South Africa’s parliament yesterday approved a controversial bill aimed at protecting state secrets. Dubbed the “secrecy bill” by its critics, the Protection of State Information bill was passed by 189 votes to 74. Campaigners against the bill warned of the “chilling effect” it could create for anyone fighting to bring government corruption to light.
The Right2Know campaign has been working against the bill since its introduction in 2010, and has vowed to continue fighting against the bill, which now must be signed by Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president, in order to go into effect. Although the bill was amended last year to include a clause on public interest, the campaign says that the modified bill still “only has narrow protection for whistleblowers and public advocates”. Right2Know also criticised the bill’s vague language — which they say could possibly endanger whistleblowers and journalists.
Writing for Index on Censorship last year, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer said that the bill “must be discarded in its entirety.”
South Africa’s parliament yesterday approved a controversial bill aimed at protecting state secrets. Dubbed the “secrecy bill” by its critics, the Protection of State Information bill was passed by 189 votes to 74. Campaigners against the bill warned of the “chilling effect” it could create for anyone fighting to bring government corruption to light.
The Right2Know campaign has been working against the bill since its introduction in 2010, and has vowed to continue fighting against the bill, which now must be signed by Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president, in order to go into effect. Although the bill was amended last year to include a clause on public interest, the campaign says that the modified bill still “only has narrow protection for whistleblowers and public advocates”. Right2Know also criticised the bill’s vague language — which they say could possibly endanger whistleblowers and journalists.
Writing for Index on Censorship last year, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer said that the bill “must be discarded in its entirety.”
“I swear, by God, the armed forces did not kill nor order killings of protesters,” Egypt’s Defence Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sissi told Egyptian State TV earlier this month.
Al-Sissi defended the armed forces, insisting the military had “protected Egypt and safeguarded the January 25, 2011 Revolution.” He also warned the media against slandering the military.
Al-Sissi’s comments came in response to leaks to the Guardian and Egypt’s independent Al Shorouk newspaper from a report by a fact-finding commission implicating the military in human rights abuses during and after the 18-day mass uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. The commission was formed after President Mohamed Morsi came to power in June 2012 in the wake of tensions with the country’s powerful military. In a report handed to President Morsi in December, the commission stated that “the military had ordered doctors to operate on wounded protesters without anaesthetic and that soldiers killed and tortured demonstrators — including performing humiliating virginity tests on female protesters less than a month after the uprising”, according to the Guardian. The military had also participated in forced disappearances, with more than 1,000 people reported missing during the 18 days of the January 2011 uprising.
While al-Sissi has denied the charges, a video clip posted on YouTube shortly after his statement was broadcast on Egyptian state TV tells an entirely different story. The video was posted by Askar Kazeboon, or Military Are Liars — a group of volunteers whose declared aim is to “expose the lies of the armed forces and inform the public about military abuses.” The clip showed soldiers brutally beating and kicking protesters. It also depicted scenes of the December 2011 “blue bra incident” during which a female protester was dragged by soldiers and stripped half naked during protests against military rule outside the parliament building in Cairo. During the clashes between military forces and protesters on Qasr al-Aini Street, the army had also assaulted and arrested journalists, confiscating their equipment, and targeting news outlets. A military spokesman soon afterwards denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the army had “exercised self-restraint.”
Activists responded to the claims by launching Askar Kazeboon — an alternative campaign to “expose the state media propaganda lies” by screening video clips in public spaces across the country, depicting scenes of military forces practicing severe brutality against peaceful demonstrators. The footage is often interlaced with military denials of involvement in any criminal activity. Besides screening videos of military abuse, the Askar Kazeboon — or the Military are Liars — team has staged protest-marches in several cities and towns and used social media networks Facebook and Twitter to raise public awareness about the violent military crackdown on protesters demanding an end to military rule during the transitional period (when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was in power). The group’s Facebook page has approximately 149,000 fans and the number is steadily increasing.
The latest Askar Kazeboon video which has gone viral on social media networks Facebook and Twitter, has embarassed the armed forces while serving as a reminder that it is becoming all the more difficult to hide truths in the ‘Information Age’ when activists and bloggers are constantly taking pictures on their mobile phones, uploading and sharing them with internet users around the world. But the video is not the first of its kind countering the narrative of state media . On 27 January 2012, the group’s video clips were projected onto the facade of the Egyptian State Television building at Maspero “to shame the state broadcaster for propogating lies” — according to campaign members — after state TV channels broadcast a video produced by the military’s Public Affairs Department depicting protesters throwing rocks and molotovs at military forces in downtown Qasr el Aini Street and showing children “confessing” to having been paid to attack the military. The following month, the Askar Kazeboon group took their campaign one step further, projecting their video clips onto the outer walls of the Ministry of Defence –the SCAF Headquarters.
“By taking our protest movement out of Tahrir Square into other districts , villages and hamlets, we have managed to attract more followers to our cause ” Reem Dawoud, a founding member of the campaign told Index. She added that the group’s mission was the pursuit of” transparency, accountability and free flow of information.”
The campaign has over the last sixteen months evolved into an initiative “countering the lies of those who speak in the name of religion” — in reference to the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, which has reneged on several promises, including the promise not to field a presidential candidate. Askar Kazeboon and other initiatives — like Ikhwan Kazeboon and the No to Military Trials Campaign — do more than just open peoples’ eyes to vivid truths; they also symbolise an unprecedented level of street and cyberactivism that was lacking in the pre-revolution days. Gone are the days when the state had near-total control over the media and when the government had succeeded in silencing voices of dissent. Despite growing fears that a government crackdown on media critical of the Morsi regime in recent months could pave the way for a regression in the freedom of expression — overturning the gains made in freedom of speech since the revolt more than two years ago — the campaigns bring hope of a freer, more transparent society where every citizen has the right to access information and hold authorities to account.
Journalist Shahira Amin resigned from her post as deputy head of state-run Nile TV in February 2011. Read why she resigned from the “propaganda machine” here.
Does copyright do more to enhance free speech than to stifle it? This question comes into sharp focus every 26 April on World Intellectual Property Day, which aims to “promote discussion of the role of intellectual property in encouraging innovation and creativity”.
This year’s theme is “Creativity: The Next Generation”. Debate around whether copyright encourages or actually hinders creativity has intensified in recent years as laws designed to address offline infringement have struggled to keep up with digital technologies and the internet. Also struggling to keep up are artists, most of whom have seen slower revenue streams due to mass online piracy of their work. Many copyright laws and treaties already exist or are in the works to protect artists and the broader intellectual property industry against digital piracy, but some of their implications for free speech are troubling.
The 1998 US Digital Millenium Copyright Act criminalised the production, distribution and use of tools that can circumvent digital copyright controls. It also limited the liability of internet service companies for their users’ copyright infringing activities if the companies agreed to implement notice and takedown procedures for copyright holders to seek redress.
Circumvention tools can be used for fair use activities that do not infringe copyright, making the criminalisation of tools without regard for intent potentially chilling in its broadness. Copyright holders from the recording and film industries also sometimes abuse notice and action systems by flooding them with bogus claims where fair use is clearly protected. The undue burden this places on service providers can encourage them to over-comply with requests in order to stay on the safe side of copyright laws. Such over-compliance can mean unnecessary censorship. The Centre for Internet and Society documented this to be the case in India, sending flawed takedown requests to seven web companies, six of which over-complied and removed more content than legally required under the country’s Information Technology Act.
Major companies including Google, Twitter and most recently Microsoft issue regular reports showing how many copyright removal requests they receive and comply with. Google received nearly 20 million URL removal requests on its search product alone last month, the majority of which came from copyright owners in the recording and motion picture industries and organisations that represent them. A big company like Google might have the resources to sort legitimate requests from the rest, but many small companies certainly do not.
A recent flurry of intellectual property bills and treaties on both sides of the Atlantic pose further challenges to freedom of expression. The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act both failed in the US, and the European Parliament rejected the the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in 2012 following global campaigns by internet activists and web companies opposed to their provisions. These bills and treaties have all been put on the backburner but run the risk of flaring up again if legislators move to push them forward a second time. The US bills would create a blacklist of websites accused of providing illegal access to copyrighted content, which could kick off a digital witch hunt from overprotective copyright holders that wish to censor sites even in cases of fair use. ACTA aims to shift the current IPR debate from international fora to secretive backrooms. It would also increase intermediary liability, making websites more responsible for user activity and more likely to restrict users’ online expression.
Important to note is that many people simply don’t understand copyright, causing them to unknowingly break these laws. About half of participants in a recent survey were confused about the legality of uploading and downloading copyrighted materials online. Major prosecutions, including that of a US woman who was fined $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs in 2009, have increased awareness of copyright laws and their sometimes disproportionate consequences. A new Copyright Alert System in the US aims to do the same, relying on ISPs to voluntarily slow down internet speeds for users who regularly pirate copyrighted content.
Legal reforms and public knowledge alone will not stop pirating. Artists who have traditionally relied on rich patrons, governments and organised industries to bring their work to fruition are experimenting with new funding and marketing models to meet online challenges and to take advantage of new opportunities. Small donations from more than 3 million people on the crowdsource funding platform Kickstarter have financed more than 35,000 creative projects, bringing in $500 million in the past four years. Many musicians are also shifting their business focus from singles to concert sales, an experience that cannot yet be replicated online and that many fans are still willing to pay for.
Artists need to eat, and pirates should be punished. But for this to happen, copyright laws and their enforcement should to be just and proportionate and new funding models for creative industries should be pursued. Perhaps next year’s World Intellectual Property Day theme should focus on reforming copyright laws and exploring new business models to safeguard the next generation’s creativity and freedom of expression.
