Category Archives: International relations and power politics

International relations and power politics

Violence, content moderation, and IR

Interesting article by James Vincent in The Verge about a decision by Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube to shut down a university webinar over fears of disseminating opinions advocating violence “carried out by […] criminal or terrorist organizations”. The case is strategically placed at the intersection of several recent trends.

On the one hand, de-platforming as a means of struggle to express outrage at the views of an invited speaker is a tactic that has been used often, especially on college campuses, even before the beginning of the pandemic and for in-person events. However, it appears that the pressure in this specific case was brought to bear by external organizations and lobby groups, without a visible grassroots presence within the higher education institution in question, San Francisco State University. Moreover, such pressure was exerted by means of threats of legal liability not against SFSU, but rather targeting the third-party, commercial platforms enabling diffusion of the event, which was to be held as a remote-only webinar for epidemiological concerns. Therefore, the university’s decision to organize the event was thwarted not by the pressure of an in-person crowd and the risk of public disturbances, but by the choice of a separate, independent actor, imposing external limitations derived from its own Terms of Service, when faced with potential litigation.

The host losing agency to the platform is not the only story these events tell, though. It is not coincidental that the case involves the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, and that the de-platformed individual was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who participated in two plane hijackings in 1969-70. The transferral of an academic discussion to an online forum short-circuited the ability academic communities have traditionally enjoyed to re-frame discussions on all topics –even dangerous, taboo, or divisive ones– as being about analyzing and discussing, not about advocating and perpetrating. At the same time, post-9/11 norms and attitudes in the US have applied a criminal lens to actions and events that in their historical context represented moves in an ideological and geopolitical struggle. Such a transformation may represent a shift in the pursuit of the United States’ national interest, but what is striking about this case is that a choice made at a geo-strategic, Great Power level produces unmediated consequences for the opinions and rights of expression of individual citizens and organizations.

This aspect in turn ties in to the debate on the legitimacy grounds of platform content moderation policies: the aspiration may well be to couch such policies in universalist terms, and even take international human rights law as a framework or a model; however, in practice common moral prescriptions against violence scale poorly from the level of individuals in civil society to that of power politics and international relations, while the content moderation norms of the platforms are immersed in a State-controlled legal setting which, far from being neutral, is decisively shaped by their ideological and strategic preferences.

International relations and power politics

Surveillance acquiescence conundrum

Politico.eu recently ran an interview with Ciaran Martin, the outgoing chief of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. In it, Martin raises the alarm against Chinese attempts at massive data harvesting in the West (specifically in regard to the development of AI). This issue naturally dovetails with the US debate on the banning of TikTok. Herein lies the problem. Both national security agencies and major social media companies have endeavored to normalize perceptions of industrial data collection and surveillance over the past decade or two: that public opinion might be desensitized to the threat posed by foreign actors with access to similar data troves is therefore not surprising. The real challenge in repurposing a Cold War mentality for competition with China in the cyber domain today, in other words, is not so much a lag in Western –especially European– ICT innovation (Martin is himself slipping into a pantouflage position with a tech venture capital firm): it is a lack of urgency, of political will in the society at large, an apathy bred in part of acquiescence in surveillance capitalism.

International relations and power politics

Cyberwarfare articles

A couple of scholarly articles read today on cyberwarfare. The first, a long piece by James Shires in the Texas National Security Review, speaks to a long-term thread of interest for me, namely the (imperfect) mapping of real-world alliances with operations in the cyber domain: the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, although strategic partners of the US in the Gulf region, nonetheless targeted Hack-and-leak (HLO) operations at the US.

Shires underscores the patina of authenticity that leaks hold, and does a good job of showing how HLOs connect them with Bruce Schneier’s concept of “organizational doxxing”. In describing these HLOs as “simulations of scandal “, he leverages theoretical understandings of the phenomenon such as that of Jean Baudrillard. Standards of truth emerge as a major object of manipulation, but the key stake is whether the public will focus on the hack or the leak as the essence of the story.

The second article, by Kristen Eichensehr at justsecurity.org, reflects on the technical and legal process of attribution of cyberattacks. It argues in favor of the creation of a norm of customary international law obliging States to provide evidence when they attribute acts of cyberwarfare to a State or non-State actor. How to guarantee the credibility of the evidence and of the entity providing it (whether a centralized international body, a government agency, or a think-tank, academic institution, or private company) remains somewhat vague under her proposal.