Posts Tagged ‘CPJ’
The Battle for Press Freedom Moves Online
Flickr Creative Commons | James Buck
From Tibet to Tehran, more and more front-line reporting is being carried out by freelancers and published online. But the revolution in newsgathering—brought about by new technology and the downsizing of traditional media outlets—has a down side. For the first time, half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support.
These are the key findings of a report released Dec. 8 by the Committee To Protect Journalists. The annual census of imprisoned journalists was conducted on Dec. 1 and includes every journalist who was in jail on that day. All told, there are 136 journalists on the list, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.
For the 11th year in a row, China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 24 behind bars. It is followed closely by Iran, where 23 journalists remain in jail, out of dozens rounded up in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 election. Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma round out the top five.
A closer look at the numbers in China reveals just how dramatically the Internet has transformed both newsgathering and the dissemination of critical commentary in repressive societies.
A decade ago, when China first topped the list, most of those jailed were print reporters for mainstream media outlets who had gone too far in their criticism of government officials. The Chinese media are much more open today, but there are still clear limits, and journalists who displease the authorities face consequences. The difference is that they are more likely to be fired than thrown in jail.
But online journalists can’t be fired, blacklisted, or, in most cases, bought off precisely because most work independently. They don’t have employers who can be pressured. Chinese authorities have few options when it comes to reining in online critics—censor them, intimidate them, or throw them in jail. This explains why 18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China worked online.
In Iran, there’s a similar dynamic. The 23 reporters jailed there fall roughly into two camps—those who worked for print media outlets allied with opposition candidates and those who worked independently online. Under the reformist presidency of Mohammed Khatami, 1997-2005, the Tehran intelligentsia famously spent hours in cafes perusing dozens of newspapers and magazines, reformist and conservative. A crackdown on the print media that accelerated under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad closed many newspapers and forced top journalists and commentators online, fueling the rise of the Farsi blogosphere. Today, many of these journalists are in jail or in exile.
Unquestionably, the rise of Web-based reporting provides exciting new opportunities. An adventurous young freelancer can head out to cover the world armed with a laptop and a digital camera. Government critics from Burma to Vietnam are able to circumvent the censors and get their views out to the world.
But the sharp increase in the number of imprisoned online journalists highlights new vulnerabilities. They are utterly alone when authorities knock on the door to take them away. Freelancers face jail without legal assistance or the backing of an employer who can provide support for their families.
Even more alarming is the vulnerability of the Internet itself. The utopian notion that the Internet is impossible to censor or control has given way to a new reality. Even as new formal and informal news organizations emerge on the Web, traditional media—text and broadcast, public and private, partisan and nonpartisan, for-profit and nonprofit—are all converging online. The convergence creates an “information chokepoint” that repressive governments can shut down when a story gets out of control. Whereas governments used to have to close dozens of newspapers and shut down individual radio stations, now they can simply halt the circulation of information by pulling the plug on the Web.
In China, for example, the government shut down the Internet and even the cell phone network when riots broke out in Xinjiang province earlier this year. In Iran, citizen journalists’ reports about the post-election violence were eventually silenced as the mullahs shut down Internet communication and began rounding up critical bloggers. On Saturday, Iranian authorities did it again, shutting down the Internet and the cell system to disrupt planning for student protests held Monday. The shutdown was also intended to limit coverage of the events through the Web and social media sites.
This is why the battle for press freedom around the world has moved online. It’s no longer about keeping the presses running and unblocking the airwaves. Ensuring that people around the world have access to diverse news and information means keeping the Internet free.
In order to defend press freedom in this new environment, press freedom groups like CPJ need to change tactics. Traditional advocacy—protest letters to heads of state, detailed reports chronicling government crackdowns—will continue to be relevant, but there will also be a technological component to our advocacy that involves navigating around firewalls, circumventing censorship, and outflanking government efforts to control the Web. In order to better carry out this kind of advocacy, CPJ is adding a new specialized program dedicated to the defense of online journalists.
But technology has its limits, and the freedom to express ideas and disseminate information through the Internet cannot be taken for granted. Like all freedoms, it must be actively defended. While there are highly effective organizations like the OpenNet Initiative and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, media companies and journalists are just beginning to understand that they have a huge stake in preserving Internet freedom.
Internet and technology companies also need to do more. So far, they have a mixed record. It’s true that people in repressive societies benefit from access to the Internet, but not when companies collaborate in censoring content or exposing government critics, as Yahoo did when it turned over to Chinese authorities information used to arrest journalist Shi Tao in 2004.
Fortunately, these companies are taking steps to address the issue. CPJ is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, an organization of human rights groups, academics, socially responsible investors, and Internet leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These companies have agreed to a set of principles that will help them push back against censorship.
Traditional media companies and Internet service providers have complex commercial arrangements that make them partners in some realms and competitors in others. But they should be natural allies as the battle for press freedom enters this new phase. We need to form a united front to push back against government censorship, confront repressive regimes, blend traditional advocacy with technological innovation, and stand up publicly for journalists of all kinds who seek to report the news online.
Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee To Protect Journalists.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2237675/
Toronto’s Citizen Lab uses forensics to fight online censors
Flickr Creative Commons | Hank Ashby
by Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director, CPJ
from CPJ’s Blog
A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.
“We are testing in 71 countries,” says Deibert, who shares his data with Berkman. “We are testing all the time. We are the technical hub of ONI.”
“We started out in 2002 with China,” said Jillian York, project coordinator for Berkman. “The work evolved, and then with Cuba we cracked it.” By 2006, ONI had expanded its dragnet for blocked or filtered content to more than 40 countries. However, as Citizen Lab and Berkman gained expertise and resources so did the censors they battled.
“We are now onto third-generation controls,” York said of Internet censorship. “The first generation was simple filtering, IP blocking in China, for example.” The second generation was surveillance, which ranged from placing spies or closed-circuit cameras in Internet cafés to installing tracking software on computers themselves. “The third generation controls combine all the above. We see it in China, Syria, and Burma. It’s a very broad approach,” York laments.
ONI’s research and public awareness-raising provides just one weapon in the increasingly sophisticated armory that bloggers need to deploy against government encroachment. Some free-speech campaigners engage across a wide battlefront, taking on authorities in Tunisia or Pakistan, for example, to keep blogging and video platforms open. Others, like Deibert, devise tools for an individual user to tunnel beneath a firewall or slip past a digital spy undetected. He helped develop Psiphon, a free, open source application that channels data through a network of proxies to circumvent censorship. “Anyone can use it. It’s fast and there’s nothing to download onto your computer for the Internet police to find,” said Deibert.
It’s a game of digital cat-and-mouse with authorities hunting down circumvention nodes, and Psiphon switching to an alternate as soon as a node is compromised. Citizen Lab launched Psiphon in December 2006 but did not have the resources to develop it further. So in May this year, Deibert and another ONI founder, Rafal Rohozinski, spun it off as a commercial enterprise. It is still free to users but charges companies to deliver their blocked content. Clients so far include the BBC and the U.S. government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to Psiphon and other circumvention tools like Tor, spreading node connection information among bloggers and journalists. This was evident during the media crackdown in Iran that followed the disputed June presidential elections, when Twitter proved difficult to shut down.
Much of the light in Deibert’s Toronto basement may come from rows of LCD screens but unmasking digital spies is not all about electronic wizardry. “With ONI, we are testing all the time but we are not just a technical operation. The technology is not as important as the cultural information,” says Deibert, sounding like an old-school Le Carré character who stresses “human intelligence” over gadgetry. Reporting by volunteers on the ground in repressive countries provides vital information and context for monitors to analyze censorship developments and anticipate blocking strategies.
Berkman has expanded the reporting network through a crowd-sourcing tool called Herdict, which allows individuals to report a blocked Web site immediately.
“This is a constant struggle—the threat environment is always morphing,” according to Deibert. And the threats don’t just come from governments. Defenders of free expression and user privacy are increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of “cloud computing,” in which vast stores of personal data are held remotely by private companies both in democracies and repressive states. “Some of the biggest threats are from private companies. Cyberspace is largely owned and operated by private companies. Data is sent into a cloud over which we have no control,” Deibert says. The potential for such abuse is heightened in repressive states. An example of the dangers for the Citizen Lab team was TOM-Skype, the Chinese version of Skype. Citizen Lab uncovered a huge privacy breach where supposedly secure data were being stored secretly on servers in China.
Another case that Diebert says should concern us was in July this year when BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates were directed by text messages from their service provider Etisalat, which is majority owned by the UAE government to a link to upgrade their phones. The software they downloaded, however, turned out to be spyware. BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion Ltd of Canada, denied involvement and showed customers how to remove the software.
Deibert cautions online journalists in these days of increased third-party hosting to pay attention to corporate as well as government surveillance, and to read the fine print of terms-of-use agreements with ISPs and others before checking the sign-up box for an e-mail account or blog hosting platform.
“We need to lift the lid on the Internet. Where are the servers, where does your e-mail go, where is the Internet exchange point located, who has access to the building?” he asked.
Every day journalists and bloggers are reminded of the need to fight for their freedoms. Censorship and surveillance are slippery slopes. Take Pakistan. In February 2006, in its first case of Internet censorship, Islamabad decided to shield its populace from cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The Pakistan Communications Authority blocked 12 Web sites that reproduced the offending caricatures. By April of that year the authority was censoring five other Web sites saying they had published “misleading information”. In July, 30 more Web sites were blocked, nearly all of them associated with the movement advocating independence for the province of Baluchistan.
This censorship creep is an established phenomenon in Asia and the Middle East. But now it is spreading to Africa, where Internet use is still relatively low. Sub-Saharan African governments that have hobbled their own broadcast and print media have watched the celebrity-censors of other continents like China, Cuba and Iran and have drawn the inevitable conclusion: Online journalism is the future, so control it now.
“Ethiopia is going to be a test case,” says the Berkman Center’s York. “Internet penetration is low, yet platforms like Blogspot are blocked.”
When you talk to people at organizations such as ONI, one thing quickly becomes clear: They don’t know who is going to win the war for control of cyberspace. Circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon are tactical weapons. A strategic response requires unrelenting campaigning and public education to raise the economic, political and social costs of censorship and surveillance for governments and private companies.
Meanwhile, Citizen Lab keeps doing what it does best; “We combine the technology with human intelligence, then turn them around to watch the watchers,” Deibert said.
Open Net Initiative
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