Powerful groups can and do lean on platforms to affect these decisions on who can say what in popular digital squares, notably in the case of mediating threats to established regimes. We will just have to watch how platforms and power centers decide to navigate the communications controls imposed on this seeming new order in its former satellite state.
The case of WhatsApp provides a more concerning possibility in the way governments may decide to react to yet another ascendancy of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. The Facebook-owned messaging app maintains the same policies against platforming known terrorists as its other networks. At least, on paper. Because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, determining which accounts are Taliban-operated is not as straightforward as on the social networking giant’s plaintext platforms.
Many reports suggest that the Taliban is a snappy WhatsApper, disseminating news and propaganda to reassure perhaps frightened Afghanis of their intentions. For instance, the Taliban operated a complaints desk in Kabul for residents to report violence and looting. Once WhatsApp identified the account, it shut it down.
Facebook does not seem to enjoy the fact that a rogue terrorist-designated state has chosen one of its products to operate a customer service hotline. It has argued that it is constrained in its reprisals because of the encryption built into the app. Beyond simply disabling the service in Afghanistan, which would also lock out Afghanis and foreigners that might be using the app for their own non- or anti-Taliban activities, there is only so much that the company can do.
This is precisely the kind of unfortunate technological edge case that governments use to argue that encryption technologies must have “backdoors” for insiders to access secure communications. It happens after terrorist attacks, civil unrest, and unauthorized capitol ingress. It is only a matter of time until policymakers are tempted to use the Taliban as yet another excuse to break encryption technologies.
Although the threatening justifications may change, the technological trade-offs are the same as they were during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s. Changing encryption to allow governments to snoop at their leisure makes everyone less secure.
Firstly, it’s technically dubious, and maybe impossible, to design the kind of backdoor system that would make both governments and technologists happy.
But even if such a unicorn system was devised, it would only be as secure as government cyber practices—which is to say, it would be insecure. Just last week, we learned that the foremost experts on nation-building in the State Department had succumbed to a major hack amidst the Afghan chaos. Yet somehow the chronically breach-prone U.S. government is expected to be able to protect a holy grail golden key that would allow unauthorized groups to take this Eye of Sauron for a spin at their leisure. Not even the National Security Agency can keep its stockpile of strategic exploits secure.
It’s not just communications, either. Cryptocurrencies are another kind of encryption technology that allow for secure data transfer—money, in this case. Financial deplatforming is another way that the United States government has exerted control over enemy groups like the Taliban.
Most people are familiar with the U.S.’s communications surveillance program that kicked off with the USA PATRIOT Act. Fewer understand that the U.S. has a corresponding financial surveillance and sanctions infrastructure enhanced by that same act to track and control the flow of money as well. As with the communications surveillance programs exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, financial surveillance ensnares millions of innocent people in a government panopticon while often not even catching the targets for which it was erected.
Financial surveillance works by mandating that third-party services like banks collect information on all transactions that fit a certain profile. Cash transactions, which are “peer-to-peer” or direct, are largely exempt from this kind of surveillance.
Direct cryptocurrency transactions, which are peer-to-peer like cash, should be treated like cash transactions in law. And indeed, in the United States, financial surveillance regulations have so far been largely imposed on third party facilitators just like our established system. Yet internationally, this is not always the case, and governments are seeking to ensnare most or all cryptocurrency transactions in this financial dragnet. Worryingly, proposals emanating from Congress and the Treasury Department would also try to subject direct cryptocurrency transfers to extreme financial surveillance.
The ascendancy of the Taliban could provide another justification for more controls on cryptocurrency. U.S.-aligned financial institutions have already started choking Afghanistan of capital channels. Innocent Afghans will be hurt, and commentators are noting that cryptocurrency is on the rise in their country. It will only take one story of a possibly Taliban-aligned actor using bitcoin for anti-cryptocurrency actors to pounce. But using digital cash to protect privacy and security should be seen as a fundamental human right, and we should defend it with the equivalent fervor.
The justifications may change with the crisis of the week, but the reality that breaking secure and private technologies will make everyone less safe remains the same. What is happening in Afghanistan is terrible, but it is no excuse to give the government more power over technology. Don’t fall for it.
is the Director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Fla. Her work focuses on emerging technologies, cryptocurrency, surveillance, and the open internet.