DAVYDOV V.N. Alienation of Information as a Political and Legal Problem
DOI 10.35775/PSI.2020.34.4.010
V.N. DAVYDOV Candidate of Sciences (political sciences), Associate Professor, Deputy Director of the Institute of contemporary politics, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, Russia
ALIENATION OF INFORMATION AS A POLITICAL AND LEGAL PROBLEM
Artificial intelligence at the service of espionage, covert control over dissent, invasion of citizens’ personal space and other negative effects (costs) of the digital revolution have attracted the attention of our regular author. The alienation of information and the encroachment on intellectual property that accompany global communications require not only improvements of international law, but also compensation of damage to the rights holders and creators of creative content.
Key words: copyright, artificial intelligence, intellectual property, IT-technologies, constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens, private space, unconventional control, political communications, manipulation in the information space, NATO, Pentagon, FBI, «Forshungsamt», digital economy, CIA, Wikileaks.
In my archive, there is an article from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, written by the French philosopher Andre Glucksmann under a meaningful headline: “Deep Slumber of Democracy at the Time of Cyber Espionage” [28]. The text is typical for modern tendentious, egocentric and arrogant European discourse. “For several months, due to my health condition, I was forced to stop my daily reading of newspapers. When I returned to contacts with reality, I was under the impression that nothing had changed,” the publicist admitted.
Let us leave on the editor's conscience the propagated delusion of the learned man about the fact that the media content, that is, the displayed, secondary reality in the philosopher's interpretation, has become primary... Nevertheless, Andre Glucksmann met with “the newspaper reality” and continued to interpret it in his own way. Unfortunately, in the spirit of the Cold war: “Putin is whistling the refrain of the “foreign conspiracy,” so dear to the hearts of Stalin and Brezhnev, and eliminates, through friends and scoundrels, the sprouts of democracy in Ukraine and Georgia,” Andre Glucksmann writes further... “Countries with malicious power (?!) are blocking the activities of the UN Security Council and democratic institutions are in deep slumber. Nothing has changed…"
If the latter statement is addressed to the US foreign policy, then the French philosopher is undoubtedly right. In recent years, the overseas patron of Europe has been accused many times of abuse of information technologies, double standards, cynicism and hypocrisy in foreign policy. Washington, according to objective analysts, has long lost the right to speak as a standard of democracy [25; 5. Pp. 91-124; 15]. As America was seen, for example, by A. Tocqueville in 1831 [23]. On the contrary, contrary to the apology of America by A. Glucksmann, human rights defenders and independent experts from Russia [7. Pp. 33-44] and Latin American countries pointed out to the White House that espionage practices in social networks and communications are inadmissible. They referred to the numerous violations of constitutional norms and human rights by the American intelligence services, agents of the policy of total cyber espionage, revealed by D. Assange and E. Snowden.
As it turned out, Washington in its “crusade” for exclusive and closed information did not make exceptions for its European allies or for its closest neighbors. The United States, for example, used Brazil's telecommunications infrastructure to intercept huge amounts of information circulating between Latin American governments. Unabashed specialists of Fort Meade got acquainted with the correspondence of F. Calderon, President of the United Mexican States, [26. P. 26] and other officials.
That does not fit with the principle that US Secretary of State Henry Stimson promulgated in the 30s of the last century: “Gentlemen do not read other people's letters.” On the contrary, his CIA antipode Allen Dulles insisted on reading foreign diplomatic correspondence. Combining “technical innovations with the skills of classical espionage” [16. P. 10]. Head of the cloak and dagger department devoted an entire section to the subject of perusal in his memoirs [4. Pp. 121-136]. As follows from the text, functionaries from Langley unceremoniously invaded the communications of state and public institutions, as well as citizens of foreign countries.
The information space of democracy is shrinking by the standards of totalitarianism. It is sad that the information space of sovereign societies under the pressure of pervasive spyware continues to shrink by the standards of totalitarianism. Recall that Hitler's Germany was the leader in the organization of large-scale control and perusal of correspondence of citizens in Europe. The Nazi regime, like the current pillar of democracy, was no stranger to spying on employees of foreign diplomatic missions, or listening to the telephone networks of German citizens.
In his story “Face to face” Julian Semyonov was perhaps the first to describe the technology of theft of confidential information in the Third Reich in the Russian documentary. There is no need to reproduce this canonical text of the author of the Stirlitz Saga. But we will pay attention to some plots. FA or Forschungsamt (Forschungsamt Research Institute-VD), directly subordinated to Heinrich Goering from the moment of its establishment was an influential anonymous power that decided the fate of millions of Germans. With 6,000 employees, eavesdropping stations in 15 major German cities, representatives in all post offices, specialists in encryption and decryption, the FA spied on the Germans better than any other agency in those days. On average, one thousand phones were tapped at a time.
It is known for certain that the US occupation authorities took missile technology out of defeated Germany as trophies. Their own research centers and new high-tech sectors of the economy were created using a foreign research and production base [29]. Probably, the chief of the Nazi secret service General R. Gehlen (1), a partner of the United States in the secret war against the USSR, as well as his compatriot SS Sturmbannfuhrer V. von Braun, shared professional secrets with his overseas colleagues [30], including total surveillance methods.
However, there were enough virtuosos of espionage with “fine hearing” in the United States as well. It will not be a big assumption to think that the US intelligence and counterintelligence agencies employed new citizens or green card applicants as the Agency staff. For example, the above mentioned CIA Chief in his memoirs claimed that the presence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba (in 1962) was confirmed also with the help of Cuban emigrants [4. P. 117].
The CIA non-core assets. Immigrants, judging by the CIA experience, are excellently suited and fit (?!) for unseemly affairs in foreign countries. For example, as part of MKULTRA # 143 Project, the CIA provided Dr. E. Bennett with $ 20,000 to create bacteria that destroy petroleum products. Dr. Bennett found a substance that, when added to diesel fuel, destroyed any engine or unit. This substance the CIA operatives used in 1967 when they sent saboteurs from among the Cuban refugees to France to infect lubricants intended for Cuba... The operation was successfully carried out and became a part of the CIA plan that was carried out from the 1960s to the 1970s and was aimed at destroying the Cuban economy [14. P. 306-307].
The anti-human style of dealing with immigrants, the CIA non-core asset, just as the total eavesdropping that undermines trust in international cooperation, are borrowed by the US from the Old World. The cross border flow of subversive practices of intelligence agencies and secret organizations is long and steady.
Having refined the methods of secretly controlling the circulation of information flows in the new technological order and extracting the benefits of alienated information at home, the US intelligence community has extended them to Europe and other continents. Some experts say that with the help of Echelon espionage technology, created in 1948, Washington became aware of the preparation of a contract between France and Saudi Arabia. The deal involved a purchase by Riyadh of French Airbus aircrafts worth hundreds millions of dollars. American “intermediaries” managed to prevent the signing of this contract and offered Saudi Arabia their Boeing jets at discounted prices [31]. As they say, nothing personal – just business…
The fate of several other international transactions was similar. For example, the sale of French Leclerc tanks to the Arab Emirates. In 2000, experts of the European Commission seemed to be intended to refer this case to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. But the scandal did not end with anything other than a lively controversy in the press.
In the same style of unfair competition, the US is fighting Russia in the European energy market, where Washington imposes its energy resources on its partners, primarily in the NATO bloc (contrary to the European Energy Charter) [17. P. 610]. By the way, the US energy resources are by a third more expensive than Russian ones. At the same time, the United States puts its rival in an unkind light in the press, social networks, and reproaches it for political self-interest; from the rostrum of international platforms, American lobbies intimidate fuel consumers with the dictatorship of the Moscow energy monopoly…
Dissecting the international information array, the US intelligence services are aware of all events and especially those that, according to experts from Langley, are threats to America. And it does not matter if an episode or two of someone's personal life gets into the spy networks. These are the inevitable costs of Big Brother's presence in global communications.
Artificial intelligence (AI) significantly simplifies the control of intelligence agencies over the population of their own and foreign territories. That is, “the ability of artificial systems to solve intellectual problems for which there is no solution algorithm” [10. P. 29].
Superbrain can become a mobile platform that monitors the health and physical condition of citizens. For example, a pacemaker program or micro-sensors make it possible to monitor the heart activity, blood pressure, blood glucose and other important health indicators.
The healthcare industry is looking for ways to remotely monitor the physical and mental health of patients for humane reasons in order to quickly assess the well-being of chipped patients and then carry out remote adjustment of the optimal life parameters, urgently removing problems... And this is exactly the kind of progress in medicine that we have to worry about, since cyber attacks can be directed not only at critical industrial facilities, but also at chips embedded in the human body for life reasons, especially if the person is a state secret carrier.
Pentagon is leaking like a sieve. Judging by the volume of investments, the modern state protects national interests, while funds to protect the interests of citizens from the arbitrariness of hackers are allocated on a residual basis. Business in this sensitive area of the economy, unfortunately, also demonstrates inexcusable carelessness. So, in violation of the Federal Law of 26.07.2017 “On security of critical information infrastructure of the Russian Federation", less than a third of Russian organizations planned a corresponding expenditure item in their budget in 2018. As a result (according to law enforcement agencies), 141,552 crimes committed with the use of computer and telecommunications technologies were recorded in our country... Most of the offenses that fall under the sanctions of Article 272 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are related to illegal access to computer information [34].
These depressing facts simultaneously indicate to the coexistence of two IT communications trends. On the one hand, national and regional network clusters succumb to the gravity of global web networks and gravitate towards them; on the other hand, there is an equally obvious pattern of self-restriction of Internet users ' contacts for security reasons.
Russian cyber security experts constantly repeat how important information protection is for every user of IT technologies [18. P. 1, 8]. In fact, this is also evidenced by eloquent figures: if in 2017 the total damage from cybercrimes was estimated at one trillion, this figure may increase to two trillion by 2020. Experts predict that with the advent of the 5th era of telecommunications (5G), the vulnerability of companies and consumers will become even more obvious [11. P. 75].
The French philosopher Andre Glucksmann, who was sympathetic to the American secret services that leaked secret information, should recommend a publication in the Washington Post that analyzes the scale of US losses from the “malicious initiative of private Bradley Manning.”
A task force led by retired General Robert Carr, consisting of 125 people, was created to investigate this offense! As R. Carr said at the military trial, the group studied more than 700 thousand stamped documents about US operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and other regions.
A military court in Fort Meade, Maryland, acquitted private Manning of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, but found him guilty of most of the more than 20 other counts, including espionage, theft, and computer fraud. On these charges, the former intelligence officer faced up to 136 years in prison [36]. However, on August 21, 2013, a military tribunal sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison for passing secret documents to Wikileaks. A gender-changing transgender (Bradley’s new name is Chelsea Elizabeth) was pardoned by President Barack Obama in January 2017, who significantly reduced the prison term. Ex-man Chelsea Elizabeth was released on May 17, 2017. As a self-justification, the newly converted human rights activist wrote an article “CIA executioners and their leaders who approved their actions must be brought before the law” [37].
Supporting the righteous anger of the de facto prisoner of conscience, we note that on formal grounds, that the rank and file took an example from their commanders and superiors. In particular, the facts of blatant neglect of official duties to protect military secrets were demonstrated by the Pentagon's generals during the reign of the 44th US President. Suffice it to recall the scandalous dismissals of generals Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, James Cartwright, and others (3). And how can we demand pedantry and loyalty to the oath from the ordinary soldiers of the visible and invisible fronts after that? Is it because of that that Obama condescended to private Manning's misdeeds?
Intellectual property is sacred, but … Hacker attacks are the surface layer, figuratively speaking, of the scanned problem; a formal assessment of the extreme relationships of global actors in the web space. The essence of the problem of gratuitous anonymous consumption of an information product is in the alienation of information, illegal confiscation of intellectual property of individuals, legal entities and collective rights holders. Judging by the analysis of current international law, this aspect of the global circulation of information is still a concern for lawmakers [1. Pp. 9-12]. There are no absolute indicators of financial losses of robbed content creators. Although attempts to understand the current political and legal problem were made by the scientific community, copyright holders, judicial authorities and diplomatic circles [3. Pp. 54-71; 20. Pp. 86-96]. Thus, at the initiative of Moscow, the UN General Assembly resolution 53/70 “Achievements in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security” was adopted on 04.12. 1998. In 2011 and 2015, Russia also co-sponsored the “Rules of conduct in the field of international information security” (IIB), distributed on behalf of the SCO member states as an official document of the 66th and 69th sessions of the UN General Assembly. The result of joint efforts of the nations was the approval of Resolution 73/27 “Achievements in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security” at the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly on December 5, 2018.
Unfortunately, the set of rules (13 rules) of the international legal act does not reflect a new class of threats in the field of intellectual labor, which the expert community pays attention to. We are talking about at least three categories of objects that need legal protection: the creation of artificial intelligence; the rights to automatically collected information and big data. “Blog posts, podcasts, music bits, and neural network pictures (4) are new objects of copyright,” the industry newspaper expresses the interests of the creative class. Their legal status has not yet been settled. How can authors protect their rights?” [19. P. 3].
For example, the classic of modern sociology N. Luman believes that “security in a strict, risk-free sense does not exist at all” [12. Pp. 240-247]. This does not mean that you should not care about protecting information – a national treasure, a strategic resource of competition. On the opposite, taking the logic of the German sociologist: information (according to Luman) is a decaying product. It remains potential and disappears when updated. In other words, as long as the information is not used, its functional cycle – from creation to consumption (processing) is not completed. In social practice, other people's creative ideas are appropriated even at the stage of understanding the idea, not to mention plagiarism, imitation or copying of commercially viable projects [6. Pp. 766-786].
In the competition for intellectual resources, unscrupulous competitors, whose habits are mentioned above, consume even semi-finished products and drafts; they copy promising developments in the humanities and exact sciences. If before intelligence agents did not hesitate to shake the contents of the bins in the offices of design bureaus and laboratories, today, you don't even have to wear gloves to look through your competitors ' archives in the network's cloud safes.
It is sad if the copyright holder (the author, the inventor), because of the arbitrariness of espionage structures or hackers, finds himself in the second or third role. His invention, essay, film, etc. are used anonymously, other people benefit from “actualization” of his property in private or public. At the same time, the copyright holder, if for some reason he did not have time to legally secure his status, is doomed to experience material and moral costs, to waste time and money for the expertise of litigation. However due to the specifics of information rejection technologies, the respondent does not have an address. Anonymous people do not fear prosecution.
* * *
A few words as preliminary conclusions. First, the article by A. Glucksmann, which gave me a chance to debate in absentia, is good in that the author willingly or unwittingly lead his readers to the common idea that the principle of equal and indivisible security should be extended to the sphere of information exchanges.
Secondly, under the influence of the gravity of the epicenter of web networks, regional nodes and national network clusters are woven into a single information space, and on the other hand, there is a self-restriction of Internet users' contacts for security reasons. What should be recognized as a limitation of the possibilities of civilization.
Third, despite the varying speed of evolution of high technologies and regulatory legislation, the international community will have to adapt them to the requirements of the time taking into account the interests of all people and each web user individually.
NOTES:
(1) What is evidenced by the memoirs of R. Gehlen published in Russia in different years: Gehlen R. War of intelligence. Secret operations of the German secret services. 1942-1971. Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf 1999; Department "East". Secret operations of Western intelligence services against the USSR. M.: Algorithm, 2011.
(2) A fair share of artificial noise in the web space is produced by the A. Robbin’s program (USA). The perfect tool of hybrid warfare is a robotic system that creates content from raw data, reproduces up to two thousand texts per second. Machine intelligence (without the participation of journalists) can produce up to a billion articles and 500 thousand tweets a year. See: Davydov V.N. Information expansion: control, deterrence, countermeasures. M.: Khranitel, ECA, 2014. P. 13.
(3) In a short period of time, Commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal, head of CIA David Petraeus and vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff retired Marine general James Cartwright were dismissed from their posts for political, technological, corruption, or personal reasons; in the same row is Commander, US Africa Command four-star general William E. “Kip” Ward.
(4) A pictorial portrait of Edmond de Belami, created by the neural network and imagination of French students, was sold at Christie's auction for 432,500 US dollars.
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