As a corrective to some of the more fatuous writing about 'revolution by twitter' and cyberliberation 'Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments' (Brookings Institution Paper 2011) by John Villasenor argues [
PDF] that -
Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.
The Arab Spring of 2011, which saw regimes toppled by protesters organized via Twitter and Facebook, was heralded in much of the world as signifying a new era in which information technology alters the balance of power in favor of the repressed. However, within the world’s many remaining authoritarian regimes it was undoubtedly viewed very differently. For those governments, the Arab Spring likely underscored the perils of failing to exercise sufficient control of digital communications and highlighted the need to redouble their efforts to increase the monitoring of their citizenry.
Technology trends are making such monitoring easier to perform. While the domestic surveillance programs of countries including Syria, Iran, China, Burma, and Libya under Gadhafi have been extensively reported, the evolving role of digital storage in facilitating truly pervasive surveillance is less widely recognized. Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.
The coming era of ubiquitous surveillance in authoritarian countries has important consequences for American foreign policy as well, impacting issues as diverse as human rights, trade, nuclear nonproliferation, export control, and intellectual property security.
Villasenor comments that -
In 2008, social scientist Mohammed Ibrahrine published a paper titled “Mobile Communication and Sociopolitical Change in the Arab World” that highlighted the important role of mobile phones in “empowering and mobilizing marginalized groups” and “increasing the range of alternative actions available to individuals, opposition forces, and civil society groups.” It was an early observation of the now widely recognized power of mobile communications to organize dissent.
However, some aspects of the ability of information technology to shift the balance of power away from repressive regimes and in favor of their opponents are temporary. When, as has been the case, the flood of electronic information is too voluminous for authoritarian governments to capture, store, and effectively analyze in its entirety, the information advantage can indeed lie with regime opponents. It is an advantage that has recently been exploited to varying degrees of success in Tunisia, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere.
But the ability to record everything will tilt the playing field back in favor of repressive governments by laying the foundation for a plethora of new approaches to targeting dissent. When all of the telephone calls in an entire country can be captured and provided to voice recognition software programmed to extract key phrases, and when video footage from public spaces can be correlated in real time to the conversations, text messages, and social media traffic associated with the people occupying those spaces, the arsenal of responses available to a regime facing dissent will expand. Some changes will be immediate and tactical. Instead of implementing broad social media or Internet shutdowns in response to unrest,44 governments in possession of complete communications databases will be able to conduct more selective censorship or alteration of message traffic during periods of instability. This will provide a greater capability to shape or quell dissent.
Pervasive monitoring will provide what amounts to a time machine allowing authoritarian governments to perform retrospective surveillance. For example, if an anti-regime demonstrator previously unknown to security services is arrested, it will be possible to go back in time to scrutinize the demonstrator’s phone conversations, automobile travels, and the people he or she met in the months and even years leading up to the arrest.
There are also longer-term consequences that include a thinning in the ranks of regime opponents. By definition, organized dissent requires that dissenters have the ability to exchange information. Prominent opponents of repressive governments have learned to expect tracking of their movements and interception of their phone calls and other forms of electronic communications. But when technology enables an entire country’s worth of communications to be intercepted, the circle of people whom dissidents will be able to recruit to their ranks will narrow.
In addition, knowledge that communications are archived will reduce the willingness of dissidents to speak frankly even over encrypted communications. Time will often favor an authoritarian government able to store intercepted data that is initially too securely encrypted to decode. Due to some combination of advances in code-breaking, computing capabilities or intentional or unintentional compromise of decryption keys, many encrypted messages will become decodable by state security services. Awareness of the likelihood that all messages – including those that are encrypted – will eventually be read by security services will chill dissent.
He concludes that -
Declining storage costs will soon make it practical for authoritarian governments to create permanent digital archives of the data gathered from pervasive surveillance systems. In countries where there is no meaningful public debate on privacy, there is no reason to expect governments not to fully exploit the ability to build databases containing every phone conversation, location data for almost every person and vehicle, and video from every public space in an entire country.
This will greatly expand the ability of repressive regimes to perform surveillance of opponents and to anticipate and react to unrest. In addition, the awareness among the populace of pervasive surveillance will reduce the willingness of people to engage in dissent.
The coming era of ubiquitous surveillance in authoritarian countries has important implications for American foreign policy. Strategies for engaging with these countries will benefit from specific consideration of the presence, growth and increasing impact of these enormous digital databases. This will impact human rights, trade, export control, intellectual property security, and the operation of multinational businesses with in-country facilities, subsidiaries, or subcontractors.
Finally, the use by authoritarian governments of systems that record everything in the complete absence of privacy considerations will lead to a long list of other unforeseen and generally negative consequences. Unfortunately, the residents of those countries, as well as the rest of us, will soon start to find out just what those consequences are.
