Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

Such protections do not shield individual data from the state. As the Yahoo!/China
incident illustrated (where China required Yahoo! to hand over email data from a
suspected criminal, which Yahoo! subsequently did), the private sector here acts as
a retainer for the state rather than for the private individual. 124 The illustration is equally
relevant to all states: states everywhere retain the right to require data in the interests of
national security and crime-fighting. However, not all states are in a position concretely
to enforce such a requirement: for that, the data-holder must have a significant presence
actually on the relevant territory. 125
The privacy policies of major private brokers (such as Facebook, Google, and so on)
confirm this general trend: personal data is more easily available to corporate and state
actors than it is to the relevant data subject. 126 The relentless farming out of state business,
including military and government affairs undertaken abroad, to “private” entities such
as Blackwater, KBR or Chemonics in the United States, raise a set of comparable (if
different) concerns. 127 Ordinary personal data collection for public uses winds up in
private hands – and private (indeed, foreign) actors are increasingly charged with datacollection,
storage and processing generally associated with the state.
The privacy policies of major private brokers (such as Facebook, Google, and
so on) confirm that personal data is more easily available to corporate and
state actors than it is to the relevant data subject.
At national level, the picture is inevitably blurred. Legal controls over the processing
of personal data raises sets of familiar interpretative problems to do with law-making
procedures (who are the laws designed to benefit?), supposed (and opaque) “cultural
preferences” (how are “local” concerns invoked to justify policies affecting privacy),
transnational economic positioning and regulatory competition (is the state overresponsive
to foreign/international interests), government ideological orientation, and so
on. States (and others) may embrace technoculture for a variety of reasons, including
the opportunity to promote and shape the “public” and its opinions. 128
Talk of an information revolution notwithstanding, the dataverse clearly facilitates
international security – extending to the “national security” of most states. Perhaps
the most intriguing aspect of China’s embrace of information technology is the
explicit reliance on securing the state and the national wealth as mutually reinforcing
endeavours. 129 It appears that, in China, technoculture is actively promoted by the state
as a matter of public policy and harnessed to these ends. Such a purpose would appear
to contravene traditional views of the public sphere, as we have described it above,
which emphasise individual rights and democracy. China is surely not the only country
124 Goldsmith and Wu (2006), 9–10.
125 This is a principal point argued by Goldsmith and Wu (2006).
126 See Christopher Soghoian, “An End to Privacy Theater: Exposing and Discouraging Corporate Disclosure
of User Data to the Government” 12: 1 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology (2011).
127 At time of writing, the US government announced that, following the complete withdrawal of its troops
from Iraq in 2011, many tasks would be taken over by civilian companies contracted by the State
Department. The New York Times quoted James M. Dubik, a retired three-star general who oversaw the
training of Iraqi security forces in 2007 and 2008: “The task is much more than just developing skills…
It is developing the Ministry of Interior and law enforcement systems at the national to local levels”. The
New York Times, “Civilians to Take U.S. Lead as Military Leaves Iraq”, August 18, 2010.
128 Goldsmith and Wu are particularly exercised about this aspect of the Chinese state’s embrace of the
internet. Goldsmith and Wu (2006), 97–100.
129 Goldsmith and Wu (2006), 87–104.
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