The future of privacy, free expression, and democratic governance rests on the decisions we make today
On August 25, 2023 big social media platforms will have to fully complying with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, obliges all “Very Large Online Platforms”, or VLOPs, to speedily remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms.
This means, a law where the European Union will have the right to ask and monitor that social media platforms are following what they understand as illegal content, hate speech and disinformation. In order words, social media platforms will need to share the data about post and content.
Even when private messages are still protected as exceptions in this Act, this opens the door for considering that when they identify a person with certain political opinions, there is a risk of disinformation, hate speech or illegal content. It would be “legal” to check personal communications, like emails, whats app or private messages in social media apps, which by the way is a normal practice between tech companies and governments now.
According with article 4 of the Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act), this Act is:
“In order to safeguard and improve the functioning of the internal market, a targeted set of uniform, effective and proportionate mandatory rules should be established at Union level…”
But what the European Union is not saying is how this act will affect the right of free speech of citizens. When creating an Regulatory Act, concepts as hate speech, illegal content and disinformation are very general, whatever information which is against the official agenda could be considered a risk for them. Remember it is not just about how our society looks like right now, this Act is going to be one of the fundamental legal frameworks for the surveillance of the future.
Let me tell you about what happened in United States according with Mike Benz, a corporate lawyer representing tech and media companies before joining the Trump administration and now director of the Foundation for freedom Online.
He witnessed at the State Department — because he was at the desk, basically, Google and Facebook call when they wanted favors abroad when they wanted American protection or American policies to preserve their dominance in Europe, or in Asia or in Latin America.
And then how And the U.S. government was doing favors for these tech companies while the tech companies were censoring the people who voted for the government.
Would be very difficult to stop social media platforms and their own corporative agenda of mass control could do as activities of collecting information about us, to use for elections purposes or imposing an agenda that benefits them, using the Data they collect to ask for political favors and exceptions.
Google started as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant and was part of the CIA’s and National Security Agency’s (NSA) digital data program, the purpose of which was to conduct “birds of a feather” mapping online so that certain groups could be neutralized.
All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ‘90s were funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State. They were developed by the intelligence community as an insurgency tool — That means to help dissident groups in foreign countries to develop a pro-U.S. stance and evade state-controlled media. Now, these same technologies have been turned against the American public, and are used to control public discourse.
The worldwide web, which is the user interface, was launched in 1991, and my suspicion is that the public internet was seeded and allowed to grow in order to capture and make the most of the population dependent upon it, knowing that it would be the most effective social engineering tool ever created.
In the past, censorship was a laborious task that could only be done after the fact. Artificial intelligence (AI) has radically altered the censorship industry. AI programs can now censor information en masse, based on the language used, and prevent it from being seen at all.
Some Twitter users recently received notices informing them that they are not eligible to participate in Twitter Ads because their account has been labelled “organic misinformation.” As Kogon asks: “Why in the world would Twitter turn away advertising business.
A booming commercial market for surveillance and censorship technologies has given governments even greater capacity to flout the rule of law, monitor private communications, and restrict access to essential resources.
Instead of placing strict limits on the sale of technologies that enable surveillance and the collection of information and communications— especially, technologies that collect and analyze biometric information (facial measurements, voice, and DNA) governments are focus on the usage of spyware, and data-extraction technology.
In a first, the Costa Rican government, joined in 2022 the movement of journalists and civil society groups all over the world are calling for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries.
More phone numbers were based in Mexico than any other country, with over 15,000 on the list, “including those belonging to politicians, union representatives, journalists, and other government critics,” the Post noted.
As The Guardian reported: “The phone number of a freelance Mexican reporter, Cecilio Pineda Birto, was found in the list, apparently of interest to a Mexican client in the weeks leading up to his murder, when his killers were able to locate him at a carwash. His phone has never been found so no forensic analysis has been possible to establish whether it was infected.”
Every year is becoming easier to control us in the name of security, start now changing your digital habits and infrastructure, the list of countries that includes France, Hungary, Turkey and countries from Africa and Middle East are just the top of the iceberg about what governments and tech companies are doing with our data, one could use the technology, to “spy on almost the entire world population.”
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