Big Brother is Watching You

In a book that is as telling as it is easy to read, Harris tells us a chilling story of the war that built the internet. Harris, whose craft has been perfected over decades of writing about the nexus of politics and digital technologies, performs the labour of making the connections between innocuous cultural practices on the web and the dire and sinister nature of both, hardware and software infrastructure that underrides it all.

What is extraordinary about Harris’ writing is that he is not a panic-monger. The book is filled with things that should make us scared — the technical back-doors that governments have used to spy on each other and their own citizens, the complex mechanisms of hyper- linking and hopping, revolutions for IP tracing and de-anonymisation, the unforgiving and unforgetting nature of encrypted data, the sorry fate of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, all get told with great clarity and attention to technological and individual details. And yet, Harris is able to show the seductive, tempting, dark side of power that allows for these practices and continue to attract people, states and markets to support them.

The book’s primary purpose is to dismantle the myth of a happy internet and show how corporate, state, and military interests converge to produce the most precarious citizen ever. Drawing from stories that are available in the public domain, conversations with anonymised sources that have played invisible but significant roles in the building of the military complex of the internet, and revealing data that he makes legible, Harris tells us the history of surveillance, espionage, murder, defence, war and the cyber-war that the USA is waging against the world and with itself.

Located firmly in the American landscape, Harris also shows us the darker side of innovation and development, by looking at the nexus of software companies like Google and Facebook, of hardware and service providers of telecommunication like Apple and Microsoft, educational institutions like MIT and Stanford, and the United States government in creating technologies that intrude, pry, chase, track, punish and kill the perceived enemies. These enemies are not always on foreign shores, though, and in the story of The Onion Router — TOR Project — that allows people to escape detection in their internet transaction, Harris is quick to point out that the line between
criminal and state commissioned hackers is also quite thin. In a wry humorous tone that marks the book, Harris notes how the USA now has a completely contradictory policy where it seeks to prop up and completely destroy TOR!

Perhaps the most convincing argument of the book is that the technologies we use to share picture of cute cats, are actually developed to wage war. He reconstructs the history of tracking and spying networks that the US built in order to bolster its global war against terror and its military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He dramatically narrates the series of attacks and counter-attacks between USA and China, each hiring an army of hackers who work at finding spots of vulnerability and go for the kill. He reminds us that the battles over file sharing and intellectual property rights are not just about the cultural industries but a part of the larger cyber-war that is being orchestrated in the deepest recesses of the internet. He shows how Edward Snowden becomes Public Enemy No. 1 because of the USA’s longer history of dealing with imagined Islamist terrorists and suspected Chinese hackers — what he calls the Advanced Persistent Threat. Snowden, then, became a problem, not because he leaked the information, but because he breached a system that was purportedly designed to keep high-tech attackers at bay and was compromised by a 29-year-old contractor.

To make things more dire, Harris shows us that this is not a simple war with allies and enemies, because when it comes to the digital battleground, the closest partners are still suspect and if they can be spied upon and attacked, they will be. On the internet, nobody might know if you are a dog, but it is definitely a dog-eat-dog world out there. So the US will also spy on the Mexican president, one of its closest allies in the war against drugs, to make sure that he is walking the line that he is talking. The book is peppered with anecdotes like this, written in a matter-of-fact but engaging tone, and what Harris lacks in drama, he makes up for in his intimate knowledge with the mindboggling world of acronyms and institutions that mark the making of the internet as a military network.

@War makes a convincing and persuasive argument that to be online is to be at war, and that everything that we do, in the world of quantified subjects, will be used against us, if it can be. From hackers stealing our data, to corporations mining our information creating probabilistic profiles and crime indexes; from governments suspending fundamental civic rights in the quest of defending territory to individuals who exploit our human and technological vulnerabilities to frame us for crimes that we cannot even imagine, the internet is a scary place. Reading Harris suddenly makes you look at your laptop with suspicion, puts you off your stroke in playing the social media game of choice, and takes away some of the joy of watching videos of unusual animal friendships. However, that is the exact purpose of the book — to remind us what happens behind the easy clicks and pinches of our digital interfaces, and of the rising military complex that monitors our online interactions.

Nishant Shah is director (research), Centre for Internet and Society, New Delhi