How Our Democracy was Hacked and What We Need to Do About It

By Peter Williamson
Opinion Section Editor

Have you ever been hacked before? Contracted a virus or spyware? For those of you who have, it’s both annoying and frightening. Annoying because it takes a lot of time to resolve the issue and root out the virus. Frightening because you can never know exactly what damage was done and what information the hacker got away with, since nothing is physically removed from your computer.

Hacking and spreading software with the intent of spying on somebody legally falls under the category ‘cyber-criminality’. If you go a step further and, say, shut down a country’s Internet grid through carefully directed cyber-attacks in order to frighten people into submission (i.e. like Russia did to Estonia), it falls into the category ‘cyber-terrorism’.

However, it seems that we apply a double standard to ourselves; or rather, the ones that make these categories allow exceptions to the rule when they see fit. When criminals or paid hackers breach your privacy for their advantage, it is seen as a crime. However, when every single western government does it on a massive scale, led by the US – it is suddenly legitimized, even though nobody ever consented to it.

Since Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald started leaking the notorious “NSA files”, they started a snowball effect. All over the world, secret government spying programs are being revealed – such as the 5 Eyes Alliance, which is the joint domestic spying venture of United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and the gigantic PRISM network of digital wiretapping on an unheard-of scale in cooperation between the US government and private companies all over the world handing over data from their customers, including, but not limited to, metadata.

Metadata consists of all the records a phone/internet company has of who you called, how long and how often, your entire Facebook data, your contacts list, and so forth. Every byte of data that exists about you digitally is extracted, collected, and analyzed on an ever-growing scale – largely without the citizen’s knowledge or consent.

The implications are clear: our governments do not think we have any right to privacy whatsoever. They might make laws, they might condemn cyber-criminality; yet their actions speak louder than their words, and we only have to look at the fingerprints their grubby fingers left all over our collective privacy.

The irony is the fact that it is all under the guise of ‘security’, the logic behind this being that perhaps, by analyzing millions of pieces of data, they will prevent terrorist attacks. However, if this was true, they would focus on very select and obvious terrorist stereotypes – such as known Islamists or anarchists, for example. However, if you accept this explanation, it means that our governments think we are all potential terrorist threats as they spy on everyone of us. If the data collected is not limited to obvious potential enemies of the state – then what is the true purpose of all this data-collection? Many people say, “I have nothing to hide, I’m not worried.” Yet we cannot know who will be in power one decade from now, and how your Internet record may incriminate you then.

What is even more disturbing is not only the revelations from Mr. Snowden’s information leak – it is the governments’ reactions to these leaks. Instead of admitting their mistakes and starting a public debate on the issue between the citizens and the state, their backlash has been uncompromising. The US government is still trying to hunt down Snowden, who for the time being is safe as a pawn of the Russian government. The British government has taken even more direct steps: they ordered the Guardian, the newspaper that first received and published the leaks, to destroy any data files and computers, which contained the ‘forbidden’ data. Furthermore, the British government has tried to bully Glenn Greenwald into submission by detaining his partner for a short period of time under a faux terrorism suspicion – resorting to tactics usually employed by organized crime rather than democratic governments.

This in itself is a very clear sign that the governments are not willing to talk about this issue – rather, they want to brush it under the carpet and silence any dissenters. Destroying information to control the flow of information? Intimidating journalists? Spying on citizens without their knowledge? Databases full of every step you have ever taken on the Internet? This all brings to mind a certain English novelist and his much-quoted novel concerning an information-controlling state.

For the time being, however, it is possible to undertake some steps to at least limit the ease with which governments and criminals can access your files and listen in on your conversations.

Zdnet.com has given several easy ways in which to do this:

1) Stop using cloud-services

Cloud computing means that you are bringing your personal data one step closer to the easy access of various spying agencies. It is already known that many major service providers, including Apple and Google (two companies with infamous privacy policies) have and continue to hand over a continuous stream of personal data to these agencies. Keep your data where only you have direct access to it, such as your computer’s hard disk drive and various external Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s).

2) Stop texting and using Instant Messengers (IM’s)

In our world, this is almost impossible. However, once again, messages are not sent between participants only, but are also always stored in your service provider’s database, where it’s free to be swiped and analyzed by anybody who has the clearance to do so.

3) Encrypt your browsing activities with Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) Everywhere and The Onion Router (TOR) browsing bundle. This makes it much harder for other parties to track you on the Internet and collect your data.

In addition to this, I’d advise you to download AdBlock, which is available for every Internet browser. Not only does it keep your browsing from being spammed with commercials, it also stops websites from tracking your activities. These may seem like small steps, but until our governments are open to democratic debate and change, it seems like we have to take things into our own hands.

Peter Williamson, class of 2015, is a Politics and Sociology major from Hamburg, Germany.