You are here: Home / Archives for 2012

Preaching Internet Freedom, Practicing Surveillance

April 27, 2012 by

In Foreign Affairs this week, I argue that while Washington preaches global Internet freedom, its practices are facilitating the global spread of unaccountable surveillance. An excerpt:

In the Internet age, it is technically trivial for corporations and governments to gain access to people’s private communications and track their movements. The Obama administration recognizes that online freedom requires not only an open and uncensored Internet, but also one on which government and corporate surveillance powers are appropriately constrained, so that citizens are protected against abuse, and abusers are held accountable. Without strong global standards of public transparency and accountability in how surveillance technologies are deployed, the empowering potential of the Internet diminishes quickly.

Yet, even as the White House clamps down in Iran and Syria, other parts of the U.S. government are driving the development of policies, regulatory norms, and business practices that make a mockery of Washington’s well-meaning efforts to expand Internet freedom abroad. Put another way, although the State Department funnels millions of dollars to nonprofits fighting censorship and surveillance beyond U.S. borders, repressive digital surveillance around the world continues to expand in scope and sophistication.

Read the whole thing here.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 05, Chapter 12 Tagged With: , ,

Netizen Report: Firewall Edition

April 27, 2012 by

The latest edition of the Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy begins with the story of how, on April 12, the Chinese Internet was cut off from the global Internet for about two hours, for reasons that remain unknown. Meanwhile, netizens around the world have been busy fighting threats to their freedom of all kinds. For a full roundup of the latest developments in the global struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, click here.

Filed Under: Globalvoices

Containing Weapons of Mass Surveillance

April 25, 2012 by

My latest article in Foreign Policy argues that President Obama is on the right track with Monday’s executive order, but the United States needs to get tougher on the global digital arms race. I conclude:

President Obama has certainly taken a step in the right direction with Monday’s executive order. But the executive branch and Congress will need to do much more if they want to stem electronic abuses against activists in Iran and Syria — let alone anywhere else. It’s time to take decisive action to stop American and other multinationals from aiding and abetting the wrong side in the global digital arms race.

Read the whole thing here.

The article contains a late-breaking update. After my deadline had passed, I managed to reach a spokesperson at the Department of Commerce, who confirmed that an investigation of Blue Coat is “ongoing.” Blue Coat is the California-based company whose surveillance and censorship devices turned up in Syria last year. I described the circumstances in the article as follows:

Last October, the international activist group Telecomix published log files taken from 13 Blue Coat devices deployed by the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment to monitor and block users’ activity. Facing scrutiny over apparent violation of a strict U.S. embargo against technology sales to Syria, Blue Coat later told the Wall Street Journal that these devices were shipped to a Dubai reseller that claimed the final destination as Iraq. In December, the U.S. Department of Commerce placed restrictions on a person and an entity in the United Arab Emirates for having sold the devices to Syria. But questions remain about what Blue Coat really knew or didn’t know, because after installation in Syria the devices transmitted regular automatic status messages back to the company’s computer servers. Blue Coat claims that it doesn’t monitor the origin of such messages.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 04 Tagged With: , , , ,

The Not-So-Great Firewall of China

April 18, 2012 by

My latest piece in Foreign Policy discusses social media as a battlefield for public opinion in China. An excerpt:

China’s censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated. Writing in the Guardian this week, dissident artist Ai Weiwei declared that while China’s Internet censorship system may be the envy of autocrats worldwide, China’s leaders need to understand that in the long run “it’s not possible for them to control the Internet unless they shut it off.” He was half right: While the Chinese government’s tactics may be ham-handed and likely doomed to failure in the long run, they are working well enough to keep the Communist Party in power for the short to medium term.

You can read the whole thing here.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 03 Tagged With: , , ,

The Netizen Report: Legislative Edition

April 12, 2012 by

Our crack team has posted another great edition of the Netizen Report over at Global Voices Advocacy. It begins:

Democratic nations face a challenge in finding the right balance between national security imperatives on one hand and the need to protect citizens’ freedoms on the other. In this week’s report we highlight several solutions that fall too far on the former side.

To read the whole thing – including a roundup of all the various global developments related to the worldwide struggle for Internet freedom, click here.

Filed Under: Globalvoices

Fighting the Great Firewall of Pakistan

April 11, 2012 by

Foreign Policy has published my latest contribution, Fighting the Great Firewall of Pakistan, featuring an interview with Sana Saleem, Global Voices contributor and founder of the Karachi-based social justice organization, Bolo Bhi. Here is how the article begins:

It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan. Sana Saleem has both.

The 24-year-old founder of a Karachi-based free expression group Bolo Bhi has been accused of supporting “blasphemy.” On Twitter, a chilling message made the rounds last month: “this @sanasaleem is a prostitute who feature in porn movies #throwacidonsana.” Her photo was posted in pornography forums.

None of this has fazed Sana, who in conjunction with several other young Pakistani blogger-activists had launched a successful campaign that has shamed the government into halting plans for a national Internet censorship system. A long-time contributor to the international bloggers network Global Voices Online, in March Saleem joined forces with other groups including the Pakistan-based social justice group Bytes For All and other activists like the dentist-blogger Awab Alvi, a.k.a. “Teeth Maestro,” who has been campaigning against censorship since 2006. Their success is a victory for free speech, and not only in Pakistan. It holds lessons for activists around the world who are fighting uphill battles against censorship schemes initiated by governments that claim to be acting in the public interest, and who have support from influential political constituencies.

Click here to read the rest.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 04, Chapter 14, Globalvoices Tagged With: ,

London Book Talk

April 5, 2012 by

Here is the video of a recent talk I gave at the RSA in London.

Filed Under: Video

Internet Freedom Starts at Home

April 4, 2012 by

I have just written an essay for Foreign Policy on the Global Online Freedom Act and why the United States needs to do a better job of practicing at home what it preaches for the world. Here is how it begins:

“An electronic curtain has fallen around Iran,” U.S. President Barack Obama warned in a recent video message marking the Persian New Year. Government censorship and surveillance, he said, make it more difficult for Iranians to “access the information that they want,” denying “the rest of the world the benefit of interacting with the Iranian people.”

Implied though not explicit in Obama’s remarks was the idea that if Iran’s Internet were freer and more open, Iran’s relationship with the world generally — and the United States in particular — would be different. Cases like Iran are the main driver of Washington’s bipartisan consensus around the idea that a free and open global Internet is in the United States’ strategic interest.

Yet more than two years after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her first speech declaring “Internet freedom” to be a major component of U.S. foreign policy, it turns out that many of the most sophisticated tools used to suppress online free speech and dissent around the world are actually Made in the USA. American corporations are major suppliers of software and hardware used by all sorts of governments to carry out censorship and surveillance — and not just dictatorships. Inconveniently, governments around the democratic world are pushing to expand their own censorship and surveillance powers as they struggle to address genuine problems related to cybercrime, cyberwar, child protection, and intellectual property.

Even more inconveniently, the U.S. government is the biggest and most powerful customer of American-made surveillance technology, shaping the development of those technologies as well as the business practices and norms for public-private collaboration around them. As long as the U.S. government continues to support the development of a surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human rights and civil liberties implications of its business — even rewarding secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies — the world’s dictators will remain well supplied by a robust global industry.

Click here to read the rest.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 05, Chapter 12 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Don’t Miss the Netizen Report

April 4, 2012 by

Over at Global Voices Advocacy, since the beginning of the year a great team of volunteers has been compiling and writing regular editions of The Netizen Report. If you want to follow news about how power is being exercised by governments and companies over people’s digital lives, and how the world’s netizens are pushing back, the Netizen Report is required reading. Last week we published the Resistance Edition. It begins with an update on the situation in Pakistan:

Pakistan’s anti-censorship activists recently proved how coordinated, global and local action can make a real difference.

Last month, Pakistan’s government publicly solicited proposals from companies around the world to create an automatic URL filtering system to block “objectionable” content. The request triggered a wave of protests which began with the local group Bolo Bhi and spread quickly to international groups like Access Now who wrote letters to tech companies’ CEOs urging them not to bid on the project, and launched online petitions which gathered tens of thousands of signatures. The Global Network Initiative (GNI), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Bytes for All, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, all issued statements urging technology companies to consider the impact of the tender on the human rights of citizens in Pakistan.

Their message was received and absorbed at least by some. Five of the eight companies petitioned, including Websense, Cisco, Verizon, Sandvine and McAfee, have declined join the Pakistan government’s censorship attempt. On the other hand, Huawei, Blue Coat, Netsweeper, and ZTE did not respond to calls from the advocacy groups before the deadline of the proposal on March 16. Now the Express Tribune has reported that as a result of the protests, the Pakistani government may step back from its censorship plans.

More broadly, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has voiced its concern over challenges to freedom of expression and the Pakistani government’s plans to censor the media and the Internet. It “demands the media, civil society and the people in general must be consulted before any changes are considered in the law. The media should do more to counter radicalisation and intolerance. It regrets that the misuse of blasphemy laws and the official apathy and appeasement of extremists have continued.”

Click here to read the rest of the report, rounding up global developments on censorship, surveillance, activism, Internet governance, new technical developments, and more.

Filed Under: Globalvoices

Consent@Google

March 4, 2012 by

Last month I ventured into the heart of Googledom (as I call it in the book). Here is the video of my talk and the ensuing discussion:

Filed Under: Video
«Previous Page
Next Page»