11 Apr 2014 | Egypt, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
The trial of three journalists working for the Al Jazeera English Channel (AJE) was adjourned on Thursday until April 22.
For award-winning Australian journalist Peter Greste, AJE ‘s Cairo Bureau Chief Mohamed Fadel Fahmy (a Canadian-Egyptian) and producer Baher Mohamed who have been locked up behind bars in a Cairo prison for more than 100 days, this means spending twelve more days in a dark, cramped cell with only an hour a day of exercise, fresh air and sunlight.
The AJE journalists are among 20 defendants accused by prosecutors of spreading false news that harms Egypt’s national security and aiding a terrorist organisation–charges the jailed journalists have repeatedly denied.
“There is not a shred of evidence incriminating us,” Mohamed Fahmy shouted out to a group of foreign journalists covering Thursday’s hearing. ” The case is political and we are scapegoats caught up in the middle of the Egypt-Qatar political rift.”
The patience of the three journalists is clearly wearing thin. While they had smiled and joked with family members and journalists attending the previous court sessions, signs of fatigue and frustration were evident on their faces Thursday as they appeared in the makeshift court at the Torah Police Institute, south of Cairo, for a fifth time. After 103 days in detention, their nerves were clearly frayed and Fahmy made no attempt to hide his anger. After the judge rejected his pleas to dismiss the charges against them and release him and his colleagues on bail, Fahmy shouted out from his cage , “Our acquittal won’t be enough! We shall seek compensation from prosecutors for the months we have spent here.”
Fahmy also vowed to expose what he said were ” crimes against humanity” being committed inside the prison walls. He however, refrained from disclosing the details of those crimes, telling journalists that what he and the other defendants say in court “is often taken against us” and results in the maltreatment and abuse of the defendants at the hands of investigators and prison guards .
Thursday’s hearing was briefly interrupted when Khaled Abdel Raouf , one of the defendants, fainted inside his cage and had to be carried away by prison guards. Fahmy later explained that Abdel Raouf’s ailing health was the result of the poor conditions at the Scorpion high security prison where he is being held. “The conditions there are inhumane; the prison is not fit for an animal,” Fahmy complained bitterly.
Fahmy himself had spent a month in solitary confinement at the high security prison before being transferred to Torah Prison where he now shares a cell with Greste and Baher and where conditions are slightly better. Some of the other defendants in the case– including Abdel Raouf and Anas El Beltagy– however, remain at the high security prison where hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood leaders also languish. Unlike the Al Jazeera team, the “Scorpion” defendants are being denied family visits and reading materials and have also complained (in a previous court session ) of torture at a detention camp where they were held immediately after their arrest.
Thursday’s court session opened with the screening of video footage that the prosecution had claimed supported the case against the Al Jazeera news team. The video material that was shown however, clearly had nothing to do with the case. It consisted of content from Sky News Arabia’s coverage of the political crisis in Egypt, a press briefing by a Keyan government official on the September terror attack at a Nairobi shopping mall, and part of a news report on Somali refugees in Nairobi that had earned Greste a Peabody Award. Asked by a journalist how he had felt watching his report in the courtroom, Greste replied, ” If they had played more of it, they would realize this is the type of work we do.”
A defence lawyer in the case told the judge that the charges were not against a terrorist news network that was inciting violence but against well-educated, patriotic young Egyptians .”The case is tarnishing Egypt’s image in the eyes of the world and must come to an end soon,” he insisted.
While the judge could not but dismiss the videos as “unrelated to the case”, he however, ordered another hearing later this month to allow a team of experts more time to review the videos in the presence of the Defence lawyers. His decision drew angry condemnation on social media networks from fellow journalists and internet activists around the world who for weeks had expressed their solidarity with the detained Al Jazeera staff via the Twitter hashtag: #FreeAJStaff .
”What a mockery of justice, Egypt!” retorted Australian broadcaster Mark Colvin (who works for ABC Radio) via his Twitter account. In a news report broadcast on CNN after the session, the on-air reporter sarcastically called it “ a trial by error” , saying that justice had been delayed in Egypt not once but five times.
In a statement released on Wednesday (a day before the court hearing), Amnesty International described the AJE detainees as “prisoners of conscience” and called for their immediate release.
Infuriated by the result of the hearing, Greste said he and the other members of his team were “fed up”, describing the evidence presented against them as “a joke.”
“ We have had enough,” he said. “I am unbelievably frustrated. But we still believe that in the end , justice will prevail.”
This article was published on 11 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Apr 2014 | Digital Freedom, News and features
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
State surveillance has been much publicised of late due to Snowden’s revelations, but allegations against the NSA and GCHQ are only one aspect of the international industry surrounding wholesale surveillance. Another growing concern is the emergence and growth of private sector surveillance firms selling intrusion software to governments and government agencies around the world.
Not restricted by territorial borders and globalised like every other tradable commodity, buyers and sellers pockmark the globe. Whether designed to support law enforcement or anti-terrorism programmes, intrusion software, enabling states to monitor, block, filter or collect online communication, is available for any government willing to spend the capital. Indeed, there is money to be made – according to Privacy International, the “UK market for cyber security is estimated to be worth approximately £2.8 billion.”
The table below, collated from a range of sources including Mother Jones, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Bloomberg, Human Rights Watch, Citizen Lab, Privacy International and Huffington Post, shows the flow of intrusion software around the world.
| Surveillance Company |
Country of Origin |
Alleged Countries of Use |
| VASTech |
South Africa |
Libya (137) |
| Hacking Team |
Italy |
Azerbaijan (160), Egypt (159), Ethiopia (143), Kazakhstan (161), Malaysia (147), Nigeria (112), Oman (134), Saudi Arabia (164), Sudan (172), Turkey (154), Uzebekistan (166) |
| Elbit Systems |
Israel |
Israel (96) |
| Creative Software |
UK |
Iran (173) |
| Gamma TSE |
UK |
Indonesia (132) |
| Narus |
USA |
Egypt (159), Pakistan (158), Saudi Arabia (164) |
| Cisco |
USA |
China (175) |
| Cellusys Ltd |
Ireland |
Syria (177) |
| Adaptive Mobile Security Ltd |
Ireland |
Syria (177), Iran (173) |
| Blue Coat Systems |
USA |
Syria (177) |
| FinFisher GmbH |
Germany |
Egypt (159), Ethiopia (143) |
Note: The numbers alongside the alleged countries of use are the country’s ranking from 2014 Reporters without Borders World Press Freedom Index 2014.
While by no means complete, this list is indicative of three things. There is a clear divide, in terms of economic development, between the buyer and seller countries; many of the countries allegedly purchasing intrusion software are in the midst of, or emerging from, conflict or internal instability; and, with the exception of Israel, every buyer country ranks in the lower hundred of the latest World Press Freedom Index.
The alleged legitimacy of this software in terms of law enforcement ignores the potential to use these tools for strictly political ends. Human Rights Watch outlined in its recent report the case of Tadesse Kersmo, an Ethiopian dissident living in London. Due to his prominent position in opposition party, Ginbot 7 it was discovered that his personal computer had traces of FinFisher’s intrusion software, FinSpy, jeopardising the anonymity and safety of those in Ethiopia he has been communicating with. There is no official warrant out for his arrest and at the time of writing there is no known reason in terms of law enforcement or anti-terrorism legislation, outside of his prominence in an opposition party, for his surveillance. It is unclear whether this is part of an larger organised campaign against dissidents in both Ethiopia and the diaspora, but similar claims have been filed against the Ethiopian government on behalf of individuals in the US and Norway.
FinFisher GmbH states on its website that “they target individual suspects and can not be used for mass interception.” Without further interrogation into the end-use of its customers, there is nothing available to directly corroborate or question this statement. But to what extent are private firms responsible for the use of its software by its customers and how robustly can they monitor the end-use of its customers?
In the US Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, there is a piece of guidance entitled Know Your Customer. This outlines steps to be undertaken by firms to identify what the end-use of its products is. This is a proactive process, placing the responsibility firmly with the seller to clearly identify and act on abnormal circumstances, or ‘red flags’. The guidance clearly states that the seller has a “duty to check out the suspicious circumstances and inquire about the end-use, end-user, or ultimate country of destination.”
Hacking Team has sold software, most notably the Remote Control System (RCS) to a number of countries around the world (see above). Citizen Lab, based out of the University of Toronto, has identified 21 countries that have potentially used this software, including Egypt and Ethiopia. In its customer policy, Hacking Team outlines in detail the lengths it goes to verify the end-use and end-user of RCS. Mentioning the above guidelines, Hacking Team have put into practice an oversight process involving a board of external engineers and lawyers who can veto sales, research of human rights reports, as well as a process that can disable functionality if abuses come to light after the sale.
However, Hacking Team goes a long way to obscure the identity of countries using RCS. Labelled as untraceable, RCS has established a “Collection Infrastructure” that utilises a chain of proxies around the world that shields the user country from further scrutiny. The low levels of media freedom in the countries purportedly utilising RCS, the lack of transparency in terms of the oversight process including the make-up of the board and its research sources, as well as the reluctance of Hacking Team to identify the countries it has sold RCS to undermines the robustness of such due diligence. In the words of Citizen Lab: “we have encountered a number of cases where bait content and other material are suggestive of targeting for political advantage, rather than legitimate law enforcement operations.”
Many of the firms outline their adherence to the national laws of the country they sell software to when defending their practices. But without international guidelines and alongside the absence of domestic controls and legislation protecting the population against mass surveillance, intrusion software remains a useful, if expensive, tool for governments to realise and cement their control of the media and other fundamental freedoms.
Perhaps the best way of thinking of corporate responsibility in terms of intrusion software comes from Adds Jouejati of the Local Coordination Committees in Syria, “It’s like putting a gun in someone’s hand and saying ‘I can’t help the way the person uses it.’”
This article was posted on 11 April, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
10 Apr 2014 | Academic Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture, Russia, United Kingdom
(Image: /Demotix)
At a conference in Prague last Spring, I listened as the wife of a former diplomat quizzed a Russian journalist on Russian politics. An old Cold War hand, she was keen to discover what motivated Putin and his cadre. Was it some hankering after communism? Was it plain nationalism?
The journalist, displaying the scepticism bordering on cynicism that, ironically, is often found among journalists bravely reporting in monstrous circumstances, shrugged. It would be a mistake, she suggested, to ascribe any value or ideology, even one as meagre as nostalgia, to the current Kremlin. Putin’s regime is about power and money and absolutely nothing else. There is no Putinism. There is just gangsterism.
It’s probably worth keeping this in mind while we fret over the geopolitics of Putin’s Crimean Anschluss. Indeed more than that, it’s clearly a point of view that merits more study. Unfortunately, one recent study of Putin’s gangster tendencies has been suppressed: not by the Kremlin, but by a UK academic publisher living in fear of England’s libel laws.
Karen Dawisha, Director of Miami University’s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, was set to publish a book on Putin’s gangster connections. One hesitates to use the dread stock book review phrase “timely and relevant”, but in this case it seems difficult to avoid it. The proposed subtitle “How, why and when did Putin decide to build a Kleptocratic and Authoritarian Regime in Russia and what is its Future?” gives a pretty good impression of what the book would contain.
According to Ed Lucas at the Economist, Dawisha’s publishers, Cambridge University Press, has taken fright at the prospect of a book actually investigating gangsterism among Putin and his cronies, and decided it will not publish the book.
In a letter to Dawisha, published by the Economist, John Haslam of CUP noted:
“After discussion with legal colleagues who have reviewed the typescript from both a US and UK legal perspective, I’m afraid that our view is that we are not in a position to proceed with your book. The decision has nothing to do with the quality of your research or your scholarly credibility. It is simply a question of risk tolerance in light of our limited resources.”
Haslam goes on:
“We have no reason to doubt the veracity of what you say, but we believe the risk is high that those implicated in the premise of the book—that Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating this circle—would be motivated to sue and could afford to do so. Even if the Press was ultimately successful in defending such a lawsuit, the disruption and expense would be more than we could afford, given our charitable and academic mission.”
This is depressing reading, and sadly familiar.
Six and a half years ago, Cambridge University Press was faced with a similar problem, and reacted in a similar fashion, i.e. capitulation.
Back then, publishers’ dreams were tormented not by Russian gangsters but Saudi bankers. Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz was the scourge of Fleet Street’s inhouse legal teams. The Saudi, who had bought Irish citizenship from kleptocrat Taoiseach Charles Haughey, was notorious for issuing threats and writs to any publication or publisher that so much as mentioned him – particularly when it came to suggestions that he may have been linked, either personally or financially, to Osama Bin Laden.
Everyone I mentioned in that last paragraph is dead now, by the way, which is why I feel no qualms about writing about any of them.
When Index first wrote about Bin Mahfouz there were many, many fraught discussions and even arguments about how to proceed. That’s a big part of what campaigners, lawyers and hacks mean when they talk about the “chilling effect” of defamation laws. The knowledge of working on something that could be ruinuous not just personally, but for an entire publication, can make you queasy and put your colleagues on edge. The fact that Bin Mahfouz, worth over $3.2 billion dollars, could have tied up even the biggest publications in endless, expensive litigation tended to put people off. Even when people did publish, in the end they always backed down in the face of the Sheikh’s muscle. His personal website featured an entire section dedicated to apologies hastily issued by terrified newspaper legal departments after Bin Mahfouz threatened them with a trip to the High Court.
Anyway, in 2007, CUP were about to publish a book on funding for Islamist terror, called Alms For Jihad. Bin Mahfouz got wind of it, and issued the usual threats via his lawyers, Kendall Freeman. CUP apparently jumped through a few hoops, asking the book’s American authors, Robert O Collins and J Millard Burr to compile a letter countering the claims in bin Mahfouz’s book. But in the end they pulped the book and recalled library copies. It was a low point, but in a curious way, some good came out of it. The Alms For Jihad case was among those that highlighted the serious problems with English defamation law. Not long after the pulping of Alms For Jihad, the first stirrings of the Libel Reform Campaign began. On 1 January 2014, a new defamation law came into force.
So why are we seeing a repeat of the Alms For Jihad debacle with this book on Putin and his cronies?
The new law should make it harder for foreign litigants to sue in London, and it should make them prove that they have suffered genuine damage. Without having seen the contents of the book (CUP say there is no reason to doubt the veracity of Dawisha’s claims about Putin’s circle, while simultaneously refusing to stand by their author), one would imagine that, particularly given US and European moves against Putin’s inner circle, the book would have had a decent chance in court.
But the new law will need to be tested. It may be that while the legal barrier to putting up a spirited defence of free speech in court has been considerably lowered, the mental block remains for many publishers. Only a strong early ruling under the new law will shake this off.
But who’s going have the first go?
This article was published on April 10, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
10 Apr 2014 | Bangladesh, Digital Freedom, Digital Freedom Reports, News and features
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
Bangladesh witnessed the internet take on an increasing role in its socio-political sphere in 2013. Usage trends swung more toward heart-warming positives, in contrast to the country’s regulatory precedents, which despite policymakers facilitating net use via cheaper connections and better infrastructure, have been mostly negative. Common people felt empowered using the internet.
Last February, tens of thousands of people were gathered, inspired by blog posts and social media to protest for the first time in the country’s history. At the same time, religious zealots started attacking online activists, and policymakers initiated the use of a draconian ICT (information and communication technology) act to clamp down on opposition, thus threatening digital freedom of expression overall.
Internet usage, mobile telephony penetration, and other ICT-enabled applications have been enjoying steady growth in both Bangladesh’s private and public sectors for over a decade. The present political leadership came to power with a mandate to “digitise” the country by implementing its Digital Bangladesh by 2021 vision. This policy rolled out net enabled ICT centers to ensure easier access of information for its citizens all over Bangladesh. At present, the national teledensity is at over 70%. Around 20% of the population use the internet, of which 90% go online using mobile phone services. There are around 200,000 local bloggers based in Bangladesh, who alongside millions of Bangladeshi Facebook users were until recently enjoying near-uninhibited freedom to express their thoughts online.
The true power of social media to mobilise massive groups of people on a political issue was first observed in Bangladesh during the Shahbag movement in February 2013. Like the 2011 uprising in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, protesters gathered for several weeks in the Shahbag intersection of Dhaka University campus, demanding justice against known war criminals of its liberation war in 1971. This movement was initiated by local bloggers and social network users, and flourished with their help. People were using online media freely to organise in the real world and to create spaces for net based dialogue on critical issues. However, along with such freedom came confrontation. Shahbag made public the conflict between the ultra religious, anti-establishment elements and the moderate, mainstream and secular netizens. One pro-Shahbag blogger was killed, many other online activists were threatened with physically harm by the zealots. Suddenly an online inspired mass protest, which was enjoying complete freedom of expression in the digital space, turned out to be the root cause of a messy and prolonged offline affair.
The Shahbag movement exposed the major weaknesses of the local legal system, responsible for guaranteeing its citizens’ freedom of expression. The government turned out to be confused in their decision making process and tried to appease both sides. It first banned several ultra-religious sites. Then the law enforcement agency arrested four secular Shahbag bloggers and organisers, charging them with “harming religious sentiments”. Such actions sent out confusing signals to the general population and posed serious questions on the existence of any tangible legal safety net for online communication in Bangladesh.
In fact, the government’s performance in the digital space has been consistently disappointing between 2012 and 2013. In addition to its self-conflicting stance on Shahbag, it applied a heavy-handed approach in dealing with other web services throughout the year. YouTube was banned for months (September 2012 to May 2013) due to The Innocence of Muslims, which ignited major protests in Bangladesh. Additionally, Facebook was blocked on several occasions, from periods of a few hours to days at a stretch. Freedom House included Bangladesh for the first time in its yearly Freedom On the Net report in 2013. Based on its performance in 2012 and first half of 2013, the internet in Bangladesh was found to be partially free, enjoying a relatively better online environment in comparison with its South Asian peers, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Nevertheless the situation is getting worse. Indiscriminate applications of the ICT Act 2006, a rise of online hate speech and related crimes have left net users in Bangladesh insecure.
In 2013, the government started using the ICT Act of 2006 more frequently, mainly to address issues related to online space and freedom of expression. This act was formulated in early 2000 and according to many legal experts, it was due to be amended to become more user-friendly and inclusive. The Bangladeshi government did amend it in August 2013, but unfortunately made it more repressive and inflexible. The newly amended act provisions a maximum 10 years in prison and fines up to £74,555 for any offensive religious, social, or political expression made online. It moreover made arrests under this act non-bailable and the police were given the power to arrest people without a warrant. Instead of strengthening the legal system to protect peoples’ right to communicate freely online, this act tightened its grip on peoples’ freedom of communication. A series of arrests took place and several court cases were filed under the act in 2013. Besides the bloggers, editors and journalists of two newspapers, two NGO officials, and several other people were arrested, some of whom are close to opposition party politics. One university teacher was sentenced to seven years in prison under the act for threatening to kill the prime minister through a Facebook status.
Overall, the present state of affair of net freedom in Bangladesh is very uncertain. There has been no independent regulatory or legal body put in place to protect the rights of the people online. Civil society needs to be more active to thwart any digital policing that compromises public freedom. As the challenges related to ICT access in Bangladesh are being solved fast, it is now high time to make sure that its citizens enjoy true freedom while using such digital infrastructure.
This article was posted on 10 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
