11 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
It’s easy to look at access to the internet — “the freedom to connect,” as Hillary Clinton called it — as a black-and-white proposition. Either you have it, or you don’t. Either your government allows the free flow of information online (as is the case in much of the West), or it doesn’t (as in China, Iran or Burma).
But equally important is the question of the quality of access, warned Nasser Weddady, the outreach director for the American Islamic Conference. He spoke Sunday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston on a panel parsing the status of global internet freedom and solutions needed to expand the universal right to information.
“Quality of access is about censorship, or lack of it, but it’s also about secure access,” Nasser said. “This is a fundamental issue that is discussed insufficiently. Look at what’s just happened in the Middle East: hundreds of thousands of people converted from being citizens to being activists, and those people aren’t necessarily aware of the security consequences of being online.”
The same online tools that allowed activists to organize online may also in many cases allow repressive governments to identify and punish them.
“A radical solution is to make sure that people who are online are actually online safety,” Weddady said.
Free expression advocates looking for ways to do this would be wise to argue against censorship not just as a human rights issue, but as an economic one too, suggested Emily Parker, an official with the US State Department and a former journalist.
“If you’re [a business] operating in a country that has heavy censorship requirements, you’re going to have to spend a lot on hardware, spend a lot of senior management bandwidth just dealing with censorship,” she said. “That’ going to have costs as well.”
Brett Solomon, the executive director of Access, echoed this too.
“There’s no possibility in the modern world to be a prosperous functioning state,” he said, “without significant Internet penetration.”
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.
But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.
Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.
Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.
If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.
For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.
“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.
10 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
James Murdoch was quoted this weekend as saying in New York that his father’s company has now put the phone hacking problem “in a box” so that everybody would not be “sucked into it”, causing the whole business to “sputter”.
Well maybe. News International has always had a cultish, us-against-the-rest character, so its mind is hard to read, but the truth surely is that the company’s lawyers have known for weeks if not months that they could not win most or perhaps any of the private cases brought by people who believe they were victims of News of the World hacking.
It may be that the decisive moment came a month or so ago, when the judicial authorities made a simple and for them almost routine decision. About 25 separate legal actions were in the works and it was no secret that papers were being prepared for more, so it was thought sensible and efficient to direct all of them towards one judge, who would then be versed in all the common factors and issues. The chosen judge was Mr Justice Vos, who had until then been hearing the preliminaries in the combined cases of Andy Gray and Steve Coogan. For News International this was surely a disaster, because in those preliminary hearings they had road tested some of their most important defences and found Vos unsympathetic to the point of dismissiveness.
Perhaps the most significant moment came during a court hearing in January, when Vos was briskly reviewing matters before ruling on a particular point of procedure. He said this:
The main point argued in Mr Gray’s case was that none of the 12 calls known to have actually been made from Mr Mulcaire’s landlines to Mr Gray’s voicemail box number was long enough to allow interception of Mr Gray’s voicemail messages. The Defendants relied in this regard on the evidence that . . . it normally takes nine seconds to access any real messages when a call is made to a voicemail direct dial number.
Here, in other words was one of the central pillars of the News International case. Glenn Mulcaire had, by whatever nefarious means, acquired all the numbers and codes required to access Andy Gray’s voicemails, but did he actually listen to them? Yes, he had called the relevant number, but the company argued that no proof had been provided of him actually hearing a message; on the contrary, what evidence there was suggested he had failed to do so. By implication, it could not be shown that Mulcaire had breached Gray’s privacy. Here is what Mr Justice Vos had to say about that:
. . .it seems to me that, in Mr Gray’s case, there is abundant evidence that Mr Gray’s voicemails were intercepted, and a strong inference that some misuse will have been made of the confidential information thereby obtained. The 12 calls that have already been proved may well not be the whole story. And at least three of them were long enough for some information to have been obtained …
He added that there was every reason to expect much more data on the telephone traffic to emerge, both from the police and the company, and that in any case he saw no reason to rely on telephone traffic data alone.
. . . the documents from Mr Mulcaire’s own handwritten notes are more than enough to satisfy me that interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly.
Vos was equally sceptical about the company’s argument that it could not be proved that Mulcaire, if he really did hack Gray’s messages, was doing it for the News of the World.
. . . since Mr Mulcaire was contracted to NGN, I disagree. Moreover, Mr Mulcaire’s own notes and the reference to “Greg” therein supports that case, even though it remains to be proved that “Greg” was Greg Miskiw, a NotW journalist.
(NGN, by the way, is News Group Newspapers, the arm of News International which operates the News of the World and the Sun.)
If, at the turn of the year, Murdoch’s people thought they could fight their cases against people in Andy Gray’s position with a reasonably chance of success, this sort of rubbishing from a leading judge must have brought them up short. Then, when they learned that all the cases would be heard by the same judge, the outlook must have been transformed. A chance of success became a serious risk of expensive and serial humiliation.
And worse still was the prospect that Glenn Mulcaire would lose the case he is due to bring to court, perhaps as early as next month (and not before Vos), in which he was set to argue that he should not be obliged to reveal whom he dealt with on these matters at the News of the World on the ground that he risked incriminating himself. With Vos already kicking them around, they apparently decided not to wait.
That said, it should be noted that the company’s statement contains some vaguely defiant language suggesting they are not giving up entirely. On the one hand, this is natural: they want to drive hard bargains on compensation and send a signal that they won’t pay out in frivolous, unfounded claims. On the other hand, they may yet take some cases to court to try and define the limits of their liability, because there are a lot of loose ends here. A final note: while Andy Gray is said to be on the list for a compensation offer, Steve Coogan is not. What does this mean? Only that Coogan’s case is less well advanced than Gray’s. His lawyers are gathering information, and Vos appears to believe that they will make it stack up.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart ENDS
