24 Nov 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy tweeted to say she had been arrested and beaten in Cairo this morning. Eltahawy, who writes for Canada’s Toronto Star, Israel’s The Jerusalem Report and Denmark’s Politiken, is said to have been detained by Police in Tahrir Square. Following her arrest, the journalist tweeted “Beaten arrested in interior ministry” around 4am (EET).
Her arrest sparked outrage on Twitter, and the campaign to #FreeMona began trending worldwide.
It is also believed that activist Maged Butter, who was with Eltahawy, was also arrested, and a similar #freemaged campaign began on Twitter. Unconfirmed reports on the micro-blogging site suggest Maged has since been freed.
Also, documentary film-maker, Jehane Noujaim, best known for her documentary “Control Room” about the pan-Arab news station, Al-Jazeera, was detained, and her camera confiscated.
The US State department responded to the rumours of the arrests on Twitter: “Reports of @monaeltahawy and @pangeaworld detention very concerning. @USEmbassyCairo engaging authorities. #FreeMona“.
Images calling for the release of Mona and Maged also appeared on Twitter, as well as an image showing Maged’s injuries, following his release.
Mona tweeted “I AM FREE” shortly after 12.20 EET, and said she could barely type following “12 hours with Interior Ministry bastards and military intelligence combined.” Mona also alleged she had been sexually assaulted by 5 or 6 members of the Egyptian security forces, who “groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area.”
10 Nov 2011 | Uncategorized
This post was originally published in the Comment is Free section of The Guardian on Wednesday 9 November
James Murdoch knows his future as the heir apparent is hanging by a thread. As he prepares for Thursday’s second, and crucial, appearance before MPs, he will reflect that he remains in his job only thanks to family loyalty, a Saudi prince and some weak questioning last time. For all the hullaballoo surrounding his first appearance before the Commons culture and media select committee in July, the young Murdoch managed to bat away the questions easily as he chaperoned his smarting and near-silent father, Rupert, who was sitting alongside him. The amateurishness of most of his inquisitors – a perennial problem with parliament’s weak committee system – helped his cause.
Since then the questions have mounted. In September the News of the World’s former legal manager, Tom Crone, told MPs he was “certain” James Murdoch had been informed about the now famous email showing that phone hacking went beyond one rogue reporter. Murdoch had told MPs in July that he had not seen the email when he signed off the settlement to Gordon Taylor in 2008. Both cannot be right.
News International’s senior figures are fighting for survival. Many shareholders in its global arm, News Corporation, have signalled their disquiet. Murdoch Jr survived a vote at the company’s AGM in California a month ago only because of the company’s preferential share arrangements, which are skewed towards family and friends.
Is he, as some have described, a dead man walking? Thursday’s session will provide clues but is unlikely to produce the killer punch. For that, attention will turn to the next stage of the Leveson inquiry, which will hear from the victims. The important thing is that Leveson differentiate between specific crimes – and many of the allegations do revolve around criminality – and the broader conclusions about the UK media.
Almost every day brings further damaging revelations about News International. The spying antics of the private detective Derek Webb are just the latest. It seems that anyone who came into News International’s orbit was tailed or bugged. The Metropolitan police inquiry confirmed last week that the number of possible victims of phone hacking has risen to 5,800 – far higher than previously thought.
The company has launched a damage limitation exercise on all fronts. It is desperately seeking to reach out-of-court settlements with as many people as possible. Some estimates put the total bill at £200m – a sizeable chunk even for NI. Some in the organisation are seeking to learn the lessons. One of the few slivers of light in this tawdry affair has been the strong coverage devoted by the Times and Sky television to the actions of their bosses. That takes gumption, even if the bosses’ power is fading fast.
Since the understandably fevered reaction to the Milly Dowler revelations in July, the atmosphere has calmed. Lord Justice Leveson and his team have started proficiently. They are fully aware of the balance they have to strike between recommending measures that will improve journalistic standards while not limiting the ability of reporters to find out the awkward truth that the rich and powerful seek to withhold.
The Press Complaints Commission, under its new chairman, Lord Hunt, is looking afresh at its own practices, which were flawed in both conception and execution. The PCC was a mediator, not a regulator. It needs to start regulating and presiding over standards, in order to stave off the ever strong calls for rules by statute. It is important that the PCC, an organisation long dismissed as toothless, seeks to take the initiative, and presents a strong agenda for reform to Leveson in the new year. Hunt has already begun to ask searching questions and to take some useful advice.
Some media-watchers have been bending the ear of politicians in their attempt to take revenge on Murdoch and to “control” a profession that Tony Blair unwisely described as “feral beasts”. As I made clear in my presentation to Leveson, the real danger facing journalism is that it is too weak. It finds out far too little. It too often swallows the spin and takes no for an answer.
A perfect press does not exist anywhere: it never has and never will. Given the inevitable choice, would we rather have a press that is excessively pliant, cautious and deferential, or one that sometimes gets it wrong? Would we want a media shackled as in France? Not only do privacy laws there prevent much legitimate investigation of financial and other public misdeeds, but more broadly journalists are frightened stiff of offending politicians. How else could one explain the reluctance for five days to publish the embarrassing Sarkozy-Obama taped discussion about Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu? At Index on Censorship we catalogue daily cases of not just egregious harassment of journalists by authoritarian regimes, but the more subtle restrictions imposed by western governments.
Britain’s media remains, mercifully, raucous. Even so it already operates under a vast array of restrictions – from dangerously restrictive libel laws to official secrecy and various self-denying ordinances. The phone hacking affair casts a dispiriting light on the state of journalism. But it is about far more than that. It is most of all about corporate governance. Although other newspapers will be implicated, this was mainly about one media organisation. News International accrued such power that it believed it had impunity to act as it pleased. It dominated public life, dictating to politicians what they should say and do.
That all this happened was an indictment of two generations of politicians, from Tony Blair flying to an Australian island to kneel at the feet of Rupert Murdoch to David Cameron’s intimate Oxfordshire suppers with Rebekah Brooks, and police chiefs taking jollies. One under-reported story in this saga was Blair’s decision to become godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s children.
NI executives behaved as they did because they were allowed to by politicians who were in turns cowardly and titillated by the invitation to the corporate top table. This was a vivid example of a corrupted public life. The most heartening factor in the affair is that it was investigative journalism that, finally, extracted the information. If Leveson and the politicians draw the wrong conclusions, if they are lulled into thinking that journalists rather than corporate executives accrued too much power, the consequences for democracy will be stark.
2 Nov 2011 | Uncategorized
This September, a firestorm erupted when WikiLeaks put the entire unredacted cache of leaked US embassy cables up on its website. Vulnerable individuals named in the cables panicked, the media and civil society expressed confusion and outrage, and WikiLeaks was widely blamed for irresponsibility and indifference to the harm its leaks could cause, suffering more defections from its ranks. Just prior, Julian Assange squarely blamed David Leigh of The Guardian for publishing in a book the secret passcode to the encrypted file, which WikiLeaks had transmitted through a secure server. Leigh responded that he had been told the code was temporary and would expire. However, shortly before Assange was arrested on 7 December 2010, the encrypted material was also posted on BitTorrent. In August, 2011, WikLleaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg tipped off a German magazine where the file could be found on the internet, and the news began to circulate. But responsibility for the revelations was even more tangled and diffuse.
Wikileaks long had serious leaks within its ranks. More news organizations than the initial four obtained and ran stories on the cables. Israel Shamir, a one-time WikiLeaks insider, appears to have given the cache to Belarus dicator Lukashenko in 2010, prompting allegations that Belarusian activists then suffered retaliation. Wikileaks also distributed the cables to many more media outlets, saying it had roughly ninety media partners by mid-2011. Further leaks sprang from the ranks of the media partners. By April, WikiLeaks staff believed that most major intelligence agencies likely had obtained the entire unredacted cache. In late August, as the connection between the passcode and the location of the encrypted cache was about to go viral, it seemed the only audiences that might still not have access were the general public and the very individuals who might be at risk of serious human rights abuse due to their exposure. WikiLeaks sent out a few quiet warnings, and then posted the unredacted material itself.
The WikiLeaks publication of the unredacted cables did alert vulnerable sources, several of whom left their countries to protect themselves. It also ensured that no party intent on retaliating against US sources would have difficulty identifying prey. We can recognise this without vilifying Wikileaks; like any publisher, they faced difficult decisions with limited knowledge, and under a great deal more pressure than most.
Even so, WikiLeaks’ acts in relation to the cables give the free speech community whiplash. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the vast majority of this information was of public interest — to many publics and in many ways, including the quintessential rationale for journalistic leaks, whistleblowing. If Julian Assange could be prosecuted in the US under the Espionage Act for mere publication, so could any major media enterprise or human rights group, a tremendous blow to freedom of expression and the right to information in a jurisdiction that often leads in protecting these rights. On the other, many human rights activists are disturbed at the willingness of WikiLeaks to further expose individuals to reprisal in the name of freedom of information. A bright line in values had been crossed.
WikiLeaks had taken a different approach with the US diplomatic cables than it had with the Afghanistan war logs, pacing its releases, redacting more carefully, and soliciting input on risks, even from the US government. This made its unredacted dump the more surprising. The publication of the raw cables by others did not absolve Wikileaks of responsibility in its own publication. By providing additional publicity and an implicit authentication, it may have added to tangible risks, but just as important, it undercut its own claim to concern for protection of individuals from abuse. The function of alerting persons who might be named in the cables could have been performed much earlier, and in ways that publicly acknowledged the wide dissemination of the cables by early 2011. And by the time Wikileaks published, the more debatable function of providing unredacted access to the global public was underway at other websites.
What lessons should publishers draw? The first is that it is hard to keep confidential information secret, and this is as much a human as a technical problem. Information not only “wants to be free,” as Stewart Brand noted it also has value, and people want to trade it. Digital information is especially easy to amass and pass in the internet age, and large data leaks are likely to proliferate.
Next, large data sets are hard to handle responsibly. They require large resources to review, analyze and redact, as my organisation, Human Rights Watch, has discovered when it secured troves in Kurdistan, Chad and Libya. WikiLeaks appropriately went to major newspapers that could muster the resources to handle it well. Yet it is governments and intelligence services that have the most resources to analyze and mine large data sets (and correlate information to other intelligence), making it all the more important for those who publish whistleblowing to try to protect individuals at risk.
Not everything is worth the effort of publishing in a responsible way. Newspapers know this, because they have to pay for newsprint. But there is a moral economy as well, where the more attenuated the public’s interest, the more other values and goals might weigh against exposure. Most researching professions, to ensure their moral legitimacy, aim not only to increase knowledge but to protect human security, privacy, and dignity. Sometimes preserving rather than uploading can be a reasonable alternative.
Finally, we should strive to create a culture of ethical transparency, because without an ethical underpinning, it will be difficult to resist growing efforts to tighten up laws that punish leaks. Part of that is cultivating some modesty about our ability to fortell the full consequences of either exposure or concealment, and a willingness to be responsible for decisions either way.
Dinah Pokempner is General Counsel of Human Rights Watch.
24 Oct 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
Chinese netizens, writers and media figures have rallied to the cause of blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng in recent weeks, facing risks of detention and harassment and beatings. Chinese blogger Zeng Jinyan describes the situation
Efforts to save blind self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng and his family from an illegal house arrest became a symbol of the struggle to save our society in a sinking China.
Every day in recent weeks, tens of thousands of messages have circulated on social media about Chen’s situation. Dozens of human rights activists, writers, journalists, students, religious figures and internet users, most of whom are ordinary Chinese, have tried to visit Chen in the remote village where he has been exiled. The visitors attempted to reach Dongshigu in Shandong province have been beaten up, robbed, insulted, pushed away, or abandoned in remote areas by officials and thugs employed by local authorities, without any legal grounds.
Chen and his family have been subjected to harassment, arbitrary detention, beating, and house arrest since 2005, when his commitment to defending Chinese citizens’ human rights pushed him expose cases of women who suffered violent forced abortions. After serving a prison sentence of four years and three months — widely seen by his supporters as the revenge of his local government for his work defending human rights — Immediately following his 9 September 2010 release, Chen was placed under house arrest in his hometown village of Dongshigu in the Shadong province. Since then the whole family — Chen, his wife, his mother who is in her 70s, and his six year-old daughter — have been under strict house arrest. They enjoy no freedom of movement, no medical treatment, their mobile phone has been blocked by signal jammers, the daughter has not been allowed to go to school, and the family has been threatened and beaten repeatedly.
Activists, human rights groups and foreign embassies have continued to speak out in support of Chen but his situation has not improved. Twitter user He Peirong (@pearlher) a female teacher in Nanjing, first attempted to visit Chen this January. Since then, she has made five failed attempts to reach Dongshigu. Each time she was beaten, robbed, insulted, and abandoned by guards around Chen’s village. She blogged about her experiences online, questioned local police authority and the National Disabled Federation, petitioned for Chen’s daughter’s right to schooling, for medical treatment for Chen and his wife, and for freeing of Chen and his family.
Following He Peirong’s example, other journalists, and supporters tried to visit Chen. They received similar treatment, Rachel Beitarie, a foreign correspondent based in Beijing, described her own attempt for Israeli daily newspaper Calcalist, which she translated:
It all happened within minutes. As soon as I stepped out of the taxi to a rural road in China’s Shandong province, I was surrounded but five men who grabbed me by the arms, snatched my bag and searched my pockets and under my belt for my passport. Foreign correspondents in China learn from day one what to say and do in the event of police harassment: You are supposed to present your documents, demand to be allowed to contact your embassy and point to the Chinese law that grants you free freedom of reporting. None of this was applicable here. The men who started dragging me into another car did not bother to introduce themselves, did not ask for any documents and did not answer questions. In fact, they did not speak at all. They were not trained to negotiate nor to maintain public order but were entrusted with one mission: To make sure the man they guard will be isolated from the world, to stop and intimidate anyone trying to get to that man.
I was pushed with force into a car and driven through a peaceful countryside back to the suburbs of Linyi city, where I was pushed out of the car. All my possessions were later given back at a local police station that refused to accept my assault complaint. I was lucky to get out unharmed: My foreign passport and status as a journalist protected me when I came to cover the attempt of four human rights activists to visit the well guarded man. The four of them, however, were captured by thugs, held and beaten for hours before they were brought to a police station where they underwent investigation. They were all released the next day without any charges.
Meanwhile, The Transition Institute, an independent think tank based in Beijing, has been asking prominent scholars and intellectuals to comment on Chen Guangcheng’s case. They posted video records of the comments online to boost the campaign. Microblog users, mostly on Sina Weibo and Twitter, showed support in their own unique and creative ways. Several have donned Chen’s trademark black sunglasses.
The focus on Chen and his family’s treatment has achieved some small results. For the first time, Chen’s daughter has been allowed to school with guards escorting and monitoring, while those who tried to see Chen last week received less violent treatment.
The next big test will come on 12 November, when activists and friends attempt to visit Dongshigu to celebrate Chen’s 40th birthday.
Her arrest sparked outrage on Twitter, and the campaign to #FreeMona began trending worldwide.