Colleagues and sometime-adversaries Ron Deibert and Janice Gross-Stein met last Thursday at Victoria College to debate the question “Civic (H)Activism: But, Should We Do It?”
Despite the unwieldy title, a crowd of about 50 people gathered to hear the discussion, which addressed issues of intellectual property, surveillance, and censorship. The two professors asked whether Hactivism-political activism by computer hackers-was a valid response to the technological challenges to human rights.
The question didn’t get answered, but the talk was entertaining.
“If there’s a central property of the Internet,” said Deibert in his opening remarks, “it’s that it is constantly changing. There are many people, myself included, who are concerned that it’s changing, mutating, in a direction that curtails human rights.
“These are technological changes, these are legislative changes, these are regulatory changes,” he added.
He went on to talk about how authoritarian governments are using sophisticated filtering technologies to prevent their citizens from accessing information on the web. During a trip to Guatemala over the past summer, Deibert said that he saw the computers of a human-rights organization seized, ostensibly because they were using unlicensed software.
“The computers were seized under the guise of copyright infringement but it was clearly an attempt at curtailing free speech,” he said.
As the director of CitizenLab.org, Deibert has been involved first-hand in hactivism, describing projects which allowed Chinese citizens to access information via the CitizenLab’s computers, “Sousveillance,” or subverting surveillance cameras by filming back at them, and a project scheduled for next year called “CC the CIA,” in which people can sign up to copy all the email they send in a day to the secret service of their respective country. Deibert joked that he hadn’t cleared that project yet with Gross-Stein, who is director of the Munk Centre for International Studies and, in one sense, Deibert’s boss.
Gross-Stein was, to a certain extent, supportive of the goals of the Citizen Lab, but was sceptical about the effectiveness of their methods.
She criticized the focus of the lab on fostering awareness and transparency, which she said didn’t go far enough.
“The thinking is-‘if other people know that I can see what they’re doing, they’ll behave better,'” she said. “There’s this facile assumption that if you shine a flashlight that’ll solve the problem, and it becomes a replacement for real public engagement.
“If you actually look at the way our society is organizing,” she continued, “networks are becoming more and more important.” But she said that just making those networks visible isn’t enough: “Trust is what is at the core of all network relationships.”
