We hear a great deal of debate here in the United States on the issue of online privacy. There are persuasive arguments from both sides on this issue, but the most interesting comments I hear on this topic are often from my students at Rice University. Even during the peak of the warrantless wiretapping controversy, my students generally made the argument, “I don’t do anything wrong on the Web, so I have nothing to fear from monitoring and surveillance.”
Elsewhere, this is definitely not the case. The latest attacks against Internet-enabled speech in Mexico are chilling. In a recent Houston Chronicle op-ed, co-author Dan Wallach and I wrote about violent retaliation by Mexican drug cartels against narco-bloggers and social media “snitches” who were operating under supposed anonymity.
- Read the Sept. 30, 2011, Houston Chronicle op-ed “Mexico cartels lash out against ‘Internet snitches,’” co-authored by Christopher Bronk and Rice associate professor of computer science Dan Wallach.
- See Eval Galperin’s blog at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for another take.
Online privacy in the protection of political speech is a vital right. Just as we should vote anonymously, often advocates for change must share their ideas under protection of pseudonym. Years ago, during my orientation to the Foreign Service, I had the opportunity to meet Phil Zimmerman, the designer of the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption program. I asked him why he made PGP, and why on earth he was at the State Department. His answer surprised me — in a good way. He created PGP during the bad old days of the Cold War to protect dissidents, so that they could communicate and organize without fear of compromise by secret police organizations. Use of PGP or other encrypted mail is just as necessary today for those whose messages will provoke violent response.
Allow me to encourage you to learn a bit more about one of the most important tools in the online privacy arsenal: Tor. Funded in part by the U.S. Navy and the State Department, Tor makes it difficult to track back user identity information (an Internet protocol address for instance). It protects anonymous browsing, allowing users to know read what they want without another party knowing what they’re reading. As my co-author for the op-ed opined, we should be able to live in a society where nobody tells us what we can think. Tor helps protect that freedom.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.