CHAPTER 1
Our Human Rights Online

What does the term digital rights mean to you? Have you ever stopped to consider your rights in the online world and what those might (or might not!) be? Do you equate them with your human rights? If not, then now is the time to start, because there is no such thing as just digital rights. The lines between our physical and digital selves have blurred and that means our rights in a digital world are simply our human rights. You cannot separate the two; they are intrinsically linked. A quick history lesson into the origin of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was put in place in 1948, will show you why.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in the aftermath of World War II, when there was a strong focus on the social levers and mechanisms that had allowed Hitler to seize power and for Nazism to take root in Germany. The intention of this declaration was to put protections in place for both individuals and society, to mitigate against potential threats like this going into the future.

This was largely a mantle taken up by Western democracies, with other countries and cultures taking longer to go down the same path. In these Western democracies, there was very much a consensus that individual human rights were important to allow individuals and societies to push back against governments that might be sliding down a path towards totalitarian rule. The most important right within the declaration is, of course, the right to life.

However, in terms of our human rights in a digital world, the two that are most interesting and pertinent are the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. As a coda to that, the right to freedom of conscience is also important. Without those three rights, it becomes very difficult for society to reform, push back or move forward as necessary.

You only have to look back at movements for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage or LGBTQ+ rights to see how important those rights are. If the people involved in those movements had been living under totalitarian, surveillance regimes, they would not have been effective. They would have been shut down and stopped - without freedom of expression, nobody else would have known what they were thinking. The point is, progress can be very easily stopped by surveillance and suppression. There are many examples where this is happening around the world even now, as I write this book. In 2020, Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong, severely curtailing media and internet freedom in the territory and pushing Hong Kong towards an authoritarian system.1 Under Saudi Arabia's male guardianship system, women are denied the freedom to make critical decisions about their lives and their freedoms are regularly curtailed.2 Saudi Arabia also utilises its anti-cybercrime law to sanction those suspected of having extra-marital relationships as well as those in the LGBTQ+ community.3 There has been a dramatic resurgence in digital authoritarianism in 2021, with Access Now and the KeepItOn coalition documenting 182 internet shutdowns across 34 countries. This is a sharp increase from the 159 shutdowns across 29 countries recorded in 2020. Ethiopia, Myanmar and India were among the countries to shut down the internet in a bid to quell the dissent brewing among their citizens.4

Free access to information and a place where people can express themselves freely is what enables people to mobilise and gives them the ability to connect and educate themselves about different issues, wherever they are based in the world. This, in turn, enables them to take a stance and campaign effectively to (hopefully) change the world, or the laws in their country.

However, to do this, journalists and dissidents need access to tools that enable them to communicate securely, because without these secure means of communication they are risking not only their liberty but also their lives.

These totalitarian regimes exist in our world today. They are not a theoretical construct or something conjured from the pages of a science fiction novel. Even if you do not live in one of these countries, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine you might visit a country where such a regime is in power and therefore be subjected to that regime's rules. Look at Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained by the authorities in Iran in 2016 and accused of being a spy. She has always denied the charges and maintained she was simply visiting her parents. Yet, she was imprisoned for six years and released in 2022 only after much political wrangling.5

Why Does This Matter Now?

Since the birth of the internet and its widespread adoption in the early 1990s, technology has developed rapidly. I remember those early days of the World Wide Web, when it seemed like some kind of utopia, where people could communicate, ingest and share information freely. You did not have to worry about online predators. It felt like a safe space. By the end of the 1990s the dot-com bubble had reached its peak and then burst, and this gave way to a new era of technological development, most notably around social media giants in the first half of the decade and then smartphone technology.

At the same time the technology was rapidly developing, the big technology and social media companies were just starting out. We saw the emergence of Google, Facebook and Twitter, as both corporate entities and the social media platforms we now all use and take for granted. The development and dissemination of smartphone technology made it very easy for us to press a button, download an app and live our lives through it. This has resulted in a very dangerous erosion of our sense of privacy.

I will explain precisely what these dangers are as we move through the book and share steps that you can take to protect against the risks you face. Awareness of these threats is the most important part, because if you do not know about them you will not even consider what you can do to protect yourself, or be able to assess whether you need that protection.

How do you feel about technology? How do you view the digital world? Your answers to these questions will likely be different than mine. They will also likely depend on when you were born, and whether, like me, you remember a world without the internet or whether you are part of a generation growing up as a digital native. If that is the case, you will have never known a world without the internet or this kind of technology. Anyone born since the early 2000s will have had access to technology and the online world from an incredibly young age. If you (or perhaps your children) fall into this generation, do you think about what that means for your privacy or your human rights? It is understandable if you have never questioned it like this before. For you, I imagine using the internet and technology is simply convenient, fun and an additional way of expressing yourself. Of course, it can be all of those things. Not all technology, or uses of technology, are bad; far from it. However, that is not to say it is all emojis, likes, shares, views and easy shopping experiences. There is a different, darker side to all of this that we need to be aware of, so that we can continue to use it in a positive way while feeling secure and protected.

Many of us (digital and non-digital natives included) do not think about the hardware or software through which we are carrying out a range of activities, whether it is downloading and watching films, socialising, having sex and relationships, or organising political activism. Many people also do not consider how much these activities say about them as a person, intellectually, emotionally, politically, sexually and in many other ways. Digital natives in particular do not think about these issues because they know no other way of being; this is just their normal.

In the past it has certainly been easy to think of our digital rights as separate from our human rights, but now that we live in an increasingly digital world, it is harder to pull apart the threads that separate the two. In fact, they have become intrinsically intertwined over the years, a process that was only accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the past 30 years or so, the internet and technology have developed exponentially, but until Covid-19 hit, there was still pretty much a choice in terms of how and when you used it. You could choose which systems and apps you preferred, and how much of your life you lived online. However, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, everything we did - be it health, finances, taxes, socialising or work - was forced online, particularly those of us living in Western countries. Using the internet was no longer a choice, it was a necessity. For many who found themselves working online, the systems, programs and apps they had to use were chosen for them by their employer.

This simply highlights why it is more important than ever before to consider our human rights in a digital context. Our online communications are an extension of ourselves and they need to be protected in the same way that our personal integrity in the physical world is. We require our human rights to be protected for every form of expression, both online and in the physical world, and if we are too complacent and just give up on those rights, we are putting ourselves in a very dangerous position, as I will explain in Part Two when I explore the Dark Triad of government...