10 Jun 13 | In the News
GLOBAL
UN report slams government surveillance
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Frank La Rue delivered a report to the Human Rights Council outlining how state and corporate surveillance undermine freedom of expression and privacy. (Index on Censorship)
GREECE
Kostas Vaxevanis faces fresh trial
The Greek journalist who published the infamous “Lagarde list” of Swiss bank accounts could face two years in jail for breaching privacy. (Index on Censorship)
INDIA
HC directive on film posters a springboard for double censorship
The Kerala High Court’s directive to the State Police Chief to take up investigation of cases registered for indecent representation of women could end up as a double censorship, it is felt. (The Hindu)
Defying censorship, the reporter who exposed the killings
Brahma Chellaney exposed the killings of young unarmed Sikh youths for a foreign news agency, and faced severe government harassment (The Hindu)
IRAN
Regime’s media slam mullahs censorship
The Iranian regime’s own media has spoken out in protest at the censoring and restrictions imposed on their work. More than one hundred media staff covering next week’s election have released a statement criticising the oppressive scrutiny of their news websites, including reporters from the state-run Fars news agency. (National Council of Resistance of Iran)
IRELAND
Media must be free to ‘be arrow and not target’
THE first President Roosevelt coined the term “bully pulpit” when describing the less obvious charms of the American chief magistracy. (Irish Independent)
JAMAICA
Free Speech And Gay Rights
Boyne: Tolerance does not mean acceptance. And this is my problem with some gay people: … Any rejection of homosexuality as morally wrong is seen as homophobia. That is nonsense and an abuse of language to shut down conversation. (The Gleaner)
MALTA
‘Adult plays should be protected from police’
When censorship laws were relaxed last year, theatre buffs rejoiced thinking that no play would suffer the same fate as Anthony Neilson’s Stitching. (Times of Malta)
SINGAPORE
Singapore Bloggers Protest Licensing Rules for News Websites
More than 2,000 Singaporeans gathered at a downtown park to protest a regulation requiring websites that regularly publish news on the city state to be licensed. (Jakarta Globe)
UNITED STATES
Former FCC Chairman: Let’s Test an Emergency Ad Hoc Network
As the Boston Marathon bombings unfolded, thousands of anxious people in the region pulled out their mobile phones to connect with friends and family—and found that calls couldn’t be placed or received. Rumors that officials had shut down these mobile networks for security reasons weren’t true. The system was simply overloaded at a time when people needed it most.
(MIT Technology Review)
Produced By Conference: Death Threats, But No Network Censorship For ‘Walking Dead’ Execs
The Walking Dead exec producer Gale Anne Hurd admitted this afternoon that one of the hazards of her job is receiving death threats from the rabid fan base of smash hit AMC zombie drama when it dares to kill off a character. “That’s one of the dirty little secrets of social media,” she admitted.
(Deadline Hollywood)
School deliberately cuts valedictorian’s mic mid-speech
A US high school valedictorian had his microphone deliberately switched off in the middle of his graduation speech because the school had not approved what he was saying.
(9 News)
Freedom of speech under attack by Islamophobes in Tennessee
I’ve noted before that Pamela Geller Does Not Understand Freedom of Speech when she found fault with American Muslims and others for denouncing her hate ads. This she called an attempt to “impose blasphemy restrictions on free speech”.
(The American Muslim)
Do news organizations hurt free speech when they ban offensive words?
From now on, no one will be described in an Associated Press news story as an “illegal immigrant,” “illegal alien,” “illegal,” or as “undocumented.”
(Denver Post)
OPINION: Pro-Palestinian groups don’t respect free speech on campus
College is meant to be a place where free speech comes alive. Different viewpoints are supposed to be welcome and intellectual diversity celebrated.
(Campus Reform)
Disputed ads are protected speech
The ad we placed on city buses quoting Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu comparing what Palestinians endure to South African apartheid was meant to educate the public about Israeli and U.S. policies.
(San Francisco Examiner)
Conservatives as Defenders of the Media
The conservative pundit Glenn Beck took the lectern at a conference center on Manhattan’s East Side last Thursday to accept the Freedom of Speech Award for his commentary on TheBlaze television network and his syndicated radio show.
(The New York Times)
VIETNAM
Vietnamese Directors Speak Out On CHO LON and Censorship
The banning of the Nguyen brothers’ Cho Lon caused extreme rage in Vietnam yesterday. And not just for filmmakers or film geeks, but all over the country; I haven’t seen anything like this before. Previously banned films came and went quietly, but Cho Lon is now the focus of a national conversation. (Twitch)
07 Jun 13 | Digital Freedom
It’s been a rocky week for government surveillance and freedom of expression, Brian Pellot writes
On Tuesday, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Frank La Rue delivered a report to the Human Rights Council outlining how state and corporate surveillance undermine freedom of expression and privacy. The report traces how state monitoring has kept pace with new technological developments and describes how states are “lowering the threshold and increasing the justifications” for surveillance, both domestically and beyond their own borders.
The true depths of this lowered threshold were exposed on Thursday, when The Guardian revealed that the US National Security Agency has been collecting call records of Verizon’s millions of subscribers. Things got worse on Friday when reports alleged the same agency can access the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to monitor users’ video calls, search histories, live chats, and emails. It was long one of Washington’s worst kept secrets that data about our communications (call logs, times, locations, etc.) were being monitored, but the revelation that the government has granted itself, without democratic consent, the ability to monitor the actual contents of our communications is appalling.
Related: ‘Mass surveillance is never justified’ — Kirsty Hughes, Index on Censorship CEO
Today on Index
The EU must take action on Turkey | Iran tightens the screw on free expression ahead of presidential election
Index Events
Caught in the Web: How free are we online?
The internet: free open space, wild wild west, or totalitarian state? However you view the web, in today’s world it is bringing both opportunities and threats for free expression — and ample opportunity for government surveillance
Mass surveillance programmes have awful implications for freedom of expression. Index on Censorship made this clear in regards to the UK’s proposed Communications Data Bill last year. States should only limit freedom of expression when absolutely necessary to preserve national security or public order. In such exceptional cases, limits on expression should be transparent, limited and proportionate. La Rue’s latest report adds that states should not retain information purely for surveillance purposes. The US programmes revealed this week grossly violate all of these principles.
Surveillance is, by its very definition, a violation of privacy. La Rue’s report rightly states that “Privacy and freedom of expression are interlinked and mutually dependent; an infringement upon one can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.” Without some guarantee or at least a (false) assumption of privacy online, we cannot and will not express ourselves freely. Mass surveillance programmes directly chill free speech and give rise to self-censorship.
If the top secret documents outlining these programmes were leaked, what’s to stop our top secret personal information, that which is being monitored by government agencies, from being exposed? These programmes and even more extreme efforts to limit freedom of expression online in other states are unjustified, disproportionate, secretive and often without adequate limits. La Rue’s report calls for national laws around state surveillance to be revised in accordance with human rights standards.
Brian Pellot is Digital Policy Advisor at Index on Censorship.
07 Jun 13 | Americas, Campaigns, Digital Freedom
Index on Censorship is appalled at the reports of alleged US mass surveillance programmes sweeping up data from internet and communications firms.
CEO Kirsty Hughes said “Mass surveillance is never justified — democracies should be standing up for digital freedom at a time when it is under threat from countries like China and Iran, not undermining it.”
The Guardian and the Washington Post have reported on PRISM — a “top secret program that claims to have direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple.” The program allows officials to snoop into a range of web content — live chats, emails, file transfers and video calls, the papers wrote, drawing from a classified document about PRISM. The Guardian previously reported that the government had seized numbers from Verizon’s network.
Related: ‘Mass surveillance is never justified’
Today on Index
The EU must take action on Turkey | Iran tightens the screw on free expression ahead of presidential election
Index Events
Caught in the Web: How free are we online?
The internet: free open space, wild wild west, or totalitarian state? However you view the web, in today’s world it is bringing both opportunities and threats for free expression — and ample opportunity for government surveillance.
04 Jun 13 | Asia and Pacific, China
On the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests — when Chinese security forces carried out a violent crackdown on protesters occupying the legendary square in Beijing’s centre killing hundreds — Index on Censorship calls on the Chinese government to honour its constitutional commitment to free speech and to allow free access to information about the events. Sara Yasin writes
China has been working hard to crush attempts to commemorate the anniversary — both on and offline. Dozens of police officers have blocked the gates to the Wanan cemetery where victims of the massacres are buried, visited annually by the Tiananmen Mothers.
China has declared today “Internet maintenance day” — where the authorities darken sites in the name of “maintenance.” In previous years, China’s day of online maintenance has included shutting down blogs and websites with reputations for veering from the ruling party’s line. The Chinese-language Wikipedia page containing an uncensored account of the massacre was blocked by authorities on Monday.
Users of China’s most popular microblogging site, Sina Weibo, have been blocked from typing in variants of phrases like “June 4”, “Today”, “candle”, and “in memory of.” Also included in the banned list is “big yellow duck” — a reference to a photoshopped image where tanks were replaced with rubber ducks in the iconic photograph of a lone protester standing before a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
The United States today called on Chinese authorities to release the full account of those two bloody days, as there is not even an official death toll. China shot back through the state-run Xinhua news agency, urging the US to “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs so as not to sabotage China-US relations.”
A reputation for censorship
China’s ruling Communist Party has also recently released a list of seven banned topics, and has been quick to curb discussion of the “dangerous Western influences” online. The political topics, which include “freedom of speech”, “civil rights”, “crony capitalism”, and “The historical errors of the Chinese Communist Party”, were banned by the country’s top propaganda officials. When East China University of Political Science and Law professor Zhang Xuezhong posted the seven “speak-nots” online, the post was quickly deleted by censors.
As Wen Yunchao wrote for Index, Chinese censorship is “mainly aimed at the control of news and discussion of current affairs. Day-to-day censorship in China falls into two categories. The government’s propaganda authorities supervise websites that are legally licensed to carry news, while those without a license are dealt with by the public security authorities and the internet police. Unlicensed websites that are considered particularly influential may also be overseen by propaganda officials.”
The Chinese state’s control of the web is a model of bad behaviour for other nations around the world, according to a New York Times report. A dirty dozen or so control what the country’s citizens read and write online.
With over 500 million web users in China, the shear size of the Chinese user base makes censorship a leaky bucket for the country. A study conducted by two American computer scientists estimated that 30 per cent of banned posts are removed within half an hour of posting, and 90 per cent within 24 hours. Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American centre, wrote in April that China’s censors are caught in “a race against new platforms and technologies.”
The country’s notoriously strict censorship machine has earned it low rankings for press freedom and freedom of expression: it ranked 173rd out of 179 in this year’s World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders — only coming ahead of free speech all-stars Iran, Somalia, Syria, Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. According to the report, “commercial news outlets and foreign media are still censored regularly.” The Committee to Protect Journalists has reported that China uses libel suits to silence journalists — and there are 32 jailed journalists as of December 2012.
