This year’s Internet Governance Forum, to be held in Azerbaijan from 6-9 November, comes at a key moment in the battle between those who want to keep the internet free and those who do not.

The United Nations’s flagship forum for discussing internet governance, the IGF will be a primer for the crucial World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) taking place a month later in Dubai. WCIT could fundamentally alter the structure and global reach of the internet as some countries seek to wrench control of the net away from the United States and centralise it through new UN controls.

Exactly how the internet should be governed as it continues to grow is contentious. The current multi-stakeholder, bottom-up model of internet governance is not without its problems: A large part of the world’s population feels excluded from internet policy making.

The internet is facing multiple threats: Censorship enacted by states and corporations through filters, firewalls and takedown requests. As private companies expand internationally they face the challenge of respecting both fundamental human rights and the law of the land, as demonstrated Twitter’s recent decision to block the account of a German far-right group. Such companies also play a leading role in delineating the boundaries of “acceptable” speech through their own terms of service and policies.

The thorny issues do not stop there: Mass monitoring and surveillance of citizens’ use of digital communications endanger fundamental human rights, and Western companies’ role in exporting surveillance technology to authoritarian states continues apace. And both democratic and authoritarian states are ever more willing to criminalise speech online — be it tweets by activists in Bahrain or offensive jokes posted on Facebook in the UK.

Index sets out these challenges in its policy paper below. We will be in Baku for the IGF; our head of advocacy Mike Harris will be chairing a debate on censorship enacted by private companies, and our CEO Kirsty Hughes will be taking part in a panel on security and privacy. To follow the forum on Twitter, use the hashtag #IGF12.

Policy Note:  The Growing Threats to Digital Freedom 

Marta Cooper is editorial researcher at Index. Follow her on Twitter @martaruco

The post Index tells policy makers to keep the internet free appeared first on Index on Censorship.

He has referred to it more than once as the “elephant in the room”.

As his Inquiry into press standards continues, Lord Justice Leveson is finding it trickier to grapple with the issues presented by the internet, perhaps the most awkward piece of the press puzzle he has been enlisted to solve.

It seemed the topic, admittedly outside of the judge’s broad terms of reference, vanished for a short time, only to rear its contentious head in the last month of witness evidence.

In May MailOnline editor Martin Clarke implored Leveson and his team to stop “obsessing” with newspapers, describing them as just one part of a wider, tangled media spectrum, and that to focus on them solely was to look backwards.

Clarke has a fair bit of clout with which to make this claim. Last December his website overtook the New York Times as the world’s most popular news site, with two-thirds of its monthly users based outside the UK. Clarke listed Yahoo!, MSN and the Huffington Post as MailOnline’s biggest competitors — sites which are making headway in becoming global news providers — in addition to unregulated bloggers and social networks.

Fundamentally, as Clarke stressed, the way we consume news has changed. “You can’t really slice and dice the Internet up into different bits,” he said. “People consume the Internet as a kind of continuous spectrum. They’ll get up, they’ll look at their friend’s Facebook page, so that friend on Facebook has published something. They’ll then follow somebody on Twitter who has also published something.”

“Stephen Fry has nearly 4 million users. He can reach more people in an hour than I can. So is he going to be regulated?”

While MailOnline follows the same rules as UK newspapers by adhering to the PCC code and abiding by laws of contempt and libel, the question is whether or not this reach will extend to his online, unregulated competitors. Easier said than done, as Clarke wrote in his witness statement:

Underpinning any press regulator as a statutory body effectively gives the state the power to licence newspapers and penalise ones that either do not join the body or ignore its rules. The only way to force bloggers to sign up as well would be to give that statutory body the same power to shut down blogs. If licensing newspapers is a severe restriction on free speech, this would be positively North Korean and the subject of mass internet protest. But even if we could get a law through, is it enforceable? Are we really going to drag Guido Fawkes off to the tower like his famous namesake for not joining the PCC?

Ultimately it is a question of adapting, rather than trying to control the changes to journalism that web publishing has triggered (in Peter Mandelson’s words, “a runaway train”). The damage, if it can so be called, has been done: for all the rich opportunity and diversity it has brought to newsgathering and production, it is undeniable that the web has shaken the newspaper industry to its very core, leaving it with little in the way of a viable business model.

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s press-card system might go some way to protect the status of newspaper reporters, but what about the citizen journalists, whose material has been shown time and again to be of huge value, particularly during fast-moving news (citizens’ and reporters’ use of Twitter to keep track of the London riots is just one of a library of examples).

We have also seen the law clamp down upon those who tweet as freely as they would talk in the pub, as Swansea student Liam Stacey found out all too well. We are taking part in swathes of 140-character conversations, but how much is the average Twitter user familiar with the Contempt of Court Act, for example, and that our Attorney General is willing to come down like a ton of bricks on those who breach it? A need for a wider understanding of media law is now more relevant than ever.

Yet squaring the circle is tricky when what we’re discussing is a medium built on the basis of openness and making things easier to access.

Perhaps Leveson didn’t quite know what he had himself in for when he was appointed to lead the Inquiry last summer. He does now.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index, where she leads coverage of the Leveson Inquiry. She tweets at @martaruco

Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson

The post Lord Justice Leveson’s big internet problem appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The Leveson Inquiry should not forget the need to protect British journalism, says Marta Cooper

In some of the clearest hints on his likely recommendations on changes to press regulation — due this autumn — Leveson told Monday’s witness, former prime minister Tony Blair, that any successor to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) would need to be independent of the government and the industry.

He added that there was a need to “have a mechanism that means that sanctions work”.

The judge said any system must employ experts, and command both press and public respect, as well as provide redress to those who cannot afford the luxury of litigation. On the issue of notifying subjects before a potentially damaging story about them is printed — a cause championed by ex-Formula 1 boss Max Mosley — Leveson chose his words carefully, suggesting there had to be “some way of drawing a line”.

This is not the first time he has floated such ideas. The judge has repeatedly reminded watchers that he is merely thinking aloud, stressing he has no desire to imperil free speech, as he told education secretary Michael Gove during their duel in court 73 on Tuesday.

Yet what gets lost in this Inquiry, which seems continually to unearth new conundrums outside of its remit, is the need to protect the press that Leveson has been enlisted to sort out.

There is a need for a clearer legal definition of public interest, as demonstrated by this week’s decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to take no action against Guardian reporter Amelia Hill, who was investigated over leaks from the Metropolitan police’s phone-hacking investigation.

While the CPS found there was a realistic prospect of section 55 of the Data Protection Act having been breached, it said the public interest “outweighed the overall criminality alleged” involved in publishing the information received from a police officer. There was also no evidence the police officer was paid any money for the information.

This measured decision was the responsible and the right one: it protects investigative reporting and the freedom of the fourth estate to do its job.

But unlike section 55 of the DPA, other criminal offences that that this country’s media may fall foul of — such as the Official Secrets Act, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and Computer Misuse Act — do not offer the protection of a public interest defence.

Imagine a journalist hacked into a minister’s email in order to expose corruption. Regardless of what was exposed, or how small the intrusion, there would be no public interest defence in the Computer Misuse Act for that reporter if he or she were to be prosecuted.

We need journalists to expose the truth, and in pursuit of this there may be occasions where reporters break the law. The Daily Telegraph’s expose of MPs’ expenses, using information that was paid for, is a clear example of the ends justifying the means. A stronger public interest defence would mean journalists could be reassured that in such cases they would have a strong defence, and not feel deterred from doing good journalism.

None of this is to suggest the press is above the law. On the contrary: if journalists were protected by such a defence — one that could be weighed up by the courts — the line between responsible, investigative journalism and acts of egregious wrongdoing would be clearer.

Rather than resorting to statute to solve what has already gone wrong, a public interest test could also improve our current system of self-regulation, as City University’s George Brock has argued here (£). By showing they deserved the protection of a public interest defence in their actions, newsrooms would be able to be more transparent about the editorial standards employed. “Trivial, sloppy or bad journalism which can’t claim a public interest justification gets no protection; better journalism at least has that line of defence available,” says Brock. This seems like a fair deal and a way to create an incentive for journalists to rely less on the so-called dark arts for their stories.

Despite the relentless criticism piled on the Press Complaints Commission over the course of the Inquiry, its definition of public interest is comprehensive. It includes but is not confined to detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety; protecting public health and safety; and preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation. It states that there is a public interest in freedom of expression itself, and also protects the paramount interest of a child in cases involving children under 16. It provides a useful starting block from which to develop a fuller public interest test.

The British press is already hemmed in by the existing law of the land, as Inquiry witnesses Private Eye editor Ian Hislop and former Times journalist Gove pointed out. The question is how to better enforce it and in so doing improve editorial governance, encourage transparency and protect reporters, the vast majority of whom were appalled by the wrongdoing at the News of the World that triggered the Inquiry in the first place.

This country is home to some brilliant papers, vibrant and loud voices who are unafraid of getting their hands dirty by investigating corruption, scandal and wrongdoing. It might be tempting to look at the Inquiry as a chance to rein in the feral beasts, but let’s not forget that it was an act of brave and relentless journalism that exposed an act of putrid journalism. The illegality exposed is being dealt with, and rightly so.

Lord Justice Leveson has said he does not want to risk his Inquiry ending up as a footnote in history, and a bargain must certainly be struck between balancing our free press and a regulator with teeth. But a bigger risk is missing this chance to protect the journalism — rough and ready, noisy, tireless — that makes our press freedom worth fighting for.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index, where she leads coverage of the Leveson Inquiry. She tweets at @martaruco

Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson

The post Britain’s press needs a strong public interest defence appeared first on Index on Censorship.

For some, the Inquiry has presented the British press with an opportunity for a shake-up not dissimilar to that triggered by the Calcutt Report of the early 1990s. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger praised the Inquiry for triggering a more nuanced look at regulation and statute. Others were less keen: Northern and Shell boss Richard Desmond called it “probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to newspapers in my lifetime”.

Leveson has learned a lot in the past few months. For one, the Inquiry has hammered the last nail into the Press Complaints Commission’s coffin. Harry Potter author JK Rowling called it a “wrist-slapping exercise at best”. In the same week, the  father of missing toddler Madeleine McCann suggested “repeat offenders” of incorrect coverage should lose their privilege of practising journalism. The editor of the Daily Express, Hugh Whittow, went so far as to suggest that one of the reasons for the paper withdrawing from the PCC was because it failed to stop the tabloid publishing defamatory articles about the McCanns.

Criticism also came from the Inquiry team. Counsel Robert Jay QC put it to ex-PCC director Tim Toulmin that the self-regulation body had failed to “test the boundaries of its powers” by choosing not to question former News of the World editor Andy Coulson after he resigned from the tabloid following the 2007 convictions of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire over phone hacking. Toulmin rejected the suggestion.

But PCC chairs past and present repeated that the body had been criticised for failing to exercise the powers it never had. Former chair Baroness Peta Buscombe argued that the body did not have investigatory powers to summon editors to give evidence under oath. She noted that broadcast regulator Ofcom cannot “deal with crime, nor should it”, and that the rest of the world “would kill” for the British press’s system of self-regulation.

“It is as if you say to the police ‘you are useless because you can’t stop crime’,” her predecessor, Sir Christopher Meyer said. “These are ridiculous arguments.”

The fear of statutory regulation is also alive and well. Times editor James Harding expressed concerns that a “Leveson act” would have a “chilling effect” on press freedom and make reporters submit to political influence. Private Eye editor Ian Hislop perhaps put it best when he said, “if the state regulates the press then the press no longer regulates the state.”

Meanwhile, current PCC chair Lord Hunt warned that “the road to parliamentary hell is paved with good intentions”, adding that there were“very strong views” in parliament that there should be tougher limits on the power of the press. Britain’s “much envied” press freedom, he said, was the country’s “greatest asset”.

It was left to Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, never one for timidity, to throw the debate wide open with his suggestion of a press card system. He suggested transforming the country’s “haphazard” system into an “essential kitemark for ethical, proper journalism”, with cards denoting “responsible” journalists. How this would translate in the online world of citizen media, however, was a question left unanswered.

Though not directly in Leveson’s remit, libel was one area flagged as in dire need of a revamp. Index CEO John Kampfner and English PEN director Jonathan Heawood flew the flag for the Libel Reform Campaign, arguing that it would be a “tragedy” if the Inquiry’s ongoing work inadvertently delayed the insertion of libel into the Queen’s speech in May. FT editor Lionel Barber also alluded to the “chilling effect” mammoth libel costs have on pursuing a story, while alternative, cheaper means of resolution were proposed by several witnesses.

The Inquiry has also unearthed some misdemeanours. James Harding was recalled to discuss an instance of a reporter at his paper using email hacking to reveal the identity of anonymous police blogger, NightJack, in a 2009 story.  The controversial printing of Kate McCann’s diary without her permission was also referred to more than once. Former News of the World news editor Ian Edmonson was quizzed about extracts of the diary that appeared in the paper in 2008, contradicting claims made by former editor Colin Myler that Edmondson had sought permission to publish from the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell. Asked if he had led editor Myler to believe he had “made it clear” to Mitchell that the paper had the whole diary and planned to publish parts, Edmondson replied: “No.”

Page 3, a mainstay at the Sun since the 1970s, has also proved contentious. Women’s groups said the feature existed “for the sole purpose” of women being sex objects, while Sun editor Dominic Mohan claimed it was an “innocuous British institution” that celebrated natural beauty and represents youth and freshness. He argued that the Sun speaking out against domestic violence in 2003 and raising awareness of cervical cancer screening following the death of reality TV star Jade Goody in 2009 were proof that it was not a sexist tabloid.

The battleground of balancing privacy — “for paedos”, according to Paul McMullan — and public interest is an area we seem less clear on than three months ago. Leveson heard on more than one occasion that there may be a public interest in exposing hypocritical behaviour of celebrities who are “role models”.  Former News of the World chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck defended his splash on David Beckham’s affair with Rebecca Loos, noting that the footballer had cultivated and marketed an image of having a fairytale marriage. Heawood argued that there was a difference between a harmful publication in a newspaper and “real intrusion”, citing JK Rowling’s testimony of a slipping a note into her daughter’s schoolbag as “tresspass”.

The Internet is also an issue keeping Leveson — and newspaper editors — up at night. Mohan called for a level-playing field between print and online, claiming that the combination of an over-regulated press with an unregulated internet was a “very, very worrying thought”. Mirror editor Richard Wallace suggested  ”legitimate” online news providers — whoever these may be — would want to join a new regulatory body because “it gives them a lot of cachet”. Meanwhile, media lawyer and commentator David Allen Green urged the Inquiry not to view bloggers and Twitter users as “rogues”, adding that social media users often act responsibly and regulate themselves by being transparent.

There is much to be done before Leveson makes any recommendations. In his next module he will examine the relationship between the press and police before delving into the mingling between the press and politicians, a union repeatedly lamented during module one.  Leveson has said he does not wish to become a “footnote in some professor of journalism’s analysis of 21st century history”. If the first module — and the Twitter attention — are anything to go by, it is doubtful he will.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index on Censorship and leads coverage of the Leveson Inquiry. She tweets at @martaruco

Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson

The post Leveson Inquiry: The story so far appeared first on Index on Censorship.