When Privacy Of Information Transport Was Attacked 70 Years Ago

The privacy of how you receive information is just as sensitive, and just as fragile, as the information itself. This may seem counterintuitive, but there are several examples to prove it. Let’s learn a little from history.

Since a couple of centuries back, we have something called the Freedom of the Press in the Western world. Nobody can really prevent you from printing news and other information that you believe to be true, described from your own angle, and distribute it. At least, that’s been the idea.

For as long as there has been this Freedom of Press, those in its crosshairs – various forms of powerholders – have tried to suppress it. A famous quote by George Orwell, the author of 1984, points out that “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is PR.” Therefore, powerholders have used everything and anything in their power to attack and suppress this brittle Freedom of Press.

For example, we recently learned, courtesy of Wikileaks, that an Australian court has banned not just all reporting on a particular multi-country corruption, but also on the gag order itself – a so-called “superinjunction”. This is a fairly new phenomenon. But most times, the freedom to report on news isn’t attacked directly – as the Wikileaks example shows, secrets are hard to contain, and once news is out of the gag order, those not bound by it will report all and everything about it.

So let’s look at a time from World War 2 instead. During that time in Sweden, a particular brand of socialism was considered so dangerous to society, that powerholders really really really didn’t want their newspapers to be read. But Freedom of Press was in the Constitution – they could not legally ban the newspapers from being printed. So what they did instead was to attack the transport of the newspapers.

In a newly made-up law to get around Freedom of the Press, they banned public transport (trains) from being used to distribute certain named newspapers. This was intended to make it impossible for those newspapers to get distributed at all, and therefore, prevent dangerous ideas from taking hold and prevent embarrassing news from coming out. What happened instead was that volunteers organized to distribute the newspapers by other means, so the ban on transporting information wasn’t particularly effective.

There’s a lot to learn here, because this is repeating today. You can’t really separate the privacy of information itself from the privacy of its transport, to begin with. No information is safer or more secure than its means to reach you. This is exactly what’s happening on and with the Internet, right now, today.

So what happened with that particular attack on Freedom of the Press? As a result of what politicians learned of their own abuse of power, they made new laws, saying that a distributor is required to distribute newspapers even if the newspapers were obviously illegal. That’s a very strong – not to say extreme – legal language, and a very strong protection: the word “obvious” is a very high bar to meet, and even then, the distributors are required to keep distributing. We’re not there for the Internet yet, with laws requiring ISP to distribute all content equally even if it’s obviously illegal. Hopefully we’ll get there; right now, we’re instead going in the opposite direction, with various courts deciding that vested interests have a right to prevent things they don’t like being distributed. History does repeat itself.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.