The End Of Freedom In Cyberspace? By Former UN Inspector Petru Dumitriu

Our diplomacy Instructor, the former inspector of UN is speaking wisdom here about internet governance, as countries negotiate the Global Digital Compact to adopt in 2 weeks at Summit of The Future!

• This provocative article is written by our awesome multilateral diplomacy teacher & friend Petru Dumitriu who has gone out of his way to contact and encourage us to continue to pursue what he calls our ‘noble civil combat’ : )

• Ambassador Petru Dumitriu is a Romanian diplomat who joined the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) of the United Nations system in 2016 as Inspector, elected by the General Assembly. He earned his doctorate with a thesis on United Nations reform.

• Mr. Petru Dumitriu’s professional experience spans the fields of diplomacy, multilateral affairs, human rights, foreign trade, international economic cooperation, teaching and research.

• Within the Joint Inspection Unit, Inspector Dumitriu has led 5 system-wide reports on policies and platforms in support of learning, policy research strengthening in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, private sector partnership arrangements, and knowledge management in the United Nations system, and co-authored one review on cloud computing services management.

• Petru was one of three Inspectors leaving the Unit in December 2020: Yes, JUST DAYS before the harmful non vaccines that would fail normal rules of procurement were rolled out globally under the ‘UN Global Marketplace’, December 2020 marked the departure of Ms. Aicha Afifi (Morocco), Mr. Petru Dumitriu (Romania) and Mr. Jeremiah Kramer (Canada), who served the Joint Inspections Unit for a five-year term since 2016.

• In January 2021, just in time for the WHO authorized non vaccine procurement frenzy and rollout, three new Inspectors joined the Joint Inspection Unit for a 5-year term: Mr. Jesús Miranda Hita (Spain), Mr. Victor Moraru (Republic of Moldova) and Mr. Tesfa Alem Seyoum (Eritrea). (THEY ARE CURRENT UN INSPECTORS - SO NOW YOU KNOW)

The end of freedom in cyberspace?

Published on 07 September 2024

Author Petru Dumitriu, former UN Inspections and IOJ’s mentor and multilateral diplomacy teacher (we passed!)

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Foreword

This text is not a reply to the blog article of Jovan Kurbalija entitled “Durov and X-Brazil cases: The end of the illusion of cyberspace?”, published on 31 August 2024. It is, however, inspired by that thought-provoking article.

Jovan’s article is an ominous statement backed by judicious arguments. As I cannot contradict it on its substance, my choice is to make its outcry worse.

“The starry heavens above me…

At its origins, internet freedom was indeed associated with the perception of non-territoriality. People have been offered images with the information packets finding freely their way to the destination. Beautiful representations, indeed! Genuine abstract artwork, where one cannot see borders, territories, servers, governments, traders, or sharks. We feel quite comfortable in the illusion of freedom in cyberspace.

Visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet (Reddit).

Routers moving packets according to various protocols (Medium).

This illusion was tolerated and cultivated by the United States as long as it had full control over the governance leverage, attribution of domain names, and other responsibilities of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), through the Department of Commerce. 

The illusion of freedom in cyberspace was indeed scintillating like a constellation. 

The first blow to the ideal of freedom was the commercialization of the Internet. Normally, we should have realized instantly that once the profit hunters find ways to monetize the use of the Internet, the freedom would be limited to purchasing.

Back to Earth

Now, with the emergence of other Internet powers, countries, companies, and egocentric individuals, doubled by the clash of political and commercial interests, we have reasons to move from the utopian vision of the Internet to a rather dystopian vision of the same. 

The freedom of information on the Internet acquired a geopolitical dimension. The participants in the preparation of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, 2003) might remember that the first embryo of the now famous BRICS alliance became manifest around the issue of the internet governance and the US control of addresses, domain names and protocols.

Snowden and Assange were the collateral victims of the new phase. Now, many not so naïve people believe that Pavel Durov was arrested for no other reason than finding a way to coerce Telegram to disclose information on its users to the intelligence services of the West, turning a blind eye to some principles, otherwise widely agreed.

For a while, the issue of territoriality was somehow neglected. People got blinded by the perception of communication without borders, although they knew that there were cables and routers with a very physical presence. Personally, I found out how deeply the illusion of freedom penetrated the United Nations reality when I worked for the report of the UN Joint Inspection Unit on cloud computing. People really had their heads in the clouds forgetting that the servers are robustly planted on Earth, on the inviolable territories of sovereign states that could close, occupy, bomb, cut the electricity, take control of any server.

At the time of the WSIS, we started to see the limits of that illusion when participants concluded that laws that govern the physical space are valid for cyberspace. The ways and means to deal with that new reality were not the same, but the crimes and abuses were. Maybe, worse, the criminals enjoyed more freedom in cyberspace than in the physical one. The hate speech, the organized crime, pedophilia, and fake news have never been so facilitated in the history of humanity.

Also, much to its credit, the United Nations translated the abstractions of cyberspace into calls for action for the use of ICTs in service of development and a plethora of e-activities in the documents adopted by WSIS in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). The paragraph 6 of the Geneva Plan of Action is clearly all about territoriality. 

There was an overestimation of the potential of new technologies, but at least the international community added a collective imperative to the dynamics of the IT industries, whose power and means have increased exponentially, often to the detriment of global public good. This propensity of the United Nations to inflate the expectations that digital technologies would help the various agendas for development and “bridging the digital divide” remain constant and, yet, wishful thinking, despite stubborn facts. The recent speech of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on artificial intelligence seems a copy-paste version of past statements on other technology hypes. 

For those who recognize the famous quotation from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, inserted as headlines, I have an excuse. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. The worldly objects can be intuited a priori and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality.

A priori knowledge is independent of experience. A posteriori knowledge is acquired through experience. I suspect that if we use Kant’s dichotomy to assess our relationship with technologies like artificial intelligence, we may discover that our knowledge is in deficit on both angles of the reasoning. Notable exception: science-fiction writers.

… and the moral law within us”

As technology seems to have endless means but no conscience, the moral sense of its use remains entirely the responsibility of human beings. Yet, in practice, moral and ethical considerations do not precede or condition any of the new digital tools. They are just launched in both cyberspace and physical space and adopted by us instantly, with blind enthusiasm. We’ll see the consequences later! Seize the moment! We are not just one sorcerer’s apprentice, we are millions.

The concern for ethics and the protection of human rights has a prominent presence in the manifestos of the United Nations.

However, what do we see if we look beyond the official pronouncements? The so-called progress in the development of digital technology produces, as collateral damage, a terrible regression on basic freedoms. 

On the one hand, in the name of cybersecurity, the governments propose more limitations, restrictions, and control over private lives. The human rights fundamental concept was to protect the individual against abuses committed in the name of the raison d’État. Now, the new master in town is cybersecurity. Only this time we give up our freedom willingly.

If the privacy of correspondence was protected by law almost everywhere in democratic countries, except for the war situations and military censorship, now our messages on the Internet can be visited at any moment in times of peace by unknown visitors, private or official. In the non-digital past, we were the only ones in possession of our passports or ID cards.

Now, personal information is stored by multiple vendors and public institutions. We will end up living like fish in aquariums exposed to many. The presumption of innocence does not work. We are all potential terrorists or foreign agents, so we should show our underwear to a benevolent Big Brother.

On the other hand, individuals all over the world are conceding voluntarily, in exchange of service facilitation, elements of their personal identity, privacy, freedom of movement, free reasoning, personal choices etc. We are no longer sheltered under the roof and between the walls of our houses but surrounded by tens of pins and codes. We pay a high price in terms of freedom in exchange of relative comfort. 

With the further advance of activities in cyberspace, freedom, as we know it, will be an illusion. There is no escape from cyberspace, particularly when we open the door to the intrusion of digital technologies. The whole personal life, including profession, business, leisure, shopping, and banking, is already squeezed into a small phone, which will be literally smarter than many of their users. Our identity is lost in fragments spread out in the servers of all vendors worldwide, seemingly protected by passwords, not safer than metallic locks.

As one character in a play by the Spanish playwriter Antonio Buero Vallejo, predicted in 1974: we must be very intelligent to realize that we live in a prison.

Therefore, I fully agree with the message of Jovan’s article. With one caveat. I do not agree with his outcry, “There is no cyberspace!”. The cyberspace does and will exist, with cyberwars, cybercrime, cyberlife, and cyberdeath. Cyberspace will exist like the airspace or outer space. And the competition to conquer this space will not chase illusions but seek power. Power is real.

The end of illusion, yes! As far as I feel, I propose a different outcry from the one of Jovan: “The end of freedom in cyberspace?”

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If you haven’t signed IoJ’s Demand to STOP the United Nations Convention against cybercrime, read all about it and sign below

- Unless you want digital slavery?

Link: http://stopglobalcensorship.org/uncybercrimetreaty

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