Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace Read Free

criticized for only following horse races – elections, scandals, and so on – and for giving scant treatment to deep, difficult issues. Regarding cyberspace governance and security, I have actually found that mainstream outlets like the
New York Times, Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal
, and others, have done, all things being equal, solid reporting and have been receptive to Citizen Lab investigations and reports. Even though the conceit in much of cyberspace is that media “organs of the establishment” are beholden to special interests and their advertisers, I have not found this to necessarily be the case. The more important matter is that if these issues are out there, reported on in the mainstream press, why are so few people paying attention?)

INTRODUCTION
Cyberspace: Free, Restricted, Unavoidable
    Look around you. Do you see anyone peering into their smartphone? How many times have you checked your email today? Have you searched for a wifi café to do so? How many people have you texted? Maybe you’re a contrarian, don’t own a smartphone. You find all this “connectivity” to be a social menace that isolates people from the world around them, as they stare endlessly into the glow of their computer screens, or engage in loud conversations with invisible others as they walk down the street gesticulating. If your date answers that cellphone call all is lost, you think. The digital revolution is not all that it’s cracked up to be, you say, and you resist it.
    Good luck with that.
    Even those of you who resist or fear cyberspace sense that we are in the midst of an onslaught. And we are! You resist initially because it is drawing you in, inevitably. Whether you like it or not, to remain part of civil society you have to deal with it. Cyberspace is everywhere. By the end of 2012 there were more mobile devices on the planet than people: cellphones, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles, even Internet-connected cars. Some estimates put the number of Internet-connected devices now at 10 billion. Cyberspace has become what researchers call a “totally immersive environment,” a phenomenon that cannot be avoided or ignored, increasingly embedded in societies rich and poor,a communications arena that does not discriminate.Connectivity in Africa, for instance, grows at some 2,000 percent a year. While the digital divide remains deep, it’s shrinking fast, and access to cyberspace is growing much faster than good governance over it. Indeed, in many regions rapid connectivity is taking place in a context of chronic underemployment, disease, malnutrition, environmental stress, and failed or failing states.
    Cyberspace is now an unavoidable reality that wraps our planet in a complex information and communications skin. It shapes our actions and choices and relentlessly drives us all closer together, drives us even towards those whom, all things being equal, we would rather keep at a distance. A shared space, a global commons, the public square writ large. You’ve heard all the ecstatic metaphors used by enthusiasts and your thoughts turn elsewhere. “Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in
No Exit
, and now teeming billions of them are potentially in your living room, or at least in your email inbox, that silent assassin. You cherish your privacy.
    Of course, there have been previous revolutions in communications technology that have upset the order of things and caused outrage and celebration. The alphabet, the invention of writing, the development of the printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television come to mind. But one of the many things that distinguishes cyberspace is the speed by which it has spread (and continues to spread). Those other technological innovations no doubt changed societies but in an “immersive” sense only over many generations, and more locally than not. Cyberspace, on the other hand, has connected two-thirds of the world – has joined, that is, more than 4 billion