Since the coronavirus pandemic, much of academic discourse has naturally moved online, including meetings, conferences and workshops. Since the video conferencing software Zoom has become widely used among academic institutions, I feel the need to describe here the reasons why I will not use it.
Zoom, like Skype, Google Meet and other tools for video conferencing, is proprietary communication infrastructure. Proprietary, when talking about software, generally refers to copyright, that none other than its proprietor is allowed to distribute it or modifications thereof. Often, and more problematic, as in the case of Zoom, the distributed files are binary programs and the source code is secret. This means that no-one except the proprietor can know exactly what the program does or change it.
While running proprietary software for yourself could be regarded as a simple matter of trust, proprietary communication infrastructure has additional implications. Firstly, it forces others to run it too in order to take part of the communication, subjecting them to the power of the software’s proprietor. Secondly, placing communication under the control of a company like Zoom has wide reaching implications for democracy. The issues I will describe here are active censorship, self-censorship, corporate surveillance and state surveillance. This is not a cautionary what-if scenario. These things have happened, and will continue to happen, as long as we rely on proprietary communication infrastructure.
Active censorship
As long as communication is controlled by any third party entity, be it a state or corporation, that entity can decide to disallow communication between certain people or on certain topics. We might of course think it good that conversations with nefarious purposes are thwarted, but if we accept this, we also stifle democratic activism. In early June, Zoom closed an account commemorating the Tiananmen square massacre, on orders from the Chinese government[1]. After it was revealed that this account belonged to a US resident it became another scandal for Zoom in the US. The company reactivated that specific account and promised not to block users outside of China by orders from China[2], which implies that they will still follow any country’s order to censor its own citizens.
Self-censorship
As our lives become more public through online communication and we slowly become aware that what we say or write has consequences for ourselves, we start to question whether to keep things secret that we shouldn’t have to. Will I be allowed to travel to certain countries if I reveal that I’m an anarchist or that I have friends who are Muslims? Does Russia have a gay detector or Saudi Arabia a feminism detector that runs inside of Zoom? Perhaps it’s best to keep quiet about such matters, just in case…
Corporate surveillance
By now, we all probably know that our lives are mapped and scrutinised by the largest and richest companies in the world, and that this is one of the main reasons why they have managed to accrue their wealth. The consequences that the mapping of our lives has on democracy were both shocking and clear in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal[3]. Through extremely specific and tailored advertisement aided by Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign managed to instigate enough hatred to certainly affect the 2016 US presidential election[4]. What fewer may know is that we can mostly avoid being mapped with very little trade-off. The solution to this is Free Software, software that is under democratic control and that the public has full insight into; the source code is public so we know what the program does and can change it if it does not behave they way we want it to.
State surveillance
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we learned in school about state surveillance as it had taken place in Soviet and the DDR. We learned to believe it was something that authoritarian regimes did, and that a property of democratic countries is that they refrain from such activities. I later understood that this was far from true[5], but we certainly did not feel the weight of state surveillance the way the citizens of the DDR did. However, during the last 15 years, specifically aided by proprietary communication infrastructure, state surveillance has been happening both covertly and openly to a degree that would make my middle school teacher ashamed. The biggest revelation of today’s massive scale surveillance is of course the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013[6]. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the leak would put an end to this sort of mass surveillance, but alas not. We now know that companies that facilitate communication are routinely ordered by states to hand over data on their users[7]. This could be the communication itself or metadata on where they have been or with whom they have been communicating. Often, the company is barred from revealing what data was handed over. And even when surveillance agencies are unable to obtain this data through the court systems, it can be bought from third party metadata suppliers[8]. The rhetoric used to defend this practice obviously points to prevention of terrorism, but when protestors aiming to bring about democratic change are treated — and sometimes even labelled — as terrorists, we end up subjugating and stifling democratic involvement as well[9].
Free Software video conferencing tools
With this in mind, regarding proprietary communication infrastructure, and any normalisation thereof, as fundamentally detrimental to democracy, I would like to hold academic institutions to a higher standard, and ask that we prioritise Free Software at least for this. There are free solutions that are almost identical to Zoom in functionality, but that don’t require sacrificing democracy or forcing our participants to subjugate themselves in order to take part in academic discourse. Jitsi[10] and BigBlueButton[11] seem currently to be the most popular among the free solutions, and they have both been used successfully for conferences[12][13].
Sources:
[1] https://www.axios.com/zoom-closes-chinese-user-account-tiananmen-square-f218fed1-69af-4bdd-aac4-7eaf67f34084.html
[2] https://www.axios.com/zoom-chinese-government-tiananmen-fb1272bb-6c91-4c8f-b42e-5ced37d732d4.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack
[5] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/IB
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_(2013%E2%80%93present)
[7] https://www.accessnow.org/transparency-reporting-index/
[8] https://gizmodo.com/secret-service-bought-access-to-americans-location-data-1844752501
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/21/opinion/location-data-democracy-protests.html
[10] https://jitsi.org
[11] https://bigbluebutton.org/
[12] https://libreplanet.org/2020/
[13] https://www.cerc-conference.eu/programme/virtual-conference-system/
grijndvar
Stian Rødven Eide
quantacat
skymandr
Eintritt Verboten 