The Democratization of Repression

Stanford University's Evgeny Morozov published an interesting New York Times Op Ed Thursday about Western companies' sales of Internet surveillance technology to the Libyan and Egyptian governments and to other repressive regimes.

Morozov charges that the U.S. and other Western governments are complicit in these sales because many of the surveillance tools were initially developed for sale to Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Here's his prescription:

"What we need is a recognition that our reliance on surveillance technology domestically -- even if it is checked by the legal system -- is inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if any protection. That recognition should, in turn, fuel tighter restrictions on the domestic surveillance-technology sector, including a reconsideration of the extent to which it actually needs such technology in our increasingly privacy-free world."

He continues:

"As countries like Belarus, Iran and Myanmar digest the lessons of the Arab Spring, their demand for monitoring technology will grow. Left uncontrolled, Western surveillance tools could undermine the "Internet freedom" agenda in the same way arms exports undermine Western-led peace initiatives. How many activists, finding themselves confronted with information collected using Western technology, would trust the pronouncements of Western governments again?"

That conundrum put us in mind of the Cold War debates about selling advanced war planes and arms to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Greece, Turkey, India, Pakistan and, yes, Egypt too.

The argument then was between doves, who charged that the supposedly peace-promoting U.S. had become the world's chief supplier of deadly arms and often -- as in the case of India and Pakistan -- was supplying both sides in a bloody conflict, and hawks, who said if the U.S. didn't sell arms to those countries then the Soviet Union surely would and would gain a strategic advantage in the process.

With spying technology now as with traditional weapons technology then, it seems, the U.S. is fated to arm both sides. The State Department and other government agencies have devoted substantial sums to promoting anonymity software that allows activists and others to surf online without being tracked by their governments.

Global power over new technology has democratized since the Cold War era, though.

An implicit -- and accurate -- presumption by both sides during the 1970s and 1980s was that developing advanced aircraft, such as the F-15 fighter jet, was beyond the capacity of any nations save the two global superpowers and a few European allies. In other words, if Western nations had abandoned their advanced weapons or refused to share them, the genie might have been, for a few years at least, put back in the bottle.

But Internet surveillance technology is no F-15. Nor, for that matter, is it even an iPad 2. Hacking groups have proved fully adept not just at busting into government's surveillance technology but also at deploying their own.

At the same time, the civil liberties groups Witness.org and The Guardian Project have collaborated on a camera app for distributing evidence of human rights abuses that will automatically blur protesters' faces, strip internal data identifying who owns the device and trigger other anonymizing mechanisms to protect dissidents.

Even opponents of stateside domestic surveillance realize that policy cannot keep up with the evolution of tracking-technologies.

As Michael German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, says in an Al-Jazeera report: "We have a perfect storm where technology has outpaced how the law protects individual privacy. The law hasn't been updated, even though much of our lives are spent in an electronic world."

Leaving aside the morality of domestic surveillance in the West -- and of Western companies' complicity in repressive states' surveillance -- it's not at all clear that a Western commitment to forswear new surveillance technology could do much more than delay its development elsewhere.

If the conflict between spying states and their citizens is inevitable, the United States may have better luck developing new anonymity tools for citizens of repressive states than denying surveillance technology to their oppressors.