by Jared Cohen
Just as they do today with charities and business ventures, celebrities will look to starting their own media outlet as a logical extension of their “brand.” (We are using as broad a definition of “celebrity” as possible here: We mean all highly visible public figures, which today could mean anyone from reality-TV stars to famous evangelical preachers.) To be sure, some of these new outlets will be solid attempts to contribute to public discourse, but many will be vapid and nearly content free, merely exercises in self-promotion and commercialized fame.
We will see a period in which people flock to these new celebrity outlets for their novelty value and to be part of a trend. Those that stay won’t mind that the content and professionalism are a few notches below those of established media organizations. Media critics will decry these changes and lament the death of journalism, but this will be premature, because once the audience shifts, so too will the burden of reporting. If a celebrity outlet doesn’t provide enough news, or consistently makes errors that are publicly exposed, the audience will leave. Loyalties are fickle when it comes to media, and this will only become truer as the field grows more crowded. If enough celebrity outlets lose the faith and trust of their audience, the resulting exodus will lead back to the professional media outlets, which will have undergone their own transformations (more aggregation, wider scope, faster response time) in the interim. Not all who left will return, just as not all who take issue with the mainstream media will jettison familiar information sources for new and trendy ones. Ultimately, it remains to be seen just how much impact these new celebrity competitors will have on the media landscape in the long term, but their emergence as players in the game of accruing viewers, readers and advertisers will undoubtedly cause a stir.
Expanded connectivity promises more than just challenges for media outlets; it offers new possibilities for the role of media more generally, particularly in countries where the press is not free. One reason that corrupt officials, powerful criminals and other malevolent forces in a society can continue to operate without fear of prosecution is that they control local information sources, either directly as owners and publishers or indirectly through harassment, bribery, intimidation or violence. This is as true in countries with largely state-owned media, like Russia, as it is in those where criminal syndicates hold enormous power and territory, like Mexico. The result—the lack of an independent press—reduces both accountability and the risk that public knowledge of misdeeds will lead to pressure and the political will to prosecute.
Connectivity can help upend such a power imbalance in a number of ways, and one of the most interesting ones concerns digital encryption and what it will enable underground or at-risk media organizations to do. Imagine an international NGO whose mission is to facilitate confidential reporting from places where it is difficult or dangerous to be a journalist. What differentiates this organization from others today, like watchdog groups and nonprofit media patrons, is the encrypted platform it builds and deploys to be used by media inside these countries. The platform’s design is novel yet surprisingly simple. In order to protect the identities of journalists (who are the most exposed in the chain of reporting), every reporter for a given outlet is registered in the system with a unique code. Their names, mobile numbers and other identifiable details are encrypted behind this code, and the only people able to de-encrypt that information are key individuals at the NGO headquarters (not anyone at the news outlet), which, crucially, is based outside of the country. Inside the country, reporters are known only by this unique code—they use it to file stories and interact with their sources and local editors. As a result, if, for example, a journalist reports on an election irregularity in Venezuela (as many did during the October 2012 presidential election, although not anonymously), those charged with carrying out the president’s dirty work have no way of knowing whom to target because they can’t access the reporter’s information, nor does anyone the reporter dealt with know who he or she really is. Media outlets don’t maintain formal physical offices, since those could be targeted. Outlets necessarily have to vet their reporters initially, but after a journalist is introduced into the system, he is switched to a new editor (who has not met him) and his personal details evaporate into the platform.
The NGO outside of the country operates this platform from a safe distance, allowing the various participants to interact safely through a veil of encryption. Treating reporters in the same ways as confidential sources (protecting identities, preserving content) is not itself a new idea, but the ability to encrypt that identifiable data, and use an online platform to facilitate anonymous news-gathering, is only becoming possible now. The stories and other sensitive materials that journalists uncover can easily be stored in servers outside the country (someplace where there are strong legal protections around data), further limiting the exposure of those inside. Initially, perhaps this NGO would release its platform as a free product and operate it for different news outlets, financed by third-party donations. Eventually the NGO might take all of the working platforms and federate them, building a super-platform comprised of unidentifiable journalists from countries around the world. While we certainly do not advocate a popular shift toward anonymity, we assume in this case that the security situation is so dire and the society so repressive that the move is an act of desperation and necessity. An editor in New York would be able to log in, search for a reporter in Ukraine and find someone with a track record of published stories and even snippets from former colleagues. Without even knowing the journalist’s name, the editor could rely on the available stories and the trust he has in this platform to decide whether to work with him. He could request an encrypted call with the reporter, also possible through the platform, to begin building a relationship.
This kind of disaggregated, mutually anonymous news-gathering system would not be difficult to build or maintain, and by encrypting the personal details of journalists (as well as their editors) and storing their reporting in remote servers, those who stand to lose as a more independent press emerges will become increasingly immobilized. How does one retaliate against a digital platform, particularly in an age when everyone can read the news on their mobile devices? Connectivity is relatively low in many places that lack free media today, but as that changes, the reach of local reporting on sensitive matters will be even wider—international, in fact. These two trends—safer reporting backed by encryption and a wider readership due to gains in connectivity—ensure that even if a country’s legal system is too corrupt or inept to properly prosecute bad actors, they can be publicly tried online through the media. Warlords operating in eastern Congo may not all be hauled into the International Criminal Court, but their lives will become more unpleasant if their every deed is captured and chronicled by unidentifiable and unreachable journalists, and the stories written about them travel to the far ends of the online world. At a minimum, other criminals who might otherwise do business with them will be deterred by their digital radioactivity, meaning they are too visible and under too much public scrutiny to be desirable business partners.
Privacy Revisited—Different Implications for Different Citizens
Security and privacy are a shared responsibility between companies, users and the institutions around us. Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are expected to safeguard data, prevent their systems from being hacked into and provide the most effective tools for users to maximize control of their privacy and security. But it is up to users to leverage these tools. Each day you choose not to utilize them you will experience some loss of privacy and security as the data keeps piling up. And you cannot assume there is a simple delete button. The option to “delete” data is largely an illusion—lost files, deleted e-mails and erased text messages can be recovered with minimal effort. Data is rarely erased on computers; operating systems tend to remove only a file’s listing from the internal directory, keeping the file’s contents in place until the space is needed for other things. (And even after a
file has been overwritten, it’s still occasionally possible to recover parts of the original content due to the magnetic properties of disc storage. This problem is known as “data remanence” by computer experts.) Cloud computing only reinforces the permanence of information, adding another layer of remote protection for users and their information.
Such mechanisms of retention were designed to save us from our own carelessness when operating computers. In the future, people will increasingly trust cloud storage—like ATMs in banks—over physical machinery, placing their faith in companies to store some of their most sensitive information, avoiding the risks of hard-drive crashes, computer theft or document loss. This multilayer backup system will make online interactions more efficient and productive, not to mention less emotionally fraught.
Near-permanent data storage will have a big impact on how citizens operate in virtual space. There will be a record of all activity and associations online, and everything added to the Internet will become part of a repository of permanent information. The possibility that one’s personal content will be published and become known one day—either by mistake or through criminal interference—will always exist. People will be held responsible for their virtual associations, past and present, which raises the risk for nearly everyone since people’s online networks tend to be larger and more diffuse than their physical ones. The good and bad behavior of those they know will affect them positively or negatively. (And no, stricter privacy settings on social-networking sites will not suffice.)
This will be the first generation of humans to have an indelible record. Colleagues of Richard Nixon may have been able to erase those eighteen and a half minutes of a tape recording regarding the Watergate break-in and cover up, but today’s American president faces a permanent record of every e-mail sent from his BlackBerry, accessible to the public under the Presidential Records Act.
Since information wants to be free, don’t write anything down you don’t want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper, as the saying goes. In the future this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you “like,” and what others who are connected to you do, say and share.
People will become obsessively concerned about where personal information is stored. A wave of businesses and start-ups will emerge promising to offer solutions, from present-day applications such as Snapchat, which automatically deletes a photo or message after ten seconds, to more creative solutions that also add a layer of encryption and a shorter countdown. At best, such solutions will only mitigate the risk of private information being released more broadly. Part of this is due to counter-innovations such as apps that will automatically take a screenshot of every message and photo sent faster than your brain can instruct your fingers to command your device. More scientifically, attempts to keep personal information private are always going to be defeated by attacking the analog hole, which stipulates that information must eventually be seen if it is to be consumed. As long as this holds true, there will always be the risk of someone taking a screenshot or proliferating the content.
If we are on the web we are publishing and we run the risk of becoming public figures—it’s only a question of how many people are paying attention, and why. Individuals will still have some discretion over what they share from their devices, but it will be impossible to control what others capture and share. In February 2012, a young Saudi newspaper columnist named Hamza Kashgari posted an imaginary conversation with the Prophet Muhammad on his personal Twitter account, at one point writing that “I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.” His tweets sparked instant outrage (some people considered his posts blasphemous or a sign of apostasy, both serious sins in conservative Islam). He deleted them within six hours of posting—but not before thousands of angry responses, death threats and the creation of a Facebook group called “The Saudi People Demand Hamza Kashgari’s Execution.” Kashgari fled to Malaysia but was deported three days later to Saudi Arabia, where charges of blasphemy (a capital crime) awaited him. Despite his immediate apology after the incident and a subsequent August 2012 apology, the Saudi government refused to release him. In the future, it won’t matter whether messages like these are public for six hours or six seconds; they will be preserved as soon as electronic ink hits digital paper. Kashgari’s experience is just one of many sad and cautionary stories.
Data permanence will persist as an intractable challenge everywhere and for all people, as we said, but the type of political system and level of government control in place will greatly determine how it affects people. To examine these differences in detail, we’ll consider an open democracy, a repressive autocracy and a failed state.
In an open democracy, where free expression and responsive governance feed the public’s impulse to share, citizens will increasingly serve as judge and jury of their peers. More available data about everyone will only intensify the trends we see today: Every opinion will find space in an expansive virtual landscape, real-time updating will foster hyperactive social and civil spheres, and the ubiquity of social networking will allow everyone to play celebrity, paparazzo and voyeur, all at once. Each person will produce a voluminous amount of data about himself—his past and present, his likes and choices, his aspirations and daily habits. Like today, much of this will be “opt-in,” meaning the user deliberately chooses to share content for some undefined social or commercial reason; but some of it won’t be. Also like today, many online platforms will relay data back to companies and third parties about user activity without their express knowledge. People will share more than they’re even aware of. For governments and companies, this thriving data set is a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, to precisely target specific demographics of the population, and, with the emergent field of predictive analytics, to predict what the future will hold.5
As we said earlier, never before will so much data be available to so many people. Citizens will draw conclusions about one another from accurate and inaccurate sources, from “legitimate” sources like LinkedIn profiles and “illegitimate” ones like errant YouTube comments long forgotten. More than a few aspiring politicians will fall on their swords as past behavior documented online is later brought to light. Certainly, with time, the normalization trend that softened public attitudes toward leaders’ infidelity or past drug use—who can forget President Bill Clinton’s caveat that he “didn’t inhale”?—will take hold. Perhaps the voting public will shrug off a scandalous post or photo based on a time stamp that predates the candidate’s eighteenth birthday. Public acceptance for youthful indiscretions documented on the Internet will move a few paces forward, but probably not until a painful liminal period passes. In some ways, this is the logical next stage of an era characterized by the loss of heroes. What began with mass media and Watergate will continue into the new digital age, where even more data about individuals, from nearly every part of their lives, is available for scrutiny. The fallibility of humans over a lifetime will provide an endless stream of details online to puncture mythical hero status.
Any would-be professional, particularly one in a position of trust, will have to account for his past if he is to get ahead. Would it matter to you if your family physician spent his weekends typing long screeds against immigrants, or if your son’s soccer coach spent his twenties working as a tour guide in Bangkok’s red-light district? This granular level of knowledge about our peers and leaders will produce unanticipated consequences within society. Documented pasts will affect many people in the workplace and in day-to-day life, and some citizens will spend their entire lives acutely aware of the potentially volatile parts of their lives, wondering what might surface online one day.
In democratic countries, corruption, crime and personal scandals will be more difficult to get away with in an age of comprehensive citizen engagement. The amount of information a
bout people that enters the public domain—tax records, flight itineraries, phone geo-location sites (global-positioning-system data collected by a user’s mobile phone) and so much more, including what is revealed through hacking—will undoubtedly provide countless suspicious citizens with more than enough to go on. Activists, watchdog groups and private individuals will work hand in hand to hold their leaders to account, and they’ll have the tools necessary to determine whether what their government tells them is the truth. Public trust may initially fall, but it will emerge stronger as the next generation of leaders takes these developments into consideration.
When the scope of such changes becomes fully realized, large portions of the population will demand government action to protect personal privacy, at a much louder volume than anything we hear today. Laws will not change the permanence of digital information, but sensible regulations can install checks that will ensure some modicum of privacy for citizens who seek it. Today’s government officials, with a few exceptions, don’t understand the Internet—not its architecture or its manifold uses. This will change. In ten years, more politicians will understand how communication technologies work and how they empower citizens and other nongovernmental actors. The result will be public figures in government who can lead more informed debates on issues of privacy, security and user protection.
