18 Oct 13 | Bulgaria, Digital Freedom, Germany, News and features, United States
On 30 September, Bulgarian-German author Ilija Trojanow was travelling from Brazil to the US for a conference on German literature. That was his plan, anyway. At the airport in Salvador da Bahia, he was told his entry to the US had been denied. No explanation was provided then, and none has been provided since.
Trojanow is one of the main forces behind a 74,000 strong and growing petition against mass surveillance. Initiated and signed by some Germany’s biggest writers, the petition argues the government is bound by the constitution to protect its citizens against foreign spying.
His experience in Brazil exploded in the German media, but Trojanow seems more bemused than anything else.
“It wasn’t bad enough that governments are spying on everybody!” he says with a laugh. “What this shows is that general attacks on everybody and not individual victims, are too abstract. An individual case, even if it’s a minor one, can get more attention.”
While the incident did create more discussion around mass surveillance and caused a spike in the number of signatures, there is no doubt the petition already had widespread support. The issue of mass surveillance seems to have struck a particular chord in Germany. Trojanow believes this is due to their history.
“East Germany more than any other country in the former Soviet block has discussed its secret service files. It has been a dominant issue in the media. The archives are easy to access. Germans know how horrendous it is when the secret service is not under real control.”
He also thinks the famous German efficiency shines through even in this case. Many felt that something needed to be done about the mass surveillance, and when Germans set out to do something, they do it properly.
“It is quite ironic,” he adds: “Germans had democracy beaten into them. They were educated in democracy by the US and the UK. It seems they were good students!”
Trojanov himself has long been interested in the issue of state surveillance, with his 2009 book “Freedom Under Attack”, for instance, becoming a bestseller in Germany. For him, the issue carries a more personal dimension. Growing up in a Bulgaria, parts of his family were engaged in the struggle against the communist authorities.
“I am in the situation now where I am able to read transcripts of what adults in my family were saying, as our apartment was bugged.”
“What you realise is that when you have the attention of the secret service pointed at you, whatever you do is in some way proof of guilt. Even completely innocent things become potentially implicating.”
The petition was formally presented to the German government on 18 September, back when when it had 63,000 signatures. A month and ten thousand additional names later, they have still have yet to receive any sort of official reply. Still open, Trojanow and his compatriots now plan to take it global. As he says, mass surveillance is a worldwide challenge and cannot be tackled simply by and within one nation.
“I don’t understand why we wait until situation is completely unbearable. You start safeguarding your freedoms when they are attacked on the edges.”
This article was originally posted on 18 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
25 Sep 13 | News and features
(Photo: David von Blohn / Demotix)
This article was originally published at Indy Voices
What’s happened to Edward Snowden and his revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programme? As stories keep emerging from one of the largest leaks in US history, we learn more and more about the Americans’ ability to monitor communications, but seem less sure how to respond. Most people would acknowledge that the state does retain some right to monitor suspect activities. But this is a very different proposition from the population-wide mass surveillance suggested by the documents leaked by Snowden. Clearly the balance has tipped much too far in favour of default data gathering. So how do we move it back?
This is a complex discussion, and it’s not really being had in the UK right now. The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins has suggested an establishment conspiracy has kept the public from talking about this – it’s certainly true that the response here has not been on the level of that in other countries (not least in Brazil, where a national Internet redesign to avoid US surveillance is being considered).
But part of the problem here is not simply that people have been shielded from the discussion on surveillance, or that people don’t care. It is that people do not know what we are supposed to do about this. Who do we appeal to? What do we want?
This is where the European Union can come into its own. An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but nowhere is protection of privacy given more credence than in Brussels and Berlin. A horror of Soviet-style surveillance of citizens runs deep in many European institutions and nation states, particularly those that had hands-on experience. The most powerful person in Europe, Angela Merkel, remember, was a citizen of Stasiland.
The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (Libe), has set out to investigate claims of surveillance and examine what the EU can do about it. UK Labour MEP Claude Moraes has been charged with reporting on the Committee’s findings by the end of the year.
The parliament will be considerably aided by a 36-page briefing by independent surveillance researcher Caspar Bowden, who was helpfully mapped out the history of US and UK surveillance, and overlap with the European Union, all the way back to Alan Turing’s work with US spies in 1942.
Bowden comes up with several recommendations for Europe: the development of a “European cloud”, the revoking or renegotiation of mechanisms that allow US companies to gather data from European users, and, significantly in the case of the Snowden revelations, “systematic protection and incentives for whistleblowers”.
The European parliament investigation is welcome. But in reality, there is only a certain amount the parliament can actually achieve. The real power will, in the end, rest in the will of the governments of the respective European Union countries to act. Europe’s cyber strategy already states that “increased global connectivity should not be accompanied by censorship or mass surveillance”. But it’s time EU leaders acted on this.
That’s why Index on Censorship, along with dozens of other groups, including Amnesty, Reporters Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as stars and activists such as Bianca Jagger, Stephen Fry and Cory Doctorow, is petitioning European leaders directly. The next European Council Summit takes place at the end of October. We want every European government head there to publicly take a stand against mass surveillance.
The European Union, founded in part as a democratic bulwark against the authoritarianism of the eastern bloc, has a chance to stand out in the world against surveillance and for the rights of free speech and privacy. In the coming decades, power will be defined by who controls information: Europe, as a powerful democratic force, should work to ensure that its own ordinary citizens and people around the world are not left impotent.
Sign the petition telling EU leaders to stop mass surveillance here
29 Aug 13 | Volume 42.03 Autumn 2013
The autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine brings together articles from writers including Amartya Sen, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Dimbleby and Peter Kellner, and covers India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Honduras, Colombia, Afghanistan and Mali. Under discussion are development and free speech; ignored voices; digital media; reporters under fire in South America. Get your copy of the current issue of Index on Censorship magazine, available now, by subscribing here or downloading the iPad app.
A report from China is one of many which looks at groups of people around the world who are ignored, censored or supressed by their governments, and whose voices are not heard or are ignored:
As millions of people move from the countryside to Chinese cities they end up as “invisible members of society”. The article by Jemimah Steinfeld and Hannah Leung looks at the use of hukou, a household registration document, to control society, but also to keep rural migrants as second class citizens, who have little access to state benefits and education as well as poorly paid jobs. Most are afraid to criticise the system because of their status.
Hukou are registered to the place where they are born, restricting those rights if anyone choosing to move around the country. Shanghai, for instance, now has 10 million residents who have moved from the country, and cannot access the same services as official residents.
Also in the issue:
Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen writes on democracy, the media and free speech
Reports on violent attacks against journalists in Honduras and Colombia
Free to read now:
• Nic Dawes: Mandela’s legacy “too easily dismissed”
• Pullman v. Casserly: The future of copyright
Click here to subscribe, or download the app here
29 Aug 13 | News and features
As global power starts to shift both South and East, and the G20 overshadows the G8, will freedom of speech and broader human rights still receive support around the summit tables?
While the BRICS – Brazil Russia, India, China, and South Africa – range from active democracies to repressive authoritarian states, none are keen to take lectures from western countries on free speech.
And whistleblower Edward Snowden’s still unfolding NSA and GCHQ revelations are surely weakening the US and UK’s credibility in promoting rights internationally. Mass surveillance of digital communications undermines free speech online: monitored conversation is not free, as anyone from Iran or China can attest.
Nor are the democratic BRICS yet taking any international lead on free speech and other rights.
If free speech is to be actively defended in the multipolar order, both the emerging democratic powers and the older western powers must stand up, however imperfectly, for rights, at the UN, the G20 or in bilateral dialogues, and not let economic interest, security priorities, and diplomatic convenience hold sway.
Some European diplomats confidently see the EU, US and Japan as the prime defenders of free speech, while Brazil, India and South Africa are “swing” states to bring on side against China and Russia. But from digital to media freedom to transparency and corruption, the picture is more blurred.
The Snowden revelations risk seriously weakening the US’s credibility in pushing for digital freedom and an open internet against a joint Russia-China quest for top down global internet control. The geopolitics of internet governance were exposed at an international telecommunications summit in Dubai last December – Russia and China pulling almost 90 countries including Brazil and South Africa behind them in a test vote. India wobbled before joining the US, EU and Japan.
But efforts to get democratic BRICs to support an open internet may now falter. ‘Do as we say, not as we do’ is never the most convincing of arguments.
Digital freedom may retreat further if the NSA scandal prompts a more rapid fragmentation of the internet as some fear. While Iran and China already seek to segment their national internets, if the EU and others respond with moves to insulate their networks more from the US then fragmentation may gather speed.
Yet direct censorship of the internet – imposing blocks and filters – is much more common in authoritarian regimes – with China and its great firewall targeting free speech extensively in ways not seen in the multipolar democracies.
But there are some troubling trends. Both the UK and India criminalise ‘grossly offensive’ comment on social media – with arrests for Facebook posts and tweets in both countries . And Brazil and India often top the lists in Google’s regular transparency reports on takedown requests for online content.
On press freedom, the picture for western democracies is fairly positive: they are ahead of the democratic BRICS who are, unsurprisingly ahead of Russia then China. But it’s a varied picture – Germany and the US are substantially ahead of the UK and France, with South Africa coming in just ahead of Japan according to Reporters without Borders press freedom index – and then Brazil and India trail behind. And such indicators cannot reflect the granular reality of Obama’s prosecution of media sources, or the UK debate on statutory press regulation.
At the international level, western countries are often seen as readier to challenge individual countries’ human rights records, than India, Brazil and South Africa. Yet Brazil and India voted with the US criticising Sri Lanka’s record earlier this year while Japan abstained. And the EU and US can hesitate too in the face of economic interests not least in dealings with China.
Transparency and corruption is where western countries do best. The US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK all score fairly high up on Transparency International’s annual ranking, while Brazil and South Africa languish in the middle, India is behind China, and Russia scores even below China (and India) too. But the US and UK’s transparency record will surely be reassessed given Snowden’s leaks.
With this mixed record of the democratic powers, will we hear less about free speech and human rights in the multipolar, digital world? At least, with whatever flaws and double standards, the majority of the G20 are democracies with robust debates on free speech at home. But the revelations of mass digital surveillance now cast a long shadow.
Perhaps one more positive outcome of the US’s stumbling over mass surveillance will be if it gives India, Brazil and South Africa the confidence to speak out strongly on the international stage including holding western players more to account on free speech. If so the multipolar democracies would then have more, not less, credibility in pointing the finger at authoritarian regimes.
Read more about the multipolar challenge to free expression in the current issue of Index on Censorship magazine
