Caught in the net

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY:EVGENY MOROZOV, a Stanford scholar who studies the use of digital technologies by oppressive and totalitarian governments, is something of a bête noir for the small section of experts who make a living from that peculiar combination of soothsaying and punditry.

For many, the popular civil unrest over the last few years, from Iran’s stillborn Green Revolution to the Arab Spring, has show an erosion of governments’ capacity to constrain the will of people empowered, emboldened and organised by the promise of digital technologies.

Morozov, meanwhile, resists this growing orthodoxy. His latest book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, confirms his reputation as a Young Turk (he is only 27) among the ranks of internet evangelists eager to ascribe waves of democratic empowerment to the capacities of the web. The book builds on his writings in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, and many other publications.

While others champion digital democracy, he sees the government in his native Belarus detaining college students based on who their friends are on Facebook, or the erosion of opposition websites during elections through sustained cyber attacks. He points to the detention and abuse of those who took to the streets in Tehran in 2009 and were identified using YouTube clips. He sees data-mining companies being hired to reconstruct the digital traces left by technologies such as Facebook or text messaging to lead secret police to an activist.

It would be convenient to be able to dismiss Morozov as a contrarian or a reactionary, but he also believes in the power of digital technologies to effect change.

“I think there’s nothing wrong with authoritarian governments fearing those technologies. There are certain features of modern information technology that they would find threatening.

“I have not been denying the liberating effect. I’ve just been saying that it’s far more complicated . . . there is nothing predetermined about the way in which the internet works and the way in which it is built and structured that would actually always guarantee that democracy will prevail.”

He makes a persuasive case for pausing to consider whether all applications of digital technology are positive. Speaking at the Institute for International and European Affairs in Dublin recently, Morozov outlined an Orwellian vision of how popular protest can be undermined by technologies such as facial recognition and tracking of mobile phone signals.

“There are many other dimensions to internet technologies that we also need to factor in to our analysis, and those features could make the government’s work of surveillance easier or cheaper, or would make its propaganda strategy more effective, or censorship approaches more comprehensive.”

He says that tools and technologies which, in the West, seem innocuous, can have much more sinister applications in authoritarian states. Tools that are used every day to track online preferences and relationships to predict consumer behaviour become more insidious and menacing when used in another context.

He cites the example of internet service providers’ or controllers’ ability to determine what kind of websites should be available to somebody who is friends with 50 investment bankers on LinkedIn rather than 50 human rights activists.

Morozov’s views were not always like this. After leaving his home town, Soligorsk, a mining community of about 100,000 people at 17, he began working for an NGO which focused on new-media issues. He would travel around the former USSR and elsewhere, meeting with bloggers and dissidents. However, it wasn’t long before he began to feel that his work was missing out on what he calls the “really important stuff” – preventing authoritarian governments from becoming more powerful.

His disillusionment was accelerated by his realisation that while the organisation for which he worked, which was funded by US-government and NGO grants, would train bloggers, at the same time the US government would supply or fund oppressive governments to buy technology to spy on the same bloggers he was training.

“I found that unless that problem was resolved, there is little point training these bloggers because we’re only making it easier and giving the government a reason to arrest them.”

The impact of western governments on dissidents living under repressive regimes does not stop there, according to Morozov. He says that policy making, which views the internet as fit for one purpose at home and another abroad, in fact fuels the industries that produce the methods and technologies of control and repression.

He says that domestically, net neutrality (the view that access to the internet should not be restricted or regulated) is disparaged, while the monitoring of web traffic in an effort to limit copyright fraud is encouraged, because policy makers “feel pressure from the entertainment industry, from Hollywood, and from the cyber security industry”. Meanwhile, in the foreign policy context, these same governments see the internet as a way to undermine authoritarian regimes.

“They don’t realise that by opposing net neutrality, they are essentially creating an industry that builds tools to monitor people’s web traffic that will eventually end up in China.

“You cannot have that stance on neutrality on the one hand and oppose Chinese surveillance on the other. Most people don’t see those issues as essentially stemming from the same source and spanning lots of similar ground.”

He says also that western concepts of the role of the internet in authoritarian countries are coloured by inaccurate assumptions about the nature of the internet, and the goals and character of its users in these countries.

“We tend to think that if people are blogging, they’re buying into some sort of Habermasian idea of a public sphere . . . while in fact some of them use those blogs to find links to download music, film or pornography, or to share photos of cats.”

He says that policy makers should “stop assuming that certain technologies have certain consequences, and instead investigate the context . . . the consequences we expect would not necessarily be there, because the cultural and social milieu has a way of interacting with those technologies and producing outcomes that are very hard to predict”.

This is the kernel of Morozov’s argument; that there is a danger inherent in basing policies on flawed understandings of the internet, or assuming that it will act in one country as it did in others. He does not deny that digital tools played a role in the Arab Spring, but says that “if politics had turned out otherwise, at this point we may be lamenting the fact that so many Egyptian activists used Facebook because all of them would be in prison right now, which more or less happened in Iran after the Green Revolution failed.

“Bad thinking about the internet has a real effect on the lives of dissidents, and we’d better get it right because otherwise those people will be in prison.”