Tomorrow the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the hybrid Congressional/State body known as the "Helsinki Commission") is going to hold a hearing on dissidents on the Internet, titled "Another Brick in the Wall: What do Dissidents Need Now from the Internet?"
Testifying are the usual suspects, so to speak:
Rebecca MacKinnon, New America Foundation and Global Voices
Robert Guerra, Freedom House
Kathleen Reen, Internews
All representing organizations that do good work, but all some or all of whom are likely (given the statements of MacKinnon, and other human rights leaders like Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch lately) to propose a notion that I ardently oppose: and that is the anonymous social media account as the salvation for political and social dissidents and human rights workers (and those are often different things) to gain protection from authoritarian or totalitarian governments bent on their harm.
It seems like such a "no-brainer" -- shouldn't we just have anonymous accounts to help protect people doing good work? -- that it can be nearly impossible to get any debate going on this topic, given the great resources of these non-governmental organizations (often greater than the US Congress itself, in terms of media reach and social media mind-share).
I'll point out that none of these people speaking themselves are actually dissidents working in repressive countries (no, the U.S. would *not* be that despite the scary stories you hear about "Obama's kill switch that is going to shut off my blog".) Say, I'm not a dissident working in a repressive country either, but I'm going to represent the dissident point of view here.
There should be two principles that govern this issue, which should not become a "software solution" or the exigency of a "platform"
o choice -- the right of people to make accounts with identity, or with anonymity (if you allow anonymous accounts on Facebook, identity is undermined, and those who use identity are harassed by the anonymous; if you don't allow anonymous accounts on Facebook, dissidents who need anonymity have other places to go like Live Journal or Google Groups).
o protection -- the right of people to be protected from government harassment by making anonymous accounts AND the right of people to be protected from non-state actors who make anonymous accounts to harass others
These two principles each are in external and internal contradiction, but they also don't have a legal framework or often even a TOS framework.
My solution: do nothing. Stop badgering Facebook to change its policies; go on other platforms if you need to be anonymous for any reason.
There is no international principle or US constitutional principle that guarantees you an anonymous account on a social media service.
There's no "right to make an anonymous account" as some kind of legal principle, although it is the heart of the California Business Model (founded on the notion of the First Amendment and on the value of free enterprise) on most services to enable people to make any kind of account they want, and upload or create any kind of content they like, with consequences for anything illegal only coming after the fact.
The right to inviolability of the person and home or the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure is not in fact a right to an anonymous account. An anonymous account is only one means of achieving the good of privacy -- privacy which is not always so well defined in US or international law.
States also have the right to search with warrants and for "probable cause"-- including social media accounts, anonymous or identified, just as they do for land line phone records.
Increasingly, anonymity is seen as a social good, especially by dissident movements and their handlers in the West, but the reality is that identity is also being increasingly seen as a social good by the public at large as well as dissident movements, to escape abusive anonymous people on the Internet, which can include a range of bad actors from stalkers and haters as well as oppressive government officials and their supporters.
MacKinnon, and more relevantly, Jillian York, who, like MacKinnon, is also of Global Voices and the Berkman Center with with MacKinnon collaborates, have a position four-square for anonymous accounts which I've opposed in the past, and they believe that platforms like Facebook should be commanded to make such opportunities available, and if they balk, and, following their own terms of service, ban or disable accounts that don't provide real-life identification, for instance, at the behest of an evil repressive government official in some foreign country under tyranny, be subject to special appeals by NGOs who assure them that these accounts belong to "good people" in the dissident movements.
So stop right there, because that's the first thing I don't like -- "specials". These platforms already have way, way too much power over our digital lives and all our communications these days, and already exercise enormous, unaccountable discretionary power over these accounts as private entities. They may increasingly perform the role of public utilities, essentially, and the public spaces that used to be occupied by the town hall or the church basement or the barber shop, but they are not recognized by courts or by the law of the land in fact as interchangeable with those real-life public spaces.
Making them accountable has to be an open and free democratic process involving all the users, however, not just the "progressive movement" or various NGOs that want to harness them to their agendas.
So if you set up a system where the default is the TOS ban on anonymous accounts when reported, and the work-around or "hack" is to put in special requests, you are creating a privileged class of people for whom the rules don't apply (and that appears not to trouble them in the slightest), and you are strengthening another class of very arbitrary people who make arbitrary, undemocratic TOS that in some cases (Like Bragg v. Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life) have been called "unconscionable" because they represent contracts of adhesion, and rules which you must sign to gain access to your account and your intellectual property and your data and communications -- whether you agree with the rules or not, and whether they are good rules or not.
The argument made by supporters of anonymous accounts is that there are already all kinds of Santa Claus and Micky Mouse accounts on Facebook, so why not Chinese or Syrian Internet freedom fighters?
And the answer, of course, is that those Santa Claus accounts are still against the TOS and at any time the company can remove them, and will remove them *if they get an abuse report*. The entire California Business Model hangs on the notion of a) allowing accounts and content to be made freely b) only stopping them if there is an abuse report, i.e. if it is called to their attention. They don't pro-actively police these things; they don't even spot-check. They can't, with 600 million constantly changing accounts in Facebook alone.
I oppose any reinforcement of the arbitrary nature of these companies' policies by enhancing their discretionary power but that's an arcane and complex issue to fix -- what's more operative are two other points regarding social media:
o identity is in fact prized by human rights activists and dissidents because it means that when they chose to make groups or fan pages, or chose to make lists of friends, they can see the people they are associating with and sharing with
You would never know it hearing the lobbyists for anonymity, but in fact a lot of social movements, including those of the Arab spring, are led and staffed and participated in by people who make their identities known; not everyone is in a conspiracy.
o while it can seem daunting to adjust all the sliders to prevent over-sharing to the public or Google -- and oppressive governments -- those who make it their business to be safe on the Internet are going to take the time to do this and learn this and they can more or less effectively then use the service successfully by retaining their identity, but chosing the company they keep;
Indeed, if the companies were to have a policy of anonymous accounts, they might have anonymous people joining open groups or fan pages, and they could well be secret police who would either harass or report on them (sure, secret police can make fake authentic-looking accounts, but we're talking about *mitigation of the negative effects of anonymity here*.
o by removing the capacity to have anonymous accounts, we also remove the chief factor for abusiveness and unaccountability on the Internet: anonymity. Example: Since Techcrunch.com was bought out by AOL, and moved to Facebook and Yahoo log-ons instead of anonymous handles, the number of comments that are abusive and abusive has been dramatically reduced -- and most people bothering to take part in the discussion now use Facebook, rather than Yahoo (which would still enable them to make a nickname).
There are plenty of services that enable people doing risky human rights work to communicate anonymously -- the free email services of gmail and Yahoo, Google and Yahoo groups; Twitter (which has no policy of requiring RL identity like Facebook), and smaller social media start-ups like Diaspora or Path. If your purpose is to convey information safely to open human rights or political groups, or if you purpose is to organize demonstrations in the square with your friends in anonymous groups, the Internet affords you ample protections -- but of course, not so ample as to become casually and carelessly used.
In Belarus, despite people's use of Tor and PGP and various circumvention and encryption programs, when push came to shove, and the secret police goons came in the door, they could get people's information by finding their computers logged on and open; by finding Firefox, beloved by geeks, handily opening up pages frequently used because it remembers your password for you (a feature that is annoyingly hard to shut off) or because the passwords used were easily hacked with social cues like children's names or typical words people use for passwords (and possibly some were gained from interrogation and torture, like they were in Iran). Skype is supposed to be resilient against evil government hacking -- Skype conversations were the first thing dumped in the government-controlled press right after the December 19 crackdown.
In fact the Soviet-era dissidents, and many of the post-Soviet countries with still ongoing dissent and human rights movements, use identity and publicity and glasnost in fact as a form of protection -- when you have nothing to hide, the secret police look bad instead of you. That doesn't mean you have to do the secret policeman's work for him and make it easy, but it's rare that people in these countries adopt a nomme de guerre or a secret revolutionary name -- precisely because they recall the Bolshevik history where the people who did that -- Lenin and Stalin -- turned out to be so abusive and oppressive.
That doesn't mean that every movement in the world is in the same circumstance with the same values. Those making the case for anonymity in the Arab countries are demanding this "safety" in anonymity because the regimes there can jail and torture far more than those of other areas of the world and the need is supposedly greater (this could be argued endlessly pro or con).
When challenged that people could use Live Journal for blogging anonymously (if they don't mind the Russian company now controlling it and not always able to fend off what looked like Kremlin-related hacks), or Word Press, or other free blogging accounts, or use Twitter, or use google groups, the supporters of anonymity argue that they wouldn't have as much visibility as they can get on a platform with 600 million people, where with one search, you can find a group to join among millions of likeminded people.
So they want the social good that comes with a massive audience of 600 million people -- an audience that came there largely because of identity affordances and adjustments for privacy still enabling real-life identity.
But then they want to exploit that social good achieved with identity by demanding the special dispensation of the anonymous account.
(Criticize FB's sometimes dubious advertising data-scraping policies all you want, but most sliders that ban the casual perusal of your comments and pictures and info do work and do achieve their goal).
I can only pose a problem of civic accountability here: why do you think you can organize tens of thousands of people in a public square in real life, but keep your name hidden? Doesn't the public you are whipping into revolutionary ardor have the right to know your identity?
If you are "just a blogger" not attempting to turn out people into the public square, you have many options that don't then involve undermining the good of Facebook and its reliance on identity -- which helps keep regime supporters and regime secret agents out of your groups and your feeds -- and not making all of us then have to suffer the harassment and bullying of anonymous accounts.
Because a company like Facebook is likely to be unwilling -- even when pressured by the very high-profiled and well-heeled lobbying group of GNI, which contains Google -- to make special dispensations for some people, and will see the issue in terms of "having anonymous accounts -- or not".
If they allow anonymous accounts, all of us then will be subject to the thuggishness and vandalism of the online hackers' group Anonymous -- and all the other anonymous unaccountable people of the earth who hide behind nicknames, including the secret police and their fans.
(BTW, a difficulty can ensure in making this seemingly obvious point due to the infatuation that some Internet freedom fighters have for Anonymous, which they constantly try to upgrade and whitewash as ostensibly having left behind their days of bullying schoolgirls, and feature as now only helping Syrian or Iranian dissidents by hacking and disabling their evil governments' servers. But the key fact about Anonymous is that they are large and amorphous and they lie -- and while out of one side of their mouths they talk about their supposed good deeds saving the Iranian cause, out of the other side of their mouths they are taking responsibility for the largest hack in history of a platform -- the Sony hack which led to the compromising of credit cards of 100 million customers. Oh, and if you think Anonops wasn't behind the Sony attack, then ask your favourite little Anonops script kiddie that you follow on Twitter to denounce the Sony attack as wrong -- and see how far you get.)
There's also a balance to be had here between the freedom of expression that includes the customer's desire to have his persona online be anonymous -- or not -- and the freedom of association that is the private company's right to decide what kind of account they want on their servers.
This latter right is often overlooked because NGOs start with a certain anti-corporate default that views these companies as somehow inherently evil because of the powers they have over our communications and content.
They need to think hard about these facile remedies they devise as today's workarounds to solve their immediate problem of wanting to promote their friends' political movements in the Arab world.
American companies need to keep their freedoms -- if they are subject to US government regulations that could make them less free, and we lose our freedoms along with it.
It would be one thing if US government regulation in fact led to First Amendment speech level service from these companies that can ban you arbitrarily on a whim. But given the amplification capacities of social media that makes a million Skokies possible, not just one, the drive to regulate these platforms may lead to erosion of First Amendment protections in real life as well as in cyberspace, not enhancement of them.
Any association has to have the right to determine who its members are, and what the rules of governance are for those members. If you don't like a given association, the solution is not to hijack Congress or various federal agencies to make other civic groups do the bidding of your own NGO, the solution is to make another association with the members and ideas you like, and compete in the marketplace of ideas and associations.
And no fair saying that because some associations are really big -- like Facebook with its 600 million -- that you get to demand special dispensations for your perspective to "balance things out".
Because the reality is you are still demanding these concessions over the heads of rank-and-file customers. Most of them have valued identity and chosen identity. The needs of the few in dangerous places for anonymity should not be able to trump that -- because they have a choice of other platforms to go to.
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