“There has been a decline in some aspects of governance, political participation, and media freedoms, and a clear deterioration in attitudes associated with, or conducive to, democracy in many countries, including in Europe.” 

The EIU measures how democratic countries are based on five categories: “electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture”. Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark have topped this year’s list, which ranks 165 countries and two territories. Even though half of the global population live “in a democracy of some sort”, the EIU reports that previous gains in democratisation have been eroded in the past few years.

The global financial crisis has aggravated this decline, and this can be felt in many parts of the world. According to the EIU, the economic crisis has been a double-edged sword:  in some ways it can “undermine authoritarianism”, but it can also help reinforce it. While in some cases the economic crisis has emboldened protesters — it has also left governments feeling “vulnerable and threatened”, which has meant a rise in attempts to restrict freedom of expression and control the media.

This isn’t restricted to more authoritarian countries. The report notes a “noticeable decline in media freedoms, affecting all regions to some extent, has accelerated since 2008.” A rise in unemployment and a lack of job security has helped create a “climate of fear and self-censorship among journalists in many countries.”

Perhaps challenges in Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa — particularly in younger democracies, are no surprise. But there have been some startling changes in more well-established democracies. Developed western countries have seen a decline in political participation, as well as restrictions on civil liberties in the name of security.

The report shows a troubling situation in Europe, as confidence in the region’s public institutions continues to drop. In Eastern Europe, the scores of ten countries have declined. The scores of Western European countries since 2008 have shown the impact of the economic crisis. Out of 21 countries, 15 have had a decrease in their scores between 2008 and 2010. 

The United Kingdom moved up from a score of 18 to 16 this year. The EIU pins the UK’s score on a “deep institutional crisis”, and says that trust in the government is “at an all-time low.” The United States, on the other hand, moved down from 19 to 21 this year, as the report says that the country’s democracy “has been adversely affected by a deepening of the polarisation of the political scene and political brinkmanship and paralysis.”

If the Democracy Index tells us anything, it’s that the economic crisis definitely plays a role in how healthy a democracy is.  The United Nation’s International Labour Office now predicts that youth unemployment will only continue to rise in the next five years — estimating that today’s youth will be approximately “three times more likely than adults” to face unemployment. At the start of the year, the World Bank predicted an “uncertain future” for the global economy; with limited growth in the coming years. As countries scramble to cope with economic woes, I think that this report is an important reminder that we shouldn’t lose sight of freedom of expression.

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The Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent advisory body created by the International Religious Freedom Act to monitor religious freedom abuses internationally, released its 2013 report, which idenitifes “governments that are the most egregious violators.”

The 15 countries are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam, all of which severely restrict independent religious activity and harass individuals and groups for religious activity or beliefs. These nations are classified as Tier 1 “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) in the report.

Despite its recent opening and political reforms, change in Burma have “yet to significantly improve the situation for freedom of religion and belief.” The report states that most violations occurred against minority Christian and Muslim adherents. China’s government is also cited for its ongoing severe abuses against its citizens’ freedom of thought.

The report said that Egypt’s transitional and elected governments have made progress toward religious freedom, it further highlighted the attacks that Coptic Christians have sustained in the period after the Arab Spring that brought down the Mubarak regime. “In many cases, the government failed or was slow to protect religious minorities from violence.”

The former Soviet states of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were included for pursuing state control over religion, targeting Muslims and minorities alike. Iraq was cited for, among other things, tolerating “violent religiously motivated attacks” and Iran for “prolonged detention, torture, and executions based primarily or entirely on the religion of the accused.”

Saudi Arabia continues to suppress religious practices outside of the officially-sanctioned Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, interferes with the faith of guest workers and prosecutes individuals for “apostasy, blasphemy and sorcery”, according to the report. Pakistan has a strict blasphemy law and failure to prosecute acts of religious violence, the report said.

The situation in Sudan has deteriorated since South Sudan gained its independence. Criminalization of apostasy, the imposition of the government’s strict interpretation of Shari’ah on both Muslims and non-Muslims and attacks against Christians, were cited in the report for the decline.

The report also identified Nigeria for continuing religious violence between Muslims and Christians compounded by the government’s toleration of the sectarian attacks. North Korea’s totalitarian regime was also included for its ongoing harassment and torture of citizens based on religious beliefs.

A second tier includes Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos and Russia, where abuses of religious freedom are tolerated by the government and meet the threshold for CPC designation by the US Department of State, but don’t meet all of the standards for “systemic, ongoing, egregious” measurements.

Other countries regions being monitored included Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Ethiopia, Turkey, Venezuela and Western Europe.

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This article was originally published on Open Democracy, as a part of a week-long series on the future digital freedom guest-edited by Index

The digital age has inevitably shaken the concept of copyright to its core. When you have “digital” content, you always have the “human readable” format and you also have the digital expression of the copyrighted material translated by computers into bits — the ones and zeroes. As a result there is a degree of inevitable copying of the work in question. “Digital” means copying, in other words.

Similarly, networks must make temporary copies to function. So, “network” means copying.

Computers make copies in order to process and display information. Therefore “computer” also means copying. As a result, the growth of computers accessing content over digital networks means either reinventing information and communications technologies or re-inventing copyright to some extent.

Unfortunately, it has taken a painfully long time for this fairly simple realisation to dawn on many of the analogue industries that had grown too comfortable to grab the opportunities that the digital revolution offers. One of the best examples of this dogged refusal to accept the most basic concepts of digital technologies was the debate surrounding the copyright status of temporary technical copies created by computer networks.

In 1999/2000, publishers and the music industry ran an energetic lobbying campaign against a copyright exception for incidental network copies that, “do not interfere with the normal exploitation of the work” by the copyright owner.

The European Publishers’ Council (EPC) warned in 2001 that “unless we have Parliament’s amendments [to prohibit unauthorised temporary copying] or something similar in effect, we do not have the ability to authorise any kind of copy, regardless of its economic significance, and thereby lose our control over illegal, piratical distribution of our works.”

The logic of the publishers was somewhat more subtle and more dangerous than it sounds. If every copy in an internet provider’s network would be a copyright infringement, the provider could not function without prior authorisation. Providers would be liable for copies made in the transmission of legal/authorised content and doubly liable (for the copy and the facilitation of the infringement) for illegal/unauthorised content.

If the amendments in question had been adopted, European Internet companies would have had no option other than to monitor, delete, censor and restrict their customers in every way that the publishers considered appropriate for fighting against copyright infringement — as well as increasing prices by demanding royalties for legitimate content. Of course, 1999/2000 was a lifetime ago in internet years and things have moved on in the meantime.

Or have they? In 2012, the Austrian High Court has referred the “kino.to” case to the European Court of Justice. One of the questions asked in that case is: “are reproduction [sic] for private use and transient and incident reproduction permissible only if the original reproduction was lawfully reproduced, distributed or made available to the public?”

The referral attempts to re-open the question of making internet companies independently liable for copyright infringement in relation to every unauthorised file that passes over its network. So, we are back in 2000, with a threat that internet companies could be forced into a “gatekeeper” role as a privatised police force.

An unwise ruling from the European Court of Justice would speed up an already problematic trend that is fuelled by efforts to use internet companies as private enforcement “tools” in order to protect copyright in the online environment. Even though both ACTA and SOPA failed, their proposals on the enforcement of copyright through “voluntary”arrangements with any or all internet intermediaries live on. The US-led OECD “Communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making”[pdf] adopted in June 2011 talks obscurely of norms of responsibility that enable private sector voluntary co-operation for the protection of intellectual property.

It somewhat less obscurely reflects an active choice to avoid references to the right to a fair trial and due process of law, choosing instead to refer to “fair process” — which sounds like both, but means neither. This practical implementation of such a policy can be seen in efforts of the United States “IP Enforcement Coordinator”, to exploit the global reach of US companies to take “voluntary” punitive actions against foreign online services considered to be breaching US copyright rules. The “voluntary” measures taken against Wikileaks also give a taster of where this policy is heading. Payment service providers blocked payments to Wikileaks while Amazon withdrew hosting services.

Amazon pulled hosting services from Wikileaks in 2010 after pressure from the US government

This increasing pressure on intermediaries to meddle with content is happening at a particularly inauspicious time. Internet access providers are increasingly demanding the right to interfere with the functioning of the open internet (i.e. undermining the concept of network neutrality). The core value of the internet for free speech is the “any-to-any” concept whereby any part of the network can (broadly speaking) communicate unrestricted with any other part of the network.

This is now under threat from the privatised enforcement measures demanded by some policy-makers from internet intermediaries that are increasingly finding commercial advantages in making such interventions.

Suddenly, we end up confronted simultaneously with all the worst aspects of policy-development over the past fifteen years. We have courts questioning the most fundamental elements of the networked environment — the “right” of network providers to make the transient copies that are essential to the functioning of the Internet — the argument that we already had thirteen years ago.

Layered on top of these existential questions, we have policy-makers tinkering with the most fundamental legal principles of a society that is based on the rule of law, seeking to replace the regulation of free speech and communication by laws and courts with terms of service and the whims of internet access providers, hosting providers, domain name registrars, domain name registries, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks.

And layered on top of this, we have internet access providers raising their own existential questions about the viability (from their perspective) of the core concept of the internet – the  ”any-to-any” principle.

Joe McNamee is EU advocacy co-ordinator at European Digital Rights

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SYRIA

Kerry discussed the situation in Syria with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Berlin, and he will be meeting members of the Syrian National Council (SNC) at a US-organised conference in Rome. Initially, leaders of the opposition group threatened to boycott the meeting, but had a change of heart after Kerry made strong statements in London on Monday supporting the opposition group’s attempts to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Since the start of the country’s ongoing conflict, Syria has faced horrifying human rights violations — with a death toll of at least 60,000 — and journalists attempting to cover the country’s ongoing tragedy continue to be targeted. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has named Syria the “most dangerous country in the world for journalists”, with 32 journalists killed since the start of protests in March 2011. Only this week, French freelance photographer Olivier Voisin was killed in Syria’s Idlib province. Two journalists also died last month: French journalist Yves Debay and Syrian-born journalist Mohamed Al-Massalma.

EGYPT

Kerry’s next stop will be post-revolution Egypt, where freedom of expression faces many challenges under President Mohamed Morsi. The country’s new constitution passed in December raised some eyebrows with clauses related to blasphemy (amongst other things). Article 44 of the constitution forbids “defaming all religious messengers and prophets”. New Egypt has been no stranger to blasphemy charges: most recently, novelist Youssef Zeidan was this week accused of blasphemy by the Islamic Research Institute (which seeks for him to be charged under Article 77 of the Penal Code, which could mean a death sentence for the writer).

In further efforts to battle so-called blasphemy, Egypt has made a series of worrisome moves. Earlier this month, a Cairo court ordered a month-long ban on YouTube, since the video sharing site refused to remove the trailer for anti-Islam film the Innocence of Muslims. Since then, Egyptian authorities dropped the ban, since it would be far too costly to actually implement. The film sparked protests across the world last September last year, and following the controversy Egypt sentenced seven Coptic Christian filmmakers connected to the film to death in absentia. Alber Saber, a 27-year-old atheist, is currently appealing a three-year sentence handed to him for allegedly posting a link to the crude film’s trailer on his Facebook page.

In addition to insulting religion, individuals have also faced charges for allegedly insulting Morsi, and novelist Alaa el-Aswany told US-owned Voice of America that the country’s president has even restricted free speech more than his ousted predecessor. Egypt’s answer to the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, Bassem Youssef, was charged in January with insulting President Morsi, but the investigation was eventually dropped by authorities. According to el-Aswany, ten writers have faced such accusations.

 SAUDI ARABIA

Freedom of expression isn’t a phrase that is likely to be associated with Saudi Arabia. The country came in at number eight on CPJ’s ranking of censored countries around the world. It crushed recent protests held by the country’s Shia population in the Eastern Province, and has  attempted to stop any coverage of it through blocking foreign coverage and arresting local journalists attempting to cover the unrest.  According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of protesters have also been arrested, and 14 protesters have been killed by security forces. Dissent is not taken lightly in Saudi Arabia: human rights defender Muhammad Al-Bejadi was sentenced on 10 April last year to four years in prison as well as a five-year travel ban for multiple charges in connection to his work.

In the ultra-conservative kingdom, insulting religion also earns a harsh penalty. Saudi writer Turki Al-Hamad was arrested in January after making tweets critical of the politics of some Islamists last December. Al-Hamad’s novels have been banned in Saudi Arabia (and have earned him fatwas from the country’s clerics), as well as Kuwait and Bahrain. Columnist Hamza Kashgari was arrested last February for blasphemy — a charge that carries the death sentence — for controversial tweets he made in February about the Muslim prophet Muhammad. While Kashgari attempted to flee Saudi Arabia to Malaysia, he was extradited back to his native country, and is still in prison while waiting for a trial. It’s no surprise that Saudi Arabia has called for “global internet regulation” in the name of “public order” in the past.

TURKEY

In the past few months, Turkey has shown that it still has a long way to go when it comes to freedom of speech. Article 301 of Turkey’s constitution makes it illegal to insult “Turkey, the Turkish nation, or Turkish government institutions”.  Free speech organisation Turkish PEN is currently undergoing an investigation for “insulting the state” for issuing a statement against the arrest of pianist Fazil Say, who is currently facing charges for retweeting a statement deemed to be insulting towards religion.

The country also has a number of journalists and writers in prison. According to CPJ, Turkey has hit an all-time high of imprisoned journalists, with 49 in prison as of 1 December last year. Most of there are ethnic Kurds, charged under the country’s vague and problematic anti-terror laws.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Despite a flourishing international reputation, the United Arab Emirates has performed poorly when it comes to freedom of expression. Most recently, the illusion of its commitment to academic freedom was shattered after the London School of Economics (LSE) cancelled a conference scheduled to be held this week in the country. The LSE cited the barring of academic Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen from the country as well as concerns over “restrictions imposed on the intellectual content of the event that threatened academic freedom” as the reasons for the cancellation of the conference, which was organised in coordination with the American University of Sharjah. The UAE boasts a number of foreign university campuses, including Michigan State University, New York University, the Sorbonne, and Middlesex University. Such restrictions only cast a shadow on the integrity of such partnerships.

In addition to restrictions on academic freedom, the UAE has been engaged in a crackdown on activists both off and online. On 12 November, the country’s leader, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahaya issued a decree making it possible to imprison anyone poking fun at the country’s leadership or any of its institutions online. The country has quickly restricted rights in the name of national security — and according to the Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR), 66 activists were arrested in March 2012. According to the country’s authorities, those arrested are tied to Islamic group al-Islah, and whom authorities claim were planning to overthrow the government. Last year, five political activists eventually known as the “UAE 5″ were in prison for eight months after being arrested in April 2011, for posting messages critical of government leaders and policies in a now-defunct online forum called UAE Hewar. Even though the activists were eventually pardoned, Dr Mohammed Al Roken, a human rights lawyer who worked on their case (amongst many others), is currently being held in solitary confinement.

QATAR

The tiny country is mostly known for being the home of news station Al Jazeera, which has been criticised for its lack of coverage of stories within Qatar. Most recently, Qatari poet Mohammed al-Ajami had a life sentence reduced to fifteen years this week. He was first handed a life sentence in December for insulting the country’s Emir Sheikh Hamad al-Thani late last year, for a poem he uploaded in 2011 supporting the revolutions within the Arab world — where he called the leaders of the region ”indiscriminate thieves”.

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Take Two: Islam blasphemy riots now self-fulfilling prophecy

It would be very easy to cast, as many commentators have so far, the latest riots in response to the Islamophobic film The Innocence of Muslims, as another example of intolerant Muslims lacking a funny bone. The Rushdie affair, the Danish cartoons, the murder of Van Gogh — surely the latest saga fits neatly into a pattern of evidence suggesting Muslims are over sensitive and violent. After all, critics will argue, Christians are regularly derided through the arts and media and they don’t go around burning embassies and killing people.  Only the situation is hardly analogous. Muslims perceive this as a dominant majority insulting and humiliating a disgruntled and feeble minority. Ignoring the violent minority, the truth is, the protests and anger across the Arab world are about much more than the usual “free speech” versus “Islam” narrative.

In fact, at the heart of the unrest is a powerful current of anti-Americanism rooted in imperialist policies and bolstered dictatorships.

Firstly, although the film may have been the catalyst for riots, it would be wrong to assume that all the protests have exactly the same cause. The murder of American embassy staff in Libya appears to have been the work of an Al Qaeda fringe which had been plotting the revenge of one its senior leaders and used the protest against the film as a smokescreen for its attack. However there and elsewhere, the anger of the masses has appeared to morph into something much broader – a reflection of anti-American sentiment grounded in America’s historically fraught relationship to the region.

This is hardly the first demonstration of anger against western targets in any of these countries.

For those with a short memory, it was only last month that a pipe bomb exploded outside the US consulate and both the Red cross and other Western aid organisations have come under fire in recent months. It is misguided to think that NATO intervention in support of the rebels against Gaddafi somehow erased deep-seated grievances against the US, not least the sense of humiliation in the Arab world stemming from decades of Western domination. Sure, the west may have helped get rid of Gaddhafi when it was expedient, but for a long time, we traded quite happily with the man whilst he brutally repressed his people. In some cases, we even helped him do it.  A recent Human Rights Watch report, Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya details the stories of Libyan opposition figures tortured in US-run prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and then delivered back to Libya, with full awareness that they were going to be tortured or possibly killed. Even in the “new Libya”, not all sections of the revolution feel the outcome of the recent elections was truly representative of popular feeling. Not to mention Egypt, where Mubarak, whom Hillary Clinton once described as a “close family friend”, tortured and killed innumerable dissidents in a US-backed dictatorship. To think that the Arab Spring would transform popular opinion concerning the US’s role in the region is ludicrous. And that’s before we even get to Iraq.

Broken by poverty, threatened by drones, caught in the war between al Qaeda and the US, to many Arab Muslims, the film represents an attack on the last shelter of dignity — sacred beliefs —  when all else has been desecrated.

It is no surprise that some of the worst scenes of violence come from Yemen, where US policy has resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians, fuelling anger against a regime whose brutality and corruption has left the country ranking amongst the poorest in the Arab world. Given that it is also one of the countries where people have the least access to computers and the internet, it is also entirely likely that many protestors never even saw the film. It also seems unlikely anyone believed the film was actually produced by the American government. Though many might have believed the US government could act to restrict the film’s diffusion, censorship being altogether common in many of these countries, the focus on American symbols — embassies, American schools, even KFC — suggests the roots of popular anger are not merely tarnished religious pride.

These symbols of America were not the unwitting target of frustration over a film – rather the film has provided an unwitting focal point for massive and widespread anger at US foreign policy in the region. If the Arab revolutions let the dictators know exactly how people felt about their repression, these demonstrations should be read as equally indicative of popular anguish with the US’s role in the region.

The film is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back — to stand in consternation at the fact a single straw could cripple such a sturdy beast is to be naïve or wilfully blind to the accumulated bales which made the straw so hard to carry.

This is not an attempt to minimise the offence caused by the film — Muhammad is a man whose status in the eyes of many Muslims, cannot be overstated. When your country has been bombed, you’ve lost friends and family, possibly your livelihood and home, dignity is pretty much all you have left.

The producers of the film may have known very little about film-making, but they knew lots about how to cause a stir. Despite its obscure origins, references to an “Israeli” director living in the US, to a “100 Jewish donors” who allegedly provided “5 million dollars”, to a hazy “Coptic network” – all played into a well-known register. When two out of five Arabs live in poverty, a five million dollar insult has more than a slight sting to it.

Those who sought to bring winter to an Arab spring and possibly destabilise a US election, were keenly aware of the impact those words would have, situating the film within on-going tensions between Israel and the Arab world and stirring up the hornet’s nest of minority relations in a region where they remain unsettled.

In a tweet, the Atheist academic Richard Dawkins decried the events by lambasting “these ridiculous hysterical Muslims”. In so doing, he, like others, not only failed to read these events for what they are — political protests against US meddling, but he also failed to recognise the basic humanity of the protestors. To dismiss deep anger as mere hysteria is to diminish to decades of oppression experienced by many Muslims, particularly in the Arab world, often with US complicity.

If you deny any relationship between the systematic discrimination of Muslims and stigmatisation of Islam and the overreaction of the Muslim community to offensive jokes, or films, or cartoons, then you are only left with essentialist explanations of Muslim hysteria and violence. These protests aren’t about a film — they’re about the totality of ways in which Muslims have felt humiliated over decades. The actions of a virulent fringe shouldn’t overshadow the peaceful majority, nor should it impede our ability to recognise the message of frustration and humiliation coming from the Arab and Muslim world.

Reporting on these “clashes of culture” as somehow indicative of Islam’s essential incompatibility with the West conveniently omits the realities of Muslim oppression global. Before we start searching for the nebulous network behind the film, or the reasons why “Muslims are so prone to getting offended”, we would do better to actually consider the conditions that have contributed to rendering the mass dehumanisation of particular group of people socially unobjectionable and do well to remember that the right to protest is just as central to the concept of free speech, as the right to make offensive movies.

Myriam Francois-Cerrah is a writer, journalist and Postgraduate researcher at Oxford University. A version of this piece appeared on Myriam’s blog. 

Also read:

Kenan Malik on The Satanic Verses and free speech and Why free expression is now seen as an enemy of liberty

Sara Yasin on France, Charlie Hebdo and the meaning of Mohammed

When we succumb to notions of religious offence, we stifle debate, writes Salil Tripathi

Sherry Jones on why UK distributors refused to handle her book The Jewel of Medina

The post Film protests about much more than religion appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Food movements in both North America and the EU have been rallying for more visibility in food systems, and the push for more clarity from “farm to fork” has resulted in legislative blacklash to these efforts, known as “agricultural gag laws” or “ag-gag laws”. Backed by powerful agribusiness interests in the United States, ag-gag laws aim to prevent whistleblowers from documenting and disseminating important information about where food comes from and how it is produced.

Ag-gag laws prohibit photographing or videotaping farms without the owner’s consent, punishing undercover journalists and activists working to document abuses — even if there is no evidence of trespassing. In Iowa, reporters who become employees of farms to gain internal access can now be charged with a serious or aggravated misdemeanor. In Utah, disseminating photographs or videos of a farm is now considered a criminal act. This provision is already under fire for First Amendment concerns. The US Supreme Court has previously asserted that the media and others have the right to share information — even if that is information originally gathered through illegal means by someone else.

Since early 2011, 10 states have proposed such laws. The legislation passed into law in Iowa and Utah, but has been defeated in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Minnesota. The New York Senate bill was pulled by its sponsor, and the bill has been ‘indefinitely postponed’ in Nebraska. In Missouri the bill came under fire this May over First Amendment concerns in the Senate’s agriculture committee. As a result, it was tabled. A watered-down compromise was inserted into a separate omnibus agriculture bill: animal abuse footage must be turned over to law enforcement within 24 hours of filming.

In 1990, my agricultural home state of Kansas ushered in the first generation of ag-gag laws, with Montana and North Dakota following suit in 1991. These versions focused primarily on destruction of property which addressed the fear of livestock ’liberation’ or ‘theft’ by animal welfare activists.

Ag-gag laws are not alone in their attempt to stifle criticism of food production: throughout the 1990s, food libel laws or food disparagement laws were passed in thirteen states. In 1998 the beef industry used this legislation to sue Oprah Winfrey for comments she about the mad cow disease scare in 1996.  In the federal context, Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act in 2006 which made it a crime to intentionally damage, disrupt, or cause the loss of any property (including animals or records) used by an ‘animal enterprise’. The government definition of ‘animal enterprise’ is broad and includes farms, research facilities, zoos and pet stores, circuses and rodeos, and breeding operations.

Corporate agribusiness has not been shy about its active role in introducing and lobbying for the recent bills. Iowa’s sponsor of the bill, Representative Annette Sweeney, was former director of the Iowa Angus Association, and the Iowa Poultry Association affirms that it helped draft the bill.

Agricultural corporations wield considerable power beyond US politics — they now control 40 per cent of the global food trade, and six companies dominate 70 per cent of the international wheat trade. The US legislature is currently laying the groundwork for policies and protocol that could spread internationally.

Although the US is leading the pack, McDonald’s Restaurants vs. Morris & Steel (better  known as ‘the McLibel case’) suggests that food corporations will find ways to silence dissent globally. In the McLibel case, British activists who distributed pamphlets against the fast food giant in 1986 spent 15 years fighting libel writs handed to them in 1990, battling the corporation in the longest case in English history.

There is an acute need in our food system for external watchdogs and legislation that protects — not persecutes — journalists and organisations reporting on farming conditions. As food writer Mark Bittman arguedin his opinion piece about pending ag-gag legislation last year:

“Videotaping at factory farms wouldn’t be necessary if the industry were properly regulated. But it isn’t”.

Caitlin Zittkowski of The Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law agrees:

“In an industry already only minimally constrained by regulation from negatively impacting the environment, ag-gag laws could make it even more difficult to enforce what little law exists…Furthermore, similar protection from public scrutiny and whistle-blowers could spread to other industries with extensive environmental impacts whose lobbyists effectively manage to curry favor with legislators.”

The bottom line is that ag-gag laws allow an industry rife with wrongdoing to keep up the status quo without risk of censure.

If ag-gag legislation is successful, corporate agriculture will likely push for gag rules in areas beyond animal agriculture –including food safety and labour rights. Companies that hire workers to pick grapes or tomatoes will lobby in addition to those that process beef or poultry. It is likely that the tomato industry is already squirming: over 1,000 people working in Florida’s tomato fields have been freed from modern-day slavery in the last 15 years, and groups such as the Coalition of Immokaloee Workers continue to document and disseminate information about the industry’s illegal practices. Many players in industrialised agriculture have dirty laundry to hide.

Jeanne Firth is a programme specialist at Grow Dat Youth Farm, and adjunct professor at Tulane University in New Orleans.

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Enforcing intellectual property rights and promoting Internet freedom are not — and should not be — mutually exclusive goals for the US government. Efforts to curb IP infringement in a manner that respects rule of law and free expression are not equivalent to government censorship.  Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls on states to multi-task, protecting the right to free expression, the right to participate in cultural life, and the right of artists to benefit from their works at the same time.  Setting up a false dichotomy belies the harder questions at the heart of current debates around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US: the question isn’t whether to protect, but how to protect intellectual property in the Internet age.

And the inconvenient truth is that the “how” really matters.  How narrowly does the enforcement mechanism target infringement?  How much will the measure impact lawful expression?  How might the measure harm other important rights and interests like user privacy or economic innovation?  Ultimately, will the measure’s effectiveness be worth its unintended consequences?  What precedent will the measure set for other, more restrictive countries?  The answers will reveal whether an IP enforcement proposal appropriately promotes both intellectual property rights and the human rights of users, and not one at the expense of the other.

To maintain American credibility on Internet freedom, Congress must strive to craft effective IP enforcement measures in a way that does not unduly harm freedom of expression, privacy, and innovation online.  Doing so requires a sober assessment of the questions above, comparing the actual benefits against the costs to human rights and other important interests.  SOPA and PIPA’s proposed mechanisms fail any such reasonable assessment.

SOPA would create two mechanisms that would cause broad collateral damage to freedom of expression and privacy: First, it would allow the US government to interfere with “foreign infringing sites,” but the term’s definition is so broad that any non-US site that allows user-generated content could qualify.  Once the US government had a court order under this section, it could require ISPs and search engines to prevent access to a site, and compel ad and payment networks to stop doing business with a site. PIPA is narrower in scope, but includes similar remedies, including an obligation for ISPs to filter out requests for certain domain names.  As a group of prominent engineers has argued, domain-name filtering would have limited effectiveness, sweep in innocent expression, and seriously harm Internet security.

Separately, SOPA would create a notice-and-cutoff system that allows private parties to starve a website (whether foreign or US-based) of its financial resources.  Under this system, if a single rightsholder believes a site does not do enough to monitor and police user infringement, he could send notices to payment and ad networks to stop them from doing business with the site.

The implications of these mechanisms would be profound.  SOPA in particular takes direct aim at user-driven, online communications tools — tools like YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Dropbox that we use everyday to communicate and access information.  General-purpose social media sites based outside the US could be tagged as “foreign infringing sites” that could be filtered in the U.S. and stripped of financial support simply for providing a platform for individual expression — even if they had no bad intent and are used largely for innocent expression.

And to protect themselves from the whims of an aggressive rightsholder under the notice-and-cutoff system, every user-generated content platform, social media website, or cloud-based storage service — anywhere in the world — would have to monitor and police the behavior of users, with severe impact on user privacy and expression.

Finally, SOPA and PIPA could have sweeping impact beyond US borders.  First, because SOPA’s broad reach would encompass legitimate platforms for expression, it could directly impact the work of human rights defenders and democracy activists everywhere.  We have seen the power of social media to enable grassroots social movements in the Arab world.  If these tools of social change get caught in SOPA’s crosshairs, it could hurt their ability to remain open platforms for expression and organisation.

More broadly, these bills stand for the proposition that online communications tools and the domain name system should be used as points of control to enforce local laws.  Nothing limits the use of such mechanisms to merely the enforcement of intellectual property.  If SOPA and PIPA are enacted, the US government must be prepared for other governments to follow suit, in service to whatever social policies they believe are important — whether restricting hate speech, insults to public officials, or political dissent.

If many other countries adopt these mechanisms, we risk further Balkanisation of the Internet, undermining its benefits as a global platform for expression, democratic engagement, and economic development.  This result is difficult to square with the US’s stated foreign policy of supporting a single, global network. The US cannot effectively urge other governments to stop blocking Internet content that violates local laws when the US is supporting precisely the same mechanisms in service of IP enforcement.

These unintended consequences for human rights and the global Internet must be fully weighed as Congress considers current proposals.  While there is no inherent contradiction between IP enforcement and human rights, Congress must ask whether the “how” of these bills truly supports both IP enforcement and human rights.

Cynthia M Wong is director of the Project on Global Internet Freedom at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, DC. You can follow her on Twitter: @cynthiamw

Index on Censorship has written to the US Committee on the Judiciary in opposition of the Stop Online Privacy Act. Read the letter here.

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Western policymakers must proceed with caution when considering online surveillance and web-blocking; their actions impact on human rights abroad, argues Cynthia Wong

The US government has made internet freedom a cornerstone of its foreign policy and recently released a comprehensive strategy for cyberspace that articulates core principles for US internet policy. At the heart of the US’s internet freedom strategy is a commitment to support civil society and homegrown democracy movements as millions of new users come online every year. As the US government moves forward with its cyber strategy — and in the spirit of a whole-of-government approach to internet policy — it is critical that we examine the broader enabling conditions for internet freedom and freedom of expression in the digital age.

While the US has provided critical training and support for circumvention and security tools, the answer will be much more complex than any one technical solution. Building an internet that supports civil society and human rights requires not only an absence of direct state restrictions on expression, but also an internet policy environment that supports freedom of expression, openness, interoperability, and privacy.

All governments, democratic or otherwise, are struggling with policy challenges often made more complex by the internet — safeguarding national security, protecting intellectual property, and fighting cybercrime. However, policy approaches adopted even for legitimate purposes can undermine the free and open nature of the internet. As the US government debates emerging internet policy challenges, it must face an inconvenient truth: the US is often viewed as the standard bearer for many (though not all) aspects of internet regulation and its laws can and will have an effect far beyond American borders.

When I attend conferences on freedom of expression and media rights or internet policy outside the US, I am often asked about national US policy debates, sometimes in intricate detail: Will the US enforce meaningful rules to promote net neutrality? Will the US expand CALEA-like technology mandates to enable surveillance of new kinds of online communications tools? And will the US and other countries follow France’s lead in enacting graduated response laws that could lead to internet disconnection for copyright violations?

Even in regions where internet penetration rates are at their lowest, advocates are worried about what kind of internet they will have access to once the wires are in place, given regulatory precedents set elsewhere — a pragmatic recognition, perhaps, that precedents set in western liberal democracies may represent the high water mark for what digital rights protections may be possible.

The debates over surveillance technologies are instructive. Fifteen years ago, the US Congress — at the request of the FBI — mandated that telephone networks, and the equipment manufacturers that build their equipment, must build flexible wiretapping capability into the equipment. That law, the “Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act” (CALEA), led to similar mandates around the world. A few years ago, the FBI successfully demanded the CALEA wiretapping mandates be extended to some internet services.

Now, nearly all standard networking equipment sold on the market today enables wiretapping capability to comply with national mandates. Unsurprisingly, many companies build equipment to comply with the legal requirements of all markets in which they sell as a matter of manufacturing efficiency, leading to a race to the bottom of sorts by enabling much more invasive kinds of surveillance on a worldwide basis for any government who buys network equipment off the shelf.

US policymakers were largely indifferent during the domestic debates over CALEA to the global implications of requiring that wiretapping be built into the telephone and internet networks and seem largely incapable of connecting the CALEA mandate to the technically sophisticated wiretapping occurring in places like Iran. When the United Arab Emirates demanded last year that Research in Motion take greater steps to enable surveillance of its Blackberry devices, the regulator published a memo pointing to CALEA and UK law as evidence of common practice.

This debate is now reigniting (in the US and elsewhere) as law enforcement once again hints at expanding technology mandates for new kinds of internet-based services like webmail, social networking or peer-to-peer services.

The US government must also be cautious in enlisting technical intermediaries to enforce legal rights without fully weighing the negative impact such a precedent would set against the benefits it provides. For example, currently, the US Senate is debating the PROTECT IP Act, which would establish for the first time in US law a requirement that ISPs block certain domain names that enable copyright and trademark infringement. While the objective of the Act is worthy, nothing in principle limits the application of its domain blocking mechanism to websites “dedicated to infringement.”

To establish such a mechanism to enforce one set of rights is to invite other states to demand reciprocity in enacting similar laws, and potentially for much broader purposes.  While illiberal states may continue to flout human rights regardless of US copyright policy, US policymakers should not be surprised when our democratic allies follow suit by adopting domain blocking to enforce local speech laws (many of which would be unconstitutional in the US) — leading to a much less vibrant, less global platform for freedom of expression.

Similarly, the US government must also be mindful when selectively “exporting” US policy through our trade relationships without a better understanding of how a specific policy will play out within an entirely different legal and political context. For example, internet advocates abroad are rightly concerned about how agreements like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will impact the environment for online expression if they strengthen IP enforcement without also incorporating safeguards for freedom of expression and access to knowledge.

As the US government grapples with these and a range of other challenges, it would be well served to remember that the world is watching. The precedents set in the US will reverberate globally as other states seek out models for internet regulation.

As important, global civil society must be persistent in scrutinising a range of inernet policy proposals for their impact on freedom of expression and openness online. Preserving the one global internet — an internet that enables human rights and democratic participation ­— requires vigilance in ensuring internet freedom begins at home.

Cynthia Wong is Staff Attorney and Plesser Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology

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