On Friday, Google hosted its first Big Tent event in DC with co-sponsor Bloomberg to discuss the future of free speech in the digital age.

Each panel was guided by hypothetical scenarios that mirrored real current events and raised interesting free speech questions around offence, takedown requests, self-censorship, government leaks, national security and surveillance. The audience anonymously voted on the decision they would have made in each case, but as Bill Keller, former executive editor at the New York Times, acknowledged, “real life is not a multiple choice question”. Complex decisions are seldom made with a single course of action when national security, privacy and freedom of expression are all at stake.

The first panel explored how and when news organisations and web companies decide to limit free speech online. Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said that governments “go for choke points on the internet” when looking to restrict access to particular content, meaning major search engines and social media sites are often their first targets regardless of where the offending content is hosted online. Drummond said that Google is partially blocked in 30 of the 150 countries in which it operates and cited an OpenNet Initiative statistic that at least 42 countries currently filter online content. Much of this panel focused on last year’s Innocence of Muslims video, which 20 countries approached Google to review or remove. Drummond questioned whether democracies like the US, which asked Google to review the video, are doing enough to support free expression abroad.

Mark Whitaker, a former journalist and executive at CNN and NBC, said staff safety in hostile environments is more important in deciding whether to kill a story than “abstract issues” like free speech. Security considerations are important, but characterising freedom of expression as “abstract” and endorsing self-censorship in its place can set a worrying precedent. Bill Keller argued that publishing controversial stories in difficult circumstances can bring more credibility to a newsroom, but can also lead to its exile. Both the New York Times and Bloomberg were banned in China last summer for publishing stories about the financial assets of the country’s premier. This reality means that news organisation and web companies often weigh public interest and basic freedom of expression against market concerns. Whitaker acknowledged that the increased consolidation of media ownership in many countries means financial considerations are being given even greater weight.

The second panel debated free speech and security, with Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project standing up for free speech, former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales coming down hard on the side of security, and current Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Jane Holl Lute backing up Gonzales while recognising the vital role free speech plays in a functioning society.

In the first scenario posed to this panel, audience members were split on whether mobile networks should be shut down when a clear and imminent threat, such as the remote detonation of a bomb, arises. Lute said, “the first instinct should not be to shut down everything, that’s part of how we’ll find out what’s going on,” whereas Benesch focused on the civil liberties rather than surveillance implications of crippling communications networks.

In cases of extremism, which the panel agreed is often more easily and quickly spread via digital communications, Benesch endorsed counter speech above speech restrictions as the best way to defend against hate and violence. 94 percent of the audience agreed that social media should not be restricted in a scenario about how authorities should react when groups use social media to organise protests that might turn violent.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt closed the event by highlighting what he considers to be key threats and opportunities for digital expression. Schmidt believes that the world’s five billion feature phones will soon be replaced with smartphones, opening new spaces for dissent and allowing us “to hear the voices of citizens like never before”. Whether he thinks this dissent will outweigh the government repression that’s likely to follow is unclear.

Big Tent will make its way back to London next month where Google hosted the first event of its  kind two years ago. The theme will focus on “innovation in the next ten years” with Ed Milliband, Eric Schmidt and journalist Heather Brooke as featured speakers.

Google is an Index on Censorship funder.

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Artist Chris Drury’s 2011 sculpture Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around.  Image: Chris Drury

It’s hardly breaking news that big fossil fuel companies often exert a great deal of influence over political processes through campaign contributions and lobbying. On 13 September, the New York Times, for example, reported that, “with nearly two months  to go before Election Day on 6 November, estimated spending on television ads promoting coal and more oil and gas drilling or criticising clean energy had exceeded $153 million this year.” But how do the oil, gas and mining industries exert influence over the cultural sector? A recent American example is instructive, demonstrating how this influence can lead to institutions buckling under political pressure, censoring art and lying to the public.

Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around had barely been installed at the University of Wyoming before it was removed without warning in May 2012. The installation, which was 36-foot in diameter, consisted of a “flat whirlpool of beetle-killed logs spiraling into a vortex of charred, black wood and studded with large lumps of Wyoming coal”, representing natural and human-induced global warming.

It was a provocative installation in a state where the fossil fuel industry is a major economic driver and the 2011 sculpture by British artist Chris Drury immediately generated controversy. Marion Loomis, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, told a local newspaper:

They get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonising the industry. I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing.

Bowing to pressure from both the local mining industry — a major university donor — and outraged local Republican officials, the university removed the installation after less than a year. It’s worth noting that in the fiscal year 2011 the university received $43.1 million in private donations via the University of Wyoming Foundation — when releasing the figures, fund president Ben Blaylock said donations from the energy sector were on the increase. After initially claiming the sculpture was removed because of  water damage, in October a local radio investigation obtained emails that revealed the university actually decided to remove Carbon Sink “because of the controversy it generated”.

This episode is extreme, but it’s not entirely isolated. In December 2011, fashion label Lacoste demanded the removal of artist Larissa Sansour from a Swiss photographic competition it was sponsoring for being “too pro-Palestinian”. In the UK, draconian cuts to public spending on the arts sector means that more organisations are being pressured to find corporate sponsorship. But is the price sacrificing content?

Arts Council England, which supports museums, galleries and theatres, has had its government funding cut by 29.6 per cent last year. Arts and cultural organisations are now much more reliant on private contributions. In the UK, some of the most high profile arts sponsorship deals have been with the oil industry: the Tate galleries have taken money from oil giant BP for more than 20 years. At the end of 2011, BP announced a £10 million deal for four arts institutions, including Tate, over five years. BP also sponsors the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery, while Shell is a long-term sponsor of the Southbank Centre.

Increased levels of corporate sponsorship of the arts can lead to overt interference in programming and curatorial decision-making but there hasn’t yet been a smoking gun incident on the scale of what happened in Wyoming. One can only speculate what the response might be from BP if Tate Modern were to use the iconic Turbine Hall for a large installation that explicitly referenced the environmental and human rights abuses of the oil industry.

There are justified fears that long-standing sponsorship arrangements lead to self-censorship — one of the most pernicious enemies of freedom of expression. If overt political pressure is brought to bear we stand a chance of discovering it, but we will never have conclusive evidence of what has not been programmed, who has not been invited, which work has not been made, or which issues have not been tackled.

In 2011, at an oil-related event at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, a duty manager insisted on vetting materials on a stall in case they were critical of Shell, while in 2010, Tate staff sought to ensure that a workshop on disobedience didn’t go anywhere near the issue of the gallery’s sponsors — accidentally giving birth to the art-activist collective Liberate Tate in the process. This sort of self-censorship is arguably a far harder nut to crack, and one that serves corporate sponsors’ purposes far more successfully than a sponsorship agreement that sets down in writing what can and can’t be said, made, or done.

There’s an institutional opacity of Tate and others in refusing to “go there”on the subject of controversial sponsorship choices, beyond trotting out a series of platitudes as to BP or Shell being great friends to the arts. Sadly, we may have to rely on initiatives like Art Leaks, which gives an anonymous space for people within these institutions to give insight into the inevitable impact of corporate sponsorship on many of the UK’s most prominent institutions.

Kevin Smith campaigns on oil sponsorship of the arts for Platform, an environmental and human rights organisation that combines arts, research and activism. He is the co-editor of Not If But When - Culture Beyond Oil.

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Palestinian artist claims censorship after removal from gallery prize shortlist

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This Wednesday in a Boston courthouse a crucial legal battle will be played out. It is a consequence of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) contempt for academic research and the protection of confidential sources. While the “troubles” in the North of Ireland may be over for most people, the PSNI is one state agency determined to poke at the hornets’ nest that is the region’s politically violent past. In doing so it displays wanton indifference to the caution urged by amongst others Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, a former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and current head of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, who warned that investigating the past “would blow apart the degree of consensus we have achieved.”

At the heart of the upcoming courtroom drama is an oral history project commissioned by Boston College between 2001 and 2006. Its aim was to enhance awareness of the long running violent political conflict in Ireland. It sought narratives from republican and loyalist activists who could offer unrivalled insight. It promised that all the material archived would be securely deposited in Boston College where it would remain inaccessible in all circumstances unless prior approval was given by the donor or the storyteller died.

The extent to which the PSNI is successful in its attempt to seize academic research will prove ruinous to public understanding of the Northern Irish conflict. It will drain the pool of knowledge that society may draw upon in order to keep itself better informed. The judicial outcome in a Boston courtroom will determine the ability of non-state actors, principally, academics, journalists and historians to collate information crucial to a more rounded public understanding. In the words of a prominent civil liberties lawyer in the US the move “could forever chill groundbreaking and important research.”

As it turned out Boston College, despite being equipped with a law school, was not on firm legal ground in issuing such promises of confidentiality, although nothing it drew up in its donor contract suggested that. Worse still, when it came to the crunch, the college — in an act of institutional deference to authority — was found to be afflicted by a fortitude deficit. In order not to offend the US Justice Department, it moved to abandon its own project, along with the researchers it commissioned and the research participants to whom it had promised the “ultimate power” of discretion over the use of their donations.

In May last year the PSNI applied through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to US authorities to subpoena part of the archive ostensibly as part of an investigation into the 1972 killing and disappearing of Belfast woman, Jean McConville. A killing that the Northern Irish police force in all its guises failed to investigate in almost four decades. Historian Chris Bray, writing in the Irish Times, stated that “quite literally, not so much as a local patrolman ever bothered to type up a pro-forma report on McConville’s disappearance; the filing cabinet was nearly empty.” As a result the suspicion is being aired in many places that the real motivation behind the subpoenas is one meant to embarrass or prosecute Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams who, according to the Irish Times, has been accused by some of the Boston College research participants “of giving the order to kill McConville, a charge Adams categorically denies.”

In this precarious business it has not gone unnoticed that the Police Service of Northern Ireland, under its old name the RUC, was heavily involved in a dirty war often waged in the shadows. Its Special Branch was involved in a range of activities including killings. The Northern Irish police has a long history of torture, abuse and collusion with loyalist death squads. Like the British state it served, it was a key player in the conflict. Very few police members have been brought to book. It is unlikely that they ever will. There is a professed willingness on the part of the PSNI to pursue all leads … except those leading back to the British state.

This flags up one of the murky issues at play in the case. It is the problem of law enforcement agencies being used to prise open a past when much of the problems of the past were caused by law enforcement agencies. Because no law enforcement solution to the conflict was considered possible, a political one was devised that in many senses by-passed law enforcement or relegated in significance its contribution to a solution.  The jails previously packed by law enforcement measures were emptied of conflict prisoners as the North marched into the future and away from its past. Now we have law enforcement trying advance its own agenda under the camouflage of “rule of law”, feigning a concern for victims so that it may selectively and tendentiously mine the past.

The PSNI action in seeking access to the Boston College oral history archive, so that it might plunder it for material useful to prosecutions, has serious consequences for the production of knowledge. It is now likely that a diminution in information will flow to journalists or academics for fear that the State might insist on access to what is collated for purposes of criminal investigation. The action throws a chill of censorship over the societal acquisition of vital knowledge. By seeking to colonise academic research for its own narrow objectives, law enforcement is forcing academic study off the field of play leaving our comprehension of the past in the hands of law enforcement which has at all times sought to airbrush its own invidious role out of the historical record.  Hardly a satisfactory outcome.

This assault on academic freedom  will have a deleterious impact on public understanding and will  stymie public debate. As Harvey Silverglate and Daniel R. Schwartz argued in Forbes Magazine “academics play an important role in society for the enlightenment of current and future generations; they are not mere detectives bedecked in tweed and working for governments…”

Anthony McIntyre was one of the Boston College researchers who along with colleague Ed Moloney is currently fighting to have the subpoenas quashed. McIntyre is a former Republican prisoner

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Manning’s court hearing will begin on 16 December

After nearly 18 months’ incarceration and punitive treatment described as “torture” by human rights activists, accused leaker and former US Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning will finally get a day in court.

This is not a trial, but an “Article 32″ hearing, the US military equivalent to a civilian pre-trial hearing, where the defence can evaluate the government’s case and obtain facts through pre-trial discovery. It begins on 16 December at Fort Meade, Maryland and is expected to run right through the weekend for approximately five days. Despite press interest, only a small number of seats are available for the public and reporting restrictions are in place to prevent live coverage.

Saturday will mark Manning’s 24th birthday, the second birthday he has spent in custody since his arrest in May 2010 for allegedly leaking a US Army video that showed soldiers gunning down Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists. He was later charged with 22 violations of military law for allegedly leaking records and transmitting defence information. He faces life in prison if convicted. The hearing will determine whether or not he goes ahead for a full court-martial.

The length of time Manning has been in pre-trial confinement is controversial, but more so has been his treatment while confined — seeming more like punishment than justice. While in the military brig in Quantico, Virginia he was in maximum custody and controversially placed on prevention of injury (POI) watch, which meant he was in solitary confinement, forced to spend 23 hours in a cell six feet wide and twelve feet in length.

His lawyer David Coombs reported Manning was woken at 5am weekdays and 7am on weekends and was not allowed to sleep any time between then and 8pm. If he attempted to sleep during those hours, he was made to sit up or stand by the guards.  Guards checked on him every five minutes by asking him if he was okay. He had to surrender his clothes at night apart from boxer shorts. He was not allowed a pillow or sheets, nor any personal items in his cell, and was prevented from exercising apart from one hour when he would walk in a figure of eight motion.

The harsh conditions were denounced by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and brought the attention of the United Nations’ rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez, who tried to visit Manning but was refused a private and confidential meeting with the prisoner. More than 50 members of the European Parliament signed a letter to the US government expressing their concern over the whistleblower’s treatment in custody, and  250 American legal scholars signed a letter to President Obama protesting that Manning’s “degrading and inhumane conditions” were illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

It was the sort of treatment one might expect from third-world or despotic countries, not the supposed leader of the free world purporting to set an example on human rights. Even the former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley broke ranks and said the treatment was “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid”.

Following these worldwide criticisms, Manning was moved to a facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where his conditions were said to be better.  The US military conducted an internal investigation into the alleged mistreatment at Quantico and found he had been improperly placed on “prevention of injury” watch against the recommendations of qualified medical personnel. However, the prison official implicated by the report was able to overturn it.

Manning’s “guilt” so far has been based on chat logs of dubious prominence: conversations he allegedly had with hacker Adrian Lamo between 21-25 May. In these logs he”‘confesses” to leaking the video and US Army records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 260,000 State Department cables and personal files of Guantanamo prisoners to whistleblowing site Wikileaks. The logs also provide a motive: not spying or stealing for material gain, but a desire to educate the world’s citizens about what governments do in their name.

Manning’s story reads like a betrayal by all sides. Not just by those he thought he could confide in but by a government supposedly committed to human rights.

By its punitive pre-trial treatment of Manning and the extra-judicial attempts to shut down Wikileaks, the US Government has renounced the moral highground. It had a unique opportunity to show by action rather than rhetoric how best to practice due process, the rule of law, human rights and freedom of expression. How sadly it has failed to live up to the values it preaches.

Heather Brooke is a writer, journalist, and activist. Her campaign for the full disclosure of MPs’ expenses led to a full-scale reform of the Parliamentary expense system. Her latest book is The Revolution Will Be Digitised. She is on Twitter – @newsbrooke

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