The Use of Computers to Support Oppression

You made it bad by supporting them and then made it even worse by cutting support really fast and isolating them.

It's amazing how you got the worst outcome possible. Glad they more or less survived it anyway. It could me much worse.

My family made extensive use of IBM computers and technology in their ANTI-apartheid activities.

They wrote speeches with Wordperfect and Wordstar on IBM XTs.

They saved them to Verbatim floppy disks, printed them out on Epson and HP printers, faxed them with imported fax machines (Canon?), scanned for viruses with McAfee antivirus, shredded evidence with imported shredders, and powered it all with no doubt dubiously imported UPSes and petrol generators.

Then they used US Robotics modems and PCAnywhere with encryption software (2) to transmit files to people both around South Africa and overseas.

They used personal-database software to keep track of press articles and potential supporters overseas, and then used Lotus 123 to calculate where the money was going.

They used the international telephone system (Gasp! Technology!) and Swiss Bank accounts (I think - I was never sure on where the banks were) to transfer money that supported anti-apartheid causes.

They also smuggled people over the border, no doubt using foreign-manufactured cars, airplanes, and perhaps foreign weapons in the process.

Did my family help more than having a computer system run the Pass system hurt? Absolutely not - but I like to think that by having access to some of this technology things changed for the better sooner.

Somehow in this history I've picked up a healthy anti-respect for authority, a view that some things can be used for both good and evil, and a fundamental respect for the power of computers. Balance in all things.

1. Many of your friends no doubt earned their pocket money by cleaning the yard and taking out the trash. I earned mine by shredding hundreds of pages of activist documentation for my grandmother.

2. The encryption software they used was dumbed down thanks to US ITAR export rules, probably putting the lives of countless good people in danger.

I'd phrase my core logic as this. Historically, most really big things, great or terrible, have been done by centralized states. Central to state-building, though, is the concept of legibility: making information about the world understandable to the State and making it so that the State can efficiently use and act on that information to enact its will on the world. And technology--particularly telecommunications, including spoken language, counting, writing, roads, the printing press, arithmetic, ship building, radio, all the way up to computer programming--is all about legibility. Every advance in technology extends the State's power, and that continues today.

That's why Lenin could hop on a train in 1917 and drop straight into absolutist Russia without anyone in charge noticing. Then in the 1980s the apartheid government had the ability to effectively track the movements and contacts of dissidents and activists. And today the US federal government can call up a couple contacts and know everything about you, from how many times a week you get a coffee from the store at the corner to what you were thinking and searching for online on January 4, 2010, after lunch.

I'd agree that it was unrealistic for me to say we can direct how technology will end up being used. It's obviously true that you can't really direct it, nor can you really avoid it by ignoring it and hoping it goes away. What's now important for being proactive is building technology that will make human actions less legible and less subject to control by external forces.

Why not? There is not one infallible way to ensure a technology is used for good and you never know in advance but it is not a reason to stop trying. I'd say for example that open formats and protocols are more likely to generate less evil than their counterparts.