Windows, bridges and cafes. That’s how blogs were described in a panel discussion at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on Thursday. The discussion, entitled “Expression under Repression”, was organized by Dutch non-governmental organisation Hivos and Global Voices, a non-profit global citizens’ media project. Blogs, which are a form of citizen’s publishing that makes it easy for people with internet access to run their own website, were windows because they shone a light not only on the inside of a country but also gave a view of the outside world. They were bridges because they created social islands in divided countries, for the first time giving a voice to marginalized communities such as women. They were cafes because they created a space away from the monopoly of the government where important debates could take place that might have long-term political effects.
This was how Iranian blogger and event panelist Hoosein Derackshan saw the effects of blogging on his country, where about 10 percent of the population have internet access and where there are an estimated 700 000 blogs. Blogs had become a phenomenon in the country, he said, presenting a threat to the government who were afraid of the organizing potential of the internet and its possible disruption to the social and political order.
In the lead up to the event, it was unclear whether or not it would go ahead. The Tunisian authorities had indicated that they were unhappy with any events that dealt with the subject of freedom of expression or human rights and had marked out five events due to be held at the official exhibition centre – the Kram exhibition centre outside Tunis – that they felt did not keep strictly with the theme of information and communications for development. High-level diplomatic interventions meant that the event was eventually able to go ahead, but throughout the period in which it was held there was wrangling in the corridors outside between Tunisian authority representatives and event organizers. At one stage during the meeting instructions were given to those attending that they were not allowed to hand out material to those assembled. The WSIS has been marred by the Tunisian authorities barring an alternative civil society meeting, by attacks on journalists and by the disruption of meetings.
Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, said a powerful shift was taking place in terms of global citizens media, which had the potential to democratize the media. In the past there had been no way to access and understand what people in other countries were saying, but as a result of the internet and the development of blogging, people were able to share their voices with the rest of the world.
While some people had questioned how relevant the internet was to the improvement of economic and social well being, it was critical because without individual empowerment development was not sustainable. Censorship was therefore very much connected with impeding development.
The issue of increased attempts by governments to control the internet came under the spotlight in a presentation by Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen’s Lab. Villeneuve has been studying filtering of the internet for the last three years. He described how states were beginning to create borders in cyber space through placing controls on the points of centralization on the internet infrastructure. Filtering was described as a specific technique used to implement controls and was in most cases about content. It could be implemented in various ways, from software on personal machines or through specialized technology at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or upstream at international connection points.
Most of the technology used for filtering was imported from the US, as was the case in Tunisia, where a US company had supplied the technology for blocking websites.
For the most part, governments were not transparent or accountable in their filtering activities. Some denied that it happened at all or obscured the fact that filtering was in place. Most were unable to answer what the blocking criteria was, or if there was a review or grievance process.
For the most part, filtering began as attempts to control content such as pornography, but an interesting trend, said Villeneuve, was that once filtering began it tended to migrate into other areas, with filtering seen as a quick fix to a larger social or political problem.
One of the worrying trends was that countries relied on commercial products for filtering, meaning that control over what was filtered therefore got ceded to the company developing the technology. There was also a large amount of “collateral damage” involved in filtering in that blocking one website could often lead to the blocking of thousands of others.
Filtering was in effect one mechanism and was linked with repressive controls and laws that caused people to self-censor. Reverse filtering was another problem, whereby filtering took place on the basis of geographic location. For example, because of the US embargo on Iran, websites were blocked for US web surfers.
Villeneuve said in some countries a “national interest” model was being pursued, with countries creating what were effectively intranets that could be accessed from within the country at lower cost than the international network. This meant that the local content would only be approved content and only wealthier internet users would be able to access the mainstream internet.
“What we are seeing is that non-transparent filtering is starting to turn into forms of political censorship and this has an impact on the internet and on democratic participation in a country. What filtering does is to isolate nodes of a network and cut them off – isolating them so that they can be more easily repressed. This is the opposite of what the internet is meant to be,” Villeneuve said.
Taurai Maduna, information officer for www.kubatana, a forum for civil society voices in Zimbabwe, also spoke as a panelist at the event. He said freedom of expression in Zimbabwe had been eroded through a variety of factors including repressive legislation such as the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). Adopted in 2002, POSA had been used by the government to make it difficult to hold public meetings. AIPPA had contributed to curtailing people’s freedom of expression. Zimbabwe media had been shrinking over the years.
He said the internet remained one of the few uncensored methods of communication and information dissemination and described the use of the internet to distribute information relevant to the civil society sector in Zimbabwe, the powerful use of email in civil society campaigns and Kubatana’s involvement in the training of organisations in the use of email and the internet in their activities. “You find that most civil society organisations, when a human rights violation happens, don’t know how to disseminate the information. Using email they can get the word out.” “What Kubatana does is to focus on local content – there is a lot of content out there but not a lot that focuses on Zimbabwe. We are helping Zimbabwean organisations to come together.”
* Please send comments to [email protected]
