Resisting Digital Authoritarianism

Highlights/Executive summary

This policy brief explains (a) why public institutions urgently must promote a rights-based approach to the Internet, (b) what crucial steps they have to take to make the Internet a technology of empowerment rather than repression, and (c) why NGOs and activists should lobby public institutions not to be tempted to abuse the power of the Internet. This brief suggests that public institutions

• Promote an empowering Internet by recognising a human right to freely access and use the Internet.

Essential implications of respecting and promoting such a new right would entail:

• Avoid sacrificing freedoms for security.
• Respect citizens’ privacy/Protecting Internet user anonymity and encryption.
• Enact a moratorium on human-rights violating spyware.

Who is this for?

This policy brief is aimed at policymakers, third sector organisation, and activists who want to promote a version of the Internet that is based on empowering people and respect for their human rights.

Introduction

Like all technologies, the Internet is a two-edged sword that can be used to enhance or undermine well-being and human rights. Autocratic regimes use the Internet for their purposes as a powerful repression technology. Governments in e.g. Russia and China use the Internet to monitor, silence, manipulate, and misinform their subjects (Freedom House 2018). Prosecuting dissent voiced online, blacklisting websites, the Great Firewall of China (Roberts 2018), and Chinese social credit scores are all examples how the Internet is used to oppress, and how people’s exercise of their human rights online is used against them by autocratic regimes. Democratic governments, too, have succumbed to temptations to misuse the Internet’s power to transmit and preserve information for their own purposes (e.g. national defence, disadvantaging political opponents). But it is only if democracies guarantee and promote the free use of the Internet that they can rescue it from being the worst technological tool against human rights, freedom, and democracy (Reglitz 2024).

Recommendation

Promote an empowering Internet by recognising a human right to freely access and use the Internet:

• The Internet is an unprecedented tool for exercising human rights and for promoting “progress of humankind as a whole” (UN 2011: 19). But it can only do so if it is not itself used as a tool for undermining human rights.
• Rights are the most effective social guarantees for protecting our fundamental moral interests. Considering the Internet’s potential for using and for undermining our existing human rights, public institutions should recognise a new human right that guarantees access to, and the free use of, the Internet (Reglitz 2024).

To not arbitrarily interfere with legitimate uses of the Internet, public institutions must 

1. Avoid sacrificing freedoms for security:

• Practices of indiscriminate mass online surveillance for the sake of national security as revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 are anathema to a human-rights based approach to the Internet. They fail the established 3-step test for legitimately transgressions against rights e. that such interference must be (1) provided by law, (2) be necessary, minimal, and proportionate, (3) and done for justifiable purposes.
• Indiscriminate and unchecked interferences with human rights online is only justifiable theoretically to prevent the worst possible threats (e.g. institutional or societal collapse). Respect for free access to/use of the Internet must be the default for public authorities.

How? To make actions such as the surveillance of online activities of individuals compatible with free Internet access and use as well as human rights, public institutions require case-by-case authorisation from independent institutions such as courts.

2. Respect citizens’ privacy:

• National and public security agencies of democratic governments have repeatedly pressured providers of online communication services and social media platforms to construct and share with government agencies ‘backdoors’ to communication channels of their users.
• Anonymity and privacy have always been key to the secure exercise of people’s agency and rights. The actions of Internet users, though, are easily identifiable and recordable by those who operate Internet platforms and other online services.

How? To respect citizens’ agency, privacy and other human rights online, public institutions therefore must generally protect, rather than trying to undermine, Internet users’ ability to encrypt and otherwise anonymise specific online activities (e.g. search and browser histories) and communications (e.g. email and messaging services).

3. Enact a moratorium on the sale of human rights-violating digital tech:

• Spyware such as Pegasus are not only gifts to autocrats. They have also been employed by democratic governments and their security agencies to spy on dissenters and political opponents. Spyware also has become a lucrative commodity marketed internationally.

How? Domestically, the use of spyware by democratic institutions has to comply with the 3-step test outlined above to be legitimate. Internationally, democracies cannot support a human rights-based version of the Internet if they permit the sale of spyware to those likely to use it to violate human rights.

Permissions to export spyware must be (like that of other weapons) controlled by democracies and permitted only in exceptional cases if there is sufficient certainty the technology will not be used illegitimately to violate human rights.

Key Insights/Takeaways

A human right to freely access and use the Internet is needed to ensure it is a technology for the progress of humankind.

• Only if Internet access and use are free from arbitrary interferences can we prevent the Internet from being a repression technology.
• Autocrats whose rule is hindered by human rights have discovered the Internet as a uniquely powerful and fine-grained tool of oppression and manipulation.
• Their vision and use of the Internet is tempting for many governments around the world and a human rights-based approach to the Internet presents the only positive alternative.

A human rights-based approach to the Internet requires that democracies respect human rights online.

• This involves compliance with the 3-step test for legitimately interfering with human rights online (such as privacy) on a case-by-case basis.
• Internet user anonymity and the encryption of online communications are essential for the protection of human rights online and must not generally be made impossible.
• Spyware presents a new powerful weapon for violating human rights if it is used without proper authorisation and control. Exporting of such technology must be an exception and not generally acquirable commodity.

Further readings and references

• Merten Reglitz. 2024. Free Internet Access as a Human Right (Cambridge University Press).
• E. Roberts. 2018. Censored. Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press).
• Freedom House. 2018. Freedom of the Net 2018. The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism.
• 2011. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank LaRue

Contact:

Dr Merten Reglitz/ Associate Professor/ Department of Philosophy/ University of Birmingham /

m.reglitz@bham.ac.uk.