Repressive governments will be able to determine who has censorship-circumvention applications on their handsets or in their homes, so even the non-dissident just trying to illegally download The Sopranos will come under increased scrutiny. States will be able to set up random checkpoints or raids to search people’s devices for encryption and proxy software, the presence of which could earn them fines, jail time or a spot on a government database of offenders. Everyone who is known to have downloaded a circumvention measure will suddenly find life more difficult—they will not be able to get a loan, rent a car or make an online purchase without some form of harassment. Government agents could go classroom to classroom at every school and university in the country, expelling all students whose mobile-phone activity indicates that they’ve downloaded such software. Penalties could extend to these students’ networks of family and friends, further discouraging that behavior for the wider population.
And, in the slightly less totalitarian autocracies, if the governments haven’t already mandated “official” government-verified profiles, they’ll certainly try to influence and control existing online identities with laws and monitoring techniques. They could pass laws that require social-networking profiles to contain certain personal information, like home address and mobile number, so that users are easier to monitor. They might build sophisticated computer algorithms that allow them to roam citizens’ public profiles looking for omissions of mandated information or the presence of inappropriate content.
States are already engaging in this type of behavior, if somewhat covertly. As the Syrian uprising dragged on into 2013, a number of Syrian opposition members and foreign aid workers reported that their laptops were infected with computer viruses. (Many hadn’t realized it until their online passwords suddenly stopped working.) Information technology (IT) specialists outside of Syria checked the discs and confirmed the presence of malware, in this case different types of Trojan horse viruses (programs that appear legitimate but are in fact malicious) that stole information and passwords, recorded keystrokes, took screenshots, downloaded new programs and remotely turned on webcams and microphones, and then sent all of that information back to an IP address which, according to the IT analysts, belonged to the state-owned telecom, Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. In this case, the spyware arrived through executable files (the user had to independently open a file to download the virus), but that doesn’t mean the targeted individuals had been careless. One aid worker had downloaded a file, which appeared to be a dead link (meaning it no longer worked), in an online conversation with a person she thought was a verified opposition activist about the humanitarian need in the country. Only after the conversation did she learn to her chagrin that she had probably spoken with a government impersonator who possessed stolen or coerced passwords; the real activist was in prison.
People living under these conditions will be left to fend for themselves against the tag team of their government and its corrupt corporate allies. What governments can’t build in-house, they can outsource to willing suppliers. Guilt by association will take on a new meaning with this level of monitoring. Just being in the background of a person’s photo could matter if a government’s facial-recognition software were to identify a known dissident in the picture. Being documented in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether by photo, voice or IP address, could land unwitting citizens in an unwanted spotlight. Though this scenario is profoundly unfair, we worry that it will happen all too often, and could encourage self-censoring behaviors among the rest of society.
If connectivity enhances the state’s power, enabling it to mine its citizens’ data with a fly-on-the-wall vantage point, it also constricts the state’s ability to control the news cycle. Information blackouts, propaganda and “official” histories will fail to compete with the public’s access to outside information, and cover-ups will backfire in the face of an informed and connected population. Citizens will be able to capture, share and remark upon an event before the government can decide what to say or do about it, and thanks to the ubiquity of cheap mobile devices, this grassroots power will be fairly evenly distributed throughout even large countries. In China, where the government has one of the world’s most sophisticated and far-reaching censorship systems in place, attempts to cover up news stories deemed potentially damaging to the state have been missing the mark with increasing frequency.
In July 2011, the crash of a high-speed train in Wenzhou, in southeast China, resulted in the deaths of forty people and gave weight to a widely held fear that the country’s infrastructure projects were moving too quickly for proper safety reviews. Yet the accident was downplayed by official channels, its coverage in the media actively minimized. It took tens of millions of posts on weibos, Chinese microblogs similar to Twitter, for the state to acknowledge that the crash had been the result of a design flaw and not bad weather or an electricity outage, as had previously been reported. Further, it was revealed that the government sent directives to the media shortly after the crash, specifically stating, “There must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed. No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!” The directives also instructed journalists to maintain a feel-good tone about the story: “From now on, the Wenzhou train accident should be reported along the theme of ‘major love in the face of major disaster.’ ” But where the mainstream media fell in line, the microbloggers did not, leading to a deeply embarrassing incident for the Chinese government.
For a country like China, this mix of active citizens armed with technological devices and tight government control is exceptionally volatile. If state control relies on the perception of total command of events, every incident that undermines that perception—every misstep captured by camera phone, every lie debunked with outside information—plants seeds of doubt that encourage opposition and dissident elements in the population, and that could develop into widespread instability.
There may be only a handful of failed states in the world today, but they offer an intriguing model for how connectivity can operate in a power vacuum. Indeed, telecommunications seems to be just about the only industry that can thrive in a failed state. In Somalia, telecommunications companies have come to fill many of the gaps that decades of war and failed government have created, providing information, financial services and even electricity.
In the future, as the flood of inexpensive smart phones reaches users in failed states, citizens will find ways to do even more. Phones will help to enable the education, health care, security and commercial opportunities that the citizens’ governments cannot provide. Mobile technology will also give much-needed intellectual, social and entertainment outlets for populations who have been psychologically traumatized by their environment. Connectivity alone cannot revert a failed state, but it can drastically improve the situation for its citizens. As we’ll discuss later, new methods to help communities handle conflict and post-conflict challenges—developments like virtual institution building and skilled labor databases in the diaspora—will emerge to accelerate local recovery.