Hacktivism: the only solution to censorship and surveillance?

The Friday show of NPR's On Point had a great hour-long conversation about Internet Censorship and Surveillance. Featured guests were Tim Wu of Columbia Law School, Ron Deibert of the Open Net Initiative, Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, and Declan McCullah of CNet. The show is online here and really worth a listen.

Host Tom Ashbrook and many of the people who called in were interested in figuring out what people can do to prevent companies from collaborating with governments in censorship. Many of the guest were skeptical that either legislative measures or consumer action would end up solving the problem. Ron Diebert concluded that in the end, people in the technology world and civil society who care about freedom and want to defend it are going to have to take matters into their own hands. Become a cyber-activist: support and build tools that will help circumvent collusion against freedom of speech between governments and many commercial software and web service providers. Here is my transcription of what Ron said (caller and host comments omitted):

Many individuals and organizations are working on tools that provide users with privacy and security, and ways to get around censorship. So it is a constant cat and mouse game. I just think that people need to be dilligent and understand that we just can't take this technology for granted. Its being shaped by very powerful forces. At the user level we need to raise awareness and then we need to begin to think about the rules that govern the corporations and the states that control the information infrastructures. ...

We need to actively promote and encourage the research and development of privacy-enhancing, security enhancing technologies. Technologies that allow individuals to get around censorship and many do exist out there that do this job on a daily basis. ...

China is a very difficult case because it throws so [many] resources into this issue compared to other countries around the world. But even notwithstanding the matrix of controls that China puts in place, individuals, human rights activists, with great risk - now I'll underline that, with great personal risk - are able to side-step these controls. But I think this is where, if we want to encourage technological solutions - putting aside the regulatory solutions for a minute - we need to begin to resurrect that original notion that really helped shape the internet in the beginning. This notion of hacking in its pure sense of the term. Allowing individuals to develop tools that enhance freedom of speech, access to information. And encourage foundations like the Soros Foundation and Ford Foundation to fund this type of research so that individuals can get around these controls. I see it as the only way of trying to reclaim some of that freedom of speech and access to information that were once central characteristics of the internet.

These hactivists already exist.  I was privileged to work with my co-conspirator Ethan Zuckerman and an all-star team of geek freedom fighters at that unwisely-located U.N. gathering, the World Summit on the Information and Society in Tunis, where our Expression Under Repression workshops (pdf) nearly got shut down by Tunisian authorities who were unhappy about the way in which our sessions called attention to their own repression of online speech.

Some excellent examples of the work being done can be found in the technical sections of the Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents, NGO in a Box put out by the Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line, and a new project called CiviSec run by the Citizen Lab, for which they are starting to hire programmers and web developers. Here's how they describe the project: "The aim of the CiviSec Project is to help individuals at risk (e.g., human rights activists) or those who live in countries where electronic communications are censored and monitored, to communicate securely, privately, and anonymously."

Message to the corporates: If we can't trust your tools we'll have to make our own.

Comments

[Zeke]

I'm digging your free speech kung fu, Rebecca. Thanks for what you're doing... it matters. More every day, I think.

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