Abstract
Most people, despite Edward Snowden’s revelations, are still fairly apathetic about protecting their online privacy. But if it’s easier to do, will we adopt methods to guard our online selves?
Snowden himself predicted this when he stepped out of the shadows and invited reporters from The Guardian newspaper into his Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013.
“I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me,” Snowden told The Guardian at the time. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.”
His analysis was correct. Many media outlets have focused on Snowden, the person, instead of the issues surrounding mass surveillance. The effort to downplay the revelations has arguably proven effective as most individuals have shrugged off the idea that the authorities are monitoring their communications. Those that are aware of mass surveillance are mostly nonchalant. Most do not want to engage in a debate because they believe they “have nothing to hide” in the first place.
Is this really the world that people want to live in? Probably not. Efforts have been made to explain the National Security Agency leaks in simple language. When Edward Snowden was interviewed by TV presenter John Oliver for his US show Last Week Tonight in April 2015, they discussed how people are mostly concerned whether or not the government is collecting photos of their private parts. (They are, said Snowden. Not as a particular “Dick Pic Program”, but because they get swept up with bulk collection of online activity.) Yet even this has failed to drive adoption of privacy-enhancing tools. At the heart of the matter is habit. Most people are too lazy to change their current routines when it comes to protecting their privacy. Companies such as Facebook make it difficult for users to take matters into their own hands by complicating and changing the privacy settings.
Snowden’s actions mobilised and energised the developers of privacy-enhancing tools. A plethora of choices now exist for those who want to protect their privacy. There are so many choices that the internet freedom community itself is at times guilty of debating the merits of individual tools instead of encouraging adoption.
This past year, however, saw one exceptional and largely unheralded development in this space. Non-profit software group Open Whisper Systems has come to the forefront to, as their website states, “advance the state of the art for secure communication, while simultaneously making it easy for everyone to use”. They developed the encrypted call and messaging app Signal, which was released at the end of 2015 and was publicly praised by fanboy Snowden. “I use Signal every day. #notesfortheFBI (Spoiler: they already know),” Snowden tweeted last November, and Signal received an uptick in users amid the surrounding publicity.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in new film Snowden
Credit: Jürgen Olczyk
But perhaps the greatest development in pushing everybody towards secure and encrypted communication was when OWS launched a partnership to incorporate their technology into the globally popularWhatsApp chat app. In April, hundreds of millions of people woke up to find out the messages they were sending to their family and friends would be encrypted. Many would come to understand that this would mean that their communications would be invisible to the prying eyes of the NSA and their partners around the world. What was the price for this newfound privacy? Absolutely nothing. Users were informed of the changes when they logged on to WhatsApp. No settings had to be changed. No new app had to be downloaded.
What’s more, there has been a domino effect after the OWS integration. Consumers have been putting pressure on other messaging and communications platforms to implement end-to-end encryption for their services. The positive end result is that we should expect to see more communications apps implement end-to-end encryption by default.
The internet freedom community is building off of this momentum and needs to take advantage of arguably unrelated market conditions to expand private communications beyond the community of activists and others who need to protect their privacy. Most importantly, this community needs to seek out collaborative partnerships like the one between OWS and WhatsApp. It also needs to recognise that most people are not interested in using new apps and tools. Instead, the focus should be on integrating privacy, secure communications and encryption into the world’s most popular communications platforms.
Recent leaks have highlighted the importance of encrypting email. In July, WikiLeaks released almost 20,000 emails from the US Democratic National Committee, revealing that some delegates were undermining Senator Bernie Sanders in his bid to be the party’s presidential candidate. If Sanders runs for office again in four years’ time, it is unlikely that the DNC will conspire against him in normal, written, plain-text email communications.
Fully encrypted email services do exist but there is a WhatsApp-like opportunity to suddenly put the power of encrypted email into the hands of more than one billion Gmail users and companies that use Gmail to power their work email. The Mailvelope app seamlessly integrates with Gmail to provide a simple yet secure solution for encrypted messages within the Gmail interface itself. While Mailvelope has yet to formally strike a deal with Google, it is certainly not inconceivable that consumers demand that Gmail offer an integrated solution for encryption. For Google, this will be about meeting consumer demand. And for the internet freedom community, this is about making it is as easy as possible for a great number of users to start encrypting email.
Geographical restrictions on the viewing of online content have brought virtual private network usage to the forefront. VPNs help you browse the internet more anonymously by routing your traffic through a server in a different location or country, and are now commonly used to circumvent geographical restrictions on the viewing of content.
Some companies have recently cracked down on the use of VPNs to circumvent content-viewing restrictions, including moviestreaming site Netflix, which says it will step up enforcement against subscribers who use VPNs to access localised content from different countries.
Yet the adoption of tools to circumvent these restrictions has had the added benefit of masking the internet traffic of many people. This is a great market opportunity for privacy advocates. Increased demand for VPNs will help to drive down prices. Increased competition will also help to improve quality, making them easy to purchase and install on as many devices as possible, allowing greater privacy to proliferate.
As privacy enhancing tools start to move mainstream, our online habits will also change. By taking back control of our privacy, free expression of ideas and opinions will proliferate, without the fear of retribution.
