Who controls net speech?
Resend: Important material inserted concerning 'backdoors' and encryption
Indictment of Telegram owner part of trend launched by U.S. gov't
Pavel Durov, the chief of Telegram, a messaging and social media app, was charged Wednesday in France with a wide range of crimes related to illicit activity on the app.
The New York Times noted: "It was a rare move by legal authorities to hold a top technology executive personally liable for the behavior of users on a major messaging platform, escalating the debate over the role of technology companies in online speech and the limits of their responsibility."
Durov, 39, who was seized by French police Saturday and placed under formal investigation on a range of charges, including the managing of an online platform that enables illegal transactions, distribution of matter tied to child porn, and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement.
What does the arrest of Telegram's chief have to do with freedom of speech in America?
After all, the French can say that since Pavel Durov is a French citizen, there are no serious international problems concerning his arrest. Yet when X chief Elon Musk was about to air an interview with Donald Trump, warnings were heard from Europe that Musk faced prosecution on grounds of promoting hate.
In any case, the indictment of a major social media platform owner follows a pattern laid down by U.S. authorities to control internet mavericks.
# The U.S. conducted a relentless campaign to bring down Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In Assange's case, the leaks that caused all the trouble weren't highly classified, and so it was hard to justify bringing him to court. But then, in 2017, Wikileaks revealed a set of CIA cyber-hacking secrets. The classification on these was high, and the CIA waged a campaign against Assange (including eavesdropping on his conversations with lawyers), with the final result that he admitted to a cyber charge after spending five years in a British prison fighting extradition to the U.S. My opinion is that certain forces in the CIA wanted Assange out of the way so that he would not help Trump in his reelection bid, as he had in 2016. Trump, facing relentless attempts to impeach him, was cornered and could do nothing for Assange.
# Kim Dotcom has just lost a yearslong extradition battle, so that he faces various cybercrime charges because he did not, says the U.S., properly moderate the content of his file-sharing service. In other words, Dotcom was required to do the government's job for it. The government is also protecting big entertainment media companies from rip-offs, even though those corporations had the right to sue his company for extensive damages.
# In 2021, a total-encryption cell phone firm owner was indicted on U.S. charges of abetting criminality.
What is the real theme here? Answer: governmental control of what can be transmitted by any electronic means. The government in a number of cases tries to wiggle out of freedom of PRESS, by defining "press" as narrowly as it can get away with. Even so, it is very plain that to the founding fathers, the word "press" meant devices that transmit speech. Yet governments everywhere are prone to argue that while speech and printed words are protected from prior restraint, the other means of communication are not protected.
The cell phone is a major tool of organized crime. Hence, by authoritarian logic, your audio and text conversations must be moderated and your right to communicate controlled by the private company with which you do business. If company executives fail to keep your talk under surveillance, they would face charges of promoting criminal activities — as actually happened in 2021. Put another way: governments are mostly prohibited from directly regulating speech, and so they desire to have corporate executives do for them what they can't do themselves.
Sounds a bit fanciful. After all, in the United States cell phone companies are utilities and, at least before 2021, were not held responsible for user content. But then, social media companies enjoy protection as both utilities and media, due to an antiquated 1990s U.S. internet law. Yet that fact certainly hasn't prevented the government from engaging in censorship, as is demonstrated by theTwitter Files, recent exposes concerning Meta's Facebook and the matter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose right to sue over his muzzling was just reinstated by a federal judge in Louisiana.
True, it isn't customary — tho it can happen — to prosecute cell phone executives for defying government surveillance demands, but are we not on a slippery slope? After all, right now phone companies are required to keep all your phone conversations in a data bank for six months so that they can be accessed by the FBI and intelligence agencies. Additionally, phone executives are well-known for cooperating with surveillance "requests," no matter how dubious the legal grounds.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 election, there was a great hoohaw over control of "probable Russian disinformation" roaming about social media and gulling ordinary Americans who were too dumb not to fall for the deceptions. Except that it was marginalized workers whose jobs had been offshored that came out in droves to support the candidate. Disinformation, misinformation, malinformation are phenomena that always appears during heated political campaigns.
Both Durov and Dotcom argue that they should not be held responsible for how people have used their services. These men seem to have been stripped of the "utility" theory of social media, as part of a major effort to control what people can share. Of course it isn't good when criminals communicate in criminal conspiracies. So, authoritarians tend to claim, therefore no one must be allowed to say anything at all without being monitored. Yet, we need to remind ourselves that one of the big prices we pay for freedom is that we put up with the fact that some people will behave in criminal ways.
The clear and present danger of this sort of thinking is that governments begin expanding their definitions of disfavored speech, as we see in the case of Kennedy, whose Facebook speech was taken down at the insistence of the Biden White House on grounds of promoting "vaccination hesitancy." But the fact of the matter is that the White House could not martial enough facts to show that covid vaccine skepticism was unwarranted. Instead, it resorted to intimidation of social media executives. Worse, federal authorities also pressured executives to curb expression of skepticism about the 2020 election.
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has just reluctantly admitted that Facebook did indeed muzzle people at the federal government's behest.
It's easy to throw hot-button phrases around like "terrorism, child porn, public safety" and so on to rationalize the wish of authorities to monitor what people say to each other. In Durov's case, he has been accused of failure to cooperate with police. But it's all rather vague. What does that mean? Failure to hire droves of monitors who then routinely turn information over to police? "Why, Monsieur Durov, haven't you arranged for a staff of snoops to do the work of police?"
Another issue kept murky by the French, but which is very likely to be one of their beefs: “Monsieur, where is the backdoor to crack end-to-end encryption of your message service?”
One must assume that rival message services, such as WhatsApp, provide backdoor access. The U.S. government for years has done all it can to high-pressure communications firms to let them peek at encrypted messages.
The Justice Department in 2021 used the same rationale as that emanating from the French when it indicted a cell phone company owner for, in effect, providing uncrackable encryption.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/crime-boss-or-tech-ceo-sky-global-sues-government-domains/
A big problem with the U.S. attack against complete encryption is that the First Amendment does not limit the idea of speech to unencrypted speech. It has never been thought illegal merely to encode speech. But that precedent has been severely subverted in the race for control of electronic information.
From personal experience over several decades, I can attest that there is an awful lot of meddling with my right to interact with people electronically. Where does this meddling come from? Well, it's quite hard to believe it stems from random hackers.