Protecting democracy in an increasingly digital world

I have always been a little wary of the Margaret Mead quote about how a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens is the only thing that has ever changed the world. I have always been much more fond of Thomas Paine’s view: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

The defence of civil liberties is not something a small group of clever people impose on everyone else. It is the flip side of a free society. It is the responsibility of rights that we have to convince a critical mass about. It is about convincing lots of people of the benefits of a free and fair society so that they feel invested in defending it.

The history of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties (NSWCCL) demonstrates this is spades: routinely finding ways to bring people along the journey of defending civil liberties, being undaunted in taking up sometimes unpopular causes, creating a consistency that strengthens the moral authority for use in moments when it matters.

My research in recent years has been on digital technology and democracy. These concepts are in the most significant amount of tension they have been in for two centuries. In my book Future Histories, my goal was to talk about technology not as some kind of divine or ghostly phenomenon that imposes itself onto society, but rather a human creation with a human history.

My aim was to show that historical thinkers and movements from the past have relevance to understanding debates about technology today. That rather than unprecedented or novel, many of the conversations we are having about technology and its impact on society and democracy in the 21st century are questions many have grappled with before.

Modern policing

A good example is the creation of the first modern professional police force. For a long time I had assumed professionalised policing was a standard feature of human society. But when I researched my book I realised the history was less straightforward.

In fact, the first experiment with the professionalised policing we might recognise today was in the late 18th century, on the docks of the River Thames. It should come as no surprise that this was a moment of technological disruption and advancement (in the form of the industrial revolution), where the social order and economic organisation was in a state of transformation.

The Marine Police Office was a pilot program to establish a professional body that would monitor and enforce the strictures of waged labour against the dock workers who were struggling and resisting the confines of this new form of social organisation The merchants were sick of losing stock to workers who saw it as their right to top up their wages. 

So, they pooled their funds to establish a project proposed by three men: John Harriott (a magistrate), Patrick Colquhoun (a statistician) and famed utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. The first modern police force was as a collaboration between industry and the state to operationalise — quite explicitly — a form of surveillance of everyday people at scale.

Colquhoun wrote about his experiment extensively. His vision of policing was deeply bound to economics. He described policing as “a new Science … in the Prevention and Detection of Crimes.”

“It is the dread of the existing power of immediate detection, and the certainty of punishment as the consequence of this detection,” wrote Colquhoun, “that restrains men of loose morals from the commission of offences.” Surveillance, plus the spectacle of force, offered an economical and effective way of maintaining order. It is not walls, locks or bars that prevent crime, Colquhoun argued; instead, “restraints are only to be effected by the strong and overawing hand of power.”

The theory, and the experiment, was a raging success, significantly reducing the merchants’ losses for a small price. Harriott, Colquhoun and Bentham went on to convince Westminster to support the project. The Marine Police Office came under state authority two years later. Not only did the merchants now have a police force, but one funded by the public purse.

Statecraft in the digital age

The history of policing helps us understand some key aspects of statecraft in the digital age.

Like their historical counterparts, modern police understand the power of surveillance in enforcing a form of discipline. Safety is about preserving social order, rather than reducing harm. By allowing law enforcement and intelligence agencies to tell us what it is to be safe, we allow them to use technology in increasingly oppressive ways. Over the last two centuries, we have seen this pattern repeated.

Rapid technological advances have been accompanied by disruptive transformations in social relations. Acceleration of policing has often been the response. In essence, the social fall out of technological change has been met with the strong and overawing hand of power closing into a fist to crush resistance.

In the 21st century, we see this play out in more intensive and invasive ways, where advances in technology are not just in tension with civil liberties, but increasingly challenging our society at a more fundamental level. Surveillance is being used to manage the fall out of technological transformation and technology itself is serving to consolidate power in state and corporate forms in ways that undermine not just civil liberties but democracy.

In the past two decades we have seen this shift, as technology continues to advance corporate and state surveillance, poison our information ecosystem and concentrate corporate power to a degree not seen since the gilded age. This has correlated with an expansion of surveillance capabilities. 

The New York Times described Australia as the “world’s most secretive democracy” with good cause. In the past two decades, we have passed more than 100 bills in the wake of the war on terror covering over 875 different offences by some counts. At its height, this was a new bill every six weeks. How many days did parliament have, on average, to consider these bills? A mere five. In one instance, for the crossbench at least, it was a single afternoon.

What we have is a stripping away of parliamentary power, with its attenuating scrutiny, towards a growing executive power — one that increasingly relies on technology and the technology industry.

Surveillance capitalism

Technology companies, many of them in the business of surveillance capitalism, have been overwhelmingly compliant. Their business models have been repurposed for state surveillance ambitions.

Some of the most controversial laws in recent years, such as the metadata retention regime and the Assistance and Access Act (aimed at introducing weaknesses to encryption systems) have sought to repurpose existing systems of surveillance capitalism for state surveillance.

This is still happening today. In July, the independent national security legislation monitor raised a whole range of concerns about the overreach inherent in this body of law, as well as its chilling effect on freedom of political communication and the press. Just a month later, the government was proposing to make a range of controversial powers for ASIO permanent.

Equally the failure to regulate, or pass laws, has been highly revealing of the ways in which technology has become central to modern forms of surveillance. Privacy law reform has mostly withered on the vine for the past five years (although that has fortunately recently started to change). Hard regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) has been effectively abandoned. Facial recognition technology has remained stubbornly unregulated, despite clear mandates for reform.

Undoubtedly this is a function of Australia being the only liberal democracy without a bill of rights. Laws can be passed with minimal consideration of human rights. Public debate is atrophied by a lack of discussion about the role of rights and how they might need to be balanced and managed (and be subject to redress as required).

We have successive ambitious governments who see pro-law enforcement policies as an easy poll bump, and who are too timid or cynical to resist overtures from national security bodies for more and more powers to surveill and police in more and more ways.

Big Tech

Undoubtedly this is also a function of an industry that is hugely powerful and is shaped by its own sense of politics and grandiosity.

Meta continues to fill our social media feeds with harmful content and AI slop — they make up to 10% of their revenue from advertisements they have 90% confidence in are scams. They also allow nudification technology and products to be advertised on their platforms, in defiance of the law and on occasion targeting children. The government’s response has been to criminalise the children that use this rather than those who profit from its distribution.

Meta also sells smart glasses impervious to the risk of harm for vulnerable people. These are the Jeffrey Epstein of consumer products — a device for people who do not believe in consent, which contributes to a broader culture along similar lines.

SpaceX has built one of the dirtiest and obscene data centres in the world. Called Colossus, it rents out $1.5 billion a month’s worth of capability to the AI company everyone likes to pretend is ethical, Anthropic. They, of course, have also built an image generator commonly used to create non-consensual sexually explicit material.

Meanwhile, those at “don’t be evil” land, Google, are collaborating with militaries across the world to build military targeting and intelligence systems. These have been used in theatres of war and genocide, such as Gaza and Iran, by the US and Israeli militaries.

The worst part is these people do not think they are doing anything wrong.

Take for example Palantir, a company that specialises in data analytics and helps match up data sets to identify people for deportation by ICE. Palantir founder Peter Thiel recently claimed: “If you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore, maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”

These are not just consumer tech companies, they are AI companies and there is a lot at stake in keeping them growing.

SpaceX recently listed with a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Anthropic was founded in 2021 and the current talk is that the IPO will see a valuation of $2 trillion, despite revenues of $47 billion — which would value the developer of the Claude AI chatbot at 30 times its revenue, the highest in human history.

Recent economic analysis found that current spending on AI is dwarfing previous historic capital expenditure booms, including the dawn of the railroad era and the internet. The US economy, economists suggest, would be at a standstill if we took out the growth of AI companies and data centre builds.

This is a small group of people with enormous financial power, who harbour anti-democratic politics and care little about the social and ecological consequences of their work.

Taking back power

There is a lot going wrong with the world. But there is also a lot to take heart from. One place to start with is Australian’s attitude to AI.

Everyone is telling Australians that this technology is important — from politicians to financial markets to a media industry that too often treats industry sources as gospel. Yet, in what teeters on a charming form of contrarianism, Australia polls as the least optimistic country about AI globally.

Across the board people dislike the technology and struggle to see the promise. More people (79%) report being concerned about negative outcomes than the number (73%) that report experiencing a range of benefits. Importantly, more people see the benefits of rules and accountability: nearly 90% would be more inclined to trust and use AI if international standards were in place.

There is a neoliberal assumption that people see the state as a laggard bunch of bureaucrats who could not possibly understand new tech. But Australians expect the government to step in on their behalf. They want regulation. They want elected representatives to stand up to industry. That is a common ground we can work with.

In fact, we are seeing this start to happen. In recent weeks, Coles have announced they are ending their relationship with Palantir. They used the company’s services for workforce and consumer analytics, but sustained pressure from Getup and Digital Rights Watch led to them ending the relationship. 

The next stage is to target other companies collaborating with Palantir, as well as the tens of millions of dollars worth of government contracts they have, so that we can get them out of our society.

In recent days, plans for a controversial $1.2 billion data centre in Lane Cove, in Sydney’s north, have been withdrawn with the developer blaming “emerging” regulations from state and federal governments. We absolutely need 21st century infrastructure for the digital age, but what we do not need is hyperscalers treating us as a place to set up shop because they have run out of room in the US.

The government, to its credit, has tabled reforms to the Privacy Act (which have been five years in the making) and a proposed digital duty of care. This comes off the back of mammoth litigation in the US, which has seen eyewatering sums of damages paid and significant behavioural change.

The Medicare hack by Open AI agents has seen a paradigm shift in how we understand the AI threat. Rather than seeing it as a god-like existential threat or rogue agents, people are coming to understand this as a problem of corporate governance, of cowboys not taking their obligations seriously and an opportunity to hold them to account.

I do not want to be naïve, this is going to take some hard work — the kind of fatigue that comes with defending civil liberties Paine knew well. But I would also argue these are good conditions to organise around: the overawing hand of power is seeking to crush us, but we have the capacity to land a counterpunch.

There are comically obvious villains, there are clear opportunities for intervention, and the vast majority of everyday people are on our side. This is the time for organisers, agitators, lawyers, ratbags and policy nerds to work together to build an alternative future where civil liberties are protected and democracy can flourish.

Lizzie O’Shea is a writer, lawyer and founder of Digital Rights Watch. This article is based on a speech she gave to the NSWCCL annual fundraising dinner and journalism awards on October 1.