These highly complex systems literally disintegrate the spatial and
geographical unity of political subjects, that is citizens, into streams of
rights-less digital bits of data flow. No democratic system can survive and
thrive in this context. But there is no going back.
Since last June, thanks to the confidential information disclosed by Edward
Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor turned whistle-
blower, a troubling truth has come to light: the Internet (and with it in fact the
entire gamut of new communication technologies) have become the centre-
piece of a gigantic, secret and complex system of mass surveillance used by
the NSA (and also by the British Intelligence Service) to spy on citizens, on
allies and enemies.
Not surprisingly, the latest edition of the Web Index, a report published annually
by the World Wide Web Consortium, has remarked that the rising tide of online
censorship and surveillance casts a long and threatening shadow on the future
of the Internet.
It is indeed a quite ironic turn of events for the most talked about technology of
freedom of the last fifty years, but, nevertheless, we should have seen it
coming. We have been paving the way to it for a long time.
The intergalactic network
The Internet, not many remember, is to some extent a by-product of the Space
Race which began with the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957. In
the same year, a brilliant scientist, J. C. R. Licklider – whose ideas were highly
influential in the subsequent development of the Internet – conducted an
experiment entirely focused on his own working routine. The results showed
that about 85 percent of his thinking time was absorbed in activities that had
nothing of the intellectual about them, that were instead purely clerical or
mechanical. Much more time, Licklider found out, ‘went into finding or obtaining
information than into digesting it’. If science could find a suitable, more reliable,
and faster substitute of human being for those clerical activities, Licklider
theorised, this would result in an unprecedented improvement in the quality and
depths of our thinking processes. In fact, individuals freed by that unnecessary
burden would have more time and energy to dedicate to ‘thinking’, to
‘imagining’. In short, if machines could take care of those ‘clerical’ activities,
humans would have extra time to be more creative, to interact with each other.
Licklider’s ideas went beyond the era’s traditional approach that considered
computers mere calculators. He envisaged a much more interactive and
complex environment in which computers played the role of a natural extension
of humans.
In his seminal paper Man–Computer Symbiosis published in 1960, Licklider
wrote, in the near future ‘human brains and computing machines will be coupled
together very tightly’[1]. The resulting symbiosis, he postulated, will ‘think as no
human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by
the information-handling machines we know today.’ Already in the early Sixties
it was clear to Licklider that computers were destined to become an integral part
of human life. Licklider was thinking of what he later called, with a certain
emphasis, ‘the intergalactic network.’ Such a network was intended to represent
the perfect symbiosis between computers and humans, which ultimately would
improve significantly the quality of our lives. That future is now here, all around
us. The Internet has become a global system of computer networks, which
arguably makes life easier for over two billion people worldwide. We use it for a
wide range of activities: from chatting with friends to working; from shopping to
learning; from leisure to politics, from sinning to praying, from stealing to spying,
and so on and so forth.
Expanding the galaxy
In recent years the invention of social media and smartphones have expanded
the reach and potentials of the galactic network beyond Licklider’s imagination.
The plethora of social media that surround us (many of which have come and
gone before we even learned their names) are less than ten years old and yet
they have already become the preferred prism through which an increasing
number of people experiences the world today. Among the most celebrated are
the usual suspects: Facebook (date of birth is 2004, it currently has over 1
billion active users); YouTube (2005, 6 billion hours of video are watched each
month; 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute); Twitter (2006, more
than half a billion users and on average 58 million tweets per day).
Social media have had the merit of turning the Internet, essentially a network of
machines, into a true interactive network of people, continuously sharing
information and interacting with each other. The arrival of the iPhone, on the
other end, has helped us break free from the shackles that for many years
confined our experience of the network to within secluded spaces: our office,
our home, cybercafés.
Launched by Apple in 2007, the iPhone was not the first smartphone to reach
the market, but it was certainly the most successful. It revolutionised the way in
which we use the Internet. Owning an iPhone not only quickly became a status
symbol but it also meant freedom of movement: we no longer need to be sitting
at a desk in front of a monitor to surf cyberspace. We surf on the go, wherever
we are, whenever we need it. Apple’s extraordinary marketing power brought us
into a new era of mobile Internet, with the same customer experience or an
even better one than we had used thus far. The number of mobile-broadband
subscriptions in the world today is close to 2 billion, the number of smartphones
surpassed 1 billion in 2012 and it is poised to double by 2015.
The ubiquity of smartphones and social media in our lives today has arguably
enhanced the way in which we experience the Internet. It has made it an
important political space through which we form and share opinions and
organise public contestation of power. As Clay Shirky puts it: ‘As the
communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory,
the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more
opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake
collective action.’ And, despite some recent ups and down ‘social media have
become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements’
Yet this new development did not come without cost. It had two important
consequences one direct and one more subtle.
The first impacted on our independence as users: to some extent we use these
media and new toys, we own them, but we no longer posses them. We require
our interaction with them to be as seamless as possible. We don’t want to
remember how, most of the times, in fact, we want our ‘toy’ to understand our
needs and assist us as quickly as possible. ‘Siri’, Apple’s renowned voice-
recognition software is a perfect example of this trend: we don’t have to type
anything, we don’t have to remember complicated strings of commands, we
simply say: ‘Siri find me the best Italian restaurant in a mile radius from here’.
And in a fraction of a second, almost magically, Siri will do it.
This kind of pain-free user experience that makes gadgets like smartphones
and more recently, tablets, preferable to the old desktops or laptops, means that
most of the applications we run on these devices often do it in the background.
The amount of information these cool gadgets send out - a process which is
more often than not the necessary condition for reaping most of the benefits
associated with smartphones and social media - are way beyond the grasp of
the average user. We use these advanced tools every day, all the time, but,
most of us, struggle (or worse: don’t care?) to understand how all of it works, or
what is going on. And after all, why should we? The average user needs only to
be certain that his phone is always able to deliver the service requested as
quickly as possible, that is, find the quickest route to the cinema, or quickly post
the latest picture on Facebook. How the phone achieves such a technological
feat is a matter of a surely completely uninteresting mix of sophisticated
mechanics and complex algorithms.
The surveillance state
The second consequence was indeed more subtle and radically changed our
relationship with governmental power.
The technological progress of the past decades has not been only about
improved user-experience, but it has also created a windfall of new
opportunities to gain unprecedented access to an increasingly large wealth of
data exchanged constantly through a growingly complex communication galaxy.
The main beneficiaries of these newfound opportunities are governments and
big corporations.
Using powerful computers and software (and thanks to the cooperation
provided by private Internet-service companies), many governments worldwide
can nowadays easily (and simultaneously) scan and make sense of Web traffic;
telephone conversations, email texts; video and images exchanged by users.
Progressively, especially after the 2001 terrorist attack in New York and
Washington, many governments of countries have introduced numerous new
laws or tweaked existing ones to give themselves some legal basis to access
these newly acquired powers. From this perspective, technology seems to have
become the essential infrastructure of emerging and more elaborate variants of
the notorious Oceania, the fictional surveillance state depicted by George
Orwell in his 1949 dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Cutting-edge cases are plentiful in so called authoritarian regimes, but well-
established democracies unfortunately are not immune from this trend. The
Snowden files are, in this respect, quite revealing of the shifting role of
communication technologies in democratic societies. According to Edward
Snowden’s on-going revelations, Obama’s America, more than others, seems to
have become the 800 pound gorilla in the room: the world’s most important
democratic power has taken one or two steps too far towards blurring further
the line that marks the difference between authoritarian power and democracy.
Evidences show that American Intelligence agents are using hackers’ tools to
infect users’ machines and acquire the information they need. Reportedly the
NSA has used specifically designed malware software to infect more than
50,000 computer networks worldwide to steal sensitive information.
One of Snowden’s latest leaks is a NSA memo named ‘SIGINT [Signals
Intelligence] Strategy 2012-2016’. It shows that the Agency priority for the future
is to ‘aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped
more fully to the information age’ in order to be able to track the online activities
of ‘anyone, anywhere, anytime’. The document also makes clear that the
Agency needs to ‘revolutionize data analysis’ and for this it needs to increase its
influence over ‘the global commercial encryption market through commercial
relationships’, spies and other intelligence partners.
More worryingly, according to other documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA is
able to collect each day data from ‘between 30 million and 50 million unique
Internet provider addresses’. These are real-time data that provide the agency
with crucial information to name, localise and map the movements of the owner
of the device connected to any of those IP addresses. Showing a certain
penchant for irony, the NSA calls the program the Treasure Map.
Have we gone too far?
Ideally, democratic power should always be accountable and open to scrutiny,
however the secretiveness and pervasiveness of the many surveillance
systems that surround us (both at state and corporate level, within and across
borders) shatter the idyllic image of democracy we have cultivated for decades.
These highly complex systems literally disintegrate the spatial and geographical
unity of political subjects, that is citizens, into streams of rights-less digital bits
of data flow. No democratic system can survive and thrive in this context.
It is worth pondering whether or not we have gone too far in our quest to
become a fully functional cybernetic society, the sort of living environment in
which our technological selves are increasingly considered as (or even more)
important than our physical and political ones. This is a quest that carries with it
a great danger of displacement: technology evolves, but society – that is, both
the institutions that constitute it and the people that live within it – seem to lag
dangerously behind.
But going back to a low-tech analogue world is not an option either. We have
come a long way since the inception of the intergalactic network and we are
now irreversibly part of the system. Our lives are continuously and necessarily
immersed in a cacophony of data streams that are essential to our way of life,
even though most of this data is beyond our ability to make sense or even be
aware of – at least at the individual level (software and machines, as the NSA
PRISM system shows us, certainly have an edge compared to what we as
individuals can do).
So if we cannot go back, we must then try to re-think anew the Internet and our
entire relationship with it, because what is at stake here is much bigger than an
espionage scandal.
The fire that burns
In many respects technology is the defining element of the organising process
of human life on this planet, it makes us unique in the animal kingdom. Our
relationship with it dates back to the dawn of civilization, at least to the Middle
Palaeolithic with our ancestor, Homo Erectus, in Africa. Greek mythology,
however, tells us a more fascinating story: it all started with a rebellious Titan,
Prometheus, who tired of seeing mankind struggling in the darkness, decided to
give us the first powerful technology: fire.
Fire showed us the way out of the eternal night, while our hero Prometheus
ended up strapped up onto a rock with a vicious giant eagle feeding daily on his
liver. It was a particular cruel and enduring punishment, for Prometheus’ liver
would magically grow back again the next day.
The history of our civilization is greatly indebted to that first fire and the many
that followed. The Internet can be considered a sort of new fire, at least seen
from the perspective of Licklider’s Intergalactic Network. But with any fire there
is always a risk of losing control of it and reducing everything to ashes. If there
is one thing our history has taught us it is that any type of technology can be
exploited for the profit of the few, against the rights of the many. The Internet
has not escaped such a fate. And like our mythological hero, Prometheus has
found itself enslaved to a rock of its own with a different kind of giant eagle
feeding savagely on its very soul.
The road ahead
To protect ourselves and build a better future, we need to devise new effective
ways to keep the fire in check and get rid of the eagle. But this is a very intricate
matter, more so than many seem to understand. Thus, though the Americans
might have played a crucial role in giving us the Internet, the solution to this
problem cannot be single-handled. It must be both a national and an
international effort, an open process involving all stakeholders.
Laws must be rewritten (within and across borders) to define adequate
safeguards for the users and restrain the excessive legal powers with which
many governments nowadays can request access to their citizens’ data.
In this year of Web Index, only five countries out of 81 surveyed were found to
follow ‘best practice standards for privacy of electronic communications,
meaning both an order from an independent court and substantive justification
must be provided before law enforcement or intelligence agencies can intercept
electronic communications. Information on the granting of such orders must be
made public’. In several countries (12 including the UK) ‘a non-particularised
warrant (a 'certificated warrant') is sufficient for relevant agencies to intercept
evidence’, in others (14, among these the USA) ‘there is provision for a weak
form of court oversight’. This trend must change, or our future will be rather
bleak.
The role of whistleblowers in our increasingly complex and secretive society
has become of great importance, yet we still attach a certain stigma to them, we
often call them traitors. In these troubled times, it is the wrong approach.
Because, as Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) rightly put
it: ‘at the end of the day when systems for checks and balances break down we
have to rely on the whistleblowers – [hence] we must protect them and respect
them.’
From the outset, the reality seem quite hopeless for, as Robert Hansen, a
technology expert at WhiteHat Security, put it, ‘most of the things that would
otherwise secure the user have historically been controlled by groups that have
close ties to the government.’ At the same time, Parliamentary oversight has
proven itself inadequate to respond efficiently to the task of protecting citizens’
privacy in a growingly complex information society. Many politicians have no
idea how the Internet works, as Alan Rusbridger the editor of the Guardian
recently reminded us from the pages of the New York Review of Books.
Nevertheless things are slowly changing and there is certainly room for
improvement.
The recent scandals have thrust Internet Service Providers and social media
companies in the eye of the storm. Many of these firms have a lot to lose if they
don’t change direction; competition is fierce in this market and users’ trust is key
to success. Not surprisingly, in the last few months, some companies like Yahoo
and Google have started working to upgrade their encryption system to a higher
level of security. Others are moving their data storage centres out of the legal
reach of certain governments. Yet much more must be done.
The shape of things to come
We need to devise new mechanisms to control the controllers. We need
properly to employ and empower the Internet community as a watchdog over
the system’s integrity. The power of crowdsourcing is one of the most important
gifts of the Internet. There is a vital lesson to be learned from the experience of
open systems like Wikipedia and open-source software like Linux: to be open to
scrutiny is a key element in strengthening and improving a complex information
system.
Moreover, Information Technology companies should create external nonpartisan
ethical committees to oversee some of their policies and assess the
real efficacy of their encryption protocols. For instance, bodies like the
Worldwide Internet Consortium or the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
should be an integral part of this process. Parliaments should make extensive
use of crowdsourcing to craft important pieces of legislation concerning the
Internet. Brazil, in this respect, has proven to be a step ahead of many with its
Bill of Rights for the Internet (Marco Civil da Internet.) Although, admittedly, the
process has not been without hiccups and the text of the proposed law is still far
from perfect.
The technological environment that envelops our lives today is, from a certain
perspective, the full realization of that perfect man-computer symbiosis
imagined by Licklider fifty years ago. We should be proud of our achievement,
yet, when we look at it more closely, especially after the deluge of information
released by Snowden, what we see is quite discomforting: our future
increasingly resembles that of the tragic figure of Faust rather than the
promising one of the humans freed by Prometheus.
To change the trajectory of our future, it is crucial for us to understand that the
communication technology evolution of the last fifty years has widened to
unprecedented levels the scope (both in terms of quantity and quality) of
governmental power; that the reach of this kind of power goes beyond national
space as typically understood, while these abuses of power (like in the case of
the NSA scandal) often lie in the grey area of no-man’s land, both legally and
politically speaking.
And thus, if not adequately dealt with, the NSA pervasive system of mass
surveillance may well represent the shape of things to come: a twenty-first
century society of control whose sophisticated exercise of power will be invisible
to most of us, while all we will be left with is a sort of phantom version of the
democratic life we thought we knew.
[1] Man-Computer Symbiosis, J. C. R. Licklider, IRE Transactions on Human
Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960
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