Introduction: Information Technology— Tool for State Security or a Civil Rights Concern?

According to Freedom House, global Internet freedom is in its ninth year of decline as of 2019. The United States is in its third year of decline and it was determined China had the worst Internet freedom abuses in the world. This declaration is a direct contradiction of the space that Sir Tim Berners- Lee— the inventor of the World Wide Web— thought he had created. Along with other early web developers and users, Sir Berners-Lee's goal of decentralization according to the World Wide Web Foundation (2020) was to create “freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance.” However, this has been replaced with a trend “toward illiberalism, exposing citizens to an unprecedented crackdown on their fundamental freedoms” (History of the World Wide Web, 2020). When the Internet was created, it was exported with the fundamental ideals of democracy. It would be a space where people could collaborate, inform, and connect. However, as Julie E. Cohen has made clear in her book Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism neoliberal forces have morphed this changing technology and the laws meant to regulate it to align “with the efficiencies that powerful interests have identified and the rationalizations they advance to frame particular kinds of change as desirable” (Cohen, 2019, p. 4). Could this shift be the result of the ideas laid out in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in which John Perry Barlow, a cyberlibertarian and philosopher, states, “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here?” (ibid., p. 238). Was it the September 11 attacks and the “age of terror” that created this dichotomy as sociology professor and director of the Surveillance Studies Center David Lyon states in Surveillance after September 11 or is it the change in global competition and the shift from conventional warfare to cyberspace with the Internet posing a threat to “the right of a state to govern itself without external interference,” as James Andrew Lewis (2018), director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggests? Regardless of the cause, this trend's supporters are in favor of increased state security due to the role international terrorism still plays in the world.