CENSORSHIP

JULIAN: Jake, can you speak a little bit about the detainment that you’ve had at US airports, and why that has occurred?

JACOB: They’ve asserted that it occurs because “I know why.”

JULIAN: But they don’t say?

ANDY: Can I try to summarize it, because technical security and the security of governmental affairs are two things that are totally detached. You can have a totally secure technical system and the government will think it’s no good, because they think security is when they can look into it, when they can control it, when they can breach the technical security. This was not about Jake trying to approach planes, to kill anybody, to hijack the plane or whatever. This was about his ability to affect governmental affairs by travelling to other countries, speaking to people, and spreading ideas. That is the most dangerous thing that happens to governments these days—when people have better ideas than what their policy is.

JACOB: I totally appreciate you complimenting me there in that statement, but I would just like to point out that this is way worse than that, because this is the data they collect on everyone. This was before I did anything interesting at all; it was merely the fact that I was travelling and the systems themselves, the architecture, promoted this information collection. This is before I was ever stopped for anything, it was before I was deported from Lebanon, it was before the US government took a special interest in me.

ANDY: Maybe they forecast it, maybe they saw it earlier than you did.

JACOB: Of course they did, partially because of collecting this data. But they always give me different answers. Usually they say one response, which is, uniformly across the board, “Because we can.” And I say, “Ok, I do not dispute your authority—well, I do dispute your authority, I do not dispute it now—I merely wish to know why this is happening to me.” Now people tell me all the time, “Well, isn’t it obvious? You work on Tor,” or, “You’re sitting next to Julian, what did you expect?” It’s fascinating to me because each of the different people that are holding me—usually from the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States—will tell me it is because they have the authority to do so more than anything else. I’ve also had them tell me bullshit like, “Oh, remember 9/11? That’s why,” or, “Because we want you to answer some questions and this is the place you have the least amount of rights, or so we assert.”

And in this situation they’ll deny access to a lawyer, they’ll deny access to a bathroom but they’ll give you water, they will give you something to drink, like a diuretic, in order to convince you that you really want to co-operate in some way. They did this to pressure, for political reasons. They asked me questions about how I feel about the Iraq War, how I feel about the Afghan War. Basically, every step of the way they repeated the tactics of the FBI during COINTELPRO (the massive domestic covert operations program that ran between 1956 and 1971). For example, they specifically tried to assert their authority to change political realities in my own life, and to try to pressure me not only to change them, but to give them some special access to what’s going on in my head. And they’ve seized my property. I’m not really at liberty to discuss all of the things that have occurred to me because it’s a very murky grey area where I don’t really know whether or not I’m even allowed to talk about them. I’m sure this happened to other people but I’ve never heard of it happening to them.

I was in the Toronto Pearson airport once while travelling home from an event where I was visiting my family. I was travelling back to Seattle, where I was living at the time, and they detained me, they put me in the secondary screening, and then the tertiary screening, and then finally into a holding cell. And they held me for so long that when I was finally released I missed my flight. But there’s a curious thing, which is that these pre-detention areas are actually technically US soil on Canadian soil, and so they have a rule that says that if you miss your flight or it’s so long before the next flight, you have to leave. So I technically got kicked out of America by being detained so long and I had to enter Canada, fly across the country, rent a car, and then drive across the border. And when I got to the border they said, “How long have you been in Canada?” and I said, “Well, five hours plus the detainment that happened in Toronto,” so I had been in Canada about eight hours, and they said, “Well, come on in, we’re going to detain you again.” And then they ripped my car apart and they took my computer apart and they looked through all this stuff, and then they held me. They gave me access to a bathroom within half an hour, they were very merciful you could say. And this is what they call the border search exception—this kind of behavior is because they have the ability, they assert, to do this, and no one challenges them about it.¹⁰⁰

JULIAN: So, this has happened to you, but Chinese people I speak to, when they speak about the great firewall of China—in the West we talk about this in terms of censorship, that it’s blocking Chinese citizens from coming out and reading what is said about the Chinese government in the West and by Chinese dissidents and by the Falun Gong and by the BBC and, to be fair, in actual propaganda about China—but their concern is actually not about censorship. Their concern is that in order to have internet censorship there must also be internet surveillance. In order to check what someone is looking at, to see whether it is permitted or denied, you must be seeing it, and therefore if you are seeing it you can record it all. And this has had a tremendous chilling effect on the Chinese—not that they’re being censored but that everything that they read is being spied upon and recorded. In fact, that’s true for all us. This is something that modifies people, when they are aware of it. It modifies their behavior and they become less resolute in complaining about various kinds of authorities.

JACOB: That’s the wrong answer to that type of influence, though. Their harassment of me at borders, for example, is not unique, in that every Arab-American, since September 11th and before, has had to deal with this. It’s just that I refuse to let the privilege of having white skin and a US passport go to waste in this, and I refuse to be silent about it because the things that they are doing are wrong, and the power that they are using, they are abusing. And we must stand up to those things, just in the same way that there are brave people in China that stand up to this, like Isaac Mao for example.¹⁰¹ He has been working very strongly against this type of censorship effectively, because the right answer is not to just give in to this type of pressure merely because the government asserts that it has the ability to do this.

JÉRÉMIE: But once again we’re talking politics because what you say is, basically, that people should stand up for their rights—but people should understand why to do so, and then have the ability to communicate between each other to do so. I had the occasion to talk with some people from China—and I don’t know if they were in some position in the state, or if they were selected in order to be able to go outside to talk to me—but when talking to them about internet censorship I very often had this answer: “Well, it’s for the good of the People. There is censorship, yes, because if there wasn’t censorship then there would be extremist behavior, there would be things that we would all dislike, and so the government is taking those measures in order to make sure that everything goes well.”

JACOB: That’s the same argument for organ harvesting. Don’t let those organs go to waste!

JÉRÉMIE: If you look at the way Chinese censorship is being done, you see from the technical perspective that it’s one of the most advanced systems that exists in the world.

JACOB: Absolutely.

JÉRÉMIE: And I’ve heard that on Weibo—that is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter—the government has the ability to filter some hashtags to make sure they don’t leave a selected province.

JACOB: It’s crucial to remember that when people talk about censorship in Asia they like to talk about it in terms of the “the other”—as if it only affects the people in “OverThereIstan.” It’s very important to know that when you search on Google in the United States, they say that they have omitted search results because of legal requirements. There is a difference between the two—both in how they are implemented and, of course, in the social reality of the how, the why, and the where even—but a big part of that actually is the architecture. For example, over the American internet, it’s very decentralized—it’s very hard to do the Chinese-style censorship in the same respect.

JULIAN: Well, a big chunk of it is Google and you can censor Google. There are a load of pages that reference WikiLeaks that are censored by Google.

JACOB: Yes, no doubt. And actually since the index itself is free, it’s possible to do a differential analysis.

JULIAN: Yes, in theory.

JACOB: In theory. And in practice there are some people that are working on that type of censorship detection by looking at the differences from different perspectives in the world. I think that it is important to remember that censorship and surveillance are not issues of “other places”—people in the West love to talk about how “Iranians and the Chinese and North Koreans need anonymity and freedom, but we don’t need it here.” And by “here,” they usually mean “in the United States.” But actually it is not just oppressive regimes, because if you happen to be in the top echelon of any regime it’s not oppressive to you. But we consider the UK to be a wonderful place; generally people think Sweden is a pretty great place, and yet you can see that when you fall out of favor with the people in power you don’t end up in a favorable position. But Julian’s still alive, right? So clearly that’s a symbol that it’s a free country—is that right?

JULIAN: I worked hard to maintain my current position. But maybe we should speak about internet censorship in the West. This is very interesting. If we go back to 1953 and we look at the great Soviet encyclopedia, which was distributed everywhere, that encyclopedia sometimes had amendments as politics changed in the Soviet Union. In 1953 Beria, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, died and fell out of political favor and so his section, which described him in glowing terms, was removed by the encyclopedia authority which posted out an amendment that was to be pasted into all of those encyclopedias. It was extremely obvious. I’m mentioning this example because it was so obvious and so detectable that the attempt became part of history. Whereas in the UK we have the Guardian and the other major newspapers ripping out stories from their internet archives in secret without any description. You go to those pages now and you try to find them, for example stories on the fraud case of the billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, and you see, “Page not found,” and they have also been removed from the indexes.

Let me tell you my involvement with the Nadhmi Auchi story. In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that led to the first Gulf War. The Kuwaiti government in exile, and also during its return, needed cash, so it started to sell off various assets including several oil refineries outside Kuwait. A UK businessman, Nadhmi Auchi, who had immigrated to the UK in the early 1980s from Iraq, where he used to be a figure in Saddam Hussein’s regime, was a broker in that deal and was subsequently accused of being involved in channeling $118 million of illegal commissions. That investigation was the largest corruption investigation in European postwar history. In 2003 Auchi was convicted of fraud in what was to become known as the Elf Aquitaine scandal. Nevertheless, nowadays he has over 200 companies registered through his Luxembourg holding outfit, and others through Panama. He is involved in post-war Iraqi cellular contracts and many other businesses around the world.¹⁰²

In the United States Tony Rezko, a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, was a long term pal of Auchi’s, who had been his financier. Similarly Auchi and Rezko became involved with the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. Both Rezko and Blagojevich were convicted of corruption, Rezko in 2008 and Blagojevich in 2010/11 (after the FBI recorded him in telephone intercept trying to sell Obama’s former Senate seat). In 2007/8, when Obama was running to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the US press started to investigate Obama’s connections. They investigated Rezko and reported some links in relation to the purchase of Barack Obama’s house. In 2008, shortly before his trial, Rezko received a $3.5 million transfer from Auchi which he didn’t report to the court, despite being required to—for which he was jailed. So US press scrutiny turned to Auchi, and at that moment he instructed UK lawyers Carter-Ruck to wage an aggressive campaign on much of the 2003 reportage about the Elf Aquitaine scandal and his conviction in France. This was very successful. He targeted the UK press, and even US blogs, and had nearly a dozen articles removed that we know about. Most of those articles, including in UK newspaper archives, simply disappeared. It was as if they had never even existed. There was no, “We have received a legal complaint and decided to remove the story.” They also disappeared from the indexes. WikiLeaks dug these out and republished them.¹⁰³

JACOB: They erase history.

JULIAN: History is not only modified, it has ceased to have ever existed. It is Orwell’s dictum, “He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.” It is the undetectable erasure of history in the West, and that’s just post-publication censorship. Pre-publication self-censorship is much more extreme but often hard to detect. We’ve seen that with Cablegate as WikiLeaks works with different media partners all over the world, so we can see which ones censor our material.¹⁰⁴

For example the New York Times redacted a cable that said that millions of dollars were distributed to covertly influence politically connected Libyans via oil companies operating in Libya. The cable didn’t even name a specific oil company—the New York Times simply redacted the phrase “oil services companies.”¹⁰⁵ Probably the most flagrant was the New York Times’ use of a sixty-two-page cable about North Korea’s missile program, and whether they had sold missiles to the Iranians, from which the New York Times used two paragraphs in order to argue, in a story, that Iran had missiles that could strike Europe, whereas elsewhere in the cable just the opposite was argued. ¹⁰⁶

The Guardian redacted a cable about Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine, which said that she might be hiding her wealth in London.¹⁰⁷ It censored out allegations that the Kazakhstani elite in general was corrupt—not even a named person—and an allegation that both ENI, the Italian energy company operating in Kazakhstan, and British Gas were corrupt.¹⁰⁸ Essentially the Guardian censored instances where a rich person was accused of something in a cable, unless the Guardian had an institutional agenda against that rich person.¹⁰⁹ So, for example, in a cable about Bulgarian organized crime there was one Russian, and the Guardian it made it look like the whole thing was about him, but he was just one person on a long list of organizations and individuals associated with Bulgarian organized crime.¹¹⁰ Der Spiegel censored out a paragraph about what Merkel was doing—no human rights concern whatsoever, purely political concerns about Merkel.¹¹¹ There are lots of examples.¹¹²

ANDY: Our understanding of freedom of information and the free flow of information is in some way a very radical new concept if you look at planet Earth. I would say it’s not much different between Europe and other countries. Well, there are countries that have a democratic framework, which means you can read and understand and maybe even legally fight the censorship infrastructure, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there, while you will have a hard time trying in Saudi Arabia or China.

JULIAN: My experience in the West is that it is just so much more sophisticated in the number of layers of indirection and obfuscation about what is actually happening. These layers are there to give deniability to the censorship that is occurring. You can think about censorship as a pyramid. This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand, and that is by intention. The tip is public—libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched by the military, and so on—publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component. Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don’t want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship to not end up there. Then the next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy—what it is economic to write about, even if you don’t include the economic factors from higher up the pyramid. Then the next layer is the prejudice of readers who only have a certain level of education, so therefore on one hand they are easy to manipulate with false information, and on the other hand you can’t even tell them something sophisticated that is true. The last layer is distribution—for example, some people just don’t have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid. What the Guardian is doing with its Cablegate redactions is in the second layer.

Now, such censorship is deniable because it either it takes place out of the light, or because there is no instruction to censor a particular claim. Journalists are rarely instructed, “Don’t print anything about that,” or, “Don’t print that fact.” Rather they understand that they are expected to because they understand the interests of those they wish to placate or grow close to. If you behave you’ll be patted on the head and rewarded, and if you don’t behave then you won’t. It’s that simple. I’m often fond of making this example: the obvious censorship that occurred in the Soviet Union, the censorship that was propagandized about so much in the West—jackboots coming for journalists in the middle of the night to take them from their homes—has just been shifted by twelve hours. Now we wait for the day and take homes from journalists, as they fall out of patronage and are unable to service their debts. Journalists are taken from their homes by taking homes from the journalists. Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society, because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy.

ANDY: Jérémie mentioned the pedo-Nazis.

JACOB: We’re back to the pedo-Nazis again.

JÉRÉMIE: Two Horsemen in one.

ANDY: The pedo-Nazis pretty well summarized the German, or maybe part of the European censoring arguments. Germany didn’t want any hate speech-like content on the internet due to its history and, of course, if you tell people you need to restrict the internet because of pedophiles then you will be able to do anything. Also, there was an internal working paper of the European Commission about data retention that argued, “We should talk more about child pornography and then people will be in favor.”¹¹³

JULIAN: Can you speak to this a little bit? That if we are to censor just one thing, say just child pornography, then in order to censor child pornography from people seeing it we need to surveil everything that everyone is doing. We need to build that infrastructure. We need to build a bulk spying and censorship system to censor just one thing.

ANDY: It’s in the detail of the mechanics—the so-called pre-censorship system in Germany obliges you to name the legally responsible person for whatever you publish. So, roughly, if you publish something, be it on a piece of paper or on the internet, without saying who is legally responsible for the content, you already violate the law. This means that you allocate the responsibility and if someone violates the law by distributing, let’s say child porn or hate speech, you could just say, “Ok, we look at where that guy is located and we catch him and we get the stuff off of the net.”

JULIAN: That is we censor the publisher instead of censoring the reader.

ANDY: Yes. And this is watching specific things. I could agree that not everything needs to be available at all times because if I look at hate speech issues there are sometimes things with private addresses of people and so on that might lead to situations I’m not in favor of.

JULIAN: But Andy, this is such a German thing. In order to do that, in order to determine what’s going to be acceptable and what’s not you have to have a committee, you have to have appointments to that committee, you have to have a process of appointments to that committee…

ANDY: Yes, we have all that bullshit. The German killings in the Second World War—everything the Nazis did, every property they seized, they gave a receipt, they made a list. It was all bureaucratic acts. You can say that Germans unjustifiably killed a lot of people—that’s true—but they did it in a bureaucratic manner. That’s Germany.

JULIAN: If you have someone deciding what should be censored and what should not then you have to have two things. First of all, you have to build a technical architecture to do the censorship. You have to build a nationwide censorship machine to do it effectively. And then secondly, you have to have a committee and a bureaucracy to censor. And that committee inherently has to be secret because it’s completely useless unless it is secret and therefore you have secret justice.

ANDY: You know what? We have one good principle in Germany.

JACOB: Just the one?

ANDY: The principle is that if it is unrealistic for a law to be applied, then it shouldn’t be there. If a law doesn’t make sense, like if you forbid windmills or whatever, then we say, “Hey, come on, forget it.” We here are inspired by the internet as we knew it when it was growing up, by the free flow of information, in the sense of free as in unlimited, as in not blocked, not censored, not filtered. So if we apply our understanding of the free flow of information to planet Earth—and it has been roughly applied to planet Earth—we see, of course, the governments being affected by it and the way power has been applied and the way censorship has been run, be it pre-censorship, post-censorship or whatever censorship. We have all learned about these complicated conflicts that arise. The question is what is our concept of government or the future of a Post-Governmental Organization—maybe WikiLeaks is the first or one of the first PGOs—because I’m not sure governments are the right answer to all the problems on this planet, like environmental issues.

JULIAN: The governments are not sure either, of the barrier between what is government or not. It’s fuzzed out now. Governments occupy space, but WikiLeaks occupies part of the space of the internet. Internet space is embedded in real space, but the degree of complexity between the embedded object and the embedding means that it’s not easy for the embedding to tell that the embedded object is even part of it. So that’s why we have this sense of a cyberspace—that it is actually some other realm that exists somewhere—it’s because of the degree of its indirection, complexity and universality. When you read some file on the internet in one location it’s the same as reading it in another location or in the future—that’s its universality. So to that degree, as an organization that occupies cyberspace and is adept at moving its information around the underlying embeddings, maybe we are a post-state organization because of the lack of geographic control.

I don’t want to take this analogy too far, because I am under house arrest. The coercive force of states obviously applies to all our people, wherever they are known. But the rest of the press likes to say we’re a stateless media organization and they are quite right about the importance of statelessness. I always used to say, “Well what do you think Newscorp is? It’s a big multinational.” But nonetheless, Newscorp is structured in such a way that you can get at its key components, and that’s why it has had so much trouble here in the UK with the phone-hacking scandal, and why it is trying so hard to suck up to the US establishment. But if an organization’s assets are primarily its information, then it can be transnational in a way that is quite hard to stop as a result of cryptography. There is a reason a financial blockade was erected against us—our other organizational facets are harder to suppress.¹¹⁴

JACOB: If we’re talking about it in Utopian terms, we have to actually go back a little bit further. So, you asked me about the harassment I received, you asked about censorship in the West and I talked earlier about Obama’s targeted killing program, which they say is lawful because there is a process, therefore it counts as due process.

JULIAN: Well, a secret process.

JACOB: We can also tie this back to John Gilmore. One of John Gilmore’s lawsuits about his ability to travel anonymously in the United States resulted in the court literally saying, “Look, we’re going to consult with the law, which is secret. We will read it and we will find out when we read this secret law whether or not you are allowed to do the thing that you are allowed to do.” And they found when they read the secret law that, in fact, he was allowed to do it, because what the secret law said did not restrict him. He never learned what the secret law was at all and later they changed the US Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security policies in response to him winning his lawsuit, because it turns out the secret law was not restrictive enough in this way.¹¹⁵

JULIAN: So they made it more restrictive?

JACOB: Effectively, through enabling legislation of the bureaucracy. But it’s important to note that the targeted assassination program, the harassment that people face at borders, the censorship that we find online, the censorship that corporations perform at the behest of a government or at the behest of a corporation, these things all tie back together. And what it really comes down to is that the state has too much power at each of the places that we see these things come out. This is because the power has concentrated in these areas and it has attracted people that abuse it, or that push for its use. And even if there are sometimes legitimate cases, what we see is that the world would be better off if there was not that centralization, if there was not the tendency towards authoritarianism.

The West is not in any way special with regard to this, because it turns out that if you have a czar of cyber-security, well, that’s not so different from a tsar that was in the internal security forces of another nation fifty years ago. We’re building the same kind of authoritarian control structures, which will attract people to abuse them, and that’s something that we try to pretend is different in the West. It’s not different in the West because there’s a continuum of governance, which is authoritarianism to libertarianism. I don’t mean it in the American political party sense, but in this sense: on that continuum, the United States is very far from the USSR in many, many ways but it’s a lot closer to the USSR than Christiania is, the autonomous neighborhood in the heart of Copenhagen, in Denmark.¹¹⁶ And it is even further, I think, from a potential Utopian world if we went and created a brand new colony on Mars. We would want to move what we might build on Mars as far away from totalitarianism and authoritarianism as we could. These are failings when we don’t have that.

JÉRÉMIE: Once again, all those topics are bound together. When we talk about concentrating power we once again talk about architecture. And when we talk about internet censorship, it is about centralizing the power to determine what people may be able to access or not, and whether government censorship or also private-owned censorship is undue power. We have this example: our website laquadrature.net got censored in the UK by Orange UK for several weeks. It was among a list of websites that Orange was denying to those less than eighteen years old. Maybe we mentioned the term child pornography while we were opposing that type of legislation, or maybe they just disliked us because we oppose their policy against net neutrality, as we advocate for a law to ban them from discriminating their users’ communications.¹¹⁷ We will never know. But we have a private actor here that, as a service, was offering to remove from people the ability to access information on the internet. I see a major risk here beyond the power we give to either Orange or the Government of China or whoever.

JACOB: Clarification—when you say private in the UK, do you mean that they actually own every line, every fiber connection and everything, or do they use some of the state’s resources? How were the airwaves licensed? There’s no state involvement at all? They have no duty of care?

JÉRÉMIE: There is licensing. Whether it’s government or company, they are changing the architecture of the internet from one universal network to a Balkanization of small sub-networks. But what we are discussing since the beginning are all global issues, whether we’re talking of the financial system going awry, whether we’re talking of corruption, whether we’re talking about geopolitics or energy or the environment. All of these are global problems that mankind is facing today and we still have one global tool between our hands that enables better communication, better sharing of knowledge, better participation in political and democratic processes. What I suspect is that a global universal internet is the only tool we have to address those global issues and that is why this fight for a free internet is the central fight that we all here have a responsibility to fight.

ANDY: I totally agree that we need to ensure that the internet is understood as a universal network with free flow of information; that we need to not only define that very well, but also to name those companies and those service providers who provide something they call internet which is actually something totally different. But I think we have not answered the key question beyond this filtering thing. I want to give you an example of what I think we need to answer. Some years ago, about ten years ago, we protested against Siemens providing so-called smart filter software. Siemens is one of the biggest telcos in Germany and a provider of intelligence software. And they actually sold this filtering system to companies so that, for example, employees couldn’t look at the site of the trade unions to inform themselves of their labor rights and so on. But they also blocked the Chaos Computer Club site which made us upset. They designated it as “criminal content” or something, for which we brought legal action. But at an exhibition we decided to have a huge protest meeting and to surround Siemens’ booths and filter the people coming in and out. The funny thing was that we announced it on our site to attract as many people as possible through the internet, and the people in the Siemens booth had no fucking clue because they also used the filter software so they couldn’t read the warning that was obviously out there.

JULIAN: The Pentagon set up a filtering system so that any email sent to the Pentagon with the word WikiLeaks in it would be filtered. And so in the case of Bradley Manning, the prosecution, in attempting to prosecute the case, of course, was mailing people outside the military about “WikiLeaks,” but they never saw the replies because they had the word “WikiLeaks” in them.¹¹⁸ The national security state may eat itself yet.

ANDY: Which brings us back to the really basic question: is there something such as negative-effecting information? So, from a society point of view, do we want a censored internet because it’s better for society or not? And even if we talk about child pornography you could argue, “Wait a moment, this child pornography highlights a problem, that is the abuse of children, and in order to solve the problem we need to know the problem.”

JACOB: So it provides evidence for the crime.

JULIAN: Well, no it provides a lobby.

ANDY: That would be the most radical approach but if we talk about Nazis or whatever, you still have to say what we’re talking about. People who have family will ask themselves: “Well, isn’t it better for society to filter the bad things out so that we stick to the good things, or is that not limiting our ability to view the problems and manage them and handle them and take care of them?”

JÉRÉMIE: I think the solution is always another one than censorship. When we talk about child pornography we shouldn’t even use the word pornography—it is a representation of crime scenes of child abuse. One thing to do is to go to the servers, to disable the servers, to identify the people who uploaded the content in order to identify the people who produced the content, who abused the children in the first place. And whenever there is a network of people, a commercial network and so on, go and arrest the people. And when we pass laws—and we have one in France where you have an administrative authority from the Ministry of Interior that decides which websites will be blocked—we remove an incentive to the investigative services to go and find the people who do the bad stuff by saying, “Oh, we just remove the access to the bad stuff,” like we put a hand in front of the eyes of someone looking at the problem, therefore we solved the problem. So, just from that perspective, I think it is enough to describe it like this—where we all agree that we should remove those images from the internet.

JACOB: I’m sorry, I’m squirming over here. It’s so frustrating to hear the argument that you’re making. I want to throw up, because what you just did, is you said, “I want to use my position of power to assert my authority over other people, I want to erase history.” Maybe I’m an extremist in this case—and in many other cases, I’m sure—but I’m going to go out on a limb here. This is actually an example of where erasing history does a disservice. It turns out that with the internet we learned that there’s an epidemic in society of child abuse. That’s what we learned with this child pornography issue—I think it’s better to call it child exploitation—we saw evidence of this. Covering it up, erasing it, is, I think, a travesty because, in fact, you can learn so much about society as a whole. For example, you can learn—and I’m obviously never going to have a career in politics after I finish this sentence, but just to be clear about this—you learn, for example, who is producing it, and you learn about the people that are victimized. It is impossible for people to ignore the problem. It means that you have to start searching out the cause that creates this, which is the exploiters of the children. Ironically some surveillance technology might be useful here in facial recognition of people and by looking at the metadata in the images. Erasing that, making sure that we live in a world where it’s possible to erase some stuff and not other stuff, creating these administrative bodies for censorship and for policing—that’s a slippery slope which, as we have seen, has turned directly to copyright, it has turned to many other systems.

Just because it is a noble cause to go after that, maybe we should not take the easy way out, maybe in fact we should try to solve crimes, maybe in fact we should try to help those that are victimized, even though there is a cost to that kind of helping. Maybe instead of ignoring the problem, we should look at the fact that society as a whole has this big problem and it manifests on the internet in a particular way.

It’s like, for example, how when Polaroid built the Swinger camera (this instant camera for taking pictures) people started to take abusive pictures with those as well. But the answer is not to destroy a medium, or to police that medium. It is when you find evidence to prosecute the crimes that the medium has documented. It is not to weaken that medium, it is not to cripple society as a whole over this thing. Because here we talk about child pornographers, let’s talk about the police. The police on a regular basis in many countries abuse people. There are probably more abusive cops on the internet than there are child pornographers on the internet.

JULIAN: There are almost certainly more.

JACOB: We know there’s “n” number of policemen in the world and we know there’s “x” number of those policemen that have committed ethical violations—usually violent violations. If we look at just the Occupy movement, for example, we see this. Shall we censor the internet because we know some cops are bad? Shall we cripple the police’s ability to do good policing work?

JULIAN: Well, there is a question about re-victimization, which is where the child later on, or as an adult, or its social contacts, see the child abuse images again.

JACOB: As long as those cops are online, I am being re-victimized.

JULIAN: You could say seeing an image of you being beaten by a policeman is re-victimization. I would say that the protection of the integrity of the history of what actually happened in our world is more important; that re-victimization does occur, but nonetheless to set up a censorship regime which is capable of removing chunks of history means that we cannot address the problem because we can’t see what the problem is. In the 1990s I acted in an advisory capacity on internet matters to pedophile-busting cops in Australia, the Victorian Child Exploitation Unit. Those cops were not happy about filtering systems, because when people can’t see that there’s child pornography on the internet it removes the lobby that ensures that the cops have the funds to stop the abuse of children.

JÉRÉMIE: The point on which we agree—I think it’s the most important one—is that in the end it’s the individual responsibility of the people who do the content, the child abuse material and things like that, that really matters and on which cops should work.

JACOB: We don’t agree. That’s not what I said.

JULIAN: No, Jérémie is talking about doing, not publishing—there’s a difference.

JACOB: The production of the content is not the issue, actually. Just a minor clarification—if, for example, you have abused a child and Andy took a picture of this as proof, I don’t think Andy should be prosecuted.

JÉRÉMIE: No, it’s the people who abuse. Come on, it’s aiding and abetting.

ANDY: But some people abuse the child to produce the pictures, right?

JACOB: Of course they do.

ANDY: There might also be an economic aspect involved here.

JACOB: I agree with that entirely, I’m making a distinction here, which is to say that if the content itself is a historical record which is evidence of a crime, it is evidence of a very serious crime, and we should never lose sight of the fact that there is re-victimization, but there is the original victimization and that is actually the core issue, whether or not there are pictures of it.

JÉRÉMIE: Of course. That’s what I mean.

JACOB: Whether or not there are pictures is almost irrelevant. When there are pictures, it is very important to remember that you have to keep your eye on the prize, and that the goal is to actually stop the harm, stop the abuse. A big part of that is making sure that there is evidence and that there is the incentive for the people with the right tools to solve those crimes. That, I think, is incredibly important, and people really lose sight of that because the easy thing to do is to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and then to stop it and say that has stopped the abuse. And it hasn’t.

ANDY: And the trouble is that right now a lot of people will obviously favor the easy solution because it’s very inconvenient to look at what’s really going on in society. I think you do have a chance to handle a political problem because you’re not trying to make a policy that ignores the problem or makes it invisible. In a way this may be cyber politics, but this is also a question of how a society handles issues, and I do have strong doubts that there is something such as information that does harm directly. It has to do with the ability to filter, of course, and it’s also true that I don’t want to see all the pictures that are available on the internet. There are some that I really find disgusting and distracting but the same is true for the next video store, showing movies that are fictional and ugly. So, the question is do I have the ability to handle what I’m seeing and what I’m processing and what I’m reading? And that is the filtering approach. Actually, Wau Holland, the founder of Chaos Computer Club, said something funny: “You know, filtering should be handled in the end user, and in the end device of the end user.”¹¹⁹

JULIAN: So filtering should be done by the people who receive information.

ANDY: It should be done here. Here! [Pointing to his head]

JULIAN: In the brain.

ANDY: In the end device of the end user, that’s this thing you have between your ears. That’s where you should filter and it shouldn’t be done by the government on behalf of the people. If the people don’t want to see things, well, they don’t have to, and you do have the requirement these days to filter a lot of things anyhow.