3 Jul 2014 | Digital Freedom, Digital Freedom Statements, European Union, News and features, Statements
When Europe’s highest court ruled in May that individuals had a ‘right to be forgotten’ many were quick to hail this as a victory for privacy. ‘Private’ individuals would now be able to ask search engines to remove links to information they considered irrelevant or outmoded. In theory, this sounds appealing. Which one of us would not want to massage the way in which we are represented to the outside world? Certainly, anyone who has had malicious smears spread about them in false articles or embarrassing pictures posted of their teenage exploits, or even criminals whose convictions are spent and have the legal right to rehabilitation. In practice, though, the ruling was far too blunt, far too broad brush, and gave far too much power to the search engines to be effective.
At the time of the ECJ decision, Index warned that the woolly wording of the ruling – its failure to include clear checks and balances, or any form of proper oversight – presented a major risk. Private companies like Google – no matter how broad and noble their advisory board might be on this issue – should not be the final arbiters of what should and should not be available for people to find on the internet. It’s like the government devolving power to librarians to decide what books people can read (based on requests from the public) and then locking those books away. There’s no appeal mechanism, no transparency about how Google and others arrive at decisions about what to remove or not, and very little clarity on what classifies as ‘relevant’. Privacy campaigners argue that the ruling offers a public interest protection element (politicians and celebrities should not be able to request the right to be forgotten, for example), but – again – it is hugely over simplistic to argue that simply by excluding serving politicians and current stars from the request process that the public’s interest will be protected.
We are starting to see some of the (high profile) examples of how the ruling is being applied by Google. The Guardian’s James Ball reported on Wednesday that his newspaper had received an email notification from Google saying six Guardian articles had been scrubbed from search results.
“Three of the articles, dating from 2010, relate to a now-retired Scottish Premier League referee, Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for granting a penalty in a Celtic v Dundee United match, the backlash to which prompted his resignation,” Ball wrote. “The other disappeared articles are a 2011 piece on French office workers making post-it art, a 2002 piece about a solicitor facing a fraud trial standing for a seat on the Law Society’s ruling body and an index of an entire week of pieces by Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade.”
Similarly, the BBC was told that the link to a 2007 article by the BBC’s Economics Editor, Robert Peston, had also been removed.
Neither The Guardian nor the BBC has any form of appeal against the decision, nor were the organisations told why the decision was made or who requested the removals. You may argue – as some have done – that Google is deliberately selecting these stories (involving well-known journalists with large online followings) as a kind of non-compliant compliance to prove that the ruling is unworkable. Certainly, a fuller picture of the types of request, and much more detailed information about how decisions are arrived at, is essential. You can also point to the fact that it is easy to find the removed articles simply by going to a search engine’s domain outside Europe.
The fact remains that this ruling is deeply problematic, and needs to be challenged on many fronts. We need policymakers to recognise this flabby ruling needs to be tightened up fast with proper checks and balances – clear guidelines on what can and should be removed (not leaving it to Google and others to define their own standards of ‘relevance’), demands for transparency from search engines on who and how they make decisions, and an appeals process. If search engines really believe this is a poor ruling then they should make a clear stand against it by kicking all right to be forgotten requests to data protection authorities to make decisions. The flood of requests that would be driven to these already stretched national organisations might help to focus minds on how to prevent a ruling intended to protect personal privacy from becoming a blanket invitation to censorship.
This article was posted on 3 July 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
3 Jul 2014 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, United Kingdom
(Image: Shutterstock)
I’ve occasionally thought it might be fun, even therapeutic, to have an enemies list. I would carry it in my pocket, a single, increasingly ragged B5 ruled sheet, on which I would scribble, with my specially purchased green Bic biro, the names of those who had taken against me, or to whom I had taken against; starting with the Ayatollah Khamenei (long story) and ending, well, never ending.
I could scrawl and scrawl, adding people and organisations: the wine waiter who mysteriously sneered “For you sir, perhaps a glass of Merlot” (I know that’s an insult, I just don’t know why that’s an insult), everyone who stands on the bottom deck of a bus when there are seats upstairs, the Communist Party of Vietnam, and so on, endlessly, ‘til my little scrap of paper was a grand mess of green ink, letters over letters over letters, upside down, vertical, horizontal, furious underlines, multiple exclamation marks, sometimes, just discernible, the word “NO” in capital letters.
It would be good to have the list at hand, to have it under control, I imagine. As long as I’ve got them all written down, and the list is on my person, I won’t be caught off guard. This would not be odd, you agree. It would be an entirely reasonable thing to do in a world where foes stalk us, waiting to mug us, or make us look like mugs.
For politicians, this sense of the entire world waiting for the moment you mess up is amplified, partly because it is a reflection of the truth. Opposition activists will pick up on every word you say, and the slightest slip will be turned into a hilarious/earth-shatteringly dull meme in mere minutes, with earnest young women imploring people to retweet whatever the hell it was that proves you hate nurses/the nuclear family/your party leader, and proves you’re not fit to do XYZ.
And then there’s the “feral beasts” of the press, as Tony Blair famously referred to journalists in 2007 (this was literally worn as a badge of pride by many: the New Statesman’s then political editor had “Feral Beast” badges made, which he handed out to every journalist he met), who you spend your life trying to please while deep down knowing they are willing you to cock up. You really, really can’t win.
Faced with all this, it’s not surprising that politicians and politicos are a little wary of the world. But there is a difference between wariness and paranoia, a difference demonstrated by the reaction to the Sunday Times’s report of a speech delivered recently by Labour’s Jon Cruddas to the left-wing group Compass. An attendee of the publicly advertised meeting passed a recording of Cruddas’s comments to the Sunday Times. The journalist then had the temerity to report on the speech! According to the Telegraph’s Stephen Bush, Cruddas’s next appearance, at the Fabian Society Summer Conference, was “bad tempered” and full of attacks on the “‘herberts’ and ‘muppets’ of Fleet Street who might be listening to his every word or statement in search of a headline”.
Meanwhile Neal Lawson, Compass chairman and Cruddas’s host, wrote a strange article for the Guardian, suggesting, somehow, that Cruddas’s comments were not in the public interest, and somewhat hyperbolically claiming: “The Sunday Times got its cheap splash, but in the process our political culture is diminished, maybe fatally.”
Lawson then really went for it, claiming: “What happens next? We either accept that the Murdoch empire — and maybe others — make toxic yet another level of public life and succeed in shrivelling our body politic still further. Or we make whatever stand we can.
Their goal is not just to destroy Labour or even any alternative to the individualistic, me-first politics of the past 30 years. They want to destroy the possibility of such an alternative. Invading the spaces in which such an alternative is discussed, such as the Compass event, is just a means to an end.”
All this at first reads as merely silly, but there are a few strands in it that are quite worrying. The first is the idea that a journalist reporting on a public meeting (Lawson’s justification for claiming it was “semi-private” was that attendees had to register and there was no press list) is fatally undermining democracy. There is an authoritarian undertone to this: journalists should report on what we allow them to report, not what is of interest. This is also reflected in Lawson’s comment about journalistic practices — “For the papers who do this it’s an easy, cheap hit: no research, no digging, just someone with a smartphone who is willing to sit through boring meetings on a Saturday afternoon” — somehow the story is not a good one because it was gained through day-to-day processes rather than via the Woodward-And-Bernstein routines that are seen as “proper” “investigative” journalism.
Secondly, there is the Murdochophobia which escalates an agenda to a conspiracy: The Sunday Times and Murdoch’s other papers are broadly conservative, it is true, but that’s a long way from having a goal of “destroying Labour” (a party Murdoch’s papers supported for a long time).
The problem with this paranoid mindset is that nobody takes responsibility for their own actions or even their own opinions. The question of whether there is a problem with Labour policy or not, becomes simply evil newspaper versus innocent, naive, poor little politician. It is self-pitying and self-defeating. Either have the debate, or don’t. But don’t complain when reporters report.
This article was posted on July 3, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
2 Jul 2014 | Asia and Pacific, News and features, Thailand
The generals behind Thailand’s latest coup, a well-planned seizure of power, have declared an ambitious agenda to fix the political system, dissolve conflict and “bring back happiness”. The steps they are taking: Closing down protest, pressuring academics and controlling the media may not deliver the results they are looking for.
Last month’s coup is markedly different from the 2006 army power grab that ousted billionaire prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. That coup provided a clear plan for restoring civilian rule and a timetable for elections. This time around army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha and his junta have refused to commit themselves. They claim “the political system has to be reformed before a new election can take place”, suggesting that it may take 15 months if things run smoothly, or maybe much longer, before new elections can be held.
In the meantime, the Thai junta have set about consolidating their power, ruling by decree and suppressing even the most innocuous and silent forms of dissent. A gathering of five or more people has been declared illegal. Anyone who defies their decrees will be tried by military court-martial. With the scrapping of the constitution and the dissolution of parliament, the military’s power over policy-making and the judiciary is absolute.
The junta’s message to the public seems to be don’t worry about the abrogation of human rights, freedom of assembly and the clampdown on the media. The military’s public relations and social psychology unit has unleashed a series of free concerts and distributed free tickets to a stirring epic film that glorifies the victories of King Naresuan of Siam (1590-1605). The concerts have also featured songs lauding the the army for saving the nation from the abyss and “bringing back happiness”.
Beyond the entertainment the message is clear: Political divisions and debates have to be dissolved. The Thai people have to be united by ultra-nationalistic fervour and reverence for the monarchy.
Perhaps the clincher for winning over the masses was the junta’s directive to ensure all World Cup matches would be shown free on terrestrial Thai TV channels, at the cost of 427 million baht, or £7.68 million, skimmed from another budget.
All this has combined to garner support from people in Bangkok and beyond, whose lives had been disrupted by months of anti-government rallies, blocked traffic and political deadlock.
There is a common theme in both coups 2006 and 2014 — the objective of disrupting and dislodging the electoral domination of the Shinawatra-led political parties and the “red shirt” supporters, that since 2001 have consistently won at the ballot box.
Background to the coup
The country’s fragile democracy had been battered and paralysed by months of raucous anti-government demonstrations, including the occupation of government ministries led by die-hard monarchists known as “yellow shirts”. They were opposed to a government led by Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of ousted tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra who lives in exile in Dubai.
Attempts to settle the conflict by holding an election in February 2014, were stymied by anti-government protesters blocking the way to many voting stations in Bangkok and the south. The election was later annulled by the courts, leaving the country in a state of political impasse.
Month after month, the Thai military chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha had fended off the media with assurances that there would be no coup because “a coup is not the solution”.
But soon after, on 20 May, the army declared martial law, stressing that it was not really a coup. On 21 May, the army chief declared “martial law is not the same as a coup”. Then on 22 May, martial law underwent a minor mutation leading to full seizure of power. Overnight, the action becaime a fully-fledged coup under the command of the NCPO — the National Committee for Peace and Order. Despite appearances and General Prayuth’s misleading statements, according to a reliable business source in close contact with the generals, it had all been planned a long time ago. This has now been confirmed by Suthep Thaugsuban, the former Democrat Party politician turned yellow shirt. The military have denied it.
Thailand is no stranger to coups. Tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in 2006. At the election that followed his sister Yingluck Shinatra won a landslide victory, and her government suffered the same fate in 2014. This is the 12th coup since 1932 and the end of absolute monarchy.
The repression
The current hard-line military regime has set about rooting out all anti-coup opposition — both red shirt, and a politically liberal constituency, based around groups of intellectuals, writers and academics.
The Thai Human Rights Alliance has reported that 470 people have been detained for questioning for 7 days or more, after being summoned to appear before the generals. This included not only politicians and red shirt leaders but also human rights lawyers, academics, journalists and writers. Most have been released after being pressured to sign a declaration that they would not engage in any anti-coup activity.
Universities have been warned against holding political forums. Inside schools, a decree has banned any criticism of the coup. NCPO is also considering rewriting history books to add patriotic fervour to classroom study.
Censorship of the internet was already extensive before the coup. It has reached new heights under the junta, with an attempt to close down Facebook. However it suddenly came back online after an hour with the military engaging in frantic denials.
Following the Thai junta taking control over TV, radio and print media, the only remaining source of independent information and reports from Thai reporters can be found on the web. Blocking Facebook pages is part of a long-term strategy to rival the success of Burmese counterparts in controlling internet gateways. Anyone who clicks “like” on an anti-coup comment on the web has, according to the NCPO, committed a criminal offence.
The junta tries to extend its grip overseas
Army chief General Prayuth has briefed 23 Thai ambassadors to keep a close watch for any anti-coup protests abroad. Any “inappropriate comments” about the Thai monarchy should be reported and could be prosecuted under Thailand’s notorious “lese majeste” law. This controversial law bans any public debate of the monarchy and has been widely used to discredit political opposition.
In Thailand the military’s first allegiance is to the royal family. The politics of the coup is viewed by many as part of a broader plan to ensure that the succession that follows the death of ailing 86 year old King Bhumibol Adulyadej will be managed by a Thai parliament under the firm control of deeply committed monarchists, and not Thaksin’s red shirt camp.
All sides profess affection and loyalty to the king, but the wearing yellow indicates special allegiance to increasing the powers of the throne beyond the limits of a constitutional monarchy.
In late May, the Royal Thai Embassy in London tried to lobby the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and their Thai Society, to cancel a public panel discussion on 2 June, on the coup d’état. The event featured a panel of speakers including law academic Verapat Pariyawong, one of those summoned by the junta. Despite embassy pressure, the debate went ahead at SOAS.
In Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, the long arm of the military was more successful, blocking the screening of the film 1984, based on George Orwell’s classic novel. A Thai cineclub wanted to screen it at an art gallery with an anticipated audience of probably less than 30. As a result of pressure from an army colonel who contacted the gallery, it was cancelled.
Military newspeak and Orwellian times
Addressing the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok, junta spokesman Colonel Werachon Sukondhapatipakhe urged the media: “Please avoid using the word coup, because the context of what happened in Thailand is completely different. The only thing that happened in Thailand is the change of the administration of this country.” The colonel also instructed the media against using “junta”, saying: “One must never use that word, it sounds bad.”
He also declared: “I don’t like the word ‘detention’ as people were only invited to come.” However, about 50 people who declined the “invitation”, have been charged and will be tried by court martial.
The military have also said they wanted to end the country’s deeply entrenched political divisions by setting up reconciliation forums under ISOC (Internal Security Operations Command), a body established in 1966 to counter the armed communist rebellion.
ISOC spokesman Ban hot Pompeian said “it’s time for Thais to stop dwelling on the past”. Addressing primarily red shirt voters in the north and north east, he said they “should forget everything that happened before 22 May”.
In George Orwell‘s 1984, the importance of forgetting the past is all part of a totalitarian design to exert thought control and acceptance of a new reality. “Thailand in 2014 is George Orwell’s 1984,” Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai associate professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, told Time magazine.
David Steckfuss an expert on northern Thailand, who lectures at Khon Kaen University, argues there are many things that “it would be hard for them [red shirts] to forget”, mentioning specifically the military crackdown on red shirt supporters in Bangkok in 2010, which resulted in 90 people killed. The military fired live ammunition in order to disperse a mass protest that had blocked central Bangkok for over two months.
Steckfuss argues that reconciliation based on the barrel of a gun is not going to work. Those red shirt activists and the voters in northern Thailand do not view the junta as honest brokers between the two political sides, but clearly aligned with one side comprising of the Bangkok elite, the yellow shirt monarchists and the royal palace, he said.
Kevin Hewison, a Thai studies expert who heads the Asia Research Centre at Australia’s Murdoch University, commented that General Prayuth’s actions during anti-government demonstrations were “biased towards the anti-government side, protecting and promoting them under the guise of the military being ‘neutral'”.
Dark days ahead
Thailand’s political history has been riddled by coups, usually involving a semi-feudal elite at loggerheads with both the new capitalism represented by Thaksin Shinawatra and his telecom empire, and with the recent sense of empowerment by the voters of north and north-east Thailand.
Buddhist scholar Sulak Sivaraksa points out: “Unfortunately, the military hasn’t learned much from their previous mistakes; that is, every coup thus far has been a fundamental failure, and the military must take full responsibility for this.”
If the country is to emerge from this crisis, Sivaraksa argues the elite and the military have to start respecting the poor who vote for red shirt parties and are starting to assert their political rights.
“Many red shirts are not pawns of Thaksin Shinawatra. They have bravely struggled for freedom from domination by the ‘ammarts'”, Sivaraksa said, referring to the traditional elite closely linked to the judiciary and the royal palace.
There is a chance that the military’s reform of the Thai system, and their apparent preference for a more limited or guided democracy will only be welcomed by the yellow shirt royalists, and rejected by any election based on one man one vote.
If there is to be a credible reform process, Dr Lee Jones of Queen Mary London University says: “The only way forward is a new social contract that distributes power and resources more equitably. We get that by talking and negotiating, not from the barrel of a gun.”
This article was posted on July 2, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
