The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [100]
Another favorite low-tech solution, disposable prepaid SIM cards, which allow activists to change their phone numbers on a daily basis, may not stay around for much longer either, as buying them is becoming more difficult in many parts of the developing world. Russia and Belarus, for example, require retailers to obtain a copy of the customer’s passport when someone buys a prepaid card, which essentially eliminates the desired anonymity. In early 2010 Nigeria passed a similar law, and other African states are expected to follow. Since American policymakers fret about Al-Qaeda jihadists using prepaid SIM cards to coordinate terrorist acts, it’s quite likely that similar measures will soon pass in the United States as well. In 2010, with the entire country abuzz with the Times Square terror threat, FBI Director Robert Mueller endorsed anti-terrorism legislation that would require prepaid cellphone sellers to keep records of buyers’ identities.
As useful as mobile technology could be for countering the power of authoritarian states, it comes with numerous limitations. This is not to say that activists should not be harnessing its communications power. They should, but only after fully familiarizing themselves with all the risks involved in the process.
As the Web becomes more social, we are poised to share more data about ourselves, often forgetting about the risks involved. Most disturbingly, we do so voluntarily, not least because we often find such sharing beneficial. Thus, sharing our geographical location may alert our friends to our whereabouts and facilitate a meeting that may not have happened otherwise. What we often overlook is that by saying where we are, we are also saying where we are not. Obviously, this is a boon for burglars; privacy activists even set up a dedicated site provocatively called “Please Rob Me” to raise public awareness about such risks. Such a wealth of data is also of great value to authoritarian states. Today’s digitized, nimble, and highly social surveillance has little in common with the methods practiced by Stasi and KGB in 1989. The fact that there are more ways to produce and disseminate data has not overloaded the censorship apparatus, which has simply adapted to this new age by profiting from the same techniques—customization, decentralization, and smart aggregation—that have propelled the growth of the Internet. The ability to speak and make connections comes with costs, and those costs may not always be worth the benefits.
Denying that greater information flows, combined with advanced technologies like face or voice recognition, can result in the overall strengthening of authoritarian regimes is a dangerous path to take, if only because it numbs us to potential regulatory interventions and the need to rein in our own Western corporate excesses. It’s not a given that IBM should be selling SMS-filtering technology to authoritarian states; that services like Google Buzz should be launched with minimum respect for the privacy of its users; that researchers at public universities like the University of California should be accepting funding from the Chinese government to work on better video surveillance technology; or that Facebook should be abdicating their responsibility to thoroughly screen developers of its third-party applications. All of these developments are the result of either excessive utopianism, unwillingness to investigate how technology is being used in non-Western contexts, or unquenchable thirst for innovation with complete disregard for its political consequences. While the Internet by itself may not be liberating those living in authoritarian states, Western governments