Protecting online freedom
THE recent exchange of harsh words between Washington and Beijing highlights a major concern for Internet users all over the world. How this debate plays out in their own countries will determine how free individuals are to express themselves online.
The latest controversy springs from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s landmark speech in support of Internet freedom as a part of American foreign policy.
In her talk at the Newseum in Washington D.C., Clinton pointed to renewed threats to the free flow of information, citing Internet censorship in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and Uzbekistan.
These activities, she said, were diametrically opposed to the United States’ vision of “a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.”
The US, she said, sees an urgent need to protect individual freedoms – including freedom of expression – on the digital frontiers of the 21st Century.
“This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, e-mail, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas—and created new targets for censorship,” she said.
“As I speak to you today, government censors are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.”
Clearly referring to China, she continued:
“Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They have expunged words, names and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which tells us that all people have the right ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.”
Clinton also talked about the freedom to connect.
“Governments should not prevent people from connecting to the Internet, to Web sites, or to each other,” she said. “The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly in cyberspace.”
Finally, Clinton suggested that freedom online wasn’t just good policy, it’s good business, too.
“To use market terminology, a publicly-listed company in Tunisia or Vietnam that operates in an environment of censorship will always trade at a discount relative to an identical firm in a free society,” Clinton said. “If corporate decision makers don’t have access to global sources of news and information, investors will have less confidence in their decisions. Countries that censor news and information must recognize that, from an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech. If businesses in your nation are denied access to either type of information, it will inevitably reduce growth.”
As an example, Clinton cited Google’s recent announcement that it would pull out of China unless it stopped censoring search results. She also urged the Chinese government to investigate reports that hackers, exploiting a security hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, were able to hack into the Google Mail accounts of human rights activists protesting Chinese policies.
“The Internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it’s great that so many people there are now online,” she said. “But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.”
China reacted angrily to Clinton’s speech, denying any state involvement in the Google attacks and urging the United States to stop using “so-called Internet freedom to make groundless attacks on China.” A foreign ministry spokesman added that “China has its own national situation, culture and tradition” and administers the Internet according to the law, “which is in line with the practice adopted worldwide.”
Sadly, this is an argument we are likely to hear, not only from China, but also from other countries that practice censorship.
Aside from China, Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam “actively and aggressively” censor the Internet, the press freedom watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said in its March 2009 report.
Other countries, including Australia, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Thailand were also in the group’s watch list.
Often, censorship will come in the guise of “protecting” citizens from the evils of pornography, the stated purpose of a new draft law in Italy, which wants to vet videos before they are uploaded to the Web. Australia, too, plans to install Internet filters this year. Even in the Philippines, in the wake of the Katrina Halili sex scandal last year, there was talk of Internet censorship.
A bill in Congress, Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2009, seeks to create a new body, whose job it is “to prepare and implement appropriate and effective measures to prevent and suppress cybercrime” such as cybersex, child pornography and spam. The bill does not specifically mention Internet filters, but it’s conceivable that these might be used and justified on the basis of suppressing cybercrimes.
The problem with such measures, however, is that they involve some central authority telling us what we can read or view, and controlling what we can say. It might be about sex today, but could easily become about religion or politics tomorrow.
And, unlike libel laws that punish the guilty only after the a defamatory statement has been made, filters and other such censorship measures that seek to suppress content are a form of prior restraint that prevent an idea from being expressed – and that is the end of free speech.