12 Mar 2015 | mobile, News and features, Volume 44.01 Spring 2015
Tim Cross and Martha Lane Fox, credit: Mark Boardman
Martha Lane Fox and retired Major General Tim Cross debate how far governments go when balancing individual rights and safeguarding the nation. This is an extract from a longer feature in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Martha Lane Fox
When it comes to balancing national security and personal privacy, I believe that your personal data should be your personal data, and that action should be taken based on a case that can be proven, as opposed to looking at everyone in society’s movements and then targeting those who stand out. I am not a fan of the world we seem to be ending up in, and I don’t necessarily believe that it is because of anything malicious. I think it would be better to have a system where your data is your personal property, and there then have to be the same restrictions applied as would be the case if someone wanted to enter your home and go through your belongings or intercept your post.
Tim Cross
Like fighting terrorism, governments have to “fight” with one hand tied behind their backs, but they cannot fight with both hands tied as some would clearly prefer. Individuals will understandably not want governments interfering with, or prying into, their personal privacy, but no one will thank any government if the banking system or consumer supply chains were to collapse. Monitoring cyberspace now forms a key part of any government responsibilities, and is (or should be) included in any national security strategy.
This said, if people fear the state is holding too much data on them unnecessarily and (rightly) demand some semblance of control over what happens with that data, then government is the least of their worries. Leaving aside the fact that government resources are scarce, the idea that some government employee is sitting in a room somewhere carefully sifting through everyone’s email is fanciful. Intelligence and law enforcement have to meet certain criteria including necessity, proportionality and justification. This is absolutely the way it should be. But private firms have no such restrictions in place. Government intelligence and law enforcement agencies are rightly burdened by layers of legality, including authorisations, justifications and audit trails, but big corporations, particularly those whose primary public interface is through cyber means, use and exploit personal details for a wide variety of reasons. While these may sometimes include improving their services, more unpalatably they sell details on to third parties. This is absolutely endemic. Many companies will not allow customers to use their service unless they agree to terms and conditions that essentially mean losing control of their personal details and allowing them to be sold on to the highest bidders. The primary concern of business is making money. Not so with governments, whose intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about deterring/catching enemies and protecting the public.
To read the rest of the debate, click here to subscribe to Index on Censorship magazine. Or buy an individual issue. Or subscribe to the app (free 30-day trial).
Major General (Rtd) Tim Cross (CBE) was commissioned into the British Army in 1971.
He served in Northern Ireland, Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo. He was also the British deputy to the US-led Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs, later re-titled the Coalition Provisional Authority. He is chair of the think-tank Theos
Martha Lane Fox is chair of Go On UK, a digital skills charity which helps people to get online. She co-founded travel website lastminute.com, and in 2013 became a crossbench peer in the House of Lords
10 Mar 2015 | Awards, Fellowship 2015
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The 2015 Freedom of Expression Campaigning Award-winner is activist Amran Abdundi, who, through various channels, has worked to make life safer in northeastern Kenya – supporting women who are vulnerable to rape, female circumcision and murder.
The women’s rights activist runs the Frontier Indigenous Network, an organisation which mobilises female peace builders and activists along the dangerous border with Somalia.
“The award ceremony was aired by all community radios in northern Kenya and reached many people. I am happy because it will give women courage to stand up for their rights.”
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3 Mar 2015 | Awards, Fellowship 2015, Kenya, mobile
Campaigning nominee Amran Abdundi
Amran Abdundi is a women’s rights activist based in northeastern Kenya. She runs the Frontier Indigenous Network, an organisation which mobilises female peace builders and rights activists to set up shelters along the dangerous border with Somalia. It offers first aid to the injured as well as to women and girls who have been raped, moving victims to a safer part of Kenya.
As well as protecting citizens endangered by the guerrilla activities of the Al Qaeda-linked group Al Shabaab, Abdundi and her organisation also help those fleeing drought and failed harvests in Somalia. Abdundi is also behind radio-listening groups for women, which share information about access to tuberculosis treatment, among other things.
In a society that teaches women to leave decision-making to men and to look down when men pass, Abdundi’s Frontier Indigenous Network empowers, educates and mobilises rural women to challenge such outdated social codes.
The Al Qaeda-allied Islamist group Al Shabaab has sown terror in the Kenya-Somalia border region, one of the world’s most inhospitable areas. Women in the region are often the victims of violence, rape and murder. The northern region of Kenya is one of deeply conservative social customs, in which a man owns property on a woman’s behalf – even when the woman has bought the land. In the environment Abdundi operates in, a quarter of Kenyan girls and women have endured genital mutilation, despite legislation outlawing the practice.
Abdundi told Index: “I want to see them go to school. I don’t want to see them moving here and there without education – early marriage and female circumcision are also major issues.”
She said that some of the initial challenges the organisation faced have been overcome. In the beginning it was hard to talk to parents about their girls and “how the women have suffered”, she explained. “But now they understand us. They know how good we are and we want to change their lives.”
One of Frontier Indigenous Network’s biggest achievements in 2014 has been in mapping out conflict areas in northern Kenya. It focuses on the factors which fuel armed violence occurring after peace agreements are signed between warring parties. Aware that small arms and light weapons were one of the biggest obstacles to peace in the region, Abdundi and her group mapped many of the weapons used by the combatants. She then instigated a regional agreement to pursue arms traffickers, closing boltholes used by smugglers along the Somali border and developing a register of all recovered weapons. The agreement also targeted a network of groups running an illegal arms trade.
Abdundi has established radio-listening groups specifically for women, in which she encourages them to challenge the repressive cultural values preventing women from being permitted to own property or livestock. She uses the radio groups to reach women with tuberculosis, educating them about access to treatment and breaking cultural beliefs that tuberculosis is caused by curses and bad omens.
Abdundi has also mobilised women along the Kenya-Somalia border to rise against Al-Shabaab, a militant terrorist group, by educating them on the dangers of following the doctrine propagated by the terror organisation; she has received a number of death threats as a result of this work. She has also campaigned against the practice of female circumcision in northern Kenya.
She said: “My dream is to help women, girls and children. I just want to see them doing good. That’s my dream.”
This article was published on March 2, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
26 Feb 2015 | mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
There is, I am told, a war going on in feminism. A war between “intersectionalists” (I think) and TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, as far as I can tell).
I am not about to stick my oar into this particular boating lake, for two reasons:
Reason 1. Self-awareness. I am a white middle class western European media professional, north-London dwelling male, born in a time when there is little chance of conscription. I am practically the most privileged thing that ever existed, and the last thing people struggling for equality need is me, turning up, cheerily shouting “Only me!!!” like Harry Enfield’s Mr-You-Don’t-want-to-do-it-like-that, and telling people how to do a real feminism. That is not to say I do not have a right to have an opinion, but…
Reason 2: lurking in that apparently placid boating lake are piranhas, reading to chew up and spit out any oarsman (or woman) who does not know every ebb and eddie of the lake.
It’s a horrible sight to see. Every so often some poor naive jumps in their little pleasure boat, having been assured by the man that it’s perfectly safe, and rows happily to the middle of the lake. You watch from the shore. They wave back. What’s that sound? They’re singing Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins, their rowing keeping a brisk beat with the jaunty marching tune. “Shoulder-to-shoulder” and-stroke-and-stroke.
Unbeknownst to them, the piranhas have smelled blood. They row on. Gleefully, they reach the crescendo: “Our daughters’ daughters’ will adore us…”. They raise their hands to punch the air. An unattended oar slips into the water. The piranhas stir. Daughters? That sounds like determinism. The water begins to froth. The poor unsuspecting oarsman (or woman) is still singing. Eventually they catch the commotion in the corner of one eye: they hear it grow louder, under the boat, which now seems irresponsibly flimsy.
They sing still, but now in trepidation: “No more the meek and mild subservients we!”.
The frenzy grows stronger, at what was certainly a slight on members of the BDSM community (well, the Ms anyway). Stronger and stronger. Our rower tries to resist, we can see, but the boat is now falling apart, as if rotten, under their feet. Our previously carefree rower feels first a nip, and then a rush. They are simultaneously drowning and being eaten alive.
A final defiant shriek from a the near-eviscerated pleasure seeker, and then there is nothing. The waters are calm once more.
We tut, from the shore. Such a shame, such a loss. Did you see the cowbell dog?
That’s one version, but then try to see it from the fishes’ point of view. Fish have got to live. Piranhas have been, for years, maligned as a generality by the mainstream. The very word “piranha” is thrown around as an insult. Piranhas are irrational, illogical, even abominations against nature. And of course, there is more than one type of piranha, and not every piranha has the same experience of what it’s like being a piranha. Piranha identity is complex, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean piranhas shouldn’t bond together and work together. What outsiders view as a “feeding frenzy” is actually the best – only – way piranhas can continue to exist safely.
Besides, the piranhas grew up in this lake. They know it like the back of their fins – how to navigate, how to communicate. If anyone’s in a wrong place in the boating lake, it’s not the piranhas.
This is not an unreasonable case. The question then (and here’s where the horrendous tortured boating lake analogy comes to an end, you’ll be pleased to know) is: Was George Bush right? Can the human beings and the fish coexist peacefully?
The issue emerged again recently with a terse exchange of letters in the Observer newspaper, which followed the cancellation of a show by comic Kate Smurthwaite at Goldsmith’s college. Smurthwaite said she’d been banned because some university feminists who are pro sex work were threatening to protests against her anti sex work views, and the college security didn’t want the hassle.
A letter was put together, as letters are, decrying campus censorship and the narrowing of debate (with specific mention of the National Union of Students’ policy of “no-platforming” feminist Julie Bindel for statements on trans people). There was a response, disputing the facts of the first letter and suggesting that there are bigger campus free speech issues – around student protest for example – than whether certain already powerful people can take part in a panel debate or a comedy show.
The problem here is the commodification of free speech: who is allowed it and who isn’t, and, in hierarchical societies (i.e. pretty much every society we’ve come up with so far) who grabs it as theirs and who should be granted more in order to even things out, and who can “use” free speech against whom.
This is to treat free speech as a weapon rather than a space. There is not a limited amount of free speech to go round: rather, there is a (hopefully) ever-expanding free speech arena in which we can argue. The signatories of both letters have actually identified the same problem, the narrowing of the space, particularly in education. Perhaps it would be beneficial for them to defend the space in which to argue rather than trying to push the other side overboard.
This article was posted on 26 February 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
