For the past few weekends, I’ve been gradually deleting information from my Facebook account. Each Sunday, a few more photos come down. That’s because I read Rebecca MacKinnon’s call to arms, Consent of the Networked, which shows that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are acquiring the size and power of nation-states, but without the democratic accountability or transparency citizens may demand of the states that govern them. Mackinnon asks, “How do we make sure that people with power over our digital lives will not abuse that power?”

Mackinnon started out as a CNN reporter, later bureau chief in China, and watched as digital communications rose to power in one of the world’s most sophisticated autocracies. In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking examination of the troubled relationship between states and the internet, many case stories come from China, including those of jailed bloggers, internet activists, and the effective use of the Great Firewall to manufacture consent.

MacKinnon’s experience with such activists, and her wide contacts in the world dissidents, helps her to see past the hype about “Twitter revolutions” to look at how activists actually use internet tools as part of the hard work of building movements – and how states sometimes turn those tools against them.

One of the most chilling cases she shares is from Russia, in which an activist who donated to a dissident blogger’s cause through a Paypal-like online payment system, Yandax.money, then got a call from a mysterious person who began questioning her about the financial transaction. Mackinnon writes,

A few days later the BBC Russian service reported that Yandex.money had handed over the financial and personal records belonging to [the blogger’s] donors to the Russian secret service, or FSB. When queried by journalists, Yandex executives explained that they had no choice in order to remain in compliance with Russian law.

If Yandex, why not Paypal, or for that matter, Chase Bank?  As Mackinnon points out, US law may be relatively strict about searches of physical homes, but it is worryingly vague and out of date in regulating information searches  – for instance, your purchases on Amazon could be even easier for the FBI to access than your searches at the local library.

Thus, many of her most chilling examples come from US-based companies whose size and economic clout begins to rival small countries:

When a corporate giant like IBM derives two-thirds of its revenue from outside its home US base, with only one-quarter of its workforce living in the US, the conventional power politics of nation-states is disrupted by the emerging power of the private sector.

Companies like IBM and Facebook (Mackinnon really raises a lot of concerns about Facebook) are, Mackinnon writes, governed by privileged and educated tech geeks who have a fierce stated commitment to transparency –but may combine that with cluelessness about the risks faced by rights activists or others in less privileged positions, whose lives may be devastated in a flash by an arbitrary new internet company policy that makes previously “private” information public.

This brings us back to Mackinnon’s original question, “How do we make sure that people with power over our digital lives will not abuse that power?” Though she touches on various initiatives, these have generally had weak results so far. So Mackinnon doesn’t really answer that question; but she does make a compelling case that we urgently need to find an answer.

Mackinnon is visionary in outlining new area for conflict over power (“land grabs” for domain names, eg), has encyclopedic knowledge of internet censorship in different countries, and is great at explaining tech stuff in accessible language. I will surely return to this as a reference next time someone asks me about censorship in Egypt, ICANN, etc.

However, I’m not clear exactly what she is calling on “netizens” to do – Consent of the Networked is a call to arms but not a call to action. She writes, “Democracy was never advanced by people asking politely,” but after reading the book I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to ask for. Not click “I agree” on software terms of use? Email snarky messages to Mark Zuckerberg? Start some kind of digital alliance?

Thus I’ve been doing one of the few things I can: one by one taking my photos down from Facebook.

It’s more a symbolic move than anything else but it’s a start. If readers have other ideas for ways to take more effective action, please share your thoughts.