[governance] Alternet: Powerful Intelligence World on the Verge of the Ability to Make People Digitally Disappear

[michael gurstein]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-powerful-intelligence-world-verg
e-ability-make-people-digitally-disappear


How the Powerful Intelligence World Is on the Verge of the Ability to Make
People Digitally Disappear


December 6, 2013  |   

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What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I’m not suggesting some
future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a
disappearance, but a more ominous kind.

What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to
go away? What if every National Security Agency (NSA) document Snowden
released, every interview he gave, every documented trace of a national
security state careening out of control could be made to disappear in
real-time? What if the very posting of such revelations could be turned into
a fruitless, record-less endeavor?

Am I suggesting the plot for a novel by some twenty-first century George
Orwell? Hardly. As we edge toward a fully digital world, such things may
soon be possible, not in science fiction but in our world—and at the push of
a button. In fact, the earliest prototypes of a new kind of “disappearance”
are already being tested. We are closer to a shocking, dystopian reality
that might once have been the stuff of futuristic novels than we imagine.
Welcome to the memory hole.

Even if some future government stepped over one of the last remaining red
lines in our world and simply assassinated whistleblowers as they surfaced,
others would always emerge. Back in 1948, in his eerie novel
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_War> 1984 [4],
however, Orwell suggested a far more diabolical solution to the problem. He
conjured up a technological device for the world of Big Brother that he
called "the memory hole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole>  [5]." In
his dark future, armies of bureaucrats, working in what he sardonically
dubbed the Ministry of Truth, spent their lives erasing or altering
documents, newspapers, books, and the like in order to create an acceptable
version of history. When a person fell out of favor, the Ministry of Truth
sent him and all the documentation relating to him down the memory hole.
Every story or report in which his life was in any way noted or recorded
would be edited to eradicate all traces of him.

In Orwell's pre-digital world, the memory hole was a vacuum tube into which
old documents were physically disappeared forever. Alterations to existing
documents and the deep-sixing of others ensured that even the sudden
switching of global enemies and alliances would never prove a problem for
the guardians of Big Brother. In the world he imagined, thanks to those
armies of bureaucrats, the present was what had always been—and there were
those altered documents to prove it and nothing but faltering memories to
say otherwise. Anyone who expressed doubts about the truth of the present
would, under the rubric of “thoughtcrime
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime>  [6],” be marginalized or
eliminated.

Government and Corporate Digital Censorship

Increasingly, most of us now get our news, books, music, TV, movies, and
communications of every sort electronically. These days, Google earns more
advertising revenue
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57548432-93/google-makes-more-money-from-a
ds-than-print-media-combined/>  [7] than all U.S. print media combined. Even
the venerable Newsweek no longer publishes a paper edition
<http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732466040457820143281220
2750>  [8]. And in that digital world, a certain kind of “simplification” is
being explored. The Chinese
<http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4707107>  [9], Iranians
<http://www.blockediniran.com/>  [10], and others are, for instance, already
implementing web-filtering strategies to block access to sites and online
material of which their governments don’t approve. The U.S. government
similarly (if somewhat fruitlessly) blocks its employees from viewing
<http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2012/04/10/she-remained-silent-we-do-not/>
[11] Wikileaks and Edward Snowden material (as well as websites like
TomDispatch
<http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2011/05/15/state-department-censors-web-sites-c
hina-allows/>  [12]) on their work computers—though not of course at home.
Yet.

Great Britain, however, will soon take a significant step toward deciding
what a private citizen can see on the web even while at home. Before the end
of the year, almost all Internet users there will be “opted-in” to a system
designed to filter out
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/uk-internet-filter-block-more-than
-porn_n_3670771.html>  [13] pornography. By default, the controls will also
block access to "violent material," "extremist and terrorist related
content," "anorexia and eating disorder websites," and "suicide related
websites." In addition, the new settings will censor sites mentioning
alcohol or smoking. The filter will also block "esoteric material," though a
UK-based rights group says the government has yet to make clear what that
category will include.

And government-sponsored forms of Internet censorship are being privatized.
New, off-the-shelf commercial products guarantee that an organization does
not need to be the NSA to block content. For example, the Internet security
company Blue Coat
<http://www.edgeblue.com/?gclid=CJX47-iCi7sCFWQOOgodOzoAig>  [14] is a
domestic leader in the field and a major exporter of such technology. It can
easily set up a system to monitor and filter all Internet usage, blocking
web sites by their address, by keywords, or even by the content they
contain. Among others, Blue Coat software is used by the U.S. Army to
control
<http://americablog.com/2013/01/blue-coat-internet-censor-syria-burma.html>
[15] what its soldiers see while deployed abroad, and by the repressive
governments in Syria
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/blue-coat-acknowledges-syrian-governm
ent-use-its-products>  [16], Saudi Arabia, and Burma
<http://americablog.com/2013/01/blue-coat-internet-censor-syria-burma.html>
[15] to block outside political ideas.

Google Search...

In a sense, Google Search already “disappears” material. Right now Google is
the good guy vis-à-vis whistleblowers. A quick Google search (0.22 seconds)
turns up more than 48 million hits on Edward Snowden, most of them
referencing his leaked NSA documents. Some of the websites display the
documents themselves, still labeled “Top Secret.” Less than half a year ago,
you had to be one of a very limited group in the government or contractually
connected to it to see such things. Now, they are splayed across the web.

Google—and since Google is the planet’s number one search engine, I'll use
it here as a shorthand for every search engine, even those yet to be
invented—is in this way amazing and looks like a massive machine for
spreading, not suppressing, news. Put just about anything on the web and
Google is likely to find it quickly and add it into search results
worldwide, sometimes within seconds. Since most people rarely scroll past
the first few search results displayed, however, being disappeared already
has a new meaning online. It’s no longer enough just to get Google to notice
you. Getting it to place what you post high enough on its search results
page to be noticed is what matters now. If your work is number 47,999,999 on
the Snowden results, you’re as good as dead, as good as disappeared. Think
of that as a starting point for the more significant forms of disappearance
that undoubtedly lie in our future.

Hiding something from users by reprogramming search engines is one dark step
to come. Another is actually deleting content, a process as simple as
transforming the computer coding behind the search process into something
predatory. And if Google refuses to implement the change-over to “negative
searches,” the NSA, which already appears to be able to reach inside Google
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24751821>  [17], can implant its
own version of malicious code as it has already done in at least 50,000
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/2066840/nsa-reportedly-compromised-more-than
-50000-networks-worldwide.html>  [18] instances.

But never mind the future: here's how a negative search strategy is already
working, even if today its focus—largely on pedophiles—is easy enough to
accept. Google recently introduced software that makes it harder for users
to locate child abuse material. As company head Eric Schmidt
<http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/>  [19] put it, Google
Search has been “fine-tuned
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2512752/Google-technology-catches-m
an-accused-uploading-3-000-child-porn-images-arrested-FBI.html>  [20]” to
clean up results for more than 100,000 terms used by pedophiles to look for
child pornography. Now, for instance, when users type in queries that may be
related to child sexual abuse, they will find no results
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/google-chief-says-company-has-in
troduced-software-to-block-child-sex-abuse-searches/2013/11/18/3659f110-503e
-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html>  [21] that link to illegal content.
Instead, Google will redirect them to help and counseling sites. “We will
soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will
be truly global,” Schmidt wrote.

While Google is redirecting searches for kiddie porn to counseling sites,
the NSA has developed a similar ability. The agency already controls a set
of servers codenamed Quantum
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/how-nsa-deploys-malware-new-revelatio
ns>  [22] that sit on the Internet’s backbone. Their job is to redirect
“targets” away from their intended destinations to websites of the NSA's
choice. The idea is: you type in the website you want and end up somewhere
less disturbing to the agency. While at present this technology may be aimed
at sending would-be online jihadis to more moderate Islamic material, in the
future it could, for instance, be repurposed to redirect people seeking news
to an Al-Jazeera lookalike site with altered content that fits the
government's version of events.

...and Destroy

However, blocking and redirecting technologies, which are bound to grow more
sophisticated, will undoubtedly be the least of it in the future. Google is
already taking things to the next level in the service of a cause that just
about anyone would applaud. They are implementing picture-detection
technology to identify child abuse photographs whenever they appear on their
systems, as well as testing technology that would remove illegal videos.
Google's actions against child porn may be well intentioned indeed, but the
technology being developed in the service of such anti-child-porn actions
should chill us all. Imagine if, back in 1971, the Pentagon Papers
<http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/>  [23], the first glimpse
most Americans had of the lies behind the Vietnam War, had been deletable.
Who believes that the Nixon White House wouldn’t have disappeared those
documents and that history wouldn’t have taken a different, far grimmer
course?

Or consider an example that’s already with us. In 2009, many Kindle owners
discovered that Amazon had reached into their devices overnight and remotely
deleted
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2009/07/why_2024_will_b
e_like_nineteen_eightyfour.html>  [24] copies of Orwell's Animal Farm and
1984(no irony intended). The company explained that the books, mistakenly
“published” on its machines, were actually bootlegged copies of the novels.
Similarly, in 2012, Amazon erased the contents
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/amazon-kindle-deleted-remotely-ebo
oks-drm_n_2001952.html>  [25] of a customer's Kindle without warning,
claiming her account was "directly related to another which has been
previously closed for abuse of our policies." Using the same technology,
Amazon now has the ability to replace books
<http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cd
Thread=Tx3RVFW5BNK9WP9>  [26] on your device with “updated” versions, the
content altered. Whether you are notified or not is up to Amazon.

In addition to your Kindle, remote control over your other devices is
already a reality. Much of the software on your computer communicates in the
background with its home servers, and so is open to “updates” that can alter
content
<http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/60276-63-strange-software-update-habits-r
ecently-computer>  [27]. The NSA uses malware—malicious software remotely
implanted into a computer—to change the way
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/how-nsa-deploys-malware-new-revelatio
ns>  [22] the machine works. The Stuxnet
<http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/did-stuxnet-take-out-1000-centri
fuges-at-the-natanz-enrichment-plant/>  [28] code that likely damaged 1,000
centrifuges the Iranians were using to enrich uranium is one example of how
this sort of thing can operate.

These days, every iPhone checks back with headquarters to announce what apps
you've purchased; in the tiny print of a disclaimer routinely clicked
through, Apple reserves the right to disappear any app
<http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-can-kill-iphone-apps/>  [29] for
any reason. In 2004, TiVo sued Dish Network for giving customers set-top
boxes that TiVo said infringed on its software patents. Though the case was
settled in return for a large payout, as an initial remedy, the judge
ordered Dish to electronically disable
<http://www.techhelpfox.com/7817379/Latest-On-Tivoforgentechostar-Lawsuits>
[30] the 192,000 devices it had already installed in people's homes. In the
future, there will be ever more ways to invade and control computers, alter
or disappear what you're reading, and shunt you to sites weren't looking
for.

Snowden's revelations of what the NSA does to gather information and control
technology, which have riveted the planet since June, are only part of the
equation. How the government will enhance its surveillance and control
powers in the future is a story still to be told. Imagine coupling tools to
hide, alter, or delete content with smear campaigns to discredit or dissuade
whistleblowers, and the power potentially available to both governments and
corporations becomes clearer.

The ability to move beyond altering content into altering how people act is
obviously on governmental and corporate agendas as well. The NSA has already
gathered blackmail data
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html>
[31] from the digital porn viewing habits of “radical” Muslims. The NSA
sought to wiretap a Congressman
<http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/11/27/in-2009-nsa-said-it-had-a-present-exam
ple-of-abuse-similar-to-project-minaret/>  [32] without a warrant. The
ability to collect information on Federal judges, government leaders, and
presidential candidates makes J. Edgar Hoover's 1950s blackmail schemes
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/02/fbi-director-hoover-s-dirt
y-files-excerpt-from-ronald-kessler-s-the-secrets-of-the-fbi.html>  [33] as
quaint as the bobby socks and poodle skirts of that era. The wonders of the
Internet regularly stun us. The dystopian, Orwellian possibilities of the
Internet have, until recently, not caught our attention in the same way.
They should.

Read This Now, Before It’s Deleted

The future for whistleblowers is grim. At a time not so far distant, when
just about everything is digital, when much of the world's Internet traffic
flows directly through the United States or allied countries, or through the
infrastructure of American companies abroad, when search engines can find
just about anything online in fractions of a second, when the Patriot Act
<https://www.eff.org/issues/patriot-act>  [34] and secret rulings by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillanc
e_Court>  [35] make Google and similar tech giants tools
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/18/phone-companies-silent-nsa-dat
a-collection>  [36] of the national security state (assuming organizations
like the NSA don't simply take over the search business directly), and when
the sophisticated technology can either block, alter, or delete digital
material at the push of a button, the memory hole is no longer fiction.

Leaked revelations will be as pointless as dusty old books in some attic if
no one knows about them. Go ahead and publish whatever you want. The First
Amendment allows you to do that. But what's the point if no one will be able
to read it? You might more profitably stand on a street corner and shout at
passers by. In at least one easy-enough-to-imagine future, a set of
Snowden-like revelations will be blocked or deleted as fast as anyone can
(re)post them.

The ever-developing technology of search, turned 180 degrees, will be able
to disappear things in a major way. The Internet is a vast place, but not
infinite.  It is increasingly being centralized in the hands of a few
companies under the control of a few governments, with the U.S. sitting on
the major transit routes across the Internet’s backbone.

About now you should feel a chill. We’re watching, in real time, as 1984
turns from a futuristic fantasy long past into an instructional manual.
There will be no need to kill a future Edward Snowden. He will already be
dead.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch>  [37] or Tumblr
<http://tomdispatch.tumblr.com/>  [38]. Check out the newest Dispatch Book,
Ann Jones’sThey Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> ’s Wars
— The Untold Story [39].

 

Predictions can be very difficult—especially about the future. 
— Niels Bohr
Quoted in H. Rosovsky, The University: An Owners Manual (1991),  Bohr always
attributed the saying to Robert Storm Petersen (1882-1949), a well-known
Danish artist and writer. However, the saying did NOT originate from
Petersen. It may have been said in the Danish Parliament between 1935 and
1939  [Professor Erik Rüdinger, Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen]. 
 





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