[Disclaimer: This is meant to be completely separate from Access'
Live Blog. This is all my notes and my perspective of what was said,
with at least 20% more snark.]
Here's my notes from the first conference panel I attended at Rightscon, "Open Empowerment
- How Digital Natives are Changing the World and What it Means for Democracy, Human Rights, Criminality, and Security
". It's a little scattershot, but there's some fun stuff in here.
Creating rule of law in cyberspace
Open empowerment
[tak dali = Russian for etc.]
World Bank study of countries since the 50s,
level of econ. development, everything below blue line can be based
on "human factors", rest is "leveraging" information, sci. progress, claim is
individual empowerment good for business (yeah, we'll need the slides).
For those from rights community, ICT really broke info. monopoly (soviet
graphic up there)
again comparison to Guttenberg
and now space is being contested (yes, a certain kind of dictatorship
died in 1991).
Open global commons vs. corporatized/state-dominated space is key battlefield here.
first item: technological change, "has outpaced ability of regulators to act proactively", uhm, no, Misra anecdote.
well, example of cloud computing...ehhhhh....
raises significant issues of rights, ex. in Canada, 30% of Google's cloud hosted there, who's jurisdiction (recall Kazakh example a year back).
90% of Canadian email cleaned by company in Portland, Ore., now grey area question, still being tackled by int'l law.
MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES
Eh, Tajikistan is "the global north', #itsforlatinamerica
THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IPv6 + NATs)
Cloud computing + mobile + internet of things = Inet is now completely generative limited by only "intellect" and "capital" (as if there's no relation there)
Demographics of Cyberspace
U.S. 15% of Inet population, center of gravity being pushed to South and East, out of Silicon Valley.
3 in 5 poor users in failed states, median age of 18, significant youth cultures, so demands to practice what you preach + upward mobility
Think Malenkaya Vera (a very important late Soviet film that captured the full extent to which the USSR had failed to meet its promise of a classless society) and tak dali, Nazarbayev knows.
Globalized cybercrime
Ah, those old KGB thugs. Much less risky to steal somebody's credit card number in New York than to fight over Rubles in Petropavlovsk.
Forming new underclass of cyberspace that will force us to face certain basic social issues.
Take a shot each time someone mentions the Arab Spring #rightscondrinkinggame
New form of protest possibly forming with the Internet. Picket lines were illegal until the 20s in the U.S. Should DDoS be a 21st century picket
line? EEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH..........
BORDERS IN CYBERSPACE
[Many things we know from CIS research/Morozov]
RELATION TO LATIN AMERICA
Open empowerment, two extremes (one photo, iphones, one photo a gun)
empowerment has taken Econ. rather than political forms. Damn I should have tried the mobile conference.
Latin America one of the faster growing ICT markets. 60% users located in Brazil and Mexico. 4% through mobile phones (!!!), not like CIS AT ALL
2/3rds under 35, 1/3rd under 24. Only just now beginning to worry about adult things (family, etc.). Reasons for engaging in cyberspace only
now starting to reach forefront. Latin American also most overrepresented in social media. 84% of Internet users use Facebook, which has overtaken
Orkut (maybe explains those fake friend requests I keept getting), almost certainly identityy theft. In Costa Rica, phishing sites have jumped 14,000%
Arms/narcotrafficking has taken advantage, too.
QUESTIONS
Is there some uniformity in how "digital natives" are pursuing their econ./soc. agendas?
What gov. reaction will occur? Securtitization (large and disproportional) of cyberspace?
Role of civil society?
What tools should we in civil society groups should build?
PANEL:
Rafal Rohozinski : CEO, SecDev Group
Robert Muggah : Fellow, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
Misha Glenny : Writer & Professor, Columbia University
Camino Kavanagh : Senior Programme Coordinator & Fellow, NYU Centre on International Cooperation
Case of Mexico
Gangs that have taken to the Internet/gang culture, comment please?
Drug traffickers have dominated social media until recently, they're the ones who for the last 8-10 years have been able to almost
systematically control entire communities (sound familiar?). They have millions of dollars invested in human intel, for buying off govt's.
This could be helpful for tackling heroin trade in C. Asia.
20 years ago, an AS/400 was intercepted, imagine what they have now
Where do they get their cyber-capabilities?
Anywhere from 10-20K people disappeared in Mexico thnx to cartels. Many of these people (cartel folks) came from high-tech backgrounds.
Also in control of toll roads, so by the time you arrive they know who you are.
Have they tried to buy into ISPs? Ex of Anonymous vs. Mexican cartels seems to be tie-in
There does seem to be one, it seems like they could buy in to get info on two bloggers who were disappeared, and possibly through 4 generals
who were arrested for their connections. It's still a developing story.
#YoSoy132 demonstrations, 1st time folks using tech. (and offline too) against the cartels, comments?
When you live in this kind of destruction and see this movement of students essentially reclaiming lost territory, it's an exciting thing.
Popular image going around on Twitter is a pic of a dove pooping on Televiso (Mexican media network).
[Where's the key special sauce here that could be applied to C. Asia? I can't help but think it's in the political culture.]
We're talking about several Latin Americas here, let's talk about Argentina. Could you talk a little about key challenges of cyber security rights
vs. legit gov. functions?
[Gap due to switch to Spanish/Portuguese headphones]
That has precisely to do with use of agents for criminal, like child porn for instance and other things which are considered pending, for example in Eur. Council.
These are offenses that are transnational, so we need int'l support, and possible chance for int'l agreements for extradition. We're working
very intensely with regulation of service networks. And I do believe that there is lack of development of Argentina's legislation, not only lack of
knowledge from operators but also lawyers, and mea culpa, we (judges, lawyers, etc.) all have to be more informed #fortheolds. Also necesssary to
emphasize lack of IT experts,
Budapest Convention as potential model, very Eurocentric in some ways. Defends interests more for developed north. Is there Latin American sawse here?
In the questions we ask, BRIC countries are not going to add to these conventions, since they weren't invited, so they have the option to not adhere
(well, Russia would skip in the first place, but anyway...). So it will be very difficult to fight cybercrime, there have been some advances within
the UN (hahahaha), and that could be excellent, but we have to take long-term view, not easy to do due to red tape.
Gustavo/Roberto - Open Empowerment (ok, I forgot the question)
There's a paper on Open Empowerment on the SecDev website. Int'l level, no Latin American country has signed on to Budapest Convention.
Some Eurocentric perspective and less relevance to local realities, no country has signed on since 2004 (!!!). Limited Latin American role, which
will hopefully change with more awareness. OAS Comprehensive Inter-American Strategy for Cybersecurity Threats (for terrorism, telecom, collaboration)
has helped out tho (U.S. dominated? They have their place, I guess). At least 4 kinds of responses adopted:
1. Aligning and codifying legal frameworks for cybersecurity/cybercrime. Legis. action, including Brazil revisions to penal code.
2. Specialized police units for cybercrime (phishing, ident. theft, etc.) not much for cartels and narcotrafficking
3. Computer search teams usually outside of government
4. Exec. branch entities, for managing internal infrastructure within governments.
Some observatories on cyberbullying too, issue of militaries involved too, not much militarization of cyberspace yet. Only Brazil has Cyber
Defense Command est. 2010. Not as much as America/Eastern Europe/China.
Only official filtering policy in Cuba (well, we know about isolated decisions in Venezuela, elsewhere via court order).
what about Central America? Largely recovering from conflicts and drug trade, lots of security aid. What do you think about securing that region?
Good question, really understudied. Point is levels of penetration, great heterogeneity. Brazil/Argentina well above global average. Honduras/El Salvador/ Carribean < 20%
Important to recognize variation. On those challenges, speaker has been working on tracking changes across the region.
Murder rates very, very high in Central America/Latin America/Carribean - El Salvador/Carribean/Brazil (!!!) etc.
Threat often from gangs, nobody really knows how many. What we've seen is "heavy handed" responses for at-risk youths, heavy deployment of police.
Started in 2003 and has spread. U.S. assistance has come in to help with this, billions of $ poured in for sec. initiatives (alphabet soup of initiatives)
So we have a climate of securitization in parts of Central America. What is clear is that there is a significant lack of capacity to deal with this
threat. So we're at a real transition moment of low capacity and high potential.
So paradox now is movement of empowerment for pol. purposes started here with original Rio conference (Earth Summit?), first solidarity networks came from here, now being taken over by criminal groups and attempts to contain neg. aspects of mobilization online. So Turkmenistan/Uzbek. might find allies in Latin America who do this for economic reasons.
QUESTIONS
Isn't answer to gangs on Internet to deal with gang crime rather than using the tech. against them?
John Dillinger once said he robbed banks because that's where the money is. Criminality in the culture, won't disappear. Since transnational,
tech. comes in and countries will respond. That doesn't mean we go into root causes [brain fart, missed end]
Gangs in previous forms to transnationals today often used as pretext for strong heavy handed response (aka the boogeyman. Uzbekistan has the IMU,
Latin America has gangs).
There's a big difference between gangs and cartels. A cartel is much more sophisticated, very much state capture, a la Bakiyev and drug agency abolition.
GO GO GADGET PORT. TRANSLATOR
Guy here looks like Zuckerberg with glasses. Maybe he's here in disguise
(for all the Internet boosterist-sounding comments, damn I'm glad I came). Also, I have no idea what the question was, no translation. Maybe it was a comment.
When you say that pols are more and more under influence of cartels, and you say we should try to fight more with tech. means, aren't we actually giving more power to cartels if they control the gov't?
(ME: AYUH). In some ways this is the paradox of state capture, there's no simple answer to that. Where does regulation/empowerment come from? Tech. or laws? In many ways from both, cyberspace is synthetic domain built by engineers and can be influenced by laws. So responsibility of engineers to understand the pol. consequences of their design decisions. There's no true and right path, just several tricky and haphazard experiments.
[I missed the question, it's just before lunch.] - But it was LLOOOONNNGGGGGG
Guiana, we've seen cartels buying into cartels for money laundering and other criminal activities.
Conventional sec. reform approaches are often state-bound, but with cyberspace it gets interconnected with military and intelligence concerns. A lot to do with information sharing and tak dali.
Issue of stigmatization and youth important here. Many youth groups clustered together as gangs, need to meake sure that sec. response doesn't expand beyond gangs proper.
We've seen communities if not in full control by cartels then severely intimidated (hanging bodies have that effect). That's why YoSoy132 is so important, also old and young people, and expanding all throughout Mexico.
END
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