18 Apr 12 | Digital Freedom, Middle East and North Africa
Tunisian prime minister Hamadi Jebali has outlined government plans to “secure the electronic space of the country”, sparking fears that the government plans to reinstate internet censorship.
The programme will bring together a team of experts not only from the Ministry of Technologies of Communication, but also from the Ministries of Interior, Defence, and Justice.
Activists and bloggers concerns that this announcement could lead to the reintroduction of internet censorship were heightened by the news that the Ministries of Interior and Defence would play a role in “securing” the net.
In an interview on 12 April with state television channel Al-Wataniya TV 1, government spokesperson Samir Dilou, attempted to reassure the public. He said “securing” the internet is for “users’ benefit” and aimed to “prevent defamation and other virtual dangers”.
According to a Bloomberg investigation, the once feared Interior Ministry acted not just as an internet watchdog, but also intercepted and altered emails.
“When the Interior Ministry was involved in “securing” the internet during Ben Ali’s regime, the people couldn’t impeach it after the revolution. We are still unaware about the processes that existed to censor the web. And if we don’t know our past mistakes, we are most likely condemned to repeat them. So I fear that we are paving the path for a comeback of censorship”, said Bassem Bouguerra, a blogger, to Index.
After the 2011 uprising, both the judiciary and the Ministry of Defence have been involved in internet filtering. In May 2011 the Military Tribunal of Tunisia ordered the filtering of five Facebook pages over the publishing of content that the Ministry of Defence claimed sought to “damage the reputation of the military institution and, its leaders”, “destabilise the trust of citizens in the national army”, “and spread disorder and chaos in the country”.
Meanwhile the Tunisian Internet Agency is fighting a court decision ordering the filtering of X-rated websites.
The involvement of these ministries, whether before or after the uprising, in a number of censorship related tasks, explains the concerns that free speech advocates, and bloggers have about the government’s future plan.
Sleh Din Kchouk, President of the Tunisian Pirate Party believes the government’s plan will only “strangle [the] internet”.
“If the government does go ahead with this plan, it will prove to the Tunisian people that it is not here to defend freedoms as it is claiming, but it is here to cover up for people affiliated to the former regime, because it is only through Internet we can reveal the wrong doings of these people”, he added.
12 Apr 12 | Asia and Pacific, Digital Freedom
The past few months have seen the rise of a vocal and sophisticated anti-censorship campaign in Pakistan that has effectively shamed the government into shelving its plans for a national internet filtering system.
The Pakistan government’s ICT research and development fund issued a call in February for proposals from academia and companies for the development of a large-scale filter to block websites deemed “undesirable”.
According to the call, Pakistani internet service providers (ISPs) and backbone providers had “expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable web sites using current manual blocking systems.”
The document goes on to specify that the system should allow for the blocking of up to 50 million URLs with a processing delay of “not more than 1 milliseconds [sic]”. Were it to succeed, such a blanket system would put Pakistan’s internet on a par with the surveillance and filtering of China’s Great Firewall.
Human rights groups Bolo Bhi and Bytes for All have called on companies not to respond to the bid for proposals. Their methods seem to have worked, with five companies, including Websense, McAfee and Cisco saying they will not bid. Websense issued the following statement last month:
Broad government censorship of citizen access to the internet is morally wrong. We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.
The grassroots campaign has also garnered international attention, with a global coalition of NGOs, including Index, Article 19 and the Global Network Initiative, calling for the withdrawal of Pakistan’s censorship plans.
For Jillian C York, director for International Freedom of Expression at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, the support of, rather than initiation by, international groups has been key. “I think that it was a combination of strong Pakistani organisations working with international organisations in tandem that made this campaign so big,” York said in an email. “Bolo Bhi and Bytes for All made the campaign a local one, using the language they preferred, but were smart enough to get the right organisations to amplify their voices while still maintaining control of the tone. I think that’s the example that they set.”
“I don’t see a company going forward with it now because there’s been public outrage and naming and shaming,” Sana Saleem, CEO of Bolo Bhi (“speak up” in Urdu), told Index. “There has been consistent effort and collaboration (…) It is tempting to shout but we said ‘let’s sit down first’. If we were reactionary it would make it hard for businesses to join us.”
In addition to appealing to companies and receiving international support, activists continued to contact the Pakistani government. Eventually a member of the National Assembly notified Bolo Bhi that the country’s secretary of IT had confirmed to her that the proposals had been shelved. Yet no official statement has been released, with Bolo Bhi and other civil society members planning to file a consititutional petition tomorrow. Saleem says the verbal commitment could be seen as a delaying tactic, arguing that now is the time to “consistently build on the campaign.”
Saleem says the Pakistani government has been looking for more control of the internet — which is accessed by 20 million of the country’s 187 million population — and that the filtering proposals could give rise to blanket surveillance. The vagueness of the terms “objectionable content” and “national security” in the terms of reference might also make the plans prone to abuse.
The proposals also threaten secure, encrypted web browsing available via https. “Something that has always annoyed intelligence agencies is not being able to access https,” Saleem said, noting that the government currently needs a court order if they wish to monitor particular users. The proposals would essentially absolve ISPs of the responsibility of blocking content manually.
Her fear is where the filtering would stop. “If we allow the state to be our moral police, it could be pornography today and something else tomorrow,” she said, citing a case late last year in which the PTA issued directives to ISPs to block 1,000 pornographic websites.
Given its apparent backtracking, Saleem predicts that the government will now be more careful in how it approaches internet filtering and surveillance. “The government made a huge mistake in making the proposals public, so they might be more covert in the future.” She adds that more controversial issues of morality and blasphemy will continue to pose a challenge in the country. “These are very charged issues,” she said, adding: “when we talk about internet freedom and freedom of expression, the government will continue to use these [issues] as a shield to exert control.”
Saleem’s aim now is to get more stakeholders involved in a broader debate about Pakistan’s national security, starting by holding discussions with university students. “Ideally we’d want the internet to be completely free, but we do know Pakistan is a police state. This is a time when we can sit down and see what we want to do.”
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco.
10 Apr 12 | China, Digital Freedom
It has emerged that the Chinese government has closed 16 websites and detained six people for “fabricating or disseminating online rumours” in recent weeks.
On 19 March, rumours began spreading on Chinese microblogs that claimed “military vehicles” had entered Beijing, and that the Chinese capital was the centre of a coup attempt.
The rumours focus on internal political upheaval: the sacking of Bo Xilai, the popular former Chongqing Communist Party chief. Rumours began to spread after his deputy and police head Wang Lijun sought political asylum at the American Embassy.
Xinhua reports that the closed websites included meizhou.net, xn528.com and cndy.com.cn. These small websites do not affect everyday life in China, but then on the morning of 31 March, users of the country’s most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, woke up to find that they could not comment on any posts. Users of another large microblog, Tencent’s t.qq.com faced the same issues.
And on Friday 7 April, a well-known Maoist website, Utopia, was closed down along several other less well-known leftist websites.
China’s latest censorship tactics underscore Beijing’s nervousness ahead of the leadership transition later this year, with Bo’s ousting also giving rise to speculation about top-level infighting. Combined, these two factors are making China’s leaders all the more anxious about online discussion.
Having microblog comments shut off riled netizens. Sina put up the following notice:
Weibo users:
Lately there have been a lot of unlawful and harmful content appearing in the comments section of microblogs, so from 8AM on March 31 to 8AM on April 3 our comment function will be suspended temporarily. After we have finished this round of regulation, we will re-open it again.
Han Han, China’s foremost blogger and a recent Index on Censorship award nominee, chose the second day of this three-day shutdown period to speak up. He wrote:
Flowers lose their petals in the winter, and then bloom again in spring. Some people go, some people come.
The oblique post attracted hundreds of thousands of reposts.
After commenting had been restored, users such media worker Vic speculated rote on Sina that the microblogs censors were working overtime:
Ever since microblog commenting had been restored, the moderating at Sina is obviously stronger than it had been. They have over the last couple of days set a string of posts by me under the category “only seen by me.” Little Secretary [the nickname for web censors on the microblog], you’ve worked hard!
One of the replies to Vic’s post was by Linglingfa, the head of technology at internet web forum giant Maopu. He said:
I know everyone needs at least two accounts: one for normal use, and the other to monitor whether we can use the other one normally [i.e. what gets taken down and what doesn’t]… I now understand what a great way this is for Sina to expand the number of registered users!
On the morning of 7 April, commenting on the microblogs had already returned for a couple of days, and most people were buzzing about the loss of Utopia. The Guardian reported that the leftist website was shut down because of its support of “Red” messages such as those espoused by Bo Xilai, who had initiated new classes studying the works of Mao. After reportedly being told to close for a month, the website put up a notice that said:
Our staff asked for a list of articles that they thought violated the constitution and said we would certainly co-operate and deal with these problems. They did not have any specific articles or evidence. In the end, the conversation was cut short and rudely ended.
On the Sina microblog, a link to a Tianya post that had the following statement written by a fan of the website was re-posted over 60 times. The fan had in part written:
I heard that when it started, Utopia was a last effort to restore the glory days of the Cultural Revolution, but I never saw this myself. Naturally, they posted stuff, sang Red Songs, gave speeches, went travelling, and deleted those with a different view to them, burnt some magazines that have different views, destroyed lecture venues. Though some believed in it, no-one thought it would come to this.
