Index on Censorship’s Mike Harris joins Ghida Fakhry and guests on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, to discuss whether a giving a peace prize to Burma’s president Thein Sein rewards the killings of Rohingya Muslims.
Yesterday [22 April], about 900 websites were shut down in protest against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which was passed by the US House of Representatives last week. Hacking group Anonymous called for the “blackout” in order to stop the bill, which the group slammed as an attempt to “control and censor the internet.”
CISPA would allow tech companies and governments to exchange information related to possible cyber attacks — without legal hurdles. The bill’s sponsor, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, dismissed the bill’s critics as “14-year-olds in their basements”, but there are some very valid concerns over CISPA’s potential to threaten digital freedom.
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Rainey Reitman criticised the ”dangerously vague” bill, which she says allows companies to “spy on the electronic communications of millions of Internet users and pass sensitive information to the government with no form of judicial oversight.”
The bill was passed by a two-thirds majority. An amendment preventing employers from acquiring the passwords to social media accounts of employees was blocked by the House. The US Senate stopped the bill from passing last year, but the House has reintroduced it this year. The White House has also previously threatened to veto the bill.
Despite its failure last year, the bill’s discussion this time around did not focus on the privacy issues pointed out by groups like EFF or the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Instead, supporters of CISPA used last week’s Boston marathon bombings to illustrate its necessity. Texas Republican Mike McCaul said that the United States needs to arm itself against “digital bombs.”
So who will benefit from CISPA’s passing? According to TechDirt, the bill will benefit big defence contractors — including Rogers’ wife, defence expert Kristi Rogers, who has been publicly writing about and supporting her husband’s efforts to strengthen cybersecurity. She currently works for lobbying group Manatt, working on “executive-level problem solving in the defence and homeland security sectors”, and previously lead Aegis LLC: a security company that has a $10 billion contract with the US State Department.
CISPA’s opponents have also been drowned by its supporters’ aggressive lobbying. Transparency watchdog Sunlight Foundation has reported that the pro-CISPA lobby has spent a whopping $605 million since 2011 to pass the bill. In fact, companies like AT&T and Verizon have already spent millions on ensuring CISPA’s passing (interestingly, neither of these companies are participating in the Global Network Initiative’s efforts to help telecommunications companies protect freedom of expression and privacy rights).
Even though the bill has now been passed by the House, it has yet to be considered by the Senate. The White House has also warned that the bill would be vetoed as it is, citing concerns over accountability for companies that fail “to safeguard personal information adequately.”
To find out more about the concerns around CISPA, and to voice your concerns, visit the campaign’s site.
Yesterday [22 April], about 900 websites were shut down in protest against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which was passed by the US House of Representatives last week. Hacking group Anonymous called for the “blackout” in order to stop the bill, which the group slammed as an attempt to “control and censor the internet.”
CISPA would allow tech companies and governments to exchange information related to possible cyber attacks — without legal hurdles. The bill’s sponsor, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, dismissed the bill’s critics as “14-year-olds in their basements”, but there are some very valid concerns over CISPA’s potential to threaten digital freedom.
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Rainey Reitman criticised the “dangerously vague” bill, which she says allows companies to “spy on the electronic communications of millions of Internet users and pass sensitive information to the government with no form of judicial oversight.”
The bill was passed by a two-thirds majority. An amendment preventing employers from acquiring the passwords to social media accounts of employees was blocked by the House. The US Senate stopped the bill from passing last year, but the House has reintroduced it this year. The White House has also previously threatened to veto the bill.
Despite its failure last year, the bill’s discussion this time around did not focus on the privacy issues pointed out by groups like EFF or the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Instead, supporters of CISPA used last week’s Boston marathon bombings to illustrate its necessity. Texas Republican Mike McCaul said that the United States needs to arm itself against “digital bombs.”
So who will benefit from CISPA’s passing? According to TechDirt, the bill will benefit big defence contractors — including Rogers’ wife, defence expert Kristi Rogers, who has been publicly writing about and supporting her husband’s efforts to strengthen cybersecurity. She currently works for lobbying group Manatt, working on “executive-level problem solving in the defence and homeland security sectors”, and previously lead Aegis LLC: a security company that has a $10 billion contract with the US State Department.
CISPA’s opponents have also been drowned by its supporters’ aggressive lobbying. Transparency watchdog Sunlight Foundation has reported that the pro-CISPA lobby has spent a whopping $605 million since 2011 to pass the bill. In fact, companies like AT&T and Verizon have already spent millions on ensuring CISPA’s passing (interestingly, neither of these companies are participating in the Global Network Initiative’s efforts to help telecommunications companies protect freedom of expression and privacy rights).
Even though the bill has now been passed by the House, it has yet to be considered by the Senate. The White House has also warned that the bill would be vetoed as it is, citing concerns over accountability for companies that fail “to safeguard personal information adequately.”
To find out more about the concerns around CISPA, and to voice your concerns, visit the campaign’s site.
The “quantity v. quality” debate around global digital access seldom gets the attention it deserves. Here I define “quantity” as the spread of internet access to remote and marginalised communities and “quality” as the extent to which these connections are free from corporate or government restrictions and surveillance.
With more than four billion people yet to come online around the world, basic connectivity is an obvious and necessary prerequisite for digital access. But handing out one laptop per child and selling low-cost smartphones does not solve the quality problem, and can in fact worsen it.
Repressive governments and opportunistic companies sometimes exploit their citizens’ and customers’ ignorance and apathy towards personal privacy and data protection in the name of national security and financial gain. Countries like Iran and China’s biggest web companies are obvious offenders, but western democracies and Silicon Valley startups are far from perfect.
Doling out laptops and ethernet cables without also spreading the internet’s core values of freedom and openness can inadvertently harm newly connected users and the wider web.
NGOs with good intentions sometimes make this mistake. More troubling are companies with financial incentives to lay cables and sell hardware in new markets. Africa is one of the least connected territories, making it, from a corporate perspective, a digital desert ripe for cybercolonialism. Despite being framed as aid, a $20 billion pledge from China to Africa last year was primarily about business. Chinese companies with troubling track records on digital rights and freedoms are also competing to lend their security and surveillance expertise to African governments, a serious cause for concern on the quality side of access.
Frank La Rue, the UN’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has described internet access as a right and acknowledged both the quantity and quality components inherent and critical to the enjoyment of this right. Other digital thought leaders, like Google’s chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf, has described the internet as an enabler of human rights but not a right in and of itself. Both perspectives hold weight, but we must not forget that the internet can also be used as a disabler of human rights.
Rather than a panacea, the internet can be poison when used to monitor, suppress and prosecute online speech and offline action.
Cyberutopians who think smartphones will set us free have been proven wrong time and time again. On the flip side, this does not mean that cyberdystopians who fear governments will exploit our dependence on technology and digital communications to neutralise dissent are necessarily correct. Increasing the quantity of internet connections without minding the quality of those connections forged can potentially bring greater harm than good for digital access, but such harm is not inevitable. Companies and NGOs working to spread access should ensure that the benefits they bring outweigh potential dangers they create or expose and should ensure that quantity is balanced by quality at the corporate and government levels. Only when this balance is achieved can global digital access truly be advanced.