The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [122]
The quixotic quest to promote and defend Internet freedom maybe a doomed enterprise from the beginning, for its ambitious objectives are programmed to collide with equally ambitious domestic objectives. To stay oblivious to the inevitability of this collision is to give false hope to activists and dissidents in authoritarian states, who may be naïvely hoping that the West will stick to its promises.
That the government needs to be brought into cyberspace or else cyberspace may lead to lawlessness in the real world is a view rapidly gaining traction among Western policymakers. “Cyberspace is increasingly Hobbesian, and the belief of the pioneers that a ‘social contract’ would emerge naturally from the self-organizing internet community without the intervention of the state has proven to be either wrong or moving at a pace so slow that it threatens security,” writes James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and one of the authors of the report Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, something of a cybersecurity blueprint for the Obama administration. “The emancipatory aspirations for a libertarian cyberspace that would, to unparalleled extents, privilege social freedom over regulation, may end up in a socio-technical regime that largely undermines and reverses the freedom it once enabled,” concurs Jeanette Hofmann of the London School of Economics.
It is, then, hardly surprising that some Western governments—Australia leads the pack here—are constantly flirting with censorship schemes that bear an eerie resemblance to those of China. For several years now European governments have been trying to pass hard-hitting legislation aimed at curbing illegal file-sharing, which may result in more aggressive tracking of users by their ISPs. The U.S. government, under immense pressure from the corporate sector and various activist groups, may soon be pushing to control the Internet on several fronts at once. Military and law enforcement agencies are the most aggressive in their push toward more Internet control. The Obama administration has been lobbying to allow the FBI to get access to more Internet records—like email addresses and browsing history—without seeking court orders. The White House’s logic in this case rests on a particular and rather aggressive interpretation of existing rules about phone records, and many privacy activists take exception to establishing functional identity between phone numbers and email addresses. Whatever the legal merits of the administration’s argument, it is obvious that once such measures go into effect in the United States, it would be impossible to stop other governments from expanding their own legal provisions to match the American standard.
Just like their peers in China and Iran, law enforcement professionals in the West are beginning to troll social networking sites, searching for details of their cases or just looking for new threats. On a purely rhetorical level, it’s hypocritical for democratic governments to criticize authoritarian governments for employing the same tactics. While the world’s attention was fixed on the young people arrested in Iran, most Western observers paid no attention when the New York Police Department went after and arrested Elliot Madison, a forty-one-year-old American activist from Queens who used Twitter to help protesters against the G20 summit in Pittsburgh evade the police. Nor did the world see much public outcry when in early 2010 two members of Philadelphia’s city council considered legal action against Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace after those sites had been used to organize violent snowball fights in the city. When democratically elected politicians in the West champion the organizing power of social media while the police arrest citizens who take advantage of that power, how can the West expect to hold high moral ground over China and Iran?