20 Feb 14 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Vietnam
Le Quoc Quan (Image: RFAVietnamese/YouTube)
The 30 month prison sentence for Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger, Le Quoc Quan, was today upheld by a Hanoi appeals court. Quan, who has frequently blogged about human rights violations by the government, was convicted in October 2013 on tax evasion charges. He has been arbitrarily detained since December 2012. A crowd of hundreds wearing t-shirts in support of Quan were present outside the court, while a European Union delegation, representatives from the United States and Canada and a small group of journalists were present at the trial. This is just the latest move in the Vietnamese authorities’ ongoing attack on dissent, free speech, free press and a free internet.
If you need to communicate with someone the Vietnamese government is interested in keeping an eye, it is always been useful to be careful. Phone conversations can be listened to. Meetings at houses could be watched. Protests are invariably filmed by government operatives. If you were going to, say, chat via Gmail’s chat function it should be switched to “off the record” to prevent a copy of the discussion being archived. Some unlucky people have seen their blog posts traced to the internet cafe they’ve later been arrested at. If you are a dissident you won’t be the only one the police are interested in; they’ll talk to your family, friends and employers, too. The latter they may ask to dismiss you.
It is Vietnam Ministry of Public Security conducts this surveillance work, while the Ministry of Information and Culture drafts many of the laws regarding internet usage and “abuse”. And it is most likely a unit within the MPS that is responsible for these, and earlier, malware attacks.
Much of the surveillance and intimidation is hardly new; similar operations took place during the Terror in the USSR. In fact, the CIA has compared the MPS with Russia’s KGB. The KGB of comrade days, however, never had to deal with the vastness of the internet. The government owns every newspaper and printing press in the country, but it has few serious servers, making control of the internet difficult. It does not stop them from trying.
In January the Associated Press in Vietnam reported on malware attacks against one of its journalists, against an American-Vietnamese blogger and against the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). These are certainly not the first of their kind but may have been the first directed against those on foreign shores. The private correspondence of Vietnamese-American blogger Ngoc Tu was posted on her blog after someone — supposed, but not verified to be the Vietnamese government — sent her an email with a link that installed malware and key logging software giving the sender access to her password and her email account. The Associated Press reporter was a sent an email purportedly from Human Rights Watch with a link to a ‘white paper’ on human rights.
Vietnam’s internet history: Enthusiasm and repression
Vietnam’s relationship with the internet has not been simple. The government has always been enthusiastic about the internet and the wholesale benefits it could, and has, brought to the nation. Though classified as an “enemy of the internet” by Reporters Without Borders for its blocking of websites and arrests of bloggers and journalists, Vietnam’s communist government has done an awful lot to ensure good internet access.
But the country’s vibrant internet culture is a direct result of government guidance and intervention. Vietnam has long valued literacy and learning and according to Professor Carlyle Thayer at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the government believed that the “knowledge era” was key to the nation’s economic development. The internet helped to provide that and greater world integration, something they have been increasingly keen for since Doi Moi in 1986 when the country began a period of economic renovation, shunning its former isolationist politics.
Twenty years ago the Vietnam Communist Party (CPV) noted three dangers facing the country: corruption, deviation from the socialist path and falling behind. The internet was seen a perfect way to engage more with the world. A 2011 report by market research firm Cimigo, headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, says: “Vietnam has seen a more rapid growth of the internet over the last few years than most other countries in the region and is one of the fastest growing internet countries in the world… Since the year 2000, the number of internet users in Vietnam has multiplied by about 120.”
However, the government misjudged, believing control to be easy, and circumventing its block beyond the ken of its citizens.
Putting the genie back in the bottle
There are three main laws bloggers, activists and others the state dislikes are charged under. Criminal Code Article 88 relates to “conducting propaganda against the state”. This is the one most often used — both draconian and helpfully vague. Then there is Article 258, relating to “abusing democratic freedoms”, and Article 79 covering “activities aimed overthrowing the Communist Party of Vietnam and People’s Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.
However there have also been numerous internet laws drafted, largely aimed at keeping citizens’ net activities restricted to useful research or harmless entertainment. An August 2001 law imposed “stringent” controls and required net cafe owners to report breaches to relevant authorities and to collect ID from their users. An August 2005 law criminalised using the internet to oppose or destabilise the state, security, economy or social order, infringe on the rights of organisations or individuals, or mess around with Domain Name System (DNS) settings — something many Facebook users started doing in 2009. In October 2007 the Ministry of Information and Culture issued a decision requiring all businesses to obtain a license before setting up a website. This has stymied growth in some ways, as it is only now that businesses are as present online as individuals.
In August 2008 Decree 97 made it illegal to “abuse” the internet to oppose the government. What got more attention was Circular 7, restricting bloggers to cover only personal, not political, topics. At the time blogging was a favoured pastime in Vietnam, Yahoo! 360 the favoured platform. Interest in blogging and blogs in general has since waned significantly. According to Cimigo, in 2009 40 per cent of internet users visited blogs and 20 per cent blogged themselves. By 2011 those numbers had halved as people increasingly moved to social media sites like Facebook.
It was the quiet block of Facebook in 2009 that caught the world’s attention. The government never mentioned a ban publicly though a purported scan of instructions to ISPs to block the site did rounds online. As the government never said much, Vietnam’s legion of Facebook users simply muttered something about “technical problems” as they “fixed” the DNS settings to access the site.
What led to the Facebook block was the organising between previously disparate groups against Chinese-run bauxite mines in the Central Highlands of Vietnam — an already ecologically and politically sensitive area. Catholics, activists, environmentalists and anti-China activists all united via Facebook to protest the mines. In 2010 the government tried to launch its own social networking site (which led to headlines such as ‘In Communist Vietnam, State Friends You’), go.vn, where users had to provide their full names and ID card details, but could also “friend” communist luminaries. The Minister for Culture and Information Le Doan Hop praised the site’s usefulness for young people and promotion of “culture, values and benefits”.
In 2010 came a decision requiring all public hotels to install Green Dam monitoring software. Theoretically it allowed the government to see what was being looked at, possibly by whom and take appropriate steps. In fact decision 15/2010/QD-UBND was something of a paper tiger; many pointed out how such a piecemeal and scattershot approach would have limited utility and could be wholly circumvented by any serious activist, though rights organisations took the appropriate potshots as a matter of course.
In 2010 a ban was put in place, ostensibly on all online gaming between 10pm and 6am, to combat gaming addiction. However, it was never fully possible to enforce thanks to most popular games being hosted by overseas servers.
The most recent attempts at curbing net use via legislation has been Decree-Law 72 on Management of the internet which formally came into effect in September 2013. Like many laws it is confusing and vague enough to be useful for any enthusiastic government prosecutor. Among other things it banned the sharing of news online. Or, rather, it banned the aggregation of news onto websites. The government took the time to publicly respond to the flurry of foreign concern and the head of the Ministry of Information and Culture’s Online Information Section protested to Reuters that the law did not violate any of Vietnam’s human rights commitments. “We will never ban people from sharing information or linking news from websites,” he said, arguing it had been misinterpreted.
There has been talk that Decree 72 was also designed to protect intellectual property, as violations have long been problematic and go far beyond dollar copies of new Hollywood films on DVD. One of the things 72 supposedly sought to do was prevent websites re-posting news from its original source with no attribution and thus make things easier for news sites whilst also laying groundwork for membership of the Trans Pacific Partnership in regards to intellectual property protection.
The more interesting requirement was that ISPs locate servers, or at least one, within Vietnam and deliver information on users to the government, rather as internet cafes have been required to do. They were also required to take down anything contravening laws. However Vietnam’s most trafficked sites do not have servers within Vietnam and with such new laws do not entirely see the point, either. Indeed there are not many substantial servers located there at all, and bloggers who fear the law usually host their blogs overseas in any case. Should the government instruct local ISPs to block say, Google, many will simply respond again to “technical difficulties” by readjusting their settings.
Peaceful evolution, draconian repression
The threat of peaceful and not so peaceful evolution hangs heavily over the heads of those in power in Hanoi.
Vietnam is regularly excoriated for its human rights record which generally means the way the nation locks up its dissidents, bloggers, religious leaders. Even US President Barack Obama made mention of blogger Dieu Cay’s ongoing detention, ostensibly for tax reasons.
According to Human Rights Watch there were at least 63 political prisoners convicted in Vietnam last year. And yet, as Professor Thayer said in a 2011 paper: “Great effort is put into monitoring, controlling and restricting Internet usage. The enormity of resources devoted for these purposes contrasts with the comparatively small number of political activists, religious leaders, and bloggers who have been arrested, tried and sentenced to prison.”
Though the numbers have increased since the above was written there is still little mass organising in this area, and large scale protests tend to be over more concrete issues: workers’ rights and wages or land grabs. However those considered potentially subversive are closely monitored, watched by both a physical presence and an online one.
Actual harassment of bloggers and their families has been common over the years. Most famously, mother of Vietnamese blogger Ta Phong Tan set herself on fire outside the Bac Lieu People‘s Committee building in the Mekong Delta in July 2012, in protest at the way her daughter had been treated.
Within the MPS are units that monitor all forms of communication and there are records of the country purchasing more complicated surveillance equipment. According to the same 2011 paper by Professor Thayer, Vietnam by 2002 had the Verint call monitoring system. Verint, a US company, supplies over 150 nations and 10,000 organisations with varied forms of security and monitoring equipment.
China in the 1990s also offered technical assistance to “monitor internal threats to national security” to the General Department II. The military also collects intelligence related to national security and with attention paid to those, abroad or within Vietnam, who “plot or engage in activities aimed at threatening or opposing the Communist Party of Vietnam or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.
General Department II not only, arguably, watched dissidents but also tapped senior party officials in an incident of usually opaque factionalism that later came to light.
There have been many attacks against varied blogs and websites; 16 starting in 2009 and intensifying in April of the next year. Varied activists came under fire: Catholics discussing land issues — there have been ongoing spats between Catholics and the state over land grabs — as well as environmentalists and political agitators. Sites allied to the anti-bauxite movement were also hit. IP addresses were allegedly traced back to within Vietnam and to addresses connected to the military. The attacks, verified by McAfee and Google, were botnet attacks where spyware hid in seemingly innocuous Vietnamese language keystroke software (though a Romanised alphabet Vietnamese has 29 letters and many diacritics). Neel Mehta, a security expert with Google, wrote in a blog post that: “While the malware itself was not especially sophisticated, it has nonetheless been used for damaging purposes.”
Vietnam joining the “technology race”?
That Vietnam has taken up the internet quickly and with great passion is beyond dispute but there are still gaps in the industry. Everyone may be using Google but few local businesses are profiting from the web and mobile boom.
Bryan Pelz, an IT developer, says there is “no means for direct monetization”.
“The banking industry and regulatory environment hasn’t taken strong steps to lay the groundwork for easy online payments. Essentially nobody has credit cards. If you’re building a website and hope to charge users or make a living off of advertising, it’s a tough road in Vietnam.”
And despite talented hackers and software engineers — Flappy Bird was designed by a Vietnamese engineer — with experience and skill comparable to the rest of Asia, software isn’t considered a hugely lucrative field, according to Pelz.
Of those aged 15 – 24, according to Cimigo, 95 per cent are online and spend over two hours each day on the web, via internet cafe, desktop or phone. Ninety five per cent use it for news. Google remains the top rated site in Vietnam, followed by local entertainment hub Zing. News sites Dan Tri and Tuoi Tre also feature, as does Yahoo!, Facebook and YouTube.
Last year a Russian-backed challenger to Google called Coc Coc (knock knock) opened shop. It has aimed to take some of Google’s 97 per cent market share, the reasoning being that Google had no offices in Vietnam and did not have algorithms well written enough to understand Vietnamese well. Unlike other startups it was backed with serious investment and a staff of over 300, according to the AP.
A recent article in The Atlantic reported that Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology has sponsored something called the Silicon Valley Project which aims to push Vietnam to be more than a simple producer of electronic parts (Intel has a 1 billion USD plant in the country) to a tech powerhouse with a strong startup industry and innovative firms. The recent success of Flappy Bird — one of the most downloaded apps ever — is seen as evidence of Vietnam’s larger potential.
Indeed the Silicon Valley Project’s mission statement is not dissimilar to the Communist Party’s mid-1990s ideas about the upcoming “knowledge era”: “This is the time for Vietnam to join in the technology race. Countries which fail to change with this technology-driven world will fall into a vicious cycle of backwardness and poverty.”
This government-backed and sanctioned creativity and entrepreneurship has been lauded, though it’s also been pointed out how it may rather clash with many of the internet restrictions set out in varied laws, such as Decree 72. Of course Vietnam’s ministries do not always march in-sync and what the Ministry of Information and Culture believes to be good may clash with a more pro-tech Ministry of Science and Technology.
The confirmation today that Le Quoc Quan is facing 30 months behind bars, does not bode well for the future of internet freedom in Vietnam.
This article was published on 20 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
01 Feb 14 | News and features, Politics and Society, Zambia
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
By Paul Carlucci for Think Africa Press, an online magazine that offers commentary and in-depth analysis from leading African and international thinkers.
Lusaka, Zambia: A little over two years ago, when Michael Sata was campaigning for Zambia’s top office, he promised that, if elected, he would finally bring to an end a decade of abandoned legal reform and deliver the country a definitive new constitution. Not only that, but he would do it within 90 days of taking power.
Sata’s election campaign was successful, and soon after taking office in September 2011, the new president − along with his Patriotic Front (PF) government − tasked a committee of lawyers and academics with drafting the document.
Things soon slowed down however, and it is only now − several shrugged-off deadlines later − that Zambia seems to be nearing the completion of its constitutional process. Though that’s not to say things are necessarily moving smoothly. In December 2013, the government blocked the constitutional committee from releasing its final draft to the public, insisting it be sent to the government alone, while allegations have emerged that Sata has changed his mind about Zambia’s need for a new constitution, believing instead that the existing one can simply be amended.
The government has rejected these claims, asserting that Sata’s commitment to a new constitution remains “unshakeable”, and his two-year-old promise continues to loom large in the psyche of an increasingly outraged brigade of critics. After the 2014 budget revealed a skew of alarming numbers and the global rating agency Fitch downgraded the country’s credit rating, the PF’s economic success story lost its celebrated momentum, leaving it with little more than a narrative of heavy-handed autocracy.
Many of the government’s opponents have closed in on the constitution as a panacea for all that ails the country, a movement that culminated in a major demonstration at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Lusaka and which took a sensational twist on 15 January when the outspoken Zambian Watchdog published what it claims is a leak of the final draft.
A torrent of official statements followed as the drafting committee denied originating the leak, the police vowed to clamp down on what they termed a ‘cybercrime’, and the government vowed to track down and punish the perpetrators of the leak. The cabinet, which is meant to be deliberating the final draft, also claimed it hasn’t yet received its copies of the document.
Talking the talk
While the authenticity of the leaked constitution is uncertain, it doesn’t stray far from the publicly available first draft, or even from previous drafts commissioned under past administrations. Zambia’s electoral system is addressed, requiring candidates to garner over 50% of the vote to hold presidential office, while parliament would be composed of members elected through a combination of first-past-the-post and proportional representation.
The draft Bill of Rights − which includes classical first generation rights as well as social, economic and cultural rights − is also more clearly articulated than it is in the existing constitution, and it seems to be these protections, more than technical changes to governance structure, that the opposition is longing for. They complain that their protests have been menaced by police and ruling party thugs, that critical media outlets have been persecuted by the government, and that the general population, especially outside the capital Lusaka, slogs through a life of poverty, illiteracy and environmental degradation.
Indeed, tackling these problems is crucial, but here’s the rub: there’s more than enough substance in the existing constitution to transform human rights in the country. That’s not the issue. The real problem is that successive administrations, including those headed by members of the now opposition Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), simply cast off their legal responsibilities when it suits them. What needs to be tackled is Zambia’s tradition of impunity, which dates all the way back to the era of its independence president, Kenneth Kaunda.
When Zambia was granted independence in 1964, it started its new life with a multiparty framework, led by Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (UNIP), which had won 55 of 75 seats in the pre-independence elections. But this wasn’t to last. In 1972, keen outmanoeuvre political opponents both inside and outside the ruling party, Kaunda banned all political parties apart from UNIP. In 1973, he formalised one-party rule in a new constitution that also that consolidated state power in the president’s office.
It was only 18 years later when Zambia was choked by debt and was facing mounting pressure from the international community that Kaunda commissioned a hasty legal review. That move led to the establishment of the 1991 constitution and multiparty elections that brought MMD leader Fredrick Chiluba to power.
Not a lot has changed since then, despite the reform commissions that have been mandated, the reports that have been produced, and the many amendments proposed. One amendment that has been passed was a provision barring candidates with foreign parentage from running for the presidency. Chiluba, assisted by Sata, who was then a member of the MMD, managed to force through this provision in 1996, effectively blocking Kaunda, whose father was born in neighbouring Malawi, from returning. The amendment still exists today, but the kinds of reforms that would hold leaders more closely to account have remained elusive.
A tradition of impunity
However, in many ways, the existing constitution does a lot of things right. It contains all the baseline requisites such as human dignity, equality before the law, protection from inhuman treatment, freedom from slavery, and freedoms of religion and expression. It also explicitly protects young people from various forms of exploitation. And under the Directive Principles of State Policy section, its clauses address employment, shelter, disability, and education. It does use some derogatory language, but so too do the current drafts of the new constitution.
The problem is that despite these legal mandates, correctional facilities are overcrowded and access to justice fails many prisoners in remand; there’s a long track record of beating, arresting, and criminally charging journalists, civil society leaders, and political figures who criticise government; poverty is endemic in rural areas, where education and healthcare facilities are also inadequate and the means of pursuing a gainful livelihood are largely absent.
When it comes to social and economic rights, many developing countries explain their failures in terms of cost. How can a poor nation like Zambia be expected to improve the lot of its direly undeveloped rural areas? How can it extend its meagre health and educational resources that far? How can it afford what human rights theorists call ‘positive rights’, those measures that require government action to protect and maintain?
Part of the answer is to dam the ever-bubbling backwaters of corruption, which divert enormous sums from the country’s development agenda. While corruption charges and trials do occur – usually motivated by political reasons – leaders from Chiluba to Sata have done little to substantively affect the diversion of public money from development to private bank accounts, while Chiluba in particular oversaw the country’s most notorious chapter of embezzlement.
Steak on the table
In the short term, real change won’t emerge from the government’s legal apparatus. It will have to come from outside. Protesting Zambians have chalked up victories before, as when public demonstrations played a role in dissuading Chiluba from seeking an unconstitutional third term. And if NGOs, beleaguered though they are by looming registration reforms, were to focus their efforts on mobilising not just urban Zambians, but also those people living in undeveloped areas, more tangible results could be achieved.
But it’s not just a case of focusing their efforts. It’s a case of refocusing them. The fight for a new and improved constitution is certainly a worthy one, but civil society organisations have made a holy grail of constitutional reform, as if delivery will automatically slacken the state’s grip on an array of levers it freely abuses, from stacking the judiciary with supporters to deploying waves of violent thugs in by-election campaigns.
The current opposition, meanwhile, is only too pleased to ally itself with activists, but given the MMD’s own history of unjust governance, the teaming up is clearly for self-serving reasons. Rather than giving politicians such an elevated podium from which to reinvent themselves, civil society would do better to zero in on specific rights violations and protest those on the same scale as they do constitutional reform.
The other piece of this puzzle is the international community. That’s a difficult prescription for a continent whose leaders routinely play their populations against what they frame as foreign interference, but sustained pressure from multilateral organisations able to reference even the current set of constitutional guarantees would help consolidate demands made in the streets.
None of this is to say that robust laws can’t lay the groundwork for a future of mature, responsive governance. A strong legal framework, no matter its current irrelevance, will make for useful terms of reference in a more developed future, and human rights theorists habitually point to ambitious laws as key components to equitable progress. Indeed, what is a pie in the sky today could very well become steak on the plate tomorrow. The point is that it will take more than a good-looking tablecloth to make that happen.
This article was originally published on 21 January 2014 at Think Africa Press and is reposted here by permission.
Paul Carlucci is a Canadian writer and journalist based in Lusaka, Zambia. He has reported from Ghana and Ivory Coast for Think Africa Press, IPS Africa, Al Jazeera English, the Toronto Star, and the Toronto Standard. His collection of short stories ‘The Secret Life of Fission’ is available through Oberon Press. Follow him on twitter @PaulCarlucci.
29 Jan 14 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
The revelations by Edward Snowden last June about massive, unaccountable surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart GCHQ have raised one vital question. Is there a global right of privacy? If so, what form might it take?
In November 2013, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued in favour of a global human right of privacy. “All [governments] should acknowledge a global obligation to protect everyone’s privacy, clarify the limits on their own surveillance practices (including surveillance of people outside their own borders), and ensure they don’t trade mass surveillance data to evade their own obligations.”
Fundamental to this discussion is the role technology has played in outpacing legal oversight. In April 2013, the report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression had one express focus: To examine “the implications of states’ surveillance of communications in the exercise of the human rights to privacy and to freedom of opinion and expression.” In the Rapporteur’s view, it was clear that the march of technology, with its move to low cost mobile communications as opposed to previous fixed-line methods had “increased opportunities for state surveillance and interventions into individuals’ private communications.” Borderless surveillance has become a reality.
In their remarkable article on privacy in the Harvard Law Review of 1890, Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren argued that, “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and the vicious, but has become a trade”. Through sharp, analogical reasoning, the jurists decided that grounds for a civil wrong in breaching privacy might be found. The law had to keep pace with the type of technology involved. In their times, it was the telegraph.
International law accepts that a right to privacy exists and should be protected. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) makes it explicit. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, through Article 17, has the same effect. Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms has spawned rich jurisprudence on the subject. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Council of Europe, have various guidelines and protocols in place for data protection.
That said, common law countries such as Britain and Australia have shown a reluctance to find a genuine civil wrong when someone’s privacy is violated. Preference is given to finding a breach of confidence. In the United States, there is a reasonable expectation under the Fourth Amendment that one’s privacy will be protected, though it has no application to foreigners. Civil code countries have shown a greater willingness to identify the human body as inviolable before unwarranted interference.
Analysts have argued that a protected global right to privacy is urgent because the global surveillance state has itself become a reality. It is not merely sufficient to restrain through warrant and judicial control the actions of the NSA regarding American citizens. As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Centre argues (Just Security, Oct 29, 2013), focus must lie beyond the limited social contract between US government and its citizens. The rights of non-US citizens to privacy, in other words, extra-territorial rights, matter. Privacy rights are transnational issues, requiring transnational measures of protection.
In the United States, President Barack Obama has at least acknowledged the globalised nature of the surveillance problem, and the need for global protections that consider the rights of non-US citizens as well. His latest suggestions can be found in Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28.
A notable feature in PPD-28 is the restriction on monitoring foreign citizens, which might be termed the “Merkel” clause after it was revealed that the German Chancellor’s phone was being monitored by the NSA. Section 4 of PPD-28 also serves to create the machinery by which the US will form a “point of contact for foreign governments who wish to raise concerns regarding signals intelligence activities conducted by the United States.”
In these proposals, Obama fails, as executive director of Amnesty International USA Steven W. Hawkins explains, to accept “the abusive nature of mass surveillance or put international human rights standards at the centre of US policy”. They do not so much curtail surveillance as simply limit aspects of its reach. Executive Order 12333 still affords Obama powers to authorise surveillance programs without judicial review. The law is still kept at arm’s length.
The normalisation of Stasiland is the great feature of the twenty first century – no political system has been spared that, largely because the technological means have outpaced the legal regulations. A collective of some 500 writers, among them Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, and Don DeLillo, have argued via a petition in December 2013 that, “A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space.” It is time to consider not merely limits to the bulk surveillance, but enforceable obligations on the part of states to abide by a global rule on privacy.
This article was posted on 29 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
20 Jan 14 | Events
Index invites you to Dilemmas, Debates, Demands and Drinks a candid discussion about working with freedom of expression.
Where: Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, EC1R 3GA
When: 7 February 7 6.30pm – 9pm
Tickets: Free, but RSVP Essential via [email protected]
A year on from Index’s conference ‘Taking the Offensive – defending artistic freedom of expression in the UK’ (read the conference report here) – join us for an open space event at the Free Word Centre to discuss how the changing free expression landscape affects the arts and vice versa.
There were highs and lows for free expression in UK last year.
HIGHS: the reform libel law by the Defamation Act; the box-office success for Book of Mormons; the growth in sales of self-published books; reform of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, and Grayson Perry singing out loud and clear for freedom of expression in the Reith Lectures. What pushed the boundaries for you in 2013?
LOWS: the revelations about government’s wholesale surveillance of our online activity, the enactment of new press regulations post Leveson, government commissioned web filtering and segregation on university campuses, reforms to GCSE downgrading arts education. How do these developments affect the climate for artistic expression?
FUTURE: The issues of online filters, the call for protection against harassment and social media guidelines (Crown Prosecution Service social media guidelines published last year) require us all to think what sort of internet we want – how free it is, or should be. Are you, or artists/producers you know, concerned about online abuse or commentary in relation to your work?
OPEN SPACE EVENT: The agenda is based on what you bring to it. Here is the space to discuss anything from one of the big issues of the day or talk about that difficult poem that someone once wrote in a workshop. Or just sit and listen. Join Indexers past and present and some of our close friends and associates at Free Word, facilitated by Chrissie Tiller.
