CHAPTER 11
DIVISION
The chaos comes streaming through my iPhone the moment I fire it up. The overnight updates bear testament to a world spinning too fast for its own good as the celebrity president imposes his new American values of wilful ignorance, confected outrage and calculated divisiveness on a bemused world. The Russian spymaster, the nuclear princeling, the British separatists, the Chinese empire builders, the European sophisticates, all of them have become characters in his global soap opera. We may scoff at his orange hue and unhinged tweets but there is a menacing undercurrent that threatens the world and the institutions that were once its beacon. The spectre of something darker and more authoritarian is looming.
This is not what was supposed to happen. The web was meant to be a democratising and unifying technology that would bring the world closer together. The liberal democratic model of openness and accountability seemed to fit the logic of the web perfectly. As information became easier to access, governments would devolve power downwards, finding new ways to serve and collaborate with their citizens who would, in turn, use their enhanced democratic power to demand nothing less. The gravitational pull of flatter structures would challenge and ultimately topple less open regimes that tried to concentrate power. Freedom would beget freedom. It was only a matter of bandwidth.
As national economies collapsed into regional and global free trade blocs, countries would better share scarce resources across national boundaries, especially things like ideas and IP that could be expressed as bits not atoms. A rejuvenated United Nations would lead collective responses to global challenges like climate change, population growth and human rights. The rising middle classes of Asia and India would embrace these global values and adapt them to their own specific cultures. Africa and the Middle East would follow suit, tapping technology to bypass the need for an industrial economy, transforming directly into vibrant, information-based societies. As the alliances of a unified Europe inspired other blocs of cooperation, the very idea of a nation-state would become outmoded. Humanity would connect as one, wrapped in its warm and loving web of togetherness.
But today the world is a more divided place. The march towards liberal democracy has stalled and in its place has risen a more sinister dance with leaders who harness technology to concentrate power rather than devolve it. Without the constraints of democracy, it is the dictators who are thriving. Beijing and Moscow are on the march, each lighting their own beacon of power. From Turkey to Poland, Venezuela to Brazil, a phalanx of emerging strongmen join the established autocrats of North Korea, Cambodia and Burma. The world’s largest democracy, India, appears to be on a similar trajectory. The Middle East remains a tinderbox. As the world fractures in ways we never predicted, the web seems to be forcing us further apart.
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If anyone personifies the gap between the promise of the web to open up the world and the reality it has achieved, it is the Australian hacker-turned-fugitive Julian Assange. His journey from libertarian cipher to authoritarian syphon reads like a moral fable on the folly of thinking that radical openness and freedom could transform the world. For a few short years, Assange embodied the power of the web to expose the secrets of industrial age institutions and hold them to account. In 2006 he hacked himself onto the world stage when his Wikileaks website started posting dumps of confidential data sent by whistle-blowers who, for the first time, could leak under the cover of encryption.
It started with a trickle of exposés – a corrupt Kenyan regime, files from Guantanamo Bay, Cayman Island bank accounts, internal papers from the Church of Scientology – any organisation with power and secrets was fair game. It zeroed in on the US military, releasing the ‘Collateral Murder’ video of a US gun-boat taking potshots at Iraqi civilians, the soldiers exhibiting the detached nonchalance of gamers. Wikileaks reached a global crescendo when it acquired a quarter of a million diplomatic cables leaked by a junior US intelligence officer. The files were dripped out in 2011 through the media in countries compromised by the high-level conversations between US officials and their local contacts. Confidences were betrayed, operatives exposed, the heart of the US state apparatus unveiled to the world in all its power and, it must be said, its banality too.
Assange was feted by the left as a global freedom fighter, winning acclaim from Amnesty International, attracting the love and funding of celebrities and philanthropists. Film producers and publishers lined up lionise him as a sort of Che-Guevara-meets-The-Matrix global subversive. But the cyber-fairytale would sour as the nation-state fought back. Branded a ‘high-tech terrorist’ by the Obama administration, Assange was placed on the US global Most Wanted list. Then two Swedish supporters accused him of sexually assaulting them at a clambake. Smelling a global set-up to get him handed over to the still-fuming US authorities, he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was granted asylum by that anti-American regime. There he remained for seven long years, conducting the nefarious online activities of Wikileaks, never leaving the building for fear of arrest and extradition; the general in his untidy labyrinth.
I was always ambivalent about Assange and his pretentions to being anything more than a disseminator of information. But a short monograph by Australian academic Robert Manne gave me a handle on the mission behind what seemed like a vanity project. Reviewing blogs, chatrooms and email lists that Assange had participated in through the web’s embryonic years, Manne identifies and then explores the cypherpunk philosophy, a part libertarian, part anarchist conviction that the next great battle for individual freedom would be fought around the state’s control of the web.
The cypherpunks were a loose collective of hackers who saw cryptography as their political weapon. Unlike the source codes that operate the web, cybersecurity systems are the gatekeepers of online infrastructure. With secure networks people can share private information, make financial transactions, relay commercial and state secrets. Without this security, and its constant maintenance, it’s a free for all. In this environment, the ability to make and break these codes becomes a subversive political weapon. Manne writes:
At the core of cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their employment of the electronic weapons newly at hand.
To the cypherpunks, the state was an unaccountable force that was constantly accumulating power over individuals through its ability to monitor their movements, accumulate personal information and control the flow of information. Behind elected governments, they believed, sat a Deep State of unaccountable operatives wielding the real control, ‘an invisible government owning no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people’. The bedrock of their power was the control of this information.
After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the US aggressively increased its power to capture and store information about individuals. A separate leak by Edward Snowden showed the extent to which anti-terrorism laws like the US Patriot Act had given government agencies the power to collect all manner of data about the movements of citizens – everything from travel documents to mobile phone transactions and internet records. Private providers were forced to accept protocols that would render any suspect’s digital footprint to the state. As terrorist attacks spread around the globe, states expanded their powers to collect data and share information about their citizens with allies. Troves of information were collected to be cross-referenced, analysed and shared in the name of the homeland.
The cypherpunks were convinced that the only way to prevent the misuse of this information was to shine a light on it. Through a complex network of secure encrypted servers, supporters inside the machinery of government were given the tools to safely share confidential information with the outside world. When Assange launched Wikileaks he proclaimed to friends that the principles of leaking would change human history for the better, that hacking and encrypted leaks would drain the swamp of its power. Wikileaks, Assange wrote, would ‘be an anvil at which beats the hammer of the collective conscience of humanity’.
Stripped of the overblown rhetoric, the game plan was simple: destroying the control of scarce information would ultimately lead to a hollowing out of the power of the state. Not just the state either; any corporation or organisation that accumulated power through its control of individuals’ personal information would become fair game. After a few organisations and their leaders had been exposed it would not even require ongoing scrutiny. Like Foucault’s Panopticon, the very expectation of exposure would change the way the old industrial-era hierarchies operated. Out of the shadows and into the glare of accountability, state power would inevitably collapse.
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The Arab Spring seemed like a vindication of the Wikileaks creed. Over an 18-month period from 2010, the patchwork of dictators and client states that had ruled the fractious Middle East since the Second World War came under challenge from popular uprisings. Repressive states were confronted by young tech-savvy citizens who used new social media tools to share information, plan public events, build momentum and communicate with the outside world, all under the unsuspecting noses of the traditional state instruments. Australian academic Sarah Joseph has documented the role of social media in the waves of uprisings that made up the Arab Spring, arguing that they allowed citizens to bypass the traditional structures of power even if the platforms were not quite fit for purpose. It was a real-time experiment in cypherpunk theory.
The first and most successful uprising in Tunisia was sparked by Wikileaks’ dump of diplomatic cables detailing the extravagance and corruption of the country’s president. Within weeks of the leak, the story of a young street vendor setting himself on fire after refusing to pay a bribe to local officials went viral on Facebook and Twitter. Protests erupted around the country, filmed and shared by supporters. Government attempts to shut down access to social media sites failed when global supporters set up proxies to redirect local users. Al Jazeera broke the local media blackout via satellite, broadcasting user-generated news that was being uploaded on social media from the protestors inside Tunisia and internationally. As the social network grew, it linked up with on-ground organising through local mosques. The revolution became impossible to stifle because there was no single organising point.
In Egypt the Mubarak regime saw what was occurring in Tunisia and moved to short-circuit similar protests by shutting down the nation’s entire internet. This act of society-wide censorship only had the effect of fuelling the outrage, driving the Tahrir Square revolution. It was an admission of weakness by a leader who was losing the support of his American sponsors. As uprisings spread across Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Bahrain and Libya, a digital playbook for revolution was developed in real time.
Rather than elevating a ‘hero’ leader to rally around, as was the norm through the earlier wave decolonisations, here the people led themselves. Moments were created through pre-scheduled days of action; they were promoted by simple hashtags, while closed Facebook groups provided organising infrastructure. Twitter feedback loops became the proxy broadcast medium. Everything was everywhere, so there was no need for a central carrier.
If the story had ended there and the repressive regimes had fallen and made way for more open and modern liberal democracies, Assange could rightly have claimed a win for the cypherpunks and their quest to expose the repressive workings of the state. But with the exception of Tunisia, the social movements have not translated into more free and open societies; rather, they descended into chaos. Egypt’s army removed the democratically elected but fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in a coup; post-Gaddafi Libya is still locked in civil war; Yemen remains an Al-Qaeda outpost, at war with Saudi Arabia, unable to feed its people.
And then there is Syria, the fight club of the Middle East, with shifting alliances of Assad loyalists and rebels, Russian and US clients, Kurdish separatists and the virus that is Islamic State driving a once prosperous nation into the dust. The emergence of Islamic State lays down a fundamental challenge to Assange’s worldview. These jihadist Sunnis would have just been another fringe group emerging from the US failure in Iraq were it not for their sophisticated use of the web. Like the Arab Spring protestors, Islamic State embraced social media as an organising tool. With slick videos that glamorised the brutal adventure of war, it launched a global recruitment drive micro-targeting disaffected young Muslims around the world. Its graphic uploads depicting the beheading of its enemies were a clarion call for fundamentalist warriors, creating its own unique point of difference.
As ISIS came to prominence, a big part of the recoil from the West was the realisation that its presence was being amplified on the same social media platforms that were part and parcel of our own comfortable lives. They were not just on the other side of the world in a foreign war zone; they were on our internet. Such violence and brutality was just a click away and the idea that the web was a safe and friendly place where we could make friends and share humorous memes was exposed as a grand delusion. That’s something else we missed in our enthusiasm to embrace the web as a warm global doona. We weren’t the world. We were just a particularly affluent corner of it.
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Look around the world today and it’s clear the web is not remaking the world in our western liberal democratic image. In China the state-owned, state-controlled internet offers more bandwidth to more people than anywhere on earth. Half of China’s 1.4 billion people are online, accessing state-controlled news, state-approved entertainment and culture, a massive gaming community and a vast online marketplace that has grown beyond even the control of the Communist Party. The Chinese internet is controlled by the Great Firewall of China, a state surveillance system that requires sites be pre-registered, locks out foreign news services and closely monitors individual online usage down to website visits and social media posts.
But that is just one strand of the Chinese web. In July 2018 the New York Times reported a massive government project to use facial recognition technology to identify and track its people. More than 300 million street cameras will be installed by 2020 and connected to public databases of known criminals. Giant billboards will display images of jaywalkers and people who owe money. The program was launched in the name of fighting crime, catching the heroin dealers and murderers. But the technology can just as easily be used to monitor a political dissident or someone who has just been a bit careless with their words online.
For a state that has embraced economic liberalism while asserting state control of free speech, it is no surprise that the web has been adapted in this way. The networks that bring people closer together are tightly controlled. People are empowered as consumers but supressed as citizens. As the Times journalist Paul Mozur observed: ‘China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a great democratiser, bringing people more freedom and connecting them to the world. In China, it has brought control.’
China is now exporting its version of the web to the world. As western governments embrace the privatisation of electricity and communication networks, Chinese government entities have been eager to fill the breach. One of these, Huawei, is a major player in global telecommunications, drawing the best and brightest from government-led engineering institutes to develop world-leading technology to roll out in partnership with western suppliers around the globe. The Chinese population is Huawei’s test-bed, the globe its marketplace. It goes broad and deep building networks, developing software, manufacturing smartphones. It does so playing the game like any global multinational, investing in universities, sponsoring football teams, donating to political parties of all hues.
Huawei’s ambitions go beyond being a phone provider. According to its own publicity, it is leading the world in the next wireless network technology, the so-called 5G network. This is a bandwidth broad enough to transmit the mass of data needed to run virtual reality, artificial intelligence and whatever is coming next. If 4G can deliver Netflix, 5G will allow us to control our driverless cars. Involved in joint projects from the US to New Zealand, Western Europe to South-East Asia, Huawei is even the carrier for the Iranian government’s national network. Huawei’s bid to provide the technology for Australia’s 5G network was rejected in late 2018 on the grounds of national security. The government noted that it would not accept bids from companies ‘subject to extra-judicial direction from a foreign government that conflicts with Australian law’.
Is this prudent security or paranoia? The doomsday scenario sees China and the western alliance drawn into conflict over expansion in the South China Sea or, conversely, US push-back under an unhinged president. If forced into a showdown, the network would provide the Chinese government with the tools not just to monitor and interfere in communications, but to conduct cyberterrorism – interrupting the power supply to businesses, even hospitals, disabling entire cities. This is not science fiction. The internet is already a tool that can be weaponised under the cover of avatars and proxy servers. The very networks of encryption and decryption that Assange imagined as weapons of revolution have become the lynchpin of state control.
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If the Chinese web reflects modern China, economically open but politically closed, the Russian web reflects modern Russia. The Federation formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union may have toyed with democracy for a time, but it has settled into a mode of government closer in look and feel to fascism. The government is dominated by a populist leader expanding his powers at home and his territory abroad with the backing of a covert state security apparatus and a coterie of wealthy oligarchs who own the privatised, once state-controlled, industries.
For a leader who cut his teeth in the KGB, the internet has provided Vladimir Putin with the means to adapt his core competencies to the twenty-first century. Like Assange, Putin has deployed the internet as a political weapon, allowing him to manage dissent at home while promoting his interests abroad. The online arsenal he is developing has three key capabilities: censorship, surveillance and misinformation.
Censorship of the Russian web has been the soundtrack to Putin’s accumulation of power. Since the 2012 presidential elections, access to the internet has been subject to a state-controlled blacklist that censors individual URLs, domain names and ISP addresses. The list was initially explained away as a law and order initiative to protect children from harmful online content, blocking sites promoting drug use, suicide and child pornography. But its scope has been expanded to include material deemed ‘extremist’, a designation that has captured everything from criticism of the Russian annexation of Crimea to dissident rock group Pussy Riot. Today, the blacklist is justified by the need to ‘protect cultural and spiritual values’ – values which, of course, the state defines.
The Russian web has also institutionalised state access to user data. At the time of writing, Putin is championing a new law supporting the mandatory installation of state surveillance equipment on all Russian servers. Already local telcos must collect and store their users’ metadata, including phone calls, website visits and emails, and make it available to the state without the need for a warrant. Under related terrorism laws, all web servers must store the data of all users within Russian territory, while phone companies must store recordings of conversations, texts and emails.
Alongside censorship and surveillance, the Russian web has become a global leader in the creation and distribution of misinformation. The so-called ‘troll farm’ of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) is the online wing of the Russian security services. In 2015 New York Times reporter Adrian Chen wrote the first detailed account of the IRA’s project ‘to industrialise the art of trolling’. He documented hundreds of content producers sitting in an office in St Petersburg churning out pro-Kremlin lines in online blogs, responding to news articles and posting social media in multiple languages under multiple fake identities.
The IRA first came to prominence with its project to change western attitudes to Russian involvement in the Ukraine around the time of the assassination of Boris Nemtov, a leading local politician. As news of Nemtov’s murder spread, hundreds of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts were created, generating content and sharing self-reinforcing assertions in what appeared to be an active and informed community. The Agency set up propaganda websites and social media feeds under fake identities to deliver key messages that were then promoted into western news sites. Comment pages were flooded by fake registered users sitting beside each other in the troll farm, giving their best impersonation of random participants in a global conversation.
These operations expanded during the 2016 US presidential campaign into a full-blown war-room. The Russian president had a clear interest in undermining the democratic process and, as he has conceded, wanted to see Hillary Clinton fail. The troll farm generated reams of false content and then used fake accounts on Facebook to advertise and promote them to targeted American audiences. Facebook itself told the US Senate in October 2017 it believed that during the campaign Russian agents had disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on its platform.
Most spectacularly, the IRA curated actual protests in American cities, the fake organisations establishing real events that real people turned up to. For example, the ‘Heart of Texas’ group controlled by the IRA created and promoted a Blue Lives Matter street protest to counter a Black Lives Matter event in Dallas. Another fake group, Being Patriotic, promoted a Florida Goes Trump rally. There were dozens of these events uncovered in subsequent investigations that have led to 13 Russians being indicted by the Mueller investigation for impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of government. These ‘real fake’ events were in turn bolstered by geo-targeted advertisements on Facebook that would amplify them to people identified as sharing the same values as the ‘real fake’ protestors.
Facebook has continuously argued it is a platform and not a publisher, so has no responsibility to test the veracity of its content, but the argument is now wearing thin. Its position is consistent with the logic that sees nothing immoral in encouraging readers to fill out a personality test that would also suck in lookalike data from all their online friends without telling them and then allowing a commercial business to extract and on-sell that data. This is exactly what Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump presidential campaign. When confronted with this by the US Senate in April 2018, Zuckerberg admitted some form of regulation was needed, although, of course, it would have to be the ‘right’ regulation.
Through its disregard for the consequences of its actions, Facebook has become the standard-bearer for the American web. While it may have created the technology as a web of openness and collaboration in support of liberal democratic values, by 2016 the American web had morphed into something very different: a web controlled and run by free enterprise in pursuit of profit. The common value system binding the American web had become its market value.
But even more decisive were the hacks of the database of the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta. They were carried out by ‘Grucifer 2.0’, a hacker who US intelligence believes is closely linked to their Russian counterparts, the GRU. The content and distribution of this information knocked Clinton off course at key moments of her campaign. The DNC leaks showing the party gave Hillary an inside run during the primaries were released in the middle of the DNC National Convention, a time when the party was attempting to bring Sanders supporters back into the fold. Podesta’s emails were released even later, with revelations of internal debates about Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks in which she was seen to have embraced ‘open trade and open borders’, powering Trump’s disingenuous but brutally effective protectionist outsider campaign. The email leaks from this account kept being dumped into the public domain day after day, offering fresh angles to distract reporters even as they became unconscious participants in the much bigger the story, the Russian hack of a US election.
After an extensive review, academic and noted fact-checker Kathleen Jamieson concluded the timing of these leaks, particularly those immediately after the release of hugely damaging recordings of Donald Trump bragging about sexually harassing women, was likely decisive in the final result. While the full extent of the Trump campaign’s involvement in these hacks may never see the light of day, one thing is not contested: they ended up in the hands of Wikileaks and were drip-fed to the world for maximum impact by Julian Assange.
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‘No-one can be sure’ is one of Trump’s rote responses when confronted with conclusive evidence about Russian interference in the 2016 election. It’s not my mission here to pass judgment on that, but I will throw this out there: Donald Trump’s presidency is the product of an unholy alliance between the covert Russian web, the rapacious American web and an Australian hacker whose mission is to use the web to bring the institution of the nation-state to its knees.
The Ecuadorians have finally tired of Assange and he has been ejected, to face the force of the US justice system or, just perhaps, a pardon from a grateful president. Perhaps in Trump he has fulfilled his ambitions, having created a demonstrably weaker America, even if despots around the world continue to thrive. If he ever walks free I’d love to ask him whether this is what he planned all along. Has his Wikileaks really weakened the nation-state or just its liberal democratic manifestation? Because from where I sit the world today looks more like the dark place the cypherpunks imagined they needed to guard us from than the open and free world that would result from their exposure of state secrets.
I think Assange’s ultimate mistake, and mine too, was to look at the web as a singular force with any innate characteristics. The way the world has adapted this technology in so many different ways proves that it is not of itself an inclusive and collaborative medium, one through which democracy will inevitably thrive. Yes, it can be inclusive and collaborative, but it can also be repressive and invasive and duplicitous. It can be liberating and inspiring and dangerous and terrifying. It can be Chinese and Russian and libertarian and hyper-capitalist. And it can be all these things at the same time.
Just as the web was born at the time the world was becoming freer, it is coming of age at a time when we are more divided, more tribal. Today it is western governments who are using the web to collect data on their citizens in a way that seems more in line with the tactics of closed regimes, rather than inspiring those closed regimes towards openness. In the process the web has become not just a tool, but the new battleground where these global divisions are prosecuted. Here lies its inherent truth: there never was a world wide web, and if that was once its noble aspiration, it’s been obliterated by its own pretensions. Control, alt, delete.