Two weeks ago, hours after Turkish prime minister Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to “wipe out” Twitter, his government blocked
access to the platform across the country. It was just weeks before a
hotly contended election, and Erdoğan was upset about tweets accusing
him of corruption. A judicial ruling in Turkey called for Twitter to
take down the offending links, but when Twitter did not comply, the
Turkish government opted to block the site. (Since then, the courts have
deemed the ban illegal, but the government has yet to lift it — and instead banned access to YouTube as well, reportedly due to a security leak.)
Other governments have also tried to block access to parts
or all of the Internet in the past, including Egypt’s Internet shutdown
in January 2011 and Syria’s in May 2013. As it happened, cybersecurity
expert Keren Elazari was talking at TED2014 about the effects of the
Egyptian shutdown and others like it around the same time as news of the
Turkish Twitter ban was starting to trend on Twitter.
In her talk, Elazari said
that hackers play an essential role in giving power, or free access to
information, back to the people when governments try to take it away. We
were curious to hear her take on the situation in Turkey, so we sat
down with her to discuss the ban and the uneasy relationship between
tech companies, like Facebook or Twitter, and governments. An edited
version of our conversation follows:
So what’s really going on in Turkey?
While Egypt had Tahrir Square and other places around the
world had other social uprisings and revolutions, in Istanbul it
happened in Taksim Gezi Park. This is because of some controversial
decisions and acts by the current Prime Minister of Turkey, Tayyip
Erdoğan [NB: Erdoğan's party, the Justice and Development Party, won a
victory in the nationwide local elections 10 days after this interview
took place, a show of support from voters despite stronger-than-usual
opposition]. We don’t think of Turkey as a dictatorship, right? It’s
fairly modernized. In fact, it’s one of the most modernized and
democratized countries in the Muslim world.
But in the last few years there have been a lot of
struggles. There have been a lot of questions with regard to the
elections that they had, and with regard to democracy, and with regard
to the separation of Islam as a religion from state affairs and from
military affairs.
This was a huge deal, by the way, for Turkey, when it
became a modern nation. Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish modern
nation, really had this ideology of separating religious affairs from
secular affairs and military and state affairs. And that has been slowly
changing, even reverting back to more traditional, less liberal values,
in the past couple years, and this is the reason that there are a lot
of uprisings and revolts and conflicts within Turkey. This has to do
with some traditional or religious values coming into sharp conflict and
contrast with a more modernized world that wants free access to all
kinds of information and freedom from oppression.
It seems like social media is playing a really
critical role in bringing stories to light. Del Harvey, head of safety
at Twitter, addressed this in her talk.
One of her team’s roles is to make sure that Twitter is not
inadvertently blocking things like a citizen journalist sharing a really
important video. It seems like this is a critical role of social media
and governments are scared, so they’re trying to shut it down. That
seems unsustainable, no?
But they’re still trying. They’re still freaking out.
Because governments used to have control over the propaganda channels,
the communication channels, the printing presses, the radio stations…
When you would take over a country, you would take over these things and
indoctrinate the population and use propaganda. Now, anyone has a
printing press, and they can put out revolutionary pamphlets.
So because they are freaking out, they are overreacting. So
not only is it unsustainable, it’s also causing this overreaction. We
see this again and again. In Egypt, when Mubarak tried to shut down the
Internet in order to stop the revolution, not only did it not stop the
revolution, perhaps it even propelled it even more.
It seems like it incites the rest of the world to care.
Not just the rest of the world, even people there. Even
people in Cairo who maybe didn’t know what was going on found out from
the Internet and Facebook. They didn’t get the reports from the TV
channel or the government radio. And when the internet was shut down,
then they had to go out to the streets to see what was going on, and to
be part of it.
People talk about the social network revolution. It’s
obvious that Twitter and Facebook do not cause a revolution, and they
don’t overthrow governments. Years of dictatorship, years of overreach
and years of abuse cause people to want to overthrow governments. Social
media and the web — open access to information — are tools and the
scaffolding that allows this to happen, and allows the world to know. We
can sit right here now in Vancouver, and we can know about what is
happening in Caracas, what is happening in Turkey, what is happening in
Egypt, in Tunisia.
There’s a lot of responsibility on the companies that run
these services — on Facebook and Twitter and on the foundations of the
Internet. And a lot of that responsibility lies with American companies.
And here, here’s the rub — all this power, all these companies, are
based in the US, and the US government, the most powerful Western
democracy in the world, has been trying to manipulate and control the
web. It makes other governments feel like maybe it’s okay to do this
sort of thing. If the Americans don’t make a fuss about it, why should
anyone else? That erodes the sense of democracy.
You mean that America tries to champion freedom, and yet we’re not actually embodying it?
A lot of this complexity rises from the relationship
between corporations and governments. You have to kind of hope that
multinational corporations have the responsibility, they have the right
morals and the values. But they’re not democratic government. They’re
businesses that make money. Their ethos is usually the bottom line, the
shareholder value. All though they try to “do no evil” - is that really
possible?
What responsibility do you think these companies have?
What’s interesting is that this is not Turkey vs the US
government; it’s Turkey vs Twitter, headquartered in San Francisco. Or
in the case of the Great Firewall of China, it’s not China vs the US government; it’s China vs a corporation, Google.
These are very different types of relationships, and I
think both sides of those relationships are still figuring it all out.
The web giants hold the world in their hands. What will they do? How
will they react? Will they make business decisions or will this be about
values? It’s very unclear, and we’re in the first skirmishes of the
future of this world. To me it is very clear that the power of
multinational conglomerates is extremely important. It’s not just what
the NSA or the US government or even the Turkish government does. There
are a lot of moral decisions on the shoulders of CEOs.
What should those CEOs be thinking about as they face those kinds of moral challenges?
This is very complicated, but ultimately, can we afford
these to be the decisions of boards of directors who are concerned with
the bottom line? This is why the nature of the Internet originated as
decentralized, but in essence we’re losing that aspect of it. Because
it’s not so decentralized any more. It’s almost feudal. There is a small
group of landowners, and we live on their land.
It’s very complicated to ask a business owner or a company
to think about how their decisions affect policies and people and
revolutions. They’re having a coffee on Market Street in San Francisco,
but their decision affects what happens in Rezi Park, in Tahrir Square,
in Caracas… we can only hope they do take these things into account.
How do you think hackers help to balance that
power, and help to make it so that it’s maybe not quite so dependent on
those people?
Hackers make connections happen. It’s very clear, if
Anonymous cares about what’s happening in Venezuela, I should care about
what’s happening in Venezuela. They actually connect people, they don’t
only break stuff. I saw images from the protests in Caracas because the Anonymous Twitter account was posting them. That’s how I learned what was happening there – not from CNN.
It’s also important to have those, yes, chaotic elements.
It’s really important for companies and governments to know that if they
overreach, if they do uncool stuff, there is someone that can react.
There is someone out there, maybe lots of people out there, who
chaotically, and in a disorderly and sometimes illegal fashion, can
intuitively self-organize to react and respond and get important
information out there, or even expose overreach and corruption.
Hackers have evolved as the web has evolved. They’re an
integral part of it. And they’re a vital role in it. It’s not organized,
it’s not orderly, a lot of them do bad stuff. But overall, I’m hopeful
about it. Because for me, it means that this world we live in, which is
more and more reliant on digital services, which are run by money-driven
corporations, also has someone that can be the counterbalance. They
alert our attention to what is happening and to the threats (technical
and social). I think that’s important.
What do you think that governments are failing to
understand as they continue to try these often fairly misguided efforts
to shut something down entirely?
They’re applying 20th century thinking to a 21st century
world. There’s this line from a Israeli song, “I’m an analog guy in a
digital world.” Lots of governments are analog guys in a digital world,
and they think they’ll just shut it down. You can’t. It just doesn’t
work that way. But secondly, they’re also positioning themselves as an
“us vs them.” They think they can cordon themselves off or build a
secure environment. Hackers gonna hack. They’re going to take down those
walls. So there is no such thing as unhackable. And even if we could
design an unhackable world, I don’t know if I’d want to live there. That
sounds kind of like The Matrix. It’s totally controlled and organized
by the AI. That’s kind of creepy.
In your talk you said that “access to information
is a critical currency of power.” I loved that, and it’s so true. It
really seems like shutting down parts of the Internet is removing power
from the people in your country. It’s sort of cutting them off at the
knees.
Definitely. The Internet is a basic human right. And our
world is changing. Really, we are moving towards that Matrix kind of
reality where our lives, our brains, will be backed up to the cloud. And
who controls that cloud? Who says what’s okay and not okay to go on the
cloud, or on the Internet of things? We have these technologies, but we
haven’t thought about these implications. The technology’s out faster
than we know what to do with it. Policy is way behind, politics is way
behind, governments are way behind. Even the corporations that are
building it, companies like Amazon, Google, they’re building AIs and
drones — are they thinking about the meaning of it? These technologies
can quickly become our new overlords, while national governments are
still stuck in 20th century reforms.
No comments:
Post a Comment