08 Sep 15 | Academic Freedom, Magazine, mobile, Student Reading Lists
Today, technology is being used frequently as a censorship tool as well as a way of getting around censorship. The technology and censorship reading list combines a number of articles released over a twenty-year period on the interference technology can have on free expression and the technological advances meaning censors are being more easily evaded. Includes Bibi van der Zee on the impact of Twitter in driving global political change.
Students and academics can browse the Index magazine archive in thousands of university libraries via Sage Journals.
Technology and censorship articles
Time travel to the web of the past and future: Internet predictions revisited, two decades on by Mike Godwin
Mike Godwin, December 2014; vol. 43, 4: pp. 106-109
Twenty years on, Mike Godwin revisits his article on the arrival of the online world and assesses what he got right, and what challenges remain today
Technology Bytes Back: Censorship and the new communication order by Nan Levinson
Nan Levinson, February 1993; vol. 22, 2: pp. 4
In the early days of the internet, Nan Levinson discusses new technologies and their use in the fight against censorship
Cyber Wars by Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski
Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohizinski, March 2010; vol. 39, 1: pp. 79-90
A look at the battle for online space
Virtually Free by Brian Winston and Paul Walton
Brian Winston and Paul Walton, January 1996; vol. 25, 1: pp. 78-83
One director and one fellow from Cardiff University’s school of journalism discuss the suppression of new technology
Global View: the power of noise in the fight against censorship by Jodie Ginsberg
Jodie Ginsberg, December 2014; vol. 43, 4: pp. 51-52
In her quarterly column, Index on Censorship’s chief executive looks at people power and the power of noise
Twitter Triumphs by Bibi van der Zee
Bibi van der Zee, November 2009; vol. 38, 4: pp. 97-102
Journalist and author Bibi van der Zee assesses the impact of Twitter on political change
Future Web: The N-Generation by Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott, November 2007; vol. 36, 4: pp. 51
Don Tapscott looks optimistically at the web’s potential for opening up global information-sharing
Going Mobile by Danica Radovanovic
Danica Radovanovic, December 2012; vol. 41, 4: pp 112-116
Danica Radovanovic on the new role phones are playing in spreading news and information
The reading list for technology and censorship can be found here
30 Jun 10 | News and features
As Boris Johnson wins his fight to “democracy village”, Bibi van der Zee asks if the courts intend to end the great British tradition of camping in protest
There is an oddity to the traffic arrangements around Parliament Square, but it will take the casual visitor several minutes to spot it. In fact even the keenest of observers may not spot it immediately, until he, or she, wants to cross the busy road to the green square in the middle.
There are no pedestrian crossings. It’s hard to work out where they’ve gone, but they’re just not there now. Instead commuters and tourists who want to break out of the bustle and shove off the pavements and make their way to the green island in the centre have to stride out bravely into the traffic. It’s like The Beach or something.
And this peculiarity makes it a little hard to stomach the fury of some commentators that the protesters in Parliament Square are “removing the liberty of people to walk across a public square”. The fact that the authorities, for reasons of their own, did that years ago, makes the Parliament Square democracy village just the very latest incarnation of the great British tradition of ideological squatters.
Setting up protest camps is something we Brits have done with huge enthusiasm and regularity since time immemorial. Where other nations feel the yoke of the oppressor upon their neck and think “grr, time for revolution”, we think, “ooh, where did we put those tent pegs?”
During the English civil war, the Diggers, led by Gerard Winstanley, tried to take over and cultivate communal land: Winstanley declared that if “the waste land of England were manured by her children, it would become in a few ideas the richest, the strongest and [most] flourishing land in the world”.
And ever since then, at the slightest sign of trouble we just move in. Housing shortage? Take over anything you can find. Don’t like nuclear weapons? Put up tents around the military bases. Opposed to apartheid? Take up residence outside the South African embassy. Want to stop a road being built? Unroll your ground mat right where the inside lane would have been.
Our legal system, which often treasures anomalous rights you’d imagine (if you’d grown up under New Labour) that it would just have hacked to the ground, has carefully preserved the right to do this. In a country where property is God, it is still possible to squat without having your deed-signing hand chopped off. And if you are setting up camp on private land, you can only be “directed to leave” if you’re in a wheeled vehicle or have “caused damage to the land…or used threatening, abusive or insulting language to the landowner” and all who surround him. On public land similar conditions hold, although increasingly military bases and the like can often convince friendly secretaries of states to pass bylaws that sneakily boot the camps.
More recently, our own police were forced to confirm in public (through the means of their self-flagellating Policing Protest report) that we do indeed have a right to peaceful protest which does not necessarily have to be “lawful”.
So what does all that mean for the protest camp in the heart of Parliament Square? Some may think it’s a mess and they’re right, it is a bit of a mess frankly – surely they could neaten it all up a little bit and pitch those tents in straighter lines?
But nevertheless, when I walked through the camp a couple of weeks ago I felt a swell of pride that tourists coming to Britain, visiting our Houses of Parliament and our grand cathedral, would be reminded that here, this is the way we do things. What, I thought, would Chinese, Cubans and Colombians make of it? In those countries protesters are thrown into prison or killed, not allowed to set up a permanent picket.
Despite all the best efforts of the government to make Parliament Square a no-protest zone, we’ve politely declined that option. Thank you but no. We’d rather have the freedom to express our mad, anarchic British feelings in public, under canvas, with a primus stove, a cup of tea and a handy parliament to pass legislation on whether Steve in tent four should be allowed to play his wind-up radio until 9pm or 10. Now, can we have the crossings back so that we can pop over to congratulate them without being run over?
Bibi van der Zee is a journalist and author. She recently published Rebel, Rebel: The Protestor’s Handbook
29 Jul 09 | Uncategorized
So who exactly is in charge here? Reading the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) into the policing of protest (a follow up to an earlier report), you sometimes wonder.
Recently the police have not exactly covered themselves with glory. The policing of the G20 protests — which involved “kettling” protesters and then keeping them contained in tight areas for hours and hours — was a mess, as anyone who was there can report, a provocative, incendiary mess. If you wanted to come up with a way to convince peaceful protesters that the police are heavy-handed brutes who have no respect for anyone’s rights but their own, and who are really all out for a good ruck, it would be pretty hard to top this.
The JCHR is clearly not happy. Its earlier report clearly called for police to pay more attention to human rights issues, and suggested that the Northern Ireland model, where “policing means protecting human rights” is the one we should be looking to. And this report says it all over again, but slightly more plaintively. The committee doesn’t want a wholesale rewrite of the law, but it does think some small changes could preserve the sacred right to peaceful protest.
But what powers does the committee have to enforce this? The government and the minister of policing seem disinclined to leap off their bums and follow up. At one point during the inquiry which preceded this report, the minister even said, bemusingly, that he is not sure that police should be legally required to show their badge numbers because “you have to ask yourself, if you have got a very, very small number of officers who are determined to obscure their number, even if it is a legislative framework, whether it would make much difference to them”. It’s worrying that someone working in the Home Office should not understand the basic point of a legal requirement, which would mean that officers not displaying it could be made to. Surely this is ABC level?
The government also, it emerges, cannot force the police to undergo human rights training. In fact it does not appear that the government can do very much at all.
Now much as one applauds the good and balanced work of the JCHR, one cannot help but wonder where it is going to get us. Anyone observing the actions of the police this year can easily infer that they are working with the aim of scaring off as many protesters as possible — the recent closing down of the Big Green Gathering certainly enforces this hypothesis.
The government may murmur politely to the JCHR that it absolutely support its work, that it’s marvellous dear, marvellous; couldn’t agree more. But unless they actually come out and say very, very loudly that peaceful protest is a human right, that the police must calm down immediately and that there are going to be smacked wrists all round if this heavy-handedness carries on, I’m afraid that the police will continue to feel that they have a mandate. They may well feel that actually this government is happy for them to keep on quashing these pesky protesters and keeping them as quiet as possible. And all the good intentions of the JCHR will count for very little.
Bibi van der Zee is the author of Rebel Rebel – The Protester’s Handbook
