20 Sep 2024 | News and features, United Kingdom
In August 2021, when the Taliban took over Kabul and home searches became ubiquitous, women started to delete anything they thought could get them in trouble. Books were burned, qualifications were shredded, laptops were smashed. But for 21 members of a women’s creative writing group, a lifeline remained: their WhatsApp group. Over the next year they would use this forum to share news with one another (a story that has since been chronicled in the recently published book My Dear Kabul, which was published by Coronet and is an Untold Narratives project, a development programme for marginalised writers). Doing so through WhatsApp was not incidental. Instead the app’s use of end-to-end-encryption provided a strong level of protection. The only way the Taliban would know what they were saying was if they found their phones, seized them, forced them to hand over passwords and went into their accounts. They could not otherwise read their messages.
End-to-end encryption is not sexy. Nor do those four words sound especially interesting. It’s easy to switch off when a conversation about it starts. But as this anecdote shows it’s vitally important. Another story we recently heard, also from Afghanistan: a man hid from the Taliban in a cave and used WhatsApp to call for help. Through it, safe passage to Pakistan was arranged.
It’s not just in Afghanistan where end-to-end encryption is essential. At Index we wouldn’t be able to do our work without it. We use encrypted apps to message between our UK-based staff and to keep in touch with our network of correspondents around the world, from Iran to Hong Kong. We use it to keep ourselves safe and we use it to keep others safe. Our responsibility for them is made manifest by our commitment to keep our communication and their data secure.
Beyond these safety concerns we know end-to-end encryption is important for other reasons: It’s important because we share many personal details online, from who we are dating and who we vote for to when our passport expires, what our bank details are and even our online passwords. In the wrong hands these details are very damaging. It’s important too because privacy is essential both in its own right and as a guarantor of our other fundamental freedoms. Our online messages shouldn’t be open to all, much as our phone lines shouldn’t be tapped. Human rights defenders, journalists, activists and MPs message via platforms like Signal and WhatsApp for their work, as do people more broadly who are unsettled by the principle of not having privacy.
Fortunately, today accessible, affordable and easy-to-use encryption is everywhere. The problem is its future looks uncertain.
Last October, the Online Safety Act was passed in the UK, a sprawling piece of legislation that puts the onus on social media firms and search engines to protect children from harmful content online. It’s due to come into force in the second half of 2025. In it, Section 121 gives Ofcom powers to require technology companies to “use accredited technology” that could undermine encryption. At the time of the Act’s passage, the government made assurances this would not happen but comments from senior political figures like Sadiq Khan, who believe amendments to the acts are needed, have done little to reassure people.
It’s not just UK politicians who are calling for a “back door”.
“Until recently, traditional phone tapping gave us information about serious crime and terrorism. Today, people use Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook, etc. (…) These are encrypted messaging systems (…) We need to be able to negotiate what you call a ‘back door’ with these companies. We need to be able to say, ‘Mr. Whatsapp, Mr. Telegram, I suspect that Mr. X may be about to do something, give me his conversations,’” said French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin last year.
Over the last few years police across Europe, led by French, Belgium and Dutch forces, have breached the encryption of users on Sky ECC and EncroChat too. Many criminals were arrested on the back of these hacking operations, which were hailed a success by law enforcement. That may be the case. It’s just that people who were not involved in any criminal activity would also have had their messages intercepted. While on those occasions public outcry was muted, it won’t be if more commonly used tools such as WhatsApp or Signal are made vulnerable.
Back to the UK, if encryption is broken it would be a disaster. Not only would companies like Signal leave our shores, other nations would likely follow suit.
For this reason we’re pleased to announce the launch of a new Index campaign highlighting why encryption is crucial. WhatsApp, the messaging app, have kindly given us a grant to support the work. As with any grant, the grantee has no influence over our policy positions or our work (and we will continue to report critically on Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, as we would any other entity).
We’re excited to get stuck into the work. We’ll be talking to MPs, lawyers, people at Ofcom and others both inside and outside the UK. With a new raft of MPs here and with conversations about social media very much in the spotlight everywhere it’s a crucial moment to make the case for encryption loud and clear, both publicly and, if we so chose, in a private, encrypted forum.
12 Sep 2024 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features
Everything Afghan women do this week in Tirana, Albania is forbidden to them at home. Arguing. Laughing. Speaking loudly in public. Singing. Wearing brightly coloured clothes. Showing their faces. All haram according to the men from Kandahar who currently hold power. As the Taliban move to erase women across Afghanistan, in Tirana Afghan women are asking, how do we fight back?
“Until now we have been unable to sit together and listen to each other, and understand what do we want?” said Farzana Kochi. At 26, she became one of Afghanistan’s youngest MPs, representing her nomadic Kochi people. Like most of the women at the summit she was forced to flee Afghanistan when the Taliban seized power in 2021. Now aged 33, she lives in exile in Norway.
The last time I saw her, she was taking me to meet her constituents. It was May 2021, a few weeks before the withdrawal of US troops, the collapse of the government and the return of the Taliban. She was used to Taliban death threats – we travelled in a bullet-proof car, and she had been careful not to signal her movements in advance. When we arrived at the Kochi encampment, she distributed notebooks and pens to the children, but there was no school for them to attend – neither for boys nor girls. The women remained in the tents, as the men would not let them be filmed. Women’s rights, Farzana explained, had scarcely spread beyond the city limits – her work was mainly trying to alleviate poverty. In this she had the trust of the Kochi elders. “Why wouldn’t we vote for her?” one said to me. “She’s like our daughter. And she’s the only politician who comes to visit us and see our problems.”
That day, Farzana wore a brightly coloured traditional Kochi dress. After the Taliban takeover, she sent me a picture of herself in a black niqab, with only her eyes showing – the costume she wore to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban raided her office. Now, when she calls home, all her former constituents’ problems have been magnified. They are still just as poor and no politicians or NGOs are there to help them.
“It’s worse than ever,” she said. “The first thing people say is that they want to get out, to leave Afghanistan.”
According to Farzana, the priority for the women meeting in Tirana is to unite, and not let political or ethnic divisions distract them. “No matter if I’m Pashtun, I’m Kochi, I’m Uzbek, I’m Hazara, or whatever – we are targeted as women. We are all victims of the same thing.” She hopes the summit will produce a roadmap for Afghan women to present to international governments and the UN. No-one at the summit has any illusions about how long and rocky the road. For the moment, the Taliban feel secure as their opponents bicker about whether to engage or not. But until Afghan women decide how they want to resist, inside and outside the country, nothing will change.
At the end of the week, those women who came from Afghanistan will return. An older woman, who didn’t want to reveal her identity for fear of reprisals, said she would go back to give hope to younger women, to remind them that the Taliban fell from power before and will do so again – as well as to continue helping widows and orphans. Women are establishing underground schools for girls – just like the one Farzana attended back in the 1990s when she grew up under the first Taliban government.
The exiled women will scatter across the globe.
“No matter how many years go by, I will still cry,” Farzana said, fighting back the tears. “This wound is so deep and so fresh. Wherever you are, you can just live and settle. But you have all those weights on your shoulders. A country of millions of people is not something that you can give up on.”
Watch Lindsey Hilsum’s report for Channel 4 here.
11 Sep 2024 | Afghanistan, Albania, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
A summit on Afghan women’s rights is taking place in the Albanian capital Tirana this week. The gathering comes just two weeks after the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” laws banned women in Afghanistan speaking in public.
The All-Afghan Women’s Summit is in stark contrast to a United Nations meeting in Doha, Qatar at the end of June on the future of Afghanistan which excluded women at the insistence of the Taliban.
Over 100 Afghan women are taking part in the summit in Tirana, which is co-hosted by the governments of Albania and Spain and co-sponsored by the government of Switzerland.
The event is organised by Women for Afghanistan and chaired by Afghan campaigner and former politician Fawzia Koofi. The summit is designed to give a voice to Afghan women and work towards a manifesto for the future of Afghanistan.
Koofi said: “Whilst my sisters have suffered the most under the Taliban, they have also been the strongest voices standing up against oppression. This Summit will bring us together, consolidate our positions, and build unity and purpose towards a common vision for our country. We urge the international community to listen to our recommendations on a unified platform. There is simply no time to lose”.
The occasion was marked by the release of an anthem by the UK-based Aghan singer Elaha Soroor celebrating the strength and resilience of Afghan women. The song is sung to the words of a poem in Farsi based on the rallying cry of the women’s protest movement in Afghanistan: “Bread, Work, Freedom! Education, Work, Freedom!”
“This poem is an expression of a woman’s struggle for autonomy, identity, and liberation from the constraints imposed by tradition and patriarchal authority,” Soror explained. “As the poem progresses, she reclaims her power, embracing her own identity and rejecting patience as a virtue that no longer serves her.”
Index has consistently campaigned for women’s rights in Afghanistan. Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the organisation has put pressure on the British government to honour its promises to Afghan journalists and women.
Three years ago, we helped organise an open letter to The Times calling on the UK government to intervene on behalf of Afghan actors, writers, musicians and film makers targeted by the Taliban. Since then, we have run a series of articles about life under the Taliban regime.
This article from February 2023 was written anonymously about one female journalist who suffered assault and starvation during her escape from Afghanistan. Thankfully, the writer concerned, Spozhmai Maani, is now safely in France, thanks to the support of Index and other international organisations. We were delighted to announce in January 2024 that Spozhmai had won our Moments of Freedom award. Others have not been so fortunate, The crackdown on journalists continues and the latest laws effectively criminalise free expression for women.
23 Aug 2024 | News and features
Why do we tolerate X? Elon Musk’s poisoned well is fast filling up with far-right propaganda, disinformation, hate speech and now, it would seem, adverts for machine guns and grenade launchers from Iran-backed terrorists in Yemen. This is the reality of the free speech utopia the world’s richest man promised us when he took over Twitter. And yet we continue to populate it with content. I do, Index does and many of you reading this will continue to do so. When Dr Johnson said in 1776 that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” he could not have imagined a world where 335 million blockheads provide free copy for a billionaire.
It’s not just X. The social media business model depends on us all selling our labour for nothing to feed the exponential growth of the platforms.
As Musk has grown closer to Donald Trump, he has begun to openly use X to publish his own personal propaganda for his favoured candidate. His “civil war is inevitable” intervention in Britain’s summer riots demonstrates that he is actively prepared to foment division and racial tension in a country he knows little about. As the US election approaches, Musk seems intent on turning X into an ideological sewer.
So why do we stay? We stay because the rewards are immediate and addictive. We are paid, not in cash, but in dopamine hits and the validation of our followers. And it’s not all negative. Twitter was once a fantastically useful resource for journalists, providing connections, expert knowledge and hard news from an unprecedented international network. When I broadcast to my relatively modest 15,000 followers, the response is more direct and personal that in any other medium I have worked in, including mass circulation newspapers. For a small organisation like Index, X is a vital way of communicating our work with dissidents to our 80,000 followers around the world.
In recent weeks, there has been a noticeable movement away from Musk’s platform. In the UK, journalists have led the X-odus to Threads and Bluesky. In the case of Threads, owned by Meta, it’s not quite clear why it is better to write content for Mark Zuckerberg rather than Musk, although some are remarking that the tone is less openly hostile. Bluesky is positively benign in comparison, but with just six million users it has none of the reach of its nastier competitor.
Personally, I have ended up tripling my workload as I now post not just to X, but to my loyal and impeccably behaved band of 395 followers on Threads and 81 followers on Bluesky.
It would be odd for a free expression organisation to advocate for the boycott of a social media platform, but we have regular discussions internally about the ethics of remaining on X. We will, of course, keep you informed.
There are two stories we have been tracking this week in Thailand and India that would benefit from wider international circulation. The first is the dissolution of the Move Forward party in Thailand, which won the most votes in last year’s elections. Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat promised to end the practice of military intervention in Thai politics, break up monopolies and reform the country’s lese majeste laws, which restrict criticism of the royal family. Limjaroenrat told the Guardian this week: “They’re coming after us. They’re exterminating us.”
Meanwhile, this month marks the fifth anniversary of the Indian government’s decision to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy. Since then we’ve reported on the many ways in which people’s free expression has been attacked in the region, from newspapers being closed and journalists arrested to mosques being closed. Last year, India’s supreme court backed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s position on the contested region, which has been ruled in part by Pakistan and India since partition in 1947. Local elections will take place next month and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi pledged last week that he and his opposition alliance, known as the INDIA bloc, will commit themselves to restoring statehood.
