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Law in the Internet Society
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From the Iron-Fist’s Crushing Grip to the Invisible Panopticon - The tug-of-war between surveillance strategies and political dissidents-- By SkyeLee - 16 Dec 2021The first tug: Using Encrypted CommunicationsA week ago, on 8th December 2021, four individuals from Hong Kong were arrested. They were accused of inciting unlawful assembly and criminal damage, to protest against the government’s COVID measures, using messenger app Telegram. Days before that, a Telegram channel administrator was sentenced to prison for almost five years for inciting violence and arson via his server during the 2019 protests. The recent incidents are the latest in a string of police efforts to crack down on anti-establishment communication on Telegram. The significance of this Telegram-related suppression has to be contextualised within the unique dynamics of Hong Kong’s current anti-establishment movement. The movement in Hong Kong that started in 2019 is uniquely ‘diffused’, participation in the movement is ‘open’ and, unlike previous protests such as the 2014 ‘Umbrella Movement, there is no particular organization or leadership predominating its coordination. With no identifiable leaders determining the overall direction and agenda, strategising within a ‘flat structure’ has influenced the manner of information transmission within the movement. Absent top-down dissemination from a leading organisation, decentralised access to knowledge, communication and coordination has been conducted through social media messaging apps.The second tug: Government suppression and infiltrationThe nature of the movement’s reliance on decentralised communication is compounded by its ‘open’ nature, rendering it particularly vulnerable to infiltration by the opposition. Within this context, the Hong Kong government’s approach is similarly calculated to reap the benefits of the mainland Chinese government’s response to its citizens using VPN technology to climb over the Great Firewall. Two response phrases have been observed in China, a first attempt to continue adapting the firewall and crush all VPNs, and a second, more insidious attempt at infiltrating the VPNs. Infiltrating channels of communication makes for more effective listening; one who wishes to listen, can listen without making one’s presence known. And when the listener’s presence is unknown; the talkers continue their unfiltered talking, very much unaware of invisible ears. The introverted nature of a government listener allows it to be more omnipresent, increasingly omniscient and eventually omnipotent. The invisible panopticon disciplines the anti-establishment, as did the iron fist before it. In Hong Kong, the government has responded by mirroring the Chinese government’s second approach of infiltration. In the spirit of crackdown, hacking attempts have been made by national network founders on both a systemic and individual level. State-actor sized DDos technology networks attacked Telegram concurrently during demonstrations in Hong Kong. Direct seizure of personal devices allows for a surveillance network to be constructed through piecemeal infiltration from individual and separate ‘nodes’. And in the spirit of infiltration, there begins the covert creation of fake accounts to join channels in decentralised communication networks like Telegram. However, there are additional reasons for Hong Kong’s preference for infiltration beyond effectiveness, mainly the government’s continued interest in maintaining a veneer of democracy in the nation. Unlike mainland China, there are political and (more importantly) economic interests in retaining Hong Kong’s appearance as a democratic hub that is not fully integrated into the Chinese monolith. Therefore, Hong Kong is unlikely to enact a similar ‘Great firewall’ that China has established for many years. For evidence that the Hong Kong government is entirely committed to keeping up appearances of democracy, one need turn no further than the latest political battle over the upcoming legislative council election. Given that the majority of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy candidates have been arrested or chased into exile, the line taken by the anti-establishment is now one of boycott - hoping that the low turnout numbers will make evident the lack of democratic legitimacy vested in the establishment. But in the desire to keep up Hong Kong’s global reputation, the government has churned out advertisements and messaging urging citizens to vote in the upcoming election. The government’s vested interest in this veneer of democracy makes infiltration all the more explicable as its weapon against the anti-establishment movement. In light of police actions, the Anti-establishment has also made its own adjustments. For instance, communication has become more diffused than ever such that information is passed through connections of trust and only into small, contained groups. A notable practice that has developed is a ‘scorched-earth’ deletion of data upon arrest. Arrestees sever and delete all online traces, accounts, and connections. The intention is not only to protect themselves from incriminating evidence, but to prevent their device from being used as a ‘node’ for incriminating one’s friends and allies.The third tug: Heightened user demands from encryption to deletionThis practice of deletion belies the growth of a wider, general digital insecurity in Hong Kong, which has generated an even further shift towards privacy in compromise of consumer comforts. When WhatsApp? announced its new privacy policies allowing Facebook to gain access to private user data in January 2021, usage of the app dropped sharply in Hong Kong, coinciding with the rise of Telegram as the primary app for communications. Media sites touted Telegram’s stricter policies on stored user data as compared to Whatsapp. Now, there has been a second migration from Telegram to Signal, a messaging app based on free software principles with open source code. This time, the paradigm of consumer demand is no longer soft reassurance about the security of data but the guarantee of outright deletion. Strict data policies are no longer sufficient to quell privacy concerns. Encryption is no longer the talk of the town, rather, local media sites in Hong Kong flaunt the primary attraction of Signal - with its star feature being self-deleting messages. This is not new technology. Snapchat, Telegram’s technological predecessor, automatically deletes all messages once they are read unless the user intentionally saves them. However, it is the political climate that has stimulated user hyperawareness and heightened concern about the governing power structures and locus of data control, causing them to focus on the technology’s foundational principles, beyond its substantive technical functions.This is a fine first draft, Skye. The best route to improvement is the one you recommend yourself: larger context. The real subject here is the dynamics of the Net as the Chinese state tries to seize full control of political culture in Hong Kong. But the CCP and the now-decapitated and perforce "decentralized" resistance are by no means the only parties and people shaping history. The official Beijing narrative demands the existence of foreign influence, and Hong Kong is in fact integrated into global society. Berlin could be divided by a wall, taking on many pathological elements from the result of that amputation, but it became the more intricately international for that very reason before it was unified again. As its free press collapses, student unions are disavowed by universities, intellectuals and political activists flee the city, Hong Kong's Net is responding like the nervous system of a body undergoing trauma. Trying to understand all the people and parties involved in that process—other governments and their spies, the platforms and the finance powerhouses, the foreign telecomms, and so on—is too much for 1,000 words, of course. But the essay can only gain strength from taking more of them into account. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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