End of the American Internet

Richard Allan was more than a little proud of having found a way to counter the storm when he introduced himself on Monday, Nov. 11 in front of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee. The regional director of public relations at Facebook was invited to it as part of the hearings on the vast American electronic surveillance program revealed by the Snowden affair, and he brought out his secret weapon: The American authorities are not the only ones to use Facebook to obtain personal data from its users, he announced. European countries are just as curious.

Or almost. During the first six months of 2013, Facebook, the number one social network in America, received between 11,000 and 12,000 requests from the American government, pertaining to 20,000 to 21,000 individual accounts. At the same time, EU countries generated 8,500 requests, concerning around 10,000 accounts.

Legal Intrusions

By revealing these figures, Richard Allan not only wanted to show that these legal intrusions, motivated mainly by judiciary inquiries, only affect “a tiny fraction of one percent” of the 1.2 billion social network users in the world; he also intended to defend these actions, because “everyone does it.” This has been Washington’s sledgehammer argument since former National Security Agency agent Edward Snowden leaked information highlighting the extent of spying and electronic data theft by American intelligence.

Three days later, Google brought the argument back, revealing that requests for personal data by governments had doubled since 2010 but that less than half of these requests came from the United States.

It is a close call for American champions of the Internet. These desperate efforts to turn the attention away from the heart of the problem are a sign of it because if we speak a great deal about the political and diplomatic repercussions of the Snowden case, another dimension of the scandal concerns these high-tech giants much more: the disastrous consequences to their image and credibility in light of the theft of hundreds of millions of pieces of private data by the NSA and other big fish, well beyond the thousands of requests wisely made out of respect for procedure. Not forgetting the revelation by The New York Times that American telecoms operator AT&T receives $7.4 million per year to provide the authorities with telephone data, its venture to acquire Vodafone in Europe risks being compromised.

Google claims that it “can breathe easier” since it was revealed on Nov. 1 that the NSA was happily helping itself to Google and Yahoo’s tip-offs by intercepting data behind their back at the time of their transfer from one center to the other. Google’s directors assure us that arrangements were immediately made to encrypt the data so that their transfer was protected and that everything would be sorted out. Google, scandalized, according to the expression used by Vice President David Drummond, has gone from being an accomplice to the attack to a victim of it.

Balkanization

In reality, the damage reaches much further. From now on, it is the whole premise of American control of the Internet that is being questioned. This fabulous invention, born in the United States, used to symbolize constant innovation, freedom, technological progress and the breaking down of borders. The NSA has turned it into an ultrapowerful weapon in the anti-terrorism war, removed from the control of democratic institutions, violating citizens’ private spaces throughout the entire world. Today, in the United States, cyberspace experts are criticizing this “militarization of the Internet” a little late. In the end, whether other countries participate or not matters little. The damage is done.

The heads of the American companies that share the world market, with the exception of China and Iran, have realized the extent of the disaster and the risk of the resulting backlash. This backlash already has a name: balkanization. It has already begun — not in the Balkans, but worse: in the huge market of Brazil.

Furious after learning of the extent to which her country, and she herself, have been targeted by the NSA, President Dilma Rousseff has added to an existing Internet bill an article that forces online service companies to store all electronic data on Brazilians in Brazil.

In Germany, according to Der Spiegel, Deutsche Telekom is also studying the possibility of a German “Internetz,” or even one in the whole Schengen area, with storage in local data centers. In geopolitical Internet jargon, it is called “data relocalization,” and these two words put together make the hair on the heads of the free and globalized cyberspace apostles stand on end. One seasoned Google veteran complained that it goes entirely against the objective of the Internet.

Anxious not to lose their monopoly, Internet giants are looking for a counterattack. In the United States, they are going to join forces to ask the Obama administration for a reform of the Patriot Act. At a global level, they are working on a reform proposal on Internet governance to avoid a stranglehold by the U.N., which, in their eyes, would be as damaging as balkanization.

They want governance in which civil society, through NGOs and private companies, is represented alongside governments. For them, breaking the link with American power has become a matter of urgency.