Putting controls on the internet
THE London Conference on Cyberspace took place earlier this month. One of the main items up for discussion was that great paradox of the information technology era — how do we maximise the benefits of online activity and reduce the obvious problems that exist in this network of interconnectivity?
As one speaker put it, “Anything on a networked computer can be hacked. Everything is going online, therefore everything will eventually be capable of being hacked”. It is a worrying scenario as the putting of one’s eggs all in one basket always is. If somebody figures out how to kill a lot of computers all at the same time, we could be in big trouble.
While it would be harsh to call the conference a meeting of minds on how to censor the internet, in essence this is the topic around which everybody danced for the two days, and with good reason. It is not a popular topic and nobody wants to call it censorship, per se, but unless there is a level of control of some degree on the internet communication highway then criminals will simply take it over completely. It is something not lost on the criminal fraternity and they have long been busy utilising any critical communications infrastructure they can access to fill their coffers.
The reason censorship has been such an issue with the internet since it went global is not that governments have stood back and admired it for the way it can empower their citizens, it is simply because it is truly a technology that breaks boundaries, and governments haven’t been able to agree cross border rules and regulations to rein it in — yet. If you censor something in Ireland, it can simply be accessed from somewhere else.
Take the banning of access to The Pirate Bay from Eircom’s servers, a landmark action to prevent the theft of copyrighted material in Ireland. Anybody who wants to access The Pirate Bay can now visit an anonymous proxy server site to circumvent Eircom’s servers and uses the site anyway. Even if they couldn’t get to The Pirate Bay, they’d visit one of many hundreds of other sites that offer a similar service. They sprout like mushrooms, as the US government found out in the aftermath of Napster, the most high profile of the original illegal file-sharing platforms.
There are now many more file-sharing sites on the internet than there were when the ‘illegal’ version of Napster was still in existence. If the internet could be successfully censored there is no doubt that it would have been long ago. All the self-serving political twaddle about protecting the right to the freedom of speech and needing a ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’ solution is nonsense served up while the political classes struggle to find out how to put blinkers on a horse that is bolting blindly.
The sceptical could claim that the conference was merely an attempt by politicians to assess their options when it comes to the censorship debate. This may be rather too cynical a stance to take, although there is no doubt that their ears will have pricked considerably as speakers from some of the Arab Spring countries, China and India outlined how the west had invented the technology that made the internet possible but the east had shown them how to use it to its greatest potential.
Practically every speaker agreed that the internet should be ‘free’ and ‘uncensored’, but invariably went on to state that we simply can’t leave the platform wide open for abuse by criminal gangs, paedophile rings, hackers and their cohorts. So, despite wanting an open and available internet, all agreed that a level of censorship and control is necessary, although nobody actually wants to call it that. The debates circled around how management of the internet should operate, who should govern it and who should be responsible for the penalties for abusing the system.
You can understand the concerns. Take Ireland, for instance. Every other media outlet apart from the internet is censored. If you visited your local bookstore and found even a small smattering of what is freely available on the internet, you certainly wouldn’t bring the kids with you. Yet most of us leave these same kids free rein to access whatever they wish on the internet.
Another speaker pointed out that, although we are dealing with new technology, the crimes committed using this new technology are not new. Theft, copyright infringement, invasion of privacy, etc. They’ve all been on the statute books for years, it is the manner in which they are now being performed that has changed. The explosion in interconnectivity and data access has meant that much of the activity can be carried out remotely, which makes it difficult to track.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, stated that the biggest threat to the internet is misguided government intervention and not understanding community self-regulation — something for which Wikipedia is, rightly, lauded.
But would it work in other circles? It all depends on the views of those self-regulating it. If they’re radically liberal, then anything goes. If they’re notoriously conservative, then very little goes. So who selects the regulators and who regulates them?
Another interesting topic was that of internet ‘saturation’. It is estimated that two billion people are connected to the internet in one form or another, that’s nearly a third of the population of the planet. In one way it is remarkable to think that so many people are connected in such a way, in another it is quite remarkable that five billion are totally excluded.
“The Arab Spring used Facebook to mobilise, Twitter to live stream and YouTube to report.”
— Helen Clark, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)
“A net that is stifled risks losing its transformative powers.” “Never security without freedom: that would take us backwards.”
— Carl Bildt, Swedish minister for foreign affairs
“Ensuring cyber security is hard because global and digital footprints are hard to track.” — Sachin Pilot, India
“It’s not enough to see governments’ answers, people want to see the workings too.” — Richard Allan, Facebook
“The internet is the public space of the 21st century. This generation will transform cyberspace, and cyberspace in turn has the potential to transform their lives. Existing principles of international law apply online just as they do offline. The internet presents new challenges but we do not need to start from scratch.” — Joe Biden, US vice-president
“Assume good faith (fundamental principle in Wikipedia moderation)” — Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
“Social mobilisation is more effective and more volatile because of the internet.” — Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute
“Leaders need to know about data losses just as much as they know about financial losses.” — William Beer, PricewaterhouseCoopers
* For more information on the conference visit http://bit.ly/rNPKOV
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