Hong Kong protesters challenge surveillance with apps and umbrellas

Zeynep Tufekci: I don’t think so — if anything, today they’ve issued an apology. They had a lot of discussions in their forums … This is a bunch of very young people. Most of them haven’t slept [for five days] — they’re at the airport trying to get heard. It feels like a hopeless thing; it was a very high stress situation, and today, there’s a lot of soul searching. As in, how did we get to this point?

There is a lot of fear because they feel a lot of the ones I talk to, feel like the world doesn’t care about them — China’s too important. And a bunch of young people trying to keep democratic rights or demands feel like they’re being treated like a nuisance by the world. So they feel — from what I can see — that it’s quite futile, but they’re just going to go down the best they can and try.

Obviously what happened was terrible, but what I’m seeing is a lot of efforts that are out to discredit the whole demand — the demands being quite reasonable.

There’s universal suffrage, independent inquiry, and releasing arrested protesters — you know, super basic demands, and now there’s a huge social media campaign to use that incident to portray the whole movement as just “terrorists” and violent. So … the information sphere is where the battle is. Because if you’re just turning on TV and you’re in mainland China and you just see this — it’s [just] a couple of clips from an hourlong incident, and you don’t really get the rest of the context … because that’s censored — you might feel justified by the harsh steps that China mainland might decide to take. And also the world might feel like, ‘Oh, look, this is just another violent movement,’ which isn’t a correct characterization.

It’s pretty amazing what’s going on in Hong Kong in terms of the use of the internet. Unlike the Arab Spring countries that I’ve also studied, where there was some very efficient use of digital technologies, Hong Kong is a super high-tech place. The internet works very well and very fast, everybody’s digitally literate and otherwise literate, [there is a] very high education [level]. They have lots of phones and they’re using forums. They have their own forums and they’re using Telegram as a place where they hold a lot of these discussions. In fact, apologies for yesterday’s incident came out of these forums there — the soul searching, and ‘we shouldn’t ever let this happen again’ came out of these forums. So I don’t really know how it will play out, but everybody’s so digitally adept. The way they swarm and make decisions online and the way they swarm offline and go from place to place is a very 21st-century movement. Ironically, they’re making demands for things a lot of people [wanted] in the 19th century — just universal suffrage. So there is a very stark contrast with the high-tech high functioning society, which doesn’t even have some of the basic rights that are almost universal in many countries.

There are a couple of things that they’re dealing with in terms of surveillance technology: Obviously, the phones are tracked and they’re aware of it. Some of them have multiple phones and some of them turn off their phones. They wear a lot of masks and [they use] umbrellas to block CCTV when they get off at a subway station: The first one jumps out and opens umbrellas covering all the visibly closed circuit CCTVs. And then when they want to make decisions, they open their umbrellas and huddle under it. It’s not fully protective against surveillance, but just like many other … surveilled [people], when I asked them if they were worried about surveillance, they usually say, “There’s so many of us. There’s hundreds of thousands of us in the streets.” And that’s probably their only real protection. I don’t think they can [remain undetected] even with their umbrellas and cool tactics. I don’t think they can avoid the surveillance, so they’re just counting on the fact that they probably cannot jail that many of them all at once.

As long as they’re protected by the society, probably. But if there’s some sort of compromise in which the Hongkongers — the well-off middle classes and the financial centers — decide that they’re just going to give in to authoritarianism in return for just having business as usual … it might not be. And a lot of the ones I talked to, they don’t have, of course, any memory of Tiananmen, they’re just way too young for that. But they heard from their elders about how people fled to Hong Kong after that. And elsewhere too. And a lot of them are like, ‘Is there a place in this country for us? Is there a place in the world for us?’ Because, as I said, they’re highly educated — they’re literate, and some are wondering if they should even try to save their own country if it’s going to be futile, and [if they] should just try to emigrate. So I think that’s sort of the reality — they cannot truly escape the surveillance that mainland China can bring to this city. And they also probably cannot escape the consequences. So here we are.