4. The Dark Side of Social Networking
In a recent interview with Jeremy Paxman, Noam Chomsky said “Technology is quite neutral. I mean, a hammer doesn't care whether it's used to build a house or bash in the head of a prisoner, and the same is true of technology.” (Chomsky, BBC Newsnight, March 2011). Of course, the proliferation of social media also means an increase cyber-bullying, stalking, surveillance, hacking and viruses.
One of Morozov’s biggest criticisms of the rhetoric of Internet freedom is that it naively ignores the fact that new, sophisticated technologies (often funded by and carried out in the West) can be used by governments to suppress dissent and by militant right-wing groups to organise against democracy. In the chapter The KGB Wants You to Join Facebook, he outlines a number of ways in which the Internet can be used for surveillance and oppression.
Distributed Denial or Service (DDoS) attacks are an increasingly common and effective tool for governments to use for censorship – without wanting to directly censor the Internet (through concerns about damage to reputation or because your country relies on the global business opportunities offered by the internet) it is possible to send “fake visitors” to a website thus overloading it and causing it to crash.
“They are generated by computers that have been infected with malware and viruses, thus allowing a third party to establish full command over them and use their resources however it sees fit. Nowadays the capacity to launch such attacks is often bought and sold on ebay for a few hundred dollars.”
For profit-making companies, constantly being subject to such attacks is bad for business. If you own Blogger.com and a particular blog is being continually hit by DDoS attacks preventing other users from using the service, you are probably going to freeze that blog – in this way, authoritarian governments don’t even need to censor, they can outsource to these corporations, who will not be criticised for taking action against the victims of these attacks as it is good business sense to do so. (Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, 2011, pp. 108-9)
We all know that there is an element of risk in uploading pictures of ourselves. My image is on MySpace, on friends’ Facebook pages, and my picture has been taken at events, protests etc; I’m aware of that and am fine with that. Or rather I was until I stumbled across a website called redwatch.org, a far-right website which hosts images of hundreds of people who have at some point protested against the far right. Among images of local councillors and group leaders – often with their name, sometimes their address and personal details of their family (“Marital status: Lives with partner, one daughter, Rosa, aged 3”), are images of people buying copies of Socialist Worker, selling books to raise money for anti-fascist groups and in one case just holding a birthday cake. Visitors to the website are told ‘ANY FURTHER INFO ON THE FREAKS BELOW WILL BE GRATEFULLY RECEIVED.’ Having featured in two Hope Not Hate broadcasts, it is possible – likely even – that somewhere on that site, my face is visible. Elsewhere on my YouTube channel are images of my flat and the area in which I live. A Google search for Claire Pollard will yield and image of my face; if somebody badly wanted to track me down they most probably could. A chilling prospect.
The same tactic, according to Morozov, has been employed by the government in Iran – images from Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube have been collated into a portfolio of dissenters, which can be circulated as a means of gathering information. The government doesn’t even have to do much as there will be enough loyal supporters who will retrieve the information for them – open-sourcing, if you like. Facial recognition software is increasingly sophisticated and cheap to buy and the creation of SAPIR software, which “extends the power of web searches beyond centralized text and metadata searches to include distributed audio-visual content” (for example, recordings of activists’ chants could be broken down into single voices and cross referenced against and bank of voices gleaned from YouTube videos) means that identifying activists is becoming easier than ever.
Even though advances in technology are making it easier for governments and corporations to keep tabs on us, it also enables us to better keep tabs on our government. Fiske comes to a similar conclusion in the final chapter of his book Media Matters.
“[Technology] can be used both to bring us knowledge and to know us, to give us access to one system of power-knowledge, while subjecting us to another. It is an instrument of both communication and surveillance. It can be used by the power bloc to monitor the comings and goings of the people, but equally its cameras can be turned 180 social degrees, to show the doings of the power bloc to the people”
It is becoming easier for activists to record the actions of the people they are fighting against – like the Hope Not Hate videos of BNP councilors beating up Asian youths or the footage of riot police beating Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests. Although the revelations made by Morozov are alarming, they are not new – technology has always been used to monitor people – this is not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the pace of technological development is picking up but as long as activists and authorities continue to simultaneously adopt these technologies, it is unlikely that there will be a shift in power.
