I gave a brief talk yesterday, followed by a Q&A, at the screening of CITIZENFOUR at the Cube cinema in Bristol. I was asked to talk about why I care about privacy, surveillance and digital rights. The reasons why I care and the particular aspects of digital rights that I am passionate about have changed significantly over the years, so in some ways this was a good opportunity to articulate that, and I thought I’d share with the class.

[Trigger warnings/content notes for discussion of domestic abuse, LGBT+ teen suicide, and institutional racism and ableism.]

One of the elements of my current PhD research involves looking into whether and how the internet facilitates political activism (in the widest possible sense of the term, because the personal is political), particularly for minorities and otherwise marginalised groups. Let me give you some examples.

One in four lesbian, gay and bisexual young people have no adult they can talk to about their sexuality, either at home or at school[1]. Many of them will therefore turn to the internet for information and support. For many LGBT+ kids today, the first space where they will feel safe being themselves will be online.

If you happen to be experiencing institutional racism from the police, or feel that you’re being treated unfairly by the JobCentre because of your disability, again, the internet is a likely place you will turn to for information, support, and to find other people with similar experiences.

Or, if you’re a woman experiencing street harassment on a daily basis, or in an abusive relationship, you may also seek help online.

There are many places on the internet that will provide you with practical advice or support: How do I come out to my Mum? How do I make a safety plan in case I need to leave my husband? What particular combination of forms and shibboleths might make the JobCentre treat me like a human being?

But there’s something else that happens too, something incredibly powerful, when you tell your story, and someone else stands up and says, “Me too.” Because suddenly, what you’re going through isn’t just a private, personal issue, something that is wrong with you and that you need to deal with on your own. You become aware that your issue affects many other people, that it is a social and political issue, and you can talk about it, and organise, and bring it into the public sphere.

Except, things work rather differently when you’re under surveillance.
Let’s go back to the queer kid, whose only access to the internet is at school. Half of it is filtered anyway, and the other half is monitored. Would you type “How do I know if I’m trans?” into Google if you knew that one of your teachers could see it an tell your Mum; if the horrendous possible consequences include being kicked out of home, or being subjected to serious physical violence?

How much more difficult is campaigning for justice if you’re the Lawrence family? If the police not only botched the investigation of your son’s murder but, to add insult to injury, put you under surveillance to make sure you weren’t rocking the boat too much?
And what of the woman in the abusive relationship, who knows that the police have access to data on how and when she used her phone, what she typed into Google; who knows that cops are two to four times more likely to be domestic abusers? Even if her partner isn’t a cop, she may rightly feel it’s too risky to seek help online.

The real problem here is that minorities and marginalised groups are disproportionately hit by surveillance. Partly this is a structural effect of the fact that we rely more than others on the internet as a place to meet and organise. But it’s also because some of these groups are specifically and systematically targeted for surveillance by the security services. If you happen to be a person of colour, or your name happens to me Ahmed or Muhammad, you bet that your data is subjected to much more scrutiny by the security services than if you’re a white, middle-class dude called John Smith. This is regardless of whether you have anything to hide.

But not only does surveillance have a chilling effect on the kinds of issues that can be discussed and brought to public attention; not only does it disproportionately hit minorities and marginalised groups; surveillance costs lives.

One in four LGB young people have attempted suicide, and nearly half of trans kids. Two women every week are killed by current or former intimate partners. And if surveillance plays even the slightest role in these people not being able to access help, or meet others with similar experiences, or organise and campaign, then surveillance is at least partially responsible for those deaths.

And that’s why I care.

*****

I would also like to address one question that came up in the Q&A, which is “How can we find the right balance between privacy and security?” This is one of those tropes about privacy that just refuses to die: the notion that somehow there is a trade-off, and that if only we were willing to give up that little bit extra of our rights, we would somehow be magically safe from the big bad terrorists. If this is how you conceptualise your own privacy and security, I would really like you to question the implicit assumptions behind the privacy vs security dichotomy. I would particularly like you to ask yourself who you need to be safe from. And I would like to posit to you that if terrorism is genuinely the greatest threat to your existence, then you live an incredibly privileged life indeed. For most of us the threats come from elsewhere. With 45% of women experiencing domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking at some point in our lives, the existential threats we face come predominantly – and unfortunately – from men. And if you’re a protester in Ferguson, MO, tonight, then by far the single greatest existential threat for you comes from your own police force. These are not issues we will solve with more surveillance.

[1] These figures are from Stonewall. I am not aware of similar figures existing for trans youth, but suspect they are higher.

The fact that the company name has come to mean “search on the internet” can often make us forget about the range of other services Google provides and, in particular, how they make their money. While Google may have started as a search engine – a market where it still holds a 70% global share, Google’s empire has spread well beyond that.
Read more at ORGZine.

Beeban Kidron’s documentary about young people’s relationship with the internet, InRealLife, begins and ends with teenagers having sex online. This is clearly an image that is both alien and deeply terrifying to baby boomers like Kidron and large parts of Generation X. In between these highly unsubtle bookends, InRealLife is a whistlestop tour of every trope about kids these days and this new-fangled technology that a good Daily Mail reader of a certain age takes as an article of faith: porn – check; gaming – check; sexting – check; cyberbullying – check.
Read more at ORGZine.

Dear Prime Minister,
We are writing to you about your proposals for default filtering of the Internet.
You have promised parents ‘one click to protect the whole family’. This is a dangerous and misguided approach. Focusing on a default on filter ignores the importance of sex and relationship education and sexual health. Worse, you are giving parents the impression that if they install Internet filters they can consider their work is done.
We are individuals concerned about the development of healthy sex and relationship attitudes in young people and adults. We believe that the Internet is not simply a danger to children and young people. “Content meant for adults” is not something young people simply need shielding from. Rather, the Internet needs to be an environment in which young people feel safe to develop their opinions and attitudes to sex and gender, especially where they may not feel comfortable talking to authority figures.
So there is also a broader responsibility, faced by the Government and parents, to ensure children and young people are offered consent-based sex and relationship education.
Simply blocking adult material by default will have three negative consequences. First, it will most likely block too much, especially as the filters will cover far more than pornography. It is likely that the filters will unintentionally block important sites related to sexual health, LGBT issues, or sex and relationship education. This will be very damaging for LGBT young people, for example, or vulnerable adults who may be cut off from important support and advice, in particular those with abusive partners who are also the Internet account holder.
Second, it distracts attention away from the need for consent-focused sex and relationship education and support for young people struggling with challenging issues. Third ‘one click to protect the whole family’ offers a false sense of confidence and does nothing to combat the real harms that children face, such as stalking, bullying or grooming.
We were extremely concerned, for example, that the Government voted against compulsory sex and relationship education so recently. This would have done far more to improve young people’s ability to develop healthy relationships than your ineffective Internet filtering proposals.
We would like you to drop your proposals for default on filtering. We urge you instead to invest in a programme of sex and relationship education that empowers young people and to revisit the need for this topic to be mandatory in schools. Please drop shallow headline grabbing proposals and pursue serious and demonstrably effective policies to
tackle abuse of young people.
Yours,
Brooke Magnanti
Laurie Penny
Zoe Margolis
Charles Stross
Jane Fae
Holly Combe
Jane Czyselska
Milena Popova
Also covered in the Independent.

I was on Truthloader’s live debate yesterday talking about web filtering and some of the other things this government should be doing instead:

Imagine that last week you’d read a blog post. It was post about porn blocking, and how there are other things we as a society should focus on if, say, we wanted to prevent child sexual abuse. It was a post about porn blocking from an abuse survivor.
One of the many people you follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook posted the link, and you followed it. You read the post, maybe you thought the author had made a good point or two, then you closed the tab, and that was that. Then a couple of days later you found yourself discussing porn blocking with a colleague, or a friend, and you thought, “Damn, I should link them to that post. Wonder how I find it again.”
It was a post about porn blocking from an abuse survivor. What search terms might you give Google to help you find it? The top ten search terms to hit my blog this month are (and they’re not pretty):

• abuse porn
• porn abuse
• milena popova
• survivor porn
• abused porn
• market failure examples 2011[1]
• bi threesomes[2]
• child sex porn
• abuse porn.
• milena porn

Now, something you might have missed what with the royal baby hype is that David Cameron’s speech actually proposed three completely unrelated measures, and that everyone has been conflating them ever since. They are

• default-on filters at ISP level targeting pornography “and also perhaps self-harming sites”, where you would actively have to notify your ISP if you wanted the filter disabled;
• getting the major search engines not to return any results for search terms associated with child sexual abuse;
• and banning possession of pornography depicting simulated rape.

That’s right. Under that second proposal, nearly a quarter of people who googled for a specific post on my blog this month would have had no search results returned to them. Is there a chance that one or two of these people were actually searching for child abuse images? Yeah, perhaps. Were the vast majority of them genuinely looking for my blog post, using the search terms most likely to find it? Yep.
David Cameron’s proposals would silence me when I speak out about child abuse and porn blocking. They would silence many others, too. Next time someone tells you they spoke to the man from Google [~21mins in] and it’ll all be fine really, do remind them that they are conflating three separate measures, all of which are highly likely to be ineffective in actually protecting children, and some of which are indeed equivalent to censorship.
Oh and do sign the Open Rights Group petition against porn blocking.
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[1] A variation on this seems to make the Top 10 every month. I’m guessing this post has somehow made it onto a first-year economics reading list.

[2] Remember, just because someone is bisexual doesn’t mean they want a threesome with you.

I am a survivor: when I was a teenager, I was sexually abused by an uncle. So when David Cameron proposes a raft of measures which amount to censorship of the internet, all in the name of protecting “our children and their innocence”, I find that deeply offensive.
I am not going to tell you about the potential harmful side effects of these measures, or why none of them are actually going to work. Other people can do this far better than me.
Instead, I want to move on this debate. I want to tell you about some of the factors in my environment that made my abuse possible, because maybe that will give Mr Cameron some idea of the real issues he needs to tackle if he wants to protect children [1].
Like many kids today, I grew up in an environment where parents were deeply uncomfortable talking about bodies, or sex and sexuality. When I got my first period, my mother gave me the most boring textbook in the universe to read. It covered basic anatomy and mechanics of sex, but I must admit I didn’t get very far into it. A year or so later she arranged for me to have a chat with her gynaecologist, who was a friend of the family. What I would have learned from that chat, had I not had access to other materials on sex and relationships, was that oral sex is dirty and horrible and not something one should ever engage in. What I actually learned from the whole experience was that my parents were not willing to discuss issues of sex and sexuality with me. So when the abuse happened, when I would have needed to discuss those things with them and get help, I didn’t feel able to do so.
Now, I appreciate the argument that simply saying “leave child protection exclusively to parents” is middle class privilege. However many parents, middle class and otherwise, would greatly benefit from some help and advice on how to approach difficult issues like sex, sexuality and relationships with their children, and how to create a safe space where children can raise concerns and ask questions without fear of being judged or getting into trouble.
Like many girls today, I also grew up in an environment where a woman’s sense of self-worth was directly proportional to how liked she was by others, particularly men. That translated into being conditioned to be less confrontational, always having to be polite, being told I needed to keep the peace regardless of personal cost. This is not a great way to learn to establish and enforce personal boundaries. When the man who harassed me on the way to school told me it wasn’t very nice to tell him to fuck off, I felt guilty.
Here’s the thing: You know what the most insidious part of our culture is that sends precisely those hugely damaging messages to girls and women? No, it’s not porn. It’s romantic comedies. The idea that behaviour which amounts to stalking and sexual assault is romantic is deeply ingrained in the genre; and trust me – many more kids have access to romantic comedies from a much earlier age than they do to porn. If you want to talk about normalising the idea of violence against women, it’s there that I’d start, not at rape porn. Of course this doesn’t mean I want to ban romantic comedies. However, helping both parents at teachers look critically at the damaging parts of our mainstream culture and discuss them with children would protect many more children than filtering pornography.
Like many kids today, I received sex education that was patchy, focused on the mechanics and on avoiding pregnancy and STIs. Oh, and some of it was distinctly anti-abortion – talk about personal boundaries and bodily autonomy elsewhere. At no point was pleasure discussed. At no point did we ever talk about consent. At not point did a teacher make me feel like I could ask questions, express concerns or confide in them. I knew all about the mechanics of sex. I had a very good idea of what was happening to me when I was being abused. I had no idea how to stop it.
This is the biggest bone I have to pick with the government on this subject. David Cameron has the audacity to tell us that the solution to children viewing pornography is both “about access and (…) about education”. Yet the kind of education he means is not sex and relationships education – it’s education about “online safety”. At the same time his Education Secretary can’t even utter the words “sex and relationship education” without sniggering like a 12-year-old behind the bike sheds. His party (and the LibDems) almost unanimously voted against an amendment to the Children and Families Bill which would have created a statutory provision for sex and relationship education in the national curriculum.
Pornography (extreme or otherwise) and images of child sexual abuse (vile though they are) played absolutely no role in my abuse. I am not going to argue that they play no role at all in anyone’s abuse, or that without the proper context they can’t be damaging to children and young people. What David Cameron is doing, however, is lulling us all into a false sense of security while actively working against measures which would genuinely protect children and young people. This is not a man who is well-intentioned and ill-advised. This is a man who is deeply cynical and hypocritical; a man – and a government – incapable of doing the right thing, and only capable of doing the easy, wrong thing which will gain them votes. This is a man who should hang his head in shame.
As an abuse survivor, I find the measures outlined by the Prime Minister today objectionable, offensive and disgusting. As an abuse survivor, I demand that this government face the facts and either admit that they have no intention whatsoever of protecting children or actually put measures on the table which will do so. As an abuse survivor, I hold my head high today – but I don’t think David Cameron should.
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[1] While I do believe children need protection from some things, I find the talk of protecting their “innocence” deeply squicky and disturbing. Kids do not become guilty once they find out about sex.

So Amazon has decided to boldly go where… quite a few people have tried to go before actually, in its recent move to try to monetise the creative talent (or otherwise) of the fanfiction community. If you hang around fandom long enough, you realise that roughly every seven years someone pops up who thinks there’s a pot of gold at the end of the fandom rainbow, with this most recent effort very likely prompted by the success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy which started life as a piece of Twilight fanfiction.
Read more at ORGZine.