23 Sep 2022 | News, Statements, United Kingdom
Rt Hon Michelle Donelan MP
Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
100 Parliament Street
London
SW1A 2BQ
22 September 2022
Dear Secretary of State,
Congratulations on your new role.
We are a coalition of independent organisations committed to protecting freedom of expression. We are writing to you following your appointment as the new Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to request a meeting to discuss the Online Safety Bill. We believe that, in order to prevent serious damage being done to our rights and freedoms, the Online Safety Bill must be completely overhauled.
In particular, we would like to set out concerns we have about provisions in the Bill which we believe would be damaging to the rights to freedom of expression and privacy. We believe that the following areas must be addressed as a minimum:
The law should be upheld online as it is offline, but as currently drafted, the Bill would impose a two-tier system for freedom of expression, with extra restrictions for categories of lawful speech, simply because they appear online. During the Conservative leadership contest, the new Prime Minister Liz Truss committed to protecting freedom of speech in the Bill. She also said that her “fundamental principle is the rules should be the same online as they are in real life”. In its current form, the Bill does not live up to this principle,as it specifically seeks to regulate and restrict categories of free expression which the state labels as “harmful”.
We believe that Clause 13 of the Bill regarding so called “legal but harmful” speech must be dropped.
It has been widely observed that the Bill gives the Secretary of State excessive executive powers to define categories of lawful speech to be regulated and influence the limitations of our online expression. We believe that these powers would be vulnerable to politicisation by a future government.
We believe that executive powers granted to the Secretary of State, including those which would give the post-holder undue influence over communications regulator, Ofcom, must be dropped.
The Bill also poses serious threats to the right to privacy in the UK by creating a new power to compel online intermediaries to use “accredited technologies” to conduct mass scanning and surveillance of all citizens on private messaging channels. These measures also put at risk the underlying encryption that protects private messages against being compromised by bad actors. The right to privacy is deeply entwined with the right to freedom of expression and these proposals risk eroding both, with particularly detrimental effects for journalists, LGBTQ+ people, and other communities.
The Bill must not compel online intermediaries to scan the content of our private messages.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss these points with you in more detail and would be happy to meet with you virtually or in person at a time of your choosing.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Mark Johnson – Big Brother Watch
Barbora Bukovská – ARTICLE 19
Daniel Gorman – English PEN
Sam Grant – Liberty
Dr Monica Horten – Open Rights Group
Jacqueline Rowe – Global Partners Digital
Ruth Smeeth – Index on Censorship
24 Jan 2022 | China, Events
“Not speaking out causes guilt; but speaking out causes fear.” – anonymous Uyghur woman
Despite being far outside China’s borders, in a region synonymous with human rights, rule of law, and democracy, many Uyghurs in Europe refrain from publicly expressing concerns for their friends and family in Xinjiang or from sharing their own. To what extent is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) working to intimidate, silence, and discredit Uyghurs in Europe? And what can be done to protect their right to free expression?
Marking the launch of our latest report, this virtual event chaired by Index on Censorship’s Flo Marks examines the scope and scale of the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Uyghurs’ right to freedom of expression in Europe.
Meet the Speakers
Dolkun Isa
Dolkun Isa is the President of the World Uyghur Congress and Vice President of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). He was a former student-leader of pro-democracy demonstrations at Xinjiang University in 1988 and founded the Students’ Science and Culture Union at the university in 1987 working on programs to eliminate illiteracy, promote science and lead other students in East Turkestan. He was then dismissed from university.
After enduring persecution from the Chinese government, Isa fled China in 1994 and sought asylum in Europe, and became a citizen of Germany in 2006. He has since been presenting Uyghur human rights issues to the UN Human Rights Council, European Parliament, European governments and international human rights organizations. He has worked to mobilize the Uyghur diaspora community to collectively advocate for their rights and the rights of the Uyghurs in East Turkistan.
Isobel Cockerell
Isobel Cockerell is an award-winning British journalist. Since October 2018 she has been a reporter for Coda Story, covering disinformation, the war on science and authoritarian technology. She has also written and worked as a radio reporter and video journalist covering politics, migration, LGBTQ issues, environmental affairs and culture for platforms such as WIRED, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Rappler and Eurasianet.
In 2020 she won the European press prize distinguished reporting award for a multimedia project she reported and produced for Coda in collaboration with WIRED on Uyghur women fighting a digital resistance against China’s surveillance.
She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism school.
Nus Ghani MP
Nusrat Ghani is the MP for Wealden. A former Transport Minister, she is now Vice-Chair of the 1922 Committee and an active member of the influential Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. Here, she led an inquiry on supply chain transparency which exposed slave labour in UK value chains and the data harvesting of British consumers. For this, she was sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in March 2021, the only woman in Parliament who was, in an unprecedented move by the CCP to intimidate British MPs.
Nusrat was instrumental in leading on the Genocide Amendment to the UK’s flagship Trade Bill, aiming to stop the British Government pursuing preferential trade agreements with countries committing real time genocide. She led a campaign which resulted in Parliament unanimously declaring the markers of genocide are being met in Xinjiang. She is an active member of the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).
Nusrat has spoken at numerous academic and public events on the nature of campaigning within Parliament to plug the policy gaps around declaring genocide, guaranteeing supply chain transparency, and pushing for closer scrutiny of British citizens’ data being harvested.
As a former member of both the Home Affairs Select Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, she covered issues such as such as security, policing, counterterrorism strategies and antisemitism. Nusrat is also the UK representative to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. She was nominated for the 2021 NATO PA Women for Peace and Security Award and came runner up to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Flo Marks
Flo Marks is currently a Researcher at Index on Censorship and has been central to the research and writing of the February 2022 Uyghur Report. She has her work published in the LA Review of Books, Exposé as well as Index on Censorship. Her focus thus has been on raising attention to mass atrocity crimes, CCP influence in Europe, protecting the rights of Chinese dissidents, and empowering the voices of minorities.
She is also a politics BA student at the University of Exeter and a member of the campaign group Students for Uyghurs. Alongside other students, she exposed Exeter’s controversial links to Tsinghua (and the Uyghur Genocide ideological architect, Hu Angang), commenting to The Times on the subject. She has organised, chaired university events and developed social media posts for @studentsforuyghursexeter (Instagram). Until January 2022, she worked as a diversity and inclusion intern for MEA Consulting, giving her the professional space to drive positive change. And, in 2019 she was the UK and European winner of Zonta International’s Young Women in Public Affairs Award. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
When: Thursday 10 February, 16.00-17.00 GMT
4 Jun 2021 | Belarus, China, Hong Kong, News
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As you scroll through your Telegram feed, one image jumps out.
It shows crowds of young Hong Kongers, all dressed in black, at a protest, holding their smartphones aloft like virtual cigarette lighters from a Telegram channel called HKerschedule.
The image is an invitation for young activists to congregate and march to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on 4 June. Wearing black has been a form of protest for many years, which has led to suggestions that the authorities may arrest anyone doing so.
Calls to action like this have migrated from fly posters and other highly visible methods of communication online.
Secure messaging has become vital to organising protests against an oppressive state.
Many protest groups have used the encrypted service Telegram to schedule and plan demonstrations and marches. Countries across the world have attempted to ban it, with limited levels of success. Vladimir Putin’s Russia tried and failed, the regimes of China and Iran have come closest to eradicating its influence in their respective states.
Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services.
It also means that news sites who have had their websites blocked, such as in the case of news website Tut.by in Belarus, or broadcaster Mizzima in Myanmar, have a safe and secure platform to broadcast from, should they so choose.
Belarusian freelance journalist Yauhen Merkis, who wrote for the most recent edition of the magazine, said such services were vital for both journalists and regular civilians.
“The importance of Telegram has grown in Belarus especially due to the blocking of the main news websites and problems accessing other social media platforms such as VK, OK and Facebook after August 2020,” he said.
“Telegram is easy to use, allows you to read the main news even in times of internet access restrictions, it’s a good platform to quickly share photos and videos and for regular users too: via Telegram-bots you could send a file to the editors of a particular Telegram channel in a second directly from a protest action, for example.”
The appeal, then, revolves around the safety of its usage, as well as access to well-sourced information from journalists.
In 2020, the Mobilise project set out to “analyse the micro-foundations of out-migration and mass protest”. In Belarus, it found that Telegram was the most trusted news source among the protesters taking part in the early stages of the demonstrations in the country that arose in August 2020, when President Alexander Lukashenko won a fifth term in office amidst an election result that was widely disputed.
But there are questions over its safety. Cooper Quintin, senior security researcher of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit that aims to protect privacy online, said Telegram’s encryption “falls short”.
“End-to-end encryption is extremely important for everyone in the world, not just activists and journalists but regular people as well. Unfortunately, Telegram’s end-to-end encryption falls short in a couple of key areas. Firstly, end-to-end encryption isn’t enabled by default meaning that your conversations could be intercepted or recovered by a state-level actor if you don’t enable this, which most users are not aware of. Secondly, group conversations in Telegram are never encrypted [using end-to-end encryption], lacking even the option to do so, unlike other encrypted chat apps such as Signal, Wire, and Keybase.”
A Telegram spokesperson said: “Everything sent over Telegram is encrypted including messages sent in groups and posted to channels.”
This is true; however, messages sent using anything other than Secret Chats use so-called client-server/server-client encryption and are stored encrypted in Telegram’s cloud, allowing access to the messages if you lose your device, for example.
The platform says this means that messages can be securely backed up.
“We opted for a third approach by offering two distinct types of chats. Telegram disables default system backups and provides all users with an integrated security-focused backup solution in the form of Cloud Chats. Meanwhile, the separate entity of Secret Chats gives you full control over the data you do not want to be stored. This allows Telegram to be widely adopted in broad circles, not just by activists and dissidents, so that the simple fact of using Telegram does not mark users as targets for heightened surveillance in certain countries,” the company says in its FAQs.
The spokesperson said, “Telegram’s unique mix of end-to-end encryption and secure client-server encryption allows for the huge groups and channels that have made decentralized protests possible. Telegram’s end-to-end encrypted Secret Chats allow for an extra layer of security for those who are willing to accept the drawbacks of end-to-end encryption.”
If the app’s level of safety is up for debate, its impact and reach is less so.
Authorities are aware of the reach the app has and the level of influence its users can have. Roman Protasevich, the journalist currently detained in his home state after his flight from Greece to Lithuania was forcibly diverted to Minsk after entering Belarusian airspace, was working for Telegram channel Belamova. He previously co-founded and ran the Telegram channel Nexta Live, pictured.
Nexta’s Telegram page
Social media channels other than Telegram are easier to ban; Telegram access does not require a VPN, meaning even if governments choose to shut down internet providers, as the regimes in Myanmar and Belarus have done, access can be granted via mobile data. Mobile data is also targeted, but perhaps a problem easier to get around with alternative SIM cards from neighbouring countries.
People in Myanmar, for instance, have been known to use Thai SIM cards.
The site isn’t without controversy, however. Its very nature means it is a natural home for illicit activity such as revenge porn and use by extremists and terror groups. It is this that governments point to when trying to limit its reach.
China’s National Security Law attempts to censor information on the basis of criminalising any act of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with external forces, the threshold for which is extremely low. It has a particular impact on protesters in Hong Kong. Telegram was therefore an easy target.
In July 2020, Telegram refused to comply with Chinese authorities attempting to gain access to user data. As they told the Hong Kong Free Press at the time: “Telegram does not intend to process any data requests related to its Hong Kong users until an international consensus is reached in relation to the ongoing political changes in the city.”
Telegram continues to resist calls to share information (which other companies have done): it even took the step of removing mobile numbers from its service, for fear of its users being identified.
Anyone who values freedom of expression and the right to protest should resist calls for messaging platforms like Telegram to pull back on encryption or to install back doors for governments. When authoritarian regimes are cracking down on independent media more than ever, platforms like these are often the only way for protests to be heard
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