2024-11-14
No, Cory, it really is about sovereignty
This is a response to a recent blog post by Cory Doctorow, someone who I generally like and admire:
The Precipitating Incident
At the time, I was a bit taken aback by Cory Doctorow's prickly (and frankly, pretty condescending) response to a post he calls "the precipitating incident". In his blog post, Cory doesn't name names, but it's pretty obvious he's referring to a piece by Paris Marx that Paris linked on his Mastodon account back in September. Take a gander at the replies to that post to see Cory's heat-of-the-moment take, as well as Paris' polite but firm response:
Anyhow, Doctorow's opinions on the two cases in question - a Brazilian judge ordering the suspension of Twitter in Brazil, and the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France - don't seem to have evolved much in the interim. And he doesn't appear to have gone back to refresh his memory of that initial Mastodon exchange; if he had, he wouldn't have led off his blog post by unequivocally claiming Paris had been "opining that this was purely a matter of national sovereignty, with no speech dimension." (In fact, as you can see, Paris' response to Cory in the thread includes this concession: "I'll grant there's an element of it that has to do with speech".)
So we're already starting off well, but don't worry, the rest of the piece has a disingenuous feel to it too :)
Brazil's suspension of Twitter
One gripe I have with Doctorow's piece is maybe a bit of a nitpick: Twitter is arguably not a communications "medium". A platform, sure. A big one, even! But Brazilians were not having the internet shut down, or the web, or anything remotely close to that. What was being suspended was a single (and yes, popular and therefore important) website, whose owner was flagrantly refusing to follow Brazilian law by refusing to appoint a new legal representative in the country. This was after the company had reinstated a number of accounts the Brazilian justice system had found to be linked to "digital militias" and were under investigation for, you know, minor stuff, like spreading far-right disinformation, making threats against Supreme Court justices, and attempting to incite and coordinate the overthrow of Brazil's democratically elected government.[1]
Doctorow also tries to insinuate that Brazil, fifth most populous nation on the planet, may have an ulterior motive for requiring a major social network to have someone stationed domestically who, in the words of the Associated Press, "can be notified of legal decisions and is qualified to take any requisite action".[2] You know, someone that can file paperwork, or appear in court to answer questions about a multi-billion-dollar company breaking the law. But Doctorow casts it in much more sinister terms, writing, "countries that insist on a domestic rep are also implicitly demanding that the company place one of its employees or agents within reach of its police-force."
Coincidentally - and to be clear, I'm *not* trying to insinuate anything - this is similar in tone to statements from Musk, where he claimed that Twitter's previous representative was being threatened with arrest over Twitter's non-compliance with Brazilian law. I've found plenty of news stories mentioning that Musk made the claim, but haven't found any confirmation that the claim was true, although I'm not denying that it could be.
Cory does end up mostly walking back the idea that Brazil is some sort of authoritarian police state, but walking it back only makes it feel strange that he floated the notion in the first place. It's odd partly because it means he was deliberately conflating things for rhetorical effect (i.e., invoking the words 'police force' as if that's the same thing as 'system of laws and justice', making the word choice seem like simply an emotional appeal to his readers) but also because - here's a wild idea - maybe when corporations break laws, or defy legal rulings, it should be possible to hold the people in charge liable?
* * *
Next, Doctorow discusses Brazil's "threat to penalize Brazilians who used VPNs to circumvent the block". It's a factually correct statement - however Cory ends up focusing far more on the "VPNs" part of it rather than the "circumvent the Twitter block" part, and in doing so, pushes an alarmist narrative that definitely serves his essay's purposes, but doesn't match the reality of the situation.
In fairness to Doctorow: on August 30th, it's true that there was an order from Federal Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes requiring Apple and Google to remove VPN apps from their stores, along with the Twitter app. But guess what? The order was rescinded that very evening.[3] As Executive Director of the Tor project Isabela Fernandes argued at the time, this was likely because the order was not only unenforceable, but also illegal, meaning de Moraes had no real choice but to back down from it.[4] In other words, if you're keeping score: Brazil's system of checks and balances worked!
(Incidentally, in case you're curious why VPNs were on de Moraes' radar in the first place: it might be because in April, Musk was publicly suggesting that people use VPNs to circumvent a potential Twitter shutdown ... in between rants calling for the judge's impeachment. And at the risk of bending reality to fit *my* narrative, here's a very different possible reason for the short-lived VPN order: the judge may have done this simply as a way to signal to the public that the judiciary were well aware people might try using the workaround.)
Besides, it doesn't have to be super complicated: a ban on the use of Twitter can be pretty easily, albeit haphazardly, enforced by just looking to see if any big Brazilian accounts are still posting. Sure, it's not exactly an airtight automated dragnet mode of enforcement, but like, that's actually a *good* thing, and the threat of a substantial fine was probably enough of a deterrent that most people weren't going to bother trying to get around the ban.
And hey, I'm not saying that the ban of a major platform, or the threat of hefty fines, are necessarily "good things" in a vacuum. But the political, social, and historical context does have to be taken into account. As I write this on the evening of November 13th, there's breaking news of an explosion outside Brazil's Supreme Court building.
* * *
Despite everything, a full three months later Doctorow decides that the alarmist narrative is still more appropriate here, seemingly under the impression that it was VPNs, and not Twitter, that were being banned in Brazil, warning that "a VPN ban can only be enforced with extremely invasive network surveillance and blocking orders to app stores and ISPs to restrict access to VPN tools", adding: "This is wholly disproportionate and illegitimate." Sorry Cory, but you're in a tizzy about something that literally did not happen, and my honest best guess is that the whole saga is exactly what it looks like: Musk wanted to let fascists run loose on Twitter so they could continue to spout disinfo and stir up violence, only to get smacked down by a judge who wasn't having his bullshit. Trying to cast the whole affair as some kind of human rights issue centered on VPNs is ... quite the angle for your essay.
France's arrest of Pavel Durov
The other case Doctorow discusses at length is the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France. Again, by all appearances, this is a story of a CEO who decided he didn't want to comply with takedown orders, or demands from law enforcement as to the identity of the people engaged in criminality on the platform. CSAM distribution, drug trafficking, and money laundering are among the things that were being done in public, unencrypted group messaging channels on the platform. It's also apparently a hotbed of disinformation and conspiracy theories, along with crypto scams and the like.
But Doctorow seems convinced there's something other than the obvious at play, pointing out that "France - among many other governments - has waged a decades-long war against encrypted messaging, which is a wholly illegitimate goal", and suggesting, without evidence, that Durov's arrest was motivated by a desire to put a backdoor in the encryption used in Telegram's one-on-one messaging. I went back and read a bunch of the reporting on this story, and couldn't find anything that indicated this was going on. I did, however, see numerous quotes from various people - including Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Balaji Srinavasan - decrying Durov's arrest as an attack on free speech. Additionally, I saw plenty of cybersecurity folks expressing doubts about how robust Telegram's encryption is to begin with (which, to his credit, Cory also mentions). So it's pretty wild to me that Doctorow is taking this story, which by all appearances is about a country arresting a billionaire CEO who has knowingly been facilitating crimes, and shoe-horning it into a discussion around how human rights trump national sovereignty.
* * *
And look, before people start accusing me of being an authoritarian carceral-state shill: I'm not suggesting that anyone who says or does things deemed illegal or criminal should immediately have the full power of the state rained down on them. But I do think that there are reasonable limits on what we collectively tolerate, and that democratically elected governments can and should have a role in enforcing those limits. And I can say this without inconsistency, because I'm not someone who thinks that a government restricting fascists' online organizing efforts and speech is the same thing as a government restricting the organizing efforts and speech of the left. Fascism is not something that we need to debate the merits of. Busting up fascist spaces is a good thing, full stop.
Doctorow isn't *wrong* when he says that backdooring or criminalizing encryption in order to stop these things is bad for everyone, and not just the 'bad guys'. But as Paris Marx correctly pointed out, that's not what these cases are about - and by pretending that they are, Doctorow is ultimately doing work on behalf of the tech billionaires who would love nothing more than to be permanently above the systems of laws and regulations that the rest of us are bound by, which isn't much different from the current status quo. And his fanciful notions of us being saved from these oligarchs by things like platform interoperability: these are wholly insufficient in this political and historical moment; we need our governments to aggressively go after these people and hold them to account. That will almost certainly involve more platforms being banned, and more CEOs being arrested.
But whatever, right, I'm just some cranky rando on the internet. Fair enough. So I'll leave you with something from Bruce Daisley, Twitter's former vice-president for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He wrote this in August, in the aftermath of a spate of fascist violence against immigrants across the UK - during which Musk was amplifying fake stories and tweeting things like "civil war is inevitable":
"In my experience, that threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines. Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind.
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"Musk's actions should be a wake-up call for Starmer's government to quietly legislate to take back control of what we collectively agree is permissible on social media. Musk might force his angry tweets to the top of your timeline, but the will of a democratically elected government should mean more than the fury of a tech oligarch - even him." [5]