 |
| Jo Glanville with Gigi Alford, Giles Ji Ungpakorn, and Gus Hosein Photo: Rebekah Murrell |
The Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival in London has just hosted Brave New Worlds: Digital Freedom in East Asia. Nathalie Olah reports.
If surveillance is a major sticking point of
political debate in the West, it’s a reality for thousands whose lives have
been transformed at its hands in South East Asia. Far from being a hypothetical
threat - the subject of column inches whose affects are rarely felt -
governments in China, Vietnam, Thailand and of course, North Korea, are using
surveillance software not just in the name of upholding national security, but
to police and doctor freedom of expression.
Last week, the Asia House Literature Festival brought together three pivotal spokespeople to discuss the
issue of spy software and surveillance in East Asia. Giles Ji Ungpakorn is a former professor at the Faculty of Political
Science at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, who was forced into exile after
staging a protest in opposition to the military coup of 2006. Today he works as
an administrative clerk at a hospital in Oxford, while writing extensively on
the injustices of the Thai political system and rallying resistance to the
country’s oppressive censorship laws amongst its student population. Gigi Alford of Freedom House, a US-based NGO advocating freedom of expression,
democracy and human rights, joined him, as well as Gus Hosein of Privacy International. The talk was chaired by Director of English PEN Jo Glanville.
For the audience whose knowledge on this
subject seemed varied, Alford began by outlining the ten possible forms of
surveillance: firewalls; attacks against regime credits; lawmaking to prevent
political speech online; paid pro-government commentators; physical attacks;
take-down requests; forced deletions; blanket blocking of domains; campaigns to
‘clean the web’ and the threat of shutting down mobile Internet services. All
ten techniques are being used in China where conformity to the government’s
ethos is so pervasive that it has engendered a climate of self-censorship as widespread
and as damaging to transparency as that which is imposed.
And while the suppression of feeling
contrary to a government agenda is a flagrant assault on democracy, more
shocking are instances of entrapment. As in the case of Vietnamese human rights
lawyer Nguyen Bac Truyen, who gave free legal assistance to victims of land
grabs, and campaigned for multi-party democracy before realising too late that
his private correspondence with clients had been hacked. Bac Truyen was
attacked on his way to the Australian embassy in Hanoi and his house
subsequently surrounded by the city’s Dong Thap police.
Vietnam is second only to China in the
number of bloggers targeted in one form or another by authorities. Since Decree
72 came into effect last year, citizens have been banned from discussing
current affairs online.
To Alford’s initial list, Hosein added
three more techniques that are currently being developed by software companies
in the West and exported to Asia. These
included National surveillance centres, capable of monitoring information being
shared within and across a country’s borders; as well as IMSI-catchers –
wearable, fake mobile towers that act between the service providers’ own and
target devices to collect data. At just over US$ 8,400 it is one of the more
widely available forms of surveillance hardware on the market.
Finally Hosein cited FinFisher, the
software made notorious by Wikileaks and developed by Lench IT solutions, with
a UK branch Gamma International based in Andover. It enables users to access
calls, as well as switch on the microphone and camera of target mobile phones.
That the use of this software is being justified by governments as a means of
chilling dissident speech is frankly absurd, given users remain entirely
oblivious to the fact they are being targeted.
While the UK has granted asylum to activists
such as Ungpakorn, its role in the widespread use of surveillance technology
not just on home turf, but in the East, is considerable. And the same goes for
other Western states. After all, it is here that most surveillance software was
pioneered and continues to be developed, and it is here that the precedent of
questionable surveillance policies is being set. Think back to Nokia issuing
the Iranian government technology to monitor phone calls in 2009 and you’ll be
reminded of how Western techniques have been exported to the detriment of
innocent civilians across the world.
At the present moment, few solutions exist
to the problem of surveillance. Amazon web services offer users the possibility
of privacy with their ‘https’ service, although this is only permitted while
the company does not have a physical presence inside a given territory. With
the arrival of Amazon’s first China-based office later this year, it’s safe to
say that the services availability inside the country will soon be diminished.
“Nobody’s a good guy anymore.” Gus told us.
“Intelligence agencies in the UK, in America, and soon elsewhere, can now mimic
the user interface of companies such as Facebook and Linkedin without users
knowing."
Then there’s the worry of tech-savvy
activists eventually applying their expertise to exacerbate the situation
further. Let’s not forget, that many of those who set up the Stasi, went on to create
the sorts of companies that they once fought to resist.
With the 25th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square protests now upon us, anti-government feeling is expected to
arise in a big way across China. Blocks are inevitable and the feelings of many
will be suppressed, hidden and deleted from the annals of micro-blogging sites.
Awareness can get people so far, but the systems at work to prevent freedom of
expression are becoming increasingly impenetrable. In 2011 Egyptian activist Wael
Ghonim said during a CNN interview days before President Mubarak was toppled, “If
you want a free society just give them Internet access.”
Make that a free Internet, for the web is
becoming a form of incarceration whose long term effects can likely be
predicted by observing the activity that is already taking place across so many
Eastern states.
Follow Nathalie @NROLAH
