News & Events

Africa and the Internet: a 21st Century human rights issue?

By Nicole

Flickr Creative Commons | PerformImpact

By Rosebell Kagumire  | Christian Science Monitor | June 14, 2011 |

African leaders could allow freedom of expression, or they could mimic the Chinese model of building a ‘Great Firewall of China’ to shut down Internet systems that allow critical thinking. Last week the UN declared Internet access a basic human right. To many in African countries, which are still grappling with challenges ranging from health, infrastructure, unemployment, etc., this declaration may be difficult to relate to.

I am taking part in the Internet Freedom Fellows program funded by the US Department of State and managed by the US Mission in Geneva. The fellowship follows up on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge to find innovative ways to promote the use of the Internet in support of human rights. While in Geneva earlier this week, I took part in an event where Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, US Representative to the Human Rights Council,reiterated Mrs. Clinton’s statement that the Internet is “the public space of the 21st century.”

Many in Africa are yet to see the Internet as a basic right. Yet Ben Scott, Clinton’s policy adviser on innovation whom I had a chat with called the Internet “the first truly 21st Century human rights issue.”

We were looking at Internet freedom and before I had asked how this basic right would be realized for many in Africa. Mr. Scott said that just like mobile banking (MPesa, Mobile money) is doing tremendously well in Africa, Internet access will continue to be tied to mobile telephone penetration in Africa. He indicated that Africa’s mobile phone penetration has surpassed Europe’s yet it’s still at 40 percent. This makes the Internet and mobile phone market pose both an economic and political opportunity.

In most discussions it was clear that we have two types of freedoms related to the Internet; freedom to access Internet and freedom of expression on the Internet. World leading economies have thrived on information systems and making them accessible to all citizens, therefore increasing their participation in the economy. A connected society is going to be more prosperous and stable.

Many governments in Africa are moving to invest heavily in the laying down of Internet infrastructure. As more people on the continent are connected to the Internet, they will also seek a different kind of governance because of the access to information. This is what Scott called, a dictator’s dilemma.

“Everyone recognizes that future of economy is largely based on information infrastructure. So governments want populations connected but at the same time they want to control speech on these networks and it’s a dilemma,” Scott said. “Internet tends to shift power from centralized institutions to many leaders representing different communities. Governments who want to censor are fighting a battle against the nature of the technology,” Scott said.

So the dilemma faced by that despotic leader, whom we have in plenty on the continent, is political speech versus economic prosperity. Scott said: “You can’t have one and leave the other and that’s the exact dictator’s dilemma.”

This was well manifested in the recent protests in Uganda, when the government instructed the Internet service providers to shut down social media like Facebook and Twitter.

First, the telecom industry is one of the leaders in tax revenues in Uganda and provides a lot of jobs for the Ugandan youth in a country where the number of unemployed graduates has become worrying. In the face of such a directive companies had a lot at stake, most telecoms provide Internet and they feared a backlash. This directive was leaked to the press by people in the telecoms who were concerned that they would be the first victims of the backlash. So in the end the government didn’t achieve its mission. President Yoweri Museveni cannot choose to get the taxes from the telecoms, which help him run the country and at the same time easily pass directives to control information.

Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University graduate program on Interactive Telecommunications said no other invention has ever threatened the Westphalian nation-state like the Internet has done. The states in the past were able to effectively control radio, newspapers, and TV, but the Internet is a challenge.“This is a cultural and political choice,” Shirky said. “Protecting freedom of speech is a governance challenge. Westphalia, where government controls everything, survived the 20th Century media innovations, we are going to see if they can survive the internet.”

Hindering access

Only 10 percent of Ugandans access the Internet, yet about 10 million of the 33 million Ugandans have mobile phones. The use of Internet is partly hampered by illiteracy levels as well as cost, but Uganda has a youthful population which will take up new information systems even with just post primary education.

There are real infrastructure problems hindering access to Internet in Africa but we are seeing more investment. According to ComputerWorld, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi have linked forces together on a $400 million investment in terrestrial fiber optic cables. The new network is expected to run close to 16,000 kilometers from southern Sudan to Tanzania’s border with Zambia. The terrestrial network called the East Africa Backhaul System will connect to the submarine fiber-optic cables on the East Africa coast.

However some governments have already moved to suppress freedom on the Internet. According to recent report from Freedom House, Ethiopia’s Internet is one of the least free in the world. Internet access has been denied and controlled through monopolizing the communications industry to curtail freedom of expression. In Ethiopia the few people that access the Internet that is government controlled cannot freely express themselves.

This kind of control is what my friend Ssozi described to me when we spoke about the Internet as a basic right declaration. He said as long as access to information is not a right, Internet as a basic human right will not benefit most.

The China way

Even with infrastructure in place, many worry that some governments in Africa may decide to go the way of China, which has put up what’s now famously called the “Great firewall of China.” It’s a deceptive path for African governments who may be considering following suit and having economic prosperity and also stifling freedoms of expression and speech.

China spends a lot of money to build firewalls that prevent free speech, but Scott believes this cannot easily be replicated. He says even with its economic might to maintain it alone will continue to cost China to block people from accessing information. The costs of bypassing the firewalls are significantly cheaper than putting one up, say observers.

In Africa, governments still have a hold on public broadcasting, which many people rely on in the absence of cheap, accessible Internet. So for Internet access as a basic right to be realized, or even for it to make a difference in the way citizens in Africa can hold their governments accountable, development budgets and strategies for both by governments and international development organizations must take this into consideration.

There also have to be efforts to ensure protection in the face of growing desire by governments to curtail freedom on the Internet in the wake of North Africa uprisings. We have seen the Internet play a key role in protests in Swaziland, Gabon, and Uganda to some extent.

At a recent meeting of bloggers organized by Google Africa and Global Voices, there was a general concern that many African governments are employing tactics of threatening Internet users directly instead of cutting off the Internet or attacking their sites, which could bring about immediate condemnation. In Uganda, journalist Timothy Kalyegira is the first person to be arrested and charged for an online article written in Uganda Record.

Scott said that in the Internet age there has to be a “move from government-to-government diplomacy to a people-to-people diplomacy.” When questioned on the recent Wikileaks case, Scott argued that there’s a need to balance state security and Internet freedom. Yet it’s in the same name of security that authoritarian government crackdown on their citizens.

Shirky says the debate on whether there can be Internet freedom is still very much open. “No country recognizes a universal right to speak. The negotiation around this kind of freedom is going dominate the next ten years.”

Uganda Threatens to Shut Down More Media Outlets

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Maisha Elonai

By Nicholas Bariyo | The Wall Street Journal | April 19, 2011

KAMPALA, Uganda—Uganda’s state communications regulator warned Tuesday that it is likely to close down more media outlets deemed to be inciting people protesting escalating food and fuel prices.

This followed the arrest Monday of Uganda’s main opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, who was charged with riotous behavior and inciting violence after he was arrested while leading protests over prices.

Last week’s order to Internet-service providers to block the use of Facebook and Twitter was just a “caution,” according to Godfrey Mutabazi, the executive director of Uganda Communications Commission.

“We shall not hesitate to close others if they incite people,” he said, adding that the regulator has already asked media organizations to be cautious of the danger of inciting protesters.

Tensions are mounting across the country, triggered by rocketing food and fuel prices. The government blames the food shortage on a drought late last year, which hurt yields of crops like corn, grains and cereals across the country.

The drought also affected major cash crops like coffee, tea and cocoa. Last week, Uganda’s state coffee body revised the 2010-11 coffee production forecast downwards by at least 13% because of the drought.

The commission has already directed Uganda’s local television and radio stations to stop covering the protests live, blaming the coverage for the escalation of protests in recent days.

Last week Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni warned that the government would step up a crackdown on protesters. At least four people have been killed in the crackdown, which has also left dozens injured, according to the Red Cross.

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights urged the government Monday to stop using excessive force during protests and to guarantee people’s right to freedom of assembly and expression, Uganda’s state media reported Tuesday.

On Monday, the main opposition leader, Mr. Besigye, was charged with riotous behavior and inciting violence after he was arrested earlier Monday while leading protests over rising food and fuel prices.

The state prosecutor tried to block Mr. Besigye from receiving bail, but the magistrate ruled in the opposition leader’s favor, granting him a court bail of 10 million Ugandan shillings ($4,348), according to David Mpanga, attorney to the opposition’s Forum For Democratic Change.

The charges were the second round against Mr. Besigye in less than two weeks after he started protesting against the escalating food and fuel prices.

In the Kampala suburb of Kasangati, law-enforcement teams fired teargas to disperse Besigye supporters demonstrating against his arrest.

At least one person died of suffocation after police accidentally fired teargas at a hospital, according to the Red Cross. Judith Nabakoba, Uganda’s police spokeswoman, said the police suspect that the patient died of natural causes. Witnesses said patients were seen scampering in the hospital’s yard after police fired tear gas at the building.

The opposition has rallied supporters to protest against rising food and fuel prices in the country by walking from their homes to their workplaces at least twice a week until the government addresses the situation.

Uganda suffered months of drought at the end of 2010 and earlier this year, which hurt agricultural yields and led to food shortages.

The national statistics agency said last month that average food prices rose 29% in March from a month earlier.

Mr. Besigye was President Museveni’s main challenger in disputed Feb. 18 polls.

Internet Freedom Declining as Use Grows

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Damien Van Achter

By Sanja Kelly and Sarah Cook | San Francisco Chronicle | April 18, 2011

A young Tunisian discovering that his blog has been hacked and deleted. An Indonesian housewife suddenly facing high fines for an e-mail she sent to friends complaining about a local hospital. Millions of users in Pakistan discovering that Facebook has been shut off. These are some of the restrictions on Internet freedom that users around the world have encountered in the last two years.

Indeed, as more people use the Internet to freely communicate and obtain information, governments have ratcheted up efforts to control it. Today, more than 2 billion people have access to the Internet, a number that has more than doubled in the past five years. Deepening Internet penetration is particularly evident in the developing world, where declining subscription costs, government investments in infrastructure, and the rise of mobile technology has allowed the number of users to nearly triple since 2006.

In order to better understand the diverse, rapidly evolving threats to Internet freedom, Freedom House, a Washington, D.C., NGO that conducts research on political freedom, has undertaken an analysis – the first of its kind – of the ways in which governments in 37 key countries create obstacles to Internet access, limit digital content and violate users’ rights. What we found was that Internet freedom in a range of countries, both democratic and authoritarian, is declining. Emboldened governments and their sympathizers are increasingly using technical attacks to disrupt political activists’ online networks, eavesdrop on their communications and debilitate their websites. Such attacks were reported in at least 12 countries, ranging from China to Russia, Tunisia to Burma, Iran to Vietnam. In Belarus, at the height of controversial elections, the authorities created mirror versions of opposition websites, diverting users to the new ones, where deliberately false information on the times and locations of protests were posted. In Tunisia, in the run-up to the January 2011 uprising that drove the regime from power, the authorities regularly broke into the e-mail, Facebook and blogging accounts of opposition and human rights activists, either deleting specific material or simply collecting intelligence about their plans.

Governments around the world increasingly are establishing mechanisms to block what they deem to be undesirable information. In many cases, the restrictions apply to content involving illegal gambling, child pornography, copyright infringement or the incitement of hatred or violence. However, a large number of governments are also engaging in deliberate efforts to block access to information related to politics, social issues and human rights. In Thailand, tens of thousands of websites critical of the monarchy have been blocked. In China – in addition to blocking dissident websites – user discussions and blog postings revealing tainted-milk products, pollution or torture are deleted.

Centralized government control over a country’s connection to international Internet traffic also emerged as one significant threat to online free expression. In one-third of the states examined, authorities have exploited their control over infrastructure to limit access to politically and socially controversial content or, in extreme cases, cut off access to the Internet entirely, as Hosni Mubarak’s government did in Egypt during the height of the protests there.

Until recently, the conventional assumption has been that Internet freedom would inexorably improve, given the technology’s diffuse and open structure. But this assumption was premature. Our findings should serve as an early warning sign to defenders of free expression.

Sanja Kelly, managing editor, and Sarah Cook, assistant editor, at Freedom House produced “Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media,” a 2011 report, which was released on April 18, 2011 at the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Yahoo! Series on Business & Human Rights: Freedom on the Net 2011

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | deeleea

Freedom on the Net 2011: Growing Threats to the Internet and Digital Media

Iceland Seeks to Become Sanctuary for Free Speech

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Niklas Sjöblom

By Henry Chu | Los Angeles Times | April 02, 2011

Lawmakers here have given the go-ahead to an ambitious plan to turn this unassuming island in the North Atlantic into an international sanctuary for free speech, putting Iceland at the leading edge of media openness but also pushing it into uncharted territory.

The goal, supporters say, is to promote transparency not only in Iceland but across an increasingly interconnected world.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei arrested in latest government crackdown

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Charles Hope

By Keith B. Richburg | The Washington Post | April 3, 2011

BEIJING — Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most prominent artists and an outspoken critic of the communist regime, was taken from Beijing’s airport by security agents Sunday as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police later raided his studio.

Ai is the most high-profile activist to have been detained in a government crackdown in which dozens of bloggers, human rights lawyers and writers have been swept up.

The arrests seem related to the government’s concern that activists in China want to launch a “jasmine revolution” similar to the popular uprisings roiling autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa.

Some of those detained have been accused of “inciting subversion of state power,” a catch-all term used to jail anyone critical of Communist Party rule. Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, faced the same charge and received an 11-year prison sentence.

Since mid-February, when anonymous calls for “jasmine rallies” in China began circulating on the Internet, 26 people have been arrested, 30 have disappeared and are presumed held by security forces, and 200 have been placed under “soft detention,” meaning their movements are restricted, according to a count by the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders on Thursday.

But the arrest of Ai and the others appeared to mark what human rights groups and others called a new and more sinister phase in China’s ongoing, and typically cyclical, repression of dissidents. In the past, such sweeps of activists have preceded major events on the calendar — the 2008 Olympics, major Communist Party meetings or the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo last December — and have receded once the event ended.

The arrests of bloggers and writers, in particular, on subversion charges suggests a rollback of the limited open space recently allowed for free opinion on the Internet and particularly on popular Twitter-like microblogging sites.

“This is not a crackdown in the classic cycle of tightening and loosening,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Hong-Kong based China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “This is an effort by the government to redraw the lines of permissible expression in China, to restrict the most outspoken advocates of global values.”

Activists such as Ai — an active Twitter user — have been continually pushing the boundaries of what is allowed, while increased connectivity is giving ordinary Chinese people more access to uncensored information and viewpoints.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders, in its Thursday statement, said, “In the context of the democratic uprisings taking place in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese government, fearful of its own people, is counting on getting away with staging one of the most repressive campaigns in more than a decade because of the international community’s preoccupation with events elsewhere.”

The outspoken Ai, 53, was the artistic director for the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, but he later turned critical of the Games. He has been arrested before: In 2009, in the western city of Chengdu, Ai was beaten so badly that he required surgery to have blood drained from his brain. Late last year, he was stopped at Beijing’s airport from flying to South Korea because authorities feared he might go to Oslo to attend the Nobel ceremony for Liu. Liu is in prison, and his wife, Liu Xia, is under house arrest.

Ai was prevented from having a solo exhibition of his work at a Beijing gallery this year, and in January authorities demolished his newly built Shanghai studio. In March, Ai announced that he was opening a studio in Berlin to escape the restraints on artistic freedom in China.

Police detained Ai on Sunday morning, and his assistants and attorneys said they were concerned that they have not had any communication with him since. After his arrest, police blocked off the streets to his studio and raided it, carting away laptops and the hard drive from the main computer, Ai’s workers said.

They said eight staff members and Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, were taken to the local police station for questioning. Even as night fell, Lu and two staffers were still being held, they said.

Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer, said he hoped Ai’s international fame would provide him some protection while in police custody.

Liu also said the arrest appears to be “related to the intense international situation, such as what happened in Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries.” But he said it was too early to say whether Ai’s Twitter posts and interview statements about jasmine rallies in China played a part.

On Feb. 24, amid an online campaign for Middle East-style jasmine rallies in major Chinese cities, Ai posted on his Twitter account: “I didn’t care about jasmine at first, but people who are scared by jasmine sent out information about how harmful jasmine is often, which makes me realize that jasmine is what scares them the most. What a jasmine!”

Twitter is blocked in China, except for those with a virtual-private-network line or an Internet connection from outside the country. Ai has 72,000 followers.

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report

Syria Tests Internet Freedom Theory

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | PGrandicelli

By John D. Sutter | CNN | March 30, 2011

In the wake of Egypt’s “Facebook revolution,” which was fueled in part by online social networks, much has been made about the role of technology in encouraging or even creating democracy.

“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the internet,” said Wael Ghonim, one of Egypt’s tech-savvy revolutionaries.

Syria, the latest country in the region to announce reforms in the wake of protests, is a curious test of that theory.

The country — squished between Iraq and Turkey — is known as one of the world’s toughest police states. But unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, the government supported the development of local technology, at least before the protests that pushed President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday to announce the resignation of most of the country’s government officials.

The president has not given up power. He addressed the country on Wednesday, blaming the protests on an international conspiracy and calling the situation “a test of our unity.”

There are at least three ways to read this fluid situation.

First: Syria is an exception to Ghonim’s theory about internet freedom, since the tools of online revolution have failed, at least to date, to bring about a fundamental change in power in the country. Some scholars say Syria has successfully used the internet to monitor would-be dissidents, keeping them from using the internet to organize.

Second: We’re watching another tech-led revolution unfold. The Syrian government reportedly unblocked access to Facebook amid the turmoil in Egypt and Tunisia. Perhaps that was enough to spark recent changes.

Third: The internet has had little impact on Syrian reform. Conflicting reports suggest the internet and some mobile apps may have been blocked recently.

Coming events in Syria will challenge or support these theories.

No matter the outcome, a look at Syria’s nascent tech renaissance – bubbling long before violence in the country started making headlines — offers a framework for understanding these current events.

Local techies hosted iPhone app development contests; they created websites, including a Syrian version of Foursquare; they went to internet cafes, which are so common “you can’t walk without stumbling upon one,” one blogger said; they blogged, sometimes under real names; and they used proxy servers to access Western sites and information.

About one in five Syrians is online and nearly half use mobile phones. Those tech penetration rates are only slightly lower than in Egypt.

If internet equals freedom, then these activities should lead to the end of the regime — meaning internet technology would be something the Syrian government should fear. In reality, however, Syria’s ruling party at times supported the digital tools that have spelled disaster for authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

“We’re going to see dramatic changes still in the ways Syrians use the internet,” one Syrian tech entrepreneur said by phone before protests broke out. “Now (people) feel more comfortable doing this; they’re not doing something that is going to be frowned upon. They’re not doing it under the table. They’re doing it openly.”

‘There is change’

Many of Syria’s tech entrepreneurs seem to have no political aspirations.

In interviews before the recent protests, they were quick to say they’re interested in technology for technology’s sake.

One Syrian app developer, referred to here as Ahmed to protect his real identity, moved back to the country after going to school in Texas. When he arrived, there weren’t many “social” websites or apps to speak of, so he created one.

The reason: He wanted to know the hippest place to grab dinner or a beer with friends. He said he’s not the type to dabble in politics.

Syria is becoming a good place for tech entrepreneurs, he said.

“I’m the kind of person who thinks things are getting better here,” he said. “There is a change. Maybe it’s not as fast as everybody hopes — but it is happening.”

Syria’s ‘Day of Rage’

Syrians organized a “Day of Rage” on Facebook, similar to the Facebook event that helped kick off Egypt’s revolution.

Unlike in Egypt, where protests raged for 18 days and eventually toppled the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak, only a dozen people showed up to that first planned event, which was scheduled for February 4, according to news reports.

Those who did were arrested or dispersed.

Subsequent protests in the south of Syria have attracted more attention and clashes with security police have resulted in the deaths of 73 people, according to Human Rights Watch.

Conversely, tens of thousands of people crowded the streets of Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday in support of the government.

It was soon after that initial February 4 demonstration that the government legalized Facebook, which had been banned since 2007, according to local internet users. Members of Syria’s tech elite saw this as a vote of support from the government — a sign the government trusted people to use social media for personal reasons while keeping their digital hands out of coup-plotting.

“Facebook is like part of the culture right now, it’s unbelievable. Everybody knows Facebook,” one tech entrepreneur said.

People outside the country, however, who are freer to speak their minds without fear of government intimidation, were skeptical of Syria’s motives.

“The message is clear: They don’t want people talking,” said a young Syrian blogger now living in the United States, referred to here as Salam. “Unblocking Facebook and YouTube was just a charade. They wanted to show that they had some confidence and they weren’t afraid of such protests going on in Syria.”

Evgeny Morozov, an internet scholar at Stanford University and author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” put it this way:

“The end result is that the Syrian police will be able to monitor its opponents much better, and if they want to, they would be able to trace their locations, they would be able to arrest them and intimidate them.”

It seems, despite Ghonim’s claim that the internet will liberate people, technology can be used as tool for both freedom and repression.

Crack-down on dissent

Fears of arrest and intimidation have been very real inside Syria.

Shortly after Syria made Facebook legal, the government arrested and four days later released a blogger, Ahmad Hadifa, 28, who allegedly had been critical of the regime, according to the human rights group Reporters Without Borders.

Authorities in February also handed down a five-year prison sentence to Tal Al-Mallouhi, then age 19, who the group says is the world’s youngest imprisoned blogger.

Reporters Without Borders puts Syria on its “Enemies of the internet” list for spying on citizens and using digital tools to crack down on dissent. According to The Atlantic, a 50-year-old “emergency law” in Syria “outlaws unofficial gatherings and abets the regular practice of beating, imprisoning, torturing, or killing political dissidents, human rights workers, and minorities.”

Watching such events creates a chilling climate of self-censorship, said Salam, the Syrian-born blogger. It’s difficult to press the “send” button on anything that could be considered even remotely controversial.

“You’re always cautious of what you write. You’re always wondering if what you write will get you in trouble,” he said. “The Syrian bloggers who were writing about the recent arrests … had to contemplate things for a few days or a week before posting.”

Encouraging the internet

While it may not encourage the open expression of ideas, Syria certainly has encouraged the development of an internet infrastructure.

This is a shift from past practices.

Salam remembers the first time he got online, in 2000, when the Syrian government first decided to let the technology in.

“It’s like somebody who got a new toy basically and they were so excited to figure out what they could do with it,” he said.

Soon, he had started a blog — “typos, teen angst, stuff like that” — from his parents’ home in a town in the southern part of the country.

It wasn’t long before it was shut down, he said.

“Basically it feels like you were violated when you did nothing wrong,” he said. “It was absurd. There was no good reason given.”

At least before the recent protests, Syria’s president, who has a Facebook page and is the former head of the country’s computer society, appeared to see the internet boom as a continuation of Syria’s history — not a tool that would change its course.

“We are the fastest growing internet user in the Middle East,” al-Assad told The Wall Street Journal in a rare interview published January 31. “And this is because of the nature of the Syrians: They are very open generally … They want to learn.”

Building a tech scene

Some Syrians have been geeks-in-training for years.

At age 3, Ahmed, the app developer, used his father’s screwdriver to dismantle a radio. Then the family got a VCR — and he took that apart, too, wanting to see how it worked. “My dad used to lock the drawer where he had all the screw drivers because he was afraid I would do something,” he said.

Now he plans to keep building.

He’s unsure if his social website will take off in Syria.

But, at least before the recent wave of protests, he was encouraged by how quickly Syria is taking to technology.

Where that tech adoption will lead remains an open question.

Bahrain Arrests Leading Internet Activist

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | infinitewhite

Voice of America News | March 30, 2011

Family members and human rights officials say Bahraini authorities have arrested the country’s most prominent Internet activist as part of a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

They say officials took Mahmoud al-Youssef into custody on Wednesday.  Al-Youssef has been a vocal critic of the government for its limits on freedom of expression. He has been referred to as the “godfather” of blogging in the Gulf nation.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch says Bahraini authorities are harassing demonstrators and bystanders who were wounded in anti-government protests.

The rights group said Wednesday the country’s security and military forces have sought out and threatened injured activists who were taken to Bahrain’s largest medical facility earlier this month.

On Monday, the Reuters news agency said Bahrain’s opposition party claimed 250 people had been detained and 44 others were missing in a government crackdown on protesters.

Bahrain declared a three-month state of emergency on March 15 after troops from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states came to help the Sunni monarchy quell Shi’ite-led protests.

On Wednesday, Bahraini opposition leader Ali Salman demanded the withdrawal of the Saudi-led forces.  Iran has also condemned the deployment but Salman warned Iran against interfering in Bahrain’s internal affairs.  

Bahrain’s parliament accepted the resignations of key political Shi’ite opposition members on Tuesday, signaling a further divide in the sectarian crisis gripping the island nation.

Bahrain’s parliament is the nation’s only elected body but holds limited powers. The government is mostly run by the Sunni monarch.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters

Tunisian Bloggers Expect Role to Grow

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Linda Demers

By Karin Laub | Associated Press | March 23, 2011

TUNIS, Tunisia – At the height of the Tunisian uprising, dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali tried hard to silence the young bloggers who were driving the protests against him. His security agents arrested, even tortured, some of them and repeatedly shut down their sites.

But two months after Mr. Ben Ali’s fall, the caretaker government that is to lead Tunisia to summer elections has embraced the very tools its predecessor tried to destroy.

It has lifted Web censorship. Key ministries – including the Interior Ministry, once in charge of the feared political police – now communicate with citizens through Facebook.

Some of the bloggers, once under threat from Mr. Ben Ali’s secret agents, are courted as heroes. One serves in the interim government, others have been awarded an online media freedom prize, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Internet activists during her first post-revolt visit to Tunisia this month.

The bloggers, many of them university graduates in their 20s, say they have an important role to play in the new Tunisia as government watchdogs or political activists.

“We’re not stopping our fight, and we are the first line of defense of freedom,” said blogger Wissem Zghaier, 29, who was beaten and tortured during the uprising.

Social media were key to the Tunisian revolt and the anti-government protests it inspired across the Arab world.

In Tunisia, the protests erupted in impoverished outlying areas in mid-December after a fruit vendor railing against official harassment and confiscation of his wares set himself on fire outside a government building.

The protests were ignored at first by the national media, but bloggers uploaded videos and photos of police violence against the demonstrators, sharing them on Facebook, one of the only social networks functioning under Mr. Ben Ali. The images fueled more protests, which reached the capital, Tunis, and eventually drove out Mr. Ben Ali on Jan. 14.

During Tunisia’s transition to democracy, the Internet is bound to play a key role as a forum of political debate: About one-third of the population of 10 million has Internet access, and fundamental issues are at stake in July elections.

Voters are to choose a national assembly that will write a new constitution and determine, among other things, whether Tunisia gets a parliamentary or presidential democracy and whether gender equality is enshrined in the basic law.

Even after Mr. Ben Ali’s ouster, protests largely driven by social media have continued. For example, demonstrators forced the resignation of the first caretaker prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, a holdover from the Ben Ali era some feared was trying to hijack the revolution. They also got the government to dissolve the former ruling party.

Ahead of Mrs. Clinton’s visit, the blogosphere was abuzz with efforts to organize protests against U.S. policy in the Arab world, including Washington’s previous support of Mr. Ben Ali and other dictators in the region.

During Mrs. Clinton’s visit, a few dozen demonstrators marched along the capital’s Avenue Bourguiba, a tree-lined boulevard with Parisian-style cafes and site of many demonstrations. “Clinton, get out,” they chanted, echoing the central slogan Tunisians used against Mr. Ben Ali, who had ruled for 23 years.

“Clinton came here to manipulate our politics,” said activist Hussein Hagbei, whose blog is called Sidi Bouzid, after the provincial capital where the Tunisian uprising began. “We don’t want Clinton to interfere in our politics.”

The 29-year-old has a degree in archaeology, but like many young Tunisian college graduates has not found work in his field. Instead, Mr. Hagbei runs a small Internet cafe to make a living.

But the experience of shaping history has galvanized him and his friends. Earlier this month, they gathered in a cafe near Avenue Bourguiba to discuss the possibility of forming a new party to give a voice to young activists.

Another blogger, Tarek Kahlaoui, is seeking training and funding for a news website that he hopes will meet Tunisia’s need for independent journalism. Bloggers can be influential in Tunisia if they seize the moment, said Mr. Kahlaoui, an assistant professor of Islamic history at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Some are going into politics. Mr. Zghaier, the activist who was tortured, belongs to the Democratic Progressive Party (PDP), a key opposition movement during the Ben Ali era. The 29-year-old, who adopted the middle name “libre,” French for free, is also a member of the PDP’s Facebook Committee, which is to help spread the party’s message of a market economy tempered by social justice.

The turnaround of Mr. Zghaier’s fortunes is particularly dramatic.

On Jan. 7, a week before the fall of the old regime, he was snatched from a Tunis street by plainclothes security agents who put a sack over his head, bundled him into a car and took him for interrogation.

For the next six days, Mr. Zghaier said, he was alternately beaten, threatened, cuffed to a wall, forced to strip and photographed in humiliating positions.

Much of the mistreatment, he said, took place in the basement of the Interior Ministry on Avenue Bourguiba – decried during the Ben Ali years as a torture chamber.

Today, the ministry is ringed by barbed wire and guarded by the military, but in a sign of the new times, its officials communicate with citizens through Facebook.

The ministry’s page, with more than 150,000 followers, explains how to apply for civil-service jobs, describes police activities and gives updates on the approval process for parties seeking to run in the elections.

As of this month, 37 were approved, the ministry said. It also listed nine that have been rejected, including some with a radical Islamic bent.
One of those behind the outreach is Sami Zaoui, minister of technology and communications in the interim government. Mr. Zaoui, a former consultant for an international accounting firm, told a French radio station last month that his first decision on the job was to lift the Internet censorship that had been enforced under Mr. Ben Ali.

The government is aware it’s being watched closely by the activists, said Fatma Azouz, a journalism professor at Manouba University in Tunis. “I am sure that those who went to the streets are capable of going again,” Mr. Azouz said. “Any government will be aware of the possibility.”

RIM Calls India’s Email Demands ‘Astonishing’

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | tuxthepenguin84

By Amol Sharma | The Wall Street Journal | March 14, 2011

NEW DELHI—A top executive of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. said Indian security agencies are making “rather astonishing” demands for increased powers to monitor email and other data traffic, raising serious privacy issues that threaten to harm the country’s reputation with foreign investors.

Robert Crow, vice president of industry and government relations for RIM, said India’s Home Ministry, which oversees domestic security, wants the ability to intercept in real time any communication on any Indian network—including BlackBerry’s highly secure corporate-email service—and get it in readable, plain-text format.

Such a broad requirement raises the question of whether the government believes any communications are legally off-limits, he said, including email conversations of foreign ambassadors and financial records that get transmitted over secure telecommunications networks to Indian outsourcing companies.

“You connect those dots and you’re saying, ‘Holy smokes,’ ” Mr. Crow said during an interview. “This claim is made in an environment where we don’t really have any privacy- or data-protection laws—and where we have a pretty poor administrative record of keeping similar things like wiretaps secret.”

A spokesman for India’s Home Ministry declined to comment. Government officials in India have previously said they want to ensure suspected terrorists and criminals can’t elude government surveillance by using newfangled communications technologies. Under current Indian law, the home secretary—the top bureaucrat in the Home Ministry—authorizes all telecom surveillance by central-government agencies for 60 days at a time.

For several months, RIM has faced demands from India to give security agencies a way to access encrypted messages on BlackBerry’s corporate-email service. BlackBerry has repeatedly said its system is designed so that it doesn’t have the “keys” to unlock users’ messages—and it has refused to change its technology architecture in any one of the 175 countries where it offers service.

Mr. Crow said he is heartened, at least, that India no longer appears to be singling out RIM. India has realized, he said, that other advanced services—such as virtual private networks, or VPNs, and peer-to-peer messaging services, are outside its surveillance reach.

It isn’t clear whether the Indian government has set any firm deadline for when it should gain access to BlackBerry corporate-email and other services and whether it would take the drastic measure of shutting down services that aren’t compliant. Indian media reports have said the government has told Indian telecom operators to submit plans by March 31 showing how they would accommodate security agencies’ demands. But the government has made no announcement to that effect.

Mr. Crow said he is optimistic that India’s telecom ministry, which is beginning to assert more authority on the matter, will have a better understanding of the technological constraints RIM faces and will find a solution to the issue that doesn’t require BlackBerry to compromise user privacy. A telecom-ministry spokesman declined to comment.

But Mr. Crow said he expects talks with India to drag on, given the inherent delays in the country’s democracy and the lack of well-defined regulations on data protection and privacy.

“I think this may well go on and on in India, and frankly it will be one of those factors that people talk about in the Indian business environment—not one that will be seen in India’s favor in international comparison,” Mr. Crow said.

BlackBerry, which touts the highly secure nature of its email service as a key selling point globally, has faced intensifying demands from foreign governments for access to the service in recent months. The stakes in India are especially high, given that the country has more than 770 million wireless subscribers who are just beginning to shift from ordinary phones to smartphones such as BlackBerrys.

Mr. Crow said he has proposed ways for Indian intelligence and security agencies to advance investigations without gaining access to the actual content of encrypted BlackBerry email messages. He said telecom operators can glean so-called meta data about messages, such as the time messages were sent, and the corporate-email server they went through.

“If that pattern of communications were known to the authorities on lawful grounds,” Mr. Crow said, “then the authorities would be in a position to go to the correct corporate entity that owns the server” and pursue their investigation of a suspect.

In January, RIM resolved India’s security concerns with the BlackBerry Messenger chat service, which uses a lower level of encryption than corporate email. The company gave Indian telecom operators a system that lets them key in a suspect’s phone number and get unscrambled versions of Messenger chats, when a legal order has been provided, Mr. Crow said.

Mr. Crow said RIM is “kicking the tires” on potential plans to expand in India, where it already has a data center and where about 11,000 software developers are making programs to run on BlackBerrys. One possibility down the line is for India to manufacture some of the several thousand parts that go into a BlackBerry.

“There’s a heck of a lot of demand [for BlackBerrys] within three to four hours flight of most of the manufacturing places in India, including India itself,” he said.