Webinar: Hacking, Democracy and Accountability

Joyce Hakmeh

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this webinar on Hacking, Democracy and Accountability. My name is Joyce Hakmeh. I’m a Senior Researcher with the International Security Programme and the Co-Editor of the Journal of Cyber Policy and this afternoon, we have the privilege to welcome with us Maureen Webb, who will be speaking about her latest publication on the issue. So, Maureen is a Labour Lawyer and Human Rights Activist. She’s the Author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World and has taught national security law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent book, Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism, was released in 2020. So, Maureen will talk to us for a few minutes about this book, about how hacking can contribute, actually, to the new ways of democratic being, and then we’ll have some time for some questions with her. So, over to you, Maureen, and please, we look forward to hear what you have to say.

Maureen Webb

Thank you very much, Joyce. It’s an honour to be here today. Well, it’s 2020, and in addition to a global pandemic, we’re bracing ourselves for another election in the ‘free world’ this November, in which popular discontent, I fear, is going to impose another rough reckoning. And it’s fair to say that this instrument of our democratic system of governance, the election, has come to feel more like a wrecking ball than an instrument of deliberative change. Many people are in despair about the polarised politics in their countries, since the American election in 2016 and the Brexit vote that same year in the UK and I feel – you know, you see a lot of articles questioning the efficacy of democracy. There’s been books written in important policy circles to that effect, and certainly, there’s been a demonisation of populism as well.

So for myself, as a small ‘d’ democrat, I’m a Canadian, I’m a Constitutional Lawyer, I’m a mother, the growing crisis of belief in our democratic system of governance is dismaying. And it’s obvious to me, and to a growing number of people around the world, that the old political economy is not working. We know that we need new theories of political economy, and new social experiments to discover them. We know we need to invent new ways of democratic being, but how? How do we do this? And my book is really about how the concentrations of – I’ve written in the past, and this book is a continuation of my analysis and many other people’s, about how the concentrations of wealth and power, mass surveillance and authoritarianism threatening our democracies have increasingly been enabled by digital technology.

To anyone who understands the tech well, it’s apparent that code more than constitutions, and I say this as a Lawyer, it’s taken me some time to come to this realisation, code, more than constitutions, will soon determine what kind of societies we live in, and whether they end up resembling democracies at all. For tech insiders, the urgent civics question of the 21st Century is who controls code? And it’s an issue that has more dimensions to it than Russian meddling and algorithmic microtargeting of voters at election time, although these are important issues and I deal with them, along with many others in the book.

Right now, we have a struggle taking place as corporations, states, criminal elements and parts of civil society vie to build the coded environment around us, and hackers are savants in this world. They’ve been sought after for their talents, they’ve been recruited and reviled, celebrated and thrown into prison. You know, they have an almost folkloric status right now in our popular culture and we’re all familiar with the stereotype of hackers as dangerous, nihilistic elements in society, capable of wrecking elections and critical infrastructure. These are real threats, I don’t mean to minimise them, but this is a small part of the hacker story. In fact, increasingly I think we’re going to see hackers as vital disrupters in the emerging digital environment, with its strong anti-democratic tendencies.

Now, many of you might be unaware of the full scope of the hacker story. What has famously been called the ‘Hacker Ethos’, with its hands-on imperative to take systems apart, to test and modify them, to interrogate their purposes, this has had a profound influence on digital technology, since the early days of its development. Hackers were in fact the original innovators of Silicon Valley and they’ve made an immense contribution in the development of the free software that has become the backbone of the digital world. Hackers were key players in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement and many people are completely unaware of the phenomenon that since the early 2000s, there’s been an exponential growth of the progressive hacker scene, in which citizens and hackers are working together to guarantee citizens’ privacy, to bring transparency and accountability to those in power.

Obviously, you’ve heard of the momentous stories of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. But more than that, hackers and citizens have been working to realise the social and economic goals of Occupy in the digital era, and to upgrade democratic processes themselves. And also, in the last decade or two, and those of you that are associated with universities, particularly in the computer sciences and the social sciences might be aware of this, there’s been a fascinating mainstreaming and institutionalisation of hacking and hacking experiments in places like Harvard, MIT and Stanford, that underscores the rising significance of this phenomenon. And this mainstreaming has garnered new respectability and resources for hacker experiments, although it’s also had – it’s had both positive and negative effects, which I go into more deeply in the book.

There is, right now, an astounding array of hacker experiments underway that could fundamentally change the current political economy. Before the end of this century, we could see hacker experiments succeeding and bringing us a new civilian intranet that is privacy secure, which would change the surveillance capitalism that has become so pervasive in the last decade. We could see self-determination over our own data, a plethora of leaking platforms that hold governments and oligarchs accountable, a decentralised web that brings net neutrality as a design feature, co-operative platforms and utilities that banish the platform monopolies that are presently killing much of our economies, and even self-executing contracts and communities of trust that could replace corrupt legacy institutions. So for example, hackers are showing us that with peer-to-peer and blockchain technology, this is cutting-edge technology, still has a lot of development before it’s fully realised. But potentially, this technology could allow us to create virtual supercomputers that would be powerful enough to run ventures as large as alternative stock exchanges, banking, monetary systems that could rival the rigged systems that we have today.

Hackers are creating prototypes for innovative micropayment systems that could effectively tax financial transactions or tax corporations like Amazon, Google, Apple, you know, these new digital monoliths. And increase the flow of money through local economies by distributing that bounty of technological advance more fairly. Hackers’ proselytization of free software, and free software, if you’re not aware, is it’s software that can be scrutinised, modified, built upon and shared without restriction, their proselytising of free software and their development of it has proven that commons-based production makes better code. That’s why free software has become the backbone of the digital world, of the internet and that this kind of production could actually inspire us to ultimately adopt this kind of code, as the basis of a new democratic commonwealth. Because the thing about code is that once it’s written, it can be reproduced at almost zero cost and used by everyone. So we could be looking at an entirely new kind of economy, in the future, if we were to embrace some of these hacker ideas and experiments.

And finally, hacker experiments could revolutionise democratic decision-making with algorithms that calibrate fairness, distribute influence, minimise resistance and optimise buy-in for different policy choices. In short, hackers could help Western democracies build economies that work for everyone, and methods of decision-making that give us the ability to reach consensus, something that we are sadly lacking now in our current politics. And as I write in the book, as important as this technical experimentation is that hackers are undertaking, they are also beginning to teach the rest of us what’s at stake in this emerging area. That is why privacy, transparency, data self-determination, net neutrality, common-space production and free software could be as important to a new age of democracy as the great organising principals fraternity, liberty and equality were to the Enlightenment era of democracy.

So, if you take stock of the burgeoning numbers of people attending progressive hacking events like the Chaos Computer Club’s congress in Germany each year, there were 4,000 in 2010, 16,000 in 2018, and the determination with which citizens have begun hacking their own democratic processes in many countries, you will see, as I have seen, that hacking is inspiring a whole new wave of democratic activism. Hacking is becoming not only a practice and an ethos, but a metaphor for a growing social movement in which ordinary citizens are taking the health of their democracies into their own hands. And you can see it in Italy, where the Cinque Stelle movement has – is using a hacker platform to effect a mixture of direct participatory and representative democracy.

In Spain, where a hacker collective called XNet, that I write about, has forced prosecutors there to bring nearly 100 Bankers and Politicians to trial for their role in the country’s financial crisis of 2018. And in numerous experiments with what people are calling ‘distributed democracy’, where they’re trying to distribute power, that citizens are trying around the globe with names like Liquid Democracy, CONSUL, Ethelo, Loomio, there’s numerous experiments going on. And I think that all of this is happening at a time when people’s faith in elites to govern has never been lower, and when people feel that reform, through traditional mechanisms, is out of sight. It makes sense. Just like the Peri populism that innovated universal healthcare in Canada, in my country, and in the US, during the Progressive Era, produced a sophisticated blueprint for replacing corrupt economic institutions there.

This digital populism is a good development, I feel. Not an ominous one. So, you know, of course, direct democracy, participatory democracy, self-organisation, shared leadership and direct action are all hallmarks of the hacker, the new, progressive hacker way. They’re not new ideas. But what hackers are showing us is how we can achieve an upgraded quality of democracy in our Western liberal democracies, with these and related ideas, employing digital tech, networks and a hacking ethic. So, when you think of the citizens who used their votes for Brexit and for Donald Trump in the last half of 2016, and those who might use it again for Trump in 2020, I think people – those voters felt that they didn’t have much more than those wrecking balls to change and finally demolish the old political economy. But if Western liberal democracies can be upgraded into the 21st Century, citizens will have more to work with. We’re going to need both technological and philosophical innovations. The new political economy has not yet been created. It’s still in a very nascent state. It hasn’t been fully theorised. But what you see, in the hacking experiments of the last decade, I argue, is a first cut of the project.

Joyce Hakmeh

Thank you very much, Maureen, for this very thought-provoking intervention about how hacktivism can actually play a bigger role in, you know, help build the societies that work for everyone. I thought that was very interesting. I mean, as you were talking, the first question that comes to mind is around governance. And you know, when you talk about hacking, trying to fix everything that is wrong with the world, in a way, along with the liberal democracies, what sort of – or governance mechanism do you envisage for such an approach? And who controls this power, and decides what should be public and what should be private and how do you go about achieving this?

Maureen Webb

Yes, it’s a very complex question, and it’s something that, as I delved into it, I began to appreciate how multi-layered it is. If you look just at the governance of the internet, it’s highly problematic. As you probably are aware, most of the technology, most of the companies, the important companies, are headquartered in the United States. There’s of course also a growing challenge by China, which is, you know, seeking to overtake the United States in the development of many of these technologies. But so much of the governance happens in the private sector, or in the United States and there’s been a – since the beginning of the internet, there have been organisations like the IETF – I’ve got to think of what their – the Internet Engineering Task Force…

Joyce Hakmeh

Engineering Task Force.

Maureen Webb

…yeah, ICANN, the Internet Consortium…

Joyce Hakmeh

And Cor – yeah, for Assigned Names, yeah.

Maureen Webb

…for Assigned Names and Numbers, and W3C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium and each of these are groups that run essentially by consensus, but it’s not as simple as that. Anyone can attend and contribute, and they have email working groups as well, but, practically speaking, it’s the large players and their representatives, the commercial players, that can afford to send people every year to these meetings. And also, they’ve been governed for years, you know, sort of, the public interest has been safeguarded for years by the pioneers of the internet, the guys that were – you know, invented the World-Wide Web, like Tim Berners-Lee and some of the others, who have been, you know, trying to guide the ethics of the development of the technology. But, you know, how is that going to hold up, as these people, you know, pass on, or pass on their influence to a younger generation, or, in fact, the commercial interests just completely take over? So, there’s been initiatives in the rest of the world.

There was the NETmundial Initiative in 2015, where some of the emerging economies came together and demanded a set of principles for governing the internet, that were more democratic, that gave other countries more power and more say. I understand that that largely fell apart, and then, if you think of it just on the level of the nation state and the globalised world, networks do not – they go across borders. These countries – sorry, these companies, these monopoly platform companies, they operate globally. They are – you know, their activities are either not taxed at all or not captured at all in national GDP. So, it’s highly complex, what the way forward is. And even if you’re thinking of, you know, trust laws being able to break up or regulate these companies, it’s extremely difficult.

Certainly the United States has not been enforcing their trust laws for many years. They have intentionally allowed the Silicon Valley companies to grow unregulated. There’s been some second thoughts about that, after we had the Cambridge Analytica and the, you know, activi – or the uses of Facebook, in the last American election, and the Brexit vote. But they’ve gone largely unregulated. Europe has tried to bring privacy laws and to fine these companies, but only the United States could truly break them up. And as people like Andrew Yang have – you know, the recent Presidential candidate in the United States, who ran as a tech-savvy candidate, has pointed out, these things are natural monopolies, you know, like telephone systems. So they’re not really amenable to trust-busting laws anyway. So that just gives you an idea of the multilayers that exist for governance, the governance problems that we’re facing.

Joyce Hakmeh

If I could just kind of quick follow-up just to kind of shed the light on another issue. So, you know, when you ask about what’s the legitimacy of this group, you get through the pattern of the complication within internet governance, and yes, these are organisations, but largely based on consensus, anyone can participate, etc. But we do understand the motivation of organisations like ICANN, IETF, etc. They have a stake in the internet infrastructure and the way the internet is actually working. What is the incentive for these hackers to make the world a better place? Because we do know that, as you said at the beginning, hacking is associated with, like, doing bad things and we know there are very – you know, people with very good skills doing very bad things. What is the motivation for these good people? Say we resolve the governance issue, to actually partake in this effort, and try and do, like, better work?

Maureen Webb

Well, you know, it’s a fascinating subculture. I discovered it, just starting this book. I heard that there was an important camp put on by the Chaos Communications – Chaos Computer Club, every four years, and it was the most important one in the hacker world. So I, you know, had two weeks to decide whether I was going to go, and I showed up with the tent and stayed there over the four days. You know, there is a – sort of an almost sweetly ingenuous quality to the culture. These people are highly idealistic. They have enormous skills. Many of them are – run their own consultancy companies, or they work for government, they work for – you know, they even – many of them work for Silicon Valley companies, and as it was described to me, it’s a complex landscape. It’s - even the Silicon Valley – like, companies like Facebook and Google, that, you know, increasingly we see doing bad things, they contribute money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They ascribe to a hacker ethos themselves. So, I would say that, in many ways, what you’ve seen is the evolution of the hacker scene.

It began in the 1950s, so I won’t go back that far. But, you know, in the 80s, with the hacker underground that, you know, a teenage Julian Assange was involved with, for example, and hackers in the United States, you had teenage kids that were just beginning to understand the power of computers and were experimenting and in a fairly frenetic way, were doing all kinds of things, without much political thought behind it. But that scene has matured into a growing number of people, who are committed to use their technological skills, at least in their spare time, to try to do very important things. So, one of the big projects right now of the hacker scene is to try to recapture or to build out a decentralised internet.

The internet was conceived as a decentralised interoperable network, but increasingly, it’s being captured and being subject to gatekeepers who are trying to capture the infrastructure for their own profit. And so one of the big projects is to see if they can rebuild a decentralised internet that, by design, would build in that neutrality. And this is – you know, the project is happening from – the Chaos Computer Club has a group that’s working on it, to Tim Berners-Lee and American luminaries, you know, who are working at higher levels, through institutions like MIT to try to build a new decentralised web.

Joyce Hakmeh

Thank you, Maureen. So we’ve got, like, a bunch of questions for you, and we have four minutes to go, so I’m going to try – if you can, if it’s possible to give, like, short answers, so we can go through as many questions as we can. I have a question here from Peter asking, “How would we recognise progressive hackers from those who wish to undermine democracy?” This is basically bad versus good guys, “And how would progressive hackers combat fake news?”

Maureen Webb

Okay. Well, how to recognise the difference? By their actions. I think that’s very plain and that’s certainly how hackers judge people: by their actions, not by their status. How are they battling fake news? Well, of course, through leaking platforms and there’s far more leaking platforms than just WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks inspired an enormous number of leaking platforms, including the one used by the Spanish group that I mentioned, XNet, and that allowed them to bring all those people to trial. There are a lot of discussions at places like the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, which is a progressive – they very much embrace the hacker way, where, you know, they’re looking at technical solutions for addressing fake news. But I think that the consensus among many people is that tech solutions are just not really going to suffice. If you have a fragile public space, really, you need human interventions. Technical ones could just lead to censorship by large companies like Google and Facebook, just adjusting their algorithms, and I think that’s the last thing that we want to see.

Joyce Hakmeh

Right. Another question from David. What role do governments have in working with hackers to realise some of these possibilities that you’ve described? And actually, and I want to add to that, who will drive this change?

Maureen Webb

Well, it’s interesting because the Chaos – people at the Chaos Computer Club have said that, you know, it’s like the large tech companies don’t have the incentives. The governments don’t seem to have the understanding. Like, you know, our leaders just don’t understand tech in more than a superficial way, and so it’s really fallen to hobbyists, who are the hackers, to try to propose and develop changes. And so in terms of governments, Europe has some really interesting links. So, for example, groups like Hermes in Italy are speaking with Italian parliamentarians about, you know, the use of, and the regulation of, black hat security companies like the Italian Hacking Club that sell their services to the worst authoritarian and totalitarian regimes around the world.

You have – the Chaos Computer Club, through a stunt, convinced the German and the Dutch Government to drop electronic voting. And at the Civil Liberties Committee level, in the European Union, they have been praised for their contribution to democracy. They’ve also testified in important constitutional cases against the use of Trojan technology. So, I think, as one of those committee members of the European Commission for Civil – on the Civil Liberties Committee has said, they have made a real contribution to the quality of the conversation about technology and society in Europe. And I think that that’s, you know, that’s really a model for how the government level can interact with a citizen-led movement.

Joyce Hakmeh

Right. We have five more minutes, actually. We’ve been extended for five more minutes, if that’s okay with you. And I’m asked for one more question, from – I think it’s from Esther, saying, “The hacking community is not a homogenous group and is not reflective of the wider population, which democracy seeks to serve. So, you may – what may look like accountability to one person may be unlawful to another. So how do we ensure that the accountability is being – hacked – is not being hacked, I think the purpose here, for the collective inclusive good?” So I guess the question is, “If they are meant to serve democracy, how can we make sure that they are actually representative and legitimate actors?”

Maureen Webb

Well, no civil society group is completely representative of the rest of us, right? So I would say that they’re part of civil society, and increasingly an important part of civil society. There is the critique that they’re mainly male and they’re mainly white male and Western male and that’s a problem. However, they’re increasingly working with other citizen groups, so that – I think that they are lending their technical expertise and those groups are having an effect on hacker culture. But just to, sort of, go – circle back to the question of how change might happen, the overarching thesis in my book – at the very end of the book, I spent some time in Boston to see what was happening at these elite institutions and how they were viewing hacker experiments and how they saw change coming about. And many of these Harvard and MIT Professors, they’re very interested now in systems theory. And I came to realise, over the course of writing the book, that it’s not that hackers are necessarily going to come up with a single silver bullet innovation that can turn things around, or even that we can convince a critical mass of people, politically, to embrace alternatives to some of the platform monopolies that suck our privacy and destroy our economies and our democracies. But rather that technology develops in leaps and starts. It’s not just the nature of the technology that determines what happens. It’s also chance. It’s culture. It’s some human agency and in systems theory there’s this, sort of, idea, I think it emerges out of chaos theory, that you have – these small changes in the macro can effect very large changes – sorry, in the micro, can effect very large changes in the macro. And that small things can trigger emergent effects. So that nobody would have ever thought that free software would have become the backbone of the digital world and the internet that it has become. So that’s why this experimentation is so important at this time, ‘cause we don’t know what twists and turns technology are going to take. But we need to be experimenting, because something that seems like it’s out on the margins now, could quickly become the norm that we embrace and that could change our political economy for the good.

Joyce Hakmeh

So maybe adopt a similar thinking or like the same way as in Silicon Valley? Just, like, do things and then you fix it along the way? But I think I like what you said about how you can incorporate that in the existing civil society infrastructure. Because that’s, sort of, like, it’s easier to conceive and to, kind of, think how this effort can be channelled. Maureen, when you talked in the beginning, I think that your comments were – or like the premise of the book, correct me if I’m wrong, is primarily target towards Western democracies. I wonder whether you’ve done any thinking on how hacking and this, sort of, like, ‘ethical hacking’ or whatever you want to call it, or ‘progressive hacking,’ can help developing countries as well? And countries not necessarily with liberal democracy, maybe countries with illiberal democracies that’s now at the time for this journey?

Maureen Webb

Well, I wanted to respect my own limits in writing this. I’m already traversing a huge number of disciplines, which are not my own. But I did strike tangentially on some of the territory of Third World countries. I think that the NETmundial Initiative that we talked about, that kind of an idea is a very important one and it might – I think it’s going to come back – you know, it’s going to resurface again where other countries start demanding that they have a say in the governance of cyberspace, which is so important to all aspects of human activity now.

I met hackers who had had grants to go and work in Chile, which was trying to develop a start-up and innovative – a culture of innovation, technology innovation, so that they had young people from around the world going, and many of them were hackers, to just develop this culture. Not necessarily to see things through to realisation and of course, there’s the example of the Arab Spring. Groups like Anonymous and some of the – you know, Julian Assange and others were very active in the Arab Spring, and it was people in those countries that spearheaded some of the actions. They had been involved in digital rights issues previously. They had been loosely affiliated with hacker groups and yeah, so there was concerted action by hackers to support them during that important time.

Joyce Hakmeh

Thank you very much, Maureen. I have, you know, many, many more questions, but unfortunately, our time is up and I’d like to apologise for the members, who had questions, which we couldn’t answer. A topic like this obviously merits more, like, you know, like a longer conversation. It’s a very interesting premise, and something to think about. And I think, you know, in the age of technology and its intersection with our daily lives, especially in a time like this, where we’re all extremely reliant on technology, and we will continue to be, even in normal times, it’s always interesting to think outside the box, and think about how we evolve the roles of different stakeholders, and how can we contribute to building societies that work for everyone?

Thank you very much, Maureen, for your time. It has been really a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you for the members who joined us online. We – I’d like to conclude the meeting now and ask you all to stay healthy and safe and hopefully, we’ll see you soon, either virtually or face-to-face. Thank you very much, and have a very good evening.