Last week Tim Wu gave an interesting lecture here at Princeton – the first in our infotech policy lecture series – entitled “Who Controls the Internet?”, based on his recent book of the same title, co-authored with Jack Goldsmith. In the talk, Tim argued that national governments will have a larger role than most people think, for good or ill, in the development and use of digital technologies.
Governments have always derived power from their ability to use force against their citizens. Despite claims that digital technologies would disempower government, Tim argued that it is now becoming clear that governments have the same sort of power they have always had. He argued that technology doesn’t open borders as widely as you might think.
An illustrative example is the Great Firewall of China. The Chinese government has put in place technologies to block their citizens’ access to certain information and to monitor their citizens’ communications. There are privacy-enhancing technologies that could give Chinese citizens access to the open Web and allow them to communicate privately. For example, they could encrypt all of their Internet traffic and pass it through a chain of intermediaries, so that all the government monitors saw was a stream of encrypted bits.
Such technologies work as a technical matter, but they don’t provide much comfort in practice, because people know that using such technologies – conspicuously trafficking in encrypted data – could lead to a visit from the police. Guns trump ciphers.
At the end of the lecture, Tim Lee (who happened to be in town) asked an important question: how much do civil liberties change this equation? If government can arbitrarily punish citizens, then it can deter the use of privacy-enhancing technologies. But are limits on government power, such as the presumption of innocence and limits on search and seizure, enough to turn the tables in practice?
From a technology standpoint, the key issue is whether citizens have the right to send and receive random (or random-looking) bits, without being compelled to explain what they are really doing. Any kind of private or anonymous communication can be packaged, via encryption, to look like random bits, so the right to communicate random bits (plus the right to use a programmable computer to pre- and post-process messages) gives people the ability to communicate out of the view of government.
My sense is that civil liberties, including the right to communicate random bits, go a long way in empowering citizens to communicate out of the view of government. It stands to reason that people who are more free offline will be tend to be more free online as well.
Which raises another question that Tim Wu didn’t have time to address at any length: can a repressive country walk the tightrope by retaining control over its citizens’ access to political information and debate, while giving them enough autonomy online to reap the economic benefits of the Net? Tim hinted that he thought the answer might be yes. I’m looking forward to reading “Who Controls the Internet?” to see more discussion of this point.
