Black Code: Censorship, Surveillance, and the Militarization of Cyberspace

作者：Ronald J. Deibert

全文：http://programs.ssrc.org/itic/publications/ITST_materials/blackcode.pdf

1.0 Introduction
... The intent of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state-of-play with regard to these new pressures as well as to lay out some of the principles and practices that I see as essential to its evolution if it is to eventually provide the foundations for a global liberal-democratic world order. Mostly this is a rather pessimistic story. If we start from any ideal perspective on what the communications infrastructure should look like for global democratic governance (and indeed there is substantial variation here) the current reality offers a fairly bleak picture. As the pressures in favour of military, intelligence, and commercial interests bear down on the Internet, I argue below, the prospects for civic democratic communications become increasingly fragile. The second half of this paper outlines the prospects for contrary forces emerging to censorship, surveillance, and militarization. Here, the story is not entirely discouraging, as there is a substantial set of social forces combining to bring questions of access, privacy, and diversity to the principles, rules, and technologies that configure global communications. I refer to these
social forces as “civic networks.” Civic networks have begun to create an alternative transnational paradigm of Internet security and design, oriented around shared values and technologies. But their challenges are formidable.