Can the internet be saved without harming democracy?
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Version 0 of 1. Citizens of the internet: here is some welcome news. Your downtrodden digital rights might be getting a well-overdue booster shot. But it comes with some warnings. This week in the Hague, a high-level group of 29 internet policymakers and influencers – including prominent ex-US and UK security and intelligence officials Michael Chertoff, Joseph Nye, Melissa Hathaway and David Omand – issued a clarion call for the protection and promotion of human rights online. Self-styled the Global Commission on Internet Governance, the group made this call as part of the broader objective of restoring trust and confidence in the internet. Championing our fundamental human rights to privacy and personal data protection, the commission affirmed the need for strong encryption and other privacy-enhancing technologies, while completely rejecting government “backdoors” on communications platforms – on the basis that digital communications “should be inherently considered private between the intended parties”. This clear and unambiguous statement is a mature recognition of both the environmental and legal reality: if we weaken security, even for the ostensibly “good” guys, we leave communications wide open for the bad guys, too. And while the UK Intelligence and Security Committee would prefer it otherwise, generic intrusion on our private communications, thoughts and papers has no precedent in the law of this land – and so it must stay. The commission didn’t stop with just proposing measures to rein in unjust government surveillance that lacks necessity and proportionality, backed up by robust, independent oversight and the stick of appropriate redress and effective remedies for breach. They insisted that companies, too, must be much more transparent and restrained in their use of data, offering users full and detailed information and real and informed choices, particularly in relation to the trade-offs inherent in “free” services – “often a guise for a kind of private surveillance in the service of ‘big data’,” the report states. This dual focus, on the dangers of both government and corporate surveillance, is refreshing and essential. A new normative framework underpinned by human rights The commission’s 18-page report is the first coordinated output from this group that was established 15 months ago by British and Canadian think-tanks, Chatham House and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and chaired by ex-Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt. It precedes a final report anticipated for early 2016, and accompanies some 14 independent papers of varying quality, commissioned on different related topics over the past year. The report is an important advance because it considers and balances the need for citizen confidence in digital communications and services, while at the same recognising our shared interest in law enforcement and targeted surveillance. As a result of this, it comes out firmly on the side of transparency, accountability, restraint, and the primacy of human rights. “The obligation of states to protect and promote rights to privacy and freedom of expression are not optional,” the report states. “Even if they are not absolute rights, limitations to these rights, even those based on national security concerns, must be prescribed by law, guaranteeing that exceptions are both necessary and proportionate. Governments should guarantee the same human rights protection to all individuals within their borders.” The report is also attuned to the more insidious aspects of private commercial surveillance, recognising, for example, that the evolving internet of things poses unprecedented challenges for privacy and security and must proceed with transparency, accountability, and clear legal bases for data collection and use. “Personal data protection regulations are mostly not yet suited to the complexity of the digital age,” the authors write, “for example, by not adequately regulating the extensive secondary use of personal data or ensuring the transparency of exceptions to privacy for sovereignty and national security purposes.” Social compacts, multistakeholderism and other illusions The group’s overall ambition is to articulate and advance a strategic vision on the polarising and widely-misunderstood topic of internet governance. Narrowly conceived, internet governance concerns internet-native bodies, such as ICANN (the private company with a monopoly on domain name distribution and regulation) and IETF (an internet standards body). But more broadly, internet governance is the biggest geoeconomic and geopolitical battlefield you’ve never heard about – dictating the rules, emperors, winners and losers of our online lives, fortunes and destinies. And it is politically fraught, because both in its narrow and broad incarnations, internet governance is undeniably dominated by one state’s security and economic interests: the United States. The subtext of the report – and where some hazards may lie – is a general push for what is termed the multistakeholder model of internet governance. This is a neoliberal concept that has taken hold in this peculiar, captured domain of international relations, and which brings corporations to the table with the governments that are supposed to regulate them. The report pushes what it calls a “social compact” – an invented term, not the philosophical concept of old. It reflects the frightening prospect that the new age bonds of society are not between citizens and states, but between citizens (likely, in the imagining of its proponents, to be self-employed cheap workers of the “sharing economy” and other fabricated markets) and a nebulous “community” of “stakeholders”. In plain English: between us, and near-stateless global giants like Google, untethered from terrestrial law and infrastructure, and running the ultimate monopoly machine. While the stakeholders of such compacts vary (in this report, bizarrely, the judiciary is included, despite independence being a judge’s first and most important hallmark), the constant is business, propped up by civil society, the “technical community” and academics – with governments always in a subordinate role (because of the constant spectre, whether justified or fantastical, of dictatorial and repressive regimes somehow overreaching their boundaries). Some of the props in these communities are fiercely independent, tireless voices for good and great causes. But many others, whether knowingly or naively, are just another front for business interests. And the 150-odd countries that probably have some interests, between China/Russia on the one hand, and the US and its allies on the other? They are forgotten. Will “trust” save the internet? The commission’s report is excellent in many respects. It advances what it terms a normative framework for privacy and security, and provides sensible details and strong baselines. The report is supported by some very informative and original survey work, showing the extent of public concern about government and corporate surveillance. But to make the content meaningful, there needs to be more consideration given to the premise and proposed mechanisms for action and reform. Trust and confidence are an odd premise on which to advance this report. Think about these traits. They are fickle and human. Hard to gain and easy to lose, they are attributes of people, acquired by lifetimes of experience and the manifold clues embedded in our social fabric. But machines, entities, infrastructure and artefacts – these are not things we trust. They are things we use, tolerate or begrudgingly accept, with varied levels of reflection and knowledge. We don’t want our corporations and security agencies fickle and fallible. Trust and confidence take hard work, time and evidence. They must be earned. And they will be earned by obeying laws, respecting and promoting human rights, and cracking down and remedying profligate corporate and government behaviour without fear or favour. The concerns expressed here with multistakeholderism are sounded as a general warning about the neoliberal directions in which it takes us, rather than a dismissal of the promising and important content of the commission’s report. The report is at least sensitive to the need to keep all players – whether corporate or state – accountable, within the law, and responsive to a greatly enhanced set of tech norms and ethics, a point championed in particular by the group’s tech-savvy Dutch Liberal MEP Marietje Schaake. However, it is a worry that the report does not even consider the mechanisms by which an international and social consensus might be achieved on the issues being addressed. The social compact may be advanced pragmatically, because better alternatives are not considered feasible or reachable. But the concern is that, by appealing to what is, in effect, self-regulation, the compact will become a diluted pacifier, and a ceiling, rather than a floor. The document should be seen as a challenge: by whatever mechanism it is achieved, it outlines exactly the sorts of major behavioural changes we require, both from state intelligence agencies and from multinational companies, if we are really going to save the internet. Crime, hacking and being monetised – what worries citizens The CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust is based on 23,326 internet users, drawn from 24 countries and polled over 36 days in October-November 2014. It found that: |