Human Rights First Joins With Internet Companies in Adopting Principles on Free Expression and Privacy

A key to implementation is a strong system of accountability

As the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others are reporting, the group of companies, human rights organizations, academics and investors that have been working to develop a code of conduct for the Internet industry announced yesterday that the effort is going forward as the Global Network Initiative (GNI). A website (www.globalnetworkinitiative.org) will soon be up and running where the public will be able to view the agreed-upon documents that provide a general framework for the activities of the initiative going forward.

Since 2006, Human Rights First has been at the table in the discussions leading to the launching of this initiative. We are committed to continuing to press companies to take a more assertive stand, individually and collectively, to challenge intrusive practices by governments that mute dissent and persecute individuals who speak out against government policies and practices.

Much of the media attention relating to this initiative has focused on the need for a strong accountability framework to ensure that companies are living up to the commitments they’ve made through GNI to protect their users. Human Rights First believes that a key measure of the initiative’s success will be the extent to which companies’ statements about freedom of expression and privacy can be verified through transparent reporting and independent monitoring and evaluation. We will press for a strong system of accountability in the negotiations relating to the drafting of a governance charter, reporting requirements and an assessment model going forward.

In addition to the company members of GNI—Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google—we’re pleased to be working with our colleagues at Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights in China and others. Human rights organizations have an important role to play in ensuring that GNI is a credible and effective means to protecting Internet freedom. We also will continue to work with other human rights organizations that are not at the table, looking to them for external advice, insight and advocacy as we move forward.

Throughout this process, we have been driven to pursue this important initiative by the stories of journalists and activists fighting to report stories, expressing ideas and rallying support for human rights using the Internet, whether on online newspapers, blogs, email or websites. Just this week, the government in Burma is reportedly increasing its already high degree of Internet censorship to prevent web-based advocacy and reporting in advance of the 20th anniversary of the pro-democracy uprising in Burma. The government’s desire to repress activism and the free exchange of ideas captures the tension that will be at the heart of GNI’s efforts—balancing the unprecedented capacity of the Internet to facilitate the free flow of information and the protection of individuals who seek to employ its power to make their voices heard.

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.