19 Dec 2013 | About Index, Campaigns, Digital Freedom, Press Releases
Index on Censorship is deeply concerned that neither the report nor the recommendations on the NSA prepared by the White House review panel tackles the worldwide mass surveillance carried out by the United States. Index calls on President Obama to take urgent action to respect the right to freedom of expression and privacy of all the world’s citizens, not just those of the United States.
The report from President Barack Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology is a 300-page tome which includes 46 recommendations – from forcing telecommunications firms to store call data for on demand NSA access, to higher level signoff on surveillance of foreign leaders.
Kirsty Hughes, CEO of Index, said:
“These weak recommendations offer no privacy for non-Americans and only scant protection for foreign leaders. The NSA’s surveillance programmes continue to violate human rights on a massive scale. When Barack Obama decides what reforms to implement in January, he should remember that Americans are not the only people who deserve the right to privacy and free speech. ”
18 Dec 2013 | Uncategorized
Who would’ve thought the news earlier this month of YouTube being finally made accessible in Pakistan, albeit as a local search engine, would open a floodgate of criticism?
Minster of State for Information Technology and Telecommunications, Anusha Rehman certainly did not. She probably thought she had done a good turn — wooed many young digital rights activists who had long been demanding unblocking of the website and calmed others who had demanded blocking of objectionable content from it.
“Instead of installing costly filtration mechanisms, Google will easily be able to block blasphemous content on the request of the Pakistan government,” Rehman told the Senate’s Standing Committee on Information and Technology. “Saudi Arabia and Malaysia have also reached a similar arrangement with Google,” she added.
But Farieha Aziz, director at Bolo Bhi, a not-for-profit geared towards advocacy, policy and research in the areas of gender rights, government transparency, internet access, digital security and privacy, dismissed the news out right saying: “There is no arrangement between the company and the government, unlike the perception the government is projecting.”
“I don’t want a localised version. Remember what became of Disney in India with everything getting dubbed in Hindi! I would definitely prefer the original version,” said a resolute 12-year old Khadeja Ebrahim, a YouTube buff. “I love YouTube, my entire school loves YouTube and we hate the people who have blocked it,” she added vehemently.
Yasser Latif Hamdani, who had filed a case for unblocking the website, on behalf of digital rights campaigners Bytes For All is not too happy with the news. His concern is mainly constitutional.
“It is a matter of principle. I do not think it is alright that the government can decide what I should be able to view,” he said. To him this was a clear violation of Article 19, 19-A and 17 of the Constitution of Pakistan. “Therefore, I do not consider it a great service,” he concluded.
The young lawyer uses the popular video-sharing website to listen to debates on law, politics, constitution, philosophy and history. He accesses YouTube through virtual private networks(VPNs), but complains “the experience is just not the same”.
Nighat Dad, of the Digital Rights Foundation doesn’t find the move “encouraging” either and given “how different vague provisions of different laws and constitution have been misused in blocking the content on internet” in the Pakistan” is, in fact, quite wary. She warns: “I see a huge wave of internet blocking and censorship coming our way.”
“If it happens, it will be bad news!” pointed out Shahzad Ahmad, country director of B4A.
Simply put, said Ahmad, it means legalising censorship of digital content on this platform. “YouTube may then become like Facebook. You will only be able to see that content which authorities will allow us to see,” he explained.
Presenting a doomsday-like scenario, he further said: “A new war will erupt among religious factions and the stronger ones may demand a ban on the others. Human rights movement will suffer hugely, political expression will become much more difficult and alternate discourse will die.”
Many say this will put a stop to hate speech, a major issue stoking religious sects and minorities, in Pakistan, especially on social media.
Ahmad disagreed. “Banning hate speech will not end till perpetrators and banned outfits are taken to task. If you expect that banning their Facebook/Youtube or Twitter will solve the problem, then the answer is a no, a big no!” he said emphatically.
The blocking of YouTube in Pakistan, began last year on 17 September after the website refused to remove the blasphemous 14-minute video clip “Innocence of Muslim”.
The video had led to violent protests and demonstrations across the Muslim world, killing over 50 people.
Ahmad said the decision to block YouTube had nothing to do with upholding religious values or blocking blasphemous content. He suspects it had “political” underpinnings to it.
“The authorities have used this incident to strengthen censorship and filtering in Pakistan, and spent millions of dollars, a useless wastage of the public’s hard earned tax money, as nothing can be blocked on the Internet. Citizens have already resorted to VPNs and circumvention tools.
That is true. Over the past one year, hundreds of die-hard users of this website have relied on proxy servers to work around the ban.
“I just came back from China- and while Facebook and YouTube were banned everywhere, you can access them in Shanghai Freezone especially the Pudong district of Shanghai,” said Hamdani. “So even authoritarian regimes understand the futility of such censorship,” he added.
These proxy servers are passed on word of mouth and go viral within moments, but expire every few weeks. Then the process of passing the information starts all over again. “You can imagine our desperation,” pointed out Ebrahim.
But while she and her school friends are mostly using the website for downloading songs or cheat videos for games, there are hundreds who depended on it for their bread and butter.
“I can give you scores of examples of small traders, who marketed and “networked” for expanding their businesses on this free platform because they could not afford to advertise through the mainstream media. The Virtual University, an online learning institute, had uploaded thousands of lectures for its students to access; all that came to a halt. These lectures benefitted not just Pakistani students but millions of those living abroad. Now they have set up their own servers, and which I suspect must have been a huge investment” said Dad.
Toffee TV.com produces songs, stories and activities for children in the Urdu language. They went live on July 2011 and banked on YouTube to take it further and the latter did. It met with enormous success at schools, in homes and even among speech therapists, but saw a huge slump in its business. Before the ban was imposed, TOFFEE was uploading two new video programmes per week with 100,000 new visitors a month and serving five times those many repeat visitors.
The minister for IT said that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has been tasked with drafting an ordinance that would provide intermediary liability protection to Google/YouTube, thereby not holding the company responsible for what users choose to upload to the platform.
Bolo Bhi is quite disturbed by this news. “Why is PTA, a regulatory authority that deals with enforcement and not policy making, being asked to draft the ordinance?” it asked in a press statement. It also asked what became of the expensive filtering equipment that the government had acquired for its telecommunication networks.
17 Dec 2013 | News and features, United Kingdom
Even after months of bitter opposition from the charities on the receiving end of the British government’s gagging bill, ministers are refusing to accept their reforms are threatening to undermine the “very fabric of democracy”.
That is the worry from the alliance of charities and other campaigning groups who will be hit by changes being pushed through in what the government insists should be called the “transparency bill”.
Such is the scope of the reforms in the legislation, which is now working its way through the Lords, that a whole range of campaigning activity will face intimidating regulation – and all the strangling paperwork that goes with it.
Democracy is about a struggle for power between competing political parties. But the electorate can only make up its mind if third-party groups make their voices heard on the most important public policy issues of the day.
If the government gets its way it is going to become much harder for that to happen. The list of groups which will be affected is endless: those attempting to save a threatened local hospital, or block the High Speed 2 rail project in constituencies on the proposed route, or trying to combat extremism in constituencies where far-right parties are threatening to make progress, are all set to be affected. There are many, many more examples.
Ministers claim they only ever wanted to make life tougher lobbying groups, rather than make their work virtually impossible. “It doesn’t matter what the bill was meant to do,” Baroness Hayter, the Labour frontbencher leading the fight against the bill in the Lords, says in reply. “Its intent may be transparency, but the effect of it is what’s worrying.”
The opposition’s complaints about the bill have forced minor concessions here and there. Ultimately, though, none of them change the fact that if the gagging bill passes it will be much, much harder to raise important issues just at the moment when they need to be highlighted.
Peers took over the struggle from MPs this autumn. They didn’t look to be making much progress until Lord David ‘Rambo’ Ramsbotham tabled a procedural motion which would have slowed up the bill’s progress through the Lords. A governmental panic ensued. Ministers met with Ramsbotham three times in a single morning. With the coalition facing defeat if it came to a vote, a six-week hiatus was announced.
It was a miserable concession. Opponents, who had wanted a pause of at least three months, weren’t placated at all. They were frustrated that, instead of holding a formal consultation, officials instigated a series of meetings with affected parties. One charity campaigner said he was asked again about the objections he’d already raised. “They said ‘oh no, it couldn’t possibly apply’,” he remembered. “I said, ‘are you sure?'” The ministers replied: “Well, yes, maybe…”
It is that uncertainty which remains at the heart of the issue. There is no single measure which is being fought over. Instead the cumulative effect of the reforms is what Hayter calls “tying them in red tape” – a combination of measures which makes it much more likely many small-scale groups will simply decide not to bother campaigning at all.
“The danger is the regulation it introduces will be so complex, ambiguous and demanding in terms of time that many small organisations will just not do it,” says Pete Mills, policy and research officer at Unlock Democracy. “They’ll be so worried about falling foul of the rules they’ll just stop campaigning altogether. That would be very dangerous in the run-up to an election where this kind of debate is most valuable.”
This week the bill is receiving detailed scrutiny in the Lords. After two reports from the Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement demanding changes, the government does look set to increase the spending threshold over which campaign spending becomes regulated. By how much will, of course, be critical. Ministers are also conceding they will hold a review of the system after the next general election.
Both these promises have been met with cynicism from Labour. It is enraged by the government’s failure to amend the bill this week. Instead the changes are likely to come early in the new year, when – with the disorganised crossbenchers slowly returning from the festive break – ministers are more likely to win a vote.
This is how the bigger-picture changes in the bill could become law. We could see an extension of what constitutes ‘controlled expenditure’ to cover a much wider range of activities including rallies, meetings and polling. Every group campaigning as a coalition could be forced to register the total spending of the coalition as a whole.
“We are talking about something which faces a criminal sanction if you break it, so I think one is right to expect a degree of certainty,” complains James Legg of the Countryside Alliance. He believes his organisation’s campaign against fox-hunting in the 2005 election would have been effectively shut down had the coalition’s changes been in place.
Legg fears that nightmare could become reality in 2015. “The government could simply say ‘we’ll introduce that now’, and that would shut us up,” he says.
The battle against the ‘gagging bill’ is not yet lost, but it’s a bleak outlook for Britain’s democracy this midwinter.
16 Dec 2013 | India, News and features
From a protest in Mumbai against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which, among other things, bans gay sex (Image: Abhishek Chinnappa/Demotix)
I woke up on 11 December to a phone call from my friend. She was in tears: “My parents would rather have me married than arrested. They are constantly saying that even the Supreme Court thinks my ‘lifestyle’ is illegal.” I wasn’t sure whether she was pulling a prank on me. It turns out she wasn’t. The date 11.12.13 had tossed at us a judgment that sent shockwaves through India’s LGBTQ population. The July 2009 ruling from the Dehli High Court, decriminalising sex between two consenting adult, including “gay sex”, had been overruled by the Supreme Court.
The Delhi High Court had ruled that Section 377 of the Penal Code was in violation of the Constitution — specifically Article 14 which guarantees “equality before law”, Article 15 which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth” and Article 21 which protecting “life and personal liberty.” The Supreme Court, however, stated that the section can be repealed or amended only by the Indian Parliament.
“While reading down Section 377 IPC, the Division Bench of the High Court overlooked that a minuscule fraction of the country’s population constitute lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgender people and in last more than 150 years less than 200 persons have been prosecuted (as per the reported orders) for committing offence under Section 377 IPC and this cannot be made sound basis for declaring that section ultra vires the provisions of Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution,” the Supreme Court stated. Is the implication that just because the LGBTQ community is a minority, it can do without basic human rights? If quantity is the yardstick, then surely we need not fight discrimination against the disabled, religious minorities or the tribals anymore?
After the Delhi High Court ruling, there was a general climate of optimism regarding the rights of sexual minorities. This is not to say that police harassment stopped or lesbians stopped committing suicide. Unlike in the past, this year’s the Chennai Pride march was not given permission to go along the beach, and had to change its route at the last minute. Parts of the route for the Hyderabad Pride parade was in areas with little traffic and hence had little visibility. Despite the official estimates, human rights groups like the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, Karnataka have extensively researched and published reports on how Section 377 has been widely used by the police and society at large to harass homosexuals, male sex workers and transgender people. Extortion, blackmail, rape, physical assaults have gone unreported in a climate of fear.
What if my family/neighbourhood/office comes to know of my orientation? Will I lose my job? Will my family disown me? Do I have affordable legal support at hand? These are some very basic questions that have played on the minds of hundreds of thousands within the LGBTQ community. Section 377 does not imply that one can simply be arrested for one’s sexual orientation; strict material evidence of specific sexual acts is necessary for arrest. But fear creates a vicious cycle of ignorance and more fear. Facts get subsumed and a threat becomes enough to buckle under. Combined with the country’s reactionary obscenity laws, this becomes a potent cocktail for further harassment.
Yet, organisations like Sappho for Equality have conducted regular workshops with the police and the medical establishment, and have found a largely receptive audience. Nine transgender people across the country came together to produce an album and television soaps featured queer tracks. Two of the four short films in “Bombay Talkies” — a compilation celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema, released earlier this year — dealt with the topics homosexuality and transgenderism. Commercials have targeted the modern, urban Indian LGBTQ population. So much so, that many researchers (including myself) started writing about elitism in the Queer movement. This is the backdrop against which the Supreme Court made its ruling! Where does this take us back to? Sappho’s members wonder whether they will be allowed space in governmental agencies anymore. Ranjita Sinha of ATHB (Association of Transgender/Hijra in Bengal) already reports how complaints of harassment are pouring in, citing the examples of Bijoy Maity, who was physically assaulted on the evening of the judgment by locals who did not want an “effeminate” neighbour.
The media has been largely supportive but this support has a flip side too. Each time they flash the ticker, “Homosexuality criminalised”, they end up perpetuating a climate of fear. Yet, Section 377 is not only about the rights of sexual minorities to be themselves and to choose how and whom they love. It also criminalises sex “against the order of nature” and hence even heterosexuals practising oral and anal sex — in other words non procreative sex — can fall within its ambit. The State is entering your bedroom and infringing your integrity and your bodily autonomy — it is dictating your sex life. Anybody, irrespective of sexual orientation, should be concerned by this judgment, a fact yet to be highlighted by the media. The largest democracy of the world is faced with a very basic question. Is it even a democracy if it cannot uphold the fundamental rights of its citizens? As we ponder this question, come on the streets and scream for our rights, my friend and many like her are faced with the uphill task of claiming and reclaiming their right to be themselves.
