The Web Data War Is On

Apple, the world’s largest company by market capitalization and a pioneer of cutting-edge technology that we use every day, is in one corner. The United States, the world’s most powerful nation and the birthplace of the information society, which is also a society of total surveillance than envelops us all, is in the other. They have locked horns in a conflict that is set to have both global and local implications.

Apple, the world’s largest company by market capitalization and a pioneer of cutting-edge technology that we use every day, is in one corner. The United States, the world’s most powerful nation and the birthplace of the information society, which is also a society of total surveillance than envelops us all, is in the other. They have locked horns in a conflict that is set to have both global and local implications.

The tug-of-war between Apple and the US government (personified by the FBI) has been dragging on for several weeks now. It has become a symbol of political struggles in many countries between governments that are fighting for access to certain data they need to track down terrorist activity and major tech companies that had started implementing data encryption technology after the shock caused by Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of massive NSA spying. What conclusions about who influences what on the Internet can be drawn from this standoff?

First of all, the conflict between Apple and the US government has highlighted the power and clout wielded by major IT companies. The pressure put by the US government on Apple, the arrest of a Facebook employee in Brazil, a legislative amendment proposed by a French MP seeking to ban the sales of iPhones in France, as well as the controversy over the “bulletproof security” of the Telegram messenger – all of this looks more like pointless fanning of the conflict than searching for a viable solution to this problem. Obviously Apple is not going to ditch data encryption on its smartphones, nor will WhatsApp change its underlying structure. No government has succeeded in finding a goldilocks middle ground so far. That’s why all future American digital data legislation will become a yardstick not only for European countries but also for China, which has been keenly following the developments in American law in this field for many years.

REUTERS/Morris Mac Matzen
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Secondly, the conflict has confirmed that data encryption has a prominent place among the key problems of the modern world. It is in this conflict that the tension between the supreme interests of the state and the popular demand for privacy has come to a head. That such a social conflict necessarily helps make a distinction between a democratic and an authoritarian state seems increasingly moot. It’s easy to criticize other countries for engaging in mass surveillance. The problem is that the critics are taking exactly the same steps at home. Western countries have been passing laws that increasingly threaten web data privacy. In the UK, data encryption is central to a provision of an extremely controversial intelligence reform bill. In 2015 the French government supported the introduction of a web traffic tracking system. Similar debates are taking place in Germany.

Thirdly, the issue of web data and of their transmission, storage and processing – both by private companies and by governments – has acquired fundamental importance for the global governance of the Internet. All too often the vision of the key objectives of this governance has been limited to the matter of control over the “epicenter” of the Internet – the root DNS servers and domain names. It’s no coincidence that in the US diplomatic doctrine, the term “free transmission of data” has stealthily superseded the term “free transmission of information”, which had been one of its key components in the area of digital technology.

AP Photo/Wong Maye-E
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The world of digital technology of which we are all part today is only moving forward. The amount of electronic data is rising, their sources are becoming increasingly varied and their processing is increasingly faster thanks to increasingly more efficient algorithms. The NSA and its allies rather than Edward Snowden should be blamed for stirring up this “web data war”. A fragile balance between powerful multinational corporations and governments, which had been maintained more or less successfully despite certain challenges, has been upset by secret mass spying programs. Joint efforts needed for tackling this worldwide conflict must be as strong as its implications are tremendous.