POLITICS: Censors won in Brazil, but free speech may triumph via tech

“Can’t stop the signal,” a famous line from the movie “Serenity”, has become something of a catchphase among geeks — meaning that messages of truth cannot be contained. 

But stopping the signal is exactly what a lot of governments are trying to do these days, with mixed but depressing results.

Under Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom . . . to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

That sounds a lot like what Elon Musk is defending against the government of Brazil, and what his opponents there are doing their best to muzzle.

Brazil’s socialist president Lula da Silva and its activist Supreme Court have been trying to force Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) to censor content that favors Lula’s opponent, former President Jair Bolsonaro.  

X remains blocked in Brazil, and a Brazilian court seized money damages not only from X, but also from Starlink, a company in which Musk is a minority shareholder. 

Britain’s Guardian called this move “a first among non-autocratic nations.” 

Well, for some values of “non-autocratic” . . . 

As Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady put it, “If free speech is a measure of a modern liberal democracy, Brazil is in trouble.”

But the impasse is sparking discussion about whether technology will soon make it even harder for governments to censor our communications and stifle free expression.

Musk’s Starlink, the wireless satellite internet system that is offering service around the world (and that recently won a contract to provide free Internet onboard United Airlines flights), may soon give users a way to end-run even the most restrictive of autocrats.

Until recently, Starlink Internet service worked like this: Subscribers got an antenna that connects to one of the company’s thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit. 

The connection gets handed off to new satellites every few minutes as they pass overhead.

Those satellites, however, have had to connect to a ground station that’s within a few hundred miles of the user. 

That means a nation of any size could mostly keep Starlink out by banning ground stations in its territory.

But now the Starlink satellites are beginning to connect to each other by laser, allowing the signal to be passed on to an available ground station any distance away.  

Musk tweeted about the plan in 2021, in the context of sending Starlink terminals to the Taliban’s opponents, and now it’s becoming a reality.

Starlink’s laser links are already carrying millions of gigabytes of data.

When this system is fully in place, no nearby ground station will be needed — and countries that don’t want their citizens using Starlink will be left to “shake their fists at the sky,” as Musk impishly put it.

Couldn’t those censorious nations shoot the satellites down?

Probably not: Starlink has literally thousands of satellites, far more than the number of deployable anti-satellite weapons on the planet. 

Starlink can literally launch satellites faster than any existing nation could destroy them.

Not to mention, Musk’s satellites are US-owned, and thereby protected under longstanding United States policy.

Since Jimmy Carter’s administration, Washington has maintained that shooting down an American satellite is tantamount to an act of war, making that approach both futile and risky (though maybe less so given the current administration’s dislike of Musk).

But while the satellites may be safe, they’re not the only potential targets here, as Brazil has just demonstrated with its asset-seizure ploy.  

The “space segment” might be invulnerable, but there are plenty of softer targets on Earth, such as the revenues of X, Starlink and related entities.

And of course, even a middling-power nation-state like Brazil has resources of violence that the world’s richest man cannot match. 

Normally, a wealthy American tech baron could expect to be protected by the United States government — but in Musk’s case, one wonders. 

Ever since he bought Twitter, renamed it X, and frustrated ruling-class plans for an information monopoly, he’s been on the enemies list to the American left and to many Western “non-autocratic” powers that supposedly champion liberty.

Forcing X to censor content has been called “protecting democracy,” when of course it’s anything but. 

True defenders of democracy don’t clamp down on dissent, and those who really honor the “rule of law” don’t go after political enemies for refusing to comply with the powers doing the clamping.

We’re assured by all the best people that the UN’s bill of human rights doesn’t mean what it plainly says about free speech: That would make life more difficult for the ruling class, which can’t be right.

But Musk, bit by bit, is working to make the elites’ project harder, and they hate him for it.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.