Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

P2P networking has a history of challenging governments, especially around copyright issues for democracies (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay) and political dissent for autocracies (e.g., Tor). In the United States, the pioneer of P2P file sharing, Napster, was shut down in 2001 by an injunction demanding that the company prevent all trading of copyrighted material on its network. (Napster told a district court that it was capable of blocking the transfer of 99.4 percent of copyrighted material, but the court said that wasn’t good enough.) In Saudi Arabia and Iran, religious police have found it extremely difficult to prevent young people from using Bluetooth-enabled phones to call and text complete strangers within range, oftentimes for the purpose of flirting, but also for close-proximity coordination between protesters. Unless all mobile devices in the country are confiscated (a task the secret police realize is impossible), the flirtatious Saudi and Iranian youth have at least one small edge on their state-sponsored babysitters.

BlackBerry mobile devices offer both encrypted communication and telephone services, and the unique encryption they offer users has led many governments to target them directly. In 2009, the United Arab Emirates’ partially state-owned telecom Etisalat sent nearly 150,000 of its BlackBerry users a prompt for a required update for “service enhancements.” These enhancements were actually spyware that allowed unauthorized access to private information stored on users’ phones. (When this became public knowledge, the maker of BlackBerry, RIM, distanced itself from Etisalat and told users how to remove the software.) Just a year later, the U.A.E. and its neighbor Saudi Arabia both called for bans on BlackBerry phones altogether, citing the country’s encryption protocol. India chimed in as well, giving RIM an ultimatum to provide access to encrypted communications or see its services suspended. (In all three countries, the ban was averted.)

Repressive states will display little hesitation in their attempts to ban or gain control of P2P communications. Democratic states will have to act more deliberately. We already have a prominent example of this in the August 2011 riots in the United Kingdom. British protesters rallied to demand justice for twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan, who had been shot and killed by British police in Tottenham. Several days later the crowds turned violent, setting fire to local shops, police cars and a bus. Violence and looting spread across the country over subsequent nights, eventually reaching Birmingham, Bristol and other cities. The riots resulted in five deaths, an estimated £300 million ($475 million) in property damage and a great deal of public confusion. The scale of the disorder across the country—as well as the speed with which it spread—caught the police and government wholly off guard, and communication tools like Twitter, Facebook and particularly BlackBerry were singled out as a major operational factor in the spread of the riots. While the riots were occurring, the MP for Tottenham called on BlackBerry to suspend its messaging service during night hours to stop the rioters from communicating. When the violence had subsided, the British prime minister, David Cameron, told Parliament he was considering blocking these services altogether in certain situations, particularly “when we know [people] are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.” His goal, he said, was to “give the police the technology to trace people on Twitter or BBM, or close it down.” (After meeting with industry representatives, Cameron said industry cooperation with law enforcement was sufficient.)

The examples of the U.A.E. and the U.K. illustrate real concern on the part of governments, but it is important to clarify that this concern has been about encryption and social networking. In the future, however, communication will also take place on mobile P2P networks, meaning that citizens will be able to network without having to rely on the Internet (this was not the case in the U.A.E. and the U.K.). It stands to reason that every state, from the least democratic to the most, may fight the growth of device-to-device communication. Governments will claim that without restrictions or loopholes for special circumstances, capturing criminals and terrorists (among other legitimate police activities) and prosecuting them will become more difficult, planning and executing crimes will be easier and a person’s ability to publish slanderous, false or other harmful information in the public sphere without accountability will improve. Democratic governments will fear uncontrollable libel and leaking, autocracies internal dissent. But if illegal activity is the primary concern for governments, the real challenge will be the combination of virtual currency with anonymous networks that hide the physical location of services. For example, criminals are already selling illegal drugs on the Tor network in exchange for Bitcoins (a virtual currency), avoiding cash and banks altogether. Copyright infringers will use the same networks.

As we think about how to address these kinds of challenges, we cannot afford to take a black-and-white view; context matters. For example, in Mexico, drug cartels are among some of the most effective users of anonymous encryption, both P2P and through the Internet. In 2011, we met with Bruno Ferrari, then the country’s secretary of the economy, and he described to us how the Mexican government has struggled to engage the population in the fight against the cartels—fear of retribution is enough to prevent people from reporting crimes or tipping off law enforcement to cartel activity in their neighborhoods. Corruption and untrustworthiness in the police department further limit the options for citizens. “Without anonymity,” Ferrari told us, “there is no clear mechanism in which people can trust the police and report the crimes committed by the drug cartels. True anonymity is vital to getting the citizens to be part of the solution.” The drug cartels were already using anonymous communications, so anonymity levels the playing field. “The arguments behind restricting anonymous encryption make sense,” he added, “but just not in Mexico.”

Police State 2.0

All things considered, the balance of power between citizens and their governments will depend on how much surveillance equipment a government is able to buy, sustain and operate. Genuinely democratic states may struggle to deal with the loss of privacy and control that the data revolution enables, but as a result they will have more empowered citizens, better politicians and stronger social contracts. Unfortunately, the majority of states in the world are either not democratic or democratic in name only, and the relative impact of connectivity—both positive and negative—for citizens in those countries will be far greater than we’ll see elsewhere.

In the long run, the presence of communication technologies will chip away at most autocratic governments, since, as we have seen, the odds against a restrictive, information-shy regime dealing with an empowered citizenry armed with personal fact-checking devices get progressively worse with each embarrassing incident. In other words, it’s no coincidence that today’s autocracies are for the most part among the least connected societies in the world. In the near term, however, such regimes will be able to exploit the growth of connectivity to their advantage, as they already exploit the law and the media. There is a trend in authoritarian governance to harness the power of connectivity and data, rather than ban information technology out of fear, a shift from totalitarian obviousness to more subtle forms of control that the journalist William J. Dobson captured in his excellent book The Dictator’s Learning Curve . As Dobson describes it, “Today’s dictators and authoritarians are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble than they once were. Faced with growing pressures, the smartest among them neither hardened their regimes into police states nor closed themselves off from the world; instead, they learned and adapted. For dozens of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity and cunning.” Dobson identifies numerous avenues through which modern dictators consolidate power while feigning legitimacy: a quasi-independent judicial system, the semblance of a popularly elected parliament, broadly written laws that are applied selectively and a media landscape that allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are. Unlike the strongman regimes and pariah states of old, Dobson writes, modern authoritarian states are “conscious, man-made projects that must be carefully built, polished, and reinforced.”