When President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act last month, he said the measure would “strengthen civil liberty safeguards” in government surveillance programs. The Freedom Act includes reformed provisions from the PATRIOT Act and was meant reign in government surveillance activities.
Buta ruling Monday by the mysterious Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the NSA to continue bulk collection of phone data until December has some questioning how much of an impact the Freedom Act will have on government surveillance.
All his highlights issues of intelligence-gathering in an age where the sheer volume of personal data made available by technology makes it difficult to find a balance between the right to privacy and security.
“Everywhere you’re allowed to debate, people are having [that debate] right now,” said Internet freedom activist and Open Technology Institute director, Rebecca MacKinnon. “They’re debating where is the right balance and how do we set the laws in the right place so that there isn’t abuse.”
MacKinnon has advocated for the rights to privacy and free expression online since the early 2000s when she and a colleague established the citizen media network Global Voices Online.
“The bloggers we were working with were facing censorship, were facing surveillance, were getting jailed,” MacKinnon said. “So we began to really advocate for free expression online.”
MacKinnon says there has been progress in keeping the Internet open, but that censorship and surveillance on the Internet is still a problem around the world.
"People can be a little bit naive, and they just assume that just because we have the Internet, everything's going to get better, everything's going to get more democratic,” MacKinnon said. “And actually, if you want it to stay open, if you want it to stay free, you have to keep fighting.”
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Interview Highlights
On The Early Days Of The Internet In China
This was from ‘92 until 2001 that I was in Beijing, and that was when the Internet showed up in China. We started out not even having cellphones. Covering news, not even having cellphones, imagine that. We only started to be able to use the Internet for newsgathering later in the ‘90s … But seeing how technology was transforming people's lives – that people in China were starting to get information from around the world through the Internet and the Chinese government trying to figure out how to control it from the start, too. Because they saw that the Internet was essential for their economy; they needed to be connected to the world, but they only wanted it to be connected on their terms. And so “find a way to open the door but have a nice big screen on it to keep the flies out” is sort of an analogy that some Chinese leaders like to use. So I kind of saw this tug-of-war with technology going on from the beginning.
On Global Voices Online
I started with a colleague [at Harvard] something called Global Voices Online, which is basically an international bloggers network. It kind of curates as is linking out to what people are blogging about all over the world… And he had started to follow bloggers who were writing out of Africa, and they were writing about things that you just couldn't read in the newspaper, let alone on TV or anything else. And I was following blogs out of Asia, we were both following stuff out of the Middle East. There were some bloggers in the run-up to the Iraq war and during the Iraq war who were providing perspectives that nobody else had. And so we were like, the problem is, unless you already know who these people are, you can't find them and who are the credible people blogging out of Egypt or whatever… So we thought, well let's put together a site that kind of helps the rest of us, who don't already know who all the big bloggers are around the world and that they're real people – not somebody sitting in New Jersey pretending to be an Egyptian blogger – kind of what they're saying. And so it started out as a very simple site, and there was kind of enough interest in it that we got some funders early on to help pay people to help translate the content back and forth in different languages and pay some people to help edit and curate the site and so on. And it grew and then we developed after a couple of years –because people were getting in trouble for what they were writing and so on – an activism wing, where we're advocating both for people getting released but also advocating for policies and against laws that are being passed around the world … that restrict what people can do online.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
REBECCA CRUISE, HOST: Rebecca MacKinnon, welcome to World Views.
REBECCA MACKINNON: Thank you, Rebecca.
CRUISE: Well you have a really interesting background, and so I thought we would start with that. You spent about 12 years at CNN in the early 1990s. You were a bureau chief in different areas of Asia and spent a great deal of time there. More recently, you've been serving as a senior research fellow for the New America Foundation, and you've also started a webpage for freedom of Internet access. And so maybe we could start with your time at CNN. What was that like? You certainly were there in a very interesting period of time, where I imagine technology was changing very quickly, and it certainly has changed here more recently as well.
MACKINNON: It was really amazing. I was so lucky to have had that job at that point in time. I got an entry-level job in CNN's Beijing bureau a year out of college. And I did this because I have a somewhat unusual background in that my family lived in China when I was a kid for a little while because my father is a professor of Chinese history. I don't want to take up your whole show talking about my family's weird background, but as it happened, I came out of college speaking fluent Chinese and so kind of wangled my way into an entry-level job in the Beijing bureau of CNN because I had gotten some good advice. When I was in college, I asked a few professional journalists, "I want to be a journalist. What should I do? Should I go work my way up at a local paper?" and they were like, "No! Heck, you speak Chinese! Get your tush out there. You will get a job." And at that time in the early 90s, there were not a lot of Americans who spoke fluent Chinese. There are quite a number now, but then it was very unusual. And I had interned with Newsweek; I had done a Fulbright in Taiwan before that and done some freelancing. So I knew China. I knew news. I didn't know TV, but it was an entry-level job, what the heck. And by age 28, I was bureau chief. And I worked my way up because CNN – particularly at that time – was that kind of place.
CRUISE: Was the place.
MACKINNON: You could start out as an intern or a sound person and end up a major international correspondent within a matter of a few years if you worked hard and so on. So anyway, this was from ‘92 until 2001 that I was in Beijing, and that was when the Internet showed up in China. We started out not even having cellphones. Covering news, not even having cellphones, imagine that. We only started to be able to use the Internet for newsgathering later in the ‘90s. We couldn't transmit video through the Internet until around 2000 out of China. And for a young person today, that's just crazy talk.
CRUISE: Unimaginable [laughs].
MACKINNON: But seeing how technology was transforming people's lives – that people in China were starting to get information from around the world through the Internet and the Chinese government trying to figure out how to control it from the start, too. Because they saw that the Internet was essential for their economy; they needed to be connected to the world, but they only wanted it to be connected on their terms. And so “find a way to open the door but have a nice big screen on it to keep the flies out” is sort of an analogy that some Chinese leaders like to use. So I kind of saw this tug-of-war with technology going on from the beginning. And then I moved to Japan, and I was bureau chief there, and I also covered news in Korea and some other places in Asia. And in 2002, South Korea elected a guy as president on a really narrow margin, and that narrow margin was all because of the Internet, all because of Internet activism. That was the first president in the world – Roh Moo-hyun – who got elected because of the Internet. And so I was like, "Wow, this is really significant." And I started to meet some bloggers who were sort of internationally well known who were blogging about events happening in their countries. And this kind of speaks to how I ended up not being at CNN and what I'm doing now because I was starting to get a little frustrated with my editors about what stories they wanted me to cover versus what I wanted to cover versus what people I met on the street thought we ought to be covering. And so when I saw people starting to use the Internet to report about what was happening in their countries to an international audience – and they were reporting different things than CNN was choosing to report about those countries or other international media – I was like, "this is great! I no longer have so much power anymore and nor do my editors." And you might think I might find that upsetting, but actually I thought that was awesome and really exciting. And so that's one reason why I ended up leaving CNN. I actually initially just thought I was going to go on leave for six months, spend a semester doing a fellowship at Harvard, and then go back to my job, but I started playing around with what we now call social media. We didn't even call it that back then, [we called it] blogging. And this was in 2004, and my bosses back at CNN were like, "Gee, this blogging thing, we're not sure we really like that, that you're blogging now and you might go back to CNN." And now of course they've all embraced it, but back then it was really viewed as a threat to their control over what reporters were saying. And I was like, "you know, heck, if this is going to be such a thing, I'm much more excited about the Internet than I am about going back and doing whatever my bosses want me to cover." And I was young enough; I was only 35 at the time and I had some savings, I was single, I had no debt. So I was like, "What the heck? I'm going to jump off the cliff and play with the Internet." So I stayed at Harvard, I moved over across campus to something called the Berkman Center for Internet and Society – which was at the Harvard Law School at the time – and I started with a colleague there something called Global Voices Online, which is basically an international bloggers network. It kind of curates as is linking out to what people are blogging about all over the world. And later on, fast forward to the Arab Spring, a lot of people in that blogging community were very active in Tunisia, in Egypt, and elsewhere around the region. So that was fascinating. And of course the bloggers we were working with were facing censorship, were facing surveillance, were getting jailed in a lot of different countries, and so we began to really advocate for free expression online, for rights: right to privacy online, you can't have unfettered surveillance without constraint, that kind of thing. I got involved with sort of advocating on these things pretty early. And also because of my China background, I started doing a lot of research on what's going on with the Chinese Internet, social media, censorship, the role that companies play. And so I've moved around a bit more; I spent a couple years in Hong Kong then came back to the States. I'm now at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C.. They originally had me there on a fellowship to finish my book, Consent of the Networked, which was kind of about the global struggle for Internet freedom, as it were. But since the book came out, I've stayed at the New America Foundation to do basically a startup non-profit project where we're going to be scoring Internet companies, telecommunications companies, other Internet-related tech companies, on free expression and privacy, on their policies and practices so that both users of the technology, as well as people who invest in it and so on, if they care about privacy, care about freedom of expression, care about what companies are doing, they can base their decisions on some of this information. So that's kind of the arc of things.
CRUISE: Well it sounds like you were very much ahead of the game in realizing just what this technology was and what it could be and the potential that it had. I want to step back just a moment and talk about Global Voices and where the idea came from to have this space for International bloggers – really bloggers around the world – and as you said, how important then that became during the Arab Spring. But where did this come from?
MACKINNON: Well, that’s a good question. Basically what happened, a colleague of mine at Harvard, Ethan Zuckerman – who's a specialist in Africa – basically for a while he ran a startup called Geekcorps that was taking computer geeks out to Africa and kind of setting up networks and so on and training people. And he had started to follow bloggers who were writing out of Africa, and they were writing about things that you just couldn't read in the newspaper, let alone on TV or anything else. And I was following blogs out of Asia, we were both following stuff out of the Middle East. There were some bloggers in the run-up to the Iraq war and during the Iraq war who were providing perspectives that nobody else had. And so we were like, the problem is, unless you already know who these people are, you can't find them and who are the credible people blogging out of Egypt or whatever. Unless you're an Egyptian blogger, you wouldn’t know. So we thought, well let's put together a site that kind of helps the rest of us, who don't already know who all the big bloggers are around the world and that they're real people – not somebody sitting in New Jersey pretending to be an Egyptian blogger – kind of what they're saying. And so it started out as a very simple site, and there was kind of enough interest in it that we got some funders early on to help pay people to help translate the content back and forth in different languages and pay some people to help edit and curate the site and so on. And it grew and then we developed after a couple of years –because people were getting in trouble for what they were writing and so on – an activism wing, where we're advocating both for people getting released but also advocating for policies and against laws that are being passed around the world – and not just in dictatorships but in all kinds of different countries – that restrict what people can do online. So getting more and more into advocacy. You know, I'm very excited about the potential of the internet, but I think one of the problems is that sometimes people can be a little bit naive, and they just assume that just because we have the Internet, everything's going to get better, everything's going to get more democratic. And actually, if you want it to stay open, if you want it to stay free, you have to keep fighting.
CRUISE: And I think sometimes that people don’t realize just how much their personal information is then also being shared – we hear that Google is sharing our information and that sort of thing – particularly with the newer generations that are so used to having this in their lives. This advocacy that you're talking about, what have been some of the successes? Have we seen some changes in policies? Have we seen some laws turned around?
MACKINNON: Yeah, I mean it's an uphill battle, I've got to say. Even here in the United States, there was a law that Congress came close to passing a couple of years ago called the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was well intentioned – it was like, let's protect copyright better because there's a lot of stuff getting ripped of on the Internet. And, as an author, I can sympathize. Nonetheless, the way they were going to go about it was going to require Internet companies to sort of monitor what their users were doing and take things down proactively and just kind of guess whether they were maybe violating or not. And so it was going to basically turn American Internet companies in America more into the Chinese model, which is that if you don't kind of censor everything in advance, we're going to shut you down, and then the companies turn into proactive censors. And it's like, no, that's not what this country is about. I'm not saying that everything should be free-for-all on the Internet and there should be no constraints on anything, but law has to be proportionate to the issue at hand. You can have good enforcement, and you can have bad enforcement. And this was bad enforcement. So anyway, there was a big movement that rose up around that, and the bill was stopped. And you do see this in some other countries. In the Philippines there was a couple of laws that Parliament was trying to pass that – both in terms of surveillance and censorship – were going to open up for abuse against speech. And because there was a big campaign against it, it was stopped. There's a lot of ongoing battles right now that are sort of unresolved. In this country, there's an effort to reform the law so that there will be more oversight on NSA surveillance – the USA Freedom Act – and that's a real uphill battle getting that passed. In India, actually, the government a few years ago passed some laws that make it really easy for the government to demand that Internet companies can remove content for any range of reasons: just because something was a nuisance or that a politician was insulted or just all kinds of really vague reasons people can get stuff taken down. And there's a huge movement to change that law. Indian activists and civil society are very active, they're a vibrant democracy, so they're kind of working hard lobbying Parliament. But of course there's a lot of interests and they have a lot of religious violence in the country, they've got a lot of hate speech issues, they've got genuine terrorism concerns. So they're all debating where is the right balance and how do we set the laws in the right place so that there isn't abuse? And these are debates that societies are having. Everywhere you're allowed to debate, people are having them right now.
CRUISE: Well it's certainly interesting that you have really this international phenomenon, but that states are having to be the ones that are attempting to regulate or attempting to find solutions to it. And it certainly doesn't appear to be going anywhere as the Internet and the potential of the Internet continues to expand, so we'll definitely continue to watch the story. We thank you for joining us today.
MACKINNON: Thank you.
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