In the old Poble Espanyol venue in Barcelona, the Mozilla Festival takes place, an event that for 15 years has proposed returning to a “community internet” to reach a more open digital future, based on fundamental rights. The main stage looks like a greenhouse: it has no walls and sunlight enters it from any angle. Hacktivists from all over the world await it. Finally, he comes on stage. Its precise look contrasts with the orange background. He is, for those of us who are there, a living legend.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning: activist, technologist, data scientist, and cybersecurity consultant. He lives in New York and fights for the adoption of ethical measures when using machine learning in security, medicine and law. He seeks standards of accountability and transparency, understanding that artificial intelligence systems are shaping human life. In his free time he flirted with being a Drum and Bass DJ, but abandoned it. He also left social media and is doing his best not to return.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning: This is what she chose to call herself immediately after being sentenced to 35 years in prison on July 30, 2013 on charges related to illegally obtaining and passing on intelligence information. Previously, as an intelligence soldier in the US Army, he downloaded reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the Combined Information Data Network Exchange. He copied them onto a rewritable CD that he titled “Lady Gaga” and became a key source for WikiLeaks, the portal led by Julian Assange.
Those files contained the 720,000 classified documents that that site leaked: diplomatic cables such as the analysis of mental health and speeches by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, espionage and secrets of the United States such as “Collateral Murder”a video showing a US military helicopter strafing more than a dozen people in New Baghdad, Iraq, including Reuters journalists and children who were seriously injured. “Look at those dead bastards [Miren a esos bastardos muertos]“the perpetrators are heard saying.
refactor the code
After being pardoned by Barack Obama in 2017 for those charges, Chelsea returned to prison in 2019 for refusing to testify in an investigation into WikiLeaks that had the objective of sentencing Julian Assange to 135 years in prison. It is understandable that lately she has been uncomfortable talking about her past, which made her a public figure. He already intends to turn the page. That’s why he wrote README.txt, an autobiography in which he recounts his suicide attempts in prison, his gender transition in confinement, a complicated adolescence and the reasons why he joined the army, in addition to the trial he faced and made visible the dispute over public law and government secrets. Today, after learning and unlearning, he raises his voice against the concentration of data and technologies in a few hands. She wants to reinvent what makes her desperate: her world of zeros and ones does not admit non-dichotomous alternatives.
The massive hyper-surveillance of big technology is considered legal because users “accept” the terms and conditions. But exposing government irregularities in the name of protecting democracy and transparency is considered illegal. Can we think of laws that are positive for citizens?
-When the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was approved in 2018 and the right to privacy emerged in Europe, they asked me: Is it on the right track? I have spent the last seven years arguing that regulation is not enough, we cannot rely only on laws that can be changed, made softer, watered down and diluted. That is precisely what has been happening over the last decade.
The GDPR is the self-proclaimed strictest data privacy and security regulation in the world. It imposes obligations and fines on those who collect data from people in the European Union or violate its standards. It became a beacon for countries seeking to design their own regulations. However, since their implementation, the fines on Big Tech are irrelevant in relation to their turnover and companies continually appeal: payments, if they are made at all, take years.
“Social networks have shaped the landscape, now the same citizens with their cell phone cameras and devices are the ones who are sending the information to the government”
Chelsea expands: “Data collection and mass surveillance have become so normalized that they have become overwhelming to people. It is interesting to see how governments focus less on the use of these technological tools by citizens and more on how they serve their own purposes, as threats against the population. In the United States in particular, analysts and experts can be dispensed with as a surveillance apparatus.” She knows what she’s talking about: she was an intelligence analyst for the US military when she was arrested. Today, data collection and analysis tools are automated. He adds: “Now citizens collect data for the State or for interested third parties simply by using social networks. It is something new. For example, an activist who harasses a member of a school board shares his information with allies, and the State can use it to repress dissent. In the 2010s there was a change, the focus was on vertical surveillance, from the top down.”
That year was a turning point: different technological and political trends emerged that revealed mass surveillance and state-corporate monitoring. Many exploded in the media after Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013, but their foundations date back to then: government spy Trojans, expansion of security cameras with facial recognition, Facebook making interactions private of its users in merchandise and the incorporation of the concept of algorithmic surveillance. In fact, currently platforms and users are combined that serve as intelligence services: “Social networks have shaped the landscape, now the same citizens with their cell phone cameras and devices are the ones who are sending the information to the government.”
In his lecture, Manning proposed disconnecting from the “black pocket rectangle,” and called touching the grass and channeling boredom as “genuine strength.” “We’ve been building lives around these ‘pocket rectangles’ that we carry around all the time, which serve as portals to institutions,” he said.
internet is dead
During the conference you raised the idea of an insecure Internet that hinders human connections, but is it reversible? Is it possible to return to an internet of real communities and people?
-I’m not so sure anymore. I think we don’t have Internet anymore. I said it a year ago and I stand by it: what we knew as the Internet was an excellent streak that lasted 30 years. It is now made up of five companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Meta [más Alphabet y Apple]. Everything is on the same cloud infrastructure. That’s no longer the Internet, it’s Splinternet. We live in a world where each State has its own set of tools and resources at its disposal. China with WeChat, the US has its own ecosystem, Russia with its own devices. That’s Splinternet and it makes each individual see something different.
According Internet Society, “Shard Internet”or the balkanization of the Internet, is the idea that the open, globally connected Internet that we all use is divided into a collection of fragmented networks controlled by governments or corporations. In this way, each government creates digital echo chambers, forcing the reality that is convenient for them.
“One of the problems we have with the Internet today is that it is no longer human-centered; it is oriented toward arbitrary efficiency, motivated by profit or state ideological objectives.”
What is the mechanism by which Splinternet, this new way of developing and implementing the Internet, has expanded?
-The algorithms that eliminated equality of conditions are added. Through data collection, the platforms design logic to keep you connected based on your personality traits, interests, age and history. [Pero] we can create something new that recovers some of our own values as people. One of the problems we have with the Internet today is that it is no longer human-centered; It is oriented towards arbitrary efficiency, motivated by profits, profit or state ideological objectives. We need to make a system that is a more humane community based on values. But we don’t know how to do it without a radical restructuring of our entire society, much less the Internet.
Tor or Noise Generation Mixnet (NMG) – in this second you have collaborated – are networks that are presented as alternative solutions to today’s Internet to maintain privacy with a logic of decentralization. However, they are only used by a small portion of Internet users with computer knowledge, leaving them inaccessible to the average user. How can you reach the general population with systems of this type that protect privacy?
-Mmm… I’m not sure. When I worked at NMG until they launched their product, I struggled with that very thing. How do I get people interested? How do I get them involved? Does it matter to have privacy on the Internet? Is the Internet still a space of empowerment? I don’t have the answer to how, but I came to the conclusion that we need to figure it out, understand it, and find answers.
