As we think about how to address these kinds of challenges, we cannot afford to take a black-and-white view; context matters. For example, in Mexico, drug cartels are among some of the most effective users of anonymous encryption, both P2P and through the Internet. In 2011, we met with Bruno Ferrari, then the country’s secretary of the economy, and he described to us how the Mexican government has struggled to engage the population in the fight against the cartels—fear of retribution is enough to prevent people from reporting crimes or tipping off law enforcement to cartel activity in their neighborhoods. Corruption and untrustworthiness in the police department further limit the options for citizens. “Without anonymity,” Ferrari told us, “there is no clear mechanism in which people can trust the police and report the crimes committed by the drug cartels. True anonymity is vital to getting the citizens to be part of the solution.” The drug cartels were already using anonymous communications, so anonymity levels the playing field. “The arguments behind restricting anonymous encryption make sense,” he added, “but just not in Mexico.”
Police State 2.0
All things considered, the balance of power between citizens and their governments will depend on how much surveillance equipment a government is able to buy, sustain and operate. Genuinely democratic states may struggle to deal with the loss of privacy and control that the data revolution enables, but as a result they will have more empowered citizens, better politicians and stronger social contracts. Unfortunately, the majority of states in the world are either not democratic or democratic in name only, and the relative impact of connectivity—both positive and negative—for citizens in those countries will be far greater than we’ll see elsewhere.
In the long run, the presence of communication technologies will chip away at most autocratic governments, since, as we have seen, the odds against a restrictive, information-shy regime dealing with an empowered citizenry armed with personal fact-checking devices get progressively worse with each embarrassing incident. In other words, it’s no coincidence that today’s autocracies are for the most part among the least connected societies in the world. In the near term, however, such regimes will be able to exploit the growth of connectivity to their advantage, as they already exploit the law and the media. There is a trend in authoritarian governance to harness the power of connectivity and data, rather than ban information technology out of fear, a shift from totalitarian obviousness to more subtle forms of control that the journalist William J. Dobson captured in his excellent book The Dictator’s Learning Curve. As Dobson describes it, “Today’s dictators and authoritarians are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble than they once were. Faced with growing pressures, the smartest among them neither hardened their regimes into police states nor closed themselves off from the world; instead, they learned and adapted. For dozens of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity and cunning.” Dobson identifies numerous avenues through which modern dictators consolidate power while feigning legitimacy: a quasi-independent judicial system, the semblance of a popularly elected parliament, broadly written laws that are applied selectively and a media landscape that allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are. Unlike the strongman regimes and pariah states of old, Dobson writes, modern authoritarian states are “conscious, man-made projects that must be carefully built, polished, and reinforced.”
But Dobson covers only a small number of case studies in his work and we are less certain that the new digital age will yield such advantages to all autocratic regimes. How dictators handle connectivity will greatly determine their future in the new digital age, particularly if their states want to compete for status and business on the global stage. The centralization of power, the delicate balancing of patronage and repression, the outward projection of the state itself—every element of autocratic governance will depend on the control that regimes have over the virtual world their population inhabits.
In the span of a decade, the world’s autocracies will go from having a minority to a majority of their citizens online, and for dictators looking to stay in power, this will be a turbulent transition. Yet building the kind of system that can monitor and contain all types of dissident energy is thankfully not easy and will require very specialized solutions, expensive consultants, technologies not widely available and a great deal of money. Cell towers, servers and microphones will be needed, as well as large data centers to store information; specialized software will be necessary to process the data gathered; trained people will have to operate all of this, and basic resources like electricity and connectivity will need to be constantly and abundantly available. If autocrats want to build a surveillance state, it’s going to cost them—we hope more than they can afford.
There are some autocracies with poor populations but vast amounts of oil, minerals or other resources that they can trade. As in the arms-for-minerals trade, we can imagine the growth of a technology-for-minerals exchange between technology-poor but resource-rich countries (Equatorial Guinea is one example) and technology-rich but resource-hungry countries (China is an obvious one). Not many states will be able to pull off this kind of trade, and hopefully those that do will not be able to sustain or effectively operate what they have.
Once the infrastructure is in place, repressive regimes will need to manage the glut of information they acquire with the help of supercomputers. In countries where connectivity was established early, governments have had time to acclimate to the types of data their citizens produce; the pace of technological adoption and progress has been somewhat gradual. But these newly wired regimes will not have that luxury; they’ll need to move quickly to make use of their data if they want to be effective in its management. To address this, they’ll build powerful computer banks with much faster processing power than the average laptop, and they’ll buy or build software that facilitates the data-mining and real-time monitoring they desire. Everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state is commercially available now, and export restrictions are currently insufficiently monitored and enforced.
Once one regime builds its surveillance state, it will share what it learned with others. We know that autocratic governments share information, governance strategies and military hardware, and it’s only logical that the configuration that one state designs will (if it works) proliferate among its allies and assorted others. Companies that sell data-mining software, surveillance cameras and other products will flaunt their work with governments to attract new business.
The most important form of data to collect for an autocrat isn’t Facebook posts or Twitter comments—it’s biometric information. “Biometric” refers to information that can be used to uniquely identify individuals through their physical and biological attributes. Fingerprinting, photographs and DNA testing are all familiar biometric data types today. Indeed, the next time you visit Singapore, you might be surprised to find that airport security requires both a filled-out customs form and a scan of your voice. In the future, voice-recognition and facial-recognition software will largely surpass all of these earlier forms in accuracy and use.