The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [82]
The Vietnamese activists might have never actually discovered that their every online move was being followed were it not for the buzz generated by the high-profile cyber-attacks that hit Google in December 2009. While investigating the mysterious origins of those sly attacks, researchers from McAffee, a computer security firm, accidentally unearthed the clandestine spying operation in Vietnam and initially believed the two to be related (they were not). The media buzz generated by McAffee’s unexpected discovery—also heavily publicized by Google through their own channels—probably generated enough coverage in the Western press to protect the Vietnamese activists from immediate persecution, even if a lot of their private data might have been compromised nevertheless. It’s impossible to say how many similar spying operations go undetected, putting authoritarian governments ahead of their opponents.
Never Trust Anyone with a Website
But many such surveillance campaigns—especially when heavily publicized in the media—have effects that extend far beyond the mere gathering of information. Knowing that they might be watched by government agents but not knowing how exactly such surveillance happens, many activists might lean toward self-censorship or even stop engaging in risky online behavior altogether. Thus, even if authoritarian governments cannot actually accomplish what the activists fear, the pervasive climate of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear only further entrenches their power.
Such schemes have much in common with the design of the perfect prison, the panopticon, described by the nineteenth-century British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The point of such systems is to exert control over prisoners’ behavior, even when nobody is watching them, by never letting the prisoners know if they are being watched. Governments, of course, are quite happy to overstate their actual capabilities, for such boasting works to their advantage. Thus, in January 2010, when Ahmadi Moghaddam, Iran’s police chief, boasted that “the new technologies allow us to identify conspirators and those who are violating the law, without having to control all people individually,” he must have known that his words would have an effect even if he had greatly exaggerated his capability. When no one quite knows just how extensive government surveillance really is, every new arrest of a blogger—whether it’s based on genuine surveillance practices, tips-off from the public, intuition, or flipping through a phone book—will help deter subversive action, especially from those who are not full-time dissidents.
Security has never been among the Internet’s strong sides, and the proliferation of social media in the last decade has only made things worse. Even the most protected email service won’t protect your password if there is a keylogger—software that can record and transmit your every keystroke—installed on your computer (or that slow and funky computer in a random Internet café that you once had to use). Nor does one need to break into your email to read some of it. Mounting and hiding a tiny, almost invisible digital camera behind your back is enough. Similarly, even secure, encrypted services like Skype will be of little consolation if a secret police operator occupies an apartment next to yours and sticks a parabolic microphone out the window. As long as most virtual activities are tied