internet before the G8 summit this week.
Sarkozy is notorious among internet activists for proposing a “civilized internet”, regulated by governments to protect against privacy invasions, intellectual property violations and hate speech.
Human rights groups, which were not invited to attend the conference, protested the idea that other governments may follow Sarkozy’s lead, warning that such controls could be misused to chill speech and impose centralised control on the decentralised internet. Even invited corporate guests, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt, warned officials of the dangers of regulation.
It seems that any international step to place controls on what can be done on the global internet will be twisted to impose damaging impositions. This week, Britain finally ratified the cybercrime treaty, one of the first attempts to impose some state-sanctioned order on the net. The treaty was drafted by the Council of Europe in 2001 and is meant to harmonise laws, foster co-operation in law enforcement and set minimum statutes for computer-related crimes worldwide.
In countries such as Thailand and Brazil, the impetus to introduce new “cybercrime” laws has led to initiatives that chill speech online. In Brazil, a 2008 draft bill which included demands that all Brazilians provide ID before blogging, received such a negative reaction that President Lula declared that “[the bill] tries to impose censorship”, effectively killing it. In Thailand, cybercrime legislation has been used to censor large numbers of political sites and sucked journalists and forum webmasters into court for comments posted by their users.
The latest misuse of this wave of cybercrime laws has been in Angola. The government, in the guise of fighting cybercrime, introduced a law which criminalises the dissemination of “unlawful recordings, pictures and video”, and allows the search and seizure of data without court authorisation.
As the cybercrime treaty and the e-G8 initiative shows, any attempt to regulate the internet requires a high degree of co-operation between nations. Otherwise, behaviour deemed “uncivilised” by states moves to countries without such restrictions, or into the decentralised “darknets” of the wider net.
But every step groups such as the G8 takes to assert some control over citizen’s use of the net will be mirrored and distorted by others. While it’s easy to predict countries such as Angola and China will use the excuse of new regulation to chill speech and expand dragnet surveillance, the threat is just as present closer to home. In the last few days in the United States, Senator Ron Wyden has warned that the US had already broadened its own modern surveillance statues beyond what anyone might expect.
Wyden told reporters from Wiredmagazine's online staff that "the government is relying on secret interpretations of what the law says without telling the public what those interpretations are".
As a member of the Congress intelligence committee, Wyden has unparalleled access to what the US government is doing, and a very limited capability to convey that to others who lack his security clearance. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union can only assume he is referring to a large scale data-mining of personal information, such as the precise location of mobile phone users.
On the eve of the Obama administrations’ attempt to renew the Patriot Act for a second decade, its clear that 21st century laws are being expanded beyond their initially stated aims.
Even if leaders like Sarkozy are well-intentioned in their desire to impose fresh controls on the net, the track record of such laws, wherever they have been imposed, belies those intentions.
