You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (30 page)

The Internet inspires such ecstatic visions because it feels as if it has rolled all previous communications technologies into one. The experience of using it crosses all the old boundaries. The reader becomes a writer by commenting on other people’s work. The writer becomes a reader by looking at other people’s comments. One minute the audience is passive, as if it were reading an old-fashioned book or watching a twentieth-century film, music video or television programme; the next it is active: intervening, copying, linking and recommending. Readers who are writers and writers who are readers can speak to each other personally, as if they were using a telephone. But they can extend their range of contacts beyond the possibilities of ordinary social life on social-network sites. Through trawling personal blogs, Facebook or Twitter they can listen in to private conversations between friends as if they were spies tapping a phone. Yet if they stumble across an obscure piece of writing, or a video that interests them, they can make the private public by linking to it. If enough people copy their link, they will have created a viral phenomenon, as if they were an A&R man discovering a new talent. Because they can copy and upload information painlessly, they can build sites in a day with more words than a Victorian novelist could produce in a lifetime. Because they can allow crowd sourcing and Wiki editing, they can gather more opinions than the compilers of the
Oxford English Dictionary
or the
Encyclopaedia Britannia
had at their disposal.

No wonder the new technologies went to people’s heads, and they began to believe that the citizen was ‘no longer a passive consumer of political information and occasional voter, but an active player monitoring what governments and politicians were doing and demanding a seat at the table’.

Beyond these attractions lay a wonderful gift: working on the Net was no more expensive than the price of a laptop or a session in an Internet café. The communist-influenced intelligentsia Orwell despised may have denied some of the greatest mass murders in history, lied so often it no longer understood the difference between truth and falsehood, and disgraced socialist politics irredeemably, but it had one good argument: freedom of the press was a hollow ideal when freedom came at such a high price. Only wealthy men and corporations with access to capital, or governments with access to taxes, could afford to run a newspaper, television or radio station. Only they could hire professional journalists, with the skills required to deliver news in the limited time and space available, and the star performers who could attract a mass audience. Like the joke about capitalist freedom guaranteeing everyone an equal right to book a room at the Ritz, freedom of the press meant freedom for Orwell’s private tycoons and state-funded broadcasters.

Now the costs of publication were effectively nothing, the space available was effectively limitless, and the potential audience was an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s population. Journalists felt as obsolete as blacksmiths – the products of an outdated technology which required a now-redundant professional caste. Blogging, online videos and podcasts meant that everybody could be a journalist, broadcaster or artist. If they produced material the public wanted to read or see, they did not, in theory, need a promotional budget to attract attention – search engines and links would direct readers to them. If they wanted to share their interest in a hobby or an obscure political cause they did not need to buy special-interest magazines, because the same processes allowed them to connect to others. No one needed an editor or a proprietor’s permission to publish. No gatekeepers kept out innovators or writers. Even if conglomerates such as Apple are beginning to restrict what the public can read on the Net, they do not for the time being have anything like the influence of the old press barons.

Supporters and opponents alike overestimated proprietors’ power to sway the electorate even in the media moguls’ heyday, but what influence proprietors had became negligible when the new technologies subverted their business plans and smashed their control of the news agenda. The economic facts of publishing life were on the side of the many, not the few. In every advanced country, millions of people could scrutinise elected and unelected power with an intensity the old media could not manage, and publish their findings.

Consider how the terms of trade for investigative journalism had changed. In the twentieth century, journalists who tried to persuade state or corporate officials to give them classified documents faced many obstacles that still exist. Then as now, they had to convince them to risk their careers. They had to prove to them that they were worthy of their trust, and would protect their anonymity in all circumstances. But computer processing power has rendered a fearsome logistical difficulty irrelevant. Until the 1990s, journalist and informant faced the physical problem of copying. Suppose, in the late twentieth century, a source in the British House of Commons had wanted to leak approximately 1.2 million receipts to the
Daily Telegraph
that revealed how MPs were claiming expenses for everything from the cost of cleaning their moats to duckhouses for their ponds. Or think of a disillusioned soldier in the American military who wanted to leak 251,287 documents recounting the conversations between the US State Department and its embassies. Even in the unlikely event of the information all being in one building that the source had access to, he would still have to go through dozens of filing cabinets without arousing suspicion. He would have to photocopy on site or ‘borrow’ every piece of paper, and again hope that his colleagues did not begin to suspect what he intended to do with the information. Even if he fooled them, either he would need a truck to move the documents out of the building in one go, or he would have to divide them into manageable batches and walk past police officers or military guards hundreds of times. In both cases, the likelihood of them stopping and checking his load would be so high as to be a deterrent in itself.

Suppose he overcame his fear, duped everyone in his building and transported his documents to a newspaper office. Its editors would be able to publish just a small part of what he had given them in an old-fashioned print newspaper – assuming, that is, the authorities allowed the editor to publish, and did not threaten the paper with court action or worse.

Before the Net, just one information dump made it from behind the security fence to the press: the Pentagon Papers, a secret study prepared by the US Defense Department which Daniel Ellsberg leaked in 1971 to show how the Johnson administration of the 1960s had lied about the course of its disastrous Vietnam War. The papers made up forty-seven volumes. Their two million words filled four thousand pages of original documents and three thousand pages of analysis. The US government was so conscious of the damage the secret history of the war could do, it had printed just fifteen copies. Fortunately for Ellsberg, he could target a copy that was not in the Pentagon or another heavily guarded military base, but was kept at the offices of the RAND Corporation, a think tank where he worked. Ellsberg had access to the papers, and with the help of a friend spent three months in the autumn of 1971 carrying documents in his briefcase to a safe flat, and returning them before anyone noticed their absence. The task of copying them was so lengthy he co-opted his children to help. If he had leaked secret information of comparable sensitivity in any other major power in the 1970s, he would never have seen it published. The Russians and the Chinese would have shot him and the journalists who helped him. The French and the British would have arrested them. As it was, the editors of the
New York Times
and other American papers who ran his stories had to fight in court to assert the rights of the free press that the First Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed. Now, if you have security clearance or can hack a system, you can simply copy documents to a memory stick and slip it in your pocket.

The traditional enemies of freedom of thought could attempt to manage information when it came via a few publishers and broadcasters with assets to seize, and editors and publishers they could fine and imprison. If the
Daily News
published an attack on its government in the twentieth century, the authorities knew before they knew anything else that it had originated in the offices of the
Daily News
, and that they could hold the paper to account. Mass-circulation titles had to deliver millions of copies overnight. They had to publish in the countries they covered, and submit to the jurisdiction of national authorities.

Today, if the law stops you publishing in your own country, you can publish abroad and still reach your target audience. WikiLeaks based itself in Sweden because of that country’s exceptionally strong legal protections for journalists, and was well aware that the constraints of geography no longer limited its ability to distribute news. It installed military-grade encryption on its laptops to prevent secret services breaking into its systems, and instructed its workers to speak to each other on protected Skype networks. To say that journalists in the twentieth century did not enjoy such advantages is to understate the case. The CIA and the KGB did not enjoy them either. When John Perry Barlow announced in the 1990s that governments did not ‘possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear’, he appeared to have seen beyond the constraints governments placed on the writers of the time to a free future.

Nor did twentieth-century reporters enjoy the advantages of unrestricted space. Thirty years ago, a news programme would rarely devote more than a couple of minutes to a subject, while a broadsheet newspaper rarely had the space to reproduce more than three or four pages from a stash of leaked documents. The editors would decide what was significant, and would make the wrong decisions on occasion. On the Net, you can run all the footage or reproduce all the documents in searchable format online, and leave it to thousands of readers, in some cases hundreds of thousands of readers, to examine every detail and look for significant facts and damning connections the best of editors or reporters might have missed.

The importance of viewing evidence can never be underestimated. Politicians worry more about video footage that makes them look ridiculous or a document that incriminates than the most scathing polemics, because they understand that direct evidence is more damning than any critical review. The Web allows more evidence to be presented to the court of public opinion than ever before.

Before I get to work, I should add that just because the Net inspires techno-utopian fantasies it does not mean the fantasies are always mistaken. To talk of a ‘Twitter revolution’ in Iran is to be wrong on both counts: Twitter had just twenty thousand subscribers in Iran in 2009, and the disgusting brutality of the clerical regime ensured there was no revolution. But when those same neophiliacs talked of the Arab Spring being made up of ‘Facebook revolutions’, they were not wholly deluded. Ahmed Maher, who launched the April 6 Youth Facebook group in Egypt, which linked bloggers and activists, did not create a mass movement on the Net. There were not enough users of Facebook in Egypt to form a mass movement. If you wanted to belittle April 6’s achievements, you might say that the millions attracted to groups supporting fashionable causes in the West made the support the movement attracted seem paltry. But as an astute writer for
Wired
magazine said before the revolution, you cannot use the number of people from a democracy who click on an ‘I like’ button to damn the efforts of dissidents in dictatorships. ‘In places like Egypt, these virtual gatherings are a big deal. Although freedom of speech and freedom of religion may be democracy’s headliners, it’s the less sexy-sounding freedom of assembly that, when prohibited, can effectively asphyxiate political organization. Uniting seventy thousand people is no easy feat in a country where collective action is so risky. Social networking has changed that. In turn, it is changing the dynamics of political dissent.’

The youth movement in Egypt was a new opposition force the regime did not understand. It had not been able to infiltrate its ranks or buy off its members, as it had always done with its traditional opponents. It understood the danger of individual bloggers, and arrested them, then tortured and sodomised them in prison. But it could not cope with a new form of political association which could mobilise demonstrators. In Syria, the heartbreaking bravery of the activists who risked their lives as they filmed the atrocities of the Ba’athist death squads would have counted for nothing if the Web had not allowed them to publish their videos. There, as in Iran and Egypt, the Web broke the dictatorship’s illusion of omnipotence. Once dissenters sat in jails tormented by the knowledge that not only could their captors murder them, but the secret police could erase most of the records of their movements’ struggles. The Web provides a space where no censor can wipe them from the record of history.

When the first popular hero of the revolution against the Egyptian dictatorship was Wael Ghonim, a Google executive, persecuted by the police for running a Facebook campaign of an opposition candidate, those who doubt the power of the Web have some explaining to do.

Clay Shirky, a typically can-do American optimist and the most engaging of the cyber-utopians, picked on the example of Belarus as he explored the apparently limitless possibilities for human freedom the Net had opened. This small country, squeezed between Russia and Poland, had experienced the worst the twentieth century could offer: Tsarism with its persecution of non-Russian minorities, most notably the Jews; the First World War and the terrible battles on the Eastern Front; the Russian Revolution; the civil war that followed it; Lenin’s terror; Stalin’s terror; Hitler’s invasion and its massacres; the Holocaust; the terrible battles of the Soviet reconquest; and the return of Stalin’s terror once the war was over. After Stalin’s death, there was only a modest respite: the life-denying rulers of late-vintage Soviet communism governed the unlucky land.