Free Expression Activism in a (Post)Modern World of Risk and Uncertainty

Taryn Sheridan Blanchard

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

Taryn Sheridan Blanchard

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

This thesis is about free expression activists and the central roles that risk and uncertainty play in their experiences. Today, activists who work on an array of free expression issues—including free speech, privacy, and press freedom—are driven by two principle predicaments. The first is the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies, and the second is an aging liberalism deployed in increasingly conflicting fashions. Both of these predicaments are escalated by the post-9/11 preoccupation with national (in)security and the growing precarity of the neoliberal capitalist order in a world of economic and political globalization.

Free expression activists work hard to foster conditions in which freedom can flourish (for themselves and others). But it is not only human rights discourse or other liberal idea(l)s that they appraise, confront, and grapple with on a day-to-day basis to conceive of their obstacles and advance their goals. Equally important are assessments and tools built on risk-based decision- making, discursive strategies that work to identify and harness risk and uncertainty, and other practices and ideologies through which risk and uncertainty are enacted. The goal is frequently to manage or minimize risk and uncertainty, but, by engaging them so strategically, free expression activists also end up accentuating them and giving them new, heightened meaning.

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Acknowledgments

First and always, my deepest gratitude goes to the research participants who allowed me into their lives over the course of my fieldwork. To the activists who shared with me their offices and resources, knowledge and beliefs, warmth and sass; to the journalists around the world who gave without hesitation, even as they suffered circumstances I can never truly understand; to the members of the Internet Freedom community whose generosity and creativity left me baffled; and to the emergency assistance caseworkers in a number of countries who allowed me into their ranks—opening up a world of utterly foreign experiences, selfless and world-weary commitment, and transnational connection.

Many thanks go to my dad, sister, and uncle—who asked me about my thesis progress every time we spoke, even when I really did not want to talk about it and could give only begrudging, unsatisfying responses. My friendships with Di and Yael were invaluable, keeping me sane and providing reassurance or escape whenever I needed it.

The University of Toronto’s Department of Anthropology has been a fixture in my life for almost a decade, through both my undergraduate and graduate studies. I would not be the person I am today had the graduate program not bizarrely chosen to offer me a direct-entry PhD position in the fourth year of my undergraduate degree. For that decision, I will always be grateful (and bewildered).

I was fortunate to meet Professor Jack Sidnell during the third year of my undergraduate degree, and even more fortunate that he agreed to be my supervisor as I prepared to enter the graduate phase of my academics and life. I will forever count myself lucky that I chose to take a graduate course taught by Professor Frank Cody, and that he so readily agreed to be my co-supervisor despite knowing little about me at the time.

It continues to surprise me that Professors Monica Heller, Amahl Bishara, and Alejandro Paz were willing to commit their time and knowledge to joining my thesis committee. Indeed, I am continuously surprised, thankful, and appreciative to everyone who spent so much effort on this project with me; without it, I would have gotten nowhere fast. And lastly, I must acknowledge AA, one of my first research participants—who died before the completion of this thesis, but without whom it never would have been possible in the first place.

Table of Contents

Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v List of Figures vii List of Tables viii List of Acronyms ix List of Appendices xi Chapter 1: Introduction 1.0 “Have You Heard What Happened?” 1 1.1 The Problems with Free Expression 3 1.2 Who are Free Expression Activists (and my Research Participants)? 8 1.3 The World that Free Expression Activists Live in—and Try to Change 18 1.4 Research Methods and Methodological Assumptions 28 1.5 Chapter Overview 32 Chapter 2: Privacy and National Security in Post-9/11 Canada 2.0 “What Do I Care?” 35 2.1 A Canadian Ideology of Risk and Uncertainty 36 2.2 Security Studies in Anthropology: Post-9/11 in Focus 39 2.3 #OurStateIsWatchingUs: Experiencing Canada’s Security State 45 2.4 #RightsNotFear: Discursive Strategies of Canadian Privacy Advocates 57 2.5 Digital Technologies, Personhood, and Freedom 69 Chapter 3: Free Speech and Canada’s Political Right Ecosphere 3.0 “They’re All Just Empty Heads” 73 3.1 Advocating for Free Speech in Canada 74 3.2 Canada’s Political Right Ecosphere: Free Speech, Digital Technologies, 77 Aging Liberalism 3.3 The Pathology of Progressive Liberalism 86 3.4 The Performative Encounter of Contagious Communication 94 3.5 Contradictions in (Post)Modernity 104

Chapter 4: Persecuted Journalists and the Bureaucracy of Press Freedom 4.0 “He Is Very Stubborn” 108 4.1 The Importance of Press Freedom in Free Expression Activism 109 4.2 Risk-Based Bureaucracy and Press Freedom Work 112 4.3 The Advocacy Campaign for an Imprisoned Canadian Journalist 116 4.4 Emergency Assistance for an Exiled Congolese Journalist 126 4.5 Contradictions Continued and (Post)Modern Free Expression 137 Chapter 5: Securing a Transnational Emergency Assistance Network 5.0 “Sadly, This Is A Common Occurrence” 140 5.1 Framing Privacy as Digital Security 141 5.2 Activism Networks and Security Concerns 144 5.3 The Journalist Protection Network’s Digital Security Turn 152 5.4 Mitigating Risk and Uncertainty to Improve Digital Security 161 5.5 The (Post)Modern Subject and Collective Forms of Agency 170 Chapter 6: Finding and Delivering Help in the Free Expression Landscape 6.0 “Would It Help You?” 176 6.1 The Heart of Free Expression Activism 177 6.2 Persecution, Exile, and the Search for Help 179 6.3 Intersubjectivity and the Levinasian Face 189 6.4 Bunker-Face? Mediations of Digital Technologies and Bureaucracy 197 6.5 Liberalism, (In)Humanity, and the ‘As If’ 205 Chapter 7: Conclusion 7.0 “I Can See That” 210 7.1 Revisiting Vignettes 211 7.2 Thorns and Shadows 217 References 224 Appendix A 260 Appendix B 262 Appendix C 268

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Fwd: France: Attack on offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine 1 Figure 2.1 Laptop with webcam covered at Snowden Q&A 48 Figure 2.2 Campaigning on the rejection of fear 58 Figure 3.1 Portraying progressive liberalism through the language of 87 pathology Figure 3.2 “People have rights. Ideas don’t have rights.” 91 Figure 4.1 Thank you email from Theo 128 Figure 4.2 Excerpt from FEC’s letter of support for Theo 129 Figure 4.3 Excerpt from the bureaucratic response to Theo’s letter of 130 support Figure 5.1 Locations of Journalists Protection Network (JPN) members 146 Figure 5.2 Transmission of JPN data over a two-year period 147 Figure 5.3 Transnational actors involved in emergency assistance 147 Figure 5.4 An encrypted email at rest 156 Figure 5.5 JPN membership removal email 159 Figure 6.1 Re: Requesting for humanitarian assistance (1) 182 Figure 6.2 Re: Requesting for humanitarian assistance (2) 183 Figure 6.3 Re: Information 185 Figure 6.4 Re: Refugee ID 186 Figure 6.5 Please I beg you I really need your help 186 Figure 6.6 Re: A couple questions 188 Figure 7.1 Wadi’s print 210

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Canadian court cases related to free expression 260 Table 1.2 Organizations/research participants with strong or weak ties 260 Table 2.1 Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s culture of secrecy 262 Table 2.2 Liberal government statements on terrorism and national 262 security Table 2.3 Acknowledging the risk and uncertainty of terrorism and the 263 security state Table 2.4 Deploying the ‘balancing privacy and security’ discourse 264 Table 2.5 Drawing on empirical findings and polls 265 Table 2.6 Contesting ambiguous language in Bill C-51 266 Table 3.1 A selection of free speech incidents and events in Canada 268 Table 3.2 Mainstream news articles published about free speech on 269 campus Table 3.3 Progressive liberalism is a poison, disease, syndrome, or mental 270 disorder Table 3.4 Progressive liberals control the mainstream media 271 Table 3.5 Progressive liberals control the institution of education (Ignorant 272 progressive liberals blindly follow elites) Table 3.6 Progressive liberals do not live in reality 273

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List of Acronyms

AAA Australian Asylum Association ACLU American Civil Liberties Union API Application Program Interface ATI Access to Information BAJ British Association of Journalists CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CCLA Canadian Civil Liberties Association CIC Citizenship and Immigration Canada CJFE Canadian Journalists for Free Expression CPJ Committee to Protect Journalists CSE Communications Security Establishment CSIS Canadian Security Intelligence Service DAN Digital Action Now DDoS Distributed Denial of Service DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council ENRR European Network for Refugee Resettlement FEC Free Expression Canada FPF Freedom of the Press Foundation GDFE Global Defense for Free Expression GDPR General Data Protection Regulation GJU Global Journalists Union GPG Gnu Privacy Guard HRW Human Rights Watch HTTP/S Hyper Text Transfer Protocol / Secure ICT Information and Communication Technology IMSI International Mobile Subscriber Identity INN International News Network IP Internet Protocol

JPN Journalists Protection Network MENA Middle East and North Africa MP Member of Parliament NGO Non-Governmental Organization OCLA Ontario Civil Liberties Association OPC Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada OTF Open Technology Fund PGP Pretty Good Privacy PMO Prime Minister’s Office RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police RSC Africa Resettlement Support Center Africa SARR Sweden Alliance for Reporters’ Rights SIM Subscriber Identity/Identification Module (i.e., SIM card) SLAPP Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation UN United Nations UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNHRC United Nations Human Rights Council USCIS United States Citizenship and Immigration Services UX User Experience VoIP Voice Over Internet Protocol VPN Virtual Private Network

List of Appendices

Appendix A Chapter 1 Supplementary Materials 260 Appendix B Chapter 2 Supplementary Materials 262 Appendix C Chapter 3 Supplementary Materials 268

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.0 “Have You Heard What Happened?”

Toronto, Ontario: Winter 2015 At the start of a standard workday in early January 2015, I walked into the offices shared by two free expression organizations in downtown Toronto, a handful of months into my fieldwork. As I turned on a computer and took off my coat, the executive director of the smaller NGO, Mitch, turned to me from the computer monitors on his standing desk. “Have you heard what happened?” He asked me. I had not, having yet to develop the habit of checking social media or email as part of my wake-up routine or morning commute. Mitch explained that an attack on a satirical news magazine in Paris had occurred, with mass casualties reported and those responsible still at large. The NGO’s two other full-time employees, Emily and Cara, had not arrived yet—but when I opened my email inbox, I saw there were already messages from them and other volunteer members of the NGO. Emily was on her way to a doctor’s appointment, yet had sent an email just after 9:00AM:

Figure 1.1 Fwd: France: Attack on offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine1

Mitch replied that he had a call at 10:00AM but would try to get something written before then. A member of the NGO’s Executive Council (a media lawyer by trade) had also emailed, saying that he would be commenting on the attack at 11:00AM EST on CBC Radio Vancouver.

1 “A19” refers to ARTICLE 19, a much larger free expression organization based in Britain. 1

Emily then emailed Cara, asking: “Favour. Can you send out a tweet or two tagging the proper CBC station saying Mark will be on to talk? IAYATTTYD.” “I’m not in yet!!” Cara replied five minutes later. “I’m stuck on a call about grad school.” When she did arrive an hour later, Cara immediately apologized to her boss. “No worries,” Mitch said. “Attacks on press freedom are going to happen; you can’t drop everything each and every time.” On the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack, everyone in the NGOs’ shared offices spent much of their time scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, reading news reports, and writing social media posts and website content. They sent emails back and forth about the updated body count and status of the manhunt underway in Paris; they told one another about a vigil being held outside Toronto’s French consulate that evening; and they discussed the many cartoons and graphics being circulated. “Do you think this blazer is too wrinkled for on-camera?” Mitch asked. They also fielded media requests, with the executive director happily (but tiredly) describing his marathon of interviews as “peak media saturation” for the small NGO. Between media comments, Mitch found time for a Twitter exchange with a far-right Canadian media personality, who suggested the NGO does not take a strong enough stance on controversial speech. The activists collaborated with one another throughout the day to fine-tune their comments about the attack, from broad messaging to specific wording. Cara asked whether she should italicize the name Charlie Hebdo in her NGO’s website statement, and absently switched the term ‘global right’ to ‘universal right’ when describing free expression in the final draft. They also settled on using the term ‘radical’ rather than ‘mentally unstable’, and ‘people’ rather than ‘young men’. As part of their efforts, the activists discussed the differences between their personal views and the official stances their NGOs take on the regulation of controversial speech, and the fine line they sometimes walk as NGO representatives. In media comments, they weighed in on the risks and merits of publishing controversial ideas:

“What [Charlie Hebdo] put out there is very provocative. From what I’ve seen of their work, they were not an anti-Muslim satirical magazine. They kind of attacked everybody. I think they went after any extremist viewpoint; unfortunately, when you go after an extremist viewpoint, it can make you a target.”

“Look, if you don’t defend the margins, the margins get closer to the centre.”

“Ideas are bulletproof. You can’t shoot these images.”

“This kind of attack and responding with self-censorship opens the door to more attacks like this and people thinking they are effective. To refrain from publishing these things, it’s just playing into their hands.”

Riding down the elevator with several of the activists going to the evening vigil, I noted to the group that Charlie Hebdo had been previously firebombed (in 2011). “Yeah, at least one of the cartoonists, Charb, had been under police protection since then,” said Roya, an activist from the larger of the two NGOs. “It’s bizarre to think he had to live like that in Paris, 24/7,” added another activist, Tomas. “Even more bizarre that he still got killed.” “Things are different, weird, in France.” “Things are getting weird everywhere now.” The activists murmured agreement as the elevator doors opened.

1.1 The Problems with Free Expression

The 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo represents a key event in the contemporary development of free expression issues. It brought into a single frame concerns about censorship, free speech and the line separating it from hate speech, the targeting of journalists by so-called terrorists, as well as the nature of journalism and institutional protections it requires today. The event would also become wrapped up in debates about national security, including the incessantly perceived association between ‘terrorism’ and Islam, as well as the expansion of states’ counterterrorism powers (including sweeping surveillance practices) to prevent attacks from occurring in the future.2 Anti-terrorism laws that threaten to impose a censorial chill on a slew of legal rights were passed by several countries following the attack. For free expression activists, the event contributed to establishing a blueprint for their responses to largescale violent incidents committed against journalists, despite Charlie Hebdo’s provocative content and the

2 In this thesis, the term ‘terrorism’ refers to violence conducted for political purposes outside the auspices of recognized warfare. A typical dictionary definition of ‘terrorism’ is “the unlawful use or threat of violence especially against the state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion” (Merriam-Webster 2018a). It is fundamentally a subjective term, perceived differently by victims, perpetrators, and other involved actors. 3 outrage they provoked because of it. Indeed, the controversial nature of the magazine only drew more activists into the fray, eager to contribute to the debates. Graphics and cartoons created by Charlie Hebdo and others to honour the magazine would become staples of defiance; the hashtag/slogan “Je Suis Charlie” would be taken up and modified to foster solidarity and tolerance after other tragedies; and the strained yet energetic activities that took over the NGOs’ offices that day would be a more familiar experience when something similar occurred again.

The Charlie Hebdo attack and its aftermath provide a good entry point for describing three sets of overlapping problems currently facing free expression, which form the bedrock for this thesis’ findings. First, activists must determine not only how to go about protecting it, but also what constitutes free expression in the first place today. It is not just a synonym for free speech. Rather, it has come to encompass an array of issues: free speech, press freedom, access to information, protection of whistleblowers, even privacy, and more. The American Civil Liberties Union distinguishes nine types of free expression as essential to “the democratic process, diversity of thought, and so much more” (ACLU 2018): Internet speech, student speech and privacy, employee speech and whistleblowers, intellectual property, rights of protesters, freedom of the press, photographers’ rights, artistic expression, and campaign finance reform. A range of laws affecting expression—blasphemy, religious acts and beliefs, pornography and revenge porn, sedition, and even ‘fake news’—are brought under the umbrella of free expression. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association frames free expression issues by their restrictions, including legislative provisions that limit hate speech, municipal by-laws that regulate signage or where public associations can take place, civil defamation actions, unequal Internet access, and the content or filtering policies of private companies (CCLA 2018). Efforts to engage in personal data collection, surveil and monitor the Internet, decrease anonymity, and limit encryption and other tools that circumvent censorship are also identified as restricting free expression.3

The concept of free expression is not straightforward or easily circumscribed, and activists are being pulled in many directions. Ultimately, they must decide what free expression

3 A third example of the breadth of issues that can be conceived as free expression is seen in the 14 subtopics chosen by ARTICLE 19, an NGO that “work[s] towards a world in which everyone enjoys the right to freedom of expression”: access to information, business and human rights, censorship, digital rights, equality and hate speech, freedom of religion or belief, gender and sexuality, media freedom, national security and counterterrorism, participation and association, privacy and surveillance, protest, safety of journalists and human rights defenders, and sustainable development (ARTICLE 19 2018). 4 means to them, the people they want to help, and the actors who would control or eliminate it. The multiplicity of its meanings is exacerbated by the actual threats and violations facing it, the second set of problems. Reviews and outlooks for free expression are bleak today, as watchdogs warn of deteriorating free expression conditions around the world. For example, Freedom House’s four annual reports all deliver messages of “serious crisis” and “unprecedented,” “dramatic,” and “accelerating” declines in the post-WWII international order—rooted in principles of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.4 Many lament rising populism as “perhaps the greatest danger today to the future of democracy” (Human Rights Watch 2017:2). But for many others, rising populism represents a solution to the threats and violations facing free expression, many of which come from progressive liberal human rights discourse, UN-led globalism, and social justice movements that are perceived as eroding individual rights in favour of collectivism and political correctness. It is common to present free speech as being severely imperiled on post-secondary campuses, at demonstrations, in workplaces and legislatures, and on social media. Privacy appears to teeter on the edge of a precipice, just a click of a technologist’s mouse away, or a politician’s pen-stroke away, from being relegated to the past. Press freedom, access to information, whistleblower protections, and the rest of the free expression spectrum are similarly portrayed as being endangered, eroded, or ignored, at risk of permanent ruin.

The overall message is clear: the world risks entering a dark era, with free expression rights positioned at the centre of many global battles for power and control. In 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur on free expression updated his evaluation of “critical contemporary challenges” facing free expression (UNGA 2016). In his report, David Kaye identified a slew of emergent methods being used to exert power through the control of free expression:

1. passing anti-terrorism, cybersecurity, and sedition-related laws that legitimate restrictions on expression; 2. undermining the right to information through overclassifying vast amounts of government materials that limit transparency and accountability; 3. bulk or targeted surveillance and data collection that interfere with the privacy necessary for free expression;

4 The four reports evaluate global trends in press freedom (Freedom House 2017a), freedom on the Internet (Freedom House 2017b), and political rights and civil liberties (Freedom House 2018a), as well as democracy in former communist countries (Freedom House 2018b). 5

4. disruptions of Internet and telecommunication services, including the shutdown of Internet or mobile networks, blocking websites and other platforms, and outlawing circumvention tools like VPNs; and, 5. criminalizing criticism and implementing vague prohibitions about the incitement to hatred or disorder that limit ‘propaganda’, ‘extremism’, ‘disloyalty’, and ‘hate speech’ without defining any of those terms—often applied inordinately to journalistic practices, artists of all types, and oppressed groups (ethnic, religious, LGBTQ, women, etc.).

The criminalization of expression enables arrests and imprisonment, arbitrary detentions, and spurious prosecutions—all of which intimidate and fuel (self-)censorship. The above list does not even include verbal and physical attacks on people exercising their right to free expression, such as harassment, assaults, kidnappings, disappearances, and killings. These are perpetrated by state and non-state actors alike: corrupt law enforcement, intelligence agents, and military officials; so-called terrorist groups, militants, and rebel factions; and other criminal outfits. While there is no single database of statistics about attacks based on free expression, several organizations monitor the killing of journalists. UNESCO (2018) has condemned the killing of 1010 journalists from 2006 to 2017, with nine out of ten cases remaining unresolved. Both these specific types of violations and the global trends constitute threats to free expression. Many of them would not have been possible in previous eras, making contemporary developments a double-edged blade of both positive and negative ‘progress’.

As such, the third set of problems facing free expression is the range of conditions that shape and are shaped by current iterations of (post)modernity. In particular, two concrete predicaments drive all three sets of overlapping problems: the first is the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies,5 and the second is an aging liberalism deployed in increasingly conflicting fashions. Like free expression, the meaning of liberalism has become extremely unsettled, with people on all sides of debates viewing their critics as not practicing liberal democracy in the way it was intended—and digital technologies both a cause of and

5 In this thesis, the term ‘digital technologies’ is used to refer primarily to information and communication technologies (also known as ICTs), which entails the integration and synchronization of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals), cyber devices, other hardware (such as WiFi routers and servers), software (including computer and mobile applications), and audio-visual systems. Digital technologies enable users to electronically access, transmit, store, and manipulate information or ‘data’. 6 solution to the resulting schisms. Both of these predicaments are imbricated in the post-9/11 preoccupation with (in)security and (counter)terrorism, as well as with the growing precarity that marks the violence of the neoliberal capitalist order in a world of increasing economic and political globalization. The challenges for free expression activists seeking to address these three sets of problems are therefore many. How are they to navigate this (post)modern minefield that offers both opportunity and obstacle, and everywhere complexity? How do they protect the vulnerable, convince their audiences to be concerned, and persuade actors to make positive changes? How do they decide which free expression issues to prioritize amidst perpetually limited resources? How do they resolve conflicts and disagreements between activists, especially as the gaps between their disparate positions grow ever wider?

This thesis will show that activists experience free expression and try to find answers to these questions, and solutions to the three sets of problems described above, by turning to technologies of risk and uncertainty.6 Free expression activists work hard to foster conditions in which freedom can flourish (for both themselves and others). But it is not only human rights discourse or other liberal idea(l)s that they appraise, confront, and grapple with on a day-to-day basis to conceive of their obstacles and advance their goals. Equally important are assessments and tools built on risk-based decision-making, discursive strategies that work to identify and harness risk and uncertainty, and other practices and ideologies through which risk and uncertainty are enacted. The intention is often to manage or minimize risk and uncertainty, but, by engaging them so strategically, free expression activists also end up accentuating them and giving them new, heightened meaning. Even when specific ideologies, practices, and priorities differ amongst free expression activists, they remain connected by shared orientations to risk and uncertainty. And while their work is underpinned by liberal idea(l)s, their experiences are more materially, affectively, and discursively shaped by technologies of risk and uncertainty.7

6 Note that the basic definition of risk is an exposure to the chance of injury or loss, often associated with the degree of probability of such injury or loss occurring. More broadly, risk as a concept has been developed by humans (drawing on science and mathematics) as a way to make sense of and anticipate disaster, misfortune, and loss. Uncertainty is more of a subjective existential predicament, of being in a state of doubt and indeterminacy, as well as subject to change, variability, or instability. 7 The use of the term ‘technologies’ in this context refers to the assemblage of discourses and practices—as well as other beliefs and behaviours—through which risk and uncertainty are conceived and enacted. 7

Weaving through a series of free expression settings and subgroups, this thesis examines how activists experience and engage risk and uncertainty to achieve their own ends as they work at the intersection of liberalism, technology, and security. During their efforts, issues of personhood and statecraft are negotiated, bureaucratic encounters and network governance are navigated, and the intersubjective work of asking for and delivering help is performed. Moreover, complex contradictions that mark (post)modern life are explored, within which new kinds of power and resistance, as well as questions of morality, are being developed and taken up. As such, free expression activists constantly (re)consider and (re)evaluate the structural and moral implications of (post)modernity, as free expression is ultimately coming to mean something different today. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to understand its shifting and divergent meanings, the corresponding implications for (post)modern life, and the experiences and roles of free expression activists. The rest of this chapter introduces in more detail the people who protect free expression, the types of work they do, and the research sites and participants I engaged during my fieldwork. It also discusses the (post)modern conditions that shape (and are shaped by) free expression activism and presents the thesis’ underlying theoretical framework. The final two sections then describe the thesis’ methods (and methodological assumptions) and provide an overview of the chapters to come.

1.2 Who are Free Expression Activists (and my Research Participants)?

In the introductory vignette to this chapter, several free expression activists made appearances. Mitch was a proud east coast native in his late-20s, with a Bachelor’s degree and employment history in journalism and videography. Emily was in her early-30s, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in human rights and media that saw her well-prepared for a career in free speech and privacy issues; she would deservedly earn her own executive directorship at another NGO. Cara was younger and preparing to apply to graduate school; she would later accept a position in an international relations program in England. Executive Council member Mark was a well-established lawyer and founding partner of a successful law firm, who represented media clients across Canada and volunteered with a slew of organizations connected to free expression issues. Roya was from Venezuela, a passionate feminist, radio host, and podcaster who had also worked in Kenya, Guadeloupe, and British Columbia. And Tomas had a college degree and specialized in communications, with over a decade of experience in financial, government, and

8 non-profit sectors; his passion was filmmaking. Free expression activists, as even this tiny cross- section shows, come from all sorts of backgrounds. Many work for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) big and small, local and transnational; many others are lawyers, journalists, technologists, academics, other researchers, hackers, UX designers, policymakers, staff at supranational organizations, as well as students and volunteers (and many wear several of those hats). The contributions they make are wide-ranging and vary depending on their occupations, expertise, and interests.

The many free expression issues they take up overlap and inform one another, as do the activists themselves. From a bird’s-eye view, they form an expansive meshwork across the face of the globe, variously connected through strong or weak ties. Their differences are just as diverse as the local contexts in which they reside, the ways in which they are affected by free expression violations, and their relationships with more vulnerable and powerful interlocutors. Activists are often categorized by political affiliation, even when it is not welcomed or their beliefs do not fully align with the ‘assigned’ political trope. They are also frequently categorized by the amount of personal risk (legal or physical) they are exposed to, with those working in relative security distinguished from those facing negative or harmful consequences for their activism.8 These consequences are even more heightened in armed conflicts (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.) or zones of intense violence (Mexico and other Latin American countries marked by rampant corruption and cartel crime), as well as countries with poor human rights records and repressive regimes (China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, various African nations, etc.).9 The experiences of an NGO staffer working out of a Canadian office are vastly different from and incommensurable with those of a dissident at risk of arrest, kidnapping, or death. And yet both are free expression activists, part of that expansive global meshwork.

8 As in the majority of human rights and international development ‘transactions’, especially those occurring between individuals and groups located in the Western world and those located outside it, unequal relations of power also mark free expression activists’ interactions with one another. 9 With the election of Donald Trump, even free expression activists in the United States face more personal risks because of their work. According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, as of October, in 2018 there have been six journalists arrested, five journalists killed, 39 journalists attacked, and 18 subpoenas issued to journalists in the country (CPJ and FPF 2018). Moreover, the longest prison term in the history of federal leak cases was handed down to whistleblower Reality Winner in 2018 (FPF 2018). These are examples of the risks facing two types of free expression activists (press freedom advocates and whistleblowers). Other types of free expression activists face similar risks (hose fighting state secrecy and surveillance, for example). 9

There are two basic categories of free expression activism, herein called advocacy and emergency assistance. Advocacy refers to the many actions taken by activists to bring about social or political change and to speak out on behalf of another person or group. This includes social media and letter-writing campaigns, protests and other events, lobbying governments and supranational organizations, legal interventions, research and monitoring, developing technological solutions, and more. Everything done by the Toronto activists on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack constitutes advocacy. Emergency assistance refers to the delivery of aid to individuals and groups who have been persecuted for exercising their right to free expression. This aid frequently takes the form of financial support but it can also take the form of other resources, such as referrals for legal support and medical care, security training and professional development, as well as help with immigration systems. These two broad categories of free expression activism overlap. Fundraising efforts through advocacy campaigns are frequently geared towards increasing an NGO’s emergency assistance capacity, and NGOs often carry out advocacy campaigns for people while they are also delivering emergency assistance to them. In this thesis, both advocacy and emergency assistance are subsumed under the umbrella term of ‘activism’, which is why the term ‘free expression activist’ is used to refer to the multitude of people with different backgrounds and occupations who work in various ways to protect free expression. Thus, the term ‘free expression activist’ should be viewed as a catchall term used for pragmatic purposes.10

The field of free expression activism has expanded in the past half-century, during the same period that human rights activism as a whole became a legitimate agenda for foreign policy and international relations, as well as a proliferating and veritable industry (Allen 2013; Goodale and Merry 2007; Keck and Sikkink 1998). The actors who currently engage in human rights activism include: 1) parts of supranational organizations; 2) international NGOs; 3) domestic NGOs; 4) private foundations; and 5) parts of some governments (Keck and Sikkink 1998:80). The post-WWII international order—rooted in principles of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law—has done much to bind these actors together. This inevitably attracted the attention of anthropologists, with studies examining the make-up, effectiveness, and resources of various

10 Under this catchall term, for example, ‘privacy advocates’ and ‘free speech advocates’ will be distinguished in order to identify the specific issue they are addressing within the field of free expression activism. But many privacy advocates are also free speech advocates, and vice versa, and they are not only NGO staffers but also journalists, lawyers, technologists, academics, and so on. 10 activism groups, the artifacts of their institutionalized activities (such as the drafting of international documents), and the aesthetics of their bureaucratic practices (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Riles 2000). During that same half-century period, human rights activists came to take advantage of the opportunities created by emergent technologies—and they continue to do so today, incorporating digital media into all aspects of their work. As such, it is not surprising that anthropology has explored the intersection of digital media and activism.11 These types of studies often examine digital technologies for their political uses, the role of information production and gathering, and the significance of networking. Recent studies argue that although social movements have long been decentralized, segmentary, and ‘networked’, the emergence of digital technologies has enabled activism campaigns to organize on greater scales and mobilize at greater speeds than ever before.

These types of findings can be reasserted in the context of free expression, with news media/journalism added to the intersection of activism and digital media in order to fully encompass the crossroads of fields that play out across the free expression landscape. The genealogy, ideology, and practice of free expression are closely linked to those of the press, especially through the enduring idea that “journalism should function to safeguard the institutions and principles of democracy” (Steel 2012:42). And with digital media so rapidly replacing print media, journalism and its practitioners have been forced to adapt to the changes within their profession (the nature of news production and dissemination) and the new digitally- mediated tactics used to target them for persecution (in both their online and offline lives) by actors who want them silenced. These struggles only tie journalists closer to free expression activism, with many explicitly taking on the role of activist as well.

In addition to classic social theory work on news media from the 1970s and 1980s (Altheide 1974; Fishman 1980; Gans 1979; Schudson 1978), as well as more recent ethnographies on journalism (Bishara 2013; Boyer 2013; Boyer and Hannerz 2006; Hannerz 2004; Hasty 2005; Pedelty 1995; Ståhlberg 2002), several scholars have examined high-profile

11 For example, Juris’ (2008) study of the movement against corporate globalization and Coleman’s (2013, 2014) studies of Anonymous and Free and Open-Source Software hackers, as well as older social movement theorists like Gerlach and Hine (1970), have examined how the use of new technologies in activism campaigns has subsequently led to new forms of information, networks, globalization, and politics (McInerney 2009). Other social movements and human rights campaigns that build and use networks have been studied by Donnelly (1989), Goodale (2009), Goodale and Merry (2007), Harris (1996), Keck and Sikkink (1998), Merry (2005), Nader (1999), Riles (2000), Riles and Jean-Klein (2005), and Wilson and Mitchell (2003). 11 events that spotlight issues of free expression and journalism. The 2005 publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and the ensuing uproar and protests around the world, is one such event (Bangstad 2013; Keane 2009; Peterson 2007; Steel 2012). The attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, three-day manhunt, and Unity Rally in Paris is another (Gürsel 2017). In both cases, the politics of outrage and spectacle were deployed before, during, and after the events—by the provocateurs at Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo, sellers who refused to distribute the Danish newspaper, perpetrators of the French attack who claimed allegiance to terrorist groups, news media and other commentators (activists, protesters, religious leaders, politicians, etc.), as well as regular Internet users who circulated images of violence, crowds, controversial cartoons, and other graphics. “Have you heard what happened?” and “Things are getting weird everywhere now” become common refrains at this confluence of free expression, journalism, violence, and outrage/spectacle.

These types of events bring to the fore how entangled language and violence are, as well as the dominant semiotic ideology (which is also a liberal ideology) that hinges on the separation of speech and action: “The prevailing semiotic ideologies of our time presume language’s separation from action, that language’s primary purpose is to refer to existing things in the world, rather than to act on the world…According to this view, speech should be free because it cannot hurt anyone” (Bishara 2013:24-25; Silverstein 1996; Woolard 1998). High-profile events that bring together free expression, journalism, violence, and outrage/spectacle show that the clear entanglement of language and violence belies the notion that speech cannot hurt anyone.12 Furthermore, this type of event destabilizes and challenges the dominant, liberal ideology that separates speech from action, as different groups voice their opinions and beliefs about, as well as proposed solutions to, the state of free expression issues in the world today. The performative nature of language and its ability to change sociopolitical conditions and relations is only becoming a more ardent site of contention for free expression activists today.

Outrage, spectacle, and semiotic disagreements thus characterize many free expression debates, even growing more exacerbated as liberalism struggles—like the journalists trying to safeguard its institutions and principles of democracy—to contend with emergent digital

12 At least 200 deaths and many more injuries resulted from the violent protests that erupted because of the Danish cartoon controversy (Cohen 2009). 12 technologies and post-9/11 (in)security. And activists working to sway these debates do not fall back on human rights discourse or rely solely on their liberal idea(l)s, but rather take up technologies of risk and uncertainty. The assemblage of discourses and practices, as well as other beliefs and behaviours, through which risk and uncertainty are conceived and enacted, have unique roles to play for people arguing that, yes, speech can hurt others, or that, no, censorship is not the answer to violent repression. Although not all free expression activists agree with one another or prioritize the same issues, they all engage with risk and uncertainty, trying to strategically use them to their benefit. It is therefore at the crossroads of activism, digital media, and news media/journalism that the roles of risk and uncertainty are especially illuminating and meaningful for the free expression landscape.

I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork investigating the free expression landscape, following activists who have different political affiliations, who work out of relatively safe environments, and who live in dangerous situations or conditions around the world. My participant observation began in September 2014 at the shared offices of two free expression organizations in Toronto, Canada. The first of the two organizations is a small NGO herein called Free Expression Canada (FEC).13 FEC’s work consists of an eclectic mix of programs and campaigns, as well as a couple of annual events. It participates heavily in campaigns to free Canadian citizens (journalists, academics, human rights defenders, etc.) when they are imprisoned abroad. With the sponsorship of Canadian universities and media outlets, the NGO has hosted whistleblower Edward Snowden for a Q&A during the launch event for a database it built to provide researchers better access to data on state surveillance programs. In addition, FEC intervenes in court cases that deal with free expression issues; see Table 1.1 in Appendix A for a select list. Its advocacy campaigns have also focused on reforming Canada’s anti-terrorism laws, outdated Access to Information Act, and provincial anti-SLAPP laws, as well as establishing a press shield law to protect whistleblowers, sources, and journalists. The mainstay of FEC’s international work is an emergency assistance program that provides humanitarian support to journalists around the world whose lives and well-being are threatened because of their

13 At any given time, FEC has only a few full- and part-time employees, and it has an Executive Council of 10-15 members from the Canadian media, legal, and business communities. The primary mechanism for framing and discussing free expression issues and organizing events is an assortment of committees comprised of Council members and external media, legal, business, and academic members. FEC also has a pool of volunteers who write for the website and help at events. Its website is the central hub for all of the NGO’s work, with social media such as Twitter and Facebook acting as its main methods for engaging with the public. 13 profession. Every year, the NGO disperses tens of thousands of dollars in financial grants. The program is also part of a global network of organizations that operate similar emergency assistance programs, herein called the Journalists Protection Network (JPN).

The second of the two organizations where I began by fieldwork is a larger non-profit, non-governmental network of independent organizations (located all over the world) that are connected by a shared commitment to promoting free expression as a fundamental human right. Herein called Global Defense for Free Expression (GDFE), the organization was created in the 1990s by a dozen groups and today represents the largest transnational network of NGOs working on free expression issues. GDFE members are international (such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch) and local, regional, or national (such as the Hong Kong Journalists Association and the Centro de Reportes Informativos sobre Guatemala).14 While FEC’s identity is defined by its country of origin, GDFE emphasizes its transnational networked identity, focusing on growing the collaboration between its members and increasing their individual capacities in local or international spaces. As such, GDFE’s advocacy work and web content are typically driven by its members rather than developed unilaterally by its Toronto staff. However, in collaboration with members, the staff does craft advocacy actions such as campaigns and joint statements that are sent to governments or other actors negatively affecting free expression, using the weight of the network’s combined voices to affect change. They also send out email newsletters (as many free expression organizations do) so that anyone interested can be informed of the work being done by the network and its members. The NGO’s most popular campaign is its work to end impunity for crimes committed against journalists. The campaign’s goal is to raise awareness about the severity of the problem, cultivate political will to prosecute perpetrators, and find justice for those impacted. As part of the campaign, GDFE designs web content like infographics, videos, and other explainers that can be used by members that do not have the resources to create materials themselves.

14 GDFE’s main staff of 15-20 employees runs the network’s day-to-day operations, and it has a transnational Board of Directors that administers its policies and governance (consisting of representatives from member groups). Its website is GDFE’s central hub, with social media such as Twitter and Facebook acting as its main methods for engaging with the public. The free expression issues it takes on are wide-ranging and divided into eight categories: access to information, attacks, censorship, digital rights, freedom of assembly, free expression and the law, gender and sexual diversity, and impunity. GDFE’s work is also organized into six geographic regions: Africa, Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and International. 14

These two very different NGOs and their activities are representative of the types of issues and work that free expression activists take on, even when the contexts in which they are operating differ dramatically. On a day-to-day basis, activists employed at free expression organizations engage primarily in ‘screenwork’ (Boyer 2013), creating documents, writing and responding to emails, scrolling through social media, uploading web content, and jumping back and forth between personal and professional interests and obligations. This is what the activists in the introductory vignette spent much of their time doing on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack. They engage with ‘political movers and shakers’, middling bureaucrats at a range of institutions, and vulnerable people whose rights are being violated. They gather information like reporters, academics, and other researchers, build creative solutions, try to persuade a variety of audiences on free expression issues, and worry about funding. They get on telephone or VoIP calls with officemates, colleagues in the same city or country, and activists on the other side of the world. Large and small events are organized as invaluable to collaboration efforts. Sometimes they bond, laugh, and become friends; other times they antagonize each other, arguing and sniping confrontationally or passive aggressively. They rarely agree on everything, and they expend significant energy on their interpersonal and professional relationships. Some activists have access to high quality hardware and software, while others wear out old equipment, and yet others struggle to get basic Internet access and functioning cyber devices.

These similarities and differences became evident during my fieldwork, as I used the two Toronto-based NGOs to establish other contacts and relationships in Canada and transnationally—slowly coming to see how expansive the free expression landscape is today. Table 1.2 in Appendix A lists NGOs at which I developed strong or weak ties with research participants. I also developed ties with journalists and lawyers engaged with free expression at Canadian-based media outlets and law firms, Canadian bloggers and commentators on the ‘political right’, independent experts on a range of issues (such as access to information, state surveillance, and digital security) based in Canada and other countries, and people caught up in ‘free expression incidents’ (such as hate speech prosecutions and defamation lawsuits). My research also led me to developing ties or interacting with members of (primarily Canadian) government officials (such as Global Affairs staff based at embassies in Egypt, Kenya, Qatar, Sudan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates), representatives for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in several countries, and staff at organizations for

15 refugees and asylum seekers. And finally, I developed ties with journalists and activists who have been persecuted for their work around the world (including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen).

Importantly, I developed many of these ties through participant observation with the Journalists Protection Network (JPN), a transnational network of 20-25 NGOs that operate emergency assistance programs for journalists around the world who are being persecuted for their work. The individual NGOs have eclectic histories. A few of them were founded before or during World War II; several were founded in the 1970s and 1980s as human rights activism was coming into its own as a veritable industry; a few were founded around the turn of the millennium; and a couple were founded within the last decade. A few of these NGOs were established with a general mandate to uphold Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but the majority came into being in response to specific atrocities committed against those exercising their right to free expression.15 As employers, these NGOs attract the full gamut of free expression activists that were described above, and they all operate in international as well as national spaces.

The journalists who seek out the JPN for help face extremely dangerous situations as they report on illegal activities, armed conflicts and other crises, repressive regimes, extremist groups, and more. The threats and rights violations they experience include all the many types described in section 1.1 (during the discussion of the second set of problems facing free expression today). The JPN’s emergency assistance programs have different mandates and eligibility criteria, but the main form of assistance provided is financial support. Examples of fundable expenses include medical costs arising from physical injury or imprisonment, legal costs arising from actions taken in the courts against journalists, and travel costs so journalists and their families can escape persecution. Although each program has its own set of internal rules, structures, and funding sources, staffers often collaborate closely across organizational lines and come to depend on one another (professionally and personally). They sometimes meet in person, but their

15 These atrocities include the deaths of individual journalists (often reporting in war zones) and the rampant persecution experienced during the World Wars, in 1980s Latin America, in 1990s post-USSR Balkan/Baltic regions, and during African conflicts (such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide). 16 primary mode of communication is digitally-mediated, such as email and video calls, as well as instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, and Slack. My involvement in the JPN also led me to the final component of my fieldwork. Through an American organization herein called Digital Action Now (DAN), I explored the wider Internet Freedom community, which overlaps with the free expression landscape and is itself a large collection of people and groups committed to opposing the global censorship of ICTs. There are hubs that act as organizing points of intersection for the Internet Freedom community, such as the Tor Project, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Open Technology Fund (OTF), RightsCon and the Internet Governance Forum (whose annual summits are leading events), and geographically-based groups in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley and Berlin’s cyberactivism scene. These hubs engage in structuring practices within the community, as members work to “increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies” (OTF 2018). In addition to representing a growing field of actors who seek to address the hostile environments of cyberspace, the Internet Freedom community strives to build ‘a free, open, and safe Internet worldwide’—a key part of free expression issues and activism today.

This section has described who free expression activists are, expanded on the activities and issues they take up (including the crossroads of activism, digital media, and news media/journalism), and introduced the sites across the free expression landscape where I engaged research participants. Each of the chapters in this thesis orients to a different subgroup of free expression activists. Chapters two through four examine privacy advocates, free speech advocates, and press freedom advocates, respectively, while chapters five and six focus on the activists of the JPN and persecuted journalists seeking help. The activists of chapters two and three are based in Canada, while chapters four through six take a more transnational perspective, exploring the experiences of networked activists based in Canada and other countries. This is not an analysis of the entire free expression landscape; such an endeavour falls far outside the scope and capacity of this thesis. However, it does explore some of the most representative and significant issues, debates, and experiences taking place, as activists work to address the three sets of problems facing free expression (as discussed in section 1.1). Although the many free expression activists and settings in the following chapters can appear worlds apart, a single person can belong to multiple subgroups. And even when these subgroups have divergent priorities and beliefs, they remain connected by their shared orientations to risk and uncertainty.

In the next section, the (post)modern world that free expression activists live in and try to change is described, and the thesis’ underlying theoretical framework is presented.

1.3 The World that Free Expression Activists Live in—and Try to Change

To understand the roles of risk and uncertainty in free expression activism, it is necessary to understand the roles of risk and uncertainty in (post)modern life more broadly. The first decades of the 21st-century have seen new forms of inequality, wealth, and power produced from a range of changes to society. The escalating violence of the neoliberal capitalist order and transition from the Cold War to a planetary project of counterterrorism wrought a new field of social contract and security concerns. The attacks on September 11, 2001, led to a massive reorganization of the United States’ national security culture, geopolitical objectives, and nation- building efforts, launching the ‘global war on terror’ and realigning zones of interaction between American allies and opponents in ways that continue to reverberate across time and space. The post-9/11 world is marked by a unique national security infrastructure—of affective, imaginative, and material resources—that constructs always impending crisis as inevitable yet also preventable, projecting a future caught between narratives of progress and collapse, success and failure, utopia and apocalypse (Buck-Morss 2002; Masco 2017; Scott 2014). Predicting and then securing the future has taken on a fervency of ever-growing scope and scale. The American model of renewed commitment to imagining and confronting terrorism has been replicated to varying degrees all over the world, leading to a patchwork of security states marked by increases in both targeted and mass surveillance.16 And underlying these conditions are the ever-present, ongoing shifts to the technological capacities of nation-states, corporations and industries, and individual members of society, as well as the rising global flows of people and commodities.

Alongside concerns about the post-9/11 security project (and privacy) are concerns that the liberal public sphere is narrowing dramatically. For many, trigger warnings, safe spaces, social justice warriors, and political correctness are catalysts for a belief that free speech is being stifled so that ‘cultural elites’ can consolidate their hold on power at the expense of regular,

16 More holistically, nation-states have reorganized their own priorities, passed new legislation, adopted new policies, and reallocated their resources to meet the demands of (or take advantage of) the American-led war on terror and its deeper securitization project. 18 working-class citizens.17 The attack on free expression through the policing of speech is viewed as part of a playbook that includes pro-immigration and anti-Christian stances, soft on crime and terrorism mandates, a commitment to big government, and the advancement of collective rights over individual rights. The sovereignty of the nation-state and self-determination of the individual are fundamentally threatened by this narrowing of acceptable expression in public discourse—and to stave off the collapse of Western society and liberalism, a more absolutist approach to free speech is required. Opponents to this view of a free speech crisis, and the proposed solution, argue it is actually a smokescreen used to justify thinly veiled discrimination and prejudices (racial, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, etc.). Concerns about the reentry of fascist discourse into the mainstream have emerged, pointing to the presence of renewed populism, sexism, disdain for intellectuals, convergence of religion and government, and identification of enemies as a unifying cause (the us-versus-them mentality).

Both views have been articulated alongside the development of the ‘alt-right’ (alternative right) and ‘antifa’ (anti-fascists), labels variously taken up by in-group members or hurled by out-group members as accusations and slurs. The rise in extremism on both the political right and left, however, does not mean that concerns about the state of liberalism are not held by citizens across the political spectrum. People who find themselves on all sides of debates view their critics as not practicing liberal democracy in the way it was intended. With the political philosophy and worldview of liberalism now the better part of four centuries old,18 its ongoing deployment is weighed down by numerous iterations and interpretations, while emergent formations are enabled by new conditions of (post)modernity—including the advancement of digital technologies. Methods for pursuing either freedom or censorship remain equally available and subject to negotiation within this aging liberalism, and free expression activists are frequently a leading voice in this negotiation.

Struggles over liberalism and the systems that enable expanding security states are brought home to roost for the individual through the growing pervasiveness of and dependence on digital technologies. Smartphones, computers, and other cyber devices, the Internet and

17 ‘Cultural elites’ of the neoliberal capitalist order are sometimes portrayed as liberals (as opposed to conservatives) and other times portrayed as ‘the establishment’, both liberals and conservatives. 18 Often considered the ‘father of liberalism’, English philosopher John Locke worked in the latter half of the 17th- century, and would be immensely influential to later developments in Western liberalism. 19

World Wide Web, social media, search engines, online shopping and banking, and other applications—all increasingly connected to one another and connecting people and devices— continue to restructure human life at social, political, and economic levels. ‘Metadata’ and ‘big data’ (especially in the form of personal data collection, mining, and quantification) have become a crucial commodity and source of power for governments seeking to track and control citizens and for industries seeking to capitalize on new sources and types of information.19 At the same time that actors of all stripes are orienting to the usefulness of digital technologies, and ‘regular people’ are gaining access to easy-to-use innovations, the number of end-users who have the expertise to understand how they work is actually decreasing (Hankey and Ó Clunaigh 2013:538-39). A significant gap has developed between the layperson and the specialist who has the technical skills to understand how digital technologies work, as well as between the layperson and the powerful but often unknown elites who control them. It is within this type of gap that asymmetric power relationships flourish, even unbeknownst to their vulnerable participants. And due to these gaps, subjects of censorship and persecution can be targeted in new ways—and increasingly across borders.20

Thus, the complex, multifaceted, and conflicted (post)modern world in which free expression activists live begins to emerge. It is one of security states and new surveillance programs, unsettled and tense negotiations of liberalism, new forms of personal data lifted out of individuals’ lives, and emergent forms of power and resistance. The significance of network culture in this world cannot be understated, but the act of networking is neither new nor the defining feature of (post)modernity (although it is an important part of it). What is new with respect to networking is its intrinsically digital nature, its underlying technical infrastructure and protocols that become more inescapable every day and ever more central to our core cultural formations—social, political, and economic. As Galloway (2004) argues, today digital

19 Thatcher et al. (2016) argue that this new type and use of data are part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in their daily lives. Challenging the narrative of utopia commonly invoked when considering technological developments, the authors frame this asymmetry as “a means of capitalist ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that colonizes and commodifies everyday life in ways previously impossible. Situating the promises of ‘big data’ within the utopian imaginaries of digital frontierism,…processes of data colonialism are actually unfolding behind these utopic promises” (Thatcher et al. 2016:990). 20 For instance, an investigation by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab uncovered a campaign of targeted malware attacks carried out by the Ethiopian government, whereby Ethiopian dissidents in the US, UK, Canada, and more other countries were targeted with emails containing spyware posing as Adobe Flash updates and PDF plugins (Marczak et al. 2017).This is just one example of a growing body of research exposing the use of spyware by authoritarian regimes to covertly track, surveil, and invisibly sabotage people they deem to be political threats. 20 technologies are fundamentally structured and managed by the technical protocols that make network connections possible (or not). It is this ‘protocological control’, according to Galloway, that is shaping (post)modern life and ushering in new cultural formations (including state legitimacy and population construction/management).21 It is also with respect to the digital nature of (post)modernity that my use of the term ‘aging liberalism’ can begin to be explained. Aging liberalism ultimately refers to the political philosophy/worldview’s struggle to accommodate emergent cultural formations. And an important part of this struggle is its attempts to adapt to a reality suffused with digital technologies, so different from the reality in which it was originally articulated. As will become clear in this thesis, the relationship between liberalism and digital technologies (which is drawing the attention of free expression activists) is precisely why the concept of aging liberalism provides conceptual space to explore not only free speech, but other free expression issues as well (such as privacy and press freedom). In other words, liberalism’s struggles are being played out in the context of free speech debates, as people with different views deploy it in increasingly conflicting fashions, and in the context of surveillance and data collection regimes, international humanitarianism and immigration systems, and other domains of (il)liberal discourse and practice.

To navigate this (post)modern world, including its predicaments of pervasive digital technologies and aging liberalism, free expression activists turn to technologies of risk and uncertainty. There is a notable treatment of (post)modernity—developed by Ulrich Beck, Mary Douglas, François Ewald, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Niklas Luhmann, and more recent security scholars—that places risk and uncertainty at its core. Two prominent approaches to risk have been developed as part of this scholarship: a sociological/radical constructivist approach and a cultural approach.22 The first approach positions the concept of risk as one of the most powerful features of (post)modern life, a central organizing part of the systems and structures of

21 Galloway juxtaposes (post)modernity—or, following from Deleuze (1992), today’s ‘societies of control’—from other modes of social control, chiefly sovereign and disciplinary control. The protocological control of digital life thus accompanies the shift from disciplinary society to societies of control. 22 Another analysis of risk is the economic approach. The methods associated with this approach are comprised of statistical models, algorithms, and analyses, often of the cost-benefit variety. When considering the topic of risk, the economic approach—through practical assessment, quantification, and management—has been the most popular approach (Petersen 2011), actively engaged by an array of fields touched in one way or another by the insurance industry and/or probabilistic thinking. It is only since the popularity of the economic approach attracted the attention of social scientists that the analysis of risk began to make its way into social theory. 21 contemporary society.23 Risk is framed as a technology that organizes behaviour and decision- making through disciplinary techniques of calculation—in many ways inspired by Weber’s older work on rationalization and bureaucracy. These organizing processes are typically situated in neoliberal capitalist power structures, especially the growth of marketization and individualization in social and political domains.

According to Beck, the transition to what he named ‘world risk society’ occurs as the new and unexpected side effects—the emergent risks—of industrial society become positioned in central and previously unanticipated roles within public consciousness. This view sees the paradigmatic form of contemporary risk as intangible and deterritorialized (globalized), which, if neglected, will lead to total calamity—under a nuclear mushroom, for instance (Scott 2000). Society is not ‘reverting’ or ‘relapsing’ back into the unquestionably risky conditions of earlier, pre-industrial eras. Rather, world risk society emerges paradoxically out of the sheer success of industrialization, which has produced a brand new level and scale of risks that become identified as vital concerns for reflexive society and its future.24 Although risks are not an invention of modernity (Beck 1992:20-21), the global reach that today’s risks can have touch the individual and society in previously unseen and unprecedented ways. And while some risks genuinely exist separate from human perceptions, rather than only as cultural constructs, they all become imbued with meaning at the subjective level of cultural evaluation.25 Processes of social and political recognition take place that shape the logics of risk (its definition and distribution), through which struggles over the constitution of social relations and power dynamics take place.

There are two streams within the sociological/radical constructivist approach to risk. In the first, Luhmann (1993) argues that (post)modern risk is characterized by an economy of control and individualism. This aligns with Weber’s analyses of rationalization and Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary society, with every layer of the individual’s life brought under the organizing sway of risk assessment and management. In the second stream, Beck and Giddens

23 Foucault’s work on biopolitics/governmentality has been an important influence on the sociological/radical constructivist approach to risk, as well as the connected school of thought on risk associated with Ewald (1991, 2002) and others (Ericson and Doyle 2004; Dean 1998, 1999). Contributions from Garland (2001, 2003), Hacking (1990, 2003), and Rose (1993, 2002) have also fleshed out this body of governmentality work on risk. 24 Through his concept of liquid modernity, Bauman (1998, 2000) joins Beck and Giddens in emphasizing the development and radicalization of modernity rather than its unwinding. 25 As Beck asserts, “nobody can appeal solely to an external reality in dealing with risks. The risks which we believe we recognize and which fill us with fear are mirror images of our selves, of our cultural perceptions” (2009:13). 22 foreground the sensation of loss of control. They view society as transitioning from perceiving risks as calculable and manageable to perceiving them as incalculable and uncontrollable, as the limits of scientific and technological knowledge become more apparent and unavoidable. Consequently, (post)modernity becomes marked by the unwelcome arrival of new and frightening uncertainties, which society strove to relieve itself of in the first place. Indeed, this view has allowed more recent scholarship by security scholars like Joseph Masco to emphasize the increasing importance of uncertainty in the 21st-century, even as efforts at rationalization and discipline—through risk-based decision-making and liberal governance of populations— continue on as dominant modes of life. Uncertainty is accelerated and exacerbated, with disaster viewed as always imminent and the future an inexhaustible source of danger, thereby justifying the increasingly exceptional measures of the post-9/11 era. Ensuring security for everyone, no matter the cost and despite the incalculability of risk, has become a predominant ideology.

The second, cultural approach to risk is associated foremost with Douglas (1966, 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982).26 Douglas argues that while risk is presented as a tool of neutral decision-making, it works as a system of moral classification that produces and ensures cultural identity and order. The goal of the cultural approach is to understand how different groups select particular risks, as well as the judgments implicated in the selection process. While the first approach uses risk to generate over-arching descriptions of society, the second approach uses it to describe the formation of more localized choices and identities. As such, while the cultural approach takes up the constructivism paradigm to define knowledge claims, it primarily works to examine cultural patterns of risk behaviour. For example, Douglas (1992) does this by establishing a typology of risk to explain how different cultural groups act towards ‘the same’ risk (e.g., climate change, genetically modified organisms, nuclear energy). In both approaches, the concept of risk is not an analytical category but rather a political term (Petersen 2011). Risks cannot be lifted out of their sociopolitical contexts and addressed as events or objects uninfluenced by the activities and tools used to map them; rather, they are always embedded in particular circumstances and connected to people’s behaviours.

26 Dake (1992), Lupton (2013, 2016), Rayner (1992), Tulloch and Lupton (2003), and Wildavsky and Dake (1990) have also helped to refine this approach. 23

Through her cultural approach, Douglas also developed insights about the intertwined symbolic systems that underlie the experience of uncertainty.27 She highlighted several themes that are central to the combined cultural treatment of risk and uncertainty, including the maintenance of internal group order to resist external threats that cannot be controlled (insiders versus outsiders), the importance of boundaries (of the body and social group) to the identification of risk and uncertainty, and the social structuring of perceptions of danger. Risk and uncertainty emerge as important influences of cultural identity, and all cultures have to cope with uncertainty in the form of the essential unknowability of the future and interpretation of past hardships (Alaszewski 2015). The decline in the dominance of systems of superstition is not marked by a movement towards greater certainty (or greater rationality), but rather by different logics and methods of conceptualizing and responding to uncertainty. Systems of superstition based on magic/faith and systems of risk management based on science and mathematics are both structured ways of addressing uncertainty. In both approaches to risk, then, (post)modern uncertainty emerges precisely as the sources of certainty on which life is premised (in the domains of science and technology, industry, economics, etc.) are destabilized and changed.

In this treatment of (post)modernity, there are two features that make risks particularly relevant to the world in which free expression activists live. The first is the exceptional scale and reach of the risks facing society and its individual members today. There is a clear sensation that risks are much more difficult to ‘outrun’, that they are in dogged pursuit even after having displaced individuals and groups, and that they are appearing in places previously thought safe. This is enabled by the porosity of physical and digital borders. The second feature is the key conceptual turn required to define a global risk today. Specifically, an issue does not become a risk of world-altering proportions until it is perceived as a problem in and of itself—once the dangers of radioactive emissions, climate change, or other negative effects of science and

27 Although risk and uncertainty have not been a central theme in anthropology, analyses of religion and magic are intertwined with insights about them, even if they are not explicitly foregrounded as such. Malinowski (1922) observed that the Trobriand Islanders sought to mitigate uncertainties and maximize the likelihood of success in their Kula exchange network through a combination of technology and magic. The participation in Kula exchange was a form of voluntary risk-taking (Alaszewski 2015; Zinn 2015). Evans-Pritchard (1937) addressed issues relating to the methods by which the Azande made decisions under conditions of uncertainty; they consulted a range of oracles before any significant undertaking in order to judge whether the outcome would be successful. Durkheim (1915), Mauss (1954), and Levi-Strauss (1966) drew on ethnographic accounts to develop theories of religion, magic, and gift exchange, in which methods of creating mutual dependency, moral obligations, and solidarity were based on underlying structures of logic. These structures illuminate ways in which cultures use religion, magic, divination, and other technologies to manage the risks and uncertainties of everyday life. 24 technology can no longer be ignored. Through this feature, an issue comes to be elevated from the realm of ‘normal politics’ to that of ‘panic politics’ (Browning and McDonald 2011:241; Buzan et al. 1998:34).

It is through these features that free expression violations come to be swept up in experiences of (post)modern risks. Although the types of persecution that people exercising their right to free expression endure do not in and of themselves represent a risk of world-altering proportions, activists use the frequency and volume at which these incidents are occurring globally to position them as part of a broader pattern reflecting a steady march towards an existential cliff edge, over which exists either cataclysm or complete Orwellian control, and very little to no opportunity for resistance. Because powerful actors have a growing number of methods at their disposal to track, intimidate, and censor their opponents (and evidence is emerging that they are making use of them), it becomes more legitimate for free expression activists to in turn view these types of actions as constituting a global risk. The intense persecution together with new forms of surveillance and information control—through ICT shutdowns, social media disinformation campaigns, repressive legislation and regulations, and other tactics that censor expression—begin to transform isolated or smaller scale incidents into an overarching global risk that could have world-altering consequences if left unaddressed. Asking “have you heard what happened?” is met with increasing trepidation and resignation in the face of this type of risk, with a single event (even when tragic) like the Charlie Hebdo attack having potentially far-reaching and disproportionate consequences.

The global risk associated with declining free expression also invokes and informs concerns about the futures of liberalism and humanity as moral being. Given the interconnected histories and concepts of free expression and liberalism, it is a relatively straight path from viewing free expression violations as a global risk to viewing threats to liberalism as a global risk as well. The co-emergence of these views occurs precisely because the post-WWII international order is so dependent on the political philosophy of liberalism. Where one is endangered, the other must be endangered as well. Two subgroups of free expression activists both espouse that current threats to liberalism represent a global risk, albeit for different reasons. One subgroup points to the decline of global freedom and democracy (especially through the erosion of privacy rights and increase in surveillance/information controls) as evidence that threats to liberalism

25 should be perceived as a global risk. This is essentially an extension of the view that free expression violations represent a global risk, as they follow it through to its implications for the broader political philosophy. Meanwhile, another subgroup of free expression activists, those who believe over-reaching social justice efforts and political correctness are eroding free speech and traditional Western society, also contends that current threats to liberalism constitute a global risk. What, precisely, constitutes liberalism is hotly debated as these two outlooks are articulated, but in both cases liberalism is positioned as severely imperiled. And for both subgroups, the collapse of society (into totalitarianism) will result if the current decline of liberalism continues.

It is also through the two features of (post)modern risks that ‘terrorism’ can be explained as having been taken up as a global risk. Although few experts consider terrorism an existential risk to society, in the post-9/11 era it is definitively positioned as such (Borneman and Masco 2015; Masco 2014; Petersen 2011). Giddens (1990, 1991, 2002) points to the transition from what he calls ‘traditional’ to ‘manufactured’ risks as a crucial factor in the transformations undergone in post-industrial society—although he is careful to acknowledge that ‘external risks’ do exist, sometimes manufactured and other times not. In other words, risk is a uniquely collective construct, even when it is also really ‘out there’ in the world, separate from human perception. This aligns well with current understandings of terrorism. Attacks that cause terror for ideological purposes are horrible and represent a danger to public safety; however, the meaning and power attributed to terrorism in the public consciousness today derive significantly from its positioning as an existential risk. It has most assuredly been elevated from the realm of ‘normal politics’ to that of ‘panic politics’. The always impending catastrophe of terrorist attacks has come to match the catastrophe of large-scale environmental/nuclear disasters. How else could such a monumental shift in affective, imaginative, and material resources to creating a planetary project of counterterrorism be realized? It is hardly a stretch to view post-9/11 security states as produced precisely because of the United States’ definitional authority over risk, which has enabled the country to assign terrorism to the category of global risks.28 It is in this way that an event like the Charlie Hebdo attack has the capacity to direct legislative and policy changes in countries around the world, coming to affect the personal rights of millions of people.

28 As Beck and Levy assert with respect to the centrality of risk in society today, “the central question of power is a question of definitional authority [over risk]” (2013:17). 26

As many scholars taking on security studies have observed, the ‘anticipatory preemption’ around which counterterrorism efforts revolve constructs just as much insecurity as it prevents (Butler 2004; Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Nader 2017; Robin 2004; Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017; Zulaika 2009). The achievements of the post-9/11 era in remaking reality through a lens of constant, future-oriented insecurity highlights the remarkable amount of perceptual work that has been done to justify the supposed need for a planetary project of counterterrorism. This is a feat that may not have been possible in a world not already marked by a culture of global risk. Had industrial society not begun transitioning into this new type of modernity, the concerted work done to position nuclear emissions and the environmental repercussions of human activity as this new type of risk may not have occurred (or not in the same way). If this previous work had not been completed, much more perceptual work would likely have been required to bring the post-9/11 view of terrorism into public consciousness as this same type of global risk. In other words, as the perceptual work is done to categorize certain issues as global risks, it becomes more feasible to complete similar work for other issues.

This section has explored the world that free expression activists live in and try to change, full of (post)modern conditions that present new opportunities for both persecution and resistance. To make sense of their work, it is essential to situate them in the context of a (post)modernity marked by the powerful features of risk and uncertainty. The social theory on risk and uncertainty has been discussed to demonstrate that they are a central, organizing part of the systems and structures of contemporary society. In particular, risk and uncertainty weave through the intersection of liberalism, technology, and security, playing significant roles in defining (post)modern cultural formations, including the discursive spaces in which free expression issues and activism are so frequently conceived and enacted. This thesis will show that to confront the three sets of overlapping problems facing free expression, on a day-to-day basis activists themselves turn to technologies of risk and uncertainty—variously managing and mitigating them in order to conceive of their obstacles and advance their goals. As a result, free expression is coming to mean something different today. The purpose of this thesis, then, is to understand its shifting and divergent meanings, the corresponding implications for (post)modern life, and the experiences and roles of free expression activists.

1.4 Research Methods and Methodological Assumptions

This thesis is the result of multi-site physical and digital fieldwork that consisted of ethnographic and other qualitative forms of research. As introduced in section 1.2, I spent two years building ties with research participants across the free expression landscape. I began at the shared offices of two Toronto-based NGOs, using them as points of entry to establish other contacts in Canada and other countries. This approach took me to Canadian activists working on an assortment of free expression issues, with allies and opponents arrayed along geographical, professional, and political lines. A global network of emergency assistance programs provided entry to the broader transnational field of free expression activism, especially to those who suffer through violations of their rights. And then I came to the Internet Freedom community, which is also fundamentally transnational, full of both affluent and persecuted activists. Weaving through this series of settings and subgroups, I slowly began to piece together the actors involved in free expression activism, eventually fleshing out the overarching landscape, its boundaries, and the overlapping relations. Throughout most of this thesis, pseudonyms are used for the names of research participants and organizations, with some personal or contextual details altered, in order to maintain discretion or safety.

Much of my time was spent at the shared offices of FEC and GDFE, participating in the work they do, speaking with employees, and observing the goings-on taking place. I wrote and edited articles, tweets and Facebook posts, press releases, joint statements, and letters of support. I called into conference calls and took minutes; I learned about fundraising, budgets, and the tax code; and I built up institutional knowledge about the NGOs. I spent countless hours following free expression activists on social media, as well as collecting and reading relevant news articles, reports, and other web content. As part of this, I assembled a database of over 6,000 news articles published since January 2015 and related to free expression issues across Canada. I also learned about digital security and circumvention tools, implementing encryption and other secure practices in my own life. I gossiped in the office kitchen (which did have an actual watercooler), visited people’s desks, brought food for ‘salad day’, participated in group chats with women activists (via instant messaging apps), and talked about the news-of-the-day, late night television, politics, music, basketball, food, and relationships.

In addition to going to restaurants and bars, parks in the summer, skating rinks in the winter, music events, and other recreational activities outside the offices with research participants, I attended (and sometimes helped plan) free expression events. These included annual fundraising galas and awards ceremonies; conferences and annual general meetings; lectures, panels, and press conferences by activists, academics, journalists, and other experts; book signings and film screenings; less formal ‘media parties’ and smaller get-togethers (including ‘meet and greets’ when someone well-known visited Toronto); government town halls, public consultations, testimonies, and other meetings (in the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa). When events were held online or outside Toronto, I tuned into livestreams, live blogs, and YouTube videos. With respect to the transnational work of emergency assistance, I participated in the casework involved in approving journalists’ applications and then delivering funds to them, as well as in the governance of the global network. I also met with persecuted journalists from Bangladesh, Honduras, Mexico, Syria, and Turkey who had managed to flee to Canada, and attended a hearing at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada for a journalist claiming asylum in the country (together with his wife and newborn baby). As part of my involvement in emergency assistance, I attended an in-person meeting of the JPN’s members in Valencia, Spain, in 2016. With respect to the Internet Freedom community, I attended a digital rights conference in Valencia in 2016 (when not at the JPN’s meeting), and DAN’s annual Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, later that same year.

Throughout the fieldwork period, I conducted 28 formal, semi-structured, or informal interviews, making sure to sit down with representatives from as many subgroups as possible. In Canada, this included activists identified as having left- or right-leaning tendencies, the ‘access to information community’, experts on digital rights, government officials, and journalists and lawyers engaged in free expression issues. It also included interviews with activists and persecuted journalists from other countries (such as Azerbaijan, Brazil, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Turkey), as well as members of organizations that operate emergency assistance programs or provide digital security training to journalists and activists (based in countries like France, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom). The interviews varied in length from 30 minutes to several hours depending on the interviewee’s preference and availability. A few interviews were conducted in a group setting, and some occurred in person while others occurred over VoIP. Interviews were

29 sometimes recorded with permission, while other times only notes were taken (when the interviewee thought elements of the discussion would be too sensitive). I also conducted a survey questionnaire with persecuted journalists who received assistance from the JPN. In the end, I received 35 responses from survey participants in Latin America, MENA, East Africa, Europe and Central Asia, and South Asia.

Analysis of the data collected for this study is qualitative in nature. I transcribed a selection of the interviews and took notes on the rest. My ethnographic field notes, interview transcriptions, and interview notes were coded and re-coded until a set of ideas and concepts emerged as central, and which I eventually realized should be explored through a framework of risk, uncertainty, and (post)modernity. Much of my time was spent conducting discourse and textual analysis on the field notes and interviews, as well as on the large corpus of relevant text- based and audio-visual materials I collected from online and other sources. One of the basic methodological assumptions of this thesis is that free expression activism exists as a series or meshwork of textual practices, aligning with Geertz’s argument (and widely acknowledged belief in anthropology) that cultural events and activities represent texts, “a story they tell themselves about themselves” (1972:9).29 Materials that contain written or spoken language, as well as artifacts, images, behaviours, and performances (both formal and informal) can all be interpreted as texts. This type of analysis involves searching for regularities, patterns, and trends in how people, within and across cultures, perform, understand, and sometimes explain their own narratives (e.g., stories, ideas, experiences, etc.). It is a search for meanings and their interconnections in the expression of culture.

Another basic methodological assumption of this thesis is that free expression activism is best examined through ‘multi-site ethnography’ (Hannerz 2003; Marcus 1998; Robben 2012). According to Marcus, multi-site ethnography is research that “moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space” (1998:79). This is very important to properly exploring and understanding the transnational field of free expression activism. While I began my fieldwork with FEC and GDFE in Toronto, I used the NGOs as starting points

29 Geertz famously called culture “an assemblage of texts” (1972:26), and Ricoeur (1979) argued that human behaviour itself could be treated as an interpretable text. 30 to identify and gain access to other sites within the free expression landscape. The networking capabilities of the Internet and other digital technologies are invaluable to this type of research, especially as activists primarily interact with one another through digitally-mediated methods and forms. As such, I also engaged in network analysis once the breadth of the free expression landscape became apparent, looking for the structure of relations between free expression activists and other actors they engage with and/or who affect their experiences (Scott 2000).

Lastly, a third methodological assumption that underpins this thesis is the recognition that research participants are not always less powerful than the privileged anthropological researcher. This invokes the argument made by Hannerz, who drew on Nader (1972), that anthropology should also engage in “studying sideways: looking at others who are, like anthropologists, in a transnational contact zone, and engaged there in managing meaning across distances, although perhaps with different interests, under other constraints” (Hannerz 1998:109).30 Several free expression activists I encountered had backgrounds in social sciences, many had obtained or were currently obtaining Masters or PhDs in any number of disciplines, and more than a few were familiar with the methodological tools and practices of anthropological research. My study was often not novel, although the notion of ‘researching the researcher’ (as many activists identified themselves), did variously surprise, intrigue, or amuse. ‘Studying sideways’ is part of anthropology’s reflexive turn (Geertz 1973; Ricoeur 1974), an effect of modernity that has also affected contemporary free expression activism. The shared knowledge, claims to authority, and hermeneutic tools (methodological, conceptual) between myself and the research participants required repeated reflexive negotiation. Untangling the richly textured, multilayered, and intertwined cultural constructions of the research field is an interpretive exercise focusing on the encounter between myself as fieldworker and the free expression activist as research participant, an unending search for meaning. The following chapters are the results (always partial, incomplete, and amendable) of this search.

30 Given the variety of different types of free expression activists and the contexts in which they exist, in some instances the traditional distribution of power and privilege between researcher and research participant was evident (e.g., when I engaged with journalists who were desperate and impoverished because of the persecution to which they had been subjected). 31

1.5 Chapter Overview

Each of the chapters in this thesis orients to a different subgroup of free expression activists, their unique experiences with risk and uncertainty, and the ways in which they go about addressing the three sets of problems facing free expression today. These set of problems consist of its multiplicity of meanings, the growing number and types of threats and violations to which it is subjected, and the (post)modern conditions surrounding it—most notably, the predicaments of increasingly pervasive digital technologies and an aging liberalism deployed in increasingly conflicting fashions. “Things are getting weird everywhere now,” the activists in the vignette at the beginning of the chapter agreed—but they work hard to make sure that ‘weird’ can mean ‘better’ rather than only ‘worse’.

Chapter two focuses on Canada’s privacy advocates and the discursive strategies they deploy to harness the uncertainty produced by the security state, portraying it as a greater risk than terrorism to Canadians’ liberal way of life. Indeed, the erosion of privacy rights is portrayed as a crisis that could bring about a totalitarian end to global democracy. In their struggles to prevent this future, risk and uncertainty are taken up as mediations of both privacy rights and Canada’s security state. But as privacy advocates campaign for stronger privacy protections and navigate their own wide-ranging and varied experiences of (in)security, they simultaneously possess a post-9/11 ideology that justifies the need for a heightened national security regime. All the while, their efforts and experiences reflect and contribute to ongoing shifts in what personhood and freedom look like in a world of increasingly pervasive digital technologies.

Chapter three examines the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere, who conceive of a different crisis. They broaden their risk discourse to assert that the crisis of eroding free speech through state and non-state social forces is part of a larger existential risk, whereby progressive liberalism is supplanting conservative liberalism. The primary discursive tool they use to position the free speech crisis as an existential risk is the language of pathology, which comes to mediate their performative encounters with a progressively liberal, aggressive cultural Other. By examining the language of pathology used by free speech advocates, this chapter shows that performativity (of language, free speech debates, security, and risk) is central to their activism efforts. It also becomes evident that underlying their efforts are attempts to

32 reconcile traditional understandings of free speech and individual autonomy with the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies and aging of liberalism.

Chapter four turns to the activism work of protecting press freedom and helping journalists around the world who are persecuted for their profession. Two ethnographic case studies are used to show that, while press freedom advocates justify their work through liberal idea(l)s of human rights, to achieve their goals they primarily take up the very types of risk and uncertainty that underpin the sprawling bureaucracies they engage. In other words, press freedom advocates spend much of their time negotiating international humanitarianism and immigration systems rather than assuming their narratives of liberalism will win out over bureaucratic governance, which is premised on risk-based decision-making. Chapter four thereby shifts from grander conceptualizations of existential risk to the more mundane but no less important technologies of risk and uncertainty at work in bureaucratic encounters, where the struggles of an aging liberalism are on display and can be examined further.

Chapter five explores the transnational governance of the Journalists Protection Network (JPN). Charting the years-long process by which the JPN came to prioritize digital security, this chapter argues that risk and uncertainty became a driving system of meaning as members worked to reconstitute the practices and ideologies that underlie their networking and bureaucratic governance. In order to ensure they did not place the journalists who apply to their emergency assistance programs in greater danger, the JPN strategically tried to manage the risk and uncertainty involved in its security project. But in a world of evolving network culture (with its new surveillance tactics, Internet sociality, and (post)modern subject), their efforts were not always complete or successful. Chapter five continues to examine the impact that increasingly pervasive digital technologies is having on free expression activism, as new kinds of power and resistance become available to activists, journalists, and actors trying to silence them.

Chapter six explores the fundamental act of asking for and delivering help in the free expression landscape, specifically during the emergency assistance provided by the JPN. Despite the standardized, calculative application process that emergency assistance relies on, journalists and caseworkers work hard to establish meaningful, shared understanding as moral human subjects. This chapter argues that intersubjectivity and the Levinasian face of the Other play key roles in the encounter between journalists and caseworkers as they negotiate their own and each

33 other’s risks and uncertainties. As they do so, questions of morality arise alongside (post)modern contradictions, pushing them to resolve the moral/ethical implications of their circumstances, actions, and relationships. And in the context of emergency assistance, the intersubjective experience and Levinasian face adapt to the additional mediating layers of digital technologies and bureaucracy, with moral conflict/obligation, affective overflow, and the distance created by them both problem and solution in the search to find or deliver help.

The seventh chapter concludes the thesis by first revisiting the ethnographic vignettes with which I begin each chapter, and then by considering for a final time the predicaments that are digital technologies and aging liberalism—as well as, finally, the predicament of free expression. Free expression is an inescapably tricky concept to both conceive and enact, and it is surrounded by balancing acts, tensions, and feedback loops. Its morality is never a given, with activists making laudable ethical commitments and committing morally questionable actions alike. Not only must they address the three sets of problems facing free expression, but also their own choices and decisions—and all the while risk and uncertainty guide their (post)modern pursuit of freedom and humanity.

Chapter 2 Privacy and National Security in Post-9/11 Canada

2.0 “What Do I Care?”

Toronto, Ontario: Autumn 2014 On my first day of fieldwork at the offices of FEC and GDFE, I accompanied bubbly activist Emily on an errand to a nearby journalism school. She had worked for both NGOs (GDFE before FEC), and had a wealth of knowledge about all things free expression. Emily was not afraid to speak her mind, but she was also respectful of the NGOs’ power structures and got the short-end of the stick on multiple occasions when it came to career advancement. As we waited at the curb for our taxi, boxes of posters for an event that FEC was planning at our feet, Emily told me how a digital security expert had led the NGOs in a big training session last week. “I wish I could have been there,” I said. “We all learned a lot. About passwords, encryption, best practices, etc. It’s getting more dangerous, and we’re struggling to keep up.” When I told Emily that I mostly cycled through the same passwords for all my accounts, she told me how risky that was. “If someone cracks your email password, they can get into your bank account, social media, everything.” In the taxi, Emily began a conversation with our driver, an immigrant from Somalia, after he asked us what we do. When they began discussing privacy, Emily found his opinions just as lacking as my password practices. “What do I care about the government looking at me?” The driver asked. “They can watch all they want. I drive my taxi.” Emily parried, “What about your family? Friends? Do you want them under surveillance?” The driver shrugged, laughing. Emily plucked his cellphone from its mount on the console (she was in the front, while I shared the back seat with our boxes). “Whatchu doing?” The driver yelped, trying to grab his cellphone back. Emily held it away and told him to watch the road. “So…emails, contacts, texts, Facebook, what should I open?” Emily asked, looking at the driver’s cellphone apps. “What about Google Maps? Could I get your home address from that?” Emily placed the cellphone back in its mount without opening any apps. The driver was shaking

35 his head, not sure if he should be angry. But Emily was smiling at him, and her friendly personality made it difficult. As we arrived at the university and exited the taxi, our driver waved and called to Emily, “You’re a strange woman.”

2.1 A Canadian Ideology of Risk and Uncertainty

Like its Western allies after 9/11, Canada underwent dramatic transformations to expand its national security regime in the sudden priority fight against ‘terrorism’ (Lennox 2007).31 These changes granted government agencies extraordinary powers, which have altered the relationship between citizen and state—the very foundation of the social contract that Hobbes defined as the exchange of public obedience for collective security. Illustrating this transformed relationship, the taxi driver who Emily bickered with was casually nonchalant about the state hypothetically invading his privacy. Since the post-9/11 era began, the Canadian state and its watchdogs have engaged in a tug-of-war centred on national security powers and the social contract. Despite efforts to check these powers, the message that terrorism poses a continuous risk to regular Canadians has become a naturalized part of everyday life (Murphy 2007; Walby and Anaïs 2012). Across the West, discourses of ‘violent extremism’ and ‘radicalization’ are prevailing mechanisms for categorizing national security threats and elucidating the perceived global risk of terrorism. Explicitly discussing the Canadian context, Monaghan argues that “tropes of radicalization and violent extremism have served to—and will likely increasingly be in the service of—promoting a generalized fear of menacing Islam and expand the security resources and preoccupations of the ‘war on terror’” (2014:498).

Although Canada is often viewed as a progressive haven, the state has used the domestication of fear as part of an affective regime and national resource to cultivate a culture of fear, secrecy, and information control, which came to be uniquely associated with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration (2006-2015) (see Table 2.1 in Appendix B). This culture was achieved through legislation and policy changes related not only to national security, but also to the press, access to information and privacy laws, tax laws for charities, funding for and public

31 Lennox (2007) describes in detail the series of constitutional, bureaucratic, defensive, and border infrastructural changes that Canada made in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and how they mirrored the transformations of its American neighbour and other countries across the Western world. 36 reporting by government scientists, the treatment of whistleblowers, and the collection of population data—all of which attracted the concern of Canada’s free expression activists.32 Opposition to Harper’s administration peaked with the passage in 2015 (after the Charlie Hebdo attack) of Bill C-51, new anti-terrorism legislation that gave even more powers to the state.

Increasing awareness of the Harper administration’s culture of fear, secrecy, and information control is viewed as having played a role in the Conservative Party’s defeat at the hands of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in the October 2015 federal election.33 Although the Liberal government moved away from a blatant mobilization of fear, the affective logics of the post-9/11 security project remain. Discourses of violent extremism and radicalization, which index a generalized fear of Islam without having to explicitly state the connection, are still dominant national security mechanisms. The Liberal government invokes terrorism threats to position Canadians as living in a world of innumerable dangers—but rather than emphasize the ‘fearful’ nature of this world, Trudeau’s administration tends to emphasize its risky or uncertain nature (see Table 2.2 in Appendix B). This ideology of risk and uncertainty is palpable in the central question posed by the Liberal authors of a primer on Canada’s national security framework: “In a world of uncertainty, risk, and rapid change, do we have the tools necessary to keep people safe—and are we using all our tools in ways that also safeguard our values?” (Government of Canada 2016:5). The increasing popularity of digital technologies (e.g., social media, encryption) is positioned as a key source of risk and uncertainty. Borders, passenger flights, and other means of entry into Canada (e.g., the immigration system) are treated as ‘zones’ of risk and uncertainty that must be ‘securitized’. And the Internet is similarly treated as this type of zone, where national security can be undermined in a variety of ways.34

In this always risky and uncertain context, “security is constituted as both a necessity (to defend against catastrophic shock) and as an unachievable goal (as the future is an inexhaustible source of threat), a perverse logic that the counterterror state uses to drive increasing calls for

32 As a Toronto Star (2016a) editorial stated, “The Harper government never met a climate of fear it couldn’t use.” In more detail: “Pervasive secrecy, partisan stonewalling, unnecessary redactions, and blanket refusals to disclose reached entirely new heights (or depths) under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper” (Toronto Star 2016b). 33 Bill C-51 was used to highlight this culture and juxtapose it with messages of tolerance and openness. The Liberal Party framed this message as ‘positive politics’, with Trudeau declaring: “Fear of the world beyond our borders. Fear of each other. Well, let me tell you something. Fear makes us weak, not strong. The Prime Minister’s job is to bring Canadians together, not to tear us apart” (Liberal Party of Canada 2017). 34 This includes ideological propaganda, targeted recruitment, financing, and malicious cyber activities. 37 resources, technical capacities, and agency” (Masco 2014:17). The tug-of-war between free expression activists and Canada’s security state continues, with Trudeau’s government coming under fire for many actions perceived to be violating privacy, free speech, press freedom, and access to information rights.35 These actions indicate that although the rhetoric changed with the turnover in federal administrations, the practices of Canada’s security state overall remained the same. Although Trudeau’s government eschewed the politics of fear, it remains committed to the politics of risk and uncertainty that accompany the post-9/11 security project. Because of this, there persists an underlying ideology of risk and uncertainty that is sustained through affects (fear, terror, anger) and imaginary processes of (risk) assessment, precariousness (‘becoming- precarious’), and securitization. In such an environment, the future is always unpredictable and unknowable, becoming an unending source of danger and anxiety. As many risk scholars argue, “risk-based predictions deliver insecurity rather than security, for the more that science discovers, the more it demonstrates that life is saturated with risks” (O’Malley 2004:2; Adam et al. 2000; Beck 1992; Caplan 2000; Douglas 1992).

This chapter argues that experiences of (in)security are wide-ranging and varied amongst Canada’s free expression activists. Indeed, similarities and differences abound even as they unite in campaigning for privacy rights while possessing the same assessments of risk that justify the need for a heightened national security regime. Specifically, activists share common conceptions of data, a commitment to digital security, and inconsistent implementations of security practices. However, they differ in the amount of expertise and authority they gain about digital security, the specific practices they employ to protect their own privacy, and their affective experiences of the security state. Importantly, (in)security works in this context to produce different affective experiences of Canada’s security state, depending on whether activists only imagine themselves as targets of surveillance or have actually received confirmation of being subjected to it. To address these experiences and the contrary pulls of wanting to protect privacy rights while not undermining securitization efforts, free expression activists strategically turn the risk and uncertainty of the post-9/11 security paradigm to their own ends. They work to harness the uncertainty produced by the security state to portray the state as a greater risk than terrorism to

35 These actions include delays on promised amendments to Bill C-51, planned legislation to allow police to obtain Canadians’ data without a warrant, increased search and seizures of cyber devices at border crossings, the illegal storage of Canadians’ metadata by CSIS, and various controversial surveillance activities. (CSIS refers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which is similar to the United States’ CIA.) 38

Canadians’ liberal way of life. All the while, their efforts and experiences reflect and contribute to ongoing shifts in what personhood and freedom look like in a world of increasingly pervasive digital technologies.

When former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information in 2013 and Canada’s surveillance activities became known in more detail, a network of civil society members formalized their cooperation to launch joint privacy campaigns by establishing the Protect Our Privacy Coalition. At the time of writing, the Privacy Coalition has 64 group members and 25 individual members (experts, academics, etc.). In addition, 41,030 Canadians have pledged their support at ourprivacy.ca. The term ‘privacy advocate’ is used herein to refer to the many different people who have a shared concern for privacy rights and have taken action. Section 2.1 has illustrated how Canada’s security state has affected free expression activists’ concerns in the post-9/11 era. Section 2.2 introduces the anthropological literature on security, as well as its connections with the social theory on risk and uncertainty. This contextualizes section 2.3, which scrutinizes how privacy advocates experience the security state in Canada. After exploring how security works in practice for different privacy advocates, the discursive strategies they deploy as part of their efforts to take up risk and uncertainty are examined. Specifically, they explicitly reject the politics of fear and represent the state as all-seeing, draw on empirical findings, call for greater oversight and a cultivation of epistemic authority, and expose the ambiguity and vagueness of anti-terrorism legislation. The chapter ends by emphasizing the centrality of digital technologies to privacy advocates and their activism, as well as what this reveals about evolving conceptions of personhood and freedom.

2.2 Security Studies in Anthropology: Post-9/11 in Focus

In chapter one, it was shown that free expression activists live in a complex, multifaceted, and conflicted post-9/11 world. It is one of security states and new surveillance programs, unsettled and tense negotiations of liberalism, new forms of personal data collection, and new forms of power and resistance. These are important features of (post)modernity, a broad concept that can be understood as the assemblage of cultural formations (social, political, economic) that have emerged to shape the fabric of life and society since transitioning out of the equally broad era of ‘modernity’—loosely bounded by the Enlightenment at its beginning and

Industrialism/Fordism at its end. To some, (post)modernity began in the 1980s or early 1990s. But in this thesis, the use of the term (post)modernity refers specifically to the state/conditions of life and society that have emerged since the changes wrought by 9/11 and the digital nature of networking (with its protocological control) have become so entrenched in our cultural formations.36 Although today’s security paradigm has now been described, the social theory on security requires more discussion. This section introduces that scholarship, showing that contemporary experiences of (in)security are wide-ranging and varied. They offer important insights into cultural processes accompanying securitization, which are always emergent in specific historical, material, and socioeconomic conditions, as well as the growing associations between security, risk/uncertainty, and freedom.

Since 9/11, security studies have acquired new popularity in anthropology. A growing number of scholars situate the experiences of their research participants in the context of post- 9/11 security states, connecting a variety of related sub-fields to the global preoccupation with national security and (counter)terrorism. Although more commonly found in international relations, peace and conflict studies, and political science, anthropologists operating in securitized contexts are exploring what ‘being secure’ and ‘being insecure’ look like today. Questions about what security means, how different people strive for security, and which conditions render them insecure are pursued in circumstances of both violent conflict and political stability.37 Although still a small sub-field, anthropologists uniformly argue for the centrality of security studies within anthropological inquiry, suggest the discipline can offer unique contributions to the topic, and call for others to take up this research area.38

36 It is in this 21st-century time period that the first generations of kids who were born after 9/11, and who have grown up never knowing a life without the use of everyday digital technologies (sometimes called ‘digital natives’), are now beginning to reach adulthood. The use of the parentheses around the “post-” in (post)modernity is meant to signify that there is no single, definitive period that marks life after modernity, just as many scholars refer to plural “modernities” in order to denote the complexity and diversity in types and experiences of modernity. 37 Edited volumes by Eriksen et al. (2010), Kelly et al. (2010), Holbraad and Pedersen (2013), and Maguire et al. (2014) have brought together scholars working in widely divergent settings who are nonetheless developing shared anthropological perspectives about security based on ethnographic encounters. 38 There is a growing body of work that describes itself as ‘being about security’ (Albro et al. 2011; Buur et al. 2007; Eriksen et al. 2010; Gusterson and Besteman 2009; Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Kelly et al. 2010; Lorey 2015; McNamara and Rubenstein 2011; Spencer 2010). Other researchers identify their work as located at the intersection of security and conflicts between states or other bodies, many of which concern nation-states grappling with the Cold War (Feldmann 2008; Gonzalez 2010; Gusterson 2004; Kelly 2006a; Kwon and Chung 2012; Lutz 2009; Masco 2006, 2014; Werbner 2010). Some scholars examine the relations between security, development, and humanitarian aid (Duffield 2007; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Lakoff 2010; Lutz 2006). Others explore discourses and 40

Security was long examined from the top-down and within a firm nation-state scope. However, attempts have been made to reformulate security to focus on the rights and needs of people rather than the preservation of states, which has brought the concepts of security and freedom into new dialogue.39 This movement away from only viewing security through a state- centric lens is seen in anthropologists’ work, whose ethnographic endeavors are tailored to anchoring research in local experiences, providing tools to understand how social groups function from the perspective of their inhabitants. More broadly, anthropologists have articulated the need to critically evaluate culturally sensitive forms of security, unpacking discourses and practices through which security becomes naturalized in various contexts—rather than viewing security as a natural component of society (Maguire et al. 2014:2).40 As such, although 9/11 was seen as a turning point that ushered in a new security project, today’s security scholars emphasize it was and remains part of a context far predating that event. It is a continuation from earlier Cold War and WWII security formations (Masco 2014), as well as part of a new paradigm that stems from the fractures and failures of neoliberalism (Hamilton and Placas 2011):

“Security” calls on the power of fear to fill the ruptures that the crises and contradictions of neoliberalism have engendered and so functions as a principal tool of state formation and governmentality in the world today, albeit one that is constantly challenged and negotiated by a range of local actors and state subjects. [Goldstein 2010:487]

Indications of (post)modernity emerge in this excerpt and the growing anthropology on security, whereby ruptures, crises, and contradictions come together alongside the mobilization of security in the name of nation-building from the top-down and governance from the bottom- up. Goldstein also highlights the unique relationship of security with fear and risk, whereby an issue that is ‘securitized’—represented as an existential risk by leaders and accepted as such by the public—comes to be elevated from the realm of ‘normal politics’ to that of ‘panic politics’

practices of (in)security in a range of spaces beyond the traditional state-centric concerns of ‘critical security studies’ found in other disciplines (Agamben 2005; Butler 2004; Das 2006; Feldman 1991; Lorey 2015; Povinelli 2011; Taussig 1992, 1999; Vigh 2006). And finally, several review articles about anthropology’s engagement with security have been published in recent years (Borneman and Masco 2015; Goldstein 2010; Nader 2017). 39 As early as 1994, the UN introduced the term ‘human security’ as a way to “humanize strategic development studies by focusing on ‘freedom from want and freedom from fear’” (UNDP 1994:24). 40 Several ethnographic encounters have charted the experiences of American power in the ‘global war on terror’ (Walton and Mitchell 2010), from Brazil to Palestine to Turkey to Uganda to Los Angeles. Securitization practices in these many contexts are connected by shared modalities of American power as both material production and ideological impact, always articulated in local contexts in unexpected and creative imaginaries. 41

(Browning and McDonald 2011:241; Buzan et al. 1998:34).41 This opens up the issue to subsequent treatments of urgency, secrecy, and exceptional measures (Agamben 2005; Verdery 2014). By applying frameworks that focus on the radicalization of modernity, the traditional link between security and progress—the promise that security will lead to progress, creating conceptions of a universal and timeless logic of security—is destabilized, revealing that security logics can also have illiberal effects (Browning and McDonald 2011). The securitized juxtaposition between normal and panic politics indicates a political context in which liberal democratic ideals can be coopted to justify illiberal practices (McDonald 2008; Williams 2003), which are reflexively fed back into processes of nation-building, governmentality, and resistance. “They can watch all they want,” said the Somali immigrant who drove our taxi. If it helped the government ensure security, he was perfectly fine ceding his right to privacy—illiberal practices justified in the name of liberal democratic ideals.

Unsurprisingly, freedom is an underlying theme in security studies. In Western democracies, it is clear that the hegemonic discourse of (in)security as a condition of post-9/11 life has been accompanied by an apparent readiness by citizens to accept new limits on their freedom in exchange for a perceived heightening of security (Davis and Silver 2004; Goldstein 2007). The Hobbesian social contract has been transformed by both states and publics, with citizens shrugging and asking “what do I care?” The promise of freedom has become ever more intertwined with security, for good or for ill. Anthropologists’ contributions show that security and freedom can be two sides of the same coin in some contexts, whereas in other contexts they can be mutually opposed.42 Sometimes security is another word for freedom, while other times insecurity is equated with freedom. In either case, the two are increasingly correlated with one another. Free expression activists are uniquely positioned—as actors who manifest this obsession and grapple with it—to contribute to better understanding this contradiction.

The post-9/11 scholarship reveals important ways in which security operates in the daily lives of the people with whom anthropologists work, and the following discussions about free

41 For example, Demossier’s (2014) charts the minority Roma in France being positioned as a security threat through media and journalistic narration, whereby a discourse of crisis is constructed and deployed through media repetitions, regular periods of expulsions, key speeches by government officials, and other representation practices. 42 One of many examples of this finding is Evers’ (2010) analysis of the precariousness of everyday life in the Seychelles, where the state has used an official security discourse, combined with efforts to monopolize Seychellois memory and history, as a pretext for limiting citizens’ personal freedoms. 42 expression activists experiencing Canada’s security state provide another contribution. These types of studies also recast other themes that have historically preoccupied anthropologists as being related to security, even though they were not originally approached as such.43 Holbraad and Pedersen (2013) argue that functionalism can be said to implicitly turn on a notion of security. They assert that Malinowski’s (1922) attempt to theorize the esoteric ideas and practices of the Trobriand Islanders through a ‘table of basic needs’ was premised on an underlying trope about the need for security as a universal human predicament. Eriksen et al. (2010) weigh in on the connection between Malinowski and security, suggesting that his study turned on a basic set of understandings of what humans are in the first place—namely, angst- ridden individuals pursuing existential certainty. Holbraad and Pedersen (2013) also argue that a tacit anthropology of security can be found in Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalism.44 In this view, the ‘unit of security’ in Malinowski’s research was the angst-ridden existential subject while to Radcliffe-Brown it was the order-obsessed sociocultural and moral collective (i.e., society). Radcliffe-Brown asserted, in a thinly disguised reference to Malinowski:

While one anthropological theory is that magic and religion give men confidence, comfort, and a sense of security, it could equally well be argued that they give rise to fears and anxieties from which they could otherwise be free—the fear of black magic or of spirits, fear of God, of the Devil, of Hell. [Radcliffe-Brown 1952:146]

For structural-functionalists, the answer to security could only be society itself, comprising the totality of relations between people. What emerges from retrospective analyses of security within seminal anthropologists’ work is the dichotomy or tension between the realms of the individual (associated with choice and agency) and society (associated with population regulation and organization). It is also from these scholars’ (implicit) understandings of security that the distinction between (in)security and (un)certainty becomes clear. Specifically, (un)certainty is foregrounded as an affective phenomenon and subjective existential predicament,

43 As many anthropologists who have taken up security studies argue, “a case could be made that the question of security has been an integral but largely implicit component of the anthropological project from its inception…In fact, one might even say that the history of anthropology itself could be rewritten as a story about security” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2013:4). A similar case was made in chapter one footnote 25 about the question of risk and uncertainty in the anthropological canon through the more well-known themes of religion, magic, and danger. Some scholars have also argued that security is central to much of Foucault’s oeuvre (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008; Maguire et al. 2014). 44 Indeed, this tacit anthropology of security can also be found in British social anthropology more broadly up to the mid-20th-century. 43 experienced by the angst-ridden individual, while (in)security is foregrounded as an irreducible material property of the sociopolitical organization of collectives. While both can be experienced at the level of the collective, in anthropological thought (un)certainty has been associated more with individual subjectivity and (in)security more with collective organization. But more recent work has seen a tendency by some to collapse or conflate the meanings of the concepts.

While this conflation may be a theoretical oversight, it may also indicate ongoing shifts in conceptions of the self in circumstances so marked by digital technologies. It is common today to speak of an individual’s personal (digital) security, as well as a society’s collective uncertainty. The individual-versus-society debate is more complicated now that the self must contend with unsettled experiences of emergent, non-traditional social institutions and mediated interactions that upend the categories of individual and society. Deleuze (1992) has suggested the shift from disciplinary societies (à la Foucault) to (post)modern ‘societies of control’ has replaced the individual-collective divide with a ‘dividual’-data (set/samples) divide. In this new dichotomy, the self is not encapsulated by a singular, embodied person but rather by codes (passwords, keywords, watchwords, etc.). While older treatments meant the self was indivisible, the individual is no longer the smallest unit to which society can be reduced. Personhood is not self-contained by the individual; instead, it is deformable, transformable, and dispersible as a “coded figure” (Deleuze 1992:6). This is seen in identity practices enacted via a range of digital technologies, most notably social media and smartphones, and the assemblage of cultural experiences that accompany digital life. It is also seen in the surveillance and other investigative practices of security states, as people are identified via IP addresses, passwords/codes, SIM cards, and other (meta)data. Because free expression activists wade into debates about the consequences that digital technologies and surveillance are having on a range of free expression issues, they are also implicated in these debates about the (in)dividual, society, and identity.

What remains relatively stable from a definitional standpoint amidst debates about the divisibility of the self is the distinction between (un)certainty as an affective phenomenon and (in)security as a material property. While they are mutually imbricated with one another, they are not synonymous. This is important to the discussions of Canadian privacy advocates, for it is the security state’s production of uncertainty—not insecurity—that is emphasized to portray it as a greater risk than terrorism to Canadians’ way of life. Lastly, this overview of security studies in

44 anthropology further justifies the use of a risk/uncertainty framework to explore free expression activism. Chapter one discussed the close relationship between risk and uncertainty, while this section has shown the close relationship between (un)certainty and (in)security. This chapter, then, brings into dialogue these highly imbricated concepts to show how crucial risk, (un)certainty, and (in)security are to the (post)modern world in which free expression activists live. It will further show that their experiences are more materially and affectively shaped by interactions with risk and uncertainty, as they endeavour to convince people like our nonchalant taxi driver why it is not okay for the government to watch them, why he and everyone else should care that privacy rights and the social contract between state and citizen have undergone such transformation.

2.3 #OurStateIsWatchingUs: Experiencing Canada’s Security State

As the above discussion illustrates, experiences and meanings of (in)security are wide- ranging and varied. This section will show this is true even amongst Canada’s privacy advocates. Discourses and practices of (in)security permeate their lives, manifesting as material and affective articulations of securitization that are experienced differently depending on a person’s own level of risk and exposure to the security state. In other words, there are both similarities and differences in privacy advocates’ experiences of how security in Canada works in practice. The similarities include their conceptions of data, commitment to digital security, and inconsistent implementation of security practices, while the differences include the amount of expertise and authority they gain about digital security, specific material practices they employ to protect their own privacy, and variations in their affective experiences. By charting these similarities and differences, it becomes evident how Canada’s privacy advocates strive for security, and the conditions that render them insecure in the first place.

To begin, privacy advocates often organize their work around the actions of the state, in terms of its efforts to protect national security and the ways in which they are personally affected as individuals.45 As a result, the activities that characterize privacy advocates’ work include campaigning against various pieces of legislation relevant to anti-terrorism efforts, intervening in

45 This orientation reflects the all-consuming security paradigm that accompanies the post-9/11 era. As privacy advocate Elle, a petite woman with a blunt personality, quipped to explain this orientation to the country’s national security regime and its (counter)terrorism focus: “Because, you know, everything is terrorist-related now.” 45 court cases related to privacy, and responding to the discovered state surveillance of various actors in Canadian society (journalists, Indigenous activists, environmentalists, etc.), the press coverage of those state activities, and the government reactions to public disclosures. It also involves submitting Access to Information (ATI) requests in an effort to understand national security work and uncover any wrongdoings. During this work, many privacy advocates come to view themselves as potential targets of state surveillance.46 This leads to behaviour changes, particularly the adoption of digital security practices, to mitigate the risk of surveillance.47 On multiple occasions, privacy advocates made comments (typically when discussing sensitive topics) that suggest they assume a lack of privacy:

“The Mounties are always listening.” “The Mounties won’t like what they’re hearing tonight.” “The CSIS agent listening right now will be taking notes.” “Say hello to our government minders [gesturing to a conference phone].”

The expectation of surveillance is viewed as problematic, but ultimately as immaterial, not actionable (i.e., nothing can be done about it), and accepted as par for the course.48 Privacy advocates increasingly perceive their communications and other digital content as data—and that data as always at risk of interception or collection. Data is now a crucial commodity and source of power, part of new unequal relations played out in the utopian imaginaries of digital frontierism (Thatcher et al. 2016). While privacy advocates tout the positives of digital

46 Hirschkind et al. (2017) effectively captures this oppressive view of security states and their surveillance tactics: “In the so-called War on Terror, every person is now a potential suspect who is automatically subjected to secret surveillance programs with potentially unlimited reach. Enabled by the latest data-mining software programs, governments around the globe scan and analyze vast databases assembled from computer, cellphone, and credit card use, allowing state intelligence agencies to create complex maps of our social connections, political or religious affiliations, travel, employment, and other aspects of personal life” (2017:S6). 47 A notable element of these behaviour changes is the positioning of the security state as a powerful adversary, and privacy advocates’ actions as potentially antagonistic. As digital rights activist Dean, who specializes in grassroots campaigns, said of his colleague: “Lena’s been busy picking fights with every security and law enforcement agency in the country so it was only a matter of time before she took on the RCMP.” 48 Another example of this occurred during preparations for an FEC event launching a project designed to help researchers better understand state surveillance programs. To mark the occasion, the NGO invited Edward Snowden to speak via videoconference, which he accepted. In the days leading up to the whistleblower’s virtual appearance, Mitch commented: “Well, if we weren’t being watched before, CSE will definitely have an interest in us now that we’ve been in contact with Snowden’s lawyer.” (CSE refers to Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, which is similar to the United States’ NSA.) Immediately upon Snowden’s acceptance of the invitation, the staff agreed not to mention his appearance in private communications until it was announced publicly. 46 frontierism, their awareness of these power dynamics makes them view their cyber devices and actions in cyberspace as sources of risk. As the charismatic Mitch asserted:

“If you’re putting something on the Internet, if you’re typing it into a computer, you can generally assume there’s going to be someone who has eyes on it.”

Data—as concept, process, and product—has created unique conditions for insecurity and uncertainty. No longer can the individual assume s/he is alone in private spaces, separated from the power of this new type of data. This is not just a transformation in the domains of public and private; it is also an expansion of the domain of risk as it is brought into discursive dialogue with the concept of data. Beck argues that risks are now integral to normal consumption habits (1999:143; O’Malley 2004); for privacy advocates, this applies to their consumption and production of data, which primarily occurs in previously assumed private spaces. There is a pervasive sensation that everything they do leaves small traces of themselves behind in cyberspace—revealing, unavoidable, and temporally immutable. Every digitally-mediated act carries with it the potential (though not necessarily the likelihood) of being mediated by third parties. ‘Data’, therefore, carries with it specific connotations of risk and vulnerability, of belonging fully to neither public nor private domains, but rather to an exploitable domain of invisible digital infrastructure, to which the powerful can gain access.

In response to the risk of compromised data, privacy advocates have consistently come to believe they need to learn more about digital security.49 Remember that when I was just starting my fieldwork, Emily told me FEC and GDFE had brought in a trainer to teach them about digital security just a week prior. When I asked staffers about the training session, they billed it as their big “seeing the light moment,” as activist Roya called it, when they finally accepted the need to improve their security practices and took steps to do so. Frequently, a privacy advocate who has become informed or technically savvy about digital security will push another advocate, who was aware of the need for better practices but had not yet implemented them, to take that step. For instance, late one night Emily helped a second advocate (from another Privacy Coalition

49 Some embark on this project at an organizational level, bringing in experts to educate them as a group about the need for digital security and the tools they can use to improve it. Others embark on this project at a personal level, using individually accessible resources (typically via the Internet) to educate themselves and find available security tools. In many instances, one member of a group will come to be seen as a resident expert and called on to help the others learn about and improve their own security, thereby improving the security of the collective overall. 47 group), Luis, set up email encryption (PGP/GPG). Luis had wanted to talk about a sensitive topic but Emily refused to do so until they could both use encrypted email. When Luis had it properly set up, he remarked how easy the process had been.50 In addition to email encryption, digital security practices that privacy advocates adopt include encrypting hard drives and smartphones, using VPNs and other circumvention tools, using password managers, developing organizational security policies, avoiding services viewed as insecure, using self-destructing message websites, using instant messaging applications that have end-to-end encryption, and covering laptop webcams (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Laptop with webcam covered at a Snowden Q&A

All of these are part of the Canadian privacy advocate’s experience of (in)security, an assemblage of (mostly small) actions designed to make them feel more secure, as individuals and a collective, in the face of constant potential surveillance and data collection. Retaining the distinction between (un)certainty as an affective phenomenon and (in)security as a material property, these actions can be viewed as material practices designed to decrease the uncertainty

50 The following day, Emily’s colleague Cara expressed surprise that Luis had not been using encrypted email yet, since he worked at an NGO dedicated to Internet rights. Emily agreed with but said she understood why he had not done it earlier: “We [at FEC] waited a pretty long time before getting PGP as well.” 48 of their own risk in a world where the line between public and private (the limits of state intervention) are blurred and on the move. Speaking about her own digital security, privacy advocate Elle explained in her signature blunt form:

“I’m never sure of anything. I just try to implement as many stopgaps as possible, and hope for the best.”

While these practices seem a bit technical, they dramatically affect the ways in which privacy advocates perceive and interact with their cyber devices and data (crucial material components of everyday life), and with other people. They take time and effort that are accompanied by frustration, confusion, and/or a sense of accomplishment; they require new types of knowledge that work to establish the privacy advocate identity; and they add to the pool of cultural artifacts circulating and shared amongst group members. The differing levels of expertise acquired by privacy advocates also affect their treatment by one another; some come to be viewed as sources of authority and others as lazy, less authoritative, or themselves sources of risk. These conceptions of data and security practices therefore help develop their collective identity, group organization, and understandings of the world in terms of security.

Although many privacy advocates improve their security via digital practices, others adopt non-digital practices.51 Many now hesitate to speak over the phone about sensitive issues (lawyers regarding their clients, journalists regarding their sources). Veteran journalists Darren and Sophie had begun “meeting with sources in parking lots again,” rather than speak via phone or email. Shaking his head, another journalist, Ahmed, observed they can quickly start to sound paranoid when talking about “all this cloak and dagger stuff.” Sitting down for a monthly meeting, members of a Privacy Coalition group exchanged stories of security measures they have taken to safeguard data or avoid surveillance. A national security reporter, Fatima, told the group how sneaky she felt after setting up a Gmail account and only using the drafts folder to communicate with sources.52 Human rights lawyer Niall told a story of flying to another country to obtain documents on a USB that had been found on a slain public official because he and his client could not figure out how to safely transmit the documents electronically. And Jessica, a journalist-turned-professor, predicted the next generation of journalists would be doing a lot

51 This is sometimes described as “returning to analog,” although the tools taken up are not always analog in nature. 52 Both Fatima and her sources had the password to the email account, so they never actually sent out emails. 49 more face-to-face interactions, or “going old school,” because of the rising distrust in sending information electronically. Speaking about meeting with sources to one of her journalism classes that I audited, Jessica told her students:

“You need to understand the risks you’re taking. You need to know what it means to encrypt your email or not, and all the vulnerabilities that exist. To make sure you know if you’re carrying any sort of digital communications devices, people can figure out you’re meeting face-to-face. Because that can also be tracked. Your cellphones can be in the same place and location data can show them being next to each other if someone is keeping track.”

The use of digital technologies is thus viewed as risky and a potential source of state mediation, and the uncertainty provoked by its invisible nature makes such mediation both imaginary and real, indefinite and absolute. Government agents are not sitting in a van hunched over eavesdropping equipment, but they could be (and therefore always are) tracking data. In reaction to this, privacy advocates adopt different practices depending on their own knowledge, skills, priorities, and interactions with the state. However, the rationale underpinning the belief that improved digital security is necessary does not always lead to decisions and practices that would actually maximize digital security. For instance, when revamping its website, one Privacy Coalition group chose a service provider that does not offer HTTPS, despite having already oriented to the importance of digital security.53 In another situation, in which a messaging app called Slack was adopted to facilitate internal communication at an NGO, resident security expert Lena cautioned:

“Just a note—this is all stored ‘in the cloud’—so keep in mind it’s not encrypted or guaranteed to be secure, and is not a replacement for email in a number of ways. I’m new to it myself, but will help figure it out if/where I can.”54

The inconsistent implementation of effective digital security is an important component of how the risk and uncertainty of living in Canada’s security state are experienced. While the

53 HTTPS, in contrast to the original web transfer protocol HTTP, adds a layer of security on data in transit through a secure socket layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) protocol connection. 54 A third example occurred when I set up my own encrypted email and shared my public key with privacy advocates. Mitch replied: “Don’t tell Emily I said this but please, please don’t send me everything encrypted! It is a pain especially since I respond a lot on my phone.” 50 recognition that privacy needs to be protected by improving digital security is widely accepted, the actions taken to follow through vary depending on the person and situation. Not everyone actually takes concerted steps to improve their digital security after becoming aware of the risk. And for those who do, heightened digital security practices can be ignored, forgotten, or judged ‘not worth the frustration’ on a day-to-day basis.

Inconsistency and variability are not only found in privacy advocates’ material practices, but also in their affective experiences of the security state. Despite the oppressive perception of the security state, many privacy advocates’ discussions about surveillance targeted at themselves are coloured by a good deal of wryness. The above example about the ‘Mounties’ or intelligence agencies listening in on their conversations were said with laughter or a jovial mocking tone. The examples about not speaking to clients or sources over the phone and the inclination towards paranoia were said with flippant irreverence or exasperation.55 In the introductory vignette, Emily smiled and laughed while she threatened to steal/snoop on our taxi driver’s home address and personal information—a dramatic act about a serious topic that could have been taken very differently (i.e., poorly) by the driver. What is absent, then, from many privacy advocates’ experiences living under the Canadian security state is the actual sensation of fear, in an instinctual, emotional sense. The violation of their own privacy is viewed as a real possibility, but the negative implications are kept at an affective distance. They know negative consequences exist but struggle to imagine them actually occurring to them.56 This finding applies to those who are aware of the possibility of surveillance, believe at some level they could be targeted, but have never acquired any evidence of this occurring. For them, challenging the oft-quoted justification of state surveillance, ‘if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear’, represents a conceptual exercise rather than an affective necessity.57

55 Privacy advocate and lawyer Asim, a slim-cut figure who wore very strong prescription lenses that magnified his eyes, shook his head and exclaimed: “This is Canada, for God’s sake!” 56 A journalist named Ryan, who was surveilled by provincial police, said: “You can’t understand what it feels like to have the weight of law enforcement come down on you until you actually find out it happened.” 57 As Frois explains, “the maxim ‘nothing to hide/nothing to fear’ has become a kind of advertising banner for the discretionary and unsanctioned use of technological surveillance methods that seek to legitimize surveillance practices even without the knowledge of their targets, that is, of the citizens ostensibly being ‘protected’ from real or imagined threats” (2014:50). To challenge this maxim, privacy advocates ask: ‘So if you have nothing to hide, then can I have your email password? Cellphone passcode?’ With this question, they expect addressees to respond in the negative, and to realize they too would not want the state to have unlimited access to their email and phone records. What Emily did to our taxi driver in the introductory vignette was a variation on this. 51

Although they do not react with fear, privacy advocates who only imagine their surveillance at the hands of the state evidently do react affectively. Sometimes the possibility of acquiring confirmation of surveillance appears to be accompanied by at least a flash of excitement or thrill. This momentary reaction is not because the notion of being surveilled is not intrusive, egregious, or wrong. Rather, it is because evidence of a typically invisible state activity would be simply scandalous, beneficial to them as proof of the state’s wrongdoing. An interesting manifestation of this excitement occurred when Mitch learned, through the results of an ATI request, that CSE had transcribed one of FEC’s events. Mitch eagerly argued that while it may have been a public event, assigning resources to observe and report on it was still outside CSE’s mandate, since the agency is not supposed to monitor Canadian citizens. He was trying to stretch the meaning of CSE’s legal prohibition against intercepting domestic communications. Another FEC staffer, Cara, admitted to experiencing momentary feelings of excitement and trepidation when she read her name in CSE’s transcript. She noted that her complicated last name was spelled correctly, which may indicate the transcriber looked up the correct spelling (evidence of the effort CSE exerted). Reading the transcript, the privacy advocates believed they had gotten a glimpse behind the invisible curtain of the security state, and for a few moments it thrilled them to know they were important enough to warrant attention.

Privacy advocates’ comparatively ‘positive’ or ‘light’ reactions—wryness, laughter, jovial mocking, flippant irreverence or exasperation, excitement, thrill—indicate experiences of a security state are not always only characterized by fear. As Goldstein (2010:487) noted, securitization calls on the power of fear to fill the ruptures of neoliberal crises and contradictions. But this is not the only affective power implicated in Canadian experiences of (in)security. Positive emotional responses can also be engendered, even in concerning or dire situations. Indeed, responding with a comparatively positive reaction in the face of negative developments (eroding privacy) or wrongdoing (state surveillance) can be seen as a reflexively (post)modern contradiction itself. This type of response is demonstrative of resilience, a challenge to the aspects of state formation and governmentality that operate via fear. As Goldstein elaborated, security and its mobilization of fear are constantly challenged and negotiated by a range of local actors and state subjects. In the Canadian context, the power of comparatively positive affective responses is one way to negotiate and ward against the constant uncertainty and encroachment of

52 the security state, filling the ruptures of neoliberal (post)modernity with something light in order to resist rather than succumb to the darkness of the post-9/11 security paradigm.

The lack of fear in an instinctual sense is contrasted with the experiences of those who have received confirmation that they were placed under surveillance or had their privacy violated in another way—such as Indigenous/environmental activists and Quebec journalists surveilled by police, and travelers whose cyber devices have been searched at the border. An example of the security state targeting these Canadians is the experiences of activist Cindy Blackstock. Through ATI requests, Blackstock discovered the government had compiled a file on her through sustained surveillance. Her experience is invoked by privacy advocates as a cautionary tale of the state’s powers and willingness to deploy surveillance tactics against law-abiding citizens, while illustrating the sharp contrast between people who have and have not received confirmation of being surveilled, and the fear that accompanies the discovery. As Blackstock explained:

“When I discovered the government had me under surveillance to try to find other motives for filing a human rights case on behalf of children, I was afraid. Afraid not only for myself but for my friends and family they collected information on. But at the end of the day I decided the most important thing for me to do was to not give into the fear.”

When fear is discussed by privacy advocates who have received confirmation of being surveilled, its corrosive qualities are highlighted—most notably its cultivation of self- censorship—but also its productive qualities. Blackstock, continuing her above account, emphasized the best way to deal with her fear was:

“[t]o continue to speak out and expose the government’s conduct in ways consistent with my values. I took all the documents proving the surveillance to independent watchdogs like the Privacy Commissioner and to the media.”

Similarly, for journalists who discover they have been subjected to surveillance (or other tactics, such as production orders compelling them to reveal sources or hand over notes), they often frame their fear as motivating them to continue resisting the security state.58 While fear has been

58 A national security reporter named Elijah, who faced jail time for refusing to disclose a source to Canadian law enforcement, explained: “When you see your name in top secret reports from the government and then you see that 53 shown to be an effective governance tool used to produce particular subjectivities that support the expansion of state powers (Altheide 2006; Butler 2004; Goldstein 2010; Nader 2017; Robin 2004; Zulaika 2009), it is also used as a tool to challenge that power. Technologies of governmentality, after all, are always double-edged swords that can cut both ways, used in service of power and of resistance (Foucault 1978). Privacy advocates, then, use both positive and negative affective responses to the security state to achieve their goals.

Another type of fear experienced by some privacy advocates occurs when they make (or consider making) public statements about the security state. This is not fear of the state, per se, but rather fear of suffering negative consequences because of actions they take against it. An example of this occurred when journalists who were members of a Privacy Coalition group resigned after it launched a legal action challenging the constitutionality of a piece of privacy- related legislation. These members feared they would be perceived as having a journalistic conflict of interest, because of which they would be unable to maintain their objective neutrality when reporting on that legislation.59 Speaking on the topic of journalists getting involved in activism efforts regarding free expression issues that affect them, retired reporter Dinah, who worried about privacy but shrugged and said she was too old to encrypt her email when it was suggested, explicitly stated:

“Yeah, there’s a real climate of fear amongst journalists in Canada.”

This fear complicates relations between privacy advocates and journalists, including those journalists who identify as privacy advocates. While privacy advocates understand their journalist colleagues are making these kinds of decisions based on ethical considerations, they can also come to feel not all privacy advocates are unanimously operating on a ‘single side’. This creates tensions between privacy advocates from different professions (non-profit sector, journalism, law, academia, etc.) that are affected differently by the security state and their own mandates/codes of conduct. As such, this particular experience of fear occurs when privacy

they want your records of you talking to terrorists, you start to think about who’s watching you, how they’re watching you. Honestly, you doubt humans sometimes and that really bleeds into the way you look at the world.” At the same time, Elijah tempered his pessimism by emphasizing he is willing to go “as far as necessary” to protect his sources, despite the consequences he faces: “This has taken a personal toll on me…This isn't over. I have to keep on fighting this for not just myself, but for other journalists in this country.” 59 As a result of this conflict of interest, they believed they could suffer loss of reputation and even face termination from their journalism jobs. 54 advocates anticipate consequences that may negatively affect their separate professional identities. In the wake of the resignations, Privacy Coalition member Uri, an older man heavily involved in media unions, lamented:

“We’re not fighting a top-down edict. We’re fighting against our own colleagues’ fears…We need to fight against the government, not have an internal squabble with journalists.”

These affective experiences thereby have the capacity to either bring together or divide privacy advocates. Depending on how they are subjected to state power, privacy advocates have different affective experiences of Canada’s security state. Some experience comparatively positive emotional responses as they imagine being surveilled. Others experience fearful responses after receiving confirmation of being surveilled, receive other orders from the state (such as demands for their notes, sources, or cyber devices), or imagine negative professional consequences because of their activism efforts. These experiences of fear can be corrosive or productive, provoking self-censorship or motivating further activism work. In this way, one of the key conditions that render privacy advocates insecure in the first place is activism itself. Although this is hardly surprising in circumstances of violent conflict or repressive regimes, its centrality to experiences of (in)security in politically stable circumstances must not be overlooked. Fear is a radically unevenly distributed affect, and this unevenness works in practice to divide people not only based on how they are subjected to state power but also based on how much they know about the state power to which they are subjected.

To conclude this section, it is important to note that these various material and affective experiences of security do not mean privacy advocates break from the ideology of risk and uncertainty cultivated by the post-9/11 security project. This is particularly evident in their treatment of violence perceived to be terrorism. Like government officials and ordinary Canadians, disaster and crisis via terrorism are viewed by privacy advocates as imminent and unavoidable (see Table 2.3 in Appendix B), positioning this type of rare violence in Canada as part of a global risk that requires exceptional measures and a preventative mindset (Masco 2014,

2017; Nader 2017).60 Privacy advocates frequently acknowledge amongst themselves that inevitably there will be “another terrorist attack.” It is only a matter of time.61 The post-9/11 national security paradigm, then, is not viewed as unnecessary. Privacy advocates share the same assessments of risk and insecurity that justify the need for expanded state powers. “It’s getting more dangerous,” said Emily. “And we’re struggling to keep up.” The danger she refers to comes not just from the state, but also from hostile actors (including so-called terrorists) who would target citizen and state alike to jeopardize national security.

As part of this ideology, privacy advocates perceive the future as always endangered, as always uncertain and risky, and endorse some techniques that may predict, anticipate, and reduce the dangers facing Canada.62 This finding is reflected in other security studies that show pre- existing ideological beliefs foster support for some security measures, even when there is little evidence of effectiveness (Frois 2013, 2014; Smith 2012). The discourse of balancing privacy and security, which implicitly suggests it is acceptable to restrict citizens’ privacy in some circumstances, is ultimately deployed not just by the state but also by privacy advocates (see Table 2.4 in Appendix B). Given the success with which the affective logics of security states have cultivated national consensus about the existential risk of terrorism, privacy advocates believe (or act as if) it would be foolish to suggest the danger is not real or the security project nonessential. This is part of the current form of the Hobbesian social contract. But despite the willingness after 9/11 to transform what constitutes ‘public obedience’ and ‘collective security’, privacy advocates try to curb the state’s power to achieve further transformation, challenging today’s social contract and the public’s willingness to accept it as natural.

Privacy advocates thus face a unique challenge: they must campaign for privacy rights while possessing the ideology of risk and uncertainty that justifies the need for a heightened national security regime. They struggle with the “risks to our security [that] are real and complex,” but also with the “Kafkaesque uncertainty” engendered by the secretive security state

60 As Sukanya Pillay, former Executive Director and General Counsel of CCLA, stated: “We totally understand that there are people in the world who wish to harm Canadians and our allies…We understand that the terrorist threat is real and that Canada has a legal duty to protect people from terrorist acts and threats.” 61 In the wake of an October 2014 shooting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, multiple privacy advocates made comments along the lines: “Well, this is what we’ve all been waiting for.” 62 In a report, one Privacy Coalition group explicitly states: “We do not dispute that targeted surveillance can be a necessary tool to tackle crime and protect national security” (OpenMedia 2015:14). 56

(see Table 2.3 in Appendix B). They believe that future terrorist attacks are inevitable, but also that the future of Canada’s democracy is endangered because of the security state. Risk and uncertainty come at privacy advocates from both the state and ‘terrorist’. Privacy advocates, however, wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that the state does not have sufficient powers to collect personal information from citizens; arguing to the contrary is one of their central strategies. This ideological tension points to a fundamental site of contestation: Which is the greater risk to Canadian society, terrorism or an uninhibited security state? What type of uncertainty are Canadians willing to live with, that posed by the risk of terrorism or that of the security state? It is by examining how privacy advocates address these questions, how they wade through this muddy site of contestation, that it becomes evident they do not deny the affective logics of the security state, but rather take them up for their own purposes.

2.4 #RightsNotFear: Discursive Strategies of Canadian Privacy Advocates

By charting the similarities and differences in how privacy advocates experience Canada’s security state, it becomes clear they experience comparatively positive emotional responses and various types of fear, as well as employ an assemblage of practices (consistently or not) in their pursuit of security. These experiences are shaped by how much risk they, as critics and watchdogs, are to the state (if they attract surveillance or other tactics), and how much they know about the state power to which they are subjected. To reconcile these experiences and the contrary pulls of protecting privacy rights while not preventing the state from protecting national security, privacy advocates deploy a set of discursive strategies that work to turn the risk and uncertainty of the current security paradigm to their own ends. They explicitly reject the politics of fear and represent the state as all-seeing, draw on empirical findings, call for greater oversight and a cultivation of epistemic authority, and expose the ambiguity and vagueness of anti-terrorism legislation. Underlying these discursive strategies is a reliance on the well-known ideology of objective neutrality—but not a break from the ideology of risk and uncertainty that justifies the post-9/11 security project. In these ways, privacy advocates work to harness the uncertainty produced by the security state to portray it as a greater risk than terrorism to Canadians’ liberal way of life, thereby situating risk and uncertainty as mediations of both privacy rights and the security state.

First, privacy advocates realized they had to confront the mobilization of fear that was being deployed by the Harper administration to gain support for expanded state powers at the expense of privacy rights. While advocating against Bill C-51, this was not done subtly.63 Privacy Coalition members executed campaigns calling for fear to be rejected, for rights to be embraced over fear, and for action to take place despite fear (see Figure 2.2). The fear they perceived the government to be mobilizing aligns with Goldstein’s (2010) discussion of security and fear in the post-9/11 era as a principal tool of state formation and governmentality. It also aligns with other scholars’ findings that fear has been domesticated as part of an affective regime and primary national resource, which is further projected out globally as part of the planetary project of counterterrorism (Maguire et al. 2014; Masco 2014; Monaghan 2014; Nader 2017; Robin 2004).64 Remember that fear is used as part of the cultural selection of risks as well (Beck 2009; Browning and McDonald 2011; Buzan et al. 1998; Douglas 1992).

Figure 2.2 Campaigning on the rejection of fear

63 Of particular concern to free expression activists regarding Bill C-51 was the expanded definition of terrorist activities and information-sharing capacities (which included sharing citizens’ personal information), the enhanced ability to withhold disclosure of national security information in specific cases, the criminalization of ‘knowingly advocating or promoting the commission of terrorism offences in general’, and the new ability of judges to order the seizure or removal of ‘terrorist propaganda’, including materials posted online (Library of Parliament 2015). 64 Nader associates the climate of fear, hysteria, and moral panic that was produced after 9/11 with witch-hunts. The strategic targeting of specific social and political groups in the past century—Japanese Americans and Canadians, Jewish people, suspected communist sympathizers, anti-war protesters, Muslims and Middle Easterners more generally—can be viewed as “hunts that ebb and flow with fear” (Nader 2017:27). Nader explicitly argues that witch-hunting is based on words like ‘terrorist’, and the affective regime of fear and uncertainty is buttressed through talk of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘war president’, ‘enemy combatants’, ‘axis of evil’, ‘secret prisons’, ‘secret laws’, ‘secret evidence’, and more (Nader 2017:26-27). 58

The calls to reject fear were deployed by privacy advocates as an act of unmasking (Taussig 1992),65 believing support for legislation that would erode Canadians’ rights was ultimately based on an illusion of order congealed by fear—and what they had to do was expose the illusion and the role of fear for what they were. This can also be viewed as a process of denaturalization, as privacy advocates challenged the entrenched ideological naturalization of security that emphasizes the protection of the collective over the individual (Eriksen et al. 2010; Maguire et al. 2014). In addition to the positive message of rejecting fear and calling for unified action, this discursive strategy was often accompanied by representations of the security state as all-seeing. These representations often showed a human eyeball or camera lens (see Figure 2.2), both efforts to denaturalize the belief that surveillance makes an effective tool in either preventing or investigating criminal/terrorist activity (Frois 2013, 2014; Smith 2012), and that law-abiding citizens are exempt from the surveillance gaze of the state. Privacy advocates sought to make the audience both empowered and uncomfortable by invoking the spectre of panopticism, reminding them that surveillance infrastructure frequently goes unnoticed and can reach into Canadians’ private spaces. This is precisely what Emily was trying to do by taking on the role of the state/panopticon when she snatched away our taxi driver’s cellphone. He was made uncomfortable, not sure how to react, but other than conclude she was “a strange woman,” whether Emily provoked the driver to put more thought into his privacy remains unknown. Like asking for a skeptic’s password to counter the “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear” maxim, privacy advocates pushed Canadians to consider the following question and its angst-ridden implications:

“Do you like being watched?”

The invocation of the panopticon with this slogan/question, and the implied disciplining of the individual who knows s/he is being watched even when not doing anything ‘wrong’, is very important to privacy advocates’ arguments. As is well known, Foucault (2007) began thinking about security as an emergent mode of liberal governance predicated on the equally emergent problematic of population. Using his concepts of biopolitics/biopower and governmentality, Foucault conceptualized the production of subjectivities whose ultimate

65 (Un)Masking has been seen throughout this chapter with respect to the material and affective practices of privacy advocates as they attempt to pierce the secrecy of the security state, learn more about its surveillance tactics (directed at them and others), and raise awareness about these issues. 61 purpose is to strengthen the state and serve the productivity of the capitalist economy.66 He argues that the emergence of security and population management as the main goal of liberal governance has come to displace and condition the freedom of the citizenry. Anyone who places their individual freedom above the security of the collective becomes an enemy of the people. These are the people “who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the system” (Foucault 2007:44). Privacy advocates challenge this view of the people by arguing that safeguarding one’s privacy is not an act of denying the collective its security but rather an act of protecting the collective from the state. Envisioning the panopticon by way of all-seeing eye or camera lens, pushing Canadians to imagine they are being watched—and consequently conditioned as the type of subject who allows such intrusion—is ultimately about positioning the state in a particular role as producer of insecurity, destroyer of freedom.

The second discursive strategy that privacy advocates deploy is their turn to empirical findings, what they perceive as objective facts and truths.67 They routinely support their positions by referring to studies that have shown mass surveillance to be ineffective at preventing terrorist attacks, Canadians’ likelihood of being injured or killed by a terrorist attack is extremely low, and expanded state powers result in higher rates of (self-)censorship (see Table 2.5 in Appendix B). They also use polls to show the number and types of Canadians who support privacy protections. While campaigning against Bill C-51, Privacy Coalition members methodically publicized the growing opposition to the anti-terrorism legislation, as demonstrated by polls conducted at different times (Johnson 2015; Ling 2015). They emphasized the numbers of Canadians who used the online “StopC51” platform to message their MPs (OpenMedia 2018), signed the petition to stop Bill C-51 (Tribe 2016a), and engaged in other coordinated actions (protests, a Thunderclap, public consultations, etc.). For more ‘objective evidence’, they pointed

66 Foucault’s concept of biopolitics refers to a sociopolitical rationality that takes the administration of life and populations (as an assemblage of individuals) as its subject, and his concept of biopower refers to the ways in which biopolitics is enacted and deployed. These represent “a very profound transformation of [the] mechanisms of power,” breaking from the top-down, repressive tactics of a sovereign to operate instead through dispersed networks and technologies of power (what he calls dispositifs) that work from the bottom-up, from the very “level of life” itself (Foucault 1978:136-137, 2007). Biopolitics/biopower and governmentality do not replace the repressive, more explicit tactics of earlier forms of power, but rather combine with them and play off one another to create a new organization and structural functioning of power. (Foucault’s concept of governmentality is similar to that of biopolitics/biopower, the former seeming to replace the latter in his thought as he attempted to position and contextualize biopolitics/biopower in a deeper historical context.) 67 This discursive strategy also works to counter the state’s mobilization of fear, replacing it with perceived objective evidence. 62 to groups with different political orientations and interests who opposed the legislation as proof that their concerns were not motivated by or based on partisanship.68

The discursive strategy of drawing on empirical findings to support one’s position is driven by an ideology of objective neutrality, a mainstay of several institutions, such as science, journalism, and risk management. Douglas (1992:135-137) argues this ideology is a central condition for liberal debate. Specifically, three constraints—rationality, consistency, and neutrality—are used as part of a liberal debate’s legitimizing process. Moreover, cultural talk of risk itself requires (and acquires) the neutrality of scientific discourse: “[The idea of risk’s] universalizing terminology, its abstractness, its power of condensation, its scientificity, its connection with objective analysis, make it perfect…[for] the task of building a culture that supports a modern industrial society” (Douglas 1992:15). Douglas also contends a new blaming system has emerged which emphasizes the attribution of risk to increasingly invisible villains. Blaming a powerful, invisible actor for a perceived risk and cultivating the neutrality of scientific discourse are both evident in privacy advocates’ efforts to position the security state as a greater risk than terrorism to Canadians’ liberal way of life. As Abdul, a soft-spoken and compellingly intelligent lawyer, concluded during a panel discussion event:

“We’ve tried to show you here today there is sound basis to have very rational concerns about [the security state], and to push the temptation of irrational fear out of our minds.”

In addition to drawing on empirical findings, the focus on objective neutrality as a way to counter the politics of fear is seen in privacy advocates’ calls for greater oversight of Canada’s national security regime.69 Importantly, the push for increased oversight does not challenge the regime’s existence but rather seeks to position objective scrutiny at its centre. This would empower a body to attribute blame in cases where misconduct is determined, an influential aspect of risk as a cultural system.70 The goal of this discursive strategy is not to harness fear but

68 These groups included liberal, conservative, and libertarian Canadians, the National Firearms Association, past prime ministers and other government officials, the Canadian Bar Association, academics and experts, artists, business owners, and independent senators. 69 The importance of this call is emphasized by pointing out Canada’s position as having one of the weakest national security oversight systems in the Western world. 70 As Douglas emphasizes (1992), oversight is a common tool found under the banner of risk reduction. 63 rather to highlight the uncertainty surrounding the security state’s actions because of the absence of oversight. Here privacy advocates are arguing that because of the overly secretive and autonomous nature of the security state, Canadians cannot be certain it is acting legally. One of the primary duties of an oversight body would be to increase certainty that the overseen actors are being held accountable. Whether or not the overseen actors are upholding or violating their responsibilities, their actions will be known. This does not mean oversight bodies will never mobilize or produce fear if gross misconduct on the part of the overseen actors is determined; but if fear is a product of the oversight, citizens can at least be certain it is warranted.

In many ways, the call for greater oversight is also a call for experts to have greater access to the secretive security state, and for them to act as liaisons between citizen and state. Greater oversight would allow bodies driven not by political or security interests, but instead by an ideology of objective neutrality, to cultivate epistemic authority within the relationship between citizen and state. Oversight bodies are thus positioned as producers of certainty. As Jacob, an NGO’s staff lawyer who always seemed to be juggling too many projects, stated:

“MPs aren’t meant to be experts in national security or the technical issues around it. They may be, but it’s not guaranteed. So while we support the idea of a parliamentary oversight committee, we also think it’s necessary to establish an independent review and complaint body on national security that would have these kinds of experts on it, and who could provide support to the parliamentary committee.”

This quote also reveals privacy advocates’ tendency to encourage independent, third party review rather than just parliamentary oversight. This can be seen as an even stronger push for epistemic authority, for independent third parties are viewed as having greater credibility and legitimacy in terms of relevant technical knowledge and objective neutrality (given that a parliamentary committee would be comprised of MPs, whose jobs are intertwined with political interests). Levels of epistemic authority are thereby established and differently valued. These discursive strategies thus call attention to the state’s production of uncertainty that occurs through its mobilization of fear (of the unknown terror plot, Muslim, future) and the absence of

64 oversight (which makes Canadians uncertain what the security state is doing—fundamentally undermining their social contract).

The call for greater oversight is yet another attempt by privacy advocates to pierce the secrecy of the security state, and their engagement with uncertainty in this context situates it as a function of a lack of knowledge (Ewald 2002; Stalcup 2015). Taussig’s assertion about the experience of truth and secrecy is quite applicable to privacy advocates: “So easily we join truth and secret; with rapture we skid between them, envelop the one in the other: truth = secret…I am alerted to the tenderness of face and of faces facing each other, tense with the expectation of secrets as fathomless as they seem worthy of unmasking” (1999:2-3). This rapture and expectation are good (if dramatic) ways of describing some privacy advocates’ efforts to make the security state more transparent and accountable. By unmasking the state’s actions, privacy advocates have no doubt they will uncover privacy violations that, in their exposure, will begin to be repaired. The fetishization of secrecy (Taussig 1999), and its unique escalation in the post- 9/11 era (Borneman and Masco 2015), grips privacy advocates just as surely as it does state and public.71 But their efforts reveal that rarely is there an ‘aha!’ moment in which the security state is unveiled, the surface of a ‘two-realities’ model giving way to its hidden essence. More often, it is a push and pull of discursive strategies, with small gains and losses made by various actors, as the overall system of power and resistance trundles onward.

The final discursive strategy that privacy advocates deploy to harness uncertainty and turn it back on the state is to expose the ambiguity and vagueness perpetuated by the government in its anti-terrorism legislation. It has been shown that privacy advocates identify risk and uncertainty in both the threat of ‘terrorism’ and the security state. As part of this, they contend the government strategically develops uncertainty through the legal language used in its anti- terrorism legislation. Specifically, the use of ambiguous and overbroad terms is argued to create two sources of uncertainty: the interpretation of the terms by the state, and the consequences that Canadians may face because of them. Privacy advocates identify a plethora of terms and phrases as sources of ambiguity and therefore of uncertainty:

71 One way privacy advocates lay claim to the fetishization of secrecy is via their shared goals and relationships with some of the most publicized whistleblowers of the time—Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange—who have tried to unmask webs of state secrecy and Western power, and suffered the consequences. 65

“disruption measures” “lawful advocacy, protest or dissent” “threats to the security of Canada” “national security” “terrorism offences in general” “activities that undermine the security “terrorist propaganda” of Canada” “promoting terrorism”

Contesting the use of ambiguous language was a cornerstone of a constitutional challenge launched against Bill C-51 by two Privacy Coalition groups, and it is emblematic of assessments made by other privacy advocates about the anti-terrorism legislation, including well-known Canadian experts Craig Forcese and Kent Roach (see Table 2.6 in Appendix B).

Privacy advocates argue the predicted result of the uncertainty produced by Bill C-51 will be an increased preference by law-abiding Canadians—including academics, protesters, and journalists—to remain silent rather than risk arrest, especially since the offences described can reach even those who do not have a terrorist purpose. Moreover, uncertainty is seen not just in the interpretation of the legislation’s unclear language, but also in its deployment. As stated in the constitutional challenge: “In many instances, individuals may not even know their rights were violated or to what degree, given the impugned provisions will violate Charter rights in secret” (CCLA and CJFE 2015: para. 14).72 It is in large part the uncertainty surrounding both the meaning and deployment of the legislation’s wording that will act to stifle criticism of the state, according to privacy advocates. This is where (un)certainty can become not only the subjective state of an individual but also of a collective. Dual concerns about the effect of this vague legislative language on the individual and the collective, which entail much broader cultural and political levels, escalate the significance and implications of (un)certainty, and separate it from the material property of (in)security.

The discursive strategies used by privacy advocates do not primarily, directly aim to decrease the uncertainty of the security state (although they may be the first steps to

72 The increased uncertainty due to the secretive, invisible nature of the security state’s powers and actions is a concern for privacy advocates not just regarding strictly anti-terrorism efforts but also the use of surveillance technologies like IMSI catchers (also known as stingrays) by law enforcement. As OpenMedia stated in its complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner regarding stingrays: “These tools have the potential to subject innocent Canadians to gross privacy violations, without their knowledge or consent…Canadians cannot afford to risk their privacy being violated in such a serious manner” (Tribe 2016b). 66 accomplishing this). Rather, they are deployed to 1) distance privacy advocates from accusations that they mobilize fear, 2) increase awareness of the production of uncertainty by the state, 3) use that uncertainty to their advantage—since they believe these strategies will help convince the public and government to improve privacy protections, and 4) portray the security state as a greater risk than terrorism to Canadians’ liberal way of life. As such, privacy advocates are not trying to produce or negate risk and uncertainty, but rather to recognize and harness it. They do not present the post-9/11 world as risk-free (as pertaining to terrorism) and they do not present the government’s anti-terrorism efforts as unnecessary. They do, however, identify the state’s mobilization of fear and production of uncertainty as central to the unwanted transformation of Canada’s liberal democracy. In this way, risk and uncertainty are not only positioned and taken up as mediations of the security state, but also of privacy itself.

Importantly, the discursive strategies discussed herein reiterate that risk and uncertainty cannot be reduced to one another. They show privacy advocates using knowledge of uncertainty to define a risk. Turning an issue into a risk makes it governable and represents a form of governmentality (Samimian-Darash and Rabinow 2015). In contrast to other scholarship (James 1995),73 this chapter shows privacy advocates are not predominantly trying to create certainty. Rather, they are trying to strategically invoke and raise awareness about the uncertainty produced by the security state. Confident, self-assured Dinah explained:

“If the language in the anti-terrorism legislation is allowed to stand, the government could prosecute journalists for reporting on terrorist propaganda— even if it’s unlikely to actually occur under the current administration.”

As privacy advocates imagine the actions of the security state (especially its misconduct), it is precisely what could happen, linked to the consequences any misconduct would have for democracy, that fuels their efforts. Freedom, in this context, is determined by the risk of state overreach, not by its likelihood. As a result, the illiberal effects of the national security regime suffuse both present and future, such that the project of securing the future entails the

73 As James (1995:4) remarks, the scholars she has gathered in her edited volume explore many ways in which ‘certainties’ are shaped, with some movements towards certainty taking a distinctively religious form, others using a wider range of cultural practices, imagery and representations, and yet others invoking national authenticity as a fount of singular self-knowledge and justification (including for the oppositional classification of others). 67 diminishment of freedom—regardless of whether predicted state misconduct becomes realized at some later date. Both Malinowski’s angst-ridden existential subject and Radcliffe-Brown’s order-obsessed sociocultural and moral collective are evident here in the morass of uncertain and perhaps conflated present and future, as the need for security as a universal human predicament abuts the long-standing liberal wariness of ‘mission creep’. As Radcliffe-Brown insisted, the pursuit of certainty and security—no matter how well-intentioned—can give rise to that from which humans could otherwise be free. And the dilemma of the two seminal anthropologists, of whether merely imagining spirits, God, the Devil, or Hell makes them real, moves from the realm of magic and religion to the realm of risk.

Uncertainty is thereby taken up to predict unwanted actions of the security state, similar to how government officials use uncertainty to anticipate terrorist attacks by discerning suspicious elements of the pre-event (Samimian-Darash 2009; Stalcup 2015).74 Just as privacy advocates share the underlying ideology of risk and uncertainty about the need for a national security regime, they also share the view that technologies of risk and uncertainty can be used to achieve their goals. It is the way they go about deploying such technologies that differ from the state’s own deployment. As such, following from Luhmann (1993, 1998) and Samimian-Darash and Rabinow (2015), both risk and uncertainty have been treated in this chapter as concepts rather than only as things in the world. As concepts, they are made available through particular knowledge and practices: rejecting the politics of fear and representing the state as all-seeing, drawing on empirical findings, calling for greater oversight and a cultivation of epistemic authority, and exposing the ambiguity and vagueness of anti-terrorism legislation. The focus is not on the quality of danger or insecurity in the world, but rather on mediations of risk and uncertainty as conceptually inherent to the post-9/11 security project and its checks-and- balances. By focusing on risk and uncertainty, it becomes clearer what (in)security means today and how conditions render particular people insecure (even in politically stable circumstances), as well as how they strive for security.

74 Speaking on the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies that relabeled terrorism prevention as preemption following 9/11, Stalcup (2015) argues that not only did this new iteration of preemption not require certainty, it actually required uncertainty. 68

2.5 Digital Technologies, Personhood, and Freedom

Canadian privacy advocates interact with the country’s security state uniquely, through a series of material and affective experiences that shape their understandings of the (post)modern world and the discursive strategies they use in their activism. While they take up risk and uncertainty for their own ends, they do not break from the well-entrenched post-9/11 ideology of risk and uncertainty that raises terrorism to the level of existential global risk, justifying preventative techniques in the name of counterterrorism. Privacy advocates are not only characterized by a shared conception of and approach to the security state as a greater risk than terrorism to Canadians’ liberal way of life. They are also characterized by tensions, conflicts, and divergent responses to governmental activities that arise as state power affects individual privacy advocates to varying degrees and in differing forms. Building on anthropological contributions to security studies, it becomes more evident what ‘being secure’ and ‘being insecure’ looks like for Canada’s privacy advocates, including how they strive for security and which conditions (activism, professional identity, use of cyber devices, etc.) render them insecure.

Central to privacy advocates’ (in)security and activism is, not surprisingly, digital technologies. As Emily made clear in the introductory vignette, the escalating dangers they face are directly connected to digital technologies—and privacy advocates struggle to keep up-to-date with the most effective security practices. But they are not only working to protect privacy rights in a world of increasingly pervasive digital technologies. Their activism also reflects and contributes to ongoing shifts in what personhood and freedom look like in a world where state powers are both heightened and curtailed through the use of digitally-mediated tools, where citizens are made more or less secure because of their technical knowledge and willpower to change their behaviours, where risk and uncertainty can be produced or eliminated at the click of a mouse. The issue of privacy has indelibly entered the domain of free expression precisely because of the growing centrality of digital technologies to culture and power relations, as a person’s voice and thought are increasingly influenced by the digital elements of life.75 As such, at the intersection of free expression and digital technologies, negotiations of personhood play out, particularly as debates about the individual-society dichotomy continue.

75 The common explanation for why privacy constitutes a free expression issue is that a person cannot properly develop his/her own thoughts, ideas, and speech without having private spaces in which to develop them. 69

On the one hand, the experiences of privacy advocates with respect to digital security may align with the traditional idea that there is a distinct divide between the individual and collective. This is because even when privacy advocates share a physical space (such as an office) and a collective identity, the security risks created by cyber devices, email and instant messaging services, data storage, and other aspects of digital technologies are largely experienced at the level of the individual—since everyone has their own smartphone, email, passwords and password manager, etc. Everyone has to make many digital security decisions and implement them on their own. In other words, digital security is treated more often as the aggregated response of private individuals who can, together, form a secure collective.76 As they orient to their own personal security, privacy advocates take up tools and practices that work to shore up the boundaries of their individual selves, preventing third parties from infringing on them—and which, only as a byproduct, secures the collective. Improving digital security could be their way of strengthening the traditional individual, seeking to close off the sensation that the divide is eroding in (post)modern life.

On the other hand, their experiences indicate privacy advocates also view themselves as “coded figures,” people who are assembled by passwords, IP addresses, SIM cards, and other codes—and therefore can be divided into units smaller than the individual. This is a central characteristic of what Deleuze (1992) calls the ‘dividual’ that exists in societies of control. In addition, privacy advocates’ efforts to improve their digital security encodes their treatment of all communication as data (at risk of interference). This in turn indicates the collective, or the interactions and relationships that connect people into a collective, is treated today as data, which further aligns with Deleuze’s argument that collectives/masses have been replaced by data (sets/samples). Moreover, conceiving of privacy advocates as ‘dividuals’ rather than ‘individuals’ does not contradict the notion that their support for improved security is a way of shoring up the boundaries of their selves. It means that rather than shoring themselves up as indivisible persons, they are actually shoring up the smaller units which together form an assembled, transformable self. It also suggests today’s ‘unit of security’—debated by anthropologists like Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown—is neither individual nor society, but

76 This reflects the treatment of risks as increasingly individualized in (post)modernity. As Douglas summarizes, “the public response to risk has been individualized. Public perception of risk is treated as if it were the aggregated response of millions of private individuals” (1992:40). 70 instead the assembled codes of the dividual, whether physical or digital. As privacy advocate and hipster with over-sized glasses Lisbeth asserted:

“I exist in flesh and bones. I exist in bytes. It’s all me.”

If the person exists today in flesh and bones and in bits and bytes, conceptions of freedom must necessarily adapt as well. This chapter has shown digital security is not a one-time activity or state that can be obtained and then ruled permanently resolved. It arises anew each time someone engages a digital technology. As a result, what emerges is a patchwork of security experiences encompassing a negative connotation related to state interference and a positive connotation related to actively safeguarding privacy (i.e., exhibiting positive agency). In this context, freedom cannot be equated wholesale with either security or insecurity. Indeed, the definition of freedom itself requires better articulation. Privacy advocates consider it to be ‘freedom from state interference’, but they also exercise ‘freedom of choice’ when they decide which security practices to implement (or not).77 Freedom is increased when each citizen chooses to adopt better digital security. It may therefore be appropriate to view the security state and privacy advocates as operating on different understandings of freedom. To Canada’s security state, citizens are perfectly free to protect their privacy through available tools, and intelligence agencies and law enforcement (supposedly) only intervene through a legally-binding framework. To privacy advocates, however, being free to choose from an array of security tools is not sufficient. Even the potential or risk of state interference, regardless of its likelihood, is viewed as eroding freedom. The cracks in their digital security, even if they could shore them up themselves, encode a lack of freedom caused by the state.

To end, it must be noted that while this subgroup of free expression activists is driven by liberal idea(l)s, what their experiences and discursive strategies show is that they are primarily concerned with risk and uncertainty on a day-to-day basis. For these privacy advocates, it is risk and uncertainty that must be addressed and only then can freedom be realized. This positions risk and uncertainty as useful and productive under particular conditions.78 However, as conceptions

77 This is in sharp contrast to more authoritarian countries, like China and Russia (or any other number of nation- states) that legally restrict the use of digital security tools like VPNs, messaging services that are end-to-end encrypted, and other circumvention or anonymization tools. 78 This view has been popularized by historian-economist Peter Bernstein with his oft-quoted proclamation: “Great news: we are not prisoners of an inevitable future. Uncertainty makes us free” (1996:229). 71 of freedom become ever more entwined with and dependent on conceptions of risk and uncertainty, there emerges the possibility of conflating one state for the other (i.e., a state of freedom for a state of certainty or ‘non-risk’). Free expression activists must decide whether this conflation is what they believe the path to freedom to be, and what may be lost and gained along the way as a result. This is further complicated by the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies and their treatment as zones of risk and uncertainty that must be securitized. These must be reconciled with understandings of liberalism that were developed long before the emergence of digital life. Free expression activists are thus at the heart of determining where and how exactly freedom is located within all this (post)modern complexity, as new technologies and old understandings of liberalism collide to produce unique forms of power and resistance. “We all learned a lot,” said Emily. But evidently they are working to learn more.

Chapter 3 Free Speech and Canada’s Political Right Ecosphere

3.0 “They’re All Just Empty Heads”

Toronto, Ontario: Autumn 2015 I walked along a windy downtown street beside Paul, a recent law school graduate who liked to attend public talks by “culture warriors,” protests, and other events where he could support free speech. Paul wasn’t loud and he tended to slouch even when he was standing, but he could also move through a crowd like he belonged there. We were going to a book launch, where an American conservative would be reading from and signing copies of his new release. Having met at a Starbucks before heading to the bookstore, Paul asked me to hold his coffee so he could use both thumbs to type on his cellphone. “What do you think of this?” He asked, showing me the tweet he’d drafted. Paul had spent the past 24 hours in a Twitter fight with a university lecturer he accused of liberal bias. They traded barbs about a hate speech bill introduced in Quebec, with Paul denouncing the proposed legislation and the lecturer arguing it would combat Islamophobia. “You can’t sanitize our society with censorship every time something bad happens,” I read. “Infection will only get easier. #Bill59 #Quebec.” “What type of infection are you talking about?” I asked. “Offensive, hate-filled ideas,” Paul replied. “Censorship can’t actually fight them.” “So you’re not talking about Muslims?” “What? Not at all.” Paul snagged his coffee back and took a drink. He liked to stir the pot on social media, often bombarding people with critical or provocative comments on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit—a classic, unrepentant troll. “This woman and her entire department,” Paul continued. “They’re all just empty heads.” We walked another block as he argued that anyone in the “liberal arts” was wasting their time. “What about anthropology?” I asked. “Well, you’re cool.” I laughed. “Good to know.” While he opened the door to the bookstore for me with a flourish, Paul proclaimed he was done with his most recent Twitter fight. By the end of the

73 evening, he’d tweeted two quotes from the conservative author’s new book that he considered inspirational. Both concerned free speech.

3.1 Advocating for Free Speech in Canada

After Bill C-51 was introduced in January 2015, the response to the anti-terrorism legislation was marked by a rare occurrence. Canadians across the political spectrum voiced their opposition, and those on the left happily applauded their counterparts on the right for breaking with the Conservative Harper government on the issue. The bipartisan agreement was unusual, as civil society groups categorized as either left- or right-wing often struggle to collaborate in Canada. Many conservative activists believe that liberal groups are unwilling to work with them, even when they share similar views. Some activists did recount experiences of reaching out to left-leaning groups, but in the end being unable to work together because of the latter’s disagreement with their positions on other issues.79 Harvey, an extroverted libertarian lawyer who spoke freely about his life, emphasized:

“The stereotypical social justice warrior is inflexible in the exact same way that social conservatives are—as in, ‘You can’t talk about that. We’re not even going to think about that’. They both have that sort of oppressive authoritarianism.”80

The more I researched Canada’s free expression landscape, the more it did appear that groups and their close supporters occupy working ‘silos’ according to where they are positioned along the political spectrum. Despite declaring that I was cool (even though anthropology is a suspect discipline), Paul derided the groups I was doing research with that he believed were left- leaning. Within these silos, it is more likely to find right-leaning activists tackling free speech issues that may position them on ‘the wrong side of majority public opinion’, of exposing them to accusations of hate speech by association. In their chosen defense of free expression, these activists are more likely to take on controversial speech cases that many would find distasteful.

79 Left-leaning groups deny this proposed unwillingness and I did not observe them ever recommending against collaborating with another group simply because it was categorized as right-leaning. I did observe three instances of liberal groups considering collaborations with conservative groups on a specific issue. Although these debates focused on the merits of collaboration, potential negative ‘branding’ via association with the issue or group was also considered. In all instances, the outcome was a decision (but never unanimous) against the collaboration. 80 ‘Social justice warrior’ is a pejorative term used to describe liberal activists who are more concerned with personal validation, and ‘social conservative’ refers to those who support Christian-based ‘traditional’ or ‘historical’ positions on issues of family, sexuality, and morality. 74

Ultimately, they prioritize criminalization of speech and the narrowing of acceptable expression in public discourse over the erosion of privacy.81 I refer to this subgroup of free expression activists as the free speech advocates of Canada’s ‘political right ecosphere’, a loose collection of people across the country who come from a number of backgrounds—including lawyers, journalists, academics, NGO staffers, bloggers, defendants in speech cases, and others.82

This chapter argues that the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere conceive a free speech crisis that they position as an existential risk to the country. They broaden their risk discourse to assert that the erosion of free speech through state and non-state social forces is in fact part of a larger crisis, whereby progressive liberalism is supplanting conservative liberalism, the latter of which represents the true foundation upon which Western society was built and the only method by which it can survive. The primary discursive tool that these free speech advocates use to construct the existential risk is the language of pathology, which comes to mediate their performative encounters with a new progressively liberal, aggressive cultural Other. “You can’t sanitize our society with censorship every time something bad happens,” Paul tweeted. “Infection will only get easier.” Performativity—as John Austin (1962), Judith Butler (1997), and others have explored—is a fraught form of social action, through which language is used to create and negotiate value and subject relations. As Shankar (2017:326) argues, this type of epistemological project encodes contests of meaning and representation, in which identity and rights come to the fore during processes of social formation. Free speech debates are highly performative as the value of linguistic acts involved in ‘speaking freely’ or censoring speech, as well as the relations between people who produce and evaluate them, are created and negotiated. Security and risk are revealed to be quite performative as well, with their own creation and negotiation of value and subject relations (especially via processes of Othering), as free expression issues increasingly occupy the same conceptual frame as them.

81 Despite the unexpected consensus on Bill C-51, right-leaning activists are often content to let their left-leaning counterparts take on privacy work. But many right-leaning activists do acknowledge the risks of expanded state surveillance, drawing the standard causal relation between privacy and free speech. Some (especially journalists) have also become more aware of digital security, and many scoff at the naïveté indicated by the argument that ‘if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear’. 82 This chapter does not include research with far-right extremist (and sometimes militant) groups in Canada that espouse white supremacist ideologies, other than some interactions with individuals who have been convicted of speech offences. As such, the following discussions largely focus on free speech advocates who seek to defend the ‘right to offend’ without themselves committing prosecutable offences under the Criminal Code. 75

By examining the language of pathology used by free speech advocates, this chapter shows that performativity (of language, free speech debates, security, and risk) is central to their activism efforts. It also becomes evident that underlying their efforts are attempts to reconcile traditional understandings of free speech and individual autonomy (personhood) with the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies and aging of liberalism. As part of this, free speech advocates deploy a chronological view of digital technologies (including their manipulation) and the growing conflict within liberalism over the past half-century. Doing so both challenges their beliefs and provides them new discursive paths to achieving their goals. The language of pathology used in performative encounters with progressive liberals strives for individualism, of the self and the nation; yet, as Feldman argues, “performativity posits a radical negation of the autonomous actor” (2005:214). What emerges from this free speech work, then, is a slew of unique contradictions—of freedom and (in)security, language and liberalism, the embrace and mitigation of risk—that offer free expression activists both radicalized obstacles and opportunities.

The next section describes Canada’s political right ecosphere and its free speech advocates, as well as the crisis they perceive and position as an existential risk to Canada and Western society more broadly.83 Section 3.3 then examines how free speech advocates construct this existential risk by using the language of pathology, which is able to articulate their emphasis on individualism and the perceived failures of liberalism over the past 50 years. In section 3.4, the performativity of the encounters between the political right ecosphere and the progressive liberalism censor is investigated in more detail to show how free speech advocates try to integrate their classical ideals about liberalism with new conditions of (post)modernity. Importantly, the performative natures of risk and security are unpacked to show how they combine with the language of pathology to shape the political right ecosphere’s understandings of free speech and liberalism, and the implications for personhood, freedom, and liberal governmentality. The final section charts the various contradictions in (post)modernity that have surfaced thus far in the thesis, as they shape and are being shaped by free expression activism.

83 Although robust free speech work takes place in Canada’s ‘political left ecosphere’ as well, its members are less likely to take explicitly formulated or forceful stances on the ‘right to offend’, which is an important dimension of these debates. Focusing on the free speech advocates of the political right ecosphere provides more ready access to this dimension, adding substantive material and complexity to this chapter’s analysis. 76

3.2 Canada’s Political Right Ecosphere: Free Speech, Digital Technologies, Aging Liberalism

The first decades of the 21st-century have brought major changes to Canada. By the end of Harper’s nine years in power, some lamented an unfamiliar Canada that had relinquished its tradition of strong civil liberties and multiculturalism, while others enjoyed a fiscally responsible nation that was defending its security and sovereign interests. These opinions are often attributed to Canadians with differing political ideologies, with the former assigned to those who fall somewhere along the left side of the political spectrum, and the latter assigned to those who fall somewhere along the right. These labels are both restrictive and overly broad, encompassing large swaths of people who have diverse cultural and political backgrounds—and most certainly do not agree on every issue.84 When asked how they self-identify politically, none of my research participants provided a simple answer. What emerged from their descriptions and discussions is a dissatisfaction with and reluctance to invoke terms associated with the political spectrum framework, but also an absence of any other framework.

The free speech advocates who participated in my research often contrasted different aspects of progressive and conservative liberalism, picking and choosing the accompanying views they wanted to align with and those they sought to distance themselves from. Although imperfect and imprecise, a loose imagining of a ‘political right ecosphere’ in Canada becomes discernible, whose members include mainstream conservatives, libertarians, and far-right conservatives who deny being associated with the even farther ‘alt-right’, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists.85 Tropes of radicalization and violent extremism that promote a generalized fear of menacing Islam are perpetuated by some members of Canada’s political right ecosphere.86 With respect to free speech, a well-spoken lawyer, activist, and writer named Ian stated bluntly:

84 Scholars have also shown that a single spectrum is insufficient for accurately capturing variation in political beliefs, and argue that the two opposing poles of liberalism-versus-conservatism and socialism-versus-fascism are false extremes (Bissell 2012). 85 The term ‘political ecosphere’ is used to refer to an open and only loosely organized but still cogent system of political ideologies and practices. A political ecosphere can consist of many smaller and diverse systems that, when taken as a sum, are recognized as forming some sort of meaningful whole. Canada, then, has both a ‘political right ecosphere’ and a ‘political left ecosphere’. Some Canadians view them as entirely self-contained systems separate from one another, while others view them as overlapping to lesser or greater degrees. I have adopted it as a vernacular term for practical purposes. 86 Members of Canada’s political right ecosphere also frequently support small government and a capitalist free market, lowering immigration rates, strengthening national security, and rejecting other globalist policies. 77

“Radical Islam is the greatest threat to free speech. It’s obvious. If you criticize Christianity or secular ideologies, nothing happens to you. If you criticize Islam- if you’re a cartoonist like Charlie Hebdo, you might get slaughtered. If you’re a cartoonist in Denmark, you need around-the-clock police protection. If you’re a novelist like Salman Rushdie, for 20 years you live with police guards…That’s not only a direct threat of murder, but it causes people to self-censor.”

And the episode with Paul shows that free speech and hostility towards Islam can be brought into dialogue even when explicit anti-Muslim sentiments are eschewed. Not surprisingly in light of this type of view, the ideology of risk and uncertainty that justifies expanded state powers to fight ‘terrorism’ is prevalent in Canada’s political right ecosphere. As a result, national security, (counter)terrorism, and free speech become increasingly intertwined—bringing discourses of security, risk, and freedom together in new ways.

Members of Canada’s political right ecosphere believe free speech is severely imperiled, and represents the country’s most urgent free expression issue. While the state’s criminalization of speech is an enduring concern, these free speech advocates are also taking a stance against the censoring of speech by non-state social forces. The proliferation of social media is identified as amplifying non-state sponsored censorship campaigns driven by Internet users who disagree with someone and seek to silence them. These campaigns (organized or not) use a range of methods enabled by digital technologies, including online threats, abuse, and other forms of intimidation, public censure, job termination resulting from public pressure exerted on an employer, and more. As Paul the unrepentant troll shows, these online actions become a strategy for free speech advocates to deploy and a source of censorship to be challenged (when targeted at them or those they support). Canadian Lauren Southern, a far-right political activist and former staff member of The Rebel,87 summarized the risk of this new source of censorship:

[I ascribe to] a societal view that primarily focuses on people’s freedom to express themselves…It counters the groups in society that look to eliminate others’ ability to do this because of fundamental disagreements or malice towards them. Now, here’s a crucial point: these authoritarians don’t always censor or intimidate people using the state. They

87 The Rebel is a popular far-right political and social commentary media website founded in February 2015 by Canadian conservatives Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley. It is often considered to be the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart News in the United States. 78

often use demonization, fabricated offense, and slander campaigns. They want to eliminate opposition to their worldview by any means possible…Suppression of speech perpetrated by non-state groups can be just as terrible as suppression of speech perpetrated by the state…Tyranny is possible even when a state guarantees freedom. Diversity of expression and ideas is something we should consider extremely valuable and worth defending from any opponent, even non-state actors. Also, the group with the most cultural sway inevitably manages to influence the government, which is much of what we are seeing now. [Southern 2015]

And speaking directly to the drawbacks of digital technologies, which amplify voices and possibilities for human relations but also isolate Internet users from ideas different from their own, former professor Diego, who had a nervous but passionate air about him, argued:

“I think the possibility for a diversity of voices to be expressed in a single forum is becoming rarer. Our society is becoming more and more atomized, where we have fewer connections and opportunities to interact. That kind of discussion is happening less often, and it’s also kind of being pushed to the margins. So there aren’t that many opportunities for a typical individual to be exposed to a variety of views and to learn to speak out spontaneously.”

Free speech debates grapple not only with non-state censorship campaigns but also with the reorganization of social relations, which are negatively impacting the very opportunities for the productive exchange of ideas. Political correctness, reasonable accommodation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and cultural appropriation are all topics taken up. (See Table 3.1 in Appendix C for a list of events that have attracted the attention of free speech advocates.) Although some of these issues can be directly connected to state actions (e.g., via the passage of legislation), free speech advocates argue they are also the outcomes of pressure exerted by non-state social forces. This second source of censorship is believed to be narrowing the boundaries of acceptable expression in Canada—especially related to ideas that eschew the status quo. It is not only the relationship between state and citizen that is identified as requiring reconstitution and recalibration, but also the relationship between individual and society. If these relationships are not changed, Western society and its liberal foundation will collapse under the weight of an all-consuming control that will have been implicitly authorized ‘by the people’.

Through its envisioning of a free speech crisis, Canada’s political right ecosphere positions state and non-state censorship as an urgent existential risk. This is enabled and accelerated using the same methods that have produced other global risks. A regime of affective, imaginative, and material resources are mobilized—through political commentary (circulated through the press and social media), advocacy campaigns, and other modes of public discourse— through which free speech is tied to narratives of collapse and progress, success and failure, apocalypse and utopia. As discussed in chapter one, two features mark issues as existential risks. The first is the perception that the issue has reached an exceptional scale and reach, and the second is the key conceptual turn required to define an existential risk in the first place.88 When this type of existential risk is represented as such by leaders and accepted as such by the public, it rises from the realm of ‘normal politics’ to the domain of ‘panic politics’. This has occurred in Canada with respect to the free speech ‘crisis’, as an onslaught of public commentary coincided with new free speech incidents. The state of free speech at universities has been identified as a key source of this crisis, with many commentators arguing that free speech is “under attack” on campus (MacKinnon 2018a, 2018b). (See Table 3.2 in Appendix C for a list of mainstream news articles published about free speech on campus in only a six-month period.)

Existential risks occupy a unique position in Canada’s history and national fabric. Specifically, it is the absence of existential risks in its past that has contributed to the current free speech crisis, according to free speech advocates.89 This is viewed as having produced an atrophied civil society and Canadians who no longer appreciate the importance of political participation, and the roles of state as public servant and civil society as watchdog. As Harvey described, after laughingly complaining about how much he complains:

“Our civil society is sick. I think that’s really what the problem is. Our social institutions outside the government are so weak and impoverished right now…The problem we have now with the government restricting liberty and speech is really

88 With respect to the first feature, these risks are much more difficult to ‘outrun’ and endanger everyone, coming to appear in places previously thought safe. With respect to the second feature, an issue is not elevated to this type of risk until it is perceived as a problem in and of itself, whose negative effects can no longer be ignored. 89 Abigail, who runs a popular conservative blog and trains show-dogs across North America, explained: “I don’t think Canadians understand- Canada’s got kind of a unique situation in the Western world, and that is we’ve never had to fight for existence. We’ve never had an existential threat in this country, in the way that the US had their American Revolution and Civil War, and France had the French Revolution. The British had a thousand year history of repelling invaders with varying success. Canada’s never had that.” 80

just an offshoot of 50 years of civil society being passively attacked and then people not appreciating their works and the things they do. And now we’ve created a whole new social order where liberty and free expression don’t mean much to people anymore.”

The passivity of Canada’s civil society has led to an existential risk that much of the public is not even aware of, accelerating the country’s path towards democratic collapse. A straight line is thus drawn between the absence of historical existential risks and today’s free speech crisis— with increasingly pervasive digital technologies and conflicts within an aging liberalism representing essential components of this crisis.90

Digital technologies play an increasingly significant role in the daily lives of people around the world.91 It was more than two decades ago that the coming of a new post-human subject was heralded, who resides in a “digital age,” “network society,” and/or “knowledge economy,” ushering in a “historically new reality” that is “fundamentally altering the way we are born, we live, we sleep, we produce, we consume, we dream, we fight, or we die” (Castells 1996:31). A number of diagnostic terms for society were put forward, including Bauman’s (1998, 2000) liquid modernity, which emerged in the post-industrial world as a response to the new social complexities and opaqueness brought on by market-driven globalization. A broad ideological shift accompanied the onset of this new modernity, whereby economic, political, and social power is increasingly characterized by heightened reflexivity and an attendant struggle for control over discourse (Suhr and Johnson 2003; Beck et al. 1994; Giddens 1990, 1991). Free speech debates fit uniquely well in this meta-discursive struggle.

The post-human subject’s new reality has only become more influential and radicalized. As Fairclough (2003) states, the culture industries of mass media (and their development via

90 The belief that society is disintegrating is hardly new, nor is its (re)production through critiques of political correctness. Controversies about speech codes, anti-discriminatory language guidelines, core education curricula, and so-called affirmative action and reasonable accommodation also surged during the first half of the 1990s, and then subsided for a time (Lakoff 2000:95; Cameron 1995; Fairclough 2003; Suhr and Johnson 2003; Williams 1995; Wilson 1995). However, the current iterations of imperiled society, eroding free speech, and harmful political correctness are uniquely impacted by digital technologies and an aging liberalism. 91 As Coleman observes, “the use and production of digital media have become integrated into everyday cultural, linguistic, and economic life,” which has dynamic effects on the “complex relationships between local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in everyday life and modes of communication” (2010:488-489). 81 digital technologies) continue to grow, and their networking with other domains (politics, economy, family) make them a central feature of social life. This new social life is infused with elements of anonymity and modalities of “hypermobility, ephemerality, and mutability” (Coleman 2010:492), which characterize the (post)modern conditions in Castell’s network society and Bauman’s liquid modernity. As part of the material and cultural consequences of digital technologies, new modes of personhood are being cultivated, social perceptions and forms of self-awareness reorganized, and individual and collective modes of governance transformed. Moreover, these consequences are fully entwined with the liberal democratic imaginary. The current “techno-mediatic moment…bears the promise of universal political enfranchisement in the form of ‘access’, the term by which projects of democratic inclusion are being reimagined and reengineered” (Hirschkind et al. 2017:S4; Hansen 2004, Kelty 2008, Logan 2010). Equally important, however, it also bears the spectre of totalitarian rule lurking beneath its seductive surface, enabling political disenfranchisement and democratic exclusion as well.

Free speech advocates’ own activism practices indicate the belief that digital technologies can produce opportunities for political enfranchisement and democratic inclusion.92 But they also view the manipulation of digital technologies as curtailing these opportunities, which inhibits the development of autonomous, critical-thinking individuals and prevents the ‘marketplace of ideas’ from operating as it should in a liberal democracy. This is often described as a censoring ‘chill’ imposed on speech, as the public becomes aware—faster and in more detail than ever before—of the negative consequences that speakers suffer because they have expressed an offensive idea. The growing atomization of society and decreasing ability of individuals to develop into rational liberal subjects because of digital technologies, as well as their effects on public discourse, are located not only in the chill produced by past censorship incidents.93 They are also located in the overload of data swamping the Internet, making it more difficult to sort truth from falsehood. The marketplace of ideas so tied to free speech ideology is being manipulated through digital technologies to produce ‘disinformation’, which is increasingly being discussed as a risk approaching existential levels. In 2018, CSIS reported that hostile

92 Social media, online engagement, and cyber devices are essential to free speech advocates’ everyday work and efforts to connect with audiences. In their personal time, many are also avid social media users, readers and writers of blogs, consumers of online news and commentary, and the like. And in their discourse, they continue to agree that the ‘access’ provided by the techno-mediatic moment is an innovative development that offers human agency and emancipation grounded in interactions of unfettered, unregulated exchange. 93 That is, when a speaker suffers negative consequences and others are discouraged from speaking in the future. 82 disinformation campaigns against Western democracy are “more dangerous and sophisticated than ever before” (CSIS 2018:33).94 The risk of this type of ‘free speech misuse’ is also connected to the current state of liberalism, as it is being called on—and struggling—to adapt to material and cultural consequences engendered by digital technologies.

Liberalism developed in a very different world than the one it inhabits today. Its origins are found in 18th-century Enlightenment Europe, advancing ideals like liberty, progress, reason, representative democracy, and the separation of church and state. Classical liberalism developed into the 19th-century as a political philosophy/worldview focused on promoting individual freedom (mostly of white, property-owning men) through economic independence and constitutional rule. As part of this, early liberal philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau formulated social contract theory, stipulating that 1) life, liberty, and property constitute natural rights of the sovereign individual, and 2) for a government to be politically legitimate it requires the consent of the governed. These two factors, coupled with other Enlightenment ideals, were crucial to the American and French Revolutions. Ongoing progress of representative democracy prepared the way for the introduction of universal suffrage in the 20th-century, while two World Wars led to the establishment of an international order led by the UN and human rights discourse—which contributed significantly to the civil rights movements of the early post-war period. Up to the 1970s, social/progressive liberalism rose to political dominance twice, after the Great Depression and WWII, with government efforts to address economic and social issues (poverty, healthcare, education) coming to be viewed by many as legitimate sites of intervention in the lives of the governed population.

This brief, partial snapshot of liberalism’s Western history is evident in the discourse of free speech advocates in Canada’s political right ecosphere. However, it is the next 50 years of history (late-1960s to the present) that they hone in on to situate the current free speech crisis. Following severe economic downturns in the 1970s and an initial round of resistance against social welfare policies, liberal thought underwent some transformation. Popularly associated

94 Referring to the role of digital technologies, journalism, and impact on free expression, CSIS asserts: “The reach and speed of the Internet and social media have escalated the potential impact of disinformation. Increases in data transmission capacity coupled with a shift towards programmatic advertising have resulted in a precipitous decrease in the ability of traditional journalism to mediate the quality of public information. Conventional journalism has been partially displaced by a torrent of data from an infinite number of originators. Within that torrent is a current of lies and distortions that threatens the integrity of public discourse, debate, and democracy” (CSIS 2018:7). 83 with Thatcherism and Reaganomics, neoliberalism sought to decrease interventionist states and increase economic freedom through laissez-faire capitalism. Although very influential today, free speech advocates believe neoliberal efforts have been losing a confrontation with progressive liberalism and globalism. As political commentator and “multitasker-extraordinaire” Gloria shows, neoliberal values are prominent in the discourse of free speech advocates—but there is also a sense that neoliberalism has been outmaneuvered by progressive liberalism:

“I’m reminded of something Margaret Thatcher said: ‘There’s no such thing as society, there are only individuals’. Freedom is the ability to succeed or fail on your own merits. There is no freedom without the opportunity to fail utterly. And that’s something people don’t understand. Every time someone is cushioned, every safety net, every time the state takes away one of those opportunities to suffer your own consequences, they take away a corresponding freedom at the same time…It’s just constant, these little nibbles at our freedom…With so much state intervention now, welfare and socialized medicine and everything, there’s become such a risk aversion, whether online, in public, or in private life.”

The concern about progressive liberalism felt by free speech advocates of the political right ecosphere is evident not only online but also when they get together. During an event held by a far-right group, speakers and attendees singled out and insulted journalists they perceived to be part of the ‘liberal press’. A female reporter of Canadian-Burmese descent named Eindra became a popular target, a veritable Other in the flesh to provide antagonism and validation. She was called a bigot, racist, and anti-Semitic; asked to apologize for hating white men; compared to “vaginal itching”; called a degenerate, mentally unstable, damaged, and thuggish. The host pointed at and addressed her directly from the podium to warn off attendees, reading a tweet she wrote that said the far-right group produces hate speech. Eindra said the event was easily the most hostile experience of her professional life. The day was tinged with the theatrical energy of a mob feeding off itself, of people bouncing from foot to foot excitedly and sneaking peeks at their fellow attendees to make sure that, yes, they were allowed to call those few liberal representatives hate-filled bigots and racists. But away from the glow of a revved up crowd or eager onlookers, some also commented on the unpleasantness directed at the liberal attendees, showing hints of what many of them may be like outside the free speech event. This is

84 reminiscent of Paul’s reassurance that, “well, I’m cool,” when I asked whether he condemns anthropology alongside the ‘liberal arts’.95

The far-right event’s oppressive setting and its mostly older, white crowd contrasts with the professional networking setting of an event held by a (less far-right) free speech group. Casual outfits and “Make Canada Great Again” hats were exchanged for business attire, wine, and hors d’oeuvres. Law students and other young professionals tried to hide their nervousness as they mingled with established members of the legal, business, and non-profit sectors, waiting for a federal judge to begin his keynote address. Rather than hostility, these attendees were demure in their unease, alluding to but never raucously attacking progressive liberalism and the direction it is taking Canadian society. The group focused on the “little nibbles at our freedom” that Gloria referred to, arguing that incremental changes can be just as destructive in the long run as radicalism and controversy. Small decisions that slowly push tradition away—“often on the basis of new rights”—for the sake of political culture and discourse destabilize the fabric (judicial, legislative, moral) upon which the country was founded. Rather than cheers of approval, soft nods and the quiet scratching of pens over paper indicated this audience’s agreement with the speakers. Outside the presentations, polite interest replaced boisterous encounters, but the same circumspect instinct to gauge one another’s reactions to remarks that challenged progressive liberalism was present. What emerged during the three-day event was an underlying but persistent comparison of older, traditional conservatism and its commitment to “ideological openness” with a newer, “liberal collectivist strain” that has become dominant yet brings close-mindedness, imbalance, and more “societal ills” for the individual and collective.

When the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere get together, their events are just as varied as the people who attend. Some blatantly ridicule and decry progressive liberalism; others take a more nuanced and cautious approach. But they all work towards the belief that progressive liberalism is restricting freedom rather than enabling it. The evolution of digital technologies, including their manipulation by sophisticated actors, is occurring at the same time that progressive and conservative forms of liberalism are coming to be viewed as more antagonistic. The conflicting deployments give the impression that liberalism is reaching a

95 Without the safety of a crowd or social media, the ideology about progressive liberalism (and Islam) became at least somewhat more susceptible to retrospection and tempering by the free speech advocates. 85 newly cumbersome age, as the passage of time and evolution of society place added stress on the political philosophy as it tries to keep up with the radical changes of (post)modernity, so different from the context in which it was originally conceived. In other words, liberalism has evolved over time into a number of different forms, and the competition between them is being played out in the charged realm of free speech debates. For the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere, this means their work becomes ever more intertwined with broader debates about liberalism and all this entails for freedom, security, and risk.

Chapter one began to explain the use of the term ‘aging liberalism’ in this thesis. Broadly, aging liberalism refers to the political philosophy’s struggle to accommodate emergent cultural formations in (post)modernity. And as discussed in chapter two, these cultural formations specifically encompass the dynamic changes (social, political, economic) that have been wrought by the post-9/11 (in)security paradigm and the digital nature of networking (with its protocological control). This section has continued that explanation. It has shown aging liberalism to be constituted by three components, which can be called context, content/meaning, and maturity/reflexivity. ‘Context’ indexes the stark differences between the world in which liberalism was originally articulated during the Age of Enlightenment and the uniquely complex, multifaceted, and conflicted (post)modernity in which it exists today. ‘Content/Meaning’ indexes the ballooning number of forms and iterations that liberalism has developed into over the past centuries, some very much divergent or inimical and others aligning or complementing one another. And ‘maturity/reflexivity’ indexes the process by which liberalism’s limits and flaws have come to be identified over time as contexts and content/meanings have changed; the subsequent attempts to bypass, ignore, or resolve them; and the consequences (both good and bad) that have resulted. This, then, is what ‘aging liberalism’ means, a key predicament driving those three sets of overlapping problems facing free expression and its activists.

3.3 The Pathology of Progressive Liberalism

Section 3.2 introduced the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere, their concern about non-state social forces joining the state as a dangerous source of censorship, and the positioning of today’s free speech ‘crisis’ as an existential risk to Canadian society. In addition, the changes to social life that have accompanied the development of digital technologies, and the advanced age that liberalism is reaching as it struggles to adapt to its

86 conflicting forms, were situated as key components of free speech debates. As part of their activism efforts, free speech advocates broaden their risk discourse to assert that the erosion of free speech is part of a larger crisis, whereby progressive liberalism is supplanting conservative liberalism, the latter of which represents the true foundation upon which Western society was built and the only method by which it can survive. The primary tool they use to position progressive liberalism as an existential risk is the language of pathology. This discursive tool was notably evident in the opening vignette of this chapter, when Paul wrote out his tweet about a proposed hate speech law: “You can’t sanitize our society with censorship every time something bad happens. Infection will only get easier.”96

Figure 3.1 Portraying progressive liberalism through the language of pathology

96 Remember also Harvey’s assertion above that civil society is sick, Eindra being compared to “vaginal itching” and called a degenerate and mentally unstable, and arguments about the “liberal collectivist strain” that brings “societal ills” for the individual and collective. 87

To many in Canada’s political right ecosphere, the poor state of free speech is a direct result of the ideologies and actions of a more powerful progressive liberal elite. Progressive liberalism is viewed as something to be feared and cured. In explicit articulations, it is described as a poison, disease, syndrome, or mental disorder (see Figure 3.1 above and Table 3.3 in Appendix C), which is overwhelming conservative liberalism and spreading like a contagion because the political left controls Canada’s institutions—not only government but also the press, courts, and education (see Tables 3.4 and 3.5 in Appendix C). This allows young people to be indoctrinated into their mindless, irrational ideology (see Figure 3.1). Progressive liberalism is viewed as creating a herd mentality that prevents critical thinking and is deeply opposed to individualism. Progressive liberals are perceived as not living in reality; they do not see reality for what it truly is, or, if they do, then they are actively trying to deceive others to maintain power (see Table 3.6 in Appendix C). This is often accompanied by the argument that some progressive liberals are using the class system against other progressive liberals, whereby a few are intelligent and malicious elites while others are ignorant and unable to critically challenge authority or the status quo (see Figure 3.1 and Table 3.5 in Appendix C).

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who rose to popularity for his contentious views on gender, political correctness, and social justice, infuses his discourse with the language of pathology. A self-help book he published after cementing his status as influential ‘culture warrior’ is titled “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” in which he encourages a return to personal responsibility and the ‘order’ provided by the undeniable truth that has been subsumed under “a nauseating, saccharine diet of rights and freedoms for, like, 50 years, with no counterbalance of responsibility” (VICE News 2018). Promulgating the underlying conception that progressive liberalism is an existential risk, Peterson has taken up the task of staving off society’s descent into totalitarianism by urging everyone to “live in a truthful manner” (Kunzru 2018; Peterson 2018:40-41). As part of this task, he argues that certain academic disciplines are responsible for indoctrinating students into a mindless “social justice ideology.” A Toronto Sun article about a presentation that Peterson gave titled “Postmodern Neo-Marxism: Diagnosis and Cure” illustrates this use of the language of pathology. It quotes Peterson as using words like “the plague” and “corrupted” to describe “university indoctrination” and “Post-Modernist (neo- Marxist) disciplines,” with the worst professors playing “insane bordering on murderous

88 intellectual games” (Levy 2017). Peterson delivered this presentation to a crowd of nearly 700 people at a free speech summit in downtown Toronto.

Positioning progressive liberalism as an existential risk by representing certain academic disciplines as ‘pathological’ aligns with Paul’s condemnation of a university lecturer, “her entire department,” and the liberal arts more broadly. “They’re all just empty heads,” he argued. In an interview with VICE News, Peterson emphasized the contagious-like spread of the overarching societal illness:

Interviewer: Professors and students [are] trapped in a war of ideas, as you put it, that keeps escalating. But once you walk outside the gates of that university, it seems very contained to the university. What I don’t see is sort of this veering towards apocalypse-

Peterson: Oh yeah it’s spreading, it’s spreading into HR, into corporations throughout the US, through departments very, very rapidly. [VICE News 2018] 97

Peterson then frames the narrative he wants to tell young men who have drifted to the ‘alt-right’:

Grow the hell up. Take your place in the world. You’ve got something to contribute. Make a plan. Live as an individual. Stay away from the identity politics pathology; it’s just an excuse for failing to live your life in a respectable and noble manner. It’s a way better story than, like, ‘Go wave your idiot far-right flag at some rally with a bunch of pasty-faced morons. What kind of pathetic behaviour is that?’ [VICE News 2018]

The symptoms of the progressive liberalism illness and its positioning as an existential risk are thus highlighted throughout Peterson’s discourse, including the spread of collectivism over individualism because of the rise of human rights discourse, which produces an inappropriate sense of entitlement and deterioration of personal responsibility. Other important symptoms are an inability to think critically, and more broadly an inability to see the truth, to see reality for what it truly is, and to live a healthy life in the ‘real world’. In discussing the rapid spread of progressive liberalism, having already taken over entire university disciplines and currently working through corporations and HR departments, Peterson also conveys a sense that it is an incredibly powerful pathology and difficult to treat, let alone cure.

97 The language of pathology is also invoked in an article about Peterson at The Guardian: “His work on the psychology of political correctness has raised eyebrows, given his recent proposal to purge ‘corrupt’ academic departments of courses and teachers he deems infected by this pathology” (Kunzru 2018). 89

Using the language of pathology only strengthened after Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party took office in October 2015. Unsurprisingly, free speech advocates in Canada’s political right ecosphere identified themselves and their conservative tradition as the treatment and cure. The day after the election, The Rebel’s Ezra Levant emailed a newsletter (titled “Justin Trudeau won. Now what?”) to his subscribers:

Justin Trudeau just won a majority government. Get ready for the pain…His ideas will be a disaster. Government will grow. Personal freedom will shrink. Our national security will be weakened. And our foreign policy will tilt far left…And who’s going to stop him? The political left controls most provincial legislatures and the courts. Every university and NGO pushes to the left. But the worst is the mainstream media. For nine years, they weren’t just watchdogs—they were mad dogs. I called it “Harper Derangement Syndrome.”…So who will hold the Liberal government to account? Who will shine a light of public scrutiny on what Trudeau does—his fan club at the CBC? Who will be the people’s opposition? I think a lot of that responsibility falls to us, here at The Rebel… We’ll do a bit of everything—news reports; conservative commentary; we’ll be a conservative “think tank”; and when necessary, we’ll be activists too. We’ve already started. So let me put it another way: the fight-back starts now. [The Rebel 2015]98

Levant positions himself and The Rebel as frontline soldiers fighting back against progressive liberalism and all it will wreak on Canadian society, with supporters joining the fight-back just by subscribing to The Rebel’s premium content.99 When staring down a frightening progressive liberalism illness that is more powerful and dangerous than ever before, Levant and like-minded Canadians used their outsider, underdog status (since the 2015 election) to find renewed purpose and shared group identity—to position themselves as the antidote to progressive liberalism. This antidote is inextricably tied to free speech work. In their view, citizens and society must be immunized against progressive liberalism. Some of their efforts entail counteracting what they see as growing globalism and weakening national security, but the antidote’s primary design is to counteract the erosion of free speech. To do this, politically incorrect speech must be defended

98 After The Rebel came under fire for its alt-right affiliations in 2017, Levant took up the term “Rebel Derangement Syndrome” to describe the “extreme, irrational, emotional, obsessive, fanatic hatred of The Rebel” (and before it Donald Trump, and before him Stephen Harper) (Levant 2018). See Table 3.3 in Appendix C for more examples. 99 Stoking the anxieties of his audience, Levant later harnesses them through crowdfunding campaigns, petitions, and other calls for Canadians to take action in the ‘fight-back’. 90 so that no idea or belief is placed beyond discussion; when this occurs, the rights of the individual rather than the collective are protected. As a tweet by Levant proclaims:

Figure 3.2 “People have rights. Ideas don’t have rights.”

The emphasis on the individual is consistently apparent when free speech advocates take up the cases of people who have expressed a controversial idea and are suffering the consequences. These are people who have been exposed to the pathology of progressive liberalism but have not succumbed to it. This is also why free speech groups in the political right ecosphere make a point of advocating for people who have expressed opinions with which they disagree. Richard, a soft-spoken but articulate NGO spokesperson, expressed this emphasis on protecting free speech in order to protect the individual:

“We have to defend the people, not their ideas, who are most in need of defense. Topham is an example of that. He was having a hard time getting support, and he is suffering very severe consequences, all along the way.”100

Protecting offensive speech and mobilizing civil society for a ‘fight-back’ are ways of treating the symptoms produced by the illness of progressive liberalism, which afflicts people not ideas.

100 Arthur Topham was convicted in British Columbia of promoting hatred against Jewish people. 91

And the purpose of curing the illness is not only to protect the individual’s autonomy (upon which Canada was founded), but also to mend the relationship between individual and society, and by extension between citizen and state (both of which are sick).101

Free speech advocates in Canada’s political right ecosphere use the failure of the progressive liberal age to deliver on the world it promised as a way of conceptualizing the illness affecting individual and society.102 They often chart this failure chronologically, constructing the past 50 years as an ‘incubation period’ that has led Western society into its pathological state. In remarks included in the above discussions, Peterson and Harvey both explicitly refer to the past 50 years of liberal history. During that time, the individual and society have been bombarded by the discourse of globalist human rights, and social institutions have become increasingly weakened. There is a sense that over this period, society has been marching steadily towards the current crisis and existential risk it faces today. This chronological view is marked by a high degree of nostalgia about the perceived state of free speech in years-gone-by. As Anton, a perpetually upbeat and optimistic lawyer (despite his opinions about free speech), described:

“I like to think 50 years ago, things would’ve been different. People would’ve said no [to censorship]. As an individual, I could go talk to that individual [expressing offensive ideas] on the street corner, at the civil society level, and say, ‘Hey buddy, what’s up? This may not be working for you’. Or ‘What’s your point of view?’ and ‘I disagree with it’. Like there would be that type of interaction.”

This romantic view of the past—before progressive liberalism’s contagion had infected most of society, leaving only a pocket of Canadians to fight back—is extended to the early years of digital technologies. The earnest and genuine Richard provided an emblematic example of this chronological view being applied to digital technologies, and its implications for free speech:

101 As one free speech group states in its founding principles: “We believe that societal health depends on the individual’s absolute right to free expression” (OCLA 2012, emphasis added). 102 Deploying the language of pathology is actually reminiscent of a fascist trope that positions the ‘myth of the nation’ as an antidote to the liberal age (Evans and Reid 2013:59; Benjamin 1968). Definitions of fascism often invoke the language of pathology—describing it as a “cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism” (Mann 2004:13), and “marked by obsessive preoccupation with...unity, energy, and purity” (Paxton 2004:218). However, today the language of pathology is being taken up by free speech advocates who do not associate with fascists (alt- right, neo-Nazis, white supremacists). Indeed, most of the free speech advocates who participated in my research expended a lot of energy distancing their own beliefs and opinions from those of right-wing extremists. 92

“The Internet that opened up a whole landscape of possibilities is being eroded, as the years go by. We’re at a point where a blog post can put you out of house and home. A medium that should allow spontaneous exchange of ideas, information, and critiques is now the subject of…all kinds of incredible repressions…As this happens more and more, people become aware this is possible and that imposes a chill. It limits the possibility for genuine interactions. And learning to be spontaneous and an individual, to speak your mind and expose yourself to the full range of controversial views that you need to develop into an independent thinking person, that all gets restricted as the chill gets imposed.”

The initial emergence of digital technologies is portrayed as a time of wonderful opportunities that could have (and perhaps did) increase the practice of free speech, political enfranchisement, and democratic inclusion. These early years saw the control of speech and popular media wrested away from elites and transferred to citizens eager to forge new connections and exchange rational discourse. But the jubilant raising of voices is now 1) being drowned out by a cacophony of irrational, uncritical voices, and 2) re-suppressed as powerful actors become more sophisticated and able to turn digital technologies to their own gains.

These free speech advocates repeatedly, sincerely try to figure out “how things got this bad.” They pick out notable events in the past 50 years to construct a narrative about all that has been lost and how progressive liberalism has been such a terrible influence.103 The discourse of human rights, UN-led globalism more broadly, and social justice movements are identified as especially impactful events of the last half-century. These events are viewed as revealing the failings of progressive liberalism, which over time have added up to create the free speech crisis and illuminate for a growing number of people just how flawed it is. But this illumination has come rather slowly. Meanwhile, a 50-year battle has been waging between competing liberal forms, during which conservative liberalism is viewed as largely losing. Taking a chronological view allows free speech advocates to envision what they believe to be the recent turning tide in the battle, a result of human rights discourse, UN-led globalism, and social justice movements reaching old age themselves. Because of this aging process, their corrupt and contagious natures

103 They also sometimes pick out even more historical events—remember the absence of existential risks in Canada’s past being identified as a contributor to today’s free speech crisis. 93 have slowly become undeniable to more and more people.104 This has enabled a fight-back to begin, with the rise of populism and backlash against political correctness depicted as inevitable consequences of progressive liberalism’s negative side effects.105 The free speech crisis and existential risk of progressive liberalism are thereby amplified by juxtaposing the nostalgic version of classical liberalism against the flaws of progressive liberalism.

There are a couple discursive turns at work as understandings of free speech and liberalism are constructed in Canada’s political right ecosphere. On the one hand, the past half- century has seen progressive liberalism grow in influence, its pathology becoming more contagious and the infected growing more apathetic and irrational, but also more powerful as they control institutions and put digital technologies to better use. From this perspective, progressive liberalism has thoroughly thwarted conservative liberalism, producing the current state of eroding free speech. On the other hand, perhaps conservative liberalism has not been so thoroughly thwarted. While it was losing the battle against its competing liberal form, it was also biding its time for society to realize that progressive liberalism is leading it astray. Progressive liberalism appeared the victor but it was actually going through an incubation period; this is why many did not realize what was happening—because the symptoms of the disease had not yet manifested. As human rights discourse, UN-led globalism, and social justice movements appeared to be making real change, their underlying liberal form was experiencing the period between initial infection and onset of visible signs of illness. Now those signs are manifesting, with human rights discourse undermining individual autonomy, UN-led globalism chipping away at the national body’s health and sovereignty, and social justice movements weaponizing digital technologies and political correctness. Although conservative liberalism was losing the battle to progressive liberalism over the past 50 years, today it is growing strong enough to offer a cure to the pathology plaguing society, so clearly on display during struggles over free speech.

3.4 The Performative Encounter of Contagious Communication

Concerns about free speech and liberalism are principally conceptualized by the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere in terms of the relations that exist

104 Although conservative liberalism has also been subject to the aging process, free speech advocates emphasize its Enlightenment origins in order to justify its legitimacy, ongoing viability, and ability to ‘withstand the test of time’. 105 Brexit, Trump’s election, and the increasing gains made by right-wing parties in several European countries are examples of this inevitable rise and backlash against progressive liberalism. 94 between people and groups within the nation-state. Using the language of pathology, they imagine relations that have become increasingly associated with the transmission/communication of an illness from one person or group to another. As part of this process, certain behaviours become normalized while others become ‘pathologized’, leading to the production of legitimized liberal subjects and non-legitimized Others. Favouring a performative approach, this section investigates how discourses of security and risk combine with the language of pathology to shape the political right ecosphere’s understandings of free speech and progressive liberalism, and the implications for personhood, freedom, and governmentality. By focusing on the performativity of free speech debates, it also becomes more possible to examine how free speech advocates try to reconcile conditions of (post)modernity with classical ideals about liberalism.

Performativity refers to the ability of language to affect change in the world rather than just describe it. Its function as a form of social action was first described by Austin (1962) and elaborated by Butler and others (Benveniste 1971; Butler 1990, 1993, 1997; Lyotard 1984; Searle 1969). Social organization, value, and subject relations are created and negotiated through performative language, which can be explored from the perspective of sociolinguistics, gender, philosophy, political discourse, and even the nation-state. Whereas a state-centric view identifies certain groups as objective, external intrusions upon its ontologically discrete space (territorial, cultural), performativity identifies a discursively-produced encounter that generates the effects of relational subjectivities, which are only viable in relation to one another (Butler 1990; Feldman 2005; Morris 1995). It is through this type of discursive process that the performative natures of risk, security, and free speech come to intersect, with members of the political right ecosphere navigating this junction to advance their goals for Canadian society and the individual’s life within it—and contributing to the (re)production of governmentality.

The unique obsession with freedom and security in the post-9/11 era was introduced in chapter two, whereby the promise of the former has become ever more intertwined with the latter. In some contexts ‘security’ becomes another word for freedom, while in other contexts ‘insecurity’ becomes synonymous with freedom. In either case, the two are increasingly correlated with one another—and free expression activists are in a unique position to address that correlation. Chapter two’s discussion of this obsession took place with regards to national security as it refers to the prevention of ‘terrorism’. But national security is no longer conceived

95 only in law enforcement or military terms; it is also understood in vaguer, softer ‘cultural terms’. As Feldman describes, “the identification of other peoples as carriers of other ‘cultures’ renders national security as a practice conceived through the lens of cultural differences” (2005:223).106

In the course of depicting progressive liberalism as an existential risk to Canada, progressive liberals are themselves positioned as the cultural Other who represents a security risk. Those who ascribe to progressive liberal values are actually “un-Canadian” or “not real Canadians,” while conservatives are “main-street” and “true Canadians.” In an interview with the ever confident Ian, he recommended progressive liberals take a quiz by libertarian political scientist Charles Murray called “Do You Live in a Bubble?” Pulling up the quiz on his laptop while we sat in his open-concept, half-renovated office space, Ian posed the quiz’s questions to me, a “city girl” whom he was sure “regards [herself] as a progressive woman and friend of the working-class man/woman.” When we finished the quiz, Ian concluded:

“The people who claim to be the most open-minded, the most progressive, the most liberal, probably don’t know how the other side lives. I’m not saying you have to be a conservative, but don’t claim you’re an open-minded person and you’re truly progressive when you’ve never even been in a factory. ‘Oh I speak for the working people’. No, you don’t. I mean, you say you’re in a union, what is it, a journalism or TA union? You know, I’m sorry, I mean I guess you could call that a union because it is, but when I think of a union I think of people in a big factory, or a mine, or construction.”

Members of the political right ecosphere are positioned as the marginalized underdog, “the other side,” and “real Canadians” who hold foundational values upon which the nation-state was built, while progressive liberals are positioned as invaders who must be fought off to reclaim Canada. The idea that cultures are discrete and generate opposing subjectivities whose unregulated co- existence constitutes a national security risk is promulgated in this performative encounter. Indeed, existential risk is discursively produced in this encounter through the opposition of the

106 Feldman frames this performative-based argument via European countries struggling with immigrant minorities. But the productive role of this type of ‘cultural fundamentalism’, which makes one identity viable only through the inscription of threat in its putative opposite, is no longer restricted to traditional subject-positions defined as nationals and non-nationals. 96 national (“real Canadians”) and the newly non-national Other (progressive liberal “un- Canadians”), as well as between the opposition of security and crisis.107

As this discussion begins to suggest, connections between security, crisis, and risk are becoming more central to the discursive performance of free speech. Firstly, the emphasis on crisis and always impending disaster (constructed through affective, imaginative, and material practices) aligns well with theories of risk society (Beck 1992; Douglas 1992; Ericson and Doyle 2004a, 2004b; Ewald 1991, 2002; Giddens 1990, 1991; Luhmann 1993). Secondly, there is a relatively clear path from the rise of risk—as a system of knowledge based on mathematics used to make sense of and anticipate disaster and loss—to the development of security states that have selected particular issues as world-altering risks (notably Islam, Muslims, extremism, and radicalization) worthy of panic politics. As Douglas (1966, 1992) highlights:

 risk selection reflects the social and political relations within and between groups;  boundaries (territorial, cultural) are critical to the identification of risk;  risk is frequently bound up in experiences of Otherness or insider-outsider statuses; and,  assigning blame for risk often obscures the actors who are genuinely responsible.

All of these elements are evident in the political right ecosphere’s arguments about free speech and the positioning of progressive liberalism as an existential risk. Risk and security are ultimately performative in nature, constructed and experienced as part of a process of structuring relational subjectivities rather than as a structure of fixed relations.

The language of pathology that free speech advocates draw on connects physical and linguistic vocabularies. As physical pain/injury is experienced when the human body is attacked, so too is it experienced when ‘free speech’ is attacked or infected.108 Specifically, the progressive liberal pathology is located in two performative actors: the individual body and the national body. In Jordan Peterson’s discourse, emphasis is placed on the harm being done to individuals infected by progressive liberalism through its “saccharine diet of rights and freedoms.” In his campaign against gender-neutral pronouns, Peterson argues that being compelled to use these words infringes his individual capacity to “speak his truth.” He argues that the process through

107 Similar discursively-produced encounters have been investigated by other anthropologists engaging in security studies (Eriksen et al. 2010; Feldman 2005; Maguire et al. 2014). 108 Remember Ezra Levant’s admonition to “get ready for the pain” after Trudeau’s election victory. 97 which language becomes compelled can have two injurious effects on the individual. First, particular language and thought can become normalized through this type of compulsion, such that overt compulsion is no longer necessary, having successfully produced a self-disciplined subject whose perception of the world is fundamentally different from those who were not compelled through language. Second, this language compulsion may not produce the desired results even when the intentions are well-meaning. Instead, it may further entrench in individuals and spread the very ideas that the majority of society sought to eliminate. The contagion may become more virulent. While testifying before Canada’s Senate, Peterson asserted: 109

Where’s the evidence that anti-unconscious bias training works? There’s no evidence and what little evidence there is suggests that it actually has the opposite effect. Because people don’t like being brought in front of a re-education committee and having their fundamental perceptions—perceptions, you see, not even their thoughts but their perceptions themselves—altered by collective fiat. [Senate of Canada 2017]

Language acquires a carrier function that links a particular subjectivity with contagion and disease. In the first case, compelled language becomes the vector through which the individual is infected and indoctrinated into progressive liberalism. By using neutral pronouns, Peterson believes he will be performing a subjectivity not his own, through which others exposed to his performance will be unwittingly infected even though he does not intend them harm. Uttering these pronouns is invested with contagious power: to speak the utterance is to transmit progressive liberalism and to hear the utterance is to contract it, regardless of the speaker’s intentions. This is similar to Butler’s analysis of prohibitions on homosexuality in the American military. She charts the assumption that being exposed to homosexuality—even through a soldier’s self-naming speech act (“I am gay”)—transmits homosexuality to witnesses: “The figuring of homosexual utterance as contagion is a performative sort of figuring, a performativity that belongs to regulatory discourse” (Butler 1997:122). Censorship comes to pathologically produce rather than eliminate speech and ideas that fall outside the intended social order.

In the first and second case of the individual suffering injurious effects due to compelled language, the performativity of regulatory discourse is the source of Peterson’s anxiety. But in

109 Peterson was at the Senate to oppose Bill C-16, which amended the Canadian Human Rights Act by adding gender identity and expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination (Parliament of Canada 2017). 98 the second case, it is the failure rather than success of regulatory discourse that results in the performative production of a subject attracted to far-right extremism, a consequence of the individual trying to stave off infection. This is similar to how “the military introduces that word [homosexuality] into its contagious circuit precisely through the prohibition which is supposed to secure its unspeakability” (Butler 1997:121). To these free speech advocates, it is precisely the prohibition on discriminatory speech that ensures its introduction into Canada’s “contagious circuit,” which is controlled by “collective fiat.” It is not discriminatory speech that is spreading far-right extremism, but rather the progressive liberal attempt to demarcate the speakable from the unspeakable. Making ideas unspeakable makes them more contagious outside mainstream culture. As Olivia, a journalist, lawyer, and activist who always appeared ruffled, argued:

“You can suppress expression, but when you do that you just end up driving the ideas underground. You martyr people who you don’t want to martyr. Rather than having the ideas out in the open, you just sort of let them fester and ultimately I don’t think that’s a better situation. I don’t think it actually ends the hatred, which ostensibly is what you’re trying to do.”110

Political correctness, then, has facilitated the spread of both types of injurious effects, either infecting individuals with progressive liberalism or making discriminatory ideas more virulent in the underground’s contagious circuit. Levying accusations of political correctness becomes part of the discursive antidote, identifying the poison to draw it out of the individual and national bodies. Once healed, the relief from discursive constraint will have constructed a new subject- position for the citizen (miraculously free from hate) and a (re)new(ed) cultural identity for the nation (Fairclough 2003; Lakoff 2000; Suhr and Johnson 2003).

In contrast to Peterson’s emphasis on injurious effects to the individual body, Ezra Levant focuses on injurious effects to the national body. He calls attention to the suffering of “the people,” “real Canadians,” and society’s institutions (government, education, civil society, press, family), as well as the national “fight-back” that must become the antidote. He, The Rebel,

110 In a remarkably similar passage about censoring ideas, the self-assured Abigail asserted: “What happens when you suppress those things? You don’t suppress anything. It just goes underground. And then when things get really bad, you have someone—I’m going to use Trump as an example, although I don’t think he’s a perfect example— tapping into that. He’s tapping into long simmering frustrations from people who have been told they can’t speak their minds because that makes them haters and they’ll be shunned by society. And, ‘this is just incorrect, you can’t think this anymore, you can’t have an opinion about illegal immigration; it makes you a hater, it makes you racist’.” 99 and their supporters are represented as treating the disease from a more macro, socio-ontological level, in which the political community as a whole must be immunized. This will occur via the protection of offensive speech. As Lorey (2015:11) demonstrates in her analysis of precarity and insecurity, the perceived need for “social immunization” against everything that is recognized as endangerment distinguishes liberal governmentality to a high degree. Moreover, the immunizing process “generally requires striating the precarity of those marked as Other” (Lorey 2015:15), which is evident in the connections made by free speech advocates between freedom, risk, and a softer understanding of national security in cultural terms.

Building on the intersection of social immunization, governmentality, and processes of Othering, the topic of pathology also recurs in Foucault’s work, which is an important influence for Lorey and Butler, as well as in the performativity scholarship more generally. Several discussions in Discipline and Punish, for example, can be read as formulating an argument that liberal subjectivities are created through the normalization of certain behaviours and the ‘pathologization’ of others (Weiss 2012). In his discussion of panopticism, Foucault argues:

Behind disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague…If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion,…then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power…[as each individual is assigned] his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. [Foucault 1977:198]

Pathology appears in Western liberalism’s history as a persistent mobilizing fear and stimulus for organized responses. In turn, governmentality appears to be uniquely tied to the production of a ‘pathologized’ subject, revealing a contradiction between liberal ideology (its commitments to public debate, rationality, democracy, and social contract) and its actual practices. The mechanisms of exclusion taken up by free speech advocates are not viewed as illiberal because the free speech crisis and progressive liberalism more broadly are positioned as a risk to the sovereignty of the Canadian nation-state—revealing the collaboration of liberal governance with sovereignty. As such, it is entirely predictable that free speech advocates have taken up the

100 language of pathology in order to position progressive liberals as a new cultural Other, one who has been pathologized over the past 50 years.

Just as biothreats are selected as global risks (Masco 2017; Samimian-Darash 2013), the progressive liberalism disease is discursively constructed as an existential risk to Canadian society. As has been discussed, the rise in popularity of risk as a system of knowledge was accompanied by shifts to the cultural system of blaming used to attribute responsibility for the production of risk (Douglas 1992). For the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere, overlapping blame is attributed to state and non-state actors. The former is often identified as the Liberal government, and the latter as “social justice warriors” (with both falling under the umbrella of progressive liberal). In addition, non-state actors are often described as invisible, anonymous Internet users pushing for censorship and “mob rule.” After pausing to take a sip of coffee and gather her thoughts, Olivia explained in more detail:

“You have phenomena like people attacking each other on Twitter for what one person is saying, the trolls, or the situation where someone gets fired because everyone is publicizing something they said and everyone gets in an uproar. So in that sense I think you’re changing the way speech impacts people’s lives. Because it’s almost magnifying it, and then total strangers now could potentially have an impact on the effects that your speech is going to have.”

The speech acts of people conceived as Other and as contagion are imbued with the performative power to infect unwitting individuals and eventually the national body as a whole, and digital technologies are viewed as a powerful vector of transmission. The performativity of progressive liberals is accentuated to such an extent that their words are viewed as capable of inflicting pain/harm/injury even when they are spoken by someone who is not a progressive liberal (such as Peterson and others compelled to use gender-neutral pronouns). The performativity of progressive liberal words is separated from the progressive liberal identity.

This separation between speech act and author is uniquely implicated in the rise of non- state social forces as a growing source of censorship and in the manipulation of digital technologies. Chapter two introduced Deleuze’s (1992) argument that in (post)modern ‘societies of control’, the individual-collective divide is being replaced by a dividual-data (set/samples)

101 divide.111 Add to this the ongoing development of digital technologies (and their reorganization of social life) and this new divide is becoming even more radicalized.112 The separation of speech act from author contributes to the ‘dividuation’ of society through digital technologies, and creates new issues for free speech advocates to address during their work. Discriminatory speech can now be found all over the Internet, divorced from its author but not dissociated from its consequences for the people targeted by such speech. Social media botnets and trolls are now being used to influence political outcomes, but curtailing such actions can be viewed as infringing on users’ right to free speech and making censors of social media administrators. Free speech advocates working before the emergence of digital technologies did not have to respond to the breadth of these authorless, anonymous speech acts or determine how to fit them into classical ideals about free speech and the implications for liberal democracy. They also did not have to adapt their free speech ideals to the ‘dividual’ or the ‘data-as-society’ paradigm shift. To address these new issues, the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere tend to to fall back on processes of Othering.

Free speech advocates feeling pressure to distance themselves from hate speech acknowledge the use of disinformation, trolling, and other tactics based on the manipulation of digital technologies are being taken up by right-wing extremists.113 However, they do not use the language of pathology to do so and quickly make correlations between right- and left-wing extremists (alt-right and alt-left/antifa), often broadening the scope of the latter group to include mainstream progressive liberals. For instance, when Gloria was remarking on the case of R. v Keegstra, in which an Alberta teacher was convicted of promoting hatred through anti-Semitic lessons, she asserted in quick succession that she “absolutely does not agree” with Keegstra’s

111 With personal data becoming more valuable for economic and political purposes, it is delinked from the individual and taken up by a range of actors to be analyzed and stored in digital infrastructure around the world. In this context, the individual is no longer the smallest unit into which society can be divided, since the self is no longer contained in the individual body but rather ever more dispersible through various digital codes that can be tracked and inputted into algorithms across culture industries. 112 Even the smartphone is coming to take on new meaning, with questions being posed about whether it deserves the same protections as the human body and mind. While describing the ‘extended mind thesis’, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence named Karina Vold (2018) asks: “Are ‘you’ just inside your skin or is your smartphone part of you?” 113 A Public Safety Canada report on terrorist threats to the country, which identifies right-wing extremism as a growing concern, states that “in Canada, individuals who hold extreme right-wing views are predominantly active online, leveraging chat forums and online networks. Rather than openly promoting outright violence, those holding extreme right-wing views often attempt to create an online culture of fear, hatred and mistrust by exploiting real or imagined concerns when addressing an online audience” (Public Safety Canada 2017:7, emphasis added). 102 perspective, she found it “deeply disturbing that someone could be criminally prosecuted for holding a wrong idea,” and the “mob rule” cultivated by the Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and Occupy movements is more dangerous than the offensive speech of one teacher.114

The free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere focus much more heavily on emphasizing the ‘weaponization’ of digital technologies by progressive liberals than by right- wing extremists. This is part of a broader tendency to deny the performativity of their own speech acts or of those who exercise the right to offend. While they reiterate that obstructing offensive speech negatively affects the health of the national body, they obscure the negative effects that offensive speech has on the cultural Other—the people and groups targeted by discriminatory acts. More speech, better arguments, critical discussion (rather than censorship) are viewed as the best way to treat offensive ideas. This was repeated again and again by free speech advocates. This envisioned solution endorses the performative power of liberalism (this time in a positive, Enlightenment sense of the truth emerging out of a marketplace of ideas) without addressing the performative power that offensive speech has to reinscribe and reconstitute oppressed subjects in relational practices.

The semiotic ideology that encodes perceptions of the relationship between language and action/violence can be examined here. In Canada’s political right ecosphere, the (classical liberal) ideology that presumes the separation of language from action (i.e., that language refers to existing things in the world without acting on the world) is evident in free speech advocates’ calls for unregulated discursive spaces. In this envisioning, if humans find the right words and convey them properly, then the truth that already exists in the world will be revealed. The truth is the truth, and speech must be free because it cannot hurt anyone. But this semiotic ideology is not so straightforward or uncomplicated even within Canada’s political right ecosphere. At the same time that free speech advocates assert the separation of language from action, they also use the interconnection between language and action to position progressive liberals as an existential risk. They argue that the power of progressive liberal speech acts has the capacity to end

114 Similarly, when The Rebel became embroiled in controversy after appearing sympathetic to the alt-right during a weekend of protests in Charlottesville, Levant sent out a staff memo that simultaneously condemned right-wing extremism and likened it to social justice movements: “That’s really what the alt-right is, in my mind—the mirror image of Black Lives Matter…Until this weekend, I would have said that the alt-right doesn’t tend towards violence—they walked through Charlottesville with torches, but didn’t torch anything, unlike many BLM riots. But of course the murder of a leftist by an alt-right activist changes that…We are not alt-right” (Levant 2017). 103

Canadian society. This is a clear recognition that language can act on the world, and they specifically identify “real Canadians” as being hurt by progressive liberal speech acts (such as gender-neutral pronouns). But these two seemingly incongruous semiotic ideologies are not treated as overly problematic within the political right ecosphere. And they appear capable of co- existing not because free speech advocates are blind or ignorant to the contradiction; indeed, they resolve the contradiction by applying the two ideologies to the speech of different groups.

These free speech advocates repeatedly distance themselves from the beliefs and values held by far-right extremists. They make a distinction between their work to protect the right to offend and the content of their own speech.115 And many are realistic about the inequality that minority groups face or the vitriol that far-right extremists espouse.116 Nevertheless, their support for curing the national body by allowing offensive speech to occur unregulated is not accompanied by a parallel depiction of the cultural Other as similarly being harmed or poisoned by that offensive speech. What emerges from this omission is the assumption that people who are targeted by offensive speech will bounce back, their health intact, while people subjected to the great progressive liberalism censor will languish in sickness (leading society towards collapse). The capacity or power of language to act on these different groups is thus viewed as different. The performative encounter that takes place between the progressive liberalism censor and “real Canadians” is viewed as a powerful, formative tool of subjectification. But the performative encounter that takes place between the racist and racial minority, misogynist and woman, anti- Semite and Jew, Islamophobe and Muslim is not. The politics of subjectification that take place during censorship or compelled language incidents are selected as the true source of risk, the true reason why Canadian society is in crisis. In contrast, the politics of subjectification that take place between oppressor and oppressed cultural Other do not rise to the level of panic politics.

3.5 Contradictions in (Post)Modernity

While debates about free speech and the state of democratic society are hardly new, the current Canadian iterations are characterized by a unique combination of (post)modern conditions, discursive tools, and performative encounters. Just as the rise of post-9/11 security

115 The oft-quoted Voltaire-inspired motto, “I disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it,” is frequently referenced in order to make this distinction. 116 Remember Peterson’s exclamation of the alt-right’s ‘pathetic behaviour’. 104 states is portrayed as a key existential risk by privacy advocates, the decline of free speech (through state and non-state social forces) is portrayed as an existential risk by the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere. Although their different priorities can make these subgroups antagonistic towards one another, they are both espousing a common belief about liberalism and its future. The first subgroup points to decreasing global freedom and democracy, which is enabled by the advancement of digital technologies and discourses of always impending disaster, as evidence that liberalism via free expression violations is now facing an existential risk. Similarly, the second subgroup contends that the loss of a specific form of conservative (neo)liberalism poses an existential risk today. In both cases, the relationship between some form of personhood (citizen, individual self) and some form of collective authority (state, society) is positioned as requiring reconstitution and recalibration. And if left unchecked, the existential risk will lead to the collapse of society or its transformation into something entirely unfamiliar, marked by all-consuming control.

The free expression activism discussed thus far, by privacy and free speech advocates alike, shows that risk is increasingly situated as central to activists’ understandings of free expression issues and the methods used to achieve their goals. This comes to be precisely because of the emergent predicaments posed by digital technologies and aging liberalism, which together create new challenges and questions about the nature of free expression for activists to address. In some ways it is odd that the intersection of risk and free expression has not received much concerted attention in academic or popular work, given that “risk and uncertainty are cultural artefacts (Douglas 1992) [that] play a central role in the culture of liberal freedom” (O’Malley 2015:14-15). Indeed, several scholars have charted the role that risk has played in liberal ideology and governance since its inception, with the association between risk, uncertainty, and freedom emerging as a unifying theme.117 At the same time, however, contradicting visions of this association have also emerged.

On the one hand, the emergence of risk as a system of knowledge was hailed as a triumph by 19th-century classical liberals, and then again in the 20th-century with the development of insurance industries for all walks of liberal life and governance (O’Malley 2015). Risk management was valorized because it was viewed as enabling the liberal subject to pursue

117 These scholars include Bernstein, Douglas, Luhmann, Masco, O’Malley, Samimian-Darash, and Rabinow. 105 economic independence. It freed the subject from a future of chaos and allowed him (the white, property-owning or factory-working male) to cultivate self-reliance, rationality, and prudence (also conceived as security). Risk is the primary technique for being free. On the other hand, criticism of classical liberal governance has long identified the increasing calculability of the future and governance through predictive techniques as constraining freedom rather than producing it. Weber (2003) argued that the rationalization of the liberal subject entails the erosion of freedom as humans are consigned to an “iron cage.” Foucault similarly explained liberal governance through population management as a method of precluding the slightest risk of any arbitrary action. As the population is increasingly segmented, “each individual is fixed in place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion, or punishment” (Foucault 1977:195). Such an organization of social life through risk aversion is negatively correlated with freedom. And Bernstein (1996) links the embrace of uncertainty to the unique effects of human agency and individual freedom, proudly proclaiming that uncertainty makes us free. To the classical liberal subject such a proclamation is absurd. But to the neoliberal subject it is rote, for seeking out risk is essential to cultivating free choice and economic independence.

So the calculation and subsequent mitigation of risk can make the liberal subject free, and the embrace or pursuit of risk can make the liberal subject free as well. This contradiction is evident in the discourse of the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere. They work hard to calculate and mitigate the existential risk posed by the free speech crisis and broader spread of progressive liberalism. Using the language of pathology, risk is constructed in negative terms and the connotation of freedom as ‘freedom from risk’ is promulgated.118 But when free speech advocates’ neoliberal ideologies are foregrounded, the positive connotation of finding freedom in risk is also expressed.119 In this formulation, avoiding risk produces individuals unable to develop into rational liberal subjects, unable to pursue economic or social independence. They are just “empty heads,” to use Paul’s wording. Embracing risk is located in living as an individual who does not rely on the state, while avoiding risk is located in collectivism. As liberalism’s constant concern is with the dynamics of freedom, negotiating these

118 In the domain of pathology and medicine, the discourse of risk is intimately tied to insuring the person against injury/pain—an explicitly negative connotation. 119 Remember Gloria’s argument that every time the state provides a safety net to the individual, it is taking away a corresponding freedom. She concluded: “With so much state intervention now, with welfare and socialized medicine and everything, there’s become such a risk aversion.” Here, ‘risk aversion’ refers to a failure to live freely. 106 competing understandings of positive and negative risk will continue—with free speech advocates pulled in both directions.

The contradiction between risk as a mechanism of freedom and of control is hardly the sole contradiction to emerge in these analyses of free expression activism. Security is viewed as a mechanism of freedom in some contexts and insecurity in others. Digital technologies are a mechanism of both democratic inclusion and exclusion. Language is a mode of human agency and emancipation (when exercising one’s right to free speech) and also a performative carrier of pathology. And liberalism represents both a path to equality and to the process of Othering. Free expression activists find obstacles and opportunities alike as they wade through these contradictions. They work to understand and find solutions to particular free expression issues by taking up discourses of risk and uncertainty that shape and are shaped by these contradictions, but they are also constrained by the underlying assumptions and processes these discourses entail. All the while, free expression activists constantly (re)consider and (re)evaluate the structural and moral implications of (post)modernity, as they grapple with new methods of control and resistance created through digital technologies and aging liberalism. While most of these contradictions did not originally emerge in contemporary society, the ways in which they are being radicalized and addressed by people like free expression activists can be viewed as an essential component of (post)modernity today.

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Chapter 4 Persecuted Journalists and the Bureaucracy of Press Freedom

4.0 “He Is Very Stubborn”

Ottawa, Ontario: Summer 2016 I went to Ottawa in July 2016 to do some research at the national archives (Library and Archives Canada). I also arranged to meet with a journalist from Turkey who had come to the city at the beginning of the year. Nisa is an investigative reporter and fierce critic of President Erdoğan’s government. After publishing a story that would provoke widespread international coverage and public backlash, Nisa was arrested and sentenced to 20 months in prison. When she was released on bail pending her appeal, Nisa decided to flee the country. A warrant for the journalist’s arrest was issued at home while she awaited her hearing to determine whether she would receive asylum status in Canada. I brought Starbucks drinks to the hotel room where Nisa was staying downtown, having planned to speak to the journalist about her work and persecution. In a strange case of serendipity for me, the two of us met less than a week after a failed military coup in Turkey, which would go on to have lasting and drastic effects on the country. When I arrived, Nisa was distracted and had trouble pulling her attention away from her iPhone. “Is everything okay?” I asked. “My good friend and colleague, Fazil, is in New York alone,” Nisa explained. “I tried to get him to come here, but the flights and visa did not work out and he had to leave quickly.” In the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup, several of their journalist friends were arrested or assaulted by supporters of the President or of the coup’s perpetrators. On the advice of his boss (and Nisa’s former boss), Fazil left for the United States. “He wants to come here but the problem is his passport is practically expired,” Nisa said. “It may be a bad idea for him to go to the Turkish consulate right now,” I cautioned. “That is what I am trying to convince him,” Nisa agreed. “But he is impatient. Maybe if you spoke to him?” I was hesitant and explained I was hardly an expert or voice of authority on these issues. But within an hour, the three of us were on a FaceTime call. “Things are not going to calm down for Turkey any time soon,” Fazil told us irritably. “And I do not wish to stay here.”

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“If you’re detained at the consulate, you could be sent back to Turkey,” I said carefully. “That is why I must come to Nisa as quickly as possible,” Fazil argued. When we ended the call, I apologized to Nisa since it seemed Fazil still intended to visit the consulate to get his passport renewed. “He is very stubborn,” Nisa said with a wave of her hand as she slouched on the bed. After I returned to Toronto, I learned that Fazil did go to the Turkish consulate in New York, where he was told he was a wanted criminal and he had to return home to be charged. Fazil refused but (for reasons I do not understand) was not detained, although his now expired passport was seized. About a month later, I learned that Fazil had entered Canada illegally and immediately turned himself in to border security. It would be many months until their asylum hearings; in the meantime, Fazil and Nisa were able to wait together in Ottawa.

4.1 The Importance of Press Freedom in Free Expression Activism

Free expression activists based in Canada can be found devoting their attention and resources to a wide array of issues. Chapter two charted the work of one subgroup to protect Canadians’ privacy from a post-9/11 security state. Chapter three charted a second subgroup, the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere, who defend the controversial ‘right to offend’. Both subgroups are concerned with and implicated in the construction of existential risks perceived to be endangering liberalism, Canadian society, and the sovereign individual within it. During their activism, the subgroups must contend with two uniquely (post)modern predicaments; the first is the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies, and the second is an aging liberalism deployed in increasingly conflicting fashions. Accompanying these new features of (post)modernity and its ‘post-human’ subject is the ever-growing centrality of the ‘culture industries’ of mass media in the domains of social practice, as well as the heightened reflexivity of social life as a whole and an attendant struggle for control over discourse. With these characteristics in mind, it should be little surprise that the news media occupies a very important position in free expression activism today—as it continues to be associated with liberal democracy, and as society reflexively monitors, scrutinizes, and portrays itself in a variety of ways and then feeds the resulting understandings back into the organization of its activities (Boyer and Hannerz 2006:9).

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No analysis of free expression activism can be complete without exploring the work to protect journalists. Press freedom and journalism are connected to a slew of free expression issues, including free speech, access to information, protection of whistleblowers, SLAPPs, and even privacy (as surveillance powers are turned on journalists). A robust, unencumbered press has long been associated with a properly functioning democracy and is deeply linked to the Western genealogies of free expression and liberalism (Barendt 2005; Berlin 1969; Laidlaw 2014; Mill 1912). Moreover, press freedom is directly or indirectly connected to some of the most notable events that have guided free expression activism in recent years, including: 1) the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the targeting of journalists all over the world; 2) momentous leaks to the press by Snowden and other whistleblowers about state and corporate activities that violate privacy rights; 3) the rise of authoritarian power in both traditionally democratic and non-democratic countries (spurred on by Donald Trump’s controversial rhetoric); and, 4) the consolidation of power through control of Internet and mobile networks, social media, and instant messaging services. For free expression activists, then, press freedom represents a comparatively uncontroversial subject for their work—especially in contrast to debates about offensive speech—as journalists continue to be positioned in relation to myths of the ‘heroic truth seeker’ in popular culture (Boyer 2014). These myths persist despite ongoing, polarizing attacks on the mainstream media as illegitimate, sensationalist, and deceptive, which began long before Donald Trump popularized the term ‘fake news’. In light of these varied historical and contemporary contexts, press freedom and journalism are thereby also found at the centre of efforts to navigate liberalism, technology, and security.

When Nisa and Fazil discovered it would be months until their asylum hearings took place, they turned to press freedom advocates in the country for advice on their cases, referrals and introductions, and financial support. Chapter four turns to this work in free expression activism of protecting press freedom and helping journalists like Nisa and Fazil who are being persecuted because of their profession. Using two ethnographic case studies, one of a Canadian journalist imprisoned abroad and one of an exiled Congolese journalist seeking resettlement, this chapter explores how navigating the bureaucracies of international humanitarianism and immigration is central to the work of press freedom advocates and the persecuted journalists they are trying to help. Although these free expression activists justify their work by drawing on liberal idea(l)s of human rights, freedom, and justice, to achieve their goals they primarily deploy

110 the same types of risk and uncertainty technologies (in the form of discourses and practices) that also underpin the sprawling bureaucracies they are engaging. In other words, press freedom advocates spend much of their time negotiating international humanitarianism and immigration systems rather than assuming their narratives of liberalism will win out over bureaucratic governance, which is premised on indeterminate encounters between bureaucrats and interactants, as well as the manipulation of bureaucratic governance by political actors.

This chapter thereby shifts from examining the grand conceptualizations of existential risk constructed by free expression activists in chapters two and three to examining the mundane but no less important technologies of risk and uncertainty at work in bureaucratic encounters. It is within mundane bureaucratic encounters that the consequences of liberalism’s struggles can be further explored. Chapter three examined the effects that an aging liberalism is having on free speech debates, as increasingly irreconcilable iterations of the political philosophy are being deployed. In contrast, this chapter examines its struggles in the bureaucratic context of international humanitarianism and immigration systems, where the growing precarity that marks the violence of the neoliberal capitalist order (in a world of increasing economic and political globalization) is on full display. In the next section, the profound connections between bureaucracy, risk, and uncertainty are described in order to demonstrate that press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists are obligated to take up risk-based technologies themselves to achieve their goals. Through this discussion, it becomes clear that a central contribution by scholars to the anthropology of bureaucracy is their discernments of the contradictions between liberal ideology and bureaucratic governance in practice—a contradiction that positions risk and uncertainty rather than liberal narratives at the centre of press freedom work. The section ends by describing two types of press freedom work that will be discussed in the following case studies, and the actors who engage in them.

In sections 4.3 and 4.4, the broad postulates made about bureaucracy, risk/uncertainty, and liberalism are examined as they play out in practice. Specifically, the two case studies show that the suffering of persecuted journalists is subsumed by bureaucratic governance that suspends temporality and obscures the bureaucracy’s legibility, producing uncertainty that can only be met by speculation, criticism, and hope. The first case study shows how press freedom advocates and imprisoned journalists devote their time and energy to speculative, risk assessment work about

111 bureaucratic indeterminacy rather than to developing and deploying liberal narratives of human rights and justice. The second case study then shows that interventions by press freedom advocates in the resettlement cases of journalists hinge on their attempts to make immigration bodies responsible and accountable for their futures through a discourse of individual, exceptional risk rather than a discourse of universal human rights. However, immigration bureaucracies are adept at renouncing such claims to moral obligation and exceptionalism. Throughout these case studies, the experiences of press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists revolve around juggling bureaucratic encounters, the majority of which occur in cyberspace, which serves to heighten the opacity and mutability of faceless bureaucrats.

4.2 Risk-Based Bureaucracy and Press Freedom Work

In the first chapters of this thesis, risk and uncertainty were explored both as cultural constructs and as material features of contemporary society. They are complementary methods (risk more quantitatively, uncertainty more qualitatively) used by cultural groups to identify and account for tragedy and loss, to allocate blame and mitigate misfortune, and to predict and control the future. There are also risks that exist separate from human perception, which have effects on the natural world regardless of whether or not humans select them for attention. As such, while technologies of risk and uncertainty allow humans to make meaning, the world is not simply a blank page upon which they write or a resource for unrestrained appropriation. What emerges is the impression of a balancing act being cultivated between ideological and material treatments of risk. One domain in which this balancing act plays out is the state, with risk and uncertainty being taken up in both nuanced and contradictory ways by state and supranational apparatuses defined by bureaucratic governance. It is in this context that press freedom advocates strive to help journalists who have become targets of persecution, prompting them to engage the same type of risk and uncertainty technologies deployed by bureaucracies.

Given that state bureaucracy is in many ways a “first cousin to science,” a quintessential modernist and technocratic machine crucial to the constitution and domination of bodies (Hoag 2011; Weber 1968), the connection between bureaucracy and risk (as a system of meaning based on scientific techniques of calculation) is hardly controversial. However, it is within the contradictions of bureaucratic governance that this connection is found even more substantively. Anthropological research has clearly shown that bureaucracies are simultaneously perceived as 112 apparatuses designed to reduce risk and uncertainty through standardization and as apparatuses that produce risk and uncertainty—often in the form of ambiguity or precarity (Bear and Mathur 2015; Bernstein and Mertz 2011; Best 2012; Hoag 2011, 2014; Kelly 2006b; Thomson 2012; Tuckett 2015; Weiss 2016).120 At the centre of social theory work on bureaucracy and risk are attempts to tell a story about the complexities of (post)modernity. This is true whether the focus is on risk, uncertainty, precarity, ambiguity, or insecurity. Indeed, the increasing prevalence of these (post)modern complexities reflexively produces yet more conviction that risk-based decision-making is required to get a handle on them. And in turn, the contradictory production of yet more complexities through risk-based decision-making persists, creating a feedback loop that is exceedingly difficult to break. Press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists are in no way exempt from this loop.

Indeterminacy is sustained as a key function of bureaucratic knowledge and practice, despite the assumption that bureaucracy “should work” and “would work” if all regularization efforts were successful. A central part of regularization efforts is the use of risk assessment tools, whereby strategies of applying a single set of so-called objective criteria to each interactant with the bureaucracy (applicant, client, service user) forms the basis of the decision-making process. Meant to increase transparency, accountability, and effectiveness in the disbursement of resources, this form of bureaucratic governance also removes issues from the realm of political discourse and recasts them in the neutral language of science (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:196). While this produces the appearance of rationality and generates confidence, it also disguises power and obfuscates failures of the system—even when such failures are endemic (Foucault 1978; Heyman 2004; Scherz 2011; Strathern 2000). Importantly, then, although the state is frequently envisioned as all-knowing, all-seeing, and coherent, close analysis of bureaucratic governance reveals its incoherence, illegibility, and mutability (Das 2004; Taussig 1997). This second envisioning, however, does not reveal state power to be an illusion but rather that it is in fact cultivated in the gaps between the two visions, precisely where the unknowns and complexities of (post)modern life are articulated. And in both visions of bureaucracy and power, risk and uncertainty are used to govern.

120 An initial round of scholarship turned to bureaucracy as a relevant site of research occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, with treatments by Brenneis (1994), Ferguson (1990), Haines (1990), Handelman (1981), Herzfeld (1992), Heyman (1995), Sampson (1983), Schwartzman (1993), Verdery (1991), and Wright (1994). Earlier work by Arendt (1967) and Weber (1968) has consistently been drawn on throughout the social theory on bureaucracy. 113

Anthropologists have been keen to identify the gaps that exist between the ideological positioning of bureaucracy and its actual enactment by the employees who carry out its daily work. Hoag (2011) describes this as the “policy-practice problematic,” which is characterized not only by the juxtaposition of policy versus practice but also by several other binaries: objective- subjective, formal-informal, dispassion-passion, function-dysfunction, legal-illegal, and so on (Sandvik 2011). The anthropological assumption underlying this problematic is that both sides of these binaries exist at the same time within bureaucracies, creating a tension that can be either destructive or productive for the people who engage the state and for the bureaucrats who interact with them (Tuckett 2015; Weiss 2016). And at the centre of this tension is yet another contradiction, this one directly concerning conceptions of risk. On the one hand, risk-based reasoning is accompanied by a conviction that the calculation of risk can fruitfully yield the best decision-making and corresponding outcome. On the other hand, this conviction is accompanied by a practical recognition that risk-based reasoning does not guarantee the bureaucratic process or outcome will be ethical, moral, or even clear—given that the interpretation of risk is always involved and it inevitably differs from one person to another (Scherz 2011).

In bureaucratic encounters that inherently become sites of moral conflict, such as child protection services and immigration/refugee/asylum seeking systems, the use and effects of risk- based reasoning are not straightforward. The bureaucrats, the people engaging with them, and society as a whole are all implicated in the task of resolving the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise in both the successes and failures of bureaucratic governance. Moral conflict is clearly inherent in the bureaucratic encounters experienced by press freedom advocates and journalists who are persecuted for their profession. These encounters occur in the context of struggles for resettlement (in the cases of journalists who are trying to flee their home country, or have already fled to a second country and are seeking safe third-country asylum), for justice (particularly when journalists are imprisoned or subjected to spurious prosecutions), and also for medical care (after journalists have been physically or psychologically harmed). These cases are almost always underpinned by traumatic experiences, which heighten both the need for immediate transformative action and the macabre banality of standardized protocols involved in tedious bureaucratic processes. In their desire to help persecuted journalists, press freedom advocates therefore come to orient to bureaucratic encounters as a necessary site of intervention.

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Bureaucracy, risk/uncertainty, and liberal values thereby come to intersect in the experiences of press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists. But as scholars have already demonstrated, liberal idea(l)s frequently come to be forestalled or detached at this intersection— as risk-based bureaucratic governance plods relentlessly onward, ostensibly in the name of standardized rules and practices. For example, Weber and Foucault both examine this detachment of liberal ideals from the enactment of modern bureaucracy and disciplinary power. As discussed in chapter three, Weber (2003) argued that the ongoing rationalization of the liberal subject entails the erosion of freedom, as humans are consigned to an “iron cage” of bureaucratic order. And Foucault (1977) showed that the organization of social life through the type of disciplinary power and population management at work in bureaucratic governance is negatively correlated with liberal freedom. More recently, Barnett and Finnemore (2004:157) name the bureaucracy of international humanitarianism a political economy of “undemocratic liberalism” to explain the unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes that have resulted from its obsession with standardization and regularization. As such, one of the defining characteristics of the anthropology of bureaucracy is its discernment of, in a myriad of ways, the contradictions between liberal ideology and its actual practices. And in order to handle these contradictions, press freedom advocates become compelled to take up these same risk-based technologies themselves. As a seasoned press freedom advocate named Adam said:

“We have to play the same game as them.”

This section has focused on the presence of risk and uncertainty in bureaucratic governance, which shapes the experiences, discourses, and practices of press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists struggling to influence bureaucratic outcomes. At the same time that risk-based reasoning forms the basis of efforts to regularize bureaucratic knowledge and practice, indeterminacy persists because of the contradictions at the core of bureaucracy. It is clear that bureaucratic governance does not always produce standardization, transparency and accountability, or experiences and outcomes that are fair for the people engaging the bureaucracy. Just as liberal rhetoric is used to obfuscate unequal power relations, so too are the risk and uncertainty of bureaucratic governance used to obfuscate power—for power is found in both its legibility/coherence and illegibility/incoherence of a bureaucracy. It is in this context that

115 press freedom advocates do much of their work to help persecuted journalists, in some ways believing that the only way to succeed is to ‘beat them at their own game’.

Two types of press freedom work will be discussed in the following case studies, herein called ‘advocacy campaigning’ and ‘emergency assistance’. Advocacy campaigning refers to the public and ‘behind-the-scenes’ work to affect the bureaucratic outcome of a publicized issue or event related to press freedom. In the cases of Nisa and Fazil, this entailed press freedom advocates writing articles about them for NGOs’ websites and connecting them with Canadian reporters (who also published articles about their persecutions and journeys to Canada).121 Emergency assistance refers to the disbursement of financial support to persecuted journalists and the associated activities involved in contributing to their pursuit of safety—such as connecting them to other resources (legal, medical, and psychosocial), and providing other forms of material support (references and letters of support). Nisa received a grant to help pay her legal bills, while an NGO was able to secure Fazil a lawyer who agreed to work pro bono. They also received letters of support from three NGOs that were entered into their files with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. An NGO would also connect Nisa with a trusted psychologist to help after her imprisonment.122 The press freedom advocates working to help the journalists in the following case studies typically work at NGOs that have international (rather than only local) mandates, and they are located in several countries (Belgium, Canada, Ethiopia, Norway, Pakistan, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States).

4.3 The Advocacy Campaign for an Imprisoned Canadian Journalist

Journalists like Nisa and Fazil who seek to hold governments accountable can frequently find judicial systems turned against them. In 2014, five journalists in Pakistan were arrested while covering a protest and subjected to a grueling prosecution on terrorism charges. The case attracted interventions by press freedom advocates around the world and several foreign governments. Geopolitics was implicated between no less than four countries, and indirectly between an additional four countries. Among the five arrested was a Canadian named Gregory,

121 All of this public work was done with the Turkish journalists’ permission and input. 122 Sometimes emergency assistance is provided to journalists whose cases are publicized (as with Nisa and Fazil), but more often these cases are not publicized to large audiences. 116 who was working for a media outlet herein called International News Network (INN).123 Press freedom advocates in Canada rallied hard around Gregory, and collaborated closely on an advocacy campaign for the journalist. The press freedom advocates met in person, got on conference calls, emailed excessively, and supported one another on social media and in other joint campaigning activities. An email listserv was created for them, and it became a useful tool for communicating with one another, providing updates about their individual and group efforts on the campaign, and coordinating their efforts to build support and avoid duplication.

A press freedom advocate named Roger, who became one of the advocacy campaign’s leaders in Canada, made contact with Gregory’s employer shortly after news of the arrests broke.124 As a result of this contact, a press conference featuring prominent members of the media and civil society was held to call for the immediate release of the journalists, a petition for the public to sign was launched (which would be delivered to Pakistan’s president), and a protest in Toronto was organized to decry the arrests. Similar protests were held in other countries, with journalists, press freedom advocates, and other supporters expressing solidarity and condemnation on social media using hashtags and selfies that have become a staple for this type of campaign. Press freedom advocates kept up their campaigning through the almost two-year prosecution, which was punctuated by delayed court dates, bail denials, medical scares, changing legal teams, a first round of convictions and prison sentences, appeals, vacated convictions, and a second trial—which finally ended with pardons.

Throughout the case, press freedom advocates pressured and back-channeled with various government officials in a range of countries, consulted with the lawyers of the imprisoned journalists, and collaborated with and supported the journalists’ families. A significant amount of time and energy was also spent publicly and privately urging the Canadian government to call for the release of the journalists, especially its own citizen. When Roger and his colleague Zainab managed to speak directly to the chief-of-staff for Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, they were ecstatic and viewed this as a big victory. During the long prosecution, the Canadian government appeared reluctant to publicly advocate for Gregory or otherwise

123 As such, participant observation with Canadian-based organizations provided access to some of the most involved members of the advocacy campaign. 124 To do this, Roger emailed his Canadian-based contacts at INN and asked to be connected with the managing director of the news division for which the journalists worked. It was an exercise in using his local contacts to work his way up to the higher-level management to whom he wanted to speak. 117 intervene in the case. What this created for the press freedom advocates, Gregory, and his family was the sensation that the government was ‘stonewalling’ them, ‘ducking their calls’, ‘deleting their emails’, and essentially abandoning its citizen. Prolonged frustration ensued, culminating in Gregory’s public criticism of the government after he was pardoned. At the same time, however, Gregory thanked the consular staff of Canada’s embassy in Pakistan, who had met regularly with the journalist’s family, accompanied them during prison visits, and pressed for better detention conditions—including proper medical treatment during health scares.

Gregory’s prolonged stay in prison, which lasted hundreds of days, was described by the journalist as disgusting and grim. He recalled insect bites and fetid smells, sleeping on a concrete floor with no mattress, freezing in a windowless cell unable to tell the time of day, while pain from a broken bone in his foot (which occurred weeks before the arrest) exacerbated the untenable conditions and heightened his anxiety when he did not receive adequate healthcare. Such anxiety in turn led to more medical distress; on a particularly rough day, Gregory lost consciousness (likely during a panic attack but not explicitly described as such) and a doctor had to provide him an oxygen mask. Suffering has received considerable anthropological attention, with a focus on how different cultural genres and contexts mold narratives of suffering so that they fit into particular interpretive frames (Das et al. 2000; Kleinman et al. 1997; Wilson and Brown 2008). In the context of humanitarianism, the contradictions between experiences of suffering and the positioning of victims that emerge during bureaucratic encounters have been an especially important research subject (Coutin 2001; Razack 1995; Sandvik 2008). As a result of this contradiction, Gregory’s suffering was subsumed by the bureaucratic machine that suspended temporality and obscured the state’s legibility, thereby producing uncertainty that could only be met by speculation, criticism, and hope.

Although Gregory’s lawyer requested several times that the journalist be granted bail, highlighting his poor health and pressing the trial judge to act on compassionate grounds, bail was repeatedly denied or the court proceedings adjourned with no decisions made at all. Throughout the almost two-year ordeal, the court case was adjourned almost a dozen times (with long, unexplained periods in between). Sometimes the postponements occurred because witnesses failed to appear or evidence was not presented by the prosecution, but on several occasions no accompanying explanation was provided whatsoever. A significant portion of the

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English-language media coverage consisted of headlines and reports about the adjournments, slow pace of the trial, and legal limbo that the journalists were experiencing. Gregory and his fellow defendants described their frustration with the process, calling it “excruciating,” “Kafkaesque,” “strange and ludicrous,” “unprecedented,” and that it prevented them from moving forward with their lives.

As anthropologists have shown, the slow pace of the bureaucratic process—including inexplicable delays and complicated protocols—construct an impenetrable wall of opacity around the state (or other institution) and constrain the individual, giving a chaotic impression that is variously interpreted as incompetence, malice, or both (Hoag 2011, 2014; Sandvik 2011; Tuckett 2015). A key aspect of bureaucracies, then, is their ability to make clients wait, mobilizing time as a resource (Blundo and de Sardan 2006:90-91). Remember Fazil’s impatience to leave Turkey and then to visit the consulate in New York, juxtaposed with the daunting wait- times he and Nisa later faced before their asylum hearings. That contrast is jarring and difficult to adjust to, placing added stress and uncertainty on interactants with bureaucracies. And when there is considerable belief that the bureaucratic process is being taken advantage of by political actors—as was the consensus during Gregory’s case—time and the act of waiting become weaponized. They thereby enter the domain of risk, as the passage of time risked spinning Gregory off ever farther into an endless void of illegitimate bureaucratic un-temporality.

The acute suffering of Gregory’s everyday life in prison appears forgotten or discarded in that temporal void. The journalist’s traumatic experience juxtaposes not only with the judicial process stuttering along in Pakistan, but also with the mundane attempts by press freedom advocates in Canada to connect with a minister’s chief-of-staff and other bureaucrats. It became clear that the measure of success used by press freedom advocates in Canada was based on how much access they could get to bureaucrats. Because they could not directly affect any short-term bureaucratic outcomes in Pakistan, such as securing Gregory’s bail or access to adequate healthcare, press freedom advocates focused primarily on navigating the sea of uncertainty, opacity, and ambiguity shrouding the Canadian state. While the narrative of suffering that came out of the prison where Gregory was held during his long stay was often dire, any catalyzing

119 basis it could engender for immediate transformative action was offset by the regularization that such suffering undergoes as it is held up in the bureaucratic process (Sandvik 2011).125

The opacity of the Canadian state was heightened because Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Office (PMO) appeared unwilling to advocate on Gregory’s behalf with Pakistan’s government. This made the press freedom advocates view any encounters with Canadian bureaucrats—who may be able to provide insight into the PMO—as even more valuable. Nevertheless, for a majority of the campaign, Roger, Zainab, and their fellow press freedom advocates had no concrete understanding of the PMO’s actions or motivations. As a result, they spent much of their time speculating about the government and assessing the impact that their own work could have on it. The following exchange between Roger and another press freedom advocate, Samara, shows the typical path that this strategic speculation took:

Samara: I have this mild hope that if we tone down the rhetoric for a few weeks, it might give the Canadian government the opening it needs to do the back- channels. It lets it save face a little bit. So that it can go ahead and have these conversations without it sounding as though they’re doing it just because we’re yelling really loudly. I don’t actually know if that’d be the case, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a guess. But it doesn’t seem as though anything the government has done or will do in the future will be because of public pressure. So it’s kind of like making them think it’s their own idea.

Roger: Exactly, Harper doesn’t respond well to outside pressure unfortunately. But that said, there’s been so much pressure, and I think applied at just the right times, that the government now knows it has to act. Hopefully, we just I think need to give them the chance to do it. And then the thing is, the great thing about this strategy is that even if they don’t do anything, then when the next big news break happens, the next time something actually happens in the trial, when it’s not just being postponed, then it’ll be that much easier to push really hard then.

125 While aspects of his experience were reported by the media and press freedom advocates, the full extent of Gregory’s suffering was understated in favour of political commentary about the geopolitical struggle playing out between several countries, or in favour of the liberal discourse that positioned journalists as an important but abstract category of democratic actor. This discursive work moved the immediacy of Gregory’s suffering out of the foreground for both press freedom advocates and public audiences in Canada, especially as the protracted delays were deemed more newsworthy than his unchanged state of suffering. 120

This exchange shows Samara and Roger trying to predict potential future actions of the government depending on what actions the advocacy campaign takes (i.e. keeping up the rhetoric or toning it down). They are essentially conducting an ‘if-then’ exercise in an effort to make a decision about their own actions. Indeed, this type of ‘if-then’ exercise was extremely common for press freedom advocates to engage in and gave them the sensation of making methodical, calculated decisions in which they could have confidence. As O’Malley asserts with respect to this type of exercise during risk-based decision-making, “as confidence increases, then ultimately indeterminacy is eclipsed, and the course of action will proceed as if the outcome is known” (2004:20; Ewald 1991). In the end, the illegibility of the Canadian government both increased their uncertainty regarding what intervention (if any) the PMO would provide to Gregory and gave them a clear path forward for their public campaigning. The appearance of government inaction could be used strategically during the campaigning to build support for Gregory’s plight and criticism of the PMO, pressuring it to do more. In this way, the uncertainty and opacity surrounding the federal government was viewed by press freedom advocates as at least partially useful to them. As Tuckett (2015) asserts, “a state’s indeterminacies, therefore, can be productive” (2015:126).

During the case, Canada’s ambassador to Pakistan told Gregory’s family that the pressure from press freedom advocates and the Canadian media was helpful. But much of the work to secure Gregory’s release was comprised of strategically not criticizing government officials, either in Pakistan or Canada (as the above exchange between Samara and Roger begins to show). While Gregory was imprisoned, his wife and brother became the final decision-makers when anyone considered issuing public statements, and they frequently advised not doing so in order to avoid “provoking officials in any way.” Because the case was so politicized, with the INN journalists perceived as pawns in a geopolitical game, the campaigners had to think even more critically about the effects of their actions. The sensation that risk accompanied every word they spoke or withheld was amplified. However, caution waxed and waned as court dates approached and passed with no positive developments, with anxiety rising and subsiding at the possibility of the wrong statement jeopardizing the journalists’ chances of being acquitted or released. For instance, when Gregory’s wife, Rachel, collaborated with an American newspaper to write a public letter to Pakistan’s president in advance of the (first) verdict being handed down, she asked Zainab to distribute the letter to Canadian media and other press freedom groups. A short

121 time later, Rachel then asked Zainab not to publish the letter for 72 hours, and to inform the media and other groups about the temporary embargo. The delay came at the recommendation of “high officials” in Pakistan, who told Gregory’s family that the president may be about to call for the case to be dropped (a call which never materialized, followed by guilty verdicts being handed down). In the immediate wake of the recommendation, the public letter became temporarily viewed as too great a risk that could negatively affect the president’s decision.

During the campaign for Gregory, then, his family members and press freedom advocates constantly weighed the risks of their actions, while plagued by uncertainty regarding the consequences and actions of the bureaucrats involved (politicians, judges and prosecutors, prison staff, etc.). But they were not uncertain about the actual press freedom and human rights narratives they were deploying. They did not spend their days labouring over how to frame their arguments for why journalists should not be arrested and why justice was necessary, or the best wording to use when constructing a human rights and/or liberal narrative in their articles, social media posts, and media comments. These aspects of their work came easily, unquestioned both by themselves and audiences. What they did labour over and struggle with was assessing the risks of their own and others’ actions, and with the indeterminacy of government bureaucracy. Very few of the hundreds of emails sent between press freedom advocates (and Gregory’s family) discussed the actual content of public statements (petitions, joint statements, media commentary, court updates, social media posts). Rather, their interactions predominantly focused on the strategic planning and decision-making involved in navigating bureaucratic encounters.

This was further exacerbated because of the close relationship between Pakistan’s judicial and political systems, making it constantly unclear which bureaucrat was in charge (“calling the shots”) and why bureaucratic inefficiency was being used as a weapon. During a conference call while the journalist was out on bail, Gregory, Samara, Zainab, and Roger discussed the complicated bureaucratic situation:

Samara: It’s bizarre watching the retrial from afar. It’s hard to believe that’s an actual judicial system. But we’re not in Pakistan, so we can only speculate.

Zainab: Gregory, do you think that there’s any rationale behind- I mean maybe this is wishful thinking, but is there any kind of strategy in the Pakistani

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government’s mind behind the continued inefficiency? Do you have any insight into that?

Gregory: Yes, I’ve been thinking about the inefficiency in the trial, and I really can’t find any rationale for why. We don’t get it. I’ve almost given up trying to figure it out.

Roger: My guess is, for whatever reason, they seem to be stalling so that the media coverage dies down. I don’t know what the feeling is in Pakistan but I’m thinking that maybe that’s because if things die down a little bit, then they’ll deport you. Or the flipside is if things die down a bit, then they could put you back in jail without people noticing. But the thing is if that happened, there’d be such a huge outcry around it that that doesn’t really make sense to me. So it seems more likely that maybe it’s a good thing.

Zainab: But it’s hard to say.

Roger: Yeah, I’m not in Pakistan. That’s just speculation.

Gregory: Yes, just speculation. I have given up trying to figure it out. What am I to do? What can I do? Who wants to speak out publicly in the face of that kind of pressure? I want you to know I really, really sought every single diplomatic avenue, channel, insider; I’ve spoken to people over email and in person, and they don’t get it. But it’s up to them. It’s a matter of being dignified, of dignity. I’m fighting for my life.

Their speculative work did little to generate certainty about the bureaucratic inefficiency, even after Gregory’s efforts to find clarity by connecting with any ‘insider’ officials who may have had insight. This excerpt also shows that the press freedom advocates in Canada were well aware of the distance separating them from the on-the-ground context in Pakistan. They deferred to Gregory not only because he was the journalist being prosecuted but also because they were not in Pakistan. Samara and Roger explicitly qualify their speculations by stating that since they are not in Pakistan, any thoughts they express are less contextually-based and authoritative.

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The transnational (Pakistani-Canadian) context in which Gregory was being prosecuted also led to another element of the journalist’s risk assessment. During the prosecution, Gregory decided—to many people’s shock—to sue INN, citing what he called the media outlet’s negligence for its employees in Pakistan. Although this dramatic choice had the potential to alienate him from press freedom advocates and other media actors who supported INN, his action was quite calculated. In a conference call, Roger, Zainab, and Gregory discussed their strategy in the wake of the lawsuit announcement:

Gregory: I’m speaking to two different audiences. It’s very complicated. I think you’ve noticed my critique of INN.

Roger: Yes, and we thought- the reason we assumed you’re doing that is because a) it’s true and b) because that probably plays very well in Pakistan.

Gregory: Yes, exactly. Like you said, it’s true, in every sense of the word. I’m actually going- there’s a lot more I can’t reveal right now because of the court case. But I’m going to tone down the anti-INN rhetoric for now.

Roger: The branch of INN here in Canada is furious with how INN headquarters handled this as well. So they’re definitely on side.

Gregory: That does help us here in Pakistan. But we’re not in coordination with any government figures here. It’s so politicized. We have to speak to the Pakistani media but avoid propaganda.

Zainab: Yes, whereas in Canada we want to do absolutely everything we can to keep you as a really, really sympathetic character for the Canadian public. And it’s a hard challenge because you have to play to the Pakistani media on the one hand and the Canadian media on the other. That’s why we think the emphasis should be on the story of you and Rachel, and the idea that you just want to come back and settle down in Canada.

Gregory’s comments show he had weighed the risk of the lawsuit being viewed negatively in Canada against the potential support it could garner him in Pakistan—and decided it was worth the risk. This had less to do with presenting a human rights narrative and more to do with

124 garnering support in a fraught (geo)political situation. And after announcing the lawsuit, he tried to mitigate the risk of any fallout in Canada by then “toning down the anti-INN rhetoric.” Zainab approved and, by emphasizing that he needed to be viewed as a “really, really sympathetic character,” tried to reorient Gregory to the performance required for their ongoing bureaucratic encounter with the Canadian state. As such, while the Canadian press freedom advocates could not directly help Gregory navigate the bureaucracy of Pakistan’s entwined legal and political systems, they could help him navigate the bureaucracy of Canada’s federal government.

To conclude, it is important to note that a key source of the bureaucratic indeterminacy that suffused Gregory’s case was not only the actions and motivations of the people who would influence the outcome, but also the identities of the bureaucrats themselves. This analysis has included a range of unknown bureaucrats: Rachel warns against provoking “officials” and cites the recommendations of unspecified “high officials;” Gregory refers to “diplomatic avenues, channels,” mysterious “insiders,” and “government figures;” and references to the Canadian and Pakistani governments as single entities abound (“the Pakistani government’s mind”), as well as simply to “they,” “them,” and “people.” This facelessness increased the indeterminacy of the bureaucratic process and the uncertainty experienced by Gregory, his family, and the press freedom advocates. It also highlighted and even compounded the differences in power between them, providing another means to distribute (un)accountability and diffuse responsibility for the delays and negative outcomes.126 As Scherz (2011) has shown, bureaucratic regularization can be used to obscure the author of unethical decisions or produce outcomes that have no identifiable authors at all.127 Because of the political nature of Gregory’s case, everyone involved in the advocacy campaigning agreed that someone in Pakistan (whether individual, group, or network) was controlling its outcome as part of a larger geopolitical endeavor. Sometimes ultimate responsibility was attributed to Pakistan’s president since he had the authority to end the trial. But on a regular basis, the actor(s) responsible for Gregory spending hundreds of days in prison and even longer fighting the criminal prosecution went unnamed, unknown, and unqualified.

126 These negative outcomes included bail denials, guilty verdicts, adjournments, inadequate medical care, etc. 127 Luhmann (1998) has also emphasized that the risk-based reasoning central to modern bureaucracy has become one of the defining ways to accommodate ignorance without actually eliminating it—and to avoid responsibility for its costs (Best 2008, 2012). 125

4.4 Emergency Assistance for an Exiled Congolese Journalist

In 2013, an exiled Congolese journalist named Theo contacted Free Expression Canada (FEC) by email, asking for help through the NGO’s emergency assistance program. Theo’s application requested financial support to relocate to Uganda, where he felt it would be safer to pursue freelance work after he was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for his journalism and activism work in Ethiopia—where he had fled to from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after state persecution there as well.128 The coordinator for FEC’s emergency assistance program, Melissa, verified Theo’s situation via email with a caseworker named Robert, who worked at an NGO called Global Journalists Union (GJU), and secured a $1,200 grant for him.129 FEC’s financial officer then sent the funds to him via Western Union. Towards the end of 2013, an employee at a media organization in Qatar emailed FEC with a reference request for Theo, who was seeking to do some (remote) freelance work with the organization. Melissa was no longer at FEC but her replacement, Cara, provided the information that FEC had on his situation. The following year, in August 2014, Theo contacted Cara and asked for a second grant; when he had tried to travel to Uganda, he was stopped at the Addis Ababa airport and prevented from leaving.130 Due to financial constraints, FEC was unable to give Theo another grant at the time but referred his case to a network of organizations with similar emergency assistance programs—called the Journalists Protections Network (JPN)—whereupon an NGO called the British Association of Journalists (BAJ) indicated it may be able to provide support. Cara connected Theo with Asha, BAJ’s program caseworker.

Cara continued to discuss the case with Robert, who lived in Brussels, because Theo had stated that GJU was helping him obtain a Refugee and Humanitarian visa to Australia. But there was some confusion about that, as Robert expressed succinctly in one email:

128 The everyday lives of journalists facing persecution in African countries, and in many other places around the world, are shaped by dangerous and unhealthy living conditions (including rampant petty crime), poor nutrition and overall health, temporary and precarious living arrangements, and high-risk survival strategies (including unskilled, off-the-books labour). They also live in fear of harassment by local police, militant factions, and government security agents (often from both their home country and the country where they are currently residing). 129 Securing the grant required obtaining the approval of FEC’s five-person Executive Committee, not to be confused with its Executive Council (which has 10-15 members). 130 After he was prevented from leaving Ethiopia, Theo instead used the funds from the first grant to pay rent for an apartment in Addis Ababa. 126

“I was doing pretty well until you mentioned Theo’s visa!!! Where to? I know nothing of any visa…The last I heard was that he was looking for resettlement in Australia. I made him an offer which still stands: if he can send me the official confirmation that he has been accepted for resettlement Down Under and all that is required is a ticket fare, GJU WILL pay it all!!”

In his pursuit of a visa, Theo connected with an organization called the Australian Asylum Association (AAA), which agreed to advocate on his behalf with the Australian ambassador in Ethiopia—who could flag his application for expedited status. Theo was also able to explain his circumstances to staff in the ambassador’s office, at which time he was told that Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection required more time to study his file. Meanwhile, Theo requested financial support from emergency assistance programs to cover rent and medical expenses while he remained in Ethiopia awaiting the outcome. (He was told the visa application process takes about three months.) FEC provided a small grant to Theo in October 2014 for his interim expenses, and BAJ provided a small grant in January 2015. Cara also wrote a letter for Asha confirming Theo’s situation, which was required for BAJ’s vetting and reporting process for obtaining grant approvals. The decision in Theo’s resettlement to Australia was delayed and over the next months he continued to update FEC, BAJ, and GJU about his current living conditions and the unchanged status of his application. He also researched other programs that could potentially provide him support. Finally, Theo continued to interact with the UNHCR office in Ethiopia, which had provided him assistance in accordance with its mandate when he registered as a refugee in the country (but by then had stopped).

It is clear that Theo had to juggle multiple bureaucratic encounters at once, which combined to increase the immigration system’s incoherence and mutability. The number of emails, documents, and conversations continued to grow, and he turned to Cara for help navigating the morass. This is similar to how Nisa asked me to help convince Fazil not to visit the Turkish consulate in New York, despite the fact that Nisa had no evidence that I had any real expertise or authority on the issue. Persecuted journalists frequently ask for types of help they have no way of knowing actually fall within the caseworker’s skillset or knowledge. And caseworkers frequently try to help (as I did on the FaceTime call with Fazil) even when they are out of their depth. The email below (Figure 4.1) was sent by Theo to Cara after she asked the

127 journalist to clarify what he was looking for in terms of additional assistance. It shows Theo trying to assertively convince Cara of the risks he is facing in both the present and the future.

Figure 4.1 Thank you email from Theo

Theo is explicit about what he needs from Cara, as well as frustrated by the bureaucratic complexity he is struggling to navigate by himself. By asking Cara to mediate between him and other emergency assistance programs (so he does not “need to keep emailing many JPN members”), the journalist is trying to find a way to simplify some of his bureaucratic encounters. Theo bookends his request by emphasizing the urgency of his situation and the consequences if he does not find a way to resolve the risks facing him (at any time he could be caught by Ethiopian authorities, sent back to the DRC and imprisoned, or he could soon become homeless if his money runs out). In her reply to the stressed journalist, Cara states that she will contact other JPN members but unfortunately she cannot do much more than that. She tries to strike a balance between indicating to Theo that she will do her best to help and being realistic about what Theo can expect her to accomplish, which provides some hope to the journalist but does not do much to alleviate any uncertainty about his situation.

128

One of the primary ways that emergency assistance caseworkers intervene in journalists’ bureaucratic encounters with the international immigration system is by writing letters of support, which are entered into journalists’ immigration files and serve as a source of authoritative testimony. This type of letter (an official document) begins with a formal greeting to an oftentimes faceless bureaucrat (using the “to whom it may concern” formulation) and identifies the NGO as reputable and trustworthy. Next, it explains the relationship between the NGO and journalist (humanitarian aid provider and recipient), and then describes the journalist’s work and persecution. The consequences of a negative resettlement outcome are outlined, which includes highlighting the poor state of press freedom in the journalist’s current and/or past countries of residence. The letter often ends by emphasizing the urgency of the journalist’s case and an open invitation to follow up with the NGO if any questions arise. Figure 4.2 provides an excerpt from the letter of support that Cara and a new co-worker named Margot wrote for Theo in March 2015 and sent to Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

Figure 4.2 Excerpt from FEC’s letter of support for Theo

This excerpt shows the discursive work that caseworkers do to position journalists as worthy of resettlement. While Razack (1995) has argued that women seeking asylum are most effective when their claims are framed through a discourse of the universal human rights victim, the excerpt above shows Cara positioning Theo through a discourse of individual, exceptional risk. She highlights his personal refusal to be silenced, his leadership role in organizing a protest, and the individual persecution he has experienced as a result. This aligns more with Coutin’s

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(2001) finding that in cases of political violence, asylum seekers are more successful (competitive) if they prove they were “individually targeted” because they were “different.” By emphasizing the “severity” and “urgency” of Theo’s situation, Cara pushes the (faceless) Australian bureaucrat to perceive his circumstances as more severe and more urgent than fellow visa applicants.

The emphasis placed on the personal risk facing Theo is accompanied by a similar type of ‘if-then’ exercise that was seen in Gregory’s case study. As Cara discursively frames in the letter of support, if Theo is forced to return to the DRC, then he will suffer extreme consequences. If Theo is forced to stay in Ethiopia, then the persecutors who punished him for his activism in-country will have continued access to him. If Australia’s immigration department denies Theo’s resettlement, then they will be responsible for whatever befalls him (since they knew how urgent and severe his situation was). This if-then exercise relies on risk-based reasoning and strives to make the department responsible and accountable for Theo’s future precisely because of the high probability and high cost of misfortune facing the journalist. The significant amount of risk facing Theo is thus positioned as producing a moral obligation that is articulated through and reinforced by his particular exceptionalism. However, as Figure 4.3 shows, immigration bodies like the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection are adept at offsetting such claims to exceptionalism and assertions of moral obligation:

Figure 4.3 Excerpt from the bureaucratic response to Theo’s letter of support

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This is a reply provided to third parties who intervene in resettlement cases, stating that specific details cannot be discussed due to privacy considerations followed by a boilerplate, bureaucratic disclaimer.131 Australia’s immigration department emphasizes how many people apply for resettlement in order to explain why even the most urgent cases take so long to process. The urgency of Theo’s situation is thereby downplayed, positioned as less meaningful (less cause for immediate transformative action) because everyone’s applications are urgent. By noting that all applicants are in similar circumstances, the reply further offsets Cara’s work to position Theo as exceptional—implying that if all applicants are exceptional, then none of them are truly exceptional. Moreover, to address the problem of limited spaces and a large pool of applicants all facing high risks, the bureaucracy has chosen to prioritize applicants who have the closest family links to Australia. Doing so provides another measurement by which to calculate whether an applicant should be accepted, one that has nothing to do with his/her suffering. Subjectively, the bureaucracy decides to increase its moral obligation to those applicants who have closer family ties to Australia, which simultaneously decreases its moral obligation to those who do not have the preferred family ties. In this way, the bureaucracy imposes its own decision-making criteria for who constitutes an ‘exceptional’ applicant, adapting the nation-state’s liberal idea(l)s to today’s context of tightening borders and refugee influxes.132

In July 2015, while still waiting for the outcome of his visa application, Theo began a new bureaucratic encounter by applying to another of the JPN’s emergency assistance programs, operated by a small NGO herein called Sweden Alliance for Reporters’ Rights (SARR). Cara agreed to modify the letter of support she and Margot had already written and send it to the SARR staff member handling the case. It took more than a month for SARR to process Theo’s request for assistance. Over that month, the journalist’s emails to Cara grew increasingly desperate, as he felt the risks he was facing to be growing daily. Communication from Theo stopped shortly thereafter, and it was not clear to Cara if SARR provided him a grant. The journalist did not communicate the outcome of that application to her, an example of how emergency assistance caseworkers frequently do not learn the outcome of the bureaucratic

131 This response to FEC’s letter of support is standard but quite rare. Letters of support are typically submitted to immigration bodies electronically, and more often than not they return an automatic response indicating that the email has been received (but this does not mean processed)—or no response at all. 132 This criteria also separates the discourse of exceptionalism from the political domain in which a lot of persecution takes place (including Theo’s own experiences), and attaches it to the more apolitical, social domain of family life. 131 encounters in which they participate.133 They more often than not make their contribution, sending it off into the voids of cyberspace and opaque bureaucracy, and then move on to the next encounter with no knowledge of the impact (if any) they had on a journalist’s case.

It was not until March 2016 that Theo contacted FEC again. Cara had left the NGO and Margot took over his case.134 Theo asked FEC to get in touch with Australia’s embassy in Canada about his visa application. Margot explained that the influence Australia’s embassy in Canada could have on an application for a journalist from the DRC living in Ethiopia is quite slim, but agreed to do so anyway. In May 2016, Theo then asked Margot to send a letter of support to the UNHCR office in Ethiopia, as a new representative (e.g., boss) had just been hired and Theo had recently managed to discuss refugee hardships with Ethiopia’s prime minister. He believed it was an opportune moment to press for movement in his UNHCR case.135 When Margot was modifying the letter, Theo disclosed that he had finally received the outcome of his visa application to Australia: it had been rejected. In July 2016, Theo told Margot that following FEC’s submission of a letter of support to UNHCR Ethiopia, he had been contacted and granted a resettlement interview but since then had not heard anything further. He requested a letter be sent to the UNHCR Inspector General’s office in Geneva, which assesses the quality of UNHCR’s management and investigates allegations of misconduct in its branches around the world. Margot agreed to send a letter but explained it was unlikely that Theo’s case would fall under the Inspector General’s purview. After the letter was submitted, Theo asked if Margot had been contacted by UNHCR, which she replied in the negative and explained that UNHCR rarely acknowledges when it receives letters of support and does not disclose information about cases without direct authorization from the applicant.136

133 Upon following up (at the time of writing) with the staff member who handled Theo’s case, I learned that SARR had rejected his application. 134 Margot, then, was the third staff member just at FEC to handle Theo’s case. The turnover required him to develop a new relationship with each staff member, but it also presented a ‘clean slate’ so that he could reframe his narrative to a new, sympathetic ear. 135 Theo’s UNHCR case was separate from his visa application to Australia, as he had a private sponsor for the latter that allowed him to bypass UNHCR and apply directly to Australia’s immigration department. 136 This is the second mention of the international immigration system’s commitment to applicants’ privacy. However, it also represents another layer of opacity created by bureaucrats’ reliance on protocol and compartmentalization to deal with complex and traumatic cases that would seem to demand immediate and transformative action (Thomson 2012). It also provides a straightforward method for bureaucrats to obviate responsibility for the actual outcome of the case when press freedom advocates attempt to intervene. 132

In the following months, Theo continued to implore Margot to find a way to lobby any groups that might help him leave Ethiopia. In October 2016, he told Margot that he had applied to the European Network for Refugee Resettlement (ENRR), an NGO based in Norway that provides short-term resettlement placements for at-risk journalists, writers, and artists. In his application, Theo provided Margot as a reference and informed her that she would likely be contacted. In December, he emailed Margot and said that his ENRR application had been “delayed again” and that he continued to face security threats in Ethiopia. He asked Margot to contact the ENRR staff member handling his case, Erick, which she did. Erick informed Margot that Theo’s case was still with their researchers at an NGO in England called Censorship Watch for assessment.137 FEC’s support was passed along to the researchers in January 2017 and they were told to contact Margot with any additional questions. In the next months, Theo would continue to ask Margot if she had heard anything from ENRR, and whether she could follow up with them again. When he felt Margot was taking too long to respond, Theo wrote:

“Hello, I think I deserve a yes or no response to my 2 previous emails that I had emailed you in this week ,could you tell me whether it’s doable or not ? sorry to bother you everyday. [Theo]”

And to justify himself when Margot explained her standard response time, Theo cited growing concerns that he was becoming more at risk of being deported back to the DRC:

“Haven’t you heard anything from ENRR? Things have moved from bad to worse…Ethiopia immigration department made me aware yesterday of their plan of initially revoking my refugee legal status and send me back to Congo.”

These email excerpts show that as the risks, pressure, and precarity he was facing in Ethiopia increased, Theo’s need to find a way to peek behind the curtain of bureaucratic opacity drove him to press Margot more forcefully and frequently for answers—even when she did not have them. Persecuted journalists often believe that emergency assistance caseworkers have insider access to the sprawling international immigration system, when in fact its bureaucratic intricacies are usually just as opaque to them. This belief is not surprising, given that persecuted

137 Censorship Watch is a partner organization of ENRR and helps the NGO verify and assess the situations of journalists who apply to its temporary resettlement program. 133 journalists often treat caseworkers as another bureaucratic cog in the immigration machine rather than as fellow human rights defenders. The above email excerpts also show in sharp relief that Theo is struggling with the wait-times involved in his ongoing pursuit of resettlement. Over the course of years of bureaucratic encounters, Theo displayed a stunning amount of resilience, what Nisa would probably call “stubborn” (as she did Fazil), in the face of either negative outcomes or no outcomes at all. Frequent and repeated delays have been described throughout this account of Theo’s case, which mirror the delays experienced by Gregory, Nisa, and Fazil. For all four journalists, the most enduring, inescapable features of their cases were the unwanted waiting and intertwined opacity of the bureaucracies that would decide their fates.

As discussed during Gregory’s case, one of the primary aspects of bureaucracies is their ability to make clients wait, which disarticulates the outcome of the encounter from its actual experience. It is also a key method by which bureaucracies come to produce risk and uncertainty rather than eliminate them, which is on full display in Theo’s case. The act of waiting situates a client in the liminal gap between conflicting visions of bureaucracy as rational/legible and as irrational/illegible, and between the bureaucratic binary of policy and practice. Theo’s activities and motivations are all affected by the act of waiting, with each small action taken followed by long periods of abeyance, during which expectation and anticipation, hope and skepticism fluctuate. It is also within this liminal gap that the shortcomings of an aging liberalism come into sharper focus, as its idea(l)s about human rights and humanitarianism run up against the growing precarity that marks the violence of the neoliberal capitalist order. Specifically, as conflicts and refugee crises increase the total number of forcibly displaced people worldwide (Edwards 2018), and free expression faces more and more threats/violations globally, the liberal democratic nation-state formation struggles to reconcile the contradiction between its universalist commitments to justice and security with its own state legitimacy, population construction/management, and the reality of how neoliberal capitalism works in practice as competition. And as persecuted journalists and emergency assistance caseworkers try to navigate this contradiction, they turn to technologies of risk and uncertainty rather than rely solely on the enlightenment notions and discourses of that aging liberalism.

Nuijten (2003) has examined the production of state bureaucracy as a “hope-generating machine,” in which affects like pleasure, fear, and expectation are cultivated rather than

134 rationality and coherence. Similarly, Feldman (2008) has explored how a bureaucracy’s “tactical” practices orient employees and clients toward an uncertain future to sustain itself as an institution rather than actually service clients. In different ways, Nuijten and Feldman both emphasize the intersection of mundane bureaucratic practice and hope generation, which can be perceived as fundamental strategies for managing risk and uncertainty. Theo’s long pursuit of resettlement required the journalist’s tenacious (though not unwavering) hope that a positive outcome was still possible. It is the same tenacity and hope that pushed Nisa to jump bail and Fazil to brave a dangerous consulate. And as Zinn (2008) has shown, hope and other strategies conceived as “non-rational” (such as belief and faith) remain equally important when managing risk and uncertainty. These strategies ultimately enable people to act in situations that appear too hopeless or calculably improbable of producing a positive outcome. It is this combination of situations unlikely to have positive outcomes and strategies for managing risk/uncertainty that propel persecuted journalists and press freedom advocates forward, both in their interactions with one another and other bureaucrats.

At the end of February 2017, the Censorship Watch researcher who was assessing Theo’s case for ENRR, Sebastien, did contact Margot. Sebastien was in fact a member of the JPN in his capacity as coordinator for Censorship Watch’s separate emergency assistance program, and he and Margot knew each other already. They connected on a Skype call to discuss Theo’s case and Margot then introduced Sebastien to Robert at GJU, who had originally verified Theo’s situation back in 2013. Both were JPN members but Sebastien had never spoken to Robert directly and wanted a formal introduction. The two set up a call to discuss Theo’s case. Theo’s ENRR application highlights the final aspect of emergency assistance to be discussed in this chapter: the dependence on digital technologies throughout every facet of the bureaucratic process. Although the (post)modern condition of increasingly pervasive digital technologies has not been discussed as much in this chapter, the use of digital technologies to enable bureaucratic encounters has been on display throughout Theo’s case, and Gregory’s before it. Theo’s long pursuit of resettlement hinged on the exchange of emails with a number of bureaucrats, through which a variety of typically material practices were conducted—including the submission of application

135 forms, letters of support, and other bureaucratic artifacts (documents, images, scans, etc.), as well as the important delivery of funds via Western Union.138

The practice of bureaucracy in cyberspace during Theo’s case was accompanied by the almost complete facelessness of each bureaucrat (including emergency assistance caseworkers), while the journalist was obligated to send scans of his passport, refugee ID, and press card (all of which have his photo) to various bureaucrats as part of his application processes. The opacity of the bureaucracy is compounded at the same time that Theo is laid ever more bare, exposing more and more of himself to disembodied strangers he can identify only by email addresses. Waiting in a queue at an office is replaced by waiting in front of an unchanged computer screen and empty email inbox. The absence of embodied interactions with bureaucrats only further unmoors Theo, while making it easier for the bureaucrats to obfuscate responsibility and accountability for the decision-making taking place. The movement of bureaucracy from physical to digital spaces thereby also changes the nature of bureaucratic waiting. It is more isolating than ever before, as Theo is neither able to put a face to a name nor gauge the bureaucrat’s reactions to an encounter, however brief (over a counter, across a desk, through a teller window). The same is true of bureaucrats, who are no longer able to judge applicants based on appearance (which could be a good or bad thing) or gauge their reactions to an encounter. The intersubjective and evaluative work can only take place in the disembodied void of cyberspace, as bureaucrat and journalist each tries to discern meaning from the (oftentimes brief) written text of email messages.

At the time of writing, the Skype call between Sebastien at Censorship Watch (on behalf of ENRR) and Robert at GJU was the most recent development in Theo’s long journey for resettlement and safety from persecution. The outcome of his ENRR application may take months or even years. Even if the NGO approves his application, deciding that he does meet the criteria for short-term resettlement, a placement still has to be found in one of ENRR’s member cities across Europe. This process can also take significant time. And if Theo does make it to one of ENRR’s member cities, it would only be a short-term placement and he would have to decide whether to apply for asylum in the European country or return to one of the African countries he

138 VoIP calls are also an important feature of digitally-mediated bureaucratic encounters, although they occur more often between bureaucrats than between a bureaucrat and journalist/applicant. 136 has lived in. An application for asylum would begin an entirely new bureaucratic marathon with no guarantee of a positive outcome.

4.5 Contradictions Continued and (Post)Modern Free Expression

This chapter has charted the various ways in which risk and uncertainty come to shape the work of press freedom advocates and the persecuted journalists they are trying to help. Rather than worrying over liberal narratives about human rights, freedom, and justice, it is experiences and technologies of risk and uncertainty that take most of their time and energy—as they search for solutions to their problems in the sprawling bureaucracies of (post)modern society. As Gregory’s case demonstrated, the liberal discourse that press freedom advocates deployed in their articles, social media posts, and media comments came quickly and effortlessly. In contrast, it was the risk/uncertainty created and sustained by the intertwined bureaucracies of Pakistan’s political and judicial systems, as well as the inscrutable Canadian government, that presented the central challenge during their work. Theo’s case elaborated this argument by illustrating how the journalist was not overly preoccupied with liberal narratives, but rather became swamped trying to juggle so many bureaucratic encounters. As he navigated the international immigration system and emergency assistance programs, Theo invoked the risks he was facing and uncertainty produced by a multitude of bureaucratic encounters to convince caseworkers to help him. And the caseworkers intervened in his resettlement applications not by deploying a discourse of universal human rights but instead a discourse of individual, exceptional risk, which was designed to establish the immigration body’s moral obligation to the journalist precisely because of the high risk and cost of his persecution.

Both case studies show in different ways how liberal ideology takes a backseat to the strategic, discursive work required of bureaucratic encounters. In other words, press freedom advocates spend much of their time negotiating international humanitarianism and immigration systems rather than assuming narratives of liberalism will win out over bureaucratic governance premised on indeterminate encounters between bureaucrats and interactants. The premise of this chapter has not been to suggest that liberal idea(l)s are not an important part of press freedom work, or that they are difficult to discern in the activities of press freedom advocates. Indeed, liberal narratives suffuse this environment, such that it would be natural to focus on them during an ethnographic investigation. But this focus would obscure the equally significant and dynamic 137 discourses and practices of risk/uncertainty that play a key role in the socio-material worlds of press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists. For that matter, liberal idea(l)s are undeniably valued by journalists who have devoted their careers to upholding them. Nevertheless, securing a life free from further trauma and suffering, risk and uncertainty, appears to dominate more viscerally their day-to-day experiences and long-term interactions with press freedom advocates and ethically problematic bureaucracies.

By focusing on the intersection of risk/uncertainty, bureaucracy, and liberalism, this chapter has demonstrated that the illegibility and opacity of bureaucratic encounters subsumes the suffering of persecuted journalists under a claustrophobic cloud of standardized protocols (which can be manipulated by political actors). This regularization exacerbates its macabre banality and produces more risk and uncertainty that can only be met by speculation, criticism, and hope. The ever-present act of waiting during the bureaucratic process appears to have been weaponized during Gregory’s case, as the journalist was swept up in a larger (geo)political spat; while in Theo’s case, the act of waiting appears more a result of bureaucratic inefficiency as the international immigration system struggles under the weight of ever more displaced people and tightening nation-state borders. This is also true in Nisa and Fazil’s cases; by 2017, the number of backlogged asylum claims in Canada reached 40,700 (Levin 2017). Gregory, Theo, Nisa, and Fazil are all unyielding, fierce, and relentless in their search for safety and security. “He is very stubborn” applies equally and is a positive in this context—indeed, it is a necessity. They are forced to make decisions based on their own risk assessments that could just as easily backfire as succeed, and the stakes are incredibly high. Free expression activists try to help, engaging technologies of risk and uncertainty creatively. But ultimately that risk and uncertainty return to settle on and drag down the persecuted journalists who find themselves isolated, adrift, and hounded—subjected to the whims of bureaucracies and their risk-based decision-making.

Like chapters two and three, the contradictions of (post)modernity are on full display in chapter four and deeply implicated in the press freedom work taking place. The dueling nature of regularization saturates bureaucratic encounters and governance. Experiences of suffering are belied by the so-called objective positioning of victims during bureaucratic encounters designed to equitably distribute coveted resources. Technologies of risk and uncertainty are variously destructive or constructive, depending on the user and situation, and risk-based reasoning itself is

138 treated as the best option. But this assumption is accompanied by the recognition that ethical processes and moral outcomes are not guaranteed by risk-based reasoning. With liberalism the better part of four centuries old, the differences between its idea(l)s and their enactment in practice are being exacerbated as they are pulled alongside the growing precarity that marks the violence of the neoliberal capitalist order—with its growing economic and political globalization, armed conflicts and mass displacements (internal and external), and tightening borders and resurgent populism (all tied to the post-9/11 national security paradigm). While liberalism remains a stalwart resource for its ideologies, free expression activists have turned to technologies of risk and uncertainty in order to offset its shortcomings as it struggles to adapt to increasingly pervasive technologies, its own conflicting iterations, and the ethically problematic bureaucracies in which it is supposed to be upheld and enacted.

It is in this context that free expression is coming to mean something different today. The concept of free expression and the work to defend it are no longer confined (if they ever were) to the domain of political speech found in the liberal public sphere. The protection and promotion of free expression have now reached newly grand heights of (perceived) existential risks that jeopardize entire societies, and entered the corridors of an array of intertwined bureaucratic institutions where both (geo)political machination and mundane, everyday procedures play out. The press freedom advocates discussed herein reveal that free expression activism is not just about making the most convincing arguments (typically based on liberal ideology) for why free expression is crucial to the constitution of society and, indeed, humanity. Free expression activism is also about knowing (or trying to discern) how to navigate the risk and uncertainty that wash in and around bureaucracies, as well as hoping that the strategic use of risk and uncertainty will produce the desired free expression outcomes. This newly (post)modern treatment and structuring of free expression activism could be viewed as an unmooring from its idealized (Enlightenment) origins, especially as it grapples with new modes of life shaped by digital technologies and post-9/11 security. Nonetheless, this treatment and structuring certainly reflects more accurately the current, culturally imbricated processes involved in free expression and its dynamic role in (post)modern society.

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Chapter 5 Securing a Transnational Emergency Assistance Network

5.0 “Sadly, This Is A Common Occurrence”

Valencia, Spain: Spring 2016 At the beginning of March 2016, members of a transnational network that provides emergency assistance to journalists met on the sidelines of an annual digital rights conference. Between the last session on the first day and the supper we had planned, I sat on a couch with an emergency assistance caseworker in one of the festival’s hallways. Anya was a free expression activist based in Europe and frequently called on for her knowledge of media landscapes, particularly in Africa. She was trying to get some work done before the flu she was coming down with knocked her out of action. An Apple laptop that had seen better days rested on her knees, while I sat typing up field notes. “Are you following this thread about abuses in South Asia?” Anya asked me. “Yes,” I replied. “It’s the first time I’ve heard of the network helping with this sort of situation.” Anya was referring to an email exchange on the network’s listserv about journalists in Pakistan and India being targeted with “hate campaigns” online. Lewd, degrading comments were being posted about them, as well as nude cartoons and pornographic images with their faces photoshopped into them. Network member Fred told Farah, the originator of the email thread, that she should speak with an employee he knows at Facebook (and provided the contact details). Another member, Amanda, offered to reach out to her Facebook contact as well. A third member, Oskar, passed along instructions from Facebook and Twitter about how to get “inappropriate, harassing content” removed from the social media platforms. “Sadly, this is a common occurrence,” Anya told me. “Can anything else be done?” “In past instances, I’ve gotten content removed with the help of someone I met at a conference. But the process was excruciatingly slow and took a lot of labour.” She added, “Right now I’m going through the comments and images, and flagging them using the platform’s reporting tools.” I scooted across the couch to watch. Anya was slowly working through a list of URLs that Farah had shared with her.

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“I would be happy to share the content, but I am avoiding to do so on the list[serv], given the sensitivity and humiliation attached to it,” Farah had written to Anya. “This is also very labour intensive,” I said, watching her slow progress. Anya nodded and showed me the flagging process so I could work on the URLs too. We didn’t finish before we were due to leave for supper. A few days later I was sitting in a Madrid airport when I saw an email come through the listserv from Farah. “We seem to have gotten all the disturbing pages and content removed,” she wrote. “Things look better for now. Much thanks to everyone who jumped in to help.” “Glad to hear the content has been taken down,” Anya replied. “The journalists involved should tighten up their privacy controls on social media (if they have not already done so), and also review their profile online (on the Internet as a whole not just on social media). They should take steps to remove any personal details, such as date of birth, home address, etc.”

5.1 Framing Privacy as Digital Security

Thus far in the thesis, three free expression issues—privacy, free speech, and press freedom—and the subgroups working on them have been examined. Throughout these analyses, the experiences, discourses, and practices of free expression activists have been charted as they attempt to address the problems facing free expression today, which are driven by unique conditions enabled by/in (post)modernity. In chapter two, this manifested as the predicament of increasingly pervasive digital technologies. In chapter three, it manifested as the predicament of an aging liberalism deployed in increasingly conflicting fashions. And in chapter four, the struggles of this aging liberalism were examined in the context of international humanitarianism and immigration systems. Chapter five returns to the predicament of increasingly pervasive digital technologies, examining its consequences in the context of transnational networking, and the ways in which risk and uncertainty are taken up by activists in their efforts to negotiate this (post)modern condition and achieve their goals.

In this chapter, the issues of privacy and press freedom intertwine in new ways. The press freedom advocates from chapter four, specifically the members of the transnational Journalists Protection Network (JPN), take centre stage. Comprised of 20-25 NGOs that operate similar emergency assistance programs, the JPN disburses millions of dollars to hundreds of journalists around the world every year. It also connects journalists to non-financial resources (such as legal, 141 medical, and psychosocial support), and facilitates interventions in their bureaucratic encounters with governmental and supranational institutions.139 JPN members live in various parts of the world, with the majority (though not all) based in the West. Although they occasionally meet in person, their primary mode of communication is digitally-mediated, whether by instant messaging applications, email, or VoIP calls. These caseworkers view emergency assistance as one of the most important yet difficult aspects of their activism, and, due to the traumatic experiences of the journalists who ask for help, they are often personally affected by this work.

Because of the transnational, digitally-mediated nature of emergency assistance, ‘privacy’ quickly becomes framed as ‘digital security’. As the vignette above shows, Anya’s recommendation that the journalists targeted by online “hate campaigns” improve their privacy settings was intended to increase their digital security, making it more difficult for hostile actors to gain access to their data and use it against them. This framing occurs when persecutors target journalists online for censorship or retaliation, and when caseworkers perceive their own actions and data as a means to gain access to journalists. This is based on the belief that even the act of reaching out through cyberspace for help—whether it is formally applying for assistance or informally making contact with a potential source of support—can increase the vulnerability of at-risk journalists. Once an initial request for help is made, the information that applicants provide to emergency assistance programs can be very sensitive and, if intercepted, place them in greater danger.140 In their pursuit of better digital security so applicants are not put in greater danger, JPN members have worked to reconstitute the practices and ideologies that underlie their transnational networking. This chapter argues that these changes occurred as JPN members oriented to the risk and uncertainty that are so tied to experiences of (in)security, subsequently striving to manage them through their bureaucratic governance.

Firstly, with reference to (post)modern network culture, the JPN is shown to form a complex, rhizomatic array of interconnected actors, practices, and digital technologies, which form a large target for actors seeking to silence critics. Both JPN members and persecuted

139 An overview of the histories of the JPN’s individual member NGOs was provided in chapter one. 140 A standard application form for emergency assistance asks for a range of potentially sensitive information about the journalist, including: 1) demographic and employment information, 2) the funding request being submitted and a breakdown of the applicant’s needs, 3) a persecution narrative that describes the attacks, harassment, threats, and arrests the applicant has experienced, 4) references from any past assistance and local contacts, 5) examples of the journalism work that has been completed by the applicant, and 6) the applicant’s banking information. 142 journalists are situated in a rapidly evolving landscape of “networked authoritarianism” and “liquid surveillance,” and it is in this context that they envision digital security. But while the risk of compromised security is ubiquitous, it is also accompanied by a constant uncertainty that any such breach has actually occurred (or will occur in the future). The combination of a ballooning number of surveillance tactics and few instances of verifiable breaches defines the experience of digital (in)security for caseworkers and persecuted journalists. As such, the JPN’s digital security project sheds light on the new kinds of power and resistance being developed at the confluence of digital technologies, network culture, and accompanying risk/uncertainty.

Secondly, the years-long process by which the JPN came to orient to digital security is charted, and the (partial and always incomplete) shifts in ideology and practice that took place as a result. As the JPN’s data came to be perceived as insecure and vulnerable, core members spearheaded efforts to more strictly define in-group identity through updated membership criteria based on participation requirements. By excluding inactive members, the JPN sought to tighten social cohesion through increased interactions within a smaller group. These practices of inclusion and exclusion are thus tied to security, as building trust through more active participation is thought to make information-sharing more secure. To manage the risk and uncertainty involved in the JPN’s security project, members also strove to increase their use of trust-based practices, by developing mutual dependency, moral obligations, and solidarity between individuals. But exerting greater control over their governance did not consistently result in more uniform information practices, despite efforts to persuade members of the necessity to synchronize them, as well as policy changes to formalize them. Even when members were convinced of the risk, they did not always alter their behaviours to mitigate it.

Thus, thirdly, this chapter shows that although risk and uncertainty have become a driving system of meaning in the JPN, the role of the individual cannot be minimized. Individual technical experts and experienced JPN members came to be important actors in the security project, particularly through their positioning as trustworthy decision-makers. Moreover, core members’ prioritization of digital security co-occurred with the positioning of those who did not appear to ascribe to the emergent risk ideology as irrational. Because the juxtaposition of the individual actor and collective group is a recurring topic throughout this analysis, the chapter ends by examining in more detail the (post)modern subject and collective forms of agency, with

143 the evolution of network culture and Internet sociality from web-based to more bounded app- based Internet experiences playing a key role.

5.2 Activism Networks and Security Concerns

While networks as a form of social organization have existed for a long time, there is little contention that the emergence of global ‘network society’ (or digital age, liquid modernity, information society, surveillance society, etc.) has created opportunities and challenges alike for the general population and activists in particular (Bauman 2000; Bell 1979; Castells 1996). The dynamics of transnational activism networks and the role of digital technologies constitute a rich topic of research today,141 with Castells-era frameworks and Actor Network Theory (ANT) two popular avenues through which they have been examined.142 Moreover, the combination of digital technologies and the hyperconnectivity they enable are increasingly organizing life into what Terranova (2004) calls ‘network culture’, a cultural formation characterized by an unprecedented abundance of informational output, an acceleration of informational dynamics, and nonlinear relations that have produced a new field of operation for power and resistance. In network culture, the interconnectedness of communication systems is progressing beyond what was originally thought possible—not only technologically, but also socially and politically:

It is a tendency of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a larger milieu. What we used to call ‘media messages’ no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane. Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it changes form as it is decoded and recoded by local dynamics; it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and antagonisms.

141 For a selection of this body of research, see Abdelrahman (2011); Beutz-Land (2009); Castells (2012); Donnelly (1989); Goodale (2009); Goodale and Merry (2007); Harris (1996); Keck and Sikkink (1998); Merry (2005); Nader (1999); Riles (2000); Riles and Jean-Klein (2005); Tarrow (2005; and Wilson and Mitchell (2003). 142 The common thread in Castells-era frameworks is that the development of digital technologies has increased the importance of information in society and condensed the time and space in which communication occurs, radically altering social organization and life (Appadurai 1990; Bauman 2000; Castells 2004; Giddens 1981; Harvey 1990; Lyon 2017; Wallerstein 1974).The pervasiveness of networking in society is also elaborated by Actor Network Theory (Callon 1991; Latour 1992, 1993). ANT expands conceptions of networks to include, as topics of study, chains of relations not only between humans but also between humans and non-humans alike (for example, relations between people, institutions, infrastructure, and material objects like computers, smartphones, media texts, and documents). Focusing on how networks form and fall apart rather than why they exist, ANT makes possible the analysis of complex network relations, while striving to account for both system and heterogeneity (Hannerz 1992). 144

Every cultural production or formation, any production of meaning, that is, is increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of images and words, sounds and affects across a hyperconnected planet. [Terranova 2004:2, emphasis in original]

It is in this informational plane, with its spillages and mutations, its commonalities and antagonisms, that free expression activists are (re)constituted as individual actors and as groups with collective agency. The singular sender and receiver, while materially still active (in the personal production of an email, direct message, tweet, application form or report, etc.) are part of a larger milieu in which they are generated and circulated as data-objects and data-subjects. As a result of these changes to cultural formations and subjecthood, the nature of power and resistance change as well. With respect to free expression activists, this is accompanied by the underlying conviction that they can no longer blindly use digital technologies without understanding them better. The next sections chart the rise of this conviction over several years, and the central role played by risk and uncertainty. The turn to digital security (or privacy more broadly) ultimately represents activists’ acknowledgement that network culture has incited these changes, and that they must determine how to reconceive their communicative ideologies, governance practices, and relations with one another and their digital technologies—while continuing to embrace (post)modern networking and its new forms of power and resistance.

At its most basic, a network is conceived as a set of interconnected nodes dispersed in some measurement of space (Castells 1996:501). While the JPN does fit this definition, it is also characterized by bureaucratic governance that emphasizes standardized policies and practices, built on a foundation of risk-based decision-making. Moreover, the JPN is better described as a democratic, voluntary bureaucracy rather than any sort of hierarchy—although there are core members who take leadership roles. Figures 5.1-5.3 indicate the scale and scope of the JPN’s work across the world, which must be conceptualized as almost entirely facilitated by digital technologies. Figure 5.1 provides a starting point to begin geographically envisioning the JPN, but its true extent can only be illustrated through the actual transmission of data (i.e., communication) between members and other actors involved.143 Figure 5.2 represents the

143 These other actors, as it began to become apparent in chapter four, include representatives of the international humanitarianism and immigration systems. 145 transmission of data by JPN members in a two-year period.144 Figure 5.3 shows the large number and variety of actors that JPN members connect with during emergency assistance cases. This includes colleagues at the caseworker’s own NGO, financial institutions used to send money around the world, immigration bodies contacted on behalf of persecuted journalists, state and supranational officials who can facilitate assistance, and on-the-ground contacts who can verify applicants’ situations or provide specific types of support to them.

Figure 5.1 Locations of Journalists Protection Network (JPN) members

Figure 5.2 Transmission of JPN data over a two-year period

144 In 2016, I asked JPN members to indicate (using a check list) all the countries to and from which they sent and received JPN data in the previous two years. Each vector connecting two nodes in Figure 5.2 represents all instances of a member sending or receiving data from someone in a country during their work. The darker vectors represent multiple members sending or receiving data, not the total number of transmissions each member sent or received. 146

Figure 5.3 Transnational actors involved in emergency assistance

147

From these figures, it becomes clearer that the JPN and its emergency assistance work create a complex, rhizomatic array of interconnected people, practices, and digital technologies, with cartographies better imagined as electrical circuits than territorialized spaces. It is also clear that the JPN and its data represent a large target for adversaries. While the role of digital technologies in activism is vital, it also strengthens opportunities for the deployment of repressive surveillance tactics (Ataman and Çoban 2018; Boykoff 2006; Davenport et al. 2005; Hankey and Ó Clunaigh 2013; Leistert 2012).145 As Michaelsen asserts, “the networked character of online communication creates multiple points of exposure that state actors can exploit to penetrate and compromise [civil society]” (2018:249). And as the introductory vignette to this chapter demonstrates, attempts to penetrate and compromise journalists can take very creative form—including posting lewd comments and pornographic images to harass, embarrass, intimidate, and discredit journalists. The JPN represents another point of exposure for journalists, whether they remain in-country or flee into exile. And the spectrum of risk they face via digital means continues to evolve with the mushrooming surveillance industry (Hankey and Ó Clunaigh 2013:538).146 Moreover, when one person’s data is compromised, it typically “permits a mapping of relations between people, their IP addresses, and the sharing of content, location, and interests” (Bauman et al. 2014:123).147 As such, even though JPN members may not be the primary targets of persecution, they can provide access to them.

One afternoon, I was sitting in the office chair next to a caseworker, Mack, and helping him go through new requests for support from journalists. Mack was around the same age as me, well-dressed, and often seemed more professional than his casual co-workers. We divided up the messages that had come in to the emergency assistance program’s email inbox, and started

145 Journalists have been targeted with DDoS attacks, malware/phishing attacks, hacking attempts (email, social media, instant messages, banking), wiretapping, metadata collection, the delivery of threats via Internet and mobile platforms, and other forms of online intrusion or intimidation. Journalists’ cyber devices are also targeted to gain access to the data stored on them. Laptops and cellphones can be temporarily or permanently confiscated, either stolen or during run-ins with state agents (at border crossings, checkpoints, protests, etc.), and hard drives or SIM cards removed or copied (and returned for future monitoring). 146 With the rising use of circumvention tools by activists, states have begun engaging in even more creative activities, such as deep packet inspection, keyword filtering, encryption backdoors, and deploying other sophisticated, expensive, and commercial surveillance technologies (Dalek et al. 2018; Deibert 2013; Marquis-Boire et al. 2013). 147 Gaining access to journalists’ data thereby serves several functions; it can be used to monitor their activities, exert control through their awareness of surveillance, determine their locations and networks (personal and professional), and create evidence to use during prosecutions (through data leakages and digital traces). As Michaelsen states, “surveillance precedes all other threats and must be seen as a means of control” (2017:468). 148 reading through them. Five of the emails included document attachments, two of which were completed application forms, one of which was a press pass and refugee registration card, and one of which was a long persecution narrative. As he sipped an iced coffee and we tried to decide which journalists’ cases to pursue (the NGO only had enough funds left for three or so grants that year), Mack clicked on the fifth email’s attachment. The file name was a string of letters and numbers, unlike most attachments received by caseworkers, which usually describe what the file contains (e.g., ‘application_form_maria’, ‘passport-scan’). “What the…” Mack trailed off, looking at the brightly coloured, flashing advertisement he had unexpectedly opened. In block letters, the poster read “LIQUID SALE” and at the bottom of the page, “EVERYTHING TO GO NOW!” Poorly designed, animated graphics of clothing and dollar bills were arranged around the text. “That could be dangerous, eh?” I asked. “Malware or something?” “Shit!” Mack frantically tried to close the attachment, and then the email application when he couldn’t get the jpeg file to respond to his mouse-clicking. I suggested he open the Windows Task Manager and use the End Task function. Once we were staring at the computer’s desktop background, Mack called Dan, an “IT guy” who sometimes helped Mack’s NGO. Dan told Mack to disconnect his computer from the Local Area Network (LAN), on which all the NGO’s data was stored, and turn off the computer. Mack crawled under his desk and unplugged it for good measure. Dan couldn’t come into the office but said he would be in tomorrow. He spent the next morning running security “diagnostics” and other “checks” while Mack alternated between looking over his shoulder and trying to work at another desk. Eventually, Dan swiveled to face us and concluded the NGO’s security had not been compromised. “So, it was just an ad?” Mack asked. “It could have had something nasty, but I only checked the integrity of your security.” After a discussion with Mack’s boss, they decided Dan would take no further action to determine if the advertisement contained malware. As Dan was packing up, I asked if the advertisement was still accessible and if I could take a screenshot of it. “Even if we still had the file, I would say no,” Dan answered. In a louder voice, he added to the office at large: “Let’s not go opening any unnamed attachments anymore.” Mack just shook his head and left for his lunch break.

149

Mack’s experience shows him concerned about a malicious attack perpetrated by some unknown actor who may want to compromise the data of his NGO’s emergency assistance program. His reaction is a result of the “networked authoritarianism” that a growing number of state and non-state actors are engaging in today (MacKinnon 2011; Michaelsen 2017), with the help of “liquid surveillance” apparatuses that are gaining a better handle on the mutating, flowing, and ever-changing channels and conduits of cyberspace (Bauman and Lyon 2013; Bauman et al. 2014).148 Journalists and activists all over the world have become victims of networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance,149 with some knowing what has occurred and others unaware of the breaches to their digital security.150 The South Asian journalists targeted by “hate campaigns” were unable to escape their victimhood, literally having to look at the crude results of their online data being used against them, while others remain unaware of being victimized. The episode with Mack is both notable and entirely ordinary, as the paranoia of a potential security breach drove the caseworker to shut down the digital tools he was using, call on the help of a technical expert but constrain Dan’s actions because of limited resources (Mack’s NGO did not want to pay Dan to determine if the advertisement contained malware), and the question of whether the email attachment contained malware went unanswered. Although this episode demonstrates the effects of networked authoritarianism/liquid surveillance on the behaviours of activists, it is notable in that, unlike Mack, very few JPN members are able to identify specific instances of even suspecting a security breach has occurred.

The explosion of surveillance tactics coupled with few instances of verifiable digital security breaches encapsulates well the experience of networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance today. The risk of compromised security is ubiquitous, but it is accompanied by a constant uncertainty—what Bauman et al. (2014) call a “Kafkaesque unease”—that such a breach is either inevitable or that it has already occurred. Underlying the JPN’s governance is a

148 Networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance are enabled by the embedding of computing machinery, more or less invisibly, into everyday life through ‘smart’ devices that communicate with one another, the ‘Internet of Things’ and collusion of government and corporate forces, the reliance on surveillance and personal data collection as a mode of organization in all domains of life, and the participation of people all over the world in their own surveillance through voluntary self-exposure via social media and other applications (such as fitness trackers). 149 States like China, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Turkey have built sophisticated systems of Internet control, while other states launch ad hoc campaigns to suppress critical voices during elections, protests, and other events. 150 For instance, a range of attacks against exiled Iranian activists and journalists has been documented, showing that the perpetrators used personal information gleaned from social media to develop customized scenarios tricking the targets into revealing their passwords (Anderson and Sadjadpour 2018; Guarnieri and Anderson 2016; Michaelsen 2017; Scott-Railton and Kleemola 2015). 150 simmering belief that they cannot know for certain whether sensitive data has been compromised. Conversely, this also makes it almost impossible to attribute negative consequences—such as a journalist being arrested or killed—to a lapse in the JPN’s digital security. It is always a possibility, but would be difficult to verify. As such, complete certainty that the JPN’s data is secure or that a security breach has occurred is largely impossible. And as research projects and other studies expose the creative methods being deployed by powerful actors to target critical voices, the perception of cyber devices and data as ‘unsecurable’ grows and adds to the sensation of risks pressing in from all sides (Andrejevic 2017; Hobsbawm 2007; Wahl-Jorgensen et al. 2017; Wood 2017).

Beck’s (1992:33) argument that risks are both real and unreal is particularly relevant here. In the context of the digital security of activists and journalists, they are real insofar as state and non-state practices that create security risks have been demonstrated through external evidence, documentation, and analysis. They are unreal in that, on a day-to-day basis, they exist as imagined and anticipated in the mind of the potential target, as a future probability. It is with respect to both the risk of digital security breaches and the uncertainty of never knowing for sure whether their data is secure or compromised that JPN members carry out their work. The same is true of persecuted journalists, who constantly wonder whether they are one click away from persecutors using their data against them. The importance of this digitally-mediated risk and uncertainty is inadequately conveyed by Orwell’s concept of ‘Big Brother’ or even Foucault’s ‘panopticon’.151 Both of these visions of society are related to understandings of discipline and control, of power cultivated through combined overt and covert means, but they cannot fully encompass the implications of digital technologies for social organization or power today.

A different kind of power is being produced at the confluence of digital technologies, network culture, and accompanying risk/uncertainty. It cannot be reduced to familiar narratives of technological advancements enabling new relations between watchers and watched, or the fulfillment of Orwellian predictions about totalitarian transformations. Neither can fully explain how free expression activists interact on a day-to-day basis with one another or their digital technologies, or how they conceive of adversaries viewed as increasingly fixated on data and

151 Lyon argues that his older concepts of ‘surveillance society’ and ‘surveillance state’ are also insufficient (Lyon 1994, 2001), just as Lash argues that the older concept of ‘risk society’ is no longer sufficient. Instead, they propose ‘surveillance culture’ and ‘risk culture’ as more effective alternatives (Lash 2000; Lyon 2017). 151 surveillance tactics. Their struggles with risk and uncertainty push them to reconceive their communicative ideologies, governance practices, and relations with one another and their digital technologies. The new types of resistance that emerge as a result rely on more reflexive assessments of the consequences not only of their adversaries’ actions but of their own actions as well, especially as ‘data’ (as a material artifact) increasingly enters and structures their networks. It is to the enactment and experience of these new kinds of power and resistance within the JPN and its emergency assistance that the next sections now turn.

5.3 The Journalist Protection Network’s Digital Security Turn

The JPN is comprised of 50-100 people at any given time, some working on cases from a single geographic region and therefore only in communication with similarly mandated members, and others jumping from case to case all around the world and therefore required to communicate with a wider array of members. There are ‘core members’ who actively participate a lot, generate a significant portion of the JPN’s communications, develop significant institutional knowledge, and take on leadership roles in its governance. Sophia was a Latina American who always commanded her colleagues’ attention, despite being relatively soft- spoken. She had a deep well of knowledge about emergency assistance, having overworked herself for years. Sophia and Michelle worked at the same US-based NGO, spending years as close colleagues while navigating career advancement opportunities/obstacles. Michelle had similar dark brown eyes and hair as Sophia, but was more restless and independent. It often seemed she was getting tired of working for her NGO, although she remained passionate about emergency assistance. Over drinks with fellow JPN member Lars, Michelle unabashedly asked if his Europe-based NGO was hiring. She eventually received a promotion from her current employer, taking on additional program duties after Sophia moved into a more senior position.

Lars also went through periods of restlessness, but he was more of an upbeat free spirit— despite witnessing atrocities and losing friends while he lived in the Middle East. Lars was charismatic, confident (sometimes combatively so), but also considerate. Moving between the Middle East, Europe, and West Asia, Lars was given a lot of autonomy to run his NGO’s young emergency assistance program as he saw fit. Pilar also ran an emergency assistance program, spending more than a decade at her UK-based NGO before moving back to Spain and founding an organization that supports safe working environments for newsrooms, journalists, and 152 freelancers. She could talk non-stop but did not seem to realize when her interlocutors grew impatient with her monologues. Over the course of their many years working together, Pilar and Sophia became known as a ‘dynamic duo’ who effectively led JPN initiatives.

Cara was sometimes added to the Pilar-Sophia duo, making it a trio, except FEC’s program had a small budget and she could rarely travel to meet them in person. She was often the core member who sent bureaucratic, logistical emails to the JPN about governance issues. Often agonizing over wording in emails or documents, Cara had nervous perfectionist tendencies and underestimated her own knowledge. David, on the other hand, never underestimated himself. A British expat living in the US, David was brought into the JPN to be its resident expert on digital security and other technical matters. Charming but also carrying an ego, David was very helpful but could sometimes get on his colleagues’ nerves. And as unassuming as David was flamboyant, Lucien was the JPN’s quietest but most influential caseworker. Because his Europe- based NGO had such an extensive network of contacts and a large program budget, Lucien had his fingers in cases everywhere and was always seemingly aware of this or that journalist’s situation. Quite shy, he rarely spoke during meetings but was willing to let anyone tag along when he went for a drink or cigarette. As core members, these caseworkers spent more time with one another on instant messaging, calls, and visits. As a result, they developed closer personal ties, inside jokes, shared hardships, and valuable institutional knowledge.152

In July 2014, the JPN’s advisory committee (Sophia, Pilar, and Cara at the time) sent out a survey that asked if member groups had the capabilities for encrypted communication and, if not, whether they were willing to make it a priority. The survey was part of a months-long conversation about participation and program mandates. Representatives from thirteen NGOs responded that they had the necessary capabilities; four responded that they did not but were willing to make it a priority; and one did not respond. In addition, five representatives admitted to not always communicating with the JPN. In her typical extroverted way, Cara explained why:

152 This is not a full account of all the JPN’s core members during my fieldwork; others increased or decreased their leadership as circumstances allowed. Some become core members because they have been involved for many years, and others because their NGOs have large budgets. Some members develop close ties even when they are not brought together by shared leadership roles. At a meeting in Spain, Fiona from Ireland and Joanna from England bonded after discovering a shared love of swimming; Fiona’s NGO was on the ocean and she often went swimming at lunch (weather permitting), while Joanna enjoyed swimming laps on her way home from work. One evening, they arrived for supper with wet hair, having taken a dip in the water before strolling down to the beachside restaurant. 153

“They’re reticent to post sensitive information in the list when they’re unfamiliar with who are members. In cases where they do post information, they’re wary of sharing too many details for fear of compromising the security of the applicant.”

Remember also Farah’s hesitation about sharing details on the listserv about the online attacks targeting South Asian journalists. Although best practices regarding security and confidentiality had been laid out in the JPN’s 2013 ‘Ground Rules’ document, many members thought more steps were needed to secure their data. This marked a conceptual turning point in their approach to digital security and its governing role in the JPN. In particular, email encryption was identified as “now a necessity,” as members asserted they were increasingly reluctant to share information about casework.153 Pilar elaborated, her long response during a conference call shortened here:

“We’re not sure how members are using the information, making the network as a whole less effective…There needs to be secure communications for people to feel comfortable sharing this information.”

Although not always prioritized, the topic of digital security was present from the JPN’s establishment. At its first in-person meeting in 2006, held in Brussels, members chose to create a listserv to communicate rather than use an intranet for security reasons, due to concerns about “hackers.” They also discussed the possibility of using a password-protected online forum to post casework information in order to build a secure database, noting that “while over time this could become a valuable resource, it would depend largely on members’ active participation.” In 2009, members discussed growing the JPN but cautioned that “a lot of the traffic is really really [sic] sensitive. New members need to join for the right reasons.” However, they also concluded that the “benefits of cooperation outweigh security concerns.” At a meeting in 2011, held in Beirut, members focused on responding to crises that were affecting journalists, most notably the civil uprising in Syria (amidst the Arab Spring), which would mark the beginning of its armed conflict. And at a meeting held in Phnom Penh in 2013, “there was no real, constructive, or tangible product that came out of the Cambodia meeting” with respect to security.

153 Email encryption in this context refers to the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) through GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). 154

But as JPN members slowly became more aware of emergent surveillance tactics targeting journalists and activists, and as conflict zones in various parts of the world became more dangerous, the JPN’s failure to prioritize digital security became more apparent.154 Recommendations like Anya’s for journalists to “tighten up their privacy controls” became more common, directed at both JPN members and applicants. With the new mandate that everyone use email encryption when discussing casework, the information/communication practices of the JPN saw some changes. For some, adding GPG/PGP encryption was a relatively straightforward process. It also allowed JPN members to connect with one another, even briefly, when they exchanged public encryption keys. When it worked properly, email encryption was viewed as successfully preventing caseworkers from putting applicants at greater risk. When an encrypted message was sent/received, or when the encrypted data was stored on members’ devices, no one was placed at more risk. But for many, implementing email encryption did not go smoothly.

“This is a nightmare!” Isabell yelled in frustration, throwing down a notepad and making her webcam jostle. She and I were Skyping with another JPN member, Marco, who was based in Mexico and felt comfortable with email encryption. Isabell worked part-time for a Europe-based NGO, and had been having trouble with her recently installed encryption software.155 “I think it’s your computer or email program,” Marco said after we had been listening to Isabell describe her problems, interjecting to ask questions, and offering solutions for her to try. “I’ve already downloaded this new program for my email,” she explained. “But I can’t change computers.”156 We had been on the call for an hour, and we spent almost another hour trying to help Isabell get her email encryption working properly. To check if a potential solution was successful, one of us would (try to) send an encrypted email and the other two would wait for it to arrive and then check if it could be decrypted (see Figure 5.4). When we had pretty much given up, Marco and I apologizing for our failure to help, Isabell resolved to ask if any JPN members knew an expert who could help her.

154 These conflicts include the fallout from the Arab Spring, the escalating tensions in Eastern Europe after Crimea was annexed by Russia, the rise of ISIS, the outbreak of a civil/proxy war in Yemen, attempted coups d’états in Burundi and Turkey, a resurgent Taliban as the NATO-led ISAF mission in Afghanistan was scaled back, and more. 155 In terms of email encryption knowledge, I was somewhere in between Marco and Isabell. 156 Isabell’s NGO did not have any spare computers for her to use. 155

“I can’t even imagine someone like Otto trying to figure this out,” Isabell said towards the end of the call. Otto was an older caseworker from Germany who worked mostly alone; his NGO had only a small number of volunteers.157 “Sophia and Michelle mentioned a while back that they’d help him directly,” I answered. “But I don’t know if that ever happened. I’ve been emailing with him, but unencrypted.” Neither Isabell nor Marco admonished me for my unencrypted use of email.

Figure 5.4 An encrypted email at rest

As Isabell’s struggle demonstrates, using encrypted email was difficult for many JPN members—as methods of both communication and data storage. When encrypted emails are stored (in an inbox, folder, etc.), they cannot be searched using an email service’s ‘search’ or ‘find/locate’ functions since the content of the message is in encrypted code at rest (see Figure 5.4). This made it even more difficult to find relevant casework information amidst already poorly organized email inboxes and folders, and frustrated JPN members who had to try to

157 Yet Otto was one of the most well-known and dedicated JPN members, having worked to help persecuted journalists for years, finding funding and other resources wherever he could. 156 remember subject lines or dates of emails, or look back through hundreds of emails. When email encryption was taken up as the preferred method of securing their data, there were 21 NGOs in the JPN but only six or seven were considered to be actively participating. Some members’ participation was not affected by the adoption of email encryption, some members’ participation was interrupted as they sought training, while others continued on without interruption (for example, I continued to communicate with Otto even though he did not use encrypted email). And because there were so many NGOs but significantly fewer active participants, many individual members of the JPN were not familiar with one another. Sometimes they could not even identify one another as members of the JPN, which increased concerns about untrusted strangers or even interlopers.

One evening I was out buying groceries when I received a Google Hangouts call from Noah, a caseworker who worked at a UK-based NGO. “Noah?” I asked by way of hello. “Isn’t it almost midnight for you right now?” Noah gave me the verbal equivalent of a shrug and moved on, urgency lacing his voice. “Do you know someone on the JPN named Hans?” he asked. “Um…what’s the email address?” Noah read out a Gmail account. “No, he doesn’t sound familiar. Maybe Pilar knows him?” (Pilar was his boss at the time.) “I don’t want to bother her right now,” he replied. “But I don’t know who he is and I’m wondering why he’s getting JPN emails.” “Yeah, it’s frustrating when people don’t have their org name in their email address.” My lack of suspicion/concern seemed to annoy Noah. He’d seen this Hans’ email address “CC’d” on an email thread from six months ago, and, not recognizing him as a JPN member, checked the Excel spreadsheet that contained all the JPN members’ names, organizations, and email addresses. There was no Hans on it. “Maybe the spreadsheet you’re looking at is outdated,” I said. “He hasn’t posted anything to the list, ever, but he’s been CC’d on a few other threads at least since I started here.” Noah asked me to check the administrative back-end of the JPN listserv, which I had access to and he did not, to see if this Hans character was subscribed. “Do you want me to email or call you when I get home?” I asked.

157

“Call me back.” It turns out Hans was indeed a JPN member, and a caseworker for one of the larger NGOs’ emergency assistance programs. He rarely posted to the listserv, but he was active on cases in Latin America. Pilar would vouch for him to Noah the next day. “Better safe than sorry,” Noah texted me after Hans’ identity was confirmed.

As the JPN’s membership grew over the years, some began to self-censor what they were sharing because they became uncertain who was receiving the information, where it was going, and what it was being used for. As the Noah episode exemplifies, being unable to connect an email address with the identity of its user came to be perceived as a growing problem. As such, in addition to implementing email encryption, core members agreed that decreasing the number of people in the JPN by developing stricter membership criteria (adding a minimum participation requirement and periodically reviewing program mandates) would improve digital security. An outspoken member named Lisa described being overwhelmed by the activity on the listserv, causing her to participate less often. She also believed members were only supposed to post information to the listserv when collaboration was required.158 Moreover, Lisa stated that she was not engaged in emergency assistance full-time, instead doing it only in her free time. Pilar explained in response, without coming off as condescending or disapproving:

“It’s important for us to know how the information we share is being used, and if someone is silent at the other end, then members start to censor themselves with names and quantities. Second, the idea isn’t just to ask for help, but also to share what’s happening, so we don’t accidentally duplicate each other’s efforts.”

The prospect of removing members was a concern, as no one wanted to harm their relationships with NGOs that were removed. In order to allay this possibility, members like Sophia, Pilar, and Cara agreed they had to reassure everyone that collaboration outside the JPN would continue, while maintaining that they were simply taking action to make it more effective and secure. To move forward with the removals, Cara sent an email to each inactive NGO:

Figure 5.5 JPN membership removal email

158 In other words, since she did not require collaboration from other NGOs for most of the cases she worked on, Lisa only participated in the JPN infrequently. 158

While the implementation of stricter membership criteria was viewed as successful (with five NGOs removed and only one expressing displeasure), the adoption of email encryption was viewed as considerably less successful. Another survey was conducted at the end of 2015 to determine the state of members’ digital security, finding that almost a quarter were still not using encrypted email. Of those members who were, a third of them encrypted very few emails (despite having the capacity to do so), while 67 percent encrypted only some emails. Moreover, 93 percent reported still thinking the JPN should be more secure, with 63 percent believing they should increase their use of email encryption, and 41 percent believing they should use a different information-sharing/communication tool (rather than email). The survey findings, alongside urging by core members at a meeting in March 2016, held in Spain, led the JPN to move its primary mode of communication from email listserv to Slack (www.slack.com), an instant messaging application built to facilitate team collaboration. Isabell’s first message to me

159 on Slack was “that was MUCH easier than installing PGP!!!” And Noah exclaimed when he saw Hans’ avatar (his headshot), “So Hans really is a real person! I still had my doubts :-)”

At the conclusion of the Spain meeting, attendees were keen to return home and improve digital security, participation and trust, and information-sharing. The JPN’s Ground Rules document was amended to include three new “baseline security practices to secure all cyber devices that access JPN data.”159 Yet another survey was conducted, in October 2016, to assess members’ digital security after the transition to Slack. The survey found that 34 percent of members had not yet secured any of their devices with full-disk encryption, and 21 percent had only secured one of their devices (while other devices accessing JPN data remained unencrypted). Furthermore, 24 percent did not know if automatic software updates were enabled. However, everyone was now using passcodes of at least six characters on computers that accessed JPN data, and 83 percent were using passcodes of at least six characters on mobile phones. Thus, as members struggled to adopt uniform information practices, their experiences with (in)security occurred not only at the macro level of governance discussions, but also at the mundane level of everyday use of digital technologies and sociality.

Several ethnographic vignettes have been recounted about JPN members that describe these experiences. Both Anya and Isabell took action to improve their own or others’ privacy/digital security, but in both cases their efforts were slow, arduous, and frustrating—with no guarantee of success. They also showed that JPN members turn to each other for help about security issues, sharing resources and knowledge—but again, there is no guarantee of success (i.e., Marco and I failed to solve Isabell’s email encryption problem). Both Mack and Noah somewhat frantically confronted potential malicious intrusions, and their experiences were heightened by the uncertainty of having to wait for answers. Mack had to wait for Dan to come into the office the next day, and even after the expert announced the NGO’s security was intact, the question of whether the email attachment contained anything harmful remained. Noah had to wait for me to get home to check the JPN listserv’s administrative back-end, and then he had to wait for Pilar to vouch for Hans the next day. All the caseworkers recognized the risk of a potential security breach and responded concertedly rather than ignoring it. But flitting around

159 This entailed enabling full-disk encryption, promptly installing software updates, and using passcodes with a minimum of six characters. In addition, the amended security practices specified that those members operating in elevated risk locations must take heightened measures to secure their JPN data (beyond the three baseline practices). 160 their responses were indications that digital insecurity was not only caused by the actions of hostile actors seeking to compromise their data, but also by their own actions (or non-actions). Anya’s recommendation that journalists should “tighten up their privacy controls” implies they had let them remain lax and vulnerable to begin with. Mack clicked on an email attachment without stopping to question its suspicious file name. Isabell believed she could get her email encryption to work if she used a different computer but was unable to do so (because her NGO could not spare one). And Noah’s concern about Hans arose because he had never interacted with the other JPN member even though he had been on the listserv since Noah joined.

To end, it can be noted that risk and uncertainty formed an underlying system of meaning during the JPN’s turn to digital security. In particular, they became amplified as members oriented to the relentless possibilities of insecurity. Without risk, there would be no sensation that the transmission and storage of sensitive information about journalists can put them in even greater danger. Without risk, members would not have viewed their data as worthy targets of adversaries. Without uncertainty, members would not have identified one another as potentially untrustworthy. And without uncertainty, members would not have pinpointed gaps in their security knowledge, nor sought out the skills and expertise of technical experts like David and Dan (or fellow caseworkers like Marco). There would not have been such drawn-out debate, nor concern about the nature and use of digital technologies, nor connections drawn between participation and security, nor confusion about the best ways to proceed. The turn to digital security represented experiences of newness, instability, and (imagined) interference. By examining these experiences in greater detail in the next section, the importance of risk and uncertainty becomes clearer—both to the JPN’s governance and to the partial and always incomplete shifts in ideology and practice that took place because of its security project.

5.4 Mitigating Risk and Uncertainty to Improve Digital Security

The above account of the JPN coming to view digital security as a priority, and the different experiences and reactions that resulted, provide insights into the ways in which risk and uncertainty are tied to the production of ‘acceptable’ social relations and information practices, especially in the context of digitally-mediated communication and activism. As members slowly came to focus on the insecurity and vulnerability of their data, and the consequences this was having on their transnational collaborative efforts, they began to develop potential solutions to 161 what they perceived as a growing problem. By evaluating, through a spectrum of risk and uncertainty, their own working conditions and interactions, as well as the conditions (like surveillance tactics and armed conflicts) affecting persecuted journalists, JPN members came to identify the absence of social cohesion (in the form of trust and participation) and uniformity in information practices (including the adoption of digital tools) as crucial to their security deficits.

Both of these are evident in the JPN’s turn to digital security. In 2006, the predicted success of a password-protected online forum was viewed as depending on members’ active participation, indicating an immediate association was made between security and participation when the JPN was established. In 2009, the reasons for joining the JPN were explicitly judged as ‘right’ (or ‘wrong’) by linking them to the need to protect the sensitive information being shared. In this way, the content of the casework and the ways in which it was handled were specifically aligned with the JPN’s membership—determining who is worthy of inclusion and who must be excluded. In 2009, however, collaboration and expanding the young network were judged to require more prioritization than any security protocols that could jeopardize them. The tension between security and participation—or, the belief that the stronger the security, the more difficult it is to communicate in cyberspace—was acknowledged but sidestepped in order to preserve the productive exchange of information that would facilitate the delivery of assistance.

This decision (or non-decision) about the tension between security and participation had consequences. In such a digitally-mediated environment, especially one contingent on sharing sensitive information, the perceived absence of robust security led to eroding trust, the product of which became silence or self-censorship. The very purpose of the JPN was undermined. The solution that core members chose to pursue was more strictly defining in-group identity through updated membership criteria based on participation requirements. By excluding inactive groups, they strove to tighten social cohesion through more interactions within a smaller network. Inclusion and exclusion practices are thereby tied to security in this networking context, as building trust through more active participation is thought to make information-sharing more secure. This is because when members trust one another, they have confidence that the sensitive information being shared will be handled properly and not disseminated to untrusted outsiders. As such, efforts to bolster trust were used to overcome the uncertainty of how other members

162 would handle sensitive information-sharing, “a more-or-less reflexive decision based on the assessed level of risk” (Frederiksen 2014:132; Luhmann 1993).

The search for a security solution also revealed members’ different conceptions of and approaches to information practices, followed by the decision that they must by synchronized. Lisa’s description of when and why she shared information illustrates the typical approach that many infrequent JPN participants (like the not-so-mysterious Hans) take to their information practices. They are quicker to be overwhelmed by the perceived onslaught of information flowing through the JPN, leading to the notion that they should only add to it when absolutely necessary. The sensation of being overwhelmed is also heightened by a belief that they have less time than other JPN members to spend on emergency assistance. Pilar’s response exemplifies a different conception of information practices. For her and other active members, information- sharing is not just about facilitating collaboration; it is also about facilitating situational awareness of the JPN’s transnational activities as a whole. The network was there to build an overall view of the emergency assistance work taking place, not just connect transnational actors on an ad hoc basis. The attempt to synchronize their information practices was meant to cultivate a specific type of information culture premised on trust-based security, open sharing, and duplication avoidance.

In a social group like the JPN, which operates through a collection of geographically dispersed nodes and mostly loose ties, the cultivation of social cohesion and uniform information practices does not only serve to improve digital security. It also serves to mitigate the risk and uncertainty that are so closely tied to insecurity. In this way, the very perception of risk and uncertainty play roles that are just as important to the governance and culture of the JPN. In other words, within the network’s security project, the ideology of risk and its accompanying state of uncertainty are a driving system of meaning. As Douglas (1966) argued, logics of risk are shaped by symbolic systems that enable groups to selectively, subjectively perceive and articulate risks according to their situated experiences. When JPN members became more “reticent” about posting sensitive information on the listserv, suspicious of unfamiliar email addresses/user identities and self-censoring themselves “for fear of compromising the security of the applicant,” they were selecting a newly perceived risk that, in previous years, had not been articulated because of the priority placed on growing the JPN’s young collaborative efforts. Over time, they

163 slowly began to respond to their increasing awareness of new surveillance tactics being used against journalists and activists, and the changing conflict zones around the world that were becoming dangerous in new ways.

In her analyses of risk, Douglas tends to emphasize underlying social processes and symbolism rather than the active role of the individual. It is the latter, however, that can be foregrounded in the JPN’s treatment of risk. Without core members like Pilar and Sophia (and Cara and Lars and others) pushing for digital security to be prioritized, or the expertise of David that is drawn on to find an alternative to email (Slack), it is likely the linking of security, information practices, and participation would have remained implicit rather than explicitly addressed. In addition, it is ultimately each individual JPN member who has to decide to implement the agreed upon security practices; and as surveys reveal, this did not always occur even in the wake of productive meetings. The control that core members of the JPN exert over the individual within it is ambivalent at best—highlighting the democratic, voluntary nature of the JPN’s bureaucratic governance, as well as its loose transnational ties. However, by developing mutual dependency, moral obligations, and solidarity between individual members, risk and uncertainty could be managed even in the transnational networking context of geographic dispersal and loose social ties. This was encapsulated in the Ground Rules documents, which created official agreements that members would all adhere to the same set of security practices. As Lars explained when Cara confessed to being unsure how they “would make sure everyone is complying with the Ground Rules”:

“Compliance isn’t like we send an auditor to your house to check your laptop with a magnifying glass. It’s ‘these are the rules, have you read them, do you promise to follow them?’ So we put in, ‘All members must follow the same JPN security baseline rules, and the admin is responsible for communicating the requirements to new members, and to make sure they agree and promise to follow those rules’.”

Risk management in this context is not based on an objective analysis of statistical probabilities, but rather inherently subjective rules linked to individuals’ experiences with persecuted journalists and accessible modes of communication. Compliance is not enforced through any actors or actions external to the individual; rather, it is through the creation of moral obligation between members through the ‘promise’ they make to follow the rules. Isabell

164 promised to use email encryption because she felt morally obligated, causing her to embark on a frustrating endeavour that aggravated her to no end and took up hours of her time. The moral obligation is uniquely reinforced through a mutual dependency that arises because of the very nature of information-sharing through digital technologies. Sensitive data can be compromised not only during transmission of a message from sender to receiver(s), but also at rest. In some ways, communication has never been less ephemeral than it is today, as the materiality of messages become (perceived as) ever more permanent and accessible to unseen, unknown figures plugged into the infrastructure of cyberspace. As a result, digital security must be ironclad at all points and at all times in the communication and storage process, for any breach signifies the potential that the entirety of the JPN’s data has been compromised. When discussing the baseline security practices that should be adopted, David concluded:

“My preference is to come out of [the Spain meeting] with strong guidelines, and then see what absolute no’s we get and make reasonable accommodations with prudence and care to preserve the integrity of the set of requirements, while allowing everyone to access the system…At the same time, if someone says, ‘Listen, the only computer I can use is this Windows XP laptop, I can only use this proprietary thing on it, and I spend all my time in Syria and I don’t have software updates’, and so on, I think we might reasonably go: ‘Well, you are the weakest link. You present the greatest risk to the integrity of all the personal information we post. And we can’t maintain the ethical responsibility we have to journalists who make requests of our organizations as long as we’re sharing information with that sieve you are storing data on’.”160

All individuals are morally obligated to practice the agreed upon security protocols because they mutually depend on one another to safeguard the JPN’s collective data. If the email attachment that Mack opened had contained malware, it would not have only compromised his emergency assistance data but also any data from other JPN programs sent to him or the listserv and stored by his NGO. The individual is plugged into the collective, no matter how much of a dispersed node s/he is in the network. This shared dependence and obligation fosters solidarity between members, building on their already shared commitment to helping journalists. In

160 Members often emphasized that the JPN was only as secure as its weakest link. 165 contrast to the previous chapter, then, this chapter demonstrates a different method of managing risk and uncertainty. In chapter four, caseworkers were shown to deploy the same type of standardization practices that the bureaucracies they interact with deploy. These practices help them decide which journalists will receive assistance, as well as justify their decisions by invoking risk-based reasoning.161 In this chapter, the risk and uncertainty that accompanies digital insecurity (the increasing prevalence of surveillance tactics, few instances of verifiable breaches, and shifting conflict zones) is managed by trust-based practices.

Zinn argues that “in late modern societies, individuals’ decision-making has become increasingly important and problematic because of the rising complexity and volatility of decision-making situations…Such decision-making situations require increased trust” (2008:443). The use of trust to manage risk and uncertainty is not a new finding, given that Luhmann (1979, 1988) was emphasizing decades ago the capacity of trust to reduce the complexity of decision-making. Even earlier, Simmel argued that trust cannot be reduced to the assessment or calculation of risk (regarding some uncertain outcome), as it is “intermediate between knowledge and ignorance” (1950:318). In this way, trust can be conceptualized as a hypothesis, or as “a positive expectation of the future that somehow overcomes uncertainty despite insufficient knowledge” (Frederiksen 2014:130; Möllering 2001). This aligns with the JPN’s use of trust, in a context where the invisibility of risks and uncertainty of (in)security mean it is difficult to verify a security breach has occurred, and therefore if the trust JPN members place in one another has ever been misplaced or betrayed.162

It is important to note the significant role that experts play in facilitating trust and decision-making in the JPN, predominantly through their management of risk and uncertainty. Given the invisibility of the risks to their data and any causal consequences that may occur (e.g.,

161 This risk-based reasoning and decision-making process are guided by a seemingly objective set of criteria that can be applied to all journalists, thereby determining how caseworkers will distribute their limited resources. 162 It is theoretically possible to discover a JPN member’s failure to fulfil the ground rules, despite Lars’ explanation about their security practices not being audited. However, in the wake of survey results demonstrating that not everyone had implemented newly agreed upon security tools or practices, no one expressed feeling regret or betrayed. This is likely in part due to how well-known it is that JPN members have limited resources and overworked schedules that may lead to gaps in security. It is easy for them to sympathize with one another. For the social integrity of the JPN, this is a positive situation. But this hardly means that trust between JPN members is unconditional, given how much time and effort was expended to educate and persuade one another about the appropriate practices to adopt. Their trust is also not inevitable, given the demonstrated recourse that members have to self-censorship—and their willingness to exercise it at the expense of collaboration. 166 to a journalist), electronic skills and technical knowledge have gained new significance. It is experts who carry and transfer the confidence necessary to counter the uncertainty that accompanies the security project, as well as the broader context of networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance in which they work. As discussed in chapter four with respect to ‘if-then’ exercises (built on risk-based reasoning) that activists conduct, indeterminacy decreases when confidence increases even when the outcome of a course of action is not fully known. As O’Malley argues, “conversely, unusual situations tend to generate low confidence because the applicability of familiar rules or patterns cannot be assumed” (2004:20). Although digital security is no longer an issue consigned only to ‘computer people’, but rather an inescapable dimension of the physical and psychological well-being of journalists and activists (Hankey and Ó Clunaigh 2013:546), this does not mean they are all suddenly skilled and knowledgeable in technical matters. JPN members try to offset their low confidence by finding trustworthy experts.

Trust and confidence are thus firmly linked and dependent upon one another in the JPN’s security project. This was evident in Spain when David was positioned as the “go-to tech person” during the first session on the first day. Throughout the meeting, David guided the conversations about digital security, offering his technical knowledge and fielding question after question that required him to prove his expertise:

“I’d like to suggest a couple tools that might be a better fit for the JPN than email. I don’t know which of these tools is best, and I don’t know any of these tools is better than email. I’m not here to tell you which is the right tool. I’m here to tell you what the tools are and what they can do. You need to decide which trade-offs make sense for the usability of the JPN and the security of the information that you’re sending over it. I suggest a lot of commercial, proprietary services because I think, in a risk assessment and usability challenge, they come out on top for many use-cases. Especially one like this where we have very few technical resources. We don’t have the ability to run a lot of stuff ourselves, and we don’t have the ability to manage a sophisticated security set-up…Nerds-only tools are great for nerds, but I don’t like recommending them because they generally fail as communications tools. So the first tool I’m going to suggest, which meets some but not all of the proposals, is Slack…”

167

David confidently emphasized his digital security knowledge, which increased members’ own confidence in their decision-making. The above excerpt also shows David positioning himself as technical expert but not as expert of the JPN’s work. He notes that others will know what the right communication tool is for the JPN and he will not make the decision for them—thereby giving the final responsibility to members who do the actual emergency assistance. JPN members also conceptualize another type of expert, which allows them to increase trust in the final decisions made and partially sidestep the need to make some decisions for themselves. As Amanda, a long-time and uniquely entrepreneurial activist based out of the US, stated:

“People who are super actively involved in the JPN and know Slack should maybe be the ones to think about this structure, because it’s really difficult for people like me who are less active to think about the different eventualities that might come up. I’m perfectly comfortable deferring to them.”163

The most active members were positioned as more knowledgeable, having more authority and confidence, and therefore more trustworthy to make the best decisions about the JPN’s needs. As such, knowledge gaps that may lead to low confidence are pinpointed not only between the technical expert and regular layperson but also between the experienced JPN member and ‘less experienced’ JPN member. Both types of expertise are leveraged to complete the social recognition of risk and uncertainty, and to devise methods to mitigate them. It is in the spaces of those knowledge gaps that uncertainty is harnessed for the JPN’s governance, during which different understandings of digital technologies, communication, and security are negotiated.

Despite the JPN’s creative mitigation of risk and uncertainty, the steps core members took to improve security were not always successful. Notably, the efforts to promote a uniform adoption of email encryption ultimately failed, suggesting that while core members were able to exert more control over the network’s collective identity through stricter membership criteria, they were less successful at producing collective behaviours in the name of security. The governing challenge of producing a collective behaviour change was actually reflexively identified, as Michelle described:

163 By ‘structure’, Amanda is referring to the specific set-up and practices within the Slack interface that users should agree to adopt, such as the use of hashtags to code cases for easier ‘searchability’, the division of channels according to some set of criteria, or the use of two-factor authentication to log in to their user accounts. 168

“I think we’re talking about the political- I’ve been using that word more and more, the political process of persuading a group of people to each independently do a bunch of work, where each person’s perspective is they’re doing a bunch of work to help other people. It’s a collective action struggle in trying to get that uniform buy-in around the shared process.”

In response to this challenge, some JPN members looked to assign blame.164 As part of this, those who did not appear to prioritize security were positioned as irrational. One day I was sitting next to an agitated Cara. Eventually, I asked what was wrong. “People are just stupid,” she said, flipping her blonde hair over a shoulder. “How can they not realize they need to be smart about the JPN’s data?” “Mmm…I thought it was more a lack of resources,” I said. “Rather than people not buying into [the security project].” Cara showed me an email exchange between her and a member named Raffi. She had asked him if they could exchange public keys.165 But Raffi ignored the request and sent Cara sensitive information about a journalist’s case that they were working on unencrypted. “Raffi has PGP. He could’ve emailed me securely, but he didn’t,” Cara criticized. “He’s being dumb, and he’s not dumb.” Cara was exasperated with what she perceived to be some members’ continued reluctance or unwillingness to recognize the importance of taking concerted action to prioritize digital security. Because she (and other core members) had so fully oriented to the need to prioritize digital security, those who did not take appropriate action were viewed as failing to ascribe to the emergent risk ideology.

Core members’ risk ideology positioned increased security in the domain of the ‘rational’ and the perceived failure to improve security as irrational. As risk scholars have shown, assessments of (ir)rationality play an important role when making decisions in the context of risk and uncertainty (Alaszewski 2015; Lash 2000; Zinn 2008). And as seen in chapter four, rationalization is intimately tied to the risk-based reasoning that underlies bureaucratic governance in (post)modern society. In the JPN, security becomes aligned with the perceived rationality of scientific knowledge while insecurity becomes aligned with the perceived

164 Remember Douglas’ inclusion of the important role of blame in her cultural risk framework. 165 The public keys of both sender and recipient have to be exchanged before the email sent between them can be successfully encrypted (by the sender) and decrypted (by the recipient). 169 irrationality of passive denial and apathy.166 As Hankey and Ó Clunaigh show, many human rights defenders display an attitude of defeatism as they become “exasperated by the resource differential between their adversaries and themselves,” as well as “resigned to the fact that ‘they’re going to get me anyway’ and therefore eschew ‘cumbersome’ security practices” (2013:542). JPN members also exhibit this attitude when they are particularly overworked (which is often). Anya’s recommendation to “tighten up privacy controls” and Noah’s “better safe than sorry” refrain by no means always play out in practice. Even when members understood and agreed with the rationale for using email encryption, and when the functionality and usability of the tool were not issues, many still did not fully shift to the new practice. And while those members intent on improving digital security sympathized with their colleagues’ overworked situations, the lack of change was still positioned as irrational. In the end, the social cohesion and uniform information practices that core members sought to achieve remained fixed to the whims of each individual JPN member—and ultimately indeterminate to one another.

5.5 The (Post)Modern Subject and Collective Forms of Agency

By charting the successful and unsuccessful changes made to the JPN’s governance, ideologies, and practices, this chapter has argued that its security project is characterized by members’ growing orientation to and management of the risk and uncertainty associated with the use of digital technologies in network culture, as well as the new forms of power and resistance they engender. Risk and uncertainty became central governance techniques for the JPN, as its members adjusted to the evolving landscape of networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance. With the growth of ubiquitous security risks but few verifiable breaches, it becomes clear there is no perfect digital security system, nor a security project that can ever be ‘complete’. Digitally sharing information inherently opens it up to interception not only when it is sent and received, but also every moment it is stored in digital format. This is a fundamental novelty of (post)modern networking, and it creates new types of risk and uncertainty. As a result, JPN members had to manage and mitigate the risk and uncertainty surrounding them and the journalists they help—and they chose to do so by enhancing social cohesion and synchronizing

166 Remember the repeated use of surveys to collect data from the JPN; members perceived them as an effective, rational method of data collection, giving them evidence-based research with which to construct their thoughts and arguments about digital security and membership. 170 their information practices (through new digital tools and trust-based practices), with experts and assessments of (ir)rationality playing important roles.

This chapter showed the individual JPN member to be a networked subject of variable indeterminacy, constituted primarily through digitally-mediated communication and information- sharing. Moreover, the subject of surveillance that activists and journalists find themselves positioned as is reflexively tied to the consequences of their own actions (or non-actions), rather than just the invisible actions of powerful actors. Various terms for this (post)modern subject have been suggested, including cyber subject, data subject, surveillance subject, digital subject, and digital being. These exhibit some resemblance to the dividual, who has been discussed in previous chapters. Deleuze’s (1992) dividuated, coded figure in many ways parallels Bauman et al.’s (2014) data subject, who is a conditional form of existence dependent upon his/her behaviour within digital networks. It is also comparable to Negroponte’s (1995) ‘digital being’, who is a networked subject existing in a distinctive terrain of social interaction enabled by networked codes (which recognize no boundary except the technical). And a third example is the surveillance subject (Luke 1999; Lyon 2017), a profiled figure who encodes but does not consist of particular populations, and whose value is found in his/her profile, which is constructed from an aggregate of digital traces pieced together by a range of actors. All of the (post)modern subjects who emerge in network culture and societies of control entail “the interconnection of the many…in the form of predesigned aims and objectives that operate to capture the powers of emergence through the reconstitution of individuality” (Terranova 2004:4).167

Taking in all these conceptualizations of the (post)modern subject, it becomes evident that as (post)modern conditions—digital technologies, surveillance tactics, network culture, societies of control—continue to evolve, so too does the self and the relationship between (in)dividual actors and collective forms of agency. When digital security became a priority for the JPN, its members turned to enhancing social cohesion as a way of addressing a newly perceived risk and its accompanying uncertainty. Their original mode of communication, email listserv, came to be viewed as overly risky (too vulnerable to the delivery of harmful files, phishing attacks, data interception, etc.) and insufficiently conducive to social cohesion

167 By “predesigned aims and objectives,” Terranova is referring to the new forms of control that are enabled and circumscribed by the Internet, digital technologies, and network culture. Like information, then, the (in)dividual today is characterized by its “chang[ing] form as it is decoded and recoded by local dynamics” (Terranova 2004:2). 171

(especially trust and participation). They instead turned to Slack, a cloud-based proprietary service for team collaboration that is available via web browser, desktop app, and mobile app. Although it was originally meant for organizational communication (an alternative to email, except in instant messaging form), Slack has slowly turned into a community platform.168

When the JPN was established, its members explicitly rejected the use of a closed communication system like an intranet or password-protected online forum.169 As years passed, members eventually took up, on an ad hoc basis, instances of more circumscribed modes of information-sharing—password-protected Word documents, Google docs, and Excel spreadsheets—when they needed to collect specific casework data in a single ‘place’ (instead of having it dispersed across email threads and folders, difficult to find and keep organized, and unable to search when messages were encrypted). When the JPN moved to Slack, its data became easier to organize, search, retrieve, and secure.170 With the move to Slack, the JPN’s turn to digital security coincided with the growing adoption across social life of newly dynamic applications, interactive services, and “machine-to-machine” interactions that are marking a new iteration of Internet sociality—and a new challenge for liberalism.171 In this sociality, Internet experiences increasingly begin by downloading applications from the World Wide Web, mobile app stores, or, on a day-to-day basis, by opening an app rather than a web browser.

The mounting popularity of apps and social media/communication platforms that require users to sign up for an account means that, while they produce and contain a kaleidoscope of “bewildering heterogeneity” and “informational overload” (Terranova 2004), the overall experience is increasingly located in many distinct, closed systems across the Internet.172 The communication platforms used by activists and journalists—like Facebook, WhatsApp, and

168 As a community platform, Slack has become similar to a new iteration of message boards or social media like Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Two years after its launch in 2013, Slack was billed as the “email-killing collaboration startup” that attracts users for its ease of use and exclusivity—i.e., the creation of tight-knit, private community experiences that email and basic texting services cannot provide (Diederichs 2015). 169 Although email listservs operate by subscription, anyone can be included in a listserv’s threads by adding them as another recipient (via the “To:” or “CC:” functions). 170 They also folded other branches of emergency assistance work into Slack, inviting individual caseworkers from NGOs that are not “full-members of the JPN” to join region-specific channels or create their own private channels. 171 Note that Web 1.0 was the ‘readable’ phase of Internet use, in which the World Wide Web was mostly a static information portal for users to passively receive information but not interact with content or other users all that much. Web 2.0 is the ‘writable’ phase of Internet use, in which users can now interact more freely with one another and participate in the creation of web content, with developers customizing user experiences more and more. Web 1.0 was a “static web” while Web 2.0 is a “social web.” 172 This evokes arguments made by free speech advocates in chapter three about society becoming more ‘atomized’. 172

Slack—are closed or bounded in ways that the World Wide Web writ large is not. They require an assortment of (freemium) accounts, usernames, passwords, personal profiles (including ‘handles’ and avatars), two-factor authentication, search histories, paywalls, account settings and preferences, legally-binding privacy policies and terms of service (including GDPR compliance), data retention and storage practices, software updates, API integrations/plug-ins (which expand the number of third parties with access to user data), and more. While regular Internet users can ignore many of these components, JPN members cannot if they want to reach their security goals. Everyone makes some fundamental assertions about themselves when they either breeze by or carefully consider the log-in process, accept a corporate privacy policy or the changes made when a software update is installed, or use an app that shares data with third parties. Everyone decides to accept or reject the risk, chooses to access and participate in a particular social formation, adapts discursive and material behaviours so participation is possible, allows other users reciprocal access to themselves (becoming another node in a network map), and dwells in a bounded digital space with fellow users and without ‘outsiders’.

This new type of Internet sociality, which for JPN members has enabled more networked collaboration and surveillance tactics, has important implications for individual actors and the collective forms of agency they take up. As these app-based components and their attendant practices multiply, the actor’s coded self, their dividuality, radicalizes as well. Even with millions or even billions of users on a particular communication platform, the requirement to sign up for an account, log in, and practice good security changes the nature of the culture and the person who participates in it. Network culture, Terranova argues, is “increasingly subsumed by the imperium of a single, electronic and global space accessible at the click of a mouse” (2004:43). But this imperium is no longer produced or located in one uniformly accessible space, but rather in increasingly fragmented, closed-off spaces—new “spaces of enclosure” that harken back to the factories of disciplinary societies (Deleuze 1992:6), except now built around the culture industries of mass media and the meta-discursive struggle for control (Beck et al. 1994; Fairclough 2003; Giddens 1990, 1991; Suhr and Johnson 2003). The single “click of a mouse” is newly problematized when (in)security becomes a concern, perceived as a risk to both the individual and the collective. And as users like JPN members strategically take up new tools and practices to exercise their collective agency, they build bonds between one another and restrict those with others, while proliferating their coded selves, the practices that accompany them, and

173 the spaces in which they circulate. Network culture creates a larger informational “milieu,” but it also “includes and envelops within itself the segmentation of specialized audiences and their further microsegmentation over the Internet” (Terranova 2004:5).

It is this new iteration of Internet sociality, rather than the act of networking itself, that is especially relevant and important to the current (post)modern context being discussed. It is also in the context of this sociality—with its intrinsically digital nature, its new boundaries set up between users and non-users, and its assortment of technical app components, behaviours, and assertions—that liberalism is challenged to find a way to uphold its core values. The aging of liberalism means that those who would protect and promote its idea(l)s must now do so in the face of outdated laws and policies established before the advent of digital technologies, as well as the technical and corporate domains that now have ever more significant impacts on social life, discursive spaces, and legal rights. Older forms of personhood and agency, which also drew so much inspiration from liberal idea(l)s, are now becoming incongruous with the cultural formations and environments in which they are developed today.

The continued evolution of digital technologies, from web-based to more bounded app- based user experiences, does not by itself explain ongoing changes to personhood and collective forms of agency. But when this evolution is coupled with the increasing orientation to digital insecurity as a risk and producer of uncertainty, the directions in which personhood and collective forms of agency are moving become more understandable. The JPN changed its primary mode of communication because it had come to govern through a framework of risk and uncertainty that identified digital security as a priority. And Slack, with its bounded app-based user experience, offered the network a more secure tool than email to make that priority a reality. It offered the JPN a way forward as a collective, preventing it from drifting into disbandment because of increasing self-censorship, but it did not subsume the individual actor. As the JPN demonstrates, cyberspace is both a space of boundaries/intimacy and of openness, vulnerable to the gaze of the stranger. Through this gaze, the (post)modern subject is imbued with new value or utility. Everyone is newly powerful and newly at risk because of their positional articulations within networks bound by technical capability. The JPN and its assemblage of individual actors are constituted as valuable by how connected they are to primary targets of networked

174 authoritarianism and liquid surveillance—namely, to persecuted journalists.173 And here rationalization is invoked once again, for despite being mutable and transformable (recoded this way and that), the (post)modern subject is viewed as someone who can, in fact, be made sense of—if only by the actor who can get ahold of the subject-data.

173 And given how difficult it is for JPN members to obtain verifiable evidence of a security breach, this value is firmly attached to some point in the future. This (post)modern subject, therefore, is characterized by (and located in) a marriage between a profoundly reflexive network-being—mediated by increasingly bounded communication platforms and their new codes/coded practices—and a speculative logic that infers a strange(r) gaze capable of assembling and ‘making sense of’ data. This is not the gaze of the panopticon, for the panopticon sees the body to be disciplined—not the code. 175

Chapter 6 Finding and Delivering Help in the Free Expression Landscape

6.0 “Would It Help You?”

Baltimore, Maryland: Autumn 2016 In 2016, my research led me to the Internet Freedom community, a multidisciplinary field of actors who address the increasingly hostile environment of cyberspace, visions of ‘a free, open, and safe Internet worldwide’ clashing with the forces of networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance. Press freedom, free speech, access to information, and privacy rights are all important topics of concern and resistance, making the Internet Freedom community a veritable hotspot for free expression activism. By October, I was sitting in a large ballroom-turned- conference-space at a Sheraton Hotel in Baltimore, listening to journalists, activists, technologists, and others share their life experiences, work, and trials and tribulations with one another. During one session at the Digital Access Now (DAN) Summit, more than a hundred people were rotating through a series of small gatherings (eight to ten chairs arranged in circles throughout the room) similar to a speed dating event, as a host guided 15-20 minute conversations about his/her particular area of work. Each ‘circle’ represented a different country or region, and so I moved from a digital rights specialist in Pakistan, to a journalist in the Caucasus, to a biometrics technologist in India…to Mexico, Venezuela, North America, China, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Iran. “I’ve been staying at the office for a month,” said host Rima, the executive director of a digital rights group in Pakistan. “Because we’re expecting a raid and I didn’t want to miss it.” “I could put you in touch with a good lawyer who works in [Pakistani city],” suggested a British activist named Pia. “It may be useful to have him on standby in case a raid occurs.” “In 2014, I was actually banned from going into Azerbaijan,” explained host Zeynep, who reports on human rights, press freedom, and “digital” in the Caucasus. “I was always concerned about my safety there, but now also in Turkey as I do more reporting about it and the situation continues to deteriorate for civil society.” Jordan, a technologist from New York, asked Zeynep after a back-and-forth about the journalist’s security: “Would it help you for us to go over your physical and digital protocols together?” The two agreed to meet up that evening.

176

“What do you need?” Ming, representing an American funding foundation, asked host Arjun. The technologist was working on a campaign against Aadhaar, India’s identification program that aims to collect every citizen’s biometric and demographic information. Arjun laughed, “What don’t I need?” He quickly launched into the specifics of how any funding would help.

6.1 The Heart of Free Expression Activism

What took place between Rima and Pia, Zeynep and Jordan, and Ming and Arjun at the DAN Summit exemplifies a quintessential type of interaction that takes place across the free expression landscape. Activists come together, either in person or cyberspace, get to know one another and their work, and try to figure out how they can help one another. And an important part of getting to know one another is ascertaining the risks and uncertainties that are unique to an activist’s circumstances, including the levels of insecurity and precarity being navigated, the technologies and other resources being used or sought, and the anticipated outcomes of the activism. Matching needs with solutions in order to address risks and uncertainties is an essential part of free expression activism. “What do you need?” “What don’t I need?” As such, there remains a key organizing practice that must be examined in this thesis to understand the imbrications of free expression activism with conceptions and processes of uncertainty and risk: the act of helping.

At the heart of free expression activism is the act of helping. Some members of the free expression landscape are those who need it while others are those who (try to) deliver it; in some cases, those members move from one category to the other depending on the situation. Where there is no external source of local help, individuals and groups seek out transnational help, develop their own methods of self-help, or both. The types and forms that help takes varies, as the previous chapters have shown through discussions of advocacy campaigning and emergency assistance, government lobbying and protesting, original research and social media actions. Asking for help and positioning oneself as a source of help in the face of risk and uncertainty underlies the expansive free expression landscape. Sometimes the help offered is reactive, a direct response to a request made by someone who is being censored or persecuted. Other times it is proactive, whereby activists identify specific free expression issues and the people affected by them who may be helped as a result of intervention. In both contexts, the interactions between 177 providers and recipients become intertwined in moral obligations, unequal relations of power, and shared performances.

Chapter six explores in more detail the interactions involved in asking for and delivering help in the face of risk and uncertainty within the free expression landscape, specifically during the emergency assistance provided by the Journalists Protection Network (JPN). Despite the standardized, calculative application process of emergency assistance, persecuted journalists and the caseworkers trying to help them work hard to establish meaningful intersubjective understanding with one another as moral human subjects (rather than only as bureaucrat and applicant). The concept of intersubjectivity refers to the efforts to bridge the solipsistic human experience and achieve shared ‘social-being’ with others. “When properly understood,” writes Alessandro Duranti, “intersubjectivity can constitute an overall theoretical frame for thinking about the ways in which humans interpret, organize, and reproduce particular forms of social life and social cognition” (2010:17). And as digital technologies continue to change those ways in which humans interpret, organize, and reproduce particular forms of social life and cognition, so too is the struggle for intersubjectivity changed. This chapter argues that intersubjectivity and the Levinasian face of the Other play key roles in the encounter between journalists and caseworkers as they try to find or deliver help in the face of risk and uncertainty. As they do so, questions of morality arise alongside (post)modern contradictions and their dualities, pushing them to resolve the moral/ethical implications of their circumstances, actions, and relationships with one another.

In the next section, a case study of an exiled Iraqi journalist and one of several JPN caseworkers who tried to help her is used to show that emergency assistance is much more than just a professional exchange of emails, application forms, and risk-based decision-making. It becomes a site of moral conflict and affective overflow even as additional layers of mediation provided by digital technologies and bureaucracy are supposed to eschew them. In section 6.3, the concepts of intersubjectivity and the Levinasian face of the Other are introduced to show how caseworker and journalist struggle to establish shared understanding as they negotiate their own and each other’s risks and uncertainties, as well as the unequal relations of power that exist between them. The following section then shows how the intersubjective experience and Levinasian face adapt (in the context of emergency assistance) to the additional mediating layers of digital technologies and bureaucracy, with moral conflict/obligation, affective overflow, and

178 the distance created by them both problem and solution in the search to find or deliver help. The chapter ends by considering two ways in which liberalism continues to struggle in (post)modernity, including its central contradiction with capitalism, and the implications for free expression activists.

6.2 Persecution, Exile, and the Search for Help

In chapter four, the bureaucratic encounters that press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists engage in were examined. This analysis showed how risk and uncertainty are used to govern and come to be taken up by press freedom advocates and persecuted journalists. It also unpacked the contradictions of bureaucratic governance, including the gaps that exist between the ideological positioning of bureaucracy and its actual enactment by employees and interactants. These bureaucratic encounters frequently become sites of moral conflict, with the actors involved implicated in the task of resolving the ethical and liberal dilemmas that arise in both the successes and failures of governance built on risk-based decision-making. This chapter focuses in more detail on these sites of moral conflict and explores the ways in which emergency assistance caseworkers and persecuted journalists try to navigate them. By foregrounding such efforts, the ways in which caseworkers and journalists try to find or deliver help become accessible for analysis.

The help that emergency assistance programs provide to persecuted journalists around the world can save the lives of very vulnerable individuals and their families. Financial support typically covers legal fees when journalists are detained; medical expenses when they are caught in the line of fire, traumatized by their coverage, or assaulted in retaliation; transportation costs when they are forced to flee; and short-term resettlement costs (including living expenses such as lodging, food, and Internet access) after escaping a dangerous country or situation because of their work. To get this help to them, there is a great deal of work that has to be done. Most primary staff on emergency assistance programs work from offices located in relatively safe countries.174 The distance, both geographic and experiential, between caseworkers and those they are trying to help affects almost every aspect of their work, from first contact to final decision and, if approved, delivery of assistance. Most of this process is completed through ‘screen-

174 There are exceptions to this, as some primary staff work in ‘elevated risk’ locations like Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Mexico. 179 work’, digitally-mediated by desktop computers, laptops, and cellphones.175 The following account charts the multi-year search for help by a single journalist, and the efforts of one JPN caseworker to deliver it.

Sadiya is an exiled journalist from Iraq who worked for two years (2013-2015) in her “dream job” at a local newspaper, whose owner was imprisoned for his own journalistic work before establishing the publication. In the autumn of 2014, Sadiya reported on the assassination of a military officer who had fallen out of favour with his commanders. The piece, while potentially risky to publish, filled the journalist with pride. Soon after, Sadiya was invited to a local police station. Two men—Sadiya was never sure if they were police, military, or intelligence officials—met her in a small, bare room. “Tell us, Ms. Sadiya, who has manipulated you into writing this?” The men asked. “Who paid you to write such a false story?” Despite being afraid, Sadiya told them repeatedly she was not paid or manipulated. After a long afternoon, the men let Sadiya go and she continued her journalism. The articles Sadiya wrote were uncontroversial and she did not think she was taking any more great risks. But anonymous threats began appearing via email. A couple months after her police station visit, Sadiya was walking home from a friend’s apartment when she thought she saw someone following her. As she paid close attention to her surroundings in the next weeks, Sadiya realized she was being surveilled by police officers. Not knowing what to do, she limited how much time she spent in public and cut back how much time she spent with friends and family. One evening, Sadiya returned from work to find that someone had broken into the two-room apartment she shared with her brother and nephew. Her notebooks, old laptop, and recording equipment were gone. “This is very bad,” her boss said the next day. “They could come for you anytime.” Sadiya, against the wishes of her brother, decided to leave the country alone, fearing she would soon be arrested. In the spring of 2015, Sadiya travelled to Turkey. It is not clear how she crossed the border, and she sidestepped the topic both times I asked about it. When she left her job and home country, Sadiya’s journalism license was cancelled; she had not thought this would

175 ‘Screen-work’ is a term popularized by Boyer (2013) to describe the information practices that have become the norm of the professional endeavor in information-based occupations. Not a glamourous object of study for a discipline that prizes ethnographic fieldwork as its core method of research, screen-work “remains relatively opaque to both popular imagination and scholarly commentary” (Boyer 2013:3). Nevertheless, it is central to understanding both the information-based, bureaucratic practices of emergency assistance and its intersubjective elements. 180 happen so quickly and had planned to find reporting work in Turkey. After months of unemployment, renting a small room, and living off her dwindling savings, Sadiya sat in an Internet café and began researching local and international groups she could turn to for help— just as Rima, Zeynep, and Arjun researched potential sources of help. In November 2015, February 2016, and June 2016, Sadiya secured emergency assistance grants from three JPN member groups.

Ivy is the caseworker who handled Sadiya’s application at the third JPN member group from which the journalist received help. Having worked on her NGO’s emergency assistance program for a couple years, she was well-acquainted with the other two caseworkers who handled Sadiya’s case. Ivy was based in North America, while the other caseworkers were based in Europe. The relationship that developed between Ivy and Sadiya began with the bureaucratic application process. It entailed a series of ‘objective’ assessment steps, to which all applicants are subjected,176 to determine whether Sadiya was eligible for assistance and then whether her case would be prioritized.177 The bureaucratic encounter is comprised of seven general steps:

1. Submission of an application 2. Verification of the applicant’s claims (his/her identity, persecution, living situation, and needs) 3. A report by the caseworker to his/her NGO’s financial decision-makers, including a recommendation of whether or not the journalist should receive assistance 4. A review and vote by the NGO’s ultimate decision-makers as to whether the journalist will receive financial assistance 5. The delivery of good or bad news to the journalist 6. The delivery of funds to the journalist, typically via money transfer

176 Remember from chapter four that a central part of a bureaucracy’s regularization efforts is the use of risk assessment tools, whereby strategies of applying a single set of ‘objective’ criteria to each interactant with the bureaucracy forms the basis of the decision-making process. Meant to increase transparency and accuracy in the disbursement of resources, this bureaucratic governance also removes issues from the realm of political discourse and recasts them in the neutral language of science and objectivity (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:196). While this produces the appearance of rationality and generation of confidence, it also disguises power and obfuscates failures of the system—even when such failures are endemic (Foucault 1978; Heyman 2004; Scherz 2011; Strathern 2000). 177 Remember that emergency assistance programs receive more applications for assistance than they can fulfill because of their finite resources, which means that even when a journalist meets a program’s eligibility criteria, s/he is not guaranteed to receive assistance. 181

7. Post-assistance paperwork by the caseworker and journalist, confirming the case has been completed and funds received

Ivy’s first contact with Sadiya came at the beginning of May 2016, in the form of a general email laying out her situation and need for help. With the subject line “Requesting for humanitarian assistance,” Sadiya wrote a three-paragraph email describing her persecution and exile, with a copy of the investigative piece about the assassinated military officer attached. She ended her message by reassuring the as-yet-unknown caseworker who received it that she would answer any questions posed to her, with the final plea: “I writ this letter in order to beg a humanitarian assistance which would help me to survive.” Ivy attached a blank application (in Microsoft Word format) to her reply, with the instruction that Sadiya read the eligibility criteria listed at the top before deciding whether to complete it. Ivy also cautioned Sadiya that her NGO’s emergency assistance program had limited funding, and that she should provide as much detail as possible if she did decide to fill out the application. The next day, Sadiya returned the completed application to Ivy, writing:

Figure 6.1 Re: Requesting for humanitarian assistance (1)

After a month-and-a-half period and an exchange of 18 emails with Sadiya, four with the other caseworkers who had already provided assistance, and three with the financial decision- makers at her NGO, Ivy successfully delivered $900 USD for living expenses to Sadiya via a Western Union money transfer. During that time, Ivy learned more about Sadiya’s precarious

182 situation in Turkey and the spies she referred to in her second email (Figure 6.1). To register as a refugee with UNHCR, Sadiya had to visit a local police station for security vetting. But when she arrived one morning, Sadiya recognized an Iraqi government official (whose position remains unclear) named Hassan; they had worked in the same Iraqi city and he was known to media workers as someone to avoid. When she saw Hassan, Sadiya fled the station and was too scared to return, thus unable to begin the UNHCR registration process. Ivy asked what plans Sadiya was making to try to improve her situation, such as moving to a different city or country where it would be safer to register with UNHCR. The exiled journalist replied:

Figure 6.2 Re: Requesting for humanitarian assistance (2)

Sorting through the persecution narrative that Sadiya provided in her initial email and application, the answers provided to Ivy’s subsequent emailed questions, and the case reports that the other caseworkers had written, Ivy tried to understand the events and timeline that had led the journalist to ask for help. At the same time, she was learning about the parts of Sadiya’s personality that were able to come through the text on her computer screen. The journalist was exactingly polite, beginning each email with a “Dear Ivy” and ending with a “Best regards.” She riddled her text with thanks, prayers, and blessings. Sadiya’s written English was not great but it

183 was not illegible either, although it seemed to deteriorate when her emails were longer—as if it became increasingly difficult to get the grammar right the more she wrote in an email. The journalist was also eager to answer any and all questions, although she struggled with how exactly to communicate the full extent of her situation. It seemed Sadiya felt the words she wrote were never fully enough to encompass her risky situation, but all she could do was write more and hope enough got through to Ivy. Unlike many applicants, Sadiya never expressed frustration with Ivy or the bureaucratic process, although her disappointment and despondency did come through. When Ivy asked if she was approaching any other international or local groups for help, Sadiya wrote: “Thank you to respond to me, for sure I have tried and feel like am tired. Only God knows I wrote to too many organizations some said nothing they can do other told me to wait I have just decided to wait and see what will be next.” Similar to the much briefer interactions described between Rima and Pia, Zeynep and Jordan, and Ming and Arjun, Sadiya and Ivy spent this period getting to know one another and their work, and trying to figure out if Ivy would be able to help Sadiya.

“Are cases usually this complicated?” I asked Ivy one afternoon over Skype, after the decision to give Sadiya a grant had been made. I’d been following along with Ivy as she worked through Sadiya’s case (CC:ed on or forwarded emails between the people involved), and discussing the particulars with the caseworker over instant messenger and VoIP. “Not always, but most of the time they’re somewhat messy and hard to follow,” she said. “Sometimes the more emails and info you get, the less sure you are about any of it.” “How do you decide in those cases if you think the journalist should get a grant?” “I go back to the program’s eligibility criteria. In Sadiya’s case, I also took into account that two other orgs found her situation credible.” Ivy added, “So even though there was some weird stuff, they still thought she was telling the truth enough to give support.” Earlier in the conversation, I’d asked Ivy how she’d gotten on with Sadiya since they’d been emailing so much. After participating in a fair amount of casework by then, I’d observed that when a caseworker exchanged a high volume of emails with an applicant, they either came to feel particularly invested or particularly aggravated/frustrated with the journalist. Now, I said: “If you didn’t like Sadiya, if she was annoying or pushy like some of the other applicants, would you have still recommended she receive a grant?” After a knee-jerk yes, Ivy considered the question more thoughtfully.

184

“I think so? I don’t know,” Ivy answered finally. “Sadiya had already received support from two other orgs, but it’s clear she needed more. And she fit the criteria.”

Three months after Ivy delivered the funds, she wrote to ask if Sadiya would be willing to fill out a questionnaire she was circulating to past assistance recipients.178 Sadiya completed it and used the new email exchange to ask Ivy for a favour. Sadiya had decided to try again to register with UNHCR, but she was uncertain how to go about it without exposing herself to the ‘spies’ that still scared her. So she asked if Ivy could put her in touch with UNHCR or an organization that helps refugees. Ivy replied:

Figure 6.3 Re: Information

A JPN member gave Ivy the contact information for a UNHCR representative in Turkey, who had actually left his position but in turn provided the contact information of another (this time current) employee. Ivy reached out to that employee, Mohammed, and after explaining Sadiya’s situation introduced him and the journalist. Together, Mohammed and Sadiya “jointly mapped out the best course of action to facilitate her access to the asylum procedures,” as the UNHCR representative wrote to Ivy. The process was excruciatingly slow, with Sadiya having to ask Ivy to follow up with Mohammed when she did not hear from him. When Mohammed did contact Sadiya, two months after she had first asked Ivy for the favour, the journalist emailed Ivy from the UNHCR appointment, telling the caseworker that they were meeting “right now” and she

178 The purpose of the questionnaire was to help Ivy’s NGO compile statistics about how its emergency assistance program was helping (or failing to help) persecuted journalists’ situations, with the intention of identifying potential ways to improve the program. 185 would update her when it was over. It would be another six months before Sadiya obtained her refugee identification card, attaching to the email a picture of her holding it when she gave Ivy the good news. Ivy was more exuberant than usual in her reply:

Figure 6.4 Re: Refugee ID

So for a few months, Ivy was content that Sadiya was doing better. Unfortunately, the subject line of the next email Sadiya sent read: “Please I beg you I really need your help.” But it was not the type of emergency Ivy could do anything about, even if she could have provided more funding (which the eligibility criteria of her NGO’s program prevented). Rather, it was Sadiya’s slow, relentless slide into hopelessness and loneliness that drove her to email Ivy:

Figure 6.5 Please I beg you I really need your help

Ivy wrote back, trying to convey her sympathy without it sounding empty, while also trying to suggest something concrete Sadiya could do. But she knew it was unlikely the journalist had not already considered or reached out to the other sources of help she listed, an assortment of local

186 and international organizations. Ivy ended her email by asking Sadiya not to give up: “There is always hope if you just get up every day and keep trying…You deserve a happy life, Sadiya. And you are strong enough to go out and find it.”

Two months later, Ivy received an email from a staffer at the European Network for Refugee Resettlement (ENRR)—an NGO that Theo from chapter four had also turned to for help. ENRR was not a JPN member; it provides temporary resettlement for at-risk journalists, writers, and artists rather than emergency assistance. But Ivy was well-acquainted with its staff, since ENRR often turned to caseworkers for help verifying journalists’ situations. Almost a year prior (around the time Sadiya received her refugee identification card), Ivy had written a letter of support for the journalist’s ENRR application; she had heard nothing about it since then. The ENRR staffer, Elise, asked Ivy follow-up questions about Sadiya’s situation and work. As Ivy worked to frame her reply to Elise, she exchanged more emails with Sadiya to get any other information that could be relevant. During that process, Ivy came to learn the journalist was not just at risk of hopelessness and loneliness:

“There some Iraqi Spies who come in the place I was renting the asked my landlady much questions about me , on what time I leave or reach home,if there some visitors I normally get,if I have ever tell her why am in Turkey and promise her to provide her some money to keep eye on me and keep informing them all my move,” Sadiya wrote. “Did you leave that place you were renting?” Ivy asked. “Yes, then at new place once it was raining night some people breaked my padlock and enter in my house they asked me to sleep down and not face them they only took my cellphone.” Ivy asked if Sadiya had left that second place as well. “Not til some leave a note on my door hung it on door ‘we watching you’ it was written on peace of paper box with capital letters,” Sadiya replied. “I had to leave that place to another place where I left also and sleep at church house cause I couldn’t afford to pay my rent.” Once Ivy had pinned down the exact dates of these new events, she sent her reply back to Elise. The ENRR staffer returned a brief but encouraging message: “Thank you very much, Ivy, this is of great help. It really sounds like Sadiya is in a very difficult situation.”

Sadiya’s case study ends similarly to Theo’s did in chapter four. Four months after Ivy’s interaction with ENRR, Sadiya wrote to tell her that she had not yet received a final decision in

187 her temporary resettlement application. She had become certain that Iraqi state officials were monitoring her closely. A driver named Fouad, who had worked for Sadiya’s ‘media house’ in Iraq, had approached her and she had agreed to meet with him since he had been good to her. “You must return, Sadiya,” Fouad said when they met in a park. “Tell them who has been using you; give away all the list of people who were using you. And they will forgive you and pay you good money.” But Sadiya knew he was lying, and told Ivy he only wanted to get paid. “They will use me and then kill me, or use me to kill or arrest innocent people,” Sadiya told Fouad. “How did you come to know where I am?” “They are very good at knowing,” he said. Later Fouad specified, “Your cousin Amna was the one who gave them your address and contact. Everything you and your brother told her, she reported to them.” In her final email to Ivy, Sadiya wrote:

Figure 6.6 Re: A Couple Questions

Ivy did not know how to respond, or what advice to give Sadiya. The email she eventually sent, after agonizing over the wording, was not answered. “You did help her,” I told Ivy. She replied

188 dejectedly, “Did I though?” None of the optimism that infused the interactions between Rima and Pia, Zeynep and Jordan, and Arjun and Ming could be found in the silence following Ivy’s last email to Sadiya.

6.3 Intersubjectivity and the Levinasian Face

From the account of Sadiya’s persecution and life in exile, and Ivy’s work to help her, it is clear that the emergency assistance process is not just a systematic exchange of professional emails centered on an application and accomplished through screen-work. Each case gets messy and complicated. Journalists’ situations continue to develop as they contend with ongoing persecution, as language and other communication barriers create frustration and confusion, and as caseworkers struggle to interact simultaneously with many journalists all deserving of help. And despite the neutral objectivity that the bureaucratic aspects of emergency assistance try to impose, affectively-charged relationships develop between journalists and caseworkers, stretching beyond the official end of the delivery (or non-delivery) of financial assistance. It took a month and a half for Sadiya’s application to be processed with Ivy’s NGO, but their interactions continued long after that. Ivy was under no mandated obligation to continue replying to Sadiya; in fact, sometimes caseworkers try to discourage journalists who have received assistance from thinking there is any more help to be gained from them. As a caseworker named Arthur told me, grimacing but adamant:

“It’s hard reading those types of emails [of journalists asking for additional help] when the program can’t do anything more. But we’re here for emergency support, not long-term support.”

But, evidently, Ivy felt compelled not to close down Sadiya’s connection to her. She was willing to intervene on her behalf in other bureaucratic encounters and she breached the cold distance of bureaucratic procedures when Sadiya’s hopelessness grew more piercing. “You deserve a happy life, Sadiya, and you are strong enough to go out and find it.” That is no bureaucrat speaking to an applicant, but rather one human to another.

The narratives of persecution and suffering that accompany emergency assistance ensure bureaucratic practices sustained by risk-based reasoning and associated with efficiency, rationality, and detachment become something more—more affective, more difficult, more

189 uncertain. And yet the banality of many of these practices, dependent as they are on mundane screen-work—the plodding exchange of emails; the writing, editing, and reading of documents; the tedious navigation of institutions (state, supranational, financial)—obscures the significance of the shared performances being enacted by caseworkers and journalists. It obscures the production of new subjects during their struggles to express themselves in just the right way so as to make the other respond as they hope. Emergency assistance in the free expression landscape is underpinned by that more fundamental need to understand one another across often substantial distances of physical geography and life experience. Across these distances, journalists and caseworkers have to negotiate risks and uncertainties that emerge in the demands placed on one another, the constraints of the systems/structures in which they live and work, and their personal reactions to the emergency assistance process. And further underpinning all of this is the unrelenting concern that the fragile bonds formed between them will be severed—either because of the caseworker’s inability (or perceived unwillingness) to help or, even worse, the disappearance or death of the journalist. Why did Sadiya not respond to Ivy’s final email?

The struggle to establish intersubjectivity is threaded through the digitally-mediated encounter between Ivy and Sadiya. Following from Duranti, the concept of intersubjectivity promoted here “ranges from acts in which one is minimally aware of the presence of an Other to acts in which one actively works at making sure that the Other and the Self are perceptually, conceptually, and practically coordinated around a particular task” (2010:17). Caseworkers and journalists are oriented to the particular task of improving the journalist’s safety and security, provoking them to engage in oftentimes lengthy exchanges of questions and answers, requests for updates and exhortations to hurry the process along, or to provide more personal details, or to just be more helpful. But the Self and the Other in this context are also not fully in lock-step; the caseworker is bound by a program mandate and eligibility criteria, as well as the bureaucratic application process, while what the journalist really wants is to obtain permanent safety and security. And the assistance provided by caseworkers like Ivy often does not ensure that.179 The JPN’s programs—as Arthur and other caseworkers assert—intervene in emergency situations;

179 What the JPN’s emergency assistance is best suited for is the dispersal of specific amounts of money for specific expenses; if a journalist needs $1,000 for a plane ticket, $500 for a medical procedure, $2,500 for legal fees, the JPN is an effective source of help. But for many of the persecuted journalists who go to the JPN, their situations cannot be fully resolved with that type of ‘one-and-done’ transaction. 190 their brand of help is meant to have an expiry date, no matter how much it chafes and no matter how willing they are to continue interacting with journalists after their cases are closed.

Intersubjectivity can be conceptualized as both a state that is achieved and a process that is enacted through particular activities (i.e., the use of language and other communicative practices). Prus (1997) argues that intersubjectivity is the accomplishment of “mindedness with the other,” and made possible through an assortment of daily and special activities: anticipating and assessing encounters, seeking clarification, stopping or (re)starting communication, etc. For Schegloff (1992, 2006), intersubjectivity can be lost but also defended or restored via repair mechanisms deployed during conversation. Intersubjectivity, then, is delicate and temperamental, subject to the brittle opacity and tenaciousness of human sociality. This is evident by the doggedness of Sadiya and Ivy’s interactions. It is in Sadiya’s unswerving politeness, her run-on sentences that spewed out personal details and emotions, her rapid replies to Ivy’s emails, her religious invocations with both herself and Ivy in mind. It is in Ivy’s professionally worded emails to keep her bureaucratic distance (Figure 6.3), but also her use of exclamation points and emojis (Figure 6.4), her apologies for slow replies (always slower than Sadiya’s replies), her repeated requests for more details (specific dates, places, people) even when they were not answered straightforwardly,180 and her struggles to express sympathy or concern without it sounding hollow.

The intersubjectivity that both women were striving for is not dampened by its digitally- mediated elusiveness. Drawing on Husserl’s original formulation, Duranti emphasizes that intersubjectivity is found not only in the moment of mutual understanding, but also in its possibility—and digital technologies are nothing if not purveyors of possibility:

The idea is not that we simultaneously come to the same understanding of any given situation (although this can happen), but that we have, to start, the possibility of exchanging places, of seeing the world from the point of view of the Other. Intersubjectivity is thus an existential condition that can lead to a shared understanding— an important achievement in its own terms—rather than being itself such an understanding. [Duranti 2010:21]

180 Remember when Ivy asked Sadiya what steps she was taking to improve her situation, and instead of answering directly the journalist explained her run-in with Hassan the spy and inability to register with UNHCR (Figure 6.2). 191

Despite the growing recognition of the risks enabled by digital technologies (e.g., networked authoritarianism and liquid surveillance), the communicative access they enable continues to provide opportunities for meaningful connections to be established between people who are geographic and life experiences apart. Because the possibility of achieving intersubjectivity persists, and Ivy and Sadiya continue to feel obligated to pursue it, their interactions take on both the ethical tension and gratification of two humans reaching out to one another (even across cyberspace), of opening the Self and the Other to be seen, however partially. And it is, indeed, achingly partial. “Sometimes the more emails and info you get,” Ivy explained, “the less sure you are about any of it.” Ivy and Sadiya are both accompanied by the sensation that the substance and import of their messages are being lost in the digital void between cyber devices (as well as more traditional gaps in linguistic competence).

What emerges onto their screens is a sort of “face” resulting from a series of displacements of meaning, including the digital mediation, bureaucratic application process and its risk-based judgment of need, and more basic partiality (incompleteness, opacity) of the human condition. Several scholars who have been drawn on in this thesis discuss the “face,” most notably Taussig, Butler, and Deleuze.181 They each take up Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other, whether another person or the personal other—a living presence, both object and act, that is expressed simultaneously through its exposure and vulnerability, its undeniability yet also its unknowability. As Taussig describes, the Levinasian face is “the face of an epiphany, an event, we might say, rather than a plane tilted to the light, to which one gains access not by looking but as an ethical act” (1999:223, emphasis added). The face can be seen emerging in the exploratory moments of meeting when Rima and Pia sat down across from one another, when Jordan probed Zeynep for details about her security, and when Arjun laughed good-naturedly after Ming asked “What do you need?”

Similarly, to Butler the face “makes an ethical demand upon me, and yet we do not know which demand it makes. The face of the Other cannot be read for a secret meaning, and the imperative it delivers is not immediately translatable into a prescription that might be linguistically formulated and followed” (2004:131, emphasis added). A fundamental component

181 Taussig discusses the face largely in the context of secrecy, Butler in the context of precarious representation and (de/re)humanization, and Deleuze with respect to the relationship between politics and ethics. 192 of the face, then, is its production through the act of establishing morally sound intersubjectivity. The face has always been recurrent and detachable, constituted and reconstituted by movable features that can be arranged and presented this way or that. Add to this its mediation by digital technologies and the bureaucratic distance produced by risk-based decision-making, and the face becomes even more unsettled, drawing in and rejecting its wearer and observer at once. “If you can do something for me plz I beg you but if nothing you it’s okay,” wrote Sadiya. “At least talk to me I feel am completely down am depressed have no hope any more.” She desperately wanted to demand concrete help from Ivy, but would settle for just having someone to see (in her isolation) and to see her. The face is not only the relation between Self and Other, but also the condition of being able to look for and at it.

In the encounter between journalist and caseworker, both must reconcile the co- constitutive impacts of their Levinasian faces—on themselves and one another. They are challenged even more to recognize and communicate the contingency and vulnerability (however unequal) of each other’s lifeworlds, as well as the temptation to exploit or dismiss them, in another act of displacement. After Sadiya’s case was officially closed (the delivery of funds completed), Ivy on some level—despite her morality—had to fight the temptation to end her relationship with Sadiya. Her workload was high, her mandated obligation fulfilled, and it is difficult reading another person’s suffering and pleas for more help. And it would have been easy; all Ivy had to do was not reply to Sadiya’s emails, and eventually the journalist would have stopped trying. The face of the Other would have slipped away with a few clicks of a mouse, without any confrontational rejection. The temptation is evident in the time it took Ivy to reply to Sadiya’s messages. When the journalist had good news, Ivy replied quickly on the same day.182 When she had bad news or was asking for more help the caseworker was unable to give, Ivy delayed and replied within three, four, or even more days—sometimes because she agonized over the wording of her messages, but other times because she wanted to avoid the journalist’s pain and her own inability to give Sadiya what she needed. “I’m very sorry for my slow reply,” Ivy wrote when Sadiya set her the not-so-simple task of helping the journalist navigate the UNHCR in Turkey (Figure 6.3). “I don’t have many contacts on the ground in Turkey so I don’t

182 Good news included Sadiya successfully receiving her grant, finally meeting with the UNHCR representative, and finally receiving her refugee identification card. 193 personally have any advice to offer you at this time. But…” Unsurprisingly, Ivy retreated to bureaucratic professionalism to shield herself from that ever difficult truth.

Journalists and caseworkers risk effacing the face of the other as they make moral claims on themselves and one another, although the stakes for journalists are much higher. Both have the capacity to injure the other—caseworkers through the invasive verification process and/or denial of assistance, and journalists through accusations of moral/ethical failure—with uncertainty and dejection stoked on both sides.183 However, mirroring the harsh utility of the face is its tenderness when confronted with intersubjective understanding. An excerpt from Taussig first presented in chapter two, and continued here, is useful:

I am alerted to the tenderness of face and of faces facing each other, tense with the expectation of secrets as fathomless as they seem worthy of unmasking—one of the heroic tropes, in my experience, of that which we call Enlightenment, no less than of physiognomy, reading insides from outsides, the soul from the face. [Taussig 1999:3]

Because of the nature of emergency assistance, the journalist’s face—hidden and revealed for the caseworker—is experienced as “the most basic mode of responsibility” (Levinas and Kearney 1986:23), steeped in the duties and obligations of intertwined liberal, human rights, and free expression ideologies. It is an ethical object and act performed through the interpretation of the face’s assemblage of meaningful features, like texts and images, thwarting a concrete appearance and instead mustering an unsettled, blurry exterior—not unlike the act of writing itself, as Taussig (1999:92) points out. Caseworkers expose themselves to the vulnerability of the journalist’s face, opening themselves up to the heightened rupture of being that accompanies this struggle for intersubjectivity, as they try to reconcile the ontological right to existence of themselves and persecuted journalists—and the role they play in helping journalists obtain it.

To journalists, the face of their caseworker is difficult to discern (sometimes frustratingly so), simultaneously assembled through and hidden behind bureaucratic professionalism and digital mediation. Sadiya called Ivy “sir” more than once (Figure 6.2), suggesting she thought the caseworker was a man; but Ivy shrugged when I pointed it out and never illuminated her. When I

183 As a Honduran journalist named Luis wrote cuttingly after his application was rejected: “I am very sorry to hear that you do not want to help me.” And a Pakistani journalist named Ali wrote after receiving the news that he would not be receiving a grant: “Your organization working for journalist…so? If you are not help me yet why you asking me this all question?” 194 told Sadiya during a choppy Skype call that Ivy was female,184 I heard her surprise and slight embarrassment—it is the only time I heard her laugh, briefly. And an important element of the journalist’s face is her own recognition of the burden she places on Ivy. “And am sorry always to put you in my problems.” Sadiya acknowledges the strain she can have on Ivy, and her own morality drives her to apologize. But the same morality also pushes her to continue exposing her face to the caseworker with the hope Ivy may offer some solution that will prevent her from falling into Iraqi hands. “They will use me and then kill me, or use me to kill or arrest innocent people.” “What if I accept and they arrest me and all those innocent people.” It is not only fear for herself that motivates Sadiya, but also the possibility of her journalism work being used against others.

The journalist’s own face is therefore an exercise in revelation and concealment as she struggles to present not only her truth, but the most useful version of her truth to secure assistance—for her own and others’ benefit. Sadiya also did this by pouring herself into her texts, often writing long streams of consciousness that revealed her needs and emotions (positive and negative).185 Other journalists do this through carefully considered, succinct texts that try to conform more closely to the bureaucratic professionalism of the application process. In either case, the face is not just a mask, one of disguise or makeup; it is also one of painful disclosure, the secrets from their journalism work, persecution, and hopes for the future swimming in and out of focus as they decide what (and what not) to propel across the digital void that offers both vulnerable uncertainty and relief. It is almost entirely through digitally-mediated practices that the journalist’s face is produced, an act of empowerment and agency in part enabled by the very digital technologies that create the possibility for intersubjectivity, despite the distances between them. Emails and application forms allow journalists some flexibility and time to frame their side of the interaction, removing a form of pressure inherent in instantaneous conversation (in person, over the telephone/VoIP). But always their ‘face-work’ is imagined through the gaze and authority of the caseworker.

184 The Internet connection on Sadiya’s end kept freezing. 185 Although her ‘streams of consciousness’ were likely in part be due to struggling English-language skills, sometimes Sadiya’s emails read quite grammatically correct and fluent. So it seems unlikely that the ‘affectiveness’ of her lengthy, run-on narratives were only a result of those language skills. 195

It is through this ‘face-work’ and struggle for intersubjectivity that the unequal relations of power between caseworkers and journalists come to be negotiated. Caseworkers exposing their own face (however partially), and their efforts to establish shared understanding with journalists, do make them vulnerable. Ivy flinches away from Sadiya’s suffering and her own inability to help more. “Am confused Ivy I don’t know what to do please help me to think am tired am very tired am no longer strong I feel my heart go weaker every day . You the only person I trust now tell me what can I do” (Figure 6.6). The burden that Sadiya places on Ivy is difficult to bear,186 their intersubjective experience framed by the journalist as having the capacity to stave off her very death. “Am thinking even to kill my self and make thing easy” (Figure 6.5), admitted Sadiya, the unspoken “unless you have a better solution” implicit for Ivy. The caseworker told me that whenever she opened an email from Sadiya and saw it was more than a paragraph long, it could take a day or more just to get through reading it. She would read a line or two, switch screens and jump to another task, and then jump back to Sadiya’s text until she eventually finished it. The long, run-on sentences meant she had to devote more “brain power” to process the meanings behind Sadiya’s words, and Ivy could only hold that type of mental attention for short bursts at a time. It took effort to maintain her intersubjective mindset, and the digital nature of their interactions meant the caseworker could control how she exposed herself to the journalist’s face. However, Ivy’s morality and ethical commitment to Sadiya also gave the journalist some power over the caseworker, if power in this sense is considered one person’s capacity to make another do something that is difficult (affectively or otherwise), whether willingly or not.

But, on the whole, Sadiya comes out the lesser in the unequal distribution of power with Ivy. Like the encounter between Arjun and Ming, the person who holds the purse-strings ultimately holds the power of a final decision-maker. The bureaucratic application process, with its calculative coldness and hierarchical assessment of journalists’ risks and needs, positions Ivy and Sadiya in that same type of unequal relationship—no matter how much mutual understanding they strive for or how doggedly they try to see one another’s Levinasian faces. Ivy pokes and prods Sadiya and her persecution narrative (and subsequent developments) with questions that, however necessary, indicate the caseworker is unable to take anything the

186 Sadiya asks Ivy to tell her what to do, to literally help her think, to make the journalist’s extremely difficult decisions for her. 196 journalist says at face value. The caseworker has the authority to reject those truth-claims. Sadiya has to convince Ivy to help her, and Ivy is able to pull as much bureaucratic opacity around her as she feels is necessary. Power in this context is subtle, for it is directed not by the desire to oppress (to sustain inequality) but by the ethics of the emergency assistance endeavour and the caseworker’s personal morality. This subtlety emerges in Ivy’s control of the speed of their interactions (how much time passes between emails), her polite professionalism when she has no good news for the journalist, and in Sadiya’s very dependence on Ivy’s continued attention.

This section has introduced the concepts of intersubjectivity and the Levinasian face, and explored their roles in the emergency assistance process. Both Sadiya and Ivy try diligently to establish shared understanding as they negotiate their own and each other’s risks and uncertainties, as well as the unequal relations of power that exist between them. Sometimes the face contributes positively to the intersubjective experience, helping them breach the distance that separates them, while other times it causes them to obscure aspects of themselves or shy away from the other woman. In either case, the connection between intersubjectivity and the face is evident and undeniable, and the stakes involved in navigating that connection are high. Lastly, an implicit assumption has threaded its way throughout this section: that intersubjectivity and the face may be more difficult to achieve or perceive when transferred into the realms of cyberspace and bureaucracy. But examining them in the context of emergency assistance challenges this view, showing that they are changed but not diminished. In the next section, the digitally- mediated and bureaucratic natures of the relationship that develops between caseworker and journalist are examined in more detail, explaining that intersubjectivity and the face have indeed been treated this way in the social theory and why it is wrong to do so.

6.4 Bunker-Face? Mediations of Digital Technologies and Bureaucracy

Throughout this thesis, the risk and uncertainty that free expression activists take up have been charted through Canadian and transnational landscapes, through international humanitarianism and immigration systems, through bureaucracy and liberalism increasingly influenced by digital technologies. Risk and uncertainty are largely two sides of a single coin, with the former designed to convert the latter from an “open-ended field of unpredicted possibilities into a bounded set of possible consequences” (Boholm 2003:167). In the context of this relationship, various contradictions in (post)modernity can be discerned. Risk is a 197 mechanism of freedom and control; uncertainty can set the human free and trap the human in existential dread and crisis. Security and insecurity can represent freedom in different contexts. Digital technologies are mechanisms of democratic inclusion and exclusion. Language is a mode of human agency/emancipation and a performative carrier of pathology. Liberalism represents a path to equality and to the process of Othering. Bureaucratic governance is used to advance and curtail liberal notions of human rights, justice, and compassion. The ideological positioning of bureaucracy and its actual enactment in practice can be irreconcilable, with a range of juxtapositions emerging from the successes and failures of its risk-based reasoning: objective- subjective, formal-informal, dispassionate-passionate, functional-dysfunctional, and legal-illegal. And thus to return to risk and uncertainty: risk-based reasoning is expected to yield the best decisions and outcomes, but there is no guarantee they will be ethical, moral, or even clear— thereby introducing uncertainty into the equation.

Out of all this contradiction, questions of morality arise as various actors attempt to negotiate the dualities of these (post)modern conditions and experiences. Moral concepts are, after all, value judgments that seek to address questions of right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice (Harman 1977). Morality is also conceptualized as a phenomenon by which Self and Other come to be considered, acknowledged, and engaged in one’s own lifeworld (i.e., an intersubjective experience) (Schrag 1963). In the free expression landscape, questions of morality come to a head—or distil into their most visceral elements—when those actors trying to find or deliver help struggle to establish intersubjectivity and accommodate the face of the Other. Although risk-based reasoning and the bureaucracies dependent on it (including the JPN) hold that its so-called objective, formal, dispassionate approach to the dispersal of resources will produce the best outcome, Sadiya and Ivy’s case study shows there is clearly an overflow of juxtaposed affects (subjective, informal, passionate, etc.) that cannot be contained by its ideological foundations. The calculative techniques of risk run up against the incalculable techniques of human affect, with the intersubjective experience and Levinasian face produced and navigated in the middle.187 The largely unconscious assumption of a universal sociality (that some sort of intersubjectivity is possible in human social interaction), despite the intrinsic

187 In this way, a site of moral conflict is created and made that much more poignant by the emergency assistance context (with its free expression ideology). In other words, perceiving someone in need while also surrounded by the ideals of free expression/press freedom heighten the immediacy of the moral implications involved in basic human social interaction—that instinct to establish shared understanding with another person. 198 solipsism of the human subject, confronts the (post)modern, ethically problematic challenge of conducting free expression activism through a bureaucratic framework that theoretically eschews affect and a digital framework that apparently distances it.

In the interactions between Sadiya and Ivy, intersubjectivity and the face are construed through two additional layers of mediation: the digital technology of the emailed text, and the risk-based reasoning of bureaucracy.188 Neither of these was present when the attendees at the DAN Summit sat across from each other. It would hardly be shocking to surmise these layers may make it harder to achieve intersubjectivity and perceive the face, causing human social interaction to grow apart. Scholarship on media ecology has supported this theory, finding a decline in face-to-face interaction erodes intersubjective experience (Bogaczyk 2017; Ellul 1964; Turkle 2012).189 And if the intersubjective experience does not occur, then the ethical act/demand that is the face of the Other is not made on the Self. A common refrain in analyses of technological mediation is that “we are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone: in intimacy, new solitudes” (Turkle 2012:19).190 Moreover, the visual nature of (a lot of) digital communication has been shown to create intersubjective distance that obstructs or disconnects humans from one another (Bogazyk 2017; Ellul 1985; Innis 2008; McLuhan 1994).191 The distance created by digital mediation releases humans, to greater or lesser extents, from a basic human obligation and decency to the other. Is this not precisely how the nature of (free) expression has changed in (post)modernity? The faceless Internet troll spewing hate or disinformation, the pathologized separation of speech act/utterance from author, the movement of activism efforts from the hallways of compassionate human rights discourse to those of cold, calculative bureaucratic encounter. The moral deficits enabled by digital technologies flow into the exercise of free expression, cleaving humans apart rather than bringing them together.

188 These two layers of mediation are additional because they are added to or occurring on top of the fundamental opacity of the human subject and the traditional gaps in linguistic competence that interlocutors must wade through in order to achieve intersubjectivity and perceive the face of the Other. 189 This has been found despite the cultural expectations that digital technologies would usher in a world of greater and better connections/unity. 190 Turkle specifies the cost of technological mediation for human sociality: “Insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves at the same time…We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other” (2012:xii). 191 Here, ‘visual’ refers to how texts are typed out and electronically transmitted to someone who visually receives them. More broadly, written language adds a level of abstraction to the representation of reality in a way that an picture, image, or video does not. 199

But the affective overflow evident in the digitally-mediated, bureaucratic encounter between caseworker and journalist, combined with their relentless efforts to establish intersubjectivity and accommodate the face, challenge this view of (post)modern distance in human sociality, of ‘new solitudes despite new intimacy’. Sadiya and Ivy’s case study shows that both women feel morally obligated to one another, as well as committed to treating one another decently despite the digital mediation and bureaucratic coldness of their interactions, as well as their respective risks and uncertainties that further heighten the stakes involved.192 The very fact that they are cognizant of one another’s risks and uncertainties contributes to their efforts to achieve shared understanding; Sadiya is compelled to convince Ivy to help her and Ivy is compelled to get as many details about the journalist’s situation as possible. The opacity of their encounter is something to be overcome, not a ‘new solitude’ to be accepted as par for the course; such acceptance would hinder Sadiya’s search for help and Ivy’s ethical commitment to delivering it. And while the temptation to shy away from the face of the Other is present, the affective overflow ensures caseworker and journalist are swept along by their intersubjective experience rather than run aground in their fraught and fragile interactions. The combination of 1) emergency assistance as site of moral conflict/obligation, and 2) the affective overflow that cannot be contained by its systems/structures, represent both problem and solution, a failure of the digitally-mediated bureaucratic process and a success of their humanity.

An overflow of human affect that breaches the professionalism of a bureaucratic encounter does not by itself signify an inevitably moral conclusion or outcome. Resentment, suspicion, frustration, and disappointment can drown out any positive connection, any mitigation of their respective uncertainties, and any overall willingness to help a journalist beyond a program mandate or to put up with an intractable caseworker when there may be other sources of help elsewhere. It is the repeated attempts to draw back together despite the ease with which they can end communication, and despite the difficulty it takes to accommodate the face of the Other, that signifies the morality of the intersubjective experience at work in emergency assistance. As section 6.3 explored, both Sadiya and Ivy must reconcile the co-constitutive impacts of their

192 The risk and uncertainty that Sadiya faces is clear, arising from her persecution and struggle to find help. The risk and uncertainty that Ivy faces refers to the ever-present possibility (inherent in emergency assistance casework) that her decisions could lead to a deserving journalist not receiving help, or even an undeserving journalist receiving help (i.e., someone fraudulently claiming they need help or someone over-embellishing their situation, which leads to another journalist more deserving going without help). 200

Levinasian faces on themselves and one another—and they do so willingly even when they do not have to. It is precisely in the affective overflow that the significance of their intersubjective endeavour becomes simultaneously most challenging and most visible/meaningful.

The condition of possibility for intersubjectivity, the face of the Other, and the ethical demand they place on caseworker and journalist are therefore just as evident and affectively implicated when received from the lines of visual media (emailed text) as they would be in a face-to-face encounter. Moreover, many of the women’s actions can be viewed as part of their efforts to control (but not always to cross) the distance enabled by digital technologies and bureaucratic coldness (which would supposedly erode the intersubjective experience). On one side, Ivy expresses sympathy, reassurance, and hope in ways that in no way read like a traditional bureaucrat. She also uses exclamation points and emojis to convey positive emotions, and sends emails that do not have a strictly bureaucratic purpose (e.g., just to ‘check in’ with Sadiya). But Ivy also clings to professional wording in some emails and delays reading/responding to emails when she needs to protect herself from Sadiya’s pleas and uncertainties—the discomfort of the journalist’s face. On the other side, Sadiya dispenses with the bureaucratic professionalism to which other applicants sometimes adhere, although she remains consistently polite. She always responds to emails rapidly and includes streams of consciousness that read more like oral speech, as well as religious invocations concerning both herself and Ivy. And Sadiya attaches images to complement her texts, such as the picture in which she is holding her newly obtained refugee identification card.

These various actions are strategies meant to establish shared understanding (between humans rather than only between bureaucrat and applicant), ensure moral obligation (for Ivy to help Sadiya and for Sadiya to tell the full but unembellished truth), and deal with the difficult Levinasian face. They all take advantage of the unique characteristics of visual media (written words/texts, images/pictures, emojis, punctuation, response times, etc.) and the corresponding ability to convey human emotions and obscure them in ways that would be quite different, more difficult, or not possible in face-to-face interactions. These strategies are thus meant to produce the affective overflow and to react to that affective overflow when it becomes too much—when Sadiya is languishing in her suffering, and when Ivy is struggling to behold that suffering. But whether they are pulling apart or closer together because of moral conflict/obligation and

201 affective overflow, neither woman tries to completely sever their intersubjective bridge, and ultimately the mediations of neither digital technologies nor bureaucracy are a permanent hindrance. As such, the distance that can either be breached or maintained via digital technologies and bureaucracy must be added—alongside moral conflict/obligation and affective overflow—as both problem and solution in the search to find or deliver help.

Just as the natures of intersubjectivity and the face are not diminished through digital technologies or bureaucracy, neither is the process of subject formation. Indeed, the personhood of both women—that foundation upon which Ivy and Sadiya constitute themselves as moral human beings—cannot be separated from its digital elements. The description above, of the face that is recurrent and detachable, constituted and reconstituted by movable features, is strikingly reminiscent of the coded dividual. Journalist and caseworker engage in enactments of revelation and concealment that variously express and withhold elements of themselves and their lifeworlds, which work to highlight what is absent as much as what is present. As Levinas asserts in Totality and Infinity, “The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content” (1979:194). Just as the face indicates the Other’s ‘infinite quality’, its irreducibility to a finite or bounded entity over which complete meaning or power can be exercised, so too is the dividual unable to be contained (either visually or tactilely). Privacy advocate Lisbeth’s pronouncement in chapter two bears repeating here:

“I exist in flesh and bones. I exist in bytes. It’s all me.”

Whether expressed in flesh and bones or in bytes, the dividuated subject remains. The sum of its parts is no longer required; indeed, taking the dividual as a whole would only efface its meaning and identity. The additional layers of mediation that caseworker and journalist must contend with can be viewed as building blocks or moving pieces added to the dividuated subject and/or Levinasian face (rather than taking away from them, making them somehow ‘less’). Moreover, it is not so surprising that in amongst the face’s infinite quality and the dividual’s inability to be contained, an affective overflow results precisely in (post)modern contexts that seek to do just that (i.e., to contain it or perceive the whole). And since the dividuated subject and its face both resemble an assemblage of texts and images, constructed not unlike the act of

202 writing itself (as Taussig points out), it follows that the (post)modern intersubjective experience is not eroded via digital technologies so reliant on visual media, but rather realized through them. The distance, the abstraction, the unsettled and blurry exterior can be realized in full nowhere else, while the questions of morality that accompany intersubjectivity and the face of the Other (with the ethical demand it places on the Self) remain ever demanding.

In several of Deleuze’s (1986, 1994, 1995) works, the scholar takes up the Levinasian face, articulating it as a politically (rather than only ethically) constructed identity which ‘over- codes’ the differential flows of the body without organs.193 ‘Body without organs’ is a term used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to refer to the underlying virtual realm that is actualized into extensive, intensive spatio-temporal multiplicities—a realm that has been stretched today, accommodated by and into cyberspace. Unlike Levinas, Deleuze argues the face is not a primordial form of social interaction and universal ethic, but rather a political act intimately connected to power and repression. To Deleuze, the face is not an inevitable byproduct of the intersubjective experience that underpins all human interaction; it is actually the result of situated intersubjective experiences that can only emerge in specific sociocultural contexts. One such context is emergency assistance, with its bureaucratic application process and risk-based decision-making, the underlying free expression ideology shared by caseworker and journalist, their individual sociocultural backgrounds, material and affective circumstances, knowledge and experience of digital technologies and bureaucratic encounters, and so on.

Whereas Levinas perceives the face through a Husserlian ‘bottom up’ influence on interaction from primordial intersubjectivity/human sociality, Deleuze thus adds to it a ‘top down’ influence from cultural beliefs and ideology.194 And unlike Levinas, who argues that the ‘humanity of the human’ can be revealed in the face, Deleuze views the face as a distortion of the body without organs. This distortion is produced by the regimes of signifying power that surround the face in its particular sociocultural context. While they concede that “the face is produced in humanity,”

193 Deleuze (2002:19), connecting the concepts of dividuation and the face, argues that the face cannot be located in, is not a part of, nor is it reducible to, the body—which aligns with Levinas’ conceptualization, although the two scholars conceptualize the relationship between face and body differently (Rae 2016). 194 This is similar to how the mediations of digital technologies and bureaucracy are added to or occurring on top of the fundamental opacity of the human subject and the traditional gaps in linguistic competence that interlocutors must wade through to achieve intersubjectivity and perceive the face of the Other. 203

[i]t is produced by a necessity that does not apply to human beings ‘in general’. The face is not animal, but neither is it human in general: there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face…The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations…by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face. [Deleuze and Guattari 1987:170-171]

This discussion about struggling for intersubjectivity, to see the face of the Other, should thus not be read as a romantic, idealistic outreaching of caseworker and journalist, although there are elements of such in their encounter. But the flinching away, the temptation to sever communication, the pleading and helplessness—“to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations”—are equally important to their digitally-mediated, bureaucratic encounter beset by moral conflict and affective overflow. The face must always be conceived in terms of its duality, its twin compulsions to reveal and conceal. Remember Ivy’s carefully worded emails and the prolonged time taken to read them (and more generally her control of the time between their deliveries); remember Sadiya’s capacity to avoid straightforwardly answering questions (making Ivy ask repeatedly) and her repeated pulls on Ivy’s ethical commitment.195 This also means the face must always be conceived in terms of its dual drives for both moral and immoral outcomes, to accept and reject its humanity.

The conflicting components of how Levinas and Deleuze conceive of the face (its ethical or political moorings, its revelation of humanity and inhumanity) are useful for understanding the struggle by caseworker and journalist to establish intersubjectivity, the layers of mediation that underpin their encounter, and the unequal relations of power that come with emergency assistance. The digitally-mediated communication they rely on provides opportunity to perceive one another’s faces and achieve intersubjectivity (the condition of possibility), while the risk- based reasoning of the bureaucratic process provides order and structure in the dispersal of finite resources. But digital technologies and bureaucracy enable additional mechanisms (layers) of

195 These include asking for bureaucratic interventions with UNHCR and ENRR, and more generally Sadiya’s persistent pleas for additional help. 204 distortion through which the face is either concealed or revealed, adding both affective overflow and distance between them. But as this section has revealed, affective overflow and distance are both problem and solution in the search to find or deliver help, with Sadiya and Ivy deploying strategies that take this duality into account. Although affective overflow is ostensibly incongruous with the bureaucratic setting, it guides the intersubjective experience and Levinasian face in its (in)humanity. And the distance between caseworker and journalist is evidently not insurmountable, and sometimes it is used to shield the Self from the Other’s suffering or failure. Although it is often treated as a negative development of (post)modernity, eroding the primordial intersubjectivity of human sociality (“we are increasingly connected to each other but oddly more alone”), this uniquely (post)modern distance may be better conceived as a crucial ingredient for the formation of the (post)human. And if the human subject can adapt, then the intersubjective experience and Levinasian face must necessarily (and can surely) adapt as well— and that is precisely what caseworker and journalist do to achieve their goals.

6.5 Liberalism, (In)Humanity, and the ‘As If’

The interactions between Rima and Pia, Zeynep and Jordan, and Arjun and Ming represent the very beginning of an essential encounter that takes place in free expression activism: trying to find and deliver help in the face of risk and uncertainty. This is the most basic—but in no way simple—ethical act of the free expression landscape. This thesis has shown that risk and uncertainty are used strategically to complete that act, and this chapter has explored the struggle for intersubjectivity, the fraught Levinasian face of the Other, and the questions of morality that arise as a result. Moreover, all three elements are being changed by digital technologies, made different by the accompanying distance but in no way diminished. The ethnographic account of the relationship that developed between exiled Iraqi journalist Sadiya and emergency assistance caseworker Ivy showed both women to be driven by their own morals and ethics. These manifested through Sadiya’s commitment to journalistic integrity and the public interest (including the protection of her sources), and Ivy’s commitment to helping journalists, which went beyond the fulfillment of her program mandate. And in their relationship, Sadiya and Ivy were revealed to be moral subjects, aware of the burdens they placed on one another, regretful of any harm caused, and committed to their obligations to one another. Ultimately, the actions of journalist and caseworker were underpinned by a shared free

205 expression ideology, or more broadly a liberal ideology, that proposes a universal morality while struggling with (post)modern conditions of (in)security and technology.

Evidently, liberalism has been a recurrent topic of discussion in this thesis. The ideologies of liberalism and free expression are largely co-constitutive and inseparable, even when technologies of risk and uncertainty become central practices and systems of meaning. Throughout each chapter, the presence or absence of liberalism on a day-to-day basis has been either directly or indirectly charted. It is clear that the promise of liberalism made over the course of centuries has not been realized in full, with its failures creating schisms that appear to be growing more entrenched as different groups diagnose its aging ailments, symptoms, and treatments. The turn to risk-based reasoning and efforts to manage uncertainty highlight attempts by free expression activists to find order in the chaos left in liberalism’s wake. But this is not an account of a proposed alternative by activists to liberalism, for liberalism continues to be a key goal they pursue and remains largely unchallenged as an overarching worldview. However, it is clear that (post)modern conditions of life continue to exacerbate the struggles of liberalism, even while offering new opportunities for growth.

This chapter has shown two ways in which the liberal struggle continues. First, the questions of morality that arise as caseworkers and journalists try to establish intersubjectivity and accommodate the face encode the ongoing liberal endeavour to rationalize the (in)dividual according to universal conceptions of reason and good.196 The concept of personal rights independent of utility or consequentialism is central. As Levinas summarizes, “the pathos of liberalism…lies in the promotion of a person inasmuch as he represents nothing further, that is, is precisely a self. The multiplicity can be produced only if the individuals retain their secrecy, if the relation that unites them into a multiplicity is not visible from the outside” (1979:120). But during the struggle to establish intersubjectivity and perceive the face through mediating layers of digital technologies and bureaucracy, and as the individual is divided into fragmented codes and movable features, liberalism is challenged to adapt to the treatment of the human subject as both more and less than “precisely a self.” Multiplicity is produced today less by the maintenance of individual secrecy (i.e., autonomy), and more by alluding to (i.e., making more

196 This means acknowledging degrees of moral relativism (allowing for pluralism) while circumscribing common limits of humanity, or the horizon beyond which behaviour is no long recognized as human (Berlin 1969; Crowder 2004). 206 visible) the relations that unite them. The dividual is autonomous and connected by the displacements of meaning, as Self and Other variously draw together and pull away. Applying universal conceptions of reason and good to the shifting selfhood of this (post)human (and its face) challenges liberalism to make room for a new central subject who stretches understandings of humanity and its limits—not only from a moral but also an ontological standpoint.

And second, liberalism must adapt to the distance (geographic, experiential, technical) created by digital technologies and the corresponding adaptions that the human subject and intersubjective experience undergo as a result. This distance, or the spaces and conditions of possibility it produces, can be conceived as the “great as if,” as Taussig (1999) calls it. It is the public secret, the limit-case, the supposition in which risk and uncertainty slip and slide together, destructive and productive, moral and immoral. The ‘as if’ has been taken up by several scholars of (post)modernity.197 Most relevant to the current context, Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) point to the futurity of risk and its creation of an ‘as if’ or speculative space, while post-9/11 security scholars point to the logics of anticipatory preemption surrounding the planetary project of counterterrorism (Butler 2004; Nader 2017; Robin 2004; Zulaika 2009). “Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot; but yes, we must act as if we do” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982:1). In other words, risk compels the establishment of the ‘as if’ space in the present in order to manage uncertainty of the future. Where does liberalism, with its values of justice and personal rights, fit into this ‘as if’ space and its temporal fervor?

Agamben (2005) and Butler (2004) also situate their analyses of (post)modernity in the context of a mercurial ‘as if’ space, in which the question of whether liberal values should be maintained or sacrificed at the altar of other priorities (security, technological advancement, capitalism) is unsettled. As Butler states when discussing indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay, “it is as if the entire conflict takes place in an extra-legal sphere or, rather, that the extra- legal domain in which these detentions and expected trials take place produces an experience of the ‘as if’ that deals a blow to the common understanding of law” (2004:85). The detained subject is only human if the state decides s/he is, and the non-human subject is neither dead nor

197 In his analysis of transitional justice, Celermejer argues that through ritual a subjunctive space is created, which he calls “an ‘as if’ space, where we enact the world as we would have it” (2013:299). Through this enactment, the subject in the ‘as if’ space is able to cultivate habits or dispositions from which to respond to the unavoidable “brokenness and fragmentation” of the (post)modern world. 207 alive, suspended in ‘unconstitution’ through a new ‘as if’ configuration of power. Similarly, Agamben conceives of a ‘state of exception’, whereby a zone of suspension is created in which the juridical order “is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force” (2005:31). More broadly, Butler and Agamben speak to the power of the ‘as if’ that is increasingly used to (re)conceive humanity and the human, especially in the context of rights discourses and (inter)national law and order. This is precisely what liberalism is struggling to either reject or incorporate into its framework, forced to confront new types of (non-)human subjects in the world of the ‘as if’. Whether the liberal framework will wither under its new set of growing pains, unable to adjust or correct course, maintain the status quo or find new life, balance moral relativism and universal limits of humanity, remains to be seen. What is certain is that the growing pains are being felt by free expression activists of all types (including journalists), and the free expression landscape has become a key platform in which to debate and negotiate them.

Yet another contradiction emerges in this ‘as if’ space and the corresponding liberal struggle. Human rights activism, including the efforts devoted to free expression, is deeply intertwined with capitalism (and its liberal democratic nation-state formation).198 What the discussions in chapters four through six have shown is that emergency assistance, as part of the international humanitarianism and immigration systems, are implicated in this close relationship. Just as the process of aging has revealed the flaws and contradictions of liberalism, so too has it revealed those of capitalism. Implicitly weaving through emergency assistance is the contradiction between universalist, Enlightenment promises of justice and equality and the reality of how capitalism works in practice as competition.199 Much of the violence of the neoliberal capitalist order turns on competition—for wealth accumulation, wage labour, land dispossessions, market economies, corresponding standards of living, etc. And these features are inseparable from the global movements of people and commodities across borders, including forcibly displaced refugees and asylum seekers like persecuted journalists.

As such, finding help when the financial resources of emergency assistance programs are limited, or securing safe resettlement when the number of available spots in any nation-state falls

198 This connection was made in chapter one, when the emergence of human rights activism as a veritable industry was discussed. 199 This contradiction was explicitly mentioned in brief in chapter four, during Theo’s case study, when the shortcomings of aging liberalism came into sharper focus. 208 way below the total number of applications, requires engaging in the competition of the neoliberal capitalist order. Nation-states, international humanitarianism and immigration systems, and free expression activists all struggle to accommodate this contradiction. The technologies of risk and uncertainty taken up as part of their struggle both help and hinder, sometimes creating inefficiency and enabling abuses of power, and other times providing solutions that resolve vulnerable people’s insecurity and precarity. This contradiction also contributes to the questions of morality that arise during encounters between caseworkers and journalists. The competitive aspects of emergency assistance mean that even as these programs espouse universalist idea(l)s of compassion, justice, and equality, caseworkers reproduce (and subject applicants to) aspects of the violent neoliberal capitalist order. The ends justify the means for some. But for others, the experience of this contradiction becomes more and more difficult to endure or escape, dealing an increasingly hard blow to understandings of morality and humanity.

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Chapter 7 Conclusion

7.0 “I Can See That”

Toronto, Ontario: Autumn 2015 “Can you help Wadi with some signatures?” Mitch asked me over the din of a large crowd. We were at an awards ceremony that honours activists and other contributors to the field of free expression for their accomplishments and courage in the face of significant risk. “No problem,” I replied. “But he needs a marker to write with.” Firmly brushing my forearm against Wadi’s elbow, I offered to move us towards a table tucked away in the corner of the hotel ballroom. One of the night’s award-winners, Wadi is a Syrian refugee and young photographer, whose prints were being exhibited and sold at the event. He grasped my arm tightly and smiled, but stayed quiet as we maneuvered through the crowded room. When a volunteer arrived with a black marker, I curled Wadi’s fingers around it and he bent over so his nose was almost touching a print that had been sold. The photographer signed the backs of several prints, scrawling his name and a ‘thank you, please enjoy’ across them. “That felt good,” Wadi said softly when he was finished, grinning brightly. “This is my first exhibit.” “You’re a hit,” I announced. “You’ve gotten a lot of exposure today.” “I can see that,” he replied cheekily, making me laugh. The photos on display captured moments of the Syrians living around Wadi in a refugee camp, before he was resettled in Canada Figure 7.1 Wadi’s print with his family through UNHCR. One of those prints now hangs in my living room, Wadi’s caption reading: “Thorns are everywhere, but he can still walk. I put him in shadows, but the sun is around him!” In many ways, free expression activism is not just a search for voice, but also for sight. With such a search marked by thorns and shadows aplenty, sometimes it is

the near-blind who can have the best insights—while the near- deaf scream into a void of noise and discord. Unlike the case of Wadi, exactly who is blind and who is deaf often remains tricky to discern.

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7.1 Revisiting Vignettes

The free expression activists discussed in this thesis are a wide-ranging and eclectic bunch. Evidently, they do not form a single social group, but a thoroughfare can be followed along which they can all be found. Whether in Canada or Ethiopia, living in security or insecurity, working on privacy or free speech, categorized as ‘political left’ or ‘political right’, they are joined by their free expression activism—whether called to it willingly or thrust into it when some powerful actor tries to silence them. They are joined by questions of “have you heard what happened?” (section 1.0) and “what do I care?” (section 2.0). They often feel it is getting more difficult to keep up with all that is happening, for the risks that pursue them and other bastions of free expression are becoming more difficult to outrun and overcome. As Emily remarked to me after FEC and GDFE’s big digital security training session, “it’s getting more dangerous, and we’re struggling to keep up” (section 2.0). Not only does free expression face threats and violations of either new types or new scope and scale; it also faces the conflict and multitudinous of its own unsettled meanings. And so activists frequently have to decide what to care about and what to put on the back burner, which risks to address and which to let endure. “Attacks on press freedom are going to happen,” as Mitch put it bluntly in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack. “You can’t drop everything each and every time” (section 1.0).

Free expression activism may be a noble endeavour, but the free expression landscape is not filled only with noble actions. “They’re all just empty heads” (section 3.0) is a relatively tame insult by the (non-)standards of what vitriol can spew forth in free expression debates. A range of human emotions and characters can be found in or around free expression activism, with different people and subgroups allying with or opposing one another, with formal or informal community policies and ethics upheld or violated, with morality fulfilled or shirked. Here, ‘community’ refers to loose or tightknit collectives that form during free expression activism efforts, such as the Protect Our Privacy Coalition from chapter two, the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere from chapter three, the press freedom advocates campaigning for Gregory’s release in chapter four, and the emergency assistance caseworkers of the Journalists Protection Network (JPN) from chapters four (Theo’s case study) through six. These are just a few of many subgroups that constitute the vast meshwork of free expression activists

211 that spans the face of the globe, but they represent an important cross-section of the types of people, issues, and work found along that long thoroughfare.

“He is very stubborn” (section 4.0) applies to many free expression activists and, indeed, this personality trait is often a necessity in order to achieve any free expression goals at all, not least finding the help and security that are frequently only obtainable by navigating the sprawling, sluggish, and dense bureaucracies of (post)modern society—such as state apparatuses and the international systems of humanitarianism and immigration. Stubbornness was not only exhibited by Turkish journalist Fazil in the introductory vignette to chapter four, or Nisa, Gregory, and Theo throughout that chapter. FEC employee Emily (section 2.0) was a picture of headstrong and determined in her light-hearted but serious confrontation with our taxi driver, as she single-mindedly tried to convince him and me that we really needed to pay attention to our privacy and better protect ourselves. Paul (section 3.0) was stubborn and unapologetic in his trolling for the cause of free speech, as he took on censorship by getting into arguments with the progressive liberal “empty heads” And JPN member Anya (section 5.0), who took up the arduous task of reporting lewd and harassing content that targeted journalists in South Asia (at the behest of fellow JPN member Farah), was stubborn in the way many activists who work on behalf of people they will never actually meet must be stubborn—allowing them to expend vast amounts of energy on labour intensive activities that may amount to nothing.

Free expression activism, then, is neither completely noble nor always glamourous (‘rarely glamourous’ may be the more apt descriptor, perhaps with the exception of awards ceremonies like the one referenced above). “Sadly, this is a common occurrence” (section 5.0), said Anya about the “hate campaigns” online targeting journalists. Even amidst their commitment to and passion for free expression, activists get run down, burnt out, and disenchanted by their work. This can occur because of the daily grind of way-too-heavy workloads and mammoth systems filled with inefficiency and illegibility, negative consequences they suffer themselves (as they become targets), the suffering of others to which they become witnesses, and the lack of positive outcomes despite their efforts. “Things are not going to calm down for Turkey any time soon,” Fazil noted presciently. “And I do not wish to stay here” (section 4.0). This is a common conclusion reached by many around the world whose free expression rights are violated, as they imagine safety and security but cannot envision it where

212 they are currently located. The problem is that a slew of (post)modern conditions are conspiring to make it incredibly difficult for people with few resources to escape to a safe country. These conditions include the post-9/11 preoccupation with national security and (counter)terrorism that has seen borders tightened all over the world, as well as the growing precarity of the neoliberal capitalist order in a world of ever greater economic and political globalization, particularly as conflicts and refugee crises increase the total number of forcibly displaced people worldwide.

This (post)modern backdrop has been discernable and palpable throughout the thesis. In chapter two, out of the dramatic changes made in Canada after 9/11 emerged a security state that would hurtle government and free expression activists towards their current privacy struggle. In chapter three, cultural fundamentalism and populist sentiment (that fear for individual autonomy and national sovereignty) drew straight lines between refugees, Islam and Muslims, national security, political correctness, and free speech. “What type of infection are you talking about?” I asked Paul (section 3.0), not sure if he was referring to Muslims, hatred, or censorship. In chapters four and six, persecuted journalists trapped in countries around the world turned to free expression activists in their search for escape: Gregory from Pakistan, Theo from Ethiopia (who had already fled from the DRC), and Sadiya from Turkey (who had already fled from Iraq). Nisa and Fazil had also fled from Turkey, with Fazil traveling to New York and then crossing into Canada so they could await the outcomes of their asylum claims together in Ottawa.

Privacy, free speech, and press freedom are all affected by and implicated in this backdrop of (post)modern conditions. In fact, one of the most pressing sources of moral conflict afflicting the JPN is the incongruity between its mandate to provide short-term, emergency support and the high volume of applications from journalists asking for help to find permanent resettlement in safe second or third countries of residence. The act of helping (either asking for or delivering it) is at the heart of free expression activism, and a primary undertaking required to address/engage risk and uncertainty. But the world today continues to create (post)modern complications, and activists struggle to fill the needs of so many. “Would it help you?” (section 6.0) becomes both a morally made promise and a morally problematic challenge when help is rarely guaranteed even at the moment of asking the question. Whether posed as an off-handed or loaded question, the offer of help and possibility of receiving it suffuse the free expression landscape and shape its logics of risk and uncertainty.

213

Positive outcomes were hardly a guarantee in this thesis. Canada’s security state continued to expand, with new powers given to government agencies through anti-terrorism and other legislation, policy changes, and shifts in public consciousness. State and non-state forces enabling the great progressive liberalism censor were virulent, with the “fight-back” facing an uphill battle. Both existential risks to liberalism perceived by privacy advocates and the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere remained daunting potential futures. The search for safety and security continued on for Theo, Sadiya, Nisa, and Fazil. More positively, Gregory was returned safely to Canada, the terrorism charges dropped and onerous legal battle won. And the JPN’s digital security project looked improved and optimistic, even if always partial and incomplete. Nisa and Fazil awaited the hearings that would determine whether they could stay in Canada, but in the interim they lived in safety (if not certainty) and bolstered themselves for having escaped (even temporarily) the risks back home. “Things look better for now,” Farah announced to the JPN after the inappropriate content targeting the South Asian journalists was taken down. “Much thanks to everyone who jumped in to help” (section 5.0). And Syrian refugee and aspiring photographer Wadi was successfully resettled in Canada, exercising his right to free expression amongst peers and away from dangers (section 7.0). In amongst the ongoing risks and persistent, dragging uncertainty were small gains and happy moments that carried free expression activists forward:

“We all learned a lot.” [section 2.0] “Well, you’re cool.” “Good to know.” [section 3.0] “Glad to hear the content has been taken down.” [section 5.0] “That felt good.” [section 7.0] “You’re a hit. You’ve gotten a lot of exposure today.” “I can see that.” [section 7.0]

Amidst both successes and failures, risk and uncertainty remain a constant companion to free expression activists. This observation was among the first cues that signaled I needed to consider a framework centred on risk, uncertainty, and (post)modernity in order to understand and explain the ideologies, practices, and experiences of my research participants. When presented to my research participants, this framework is sometimes unexpected but also generally accepted from an academic standpoint. But my research participants’ initial perspectives when asked to provide their own reflexive ‘ethnographer’s account’ of free

214 expression activism and their participation in it was never to explicitly bring up risk or uncertainty unprompted. (However, they did get invoked implicitly in my ‘post-fieldwork check- ins’ with research participants, which reassured me that I had not taken a huge misstep in my choice of framework). Rather, and not surprisingly, their first instinct was to turn to their underlying liberal idea(l)s as the answer to the types of questions posed by anthropologists.

When I realized the breadth of the free expression landscape and the multiplicity in the types of people, values, and practices it contains, it became evident the answer to understanding the experiences and ideological positionings of my research participants would not be found in a framework that placed liberalism alone at its centre. A framework of risk, uncertainty, and (post)modernity, however, steps beyond the instinctual perspectives of free expression activists and their attachments to these types of idea(l)s. It explains these by allowing space for the antagonistic versions of liberalism that can form such a fractious source of disagreement, and for the many contradictions (re)shaping the (post)modern environment. It ties the variety together without trying to smooth over the differences, conflicts, and moral challenges. It also connects the domains of liberal idea(l)s, the hallways of bureaucracy that activists spend so much time navigating, and the post-9/11 preoccupation with national (in)security that affects them just as much as it does their interlocutors (state and public). Indeed, it is my explicit focus on the contradictions that emerge with respect to liberalism, security, and technology—or (post)modern conditions more broadly—that represents the key divergence in my perspective from those of my research participants.

I was able to make these types of connections because, fundamentally, I am not a free expression activist. Even when my own beliefs or background aligned with those of my research participants, neither was I trying to become an expert in free expression issues, nor was my primary task to protect or improve free expression rights. My task has been to understand and explain the activists who do the free expression work. Whether conducting fieldwork in a more traditional setting with an unequal distribution of power between researcher and research participant, or in a quintessentially (post)modern, techno-mediatic setting of shared reflexivity and unprivileged power dynamics (Hannerz 1998), the ultimate aims of our work/analyses are different. Lastly, although free expression activists engage with risk and uncertainty on a day-today basis, these engagements remain largely implicit, acted out rather than spoken about—

215 whereas their articulations of liberal idea(l)s could get very much explicit. And as is common in many anthropological endeavours, making the implicit explicit is what separates the researcher’s perspective from that of his/her research participants (Philips 1998). While that implicitness or taken-for-granted quality does not always have to be present in the cultural setting being explored, it does provide one important indication that there is space for the anthropologist to provide a different (academic) perspective—and therefore that the perspectives of the research participants are not the only truth to be found.

Lastly, it is important to acknowledge that this thesis has employed a risk/uncertainty framework instead of a framework based on publics and populations (i.e., discursive spaces). It is true that privacy advocates, free speech advocates, press freedom advocates, and emergency assistance caseworkers all work in discursive spaces and try to shape them through discursive strategies, performative encounters, and trust-based practices. But scholars like Benedict Anderson, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, and their respective cohorts/critics were not engaged for a few reasons. First, and most pragmatically, there was simply not enough space in a single thesis to take up both sets of scholarship/social theory and do either justice. Second, free expression and liberalism have been explored by many through the publics framework, whereas the importance of risk and uncertainty to these topics of research has received much less consideration—even as risk and uncertainty have become powerful features of (post)modernity and everywhere present at the intersection of liberalism, technology, and security. Third, I struggled to connect all the disparate subgroups, settings, and features that I was examining through a publics framework. This is not to say it would have been impossible to do so, but just that I found the presence of risk and uncertainty to be a more compelling thoroughfare for me to connect them all. For instance, the construction of existential risks, the affects and behaviours spurring digital security practices/projects, and the risk-based reasoning of bureaucratic encounters would have been more difficult to explain solely through a publics framework. I do think the data collected during my fieldwork could have been analyzed through a publics framework—and, ultimately, my focus on a different one was both an academic and personal decision. In the future, explicitly engaging these frameworks alongside one another would be a valuable endeavour and direction in which to take this type of research.

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7.2 Thorns and Shadows

Free expression, and all the issues it has come to encompass, is a tricky concept to both conceive and enact. Too much regulation defeats the purpose; too little allows human indecency a spotlight. It is a tightrope that has likely always been difficult to walk, and today it faces several unique, complex problems. In the introduction chapter, three sets of overlapping problems were discussed, which have formed the bedrock of this thesis’ findings. First, activists struggle not only to determine how to go about protecting free expression, but also what this concept constitutes in the first place nowadays. Being able to define something is crucial to being able to address it, but evidently free expression comes with different meanings and priorities for different people. The second set of problems is the actual threats to and violations of free expression rights today. These are the subject of watchdogs’ reports and monitoring efforts, including supranational organizations that strive to uphold international law. These are the overt cruelties done to humans who fail to remain silent (assaults, kidnappings, killings, arrests, spurious prosecutions, etc.), and the more indirect infringements that constrain and limit (over- zealous legislation and regulation, bulk and targeted surveillance, Internet and mobile network shutdowns, filtering and blocking techniques, etc.). All of these myriad threats and violations weigh down the human spirit, hollow it out or fill it up with indignation, either way forcing behaviour changes to accommodate and/or challenge the exertion of ill-bred power and control.

The third set of problems underlies the other two; these are the range of conditions shaping and being shaped by current iterations of (post)modernity. In particular, two (post)modern predicaments test, radicalize, and muddy the free expression waters: the first is the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies, and the second is an aging liberalism deployed in increasingly conflicting fashions. Like free expression, the meaning of liberalism has become extremely unsettled, with people on all sides viewing their critics as not practicing liberal democracy in the way it was intended—and digital technologies both a cause of and solution to the resulting schisms. These predicaments have woven through each chapter, spurring activists into action, affecting their ideas, behaviours, and relationships, and intertwining with technologies of risk and uncertainty. And both predicaments are escalated by the post-9/11 preoccupation with national (in)security and (counter)terrorism, as well as the growing precarity of the neoliberal capitalist order in a world of increasing economic and political globalization.

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This thesis has explored the many ways in which risk and uncertainty are engaged during free expression activism to address these three sets of problems, as an array of actors navigate the intersection of liberalism, technology, and security—and free expression ultimately comes to mean something different today. Free expression activists work hard to foster conditions in which freedom can flourish (for both themselves and others). But it is not human rights discourse or other liberal idea(l)s that they appraise, confront, and grapple with on a day-to-day basis to conceive of their obstacles and advance their goals. Rather, it is assessments and tools built on risk-based decision-making, discursive strategies that work to identify risk and uncertainty and use them to activists’ own ends, as well as other practices and ideologies through which risk and uncertainty are enacted. The goal is often to manage or minimize risk and uncertainty, but, by engaging them so strategically, free expression activists also end up accentuating them and giving them new, heightened meaning. As Beck and Douglas (alongside their respective cohorts) showed, even when risks are external to human perception, or ‘really out there’, they still have to be selected for attention. The privacy advocates of chapter two worked hard to articulate a specific type of risk (the security state) as more dangerous than another type of risk (terrorism). The free speech advocates of chapter three positioned both state and non-state social forces (encompassing human rights discourse, UN-led globalism, and social justice movements) as a risk of calamitous proportions to free speech and society. And members of the Journalists Protection Network (JPN) spent several years slowly coming to frame and prioritize their digital insecurity as a key risk to themselves and the persecuted journalists coming to them for help.

Chapters two and three showed how risk and uncertainty were mobilized in contexts of grandly conceived crises thought to be driving Western society and (two different iterations of) liberalism towards collapse. Chapters four through six focused on more mundane (but equally important) elements of the technologies of risk and uncertainty taken up by free expression activists during bureaucratic encounters, network governance, and intersubjective experiences. And always the (post)modern condition of digital mediation produces useful opportunities— evoking notions of equal access, transnational connection, and political enfranchisement—while erecting yet other obstacles to be overcome. Digital technologies encode a key (post)modern contradiction, simultaneously providing pathways to equality and inequality alike, to the realization and destruction of liberal ideals. Indeed, it is no wonder that the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies is such a predicament, producing so much angst and

218 anxiety even as they open up new domains of life (social, economic, political) previously unimaginable. Living with this contradiction, trying to work with or against it, to understand or deny it, embrace or circumvent it, contorts humanity into unfamiliar twists and turns, always fundamentally uncertain whether humans are existing in a present and moving towards a future where liberty, equality, and even power/control (will) retain familiar meanings.

With respect to the second of the two uniquely (post)modern conditions that have become driving predicaments for free expression activists, liberalism is not only struggling to reconcile its increasingly irreconcilable iterations, their conflicting deployments marred by vitriolic disagreements (‘culture wars’ more broadly) that put the indecency and intolerance of humanity on full display. Liberalism is also struggling to adapt to the material and cultural consequences engendered by digital technologies. How is this old political philosophy and worldview supposed to integrate these emergent digital forms of information and communication (i.e., data) and the radical reorganization of life that they have wrought? How does its understandings of freedom accommodate the (still relatively new) types of power and resistance that are cultivated in/by cyberspace—and all they entail for culture, personhood, and meaning? How does liberalism go about protecting the post-human, the data subject, the dividual, who is made real and meaningful in an amalgam of flesh and bones and bits and bytes that strains the centuries-old philosophy? Questions and concerns and unknowns batter at liberalism and everyone caught in its orbit, and all the while free expression activists try to diagnose the problems and propose solutions.

As liberalism struggles along with its own conflicts and contradictions, free expression and digital technologies are perceived as offering the possibility of freedom, of perhaps finally fulfilling the promises of the centuries-old philosophy. But the darker possibilities in both are not so easily recognized or, when they are, reconciled by everyone (including activists). The combined veneration of free expression and digital technologies casts a shroud over these darker possibilities—and that shroud is challenging to penetrate. It is difficult to accept that if expression is free, then it is also free to be misused and abused; just as it is difficult to accept that digital technologies can be twisted this way and that by actors seeking to forge or consolidate power. And the prevailing semiotic ideology that positions language and action as separate from one another continues to play its part by obscuring these darker possibilities, distancing violence

219 and injury (physical, psychological) from free expression and digital technologies, and perpetuating their idealizations while fueling contention and deep-seated disbeliefs.

The entanglement of language and violence, and the semiotic ideology that hinges on the separation of speech and action, was introduced in chapter one through a discussion of the Charlie Hebdo attack and 2005 Danish cartoon controversy. The politics of outrage, spectacle, and semiotic disagreements that suffuse this type of event challenge free expression activists in the domains of liberalism and digital technologies alike. The speech-action relationship was also on display in chapter three, as the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere pathologized the speech acts of progressive liberals while denying the performativity of their own or of those who exercise the ‘right to offend’. And in chapters four through six, the interconnections between language and violence were seen more implicitly but just as viscerally, as journalists were persecuted for their reporting (i.e., a speech act leads to violence committed against its author) and the JPN came to orient to the possibility of violence resulting from the insecurity of their own data (i.e., their digital communication leads to violence committed against journalists). And throughout the emergency assistance process, its bureaucratic nature was shown to sometimes add to the suffering of journalists, as caseworkers were required to doubt and verify their persecution narratives, while pulling around themselves the opacity of professionalism and standardization as they saw fit. All of this pinpoints the fine line walked in free expression activism when trying to protect the idea(l) of language when, fundamentally, language cannot be sundered from the humans who experience it (as author or audience).

As such, activists must somehow advocate for free expression while not justifying or contributing to the harm that can result from its darker possibilities, an endeavour at which they can and do fail. Focusing on risk and uncertainty in free expression activism allows these failures and successes to be better illuminated, as well as the process through which they come about. Sometimes activists are aware of the risks inherent in free expression and digital technologies, and often they are deeply uncertain as to whether they are actually helping or hurting. Thorns and shadows plague their work, moral consciousness, and ethical commitments, not to mention the (post)modern conditions they must navigate. As with liberalism and digital technologies and bureaucracy, a gap can foment between the ideology of free expression and its enactment in practice. All the contradictions pervading (post)modern life discussed in this thesis are becoming

220 ever more articulated through culture industries and reflexive attention, with new questions of morality raised as a result. But the heightened attention does not resolve them (either contradictions or questions of morality), just as society has not resolved the risks produced by industrialization, which it strove to relieve itself of in the first place.

So free expression is, itself, a predicament. As both concept and practice, it must wrestle with co-existing hierarchical and non-hierarchical systems/structures. To be free to say what you want, think what you want, move as you want (in art, in public and private, in conformity or resistance) is a heady idea, even when it is considered a basic right. Activists prize and yearn for the non-hierarchical relations that free expression is supposed to make possible. But they also sometimes embrace the hierarchies that underlie the lofty ideals of free expression—at times aware of this embrace and other times not. The performativity of their own language, its capacity to cause harm, went unremarked. They initiated or participated in bureaucratic encounters that can alienate and destabilize just as much as they can rationalize and order. Their bureaucratic practices allowed them to pull the opacity of cold, calculative risk-based decision-making around themselves, distancing and hierarchically judging the suffering of those they were trying to help. Their encounters with the security state could make them feel like insiders (taking a peek behind the wizard’s curtain), giving them a thrill as they maneuvered and unmasked. Navigating the hallways and pitfalls of hierarchical systems/structures in order to cultivate their non-hierarchical counterparts is a slippery, and often problematic, balancing act.

As Galloway (2004) argues when discussing the new forms of power and control that digital technologies enable, resistance no longer necessarily entails dismantling dominant forces, but rather knowing how to use them for resistive purposes. This means finagling the contradictions that characterize (post)modern life. It means holding onto the heady idea of digital technologies, liberalism, and free expression, while not getting lost in the darker possibilities and obstacles. In the end, what all free expression activists try to do is imagine positive outcomes and how to achieve them, sometimes getting bogged down by the darker possibilities and obstacles while other times buoyed along by the optimistic ones. Like much of the post-9/11 world, activists try to imagine and then secure the future. But whereas the planetary project of counterterrorism seeks to close down the openness of the future—its indeterminacy and unknowability—in order to prevent a negative outcome, free expression entails openness and

221 indeterminacy (sometimes uncomfortable or painful). Openness to go right, and openness to go wrong. This tension is a perennial struggle for free expression activists.

Among risk scholars, Peter Bernstein is famously known for writing: “We are not prisoners of an inevitable future. Uncertainty makes us free” (1996:229). This proclamation has been invoked a couple times in this thesis. It is a positive take on uncertainty, a surprise in the gut that reads less surprising as you consider it. Less surprising upon first reading is Douglas’ assertion: “We are all creatures that live in uncertainty, and have done from earliest times; while we cope with uncertainty as best we can, we go on seeking certainty” (2001:148). As such, it is not so surprising that although free expression necessarily entails openness and indeterminacy, some activists can still drift towards the preference for certainty where free expression is concerned, seeing just a little more regulation as an acceptable compromise to fulfilling their particular priorities (e.g., the protection of offensive speech, the promotion of tolerance, etc.). And so the trickiness of the concept continues in a feedback loop, round and round; too much regulation defeats the purpose, but too little allows human indecency a spotlight. Give up one freedom to gain another freedom. Exchange one type of risk and uncertainty for another.

For those whose free expression rights are being overtly violated, the exchange can mean hindering another person’s pursuit of safety, security, justice, freedom. After all, risk does involve the assessment and management of acceptable losses and gains. Gregory in chapter four strategically tried to distance himself from other journalists imprisoned with him, and decided to sue his media outlet employer; emergency assistance caseworker Margot tried to distinguish Theo with Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection through a discourse of individual exceptionalism; and the free speech advocates of Canada’s political right ecosphere positioned progressive liberals as an aggressive cultural Other. To various degrees, all of these skirt the prioritization of universalism that is central to human rights ideology, showing how activists choose to set themselves or those they are trying to help apart from the general, universal human subject. Everyone may deserve basic rights, but those whose free expression rights are being violated deserve special accommodation. Unequal relations of power are established between different types of journalists/media practitioners, between sufferers of persecution and the general rights-holder, and between different types of liberals—no matter how well-intentioned are the goals.

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Free expression, then, requires sacrifice. This is a pervasive, underlying sentiment throughout the field of free expression activism. To get something, you (or someone) must give something up. To hold powerful actors to account, the journalist must be willing to face prison or death. To secure the limited resources of emergency assistance programs, one journalist must take precedence at the expense of another (typically just as deserving) journalist—the same goes for securing third-country resettlement. For a caseworker to verify a persecution narrative, invasive questioning, constant doubting, and bureaucratic opacity add to an applicant’s uncertainty and precarity. To convince the public that the security state is a greater risk than terrorism, privacy advocates must expose themselves to the risk of being targeted by state powers. Even when surveillance has not been uncovered, the paranoia and uncertainty of its possibility (regardless of likelihood) comes to permeate professional and personal lives, altering behaviours and outlooks. To protect the right to offend, minority groups will have to be hurt. To encourage tolerance, those holding controversial opinions will have to be constrained. The winners at free expression awards ceremonies are those who have sacrificed, who have felt the bite of thorn and shroud of shadow.

The morality of free expression (no matter how altruistic or humane it is in theory) is therefore not a given. How can it be when someone’s life is worsened in the name of a concept, when one person is protected at the expense of another? Time and time again in this thesis, the ethical commitments of activists and those who came to them for help shone bright. But their decisions and actions can also be morally questionable, and more words (speech, language, expression) are not always enough. All the words in the world can be shared, but still they may not equate to understanding. Find just the right combination of words, presented in just the right context, and meaning can still remain unseen and unheard, mired in disbeliefs, misinterpretations, and power-plays (old and new). In the end, free expression reveals both the strength and weakness of human imagination, of the capacity and incapacity to think outside the box of balancing acts, tensions, and feedback loops. Ultimately, its problems, its (im)morality, and the contradictions surrounding it are tied to the choices made by humans in the face of risk and uncertainty—in the face of thorns and shadows.

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CSIS 2018 Who Said What? The Security Challenges of Modern Disinformation. Canadian Security Intelligence Service. https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/csis- scrs/documents/publications/disinformation_post-report_eng.pdf, accessed July 5, 2018.

Government of Canada 2016 Our Security, Our Rights: National Security Green Paper, 2016. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, 2016. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/ntnl-scrt-grn- ppr-2016-bckgrndr/index-en.aspx, accessed June 17, 2018.

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OPC 2016 Time to Modernize 20th-Century Tools: 2015-2016 Annual Report to Parliament. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. https://www.priv.gc.ca/media/4516/ar_201516_eng.pdf, accessed September 21, 2018.

Parliament of Canada 2017 Bill C-16: An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/C-16/royal-assent, accessed July 7, 2018.

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Public Safety Canada 2017b Government Bolsters Rights and Security in Comprehensive Proposed Legislation: News Release. June 20. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety- canada/news/2017/06/government_bolstersrightsandsecurityincomprehensiveproposedleg is.html, accessed June 25, 2018.

Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott 2013 SCC 11, [2013] 1 S.C.R. 467 (CanLII). http://canlii.ca/t/fw8x4, accessed July 7, 2018.

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Andersen, Collin, and Karim Sadjadpour 2018 Iran’s Cyber Threat: Espionage, Sabotage, and Revenge. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/01/04/iran-s- cyber-threat-espionage-sabotage-and-revenge-pub-75134, accessed July 20, 2018.

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Buck, Alixandra 2016 Nothing to Hide? Study Reveals the Chilling Effect of Online Surveillance. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. March 25. https://www.cjfe.org/nothing_to_hide_study_reveals_the_chilling_effect_of_online_surv eillance, accessed June 25, 2018.

CCLA 2018a Fundamental Freedoms: Freedom of Expression. Canadian Civil Liberties Association. https://ccla.org/focus-areas/fundamental-freedoms/freedom-of-expression- 2/, accessed September 1, 2018.

CCLA 2018b Focus Areas: National Security. Canadian Civil Liberties Association. https://ccla.org/focus-areas/national-security/, accessed June 25, 2018.

CCLA, CJFE, Sukanya Pillay, and Tom Henheffer 2015 Ontario Superior Court of Justice: Notice of Application. Court File No. CV-75- 532810. https://ccla.org/cclanewsite/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Issued-Notice-of- Application-Bill-C-51-C1383715xA0E3A.pdf, accessed June 24, 2018.

CFE 2016 Is Fear of Terrorism Jeopardizing Your Rights? Bill C-51 and National Security. Centre for Free Expression, Ryerson University. https://www.cfe.ryerson.ca/key- resources/podcasts/fear-terrorism-jeopardizing-your-rights-bill-c-51-and-national- security, accessed June 25, 2018.

CIPPIC 2015 Civil Society Groups Call for Reasoned Debate on Legacy of Bill C-51. Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. November 20. https://cippic.ca/en/news/civil_society_calls_for_debate_on_C51, accessed June 25, 2018.

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CJFE 2015 Snowden Live: Canada and the Surveillance State. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. March 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvcCh4LGaaE, accessed June 25, 2018.

CJFE 2017a 150 Years On, Canadians Need to Take an Honest Look at their Country. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. June 29. https://www.cjfe.org/150_years_on_canadians_need_to_take_an_honest_look_at_their_c ountry, accessed June 25, 2018.

CJFE 2017b CJFE Poll: Canadians Confused by Fake News. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. May 3. https://www.cjfe.org/2017poll, accessed June 25, 2018.

CPJ and FPF 2018 U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Committee to Protect Journalists and Freedom of the Press Foundation. https://pressfreedomtracker.us/, accessed September 1, 2018.

Dalek, Jakub, Lex Gill, Bill Marczak, Sarah McKune, Naser Noor, Joshua Oliver, Jon Penney, Adam Senft, and Ron Deibert 2018 Planet Netsweeper: Global Scanning and Countries of Concern. https://citizenlab.ca/2018/04/planet-netsweeper/, accessed April 28, 2018.

Diederichs, Michael 2015 Why Slack is Exploding (as a Community-Building Platform). Hootsuite. July 8. https://blog.hootsuite.com/why-community-builders-are-choosing-slack/, accessed July 20, 2018.

Edwards, Adrian 2018 Forced Displacement at Record 68.5 Million. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2018/6/5b222c494.html, accessed November 1, 2018.

Forcese, Craig 2017 A Law for New Seasons: Bill C-59 from the “Big Picture” Perspective of National Security Reform. National Security Law: Canadian Practice in Comparative Perspective. June 24. http://craigforcese.squarespace.com/national-security-law-blog/2017/6/24/a-law- for-new-seasons-bill-c-59-from-the-big-picture-perspec.html, accessed June 25, 2018.

FPF 2018 Whistleblower Reality Winner Sentenced to Longest Prison Term in the History of Federal Leak Cases. Freedom of the Press Foundation. August 23.

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Freedom House 2017a Freedom of the Press 2017: Press Freedom’s Dark Horizon. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2017, accessed August 23, 2018.

Freedom House 2017b Freedom on the Net 2017: Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2017, accessed September 1, 2018.

Freedom House 2018a Freedom in the World 2018: Democracy in Crisis. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018, accessed September 1, 2018.

Freedom House 2018b Nations in Transit: Confronting Illiberalism. https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations- transit/nations-transit-2018, accessed September 1, 2018.

Geist, Michael 2016 Security Agencies Need to Fess Up About Illegal Privacy Breaches. http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/06/security-agencies-need-to-fess-up-about-illegal- privacy-breaches/, accessed June 25, 2018.

Guarnieri, Claudio, and Collin Anderson 2016 Iran and the Soft War for Internet Dominance. Presentation to Black Hat USA. https://iranthreats.github.io/us-16-Guarnieri-Anderson-Iran-And-The-Soft-War-For- Internet-Dominance-paper.pdf, accessed April 11, 2018.

Human Rights Watch 2017 World Report 2017: The Dangerous Rise of Populism. https://www.hrw.org/world- report/2017, accessed September 1, 2018.

Leadnow 2015 Join Over 45k Cdns Speaking Out to #RejectFear and Reject @pmharper's “Secret Police” Bill. Twitter. March 2. https://twitter.com/leadnowca/status/572514139253313536/photo/1, accessed June 25, 2018.

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Levant, Ezra 2017 Ezra Levant’s Staff Memo on the Alt-Right. The Rebel. August 22. https://www.therebel.media/ezra_levant_s_staff_memo_on_the_alt_right, accessed July 7, 2018.

Levant, Ezra 2018 Why Does Everyone Hate The Rebel? The Rebel. March 29. https://www.therebel.media/canada_s_media_is_obsessed_with_the_rebel, accessed July 5, 2018.

MacKinnon, Peter 2018b University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate and Dissent on Campus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Marczak, Bill, Geoffrey Alexander, Sarah McKune, John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert 2017 Champing at the Cyberbit: Ethiopian Dissidents Targeted with New Commercial Spyware. The Citizen Lab. https://citizenlab.ca/2017/12/champing-cyberbit-ethiopian- dissidents-targeted-commercial-spyware/, accessed September 1, 2018.

Marquis-Boire, Morgan, Collin Anderson, Jakub Dalek, Sarah McKune, and John Scott-Railton 2013 Some Devices Wander by Mistake Planet Blue Coat Redux. The Citizen Lab. https://citizenlab.ca/2013/07/planet-blue-coat-redux/, accessed April 11, 2018.

OCLA 2012 Founding Principles. Ontario Civil Liberties Association. September 18. http://ocla.ca/about/founding-principles/, accessed August 25, 2018.

OpenMedia 2015 Canada’s Privacy Plan: A Crowdsourced Agenda for Tackling Canada’s Privacy Deficit. https://privacyplan.ca/sites/privacyplan.ca/files/Canada-Privacy-Plan.pdf, accessed June 19, 2018.

OpenMedia 2017 If #CBSA is Committed to Maintaining a Balance Between #Privacy and #Security, We Need Some Answers First. Twitter. March 16. https://twitter.com/OpenMediaOrg/status/842445440054370304, accessed June 25, 2018.

OpenMedia 2018 Kill C-51: Can You Hear Us Now? https://killc51.ca/mp, accessed June 24, 2018.

OTF 2018 About the Program: Our Mission. Open Technology Fund. https://www.opentech.fund/about/program, accessed September 1, 2018.

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Peterson, Jordan 2018 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Random House.

Roach, Kent, and Craig Forcese 2015a Bill C-51 Backgrounder #1: The New Advocating or Promoting Terrorism Offence. February 5. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2560006, accessed June 25, 2018.

Roach, Kent, and Craig Forcese 2015b Bill C-51 Backgrounder #3: Sharing Information and Lost Lessons from the Maher Arar Experience. February 18. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2565886, accessed June 25, 2018.

Scott-Railton, John, and Katie Kleemola 2015 London Calling: Two-Factor Authentication Phishing from Iran. The Citizen Lab. https://citizenlab.ca/2015/08/iran_two_factor_phishing/, accessed April 11, 2018.

Slack 2018 Keep Your Data Secure. https://slack.com/features, accessed July 20, 2018.

Southern, Lauren 2015 You Might Be a “Cultural Libertarian” If… Rebel Media. August 27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5Oixo1eF18&feature=youtu.be, accessed July 5, 2018.

The Rebel 2015 Justin Trudeau Won. Now What? Newsletter. October 20.

Tribe, Laura 2016a OpenMedia Delivered Your Views on Canada’s Bill C-51 to Minister Goodale. OpenMedia. May 17. https://openmedia.org/en/openmedia-delivered-your-views- canadas-bill-c-51-minister-goodale, accessed June 24, 2018.

Tribe, Laura 2016b Official Complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. https://stopstingrays.org/sites/stopstingrays.org/files/Complaint_OPC_Stingrays.pdf, accessed June 24, 2018.

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UNESCO 2018 International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists: Facts and Figures 2006-2017. https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/endimpunity/resources, accessed September 1, 2018.

UNGA 2016 Seventy-First Session: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression. United Nations General Assembly. September 6. http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/71/373, accessed September 1, 2018.

United Nations 2018 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration- human-rights/, accessed September 1, 2018.

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Appendix A: Chapter 1 Supplementary Materials

Table 1.1 Canadian court cases related to free expression

Court Case/Commission Free Expression Issue Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission v Whatcott Free speech/hate speech (2013 SCC 11), concerning the constitutionality of Saskatchewan’s hate speech provision Various challenges under the Charter of Rights and Privacy and surveillance; access to Freedoms, such as the constitutionality of the anti- information; press freedom and terrorism Bill C-51 legislation and the impersonation of journalism journalists by police officers Request by CBC, The Toronto Star, and White Pine Press freedom and journalism; access Pictures to interview federal inmate Omar Khadr to information RCMP v VICE Media Canada (2017 ONCA 231) case, Press freedom and journalism; in which the law enforcement agency ordered reporter protection of sources Ben Makuch to hand over all communications between him and an alleged ISIS fighter Chamberland Commission on the Protection of Press freedom and journalism; Confidentiality of Journalistic Sources, which took place protection of sources; privacy and in the wake of 2016 revelations that at least 13 Quebec surveillance journalists were placed under (legal) police surveillance in order to ascertain the identity of their anonymous sources

Table 1.2 Organizations/research participants with strong or weak ties

Organizations based in Canada Organizations based outside Canada Ad IDEM/Canadian Media Lawyers ACOS Alliance Association Afghan Journalists Safety Committee ASL19 Amnesty International British Columbia Civil Liberties Association ARTICLE 19 Canadian Association of Journalists Bahrain Center for Human Rights Canadian Civil Liberties Association Center for Inquiry (US) Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom Committee to Protect Journalists Canadian Constitution Foundation CommunityRED Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Clinic Defenders Project Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Electronic Frontier Foundation Centre for Free Expression Euro-Mediterranean Foundation of Support to Centre for Inquiry Canada Human Rights

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Centre for Law and Democracy Foreign Correspondents Association of East Citizen Lab Africa Fahmy Foundation Free Press Unlimited Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Freedom House Québec Front Line Defenders IFEX Gulf Center for Human Rights International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group Human Rights Watch J-Source Initiative for Freedom of Expression LeadNow Institute for War & Peace Reporting Ontario Civil Liberties Association International Federation of Journalists OpenMedia International Media Support PEN Canada International Press Institute Stop C-51 International Women’s Media Foundation Internews IREX Journalists Helping Journalists Kality Foundation Localization Lab Marie Colvin Circle Media Legal Defense Initiative Nuba Reports Open Technology Fund P24 Pakistan Press Foundation PEN America PEN International Privacy International Reporters Without Borders RightsCon Rory Peck Trust Slack

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Appendix B: Chapter 2 Supplementary Materials

Table 2.1 Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s culture of secrecy

Headline Media Outlet, Author Publication Date Reverse Harper’s legacy of secrecy: Editorial Toronto Star 2016 Suzanne Legault wants to end a culture of Maclean’s, Nick 2015 secrecy. Good luck. Taylor-Vaisey Federal cabinet secrecy is being misused: Toronto Star 2015 Editorial Suzanne Legault warns of growing federal Ottawa Citizen, Lee 2014 government secrecy Berthiaume Free-speech report takes aim at Harper Maclean’s, Canadian 2013 government's ‘culture of secrecy’ Press The F-35 fiasco and Ottawa’s culture of secrecy CBC News, Brian 2012 Stewart Harper’s ‘culture of secrecy’ attacked The Globe and Mail, 2008 Jane Taber Stephen Harper’s cult of secrecy Winnipeg Free Press, 2006 Dean Jobb

Table 2.2 Liberal government statements on terrorism and national security

Statement Source “Canada is fundamentally a safe and peaceful nation…But Op-ed by Minister Ralph we are not immune to tragedy, as demonstrated by the Goodale, published in The horrible events in St. Jean-sur-Richelieu and in Ottawa in Huffington Post (Goodale 2016). October of 2014 (and elsewhere on other occasions too).” “In Canada, we are not isolated from the terrorist threat. National Security Green Paper Since the 2001 Anti-terrorism Act, threats to our domestic (Government of Canada 2016:5). and international security have continued to evolve.” “We live in a digitized and highly networked world in National Security Green Paper which technological innovation is always forging ahead, (Government of Canada 2016:18). advancing our quality of life, but also bringing new threats to our security. The same technologies we enjoy and rely on everyday - smartphones, laptops and the like - can also be exploited by terrorists and other criminals to coordinate, finance and carry out their attacks or criminal activities.” “It should come as no surprise that terrorism and violent CSIS Public Report: 2014–2016 extremism remained the most immediate threat to Canada’s (Coulombe 2017). national security during the period covered by this report,

262 and represented our top priority. The number of terrorism- related threats, the speed at which they evolve, and the use of technology and social media, has created some very real and complicated challenges for the Service.” “CSE operates in a rapidly changing technological Minister of National Defense world. The proposed CSE Act will maintain CSE’s ability to Harjit Sajjan, on the proposed Bill provide the Government of Canada with essential C-59 amendments to Canada’s intelligence necessary to protect Canadians and will help national security framework strengthen our national cyber defences, while at the same (Public Safety Canada 2017b). time increasing transparency, accountability, and oversight of these activities. ” “Ongoing technological evolution has had a significant Privacy Commissioner’s 2015-16 impact on privacy. Keeping up with all these changes has Annual Report to Parliament been a struggle, especially when operating under privacy (OPC 2016:2). legislation that predates many impactful technological innovations.”

Table 2.3 Acknowledging the risk and uncertainty of terrorism and the security state

Statement Source “We know the risks to our security are real and complex. Privacy Commissioner’s 2015- Canadians want to feel secure, but they do not want this goal 16 Annual Report to Parliament to come at any and all cost to their privacy.” (OPC 2016:4). “Nobody thinks you can reduce the risk to zero [of either Sukanya Pillay from CCLA, at terrorism or of police corruption].” an event hosted by the Centre for Free Expression (CFE 2016) “We’re entering a period of flux and uncertainty, mostly Kris Klein, managing director of caused by GDPR and ePrivacy regulation. And I think that International Association of will necessitate change in Canada.” Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Canada (Solomon 2018) “This Canada Day, Canadians will barbecue and watch CJFE (2017a), emphasis added fireworks, or make signs and protest in the streets. The important thing is that we acknowledge our problems, acknowledge our checkered history, acknowledge our uncertain future, and work to make it better.” “A word of warning: Kent and I always took the view that National security expert, lawyer, [Bill] C-51 was dealing (mostly) with real problems, but the and professor Craig Forcese solutions were so festooned with their own shortcomings that (2017) they didn’t solve the problems, but did create a host of new ones. (The speech crime was the exception: it was always a solution in search of an invented problem).”

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“What [the no-fly list] does is put people in a state of legal Faisal Bhabha on behalf of the limbo, Kafkaesque uncertainty…It has a significant National Council of Canadian disrupting effect on a person’s life, with no end in sight. You Muslims, at an event hosted by can never really figure out if you’re on it…You can’t the Centre for Free Expression challenge what you don’t know. So the Kafkaesque nature of (CFE 2016) the process is such that you’re trying to fight a moving target, or an invisible target.” “While the challenges of modern day security are real, such Joint statement demanding ‘Five proposals threaten the integrity and security of general Eyes’ respect strong encryption purpose communications tools relied upon by international (BCCLA 2017) commerce, the free press, governments, human rights advocates, and individuals around the world.” “The CCLA recognizes and supports Canada’s duty to fight CCLA (2018) against terrorist activity, to protect Canadians, and to cooperate with our allies in global counter-terror efforts.”

Table 2.4 Deploying the ‘balancing privacy and security’ discourse

Statement Source “When it comes to the balance between national security and Question asked in a CJFE poll protecting the privacy rights of Canadians, which of the (CJFE 2017b) following best reflects your personal view?” “If #CBSA is committed to maintaining a balance between OpenMedia (2017) tweet #privacy and #security, we need some answers first.” “In light of last week’s tragic events in Paris and Beirut, it’s Civil society joint statement more important than ever to strike the right balance between (CIPPIC 2015) effective security legislation and upholding Canadian democratic values.” “Maybe the Canadian public is comfortable with this Dave Seglins, CBC national balancing act between our sense of what is properly private security reporter (CJFE 2015) and the powers and capabilities of our spy agencies to surveil our various activities.” “In our democratic society, finding the appropriate balance Privacy Commissioner’s 2015- between the need for security and privacy is critical. Federal 16 Annual Report to Parliament institutions with security mandates need to be able to protect (OPC 2016:15). Canadians, but their work must be done in ways that are consistent with the rule of law.” “The Snowden revelations sparked a global debate over how Privacy expert Michael Geist to best strike the balance between privacy and security.” (2016)

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Table 2.5 Drawing on empirical findings and polls

Example Source A new U.S. study suggests that the perception of surveillance alone is Buck (2016), enough to stifle public debate and silence citizens online, particularly emphasis in dissident voices and minority opinions. The paper, published last week original in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, found that “the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.” Following a detailed study, the Council of Europe’s Legal Affairs Report by Committee concluded that “mass surveillance is not even effective as a tool OpenMedia in the fight against terrorism and organized crime, in comparison with (2015:14) traditional targeted surveillance.” The same committee found that aspects of mass surveillance, such as deliberate weakening of encryption, “present a grave danger to national security.” “The statistical chance of anyone in this room being killed, hurt, directly Tom Henheffer affected by a terrorist attack, is absolutely next to nothing. Your rights have from CJFE, at an already been massively encroached upon. So there is a hypothetical fear of event hosted by terrorist attacks somehow hitting you, and then the very real reality that the Centre for your rights in Canada are no longer as strong as they once were. You’re Free Expression already tangibly impacted by this legislation [Bill C-51].” (CFE 2016) Leadnow (2015) tweet

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OpenMedia ad in Ottawa, emphasizing the more than 50,000 Canadians who oppose the use of stingrays.

Table 2.6 Contesting ambiguous language in Bill C-51

Statement Source The phrase “terrorism offences in general” in the impugned Constitutional challenge: provision is not defined in the Criminal Code and is Notice of Application unconstitutionally vague and imprecise, in violation of section 7 of (CCLA and CJFE 2015, the Charter. The impugned provision does not provide fair notice para. 25) to citizens of the consequences of their speech or conduct. Nor does it sufficiently limit state agents charged with enforcing the provision. As such, the prohibited speech and conduct are neither fixed nor knowable by citizens in advance. The new Criminal Code provision also “captures an overly broad Constitutional challenge: and imprecise range of communications,” “captures an overly Notice of Application vague, broad and imprecise range of ‘terrorism offences in (CCLA and CJFE 2015, general’,” going above and beyond the fourteen existing terrorism para. 26, emphasis in offences, “requires only a low threshold of ‘knowingly’ and original) ‘recklessly’ as opposed to ‘willfully’ advocating or promoting terrorism,” “does not require an actual terrorist purpose,” “requires only a low threshold of possibility (i.e., “may”) that the accused’s communication result in the commission of a terrorism offense,” and “requires only a low threshold of ‘recklessness’ as opposed to ‘knowledge’ that a terrorism offence ‘may be committed as a result’ of the communication.”

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“[Section 83.221’s] meaning is far from clear. No person Roach and Forcese (including ourselves) can fairly say they know how this new crime (2015a:4) will be interpreted and applied. There are many unanswered questions.” On the definition of security used in Bill C-51: “It is, quite simply, Roach and Forcese the broadest concept of security that we have ever seen codified (2015b:7) into law in Canada.” See also Amnesty International Canada (2015), Assembly of First Nations (2015), BCCLA (2015), CAUT (2015), CBA (2015), CCLA (2015), CCPA (2015), CMLA (2015) CUPE (2015), Green Party of Canada (2015), ICLMG (2015), LUO (2015), NCCM (2015), NDP (CBC News 2015, The House 2015), OPC (2015), OPC BC (2015), OpenMedia (2015), OSCE (2015), Voices-Voix (2015).

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Appendix C: Chapter 3 Supplementary Materials

Table 3.1 A selection of free speech incidents and events in Canada

Notable Incident or Event A ruling by Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal against comedian Mike Ward for mocking a child with disabilities. In total, Ward was ordered to pay $42,000 in moral and punitive damages to Jérémy Gabriel, who has Treacher Collins syndrome, and his mother. The cancellation of a Canadian talking tour by American Roosh V (given name Daryush Valizadeh), following public outcry. The self-styled ‘pick-up artist’ was accused of promoting ‘pro-rape’, misogynistic, and homophobic behaviour. At the beginning of his Canadian tour in Montreal, Roosh V was confronted by a group of people who threw beer at him. The resignation of well-known author and journalist Andrew Potter from his McGill University position following a controversial article he wrote in Maclean’s magazine. The backlash and ensuing controversy when University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson publicly refused to use gender-neutral terms preferred by students and faculty. The passage of Bill C-16, which added prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code. Jordan Peterson’s public refusal to use gender-neutral terms was a response to Bill C-16. The divisive proposal and passage of M-103 in the House of Commons, a non-binding motion that condemns Islamophobia and religious discrimination. The motion’s passage followed months of debate and a series of protests and counter-protests across the country over whether M-103 would limit free speech or single out Islam for special treatment in Canadian law. Criminal harassment charges brought against an Ontario man named Gregory Alan Elliot for his online interactions with two women over social media. Elliot was found not guilty. After playing a YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson in her Wilfred Laurier University tutorial, teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd was reprimanded in a meeting with three superiors and told she had created a toxic environment. A secret recording of the meeting was leaked, and it was revealed no one had complained about the YouTube clip being used in the class. Shepherd and Peterson would later launch (separate) defamation lawsuits against the faculty members and university. The Law Society of Upper Canada obligated its lawyers and paralegal members to adopt a mandatory statement of principles acknowledging their duty to “promote equality, diversity, and inclusion.” The move prompts backlash and accusations of compelled speech. In Quebec, a theatre production of a show about slavery featuring a mostly white cast was cancelled, prompting controversy and debate about censorship and cultural appropriation. The broader debate about free speech at Canadian universities, which cites as vital problems the cancellation of planned events by controversial speakers due to public or institutional pressure, bans of (pro-life, nationalist, etc.) student groups from using campus spaces, and more.

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Table 3.2 Mainstream news articles published about free speech on campus

Title of Commentary or Opinion Article* Media Source You can’t say that on campus The Globe and Mail, March 2018 Anarchist professor takes on hate speech The Conversation, March 2018 Rubinoff: Free speech and the politics of progress The Record, March 2018 Not one person I talked to at Faith Goldy's free speech VICE Canada, March 2018 event could recall being silenced Faith Goldy’s talk at Wilfrid Laurier was cancelled. Toronto Star, March 2018 And a damn good thing, too Lindsay Shepherd: Why I invited Faith Goldy to Maclean’s, March 2018 Laurier Censorship is patronizing. Always has been, always CBC News, March 2018 will be: Neil Macdonald Christie Blatchford: Jordan Peterson vs. the new National Post, March 2018 freedom fighters at Queen’s University What would John Stuart Mill think about today’s The Globe and Mail, February 2018 campus free-speech debates? The Record’s view: WLU should study the Charter The Record (Waterloo Region), February 2018 Freedom of expression is under attack at The Conversation, February 2018 our universities Is Jordan Peterson the philosopher of the fake news National Post, February 2018 era? Todd: How universities, and other institutions, can Brantford Expositor (Postmedia preserve free expression Network), January 2018 Why I defended freedom of speech on campus Toronto Star, January 2018 Christie Blatchford: Case of student groups denied National Post, January 2018 funding shows unsettling force of social justice Douglas Todd: Five ways to protect free speech on Vancouver Sun, January 2018 campuses Pro-Palestinian groups are the real victims of campus Huffington Post, January 2018 censorship Terry Glavin: Abusing young, powerless teaching National Post, December 2017 assistant Lindsay Shepherd is today’s campus ‘wokeness’ Wallace: Lindsay Shepherd lays bare ideological Toronto Sun, December 2017 divide on Canadian campuses Rancour of free speech debate led gender-diverse CBC News, November 2017 people to feel unsafe, advocates say

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Barbara Kay: Campus free speech advocates owe pro- National Post, November 2017 life students their help NP View: Laurier’s apology and a petition won’t fix National Post, November 2017 the cancer on campus Campus culture wars: Universities need to rediscover Toronto Star, November 2017 the radical middle ground Commentary: Laurier’s apology isn’t enough— Global News, November 2017 students deserve commitment to free speech Jordan Peterson and the big mistake of university Maclean’s, November 2017 censors Globe editorial: Why are we killing critical thinking Globe and Mail, November 2017 on campus? Editorial: Wilfrid Laurier University insults our liberty Toronto Sun, November 2017 What’s so scary about free speech on campus? The Globe and Mail, November 2017 Opinion: Dalhousie code of conduct stifles free Chronicle Herald, October 2017 speech, violates university values Confronting racism on campus is not political Toronto Star, October 2017 correctness run amok *This table only includes articles that provide commentary or opinion about the ‘free speech on campus’ debate. It does not include articles that provide factual reports about free speech incidents or events.

Table 3.3 Progressive liberalism is a poison, disease, syndrome, or mental disorder

Comment Political correctness is just one of the many toxic derivatives of the mental disorder called “liberalism.” The mental disorder of Liberalism will break the back of Western Civilization if left unchecked. Self-imposed ignorance may be bliss for clueless libs/progs, but it is a grave danger to the rest of us. Leftist academia is quick to point out that Americans are war mongers and thus immoral. But a lot of people around the world are “free today to make their own mistakes because of it” and to spew the venom of progressivism. Where do Liberals come from? At last, we have an answer: The Liberal Gene…The unspoken message conveyed to the Liberal, the inescapable message is, upon any topic, “Why are you so ignorant?”… “How in the hell can you think like that?” It’s always felt as if there were a genetic basis to it, as if some aspect of Liberalism were biological. It is. Liberals have different genetics and brain structure. They can’t help being Liberal. Their brains influence their vision so powerfully they most often cannot break free. Brian_R_Allen: “Liberalism” (fascissoscialism) is a psychosis. Jim Oakley: I think liberal thinking is a form of brain damage and more liberal thinking causes more brain damage until it is actually a downward spiral leading eventually into a type of dementia. But I could be wrong, it could just be plain ole stupidity.

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Guilty white liberals are more a danger to Canada than ISIS. They truly believe they need to atone for their good fortune of being born white in Canada. It’s a mental illness. The Lieberals think that they can reason with an Islamic terrorist cuz the terrorists are just so misunderstood and unloved! Show them kindness and generosity and they’ll become model Canadians. They all suffer from a disease of the mind! Little sheeple who will follow the leader to their ultimate demise! Can’t think for themselves! tsigili: Liberals do not live in reality. They live in a fantasy world, which does not exist. Listening to liberals, is like listening to the insane. Ray DiLorenzo: Wow! Listening to liberals is like listening to the insane. Why didn’t I think of that? Remember, even though liberalism is a severe mental disorder, it can be defeated! A 12-Step Recovery Program for Overcoming Liberal Insanity! Modern humankind has been poisoned by the ridiculous, failed, yet highly emotive ideology called liberalism. Until we have the common sense to want to train our children how to think, we cannot be surprised when generation after generation are manipulated, twisted and poisoned to meet the desires of the Marxist elites. Let’s pray this changes before the entire world becomes enslaved under the whip hand of humanist tyranny. Why do they hate The Rebel? The CBC, Maclean’s magazine and other Trudeau shills. But also the “conservative” National Post. And even Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Conservative Party. What’s behind this outbreak of Rebel Derangement Syndrome? Last month, the Liberals and their media friends tried to kill The Rebel. They denounced us in every way possible, even suggesting that I, as a practicing Jew, was a Nazi! That was just “Rebel Derangement Syndrome” as I call it. It was laughable. And, I’m here to say: we’re alive. In fact, we’re coming back stronger than ever! This month we’re rolling out ten new shows and journalists. We start the first ones this Monday! The Rebel’s Hollywood Conservative Amanda Head discusses comedian Amy Schumer, who Amanda argues is suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Amanda explains how Schumer's “illness” is affecting her comedy. And Conrad Black has written a new book about Trump. Black is pretty much the only other journalist in all of Canada (other than us at The Rebel!) who publicly supports Trump. The rest suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. “We have to find out what force is co opting our conservative politicians…Its like a virus or something…”

Table 3.4 Progressive liberals control the mainstream media

Comment Trudeau is going to owe the media party big time for any successes coming his way from this election. The media cartel has become completely unhinged and totally corrupt in their hate fest for PM Harper. There is no truth to be obtained from anything the criminal elites preach. Sadly it is clear the majority, if not all Progs have not even taken the time to read Trudeau’s manifesto. He will have picked their pockets before they know what has hit them.

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The Rebel is the only source you can count on to provide a counterpoint to the left-wing cheerleading of the Media Party. And progressive bankruptcy gets even more obvious when it is aided and abetted by an utterly corrupt media on both sides of the Atlantic. Brian Lilley continues to bring up more reasons to sign our petition at www.SellTheCBC.ca. Did you know that the CBC used your money to promote their love affair with Trudeau? Have you seen the new anti-Harper music video that the mainstream media has been promoting? It’s called “Harperman”. It really is awful — poorly written, poorly sung. But the home-made music video has received nearly 500,000 views on YouTube, because the anti-Harper news media has been promoting it like they’re the second coming of the Beatles. 2015 was a terrible year for conservatives in Canada…But the real problem isn’t elected politicians. It’s everything else—from the left-wing media, to left-wing universities, to left-wing lawyers and judges to left-wing community organizations…I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the federal election. There’s no quick fix. But we need to start somewhere. Keep building The Rebel as a counterweight to the left-wing media. More reporters, more stories, more investigative journalism. We’ll keep telling you the other side of the story that the Media Party doesn’t. In addition to growing The Rebel, I have a new plan I’m calling Rebuild The Right. These are dark days. But the first step in fighting back is getting to the truth—and you just can’t trust the mainstream media to give you the straight goods on Trudeau, Notley or Obama.

Table 3.5 Progressive liberals control the institution of education (Ignorant progressive liberals blindly follow elites)

Comment Animals of the Liberal Left: They don’t know “why” because they were just doing what they were told to do by their handlers, and by the indoctrination throughout their young lives. The protesters were acting like animals, angry and flinging their feces (in a figurative way) because they were told to be angry, defiant, loud, and disruptive. While the elite ruling class tells them it is for the good of the community, in reality the agitators are trained animals acting to bring down their own society because they have been taught to. See where I’m going with this? Everything the Progressives do has a purpose, and usually not the one that is stated by them… It recruits a certain number of children or young people and turns them into social justice warriors, telling them they are fighting for freedom and justice. Those who won’t join the campaigns are seen as the enemy, and are forced into silence through shaming, through bullying, through acts of aggression. You are taught that everything you were was weak and pathetic, oppressive and, well, wrong or even evil. You have to change, to become one of them… They are boot-camping us, trying to rebuild us as passive liberal stooges. And this has largely been successful over the decades. Humans then become herds of sheeple—indoctrinated by enthusiasm and happy expectations for promised change and then followed and replaced by feelings of terror and panic.

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Looking at the typical millennial in this country who has been raised by parents, who following the Swedish example as promoted by blinking liberals here, plead rather than direct their useless brats to follow instructions…Add our useless liberal education system that rewards for merely participating, thereby turning out semi-literate drones with no work ethic, but a ton of notions about entitlement and brain dead expectations of retiring by 30 without having done anything. The Lieberals think that they can reason with an Islamic terrorist cuz the terrorists are just so misunderstood and unloved! Show them kindness and generosity and they’ll become model Canadians. They all suffer from a disease of the mind! Little sheeple who will follow the leader to their ultimate demise! Can’t think for themselves! To me PC is a political tool used by the tyranny minded to bully and shame people into accepting things that are patently false. It is evil. Until we have the common sense to want to train our children how to think, we cannot be surprised when generation after generation are manipulated, twisted and poisoned to meet the desires of the Marxist elites. Universities used to be institutions of higher learning. They’ve made a mockery of learning and teaching valuable skills for society, by switching to the indoctrination of a gender-less and creepy group-think society. God help us!

Table 3.6 Progressive liberals do not live in reality

Comment A Short Lesson in Radical Liberal Politics: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. Perception is reality. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization. The upshot is that organizations will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. tsigili: Liberals do not live in reality. They live in a fantasy world, which does not exist. Listening to liberals, is like listening to the insane. Maybe this entire country has an identity crisis, and we’re going through insanity because we really don’t like who we are – so we’re trying to change it. Stop that. Or to put it less politely: Quit pretending and start living in reality! The whole country needs to do that, but I don’t see how we can do it as a nation if we refuse to do it as individuals. It is more important for the powers that be, in order to protect their exalted chairs of power, that the narrative they sell is abided by. If anything falls outside the rhetoric, the issue is labeled under a new name, covered over, stalled, buried or the messenger attacked as being racist, etc. So the disconnect between reality and what leadership claims grows wider and wider…In fact, not a day goes by where there are not 5-6 instances of disparate rhetoric crashing head on into reality. Prime ministers with good looks addicted to Selfies are rarely ever honest enough to show their plebes reality, especially when the $1-billion-a-year-taxpayer-funded CBC make them their pets. I can’t even begin to start to imagine why Trudeau lives so hidden from reality, buried in his own

273 mind. It seems he is intentionally trying to destroy what has taken Canadians 140 yrs to build. He is going to destroy it in less than four and hand it gleefully to Islam. He hates Canada and anything that might be conceived as being Canadian. I suspect he might have the beginnings of dementia as he is nearly unable to utter a complete flowing sentence. His reasoning for establishing Muslim military bases within Canada are possibly bordering on treason, and all without any Muslim support other than Alghabra and the other jihadist Liberals. I am truly afraid for what used to be Canada. I want to comment on PC = BS. To me that can be proven mathematically’. PC = RC. (Reality challenged) and obviously RC = BS. PC = RC = BS can be stated as PC = BS. To me PC is a political tool used by the tyranny minded to bully and shame people into accepting things that are patently false. It is evil. Time to snap out of your lefty/pc coma and get a dose of REALITY! BTW, aren’t there enough liberal/left/ politically correct media out there to lull you with their never ending lies, fairytales and half truths??

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