Letter from America: US companies outed for role in net censorship

01 Apr 11 | Uncategorized

Hillary Clinton offered a glowing narrative of the US role in Middle Eastern Internet freedom in a speech back in February that championed American values while chastising regimes that trample free expression.

“Our commitment to Internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions,” she declared. “Monitoring and responding to threats to Internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance Internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.”

All of this action certainly sounded good (and the image of America as benevolent global Internet expression cop surely flattered many Americans listening). But Clinton left out of her speech one messier topic – the role of US companies in facilitating those filters, sometimes even in supporting the Internet blockades State Department money then pays to help locals circumnavigate.

That element of the story out of the Middle East over the last few months has been largely obscured from public debate in the US over global Internet freedom. Some Internet advocates lamented that Clinton’s speech didn’t tackle the topic, or propose serious measures the US could take to halt the export of homegrown technology used (often with the knowledge of US companies) in censorship abroad.

Lately, though, this uncomfortable complication has been getting real attention.

“Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” blared a New York Times headline on Monday. The story recounted the case of Flickr, the photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo), which removed photos uploaded by an Egyptian blogger of images swiped by activists from the State Security Police headquarters. Flickr insisted the photos violated its policy that users may post only their own, original work. But activists jeered what appeared to be selective application of a policy some of Flickr’s own employees don’t follow themselves.

Facebook, meanwhile, was caught this week in a similar awkward spot over a fan page devoted to promoting a Third Palestinian Intifada. Israeli officials demanded Facebook remove the page, which had already amassed more than 200,000 friends. Facebook originally refused, arguing that content that is upsetting to some “alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.” But Wednesday, the social networking site reversed course and yanked the page (now with more than 350,000 followers), on the grounds that its peaceful discourse had dissolved into out-right calls for violence that violated Facebook policy.

That flip-flop has compounded claims that Facebook hinders protesters around the world just as much as it helps them, particularly given the company policy that porhibits activists from signing up for accounts without exposing their true identities.

In the media, stories questioning the role of less visible US technology companies have also proliferated.

“US Products Help Block Mideast Web,” warned the Wall Street Journal this week.

“Censorship: Made in the USA,” read the Huffington Post headline above a story written by Free Press campaign director Tim Karr.

Both pieces relied on revelations unearthed in a new report from the OpenNet Initiative by Jillian C York (a contributor to the new Index magazine) and Helmi Noman. The two found that American and Canadian-made software had been used to block socially and politically objectionable online content for more than 20 million web users in nine North African and Middle Eastern countries: Bahrain, the AUE, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan and Tunisia.

“This is not simply a case of a general purpose, neutral tool being used for an end not contemplated by its maker,” reads the forward to the report. “The filtering products of today engage in regular communications with their makers, updating lists of millions of websites to block across dozens of content categories, including political opposition and human rights. When McAfee Smartfilter or Websense do their utmost to maintain lists of non-profit and advocacy groups their efforts directly affect what citizens in some authoritarian regimes can and cannot access online.”

The discovery is about as embarrassing as those images of Made-in-the-USA tear gas canisters that turned up in Tahrir Square, and US politicians have begun to take notice, too. Earlier this month, Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate human rights subcommittee, wrote an op-ed for the popular Washington-based political site Politico under the banner “Tyrants can use Facebook, too.”

He finally said what Hillary Clinton did not.

“US technology companies allow millions around the world to express themselves more fully and freely,” the senator wrote. “But the industry has a moral obligation to ensure that its products and services do not help repressive governments. If U.S. companies are unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, Congress must step in.”

 

US Congress pushes ahead with Muslim hearings

11 Mar 11 | Uncategorized

On Thursday, conservative New York Congressman Peter King held the first of what he’s vowed will be a series of congressional inquiries into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community,” a topic that has alarmed religious and civil liberties organisations in America for its narrow focus on one minority group and its inherent indictment of the entire “community”.

By the time King called the hearing to order, he’d already successfully wound up much of the country’s punditry. Muslim groups held a protest in New York’s Times Square on Sunday. Obama Administration officials were already trying to distance themselves from the suggestion that the US government – any arm of it – views Muslims with particular suspicion. And dozens of social-justice organisations had circulated petitions and press releases condemning what they likened to a political witch-hunt – as bad as anything Washington has seen since McCarthyism.

King, for his part, tried to sound bemused by all of the reaction on Thursday morning, as if he hadn’t worked so intentionally to provoke it. He was an easy target for the press leading up to the hearing, as a one-time vehement supporter of the IRA, it left him open to accusations of hypocrisy.

Some of King’s opposition was thoughtful, he conceded. But the rest of it – “both from special interest groups and the media – has ranged from disbelief to paroxysms of rage and hysteria,” he said in his opening statement. He appeared to relish ploughing ahead anyway.

“Let me make it clear today,” he continued, “that I remain convinced that these hearings must go forward. And they will. To back down would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee – to protect America from a terrorist attack.”

But his critics weren’t calling for political correctness; they wanted facts, which were in short supply on Thursday. King and his witnesses offered scant statistics, and no objective testimony suggesting Muslim radicalization is on the rise or Muslim cooperation in decline.

The hearing also failed to acknowledge that while every Muslim American is not engaged in terrorism, every terrorist act in America is also not perpetrated by a Muslim (consider, within the past two years, the gunman who tried to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords, the disgruntled software consultant who flew a plane into an IRS office, and the extremist who gunned down an abortion doctor in a church – all white US citizens whom many commentators have been loathe to label as “terrorists”). A true hearing on the problem of homegrown radicalization, King’s critics argued, would examine the threat in all its forms.

Such a broad-based hearing, undoubtedly, wouldn’t have inflamed people so. But King scoffed at that idea.

“This Committee cannot live in denial, which is what some would have us do when they suggest that this hearing dilute its focus by investigating threats unrelated to Al Qaeda” he said. “The Department of Homeland Security and this committee were formed in response to the al Qaeda attacks of 9/11. There is no equivalency of threat between al Qaeda and neo-Nazis, environmental extremists or other isolated madmen. Only al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation.”

The biggest fear, though, was that in antagonizing the Muslim community, King might actually achieve the opposite of his intended effect, making America less safe.

“I cannot help but wonder how propaganda on this hearing’s focus on the American Muslim community will be used by those who seek to inspire a new generation of suicide bombers,” warned Representative Bennie Thompson, the first in a string of Democrats to take the microphone during the hearing to denounce it. The event, in fact, had an odd partisan pallor, with Republicans uniformly lining up to praise the investigation and Democrats clutching their pocket-sized constitutions in fury across the aisle.

Keith Ellison, one of two Muslims in Congress and a Democrat, even began to cry during his testimony, as he recounted the story of a 23-year-old Muslim first-responder who was killed on September 11.

Muslims, “they are our neighbours,” Ellison said, delivering one of the most tweetable lines of the day. “In short, they are us.”

If King did sincerely want to unearth solutions to domestic Muslim radicalization – however disproportionate the real problem may be to his outsized congressional theatre – the hearing never yielded much in the way of thoughtful strategy. Only one law enforcement officer was called to testify. And some questioners wanted to know more about how uncooperative he found Muslims in his community, rather than what his officers did to work successfully with them.

King also spent much of the time asking the Muslim representatives he had hand-picked to speak to explain why they agreed that his hearing was so necessary. He had clearly sought cover for an investigation targeting Muslims by putting a few agreeable ones at the microphone.

Sheila Jackson Lee, a fiery Texas Democrat, called out the irony in this stagecraft.

“Muslims are here cooperating!” she exclaimed. “They are doing what this hearing is suggesting they do not do!”