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Internet Freedom and Privacy

The Internet and other communication technologies have created unprecedented opportunities to share information, opening up paths for pro-democracy groups, activists, journalists and individuals around the world to organize, and hold their governments accountable.

But new technological tools are vulnerable to exploitation by governments aiming to crush dissent and deny human rights. All governments struggle to balance a need to deal with serious issues such as security, hate speech, and child safety for their citizens but in repressive societies, these concerns often serve as convenient pretext to engage in censorship or surveillance of the Internet that violates the rights and privacy of users and threatens the free flow of information.

Watch this video to see why Internet Freedom is important.

Human Rights First is working on several fronts to protect Internet freedom, including:

  • The Global Network Initiative (GNI): we helped launch and continue to actively support this multistakeholder initiative to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.
  • The “Netizen” project: maintaining free access to the Internet or communications tools is essential to the work of journalists, activists and bloggers around the world who use them to organize. Working with these netizens gives us a window into how to maintain that space.
  • U.S. government advocacy: we promote policies with the U.S. administration and Congress that support these strategies. Read more about Congressional action in this area, and join our email list to see how you can help!

New technology demands new thinking about how companies, governments and civil society groups can each work to promote Internet freedom.

 

Working with Internet Companies on Free Expression and Privacy: The Global Network Initiative

Human Rights First is part of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), a multistakeholder initiative designed to address efforts by governments to pressure information and telecommunications companies to comply with policies that violate users’ freedom of expression and privacy.

The GNI brings together companies from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, human rights organizations, academics and investors to address laws and policies of governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance and to promote the rule of law and the adoption of laws, policies and practices that protect and respect freedom of expression and privacy.

This diverse coalition has developed new principles and guidelines rooted in fundamental human rights guarantees of freedom of expression and privacy. These commitments are supported by a strong accountability framework and ongoing learning and capacity building. Learn more about the GNI.

 

“Netizens” Fighting against Repression

Meet our featured netizens: journalists, activists and bloggers from around the world who use the Internet and communications technologies to organize democratic movements, hold their governments accountable, or simply express themselves freely. Listen as they discuss the challenges they face with various forms of repression.

Maziar Bahari – Iran
Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian playwright, film-maker and journalist. During the 2009 election protests, Bahari was arrested, held in solitary confinement, and beaten for crimes such as insulting the Supreme Leader and undermining the security of the state. Read more» The Iranian government like any other government wants to have legitimacy. They do not want negative publicity and that is why they are trying to create obstacles for the free flow of information. They do not want the young Iranians to report what is going on in Iran. That's why whenever there is a demonstration, whenever there is some sort of turbulence in Iran they narrow the bandwidths of the Internet, they try to shut down social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or You Tube, in the last instance, last week, we saw they even managed to shut down Gmail accounts. The telecommunications company, landlines and cell phones are in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards. As with the internet, whenever there is a demonstration and whenever there is some sort of turbulence in the country they shut down the SMS text messaging service in the country and they have also passed new cyber crime laws and digital crime laws that effectively can incriminate sending messages that are not liked by the Iranian government. And even though those messages can look quite innocuous to the outside observer the Iranian government can always find a way to incriminate a joke or a report or a simple message that is sent by a cell phone user to another cell phone user.

Click here to listen to Maziar Bahari discuss obstacles to Internet freedom in Iran.

Gamal Eid – Egypt
Gamal Eid, a human rights lawyer in Egypt, has taken the lead on critical human rights cases and founded an organization that supports freedom of opinion, expression, and belief. He’s awaiting trial on charges including “misuse of a communication tool” for a post made on the Internet in 2007 accusing an Egyptian Judge of infringement of intellectual property rights for plagiarizing a report of his organization. Read more» Egypt tried to block and censor the Internet. But now they use torture and kidnap the bloggers and torture them. And sometimes they took their password from them and to erase and delete the whole website. It's different from Syria, or Tunisia or Saudi Arabia. They are enemy of Internet and hundreds of thousands of sites are blocked there. Egypt... did not block website but they create a unit - police for the Internet...they send some spy to write against some minister for example so they will find reasons to arrest people and people who have this discussion. After that, they will kidnap them, torture them, the bloggers and the Internet activists, take the passport and send them to prison until the hurts on their body become normal. So for us, there is no evidence about what happened - usually two months, first two weeks for torture and taking the password and deleting and one month and a half just to be sure that there is no evidence about what they have done.

Click here to listen to Gamal Eid describe repressive tactics used by the Egyptian government to suppress Internet freedom.

Oleg Kozlovsky – Russia
Oleg Kozlovsky, a pro-democracy leader in Russia, has faced harassment, arrest, and imprisonment by Russian authorities for his involvement in peaceful protests. Read more» The Internet is one global network and you cannot really isolate a part of it and think in a part of it there will be freedom and the other part will be completely uncensored and we can see in Russia when they try to censor it inside, they begin to censor it outside. A few months ago there was a very sophisticated and very massive hacker attack on a blogger who lives in Georgia who posted some material ... and by this attack they managed to pull down Twitter for several hours and they managed to slow down a lot of other websites like Blogspot and Live Journal just to attack one blogger and, of course, we don't know exactly who did this attack but it really looks like many other hacker attacks that took place in the past and that were targeted on opposition, human rights, democratic movements and on independent newspapers and media outlets and so we believe the government is somehow connected with these attacks and at least it doesn't make any investigations. So I'm sure that it is in the interest of foreign governments and western international companies to watch this situation closely because they can also become victims of these attacks.

Click here to listen to Oleg Kozlovsky talk about how the Russian government limits basic rights to freedom of expression and privacy

Iryna Vidanava – Belarus
Iryna Vidanava has been active in promoting civil society and independent media in Belarus for more than a decade. Founder and editor-in-chief of an award-winning magazine, she has been named one of the “World’s Top Dissidents” by Foreign Policy Magazine
in recognition of her efforts to fight for freedom of speech in Belarus.
Read more»		 It was clear for several years when the Belarusian government delegation went to China to learn there how to control the Internet, independent sector of Internet was growing fast. It is definitely irritating to the authorities because they cannot control. The blogging part is really [booming], with its pluses and minuses, but it is quite a beacon in Belarus. So, keeping that in mind, and knowing that we are known as very provocative publication and that we are not going to restrain ourselves because of those thoughts in our heads, first of all our domain and our server outside are of the country as true for most of the independent websites in Belarus - so that is the first thing that everybody does going outside the country. Of course we have - we have certain agreements with other partners that if we are blocked at some moment then our content will appear on other websites ... But in February of this year 2010, the new decree on Internet regulation was signed by the President. It was anticipated, the first information leaked a couple of months ago. The text of this first draft was totally unclear, the text of this new decree is as well quite unclear, but we already know that they will try to control the business part of Internet, meaning that any commercial activity in Belarusian segment of Internet should be registered legally with Belarusian authorities. And then we know they will try to control the providers and the users. So now what happened before was blocking certain websites, with striking down certain activities, with using or watching emails when it's possible, now its all legalized. So I think that if the democratic movement is smart enough and quick enough, we can self organize to actually start a huge public campaign explaining what's happening and what the consequences of this regulation might be. We definitely need help from the international community to draw attention to this new law, because it is a huge topic and because in the propaganda Lucashenko constantly refers to the European experience in regulating the Internet, and to the US experience of regulating Internet, that's something new but he knows probably more than we do.

Click here to listen to Iryna Vidanava talk about restrictions on Internet freedom in Belarus.