Free Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

timing of disease outbreaks.Simply by collating the number, location, and frequency of search queries for symptoms, insight of planetary significance and proportions is gained. If enough users in Chicago or San Francisco simultaneously search for information about a fever, Google can spot a virus before it spreads with a greater degree of accuracy than tools specifically designed to issue early-warning alerts employed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
    This ability to identify large-scale patterns can lead to new opportunities for humanitarian aid and development assistance, even in the most impoverished and dangerous of environments. In Haiti, for example, researchers used mobile-data patterns to monitor the movement of refugees and health risks following the massive hurricanes that slammed into that small island country in 2010. Crowd-sourcing data through the Ushahidi platform – a free and open-source software tool developed for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping after the 2008 Kenyan election – is used to monitor elections, conflicts, and numerous other issues around the world. The LRA Crisis Tracker usescrowd-sourced data plotted on Ushahidi from radios distributed to local communities and other means to monitor atrocities undertaken by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), responsible for one of the most ruthless insurgencies in Africa. Each LRA-related incident is plotted on a map by type – civilian death, injury, abduction, looting – and once consolidated, the map shows the movements of the LRA across the region, and the scope, scale, and frequency of its actions. Incidents captured by cellphone cameras are linked to specific events on the website as corresponding evidence.
    In Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya’s largest slum, an experiment in crowd-sourcing data may revolutionize access to basic health care and sanitary services. Conditions in Kibera are dire: most residents are illegal squatters, and local officials regularly withhold basic services, including electricity, sewage treatment, and garbage collection. The most important commodity, water, is extremely scarce – turned on and off by capricious officials, and grossly overpriced by private dealers. Despite the poverty, over 70 percent of Kiberans have mobile phones. They are cheap, plentiful, and can save lives.Researchers at Stanford University are testing an app called M-Maji (“mobile water” in Swahili), which sends users text messages with up-to-date information on the location, price, and quality of water available from different vendors. They believe that this project can be replicated in impoverished communities around the world.
    There are countless examples of big data being used to achieve such social goods, but such a rapid transformation of a global communications environment rarely avoids unanticipated negative consequences. To understand these, we need first to understand the political economy of big data, and this boils down to a simple question: Why are we able to use Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and other cyber services for free?
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    “There is no free lunch,” the old saying goes, and to that we should add “and no free tweet, either.” The business model of big data rests on the repurposing of that which all of us routinely give away. Not surprisingly, the market to harvest the digital grains of sand on that constantly expanding beach has exploded: companies of all shapes and sizes systematically pick through our digital droppings, collating them, passing them around, inspecting them, and feeding them back to us. And this market shows no sign of slowing. In 2012, the open-source analyst firm Wikibon reported thatthe big-data market stood at just over $5 billion and predicted that it will grow to $50 billion by 2017. ISPs, web-hosting companies, cloud and mobile providers, massive telecommunications and financial companies, and a host of other new digital market organisms digest and