How is technology used for political repression?

I’m sharing this writing as a first step towards what I hope will become a collectivised grassroots-led research project on the use of digital technologies for political repression. My focus up until now has been on online communications platforms and social media, but my aim is that this project can also encompass research into mass surveillance and targeted police surveillance against activists in so-called Australia and abroad.

Many organisers I know are continuously having inconclusive discussions about surveillance threats and how to manage them. The research project will ideally be evidence-based and fully cited, will have an outcome in the production of accessible and shareable practical publications for grassroots activists, as well as including proposals for further research and development to address these issues.

I'm not an academic in this space, just a technologist with an interest in software development and some experience in grassroots activism. I would invite the participation of experts and anyone who can contribute to coordinating or otherwise supporting the project. If you're interested please contact me at radicaldirectory@protonmail.com

Four major strategies for political repression

These are what I consider the primary risks that need to be considered in the choice of communication and media technologies. These encompass risks both to individuals as well as to movements more generally.

Surveillance

For individuals, authoritarian regimes use surveillance to build profiles of key activists who they can then target with criminalisation when further repression is called for

For movements, surveillance is a source of intelligence that informs repressive strategy, operations and tactics

Censorship

Because communications and media are such effective tools in mobilising resistance against authoritarianism, censorship aims to directly limit its reach

Disinformation/propaganda

As censorship is hard and costly, disinformation & propaganda serve to confuse the interpretation of information that has already been disseminated and limit its impact

At a large scale, propaganda reproduces ideology, which conditions people to ignore or dismiss information that challenges authoritarian narratives

Distraction

Finally, authoritarian regimes benefit from the constant occupation of our attention with (ideally, ideologically-laden) media. These exhaust our mental capacity to receive competing information, let alone participate in organising

These strategies are put into practice by governments as well as corporations all around the world. They may be covert particularly in the Global North, but they always come into overt force during crisis moments.

As 'state of emergency' and 'anti-terrorism' discourses become increasingly pervasive, as Giorgio Agamben argues, whatever liberal protections offered by the so-called rule of law are progressively dismantled in favour of a permanent 'state of exception' wherein these tactics can become even more normal.

Some tactics for surveillance and control

This section briefly overviews some of the technical tactics that are used to enact the repressive strategies outlined above in the context of online communications technologies.

web scraping

This is the use of automated tools to access online content and extract data. This was notably used by Clearview AI which scraped Facebook profile pictures to create facial recognition services which were used by law enforcement teams.

cookies & trackers

Many websites use 'third-party cookies', enabling external companies to track user actions on those websites. These are used to build profiles of users’ interests, behaviours and habits which can be offered to paying advertisers

content recommendation tools

Social media and new media platforms use data profiles of their users to recommend content, which often opaquely determines what occupies the attention of users

content moderation tools

On social media and new media platforms, content is automatically screened and flagged as potentially risky, problematic or harmful - to the profits of the platform owners. This can often be politicised content

social graphs & network effects

The map or ‘graph’ of social relationships is very valuable and revealing data that is extracted by social platform owners for profit. Network effects deter platform emigration by monopolising this relationship data and allowing only partial access to it to the users from whom it was extracted

mobile app stores (censorship, closed platforms)

Google Play Store and particular Apple App Store use strict policies to enact censorship and otherwise control what apps are allowed or at least easy to install on users’ devices

API restrictions (rate-limiting, etc)

APIs are the infrastructural ‘interfaces’ which among other things, enable our phones and laptops request and send data to and from private corporate servers. Most online services prevent unofficial ‘client’ apps from giving users more control over how they access the service. They use rate limits, complex authentication schemes, user agent detection, and just opaque API designs and private documentation

client-server architecture

From around the turn of the century, ‘web 2.0’ is the paradigm that allowed companies offering web services to rise and dominate. The monetisation strategy depends on the core architectural premise which is a centralised ‘server’ from which access to data and computation can be meted out to users (clients) in a controlled or transactional way

While this list loosely focuses on software and networking technologies, there are equally pressing political issues to be considered in the realms of hardware, embedded devices, ‘predictive policing’ and police surveillance, military and intelligence technologies, fintech, healthtech and numerous other technological subfields. My focus here is particularly on how technologies come to mediate social interactions and how that impacts grassroots political organising.

As I said above this is really just the first step in a bigger project and I would love support and contributions. I’m wanting to integrate this into the ‘Radical Directory’ umbrella and the series of ‘hacklab’ events I began organising a few months ago. If you’re interested please contact me at radicaldirectory@protonmail.com