The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [95]
But first it may help to examine the ways in which the Internet has helped dissidents to conceal antigovernment activities. First, sensitive data can now be encrypted on the cheap, adding an extra level of protection to conversations between dissidents. Even though decryption is possible, it can eat a lot of government resources. This is particularly true when it comes to voice communications. While it was relatively easy to bug a phone line, this is not such an easy option with voice-over-the-Internet technology like Skype. (The inability to eavesdrop on Skype conversations bothers Western governments, too: In early 2009 the U.S. National Security Agency was reported to have offered a sizeable cash bounty to anyone who could help them break Skype’s encrypted communications; to date no winners have been announced.)
Second, there is so much data being produced online that authorities cannot possibly process and analyze all of it. Comparable estimates for the developing world are lacking, but according to a 2009 study by researchers at the University of California at San Diego, by 2008 the information consumption of an average American reached thirty-four gigabytes of data per day, an increase of 350 percent compared to 1980. The secret police have no choice but to discriminate; otherwise, they may develop a severe case of attention deficit disorder, getting bogged down in reading millions of blogs and Twitter updates and failing to see the big picture. Thanks to this data deluge, it may take a few months before authorities discover the new hideout of activists, who thus gain a few months of unsupervised online collaboration. The authorities are much better informed about the parameters of the haystack, but the needle is still quite hard to find.
Third, technologies like Tor now make it possible to better protect one’s privacy while surfing the Internet. A popular tool that was initially funded by the U.S. Navy but eventually became a successful independent project, Tor allows users to hide what it is they are browsing by first connecting to a random “proxy” node on the volunteer Tor network and then using that node’s Internet connection to connect to the desired website. Interestingly, as users of the Saudi site Tomaar found out, tools like Tor also help to circumvent government filtering of the Internet, for, from the government’s perspective, the user is not browsing banned websites but is simply connecting to some unknown computer. This is why once the Iranian government found out the proxies used by its opponents during the 2009 protests, many of them publicized by unsuspecting Westerners on Twitter, it immediately began blocking access to them.
But Tor’s primary function remains guaranteeing its users’ anonymity. Think of this as surfing the Internet using an anonymous network of helpers who fetch all the websites you need and thus ensure that you yourself are not directly exposed. As long as the government doesn’t know these helpers by name, the helpers don’t know each other, and you frequent enough other networks not to attract attention to the helpers, you can get away with browsing whatever you want.
But how many activists actually bother to read the fine print that is invariably attached to all modern technologies? Most probably ignore it. If the Soviet dissidents had to memorize the manuals to their smuggled photocopiers before distributing any samizdat, their output might have been considerably less impressive. And a lot of the tools are easy to misunderstand. Many users, including those in the most secretive government outfits, mistakenly believe that Tor, for example, is more secure than it actually is. Swedish researcher Dan Egerstad set up five Tor nodes of his own—that is, he became one of the final stage helpers—to learn more about data that passed through them. (The “helper” who finds herself as the final node on the network—that is, it helps to gain access to the desired target site rather than simply redirect