The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [127]
Many cyber-attacks—especially those of the DDoS variety—may simply be construed as acts of civil disobedience, equivalent to demonstrations in the streets. It’s not obvious that a campaign to limit the public’s ability to practice those would abet the cause of democratization. If society tolerates organizing sit-ins in university offices and temporarily halting their work, there is nothing wrong—at least, in principle—with allowing students to organize DDoS attacks on university websites. In fact, this is already happening, with various degrees of success. In March 2010 Ricardo Dominguez, a professor at University of California at San Diego, called on his students to launch DDoS attacks on the website of the university’s president to protest more than $900 million in budget cuts (the university administrators disconnected the professor’s own server in retaliation). Some European courts have already ruled on that matter—in favor of DDoS as a means of dissent. In 2001 a German activist launched a series of DDoS attacks on the websites of Lufthansa to protest the fact that the airline allowed the German police to use its planes to deport asylum seekers. He argued that his campaign amounted to a virtual sit-in, and a German appeals court agreed.
The morality and legality of such cases have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Clearly it would be inappropriate to outlaw all cyber-attacks across the board or proclaim them to be immoral. Imagine that pro-democracy activists in some authoritarian country governed by a ruler friendly to the United States—say Egypt or Azerbaijan—use Twitter and Facebook to launch or publicize a series of cyber-attacks on their government’s websites and get arrested as a result. What should the U.S. government do in the face of such a Sartrean predicament? Speaking up on behalf of those activists would mean condoning cyber-attacks as a legitimate means of expressing dissent and would thus risk triggering a cascade; staying silent would mean reneging on core principles of Internet freedom, further entrenching authoritarian rule, and inviting even more cyber-attacks. It’s a tricky situation that cannot be resolved in the abstract; what is clear, though, is that it is a bit premature to make major political commitments that would force Western policymakers to choose one over the other regardless of the context in which such cyber-attacks happen.
You Can’t Be a “Little Bit Free” on the Internet
Perhaps Western governments harbor no ambitions of promoting Twitter revolutions. It’s possible they just want to chide authoritarian governments for excessive Internet censorship and unexplained cyber-attacks. Maybe all they want is to promote freedom of the Internet rather than freedom via the Internet. Nevertheless, it’s not the Western governments’ original intentions that shape responses from their authoritarian adversaries; it’s the perceptions of those intentions. There is such a long-running suspicion about the motives of the United States in many parts of the world that John Mearsheimer, a prominent scholar of international relations at the University of Chicago, justifiably concludes, “It should be obvious to intelligent observers that the United States speaks one way and acts another.” Nowhere is this chasm more obvious than in what the State Department says about Internet freedom and what the Department of Defense does about Internet control.
Even Western policymakers cannot agree on the extent to which the power of the Internet should be harnessed to engender democratic change around the world. “The problem is that in Washington, the phrase ‘global Internet freedom’ is like a Rorschach test, in which different people look at the same ink splotch and see very different things,” writes Rebecca MacKinnon, who,