THE revelations of Edward Snowden might bring unforeseen responsibilities in its wake for Germany. The country might have to become a superpower for a global information society.

This new responsibility emerges from the loss of moral leadership of the US in global IT matters. That American leadership developed historically, and it was only contested by Russia and China. Russia has been a direct and outspoken ideological rival, while China has been vocal, but less so, working rather in the background with pragmatic, non-ideological reasons. The main difference of this moral, West-East divide was the role of surveillance and censorship and the amount of control realized through information technology. The West seemed to be the herald of freedom, of a civil and uncontrolled Internet, driven only by innovation, while the East seemed the agent of government-led monitoring and paternal supervision.

This difference has been levelled by the PRISM incident. Granted, there is still a significant difference in the sense that China and Russia primarily aim at internal stability and monitoring their own people while the US collects foreign intelligence. But it is no longer a clear-cut distinction between freedom and control. This strong polarity has been lost. Now, the divergence seems to be between one kind of control and another.

 

Being concerned about the loss of such a distinction might seem academic, but this particular loss bears a potential to evoke a disaster of historical proportions. Distinctions are a part of our perceptions. Our perceptions form our visions of the future. And while the industrial countries and superpowers might already live in an information society, with an established vision and a technologically and regulatory solidified ideology on what the Internet is all about, many other countries – in fact, the majority of the world – still struggle with their views on this new tool. What should it be? How should it be used? What is accepted? What is acceptable?¹ 

Many of the above questions will and should demand strictly national, culturally sensitive and specific decisions, and they will become part of their own discourses once the technology is commonplace enough. However, contrary to the established information societies, this process does not start from zero for these countries. They are already confronted with a reality of views, of regulations and of technical terms and conditions emanating from the more advanced countries. While these frameworks can always be rejected, any immediate rejection usually comes at a high cost; therefore, many framing elements will have to be accepted for a few innovation cycles before they can be altered. And some will probably not even be noticeable as disputable conditions – since apart from the more explicit contracts and machines, an implicit notion of normality and acceptability is transported as well.

At this point, the PRISM incident and the ensuing loss of the clear-cut argument of ‘freedom versus control’ bares its fangs. The incident is influencing the creation of a particular kind of ‘normality’: for political decision-makers, it renders the control paradigm more common and acceptable than its counterpart. Control no longer seems a mark of fear and instability, but a reasonable and responsible step on the way to becoming an information society.

 

This ‘new normal’ could have a tremendous impact on humankind at large. The famous techno-anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan explained why in his masterpiece ‘Le gesteet la parole’: humans are evolutionarily altered by how they get used to technology. This is a very plausible hypothesis, which can be observed over and over in history. For information technology, this translates into a simple projection: once IT-based surveillance and censorship – the online control of knowledge, of opinion, of perception – are perceived as acceptable, surveillance and censorship at large will be accepted as normal, as a new kind of technological fait accompli. Logically, this is a non sequitur. But techno-evolutionarily, a step-wise mutual adaption of perception and technical realities has been a rule.

There might even be an infectious impulse from these multiple ontogeneses – the many nationally, culturally specific versions of an information society – on the phylogenesis of ‘the’ information society at large. Mass is important in the evolution of a particular species of technology. The mass of its users and their most dominant interests will ultimately provide a mass of the resources for its development. The larger mass of Internet users is yet to come. It resides in all those countries which are still ‘developing’ information societies. These latecomers are frequently sceptical about the present US-dominated multistake holder, industry-heavy approach, and they may quite well dictate and design their own decisions and governance issues. This will not happen in the very next innovation cycles, but it could happen in the coming decades. If their acceptance of surveillance and censorship transports an acceptability of such measures in general, these techniques could become part and parcel of the technological and regulatory framework of our IT future around the world. The Internet will become an ultimate tool of control.

 

This process could very well be a quiet and creeping one. It will be difficult to observe and interfere with because the decision between freedom and control will rarely be made in such a categorical way. It will be splintered into many smaller technological, economical and political decisions, mostly settled in seemingly harmless frameworks such as trade agreements, copyright laws, software plug-ins, or entirely legal and uncontroversial techniques of law enforcement. In most of these cases, the question of freedom versus control will not be visible, especially if the discourse is not as established and emotional as it is in the industrial countries. These countries still place a lot of emphasis on the trade-off between freedom and control, and any IT development is still under close scrutiny of a sufficiently large and tech-savvy part of civil society. If this independent vector of control is not in place, upper-level rational microprocesses will decide the path, and the path will only become visible ex post-facto.

 

Given this potential evolutionary impact of a strong, yet in its details barely visible global shift towards control, the material implementation of a ‘new normal’ cannot be accepted. Freedom has to be an option. It has to come back on the agenda. But it needs a strong and outspoken apologist. The US will no longer be able to fill this role. It should even refrain from trying to do so. Any such attempts will only reinforce the impression that freedom has just been the sugar coating of an entirely different kind of cake. So who should replace the US? Europe could step in. It has sufficient experience with technology and IT governance and clear-cut and outspoken ideologies, trying to strike a balance in favour of freedom. But the European Union will not be a good representative. It is far too bureaucratic, too static and inflexible.

Turning towards specific European nations, which could take the lead? Britain is too close to the US. The club of the five-eyes is not suitable for this task. France is too focused on itself, and would be expected to try to turn this into some kind of self- promoting industrial policy. Spain, Italy and Greece are struggling with financial crises and do not yet have any determined positions on the future of an information society.

As for smaller countries, some of them have established strong and knowledgeable positions, such as the Netherlands with its Internet Freedom Agenda, Sweden with the Pirate Party and an associated societal debate, and Estonia with its very own thoughtful design of an information society, thanks to its IT-savvy president Toomas Ilves. But these countries are too small to pick up the role of a global leader. Other countries will doubt whether they understand the concerns and the determinants of different regions and larger societies.

That leaves one option: Germany. Germany is a big country, able to understand many different concerns. It knows how to design and how to regulate technology. It is secure and economically stable. It has a large and established societal debate about the future of an information society. It is a western democracy, but in its own way, and by far not as intrusive as the US. Furthermore, it has good relations with the West and the East and is unlikely to attract strong opposition from either. Germany would therefore be a good choice. If it would develop an outspoken position on digital freedom, the world would listen. An alternative path would be back on the table, in a solid and credible fashion.

But first, a conundrum has to be solved. Germany is trustworthy and influential because it is rational and not ideological, because it is moderate and cautious in its foreign policy, and because it tends to think things through before it acts. These three elements should be taken as a basis and a background for becoming a new apologist of a free version of an information society. But they cannot determine the emergence of an apologist as such.

 

Germany would need to have a declared and – to some extent – confrontational ideology. The clear-cut distinction must be formulated again, based on a set of values, which must be loudly and explicitly formulated. The message must be heard, or it will not be listened to. Moreover, Germany will have to be quick about adopting this new role. Much will be decided in the coming months and years, and many political decisions should be broached as issues of freedom versus control, if they bear this potential, or the process might not recognize its own political character.

And this is a problem. Assuming ideological leadership in a loud, explicit and quick fashion would be extremely un-German – all of it, and especially in foreign policy. It is entirely against any German instinct regarding its role in the world after its troubled past. It doesn’t want to be ‘superpowerish’ in any respect. But those historical concerns might as well be interpreted in a different way. Hannah Arendt should be revisited. The lesson of the two world wars was not that all Germans are evil. It was that evil lurks in the small steps we take towards totalitarianism and away from freedom and civil empowerment. And if, this time, it takes Germany to be an explicit advocate of freedom, the historical responsibility must be to accept this role, not to reject it.

 

In conclusion, Germany will have to seriously consider if it should be the new superpower in global IT matters. German foreign policy makers will have to decide whether they want to continue to be cautious as quiet bureaucrats in the background, or whether they want to try something else: to stand up in bright daylight as the representatives of something they believe in, of something humankind might direly need to continue to make the right choices for the imminent next steps in its technological evolution.

A change of mentality for the better might be in place. And Germany will not be the only one to change its mentality. If it should accept this role, the US must refrain from trying to influence and dominate its course. Such an absence would be un-American in cyber matters, but it will be in its own interest. If freedom and democracy shall structure our digital futures, an independent and believable representative is what is needed now. Any attempt to influence this new representative will only weaken its posture and a truly important cause.

 

* Sandro Gaycken is a strategic advisor to the German DAX companies, the Bundestag, the German ministries and other institutions on IT matters, a director of NATO’s SPS programme on national cyberstrategies, and has been a lead author of Germany’s foreign and security policy on cybersecurity and Internet freedom.

Footnote:

1. Ethics of technology hold that there is a big difference between acceptance and acceptability. The first is what is accepted empirically by people who are usually not competent or interested enough to foresee side effects and long-term developments for them and for others. The second is what should be accepted if an informed and responsible decision were to be made.