It was not so long ago when Savita Bhabhi walked our digital streets, before the Nanny State chased her away to protect and uphold our innocence. Luckily, her manager soon found her a new home in Cyberia. Our customs department routinely seizes copies of The Economist for printing maps showing parts of Kashmir under Pakistan?s custody. Online subscribers continue to access the digital edition on their computers, tablets and smartphones. Salman Rushdie?s Satanic Verses remains banned in India, though Amazon sells Kindle editions of the controversial novel, which can be bought and read anywhere in the world.
The freedoms we currently enjoy online and take for granted may not be around for long. Big Brother 2.0 is at our doorstep, and he is not waiting for an invite.
Even as millions of Chinese, Iranians and Syrians fear arrest and torture for speaking freely on the Internet, the ?advanced? west isn?t behind either. Efforts to gag, block and snoop are everywhere, regardless of the nation state?s ideology, wealth or location. With multinational technology corporations only too willing to crawl when asked to kneel, the future could be digital and dark, says Rebecca MacKinnon in Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. The book raises issues relevant to casual Internet users as well as anyone concerned about the alarming rise of unanswerable online despots.
Our online lives have elevated Facebook, Google, Gmail, Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr and BlackBerry to the status of digital sovereigns of the 21st century, holding enormous power over us, but with little accountability. These modern-day public squares hold vast amounts of customer data which we voluntarily hand over when we click on ?Agree?. Few bother to check before bartering their rights away, which is perfectly fine since most people will struggle to understand the fine print. France?s online regulator said this week that Google?s latest privacy policy overhaul could confound even a privacy expert! Corporations go on to retain customer data which they hawk to advertisers who help keep services free. Smartphone apps at the Android Market and the Apple App Store routinely ask for ?permissions? to read and write our SMSs, download our contact lists, monitor our activity and post to social networking websites on our behalf. And all this is the easy part.
For a country which has seen erratic and clumsy government efforts to choke the Internet, India, for the most part, escapes MacKinnon?s attention. In 2005, the country ordered the removal of Blogspot content which it found offensive. ISPs, ever eager to please, quickly blocked the entire Blogspot domain, shutting out millions of users. In 2008, an ISP gave the government wrong IP data over a case of defamatory online content, which led to the arrest (and alleged torture) of the wrong person and his lengthy incarceration. The IT rules rolled out last year make intermediaries like Google and Facebook responsible for the content posted by their users, in effect handing government-level censoring and blocking responsibilities to unaccountable private corporations. In 2010, Nokia set up its messaging server in India, as required by domestic rules. The latest Google Transparency Report says India demanded user data of 2,439 Internet users in just six months of last year, the second highest number of requests among all countries it listed. In December, 2011, our IT minister made the controversial demand that social media websites must self-censor content. In January, the Delhi High Court warned Facebook and Google that India, too, like China, can block websites, while directing the sites to remove ?offensive and objectionable content.? The websites quickly fell in line, removing all disputed content. According to a recent report, all email providers ?including Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail?will soon be asked to route all their India-related email through servers in India, which will naturally come under surveillance. Under the constant threat of a ban, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion last week set up a server in Mumbai as per government wishes?the initial demand was to provide a backdoor snooping key. Again, just a few days back, the government blocked Shariah4Hind, a radical British Islamist preacher?s website, before his arrival in India.
Reading Consent of the Networked makes you realise that when governments with scant regard for democracy, human rights and civil liberties extend their claws to the digital sphere under multiple pretences, we face the real possibility of an Orwellian future. When France?s President Nicolas Sarkozy said, ?The Internet is a new territory to conquer, but it cannot be a Wild West,? he could well have been speaking for Tunisia?s Ben Ali, Egypt?s Mubarak, Syria?s Assad and Iran?s Khamenei?all unaccountable despots who stamped out the green shoots of dissent and democracy on the Internet.
Surveillance and repression are not phenomena exclusive to China, Iran and the Arabian countries. Far from it. Corporations from the ?liberal? west are often willing hand-maidens of the authoritarian state, building software and hardware to spy on activists for democracy and human rights, besides handing over user data to governments eager to track and suppress dissent. Here is the deadly part: the symbiosis of sovereign governments and corporations?the first eager to block, censor, moralise and monitor, with the latter handing over citizens? data to the former.
MacKinnon narrates several governmental attempts to choke the Internet in the US, France, Egypt, China, Iran, Syria and Tunisia under excuses ranging from national security, faith, morality, copyright, public order and child safety. As she correctly points out, censorship is a slippery slope. Once a government wields the power to censor (or commissions a private corporation to do the dirty work on its behalf) there is no end to it. Liberties are steadily eroded and before we know it, we are left with none.
The author, who headed CNN bureaus in Beijing and Tokyo before finding her true calling in the online civil liberties movement, is also the co-founder of Global Voices, an online community of bloggers from around the world working to support and expand free speech on the Internet. Her experience working with activists and bloggers across the world reflects in Consent of the Networked, which is peppered with examples when free speech was aggressively challenged and stoutly defended across the world.
The signs, one must dare say, are not encouraging. On a whim, Facebook can kill your account, Orkut can delete your page, YouTube can remove your video and Flickr can burn your pictures. The government can snoop any time for any reason and no reason. How then do we prevent corporations trading in our data and governments trampling on our liberties online? There are no easy answers. In order to ensure that the ?sovereigns of the cyberspace? take the consent of the networked before making their decisions, the key is to create a critical mass of Internet users, which can then push for change. Just like television emerged as a major pressure group influencing politicians and corporations who would otherwise love to do as they please, a growing constituency of liberal and assertive users will be the first step to influencing decisions which will help us secure our Internet liberties. It is not going to be an easy battle, but then, the alternative is 1984.