The British MPs who want to ban "The Innocence Of Muslims"

Freyja Soelberg | Demotix Protests against The Innocence of Muslims at the US Embassy in London (Demotix)

This one sneaked under the radar before Christmas. On 6 December, UK parliamentarian Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP for Stockton North, tabled an “Early Day Motion” demanding that the British government ban the controversial anti-Islam film “The Innocence of Muslims”. The moved was backed by 14 other MPs — 11 Labour, two Liberal Democrats, and RESPECT’s George Galloway.

Here’s the text of the EDM in full:

That this House notes the anger of Muslim constituents in response to the online video, The Innocence of Muslims; is offended by the vile, Islamophobic slurs it makes about a faith followed by over two billion people worldwide; believes that the film constitutes incitement to hatred on the grounds of race and religion; further believes that the film itself is of appallingly poor quality; and urges the Government tomake provision for its banning.

Note the invocation of our friend Muslim anger; note the absurd generalisation of the feelings of “two billion people worldwide” — none of the 15 signatories is actually Muslim. Note the remark on the “poor quality” of the film, a classic censor’s gambit (“it’s rubbish anyway, so this doesn’t really count as censorship”), but one which also raises the question of whether they’d call for Innocence of Muslims to be banned if it was well made. All rather grim.

The signatories are listed below (source http://www.edms.org.uk). Is your MP part of this censorious set?

Alex Cunningham Stockton North (Labour)
Iain Wright Hartlepool (Labour)
Simon Danczuk Rochdale (Labour)
Ian Lavery Wansbeck (Labour)
Jim Dobbin Heywood and Middleton (Labour)
Andy McDonald Middlesborough, Labour
Ronnie Campbell Blyth Valley (Labour)
Sandra Osborne Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Labour)
Kelvin Hopkins Luton North (Labour)
Alan Meale Mansfield (Labour)
George Galloway Bradford West (Respect)
Andrew George St Ives (Liberal Democrat)
Mike Hancock Portsmouth South (Liberal Democrat)
Roger Godsiff Birmingham, Hall Green (Labour)
Mary Glindon North Tyneside (Labour)

Read more on The Innocence of Muslims:

A new argument for censorship? Padraig Reidy asks if this time is different from previous blasphemy rows

Google sees “intimidating effects” in top exec’s detention

Tech giant Google is in the middle of a censorship debate in Brazil after its top executive in the country was temporarily detained during the latest mayoral election.

Fabio Coelho was detained in September by order of a judge from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. He demanded the removal of YouTube videos considered offensive against Alcides Bernal, the mayoral candidate of state capital Campo Grande. Since the video wasn’t promptly deleted, Coelho was held responsible.

He was questioned by federal police and released shortly after.

Google Brazil executive Fabio Coelho. Image from Twitter

Google Brazil executive Fabio Coelho. Image from Twitter

Brazilian law is extremely rigid about offensive material aimed at political candidates. But many view some of the judges’ attitudes in these cases as excessive and often times myopic.

In a statement issued in September, Coelho said the episode had “intimidating effects” on freedom of expression. He claimed the videos were “legitimate manifestations of free speech” and should be kept available.

“There are gaps in Brazil’s electoral legislation that make this kind of situation possible”, said Google Brazil’s Public Policy Senior Counsel Marcel Leonardi about Coelho’s arrest. He added:

We hope this episode puts a light on the need to adjust Brazil’s law, so that legitimate political outcries from internet users can be differentiated from, say, unlawful propaganda. The dynamics of the internet need to be understood.

In November, lobbying by telecom companies in the Brazilian Congress’s lower house killed a draft bill known as the “internet bill of rights”, a civil rights framework to guarantee basic rights for internet users, content creators and online intermediaries.

Google says Brazil is one of the countries that has the most cases of site removal requests made by government agencies.

The mechanics of China’s internet censorship

Even rainstorms can be sensitive in China. The recent storm in Beijing which killed at least 77 people caused the censors to come out in force, with newspapers told to can coverage and online accounts of the deluge snipped.

But with 500 million internet users, the obvious question is, how does China do it? What are the mechanics of China’s internet censorship?

It makes things simpler if we divide the censorship first into two camps: censoring the web outside China and censoring domestic sites.

American journalist James Fallows very readable account of how China censors the outside web explains: “Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted.”

Briefly, this is what happens.

Censoring incoming web pages

The public security ministry is the main government body which oversees censorship of the outside Internet through its Golden Shield Project.

The key to their control is the fact that unlike many other countries, China is only connected to the outside internet through three links (or choke points as Fallows calls them) — one via Japan in the Beijing-Tianjin-Qingdao area, one also via Japan in Shanghai and one in Guangzhou via Hong Kong. At each one of these choke points there is something called a “tapper” which copies each website request and incoming web page and sends it to a surveillance computer for checking. This means that browsing non-local websites in China can sometimes be frustratingly slow.

There are four ways for a surveillance computer to block your request.

  • The DNS (Domain Name System) block: When you enter a web page, the DNS looks up the address of that page in computer language (the IP address). China has a list of IP addresses it blocks, if your web page is on that IP address, the DNS is instructed to give back a bad address and you will get a “site not found” error message.
  • Connection Reset: Another the way the government prevents you seeing one of its blacklisted sites is not to return a bad address but to constantly reset the request, which is slightly more insidious since this kind of error can occur naturally. If it happened outside China you could press reset and the chances are the next time you would be successful. But in China the reset is intentional and however many times you resend the request you will get a “The connection has reset.”
  • URL keyword block: To cast its net even wider, the tappers also check the web address. If it contains any banned words, say “Falun Gong” or “Dalai Lama” the request is sent into an infinite loop, you never reach the site and your connection times out.
  • Content filtering: In this technique the content of web pages is scanned for banned words, with the connection timing out if any blacklisted words are found. This could for example, allow you to browse the Guardian website, but not access some of the new stories.

Censorship technology is continuously becoming more sophisticated, and words and IP addresses go on and off the blacklists.

Index contacted Jed Crandall, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico and whose research has focused on Chinese internet censorship, to ask him if there had been much change to the above in the four years since Fallows’s article. Here’s what he said:

“It seems like filtering the content of the web pages using internet routers was not working well for the censors, and they even seemed to be devoting less resources to it over time as we did our experiments,” he told Index by email interview. “They still block IP addresses, DNS addresses, and do keyword filtering on GET requests [URL keyword block].”

Censoring domestic websites

Far more of a challenge to the Chinese government is keeping its homegrown internet in check. And this it does mostly by making sure the private companies that run most of the Chinese web self-censor by issuing threats, “vaguely-worded” laws and, in the case of emergency breaking stories, day-to-day directives.

Censoring professional content

Web companies self-censor in many different ways. Content which they produce themselves is “cleansed” first by the writer and then by editors if necessary. There are few specific censorship guidelines; it is more of an acquired habit of knowing where to draw the line based on fear of punishment. American scholar Perry Link wrote an eloquent essay back in 2003 — read it here — about how Chinese censorship is like an anaconda in the chandelier ready to pounce if someone oversteps that line:

The Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments–all quite ‘naturally.’

Censoring user-produced content

This is where it gets really interesting.

“Social media is more dynamic and fluid than traditional online content, so the censors have to be creative in how they control social media,” says Crandall.

Banned topics and sensitive terms are deleted by hand by armies (literally) of paid internet “police”. This, from a paper published here in June by a team of researchers at Harvard University:

The size and sophistication of the Chinese government’s program to selectively censor the expressed views of the Chinese people is unprecedented in recorded world history. Unlike in the US, where social media is centralized through a few providers, in China it is fractured across hundreds of local sites, with each individual site employing up to 1,000 censors. Additionally, approximately 20,000–50,000 Internet police and an estimated 250,000–300,000 “50 cent party members” (wumao dang) are employed by the central government.

More evidence for the lack of a hardcopy list of banned topics is that different online companies seem to censor different things.

Crandall adds:

One thing we’ve noticed in our research is that what various companies censor seems to vary widely from company to company, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious ‘master list’ of what companies are supposed to censor.  They seem to make up their own lists based on what they think their liabilities would be if the government had to intervene.

For example, censoring in Tibet and Qinghai (a largely Tibetan province) is much stricter than in eastern parts of the country.

Latest trends

Recent reports on Chinese internet censorship have offered some surprising results. First, the Harvard paper referred to above analysed Chinese-language blogs and found that censors were targeting material that could have incited protests or others types of mass action, leaving material critical of the government uncensored.

A recent University of Hong Kong study on Weibo (China’s wildly popular version of Twitter) posts found that the list of words was changing constantly.

“What we are finding is a constantly morphing list of keywords, a cat-and-mouse contest between people and censors,” King-wa Fu, one of the study’s researchers, told the Economist last month.

There might be more to it than a simple catch-up. According to Crandall, censorship can be used as a sophisticated tool to control the news. In a paper titled Whiskey, Weed, and Wukan on the World Wide Web: On Measuring Censors’ Resources and Motivations, when a news story reflects badly on the government, posts on it are censored, but when that news story has been turned around to a good story, the word is unblocked.

“It appears that censorship was applied only long enough for the news about Wukan to change from sensitive news to a story of successful government intervention to reach a peaceful resolution to the problem,” the paper’s authors write.

(Wukan is the name of a village in southern China where huge clashes between the police and locals occurred over illegal land grabs late last year. The government eventually caved into the villagers’ demands and then turned the story in one of a provincial government victory.)

The Future

Chinese censorship has to move with the times, particularly now there are 500 million Chinese online, many of whom are ardent microbloggers.

Crandall believes that the government is looking into how to manipulate social media to influence the news.

I think what the future of internet censorship holds is more emphasis on control and less emphasis on blocking content. It’s very difficult to block some specific topic, but if you can slow down spread of news of the topic at some times and speed up spread of news about the topic at other times you can use that to your advantage to control how issues play out in the news cycles.

MORE ON THIS STORY:

Blogger Wen Yunchao wrote for Index on Censorship magazine in 2010 about the art of Chinese censorship. Read his article here.

Also writing for our magazine, Southern Weekend columnist Xiao Shu discusses the repressive and chaotic nature of China’s internet censorship here.

Read Chinese author and blogger Han Han’s essay about publishing and censorship in China here.

 

Advocacy

Hillsborough Family Support Group: UK lobbying group

For more than 20 years, the Hillsborough Family Support Group lobbied the UK government for a second investigation into the Hillsborough disaster, the human crush at the Sheffield Wednesday stadium, which claimed 96 lives in 1989.

The group, set up by families who had lost loved ones in the disaster, worked tirelessly to keep the case open and to make public information that had been suppressed by the authorities following the disaster. This included the alteration of 164 police statements, 116 of them to delete or change reports, as police sought to shift the blame on to the victims. Their years of effort won the group an Amnesty ‘Long Walk’ award.

Families were integral to a process that focused on finding and publishing documents, rather than a judicial inquiry-style cross-examination of witnesses.

James Jones, the Anglican bishop of Liverpool, who chaired an independent investigation panel into the case, told the Financial Times: “The documents speak for themselves.”

Their work has promoted freedom of expression in the UK by challenging the police cover up and persevering in their campaign for the truth behind the disaster. Following the publication of the independent panel’s report in September 2012, the HFSG has called for fresh inquests to be held and for criminal prosecutions to be brought against those responsible both for the deaths and for perverting the course of justice.

As a result of their combined efforts, the Independent Police Complaints Commission has launched an investigation into police action following the disaster. In December, a high court accepted the attorney general’s application to quash the verdict of a disputed 1990 enquiry, opening the way for new inquests to take place.

Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani education campaigner

15 year old Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai has received global attention for her courage in standing up to the Taliban and her defence of girls’ education. Yousafzai first came to attention when, at the age of 11, she wrote a pseudonymous diary for BBC Urdu, describing the Taliban’s closure of her school in the city of Mingora.

The closure followed the destruction of more than 100 schools in the district. Later in 2009, a journalist and filmmaker from the New York Times made a film about Yousafzai and her struggle to keep up her education. The same year, she began to make public appearances including on television, to advocate for girls’ education.

In October 2012, a Taliban gunman shot Yousafzai in the head and chest for her activism, as she was returning home from school in Pakistan’s Swat district. After receiving life-saving surgery in Pakistan, she was flown to a Birmingham hospital for specialist medical care. She was released in January but will return to undergo cranial reconstruction surgery.

Yousafzai’s rise in prominence has been rapid. In 2011, she chaired a session of the Unicef-supported Child Assembly in Pakistan’s Swat district, was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Bishop Desmond Tutu and won Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize. Following the attempt on her life, in November 2012, more than 60,000 people called for her to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.

In 2012, Yousafzai was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its 2012 list of top global thinkers and nominated for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Ales Bialiatski, Belarusian human rights defender

Ales Bialiatski is a prominent human rights defender in Belarus. As chairman of the Viasna Human Rights Centre and vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, he dedicated his life to helping victims of human rights until his imprisonment in August 2011. Bialiatski was sentenced to four and a half years for alleged tax evasion.

A defender of freedom of expression and human rights since Soviet days, when he led efforts to memorialise Belarusian victims of Stalin’s purges, Bialiatski founded the human rights NGO Viasna in Minsk in 1996 to provide financial and legal aid to prisoners of conscience and their families.

The vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, his work was honoured internationally several times before his arrest. Bialiatski was jailed for using money in personal bank accounts in Lithuania and Poland to support Viasna’s human rights work in Belarus. The organisation was unable to register in Belarus, and therefore unable to open a bank account there.

The Minsk authorities claimed he had been tried and jailed lawfully. In December 2012 a UN Working Group rejected this position and ruled that Bialiatski was in fact being arbitrarily detained by the government in contravention of UN Human Rights conventions and that he should be immediately released and awarded compensation.

Bialiatski’s arrest was part of an on-going crackdown against critics of President Alexander Lukashenko, known as Europe’s last dictator. Following his disputed re-election in December 2010, seven opposition candidates were arrested.

Meanwhile freedom of expression continues to be severely restricted in Belarus. Lukashenko’s regime has passed several laws to muzzle critics, including one to ban silent protests and even clapping in the streets.

Girifna, Sudanese youth movement

Girifna, a Sudanese youth movement calling for non-violent resistance, has been taking the country by storm. The group, whose name comes from the Arabic for “We are fed up”, was set up by university students in October 2009 to encourage their peers to vote in the 2010 election.

Combining demands for freedom of association with monitoring and information campaigns, members distribute information about human rights violations and organise peaceful protests.
Girifna stands apart not just because of the age of its members but also its ethnic diversity.

Though women’s voices are widely suppressed in Sudan, they play an important role in Girifina’s campaign and information work. In July 2012, mothers, daughters and sisters marched alongside each other as part of the Kandake Protest (the Protest of Strong Women). As well as traditional methods of campaigning such as leafleting and organising youth forums on issues of social justice, Girifna uses the power of the internet to spread its message.

One of the group’s most successful campaigns involved posting the testimony of a woman who was kidnapped and gang-raped by members of the security forces on YouTube – an unprecedented move in a country where speaking out about rape is considered shameful. But Girifna’s actions have not been without repercussions. Around 2,000 people were arrested following the June protests with detainees held incommunicado and without access to lawyers. Many members of the group have been arrested, detained, tortured and sexually assaulted.

Girifna has been targeted by the Sudanese authorities following a wave of demonstrations that began in June 2012. Several members of Girifna have been detained without being able to speak to their families or lawyers. Some say they were tortured in detention. Despite this attempt to silence them, Girifna continue to distribute information and organise activities, including peaceful protests calling for the respect and protection of human rights in Sudan.

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