On the Information Imperialism Occasion: Cultivation of the Internet Wilderness

Dreiling 1

On the Information Imperialism Occasion: Cultivation of the Internet Wilderness

Imperialism ... With the best intentions
Our nations built ... On ruthless expansion

-- MDFKM “Amerikan Dream”

Francis Bacon, the famous British philosopher, proclaimed emphatically “Knowledge is power” [1]. Bacon’s simple quote has arguably greater significance currently than during the enlightenment period when the quote was first coined. With the creation and widespread acceptance of the Internet, information -- and thus knowledge -- is being disseminated more rapidly than ever before. This prevalent acceptance of the Internet has been troubling the United States’ government since most of its statutes and regulations do not apply to this revolutionary medium. Its laws are blind to the Internet; consequentially the United States has little power over this medium. In recognizing the deficiencies of current laws the United States has embarked on an imperial project to sequentially understand and identify the Internet’s framework, create regulability of this framework, and thus control the Internet.

Information and the access to information has always been the predominate vehicle to acquire knowledge. When an individual is privileged with a plethora of information the chance for greater acquisition of knowledge is feasible. Access to information was increased with the revolution of the Internet and an information society. The Internet Software Consortium noted, in a 2000 study, that over 72 million computers from more than 220 countries were connected to the Internet [2]. In the early 1990’s the Internet was relatively unknown military based framework and has now transformed into a massive global phenomenon. Even more startling is access to this information is as simple as a phone line and a modem. Regardless of the subject, it is possible to find any a bevy of material on the Internet. Libraries, schools, universities, corporations, and governments are no longer the sole providers of knowledge. Unlike these other sources, the Internet is without boundaries and sees no distinction between nationalities, genders, races, and religions. This chaotic nature of the Internet is part of its grandeur. Simple web pages expanded into graphical web sites, yet they led the way to a full multimedia emersion on the World Wide Web. Its shape, its form, its ontological conditions are constantly changing; there is no set picture of the Internet. What the Internet could become is limited only by the imagination of the people that are using and developing this medium. That is unless the government seizes control and tries to end this blissful chaos and regulate this picture of the Internet.

Although individual and societal recognition of the Internet is growing without limitation, governmental response to the new issues created as a result of the Internet is not as expedient. One reason is simply the spread of the Internet compared to the policy making process of the United States. No other communication medium in history has developed at the rate of the Internet. According to the International Telecommunications Union, the Internet took a mere four years to reach fifty million users. In contrast, television took thirteen years, radio took thirty-eight, and telephone took seventy-four years to reach the same density that the Internet gained in four short years [3]. Observing this rampant intensification of the Internet on people’s lives, the economy, and the society in general the government was faced with new problems of copyright infringements, privacy issues, search and seizure dilemmas, decency standards, accessibility concerns, and regulabilty problems. These problems occurred because current law did not ever assume a structure such as the Internet. This configuration of networked computers was unlike anything imaginable and laws where not written for it. The foreignness of Internet structure lead to fear that the Internet could become something that the United States, in its best interest, would not want. The United States had no way to control these perceived problems and thus have attempted to start regulating the Internet. Some of these regulations have had success, and others have failed, nevertheless, with more understanding the Internet becoming less foreign more laws were conceived and this revolutionary structure’s identity is becoming more Americanized.

Questioning the effectiveness of status quo policies, the United States set out to solve these problems under the guise of over exuberant American imperialism. Although international in nature, the Internet was undoubtedly “American” in the eyes of the United States. The Nua Internet Surveys statistically prove their assertion as seventy-one percent of the Internet population comes from the “West” -- Canada, United States, and Europe [4]. Thus, since the majority of the Internet’s use was by as westernized nations, the United States felt it needed to solve the problem inherent to the Internet for the good of the world. Furthermore, without a solid understanding and policy stance -- thus control -- of the Internet framework the United States considerd the Internet as unknown, primitive, and a disorderly anarchic system [5]. Without understanding and control of the Internet the United States has no governmental recourse to attempt to shape the form of the Internet into something pleasing to United States convictions and pedagogies.

The foundation of this information imperialism -- or any imperialism -- is simple: total control. Martin Heidegger agrees with this assessment of imperialism when he contends:

In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man (sic), the subjectivism of man (sic) attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., technological, rule over the earth. [6]

As stated above, America is in the midst of an information imperialism project, a project that is attempting to gain complete rule over the Internet and establish the “Americanized” organization on the international medium. If this American rule of the Internet is fully established the United States would be able to control the form and shape that the Internet is and could become.

Within this project there are three distinct steps that can be observed. The first step of this project is the governments gaining of knowledge and understanding and therefore identifying the Internet. The second step is the creation of a regulable Internet in which the United States can usurp control over the denizens of the Internet. The final step is the finalization and complete control of the Internet framework. As you will see in the preceding pages, the information imperialism project is well into the second stage, and we as the users of the Internet must never allow a completely regulated Internet.

The first realization that the United States saw in this new “Age of Information” was that laws accepted universally here could not be applied to the Internet. For example, as Patricia Aufderheide states, “when the 1934 Communications Act passed, no one had a TV set, or a cordless phone, or a computer” [7]. Also, copyright statute was never concerned with electronic and digital transmission and distribution with perfect quality and replication. As a result, the United States realized that the Internet was completely foreign and even though the judicial system attempted to cross apply current laws to this new internet occasion there too many loopholes since these laws never assumed this application. This difference between the Internet and the current legal system challenged the United States to attempt to make the system understandable, and to attempt to control it.

Philosophically, this foreignness of a new place, structure, or idea is nothing novel. This foreign condition is, what I will call, the “Other”. The Other in the case of the Internet occasion is what is foreign, not understandable, and different. The Other has a diametrically opposite viewpoint to coincide with it. The known with unknown, domestic with foreign, and same with different. Almost everything is defined with this point/counterpoint structure: man and woman, black and white, east and west, first world and third world. In each of these cases one term is privileged, looked at as superior, to the its opposite. So the structure of the examples given above should be known over unknown, man over woman, west over east, and so on. The oppositional way of looking at the world is what constructs the Other [8]. The Other is inferior to the favored. Looking in through the gaze of “Otherization” -- binary opposition -- is rooted in western thought and a critical component of western imperial practice. As William Spanos argues this point:

This binary logic, in other words, empowers the privileged term to represent the Other as nonbeing, as some kind of arbitrary threat to Being – the benign total order to which the first term is committed – and thus to subdue and appropriate this Other to the latter’s essential truth. It is in this sense that one can say that Western metaphysical thinking is essentially a colonialism. [9]

What justifies conquest is that the “other” is perceived as second-rate and thus needs to be reformed and changed into the mold of the privileged viewpoints. Since the Internet has this difference (the Internet is the “other”) to standard conceptualization of being, the Internet, in turn, can and should be overtaken, changed, dominated in American imperialist logic.

After the identification and the Otherization of the Internet occurred the United States could justify a colonialism of the space known as the Internet. One of the inherent problems that needed to be solved was the notion that the United States knew very little about what was a occurring on the battlefield of the Internet. Data was being transmitted from country to country sometimes encrypted, property was illegally copied and sold, and the widespread access to questionable and obscene material were all systemic problems on the Internet. With each of these issues, the solutions set forth by the United States show the heart of a massive imperialist project for the colonialization of the Internet.

The common theme for this second phase of the information imperialist occasion is rooted in Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, a circular prison in which the cells line the periphery with a guard tower at the center of the circle that can see into the cells at any time. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault studies the way that the seemingly passive act of observing the prisoners actually exerts what he calls disciplinary power: the prisoners behave in the way that the guards want them to because they know that the guards are always potentially watching them. Foucault then applies the idea of the Panopticon to a generic conceptualization of power by stating:

The Panopticon … must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (sic) … it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical systems: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. [10]

The Panopticon of the Internet occasion are the governmental laws used “to ‘civilize’ the ‘deviant’ peoples of the other ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘underdeveloped’ worlds” [11]. The other world in this discussion is the Internet. Taking Bacon’s quote to it furthest level, if the government knows everything that is going on with the Internet then there could be total control over of the medium. This legal panoptic gaze looks down upon all the Internet’s users and attempts to control their actions because the government might be watching them, thus fulfilling Foucault’s ideas that just the threat of surveillance can chill actions of people.

The legal Panopticon of the Internet occasion can be observed in four distinct and pragmatic policies that have been proposed and/or passed in the last few years. Each regulation shows a conspicuous argument linking the motives of each policy to the imperial project. Also, each regulation -- step -- provides a startling reminder of the chilling effects caused by the all seeing panoptic eye. The steps in this information conquest include the gathering, maintaining access, protection and regulation of information. This process can be equated to the cultivation of a barren wilderness. The map of the wilderness is made, steps are made to ensure special access of this wilderness to the people controlling it, and finally there are rules and laws established for the improvement of the wilderness. At the end of the process there is no longer a wilderness. The once uncultivated domain has been transformed into a civilized land, the unknown terrain now has an identity, and land once worth nothing now has material worth. In each of the regulatory steps it is possible to see the information wilderness beginning to sow the seeds of American exceptional expansionism.

The first step to cultivate the Internet wilderness is to map out the unknown wilderness and see what the inhabitants are doing. The virtual mapping of the Internet is done with an FBI device named “Carnivore”. The FBI itself describes Carnivore as a device that “provides the FBI with a ‘surgical’ ability to intercept and collect the communications which are the subject of the lawful order” [12]. So basically, carnivore is the extension of wiretapping laws to the Internet. As the ACLU warns, “unlike the operation of a traditional ... wiretap of a conventional phone line, Carnivore gives the FBI access to all traffic over the ISP's network, not just the communications to or from a particular target” [13]. Regardless of weather or not the government is using all this data, or even keeping it all, the amount of information to be gained from this tool is limitless, since Carnivore’s technical potential includes the recording every transaction that takes place at the Internet Service Provider in question. The government knows whom you communicate with, what web pages you visit, and the information you are downloading. This gives the government a virtual map of your personal Internet wilderness.

Carnivore is a chilling reminder of the panoptic eye of American imperialism. The government is looking down from its watchtower upon your Internet wilderness, that it knows very little about, and is gathering information about it. Spanos contends this mapping of existence or creating a totalized -- known -- space is all a part of the general imperial project. After characterizing a form as an “other” the panoptic eye wants to turn that “other” into a measurable -- totalized --- space. As Spanos himself contends:

But to speak of the circular space perceived by the [panoptic] eye of the Enlightenment as an unknown, unnamed and unimproved space that demands to be known named and improved is to realize that the civilizing on enlightening mission ... also requires specification both of the articulation of that space and of the effect of that spatial economy on knowledge and power. To put it generally, the Eurocentric solar or panoptic eye of the Enlightenment turned the earlier emptiness of the circle of its vision into a measurable space. [14]

Carnivore is the United State’s imperialist tool in order to turn the earlier emptiness of the Internet occasion into a measurable space that it understands and can dominate.

Another example of this imperialist project to control the Internet can be found in the attempted regulations on encryption technology. Officially called the “Escrow Encryption Standard” and more dubiously know as the “clipper chip” this proposed law would make the clipper chip the standard encryption system in the United States and give the government backdoor access to any transmission using this encryption scheme [15]. Constantly more secure data is being transmitted on the Internet, and people are sometimes using encryption to protect that confidential data. People are making purchases, researching, and communicating all over the world, and in turn for this luxury are giving up some privacy to people selling e-mail addresses, collecting detailed information and profiling you tendencies when surfing or shopping. As examined earlier, Bacon claims that power is related to knowledge. With that same idea A. Michael Froomkin, a Miami Law School Professor, claims that, “Secrecy is a form of power. The ability to protect a secret, to preserve one's privacy, is a form of power. The ability to penetrate secrets, to learn them, to use them, is also a form of power.” [16]. Froomkin presents the paradox that the government sees with encryption technology, the struggle between the power of individuals to keep confidential information from the state and others, and the power of the state to infiltrate that confidential information [17]. Even though the mandated use of EES and the clipper chip are not a current part of United States law, the strong support for it by the government shows the vigor they have to control the access of information on the Internet. This encryption struggle also exemplifies the possible power of the all-seeing stare of the imperialist project. The United States not only wants to see what is visible from its watchtower on top of the information watchtower, but it also wants to be able to know all the secrets and private information included in encrypted materials. Spanos shows that this type of thought is effectively a colonialism since “an imperial thinking ... sees the being into which it inquires as a totalized spatial image, a ‘field’ or ‘region’ or ‘domain’ to be comprehended, mastered, and exploited” [18]. The wilderness of the Internet is nothing more than an exploitable domain to the United States and with the access to an individuals or groups confidential information it becomes easier to comprehend and master -- thus colonizing -- the realm.