Berners-Lee: Insidious government surveillance may be worse than outright censorship
Enlarge / Tim Berners-Lee
The insidious nature of government spying has a chilling and subtle effect on Web freedoms that could ultimately be more damaging to society than outright censorship, World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee told the audience at the launch of theWorld Wide Web Foundation's 2013 Web Index findings.
The legacy of the revelations made bywhistleblower Edward Snowdeninto theactions of national security agencies (the NSA, GCHQ, and others)will be long-lasting, intimated Berners-Lee. While nations such as China openly engage in censorship, what the US and the UK have done could potentially leave a trail of paranoia that in turn leads to a trend for self-censorship among citizens of the allegedly "free" West.
"The question of 'who is it that's got the off switch for our connectivity' started to be asked because of Egypt," said Berners-Lee. "It's a rather obvious thing you can see happening, and a country that does that doesn't get very far. Turning off the Internet got the youths onto the streets because that's what they had left to do. So blocking of the Internet is kind of obvious. And censorship in places like China is obvious too when it comes to blocking whole websites. It's hard to pretend it doesn't exist when the rest of the Web has links to those websites.
"But spying is this insidious form, because of its chilling effect if you feel someone's looking over your shoulder, there's all kinds of things you will not do [You're not going to be] able to use facilities because of nameless fear."
This year's Web Index was finished in September, so Berners-Lee suggests some countries may have ranked even lower considering therevelations of the past few months. The US and the UK predictably fell a few spots down the table on the sub-index Freedom and Openness. Though the UK came out third overall, one spot ahead of the US, it came 24th for Freedom and Openness. It came eighth for Universal Access, first for Relevant Content, and third for Empowerment.
It shows the contradiction that can exist between the public's perceived freedoms online, and the government's control of those freedoms. For instance, while the US is first for Empowermentdefined as "how far the Web is empowering people not just to receive information, but to voice their own views, participate in public affairs, and take action to improve their lives"it came 27th for Freedom and Openness. Citizen empowerment and public engagement is concealing the darker underbelly of wider-spread abuses of personal privacy. "Provisions against cybercrime, terrorism, or blasphemy are frequently being employed to silence legitimate dissent or justify blanket digital surveillance," explains the report.
Anonymity is a key area where the state's agenda directly clashes with concepts of freedom, suggested Berners-Lee, and it will be a complex issue to solve.
"Some things are good, like the openness of government data, and some things are just bad. But anonymity is one where it's not so simple. NGOs that work under oppressive regimes and are in contact with the underground campaign for it. Then we have people dealing with cyber bullying where clearly if someone's saying nasty, mean untrue things about you then you can reveal who they are."
In any situation where users say they need a secondary identity, Berners-Lee says we need "a whole social system and machinery" around that service to protect others. Communities need to be self-monitoring so that anonymity can legitimately exist where necessaryas with whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Berners-Lee: Insidious government surveillance may be worse than outright censorship