• • •
Each country in the global South and East deals with cyberspace challenges in unique ways. India, the world’s largest democracy, is confronted by most of the usual challenges afflicting the developing world: sectarian and religious strife, overpopulation and unemployment, infrastructure decay, regional tensions – along with barely contained hostilities with neighbouring Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Cyberspace policy issues vaulted to the top of India’s national security agenda after the Mumbai terrorist attacks: three consecutive bombings in July 2008 that left twenty-six dead and hundreds injured. It was widely reported that those responsible coordinated their activities through disposable cellphones and forged SIM cards. Alongside revelations that India’s national security establishment had been thoroughly breached by Chinese-based hackers and constant concerns over inflammatory Internet content offending various religious and cultural sensitivities, these attacks provoked a sudden urgency among Indian policy-makers to do something – anything – to control cyberspace and its now 100 million Indian Internet users. The result has proven extreme, draconian, and chaotic in its effects.
The country’s Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules of 2011 place extraordinary policing responsibilities on ISPs and other services that operate in cyberspace. Companies are required to screen content and any Indian resident can compel Google to remove material he or she deems offensive. Content forbidden by the state includes anything that is “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever; or threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence or prevents investigation of any offence or is insulting any other nation.” One might wonder what is allowed in cyberspace in the world’s largest democracy?
In December 2011, the Indian government asked Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Facebook to set up a proactive “prescreening system” to look for objectionable content and remove it before it goes online. Meanwhile, Section 69 of the 2008 Information Technology Act gives the government the power – in the interest of the sovereignty, integrity, defence, or security of India – to direct any Internet service to block, intercept, monitor, or decrypt any information related to these areas. Failure to comply with such demands can lead to fines and up to seven years in jail for executives. Not surprisingly, companies have found it nearly impossible to meet such broad and unusual requirements, and both Facebook and Google are now facing criminal charges in India for not removing content. India has also waged a persistent campaign to require companies operating there to assist in surveillance, most notably Canada’s Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the popular BlackBerry mobile device. Several times India has threatened to expel RIM from the country if the company fails to comply with its demands. At the municipal level, Delhi city authorities have even launched an ambitious program to monitor every single individual visiting the city’s cyber cafés.
• • •
In many countries of the global South and East the rule of law is unevenly applied and arbitrarily enforced, and the newness of the challenges presented by cyberspace cause governments to overstep or awkwardly apply regulations in the face of emergencies or crises. In response to violent demonstrations that erupted across his country against a U.S.-made anti-Islamic film and the publication of French cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the Pakistani minister of the interior, Rehman Malik, ordered all cellphone networks disabled, cutting off access to approximately 100 million users. The ban affected practically everyone, including private security guards, emergency responders, NGOS, and doctors who scrambled to find ways to communicate during the state-imposed blackout. Meanwhile, the Indian government banned all mass text messaging after false alarms about imminent attacks on minority groups circulated over SMS, leading to an estimated 15,000 people fleeing various cities in panic.
In Kenya, in an attempt to prevent the sale and distribution of cloned and pirated mobile phones, the government ordered ISPs to turn off nearly 2 million cellphones whose hard-coded numbers didn’t match databases. Thousands of Kenyans woke up to find their phones suddenly didn’t work, even many who insisted that their purchases were legitimate. In 2010, Turkey ordered ISPs to block access to YouTube, the regulation implemented in such a way that numerous other Google services were also blocked, including Google Books, Google Pages, Google Docs, and Google Translate. In 2005, testing by the OpenNet Initiative found that when South Korea put in place regulations to block several dozen pro-North Korean websites, they also impeded access to more than 3,000 completely unrelated websites that shared the same IP address as the pro-North Korean websites because they used the same hosting company.
More so than in the largely secular West, religion remains a motive force across the global South and East and a major influence on law and politics. This will invariably shape cyberspace as regimes in those regions transplant laws applied to traditional media to ISPs, cellphones, and social media, banning content that offends religious or cultural sensitivities and downloading policing to the private sector. In his 2010 report, In the Name of God, the Citizen Lab’s Helmi Noman analyzes how “the flow of information in cyberspace in majority Muslim countries mirrors, to a large extent, the flow of information in ‘real’ space in these nations.” Many majority Muslim countries criminalize the promotion of non-Islamic faiths among their Muslim citizens offline, and they have now taken steps to ensure that the same laws are applied to cyberspace.
Islam is mentioned explicitly as the state religion in almost all Arab countries, and sharia law is a strong influence over the legal code. As a consequence, press and publication laws that make it a criminal offence to insult Islam are being carried into cyberspace. The terms of service of Oman’s Omantel and Yemen’s Y.net, for instance, specify that users refrain from using these services to contradict religious values. Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a religious police unit in charge of enforcing sharia law, published a document on its website entitled “The Moral Vice of the Internet and How to Practise Hisbah” (Hisbah, roughly translated, means encouraging moral virtues while suppressing vice.) Likewise, access to homosexual content online is restricted in many Muslim countries because gay relationships are considered taboo, and are in many cases illegal.
While many of these restrictions are imposed by the state, Noman details how pressures to enact and enforce such laws often come not from governments but from civil society groups and/or religious leaders. In July 2012, Ra’if Badawi, editor of the Free Saudi Liberals website, was arrested under Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cyber Crime Law for violating state values by providing an online platform for people to debate religion. The primary impetus for the charges seemed to emanate from a powerful Saudi cleric, Shaikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, who declared Badawi an “unbeliever … and apostate who must be tried and sentenced according to what his words require.”
Although the protection of religion is generally put forward to justify such charges, the real purpose, many argue, is to silence political dissent. On point, our research suggests that similar conflicts are cropping up with increasing frequency across the Muslim world, particularly in countries facing social unrest. Recently, a Saudi religious cleric objected to women using emoticons, insisting that “a woman should not use these images when speaking to a man who is not her ‘mahram’ [husband, roughly translated] because these faces are used to express how she is feeling, so it is as if she is smiling, laughing, acting shy and so on, and a woman should not do that with a non-mahram man.” These religious pressures have pushed many Islamic countries towards attempting to build a halal (permissible under Islamic law) Internet that would cordon off their pop
ulations through both technical and regulatory means. In 2012, for example, Iran took several steps towards the creation of its own halal Internet, creating new laws, censoring foreign websites, outlawing circumvention tools, and even, for a time, blocking access to all Google services.
In the Far East, the same pattern is emerging. In Thailand, insulting the royal family is forbidden, an ancient crime known as lèse-majesté. The law is enforced by the Office of Prevention and Suppression of Information Technology Crimes, which systematically scans the Internet looking for evidence of violations. Thailand threatened to censor all of YouTube, before it reached an agreement with the service to block only those videos that offend Thai law originating from its own jurisdiction. Nonetheless, critics claim that tens of thousands of websites are routinely censored in Thailand, and the law is widely seen to have been applied selectively, often in very harsh ways. In a notorious 2011 case, sixty-year-old Ampon Tangnoppakul was sentenced to twenty years in prison for sending four text messages deemed insulting to the queen.
In an echo of elsewhere, the Thai government downloads policing responsibilities to ISPs and website administrators. Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the former webmaster of a popular Thai website, Prachatai, is on trial and faces a prison sentence of up to fifteen years, not for anything she said or posted, but for not deleting comments fast enough from the web forum that she operates. In such a climate, website operators are going to err on the side of caution, creating a wide chilling effect. Those who question the journalistic ethics of online anonymity ought to look more closely at such cases.
• • •
Netizens in the West are used to thinking of either the state or corporations as the biggest threat to rights and freedoms online, but in many developing countries non-state and non-corporate actors pose the greatest danger. Although cellphone use is spreading in Afghanistan at a lightning pace, it operates in a regulatory space largely shaped by the Taliban. In the provinces and cities where they dominate, the Taliban has issued threats to cellphone providers to turn off signals at the towers they control, making cellphones unusable. Taliban leaders view this as a defensive measure to prevent informants from calling in Taliban locations to American forces or to keep NATO signals intelligence from eavesdropping on their communications. “Our main goal is to degrade the enemy’s capability in tracking down our mujahedeen,” a Taliban spokesman told the New York Times, but as the Times report noted, the motivation is just as likely to remind the population that the Taliban, not the government, has control over communications.
In Latin America some of the most innovative uses of information and communication technologies, and the most repressive in terms of their societal effects, have been deployed by drug cartels. In several high-profile cases, authorities have seized cartel-related assets that demonstrate advanced digital and networking capabilities – a giant 100-metre transmission tower, for instance! Today’s cartel member is as heavily wired as a Palo Alto undergraduate student or Manhattan bond trader. Popular YouTube videos in Mexico glorify the lifestyles of the drug trade and are used to issue threats against rival gangs, and intimidate police and the general public. One of the most alarming innovations has been the use of the Comments section of YouTube video postings to communicate threats from one cartel to another, or from a cartel to the general public. The cartels have also shown a ruthless ability to employ social media to intimidate watchdogs and others from using those very same tools. One blogger critical of the cartels was beheaded, and then, in a macabre display, the cartels posted a video with her head on a keyboard, next to a cardboard sign warning others not to do the same. Cartel members who murdered a moderator of a social network left a note next to his corpse saying, “This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report on the social networks.” In another case, a sign attached to two dead bodies hung from a pedestrian overpass read, “This will happen to all the Internet snitches.” In yet another case, disembowelled and mutilated corpses were hung from a bridge with a sign that read, “This is going to happen to all those posting funny things on the internet, you better fucking pay attention. I’m about to get you.” Gruesome videos of informants or captured police officers being executed are set to music glorifying one or another gang, some of whom have become popular on local radio, probably as the result of intimidating broadcasters, or of outright ownership of media outlets by the cartels.
Most of us are vaguely aware that there is a seamier, darker side to the Internet, but we tend to assume it is hidden deep in the shadows. While that’s true in some cases, in Mexico (and spreading through other parts of Latin America) the gruesome violence of the cartels is on full display, thriving in the new social media environment, while simultaneously presenting an extraordinary threat to freedom of expression. Barely noticed by the technorati of the industrialized North, Mexico is undergoing its own social media revolution, and it is having a regional, if not global, impact.
• • •
In February 2012, Google broke ground on an experimental super-fast fiber-optic network it launched in Kansas City, Kansas. The city was selected from a list of more than a thousand other American municipalities as the test ground for a one-gigabit-per-second Internet connection that would offer speeds up to 100 times faster for downloads and 1,000 times faster for uploads than a typical U.S. connection point. The Google manager behind the project, Kevin Lo, said that engineers had been busy planning, surveying, and eating “way too much barbecue.”
At roughly the same time, thousands of miles away, two separate freak accidents resulted in the severing of four submarine cables to the African continent, shutting off connectivity to at least nine countries. Ten years ago, there was virtually no Internet access in Africa outside of South Africa and parts of North Africa, and there would have been, as a consequence, no cables to sever, no outages rippling across the region. Since then, the situation has changed, and dramatically so. Although there remain huge regulatory, energy, computer literacy, and other roadblocks, the continent is rapidly coming online, with growth rates approaching 2,000 percent per year, compared to roughly 480 percent for the rest of the globe. Africans, like other populations of the global South, have a growing stake in cyberspace.
Real communities rarely, if ever, emerge by fiat, or by any other artificial means. Rather, they coalesce organically, a result of individuals and interests growing together. Cyberspace may well be a global technological artifact, but it is colonized and inhabited by individuals and communities who have come together spontaneously, empowered by digital technologies and collectively creating its social ethos.
In the 1990s, the users and creators of cyberspace were largely white, prosperous, and clustered in the industrialized North and West. By the mid-2000s, this was no longer the case. While the highest penetration of users remained in North America and Europe, the bulk of Internet users had shifted south and east. By 2012, two-thirds of all Internet users were located outside of North America and Europe, and over one-quarter were in China.
Images and metaphors of cyberspace are a useful way to portray its dominant characteristics. William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term cyberspace, paints a picture of the domain as a virtual-reality matrix in which users physically plug their minds into a world of “endless city lights receding.” The image evokes clean spheres and precise mathematical coordinates, like the contours of 3D computer graphics. Gibson was influenced by his experiences of the game arcades that lit up Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, where he lived. For many cyberspace users today this consumerist abstraction is still the dominant impression.
For the next phase of its evolution, however, the more appropriate image would perhaps be the favela, or shantytown, which better describes where the next billion cyberspace users will come from. Most of the next billion digital natives will be under twenty-five years old, and most will live in societies where the chances for local prosperity are relatively slim, and where the political institutions tend to fa
ll on the authoritarian end of the spectrum, if there are political institutions at all. To them, the glittering virtual realities of cyberspace represent a world far removed from their own – a world of wealth, opportunity, boundless creativity, and hope. It is in these back streets of the developing world, with their crowded Internet cafés and burgeoning wireless access points, that the future of the Internet is now being forged.
Western states came late to the game of governing the Internet. Indeed, there were deliberate policy choices made early on to “keep the state out.” Al Gore may not have “invented the Internet,” but he did play an important role in Congress by defining a limited role for government in structuring how it should be regulated. Not so for most governments in the South and East. They approach cyberspace at a time of heightened concerns around cyber security, where threats are everywhere, and states like Russia and China are offering solutions.
We tend to think of globalization as a torrent of ingenuity originating in the industrialized North and West and spreading outwards. But globalization is a two-way process. The same networks that spread information from London, Tokyo, and New York offer a channel in the other direction from the developing world. With globalization, the local is not so local anymore. Just as online commerce enables small businesses in middle America to reach global audiences, so too has the penetration of communications technologies in Colombia, Somalia, and Uzbekistan given those geographic outposts global reach. For new digital natives cyberspace may offer not only the best means for routing around structural barriers to socioeconomic advancement, but also a chance to access global markets and economic riches far in excess of those available locally. Such access does not require venture capital, leased office space, and a large staff; it requires intelligence, boldness, and Internet connectivity through a cheap consumer device.
Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace Page 10