Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

The United States government itself has used information technology to inform and even persuade the public in other countries to support certain stances. Some of this has been clandestine; many in the United States today would reject some of the steps taken by the CIA in Europe and Latin America in the 1950s. But others have been out in the open, including Radio Free Europe during the Cold War and today’s Voice of America. The United States as a nation has been comfortable using technology to spread information to seed and advance democracy. But now technology is being used to spread disinformation and disrupt democracy. At one level, we can divide these activities into separate categories based on principles that we connect with fundamental human rights. But at another level, realpolitik has changed in a critical respect. Until recently, communications technologies seemed to favor democracy and put authoritarianism on the defense. Now we must ask whether the internet has created an asymmetric technology risk for democracies that authoritarian governments can counteract more readily than the republican form of government that Franklin’s words urge us to protect. The answer is probably yes.