Ronald Deibert from Citizen Lab on Cyber Surveillance, Digital Subversion, and Transnational Repression https://democracyparadox.com/2022/05/10/ronald-deibert-from-citizen-lab-on-cyber-surveillance-digital-subversion-and-transnational-repression/
Extracts...
a very famous piece in the Journal of Democracy called “Liberation Technology” by Larry Diamond that outlines this thesis and there’s a lot of merit to it. Actually, when you look on the face of it, many, many examples of people using digital technologies do hold governments and private companies accountable, do connect with each other to organize, to mobilize.
But what’s happened over time is the tables have turned. Part of it has to do with the fact that computers and networks, internet networks are two-way streets, if you will. We communicate out, but they also look at us and they are increasingly, especially with social media, designed to monitor us. And generally speaking, the entire ecosystem is insecure and that means that it has become a very convenient tool for those who want to do some sort of malfeasance to use the internet for that purpose. What’s happened is we’ve seen this real explosion of the spread of transnational repression practices tied to digital technologies, because of the way in which the architecture is constructed and how the devices that we carry around with us at all times are highly invasive, but insecure and poorly regulated.
There are a lot of wealthy people in the world. A lot of oligarchs that are flaunting their wealth and using that wealth to circumvent laws to operate in gray areas. Once that sort of becomes acceptable, you can understand how they would be led down a path of contracting out with private investigators.
So, that’s coming from the private sector and then governments, of course, have always had an appetite to spy on adversaries, each other, their own citizens, citizens abroad. It’s just that now they have so many more tools and capabilities and resources that enable them to do this. Like I said before, people are kind of set up to be spied on by default.
the concept of transnational repression
the fact of the matter is governments can intimidate, harass, repressed people abroad. They have done it for centuries. You can think of many examples where governments have organized some kind of secret crew to go abroad undercover. Maybe murder somebody abroad. But it takes a lot of effort. It’s very risky. It can easily be exposed. It obviously requires physical proximity. With digital technologies, all of those constraints are removed.
So, digital transnational repression is not only very effective directly. It also has these indirect impacts on people’s psychological state and emotional wellbeing which happens to be the title of our recent report on this topic, “Psychological and Emotional War.” We did an extensive study of transnational repression in Canada and found that people fleeing from abroad to this country were experiencing this new type of control method that’s quite insidious and is transnational in nature.
Since you have access to somebody’s device, it’s not inconceivable that you could plant falsely incriminating information. It would be very difficult to disprove. So, if I hacked your phone and I put on your phone horrible images that are illegal and then called the cops and they grab your phone,o, you know, you can anticipate meetings of people, you can plant falsely incriminating information, you can find out where someone is going and kidnap them or murder them, all sorts of things. It’s very powerful. I think the fact that the market is mostly unregulated, it’s kind of Wild West right now. It’s really daunting to think about those two in combination: extremely powerful technologies in the hands of autocrats, despots, and even democracies as we’re finding out with a report on Spain that we just produced and then very poor regulation. That’s a dangerous combination.
The companies like NSO group claim they only sell it to governments. Let’s take them at their word for now. But even assuming it’s restricted just to governments, that doesn’t give me much solace because there are so many governments in the world that are nasty, brutal, despotic regimes, especially their security agencies in countries where there’s no oversight or whatever. But then on the less technologically sophisticated side of the spectrum, we’ve seen many, many examples of people succumbing to the same problems, but with very simple techniques that trick them.
Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture “Digital Subversion: The Threat to Democracy” by Ronald Deibert
“Subversion Inc: The Age of Private Espionage” by Ronald Deibert in Journal of Democracy
