1 May 2014 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features
India was among the few governments that did not sign the NETmundial outcome statement. But why does it seem that the world’s largest democracy is not putting its weight behind a “bottom-up, open, and participatory” multistakeholder process?
In his address to the NETmundial gathering, Vinay Kwatra, the official Indian representative said, “We recognize the important role that various stakeholders play in the cyber domain, and welcome involvement of all legitimate stakeholders in the deliberative and decision making process. Internet is used for transactions of core economic, civil and defence assets at national level and in the process, countries are placing their core national security interests in this medium. Now with such expansive coverage of States’ activities through the internet, the role of the governments in the Internet governance, of course in close collaboration and consultation with other stakeholders is an imperative.”
The message was clear. The internet has a large role to play in India’s national policy goals, and to that end, a global internet governance ecosystem has to be managed, at the international level, by multilateral mechanisms.
India has over 200 million Internet users — with about 52 million subscriptions — over 900 million mobile telephone subscribers. These numbers are only going to grow. Kwatra, continuing his address, added that, “On our part, however, we would have liked to some of important principles and ideas, highlighted by us and many other countries reflected in the draft outcome document… (we) look forward to constructively engaging with other delegations in collectively contribute to making the Internet open, dynamic and secure, and its governance balanced between rights and responsibilities of all its stakeholders.” (sic)
Kwatra was speaking, of course, at NETmundial, dubbed the “world cup of internet governance.” Held in Sao Paolo, Brazil, on April 23-24, 2014, the conference was announced by Brazil President Dilma Rousseff. The entire chain of events can be traced back to the revelations by Edward Snowden that the US’s National Security Agency had been spying on its own citizens and other countries alike, including the personal communication of President Rousseff. In a heated statement at the UN General Assembly in September 2013, she called for the UN to oversee a new global legal system to govern the internet. She said such multilateral mechanisms should guarantee the “freedom of expression, privacy of the individual and respect for human rights” and the “neutrality of the network, guided only by technical and ethical criteria, rendering it inadmissible to restrict it for political, commercial, religious or any other purposes.
Soon, after a brief consultation with Fadi Chehade in October 2013, the head of ICANN — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – an organization thatcoordinates the Internet’s global domain name system, the dates of NETmundial was announced. And to add expectation to the event, in March 2014, the the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced its intent to transition key internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community. It clarified that it would not hand over ICANN to any government-led body. Suddenly, NETmundial gained weight as it was to be the next international forum where the future of internet governance was to be debated – and now one of the organizations government a part of the internet was in play. A far cry from what President Rousseff had suggested in the UN General Assembly, instead of talking about an international legal regime to govern cyberspace, the focus of the meeting turned to multistakeholderism as the way forward in the sphere of internet governance.
The draft outcome statement and the subsequent final outcome state released after the two-day conference is a result of 180 input documents and 1300 comments from over 47 countries, and the work of the 1229 delegates from 97 countries who attended NETmundial. India had an official delegation as well as civil society participants who attended the meeting. In fact, an Indian academic was chosen to co-chair the organizing committee for civil society for the event. Remote participations hubs were set up in cities around the country, including Gurgaon, Chennai and Bangalore. Within the Indian contingent too, as with any large country, there are divergent views on the governance framework to be taken for the internet, with those who support the governments view for multilateralism at the international level and multistakeholderism at home, and those who oppose the official view and encourage an international multistakeholder regime.
The final statement – though non-binding – has squarely put its weight behind multistakeholderism. It talks about protecting the ‘rights that people have offline, must be protected online… in accordance with international human rights legal obligations.’ It also champions cultural and linguist diversity, which was part of India’s official submission to NETmundial. However, when the document starts to tilt towards governance structure is where it diverges from the official Indian position, with language such as – “internet governance institutions and processes should be inclusive and open to all interested stakeholders. Processes, including decision making, should be bottom-up, enabling the full involvement of all stakeholders, in a way that does not disadvantage any category of stakeholder.”
In the crucial area of cyber jurisdiction, it says, ‘It is necessary to strengthen international cooperation on topics such as jurisdiction and law enforcement assistance to promote cybersecurity and prevent cybercrime. Discussions about those frameworks should be held in a multistakeholder manner.’ On surveillance, the most controversial topic from 2013 which prompted the Netmundial meeting in the first place, the document says, ‘Mass and arbitrary surveillance undermines trust in the Internet and trust in the Internet governance ecosystem. Collection and processing of personal data by state and non-state actors should be conducted in accordance with international human rights law. More dialogue is needed on this topic at the international level using forums like the Human Rights Council and IGF aiming to develop a common understanding on all the related aspects.’
The reaction to Netmundial has been varied, depending on whom you ask. There are those who have hailed it as a first positive step towards a multistakeholder process, and are encouraged to find that participants found more things to agree on than disagree. The US called it a “huge success”. The European Commission felt Netmundial put it on the “right track.” Many big businesses released statements indicating they were pleased at the outcome. The civil society group at Netmundial expressed ‘deep disappointment’ that the outcome statement did not address key concerns like surveillance and net neutrality. Others commentators hailed it a big success for big business as it was able to ‘grab the ball on three important points: intellectual property; net neutrality; and intermediary liability’.
In a sense, India’s refusal to sign the outcome statement, and instead take back to its stakeholders seems to be completely aligned with its stated view of the internet. If, as documentation suggests, the internet is being viewed by India as not merely an open, free, global commons that should remain untouched by any major governmental control, but instead a resource that needs to reflect the values of an ‘equinet’ – a platform for commerce, e-governance, national security mechanism to be achieved through fair playing rules established by a ‘globally acceptable legal regime’ and a ‘new cyber jurisprudence’, then there is a long battle ahead. The official Indian argument does not need to be viewed through the lens that presupposes it wishes to inflict censorship in the manner that an authoritarian government might. The argument must be weighed on the merits of this line of thought – that for Indian netizens, business, and even state surveillance to survive, it must be the government who reflects the national interest in international platforms, after having consulted stakeholders back home.
It certainly seems that the weight and development of a billion people sits heavy on the shoulders of the Indian government. The question is: does it need to lead them to the world wide web, or can they find it themselves?
This article was posted on May 1, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
25 Apr 2014 | Americas, News and features, United States, Young Writers / Artists Programme
(Image: Bplanet/Shutterstock)
(a list poem)
Because if you’re an artist, you never know where you’ll go.
Because you need a personal identity number to send a package.
Because an IP address is not a perfect proxy for someone’s physical location, but it is close.
Because I do most of my research online.
Because there hasn’t been a proper rain in California in over three years, and this year may be the driest in the last half millenium.
Because the burning of fossil fuels is destroying our atmosphere.
Because persistent cookies are stored on the hard drive of a computer until they are manually deleted or until they expire, which can take months or years.
Because tracking cookies are commonly used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals’ browsing histories.
Because server farms require massive amounts of energy.
Because the friend who wanted to send the email “Photos from Taksim Square” couldn’t until she changed the subject to “Paris Vacation Photos”.
Because the line between “public” and “private” is tenuous at best.
Because the ACLU is doing its best.
Because a webcam’s images might be intercepted without a user’s consent.
Because a surveillance program code named “Optic Nerve” was revealed to have compiled and stored still images from Yahoo webcam chats in bulk in Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters’ databases with help from the United States’ National Security Agency, and to be using them for experiments in automated facial recognition.
Because it’s sketchy to be a Communist.
Because the Defending Dissent Foundation is all kinds of busy.
Because the U.S. army actively targeted nonviolent antiwar protestors in Washington in 2007.
Because I saw it on Dronstagram.
Because everything will or might end up on the internet.
Because the internet is a wormhole full of parasites.
Because I am trying to connect all of the dots.
Because free speech is a tinted mirror.
Because all mediated information is processed, edited, and altered.
Because Wally Shawn had to bring his play to Glenn Greenwald since the journalist who broke the story about Edward Snowden can’t return to the United States.
Because the author risked his freedom and physical security for the truth.
Because artistic solidarity is framed as criminal complicity.
Because how could I forget that language is always political?
Because Chelsea Manning is still being misgendered.
Because the personal is always political.
Because it’s not just the major political players.
Because of the metadata collection.
Because a local surveillance hub may start out combining video camera feeds with data from license plate readers, but once you have the platform running, police departments could plug in new features, such as social media scanners.
Because the Domain Awareness Center’s focus has been not on violent crime, but on political protests.
Because the collapse of the economy and the devastation of the environment are two sides of the same coin.
Because of the NSA’s presence at UN climate talks.
Because of the vested interests in the oil industry.
Because tell me something I don’t know.
Because my personal information is probably being used not just for advertising purposes.
Because despite Facebook’s rights and permissions policies, I still want to share with my friends.
Because Pussy Riot was imprisoned.
Because the Trans-Pacific Partnership would rewrite rules on intellectual property enforcement, giving corporations the right to sue national governments if they passed any law, regulation, or court ruling interfering with a corporation’s expected future profits.
Because I don’t know who is making money off of my information.
Because Abstract Expressionism was funded by the CIA.
Because of the time-honored tradition of governments keeping tabs on artists.
Because we don’t want jobs, we want to live.
This poem was posted on April 25, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
17 Apr 2014 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Pakistan
(Image: Aleksandar Mijatovic/Shutterstock)
As states have been revealed to be snooping on citizens and other governments, and we are confronted by data breaches and security issues like the latest Heartbleed crisis, more people are becoming aware of their internet rights. Voters and civil society around the world are pushing their governments to provide secure and private online spaces for internet users. It is quite refreshing to see Pakistan’s government working for internet laws. However, though some provisions of the proposed Computer Crimes Law (CCL) are copied from other countries’ legislation, several parts of the draft version violate international human rights, including the freedom of expression.
In an attempt to offer support to the government of Pakistan, Article 19 and Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan dissected the draft legislation to point out the provisions that need to be amended, and to help the government conform to international human rights norms. It is mandatory at this point to pressure the government to put in place better internet legislation in order to avoid future misuse of the legal framework, as has happened with other laws.
A leading example of how such poorly devised laws help authorities abuse power is the Monitoring and Reconciliation of International Telephone Traffic Regulations (MRITT), also known as the Grey Traffic legislation. Passed in 2010 to help the government ban anonymous communication and VPN usage, MRITT mandates the monitoring and blocking of any encrypted and unencrypted traffic that originates or terminates in Pakistan, including phone calls and data.
MRITT legitimised blocking and internet monitoring on a massive scale — allowing a ban on VPN and VoIP services like Skype, Viber, WhatsApp and SpotFlux among others. The implementation of this legislation raises several concerns especially among the business community of Pakistan. The first official notification citing the MRITT to block VPN was issued in July 2011, targeting “all mechanisms which conceal communication to the extent that prohibits monitoring”.
The global reliance on the internet for communications and the, at times, complete blackouts of certain services by the government of Pakistan pose serious economic challenges. Not only business, but educational activities are hampered by the implications of MRITT. It also affects the privacy rights of Pakistani citizens. License deploying monitoring systems are expected to provide data — including a complete list of Pakistani consumers and their details — to the authorities when required under sub clause 6(d) of Part II of the regulation.
The Pakistan Protection Amendment Bill 2014 is another scary example of a woolly worded law. It was recently passed by Pakistan’s national assembly and is awaiting approval by the senate. Human Rights Watch stated that: “The vague definition of terrorist acts, which could be used to prosecute a very wide range of conduct — far beyond the limits of what can reasonably be considered terrorist activity. Besides ‘killing, kidnapping, extortion,’ the law classifies highly ambiguous acts including ‘Internet offences’ and ‘disrupting mass transport systems,’ as prosecutable crimes without providing specific definitions for such offences.”
The latest version of the Computer Crimes Law has been drafted by the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications (MoITT). The proposed law establishes various computer crimes and sets out rules for investigation, prosecution and trial of these offences. Acts such as illegal access to and interference with programs, data or information systems; cyber terrorism; electronic forgery and fraud; making of devices for use in these types of offences; and unauthorised interception of communication are included. Like MRITT, it is feared that the Computer Crimes Law in its current draft form, if passed, would include several violations to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Pakistan acceded in 2010.
The concerns over the Computer Crimes legislation mentioned by Article 19 and Digital Rights Foundation, include lack of proper definitions of terms like content, data, information system or program. Their recommendations also highlight concerns about broader cyber-terrorism offences under Section 7 (a) and (b), and more importantly, the lack of procedural safeguards against unchecked surveillance activities carried out by the country’s intelligence agencies.
At this stage of the process, it is important for regional and international civil society and internet privacy rights groups to put pressure on the government of Pakistan to make the right amendments to the law before passing it. This law is extremely important for providing safety and security to Pakistani internet users and cannot be abolished or delayed. It is only right, then, that it introduces correct and clearly defined provisions to make it effective, and not vulnerable to abuse by authorities.
This article was published on 17 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
15 Apr 2014 | Academic Freedom, Egypt, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Egyptian demonstrators chanting for the army and police and raising flags and banners bearing images of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. But since the military-backed removal of Mohamed Morsi in summer 2013, academic freedom has been further corroded. (Image: Adham Khorshed/Demotix)
Since the military-backed overthrow of Mohamed Morsi’s government last summer, censorship of journalism in post-revolutionary Egypt has become an urgent concern of human rights and freedom of expression organisations. A quieter and more gradual undercurrent to the question of censorship, however, has been the continued corrosion of academic freedom of expression in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Under Hosni Mubarak’s regime, academic freedom within Egypt was notoriously limited, not least by the fact that since 1994, deans and presidents of public universities were appointed by the state, and professional career progress in academia frequently depended on compliance with the state line. Political activism was prohibited on campus and police units were stationed inside universities to “maintain order”. However, the dramatic increase of Egyptians in higher education in the last fifteen years of the Mubarak era – without the improvement of either higher education facilities or graduate employment prospects – is widely held to have been a central factor in the popular uprising that overthrew the regime in 2011.
Activist academics played a pivotal role in the 2011 revolution. In particular, the March 9 movement, founded in 2004, acted as a complement to the more clandestine student activist April 6 movement, and was comprised of politicised professors and academic administrators who were focused on protesting the impingement of academic life by the state.
As such, the post-Mubarak era was heralded by many as new “window“ for academic freedom in Egypt and “an opportunity to revive the Egyptian universities’ founding ideals as autonomous institutions seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Like freedom of the press, however, none of the “stages” of the post-revolutionary period have allowed this to come to fruition. Under the immediate, post-revolutionary, interim SCAF period, and under Morsi’s short-lived presidency, university reform was never substantively addressed, whilst activism on campuses splintered along the increasingly polarised lines of post-revolutionary political discourse. Moreover, many of the student activists of the 2011 uprisings were concerned at the possibility of Islamist encroachment on academic freedom of expression, and the policing of secular and female students’ activities at universities.
Since the military-backed removal of Morsi in summer 2013, and the mass violence that accompanied it, academic freedom has been further corroded both by the discourse and strategies of the new ruling powers on the one hand, and by the return of university premises as physical sites of political violence. The return of state security to campuses has been met with resistance from student activists and those who see it as a return to Mubarak-era surveillance of the university space. This has, however, been framed as a necessary step to prevent further violence as that witnessed since late 2013, which saw intense clashes at Al-Azhar University and an engineering student shot dead on the Cairo University campus.
Alongside the physical space of the university, the discipline of academic practice has been significantly impinged by the increasingly fractious and polarised political situation. Like journalists, academics have been caught in the political cross-fire of the post-July 2013 government’s campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, who the government declared a terrorist organisation in December. Over the summer, two Canadian academics were detained for nearly two months despite no independent proof that they had engaged with the Muslim Brotherhood or taken part in “terrorist activities”.
As Ursula Lindsey has noted in The New York Times, political scientists working on the subject of contemporary Egyptian politics have faced particular difficulties. The 2011 revolution is itself now the subject of academic study, yet its protracted aftermath impedes research, and academics such as Nathan J Brown, a leading scholar on Egypt’s constitutions and judiciary, have noted that foreign academics are now cautious against travelling to Egypt for research. The military-backed government that overthrew Morsi has engaged in both a physical clampdown and a war of narratives with the Muslim Brotherhood, quick to frame all association with the Islamist organisation as collusion.
This presents particular problems for academics who wish to conduct interviews for the purpose of academic research. After all, this time last year, Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-backed regime was the official government, and, as such, academic researchers would likely have had contact with the group — not out of political allegiance but in order to conduct their studies. Yet such “contact” can now find scholars isolated, silenced, or even accused of “espionage”, as in the case of Professor Eman el-Din Shahin. Professor Shahin’s colleagues have spoken out in his defence, arguing that he is a well-respected and thorough researcher whose contact with political enemies of the new regime would have been in his legitimate capacity as a researcher. Such a climate is naturally conducive to self-censorship on the part of other academics, a loss for all of us who wish to understand and engage with contemporary Egypt. As an academic, you may not be politicised, but the state is very interested in politicising you.
The March 9 movement, formed in the Mubarak era by scholars seeking freedom of academic expression, marked its anniversary last month in sombre circumstances — these new challenges for academic freedoms overlay the continuing, unresolved issues of the pre-2011 period, from workplace nepotism to underfunding in public education. The uprisings of 2011 were ignited in part by the March 9 movement’s campaign for academic freedom of expression, yet in the various incarnations of the post-revolutionary order, this dream is still far from being realised.
This article was posted on 15 April 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
