CATEGORY: Magazine

Private lives

Private lives

by | 16 Jun 2020

ust how much of our privacy might we give away – accidentally, on purpose or through force – in the battle against Covid-19? This is the question we pose in the Index on Censorship summer 2020 magazine. Tech journalist Geoff White looks at how drones are hovering overhead around the world, from China to the UK, to make sure we are abiding by quarantine and physical distancing. Just how up close and personal can they get? Less technical but just as sinister, Issa Sikiti da Silva reports from Uganda on government spies that are doing the same job as the drones, only they seem to be targeting political opposition. Meanwhile, people around the world are being encouraged to download contact tracing apps. That might be ok when the app has safeguarded privacy, but more often than not what is happening to data is not being spelt out, something Indian journalists are worried about in terms of their safety and that of their contacts, as Indian journalist Somak Ghoshal writes. And in the case of Colombia, Stephen Woodman highlights that the apps are easy for hackers to access. But when we’re in the home things don’t seem much better, as Adam Aiken argues in his article looking at the privacy issues that blight Zoom.

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Podcast: Complicity with Mary Ellen Klas, Moa Petersén and Noelle Mateer

Complicity

by | 24 Mar 2020

What role do we play in our own free speech issues? This is the question we pose in the Index on Censorship spring 2020 magazine. From the journalists who self-censor and the academics who don’t stand up to their arrested colleagues to the average person who shares lots of data with a third party, we are all playing a role in giving away some of our basic rights, information and privacy. Whether we don’t realise we are doing it, we don’t have much other choice or we simply think the trade is worth making, we can be complicit in letting our own rights erode. The ways we are complicit are multiple. Noelle Mateer offers a personal account about living in Beijing under a landlord who embraced the growing trend for video cameras at home. Nathalie Rothschild introduces us to the Swedes who are willingly having microchips inserted under their skin. Is this a great way to keep your own data very, very close to you or a gateway to further data exploitation? Helen Lewis talks about how our fears to enter certain heated discussions might be making vulnerable groups more vulnerable. And Mark Frary tests out the apps to see just how much we are giving away. Elsewhere Stephen Woodman talks to Colombian journalists living in fear of drug cartels. We also publish extracts from a Brazilian documentary that was censored by Jair Bolsonaro, plus a short written exclusively for the magazine by Najwa Bin Shatwan.

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A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.

The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.