19 Oct 2012 | Uncategorized
A peaceful protest against the Innocence of Muslims in London – Brian Minkoff/Demotix
The Innocence of Muslims controversy put a spotlight on whether offensive online content should be censored or criminalised, as violence in Egypt, Libya and beyond meant many were tempted to argue for the removal of the video from the web.
Most states have laws to control clear and direct incitements to violence; but causing offence is neither an incitement to violence nor a reason to respond with violence. Yet since the initial protests, many countries have queued up to ask Google to block the offending video. Google initially blocked it in Egypt and Libya without even a government request, and then unblocked it.
Should companies, rather than governments, ever be the censors — arbiters of acceptability? Is it more palatable if companies are served with court orders to block access to Internet content? Or that, in keeping with its policy to abide by local laws, Google blocked the video in India and Indonesia because it was ruled illegal?
But more importantly, has a clear line been drawn between the direct incitement to violence (which should absolutely not be protected as free speech) and whether people choose to respond with violence to something they find offensive?
Rwanda is often cited as a case where the balance between safeguarding free speech and preventing violence is particularly relevant, given the severe ethnic conflicts resulting in the 1994 genocide following callings for violence. Local officials and government-sponsored radio incited ordinary citizens to kill their neighbours, and those who refused to kill were often murdered on the spot. The genocide-inciting radio broadcasts shouldn’t have been allowed. There is a clear dividing line.
But The Innocence of Muslims is not in the same category. And if Internet censorship is used because there is crowd violence — and in anticipation of violence, where does it end?
“The big story here is the crack-down on the Internet” William Echikson told me in a telephone interview from Brussels. “The pressures have grown dramatically. And we are doing our best to protect free expression. ”
Echikson is Head of Free Expression Policy and PR, Europe, Middle East & Africa at Google.
According to different reports, Innocence of Muslims was also blocked in India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia as a result of court orders. Google also blocked the video in Malaysia after receiving an official complaint from the Communications and Multimedia Commission, according to AFP. Reporters without Borders said the video was also blocked in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia via court orders on grounds of being “extremist”. And in Pakistan, it was blocked by the Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, who issued a directive to the Ministry of Information Technology.
The key, original censors here seem to be violent demonstrators and restrictive governments. Of the 150 countries where Google operates, in about 30 its service has been “affected one way or the other”, adds Echikson.
Governments are indeed cracking-down on the web, either because they already censor blasphemous and other offensive material (even without any likelihood of violence) or because they are giving in to actual or threatened violence. But if governments continue doing that, couldn’t it become an incentive for any fanatical group to threaten or act violently, and get censorship as a result? Isn’t this very similar to the mechanisms of terror: you terrorise or hurt one to scare a thousand?
That is why it is so vital that everyone understands the difference between incitement to violence, and violence in response to offense, an idea that, weeks after the video furore, has vanished from the agenda.
A country such as China may shed some light on where we are heading.
After a series of huge protests and ethnic riots (many of which were organised using instant messaging services, chat rooms, and text messages), China is reported to have intensified its efforts to neutralise online criticism. According to Amnesty, China has the largest number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world, while the number of “Internet police” is rumoured to be higher than 30,000.
The reason for all this political censorship.
Many of the violent reactions to The Innocence of Muslims were for political reasons, using offence as an excuse. In fact, some analysts and US officials have reported that Benghazi attack of 11 September, which killed the US ambassador to Libya, appeared to have been planned in advance, and had nothing to do whatsoever with the video.
So for the Internet, where does all this end? With the annihilation of McLuhan’s global village and the beginning of a new era of of separate, isolated, over-scrutinised, parochial Internets.
Miren Guitierrez is editorial director of Index on Censorship
18 Oct 2012 | Uncategorized
Any extension of state powers of surveillance are — rightly — hotly contested. The current Data Communications Bill is no exception. There are problems with this bill — but maybe not the ones you’ve heard of.
Almost universally, it has been labelled the ‘snoopers charter’ by its opponents, representing an enormous encroachment of state spying into the lives of innocent citizens. Journalists are outbidding each other in their vitriol toward it, usually calling on Orwell. One example from many is Index’s Mike Harris in the Independent: “This proposed scale of state surveillance will add the UK to the ranks of countries such as Kazakhstan, China and Iran.”
This, to me, is misleading. Yes, China, Iran, and Kazakhstan use “Deep Packet Inspection”, which this Bill proposes. But we also bug citizens’ homes — far more intrusive. What matters is the way it is regulated. There is a difference between governments that pass surveillance laws through a vote of elected representatives of those that will be monitored, and governments that do not.
Nor is it about mass surveillance by the state. This Bill is asking/demanding/paying communications companies to collect and retain data on the existence of people’s communications for 12 months, so that in the event that a request is made for that information, it is available.
Crucially, the state only accesses this information when a successful application is made through the existing Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. This does not include the content of a communication — which has to go through a more stringent process of access. In that respect, not so much has changed, because this all happens already, it’s just that rather often, the information the police want is not there. (And in case no-one noticed, little brother is already miles ahead of what Big Brother is doing.)
That is not to say that the bill is perfect. Four changes would improve it considerably.
First: clarity. All infringements on our civil liberties need to be based on some kind of public understanding and consent that the measures being taken are proportionate and necessary. But the Bill is vague, the technology complicated, some specifics necessarily secretive. Is should be far more explicit: this would allow for at least an informed debate about whether the measures proposed are necessary and proportionate.
Second, given the value of the Internet to the economy and society (something RIPA is pledged to defend); and the potential misuse of modern technology – including the difficulty of splitting content from communication — only the very strictest system of oversight and redress will do here. More is needed.
Third, the root of RIPA is that the more serious the intrusion, the fewer agencies can do it, and for fewer purposes. RIPA makes a distinction between content and communications data — the latter being considers far less intrusive, and so much easier to obtain. But when RIPA was passed, communications data used to be mainly be about who you phoned and when. Now it means what websites you visit, where you are, and whom you email. Therefore a new category for this ‘use’ data may need to be created. The authorisation for accesses should be higher than the current bill proposes, but lower than the Home Secretary signing if off, as with content intercept, ideally a warrant from an independent magistrate.
The final problem troubles me most. It is now far easier for the state to access personal information that we citizens happily put into the public domain. Twitter can be mined in real time, open source Facebook groups can be monitored, networks and relationships contructed: all outside the RIPA legislation. None of this is mentioned in the new bill — but I think it is this that worries the public and many journalists. As I argued in #intelligence this type of widespread, mass social media monitoring needs to regulated, limited, and put on a legal footing. The bill is a chance to tackle this tricky problem: otherwise it could make the current furore seem like a minor skirmish.
Jamie Bartlett is Head of the violence and extremism programme at the UK think-tank, Demos, and Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. Follow him @JamieBartlett
DEBATE: Index’s Mike Harris on the Comms Data Bill and surveillance
In Britain, the government is proposing legislation (the Communications Data Bill) that will grant the Home Secretary the power to blanket retain data on every citizen for an undefined purpose. It won’t require judicial approval — but potentially every text message, every Facebook message, every phone call, every email from everyone in Britain would be stored on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. If the Bill passes, companies will have to collect data they don’t currently collect and the Home Secretary will be able to ask manufacturers of communications equipment to install hardware such as ‘black boxes’ on their products to make spying easier. This proposed scale of state surveillance will add the UK to the ranks of countries such as Kazakhstan, China and Iran. This total population monitoring would break the fundamental principle that a judge and court order is required before the state invades the privacy of its citizens by holding their personal data.
Read the full article here
6 Jul 2012 | Europe and Central Asia
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“I will be arrested the minute I land in Uzbekistan and then thrown in prison,” an Uzbek human rights activist tells me, “and what happens with me afterwards is a good question.”
For his family’s safety, I cannot tell you the name of the young man. Let’s call him Rustam, a common name in Uzbekistan.
“I only have five minutes, then they cut off the phone,” the 26-year old explains.
Since 12 June he has been held at the immigration services detention centre in Oslo, Norway, after having received the third and final rejection of his appeal for political asylum. He will be deported on 12 July.
Looking at his case it is obvious that the Norwegian authorities are ignoring evidence showing that returning Rustam to Uzbekistan is as good as sentencing him to torture, even death. They have also disregarded UN evidence that says returned Uzbek dissidents who sought refugee status abroad have been disappeared and subjected to torture.
It is easy to detect the fear in Rustam’s voice. In 2004, he and some friends started an NGO called Movement for Freedom and initiated a campaign against child slave labour. Every year, two million Uzbek school children — the youngest just 7 years old — are forced to spend six to eight weeks picking cotton, eight to 10 hours a day.
Uzbekistan has been heavily criticised for this abuse of children. But the income from cotton exports runs into hundreds of millions of dollars, and much of it falls into the pockets of the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, who has been in power for 23 years since Soviet times.
When Rustam and his friends started their campaign against child slavery, he was detained and tortured. Upon his release, Rustam fled to Russia. While he was in hiding, he heard that one of the Movement’s co-founders had been killed in an Uzbek prison. He decided to move on to Norway.
I understood how dangerous it would be for me if I returned or was extradited…I too could very easily be killed.
Russia, a close ally of the Karimov regime, routinely extradites Uzbeks. Afterwards many of them ‘disappear’.
The authorities in Norway have two problems with Rustam’s plea for asylum:
1/ Rustam does not have a passport. Rustam says he threw it away when he smuggled himself out of Uzbekistan to ensure he could not be identified by the police if he was apprehended. But it means outside Uzbekistan Rustam now cannot prove that he is who he claims to be.
2/ While Rustam was in Norway hoping to be granted asylum, he started working as a volunteer for the Uzbek human rights defender Mutabar Tadjibaeva. This is now the heart of Rustam’s appeal: the Norwegian authorities do not believe that he worked as her webmaster.
Because of her international standing, Tadjibaeva is hated by the Karimov regime; working with her would land Rustam in very serious trouble in Uzbekistan.
Tadjibaeva has been living in exile in France since in 2008 escaping after three years of prison, rape and torture in Uzbekistan. The country has more than 10,000 political and religious prisoners and experts put it amongst the harshest dictatorships in the world, on par with North Korea.
Tadjibaeva runs the website Jayaron, one of very few independent sources of information about Uzbekistan, a country in which media are strictly controlled by the regime. She has established a widespread network of informants inside the country who send her details about corrupt court cases, unfair imprisonments and cases of torture. Her site is a thorn in the side of a regime that has almost managed to completely isolate its population from the outside world.
The Karimov regime call Tadjibaeva an “extremist” and accuse her of planning to overthrow the government, which is rather difficult to imagine when you meet her in person — a small, soft-spoken 49-year-old woman, her health scarred by years of torture and prison.
In 2008 the US State Department gave Tadjibaeva the prestigious Woman of Courage award. After Tadjibaeva received it, a Wikileaks telegram revealed that the American ambassador in Tashkent received a “tongue lashing” from the Uzbek dictator, who threatened to block US transit to Afghanistan in retaliation.
The ambassador advised his government to tone down the criticism of the Uzbek regime, advice they took. And relations are nearer to the close relationship the countries enjoyed before Karimov’s army killed 800 demonstrators, many of them women and children, in May 2005.
Mutabar Tadjibaeva stresses to me that Rustam has worked with her since August 2010. She cannot understand why the Norwegian immigration authorities rejected Rustam’s asylum plea, stressing that they do not believe that he and Mutabar work together.
We have worked closely together, you can even find his name on our website. Because of this, his life would be in great danger if he were returned to Uzbekistan.
“The Uzbek regime does not like people telling the truth,” she adds. “I have no less than 343 emails here in which we discuss Rustam’s work with our website and my blog,” she tells me, “that obviously prove that we worked closely together.”
“If the Norwegians really wanted to know the truth, all they have to do is check his computer, mobile phone and emails.” She showed me the email and text communication between the two.
“I have even transferred money to him in Norway, so he could buy a computer and work on our website,” Mutabar explains. She shows me receipts.
If he is sent back to Uzbekistan, a long time in prison and severe torture awaits him. There is a real risk that the regime will kill him, as a warning to others to stay away from human rights work.
At the moment it looks like that Rustam will be deported to Uzbekistan within the next week.
But in June something happened which Mutabar hopes will help Rustam. The UN Committee against Torture censured Kazakhstan — Uzbekistan’s neighbour — for deporting 29 Uzbek asylum seekers in 2010. Several of the 29 were later given lengthy prison sentences, kept in isolation and therefore, say analysts, most likely tortured.
UN conventions forbid states deporting people to their home countries if there is a risk that they will be tortured.
Exact numbers are impossible to come by — this is Uzbekistan — but according to local human rights organisations dozens of people are tortured to death each year in Uzbek prisons, and the favourite victims of the security police are those who have been in the West asking for asylum or even speaking poorly about the regime. This description clearly applies to Rustam.
Mutabar Tadjibaeva hopes that the UN decision will make Norway re-consider his case. “But,” she adds, “so-called democratic countries in Europe have often shown themselves full-willing to close their eyes to the atrocities of the Uzbek regime. I have lost all faith in them.”
Michael Andersen is a Danish journalist who has covered Central Asia for more than 10 years. His newest feature-length documentary on Uzbekistan is called Massacre in Uzbekistan.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
