Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

States might view this kind of action as a political imperative, an effort to mitigate the internal threats to stability by simply erasing them. Information about the groups would remain available outside a country’s Internet space, of course, but internally it would vanish. This would be intended both to humiliate the group by negating its very existence and also to isolate it further from the rest of the population. The state could persecute the group with greater impunity, and in time, if the censorship was thorough enough, future generations of majority groups could grow up with barely any awareness of the minority group or the issues associated with it. Erasing content is a quiet maneuver, difficult to quantify and unlikely to set off alarm bells, because such efforts would have small tangible impact while remaining symbolically and psychologically disparaging to the groups most affected. And even if a government were to get “caught” somehow, and shown to be deliberately blocking minority-specific content, officials would probably justify their actions on security grounds or blame them on computer glitches or infrastructure failures.

If a government wanted to go further than content control, and escalate its discriminatory policies to full-blown persecution online, it could find ways to limit a given group’s access to the Internet and its services. This might sound trivial in comparison with the physical harassment, random arrests, acts of violence, and economic and political strangulation that persecuted groups around the world experience today. But as connectivity spreads, Internet service and mobile devices offer vital outlets for individuals to transcend their current environment, connecting them with information, jobs, resources, entertainment and other people. Excluding oppressed populations from participating in the virtual world would be a very drastic and damaging policy, because in important ways they’d be left out and left behind, unable to tap into any of the opportunities for growth and prosperity that we see connectivity bringing elsewhere. As banking, salaries and payment transactions move increasingly onto online platforms, exclusion from the Internet will severely curtail people’s economic prospects. It would be far more difficult to access one’s money, to pay by credit card or get a loan.

Already, the Romanian government deliberately excludes some 2.2 million ethnic Roma from the same opportunities as the rest of the population, a policy manifested in separate education systems, economic exclusion in the form of hiring discrimination and unequal access to health and medical benefits (not to mention a heavy social stigma). Current statistics on the Roma’s level of access to technology are hard to come by—many Roma fail to register themselves as such on government surveys for fear of persecution—but as we’ve made clear, connected Roma will find ways to improve their circumstances. The Roma might even consider pursuing virtual statehood of some kind in the future.

But if the Romanian government decided to extend its policies toward the Roma into the online world, nearly all of those opportunities would evaporate. Technological exclusion could take many forms, depending on how much control the state has and how much pain it wants to cause. If it required all citizens to register their devices and IP addresses (many governments already require mobile devices to be registered) or maintained a “hidden people” registry, Romanian authorities using that data would find it easy to block the Roma’s access to news, outside information and platforms with economic or social value. These users would suddenly find themselves unable to reliably access their own personal data or their online banking services; they would confront error messages or seem to have egregiously slow connection speeds. Using its power over the country’s telecommunications infrastructure, the government could instigate dropped calls, jam phone signals in certain neighborhoods or occasionally short-circuit the Roma’s connections to the Internet. Perhaps the government, working with private-sector distributors, could engineer the sale of defective devices to Romany individuals (selling to them through compromised trusted intermediaries), distributing laptops and mobile phones riddled with bugs and back doors that would allow the state to input malicious code at a later date.

Rather than a systematic campaign to cut access (which would incur unwelcome scrutiny), the Romanian government would need only to implement these blockages randomly, frequently enough to harass the group itself but intermittently enough to allow for plausible denials. The Roma, of course, could find imperfect technological work-arounds that enabled basic connectivity, but ultimately the blockages would be sufficiently disruptive that even intermittent access couldn’t replace what was lost. Over a long enough period, a dynamic like this might settle into a kind of virtual apartheid, with multiple sets of limitations on connectivity for different groups within society.

Electronically isolating minority groups will become increasingly prevalent in the future because states have the will to do so, and they have access to the data that enables it. Such initiatives might even start as benign programs with public support, then over time transform into more restrictive and punitive policies as power shifts in the country. Imagine, for example, if the ultra-Orthodox contingent in Israel lobbied for the creation of a white-listed “kosher Internet,” where only preapproved websites were allowed, and their bid was successful—after all, the thinking might be, creating a special Internet lane for them is not unlike forming a special “safe” list of Internet sites for children. 1Years later, if the ultra-Orthodox swept the elections and took control of the government, their first decision might be to make all of Israel’s Internet “kosher.” From that position, they would have the opportunity to restrict access even further for minority groups within Israel.

The most worrisome result of such policies is how vulnerable these restrictions would make targeted groups, whose lifelines could literally be cut. If limited access were to be a precursor to physical harassment or state violence by compromising a group’s ability to send out alert signals, it would also strip victims of their ability to document the abuse or destruction afterward. Soon it may be possible to say that what happens in a digital vacuum, in effect, doesn’t happen.

In countries where governments are targeting minority or repressed groups in this way, an implicit or explicit arrangement between some citizens and states will emerge, whereby people trade information or obedience in exchange for better access. Where noticeable cooperation with the government is demonstrated, the state will grant those individuals faster connections, better devices, protection from online harassment or a broader range of accessible Internet sites. An artist and father of six living in Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority community may have no desire to become an informant or sign a government pledge to stay out of political affairs, but if he calculates that that cooperation means a more reliable income for himself or better educational opportunities for his children, his resolve might well weaken. The strategy of co-opting potentially restive minority groups by playing to their incentives is as old as the modern state itself; this particular incarnation is merely suited for our digital age.

Neither of these tactics—erasing content and limiting access—is the purview of states alone. Technically capable groups and individuals can pursue virtual discrimination independently of the government. The world’s first virtual genocide might be carried out not by a government but by a band of fanatics. Earlier, we discussed how extremist organizations will venture into destructive online activities as they develop or acquire technological skills, and it follows that some of those activities will echo the harassment described above. This goes for lone-wolf zealots, too. It’s not hard to imagine that a rabidly anti-Muslim activist with strong technical skills might go after his local Muslim community’s websites, platforms and media outlets to harass them. This is the virtual equivalent of defacing their property, breaking into their businesses and shouting at them from street corners. If the perpetrator is exceptionally skilled, he will find ways to limit the Muslims’ access by targeting certain routers to shut them down, sending out jamming signals in their neighborhoods or building computer viruses that disable their connections.