I've talked before about how anti-corporate (sometimes at root, anti-capitalist, really) campaigns against companies doing business with repressive regimes can be a distraction from those regimes themselves as the real culprits.
The subject of evil companies selling evil surveillance technology has been endlessly recycled on LiberationTech, the subscribe-only "open" mailing list out of Stanford for the cool kids following Internet policy and the "progressive" agenda (I won't say "Internet freedom" because they aren't always about freedom, but putting themselves in power.)
I posted to the list that rather than fighting surveillance technology that we might be able to stop for a Western company but which would only be replaced by a Chinese or Indian company, we would achieve more if every nerd looked up and got either the Russian or Chinese or India nerd sitting next to him at work or school to think about the issue of Syria and Iran and ask his government why they were propping up those regimes, than trying to get this or that company to stop selling this or that technology.
Sure, it's great if you can get a targeted boycott going that you can really show makes sense. Example of something no one ever did: if the Austrian telecom that agreed to enable the Belarusian regime to get the opposition's text messages last year could be boycotted, forced to cease doing business with Belarus, etc. -- unless it agrees to keep serving the public in general without prejudice and refuses to turn off dissidents phones or turn over their logs -- or leave the country if they can't get those terms met.
Or it can be symbolic and not work; it can be about naming and shaming. The problem is these things start to acquire a life of their own, and then there are even people who want to create an entire NGO-run regime over the Internet and technology that will decide what is ethical and what is not (another excuse to ram the "progressive" agenda).
No would pay any attention to me with this thought of course but when one of their own says the same thing, nerd girls like @Katrinskaya then can start nodding.
Such is the piece in the Internet Governance Project by Milton Mueller. He notes the same thing I said -- that you distract from the perpetrator when you become too caught up in the magic bullet of removing tech. And there's something to be said for looking at both how technology is not neutral, and in fact has features that facilitate evil, and that it is also merely a tool, and that evil has organic roots.
Mueller is absolutely right that the "magic talisman" (all tech is such a magical totemic item) of the surveillance tech hasn't helped the regimes in Tunisia or Egypt that fell (well, sort of fell).
As Mueller says:
Second, we need to recognize that it is political institutions that need to change more than trade in technology. It seems obvious, but gets lost in the shuffle: the problem lies in the users and uses of the technology, not in the equipment or software itself. The only relevant difference between US use of surveillance technology and Libya's (or Iran's or China's) is that in the former case there is a rule of law which (most of the time, and imperfectly) protects individual rights and limits the use of the technology for arbitrary surveillance, repression and harassment. Therefore this is not, at root, a problem of governments having or not having a specific device or piece of software. It is an institutional problem - one of balancing and routinizing social processes in ways that effectively limit, regulate and distribute political power and hold those who exercise it accountable
Thank you, Milton. You just argued why we should indeed have SOPA. Because we aren't China and therefore anti-piracy blocking techniques or technology aren't "like" China because we have the rule of law over the Internet -- or should. I'm sure you wouldn't see it that way, but you may be forced to realize why SOPA is right exactly as a rule of law project over the unruly Internet.
As I often say: the US, China, and Iran all have handcuffs. Who do they arrest them with? That's the point.
Even so, it doesn't bother me if politicians "put technology on restricted lists". It's a good idea to stop high tech companies from providing aid and comfort to regimes, even if that's not the only reason they are abusive and even if it doesn't work. And -- again, we don't have to be binary thinkers here as Morozov and others were on the Haystack issue -- the State Department can put in place a generic ban, and then review exceptions, i.e. help to a dissident group versus the regime's propaganda center.
Making further excellent argumentation against that completely idiotic meme that many anti-SOPA lobbyists and friends are peddling, that we will be "like" China, Mueller says:
The problem with this approach is that information technology, unlike bombs or tanks, is fundamentally multi-purpose in nature. You cannot isolate "bad" information technology in order to control bad uses. There is no technical difference between the devices and services for digital surveillance used by the Chinese and Iranian governments and those used by the American, Canadian, French or British governments. The same capabilities inhere in all of them.
To be sure, there's a conversation to be had about whether you can look at each technology and its functions and see if certain functions are being misused. For example, Twitter and the Taliban issue. Is it just a propaganda issue? Or is it coordinating terrorist attacks?
But here's where Mueller goes off the rails, because he's thinking in abstractions only:
We should be pressing for free trade and free markets in communication and information technology products and services in those countries, not creating restricted lists and throwing everything that can be misused onto them.
Um, with Syria? With Iran? With Belarus? These are not countries where we can "press for free trade and free markets" whatsoever. They are busy massacring their citizens in large numbers or putting all the main opposition in jail and faking terrorist attacks. They are in no shape to create and sustain "free markets" -- an entire root and branch change of the government and system would have to take place.
This idea of incremental betterment through trade, and eventually freeing up of markets, comes from the China playbook, of course, where the Communist Party itself there has a line about perestroika before glasnost. There's no reason to believe it. Making China more "capitalist," i.e. having more business with a greater variety of ultimately state-controlled entities -- doesn't mean that somehow you are then aiding the democratic opposition.
Mueller takes on the silly "neoliberalist" canard:
Competition and liberalization of the telecommunications industry, for example – though often excoriated by lefties as an aspect of the dreaded “neoliberalism,” has been one of the most powerful tools limiting state power over communications.
-- and that's all to the good. Except the notion of idealistic competition among entities in a market isn't enough of a theory of good. We don't have to collectivize and liberate property to ask whether markets where you only have Fox as the main alternative to the mainstream networks or only have NPR funded by the tax dollar are perhaps incomplete, and needing of help from foundations or alternatives that cost less that people can run (social media). Of course, what kind of people? Dave with his Darknet?
This becomes clearer when one broadens one's perspective. Stop focusing narrowly on information technology, and examine the tools of repression and aggression more generically. Yes, nasty spyware embedded in mobile telephone infrastructure can lead to the capture and shooting of people the government doesn't like. But what about the bullets and guns themselves? Or the airplanes and tanks? Why is the information technology being singled out?
I keep coming back to Turkmenistan, where the government simply *shut off* 2.4 million people's cell phones by ending the contract of the Russian provider MTS and seizing their towers and infrastructure.
That Gazprom-owned satellite that went out for a few days right before the big marches. Did anybody besides me wonder if that was a "test of the emergency de-broadcast system" to make sure no TV would work, anywhere? I'd have to hear more about what was on that satellite -- I know that television in some of the stans was dependent on it.
And Belarus, where they simply turned off the electricity on the squares where people were demonstrating, and turned off cell phone service, or turned off electricity in buildings where opposition offices were.
I would go further. Why examine only tools of repression like guns or fighter jets? The nature of the regime and the methods of repression that are organic are maybe more important to study.
Evgeny Morozov in his earlier (better) days would examine these questions and report on them in interesting ways, for example, on the Russian intelligence agency's manipulation of the web to fill the ideology vacuum and control public opinion.
Agitprop and disinformation and deploying of agents of influence -- all those techniques perfected by the KGB in the Soviet era long before there was an Internet -- are so streamlined and effective and amplified now. This article describes the "30 ruble army" which is like China's "50 Cents Party" -- the droves of regime fanboyz who will work to run forums and bully and harass dissenters and make others conform (these methods are now used by Anonymous on Twitter).
Seeing the Anonymous agitprop techniques on Twitter these days is a good reminder of the essential organic nature of totalitarianism -- how the Big Lie gets started. It's in conversations like this: I ask the e-thugs if they believe in collective punishment, because they want to punish all the police in Boston, not just the ones with whom they might have a possibly legitimate beef. The answer of their apologists goes like this:
o distraction -- "but this guy in Florida unrelated to OWS was pepper-sprayed and died" -- how can you not care? (I persist: are you or are you not for collective guilt and punishment?)
o dodging -- "but you yourself don't agree with everything in the groups you support, so why are you asking us to denounce a group for something?" (So...I take it I can put you down as against vigilante actions against police in Boston, then?)
o prevaricating -- "But why do you think I agree with everything Anonymous does, I'm just here reporting the news on Twitter" (when of course, the person has shown up to dog me precisely because I've published a critique of Anon's attack on the Boston police).
o smearing with McCarthyism -- "but demanding that we denounce something in a group is hypocritical" -- to which I can only return to the topic: but are you for the unlawful notion, contrary to domestic and international law, of collective guilt and collective punishment? Yes or no. That's not asking "are you now or have you ever been a communist?" It's asking whether you are a vigilante, and can own up to being a vigilante, and stop distracting from your anti-human rights and illiberal ideology, so we can see what you are really about. Ah, but you wouldn't want that to happen, would you!
o pity-party -- "but I'm a stay-at-home mom"
etc. -- you get the idea. A technique of dissembling and disinformation that many don't recognize as it unfolds.
Ultimately, I think the activists on Liberationtech won't be persuaded by Mueller because they need talismans and targets and they need "surrogate advocacy," i.e. attacking the thing that props up the thing you can't get at, because it's too hard to protest directly against authoritarian governments. They also hate corporations so much in line with their lefty views (except Google) that they won't want to give up the satisfying anti-corporate fight. It's too much work to look in the cubicle next to them and persuade someone to change their mind about their governments. And, it's happening without them, in Russia for example.
My post:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/08/is-cisco-selling-equipment-to-china-reaaallly-the-problem-.html
I'm the first to say boycotts over symbolic issues even if they don't really change behaviour (or force the target merely to buy elsewhere) are worthwhile if they help you avoid conferring legitimacy on bad governments (i.e. the boycott of Uzbek cotton by Western companies, even though Uzbekistan merely goes and sells to Russia or Bangledesh). Building out the moral "wall of shame" is a worthy task. But that's if you can at least show a direct relationship between Western technology and Syria, and not destroy the village in order to save it, i.e. indicate beyond reasonable doubt that the technology was purchased and not pirated, or that resistance and bloggers and such in Syria don't get an advantage from the technology, too. Can you show that? Dan Colascione has indicated enough variables to open it up for debate.
I have some other considerations:
1. As Electronic Frontier Foundation has run campaigns against corporations before, I've wondered whether this cause, too, is not part of a larger anti-corporate, anti-proprietary-software struggle for which these companies like Cisco selling to China or Western companies selling to Syria are merely low-hanging fruit that help them dramatize their point and attract human rights advocates not focused on technology to their cause. As there is selectivity about these anti-corporate campaigns (i.e. avoiding Google) and it's part of a selective human rights program in any event, I do question it. In other words, if these struggles are for EFF part of putting in place a world order that doesn't include nation-states, even if elected, and corporations, even if responsible, and free enterprise and IP even if regulated, I question whether to join it. And that's simply because I think that alternative utopian world order of networks and darknets and humming engineers is no guarantee of liberties whatsoever, quite the contrary.
2. I'm really wary of the notion of hard-wiring "human rights policy" into the ICT chain because I don't think, again, we mean the same things by "human rights" -- which in some hands turns, again, into a struggle against corporations, property, proprietary software merely as part of a larger anti-capitalist struggle not really about rights in the classic sense. Property as well as liberal democratic governments are vital factors in maintaining human rights, in fact. Aside from what would undoubtedly be deep disagreements about what human rights are, it's surely legitimate to ask whether housing the responsibility to protect human rights in vague third-party entities like "all software coders following this human rights blueprint" or the Google-dominated GNI is a solution, and in fact as Dan says, doesn't lead to a policy of repression, where as I would point out more starkly, we are hinging the fate of people's freedom on a self-selected and actually unaccountable Wired State.
In fact, I'm wary of Brett Solomon's "human rights by design" wiring not because I think technology is neutral and can't be relied on to enforce code-as-law, as Dan implies. Rather, I think software in fact is HIGHLY subjective and malleable as a concretization of coders' will, and that all kinds of little and big decisions made very politically and subjectively by coders without accountability get baked into the code and leave us with oppressive situations all over. Software is not neutral because coders -- and companies -- are not neutral and it's not technophobia to point this out, but anthropology.
3. Precisely because technology isn't merely technological, I don't think making technological solutions to complex problems like Syria is the order of the day. With everybody online and increasingly looking to coded solutions to every human need, there's a tendency to say "don't sell the technology to the bad government and then they'll be blocked from doing evil" or "let's all click on something." Even if this were true (and there is much to show that they merely go to China or elsewhere), by looking for technological fixes like this in the first place, you distract from the complexity of the problem of oppressive governments that need to be tackled in their own right.
The problem is the atrocious Syrian regime and its backers among some elites within Syria and some old regional and global allies and the weakness of civil society at home and abroad to withstand these brutal forces. Putting a technology lens on this knot of issues doesn't dissolve it.
When you constantly look to third-party technological solutions, you distract from the root of the problem -- the Syrian government and its supporters in this case, and distract from other routes to solutions not involving technology per se.
Example:
If every single person working or studying in Silicon Valley and its extensions around the world, and starting with many of them in Silicon Valley on this list, were to look up from their desks and ask the Russian, Chinese, or Indian student or engineer sitting near them why their governments are following the old communist foreign policy grooves and backing Syria's deadly regime -- and began to debate with them vigorously how to change the public chemistry on these issues in these countries -- it might have more lasting effect eventually than just shutting off a "kill switch" -- which of course the same people on this list are only to happy to deny our elected Obama, who might use it for good, in another setting.
Sure, debating people who are students and guest workers is uncomfortable and many would be quick to say they shouldn't be held accountable for what their far-off governments do. Why not? We are. Russia and China vetoed the UN resolution condemning Syria; India abstained, thwarting the West. Well? Life is made of such decisions and even civil societies in countries that have their own hard time can begin to change this algorithm.
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