The new face of Fascism?
A traditional definition of fascism would be to enforce your own morality or opinions on other people with the barrel of a gun. If you don’t agree with me I simply make your viewpoint illegal and jail you.
Of course, a huge part of enforcing that is to find out who disagrees with you, which is why secret police like the East German Stasi were invented.
As many tech news followers will be aware the United Arab Emirates Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has demanded changes in the way smart phone maker, Research in Motion (RIM) delivers it’s messenger, email and web browser services. Saudi Arabia authorities have also ordered local telecommunications providers to freeze messenger and India is in discussions over the same issues. A good summary of the facts can be had at this reuters story.
What’s of particular interest to us is that security is being sited as a major driver or reason.
What makes Blackberry special is that the data services are routed in a central way, through RIM Network Operating Centers, which are not physically located in any of the countries involved. Together with encryption of the data stream, it makes it impossible for local governments to monitor the traffic. The gist of their request is to locate RIM proxy servers locally so the various authorities can eavesdrop the data.
Reuters reports that UAE is asking for a proxy server to be installed locally, but RIM is offering alternatives to that. Obviously RIM’s offer didn’t quite meet UAE demands and as it stands their threat is to suspend Blackberry services on October 11th.
An interesting aside, in Saudi Arabia 80% of Blackberry users are private and only 20% are corporate. It is said because it enables young people to connect with members of the opposite sex in a conservative culture. So what is being proposed here is state surveillance of some 700,000 users in Saudi and 500,000 in UAE.
We can infer take several things from these state of affairs:
Firstly, because UAE is not complaining about other smart phone data deliveries they probably already eavesdrop those, and other, data streams. Or have plans to.
Secondly, governments feel no qualms about eavesdropping private data when ever and where ever they please.
Thirdly, the days of governments, who are not the United States, leaving the internet much as it is are coming to a close, as we can also see from Google’s experience in China. It is hard to see how RIM will be able to deflect these demands.
Fourthly, if we see this together with the fact the the British government is happy to deploy millions of CCTV monitoring cameras throughout the country almost without debate or recourse, it’s highly unlikely western governments are going to act vastly differently to China, India, Saudi Arabia or UAE. We know in the USA the NSA already have wholesale monitoring of telecommunications data, maybe other governments simply feel they are keeping up with the Joneses.
It’s very hard to see any good coming from these developments. As I have said before, privacy is a prerequisite for true freedom.
I wonder if those poor citizens who lived through the oppression of East Germany in the cold war are getting an uncomfortable sense of Deja Vu?
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