Nithin Coca
Articles by Nithin Coca
Inside Indonesia's fight to save its most important soil
Often referred to as one of the world's most important ecosystems, it's also one that's rapidly disappearing in bogs across the planet. While Indonesia's peatlands store more carbon than anywhere else in the world, they have been severely degraded. Once it's dry, peat can burn.
Open source hasn’t made tech more open
There are two institutions dominating the top of the tech food chain today. On one side are big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, as well as China's big three of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. Alongside them are the massively funded, heavily staffed global cyberpowers -- most notably the US, China and Russia -- who are seeking to monitor and control information flows online in the name of national security or political control. Both are intertwined. Sometimes intimately, as in China, where an Orwellian social credit system is taking shape, and private companies are becoming indistinguishable from the state's apparatus. In the US, tech companies are now the biggest lobbyists and political donors in Washington, while in Russia there is a battle against the message app Telegram. Together, these forces control the vast majority of information that flows online, either through data gathering, surveillance or censorship. There is an opposition: Small, often bare-budget operations run by hackers, nonprofit activists and volunteers. These open-source, decentralized projects and cooperative alternatives aim to protect user security and provide them greater control of their personal data. Some, like Tor or Signal, aim to encrypt and protect digital communication from the peering eyes of governments and corporations. Others, like Orchid, Dat or Blockchain-based protocols such as Ethereum want to return the web to it's initial, decentralized roots. Whether or not they get more people to adopt their alternatives could determine whether the years-long trend toward greater corporate and governmental control of data will continue. At stake is nothing less than the future of the internet itself. "We need to find a way to balance our own privacy and security and the data economy we have built," said Mark Surman, executive director at the Mozilla Foundation. "We need to look at ways that both companies and governments are reigned in."
China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants
In July 2009, deadly riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China. Nearly 200 people died, the majority ethnic Han Chinese, and thousands of Chinese troops were brought in to quell the riots. An information battle soon followed, as mobile phone and internet service was cut off in the entire province. For the next 10 months, web access would be almost nonexistent in Xinjiang, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of more than 20 million. It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever. That event, which followed similar unrest in neighboring Chinese-ruled Tibet in 2008, was the sign of a new phase in the Chinese state's quest to control its restive outer regions. The 2009 shutdown was the first large-scale sign of a shift in tactics: the use of technology to control information. "Xinjiang has gotten little attention, but this is where we're really seeing the coming together of multiple streams of technology [for surveillance] that just hasn't happened in other contexts before," said Steven Feldstein, fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Nine years later, Xinjiang has seen the widespread implementation of sophisticated high-tech surveillance and monitoring technology, what BuzzFeed called "a 21st century police state." But what happens in Xinjiang does not stay in Xinjiang. The technologies piloted there are already spreading across all of China, and there are even early signs that Chinese companies are beginning to sell some of this technology to other authoritarian-minded countries. If this trend continues, the future of technology, particularly for those in the Global South, could more resemble what's happening in Xinjiang than developments in Silicon Valley.
The missing trade war against China’s digital protectionism
Earlier this summer, the Trump administration took its first concrete step toward what some think could turn into an all-out trade war with China. The product that it put an import tax on? Aluminum foil. Like the Obama administration, which took action against China's subsidies to auto parts manufacturers and withholding of rare earth exports that are crucial to tech manufacturing, Trump seems focused on physical goods. But China's main trade barrier against the US isn't on manufactured or raw goods; rather, it targets Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the bulk of the multi-billion-dollar, fast-growing tech sector. Many of these companies have been facing market access issues in China for years due to the blocking or censoring of their digital content or tools, likely costing them billions in potential revenue.
Technology is failing to create transparent supply chains
During the early days of globalization, it was relatively easy for corporations to either hide, or be ignorant of, human rights and environmental atrocities committed along their supply chain. Factories and producers were shifting manufacturing or sourcing of raw materials to an increasingly complex network of suppliers, but there was no incentive to look into how a supplier produced, for example, raw cotton or shoe soles. As long as the price was cheap and the quality was good, companies saw little need to ask further questions. That changed, though, in the early '90s, when nonprofits and journalists began to undercover vast labor and environmental issues connected to suppliers of large corporations, shining a spotlight on the dark side of the global consumer market. This led to the development of an array of supply chain technologies -- RFIDs, remote sensing, satellite monitoring, even blockchain-based tools. Many were marketed as solutions, aimed at making it easier to monitor and respond to human rights and environmental violations along supply chains. The results, however, have been mixed.
The high-tech war on Tibetan communication
Each year, March 10th in Tibet brings more police onto the streets, closer online censorship of terms like "Free Tibet" and "Dalai Lama" and a spate of cyberattacks. "Every March 10th, almost all major Tibetan organizations in Dharamsala are targeted with Distributed Denial of Service and other cyber attacks," said Tenzin Dalha, a researcher at the Tibet Policy Institute, part of the Central Tibetan Administration. Four years ago, that happened to the Voice of Tibet (VOT), a nonprofit media outlet run out of the Indian hill town of Dharamsala, bringing its website down for several days. The reason for the crackdown is that the date commemorates March 10th, 1959. On that day, rumors spread in the Tibetan capital Lhasa about the impending arrest of Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, by the Chinese, who had invaded the territory in 1950. Tibetans rallied to support their spiritual leader and the mass protests led to a violent crackdown. The Dalai Lama and his entourage escaped to India, where he and the Tibetan government-in-exile remain. When VOT started in 1996, it was one of the few channels of communication between Tibetans and their government-in-exile across the border, as all newspapers, television and other print materials were heavily censored. Using shortwave radio, it transmitted its news service across the border into Chinese-occupied Tibet, both in Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese.