Big Brother's Reading Your BBMs

By Michelle Consorte

With the new generation of technology that has fallen into the lap of the general populace, has also come a new wave of regulations and patrolling at a similarly uncomfortable distance. The ability to regulate what types of communications go on and what information is sent to who becomes increasingly difficult as new portable technologies and encryption codes continue to become more complex as to allow more privacy. These new technologies also allow for the easier and more rapid spread of ideas. Both of which will definitely put off authoritarian and despotic-esque governments like China, Russia, and the several members of the United Arab Emirates. These governments have recently taken more drastic measures to try to stifle these novel developments.

Having been at my internship at a human rights organization for 2 days, I feel that I am adequately qualified to assess this situation as a direct violation of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Humor aside, the actions of these countries legitimately cross clearly-set lines of human rights. Whether you belong to the school of thought which honors international law as a binding legal framework, or that which assumes international law to be more ‘guidelines’ than actual rules, you cannot deny that these codes have indeed been broken.

China was the first country to come into the media’s recent spotlight as having taken censorship and suppression a bit too far. China’s transgressions were apparently so offensive that Google Inc, the world’s premier information provider, initially chose to leave the country rather than submit to the censorship laws that were being imposed on the company.

However, after much deliberation and communication, Google, Inc decided to remain in China, despite, the intensive and slightly invasive censorship enforced by the Chinese government. According to Google Inc’s blog, the internet giant apparently reached a compromise with China. Instead of automatically redirecting all users, Google Inc is taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, Google Inc can provide locally without filtering. “This approach," states the blog, “ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.” Still, if internet giant Google Inc were originally intending to pull out we can see the impact that China’s steadily tightening supervision of the Chinese Web is having.

Besides attempting to control the vast abyss that is the internet, certain countries are also trying to take command of more personal communication: texting and emailing, primarily from BlackBerry Smart phones. Certain countries in The United Arab Emirates are planning to suspend BlackBerry services like email and text messaging in October. This is because the devices use highly encrypted data which is sent through a closed, global network operated by Research In Motion, the company that produces BlackBerries. Since the data is so highly encrypted and never hits the open Internet, it cannot easily be tracked by governments on a large scale. In other words, if Big Brother can’t watch your BBMs, then apparently, you can’t have them.

Additionally, Russian authorities have recently taken to confiscating laptops under the pretext of them having illegally-downloaded Microsoft software on them. It should be noted, though, that most of the confiscated laptops have been taken from activist groups that plan activities and hold missions that run counter to governmental policies. The tactic works to stifle such activism and uprisings. One such group, Baikal Environmental Wave, which was organizing protests against Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to reopen a paper factory that had been polluting Lake Baikal, was intercepted by Russian police who took the group’s laptops. The group was then charged with piracy, even though members stated that the software was legal, and were even able to produce original receipts.

Originally, Microsoft seemed to be siding with the government. However, on Monday, the company’s senior vice president and general counsel, Brad Smith, issued the following statement from its headquarters in Redmond, Wash: “We want to be clear that we unequivocally abhor any attempt to leverage intellectual property rights to stifle political advocacy or pursue improper personal gain,” Mr. Smith said in a post on the company’s blog. “We are moving swiftly to seek to remove any incentive or ability to engage in such behavior.” Microsoft also implemented a new policy of an automatic blanket software license to advocacy groups and media outlets so that any computer owned by these groups containing Microsoft software is considered legal, thus making it much more difficult for authorities to charge and stop opposition groups. And the battle between technology, business, and private citizens continues ever onward, only escalated by the emerging technologies.

All of these bring to mind, for me at least, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In both of these novels, for those of you who haven’t brushed up on your high school literature in a while, both of these works describe authoritarian governments, complete with mind control, drugs that force people into submission, and propaganda powerful enough to alter years of history in minutes. That is not to suggest that governments have gone quite that far. However, there has indeed been a move of governments to invade the privacy of civilians and put barriers and restrictions on various types of communications, which, unfortunately, makes some of the instances in these novels, once seen as ludicrous and impossible, seem not too far off.