by Jim Dwyer
In 2010, as the Diaspora project was getting started, Google released its first “transparency report” about requests from government and others to remove content from parts of the Internet under Google’s control. It announced in November 2013 that the requests from governments for information about users had increased by 100 percent in the three years since the first report. The United States led all countries by a wide margin, seeking data on nearly eleven thousand people, and an uncertain number of requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Google said it was bringing a suit against the United States because the Department of Justice contended that the company was not permitted to disclose those requests.
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When the 2009 election in Iran returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power in a supposed landslide, Isa Saharkhiz, a fifty-seven-year-old journalist, became a conduit between reformers and foreign reporters. “After the disputed election, they came and raided the house and took the computer,” Mehdi Saharkhiz, his son, said.
His father hid out in Tirkadeh, a small village in northern Iran. “He was in full disguise there,” Mehdi said. “He kept his phone off all the time, except when he was making calls.
Nevertheless, intelligence agents hunted him down. “They told him that they tracked him through the cell phone,” Mehdi said, “the few minutes a day he was on.”
The agents had a powerful tool: for several years, Nokia Siemens Networks had been supplying the two leading mobile network providers in Iran with items from its “Intelligence Solutions” catalog, which delivered “tailored solutions for lawful interception, monitoring and intelligence analysis to law enforcement agencies, government agencies and authorized groups worldwide.” The brains of its product line, purchased by the Iranian companies, were monitoring centers trumpeted by Nokia Siemens for the power of their surveillance capacities: “Its unique modular Front-End and Back-End architecture allows the monitoring and interception of all types of voice and data communication in all networks, i.e. fixed, mobile, Next Generation Network (NGN) and the internet.”
Using a panther for a logo, Nokia Siemens said the products were built for pulling together scattered bits of information and seeing where they led. “It is the smart analytical tool for intelligence personnel and analysts, enabling them to trace the track and helping decision-makers to fulfill their mandates: To identify and predict trends, patterns or problem areas that require action.”
The extent of this power was reported by Hanna Nikkanen in Voima, a Finnish newspaper, in an article that quoted from a manual for the equipment: “Collecting interception data is a process which takes place in the ‘background,’ assuring that the intercepted target (end user) is never aware of a possible interception. . . . The maximum number of simultaneous active interception sessions is 50,000.”
During his interrogation, Isa Saharkhiz was beaten and injured. He was sentenced to three years in prison for actions deemed subversive and disrespectful to the supreme leader, and his health declined. “We understand that he is now in a wheelchair,” Mehdi said.
Nokia Siemens, having sold its surveillance gear as the avant-garde of technology for governments of all stripes, was called before the European Parliament in June 2010 to explain its provision of such equipment to repressive regimes. As it happened, European regulators had themselves been at the forefront of pushing for the integration of more powerful surveillance and tracking standards in mobile phone networks.
“Governments in almost all nations required operators to deploy Lawful Interception as a condition of their license to operate,” Barry French, a Nokia Siemens executive, told the hearing. This was a passive component, he said, that most likely was already in the phones used by everyone in the hearing room. “And for good reason: to support law enforcement in combating things like child pornography, drug trafficking and terrorism.”
The monitoring centers were a separate, but necessary, component from the Lawful Interception features, he said; they gave enormous power to law enforcement agencies, at times bypassing oversight functions.
“Monitoring centers are, in our view, more problematic and have a risk of raising issues related to human rights that we are not adequately suited to address,” French testified.
So Nokia Siemens had started to get out of the monitoring business a few months before the disputed 2009 presidential elections in Iran, he said. But not before it had installed a system that made it possible for the tracking of Isa Saharkhiz and others.
“We believe we should have understood the issues in Iran better in advance and addressed them more proactively,” French testified. “There have been credible reports from Iran that telecommunications monitoring has been used as a tool to suppress dissent and freedom of speech.”
Nokia Siemens could not reinvent history, he said, but it could learn from it. And he reminded the legislators that there were tensions among ideals and technology, and international agreements on standards.
“Consider the fact that the systems that we provided to Iran were designed to implement a right that the [International Telecommunications Union] has said is held by member states, and are required by law in the vast majority of those member states,” French testified.
Societies evolve, he said, leaders change, and governments do not remain static over the life of a set of technologies.
“We are always at risk of finding that we have deployed technology that seemed appropriate for use by one government only to find it misused by the next,” he said. A fair enough point in the abstract, but the Iranian regime was already authoritarian in character when Siemens Nokia supplied the surveillance equipment.
An American company called Blue Coat Systems, of Sunnyvale, California, provided surveillance and censorship equipment to more than a dozen countries, including ones with histories of vivid abuse of human rights—like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and China. Other countries included Russia, Bahrain, and Thailand, according to a report in 2013 by the Citizen Lab Internet research group at the University of Toronto.
It was a matter of definitions. One person might see a surveillance package as a sentinel for people haunting cyberspace with disfigured appetites for children, or notions of how to slaughter civilians; another might see it as a way of hunting and crushing dissent.
As the four Diaspora guys set out to build their project, the Internet was still in its big bang moment, the clouds of its atoms nowhere near settled into recognizable forms. Its short history was summed up by Rob Faris of Harvard’s Berkman Center during a conference in Budapest on digital liberties: “A bunch of smart people invented the Internet; another person added World Wide Web. Soon tons of people were saying, hey, this is great. We can share recipes for cookies; can share tips for gardening and knitting; we can create groups to share science fiction.”
It was also, he pointed out, a source of recipes for bombs, a platform for incitement and subversion and persecution, and, sometimes, a tool of liberation. And it was grafted into every dark corner of the human psyche.
“Millions of other people said, hey, the Internet is great for porn as well. Others,” Faris said, “offered up ways to more effectively commit suicide.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Max turned his head, unable to watch. Out of the blue, Ilya had just volunteered to show a bit of Diaspora’s progress to a group of about forty fellow hackers—people who, for much longer, without any attention from mainstream news organizations like the New York Times, and certainly with no monsoons of Kickstarter cash, had been working toward essentially the same goals as the four young men from NYU. In mid-July, the group had gathered in Portland, Oregon, for a summit.
Just when the serious business of the day was winding down and people were packing up to go sample the city’s artisanal beers, Ilya volunteered to show one of the group’s gurus, Evan Prodromou, how a particular Diaspora feature worked.
“This is not the moment to do a demo t
hat we’ve never actually tested,” Max muttered. “And not in front of this audience.”
But Ilya already had his laptop open, and Prodromou was leaning over his shoulder.
“This is when things never work,” an onlooker commiserated with Max.
Another person, in the back of the room, Jon Phillips, was blunt about Diaspora. “These guys are vaporware,” he declared. Prodromou was also a skeptic. One purpose of the summit, he had said, was to dispel the notion that some “messianic” force by itself could achieve their goals. But if people there hadn’t figured out by then that the Diaspora Four had no illusions about being messiahs, then Ilya’s wide-eyed guilelessness, his unguarded exuberance about sharing an early draft of the work in progress went a long way to allaying such fears.
Long before Diaspora lit up Kickstarter, Prodromou and other members of the group in the room had toiled in anonymity to make it possible for people to use the web as a social tool, on their own terms. Share a photo? Give a thumbs-up for someone’s comment on an article that had been posted? Track down old friends? All these things could be done without having to go through Facebook or anything like it. With the right tools, they believed, each person could and should be sovereign over what he or she chose to share. Moreover, there was no reason that a person on Facebook should not be able to connect with a person in another network.
Those were the general principles of what this group of hackers called the federated social web. Services like Facebook fenced in their users, deciding what sites they could interact with and how they could display information. The better model, in the view of the federated social web group, was the telephone: no matter what brands or models of phone two people were using to converse, regardless of whether they were customers of AT&T or Verizon, they could call each other and send text messages. At the summit, the hackers spoke about ways to make that happen on the web.
At its essence, the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee and his generation was entirely federated: it consisted of databases of documents that were stored around the world in millions of digital libraries, called servers, and connected through the Internet. Regardless of who had created them or how they were stored, web browsers made it possible to view any of them that were not restricted by passwords. There was no high wall to block users from communicating with someone else on the web just because the two parties used different servers, for instance, or one person had text files while another had photos. Similarly, e-mail is federated: a message can be sent from one service to another, like a person with a Gmail account writing to someone with a Yahoo! account, or a personal mail server. The hackers at the federated social web summit saw no reason those principles should not apply to all kinds of personal sharing.
“From the point of view of a typical social website, if you don’t have an account on that site, you don’t exist,” Prodromou said. “The only way for your friends on that site to interact with you is if they invite you to join the site. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of other social networking sites on the web, almost every single one works as if there were zero other social networks on the web.”
To get around this, Tantek Çelik, another of the organizers, explained that loosely affiliated hackers had spent years developing and agreeing on short strings of code, microformats. Each string performed what seemed like an elementary task. For instance, one allowed a user to authentically identify himself to another, and made it possible for the receiving party to answer back with a persuasive confirmation of her identity. Another let a single message be published to a list of contacts. They might have seemed simple, but it was essential that people making software reach a consensus that these strings—rather than some other formula—were the methods that would be used. By the agreement of this community of makers, some of them in start-ups, others in major corporations, these microformats were the building blocks of a social web. They belonged to no one. It was principle-driven work. Plus it was practical: why shouldn’t they be able to communicate to anyone, anywhere?
“The only way we are going to move social networks forward is if we can interact with our friends across social networks,” said Chris Messina, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who also had worked on the microformats before joining Google.
These microformats were wires, pipes, and valves, not exciting, but essential infrastructure. The Diaspora group had not said much about using them in building their project, and their arrival in this crusade, with their $200,000 in crowdsourced money, to the accompaniment of trumpets by the New York Times, was the occasion of grumbling, encouragement, and worry. Blaine Cook, at thirty, was one of the elders. Working as a lead developer for Twitter, Cook had created a microformat that allowed a Twitter user to connect to other applications without revealing password and identification information. After leaving Twitter, he continued to fiddle with the standards. He had written to Diaspora and was eager to meet them in Portland. It was a relief; he was happy to see them succeed, but not to abandon the work that had already been knitted together.
“When I first saw the project, they had their own technology stack ideas,” Cook said. “All of us were like, ‘Oh, God, they’ll set us back two years with the technology that they were proposing.’ It was massively complicated. It was going to be the sort of thing where people look at it, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this technology doesn’t work, and let’s abandon this idea.’”
Max and Ilya assured him that Diaspora was happy to discover a community of fellow travelers, and fully intended to use their protocols. “We’re very glad that you guys have done all this already,” Max said.
Max turned to Dan. “Making standards is a thankless, awful job. It’s like giving a root canal while you’re getting one,” he said.
“Did you just think of that?” Dan said.
In the front of the room, Ilya had his laptop open and was showing Prodromou how Diaspora could use one of the micoformats to communicate with StatusNet, a microblogging company run by Prodromou.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” Prodromou wrote later. “Hard to believe how quickly this is moving along.”
Tantek Çelik said that all of their work had to be proven in real life, beginning with themselves. It was a cardinal principle of development: use the software yourself. Dunk it in a bath of real life. If you’re making dog food, eat it.
“As soon as I build something, I try to dog-food it immediately,” Çelik said.
Interest in federation was hardly limited to the group in Portland; Diaspora had shown that there was excitement around the world. Not only could it mean better tools for socializing; it could also be a place for more vibrant political speech.
“Consider that informed citizens worldwide are using online social networking tools to share vital information about how to improve their communities and their governments—and that in some places, the consequences if you’re discovered to be doing so are arrest, torture or imprisonment,” wrote Richard Esguerra of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the influential force on digital and human rights issues. “With more user control, diversity, and innovation, individuals speaking out under oppressive governments could conduct activism on social networking sites while also having a choice of services and providers that may be better equipped to protect their security and anonymity.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A few minutes after nine, Ilya dropped his bag at the desk, grabbed a plate, and, working from a groaning board that he could have navigated with his eyes shut, speared waffles and bacon. Dan was already parked at a table, sipping coffee. Max was deep in conversation, his plate cleaned. Rafi was a few steps behind Ilya at the buffet. All armies, including coders, move on their stomachs.
By that Friday morning in early August 2010, the four guys had spent two months holed up in a big software development laboratory in San Francisco, working anonymously and ferociously. Before they left New York, everyone wanted a piece of them. The Grippi family
discovered a television news crew parked outside their home one morning. Reporters from all over the world were hunting down any of the Diaspora guys to hear nerds declare war on other nerds. Anyone connected with Diaspora was hounded by a press corps eager to speak with the “Facebook Killers”—a title that was the snickering figment of a headline writer’s mind, embodying an ambition the four guys had never uttered, or, as far as could be told, entertained.
“We have to just go and code,” Rafi had said. There was no point spending huge amounts of time to correct a twisted version of their hopes. They would otherwise never get anything done.
Other than to post a grateful blog item that was distributed to their Kickstarter list, saying that they were going to put their heads down and work for the rest of the summer, the Diaspora Four said nothing about where they planned to do it or when they would emerge. They vanished. The windfall coinage of their celebrity in public had stunned them. Every second, eight new people were joining Facebook. As Goliath swelled, so did the importance of the Davids.