The Internet and Human Rights

The Internet and human rights may not be immediately connected in our minds when we first think of email, blogging, shopping, YouTube, etc. But the Internet has a very real impact on the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression and privacy around the world. While the Internet has created new paths for dissidents, activists, journalists and individuals to share ideas and critique government action, it has come with a new set of concerns about censorship, surveillance and privacy.

Freedom of expression and privacy rights are protected in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an international human rights convention to which almost all countries are party. The covenant protects the right to hold opinions without interference, the right to freedom of expression (including the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas in any form of media), and the right to privacy.

The Internet has opened up an entirely new—and often anonymous—way to express opinions and exchange information. When a government doesn’t care for particular viewpoints or ideas found on the Internet, it may try to curtail their expression through censorship and surveillance of online activity, and through intimidation and prosecution of the authors of the objectionable content.

A caveat: there’s a difference between sharing child porn on the Internet and sharing ideas about current events and basic freedoms. Where exactly that line falls is the subject of a different debate, but let me be clear that I’m not talking (for the moment) about legally authorized surveillance of Internet activity in pursuit of people breaking the law.

A few examples to highlight the intersection between human rights and the Internet:

The New York Times ran a story this week on the discovery that text messages sent using Tom-Skype, a joint venture between eBay (Skype’s parent company) and a Chinese company, are subject to surveillance and storage on Chinese servers. Nart Villeneuve, a researcher at the University of Toronto, uncovered the surveillance and identified a set of words that trigger storage of messages and the IP addresses of the computers used to send them. The list of words predictably includes “Taiwan” and “Olympics,” but also “milk powder,” reflecting concern about criticism of the government’s response to the discovery of tainted milk that has caused the deaths of at least four children and sickness in 50,000 others.

Secondly, Reporters Without Borders reports this week that a Malaysian blogger, Raja Petra Kamarudin is being tried for sedition in association with an article he published in the online newspaper Malaysia Today implicating members of the ruling party in the 2006 murder of a Mongolian woman.

These examples highlight the different ways surveillance and censorship take shape in countries where the government doesn’t tolerate the free expression of ideas, and particularly ideas that are critical of the government. Surveillance can be wholesale and general, targeting every Tom-Skype user in China, or it can be highly specific, targeting a particular journalist.

Whether it's protecting user data or providing Internet hardware to repressive governments, companies have an important role to play in respecting freedom of expression and privacy rights around the world. I’ll be following the discussion around the Internet and human rights, and particularly a new set of Internet principles that is expected to be announced soon addressing freedom of expression and privacy rights. Stay tuned.