7 Jun 2013 | Digital Freedom
It’s been a rocky week for government surveillance and freedom of expression, Brian Pellot writes
On Tuesday, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Frank La Rue delivered a report to the Human Rights Council outlining how state and corporate surveillance undermine freedom of expression and privacy. The report traces how state monitoring has kept pace with new technological developments and describes how states are “lowering the threshold and increasing the justifications” for surveillance, both domestically and beyond their own borders.
The true depths of this lowered threshold were exposed on Thursday, when The Guardian revealed that the US National Security Agency has been collecting call records of Verizon’s millions of subscribers. Things got worse on Friday when reports alleged the same agency can access the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to monitor users’ video calls, search histories, live chats, and emails. It was long one of Washington’s worst kept secrets that data about our communications (call logs, times, locations, etc.) were being monitored, but the revelation that the government has granted itself, without democratic consent, the ability to monitor the actual contents of our communications is appalling.
Related: ‘Mass surveillance is never justified’ — Kirsty Hughes, Index on Censorship CEO
Today on Index
The EU must take action on Turkey | Iran tightens the screw on free expression ahead of presidential election
Index Events
Caught in the Web: How free are we online?
The internet: free open space, wild wild west, or totalitarian state? However you view the web, in today’s world it is bringing both opportunities and threats for free expression — and ample opportunity for government surveillance
Mass surveillance programmes have awful implications for freedom of expression. Index on Censorship made this clear in regards to the UK’s proposed Communications Data Bill last year. States should only limit freedom of expression when absolutely necessary to preserve national security or public order. In such exceptional cases, limits on expression should be transparent, limited and proportionate. La Rue’s latest report adds that states should not retain information purely for surveillance purposes. The US programmes revealed this week grossly violate all of these principles.
Surveillance is, by its very definition, a violation of privacy. La Rue’s report rightly states that “Privacy and freedom of expression are interlinked and mutually dependent; an infringement upon one can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.” Without some guarantee or at least a (false) assumption of privacy online, we cannot and will not express ourselves freely. Mass surveillance programmes directly chill free speech and give rise to self-censorship.
If the top secret documents outlining these programmes were leaked, what’s to stop our top secret personal information, that which is being monitored by government agencies, from being exposed? These programmes and even more extreme efforts to limit freedom of expression online in other states are unjustified, disproportionate, secretive and often without adequate limits. La Rue’s report calls for national laws around state surveillance to be revised in accordance with human rights standards.
Brian Pellot is Digital Policy Advisor at Index on Censorship.
7 Jun 2013 | Campaigns, Europe and Central Asia, Turkey Statements
Index on Censorship is calling on EU Enlargement Commissioner Štefan Füle to press Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a meeting today on the need to ensure Turks can exercise freedom of assembly and expression in Turkey.
The commissioner should urge Edrogan to foster dialogue with the protesters and to allow the media to report on the demonstrations without fear of censorship.
Unprecedented demonstrations swept the country in reaction to plans to build a shopping centre on Gezi Park in Istanbul. Police reacted with violence and intimidation.
Related: Protests expose the extent of self-censorship in Turkish media | “There is now a menace which is called Twitter” | Turkey losing its way on free speech
Index Events
Join Index on Censorship and a panel of Turkish and British writers to discuss free speech in Turkey, 22 June, Arcola Theatre London
After a four-day trip abroad, Erdoğan returned to Turkey on Thursday night, where he told a crowd of supporters, “These protests that are bordering on illegality must come to an end immediately”.
Index on Censorship CEO Kirsty Hughes wrote on Monday:
“The EU insists all candidate countries meet its ‘Copenhagen Criteria’ that say candidates must be democracies who respect the rule of law and human rights. Back in 2004, when the Union’s leaders agreed to start talks Turkey was said to “sufficiently meet” those criteria.
“It is no longer clear, given its deliberate creation of media censorship, and the brutality of police in the face of mass protests, that Turkey does meet those criteria. If the EU stands for human rights in its neighbourhood, surely it should make a much stronger, robust condemnation of Turkey’s growing anti-democratic tendencies and its attacks on freedom of expression.”
7 Jun 2013 | Middle East and North Africa
With the 14 June presidential election approaching, Iran’s leaders are moving to prevent the outburst of protest that followed the disputed 2009 poll by tightening access to the web and silencing “negative” news. Raha Zahedpour reports
Iran’s state television this week held the second of three presidential debates. Unlike the 2009 debates, no one-on-one debating was allowed. In these debates, resembling game shows, candidates have less than five minutes to talk about their policies on different issues, and other candidates were chosen at random to question the speaker. Candidates were then left with very limited time to conclude after the end of questions.
The eight qualified candidates could not escape Iran’s strict censorship during their campaigns. Iranian state TV censored reformist candidate Mohammad Reza Aref’s speech in a programme broadcast for the Iranian diaspora on 26 May. The recording was halted and not resumed.
In another programme on the domestic Channel One, conservative candidate Mohsen Rezaei was censored for talking about how unemployment devastated a family who lost their children in the war, and were led to suicidal thoughts as a result of pressures from the economic crisis and inflation.
State television censored documentaries made by the campaigns of each candidate — including Saeed Jalili, Ayatollah Khamenei’s favoured candidate — showing that even a favourite could not escape the sharp blades of censorship.
Iran carefully vetted the candidates in this year’s race: Hashemi Rafsanjani and Rahim Mashaei were disqualified from the upcoming presidential election by Iran’s Guardian Council. Hashemi Rafsanjani, 78, was dropped from the race for being too old. Mashaei was disqualified because he promotes nationalism and nationalist Islam — despite being a part of hard-liners faction.
Even before the election’s candidates were announced, Iran’s ruling elite moved to slow internet connections, blocked access to Gmail accounts, and clamped down on circumvention tools. All over the country, Iranians are struggling to access social media, or even check their email.
Authorities have also tightened up web censorship — censoring even influential political figures close to the government. A blog belonging to one of Rafsanji’s advisors was blocked recently. The move raised eyebrows, because Hashemi Rafsanji is key revolutionary figure, a former president, a former head of Parliament and the current chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council of Iran.
Iran also shut down sites aligned to presidential hopeful Efandiar Rahim Mashaei.
Meanwhile, Ahmadi Moghadam, the chief commander of Police, said that the authorities would not allow any distractions around the election. Following the announcement, jailed journalists and bloggers who were released after being imprisoned and sentenced after the 2009 uprising were arrested once more. Former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi are still under house arrest.
Iran’s press has also faced enormous challenges in reporting on the election. The ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance invited journalists to a seminar about what could be reported. Officials emphasised that “negative news” should not be published. Subsequently, some papers received official notices for their content. The websites of reformist newspapers Mardom Saalaary and Bahar were blocked, even though print editions of the newspapers continued to be distributed
In light of restrictions, rights organisations have cast doubt on the election’s freedom. In a 24 May statement Human Rights Watch asked, “How can Iran hold free elections when opposition leaders are behind bars and people can’t speak freely?”
Raha Zahedpour is a journalist and researcher living in London. She writes under a pseudonym
7 Jun 2013 | Americas, Campaigns, Digital Freedom
Index on Censorship is appalled at the reports of alleged US mass surveillance programmes sweeping up data from internet and communications firms.
CEO Kirsty Hughes said “Mass surveillance is never justified — democracies should be standing up for digital freedom at a time when it is under threat from countries like China and Iran, not undermining it.”
The Guardian and the Washington Post have reported on PRISM — a “top secret program that claims to have direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple.” The program allows officials to snoop into a range of web content — live chats, emails, file transfers and video calls, the papers wrote, drawing from a classified document about PRISM. The Guardian previously reported that the government had seized numbers from Verizon’s network.
Related: ‘Mass surveillance is never justified’
Today on Index
The EU must take action on Turkey | Iran tightens the screw on free expression ahead of presidential election
Index Events
Caught in the Web: How free are we online?
The internet: free open space, wild wild west, or totalitarian state? However you view the web, in today’s world it is bringing both opportunities and threats for free expression — and ample opportunity for government surveillance.
