However, as MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, told audiences at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles and the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, if something analogous should happen in China, it will go quite differently. The world has changed, and surveillance today is electronic, impersonal, and comprehensive.

This is what happened in Egypt last year, when activists entered the state security headquarters. They didn’t find surprise informants in their files. Instead, “it was email records, it was cell phone communications, it was cell phone text messages, it was material captured from people’s computers”–and contracts between the government and Western companies providing surveillance technology. “Egypt’s transition is contentious, and activists there are assuming that this technology is still being deployed,” said MacKinnon, forcing them to do some of their organizing the old-fashioned way–on the ground.

The transition after the end of dictatorship has been smoother in Tunisia, but the country is still grappling with issues of Internet security and freedom as they debate how to build a democracy in a Muslim state. Censorship has been reinstated as constituencies call on their democratically elected representatives to block “socially harmful” content. Who decides what gets blocked, and how do you make sure this power doesn’t get abused? “We can’t allow centralized censorship, because it’s going to be mission creep,” explained MacKinnon. What Tunisia needs–and what the U.S. and other Western nations need, too–is to build institutions and processes that support democracy in technology.

This debate has played out in Washington in the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Although this legislation attempts to solve the problem of copyright infringement, many civil liberties groups, corporations, and nonprofits are concerned by the suggested solution: blocking websites and holding Internet platforms and social media companies responsible for the actions of their users. The debate here reverberates around the globe, said MacKinnon, pointing to Tunisian activists she knew who were concerned about how their politicians would react if the U.S. passed this legislation.

Right now, the Internet is regulated mainly by large corporations like Facebook and Google, who set their own rules as they go, with commercial ends in mind. Although activists might rely on Facebook in organizing protests, for example, a sudden change in privacy settings or policies can put these users at great risk. In 2009, Facebook abruptly changed its privacy settings to make friends’ social networks visible by default, alarming activists in Iran. Facebook’s requirement that everyone use their real name can also be dangerous for activists who might need to work anonymously. The choices these companies make affect not just our digital lives, said MacKinnon, but our political lives as well.

“My argument is that we need to think about the Internet … not just as users of the technology, but really as citizens of these digital spaces,” said MacKinnon. Unless we are proactive citizens, “we’re going to get the Internet we deserve.” We need to hold both companies and the government accountable for the way they regulate and govern our digital world.

In the question-and-answer session, the audience challenged MacKinnon and asked her to address their fears about the future.

How scary is e-commerce and the way businesses can track and monitor exactly what you buy and where you go online?

“In theory, people are consenting to this for the sake of convenience, and being able to shop online instead of having to go to the mall,” said MacKinnon. “But in reality, people aren’t aware of what’s being gathered and tracked.” Accountability is needed for how information gets used and abused, as is the option of knowing what information’s been gathered about you and opting out if you’d like.

Is the idea of freedom of speech a Western construction? In India, the government regulates hate speech–necessary action in a country where tensions run high. There is a debate going on India right now about this, responded MacKinnon. The problem is that “one’s person dissident is another person’s terrorist in some countries.” The easiest solution to thorny problems like hate speech is often censorship and surveillance, but, MacKinnon asked, “does that solve problems or just make politicians feel good about solving a problem?”

What can we learn from SOPA and PIPA? MacKinnon feels we may have hit a turning point, or at least a new level of awareness. There is “a global trend” of politically active people around the world seeking to exercise their influence as voters on Internet-rights issues–and that’s a hopeful sign.

Watch full video here.
See more photos from Los Angeles here and from Tempe here.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.
Read expert opinions on whether the Internet should be patrolled here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

The post Oh, What a Crummy Web We Might Weave appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The question we should be asking, though, is not which of these visions for “cyberspace” is right but whether the underlying metaphor is really a helpful one. Does it make sense to think of the Internet as a “place” that might be “policed” in some comprehensive way, as by a town sheriff? Alternatively, is it helpful to think of “Internet regulation” as some narrow or specialized policy domain, akin to pharmaceutical or industrial regulation, perhaps with some equally specialized administrative agency empowered to set rules?

This was, perhaps, a tempting way to think back when Barlow issued his manifesto–when the Internet was experienced as a kind of Narnia to which the tech-savvy could escape via the modem-portals in their basements. The more the Internet is integrated into the average person’s ordinary life, however, the more quaint this starts to seem. The Internet is (and, really, always was) right where you are sitting now.

If we’re boringly literal, “it” is not really even an “it” in any ordinary sense: “The” Internet encompasses a whole array of evolved and evolving communications protocols, the physical and wireless infrastructures of its countless component networks, the higher-level protocols and software applications that enable particular functions ranging from web browsing to multiplayer gaming to videoconferencing, the particular sites and platforms that use those protocols, the content hosted on those platforms, the contents of the millions of discrete communications they enable, and all the people who generate and receive that content. I belabor what should be a self-evident point because the metaphor obscures a complex underlying reality in ways that distort policymaking.

First, it makes legislators too prone to imagine that we need a new and specialized body of cyberlaws to cover cyberbullying, cyberpiracy, and a whole array of other cybercrimes. But Internet users are still, for better or worse, humans confined to geographically bound bodies in boring old terrestrial legal jurisdictions. Communications technology may heighten problems of enforcement across jurisdictions, but it did not create them.

Second, analogizing the Internet to physical space makes it too easy to forget that essentially everything happening on the network is speech of one kind or another: Witness the professed astonishment of supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act that anyone might apply the label “censorship” to a ham-handed regime of domain blocking–a regime that would treat widespread, mandatory filtering of communications by thousands of discrete actors as essentially equivalent to seizure of a drug dealer’s car.

Third, and related, it encourages violations of what legal scholar Lawrence Solum has dubbed the “Layers Principle,” which enjoins legislators to respect the layered architecture of the Internet by avoiding policy responses that seek to address problems at the content layer by regulating other layers–seeking to block certain forms of speech or illicit copying of copyrighted material by targeting the Domain Name System, imposing obligations on the operators of physical network switches, or limiting the functionality programmers may legally build into general-purpose software applications.

In practice, such remedies tend to result in a systemic “lack of fit,” in Solum’s phrase, between the aims and outcomes of regulation. It is as though we asked dictionary and periodical publishers to give us a version of English that was incapable of being used to facilitate crime. It would be unlikely to succeed, but might do a good deal of mischief in the interim.

Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. He is the former Washington editor of the technology news site Ars Technica.

*Photo courtesy of Mal_irl.

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Many of us realize how much we take the Internet’s current qualities for granted only when some party proposes to change them. Perhaps you felt you were just getting a handle on the most common domain extensions, such as .com and .org and .edu, only to find that domain extensions will soon be as limitless as our imaginations. Or perhaps you were looking for something on Wikipedia only to find that the site had gone dark in protest of proposed “SIPA/SOPA” legislation that would regulate the Internet far more closely. Proposals to police the Internet come up frequently, and, of course, tight control of the Internet is a daily reality in many nations. In an ideal system, though, how, if at all, should the Internet be policed? In advance of the Zócalo event “Is Internet Freedom At Risk?“, we asked several scholars and thinkers to weigh in on this topic.

Don’t police the Internet, thank you very much.

Visiting Syria in 2010, I couldn’t access Facebook, YouTube or Skype. The state controlled the Internet and kept people from connecting with one another. The Internet is today’s most important and powerful facility for the freedoms of speech, association, and the press that we cherish in our Constitution.

Existing law governs human interaction in all forms and forums. But NBC Universal’s general counsel has argued that a new “rule of law” on the Internet (1) must be embedded in the technology of the Internet itself, (2) must rely on government (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and “intermediaries” such as Internet service providers and banks to be the enforcers, (3) must analogize Internet enforcement to physical world enforcement, and (4) must promote enforcement despite the risks of abuse or incomplete success. This charted the path for the now-discredited SOPA and PIPA bills.

I could not disagree more. Efforts to legislate against technology are fruitless: a regulated technology will become a backwater (witness DAT and MiniDisc players) while other technologies will arise to supplant it (witness CDs, jump drives, and cloud storage). And a government that shuttered 84,000 websites (hosted by mooo.com) by mistake or that seized and held a domain for a year with secret court orders before acknowledging failure and returning it (dajaz1.com) doesn’t deserve additional powers. Nor does an entertainment industry that relentlessly pursues a $1.5 million verdict against a single mom for downloading 24 songs,.

The Internet needs no special policing. Targeting the Internet for enabling communications not only shoots the messenger but also threatens American political values and economic progress. Police manual typewriters or fountain pens instead. That will satisfy the urge but avoid the harm.

Andrew P. Bridges, a partner with Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco, represents innovators and entrepreneurs in developing, defending, and protecting new business models and technologies. He has won many landmark cases including those involving the launch of the first consumer MP3 player, Internet search, online payment systems, and family-friendly DVD playback filtering software.

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Good luck trying to police it

The Internet is a medium of communication, and communication is speech. So policing the Internet is policing speech. In liberal democracies, and certainly in the United States, we are leery of such policing, and for good reason. Free speech is the bulwark of democracy, liberty, and science, and we should tread carefully when we consider restraining it online or anywhere else.

We nevertheless do recognize limits to speech when it conflicts with the rights of others. As a result, debates over particular attempts to control information center on whether the principle to be protected–whether public morals, privacy, intellectual property, or security–is a fundamental right or paramount societal value, and whether it should take precedence over speech rights when the two conflict. These are worthy debates, but we should also ask the positive question: Can the Internet be policed?

Controlling information on the Internet is incredibly more costly than was controlling information on previous communications media. Switching off a printing press or radio transmitter is easy, but the decentralized nature of the Internet complicates matters. This is not to say that information can’t be controlled, just that the cost to those who would do it is high.

Additionally, as Internet technology advances, the direct and indirect costs one must incur to maintain a same level of information control will continue to increase. This means that the margin on which information can be effectively controlled is also shrinking continuously. As a result, while the Internet can no doubt be regulated, and information controlled, it can only be done on an increasingly small margin, and at an increasingly high cost. This dynamic is inherent in, and determined by, the nature of the Internet, and it is cause for optimism.

Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its Technology Policy Program.

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Any policing strategy should advance liberty and tolerance.

The key is to recognize that the panoply of human rights and democratic liberties should exist on the Internet just as they do offline. The police will track criminals, but they must do so under the law and in accordance with due process. The military will chase terrorists online, but they should do so under established rules.

Of course, the rules governing online behavior, and the limits to governmental intrusion in it, are not always well established–certainly not internationally. Thus, America’s global Internet freedom promotion efforts are critical. They must include an effort to shape norms and establish rules that will both protect the free flow of information online and bolster our security.

This is no easy task. For more than two centuries, America has wrestled with the competing demands of security and freedom. But whether we act at home or abroad, we should keep at the fore of our minds a guiding principle: America should pursue an online freedom strategy that helps tilt the balance in favor of those who would use the Internet to advance tolerance and free expression and away from those who would employ it for repression or violence. It’s not a bad place to start.

Richard Fontaine, a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age. Follow him @RHFontaine.

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The Internet is all too easy to police.

The freedom to speak our mind, learn from others, work, and engage in leisure activities is increased because of the Internet. However, the tradeoff is that the Internet is easy to monitor. Information that travels via the Internet is more easily captured, recorded, tracked, identified, analyzed and used than information that travels any other way.

To aggressively police Internet activities is to put at risk freedom of expression, freedom to pursue creative endeavors, and freedom to explore. The effects of doing so could manifest themselves in an unexpected way: psychologically. Just the possibility of being individually observed often changes a person’s behavior, so the risk of self-censorship is immense.

Instead of policing the Internet in a way that risks openness and free expression, we should continue to build and protect a place where both like-minded and differing people are encouraged to engage with one another, where a person who thinks he or she is alone can find an entire community where he or she belongs, where the majority and the minority (who are particularly vulnerable to repression) are equally comfortable expressing themselves, and where creativity and exploration are unhindered. Freedom and a free Internet go hand in hand.

Kelly Caine is Principal Research Scientist at Indiana University and a fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.

*Photo courtesy of kulakovich.

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