Translator: Charlotte Mason
Reviewer: Hélène Vernet In your opinion, who knows you the best? Boys are going to say, "Mum!" of course,
or it could also be your partner. You've lived together for so long,
he or she should know you perfectly. Yes, usually, our loved ones
are the ones who know us best. Yet, a recent study showed that 250 likes on Facebook was enough -
although it is still not many - to render an algorithm
more reliable than your loved ones for assessing your personality. Simply put, not only does Facebook
know your gender, your IQ, your sexual and political orientations, but Facebook also knows
your psychological profile fairly well. This is something quite far-reaching. Unfortunately, today things
are going even further. What about your search engines? Every day, you consult the famous
Google, Yahoo and Bing, all these big commercial search
engines we rely on in our daily lives. When we're on Facebook,
we know we're in a public space, and so we tend to self-censor. But when we ask our search engine,
we basically assume that we're anonymous, so the searches we make
on Google or the like are potentially very intimate. Here's an example from a famous leak
from a few years back: "Impossible to sleep
with a husband who snores" "How many online
romances lead to sex?" "How to get to the Omni hotel
in San Antonio from Houston?" and "How to make a man
crazy with desire for you?" All of this is extremely explicit. Knowing that big search engines
have this type of information on us is kind of spooky, but it gets even more serious, because the very foundations
of democracy are at risk. Since Snowden's revelations, we know
that the American security services set up a vast surveillance system
of the masses on a global scale, on a global scale! Keith Alexander, who directed
the NSA at the time, even said, "My goal is to listen
to the entire global internet." It's a mistake to think
this movement is confined to the US. Let me remind you of the debates
in France, last year or two years ago, about the Surveillance Bill,
and of all the laws that have been adopted
across Europe in recent years. We are in the middle
of a fundamental qualitative change. It is important that you understand that for the first time
in the history of humanity, states are able to track
their entire populations. And out of a simple natural inclination, not out of a desire for dictatorship
or absolute control, just out of a simple natural inclination,
it is what they are trying to do. Now to quote [Jennifer] Granick,
a legal expert at Stanford University, secrets, lies, and the power to apply pressure
that mass surveillance confer are incompatible with a democratic
government of, by and for the people. Yet, this is what
we are currently living through. Now you can tell me
that you have nothing to hide - you and me don't have
anything to hide indeed. And yet, we put curtains on our windows. Why? Well, it is not because we want
to hide illegal or immoral activities, but simply because humans
need moments of privacy. There are moments
when we need to be alone in order to engage in certain activities. It's part of humans' basic needs. Without going as far as that famous phrase "If you have nothing to hide,
you've got nothing to fear," still, there are situations
that make us wonder. Let's take the example of Fitbit, those wristbands connected to the internet
that track our physical activity. Among the physical activities
Fitbit can track, we find sexual activities
since they use up calories - to a smaller or greater amount,
but they still do. Now giving the details of our sex life
to a private company, well, it's a matter of personal decision, but when, after mishandling your profile - meaning you mishandling your profile,
not someone hacking it or whatever - the details of these sexual activities
become freely accessible on the internet as you can see, just
through a simple Google search, then, the issue takes on a new dimension. Just think of your boss who notices that you are
strangely lacking in concentration during your work hours. Also think of all these structures,
all the credit institutions and insurers that don't stop and will not stop using our digital traces on the internet to select the less risky clients
and thus the more profitable. I'm speaking of our beautiful democratic
countries where fundamentally - although I consider
there's a danger for democracy - we are still free people, but it is far worse
in dictatorial countries. China is currently developing
what they call the "social credit system." It's a system that gives
or takes points from you according to your activity,
to your behavior. And it's a system
that is very largely based on online activities. If your behavior conforms
to the Party's wishes - because that's what
this is all about - you earn points, that is benefits
in shops, on transport, and even some degree
of priority in hospitals. On the other hand,
if your behavior is deviant, you lose points, you are punished. A critical journalist, Liu Hu, is now finding himself
unable to do his job because he has completely
lost access to his social networks, and it is hard for him to move around. It can get even worse
since it's a matter of life and death. Countless internet activists
have been or are still imprisoned. Some, like Bassel Khartabil,
have been executed. Bassel Khartabil was executed
in 2015 by the Syrian regime. How to fight against these abuses, against the normative pressure
mass surveillance imposes, against this well-known
phenomenon that makes us, when we are watched or know we're watched, modify our behavior even unconsciously in order to conform to what
we think of those who surveil us? How can we protect
freedom of speech on the internet and the freedom of information? How can we restore a free internet? Well, the answer is going to surprise you because the darknet is above all
known as part of the underworld where absolutely
unspeakable things happen. That's true, but the darknet
is much more than that. Darknet is first and foremost
a tool for freedom. Now what is a darknet
since there are so many? Basically, we call "Darknet"
all the internet's subareas where we can communicate
anonymously. Its principal is quite simple: instead of connecting you directly
to the service you want to view, your connection pass
through various proxies that then hide its origin. You probably know
the most famous one, Tor network, that wasn't developed
by the Russian mafia but by the American army
in the early 2000s. Tor is very easy to use, all you need to do
is to upload the Tor Browser, in order to both access
the famous dark web and surf the open web anonymously. The dark web, so well-known,
which you've heard so much about, where you find the infamous
black market for drugs etc., makes up less than 3% of Tor's traffic. More than 97% of Tor's bandwidth is used to go on the open web, thus to get around censorship, thus to avoid surveillance. The key promoters of the darknet
once again are not the big mafias but the big journalist organisations, starting with RSF,
Reporters without borders. RSF provides what they call
the "digital survival kit." A digital survival kit is just a set
of tools to access the darknet. You're a war correspondent,
an investigative journalist, you need to protect your sources,
and you need to protect yourself. To do so, the darknet
is an invaluable tool. You're a whistleblower. I'm thinking of WikiLeaks
but also all the whistleblowing that has taken place
during those last few years. Thanks to the protection
of the darknet, a vast number of scandals
have come to light, particularly concerning tax evasion. The darknet is a tool to fight
against abuses by the powerful. Then, believing that mass spying is confined to the surveillance
of populations, is a mistake. Intelligence agencies also
take part in economic espionage. On the screen, you can see a facsimile of the order given
to the NSA to spy on France. If you are a big structure, you can afford to provide
yourself with secure systems. But if you are an SME,
if you're a technology startup - I come from Grenoble
which has a lot of them - you don't have the means
to buy these tools. With the darknet,
you can get, at a lower cost - we're talking about open source
softwares that are generally free - tools that enable you to communicate
both anonymously and confidentially. The darknet is a tool
to protect businesses. Finally, the darknet is of course
a tool for dissidents. By "dissident" I mean societal dissidence
as well as political dissidence. What do I mean by "societal dissidence"? You're aware that homosexuality
is outlawed in many countries, including in Africa. The African homosexual communities use the darknet
in order to exist as communities, to organize and communicate
safe from surveillance. And of course the darknet
is a tool for political dissidents because it's a tool that enable them
to hide from surveillance. When he was working on
the emerging controlling society, this society that will replace the disciplinary society
we're still living in, Deleuze, following Foucault, Burroughs
and others, stated among other things, "Faced with future forms
of incessant control in open spaces, it may be that the hardest seclusion seems to us to belong
to a wonderful and benign past. The important thing will perhaps be
to create vacuoles of non-communication, switches, in order
to escape that control." The darknet is precisely
one of these vacuoles, one of those switches. So faced with this controlling society arising from the generalization
of the Internet, faced with this glass house
in which "they" try to force us to live, the darknet is an essential tool
for protecting today's freedoms, and even more so tomorrow's freedoms. In this sense, it shouldn't
be called "darknet," but really "freenet". Thank you. (Applause)
