Crypto-Politics

Encryption and Democratic Practices in the Digital Era

Linda Monsees

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429852671
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Thema: Libertad política

This book examines current debates about the politics of technology and the future of democratic practices in the digital era.

The volume centres on the debates on digital encryption in Germany and the USA, during the aftermath of Edward Snowden's leaks, which revolved around the value of privacy and the legitimacy of surveillance practices. Using a discourse analysis of mass media and specialist debates, it shows how these are closely interlinked with technological controversies and how, as a result, contestation emerges not within one public sphere but within multiple expert circles. The book develops the notion of 'publicness' in order to grasp the political significance of these controversies, thereby making an innovative contribution to Critical Security Studies by introducing digital encryption as an important site for understanding the broader debates on cyber security and surveillance.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, science and technology studies, and International Relations.

1 Crypto-politics

Encryption is a core technology for internet security. It secures data against unwanted access by third parties, for example by keeping email private and preventing digital espionage. This book examines digital encryption as a security technology and analyses the controversies revolving around it. Digital encryption is a fundamental political technology; a site where struggles about privacy, freedom and democracy are fought. In a pamphlet published in 1992, author and tech expert Timothy C. May described encryption as a contentious but also visionary technology:

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner […] The state will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns […] Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.

(May, 1992)

May envisions encryption as a technology endowed with the potential of radically changing existing forms of political ordering. What he calls ‘crypto anarchy’ is a world in which, through the power of encryption, the power of the state is challenged in a fundamental way. Today, encryption is a technology that is indeed used on a daily basis. But the transformative impact of encryption that May envisioned is far from self-evident. Developing sophisticated encryption systems and, in turn, software to break or circumvent them is big business. From this perspective, digital encryption is less a technology that transforms power relations than a means for stabilising the power of the state. So how is it that encryption, which was once seen as an utopian tool for an alternative world order, is now part of a rapidly growing security industry? Can we still see glimpses of May’s visionary ideas today, and do encryption controversies enact an alternative kind of politics? Crypto-Politics sets out to answer these questions.

The first question is answered through an empirical analysis of controversies (Barry, 2012; Callon et al., 2009; Schouten, 2014). I investigate how debates about encryption technology are entangled with controversies around security, surveillance and privacy. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I describe various instances of how encryption becomes contested and scrutinise multiple controversies concerned with security, technological features and the role of companies in providing encryption. What emerges is that encryption is still envisioned as a potent tool against state; a means to protect against surveillance by the state. A countervailing narrative promoted by state actors depicts it as a tool that hampers law enforcement. From this perspective, strong encryption causes insecurity by making communication among criminals inaccessible. The answer to the second question is provided by a theoretical investigation of how we can observe modes of ‘publicness’. In particular, I discuss how these modes of publicness challenge or reaffirm ideas about what security is, and how they acquire political significance. In Chapter 3, I introduce the notion of publicness, which provides the analytical leverage to understand controversies as potential forms of ‘radical’¹ contestation. In Chapter 7, I rely on this theoretical building block and the empirical analysis to reflect further on the ways in which encryption controversies enact politics. Ultimately, I show how encryption controversies challenge established ideas of the state as the prime provider of security, but also reaffirm political ideas such as the distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

The explicit focus of this book is on digital encryption and security. The issue of digital encryption has so far received little attention in International Relations (although see the discussions in: Dunn Cavelty, 2007; Herrera, 2002; Saco, 2002). However, encryption is a crucial aspect of debates about cybersecurity² more generally, and surveillance and privacy specifically. The realm of security is not only of particular empirical interest. Analysing security is also crucial because claims to security rely on specific imaginaries of the political. For example, security claims always enact specific claims about the role of the state (Huysmans, 2011). The state is often considered to be the prime provider of security, but in other contexts it is also considered to be a threat (Walker, 1997: 63). This tension becomes apparent in encryption controversies, where this opposition is a dominant theme. For this reason, this book looks at encryption technology as a security technology from a state perspective, but also investigates how activists contest state policies and how users are entangled in the politics of encryption. This study is based on a qualitative analysis of texts produced by activists, politicians, experts and state agencies. The focus is on the debates that started in the aftermath of the revelations by Edward Snowden. These texts were analysed in order to understand the controversies that revolve around encryption. In Chapter 2, I describe my method of analysis and the material on which that analysis is based in more detail. Crypto-Politics thus expands our empirical knowledge of encryption as a crucial security technology and combines it with a theoretical reflection about how the contestation of security technology works inside and outside established political categories.

The rest of this introductory chapter will introduce the main themes of the book, starting with a brief description of encryption as a security technology, pointing out its relevance for debates on surveillance and privacy. I will then introduce some conceptual arguments, on which I will draw for the study of security technology throughout the book. Next, I introduce the particularly important concept of ‘publicness’, which can help us to grasp the political dimension of security controversies, before concluding with a brief chapter outline.

Debating encryption

Controlling access to and implementation of digital encryption means controlling who has access to what kind of information. This is so because encrypting information means rendering it unintelligible to third parties who lack the necessary key to decrypt the information. The capabilities of encryption increased in importance with the advent of the internet. Today, encryption is used whenever we write an email, pay by credit card or even use a remote control. Encryption ciphers communication and prevents eavesdropping, but it can also function as a digital signature, thus verifying the origin of a message. The importance of encryption will only increase in the future with the expansion of the internet of things, in which many mundane devices become networked. Securing self-driving cars or networked health devices requires extremely good encryption.

The political debates about encryption can be traced back to the early days of the internet. These issues will be described in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5; here, I will merely introduce the main conflict lines. During the 1990s, encryption became the battleground for a fundamental conflict between ‘hackers’ and civil society organisations, on one side, and the US government and its law enforcement agencies, on the other (for an overview, see: Diffie and Landau, 1998; Kahn, 1997). With the development of digital communication, state efforts to control this communication and have access to it increased. This led to two important questions. Who should have access to the strongest kind of encryption? And who should decide on the design and implementation of encryption? Activists advocated for the free use of encryption in order to promote security and privacy, while law enforcement agencies wanted to weaken available encryption in order to maintain their ability to wiretap all communication (Hellegren, 2017; Levy, 1994). In the end, the state lost, in part because business had a vested interest in strong encryption (Herrera, 2002: 113–117; Saco, 2002: 178).

The conflict over encryption is not only one between the state and civil society. Commerce adds another layer of interest to the debate, because strong encryption is considered to be crucial for all financial transactions and to prevent industrial espionage.³ In addition, if encryption is forbidden in only one country, that country will fear losing out in the global marketplace. Thus, economic interests aligned with the interests of activists in their fight for the spread of strong encryption. Nevertheless, companies such as AT&T also cooperated with the US government to produce end devices that implemented weak encryption. Today, Google has to prevent end-to-end encryption to sustain its business model, which is based on targeted advertising and Dropbox, for example, allows encryption, but this massively increases the cost of data storage (see DuPont, 2016). Although the power of economic actors is crucial for the issue of encryption, their interests differ depending on the impact of encryption on their business models. Hence, the role of information and communication technology (ICT) companies is often ambiguous.

Struggles over encryption are embedded in broader societal questions about control over networked technology and private data. For example, state-led surveillance practices became a major public issue after Snowden’s revelations, which rekindled the debate about encryption (Gürses et al., 2016; Hintz and Dencik, 2016; Kuehn, 2018). Encryption can hamper some surveillance practices and plays a pivotal role in digital anonymisation technologies. Implementing strong encryption is thus one way to complicate surveillance efforts by both the state and business. Civil rights organisations such as the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have been especially strong advocates of the widespread use of encryption since the Snowden revelations. The direct impact of these developments can be observed in the fact that many social media companies implemented stronger encryption, such as WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption. Privacy advocates try to foster the use of encryption, whereas state agencies present it as a negative tool that will prevent legitimate access to the data of, for example, criminal suspects. And while telecommunications companies often openly claim to be politically neutral, their capabilities for surveillance and data retention shape, often in covert ways, access to information and the possibilities for privacy. Indeed, one can speak of a ‘surveillance–industrial complex’ where ‘those involved in the business of selling surveillance and security are inevitably embroiled in the politics of fear’ (Hayes, 2012: 172). This industry is growing rapidly, as is the market for new security and surveillance technologies. Customers are private businesses as well as government agencies that outsource security services (Hayes, 2012: 167; see also Marquis, 2003). Encryption is one crucial part of this industry as well as an important aspect of surveillance controversies, as I will examine in detail in Chapters 3 and 4.

Privacy, surveillance and diffuse security

The brief summary above shows how encryption is embedded in debates about privacy and security. Users consider digital encryption to be a potent tool for protecting their privacy against surveillance by the state and ICT companies. Traditional definitions of privacy focus on access to information, such as Alan Westin’s: ‘the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others’ (Westin, 1967: 3). This definition, however, runs into problems when we try to analyse contemporary monitoring practices. For example, predictive data mining can uncover beliefs and attitudes about a person that might not even be known by that person (Millar, 2009). The Cambridge Analytica scandal provides another instructive example. This company used Facebook data generated through apps that offered free personality tests, and once the scandal broke many people became aware for the first time that their ‘private’ data had been used for purposes beyond their control. Here, the content of the data was perhaps less of an issue than the fact that it was used for targeted advertising in the context of political campaigning. Claims to privacy acquire political significance to the extent that they challenge the power of state actors as well as private enterprises. In Chapter 5, I will examine how claims to privacy unfold in the debate around encryption. I show how claims to privacy in these controversies are tightly linked to claims about security. Privacy and security are often presented as two opposing values that need to be balanced in something like a zero-sum game (Waldron, 2003). Ultimately, however, these debates tend to prioritise one over the other (Čas et al., 2017: 7). This is why claims to privacy need to be understood in the broader context of debates about surveillance and security, and indeed the legitimacy of commercial and state actors and their monitoring practices.

Both commercial and state actors monitor citizens and users in order to generate data that is used – among other things – for targeted advertising and law enforcement. This theme runs through the whole encryption debate, since encryption is one tool to disrupt these activities. More importantly on a conceptual level, these surveillance practices cannot be grasped by relying on state-centred categories that focus mainly on institutional practices and regulations (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Huysmans, 2016). Surveillance practices are ubiquitous: digital data is traced and collec...