Internet Freedom Wanes as Governments Target Messaging, Social Apps

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/14/500214959/internet-freedom-wanes-as-governments-target-messaging-social-apps

by happy-go-lucky • 10 years ago

206 60 10 years ago

npr.org

rm_-rf_slash• 10 years ago

Although perhaps politically impossible, I maintain that the only check against corruption and misuse of mass data collection is to make it freely available to the public.

Mass surveillance is not going away. If anything, it will accelerate. The only way to keep the powerful from misusing it is to put everybody on the same level playing field.

The alternative is to glue our crossed fingers together and hope that nobody will abuse a technology that can bring so much good to do many people.

CaptSpify• 10 years ago

You might be interested in this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/this-man...

The only way to keep the powerful from misusing it is to put everybody on the same level playing field.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I have a few issues:

1) Nobody will ever be on the same playing field. There will always be someone who needs special closed-door meetings because "state-secrets" or "to catch the bad guys" or whatever. I think it is just too easy to abuse by those in power for them to let it slip by.

2) We'd need to stop treating criminals or outsiders as "bad" people first. Example: We need to treat violent offenders as people who don't fit in well with our non-violent society, rather than horrible people who need locked away and punished. We'd have to start recognizing that people who don't fit in well are often products of our culture, and we need to do more to support them.

3) I think the social changes would be drastic, for good and bad. Example: We'd start to realize how, statistically, everyone watches porn from time to time, and what types they watch. There's way too much social stigma out there right now for me to think that would end well.

ccvannorman3• 10 years ago

for a follow up to 3) I recommend investigating South Park's "TrollTrace" episodes where a town riots due to browsing/troll history lookup power given to the citizens.

hackernews2000• 10 years ago

Brazilian politicians are currently suggesting to create a new federal agency to regulate mobile apps because they "are unfair competition" to the services provided by the government-enforced oligopoly of four mobile carriers that basically share the market equally (http://img.estadao.com.br/link/files/2012/01/operadoras-tele...), and because Whatsapp doesn't (can't) hand out encrypted conversation histories to the police (http://adrenaline.uol.com.br/2016/11/09/46694/mp-defende-cri...).

diego_moita• 10 years ago

Brazilians being Brazilians it is quite likely that this will create an incentive for people to start using illegal apps.

E.g.: in Brazil abortion is illegal but quite common, tax evasion is illegal but quite common, smuggling from Paraguay is illegal but quite common, gambling is illegal but quite common, ...

meira• 10 years ago

What is really common is to bash Brazil while brazillian.

marcosdumay• 10 years ago

It's very hard to make those applications actually illegal (the Congress literally does not have the power for that).

More likely, the government will regulate any company distributing them out of existence, while foreign companies and software-only protocols will get the entire market.

slezyr• 10 years ago

How could germany be so free?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_YouTube_videos_in_...

tormeh2• 10 years ago

GEMA is not the German government as far as I can see...

Kenji• 10 years ago

We will witness the day when everyone is forced to have a unique internet ID and your full name and address are revealed when you visit a website. It will have a vast chilling effect on free speech. Everyone who uses non-backdoored encryption will be a prosecuted criminal. Uncontrolled free speech only harms government and prevents it from growing.

dictum• 10 years ago

I wonder if that's part of Peter Thiel's plans.

philippnagel• 10 years ago

Why do you think that?

pyrale• 10 years ago

I hate to be the sheeple-ception guy, but :

We will witness the day when everyone is forced to have a unique internet ID

FB and google can already fuly trace most people's web journeys

your full name and address are revealed when you visit a website.

They also have your physical data.

It will have a vast chilling effect on free speech.

Facebook and Youtube's comfort bubbles of information already regulate your ability to reach people, and filter your information sources.

Everyone who uses non-backdoored encryption will be a prosecuted criminal.

Meanwhile, Whatsapp, the standard bearer of encryption, leaks your data to the parent company, for advertising purpose.

Uncontrolled free speech only harms government and prevents it from growing.

You're already owned by people in power. Breaking free already entails becoming an outcast in your society. And maybe, just maybe, if you fear the government to take control, allowing such power to concentrate in a couple corporation is not a good idea, and you should drop your dichotomy between private and public entities.

myowncrapulence• 10 years ago

The irony that most people agree about "around-the-corner" dystopian futures but when you provide fact that we are already living in one you start seeing "conspiracy nut/paranoid/shadow-people" replies.

Many don't step out of mainstream lifestyles and so they don't see the rigid boundaries. Think Allegory of the Cave.

ccvannorman3• 10 years ago

Your main argument is on point but you weaken it with "owned by those in power". Be careful the words you choose as these seem to land you somewhere on the wrong side of conspiracy-theorist/anti-corporate. I say this because if your goal is to affect swing votes, that phrase will push them away.

bittercynic• 10 years ago

I don't want to diminish the problems you've outlined, but I do think our current state is different from what GP believes is coming. We are still free to use strong crypto, free to take steps to anonymise ourselves. As long as we can do those things without fear of prosecution, I think there is a glimmer of hope for the internet.

edejong• 10 years ago

Methods to circumvent this (I'll sound like ESR, but wth):

1. Own your hardware.

2. Own your data.

3. Share your algorithms.

4. Promote commercial benefits of encryption. Lift existing laws to encrypted communication, such as doctor-patient confidentiality.

5. Learn about cryptography and explain it to your techy friends. What we don't know, we fear.

sangnoir3• 10 years ago

6. Own your pipes. ISPs with DPI can undo much of your efforts as they try to monetize you. This might be mitigated by encryption everywhere, but I think you're still subject to the state, which can still identify you if sufficiently motivated. Or alternatively, make it attempts at bypassing identification illegal and prosecute all those who do ("Why do you have something to hide?")

vaadu• 10 years ago

So Freedom wanes because governments are doing what internet monopolies(facebook and google) have been doing for years?

Bartweiss• 10 years ago

Well... yes?

Governments are under much stricter restrictions regarding censoring speech than companies, and are generally seen as more important because they can come and put you in prison. I agree that total privacy on the internet has been exceptional for ages, but there's a real difference between Google knowing all about you (and maybe telling the government if they ask) and the government knowing all about everyone and deciding how they want to act on that.

J. Edgar Hoover never worked for Google.

fauigerzigerk• 10 years ago

So far Google hasn't prosecuted me for spreading atheism.

ccvannorman3• 10 years ago

"First they came for the neo-liberal Trump supporters, and I didn't speak up."

bbcbasic• 10 years ago

Even if they could, they would rather targetedly advertise to you now they know that about you.

noarchy• 10 years ago

So Freedom wanes because governments are doing what internet monopolies(facebook and google) have been doing for years?

I don't have to use Google for search, and I don't. And Facebook is far from being compulsory.

Can you tell me how to opt-out of what governments are doing?

piotrjurkiewicz2• 10 years ago

Germany free?

Especially to those ones who criticize Merkel's immigration policy...

This report is a joke.

denzil_correa• 10 years ago

Especially to those ones who criticize Merkel's immigration policy...

Are you referring to anything in particular here?

piotrjurkiewicz2• 10 years ago

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7371/facebook-freedom-of-...

tormeh2• 10 years ago

German police here, downvoting this comment. /s

Just stop. There are limits on free speech in Germany, but it's mostly for denying the Holocaust and yelling "sieg heil" in the street etc. I assume you're not referring to that?

kr7• 10 years ago

Or satirizing Erdogan:

https://boingboing.net/2016/04/23/german-political-leader-ar...

Or "hate speech", which will certainly have a chilling effect on the legitimate discussion of immigration policy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-springs-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/19/head-of-german...

jwtadvice2• 10 years ago

How did the Snowden Disclosures get completely dismissed by this report? US intelligence has been backdooring social and messaging apps for mass surveillance and propaganda (e.g. Zunzuneo) for decades.

Internet freedom was only a short, small blip of possibility. It died decades ago when control was consolidated into regulated corporations, its companies were infiltrated by intelligence personnel, and when modern communications became a specific military target (with UK and US leading the charge).

This story doesn't offer solutions (I get that it's not trying to). Rather, it repudiates specific countries for specific decisions while giving others a free pass for their own unsavory behavior.

It's cute that their map shows the former Soviet Union as "not free" and the former American Cold War strategic assets as "free" - but this cute glib approach to assessment is backed by a severe lack of security analysis and a severe lack of reasonable acknowledgement of basic facts.

Here's an approach: encourage technology whose transparency and control is centered in individuals & cede top-down influence over the networks of those individuals and their technology as much as is technically possible.

Don't like that solution? Well, you're in for a ride called "waning internet freedom". Color the map however you want. But appropriating the free software movement into some military geopolitical nonsense loses you credibility.

rdtsc5• 10 years ago

It's cute that their map shows the former Soviet Union as "not free" and the former American Cold War strategic assets as "free"

Very good point. I think anyone interested in how "Free" press is used and how un-free it usually is, should read Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Hate them or love them, they provide a very good examples that are documented of "free" media bias.

My favorite example is CNN recently. I think they at some point dropped the pretense and sunk to levels lower than what Fox has been considered. My favorite recent example is of course Chris Cuomo from CNN who said "...it is illegal to possess these stolen documents. It is different from the media. So everything you learn about this, you are learning from us." That is such a brilliant example of what is happening.

The only question there to ask is why be so blatant and desperate about censorship. And I think the answer is because they got desperate. They realized they lost control.

As you say, and Snowden showed US govt has been using Tweeter and other such thing to control and conduct various operations. I am guessing the Arab Spring is a good recent example.

Natsu• 10 years ago

That would be this CNN clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X16_KzX1vE

And this is the best explanation for why he was wrong:

https://popehat.com/2016/10/17/no-it-is-not-illegal-to-read-...

As for why they would do that, well, they leaked the debate questions to Donna Brazille. And then she lied about it, saying they were modified. Anyone on here can go check the DKIM headers, they're both valid and they cover the body of the message providing cryptographic non-repudiation.

eveningcoffee4• 10 years ago

Except that you fell for the GP incompetence in geography.

The fact is that one should read everything very very carefully everywhere and try to just access bare facts and abandon everything that is purely a (journalist) opinion. It is very important to know bias of the source and understand that information is used to distort the understanding of the reality.

There are quite many people who think that they have escaped the misinformation field except they have been fallen for other carefully constructed reality.

convivialdingo• 10 years ago

Well, to be clear it probably is illegal to read for those with clearance. e.g. SF-312

It wouldn't be criminal, but it's certainly possible to receive a civil contract enforcement action.

pipio21• 10 years ago

Agreed.

In the article the important thing is not freedom, but having facebook, twitter, google and other American companies restricted or not.

Given that after 9-11 free pass on the US gobertment directly controlling those companies in the name of security, the people using those products are not that free at all.

We need decentralization, we need trusting our hardware does not betray, report and inform to the overlords, that would be real freedom.

mzw_mzw• 10 years ago

the US gobertment directly controlling those companies in the name of security

[citation needed]

75j• 10 years ago

propaganda (e.g. Zunzuneo)

Here's a more recent example of the US government creating propaganda abroad and covertly embedding it into the local media:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/us-government-pentag...

eveningcoffee4• 10 years ago

It's cute that their map shows the former Soviet Union as "not free" and the former American Cold War strategic assets as "free"

What is not true.

Large parts of former Soviet occupied and Warsaw Pact countries are marked either as not assessed or free. Except Russia along with Belarus (not free) and Ukraine (partially free, well, except Crimea, that is at the moment Russian annexed, but probably marked after Ukraine, or vice versa).

I think that the even more serious problem we face is that most people are distancing themselves from the reality and are falling into some lalaland where the reason is a very weak argument.

qwertyuiop924• 10 years ago

...Well, just stick to the web and the more underground sections of the internet, and avoid big silos. Don't log into facebook. Don't log into google. Hell, don't even use google, if DDG works for you now.

Overall internet freedom isn't waning as much as you think. Step outside the silos, and look at the net, not just your corner.

dualogy• 10 years ago

Sure. Same old story though, "the silos" are where "the masses" are. If you're doing Just Underground Thangs in "the more underground sections", "TPTB" will happily leave you alone because you're fringe (no leverage, no voice) and you're not engaging "the masses". If you aimed to, you'd have to play in the silos, by "silo rules". ;)

Back when we had the communist bloc or before the fascist axis, the above model seemed much more potently free-est-of-all because "autocrats would target and shut down underground channels, not here though"..

forgottenpass• 10 years ago

This is what we get for designing systems with a low number (typically one) privileged centralized controlling body.

The government gets to roll up and says "I'll have some of what they're having."

I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to centralized architectures, just that this is one of the inseparable tradeoffs that comes with those decisions.

DamnYuppie• 10 years ago

I will admit I maybe missing the point of your comment. Are you referring to the infiltration of large telecommunications and social media providers? If you are referring to the underlying protocols themselves then it doesn't make much sense as packet based protocols were initially funded and built by the US Department of Defense.

voxic11• 10 years ago

He is referring to technologies like Facebook which are controlled 100% by 1 person. Verses technologies like email which are not fully controllable by a single entity.

walrus01• 10 years ago

Network engineer here: the best crypto in the world won't save you when the government sends men with guns to your offices to tell you to null route certain IP blocks (google IPs, YouTube, Turkey) or forces all ASNs in the country to single home themselves to the government run ASN (DCI, Iran).

There are a lot of bottlenecks at layers 1-3 that autocratic regimes can use to mess with the internet long before layers 4-7 become important.

enraged_camel• 10 years ago

>Network engineer here: the best crypto in the world won't save you when the government sends men with guns to your offices to tell you to null route certain IP blocks

Yep. This is exactly why crypto is not the solution to government oppression. The only thing crypto does is make the government's snooping more difficult, which can definitely piss them off and/or flag your activities as suspicious. And that is generally NOT what you want when facing a government actor.

Look, I'm going to say something that's going to be very unpopular here since this forum is full of techies. Here it is: you can't solve social problems using technology, because at the end of the day it's humans who are the weakest link in any equation. Keeping your communications encrypted isn't very meaningful when the government can just torture whatever it needs out of you and your loved ones. Sure, that's illegal in much of the West today, but that is now. The future holds no such guarantees. In fact, I'd posit that the USA at least is just one major terrorist attack away from full-on tyranny. Another September 11 equivalent and we're all fucked, crypto or no crypto.

niftich• 10 years ago

Better link (prefer original sources): https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2016

The "what about Snowden's revelations" argument is partially missing the point. People in the 'green' countries don't experience network-wide blocks, or loosely-targeted, blanket arrests for merely participating in platforms, even in places where other chilling-effect factors exist, like in the US [1], and Hungary [2] (both of them conductors of mass surveillance [3][4]), which are documented in detail in the long-form reports. This lack of active, direct governmental harassment of ordinary citizens is a fairly observable difference in outcomes from those places where this occurs.

But in any case, their reports are more valuable than their map, which distills many disparate, sometimes orthogonal factors into one of four discrete colors. In my opinion, despite Freedom House's good content in their textual reports, the Reporters Without Borders 'World Press Freedom Index' [5] provides a ranking that more accurately represents chilling effects that are not due to direct governmental coercion.

[1] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/united-stat... [2] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/hungary [3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/01/top-european-co... [4] http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/hungary... [5] https://rsf.org/en/ranking

gnipgnip• 10 years ago

Considering the biased source, it'd be nice to hear first hand experience from HNers.

Let me start.

India:

Generally free. Sometimes random people are arrested because they happened to curse a politician, and some moron complained to the Police. It's more often comical, in contrast to say cases like Snowden/Assange, The IT dept. (like much else) are rather incompetent, and have at various points blocked Github and Vimeo in their puritanical zeal.

Internet Freedom Wanes as Governments Target Messaging, Social Apps

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