20 Sep 24 | News and features, United Kingdom
In August 2021, when the Taliban took over Kabul and home searches became ubiquitous, women started to delete anything they thought could get them in trouble. Books were burned, qualifications were shredded, laptops were smashed. But for 21 members of a women’s creative writing group, a lifeline remained: their WhatsApp group. Over the next year they would use this forum to share news with one another (a story that has since been chronicled in the recently published book My Dear Kabul, which was published by Coronet and is an Untold Narratives project, a development programme for marginalised writers). Doing so through WhatsApp was not incidental. Instead the app’s use of end-to-end-encryption provided a strong level of protection. The only way the Taliban would know what they were saying was if they found their phones, seized them, forced them to hand over passwords and went into their accounts. They could not otherwise read their messages.
End-to-end encryption is not sexy. Nor do those four words sound especially interesting. It’s easy to switch off when a conversation about it starts. But as this anecdote shows it’s vitally important. Another story we recently heard, also from Afghanistan: a man hid from the Taliban in a cave and used WhatsApp to call for help. Through it, safe passage to Pakistan was arranged.
It’s not just in Afghanistan where end-to-end encryption is essential. At Index we wouldn’t be able to do our work without it. We use encrypted apps to message between our UK-based staff and to keep in touch with our network of correspondents around the world, from Iran to Hong Kong. We use it to keep ourselves safe and we use it to keep others safe. Our responsibility for them is made manifest by our commitment to keep our communication and their data secure.
Beyond these safety concerns we know end-to-end encryption is important for other reasons: It’s important because we share many personal details online, from who we are dating and who we vote for to when our passport expires, what our bank details are and even our online passwords. In the wrong hands these details are very damaging. It’s important too because privacy is essential both in its own right and as a guarantor of our other fundamental freedoms. Our online messages shouldn’t be open to all, much as our phone lines shouldn’t be tapped. Human rights defenders, journalists, activists and MPs message via platforms like Signal and WhatsApp for their work, as do people more broadly who are unsettled by the principle of not having privacy.
Fortunately, today accessible, affordable and easy-to-use encryption is everywhere. The problem is its future looks uncertain.
Last October, the Online Safety Act was passed in the UK, a sprawling piece of legislation that puts the onus on social media firms and search engines to protect children from harmful content online. It’s due to come into force in the second half of 2025. In it, Section 121 gives Ofcom powers to require technology companies to “use accredited technology” that could undermine encryption. At the time of the Act’s passage, the government made assurances this would not happen but comments from senior political figures like Sadiq Khan, who believe amendments to the acts are needed, have done little to reassure people.
It’s not just UK politicians who are calling for a “back door”.
“Until recently, traditional phone tapping gave us information about serious crime and terrorism. Today, people use Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook, etc. (…) These are encrypted messaging systems (…) We need to be able to negotiate what you call a ‘back door’ with these companies. We need to be able to say, ‘Mr. Whatsapp, Mr. Telegram, I suspect that Mr. X may be about to do something, give me his conversations,’” said French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin last year.
Over the last few years police across Europe, led by French, Belgium and Dutch forces, have breached the encryption of users on Sky ECC and EncroChat too. Many criminals were arrested on the back of these hacking operations, which were hailed a success by law enforcement. That may be the case. It’s just that people who were not involved in any criminal activity would also have had their messages intercepted. While on those occasions public outcry was muted, it won’t be if more commonly used tools such as WhatsApp or Signal are made vulnerable.
Back to the UK, if encryption is broken it would be a disaster. Not only would companies like Signal leave our shores, other nations would likely follow suit.
For this reason we’re pleased to announce the launch of a new Index campaign highlighting why encryption is crucial. WhatsApp, the messaging app, have kindly given us a grant to support the work. As with any grant, the grantee has no influence over our policy positions or our work (and we will continue to report critically on Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, as we would any other entity).
We’re excited to get stuck into the work. We’ll be talking to MPs, lawyers, people at Ofcom and others both inside and outside the UK. With a new raft of MPs here and with conversations about social media very much in the spotlight everywhere it’s a crucial moment to make the case for encryption loud and clear, both publicly and, if we so chose, in a private, encrypted forum.
11 Sep 24 | Afghanistan, Albania, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
A summit on Afghan women’s rights is taking place in the Albanian capital Tirana this week. The gathering comes just two weeks after the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” laws banned women in Afghanistan speaking in public.
The All-Afghan Women’s Summit is in stark contrast to a United Nations meeting in Doha, Qatar at the end of June on the future of Afghanistan which excluded women at the insistence of the Taliban.
Over 100 Afghan women are taking part in the summit in Tirana, which is co-hosted by the governments of Albania and Spain and co-sponsored by the government of Switzerland.
The event is organised by Women for Afghanistan and chaired by Afghan campaigner and former politician Fawzia Koofi. The summit is designed to give a voice to Afghan women and work towards a manifesto for the future of Afghanistan.
Koofi said: “Whilst my sisters have suffered the most under the Taliban, they have also been the strongest voices standing up against oppression. This Summit will bring us together, consolidate our positions, and build unity and purpose towards a common vision for our country. We urge the international community to listen to our recommendations on a unified platform. There is simply no time to lose”.
The occasion was marked by the release of an anthem by the UK-based Aghan singer Elaha Soroor celebrating the strength and resilience of Afghan women. The song is sung to the words of a poem in Farsi based on the rallying cry of the women’s protest movement in Afghanistan: “Bread, Work, Freedom! Education, Work, Freedom!”
“This poem is an expression of a woman’s struggle for autonomy, identity, and liberation from the constraints imposed by tradition and patriarchal authority,” Soror explained. “As the poem progresses, she reclaims her power, embracing her own identity and rejecting patience as a virtue that no longer serves her.”
Index has consistently campaigned for women’s rights in Afghanistan. Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the organisation has put pressure on the British government to honour its promises to Afghan journalists and women.
Three years ago, we helped organise an open letter to The Times calling on the UK government to intervene on behalf of Afghan actors, writers, musicians and film makers targeted by the Taliban. Since then, we have run a series of articles about life under the Taliban regime.
This article from February 2023 was written anonymously about one female journalist who suffered assault and starvation during her escape from Afghanistan. Thankfully, the writer concerned, Spozhmai Maani, is now safely in France, thanks to the support of Index and other international organisations. We were delighted to announce in January 2024 that Spozhmai had won our Moments of Freedom award. Others have not been so fortunate, The crackdown on journalists continues and the latest laws effectively criminalise free expression for women.
31 Jul 24 | Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
On 14 February, as the upper echelons of Germany’s Green Party prepared to descend on the south-western town of Biberach for their annual meeting, demonstrators blocked access to the town hall with tractors, paving stones, sandbags and manure.
Things took a more aggressive turn when three police officers were injured by protesters hurling objects. Police intervened with pepper spray and a protester smashed a window of federal minister of agriculture Cem Özdemir’s car. The Green Party cancelled the meeting because of safety concerns.
In the state of Thüringen, 200 farmers and demonstrators attempted to block roads to stop a company visit by vice-chancellor Robert Habeck. They insulted the company’s employees and threatened to hang journalists. A week later, an angry crowd followed and heckled party leader Ricarda Lang in Schorndorf, in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, until police stepped in – then the crowd attacked the officers, injuring some of them.
These attacks were far from isolated incidents. In 2021, the party was the most successful of its kind in Europe and the poster child of the continent’s hopeful environmentalist movement, having joined a government coalition for the first time.
Today, it is coming under attack – verbally and violently – unlike any other party.
According to German parliament figures, 44% of the politically motivated attacks recorded in 2023 targeted Green Party representatives, three times as many as their coalition partners or the opposition.
Early this year, another angry mob prevented Habeck, once one of Germany’s most popular politicians, from getting off a ferry in northern Germany. In September 2023, a man threw a rock at party leaders at a campaign event in Bavaria. And earlier that year, Lang found a gun cartridge in her letterbox.
Violence against MPs and politicians is on the rise across the EU, and in May Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot in an assassination attempt. But in Germany, this violence disproportionately targets Green Party politicians.
Local party members and supporters have refused to join the electoral campaign out of fear, according to Carolin Renner, a local party speaker in Görlitz, a far-right stronghold where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won 32.5% of the vote in the 2021 election.
It’s hard to pin down when the mood began to swing against the Green Party. “I think this hate was always there,” Renner told Index, adding that it might have been when AfD drifted to the far-right around 2015.
But things took a turn for the worse in 2020 and 2021 when Covid restrictions generated massive anti-lockdown movements in Germany. At the end of 2021, the Green Party formed a government coalition with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
“That’s when it really got out of hand,” Renner said. “We had people calling to say they were coming into our office and going to kill us and our families.” People slapped stickers on the doors, others spat on the windows and others glued the building’s doors so members couldn’t get in. “I was handling all the reporting to the police at the time, and I had to file at least one report per week,” she said. “It was pretty bad.”
Since the 2021 election, several political parties have tried to portray the Green Party as an urban elitist movement out of touch with the population. It is a favourite target of the far-right AfD, and its representatives have recently said it was “not surprising” that it was coming under attack.
But other parties have joined in attacking them, too. “It seems that the Greens were identified as the main political opponent by several, very different parties,” said Hannah Schwander, a professor of political sociology and social policy at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Markus Söder, the leader of the centre-right Christian Social Union in Bavaria, said the Greens were “the number one party of prohibition”, falsely claiming it planned to ban meat, firecrackers, car washing and balloons. And the far-left party leader Sahra Wagenknecht has branded the Greens “the most dangerous party in the Bundestag”.
Even Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor from coalition partner the SPD, said it “remains a party that likes bans”.
“When you have politicians or the media who take up these narratives, that creates an atmosphere in which it seems legitimate to attack politicians – verbally, at first,” said Schwander. “But as we see now, that translates into action as well.”
The politicians’ rhetoric was accompanied by an onslaught of online campaigns. According to Raquel Miguel, a senior researcher with EU Disinfo Lab – an independent non-profit that gathers intelligence on disinformation campaigns in Europe – Green Party members were the most targeted by hoaxes during the 2021 election year. She said that they exaggerated the party’s inexperience and proposals, falsely claiming the party planned to ban fireworks or family barbecues, for example.
“Online campaigns contributed to stirring up hatred against individuals but also to discrediting and undermining trust in politicians, dehumanising them and making them more susceptible to attacks,” Miguel told Index. “And dehumanising contributes to accepting violence.”
In conspiracy-minded far-right groups congregating on the social messaging platform Telegram, the party was depicted as an enemy trying to “take away your way of life, your steak, the sugar from your coffee”, said Lea Frühwirth, a senior researcher with the non-profit Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy. “What that does psychologically is [make it feel] like an invasion of your personal space.”
The media have reported that the attacks on the Green Party’s annual meeting in Biberach and the heckling of the party’s leader in February originated from conspiratorial Telegram channels.
Violence against the party is on the rise, just as green parties faced the worst losses in the 2024 European Parliament elections. The party’s share in Germany appears to have plummeted since the last elections. However, researchers say that the population has not turned against climate issues. “The data shows that there hasn’t really been a widespread backlash against green policies,” said Jannik Jansen, a policy fellow focusing on social cohesion and just transition policies at the Jacques Delors Centre think-tank within Berlin’s Hertie School, which focuses on governance. Jansen co-authored a recent study of attitudes to climate policy among 15,000 voters in France, Germany and Poland. “The political mainstream hasn’t really shifted in this sense,” he said.
But polarisation and extremism have risen. Schwander said some climate issues had become more politicised, and society in general has become more polarised – although in a peculiar way. “People don’t seem to be more polarised on issues than they were before, but they dislike people who think differently more,” she said.
Political violence has risen considerably. Police recorded 2,790 incidents of physical or verbal violence against elected politicians in 2023 – and the figure has nearly doubled in the last five years. Attacks resulting in physical injury also appear to be on the rise.
Twenty-two politicians have been attacked so far in 2024, compared with 27 for all of 2023, according to federal police.
The number of politically motivated crimes has also risen to record-high levels, driven by a rise in right-wing extremism. According to government figures, the country recorded 60,028 offences in 2023 – the highest level since records began in 2001.
But things appear to be going better in the far-right stronghold of Görlitz. “This year, we only had maybe two or three direct attacks,” said Renner. She said the biggest incident happened during the farmers’ protests that shook Europe in late 2023 and early 2024.
“Shortly before Christmas, someone dumped a big load of horse shit right in front of our door at the Zittau office,” she said, adding that the decrease in attacks might be due to the police being more actively involved.
She said the party had also put in place a safety plan ahead of the European elections, requiring members to move in groups of at least three and sharing the list of party events and members’ whereabouts with the police at all times.
Attacks seem to have spilled over to other parties. In early May, European MP Matthias Ecke, from the SPD, was seriously injured when four young men assaulted him while he put up campaign posters in Dresden. He had to be taken to hospital and required surgery. That same evening, a Green Party campaigner was assaulted in the same area, allegedly by the same group. And a few days later, it was the turn of AfD politician Mario Kumpf, who was attacked in a supermarket.
Renner told Index that someone tore down nearly every party’s electoral posters in the northern part of the Görlitz district. “There’s not one poster left except for the far-right,” she said. “It’s not just the Greens anymore – it’s democracy itself that’s being attacked.
12 Jul 24 | Europe and Central Asia, France, Germany, Netherlands, News and features, Russia
A network of accounts flooded social media with disinformation in the run-up to the European Parliamentary elections a new report has found.
The report was commissioned by the Social Democrats in the European Parliament (S&D) grouping together with the Dutch delegation GroenLinks-PvdA and produced by disinformation specialisists Trollrensics.
It reveals that organised networks of thousands of accounts, which the researchers believe are of likely Russian origin, actively influenced public opinion on X in France and Germany during the elections while voters in the Netherlands, Italy and the English-speaking public were also affected by the troll networks
Trollrensics’ data analysis showed that at least 20% of all tweets about the French far-right politician Zemour came from this troll network, for example. However, the research company estimated the actual percentage is significantly higher as the networks manipulated the X algorithm to amplify specific themes.
The research also found that German political party AfD received a huge boost thanks to the troll army. At least 10.7% of the tweets about the AfD came from the disinformation network.
The network focused mainly on spreading pro-Russian propaganda, messages about anti-vaxxers with anti-vaccination narratives and anti-LGBTIQ+ messages.
Thijs Reuten, an MEP for the S&D, said, “We commissioned this independent study as we were curious about the extent of online foreign interference and how measurable it is – especially because this sometimes seems so hard to ascertain. This study has shown that significant influence took place during the European elections. Troll armies managed to make topics trend and at the same time make certain news reports less visible.”
Reuten added, “This clearly shows our democracy is vulnerable and that foreign powers are willing to spend a lot of money and effort to sow division in our population. We need to defend ourselves better against such organised attempts of foreign interference. I expect the European Commission and the intelligence services to be on top of this. Our open society is in danger if troll armies are able to manipulate social media and, therefore, the public debate”.
