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Written By: Zaid al-Alaya’a
Article Date: Jun 12, 2007 - 3:35:05 AM
Internet censorship is a growing virus, says Amnesty International UK.
Amnesty International-U.K. launched yesterday a new campaign to combat the repression of Internet sites around the world. This campaign was announced at a recent conference entitled, “Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace.” AI called Internet censorship a virus that could “change the Internet beyond recognition,” if no action is taken to fight it.
This news is particularly relevant to Yemen, where several websites have been blocked this year, and where certain sites are regularly filtered. AI-UK’s campaign was first launched in London’s Observer in May 2006. This new effort marks the first anniversary of Amnesty’s website irrepressible.info, which is being relaunched to become a news aggregator and information hub for anyone interested in the future of internet freedom, said AI. The campaign seeks to enhance the power of the Internet, gathering all web users to take action against governments who are censoring and blocking sites or imprisoning web users.
The repression of users seen everywhere shows that the freedom that people once dreamt about online is eroding dangerously in developing countries in particular, where bloggers are subject to imprisonment and all sorts of harassment, said AI. “The virus of Internet repression is spreading. The ‘Chinese model’ of an Internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers,” Amnesty International UK Campaigns Director Tim Hancock said.
“More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online. And major Internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts.” He added that when people turn to the Internet they assume that they can see all that there is online rather than what someone wants us to see. AI highlighted increasing reports of “Internet filtering” around the world, where governments block access to specific sites or sites featuring particular words or themes.
The latest Open Net Initiative (ONI) Report on Internet filtering shows that at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand and Tunisia. Amnesty research has also found that companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have been complicit in suppressing freedom of speech in China by censoring web content, releasing personal data leading to arrest and providing filtering hardware. There were some cases of imprisonment recorded in the AI report.
Egyptian Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, a 22-year-old Egyptian blogger, was sentenced to four years imprisonment in February for “contempt of religion” and “defaming the President of Egypt.” His imprisonment sends a clear message to Egypt’s burgeoning blogger community. Huang Jingue of China was sentenced to 12 years in prison, after he posted a political essay on the Internet. Shi Tao, also of China, is serving 10 years in prison for sending an email about the crackdown on press freedom. The examples are many. The repression of the Internet is not only something prevailing in developing countries.
A case in point here is that of jailed US blogger Josh Wolf, who shared his experience with the American authorities. Wolf was jailed for 226 days, longer than any journalist in U.S. history has served for protecting source materials, for refusing to submit videos he took of a G8 Summit protest in San Francisco in 2005. He also spoke of the compliance of the IT companies. Martha Lane Fox, one of the founders of lastminute.com, in 1998 talked about how powerful the Internet is, how it made life easy, and that you have the world under your fingertips. “The daily impact of the Internet can do to my life is still astounded me,” Martha Fox said.
But many countries don’t trust their citizens to have access to the entire world at their fingertips. Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, specializing in media, technology, and world politics, and the director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies, said that there are more than 40 countries that filter things in the Internet. Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian blogger and cyber activist now lives in The Netherlands as a political refugee. His blog “fikra” (which means “idea” in Arabic) has been censored in Tunisia since 2003.
“I do think that the Internet is a bad thing for two groups: for governments who are realising that they are losing control of information and are trying to restrict the use of the Internet; and for the victims of those governments, individuals who are imprisoned for simply using the Internet to post and share information.” Gharbia said that repressive government are spending millions and millions of dollars to control the web and the actions of bloggers and Internet users. He said that networking sites like Facebook and Flickr are blocked in Iran and Pakistan, search engines like Google are being filtered in China, and online maps like Google Earth are being Photoshopped in countries like Israel, Bahrain and Morocco.
Morton Sklar spoke about the compliance of IT corporations with governments. Sklar has served as the founding executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA. He said that in China, Yahoo! is providing the government with means to identify users using the internet exchange to find information about democracy and human rights. He helped a Chinese woman filing a suit against Yahoo! in the US, whose husband, Wang Xiaoping, served a ten-year jail sentence. She said that Yahoo! betrayed her husband by providing the Chinese government with his email address. The only thing that the husband did was to express his opinion on the Internet. Xiaoping was sentenced for incitement to subvert state power.
A report released recently by OpenNet Initiative stated that China, Iran and Saudi Arabia remain the top blockers. Each nation filters not only pornography, but also a wide range of political, human rights, religious and cultural sites deemed subversive by those countries’ governments. Deibert said that the ONI has found that website filtering has transferred into applications. In countries like Thailand, voice-over-internet application Skype, and video-upload site YouTube, were recently blocked.
He then talked about the key moments when websites were blocked. For instance, opposition sites during elections are often inaccessible. Cambodia went further than that, and applied this kind of censorship when it ordered that cell phone messages be shut off during elections. Amnesty calls for governments and companies alike to respect people’s right to freedom of expression online. However, the organization recognises that there are some acceptable limits to free speech, such as stopping sites promoting racial hatred, violence or child pornography.
