Por Naomi Brockwell
 |
Fair Use
Late on the night of September 30, with the Senate about to leave town for a month, a bipartisan group of senators asked their colleagues to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) by unanimous consent. A single objection from Senator Rand Paul that thwarted the bill. For now.
KOSA ostensibly aims to protect children by making platforms legally responsible for harms to minors. This sounds like something nobody could oppose, but it is a Trojan horse.
If politicians really wanted to protect children, they would push for devices built specifically for kids and ask nothing of adults. Instead, KOSA is a step towards forcing everyone on the internet to verify their real identity, until we can’t read a digital book, watch a YouTube video, or chat with a friend without first proving exactly who we are.
KOSA never uses the words “ID mandate,” and it even states that it does not require age verification, but it holds platforms liable based on whether they know a user is a minor. A platform that guesses wrong faces enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission and lawsuits from state attorneys general. Demanding government ID from everyone becomes the safest way for a platform to protect itself, incentivizing a national ID mandate for using the internet that Congress never even has to vote for by name.
KOSA is part of a much larger trend. With it, Congress is looking to codify what is quickly becoming the norm across America and much of the Western world. About half the states now require age verification to access parts of the internet, which typically means uploading your driver’s license, scanning your face, or handing over a credit card. More overt digital ID laws are taking hold throughout Australia, UK, and the EU.
It’s not hard to see why politicians would seek this control in the age of populism and a crumbling establishment. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) may seem like political opposites – but they jointly introduced the motion for unanimous consent.
An internet that knows everything about you offers an extraordinary control mechanism. It allows a government to know what its citizens are thinking and doing, and it produces exactly the kind of data that companies like Palantir are already paid by the government to pull together and analyze. A watched society is a quiet one, because when every post, search, and meeting can be traced back to you, you start to hold back. And a population that holds back means fewer people willing to challenge those in power.
“Dictatorship is a system of engineered compliance,” Farida Nabourema, an activist from Togo, said to a room of us at the Oslo Freedom Forum earlier this year. The line has stuck with me.
We in the West have a clear picture of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in far-flung dictatorships: a democratically elected leader goes on to silence his opposition and eventually resorts to violence. We flatter ourselves to think we’ve evolved beyond such material brutality, and so struggle to recognize the same dynamic playing out more quietly in our digital lives.
Whether online or not, control is engineered — taken in small steps, with each one wrapped in a moral argument. It’s for the good of the nation. It’s to protect children. What have you got to hide? Show your papers.
KOSA will be back when the Senate returns in November, and this time it may pass. But much of this system is already being built with no vote at all, every time one of us holds a driver’s license up to a camera to keep using something we used freely the day before.
That also means we have the agency to refuse, as Discord’s own users showed earlier this year when the company told them to scan their faces or upload an ID. Enough users revolted that Discord scaled the plan back.
So the next time a screen asks for your papers, understand that you are being asked to help engineer the checkpoint. Farida ended her talk by reminding us that any dictatorship built “can also be dismantled.” The checkpoints I’ve described are still under construction, and it is far easier to refuse to build them than to tear them down.
Naomi Brockwell is founder and president of Ludlow Institute, leading one of the world’s largest privacy education platforms. She is a Young Voices contributor.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário