26 Apr 2012 | Uncategorized
In a speech at Washington DC’s Holocaust Memorial Museum this week, Barack Obama this week announced US measures against technology companies aiding the Syrian and Iranian regimes in tracking and monitoring of members of the opposition. Here’s the introduction from the Executive Order signed this week, worth quoting at length:
I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby determine that the commission of serious human rights abuses against the people of Iran and Syria by their governments, facilitated by computer and network disruption, monitoring, and tracking by those governments, and abetted by entities in Iran and Syria that are complicit in their governments’ malign use of technology for those purposes, threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States. The Governments of Iran and Syria are endeavoring to rapidly upgrade their technological ability to conduct such activities. Cognizant of the vital importance of providing technology that enables the Iranian and Syrian people to freely communicate with each other and the outside world, as well as the preservation, to the extent possible, of global telecommunications supply chains for essential products and services to enable the free flow of information, the measures in this order are designed primarily to address the need to prevent entities located in whole or in part in Iran and Syria from facilitating or committing serious human rights abuses.
It’s another indicator of the fact that the online element is now an essential part of any conflict. Since Hillary Clinton’s speech on the web in January 2010, the US has positioned itself as the defender of the free internet against the censorious, snooping impulses of Iran, China et al.
Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States have welcomed the White House move as ultimately “a good thing”, though with caveats. EFF say:
First, here’s what the order does accomplish:
It sanctions individuals and entities in Iran and Syria that are “complicit in their government’s malign use of technology” for the purposes of network disruption, monitoring, or tracking of individuals.
It aims to prevent entities (including companies) from facilitating or committing serious human rights abuses in Syria.
It bars the contribution or receipt of funds to any individual or entity named on the list contained within the order.
Notably, the order makes mention of companies that have “sold, leased or otherwise provided, directly or indirectly, goods, services or technology to Iran or Syria likely to be used to facilitate computer or network disruption, monitoring, or tracking that could assist in or enable serious human rights abuses by or on behalf of [the two countries’ governments]” (emphasis ours). This is notable because, when it was discovered that their products had made it to Syria and were being used by the regime to monitor network communications, executives of U.S. company BlueCoat denied knowledge of their products being in Syria.
Now, for what the order does not accomplish:
The order is solely focused on Syria and Iran, leaving out—most notably—Bahrain, where a protester was killed this weekend by police forces as well as, of course, other countries that engage in technology-related human rights violations. Bahraini human rights groups have documented the use of Trovicor technologies in surveillance there, leading to—in some cases—torture.
The order does not loosen existing restrictions by the Department of Commerce, whichbar the export of “good” technologies—including web hosting, Google Earth, and Java—to Syrians. At the Stockholm Internet Forum for Global Development last week, Syrian activist Mohammad Al Abdallah raised the Commerce restrictions as a consistent frustration amongst Syrian activists on the ground. While Treasury restrictions on Iran have been revised time and again, Commerce restrictions go unchanged.
Read the rest of Jillian C. York’s analysis here. Index very much supports EFF’s point on the lack of attention given to Bahrain.
24 Apr 2012 | Events
Date: Sunday 3 June
Time: 7pm
Venue: Llwyfan Cymru – Wales Stage
Tickets: £6.25, available here
John Kampfner, former Chief Executive of Index on Censorship and current trustee, will interview the author Maziar Bahari about the experiences out of which his latest novel, ‘Then They Came For Me’, was born. The Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential election, believing he’d return to his pregnant fiancée, Paola, in just a few days. In fact he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions while terrible threats were made to his family.
11 Apr 2012 | Uncategorized
By being declared persona non grata by Israel, German author Günter Grass joins a select group of other intellectuals also unwelcome in the Jewish state.
There’s Noam Chomsky, an iconic left-wing figure and world expert on linguistics and philosophy, who was refused entry by Israeli immigration officials in May 2010. Preceding him was controversial US academic Norman Finkelstein, denied entry at Ben Gurion airport in May 2008. (Both are Jewish, meaning they have the legal right, rarely refused, to apply for Israeli citizenship, making the gesture yet more ludicrous).
No reasonable person would deny Israel’s right to monitor and defend its own borders and refuse entry or deport those deemed a security risk or “not conducive to the public good”.
You could perhaps make this case when it comes to the many journalists and activists (as well as the odd tourist) deported or denied entry over the years.
Hard to see, though, the imminent risk to security or public order posed by hoary old writers or figures such as Ivan Prado, Spain’s top clown, deported in May 2010 when he tried to enter the country en route to launching a clown festival in Ramallah.
And these figures were turned back in the actual act of trying to enter Israel. Grass, who wrote what consensus has deemed a rather poor poem about the danger Israel posed to Iran, had not expressed any intention to visit Israel in the near future. But why let that get in the way of a pointless but populist gesture.
Some have argued that the fact the 84-year-old Nobel laureate served in the Nazi Waffen SS, something he only revealed in 2006, makes his harsh criticism of Israel’s nuclear policy in What Must be Said distasteful in the extreme, if not entirely illegitimate.
Indeed, there’s much that can be viewed as disagreeable about this poem, not least the rather embarrassing way Grass portrays himself as a revolutionary underdog who is bravely speaking out only now in the face of great oppression and at personal risk to himself.
That’s just not true, unless the outpouring of hyperbole by Israeli officials, each trying to outdo the other in ramping up their level of outrage, puts him in imminent danger.
Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said it was an expression of the “cynicism” of some Western intellectuals, “who for their self-promotion and desire to sell a few more books are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people for the second time on the altar of deranged anti-Semites.”
“What must be said is that it belongs to European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration,” raged Emmanuel Nahshon, the deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin.
“Even before the traces of the swastika on his clothes were gone, Grass joined the crusade against the State of Israel,” the Hebrew Writers Association said in a public statement this week; now other Israeli figures want the Nobel Prize committee to withdraw their award to Grass.
And then came the ban by Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai — a man unlikely to have been captivated by Grass’s seminal The Tin Drum but well aware of what gestures would play well with his right-wing constituency.
This has had the neat and self-defeating effect of turning the issue from one about outrage over a distasteful, self-pitying poem (only lauded as a work of lyrical genius by Iran’s deputy culture minister) into one of freedom of speech.
Intellectuals and journalists have rushed to support not Grass’s words, but his right to say them. Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about censorship, got it right when he tweeted:
It has not gone unnoticed that denying entry permits to people whose views it doesn’t like puts the Israeli state on a par with truly unsavoury states. Israeli paper Ha’aretz wrote in an editorial this week that Yishai’s decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of this poem was “characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea”.
The ultimate effect of all this pointless posturing has once again brought into focus Israel’s growing confusion over democracy, which goes far beyond the simple right to vote.
Israel’s stringent border controls exist, surely, to protect its citizens from physical danger and militant attack — not from ideas it disagrees with.
Daniella Peled is an editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. A former foreign editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on Israel and Palestine and is a regular contributor to Ha’aretz
4 Apr 2012 | Index Index, minipost
A TV presenter has been killed by a car bomb in Iraq. Kamiran Salaheddin was killed at around 9pm on Monday (2 April) night, after a bomb placed under his car exploded. Salaheddin presented Al-Iraq w-al Hadath (Iraq and Events), a news and current affairs programme on Salahaddin TV, where he had been employed since 2005. The journalist was also the head of the local journalists’ union in Tikrit. Salaheddin is the first journalist to be killed in Iraq this year.
