In 2005 a young woman was riding on the underground in Seoul with her dog when it defecated on the floor. She refused to clean it up, to the consternation of passengers. Someone filmed the event and uploaded the video. It went viral. Thousands of South Koreans found out her name and address and began to harass her. The woman had to go into hiding, get plastic surgery and change her identity.
In an attempt to prevent further cyber-bullying, the government introduced a law requiring full identity registration of users of the internet. This led to bloggers being arrested and jailed for "spreading false information to harm the public interest" and data being stolen and finding its way to China. The law was eventually rescinded.
In her grand sweep of "the worldwide struggle for internet freedom", Rebecca MacKinnon alights on the many dilemmas facing policy makers and corporate chiefs, and the many threats that cyberspace poses for individual liberty. At the heart of her critique is less the steps taken by western governments to impose rules than the lack of transparency and accountability for them. She lists the tactics of repressive regimes – from pre-emptive denials of service of websites to closing down of internet access. Cleverer authoritarians have taken to the internet and to social media with gusto, churning out propaganda or employing fifth columnists to do their work for them.
The most dangerous development has been the use of online tools for surveillance. She lists activists from Russia to China, from Iran to Syria, who have been rounded up for their tweets or Facebook messages in an era she dubs "digital Bonapartism". She writes: "Deep packet inspection technologies make it easy to automate surveillance through the internet service providers – provided by US and other western firms." And she details which firms have provided what.
Much of this is known, although it is important to restate the dangers. Most telling are MacKinnon's chapters on the behaviour of supposedly democratic governments. Among the first countries to use filtering systems on a national level were the squeaky-clean Finns, Danes and Swedes. Almost invariably the motivations are good, such as child protection. In 2009 the German parliament passed such a law. Yet the list of websites to be blocked was maintained by the police without public oversight.
Copyright and intellectual property provides a legislative and philosophical minefield, exploited by governments to stifle dissent. As shown by the recent battle in the US over the Sopa and Pipa legislation aimed at protecting copyright on the internet, governments the world over often overreact to the challenges of open access to information. MacKinnon reminds readers that, for all its rhetorical flourishes to the contrary, the Obama administration has continued the woeful record of George W Bush. Governments are taking a Hobbesian approach, ever fearful of chaos. Theirs is a "false binary choice between their preferred solutions and an anarchic state of nature in cyberspace… without allowing for any alternatives."
As for corporations, they tend to flounder in the face of government threats. The solution, she says, is transparency. If companies were more open about the information they give authorities, including in uncontroversial areas such as anti-terrorism and child pornography, they would earn more trust. "Many old-fashioned brick-and-mortar companies in the food, beverage and fashion industries, even a number of oil, gas and mining companies, are much further along than the world's most cutting edge internet-related companies when it comes to accountability," she adds.
Thoroughly researched by one of the experts in the field, the book straddles the line between an academic and general audience. MacKinnon entreats internet users to see themselves as active citizens – not consumers or eyeballs. She harks back to Huxley's Brave New World: "Our desire for security, entertainment and material comfort is manipulated to the point that we all voluntarily and eagerly submit to subjugation." She ends with a rallying cry: "We have a responsibility to hold the abusers of digital power to account, along with their facilitators and collaborators. If we do not, when we wake up one morning to discover that our freedoms have eroded beyond recognition, we will have only ourselves to blame."
John Kampfner is author of Blair's Wars and Freedom For Sale
