Global Voices Summit: Protecting the Open Internet

Every two years, Global Voices comes together for a community meeting. Over a hundred of our authors, translators, editors and management have been meeting this week in Cebu, the second largest city in the Philippines. For two days of our meeting, we’re opening our discussions to the Filipino public, hosting a public gathering at the provincial capitol of Cebu. The discussions are streamed online, and more than two hundred of our members as well as local and international activists and media figures are here with us.

The main theme for our conference is the obligation of those of us who participate in citizen media to protect and defend the open internet. With this in mind, the event begins with a solemn ritual. Eight Global Voices contributors read the names of bloggers and writers who are imprisoned by their governments or extremist forces for their online writing. They read dozens of names, from Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Cuba, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Israel, Kuwait, Macedonia, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the USA and Vietnam. The names include members of our community like Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fatah, and the Zone9 bloggers collective from Ethiopia, where four Global Voices bloggers are imprisoned. Barret Brown, recently sentenced to a lengthy prison term for linking to an online document represents the US on this shameful list. The Global Voices statement demands that governments fulfill their duties to the universal declaration of human rights, noting “We cannot remain silent and you should not either.”

The first panel, hosted by Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Lokman Tsui, is titled “Protecting the Open Internet is Everyone’s Business”. As someone with his historical roots in the Netherlands and in Hong Kong, Lokman identifies his home country as “the internet” and notes that protecting the open internet is literally protecting our home. He introduces Nani Jansen, legal director of Media Legal Defense Initiative in London, which is managing more than 100 cases around the world including many threats to freedom of expression. She is therefore in a terrific position to offer an overview of threats to freedom of expression around the world. Internet specific legislation like Act 66A in India, which makes it a punishable crime to “cause annoyance or inconvenience to another with online posts or email”, is a great example of a chilling law. With people facing three year sentences for these vague crimes, the law is often used to surpress political speech. In the Philippines, a recent cybercrime law has extended criminal libel laws onto the internet, now offering up to six years for online defamation. Azerbaijan was promising to decriminalize defamation in 2006, but now extends those laws to the internet, offering up to three years in prison.

Governments also continue to block internet content without court order, Ms. Jansen explains. The Zambian Watchdog, one of the country’s few critical media sites, was blocked within Zambia since 2013. The site was accessible externally, but the block locally was a key restriction on speech, and when Reporters without Borders mirrored the site and had their mirror blocked as well. In Pakistan, YouTube was blocked for almost two years. Jansen explains that there’s no basis in law for these blocks – any ministry can simply contact the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority and demand a site be blocked. Intermediary liability, holding a site responsible for the actions of a commenter or poster, is another form of online control. The extension of traditional media laws to online content can have a chilling effect as well. In Russia, the new blogger’s law turns online publications into traditional publications, which adds onerous new administrative requirements to online speech, causing some blogs to shut down. In Italy, it’s difficult to force removal of content via libel laws, so copyright laws are often abused to bully sites into compliance. Protecting online speech involves being vigilant on all these fronts simultaneously.

Chiranuch Premchaiporn from Prachatai, a leading activist and citizen media site, talks about resistance online and offline to media blackouts after the May 22 coup. International news stations were blocked on television, and viewers who wanted to see BBC or CNN saw a screen with the logos of the coup government. Subway stations were preemptively closed in the fear that they would be locations for protests. In response, Thai activists and citizens found ways to protest creatively, online and offline. The three finger salute from the Hunger Games has become a popular sign of protest, and the coup government has responded by detaining those who display the signal for up to a week for “attitude adjustment”.

The three finger salute has also moved online, and into stickers and graffiti, as this symbol: .|||. Another popular sticker is 2+2=4. It’s a reference to a viral video of a teacher who was trying to teach students that 2+2=5. It’s become a symbol of disobedience and resistance. Thai citizens have been remarkable in using digital media as a space for protest. When a group of high school girls were forced to walk a long distance on their knees on cement as a form of collective punishment for being late to school, the girls documented the wounds to their knees by publishing the photos online. The accompanying hashtag campaign went viral and proved extremely embarrassing for the school.

Premchaiporn makes the point that people who live in countries with no offline freedom feel more freedom online. But she warns that the authorities will eventually come for you online as well. It’s a cat and mouse game – hundreds of Facebook users have been arrested for lege mageste in military courts. We need friends who live in freer areas to ask their government to stand firm and resist censorship, and ask the companies we use for online services to protect their users.

Al Alegre from the Foundation for Media Alternatives reminds us that Cebu has several special significances for Filipino activists. It is the home of Lapu Lapu, a brave Cebuano who resisted colonization in the 1600s. It’s also the place where the Philippines were first connected to the internet in 1994. Alegre offers a quick tour of global threats to privacy: mobile phone surveillance; using backdoors of coercion, cooperation and corruption to gain information from telephone companies; backdoors in critical tools like Skype; key internet companies giving user information to governments. The Snowden revelations are only the latest bad news in a long, ugly story. And even the good guys have their dark sides, argues Alegre. Google has been good about revealing information they’ve been forced to give to governments, but has violated privacy with their Street View cameras. He encourages us to read the UN report from Frank LaRue, crediting it as “probably the most comprehensive report on how privacy and surveillance has impacted human rights.”

Alegre warns that we are likely to see more requests for surveillance in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. It’s not just direct surveillance of communications, but surveillance of transaction records – when we shop, make a phone call, or move around the world. He reminds us that “if the product is free, we are the product”. Why should we worry about digital surveillance? Isn’t privacy a shield for corruption?

He argues that we need to build a link between online privacy and other rights. We need to consider complementary rights in the human right regime and need to protect rights equally, indivisibly. He closes with a horrific Filipino story about the importance of surveillance. On November 23, 2009, 63 people, including 31 media practitioners, were killed in an act of political violence called the Ampatuan massacre. The people were surveilled and ambushed on a ridge as a mayoral candidate attempted to register his election papers. No one has been convicted. He asks us to #endimpunity, and to demand that human rights include a right to be free of surveillance.