Mumbai Attack
Recently, an oil industry expert went on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to explain how oil prices go up due to speculation about possible dangerous scenarios that could happen in oil producing countries like Libya. I think this is an example of how we are forced to adjust in many ways, including in media coverage and consumption habits, to how situations might play out before they even do. Beyond calculating supply and demand for resources, speculation is also becoming more intrusive on the way we communicate everyday via the Internet.
Recently, Research In Motion (the company behind Blackberry smartphones and other devices) has come under pressure from a few countries — Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, and India — to grant government access to encrypted data and emails that travel between their devices. While the governments have stated (in India’s case especially) that this is a policy being enforced on all smartphone manufacturers that want to provide services in these countries, Research In Motion is finding itself at a crossroads because its business-minded consumer-base use Blackberry devices largely for the security it provides for their information. Given the reputation it has built around its data encryption capability, Research In Motion can only make a few concessions (like granting access to its Blackberry Messenger service data in a few countries already) before privacy and security concerns become perhaps their biggest problem. Perhaps not.
Could these concerns really become too much for Research In Motion (and other smartphone manufacturers for that matter) to quell? Privacy is of utmost importance to most consumers of media and technology but concern for security is something that the public shares with the state. Looking at this issue from the perspectives of the governments however, security means something slightly different from what it means to Research In Motion and its loyal customers. At the same time, both meanings often overlap and point to the same thing. By outlining what concerns for privacy and concerns for security mean to governments, Research In Motion, and Blackberry users, I think I can see how speculation, paranoia and anxiety in the wake of 9/11 is affecting democracy in the digital space.
Security from the government’s perspective goes beyond security of information to a broader concern for national security. The Indian government is certainly concerned with not seeing the events of November 26, 2008 repeated. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai were significant for the way they were coordinated via mobile phones. According to the Indian government’s reasoning, unrestricted access to information traveling via blackberry smartphones will give them the ability to preemptively visualize potential terrorist attacks and prepare proactive — rather than reactive — counterattacks. I don’t have much to go by on the Indian people’s general attitudes toward government infringement on their rights to privacy but relying on the definition of national security as protection from terrorism, many consumers in the U.S. might see this as pretty solid reasoning. Here in the U.S., there’s been a long history of the people willing to suspend some of their basic human rights in exchange for a greater feeling of security. Surely Research In Motion is hoping that the memory of Mumbai attacks, still fresh in its citizens’ collective memory would help alleviate the amount of backlash they’ll receive if they eventually cave to the Indian government’s demands.
Where this reasoning isn’t as sound is when the definition of national security expands to include protection of the ruling power from uprisings. The protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are proving that social networks and all their entry-ways (smartphones included) have an unrestrainable ability to facilitate, coordinate and publicize social unrest. In times of political turmoil, activists, bloggers and casual observers value their privacy even more. It isn’t simply ironic that some of the same methods used to coordinate the Mumbai attacks were also employed in the successful Egyptian revolution. Rather, it is one of the defining characteristics of network dynamics in which network phenomena can take the form of uprisings or terrorist attacks and still be viewed as signs of a functioning network.
In order for Research In Motion, Nokia, and other mobile device manufacturers to not find themselves complicit in regional acts of oppression against their customers, they must weigh both these issues (protection from terrorism and freedom to organize against oppression) against each other and see how much of one can be given up in favor of the other. The future of democracy is at stake.
