class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Dirty Wars ## War and Digital Rights ### Jack McDonald --- # Lecture Outline .pull-left[ How does technology collapse the contexts of war and national security? Is it possible to address the impact of online communication on war and national security in a coherent manner? ] .pull-right[ - Technology and Context Collapse - Liberation Technology - War and Digital Rights - Digital Rights and Digital Repression - Conclusions and Connections ] ## Main Points If we view war and domestic security as contexts for social activity, then digital communications technologies can collapse the functional distance between key activities such as communication and speech Some people read value into technologies (e.g. freedom) however the actual usage of a system may reveal a different impact on political and social life Human rights don't necessarily transition perfectly to the digital world ??? asd --- class: inverse # Part 1: Technology and Context Collapse ??? --- # Context Collapse > Contexts incorporate assemblages of roles. By this I mean typical or paradigmatic capacities in which people act in contexts. > Contexts are partly constituted by the canonical activities and practices in which people, in roles, engage. > Behavior-guiding norms prescribe and proscribe acceptable actions and practices. Some of them define the relationships among roles and, in this way, the power structures that characterize many familiar social contexts. > Many of the canonical activities of a context are oriented around values—sometimes more aptly called goals, purposes, or ends; that is, the objectives around which a context is oriented > Contexts may overlap and possibly confl ict with one another. What does this mean? In the course of daily life, people regularly find themselves negotiating multiple contexts, sometimes simultaneously. Helen Nissenbaum, _Privacy in Context_ ??? Line between war and peace and national security/// --- # Technology and Society .pic80[![Production line](img/r6/production.jpg)] > The most important means of identifying British subjects in the twentieth century was not the identity cards of the National Register, but the simple automobile driver's license. Jon Agar, _The Government Machine_ ??? --- # Technology and Social Control .pull-left[ ![Punching in](img/r6/punch.jpg) ] .pull-right[ > Intense forms of abstraction and generalisation also encourage powerfully asymmetrical forms of knowledge, with one individual or institution able, for the first time, to measure very large populations. Keith Breckenridge, _Biometric State_ ] > The instruments which serve authority best are those which expend the smallest amount of energy possible to produce the effects of control or domination. Olivier Razac, _Barbed Wire: A Political History_ > A new way of controlling the land, designed to make more efficient use of it, transformed the relations not only between humans and animals but also between different human groups — distinguished by their different access to the new technologies of control over space. Reviel Netz, _Barbed Wire_ ??? --- # Surveillance and Technology .pull-left[ ![Telegraph in Gettysburg](img/r6/telegraph.gif) ] .pull-right[ > Law enforcement at all levels has the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court orders, but it often lacks the technical ability to carry out those orders because of a fundamental shift in communications services and technologies. This scenario is often called the “Going Dark” problem. FBI.gov, _Going Dark_ ] ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[To what extent do you think it is possible to maintain a separation between a state's domestic security arrangements and its external security activities?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 2: Liberation Technology ??? --- # Digital Rights > There are a number of questions we can ask ourselves that would help us to formulate a declaration of digital human rights: > • For any particular right, what would it mean to respect this right in the digital realm? > • What new rights might we need to articulate to address the unique context of the digital realm? > • What rights may not transfer to the digital realm at all? > • Are there some rights that are becoming irrelevant given the digital and communications revolutions? Kay Mathiesen, _Human Rights for the Digital Age_ ??? --- # Technology and Individual Freedom > Our intention was to show that superheroes could deform the world just by being there, not that they'd have to take it over, just their presence would make the difference... the atom bomb doesn't have to take over the world, but by being there it changes everything. Alan Moore .pic80[![Dark web](img/r8/darkweb.jpg)] ??? --- # Liberation Technology .left-column[ ![Diffie and Helman](img/r8/diffie.jpg) ![Social Media](img/r8/twitter.jpg) ![Bitcoin](img/r8/btc.jpg) ] .right-column[ > Liberation technology is any form of information and communication technology (ICT) that can expand political, social, and economic freedom. In the contemporary era, it means essentially the modern, interrelated forms of digital ICT—the computer, the Internet, the mobile phone, and countless innovative applications for them, including “new social media” such as Facebook and Twitter. > One of the most direct, powerful, and—to authoritarian regimes—alarming effects of the digital revolution has been its facilitation of fast, large-scale popular mobilizations. Larry Diamond, _Liberation Technology_ ] ??? --- # Do Artifacts Have Politics? > In the first instance we noticed ways in which specific features in the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting. Technologies of this kind have a range of flexibility in the dimensions of their material form. It is precisely because they are flexible that their consequences for society must be understood with reference to the social actors able to influence which designs and arrangements are chosen. > In the second instance we examined ways in which the intractable properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority. Here, the initial choice about whether or not to adopt something is decisive in regard to its consequences. > To know which variety of interpretation is applicable in a given case is often what is at stake in disputes, some of them passionate ones, about the meaning of technology for how we live. Langdon Winner, _Do Artifacts Have Politics?_ ??? /// --- > With McLuhan as its patron saint, the Californian ideology has emerged from this unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter-culture radicalism and technological determinism - a hybrid ideology with all its ambiguities and contradictions intact. > On the one side, the anti-corporate purity of the New Left has been preserved by the advocates of the 'virtual community'... Community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech 'gift economy' in which information is freely exchanged between participants... Despite the frenzied commercial and political involvement in building the 'information superhighway', direct democracy within the electronic agora will inevitably triumph over its corporate and bureaucratic enemies. > On the other hand, other West Coast ideologues have embraced the laissez faire ideology of their erstwhile conservative enemy... each member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, _The Californian Ideology_ ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[ What have been the key impacts of digital communications technologies on social mobilisation/insurgency? - How have your thoughts on this changed over the last five years? - Do you think these impacts will be stable over the next five years? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 3: War and Digital Rights ??? --- # War and the Wired World .left-column[ ![Chappe's Telegraph system](img/2020/chappe.png) ![Chappe's Telegraph system](img/2020/chappemap.gif) ![Gutta-Percha used to make transatlantic cables](img/2020/gutta.jpg) ![Cables to Australia](img/2020/cablemap.jpg) ![Family sitting around the radio](img/2020/radiofamily.jpeg) ] .right-column[ > In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Marshall McLuhan ] ??? Information security Each type of communications infrastructure has its own physical requirements, tolerances, and dependencies. Is diffusion theory deterministic with regards to technologies that improve communications within a social system? Another periodisation: when technologies communicated more info than humans (Floridi) --- # New Domains of Warfare? .pull-left[ ![Electronic Warfare in 1944-45](img/2020/ew1945.png) ] .pull-right[ Picture stolen from Steve Blank's [_The Secret History of Silicon Valley_](https://steveblank.com/secret-history/) Intentional human manipulation of electromagnetic spectrum gives rise to electronic warfare. - Intangible domain of war - Raises key question: what is a domain, anyway? - Another question: how do you conceptualise conflict in an intangible domain? ] ??? /// --- # Technology and Population Control Forms of population control - Coercion - Persuasion - Isolation - Preventing, disrupting, or crushing social mobilisation Cryptography promises to greatly constrain state power to coerce and isolate individuals and populations Horizontal communications technologies promise to increase the ability of social movements to organise and cooperate ??? Individual freedom Social movements Need what is cryptography/// Criminals, terrorists Insurgencies, States (information Warfare) --- # The Crypto Wars .pull-left[ Cryptography basics: - Encrypting messages with a small amount of work, that require an infeasible amount of work to reverse without access to a key - Symmetric keys: Both sender and receiver have access to a shared secret key - Public key: A public and private key is generated. Messages encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with access to the private key ] .pull-right[ ![Crypto wars](img/r8/crypto.jpg) ![Clipper Chip](img/r8/clipper.jpg) Key issue: is cryptography an expression of free speech? ] ??? - Can free speech be weaponised? - What kinds of communication activities can make you a target? - Why is censorship a problem? - How might digital repression matter in war studies? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[Do you think that individuals should have the right to digital communication that could not be intercepted or otherwise accessed by the state?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 4: Digital Rights and Digital Repression ??? --- # Dataveillance > Data surveillance is now supplanting conventional surveillance techniques... With mass dataveillance, the fundamental problems of wrong identification, unclear, inconsistent, and context-dependent meaning of data, and low data quality are more intense than with personal dataveillance. Roger Clarke, _Information Technology and Dataveillance_ > We want [technology companies] to work more closely with us on end-to-end encryption, so that where there is particular need, where there is targeted need, under warrant, they share more information with us so that we can access it. Amber Rudd, August 2017 > I don't need to understand how encryption works to understand how it's helping – end-to-end encryption – the criminals. I will engage with the security services to find the best way to combat that. Amber Rudd, October 2017 ??? --- # Surveillance Products > XCP and MediaMax presented unique marketing challenges for Sony BMG. Since fully-informed customers were unlikely to pay full price for what they would view as an inferior product, Sony BMG faced a choice. It could either develop a product that included DRM but was nonetheless attractive to consumers-most likely by significantly reducing retail prices--or it could obfuscate the nature of the product it sold and prevent its customers from excising the unwanted DRM post-purchase. All evidence suggests that Sony BMG adopted the latter approach. Deirdre K. Mulligan & Aaron K. Penanowski, _The Magnificence of the Distaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident_ ??? - Key point: corporate surveillance is often indistinguishable from state surveillance at a tech level - EG Rootkits - software that enables a third party access to your computer without consent or knowledge - A good controversy of this in the civilian world was corporate responses to filesharing - Sony produced CDs that would install rootkits on users' computers to prevent them from copying the music - This introduces vulnerabilities - as we discussed in encryption lecture last week --- # Spyware and Stalkerware .left-60[ > "Malware" is short for malicious software and is typically used as a catch-all term to refer to any software designed to cause damage to a single computer, server, or computer network, whether it's a virus, spyware, et al. Robert Moir, _Defining Malware_ > Though often, and shamelessly, advertised as a tool for parents to track the activity of their children, these apps are commonly used against survivors of domestic abuse... It serves as no surprise. Stalkerware coils around a victim’s digital life, giving abusive partners what they crave: control. David Ruiz, _Helping survivors of domestic abuse: What to do when you find stalkerware_ ] .right-60[ Spyware is a form of malware that gathers information without a user's knowledge and transfers it to a third party. There are many reasons for using malware ![Stalkerware](img/r9/stalkerware.png) ] ??? - Spyware is a common form of malware used for surveillance - Reliance upon digital devices means susceptibility to malware use - Malware is distinguishable from corporate systems monitoring by consent and knowledge of the user - However many apps in commercial world are, for all intents and purposes, data harvesters, and considered Malware by some https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archive/dd632948(v=technet.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN --- # Biometric Borders > In the Spring Semester of 2004, the Italian philosopher and scholar Giorgio Agamben cancelled his plans to teach at New York University because he refused to have his fingerprints scanned and checked by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Sidsel Rosenberg Bak, _Control of Fingerprints – Power over People_ > Today, one sees the beginnings of a society in which one proposes to apply to every citizen the devices that had only been destined for delinquents. According to a project that is already on the road to realization, the normal relationship of the State to what Rousseau called the "members of the soveriegn" will be biometric, that is to say, generalized suspicion. > I will refuse to be a party to all biometric supervision and that I am ready to renounce my passport as well as all pieces of identity. Giorgio Agamben, _No to Biometrics_ ??? --- # ANPR & Facial Recognition ANPR invented in 1976 by UK's Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB) Trialled from 1979, first arrest credited to ANPR in 1981 Deployed as part of "Ring of Steel" network in City of London in 1993 1997 The Police National ANPR Data Centre (NADC) formed as an extension to the Police National Computer service 2003 - ANPR used as part of London Congestion Charge scheme .pic80[![First arrest in 2017](img/r5/facialrecog.jpg)] ??? First arrest using facial recog in uk 2017 in wales - football fans --- # What Makes Digital Technologies Different? Digital technologies are amenable to distributing power in theory, but in practice tend towards centralising control Digital technologies enable non-human cognition and information processing Digital technologies minimise costs of storage, knowledge discovery, and combination Digital technologies enable persistent, redundant, available archives of individual behaviour at social scale ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .large[What, if any, do you think should be the limits on police using, or accessing, facial recognition systems in public spaces?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 5: Conclusions and Connections ??? --- # Key Points Digital communications networks both increase personal freedom and extend the power of state control We should expect more bleed-through of issues between international and domestic spheres over time One feature of digital systems is that they can be repurposed for radically different use-cases, which is hard to regulate ??? --- # Key Questions How can governments manage digital rights issues in the national security space? Who has the right to access or prevent online speech? Are there new kinds of online harm that need to be evaluated in the context of war/national security? ???