Censorship is only possible when I have a chance to stop you expressing yourself. This is why the first thing a revolution or coup did was to take over newspaper presses or broadcasting equipment. The difference today is that the human world’s busiest information network cannot be deftly taken down. And private communication can be protected cheaply.
Thus the cornerstone of reducing censorship in the internet age has been to keep up the public use of encryption, which can be used to confirm secrecy, security or identity.
The encryption argument was always in balance. Although bad people can talk without being intercepted, at least good people can spread new ideas without interference from state actors who may not benefit.
We can’t reasonably stop bad people using encryption, but we can define all people that use encryption as bad. This is not just a bon mot; it is fast becoming the current thinking.
I have no overarching fear of the state, which is why I certainly don’t think we all need to be armed. And like most people, I am delighted that the government keeps tabs on terrorists and malcontents. But I don’t think the government has a role in stopping the communication of ‘propaganda’. This is exactly why we favour and pay for comprehensive education. Preachers who materially swell the ranks of IS (for example) by hate speech will always be at risk of prosecution. But the mere backing of radicalism is no reason to reach for the fiber.
Terrorists will definitely use encrypted channels to carry out attacks — but this is not, and never has been any sort of bar to the security services infiltrating their activities. Instead of treating a society as a closed and everlasting entity, it must be treated as a fairly vulnerable thing that needs constant protection. There is no one silver bullet that will stop all problems. It is a constant struggle. The security services should have as many tools as possible to combat societies foes, but if you need to remake society to keep it safe — something has gone wrong.
The UK government’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s assertion that internet corporations have a responsibility in stopping terrorists using their services was a polite but very naked attack on open society. The reason for concern is that encryption is being re-positioned as “something you tech types have landed on us so as to force us to negotiate”. This subtle placement of young internet entrepreneurs as the willing servants of Jihad is a carefully planned shot in what seems to be a well rehearsed campaign.
And in parallel, IS are used as the poster child for what social media freedom leads to. ‘Those evil geniuses are focusing on using social media to groom our vulnerable young people”. Never mind that almost everyone between 18–25 uses social media almost exclusively to communicate.
And I think this re-positioning may be working — as can be seen by people’s attitude to trolls on Twitter. The service has always allowed effectively anonymous users, and has never done enough to stop the inevitable rise of non-human or non-individual accounts. The massive increase in attacks on very real people from these types of account have led many to believe that the service is at fault. A very unoriginal attempt to blame the messenger.
And consequently this has opened up the idea that maybe the idea of an unmoderated public forum is actually the problem. This has two entry points — the culpability of services like Twitter but also the approach of Facebook. (Of course the corollary of the Facebook approach is the bubble.)
Once the idea of an open public forum is considered to be too dangerous, then it is a short trip to a controlled environment. Twitter has the massive advantage that as all tweets are public, all counterpoints are public too.
The above is amusing, but it is the same mechanism that a troll might use to target a comment — open communication. In this case, the value of a known or verified identity was leveraged to full effect.
There is plenty of commentary about university societies curbing free speech in order to persevere ‘safe places’. This feels to me like a fairly limited experiment among inexperienced students that has got somewhat more attention than it deserves. Nevertheless, it does help to add an extra weight against the side of public discourse.
It is important to keep both public discourse, and encrypted discourse away from the purview of state actors, when no law (analog or otherwise) has been broken.
Worrying about the control that a group has because it shapes the language is as nothing to the control that a regime can have if it can stop everyone else from saying anything at all.
