Post-apocalyptic future envisioned for 1984 film The Terminator.Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.Agne Pix (AP): We met to talk about an open and neutral
Internet, however, recent tragic events have dramatically changed the context
of our conversation. Tell me about the situation from your perspective as a
civil liberties hacktivist and a Parisian. After the carnage in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015
there were certain security measures taken. Why did they not prevent another
terrorist attack in Paris?
Jérémie Zimmermann (JZ): In
the last year and a half, four security laws have been adopted in France in the
name of combating terrorism. Now would be the right time to question their efficiency.
Things did not start with Charlie Hebdo: in the last
15 years about fifteen other bills were adopted which closely followed the
example of the US and some other European countries after 9/11. The most recent
law, prolonging the state of emergency to three months and even renewable for
longer, is the most striking because it coincides with the collective emotional
shock and disorientation of French society as a whole after November 13. This state
of emergency was adopted in an extremely rushed procedure, almost overnight,
with no room for debate, so that one might surmise that most of the MPs did not
have time to read the bill they voted for. It seems as if the political process
has been poisoned by the intelligence agencies, who are given more power with less
accountability requested every time they fail, so that this efficiency cannot
even be assessed properly. We are in a downwards spiral, where policies that
are driven by fear undermine the rule of law and fundamental rights, in favour
of an illusion of more security.
AP: In the post-9/11 world,
after 14 years of increased surveillance, billions spent on wars, torture and
drones, why are western security forces still unable to detect a major
terrorist attack?
JZ: The New America Foundation conducted
a study on the effectiveness
of mass surveillance which showed that it's mostly useless against
terrorism. In the vast majority of cases it is targeted surveillance and human
intelligence that foil plots. So mass surveillance does not work to prevent
terrorist attacks but it has become the norm, pervades all our devices and
communications, and is widely used everyday for economic and political
espionage.
Since
9/11, following the lead of the NSA, in France and elsewhere huge investments
were made into the technological means of mass interception, collection,
storage and processing of communications, while human resources in the field
were reduced.
Agents
infiltrating targeted groups were substituted by big computer systems. This is
a long-term trend, which may be way more comfortable for the personnel of
spying agencies, but at the same time gives them unprecedented degrees of
unaccountable power. And with what result? Four out of the eight killers at the
Bataclan concert hall and Paris’ 11th district had already ben
arrested and charged for offences related to terrorism, and four had traveled
back and forth to Syria. They were known to the police and organized themselves
using Facebook and SMS. Free speech has been used
as a pretext to legitimize the drift towards a police state.
One of
them spent thrice his monthly revenue renting apartments and cars, and still
the computer surveillance did not detect that to prevent the tragic events. Now
this failure of intelligence will mechanically enable them to gain more power,
more resources, and less scrutiny.
This
is simply wrong and will precisely lead to more of the injustice and imbalance
of power that we should all be fighting against.
AP: Charlie Hebdo was perceived
as a symbol of free speech, one of the fundamental French and European values.
Now the state of emergency curbs this freedom.
JZ: One
cannot call it a symbol of free speech when one week later security laws
enabling mass surveillance are enacted, the military is put on the streets, and
people are jailed for ‘incitement to terrorism’ for things they post on
Facebook. Free speech has been used as a pretext to legitimize the drift towards
a police state.
AP: From a civil rights point of
view what are the most disconcerting measures introduced by the state of
emergency after November 13?
JZ: Police
can now search and seize any property any time without a court order. They can
search computers, grab all of their data, as well as all of the data on any
other computer the searched computer is connected to, think “the cloud”. Over
2500 homes have been raided, including some organic farmers from the south of
France who protested two years ago against a silly and costly airport project,
along with many others.
The
government can now censor any website and block any protest or public
gathering. They can house-arrest anyone, or jail for 6 months those who disobey
such bans, and this just happened to environmental activists preparing to
demonstrate at the COP21 conference on climate change. Out of these thousands
of innocent people harassed and whose freedom have been unduly restricted by
the police, only two cases were “signaled” to the anti-terror judges. How can
this be justified?
AP: The state of emergency was
extended from the usual 12 days to 3 months by the National Assembly's vote 551
to 6. Over 90% of French people approve of the extraordinary security measures.
There's an overwhelming acceptance on the part of society to sacrificing part
of their liberty on the altar of security.
JZ: I
don't comment on polls and the so-called “perception of public opinion” because
you can manipulate these numbers by formulating questions in a certain manner.
If you ask “would you sacrifice freedom to gain more security” people may
answer “yes,” but the question itself is an illusion. There is no such
trade-off, no clear evidence that losing one will help you gain on the other.
The
fact is, fear is being instrumentalised by politicians hoping to gain an advantage
in the upcoming elections. History has taught us that when you install
scaremongering policies it backfires into an escalation of violence.
Interestingly, what the so-called “socialist” president François Hollande and
PM Manuel Valls have proposed for this emergency law has been taken directly
from proposals by Sarkozy's conservative party and the far-right National
Front. As if the whole political landscape in France was inexorably drifting to
the far right.
9/11
and 11/13
AP: You described the shock and
awe vicious circle in a tweet just after the Paris attacks: first
horror, then sadness, followed by political exploitation, media uproar,
restriction of freedoms, hate again and then back to horror. Is France, the
homeland of liberté, egalité, fraternité, now succumbing to a new “war on
terror”?
JZ: It is the
same pattern as after 9/11, but the difference is that in the US it took them 6
weeks to pass the Patriot Act, while in France the emergency legislation was
adopted in a couple of days. But another similarity with 9/11 is the way a
society in deep shock and traumatised is
constantly bombarded by media with violent images and warmongering rhetoric.
Politicians
like Hollande, and Bush at the time, who were low in the ratings, used it to
raise their profile as reassuring champions of security, hoping that this boost
would last long enough to get them re-elected. They don't address the real
causes of terrorism, and completely refuse to acknowledge the failures of
intelligence and foreign policy, among others… They
don't address the real causes of terrorism, and completely refuse to
acknowledge the failures of intelligence and foreign policy, among others…
Instead
they focus public discourse on random issues and repeat the same errors. By
exploiting fear to their personal advantage and by attacking fundamental
freedoms to this end, politicians are undermining their own legitimacy, that of
the institutions they represent and the democratic models which they are in
charge of defending.
I have
the sense that this is part of a downward spiral towards authoritarianism and
that we will experience yet more fear and violence, antidemocratic backlash and
crackdown on fundamental rights.
AP: In the first hours after the
Paris attacks, President Hollande initially appealed for calm and unity. Then
the government lost their nerve and pushed through intrusive legislation. Human
Rights Watch points out that the new sweeping powers are disproportionate. Amnesty
International warns
that repression will be codified and new proposals are expected to expand
surveillance worldwide in the name of counter-terrorism. Are we up for another decade of the same old
failed responses and a Europe that has learned nothing from the US mistakes?
JZ: I wish the EU
was different and able to reflect, but, apparently, unfortunately, it is not.
I'm very concerned now that this collective psychosis in France that has turned
it into a police state in a just few days will duly spread to the rest of the
EU. We just saw Belgium in a nearly one-week lockdown mimicking French
emergency measures under political pressure.
Scapegoats, cryptos, Achilles and Snowden
AP: At the European level we can already observe moves that confirm your concerns. Interestingly enough, the first calls to ban
encryption came from the US, followed by the UK. Encryption was vilified as the
Internet’s “Achilles heel.” However, the terrorist leader was already bragging about
his plot in a publicly
available jihadist web magazine in February.
JZ: This is the
exploitation of fear for political gain in another form. In the USA for months
now we could sense the arrival of the second "Crypto War,” based on what
we saw during the first failed attempts to ban crypto in the 90s.
In France, crypto was illegal until the early 00s and it was considered
a “weapon of war” but people used it anyway. Crypto can be a problem for
authoritarian governments because it means using mathematics to exercise your
fundamental right to privacy. Such regimes want to be able to violate privacy
any time.
The White House has recently
withdrawn their attempts to block crypto, but the UK PM David
Cameron is still keen to uphold these efforts. A few hours after the Paris
attacks, unidentified US ‘officials’ fed the
international press with allegations that the Paris terrorists were
using encryption and therefore we should ban it.
That was a red herring to avoid what should really have been discussed:
the failures of French intelligence services to prevent the attacks. It happens
that the terrorists were using SMS and Facebook, centralized and US-controlled communication
services nobody calls upon to be outlawed. It is now clear that the second
“Crypto War” is under way and it does not limit itself to the US only, but it
is being exported to France, the UK, and the rest of the world.
Western governments are actively seeking to restrict
the autonomy of their citizens. Western governments are actively seeking to restrict
the autonomy of their citizens. More than ever it shows that we should all be using the encryption of our communications
to protect ourselves, and as a matter of principle. Indeed, terrorists will use
it too, but it would not be an obstacle to properly targeted surveillance and
infiltration of these groups, if intelligence agencies were doing their job
properly…
I think that Daesh terrorists, whose business model is to exploit fear,
must be loving this, because we are literally playing their game: if their
objective was to attack our freedoms and way of life, we are finishing their
job for them by getting terrorized and restricting our rights ourselves. We
cannot protect our freedoms by restricting them.
AP: Another scapegoat strategy is “the Snowden effect.” After the Paris
massacre, again, prominent US and UK politicians pointed to Edward Snowden as
having blood on his hands for having promoted encryption that, they alleged,
enabled terrorists to secretly communicate.
JZ: I sincerely hope
that the more our governments turn authoritarian, the more their citizens learn
to use end-to-end encryption, free/libre open software and decentralized
services, because that's the only way we can protect ourselves and our
communications from abuses, injustice and tyranny, whether in authoritarian
regimes or in ‘democracies’ drifting towards police states. Attempts at
scapegoating Snowden or encryption in general are yet another way of diverting attention
away from the failures of anti-terrorism as a mode of government.
AP: Isn't safety a basic need,
more important than personal or collective freedoms? In Maslow's hierarchy of
human needs, security comes just after physiological needs like food or sleep.
Do you think it is possible to strike a balance between privacy and security?
JZ: There is no balance to strike. There is no balance to strike… Such rhetoric seems
designed to habituate us to seeing our freedoms sacrificed. It is unacceptable!
That was an argument of the far right in the 80s and 90s in France and now
the allegedly ‘socialist’ government has recycled it by saying that “security
is the first of all freedoms.” This
narrative is an outrageous fallacy. Freedoms cannot be traded for each other,
and there is indeed no evidence that by sacrificing freedoms we would actually
get more security… Rather the other way around if you look at the US. Our
fundamental freedoms should be considered altogether, as a non-negotiable,
uncompromising package. The legitimacy of our governments and institution is
bound to their ability to preserve the package as a whole.
Such
rhetoric seems designed to habituate us to seeing our freedoms sacrificed. It
is unacceptable! Various constitutions mention safety as a fundamental
right but it is often defined as protection against arbitrary use of power by
the state. In history, the security of individuals have most of the time been
threatened by states. Only very recently, also by companies… The notion of
“national security” comes from the US and it is not very well defined, I think.
Is it about the security of everyone? Or security for those who write the law,
of the institutions and their representatives, of the infrastructure?
Freedom or barbarie
AP: The Internet is a powerful
communication tool, but not the cause of violence. However, it is definitely
vulnerable to hateful content. Don't we need some form of governance to protect
it, just like we have certain rules in society to govern our behavior and
exchanges?
JZ: There's
big hype around the concept of Internet governance. It is a pretext for boring,
yet completely shallow and powerless meetings in the world’s more exotic
locations, while at the same time state administrations and corporations have
been able to successfully take over the Internet for the last 15 years. We
individuals are somehow out of the loop, unable to participate.
Now,
if we talk about how to collectively participate in governing the Internet, we
could think of countless decisions that actually do affect the Net. Some of
them are purely technological decisions, when new protocols are being invented,
developed and spread, for instance BitTorrent, Jabber, and various voice
protocols. Also, political decisions often have an effect on the Net: when a
government attempts at censoring parts of the network for their populations,
and other stupid or dangerous pieces of legislation. These are always local,
national choices. Then there are cultural and social decisions to use Facebook,
YouTube, Google and make it extremely big and powerful, or to opt out of it. So
there's a myriad of actors, and political, economic, technological and
individual decisions to be taken. All this together in its whacky diversity
leads to the collective governance of the Internet.
We all
have a role in that, whether or not we can afford a ticket to the next farcical
Internet Governance Forum. All the decisions regarding the Internet, whether
political, technological or economic, should be taken on the basis of strong,
uncompromising ethical principles, and not private interests.
AP: Allegedly jihadists “go dark” to avoid
detection or even use Sony’s PlayStation 4 encryption, according to Belgian
interior minister Jan Jambon. Some services in France's Ministry of Interior
were apparently considering blocking TOR. Is
balkanization the future of the Internet?
JZ: Rhetoric
about the “Dark Net” seems to be a dangerous construction used to describe the
technologies that help you to protect your freedom and fundamental right to
privacy as somehow dark, or dangerous. When you are using them you're not more
“dark,” you're more free. So what has been called “Dark Net” should be called
“Freedom Net.” So what has been called “Dark Net”
should be called “Freedom Net.” The Internet means the freedom of any 2
given computers to connect via a protocol of their choice. So choosing to use
protocols that are only understandable by your destination is part of the
essence of the Net.
The distinction to make is that there is a part of the Internet that can
be easily spied upon to enable mass surveillance, profiling and predictive
algorithms on the collective data of individuals, all of them detrimental to
democracy. That's the Google Internet, where they can suck in every bit of data
and turn it into a goldmine and a source of intelligence, used by a very few
powerful actors. And then there's the rest, where we may still have a faint
glimpse of hope that we can develop ourselves, think, speak, discuss and
organize without being spied upon and analyzed at all times.
PA: You said that there was no difference between the
virtual and “real” life: both are interconnected. But the sad fact is that we
are not safe on the Internet any more. Are you pessimistic or optimistic about
its future?
JZ: Both,
like Schrödinger's cat (laughs).
Seriously, I don't know, because I don't read
the future. It's all in our hands. It depends on our capacity to
organize and mobilize, to be courageous, to do the right thing, to invent and
reinvent ourselves, to create material, affective and political solidarity, to
improve our skills, to never give up and to always question everything. It's
freedom or barbarie. It's a struggle for humanity. Otherwise, we are
heading towards a world looking like Terminator mashed-up with Soylent Green.
Film poster for Soylent Green. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.
There is an acute and growing tension between the concern for safety and the protection of our freedoms. How do we handle this? Read more from the World Forum for Democracy partnership.
