ipolitico

Politics and policy in the information age

[ipolitico]

Brazilian Digital Rights in Crisis

Today, I published my new report on Brazil, the Internet and Digital Bill of Rights in English and Portuguese with the Igarapé Institute in Rio. Below is a short editorial summary of the report's major points on the state of Brazilian Internet governance in 2017.

Three years ago, former President Dilma Rousseff signed the Marco Civil da Internet into law. This crowdsourced digital bill of rights provides key guarantees for Brazilian citizens that were now assured in the constitution. These rights stem from ten principles created by the multistakeholder Internet Steering Committee including privacy, freedom of expression and network neutrality. In one of her last acts as President before her impeachment in May 2016, former President Rousseff signed the definition of the law and made it a final cornerstone of her legacy. Amongst other things, this act made net neutrality the law of the land, making Brazil one of the largest countries in the world governed by the democratic principle that everyone’s data must be treated equally, no matter the source, from YouTube to MidiaNinja.

However, since the landmark development of this bill, the project of creating a strong framework for civil rights online is being challenged in many ways. Brazil is in a crisis of many forms, but one of the most important yet undiscussed is that in the governance of the network that provides all citizens with information, gives them access to government services, undergirds their banking system and controls the country’s critical infrastructure. This is both in terms of the network and the laws that govern it, including the Marco Civil.

Congress has responded by proposing new bills that will affect critical components of the law, from the way companies treat individual data to the way that law enforcement can conduct investigations online. A key regulation that the Marco Civil lacks is one to ensure that companies and government agencies are protecting citizen data. After a lengthy process of open source, online review by experts, Rousseff’s government proposed a bill (PL 5276/2016) that would provide a strong system of data protection governed by a new independent authority, which has been merged with an existing proposal PL 4060/2012. The Senate proposed another (PLS 330/2013) that would not create an independent body, leaving oversight in the hands of existing authorities, however there are plans to marry the legislation.

Security is integral to creating a strong system of privacy, to ensure that your data is safe in transit, verifiable and always available. In addition, those who commit crimes online should be investigated and prosecuted for crimes such as stealing data or infecting computers with viruses. The objective of creating a strong system of penalties for crimes online was the original catalyst for the Marco Civil, to develop a framework of legal responsibilities and rights to balance penalties. 

How this equilibrium of rights, responsibilities and penalties operates is part of the ongoing debate about how cyberspace should be governed, just as it is in real life. After the passage and implementation of the Marco Civil, largely led by allies of the Workers Party but supported by many others, opposition forces aligned with law enforcement, the intelligence community and others who support stronger penalties have proposed new laws.

Congress has responded by proposing new bills that will affect critical components of the law. Among the most notable of these is PL 215/2015, also known as “PL Espião” because it would mandate that all Internet companies store information about users such as their real name, CPF, and home address for criminal investigations. In addition, the Congress developed a Parliamentary Commission on Cybercrime (CPICIBER) that proposed many new bills that would roll back key privacy provisions of the Marco Civil in the name of greater public security. These include a bill (PLS 730/2015) that would allow police to access this kind of user data without a judicial order. 

Successive shutdowns of the WhatsApp network in the past year show the danger of such unconstrained legal action. Judges in Piaui, Rio, São Paulo and Sergipe separately ordered WhatsApp blocked after it refused to comply with legal requests for data, even jailing a Vice President of its parent company Facebook at one point. Articles 10-12 of the Marco Civil provide the legal basis to suspend services in the country if companies refuse to comply with legal orders, but also specify that these actions must be proportional to the crime and apply less punitive measures such as fines.

Integrating suggestions from the CPICIBER, deputies have proposed bills that would prevent these kinds of shutdowns (PL 5172/2016 and PL 5130/2016) but it is unclear if they will proceed. The Institute of Technology and Society in Rio, a civil society organization, have also entered an amicus curiae brief with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal arguing that the Marco Civil simply does not sanction this kind of large scale blockage for small legal cases.

Attacks on Brazil’s network have grown exponentially in the past years, as they have throughout the world. Brazil’s Computer Emergency Response Team reported 722205 attacks in 2015, up from less than 6000 reported in 2000. The government has formed a new Cyber Defense Center under the control of the ministry of Defense, particularly to defend against cyberattacks during major events such as the Olympics and the World Cup, but also to manage the country’s network security more broadly. 

They have a lot more to defend, as more people come online, particularly through mobile phones. There were over 26 million fixed broadband connections and 248 million cellular subscriptions in Brazil in 2016. Universality plans promoted by the Rousseff administration reanimated Telebras and incentivized other carriers to drive access in rural areas, wire government and schools, and give ordinary citizens access struggled for lack of funds. These plans have given way to a new proposal (PL 3453/2015) by Congress to give subsidies traditionally earmarked to fund infrastructure construction back to the telecoms to use as they like. This plan seems far from the Marco Civil’s goal of universal access, especially as these are the same telecoms that have worked to limit or charge more for increased broadband usage.

New infrastructure will make Brazil an even more critical component of the world’s Internet. At least five new transatlantic cables will connect the country with the world, and a Geostationary Defense Satellite to be launched this year will provide Internet access in remote regions and be the first completely Brazilian operated.

What remains to be seen is whether Brazil will be able to return to the original aims of the Marco Civil, from network neutrality to freedom of expression, to privacy and security, and provide next generation Internet for its people. Everything from the Internet of Things to the cloud, new applications, development, education and health services depend on strong networks and these regulations that shape it. When it was launched, the Marco Civil showed that Brazil could be a model for the world, its multistakeholder, democratic and collaborative system was lauded by groups ranging from the World Economic Forum to the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee. After three years, the Brazilian Internet and the legal system that governs it is in trouble. To return to its former position, policymakers should recognize the power of these values and join the fight to reinvigorate them.

All graphics from the report, Brazil, the Internet and Digital Bill of Rights designed by Rapha Durão. A shorter version of this editorial was published on the blog JOTA.info under the title "Brazilian Digital Rights at a Crossroads".

[ipolitico]

Information Age Export Controls

Possible targets in his sights? (Imaginary Museum Projects: News Tableaus/Flickr, CC BY-ND)

Russian backed cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee, hacking Hillary Clinton’s campaign, on critical infrastructure and even on the roots of the Internet itself have captured the headlines in the past year. These kinds of attacks are only likely to grow in the coming years as we become increasingly interconnected through traditional computers, mobiles and the growing “Internet of Things”.

What is worse, we now have governments and corporations that use and profit from these same information technologies on exponential scales. What is malicious malware, viruses, and trojans in the hands of rogue hackers, dictatorial regimes and other adversaries become tools of intelligence services and law enforcement in the hands of governments and multinationals. How do we as citizens confront these challenges, and push our elected representatives and our governments to address them?

In a new article I presented at the 2nd Seminar on the Governance of Networks and the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, I explore how this dual use concept works in terms of the export of cyber weapons internationally. I examine the policies of China, the E.U. and the U.S. in terms of the major exporters of such ICTs, the international treaties that have been created to control them, and the major cases of violations in the past decade.

The EU and the US are both parties to the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, the two major export control regimes for ICTs. China is not a member of either, while countries like Russia and South Africa have acceded to Wassenaar, the Council of Europe (which includes countries outside of the EU like Turkey) penned the Budapest Convention, they invite others to join, as well.

Wassenaar contains a list of dual use technologies that can have both civilian and military applications, and in section 5, it specifies both software and hardware to encrypt information or test information security, amongst other uses. The Budapest Convention focuses on prohibiting the sale and export of technologies that can be used to commit crimes, specifically against the confidentiality, integrity or availability of other computers and networks.

There is no way to prevent the export or misuse of these kinds of technologies in all cases. Authoritarian regimes will always use them to track, surveil and censor opposition, individuals will find and use them for there own ends, and companies will make and profit from their use. Through these agreements and other legal safeguards on government intrusion, citizens, policymakers and government officials in democratic states can demand accountability in both the public and private sector.

The U.S. Congress has rightly demanded that the government restrict the export of surveillance hardware to dictatorial, murderous regimes like Syria. When an investigation revealed that servers configured by a company called Blue Coat for such purposes were diverted from Iraq to Syria, the government had the means under the terms of the agreement to sanction the company and ensure that measures were put in place to verify end users and prevent such exports in future. The Wassenaar Arrangement provided a means for the government to hold the company accountable.

Buy two bugs get one free! Hacking Team customer revenue by country in 2015, from the leaked files.

In terms of software, the exposure of the Italian company Hacking Team’s internal emails and files shows a network of clients ranging from intelligence services and law enforcement, from Sudan to Brazil, both dictatorships and democracies. Again, the European Union cited Wassenaar in blocking the company from making new deals outside of the trading block while it reviewed the its activities.

The fall of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya helps to illustrate just how deeply certain European technology firms are entwined with authoritarian regimes, and also how companies follow E.U. policy in practice. In 2009, A French corporation called Amesys provided Gadhafi with a complete Internet filtering system. Its EAGLE system could examine traffic flowing through the central Libyan Internet Exchange in Tripoli, not only to block and identify sites that users want to access, but could also open emails and other forms of electronic correspondence. As Amesys company documents found in Gadhafi’s Internet surveillance office describe: 

"Whereas many Internet interception systems carry out basic filtering on IP address and extract only those communications from the global flow (Lawful Interception), EAGLE Interception system analyses and stores all the communications from the monitored link (Massive interception)."  

The Amesys EAGLE System, via Wikileaks.

China’s ZTE and a South African firm called VASTech also each contributed pieces to Libya’s surveillance infrastructure, while Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing, participated in the bidding process. VASTech noted that it was in compliance with E.U. and U.S. regulations and would never export technology to states under U.N. sanctions, but this case illustrates both the centrality of these technologies in authoritarian command and control structures and the range of international companies that can provide them.

The section of the Wassenaar Arrangement on Information Security has been updated in 2013, a rewrite that has drawn protests from security researchers who argue that they need access to tools such as penetration testers for legitimate purposes, including securing systems against attacks. Clearly there needs to be a balance so that organizations and individuals in democratic states can collaborate with each other across borders to ensure privacy and guard against surveillance by any party. The flags raised by these opponents are legitimate and the wording of such agreements needs to be carefully examined and exceptions granted for legitimate security users.

Above all, these international agreements provide the mechanisms for citizens of democratic states, in collaboration with their representatives in legislatures and the bureaucracy, to ensure their privacy, hold their governments and others accountable and cooperate across borders to ensure compliance and pressure authoritarian regimes. These technologies are only growing more powerful, and we need every tool, legal and technical, to challenge the ability of others to use them to destroy our privacy, a cornerstone of democracy in the process.

[ipolitico]

Building a Democratic Internet for the Americas

Looks a little more democratic this month. Screenshot from Telegeography.

In the past two months, the two largest countries in the Western Hemisphere, Brazil and the United States, have strengthened network neutrality in the law and consolidated democracy online for over half a billion people. In Brazil, a President on the verge of impeachment, Dilma Rousseff, made a final decree to implement the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights (known in Portuguese as the Marco Civil da Internet) and mandate network neutrality. In the U.S. an appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had the right to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as a Title II common carrier, in other words like the telegraphs and telephones that came before. The Internet is now a kind of utility that is essential to the life of American citizens.

Net neutrality is a measure of democratic Internet governance online because it confers many of the same rights we enjoy in physical space in cyberspace. Any service that you request, be it Spotify or Uber, your private email server or Gmail, has the same speed and right of access as any other. This is equality for your data, just as we have equality to vote or voice our opinion in a democratic system.

The Americas are also home to the first countries to enact regulations enabling network neutrality. Chile’s parliament was the first to pass such a law in 2010. Other countries like Canada have had regulations in place since 2009, overall the area is one of the homes of the idea, both legally and conceptually.

The American legal scholar Tim Wu coined the phrase in a 2003 paper “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination”. It discussed how online networks could discriminate against data. This started a movement towards regulating data online in the same way that we regulate speech or assembly in real world democracies, passing laws to hold institutions accountable, and ensure that we all have equal rights to public services.

Other academics such as Ronaldo Lemos, then the head of the Center for Technology and Society at a law school based in Rio de Janeiro, agitated for the concept’s integration into law. He proposed a digital bill of rights that came to include strong network neutrality provisions, jump starting an open source online consultation process to draft legislation. After a years long process, Congress eventually passed the Marco Civil in 2014. Dilma’s decree in May is the final step in its implementation.

There have been challenges to this concept. On one level, ISPs have not been happy with this idea, and neither have certain content providers. Corporations, by and large, would like to be able to choose what kind of content to serve you, and at which speed. Companies like Comcast in the U.S. own NBC, and would prefer it if their videos arrived faster than ones from ABC, Netflix or YouTube.

Just the same, in Brazil, telecom providers like TIM, Vivo and Oi have protested against Over The Top “OTT” text messaging services like WhatsApp using their data connections to provide SMS like services, often at far higher quality and speed. They have called on Brazil’s regulator, ANATEL, to sanction WhatsApp and others, calling them pirates and other terrible things. When Brazilian judges ordered telecoms to shut down the entire WhatsApp network in December and April when it did not provide user data for criminal investigations, they did not protest or appeal. The Internet in Brazil lost a few million voices those days, shuttled to other corporate networks, and the democratic Internet as a whole became weaker, more authoritarian in nature.

Facebook markets its proprietary social network as a new kind of OTT. They, alongside WhatsApp (now a Facebook subsidiary) and others broker deals with these same telecoms to offer “zero rating” services that provide access to their networks, including messengers, for free. This is a major challenge to network neutrality in itself, because they are claiming that access to their network is more equal than others, that one corporation can pay another for the privilege of providing a free service. They have even created a program called Free Basics that provides a whole family of apps to users in developing countries such as Bolivia or Colombia, including Facebook. However it isn’t free; users pay in other ways, by watching ads, contributing content to the social network, and above all by providing their data which has more value in this day and age than anything else. Countries like Colombia have written network neutrality laws that provide exceptions for such services, possibly to draw these businesses to their markets, also partly because they are popular with consumers.

This is why it is important to note that while Rousseff’s decree mandates network neutrality alongside stronger privacy and data protection provisions, it is not explicit on the subject of zero rating. She strengthened the law when she defined net neutrality and declared that “The discrimination or degradation of traffic is an exceptional measure, and it can only arise from technical requirements that are deemed essential for the adequate provision of services and applications or the prioritization of emergency services”. There is some argument as to whether zero rating services are covered under this decree, although it is difficult to argue that they are essential for the provision of services.

In the US, the battle could go all the way to the Supreme Court, but it seems likely that the case will end with this appeals courts. The 2-1 verdict affirmed that the FCC had the power to make this change. The majority believed that the regulator had demonstrated why it should now police the Internet as the essential service that it has obviously become. Just the same as anyone knew a phone was essential in calling to request government assistance, learn about a job or find information in the 20th century, now it is readily apparent that the Internet plays the same role, and this is a vision of reality to which both the FCC and now a Federal appeals court agree.

Here is where these two great American powers are both pushing to affirm the democratic Internet. President Rousseff has two other decrees, firstly to free all government data that is unclassified, put it online and make it machine readable. This is democratic governance through freedom of information. In addition, she instituted a new plan to build out broadband nationally known as Intelligent Brazil. This is democratic governance through universal access and education. Obama has similarly pushed a new plan “Connect ALL” to bring broadband to 20 million more Americans by 2020, while Hillary Clinton’s recently announced technology policies commit to following through with these promises should she win.

These are all ways to build democracy online, through universal access, network neutrality, and freedom of information. There are others though, including creating educational systems that support information literacy, better security and interoperability standards, and strong methods of online governance and participation. Like freedom of speech though civil rights, network neutrality is a cornerstone of these digital rights, and a harbinger of democratic rights not only in the Western Hemisphere, but globally.

In all of these contexts there are never final decisions, but the tide has turned. In Brazil, President Rousseff has been suspended and her successor Michel Temer could choose to ignore or write a new decree. Fortunately, the Marco Civil provides a strong framework for digital rights within the civil code which will be difficult to misinterpret or subvert. Just the same, in the US, a change in government could transform the makeup of the FCC, perhaps as it was under President W. Bush when his commission decided that mandating net neutrality and making ISPs common carriers was not in the public interest.

In any democracy, governance online is an ongoing struggle, an evolution that civil society organizations, businesses, government regulators, and individual citizens need to continually challenge and create. The revelation of the Information Age is that we will both depend on and harness the power of the Internet to ensure democratic governance exists both online and in reality.  

[ipolitico]

Missing Encryption`s Forest for the Trees

Apple in the grove by d.neuman CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Apple has been in the news a lot recently. The San Bernardino terrorists used an iPhone, and the FBI tried to crack it, unsuccessfully. The phone’s encryption system works in such a way that it locks up and erases all the data after ten unsuccessful login attempts. The Feds challenged Apple to write a new system that wouldn’t lock up, a special script they said would be only for this phone, to be completed by Apple on their company grounds in California, deleted, and not set a legal precedent. This isn’t true, because there are hundreds of other cases and judges that would demand access to the same system, and anyway the government found another, secret backdoor into the phone (rumored to be a zero day vulnerability they bought from "gray hat" hackers) and promptly dropped the case. They still haven’t given Apple the details of what they did, so the vulnerability is likely still in everybody’s iPhone.

FBI: You should do it, it’s just one phone Apple: No it isn’t FBI: We got in Apple: You should say how, it’s just one phone FBI: No it isn’t

— Jonathan Zdziarski (@JZdziarski)

March 30, 2016

But the Apple case is just a single, blighted tree in a diseased terrorist grove that the Feds want to point at as an example to gain access to more locked systems. However, there’s a forest of encryption out there that runs much deeper.

Thousands of miles away, a Brazilian judge faced a similar conundrum in a drug trafficking case where a suspect used WhatsApp to exchange information with contacts, and investigators tried and were unable to get access to the messages or log files from WhatsApp or its parent company, Facebook. The judge ordered the Facebook’s Vice President for Latin American operations, Diego Dzodan, imprisoned for refusing to supply WhatsApp’s data for a day, although this was later reversed.

In an interesting contrast, as the Facebook chief was being led into jail, Apple won a victory in a New York court that wanted similar access to the phone that the FBI gained in the San Bernardino case.

In the Brazilian case, the judges targeted corporate leadership with threats of imprisonment. In the American case, the government and the FBI are trying to get Apple to design technological solutions that would act as backdoors into their operating system, which gets to the core of their business.

Another judge in Brazil just last year tried another kind of technical solution as a similar kind of threat: He ordered telecoms to shut down Whatsapp on their networks throughout the country for refusing to give up information for another trafficking investigation. The telecoms, often at loggerheads with a service that rides on their infrastructure while paying nothing, did not appeal. The shutdown lasted only 12 hours after an appeals judge ruled it a little extreme, but shocked one of the largest WhatsApp user bases in the world, 93 million strong. The showdown showed the power of the social network but also that of a young democracy to shut it down.

The trials of Apple in the United States were a portent of the larger issues with Whatsapp globally, and the latter company could prove to be a much bigger challenge. Apple represents just a fraction of the market, mostly upscale users, and while it has sold around a billion iPhones, the latest better encrypted phones are still priced out of the reach of most. WhatsApp’s user base is now over a billion people, anyone using the free app has the same strong encryption. A user’s data resides only on their phone, and that of their correspondents.

In both cases, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency’s surveillance activities in 2013 are now bearing fruit, changing the shape of international networks and the strength of encryption for ordinary users.

Whatsapp has built up its reputation for strong encryption, end to end, and also for the strength of its user base and the speed and efficiency of its software. These factors led to its acquisition by Facebook in 2014. It remains a boutique, startup kind of corporate structure with less than 200 employees. As a result, Facebook is now its primary policy and legal counsel, especially outside of the US where it has little to no representation. In all of Latin America, the company has only recently acquired a person responsible for examining the country’s legal position in the region, not yet directly responding to cases.

Another partnership WhatsApp made in 2014 is bearing even more crucial fruit for its encryption plans. It engaged Open Whisper Systems, which builds communication apps that ensure complete or “end to end” encryption, including Red Phone and TextSecure, now merged into Signal, Snowden’s preferred messenger. Last week, this partnership came to full fruition with the introduction of end to end encryption in all WhatApp communications. Now any time you send a message using WhatsApp to another user it is fully encrypted using OWS’ software.

Ironically, OWS is partly funded by a US government to support encryption systems for democracy activists in places like Cuba and Iran. The same US government is trying to break phones like the iPhone in San Bernardino, or outlaw encryption without government access through legislation stewing in Congress.

Neither the Apple nor the WhatsApp case is without precedent. In 2012, a judge briefly had the head of Google Brasil imprisoned for refusing to take down a libelous YouTube video against a regional candidate. In both cases of executive imprisonment, despite one being motivated by the urge to censor public content, the other by the need to secure private data, judges used the threat of jail to compel responses from the parent organizations. Politicians in the US have been looking for ways of getting companies to give law enforcement “backdoor” access to telecoms since before the commercial Internet, most notably during the Clipper Chip debates in the 90s, and they are still pushing this line, most recently in a proposed Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016 sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr, which would require tech companies to provide police essentially any data they want, irregardless of encryption. Companies would be legally obligated to build backdoors.

Brazilian lawmakers have made similarly misguided attempts to gain access in this way. During the debate around a Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights (Marco Civil da Internet in Portuguese), passed in 2014 in the wake of Snowden’s revelations, the Congress considered inserting a provision to compel any company with Brazilian users to colocate their servers domestically for police access. New laws, nicknamed the Big Spy Bill (PL Espião) and a parliamentary commission have made recommendations to force Internet companies register users through their national ID numbers and other personal info. Other recommendations by the commission would negate privacy aspects of the Marco Civil, including getting user data without a court order, making it easier for politicians or other public figures to get content taken down, and sanction judges ability to shut down or block apps like WhatsApp.

There is a final concern in all this: Your data is at often more at risk in the servers of publicly held companies as it is in the hands of governments, and the security of it is only  important so long as it is commercially viable for these companies to pursue. That they put more emphasis on it today than 10 or 20 years ago is a great thing, but security comes at a price, and your data often constitutes the fee.

WhatsApp also differs in that it is not storing your data on central servers as Facebook or Google does. You’ll notice if you use WhatsApp Web on your browser, the service only works if you phone is connected to the Internet. That is because both your phone and computer are acting as servers, there is no centralized system that has copies of your messages, only information about your number, contacts, name and any other information you wish to put in a part of your profile. Metadata, which has a value all of its own.

The US is much more central to the picture because it is the home of companies like WhatsApp, Google, Facebook, and Apple, but it is equally powerless to prevent companies outside of its borders from building better encryption apps without backdoors, or to prohibit American users from building them. Brazil is just one example of a country grappling, largely unsuccessfully, to claw back the same access police had when they only had to deal with telephone wiretaps. As WhatsApp’s founder put it in an interview with Wired: “There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech. If anything, we’re bringing that back to individuals.”

A recent report: “Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the Going Dark Debate” organized by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society backs up this quote, and posits that the value of data to companies like Google and Facebook will ensure that much of it remains unencrypted, while the growing internet of Things will provide much more for intelligence and police consumption. Not only academics but active official in the US government and intelligence services contributed to the report.  They noted that besides ongoing surveillance using traditional techniques, metadata would continue to be unencrypted: “This is data that needs to stay unencrypted in order for the systems to operate: location data from cell phones and other devices, telephone calling records, header information in e-mail, and so on. This information provides an enormous amount of surveillance data that widespread.”

However, WhatsApp’s new end to end system makes an argument for a certain kind of dark reality that governments will simply have to deal with, not only in terms of encrypted messengers, but operating systems like Apple’s IoS and Tails, an open source operating system designed by the same people who make Tor, an encrypted network that helps hide the Silk Road and other parts of the darknet.

In the Wired article where WhatsApp’s founder spoke, it’s also noted that Apple has hired OWS’ security expert as an intern. Interesting to see how that will bear fruit. It comes as one of many signals the days of open networks, operating systems and protocols in Silicon Valley are long gone.

I'm delighted to announce that I accepted an offer to be working with the CoreOS security team at Apple this summer.

— Frederic Jacobs (@FredericJacobs)

February 25, 2016

[ipolitico]

Myanmar`s Leap Year

The Heart of the Beast: Myanmar Post and Telecom's HQ in Yangon.

After over forty years of dictatorship, 2016 is truly Myanmar’s leap year. Last month, the first parliament controlled by the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) took their seats. March 15th the parliament will vote to decide who will be the first democratically selected President since the military ended its total control. It will not be the world famous former political prisoner, Aung Sung Su Kyi, who is the head of the NLD, the party that swept to victory in November. “The lady” as she is called, is not eligible to be president because of a special clause in the constitution that states that anyone with a foreign born husband cannot be president. Since she had a British husband (now deceased) she cannot run, but has just nominated one of her closest advisors and head of her Foundation, Mr. Htin Kyaw. At the same time, she has said that she will maintain control of the party, and therefore the government, moving forward.

Her country is making a leap of faith, partly in her. This is a country facing a legacy of surveillance, censorship, political imprisonment, torture and civil war since its independence in 1948. Her father, Aung San, led the country to indepedence during and after world war II as a head of the resistance, but was assasinated in 1947, shortly before the British left. The fragile Union of Burma that took their place lasted until only 1962, when a military coup instated a socialist dictatorship that lasted for the next half century.

An election that that wasn't just for show.

Think about what fifty years of dictatorship does to a country's education system, its political institutions, infrastructure, and the overall basic capacity to solve problems. To transform Myanmar into a full-fledged democracy, its people will have to make a conceptual leap in their understanding of the political process of negotiation, democracy and a broader ability to understand and act upon their newfound freedom to access and spread information.

Already we have seen Buddhist monks and their allies spreading false rumors on Facebook and organizing protests that descend into riots about the native Muslim population, the Rohingya. In a country where most of the population uses the big blue network as their sole information resource, and many perceive Facebook as the Internet itself, the world’s social network is the central conduit of information, more so than almost anywhere in the world. Outside of it, recently published research shows that the military has used cyber-attacks to take down anti government websites during the elections of 2012. The elections in December were hotly contested, but there is no evidence that they repeated this effort in the face of an overwhelming NLD victory as Suu Kyi's party clinched 85 percent of the seats.

Aung Sung Su Mobile

The only way people usually access this new informational world is not only through Facebook, but through their mobile. In 2012 less than 1% of people had one, Myanmar Post and Telecom (the government provider in the first photo) controlled the market and charged over $200 for a SIM card. Now, SIMs go for around 2000 Myanmar Kyat (or around $2) after the entry of foreign operators Ooredoo and Telenor in 2014. People are coming online, through smart or feature phones, in rapid numbers, the latest figures suggest exponentially. Telenor's CEO said in July 2015 that over fifty percent of its 10 million subscribers used data, and that doesn't include rival MPT or Ooredoo users. However, the creation of an information society is not only confined to Information Communication Technologies or ICTs; the most powerful and complex information processing unit is still biological. 

People, either individually or jointly, need to form strategies to deal with complex information problems in any society, whether it is gathering candidate platforms for an election, researching conflicts, writing a news article or a creating a blog. All of these take skills that include traditional literacy, conceptual knowledge of citation, bias, search, filtering and organization.The University of Washington’s project, Information Strategies for Societies in Transition, offers modest solutions with these kind of goals in mind. On one level, we partnered with a network of fellows from all parts of society to develop organizational solutions to information problems, principally by teaching a form of project management for ICT problems: Develop a solution to an information problem, identify stakeholders, develop models for users, draw up wire frames for apps or websites, and create a project plan.

On another level, we tried to get to the more foundational and beginner level users who are just entering the online world, individual solutions. First, how do these people, generally only accessing the web through a mobile phone, with little to no experience with uncensored information or technology, gain the skills, as well as the conceptual knowledge to look at these objects, physical like a keypad, virtual like a social network, with the understanding and correct attitude to take problems on?

Flash Symposium

In this political atmosphere, and with the experience of almost three years of project development, in January we organized an “Information Symposium” in Myanmar’s capital Yangon together with local partner NGOs. Representatives from our two principle sponsors, USAID and Microsoft, participated, alongside the Asia Foundation, a regional group that helped organize the event. The symposium brought together people from all parts of the country’s rapidly evolving information universe, including journalists, politicians, librarians and teachers. While it is popular to talk about information in terms of ICTs, it was equally important for us to talk about it in myriad other forms, how readers there are just seeing independent newspapers on the streets, how people are accessing libraries that were limited for years by a lack of new books, money or education, and even how people can now speak freely in teahouses about an election.

We talked about different aspects of Myanmar’s information society, from elections, to the peace process, Facebook’s massive role in society, and citizen empowerment through new apps. We had members of the military controlled Ministry of Information engaging with newly elected members of parliament from the opposition about the power of big data, election monitoring, and egovernment. I spoke on "What You Don't Know about Facebook", which includes the data they gather from your account, what they share with the government and how they want to control the online ecosystem globally, as they already do in Myanmar.

It is a country that faces bigger knowledge gaps than most, which the panelists were quick to acknowledge. Myat Thet Thitsar, Executive Director of Enlightened Myanmar Research, our partner NGO specializing in research and  analysis on elections and political parties, commented that there is a huge scarcity in trust in the government. This hinders any project, from the national census (a huge information project) to the elections, to data synchronization across ministries. 

Thant Thaw Kaung, Executive Director of our partner NGO Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation, gives a press conference on the Sympsium in his book store.

Language, human code, is itself a complicated concept here. Burmese, the dominant language, takes the frontseat, but there are other local languages such as Shan, Karen, Kachin and Chin, that are scarcely represented online, in the media, or in the educational system. This is a sensitive subject, because these are also spoken by the groups that have been fighting local civil conflicts for political rights, representation and in some cases complete independence from the Burmese dominated military government. These conflicts exist today, and while a recent truce and peace negotation with many of the groups continue, the settlement of these roles and integration of these regions and people into a federal, democratic system will be crucial for the country's future. These conflicts, and the nascent democratic processes that offer the path to their resolution, came up repeatedly in the conversations. New democratic systems require civil society groups such as the Myanmar Electoral Resource and Information Network (MERIN) to keep agencies honest. As the attacks on Rohingya muslims demonstrate how social media offers opportunities and challenges, and the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO) showed ways of countering hate speech online through Panzagar, a tool for tracking and reporting threats and responding with peaceful buddhist messages.   

Even Burmese has a complicated techno-linguistic relationship with the Internet. During the junta, with little to no Internet access or ICT experience domestically, programmers and language experts outside of the country developed a font so that they could communicate in their language. However, what they developed, the zawgyi standard, is not Unicode compliant, and as a result there has been staggered integration into the systems of multinational companies and the broader global Internet. Only Facebook has truly embraced zawgyi, part of the reason for its ubiquity. It remains a challenge to use search engines because of the dual languages (if you type zawgyi text into a search bar you may miss unicode text) or teach typing because users have to choose one or the other when they start, and usually they start by using the earlier format that everyone else knows and apps, including Facebook, generally use. Companies such as Microsoft or Google have not released much of their software or tutorials in Burmese, and have not even proposed plans to do so in future. This issue underlies a number of the challenges groups like MIDO and MERIN face, alongside a lack of infrastructure development, education, trust, as well as barriers digital, information or media literacy.

Technology is playing a huge role, primarily through increasinly ubiquitous feature or simple smart phones. However, still older and fundemental democratic concepts such as freedom of the press, strong education systems and transparency in government will be just as integral to the creation of a strong democratic civil society in the country.

Pressing on

On one of my last days in Yangon, I passed the old offices of the Bombay Burma Press, a relic of a past informational age when Myanmar was still part of the British Empire. Today, a crumbling building with tenents clinging precariously to their apartments is all that remains. Just as the Burmese people once made a leap from the colonial era of this building into a socialist dictatorship, Myanmar’s people are now moving rapidly into a capitalistic, hyperconnected, global 21st century world. This will come through cell phones, Internet, Facebook or beamed by the satellite dishes already sprouting like mushrooms throughout the country, including on the side of this relic. This leap, economic, socio-political and informational, will succeed today, or fail as in the past because of the country’s ability to navigate these challenges, and 2016 is the year it truly begins.

[ipolitico]

What You Don't Know About Facebook

This talk was given at the Strand Hotel in Yangon, Myanmar on January 28th, 2016 during the Information Symposium, an event organized by the University of Washington in cooperation with Enlightened Myanmar Research and Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation.

Good morning everyone, thanks to all our honored guests who are attending, including my co-panelists. I would like to talk about a subject that is very important in your country, namely what you don’t know about Facebook. I am a part of the team that put on this conference from the University of Washington. This is part of our project to collaborate with all sectors of society, organizations and individuals, with the support of our partners Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation and Enlightened Myanmar Research. We call our project “Information Strategies for Societies in Transition”, and the question I am addressing here today is integral to this mission of addressing information problems in your country with sound strategies. I would say the information on Facebook is not good enough for Myanmar because of what you don’t know about it.

This is because the first thing we had to ask as we developed our central project, a mobile and information literacy curriculum, and we had to tackle again and again: Does the average citizen know that Facebook is not the internet?

Recently, the Sri Lankan NGO LiRNE Asia put this question to users in Thailand, Indonesia, Nigeria and Myanmar by asking if users had access to the Internet. In Myanmar in 2012, less than 1% of people used the Internet but just over four out of every hundred were on Facebook. Not only is Facebook the most popular information resource, in many cases Facebook is the Internet. This was true in 2012, when Myanmar was just coming online, and is likely the case today. You can look at the case of Thailand, where 47 percent Thais had used Facebook, but less than thirty percent used the Internet, for Indonesians, 29 percent Facebook usage and 16 percent Internet usage.

You can see a pattern that continues in countries with varying levels of ICT development, one that confirms one of the first and most important things that we don’t know about Facebook, to what extent this omnipresence can affect the societies it is operating in. Many other questions stem from that. Here are a few.

The first is what does the pervasiveness of this social network do to your society? Myanmar is perhaps the best example of how a society can totally embrace a social network. Members of your government make posts on it every day, many others use at as their official blogs or information centers. Should a single, corporate owned network be given the power to broadcast these issues to the general public? On the other hand, this makes sense because you are reaching more citizens, and that is the job of the Ministry of Information and others. Members of the government, ultimately, serve the people.

But this raises a third question that we cannot find the answer to that easily, namely, what does facebook know about us? What kind of data do they retain not only about what we post, but also about what pages we look at, who we talk to, how we browse, how much time we spend on different areas of the site? We are acting out a social life online, and instead this being private and personal, this is public and owned by a multinational, American corporation and actively monitored by governments. Governments such as yours can both see what you post publicly and can request that facebook provide records of what you do online.

This gets to the so-called concept of “lawful intercept” and what is legal for governments to see, both legitimately and illegitimately. Every country needs a framework to address the question of how they can access data, from the United States to Myanmar, and this is becoming increasingly important as we conduct business, social lives and everything else online. What concerns me, and many others, is the fact that BOTH corporations and governments now have free access to something that was once much harder to find. To get a lawful intercept in the 20th century, one had to request a wiretap. Here and in many other places this was all under the purview of the government, corporations didn’t enter into it, but companies such as Facebook are now forming an integral part of the equation in various contexts.

And this leads me to my fourth question that I don’t really know about Facebook: What are their intentions with programs like facebook zero or what is now known as Free Basics? Because in a world where they already have 1.5 billion users and growing, they want to convert the remainder into accounts, and this has serious implications when they have a larger user base than the Chinese population.

Corporations are vying with governments for control over your data, make no mistake over this, and Free Basics is not only Facebook’s central project to convert anonymous people into users, it is also the largest and most controversial move by any international organization to reach those who are not yet connected to the Internet.

I have several problems with this, but it comes back to intention. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Free Basics is an application, which like Facebook Zero, provides the blue social network free of charge through a telecom provider, such as Telenor here. However, it also provides several other applications that have made agreements with Facebook, such as Wikipedia or Microsoft’s Bing. I will note here AGAIN that Microsoft is a supporter of our project, but why is Google not a partner?

Facebook originally called this project Internet.org, which caused a lot of problems because it was neither really the internet (remember my first question) nor a true .org. Online, a .org designation signifies that you are a nonprofit organization, which Facebook had set up in this case, but only in the service of its own agenda. So it was not really offering access to the internet, only a small part of it, and mostly facebook, and it was not holding true to the principles of .org because it was not a truly independent organization.

Many people protested this, most notably in India, and Facebook has changed the name, but there is still something about free basics that gets me. Maybe it’s the basics part. Who defines this, Facebook? And are we allowed to enter other areas and learn about the internet outside of their walled garden? And what about the free part? They say there’s no advertising, and there isn’t at least on the free basics app, but how are they paying for it?

I have spoken with Facebook representatives about this who claim that there is no advertising and say that over 50% users go on to pay for data packages to see more, but the important thing to understand here comes back to the data. The value is there.

Facebook is trying to get people onto their network so they can have more users, who all give their network more data, which in turn draws more advertising and business. And they’re not going to give this data to you, a government, or anyone else without a court order. In fact, you would have a hard time finding the data showing how users migrate to the wider web. I asked a representative from Facebook at the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil this November, and he wouldn’t tell me. He can’t because he and his company know that this is where the value is, the value of data.

These questions have implications for Myanmar and everywhere, and lead to my final one. If we are giving them our data, without understanding the implications of this or their business model, how can we begin to utilize the internet fully and completely?

At the University of Washington, we have developed our mobile and information literacy curriculum to address different aspects of literacy based on a framework from the European Union, which covers five competency areas: Information (how you share, search and organize it, for example) communication ( how you are able to move the information around) content creation (that is how you create information in different forms) safety and security (how you do these things safely online) and finally how you can solve problems in your own life based on these competencies.

Facebook doesn’t always work in this framework because it only addresses these competencies in a highly selective way. How do you learn to search outside of their system? Can you send email and work with multiple people using other systems? How does a system that encourages you to send and share, but mostly consume content induce people to create? What does it teach us about security if Free Basics is never encrypted, and are encouraged to share everything, ignoring privacy? How do you learn to solve problems outside of this box?

We are struggling with this central question that I started with, what you don’t know about Facebook, and it extends to all facets of our work and society. I would encourage everyone here to address this problem not only in this session but in the ways, you are contributing to the information society here in Myanmar, as journalists, librarians, members of the government, NGOs and business people. Everyone has a role to play and it is increasingly through Facebook online, but what, ultimately, does this mean for our world? Facebook is your reality and mine, but how can we use this network to do better and move beyond to the wider Internet?

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions and discussion.

[ipolitico]

Reflections on IGF 2015 and Brazil`s Digital Constitution

Earlier this month, the United Nations held the 10th annual Internet Governance Forum in João Pessa, Brazil, and I was there representing the University of Washington and civil society. The IGF is gathering of people from all over the world to discuss the rules that govern the Internet and all sorts of digitally related topics, from digital literacy, privacy and big data to security, access and the digital divide. It includes not only representatives of governments, corporations and academia, but also techies, NGO people and all sorts from representatives from civil society, like me. This is the last one that is authorized by a UN mandate, although there is a good possibility that it will be extended.

On the first day, the divide between the corporations and governments versus everyone else became readily apparent at the opening ceremony. In an event led by the Brazilian Minister of Communication, a UN Assistant Secretary-General, and the governor of Paraiba (the state where the IGF was held), participants unveiled signs protesting Facebook’s “Free Basics” program, which gives people in developing countries access to Facebook and a number of selected apps. Formerly known as Internet.org, this is controversial because it funnels the newest, often uneducated and poor users of the Internet onto the blue network’s walled garden without teaching them much about the world beyond it.

Civil society gets real by @NewsRevo on Twitter.

UN police and security quickly ordered them to take down their banners, and despite being a silent protest, the confrontation jibed with the spirit of the open, multistakeholder event. One, an encryption specialist and activist named Joana Varon Ferraz gave a fiery speech at the opening session that followed, decrying the censorship and asking for greater access to closed-door meetings. An “Internet Ungovernance Forum” down the road organized by the Brazilian Pirate Party at the Federal University of Paraiba struck a similar chord. She voiced a theme I found repeated throughout the conference, namely that multistakeholderism is a questionable proposition when governments and corporations continue to decide the rules of the game.

At the opening session, of twenty representatives speaking, she was the only one from civil society, and only one of four women. Representatives from China, the International Telecommunications Union, Disney and the Internet Society gave nice speeches, but reflected the contrast between the promise of open multistakeholder participation and the reality of the system.

Nonetheless, subjects like zero rating were central to the IGF agenda throughout, most prominently in discussions of net neutrality, as Free Basics and other similar programs could abrogate newly instated laws such as Brazil’s recently passed Internet Bill of Rights. These laws require governments to regulate the Internet to ensure ISPs treat all traffic equally. Representatives from telecommunications providers pushed back in other sessions, arguing that discrimination in the name of traffic management, for instance to allow for better video or VoIP delivery, is justified.

Facebook continually defends its Free Basics program with the claim that it is not profiting from advertisements, but I challenged their representative by pointing out that a lot of the value comes from the data that new users generate. He re-emphasized his point that over 50% of users go onto to use the broader Internet, repeated throughout the forum, but would not elaborate on how he would share that data.

This is a key point, not only because they are monetizing your data in various ways through advertising, but also because it is impossible to verify these claims along with many others without access to the data. Of course, if they share them there would be less value in it, so there is an inherent conflict between their stated goal of openness and the reality of their business model. This is one of the reasons why a program like Free Basics is problematic from the outset.

This debate is key to the accessibility question, how to bridge the “digital divide” and get more people online in ways that give them real access to the open Internet with a full understanding of its potential. DiploFoundation, a good Internet governance NGO, provides a nice visualization of the key themes mentioned during the opening session , and access and the digital divide are way up there, along with cybercrime, freedom of expression and infrastructure debates.

Free Basics at least provides a model, whether it is an equitable one is up for debate. Another option is to give people access through open, no strings attached methods.

I also took part in the Dynamic Coalition on Public Access in Libraries, which represents at least one such more traditional alternative. This connects with my work with University of Washington on digital and information literacy in Myanmar. We are collaborating with two NGOs there (Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation and Enlightened Myanmar Research) to connect with libraries and teach online skills and concepts throughout the country as they are just getting internet access.

There are a number of dynamic coalitions on subjects ranging from net neutrality to gender to the internet of things, and these are increasingly integrated into the IGF program. They all submit input documents to the UN as they consider these issues, which in turn can be taken into account by governments as they consider policies. These can be especially important when developing national programs to ensure access and harmonize policies that span borders, as the Internet tends to do.

Completing the transition of the domain name system from US to international control, administered by Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), represents an example of this, and is a key part of these discussions. In particular, the multistakeholder system pioneered by Brazil is becoming a model experts use to describe how they would like the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to develop.

Brazil is an auspicious and conscientious location for the IGF, it is the second time the event came here, the first was in Rio in 2007, and it is the only country to host the event twice. This is not a coincidence, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet or CGI in Portuguese) organized and funded the event here, and it manages the multistakeholder system of Internet governance that is an example for other countries, the United Nations and the IGF itself.

Last year, CGI hosted a similar multistakeholder meeting known as the NetMundial, where it signed into law the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, the Marco Civil da Internet. Like the IGF, and in many ways related to it, CGI and the Brazilian government, along with backers like ICANN, want NetMundial to become an ongoing part of the process to discuss these issues.

Whether creating a multiplicity of forums for debate is a good question, but what isn’t in doubt is the strength of the model that the Brazilians have created. Notably, the Italian government has consulted with the authors of the Brazilian law to formulate their own Internet Bill of Rights. At a meeting before the start of the conference, authors of both bills, Ronaldo Lemos from the Institute of Technology in Rio, and the former Italian parliamentarian Dr. Stefano Rodotà. sat and discussed their experiences. The inclusion of a member of the EU Parliament on the same panel reflects the Italian goal for their bill to become the model for a broader European project.

At the same event, Ronaldo introduced a book published by ITS on “Understanding Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights”, in which I contributed a chapter along with a European colleague, Roxana Radu, with transatlantic perspectives on the Marco Civil. We discuss the Italian project and the potential areas where Americans can learn from the law.

I hope it can contribute in some small way to a better understanding of the law, and how all countries of the world can benefit from the model the Brazilians have produced, at places like IGF and all over the world.

[ipolitico]

A Panorama of Brazil’s Internet Society

Mike Agliolo via Getty Images

After a month of travelling and working with the Global Fellows of the Institute of Technology and Society in Rio, São Paulo and Brasilia, I have spoken with representatives of Brazil’s vibrant information society, at telecoms, Google and Facebook to policymakers across ministries, to hackers and activists in civil society. We came across a number of universal themes in our travels and gained a lot by understanding them through these different people, places and perspectives.

Wherever we were speaking, network neutrality remained a central topic of conversation. The Marco Civil da Internet, the Internet constitution passed last year, made network neutrality a cornerstone and it was one of the most controversial parts of the debate.

Eventually, Congress mandated that government agencies would decide the exact form of net neutrality through public consultations, in open source, free access online forums that mirrored the process that created the Marco Civil itself.  This leads to another important concept incubating in Brazil, democracy through online participation.

A number of agencies have taken on the mandate of creating democratic and collaborative governance online, and we met staff at the Ministry of Justice, ANATEL and the Internet Steering committee taking comments with coordination from the president’s office and its participa.br. They have a lot of feedback after soliciting comments for the past half year through separate MoJ and ANATEL processes, and now the CGI and ANATEL will themselves weigh in and the president’s office will make a decision on implementation. Other online platforms such as plataforma.br, a political participation system supported by ITS, or LabHacker, a group we met in Brazil’s Congress that is building tools for the public to understand the positions and laws that legislators are debating.

How to gestate these new forms of collaboration and build a truly innovative, participatory society is also the remit of the Ministry of Culture, which is working with communities to create online and physical cultural centers that encourage creative commons, makers and the propagation of ideas in a variety of diverse contexts.

How people access these new participatory systems is a major question when less than 50% of people are online but there exists more cellphone subscriptions then Brazilians. “Zero rating” programs are a major component of this debate, where cell phone companies offer applications like WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook for free. A key question has become, are these programs an abrogation of the neutrality principal? We spoke with one provider, Vivo, which does not offer these services free, but their reps commented that they believed that their competitors’ services abrogated net neutrality when they continued offering zero rating apps after a user runs out of credit.

Facebook has become the most important as it is the world’s largest and most pervasive social network, including here in Brazil, and now Facebook is taking this a step further with Internet.org, a similar program where Facebook is offered to cell phone users alongside other apps such as Wikipedia.  This is a problematic concept because it creates a version of the Internet that is incomplete for users that do not necessarily understand there is much more, but for new users who are eager to get online and don’t have money to pay for data, Internet.org is a gift. The question remains whether it is a truly altruistic gift, as the political rep from the company in Brasilia claimed, or a means of creating a new market and capturing new, inexperienced users in Facebook’s “walled garden”, as our group of fellows generally argued.

We also criticized Facebook’s initiative because it does not include strong encryption provisions; none of the programs can use HTTPS, a key method of ensuring user privacy. Not only Facebook, but representatives at Vivo/Telefonica we met, or members of the São Paulo city government were wrestling with ways of keeping citizen data safe as they sought to create “Smart Cities” and ensure privacy. This one of the other keys to the Marco Civil, balancing government and corporate interest in maintaining user data for profit, management and service provision while ensuring it is secure and not stolen and misused either by the entity controlling it or third party hackers.

Access to government, development, democracy, privacy, security; these are all concepts that we have struggled with in our history, and are only beginning to address online, but Brazil’s large and dynamic society offers windows into how this new online world operates in while affecting our physical reality. These are some of the keys and consistent themes we tackled in our travels, I look forward to exploring them further in Brazil and elsewhere with ITS and their partners.

Cross-posted in English, originally posted in Portuguese at ITS Rio’s Brazil Post blog.

[ipolitico]

A Tour of Brazil`s Internet Hub

Hub without a horizon, by Florian Martin-Bariteau.

São Paulo is a massive hub that linking Brazil in physical, economic and virtual networks. It is home to around 20 million people, an economic engine with the country’s stock exchange and over 12% of the country’s GDP. In informational terms, it is home to every major tech company operating in Brazil, from Facebook and Google to Apple and Airbnb, and it also happens to host the largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Latin America, a critical bank of servers in a network that helps route traffic for the entire continent. 

The infrastructure of cities once only consisted of roads, pipes and electical wiring, physical things, but now besides hardware and wires, it is also software and wireless, both fixed networks and mobile. These networks are managed by technicians, engineers, administrators that run the apps, websites, databases and infrastructure itself. It is used by governments, businesses, schools, hospitals and individual citizens in a variety of ways, now all tied together by cell phones, wifi, laptops and an increasing number of devices that are not traditional computers, what is becoming “The Internet of Things”.

Last week, as a Global Fellow at the Institute of Technology and Society, I took a tour of São Paulo and Brasilia that helps to illuminate how this virtual world is all tied together in these cities. ITS is a NGO based in Rio de Janeiro headed by Ronaldo Lemos and some of the colleagues who helped draft, pass through Congress, and now implement the Brazilian “Bill of Rights” for the Internet, known here as the Marco Civil da Internet. This is the first in a series of two posts to review my trip and describe how the Brazilian Internet operates, first in its business capital São Paulo, and secondly in its political capital, Brasilia. 

The Marco Civil is important because it represents a movement to try to regulate the network here in a way that is open, democratic and collaborative, and incorporates a number of principals that exemplify these goals, including net neutrality, security, privacy, freedom of expression, diversity, transparency and universality. Our tour was partly an exploration of how this law, passed in 2014, along with new online technologies and regulation, are beginning to change society to create a new reality.

In São Paulo, we started our meeting with the Comitê Gestor da Internet, or Internet Steering Committee, which itself serves as a kind of hub where all different stakeholders in the Brazilian Internet can meet, consult on both technical and legal codes and give their opinions on how the network should best be managed. The committee contains representatives from the government, businesses, the technical community, civil society and academia. It also serves as the place where the Brazilians coordinate their security, domain names systems and other Critical Internet Resources, discuss and develop policies and consult with Congress as it debates and passes legislation. The Marco Civil represents one such example of this political process as it grew from a resolution that the CGI proposed in 2009 that laid out principals for Internet governance that came to define the law. It is an interesting space that physically illustrates the connections between the political and technical, as the committee meets feet from servers that help track and manage the Brazilian Internet. One can see it through a window in the room, commissioners can vote while servers hum in the background of their conversation.

CGI’s nerve center. (FMB) 

From there, we moved to an interesting discussion of the evolving online political landscape at the co-working space Vila Civica, where different groups shared a space to develop political campaigns online. There was Catarse, a Brazilian crowdfunder like Indygogo, Parade Vida, an artist collective focused on political awareness through the art of the street cart, and a host of smaller organizations that used the space to build online campaigns, work and network. It is a small but vital representation of civil society’s participation in the democratic process online.

In a stark contrast, we followed this up by visiting Google’s penthouse suite, two massive floors of a skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, including a deck with amazing views of the largest metropolis in South America. A representative from Google discussed all aspects of the company’s strategy in Latin America from their approach to privacy, mentioning they are working on app specific privacy settings in the new Android M platform and a special Google Privacy Working Group that uses a tool called Hubble to zoom in on specific areas of the company to see if they are applying policies correctly. We also talked about net neutrality and zero rating, where services such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Wikipedia offer their services for free through certain cell providers. It is currently a hot topic, made hotter by Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to provide Facebook and other apps free of charge through a proprietary app, and the Google guy offered a slight endorsement, saying that the Marco Civil does not explicitly prevent such initiatives because cell phone providers are not fundamentally changing the underlying network protocol.

The view from “o googleplex”. (FMB)

On day two we moved onto discussions with one of these internet service providers, Vivo, which is now controlled by the Spanish consortium Telefonica. Vivo is the largest cell phone provider in Brazil, controlling nearly 30% of the market, and their perspective was interesting.

They expressed skepticism that zero rating programs were legal under the Marco Civil. Vivo reps believed their rival provider TIM was providing a potentially illegal service when it continued offering WhatsApp and Facebook free after users ran out of credit, while saying that another competitor, Claro, had it right when it would cut users off from all services when they ran out of money, while still offering the apps gratis when a user had data credit.

Two representatives from the central office of Telefonica in Spain seemed to contradict the staff members in Brazil at points on net neutrality, as the Spaniards said they needed the ability to manage high bandwidth traffic such as video by treating it differently. While not explicitly saying they wanted to abrogate net neutrality, they seemed to say it was their prerogative to manage the network how they wished as a technical exception specified by the law.

Another component of the talk focused on their smart cities initiatives in Santader, Spain as well as a small pilot in Aguas de Sao Pedro here in Brazil. While it seemed like they had achieved some success in developing better traffic management and crowd controls, they seemed unprepared to answer questions on their plans for securing these systems and ensuring user privacy, when we asked they said they had not developed specific plans for protecting the data gathered by such initiatives. This contradicts the idea that security should be baked in from the start, despite protests that these are only pilots, it is something they need to be focusing on now. It isn’t like security isn’t a priority in their operations. We visited their command center deep in the basement of the headquarters and saw real time traffic management, and their cybersecurity spokesman commented that almost all of their traffic still passes through the US despite the NSA scandal, and they mostly run American equipment such as Intel, Cisco and Dell. Where else is there to go?

This is from 2007, not a lot has changed, yet... "World map of submarine cables" by Rarelibra.

We spoke with members of the São Paulo government for another perspective on how they would work on making “Smart Cities” a reality, and they are working on a “São Paulo Aberta” (Open Sao Paulo) plan, whose goal is to make the city’s government more open, participatory and accountable to the public. With a budget of around 100 million dollars, they had moved to set programs to allow citizens to comment on the budget process, give them access and tools to understand the city’s “big data” and create innovative apps for transport tracking. Many of the tools developed by the city and local participants were shared on GitHub, and seemed that they were taking admirable steps in the right direction to involve the public in their own governance through new technology and the Internet.

While they said that they were not coordinating directly with the federal government on these programs or collaborating with other cities in any organized way, it seems that São Paulo’s bureaucrats are taking cues directly from the democratic and collaborative governance principals of the Marco Civil. On our tour we met users, application and service providers, content creators and administrators of the hub and how they all played different roles in this new online society. In the next stop on our journey, Brasilia, we were going to see how the political management of these networks operate, and how the Marco Civil is being implemented in a capital built with a totally different future in mind.

[ipolitico]

Online Identity on the Island of the Disconnected

Mouse mightier than the sword? The Brazilian magazine Veja’s take during Yoani Sanchez’s 2013 visit.

I saw a new documentary film in Rio at the Fundação Getulio Vargas earlier this month, The Voyage of Yoani (A Viagem de Yoani em portugûes) follows the visit of the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez to Brazil. She is known as one of the most important bloggers today, an influential Latin American intellectual, and this is a candid look at her burgeoning popularity worldwide. The trip was her first out of Cuba, what she dubs the “Island of the Disconnected” a communist regime that has heavily restricted travel and internet access. In 2013 they relaxed travel rules, and she chose Brazil as the first place she would visit. As one of the highest profile pro democracy Cuban bloggers, this trip was closely scrutinized by the media, governments and civil society, and the result is a whirlwind. 

The documentary crew followed her throughout her trip, including protests by communists and Castro sympathizers who call her a Yankee Stooge, wall to wall media interviews and meetings with members of Congress who use her visit to broadcast their anti-communist/pro democracy credentials. Her blogs had created a pandemonium of interests, protest and publicity that led her to meetings with powerful senators, journalists and activists. Her ability to physically travel is free, but her growing online identity has severely impacts her life in the real world.

The film has a great way of depicting online identities, through interesting visualizations and discussions of how her popularity grew as she constructed them, and then how they came to define who she is in real life. Sanchez’s blog is a simple tool she uses to discuss what is going on in Cuba, but even her struggle to get online is an interesting story, starting with a visit outside of Cuba that opened her eyes to the vast informational universe of the Internet. From there, she moved to hotels or rented rooms with Internet access to write and connect, but as her identity online becomes more well known internationally, she became scrutinized, restricted from travelling, surveilled and increasingly vilified in the Cuban press.

This tells an important story not only about Yoani’s case and experience, but also about the tension between the identities we construct in these online worlds. How does the Internet change the way we interact and empower people to create ideas, and what happens when the world talks back? No woman is an island, and the changes of our physical reality as we become more interconnected online are often imperceptible but important to understand, and this film goes a long way in describing this relationship in a fresh, powerful way.

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Democracy Comes Online

Network neutrality has become the defining issue in the fight for democratic Internet governance, and it is worth exploring the battlegrounds as a way of understanding why and how it has come to the forefront of international debates. Governments, corporations and civil society are working to define how the Internet operates in Brazil, India, the United States, and around the world. This involves a mix of both technical standards and the policies that shape them, sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in confrontation.

Brazil provides one of the largest and most powerful examples of a country grappling with how to implement network neutrality. As the largest population, economy and national network in Latin America, they are also leaders the space of Internet governance with the support of their new “Bill of Rights” for the Internet, the Marco Civil. It contains provisions that directly address net neutrality, including an entire section of the bill. Certain articles, including an entire section, are devoted to net neutrality and now dictate that ISPs may not discriminate against traffic for political, economic or reasons other than government mandated emergency management.

For the entire month of March, the Brazilian government solicited comments on how these provisions should be implemented and enforced through Cultura Digital, the same online public forum that started the open process to define the bill in 2009. This spirit of “open and democratic governance”, itself a key principle of the bill, continues today with the invitation for comments on the implementation and upcoming laws concerning privacy. ANATEL, the public telecom regulator, opened another one to discuss its role in the net neutrality process in April. Showing how once closed governance processes can be transformed both by the new technical systems and laws that give the public more input and access than ever before.

In the U.S, Americans have seen a similar seismic shift in the way that they interact with the government, now mediated through the Internet. Last year, after a court struck down existing telecom “Open Internet” regulations forcing ISPs to maintain neutral networks, The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (ANATEL’s analogue) had a similar, extraordinary open comments period that led it to classify ISPs as common carriers. Over 1 million people commented through the FCC’s website over the course of the process, setting a historical precedent, and at one point overwhelming the FCC’s servers.  Under this new definition, ISPs now have to provide Internet in the same way that traditional telecoms provide phone service, more like electricity, water, or any other utility. Communications under this definition will be more heavily regulated to ensure that they do not give more access of certain kin ds of content. Imagine if people had a branded Coke dispenser in every house that was cheaper to use than water, which beverage would people drink more?

The FCC is now doing battle with the telecoms over the power to force them to follow this new definition of the law, and their lobbying companies have sued to stop this process, along with another suit by one of the largest telecom companies in the U.S., AT&T. Ironically, this is the same company that the government broke into pieces in the 80s after the FCC found its regulated monopoly on American telephones breached the Communications Act, a law from 1934 that now helps to define net neutrality.

In both cases, the laws that built net neutrality were shaped by the same forces, public input through the Internet, showing how this technology is changing the way citizens interact with governments in fundamental ways, most directly in the form of the way that we are challenging them to govern the network itself. Harvard cyberlaw expert Yochai Benkler calls this concept the “networked public sphere”.

Brazil has consistently set precedents for moving political and civic processes online, from electronic voting in the 90s to online banking to the modern Marco Civil process and an Internet Steering Committee that guided it throughout. In the US, the process is more haphazard and market driven, but both countries are moving in a similar direction, especially when it comes to net neutrality. This neutrality principal transforms the equality provisions that we enjoy in democracies to the online space, while the passion the issue elicits is also the catalyst for debates about what an truly open, free and democratic Internet means.

This brings us to the third example of how this debate can operate. In India this month, Facebook found itself in the midst of a firestorm as its Internet.org initiative came under fire for abrogating net neutrality. Internet.org is a Facebook application to give free access to certain websites like Wikipedia, Bing as well as Facebook through deals it has made with telecom providers in India and eight other countries. Facebook Zero and other “Zero Rating” services offer cell phone users in many countries free access, a seemingly good deal for poor Internet users who do not want to pay for data plans.

However, groups like Net Neutrality India and savetheinternet.in argued that this is a direct attack on the principals of a democratic Internet because it is favoring certain kind of commercialized content as well as more philanthropic or news sites, and encourages users to access certain kinds of services that profit specific groups, and dissuade them from using others. Because of this conflict, the civil society campaign successfully persuaded news companies like the BBC, the Times of India and apps like FlipKart and ClearTrip, shopping and travel companies to drop from Internet.org. As in the U.S. and Brazil, India is struggling with regulating the Internet, specifically around this big, looming issue, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), currently considering various models of legislation as it approaches the same debate. Over 750,000 emails inundated TRAI in the past month through Savetheinternet.in and other channels, mirroring the deluge of public comment in the U.S. and Brazil.

Countries all over the world are facing these issues, along with a host of others such as online security or user privacy and copyright. Net neutrality, however, has become the defining issue of our new democratic information age, and it is through this prism that the global community will continue to discuss these issues in a variety of similar contexts.

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Temples and Towers

Incredible temples range across Myanmar; from the magisterial Shwe Dagon in Yangon to Bagan’s sprawling complexes they show the country’s rich Buddhist art, culture and heritage. The monks often built them high up, as in Mandalay Hill, above. Sitting closer to God and above the everyday,as in many other religions, was a beneficial position for the builders of theseincredible structures, but they are also a nice place to put the harbingers ofmodernity, cell phone towers. Now they often live together in the hills, symbols of the religion that defines much of the country’s culture and history alongside those of its looming future. One to talk to God, the other to talk to your fellow man.

Myanmar is a country on the verge of big changes. You can feel it in your conversations with almost anyone you meet. After over fifty years of dictatorship following a brief post-colonial interlude, the country’s people are starting to grasp the meaning of independence, democracy, and embracing the world. This is coming most vividly in the form of rapid cell phone adoption.

Telenor and Ooredoo

Ooredoo’s network goes live in Yangon, August 2014. Myint Lwin Oo/CNET

Last year, the government allowed two new foreign entrants into the national telecom sector, Norway’s Telenor and Qatar’s Ooredoo, to build out cell networks throughout the country. Less than two years ago SIM cards cost hundreds of dollars, Internet penetration rates were less than 1% and almost every piece of tech you bought needed to be government approval. Now, with the help of these new operators, Myanmar is moving rapidly to total coverage, because part of these companies' contracts were to build all over, and quickly, in less than 5 years. Obviously this is also beneficial for the telcos, as well, more customers, connections and ubiquitous cell phone signals. Now you can’t go a block in the big cities such as Yangon and Mandalay without seeing an Ooredoo billboard, a Telenor cell phone shop or a corner market offering SIM cards for both alongside of the Myanmar Post and Telecom’s fading facades.

This plan is now backed by a government that has profited for years on a total lack of information in any facet of life. In a country with a literacy rate of over 90% it fed the population a diet of propaganda and gave them little opportunity to improve their perspective, whether through newspapers, the Internet or other media. There was no domestic Internet, partly because a lack of development led to problems establishing a standard Burmese script online, and few people had the money, technology, connections or skills to use a browser or email to find information online. This is generally still the case for a majority of the population.

Where Facebook is the Internet and Gmail is Email

This has skewed an entire population’s perspective and experience in terms of their information or digital literacy, basically their understanding of the technology, Internet, and information that is presented to them in any form and through various media. In developed countries, we have struggled for years to integrate all of these new devices and services into our daily routines, but were given years to do this and often still wrestle with the daily deluge of data, email, new social media networks and a thousand other IT problems. They now are getting all of this at once, alongside the institution of new democratic systems.

The result is often confusion. Americans may remember their own struggles to venture outside of AOL’s walled garden into the wilds of the World Wide Web, Myanmar’s people have the same troubles breaking outside of Facebook’s boundaries. Zuckerburg’s machine is one of the few large web companies to have adopted the flawed but widely adopted Zawgyi font, which does not conform to Unicode standards, a problematic conflict for anyone trying to make a search or use a keyboard in any consistent fashion. Facebook has captured the market through text in the flawed but widely used code while Microsoft, Google and others wait for Unicode implementation. At the same time, Facebook Zero offers new cell phone users a month of free access, with general word of mouth and online virality, the blue wave has totally saturated the country.

I saw prices anywhere from three to seven thousand kyat (three to seven dollars) just to set up an account on the streets, and many people who know nothing about the Internet know everything about Facebook and desperately want it. However when you ask them if they use or want other services they are generally uncertain. Viber is popular and Gmail is the only email most people send because Android is the most widely used operating system by far.

LiRNE Asia

A recent article by Quartz magazine backs up earlier data about Myanmar, Indonesia, Nigeria and other developing countries with recent technology adoption. Researchers at the Sri Lankan NGO LiRNE Asia found that 47 percent of Thais had used Facebook, but less than thirty used the Internet, 29 and 16 percent of Indonesians, while in Myanmar less than 1% of people used the Internet but just over four out of every hundred were on Facebook in 2012. Not only is Facebook the most popular information resource, in many cases Facebook is the Internet.

An IT Conference without the T

Barcamp, or how to get ahead in information communication technology.

So this made one of Southeast Asia’s largest “Barcamps” an interesting experience. What would people talk about at a technology conference in a place where very few people can see beyond the cell phone, the blue social network, and were previously prohibited from looking beyond the government spokesperson or neighbor they trusted. This is a picture of a keynote address on how to do a job interview. Notice that no one has a laptop, very few have tablets, but a full house of people are all intently listening to someone talk about how to find work in the IT industry on the campus of one of the largest incubators of Myanmar’s tech community in Yangon.

Throughout courses on application development, cybersecurity or even witchcraft, few of which I understood except through the slides, (often in English) the audience sat transfixed throughout a variety of conversations. Many of the subjects would be completely new to the listeners, others were just beginning to understand the online world they are just getting into.  

The Digital Teahouse

A teahouse in Yangon, speakeasy?

Many teahouses and cafés now sport Telenor or Ooredoo umbrellas, and it is not surprising, because these have been Myanmar’s center of conversations throughout years of empire and dictatorship, and well before. During the years of the junta, from 1962 until a few years ago, these were the places where whispers spread, before the internet, before democracy, before the world came crashing in. These social networks fortified people through years of poverty and struggle, and now these teahouses are starting to spring online. What will they say about the new democracy, with elections this fall, and where will they say it?

Probably Facebook, Viber, or Gmail or any number of places down the line, starting with the largest social network in the world, but they are moving into the digital realm we already inhabit everywhere else. How they will get there, and how it will transform their society along with economic development, reopening and democratization?  How these social networks will operate and who decides on how they run is up to the government, multinationals, a nascent private sector and civil society. As they adapt to these realities, both at local and high levels, this is becoming a complete informational as well as political and economic revolution.

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Net Neutrality Enters the House of Cards

Surprisingly, the House of Cards played a role in the real life version this week.

Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed new regulations mandating that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would now beclassified under Title II of the Communication Act in a 3 to 2 party line vote, led by the Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler. This puts ISPs under the same categoryas telephone companies, and includes providers of mobile Internet access, suchas T-Mobile and Sprint. Those two companies broadly praised the decision, but across the board, the other telecom companies came out strongly opposed to the decision, and are likely to appeal it in court.

Ironically, the entire decision hinged on a court decision induced by one of these telcos, Verizon, successfully challenged earlier net neutrality regulations the FCC had tried to institute, which did not classify ISPs under Title II but held them to common carrier provisions that would have instituted a form of net neutrality. In January last year, a court invalidated this approach, which led to fierce public debate over the concept that gradually moved onto the Internet itself. A wide array of Internet companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo! aligned with civil society organizations such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology rallied people through web forums like Boing Boing, Reddit and Imgur. John Oliver may have given the funniest coup de gras with his segment on the telecoms' ridiculous arguments against reclassification, but it also helped spur the viral campaign online.

The resulting tidal wave of input to the FCC during the public comments period overwhelmed its website, a new record for the number received, and partly led the Chief Commissioner Wheeler to completely change his approach towards Thursday’s decision. Most analyses of the comments suggest that they favored Net Neutrality in some form 9 to 1.  ISPs and telecoms are now both kinds utilities, entrusted with ensuring equal public access and “common carriage”. The wires that they administer are now more like the roads, plumbing and electricity we use every day.

Governance Moves Online 

Now the ugliness truly begins, as the issues of net neutrality move to the center of Washington’s House of Cards. Congress is mulling bills that would supersede the FCC decision and the ISPs are moving to challenge it in court, something that Wheeler and his democratic colleagues anticipated with a number of revisions and long deliberation over the details, which continues today. At this point, the FCC did not release the new rules to the public or the press, its typical process calls for a period when opposition members can submit dissenting comments, which are then integrating into the published rules. The current Republican commissioners, past democratic ones, and members of the media and public criticized this approach. It contradicts the principal of the public comments period that spurred the bill, and the FCC and Congress should review this process if we want to move toward more democratic models of governance for the Internet age.

One such model is Brazil’s Marco Civil or “Internet Bill of Rights”, covered often on this blog, which went through a long period of public comment before a representative submitted a draft to Congress. It too ended up edited by Congress, but the public could at least follow the process online and in the media. The Marco Civil contains net neutrality provisions in addition to others covering universal access, freedom of expression and privacy, and its passage in April, together with the FCC’s decision, represents key links in a growing worldwide movement to extend democratic principles online.

A secondary, positive component of the bill that the Republican Congress is challenging forces states to review their laws against municipal, government run broadband networks, that the FCC claims could violate laws supporting interstate commerce.  Reps from North Carolina and Tennessee, states that have such laws, have immediately challenged this component of the ruling, claiming that states’ rights are being abrogated, but it will be a tricky argument to make when the FCC does have the power to regulate the national network, however much Congress dislikes this fact.

Netflix, Comcast and the Fate of the House of Cards

Interestingly, Netflix and the ISPs played a crucial role illustrating the dangers of a completely free market approach. This time last year, as the House of Cards second season riveted fans of the series, Netflix concluded a deal to pay Comcast for more bandwidth and interconnections in the backbone of the Internet, one that many decried as a terrible precedent for net neutrality. However, although these back-end interconnections are an increasingly important point of debate, the deal does not necessarily cover them after a democratic commissioner stripped relevant provisions at the last minute.

Again, we will not know the details for another few weeks, after the final review period is completed, but it is becoming clear that these laws governing the Internet are now central to the real houses of cards in Washington DC and other capitals around the world. On the front end of the week, another victory highlighted the back-end of this governmental network, as Citizenfour took the Oscar for best documentary, and Hollywood took another swipe at the Washington elite it portrays through the guise of Senator Frank Underwood and his wife.

The security and privacy concerns the film elicits through its portrayal of Edward Snowden’s flight and subsequent illumination of the U.S. national intelligence apparatus are real; they represent the other side of Internet governance debate. The programs he exposed fundamentally undermine the democratic principles not only of the Internet, but also of our society as a whole. Without these revelations, citizens or even our elected representatives would be completely in the dark about the hacking of root level servers in major web companies, the metadata collection programs that touches millions and backdoors into our infrastructure that represent just a fraction of these agencies’ activity.

In the 21st Century, we cannot have a truly democratic society without strong laws guaranteeing neutral access to information as well as others restraining the state from reading our every communication. Laws like Brazil’s Marco Civil, the FCC’s recent decision and proposed bills that restrain our intelligence services such as the USA Freedom Act are beginning to shape the global status quo, whether they can construct a new house made out of something stronger than cards remains uncertain.

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Internet Governance in 2015

Graph representing the metadata of thousands of archive documents, documenting the social network of hundreds of League of Nations personals. Published in: Grandjean, Martin (2014). "La connaissance est un réseau". Les Cahiers du Numérique 10 (3): 37-54.

A lot happened around the online policy world in 2014. Major debates about network neutrality erupted in the U.S. and other countries, while Brazil passed a bill of rights for the Internet, the “Marco Civil”. In authoritarian states such as Russia, China and even democratic Turkey, governments continued crackdowns on Internet freedom in various forms.  What’s next in 2015?

Net Neutrality

After long debates last year that brought both the President and Congress into a dialogue with the broader public about how to regulate Internet Service Providers, the FCC is planning to rule on whether they will be considered a Title II utility next month. This designation would force providers to follow laws that telephone companies do when they provide Internet connections to the public. Congress is also likely to offer its own attempts to regulate the issue, primarily through a bill being drafted by Republican House Members that would ensure ISPs have to provide content without throttling or blocking certain pages, but without invoking Title II. Any legislation that passes would supersede an FCC directive, but President Obama still wields the veto pen.

Cybersecurity Legislation

After hacks took down Sony’s network and nearly torpedoed The Interview, a film about North Korea, cybersecurity is front and center on the American agenda, and is also increasingly popping up in other places. The Sony hack was just the cherry on top of a year that included a number of high profile hacks on companies like Target and even cyber infrastructure, an attack destroyed parts of a steel mill in Germany after malware targeted its industrial control systems late last year. Obama singled out new legislation in his State of the Union while Republicans have designed their own drafts to ensure more data sharing between public agencies and private enterprises. The EU will likely also follow suit with its own legislation, and in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, its members from the UK to France and China are making loud noises about backdoors into encrypted messenging technology such as WhatsApp and Skype to counter terrorist networks. As a result, all forms of cybersecurity legislation will be on the table in 2015 as countries wake and nervously assess their own, often weak legal systems for the Internet all over the world.

Data Localization and Privacy

A number of countries such as Russia are increasingly forcing countries to store its citizens data in servers that are kept in country. The Russian legislation is scheduled to go into force this year, while other countries have either considered such measures, as in the case of Brazil during its deliberations over the Marco Civil, or followed suit, as in the case of Vietnam. More countries are likely to follow this lead as they consider the need for access to data in criminal investigations, and the potential for even greater censorship and surveillance. Internet companies are going to push back on these requirements but they are only likely to multiply and grow stronger going forward as countries seek to place data in their physical territory. Any comprehensive shift in this infrastructure would lead to a very different, divided and compartmentalized Internet from the one we know today.

Marco Civil Implementation

Brazil passed its Internet Bill of Rights, the Marco Civil in April, and it is now moving to implement the law. This opens up a series of questions for the government, private sector and people of Brazil. For instance, what do concepts like net neutrality mean now that they are actually in a constitutional code? How can a citizen demand their rights to equal access, how can they prove that companies are breaking the law, and conversely how can companies demonstrate compliance? These are just some of the myriad questions the law poses now that it is in force, and it will be interesting to watch Brazil as it grapples with them.

Intellectual Property

Debates around the Trans Pacific Partnership will intensify in 2015 as countries increasingly question the US approach to copyright, which is essentially to transpose its highly restrictive system on other Asian countries as part of the TPP. The negotiations have been carrying on in secret for years, largely without public input, and alternatively the parties could the come to a major breakthrough at a meeting this year. Any progress would likely be bad news for fans of copyright and intellectual property reform internationally.

Internet Freedom Crackdowns

Freedom House reported that countries around the world are moving backwards on online freedom in various forms, through increasing censorship of specific posts online, and the blocking of complete web service such as Google and Facebook in China or the Turkish government’s attempt to block Twitter in March that a court ultimately stymied. Surveillance of social media and online communication led to arrests in places such as Thailand, where the police arrested citizens for insulting the King. In their index of Freedom on the Net they showed that Internet Freedom is increasingly at risk in a wide range of locations, but because of their size and influence China and Russia are likely to play increasing roles as countries gain experience and tools to censor and monitor their citizens.

NSA Reform

The surveillance revelations released by Edward Snowden continue to trickle out, and Congress continues to examine the possibility of reforming online surveillance systems, particularly pertaining to metadata collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act, which even President Obama has said he will end in past, although he has failed to repeat this claim recently. Look for Congress to reintroduce versions of the USA Freedom Act that introduced reforms such as public defenders to challenge secret FISA courts that review surveillance requests. It came close to passage in 2014, and could still have a chance of passage if written correctly, even in a more conservative but anti big government Congress.

Telcom Mergers

Both the Comcast/Time Warner and the AT&T/DirectTV mergers are on the table and moving forward in 2015. Look for the FCC to make a decision on these two major decisions in the coming year, and if either of them go forward they will have big implications not only for the US, but for places like Latin America where DirectTV has services and other countries around the world whose data must transit through US networks every day.

Broadband Deployment

President Obama called for states to loosen or disregard laws prohibiting local and municipal governments from building their own broadband. While he has no direct power to force them to do so, it appears that there is growing movement for cities to take the initiative, whether by building their own networks or collaborating with companies like Google to deploy fiber. If successful, new experiments in this space could spur others to explore their own alternatives to the status quo, as the runway success and high demand for Google Fiber is already showing. 

2015 going to be a busy year for Internet governance, as our global network grows, so will the importance of these policies and issues. 

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Myanmar`s Online and Democratic Frontiers

Right on the border, Pyinmana, Mandalay Region. Photo: Markus Kostner / World Bank

Soon, I will be travelling to Myanmar as part of a project sponsored by the University of Washington to encourage better understanding and use of Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) in the rapidly devloping country. Formerly known as Burma, it is undergoing an incredible political, social and economic transition after years of authoritarian rule.

One of Southeast Asia’s most unyielding dictatorships gradually relinquished power in recent years. The movement towards democracy really got going with an announcement in 2011 that the junta in charge since a coup in 1962 would be devolving power and allowing free elections. As a sign of this shift, they also released Aung Sung Su Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and the leader of the opposition, from house arrest, and allowed her National League for Democracy to participate in elections. Historically, the ruling junta prevented the NLD from participating in politics and she had been under guard or surveillance almost constantly ever since the violent protests and aborted election of the “8888 Uprising” in 1988.

In the 2012 by-elections, her party won 44 out of 45 open seats and is now setting the stage for presidential elections next year. In this highly charged political transition, the country is also finding itself besieged by new sources of investment and foreign aid as international sanctions are relaxed and companies, NGOs and governments move in with multiple, often competing interests in new markets, the rapidly evolving political system and now largely open civil society.

New telecommunications systems are going to play a huge role in this transition, economic benefits will come hand in hand with access to global financial and political networks as well as an opening of social networks to discuss myriad topics that were once off limits. Politics is a big one, but cultural domains such as art and music are also transforming through the weakening of censorship laws and imports from abroad that many in Myanmar will have never experienced before.

In 2013 less than 1 of every 50 citizens had access to the Internet, few had ever even seen it before, and if they had, it was likely through a cell phone that at least 10% of people now possess. However, until the relaxation of the military’s grip on power, SIM cards cost around $500 and most of the equipment used to access the Internet, such as smart phones or modems, were similarly expensive, and often only available to government employees.

As with many things in Myanmar, this is rapidly changing. The government has loosened or negated cybersecurity laws that prevented ordinary citizens from accessing the Internet or even importing and registering a modem. This year, two foreign telecom providers, Telenor of Norway and Ooredoo of Qatar, received licenses to develop cell phone networks to span the country and provide around 80% the population with mobile communication access in under five years. Those $500 SIM cards were reduced to $250 in 2012 and are moving towards prices that the rest of the world knows (roughly $1.50 or 1500 Myanmar Kyat), and the cell phones, tablets and computers that can access the Internet are also being allowed into the country in a technology import environment that is far less restricted.

The Internet itself is far less censored than ever before, and many experts in the field, such as Freedom House argue that is now less restricted than its neighbors in the ASEAN region such as the former communist states of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, or its neighbor Thailand, now reverting to dictatorship. In some ways, the government is still getting a handle on the new systems and has not developed the ability, whether through technology, policy or personnel, to censor and surveil in the way the intelligence appartatuses of other authoritarian or transitional regimes around the world have made their bread and butter.

It remains unclear whether there will be a reversion to authoritarianism, either in physical or online space. What is clear is that there will be a strong linkage between the success or failure of democracy in the country and the development of its nascent online space. For the past year, I have been working on a project with a group at the University of Washington supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Microsoft and the Gates Foundation to work with actors within the government, opposition, the press, and broader civil society to start the conversation around the formation of a democratic information society.

We have engaged with a group of fellows from across different sectors of society, including journalists, NGO workers, librarians, opposition party members and government officials. This network is engaging in seminars both here in Seattle and in Myanmar on informational topics such as project management and digitial literacy, as well as lectures covering crowdsourcing, Internet enabled election monitoring, encryption technologies and social media, amongst others. The truly challenging aspect of working in this country is that it is almost a blank slate in terms of what people have experienced technologically and what they know about Information Communication Technologies (ICTs).

They have much to learn and assimilate in an increasingly compressed timescale, and very little research has gone into teaching people about ICT concepts and practice in places with low bandwidth, weak infrastructure and poor general IT knowledge. With the help of our partners in the country, the NGOs Minerva Education Center and Myanmar Egress, we are working to develop a curriculum to teach people both competency with new digital tools and knowledge of the role of ICTs. This includes better information literacy to understand the growing flood of data inundating the country as old barriers of censorship fall, infrastructure develops, and fear of surveillance, arrest and imprisonment fade.

Whether we are seeing the beginning of a new democratic society or the development of an increasingly fractured one remains to be seen, as weak truces hold in civil conflicts across the country. An increasingly fractious conflict between the majority Buddhist population and the Muslims of the Rakhine state in the west of the country has even drawn the attention of Anonymous hackers around the world, who brought down several government websites last year in response to attacks on the Muslim minority by mobs, often spurred by calls to action through Facebook and other social media.

These conflicts illustrate the growing tensions these new technologies are stoking, the potential for negative outcomes as well as positive ones as the Internet becomes more prevalent in a place where it, and the information it is presenting, is not well evaluated or understood by a growing number of new users. Part of our project is to play a role in fostering IT skills and pushing both leaders and regular citizens to begin thinking more critically about the information they are receiving and creating to manage and distribute it more effectively using a range of technologies. As countries around the world like Myanmar are finding, rich and poor, authoritarian or democratic, this is an increasingly challenging but important task in any truly independent and dynamic 21st century political system. 

This blog is cross posted at the website of the University of Washington's Technology and Social Change Group (TASCHA) which is hosting the program I am working on.

[ipolitico]

Bridging Brazil and the Bay

The Golden Gate bridge by Martin Kuenzel (CC 3.0 ).

Last week, I attended a meeting on “Brazil in the 21st Century” at the Stanford Law School organized by Bay Brazil, a group working to provide a hub for Brazilian and Bay Area techies, investors and business people to discuss strengthening commercial ties and building on a shared culture of technology and innovation in both countries. The Brazilian Ambassador, the Chief of Google Brazil, and the Ambassador for IT at the Ministry of Science and Technology all spoke. They gave excellent talks on the prospects for developing the relationship between the two countries, building the market for online services, and the impact of the recently approved Marco Civil da Internet, Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights.

Stronger links between Silicon Valley and Brazil’s burgeoning technology sector are an important goal for the business communities in both countries, as well as the respective governments. Latin American reps from Silicon Valley titans like Airbnb, Uber and Evernote attended, and discussed their approaches to the Brazilian market, exploding in the wake of the World Cup this summer. Airbnb went from around 2000 listings before the event to over 40,000 by July, and other companies like Google, Youtube and Facebook have already established a strong presence.

Ambassador Mauro Viera echoed this desire for increasing Internet development, mentioning more than a third of the country now has access to broadband Internet, up from roughly 6 percent in 2012, along with 274 million cell phones in the country, and a tech sector that represents at least 4% of the country’s GDP, possibly up to 7% with related services. Clearly, Brazil is incubating a vibrant and increasingly important technology scene, he talked about government’s initiatives such as IT Maior to promote domestic software and IT service, Nova Empresa for private sector innovation to support development in the space, environment and technology sectors as well as the National Broadband Plan (Plano Nacional de Banda Larga). These, together with private sector growth, are likely to drive tremendous expansion in Brazilian tech in the coming years.

Finding a way to harness the power, knowledge and resources of Silicon Valley as well as emulating its success in places such as Belo Horizonte’s San Pedro district, or Rio and São Paulo’s downtowns will be a key to achieving these goals. Centers of development and innovation will be the key to lasting, sustainable entrepreneurship in these areas. The private sector is certainly interested, and the ambassador mentioned that two key U.S. companies are working rapidly to expand their presence in the country. Google has pledged to set up a campus in São Paulo in the first quarter of 2015 and Microsoft signaled they would be investing $100 million in startups in Recife, Rio, and São Paulo.

The head of Google Brazil, Fabio Coelho, confirmed the new campus and spoke about the need to create a stronger local ecosystem for the technology sector to take advantage of the country’s movement towards a “tipping point” over half of the country connected to the Internet, close on the horizon if not already passed. He also mentioned the success of Google’s Loon project in the northeast to bring wideband wireless Internet access to people in more rural areas, driven by balloons containing high-powered white space transmitters.

I asked him if he is happy with the new regulatory framework created by the Marco Civil and if the clarifications in the law would make it easier to operate in Brazil and avoid conflicts with the government, such as the one over electoral libel that led to his brief arrest in 2011. He replied that he saw the arrest as necessary to educate the public about problems with the law and spur reform, partly represented by the Marco Civil, which he confirmed as beneficial for business from Google’s perspective.

The chief of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet) and one of the leaders of internet policy in the Ministry of Science and Technology, Virgilio Almeida, talked about how important it is to drive inclusion of civil society in a truly multistakeholder model of Internet governance, pioneered by Brazil. He seemed hopeful that his country and government could act as a bridge between East and West, developed and developing countries in a host of forums struggling to deal with the growing range of political and legal conflicts in cyberspace, such as the ICANN, the Internet Society and the UN’s International Telecommunications Union. New regimes and old are going to have to find resolutions to these problems that take the views of all sectors of society into account.

Ultimately, meeting such as this are excellent forums to bring together representatives from the private and public sectors, as well as research and civil society institutions like Stanford and Bay Brazil. The goal is to bring them together in such a way that includes all viewpoints while pushing them towards concrete results in terms of increasing technical strength, sophistication and security, as well as profits and legal systems that bolster rather than disable democratic systems.

Social networks can unite groups to work towards shared goals, and bridging the gaps in communication, both online and through physical hubs and connections can push innovation in both societies. Perhaps with this in mind, Bay Brazil closed the event by announcing that they would be pushing for a direct flight from SFO to São Paulo with the support of the local consulate and the San Francisco city government, which would provide one more physical link to bridge the Bay and growing opportunities in Latin America.

[ipolitico]

Letter to the FCC Supporting Net Neutrality

Below is a Public Comment I submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this month supporting an "Open Internet", as it prepares to simultaneously reform net neutrality regulations that a court struck down earlier in 2014 and reviews two major telecom mergers. Over a million others commented on possible changes to the laws, and broke the FCC's ridiculously outdated website in the process.

Dear FCC,

I am a researcher of Internet governance issues at the University of Washington and I believe that net neutrality is vital to maintaining and improving the high technical standards of the network, enabling economic development and ensuring the strength of our democratic political system as a whole. Please work to create and maintain regulations that enforce net neutrality and create a better Internet for all.

Net neutrality is a key aspect of the ability of the Internet to function and grow in three central aspects. By allowing citizens to access content equally and equitably, without censorship, monitoring or selective intervention in their connection, the online ecosystem becomes stronger technically, politically and economically. Technically, it is the most perfect system that we can devise, as evidenced by the strength and consistency of its expansion historically. By allowing for all packets of information to be distributed equitably, we are ensuring not only that there is no discrimination against users, but also are decreasing the amount of technical resources that committed to processing, storing and transmitting the data for analysis and potential rejection.

Economically this system would not develop with the ferocity that it has in past, or in a micromanaged environment as seen in China today, and would prove equally costly. Politically, various actors within the government, in the media content industries and the ISPs have selfish motives for managing access that do not necessarily align with the interests of individual citizens and could limit the architecture of the overall network. The goal of enshrining these principles in law is a worthy one and important for the health of the network, the growth of the economy and the strength of our country’s polity as a result.

Sincerely,

Daniel Arnaudo

Seattle WA