From TheGuardian.com

Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

John Naughton, The Observer - 28 July 2013

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted

While the press concentrates on the furore surrounding Edward Snowden's search for political asylum, it has forgotten the importance of his revelations. Photograph: Tatyana Lokshina/AP

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be - finally - a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap - speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door - it doesn't matter - any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

+++++++

From Rabble.ca

Digital revolution: 'Digital Disconnect' analyzes corporate control of our digital communications future

Why a broad, progressive movement is needed to reform our Internet

BY GREG MACDOUGALL | AUGUST 1, 2013

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

by Robert W. McChesney (The New Press, 2013; $27.95)

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracydiscusses how politics and the "capitalist*" economic system of the United States has very much warped the initial vision and potential of a non-commercial democratic Internet. In it noted scholar and activist Robert W. McChesney does a good job of illustrating the "banana republic" -- that is the corporately-controlled -- status of the U.S. state.

Beyond just communication media, McChesney describes how for the overall society, "what is emerging veers toward a classic definition of fascism: the state and large corporations working hand in hand to promote corporate interests, and a state preoccupied with militarism, secrecy, propaganda and surveillance." And this understanding of U.S. society is very important in understanding the business of the Internet.

McChesney cites a scene from The Godfather II where the gangsters meet to divide up their control of Cuba and then show their appreciation for how nice it is to be working in a country "with a friendly government that knows how to work with 'private enterprise'" -- this, McChesney says, is an apt analogy showing the true nature of who controls the Internet and the trend of continuing (and increased) consolidation of this control.

Digital Disconnect aims to bring a political economy analysis to our digital media communication future. Specifically, McChesney describes and applies a "political economy of communication" (PEC) that "evaluates media and communication systems by determining how they affect political and social power in society and whether they are, on balance, forces for or against democracy and successful self-government."

And he notes that how a society chooses to structure its media system is "of paramount importance."

Personally, I've always liked a quote of McChesney's: "regardless of what a progressive group's first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media is in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board."

This quote frames the importance of Digital Disconnect; it provides a deep analysis of the contributing factors and potential ways forward in relation to what has become such a vital element in shaping our societies and the way the future will develop.

McChesney starts off by describing and examining the different sets of views -- from the "celebrants" and the "skeptics" -- about the Internet's potential and impact upon society. McChesney then adds that a critical omission was that most of these people did not have a sufficient analysis of the impact of "capitalism*" and the effect it has had on the development of the Internet.

And then McChesney gets to the (*) on "capitalism."

The fact that theoretical capitalism, or capitalism by standard definition or catechism, does not equal the same thing as what we actually have -- or as he puts it, "really existing capitalism."

The second chapter explores this "really existing" capitalist economic system that exists in the U.S. and elsewhere, with specific aim of how it is relevant to the communications analysis that is the rest of the book.

McChesney has developed his thinking through a lengthy career of academic research, writing 12 other authored or co-authored books and involvement in media reform advising and advocacy, including being a co-founder and past president of the Free Press organization.

In Digital Disconnect, he states that now, "We are in a position, in some respects for the first time, to make sense of the Internet experience and highlight the cutting-edge issues it poses for society." And thus, he attempts to address some of the "big questions" out there, the main one being exactly that: to make sense of what is happening with the Internet and society.

One major fact to help make sense of things is that "in short, the Internet monopolists sit at the commanding heights of U.S. and world capitalism." This is backed up by the fact that in 2012, 13 of the 30 largest U.S. corporations were Internet or computer companies.

McChesney illustrates the way that these major corporations have worked and lobbied with governments to set policy in their own favour, as well as illuminating how Internet factors work to create monopoly-inducing conditions.

One statistic he cites is from Wired magazine: in 2001 the top ten websites accounted for 31 per cent of all page views, 40 per cent in 2006 and about 75 per cent in 2010.

He also breaks down the near-monopolies in different areas: Google controls nearly 70 per cent of the search-engine market and 97 per cent of mobile searching; Microsoft Windows accounts for 90 per cent of computer operating systems; Apple's iTunes has 87 per cent market share of digital music downloads and 70 per cent of media-player downloads; and Amazon sells between 70 and 80 per cent of all books and e-books online.

He also writes about what "may be the great Achilles' heel of the Internet under capitalism: the money comes from surreptitiously violating any known understanding of privacy."

This is not only true when it comes to surveillance operations by the government -- which he analyzes in terms of the nature of the relationship between the government and the major Internet corporations -- but more broadly as influenced by "targeted-advertising" approaches that reward sites for collecting as much information on their visitors as possible.

He notes the change from 2003, when digital publishers received almost all the advertising money spent on their sites, to 2010, where nearly 80 per cent of the advertising money went instead to the ad networks and data collectors and managers. Google and Facebook are the two most noted data gathering companies.

In terms of journalism, he gives a list of the fundamental characteristics of the type of journalism required for a healthy democratic society and then describes the deepening crisis in journalism -- basically a reduction in original news gathering and no real difference between almost all mainstream journalistic thinking and establishment political thinking.

McChesney argues this crisis is not caused by digital communications, but simply quickened by it. Further analysis leads him to the argument that there is no for-profit business model that works for the type of journalism that we need for the public good; instead it must be publicly supported and invested in.

Overall, McChesney's conclusion to the digital problems laid out in Digital Disconnect is that a large, broad progressive movement is needed, not one solely devoted to the Internet or media, but one that does necessarily challenge the "really existing capitalism" that has so much negative influence on society's overall functioning and on people's individual lives.

McChesney calls on people concerned with the media to broaden their focus and make joint cause with others working towards social justice, and he sees this current time as a critical juncture where real substantive changes are possible.

However, McChesney argues that this broad movement must have Internet and media issues at its centre: "efforts to reform or replace capitalism but leave the Internet giants riding high will not reform or replace really existing capitalism."

Digital Disconnect shows how and why this broad movement is important, and helps make sense of how we could get this reform to work.

Greg Macdougall does community organizing, education and media-making based in Ottawa, unceded Native territory. More of his work on media can be found at his site EquitableEducation.ca