Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Just as they do today with charities and business ventures, celebrities will look to starting their own media outlet as a logical extension of their “brand.” (We are using as broad a definition of “celebrity” as possible here: We mean all highly visible public figures, which today could mean anyone from reality-TV stars to famous evangelical preachers.) To be sure, some of these new outlets will be solid attempts to contribute to public discourse, but many will be vapid and nearly content free, merely exercises in self-promotion and commercialized fame.

We will see a period in which people flock to these new celebrity outlets for their novelty value and to be part of a trend. Those that stay won’t mind that the content and professionalism are a few notches below those of established media organizations. Media critics will decry these changes and lament the death of journalism, but this will be premature, because once the audience shifts, so too will the burden of reporting. If a celebrity outlet doesn’t provide enough news, or consistently makes errors that are publicly exposed, the audience will leave. Loyalties are fickle when it comes to media, and this will only become truer as the field grows more crowded. If enough celebrity outlets lose the faith and trust of their audience, the resulting exodus will lead back to the professional media outlets, which will have undergone their own transformations (more aggregation, wider scope, faster response time) in the interim. Not all who left will return, just as not all who take issue with the mainstream media will jettison familiar information sources for new and trendy ones. Ultimately, it remains to be seen just how much impact these new celebrity competitors will have on the media landscape in the long term, but their emergence as players in the game of accruing viewers, readers and advertisers will undoubtedly cause a stir.

Expanded connectivity promises more than just challenges for media outlets; it offers new possibilities for the role of media more generally, particularly in countries where the press is not free. One reason that corrupt officials, powerful criminals and other malevolent forces in a society can continue to operate without fear of prosecution is that they control local information sources, either directly as owners and publishers or indirectly through harassment, bribery, intimidation or violence. This is as true in countries with largely state-owned media, like Russia, as it is in those where criminal syndicates hold enormous power and territory, like Mexico. The result—the lack of an independent press—reduces both accountability and the risk that public knowledge of misdeeds will lead to pressure and the political will to prosecute.

Connectivity can help upend such a power imbalance in a number of ways, and one of the most interesting ones concerns digital encryption and what it will enable underground or at-risk media organizations to do. Imagine an international NGO whose mission is to facilitate confidential reporting from places where it is difficult or dangerous to be a journalist. What differentiates this organization from others today, like watchdog groups and nonprofit media patrons, is the encrypted platform it builds and deploys to be used by media inside these countries. The platform’s design is novel yet surprisingly simple. In order to protect the identities of journalists (who are the most exposed in the chain of reporting), every reporter for a given outlet is registered in the system with a unique code. Their names, mobile numbers and other identifiable details are encrypted behind this code, and the only people able to de-encrypt that information are key individuals at the NGO headquarters (not anyone at the news outlet), which, crucially, is based outside of the country. Inside the country, reporters are known only by this unique code—they use it to file stories and interact with their sources and local editors. As a result, if, for example, a journalist reports on an election irregularity in Venezuela (as many did during the October 2012 presidential election, although not anonymously), those charged with carrying out the president’s dirty work have no way of knowing whom to target because they can’t access the reporter’s information, nor does anyone the reporter dealt with know who he or she really is. Media outlets don’t maintain formal physical offices, since those could be targeted. Outlets necessarily have to vet their reporters initially, but after a journalist is introduced into the system, he is switched to a new editor (who has not met him) and his personal details evaporate into the platform.

The NGO outside of the country operates this platform from a safe distance, allowing the various participants to interact safely through a veil of encryption. Treating reporters in the same ways as confidential sources (protecting identities, preserving content) is not itself a new idea, but the ability to encrypt that identifiable data, and use an online platform to facilitate anonymous news-gathering, is only becoming possible now. The stories and other sensitive materials that journalists uncover can easily be stored in servers outside the country (someplace where there are strong legal protections around data), further limiting the exposure of those inside. Initially, perhaps this NGO would release its platform as a free product and operate it for different news outlets, financed by third-party donations. Eventually the NGO might take all of the working platforms and federate them, building a super-platform comprised of unidentifiable journalists from countries around the world. While we certainly do not advocate a popular shift toward anonymity, we assume in this case that the security situation is so dire and the society so repressive that the move is an act of desperation and necessity. An editor in New York would be able to log in, search for a reporter in Ukraine and find someone with a track record of published stories and even snippets from former colleagues. Without even knowing the journalist’s name, the editor could rely on the available stories and the trust he has in this platform to decide whether to work with him. He could request an encrypted call with the reporter, also possible through the platform, to begin building a relationship.

This kind of disaggregated, mutually anonymous news-gathering system would not be difficult to build or maintain, and by encrypting the personal details of journalists (as well as their editors) and storing their reporting in remote servers, those who stand to lose as a more independent press emerges will become increasingly immobilized. How does one retaliate against a digital platform, particularly in an age when everyone can read the news on their mobile devices? Connectivity is relatively low in many places that lack free media today, but as that changes, the reach of local reporting on sensitive matters will be even wider—international, in fact. These two trends—safer reporting backed by encryption and a wider readership due to gains in connectivity—ensure that even if a country’s legal system is too corrupt or inept to properly prosecute bad actors, they can be publicly tried online through the media. Warlords operating in eastern Congo may not all be hauled into the International Criminal Court, but their lives will become more unpleasant if their every deed is captured and chronicled by unidentifiable and unreachable journalists, and the stories written about them travel to the far ends of the online world. At a minimum, other criminals who might otherwise do business with them will be deterred by their digital radioactivity, meaning they are too visible and under too much public scrutiny to be desirable business partners.

Privacy Revisited—Different Implications for Different Citizens

Security and privacy are a shared responsibility between companies, users and the institutions around us. Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are expected to safeguard data, prevent their systems from being hacked into and provide the most effective tools for users to maximize control of their privacy and security. But it is up to users to leverage these tools. Each day you choose not to utilize them you will experience some loss of privacy and security as the data keeps piling up. And you cannot assume there is a simple delete button. The option to “delete” data is largely an illusion—lost files, deleted e-mails and erased text messages can be recovered with minimal effort. Data is rarely erased on computers; operating systems tend to remove only a file’s listing from the internal directory, keeping the file’s contents in place until the space is needed for other things. (And even after a file has been overwritten, it’s still occasionally possible to recover parts of the original content due to the magnetic properties of disc storage. This problem is known as “data remanence” by computer experts.) Cloud computing only reinforces the permanence of information, adding another layer of remote protection for users and their information.