information rights – Page 2

David Cameron doesn’t get it

David Cameron’s speech in the House of Commons today and associated comments, show that he has a really superficial grasp of what has been going on in British cities, mostly whilst he was on holiday and unwilling to return to demonstrate any kind of leadership.

First of all, he’s done the usual knee-jerk authoritarian and technophobic thing of blaming Blackberry and other messaging services. He has indicated that “Ministers would work with the police and MI5 to assess whether it would be right to stop people communicating via social network sites ‘when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality’, and had “asked the police if they needed new powers in this area”. When the Egyptian government cut off access to social networking sites recently, western governments were quick to condemn this as evidence that this regime was exactly the kind of authoritarian government that should be brought down. However, in Britain, apparently not. And closing down communications systems just because some people are using them to send messages you don’t like is several steps beyond things like wiretapping. It is a massive and idiotic overreaction. Let’s hope the ‘assessment’ is, in the end, more considered…

Another face-palming moment was provided by the appeal to US experts in gang culture. Now, no-one is going to deny that there were gangs involved in this, nor that gang culture is an issue in British cities. But, first of all, the US is no place to look if you want lessons on controlling gangs, or more importantly, how to create a society in which gangs seem like a less attractive option in the first place. And secondly, there is an assumption that UK gang culture is just like US gang culture, just because they are both gang cultures. Why not look instead to other European countries without significant gang problems and ask what it is about those societies that work? Unfortunately that is the kind of question that would lead to fundamental challenges to UK socio-economic policy, and that’s exactly why the questions and responses will remain superficial.

These kinds of things will annoy the libertarian right and the left respectively, however at the same time, the UK Prime Minister is taking some strange stances that threaten to alienate his own centre-right supporters, in particular in refusing to halt cuts to policing budgets already proposed as part of his austerity measures (never mind massive cuts to social services to inner city youth, which will also be pushed ahead regardless).

It’s hard to see who remains that he is appealing to here…

Will the Global South overtake the North in transparency?

At a time when liberal democracies in the Global North seem increasingly paranoid and cutting down both on personal freedoms and government accountability, could nations from the Global South seize the moment to become the new pace-setters on open government?

There are plenty of good examples from Latin American, but it’s in Africa that the real changes are occurring. Yes, that’s the same Africa often stereotyped as the home of endless war, corruption, military coups and dictators. Kenya, in fact, which the pessimists were portraying as being on the brink of collapse and authoritarianism after election violence a few years ago. But now, Kenya is pushing forward with massive changes in the way its government operates with an increasing tendency towards open information and other accountability initiatives, as a Guardian story is reporting.

Cynics will argue that this is just pandering to a new urban middle class, with only 26% of Kenyans having home Internet access. However, like many countries in Africa, the communications revolution us predominantly mobile and almost 65% of Kenyans have mobile telephones and will be able to access mobile versions of the new sites.

On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog

So the (now rather old) joke goes. In fact, this joke is now often seen as an example of how people early on in the history of the Internet misunderstood it. People, the argument goes, are just people on the Net, pretty much the same way they are in real life. No technological determinism here, no siree.

However there is increasing evidence that this new ‘common knowledge’ is dead wrong, but it isn’t necessarily individual ‘dogs’ pretending to be humans online, it is whole organised packs (don’t worry, I won’t take this metaphor any further). Various sources have been reporting the development call by the US military for software development to create artificial posters on Internet forums, chatrooms, and news sites. The US state it seems has woken up to the possibilities of what is often called ‘astroturfing’, the creation of fake grassroots movements, with fake members.

George Monbiot, a leading British investigative journalist with The Guardian newspaper knows about astroturfing more than most. He frequently writes about climate change denialists, and the comments under his stories are always filled with pseudonymous critics who seem to pop up every time the word ‘climate’ is mentioned and their responses often appear to be scripted and organised. He’s been digging deeper, and while his investigations are still ongoing, he has provided a useful summary of recent development here.

As well as the corporate interests (tobacco, oil, pharma etc.) it’s also worth pointing out that other states are far ahead of the US on this. China notoriously has its so-called ’50-Cent Party’, students and others who are recruited by the state and paid by the message to counter any anti-Chinese or pro-Tibetan, pro-Taiwan or pro-Uighur sentiment. Their early efforts were laughably obvious, but are becoming more and more subtle. Israel is open in its backing of such ‘online armies’, and advocates the use of a particular software tool, called Megaphone, which enables its users to respond quickly and widely to any reports or discussion seem as against the interests of the Israeli state.

Anonymity is also used by these organised groups as a form of individual intimidation through other ‘open’ channels, especially of those who lack the resources and sometimes the low cunning to be able to respond effectively. One is Freedom of Information legislation. In the area of climate change denial, we saw this with the systematic and organised petitioning of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, in which FoI requests were really a form of harassment. More recently, as I have just heard from Chris Parsons, two professors from Ottawa, Errol Mendes and Amir Attaran, seen as ‘liberal’ and critical of the Canadian government, have similarly found themselves the subject of a huge upsurge in FoI requests, many of which seem to be deliberately requesting very intimate information. This would appear to be Freedom of Information as intimidation.

There are several responses one could have to this. One would be to withdraw from more public and open forms of interaction, to batten down the hatches, retreat into extreme forms of privacy. This would be a mistake: it really would, as some of the more alarmist reports have proposed, mean the death of Web2.0. The other would be to take the Anonymous route, to ferret out the spies and the fakes. This could be done with better forum and comment software, but would mean a lot of hacking effort and knowledge. How is a chatroom supposed to go up against the power of states and corporations? The real risk with this, as with more low-tech forms of ‘exposure’, is that we help create a culture of suspicion in which moles and spies are everywhere, and genuine political interaction is chilled. It may be coincidental, but it is not unrelated, that we are seeing a growing attention being called to this kind of thing just as we have seen the power of social media in the uprisings across the Arab world. In this area at least privacy is not the answer, a more radical political openness and transparency may well be required to facilitate the kind of social trust that can keep Web2.0 growing and changing in a positive direction.

Death to the ICO?

Chris Parsons draws my attention to a blog posting on the very swish and refurbished Privacy International site (nice job BTW – I will check in regularly). Simon Davies argues in this post for the ‘assisted suicide’ of the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) because it has become a ‘threat to privacy’. The bases for this argument are several, namely that:

“the legislation that underpins the Office is narrow and in places regressive”;
the ICO is “a quasi judicial regulator that sees its role as protecting data rather than people”, which leads to timid decisions;
the ICO is sometimes “ill-informed… and almost always out of step with the more proactive and advanced regulators overseas” especially when it comes to technology;
its complaints procedure is slow and frequently pointless;
there are too many surveillance-related commissioners in the UK (the Surveillance Commissioner, the Interception of Communications Commissioner, the Equality & Human Rights Commission etc.)
it is disconnected from “an information environment dominated by companies which appear to be largely exempt from local protections for citizens.”

Now, I’ve done some work on commission for the ICO, and therefore you might expect me to defend it from these criticisms. But in fact, I find much to agree with here, as well as some points with which I disagree, and much to ponder.

On the side of agreement,the ICO, like much of government, is undoubtedly technologically rather backward. When, in the Report on the Surveillance Society, we wrote about the way in which governments were behind the times, this was as much a message for them as for parliament or the executive. Maybe it is down to funding, maybe to institutional inertia, maybe deliberate choice, but the ICO has still has not taken serious steps to remedy this as Simon points out, and relies largely on occasional external reports, many of which are in any case general rather than specialist, to update it.

I also agree with the charge that the ICO has been relatively powerless in the face of the rise of corporate surveillance. This is not surprising given its origins as an arm’s-length regulator of government, and some of the particular issues of concern – like whether it took the Google wireless hacking episode seriously enough or made the correct decisions – are far from obvious. But one can clearly contrast the relatively activist stance of even quite bureaucratic Privacy Commissioners like the federal Canadian body over Facebook, with the ICO. It has in the recent past taken some serious actions against illegal private sector surveillance – for example the bust of a notorious blacklisting firm – but this direction appears to have fizzled out. Not being privy to internal policy discussions, I am not sure why.

Then there are some areas in which the criticisms are valid, but which may not be directed at the right target.

The first of these is the proliferation of Commissioners of various kinds – and incidentally, we have thankfully been spared the birth of yet another one with the cancellation of the ID Cards scheme. I have also been arguing for the merging of all the various surveillance-related quangos for a long time. The reason so many of them exist is partly because of the piecemeal way in which British legislative process occurs. There are rarely comprehensive Acts covering broad areas, instead existing institutions, however inappropriate to the job needed, are often merely supplemented or modified. The other reason is of course the ongoing effort to protect certain parts of the state from serious scrutiny, in particular the intelligence services and political police.

The second is that, fundamentally, it seems clear that British data protection and privacy legislation is generally archaic and not up to the job. Neither is its Freedom of Information legislation, even though it was a massive advance on the culture of secrecy that preceded what in retrospect may have been one of New Labour’s most important measures.

However, I am not sure that either of these points are in themselves a criticism of the ICO but rather of the legislation which created it, and the governance environment in which it has to operate. The way in which the ICO came about, through a rough fusion of old Data Protection and newer Freedom of Information functions produced a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster made of parts and bits, kept going on a drip-feed of limited funding, something that was never going to be capable of what campaigners expected of it. The same could be said partially of the critique of the complaints procedure, itself is a widely shared opinion and one with which I would not take issue. However, how much of this is down to the limited funding and staffing, and once again, the foundational legislation which hampers as much as empowers the ICO to do much of what we outsiders would want them to do?

Then, some of the criticisms are more personal opinion, with which I am sure many in the ICO would disagree, particularly the idea that the ICO does not care about people. Both Simon and I know many people in the ICO personally and whatever our political differences with them, the idea that they are heartless data bureaucrats with no interest in people is a rather unhelpful and hyperbolic caricature, as is the idea that the ICO is an ‘enemy of privacy’. The ICO had a legally mandated job to do first and foremost and it needn’t, legally, go beyond that at all. Yet it has. The interventions that the previous Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, made on surveillance in particular were absolutely vital in adding a new level to a debate that had previously, despite the best efforts of activists, campaigners and researchers, been of more marginal concern. One could argue that surveillance and privacy would never have become such a topic parliamentary debate, let along an election issue, without his advocacy. Certainly it hasn’t gone far enough, but is has hardly, during this period at least, acted as a stereotypically uncaring bureaucracy.

So what of the solutions?

Simon advocates only one: that the government “scrap the data protection functions of the ICO and building a new Privacy Act that creates a true watchdog with a broad mandate.” It is hardly surprising that Privacy International see the ‘privacy’ element as the most important one here. Simon will also not be surprised to discover that I disagree with him on this. In fact, my argument for a while has been that privacy cannot justifiably be prioritised over other forms of human informational rights. In addition, the concept of ‘human rights’ in general does not deal with everything about information relationships, positive or negative, and the many elements of those information relationships between state, citizen and corporation cannot be so arbitrarily separated.

I would therefore argue that a comprehensive Information Act, which covered citizens’ rights to information (their own, and that generated by government and corporations), their rights of privacy and the more general parameters of what the state and companies may know of those who information this is and how they are allowed to do so (i.e the limits of surveillance). I agree that ‘data protection’ is an out-of-date concept. But ‘privacy’ does not, and cannot, replace it, at least not alone. Privacy Commissioners, where they exist, find themselves dealing with a lot more than privacy and end up becoming ‘surveillance’ or ‘information commissioners’ in practice or by stealth, and in some cases an emphasis on privacy over all else can hamper legitimate needs to know (as has been true in the case of family members of elderly patients with dementia in Canada for example).

My conclusion about what a new Information Act would contain in terms of the regulatory bodies has something in common with Simon’s view, but I have two options. One is the creation of a single mega-regulator – a real Information Commissioner that covered all the areas of our information relationships with the state and corporations that would be able to go after corporations, local and national government over issues of their secrecy, transparency and accountability, and our privacy and informational needs. It wouldn’t just merge the existing ICO, Surveillance Commissioner, Interception of Communications Commissioner and so on), but start with new legislation and a new structure.

The other option would be a merge all the existing bodies but create two new ones to replace them: a Surveillance and Privacy Commissioner, to cover all of the areas of state and corporate intrusion into the lives of citizens, but also a Freedom of Information Commissioner, to cover the equally vital areas of state and corporate transparency and accountability. Privacy without FoI, whether together in one organisation or separate, is altogether too defensive an approach to what we can expect from the state.

And whichever route one took, the organisation(s) should have a wider range of powers built in and required – research (including technological foresight), advocacy, assessment, response and enforcement functions – with protected funding and legally binding decision-making capability. I think we would all be in agreement on that…

Facebook learns nothing

Having been strongly criticised over its ‘Places’ feature for its lack of understanding of the concept of ‘consent’ in data protection, and why ‘opt-in’ is better for users than ‘opt-out’ when it comes to new ‘services’ (i.e: ways they can share your data with other organisations), Facebook is doing it again.

Between today and tomorrow, the new Facebook feature called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-Facebook sites and it is automatically set to “Enabled”.

To turn it off: Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.

(Or of course, you can just ‘Turn Off All Platform Apps” too!)

The really important thing is that if your Facebook Friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. So, copy this and repost to yours…

(Thanks to Lorna Muir for this alert)

Spain vs. Google or Freedom of Expression vs. the Right to Be Forgotten

Several outlets are reporting today, the interesting clash between Spanish courts and Google. The argument is over whether Google should carry articles that have been challenged by Spanish citizens as breaching their privacy. An injunction was won in the courts by the Spanish data protection commissioner over publication of material that is being challenged under privacy legislation.

Clearly there are two main issues here. One is the specific issue of whether Google, as a search engine, can be considered as a publisher, or as it claims, simply an intermediary which publishes nothing, only linking to items published by others. This is important for Google as a business and for those who use it.

But the other is a more interesting issue which is the deeper question of what is going on here which is the struggle between two kinds of rights. The right to freedom of expression, to be able to say what one likes, is a longstanding one in democracies, however it is almost nowhere absolute. The problem in a search-engine enabled information age, is that these exceptions, which relate to both the (un)truth of published allegations (questions of libel and false accusation) and of privacy and to several other values, are increasingly challenged by the ability of people in one jurisdiction to access the same (libellous, untrue or privacy-destructive) information from outside that jurisdiction via the Internet.

In Spain, the question has apparently increasingly been framed in terms of a new ‘right to be forgotten’ or ‘right to delete’. This is not entirely new – certainly police records in many countries have elements that are time-limited, but these kinds of official individually beneficial forgettings are increasingly hard to maintain when information is ‘out there’ proliferating, being copied, reposted and so on.

This makes an interesting contrast with the Wikileaks affair. Here, where it comes to the State and corporations, questions of privacy and individual rights should not be used even analogically. The state may assert ‘secrecy’ but the state has no ‘right of privacy’. Secrecy is an instrumental concept relating to questions of risk. Corporations may assert ‘confidentiality’ but this is a question of law and custom relating to the regulation of the economy, not to ‘rights’.

Privacy is a right that can only be attached to (usually) human beings in their unofficial thoughts, activities and existence. And the question of forgetting is really a spatio-temporal extension of the concept of privacy necessary in an information society. Because the nature of information and communication has changed, privacy has to be considered over space and through time in a way that was not really necessary (or at least not for so many people so much of the time) previously.

This is where Google’s position comes back into play. Its insistence on neutrality is premised on a libertarian notion of information (described by Erik Davis some time ago as a kind of gnostic American macho libertarianism that pervades US thinking on the Internet). But if this is ‘freedom of information’ as usually understood in democratic societies, it does have limits and an extreme political interpretation of such freedom cannot apply. Should Google therefore abandon the pretence of neutrality and play a role in helping ‘us’ forget things that are untrue, hurtful and private to individuals?

The alternative is challenging: the idea that not acting is a morally ‘neutral’ position is clearly incorrect because it presages a new global norm of information flow presaged on not forgetting, and on the collapse of different jurisdictional norms of privacy. In this world, whilst privacy may not be dead, the law can no longer be relied on to enforce it and other methods from simple personal data management, to more ‘outlaw’ technological means of enforcement will increasingly be the standard for those who wish to maintain privacy. This suggests that money and/or technical expertise will be the things that will allow one to be forgotten, and those without either will be unable to have meaningful privacy except insofar as one is uninteresting or unnoticed.

Internet doit être défendu! (4)

I write this addition to my ongoing series of thoughts on the implications of the Wikileaks scandal, en Francais because according to Le Point, the the Assemblée Nationale has passed a bill, Loppsi 2, which, amongst other things, in its Article 4, allows the French government to ban particular websites, and essentially to ‘filter’ the Internet. The Bill of course has ‘good intentions’, in this case, it is aimed at paedophiles, but the wording is such that it allows a far wider use against “la cybercriminalité en général”. Regardless, as the article points out: “Les expériences de listes noires à l’étranger ont toutes été des fiascos,” in other words such bills have generally been a complete failure as in most cases the state’s technology and expertise cannot deliver what the law allows.

However, I am left wondering what makes this any different from what China does, and what moral right the French state now has to criticise Chinese censorship or indeed any other regime that is repressive of information rights. And of course, what other very reasonable ‘good intentions’ could be drawn upon for closing the Net – opposing ‘information terrorism’, par example?

The Internet Must Be Defended (3): Everything is Terrorism?

One of the most ominous developments in the current conflict over Wikileaks has been the move in some quarters to define the publication of leaked information as something more than just ‘irresponsible’ or ‘criminal’ (e.g. ‘theft’ or even ‘espionage’). I have a lot of difficulty with those kinds of labels anyway, but it was only a matter of time before we saw serious, official calls for such activities to be defined as ‘terrorism’.

The Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, Laszlo Kover, yesterday called for the action of leaking confidential and secret information to be redefined as ‘information terrorism’. He seemed to be referring here not just to Wikileaks but to all ‘online news reporting’, in other words, he is advocating treating those who report on such information as ‘terrorists’ too.

Terrorism, let us not forget, is the use of violence to influence politics, in other words to impose one’s political will through fear of death or injury. There is no way in the world that one can argue rationally that releasing information that allows people to see what happens inside the organisations making claims to rule over us, or act on our behalf, is that kind of violence, indeed it is highly irresponsible to try to associate the term with any processes of nonviolent communication.

The problem is that to many people this probably doesn’t seem unreasonable – people already talk about ‘information war’ as if that meant something clear and comprehensible. But this kind of action would be to extend the definition of terrorism, already stretched to breaking point by legislative changes in the USA, UK and other western countries, into the realm of freedom of speech and the politics of transparency and accountability.

Since 9/11, we have seen a gradual movement, at first indirect and associational as with John Robb’s talk of the ‘open-source insurgency’ back in 2005, and now increasingly overt, to define the advocates of openness and transparency as terrorists. This must be resisted before it takes root in any kind of legislation because ultimately this means that the Internet itself, the communications architecture which supports such activity, is portrayed as the vehicle for such ‘information terrorism.’ This will simply increase the movement of the drive to close the Net away from a crazy, fascistic notion (which it is) towards ‘common-sense.’ It will stifle the development of any genuine global polity.

What to do? Well the first thing is to respond immediately any time something like this is said by any politician or even commentator. This kind of talk should remain in the realm of the ridiculous and the repressive. We need to change the direction of the discourse.

The Internet Must Be Defended (2): a Transparency (R)evolution?

(A few more random rabble-rousing thoughts: Part 1 here)

For a few years now there has been a tendency (and no, it’s not an organised conspiracy – most of the time), to try to contain the uncontrolled development of the Internet by many different states and non-state organisations. Here’s some examples:

1. China has basically created its own island system, that could potentially be entirely disconnected from the rest of the Net and still function. Within this system it can censor sites, control the flow of information and so on. This is not a case of an isolated authoritarian state: the system has been created largely by western hardware and software developers.

2. The development of new ways of accessing information – through Web apps, branded social networking software and so on – means that increasingly users are experiencing the Net (and more specifically the Web) through controlled corporate channels. The Web is in many ways the most immediately vulnerable feature of the Net.

3. There is a worldwide movement by states, pressured by the USA and others, to put into law restrictive new measures that redefine all information as intellectual property, introduce digital locks, and more widespread end-user licensing etc. (i.e. moving the software model of property rights to all information objects). This is equivalent perhaps to the ‘enclosure’ of the commons in C17th Britain, which underlay the rise of private capital.

4. Under the guise of counter-terrorism or fighting organised crime, states, again pressured by the USA but some entirely of their own volition, are introducing comprehensive surveillance measures of online communications – it started with traffic analysis and is moving increasingly to content too. This also leverages the trend identified in 2. Relationship modelling is where it’s at now. Basically, it isn’t so much that your digital doubles sitting in multiple databases, but they are walking and talking on their own to others, whether you like it or not, and it is the nature and quality of their interactions that is being monitored.

Wikileaks is a thread because it represents the opposite of these trends to closure and the retaking of control of the Internet. It’s not because Wikileaks is itself particularly threatening, it’s the fact that it is making visible these underlying trends and may cause more people to question them.

The character of Julian Assange has nothing really to do with this – except insofar as his prominence has only made Wikileaks, and the nascent opposition to this retaking control of the Internet, vulnerable because people in general can’t tell the difference between a person and an idea and will often think an idea is discredited if a person is – and individuals are very easy to discredit, not least because of the amount of information now available to intelligence services about people means that their vulnerabilities and proclivities can be easily exploited. A lot of people who are genuinely interested in openness and transparency were already questioning the need for this supposed ‘leader’ and I suspect that we will soon see (multiple) other alternatives to Wikileaks emerging.

I would suggest that people who think this is melodramatic are usually speaking either from a position of ignorance of the broad range of trends that are coalescing around the Wikileaks issue, or are simply baffled by the redefinition of politics that is occuring around information and are seeking certainty in the old institutions of nation-state and corporations – institutions that ironically were once themselves so threatening to what was seen as a natural order.

But why should we care? I have heard some people argue that the Wikileaks issue is someway down their list of political priorities. But it shouldn’t be. This issue underlies most other attempts to have any kind of progressive politics in an information age. We already have an economically globalized world. Political power is also increasingly globalized. Yet, what we have in terms of systems of accountability and transparency are tied to archaic systems of nation-states with their secrecy and corporations with their confidentiality. Yet for almost all the founders of the enlightenment, free information was crucial – whether it was for the operation of free markets or the success of politics. In other words, without transparency, there can never be a real global polity to hold the new global institutions to account. And then all your other political concerns will remain limited, local and without significant impact.

If you want a world where your political influence is limited to a level which no longer matters, then sure, don’t support Wikileaks.

But if you actually care about being able to have some degree of accountability and control at a level that does, then you absolutely should support Wikileaks against the measures being taken to destroy it. At least sign the Avvaaz petition. Sure, we don’t know what form any emergent global polity can or will take – and maybe one of the fascinating things about such an open, ‘Wiki-world’ is that no one person or group will be able to determine this – but we certainly know what the alternative looks like, and whilst it may not be ‘a boot stamping on human face forever’, it is most certainly a firm paternal hand on our shoulder.

The Internet Must Be Defended!

As I am just putting the finishing touches on a new issue of Surveillance & Society, on surveillance and empowerment, the furore over the Wikileaks website and it’s publication of secret cables from US diplomatic sources has been growing. Over the last few days, Julian Assange, the public face of the website and one of its founders has been arrested in London on supposedly unrelated charges as US right-wing critics call for his head, the site’s domain name has been withdrawn, Amazon has kicked the organization off its US cloud computing service, one of Assange’s bank accounts has been seized, and major companies involved in money transfer, Paypal, Visa and Mastercard, have all stopped serving Wikileaks claiming that Wikileaks had breached their terms of service.

At the same time, hundreds of mirror sites for Wikileaks have been set up around the world, and the leaks show no sign of slowing down. The revelations themselves are frequently mundane or confirm what informed analysts knew already, but it is not the content of these particular leaks that is important, it is the point at which they come in the struggle over information rights and the long-term future of the Internet.

The journal which I manage is presaged on open-access to knowledge. I support institutional transparency and accountability at the same time as I defend personal privacy. It is vital not to get the two mixed up. In the case of Wikileaks, the revelation of secret information is not a breach of anyone’s personal privacy, rather it is a massively important development in our ability to hold states to account in the information age. It is about equalization, democratization and the potential creation of a global polity to hold the already globalized economy and political elites accountable.

John Naughton, writing on The Guardian website, argues that western states who claim openness is part of freedom and democracy cannot have it both ways. We should, he says, ‘live with the Wikileakable world’. It is this view we accept, not the ambivalence of people like digital critic, Clay Shirky, who, despite being a long-term advocate of openness seemingly so long as the openness of the Internet remained safely confined to areas like economic innovation, cannot bring himself to defend this openness when its genuinely political potential is beginning to be realised.

The alternative to openness is closure, as Naughton argues. The Internet, created by the US military but long freed from their control, is now under thread of being recaptured, renationalized, sterilized and controlled. With multiple attacks on the net from everything from capitalist states’ redefinition of intellectual property and copyrights, through increasingly comprehensive surveillance of Internet traffic by almost all states, to totalitarian states’ censorship of sites, and now the two becoming increasingly indistinguishable over the case of Wikileaks, now is the time for all who support an open and liberatory Internet to stand up.

Over 30 years ago, between 1975 and 1976 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault gave a powerful series of lectures entitled Society Must Be Defended. With so much that is social vested in these electronic chains of connection and communication, we must now argue clearly and forcefully that, nation-states and what they want be damned, “The Internet Must Be Defended!”