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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 day ago

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Every internet fight is a speech fight

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Hard (Sovereignty) Cases Make Bad (Internet) Law," an attempt to cut through the knots we tie ourselves in when speech and national sovereignty collide online:

https://locusmag.com/2024/11/cory-doctorow-hard-sovereignty-cases-make-bad-internet-law/

This happens all the time. Indeed, the precipitating incident for my writing this column was someone commenting on the short-lived Brazilian court order blocking Twitter, opining that this was purely a matter of national sovereignty, with no speech dimension.

This is just profoundly wrong. Of course any rules about blocking a communications medium will have a free-speech dimension – how could it not? And of course any dispute relating to globe-spanning medium will have a national sovereignty dimension.

How could it not?

So if every internet fight is a speech fight and a sovereignty fight, which side should we root for? Here's my proposal: we should root for human rights.

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the US government was illegally wiretapping the whole world. They were able to do this because the world is dominated by US-based tech giants and they shipped all their data stateside for processing. These tech giants secretly colluded with the NSA to help them effect this illegal surveillance (the "Prism" program) – and then the NSA stabbed them in the back by running another program ("Upstream") where they spied on the tech giants without their knowledge.

After the Snowden revelations, countries around the world enacted "data localization" rules that required any company doing business within their borders to keep their residents' data on domestic servers. Obviously, this has a human rights dimension: keeping your people's data out of the hands of US spy agencies is an important way to defend their privacy rights. which are crucial to their speech rights (you can't speak freely if you're being spied on).

So when the EU, a largely democratic bloc, enacted data localization rules, they were harnessing national soveriegnty in service to human rights.

But the EU isn't the only place that enacted data-localization rules. Russia did the same thing. Once again, there's a strong national sovereignty case for doing this. Even in the 2010s, the US and Russia were hostile toward one another, and that hostility has only ramped up since. Russia didn't want its data stored on NSA-accessible servers for the same reason the USA wouldn't want all its' people's data stored in GRU-accessible servers.

But Russia has a significantly poorer human rights record than either the EU or the USA (note that none of these are paragons of respect for human rights). Russia's data-localization policy was motivated by a combination of legitimate national sovereignty concerns and the illegitimate desire to conduct domestic surveillance in order to identify and harass, jail, torture and murder dissidents.

When you put it this way, it's obvious that national sovereignty is important, but not as important as human rights, and when they come into conflict, we should side with human rights over sovereignty.

Some more examples: Thailand's lesse majeste rules prohibit criticism of their corrupt monarchy. Foreigners who help Thai people circumvent blocks on reportage of royal corruption are violating Thailand's national sovereignty, but they're upholding human rights:

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/24/21075149/king-thailand-maha-vajiralongkorn-facebook-video-tattoos

Saudi law prohibits criticism of the royal family; when foreigners help Saudi women's rights activists evade these prohibitions, we violate Saudi sovereignty, but uphold human rights:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55467414

In other words, "sovereignty, yes; but human rights even moreso."

Which brings me back to the precipitating incidents for the Locus column: the arrest of billionaire Telegram owner Pavel Durov in France, and the blocking of billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter in Brazil.

How do we make sense of these? Let's start with Durov. We still don't know exactly why the French government arrested him (legal systems descended from the Napoleonic Code are weird). But the arrest was at least partially motivated by a demand that Telegram conform with a French law requiring businesses to have a domestic agent to receive and act on takedown demands.

Not every takedown demand is good. When a lawyer for the Sackler family demanded that I take down criticism of his mass-murdering clients, that was illegitimate. But there is such a thing as a legitimate takedown: leaked financial information, child sex abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, true threats, etc, are all legitimate targets for takedown orders. Of course, it's not that simple. Even if we broadly agree that this stuff shouldn't be online, we don't necessarily agree whether something fits into one of these categories.

This is true even in categories with the brightest lines, like child sex abuse material:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo

And the other categories are far blurrier, like doxing:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trump-camp-worked-with-musks-x-to

But just because not every takedown is a just one, it doesn't follow that every takedown is unjust. The idea that companies should have domestic agents in the countries where they operate isn't necessarily oppressive. If people who sell hamburgers from a street-corner have to register a designated contact with a regulator, why not someone who operates a telecoms network with 900m global users?

Of course, requirements to have a domestic contact can also be used as a prelude to human rights abuses. Countries that insist on a domestic rep are also implicitly demanding that the company place one of its employees or agents within reach of its police-force.

Just as data localization can be a way to improve human rights (by keeping data out of the hands of another country's lawless spy agencies) or to erode them (by keeping data within reach of your own country's lawless spy agencies), so can a requirement for a local agent be a way to preserve the rule of law (by establishing a conduit for legitimate takedowns) or a way to subvert it (by giving the government hostages they can use as leverage against companies who stick up for their users' rights).

In the case of Durov and Telegram, these issues are especially muddy. Telegram bills itself as an encrypted messaging app, but that's only sort of true. Telegram does not encrypt its group-chats, and even the encryption in its person-to-person messaging facility is hard to use and of dubious quality.

This is relevant because France – among many other governments – has waged a decades-long war against encrypted messaging, which is a wholly illegitimate goal. There is no way to make an encrypted messaging tool that works against bad guys (identity thieves, stalkers, corporate and foreign spies) but not against good guys (cops with legitimate warrants). Any effort to weaken end-to-end encrypted messaging creates broad, significant danger for every user of the affected service, all over the world. What's more, bans on end-to-end encrypted messaging tools can't stand on their own – they also have to include blocks of much of the useful internet, mandatory spyware on computers and mobile devices, and even more app-store-like control over which software you can install:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

So when the French state seizes Durov's person and demands that he establish the (pretty reasonable) minimum national presence needed to coordinate takedown requests, it can seem like this is a case where national sovereignty and human rights are broadly in accord.

But when you consider that Durov operates a (nominally) encrypted messaging tool that bears some resemblance to the kinds of messaging tools the French state has been trying to sabotage for decades, and continues to rail against, the human rights picture gets rather dim.

That is only slightly mitigated by the fact that Telegram's encryption is suspect, difficult to use, and not applied to the vast majority of the communications it serves. So where do we net out on this? In the Locus column, I sum things up this way:

Telegram should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

Telegram should not backdoor its encryption, even if

the sovereign French state orders it to do so.

Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso.

What about Musk? As with Durov in France, the Brazilian government demanded that Musk appoint a Brazilian representative to handle official takedown requests. Despite a recent bout of democratic backsliding under the previous regime, Brazil's current government is broadly favorable to human rights. There's no indication that Brazil would use an in-country representative as a hostage, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with requiring foreign firms doing business in your country to have domestic representatives.

Musk's response was typical: a lawless, arrogant attack on the judge who issued the blocking order, including thinly veiled incitements to violence.

The Brazilian state's response was multi-pronged. There was a national blocking order, and a threat to penalize Brazilians who used VPNs to circumvent the block. Both measures have obvious human rights implications. For one thing, the vast majority of Brazilians who use Twitter are engaged in the legitimate exercise of speech, and they were collateral damage in the dispute between Musk and Brazil.

More serious is the prohibition on VPNs, which represents a broad attack on privacy-enhancing technology with implications far beyond the Twitter matter. Worse still, a VPN ban can only be enforced with extremely invasive network surveillance and blocking orders to app stores and ISPs to restrict access to VPN tools. This is wholly disproportionate and illegitimate.

But that wasn't the only tactic the Brazilian state used. Brazilian corporate law is markedly different from US law, with fewer protections for limited liability for business owners. The Brazilian state claimed the right to fine Musk's other companies for Twitter's failure to comply with orders to nominate a domestic representative. Faced with fines against Spacex and Tesla, Musk caved.

In other words, Brazil had a legitimate national sovereignty interest in ordering Twitter to nominate a domestic agent, and they used a mix of somewhat illegitimate tactics (blocking orders), extremely illegitimate tactics (threats against VPN users) and totally legitimate tactics (fining Musk's other companies) to achieve these goals.

As I put it in the column:

Twitter should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

banning Twitter is bad for the free speech rights of Twitter users in Brazil; and

banning VPNs is bad for all Brazilian internet users; and

it’s hard to see how a Twitter ban will be effective without bans on VPNs.

There's no such thing as an internet policy fight that isn't about national sovereignty and speech, and when the two collide, we should side with human rights over sovereignty. Sovereignty isn't a good unto itself – it's only a good to the extent that is used to promote human rights.

In other words: "Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/06/brazilian-blowout/#sovereignty-sure-but-human-rights-even-moreso

Image: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Border_Wall_at_Tijuana_and_San_Diego_Border.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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welcometoqueer · 4 hours ago

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Some U.S. election news updates (as of afternoon November 7, 2024):

Many states, including major battleground ones, have started recounting votes on their own despite there still being no national call for a recount. Some of these states recounting or considering recounting as of November 7, 2024 include: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona (considering), and Texas (considering).

Most news outlets have been covering state laws regarding recounts and what a recount could mean. Notably, right-wing sources like Fox News have not mentioned the possibility of a recount or the high demand for one (hmmm).

In cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia, people took to the streets in a peaceful protest to demand a recount (wait, you can protest peacefully?? without starting an insurrection?? Crazy).

More information alleging Trump cheating has come forward, although many people are expressing their frustrations over there being little to no coverage of election interference by the mainstream media. Additionally, many Democratic voters are vowing to boycott news sources such as CNN and MSNBC due to their apparent tone-deaf and lackluster response to the allegations.

On Twitter, hashtags such as “Do Not Concede Kamala,” “Recount 2024,” “He/Trump Cheated,” and “Rigged” continue to trend nationally since election night.

Also in the Twitter hellscape, Elon Musk has been removing posts with resources, posts alleging Trump cheated, and posts with information on how to check your ballot and demand a recount. This is awfully suspicious and concerning behavior from someone who has also been accused of bribing voters, which is a federal crime.

Many people are also sharing their grief over the extreme likelihood of programs and services such as Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, the Department of Education, and others being diminished or fully gutted as many Republican lawmakers and Trump have promised to do. Already today (Nov. 7), House Republicans have proposed a bill that would reduce social security payments for U.S.Americans who receive disability benefits or a pension.

There are also concerns over imposed tariffs, the United States losing its NATO membership, and the potential dissolving of the United Nations.

Many MAGA Trump supporters have started to be more emboldened, not just in the Twitter space. Multiple parents have come forward to share that young boys at their children’s schools have also begun repeating the “your body, my choice” mantra, leaving other kids in distress.

Speaking of distress, nationwide, queer and trans people have been largely absent from work and school. Since election night, LGBTQ+ and other helplines have had long waits due to such high demand.

TW: suicide mention, skip the next paragraph

There’s been over 2000+ suicides of just LGBTQ+ individuals since election night and the numbers keep increasing drastically.

End TW

Politically, sitting President Joe Biden addressed the nation today to discuss a “peaceful transfer of power.” He addressed people questioning Donald Trump’s win and the election system saying: “It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose."

Needless to say, no one was pleased by his response and are still demanding an investigation or recount.

Other political figures such as Bernie Sanders and the Obamas’ released their own statements regarding the election.

The Obamas’ had a very professional yet disappointed statement.

Bernie Sanders however, took a different approach, sharing the mass sentiment among democratic voters and criticizing the Democratic Party based on their response to the situation. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

[ID:

Multiple videos and images with election news and updates.

The first video, posted to Twitter, is of an Anti-Trump protest in Chicago.

These should be peacefully taking place all over the country. This is what democracy is about, not storming Capitol buildings. Right MAGA? pic.twitter.com/lgzsP41Lze — Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) November 7, 2024.

The video shows people in the streets of Chicago and in front of Trump tower peacefully protesting in demand for a recount and investigation.

Protesters chants include:

“Donald Trump, you will see!”

“Racist, sexist, anti-gay! Donald Trump, go away!”

and “You’re not welcome in this town! Donald Trump, you fascist clown!”

The second video was also posted to Twitter by CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) on November 6, 2024. It’s a video from MSNBC reporting on the strange behavior of Trump leading up to the election where he repeatedly said he didn't need votes. These statements seem to imply that regardless of how people voted, he expected to gain power.

The next image is of the official statement regarding the election results by Barack and Michelle Obama.

The statement reads:

STATEMENT BY PRESIDENT AND MRS. OBAMA ON THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION NOVEMBER 6, 2024

“Over the last few weeks and through Election Day, millions of Americans cast their votes - not just for president, but for leaders at every level. Now the results are in, and we want to congratulate President Trump and Senator Vance on their victory. This is obviously not the outcome we had hoped for, given our profound disagreements with the Republican ticket on a whole host of issues. But living in a democracy is about recognizing that our point of view won't always win out, and being willing to accept the peaceful transfer of power. Michelle and I could not be prouder of Vice President Harris and Governor Walz - two extraordinary public servants who ran a remarkable campaign. And we will always be grateful to the staff and volunteers who poured their heart and soul into electing public servants they truly believed in. As I said on the campaign trail, America has been through a lot over the last few years - from a historic pandemic and price hikes resulting from the pandemic, to rapid change and the feeling a lot of folks have that, no matter how hard they work, treading water is the best they can do. Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune. The good news is that these problems are solvable - but only if we listen to each other, and only if we abide by the core constitutional principles and democratic norms that made this country great. In a country as big and diverse as ours, we won't always see eye-to-eye on everything. But progress requires us to extend good faith and grace - even to people with whom we deeply disagree. That's how we've come this far, and it's how we'll keep building a country that is more fair and more just, more equal and more free.”

The last two images are Bernie Sanders’ statement on the election results, criticizing the response of the Democratic Party.

Sanders’ statement reads:

NEWS: Sanders Statement on the Results of the 2024 Presidential Election November 6, 2024 BURLINGTON, Vt. - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today released the following statement in response to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago. Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse. Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave. Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government's all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions. Stay tuned.”

/end ID]

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