These are the notes from my speech on future challenges to the internet at the World Humanist Congress 2014.

EXCUSE FORMATTING

In considering the threat to internet freedom, we need to consider the opportunity – and the opportunity that will be lost.

The Internet is the most significant technological development since the invention of the steam engine and will retrospectively, be seen as the most important technological invention of human history.

Why do I say this?

The Internet – I’m going to use this term as short hand for the network(s), the World Wide Web, social media etc – has reduced the net cost of copying information to almost zero.

This has profound implications for the way we:

i. do government,
ii. challenge authority,
iii. view human rights
and iv. learn

So in my consideration of the challenge, I’d like to outline what is positive, and therefore what could be lost if we curtail internet freedom.

1. Do government

Everyone remember the book, Bowling Alone? [1]

It was based on a 1995 essay that forsaw a future where, and I quote:

“Robert D. Putnam warns that our stock of social capital – the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities.

Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We’re even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues.”

The exact opposite has happened.

Who in the room signed a petition in the last 6 months?

Who is the room has attended a public event (gig, concert, a prostest, a political meeting) in the last six months?

And how many people learnt about that public event via the internet?

Last week in The Spectator, the magazine of the British right, had a piece by commentator Ross Clark entitled, “Individualism is Dead” [2], apparently we have now sucumbed to the lure of the crowd. Too many people are getting together, as many as 6 million lined the streets of Yorkshire to watch the Tour de France.

200,000 people now attend Glastonbury. Spurred on their friends showing how much fun they’re having on Facebook.

Sure we’re becoming more narcarsistic, but we’re also becoming more devoted to each other’s company.

We are not bowling alone.

This has profound implications for democracies.

In 1969, writer Norman Mailer ran to be the Democrat candidate for Mayor of New York.

He got crushed by the Democratic party machine candidates.

You can watch a highly entertaining BBC documentary about this [3].

Here was Mailer, a highly popular author. A hugely successful influencer backed by New York’s hipsters unable to break through into the political class.

It tells us something about the Internet:

1/ Politics used to be dominated by the block vote. Organised locally or in the workplace. 5,000 people working in a single dockyard. Strong union voices or even the factory bosses dominating how people voted, but able to leverage influence.

That died in the 1980s and wasn’t replaced by any collective forces.

Now, it’s creeping back. Thanks to petition sites and social media there are new movements enabled by technologies (as diverse as the Tea Party through to UK Uncut and the Occupy movement).

Suddenly politics is back and vibrant.

Change.org. Avaaz, new NGOs and new groups are revitalising politics and they are all enabled by new technologies and the power of social media.

Crowd-sourced election campaigns are with us now. Suddenly a candidate like Norman Mailer would have a serious chance.

We think of this as new, but it is a reversion to norm. Suddenly politics is about mobilising groups of people – not of elites, or dominant blocks.

It is a challenge to a generation of democratic politicians who grew up in the 1980s.

The challenge to autocracies is even greater still.

ii. The challenge to authority

It used to be very hard indeed to faciliate protests in autocratic states. This is mostly unknown, but the period 1964-66 was seen as an era of protest in Soviet Russia. There were a number of public protests, but no more than a dozen per year. This was seen as exceptional.

Now, even in autocratic China, protests are more commonplace.

Social media allows us to join a protest when we know it will reach a critical mass of participants. If I am a dissident in China I don’t want to protest alone, but if I protest with 1,000 people I am less likely personally to be arrested.

With social media, the impact can be most clearly seen with the Revolution Via Social Networks protest movement in Belarus. [4]

The movement originated on the Russian social network VKontakte and the group quickly grew to have over 27,000 members.

The group organised “clapping protests” through the streets of the capital Minsk, which quickly spread across the country.

Belarus had not seen significant political protests in nearly a decade.

Suddenly the group had 120,000 members (around 1.25% of the entire population of Belarus).

Eventually, the authorities fearing this new peaceful protest made a series of mass detentions.

A similar process can be seen when we look at the successful Maidan protests in the Ukraine where initial small protests quickly mushroomed into a successful revolution. The internet allowed protesters to organise and to share strategies. Ukrainians living abroad became part of the broader national conversation, thanks to the internet.

Part of why we are seeing so much political turbulence is also thanks to the internet:

We are in a new age of whistleblowers

Wikileaks & Snowden simply impossible just a decade before.

At the point where I was born a leak would have not been digital – but the photocopying of papers. [5]

NSA’s PRISM and GCHQ’s PRISM programmes we only know due to whistleblowers and their ability to distribute information – and contact journalists to help support this – securely and remotely.

Whistleblowing is having a huge impact on public policy.

Tunileaks – helped spark the Tunisian revolution. [6]

Wikileaks cables were processed by a Tunisian NGO (Nawaat) – showed people in Azerbaijan how their leader had stolen their money and how well-funded European lobby groups (such as TEAS) may be funded.

But, we’re seeing the old command and control mentality of our political leaders.

Chelsea Manning has been given what is effectively a life sentence.

Edward Snowden remains in exile in Putin’s Russia – it is a little known fact he ended up in Russia after the US government threatened European states that they would be punished if they let the plane he was on to South America pass over European soil.

We need to protect whistleblowers or we will only get whistleblowers with a sharp agenda.

3. Freedom of expression for marginalised voices

Global Voices — Hisham

Reduction to zero of net cost of distribution and social media allows
the dissemination of previously marginalised voices: transgender,
marginalised ethnic voices, marginalised caste voices, gay people in
Saudi etc. Huge impact on freedom of expression.

4. A new age of knowledge

Here is a PC Pro magazine review of Encylopedia Britanicca from 1995. [8]

Encylopedia Britannica on CD Rom cost $799 in 1995.

It had no video. It had no sound clips. It had no images whatsoever.

It did however have 66,000 articles.

Anyone want to hazard a guess how many articles Wikipedia has?

4,576,424 [9]

It will soon be 100 times bigger than an esteemed enyclopedia (the encyclopedia of note) that was developed over the course of 300 years.

It is not owned by a corporation.

People on $5 a day who can accord a mobile phone with 2.5g can access Wikipedia.

It is a fundamental change in the access to knowledge.

The internet has faciliated a huge leap forward in the ability of people to
self-educate and expand their knowledge. New online universities will
bring knowledge to tens of millions.

Old institutions that train a narrow elite will need to adapt or die.

So the internet can change the way we do government, challenge power elites particularly in authoritarian states, make government more open (whether voluntarily, or through whistleblowers) and democratise our access to knowledge globally.

That’s what we have to lose.

Notes:

[1] Bowling Alone

[2] Individualism is Dead, The Spectator

[3] Norman Mailer for Mayor of New York!

[4] Revolution Via Social Networks, Belarus

[5] Mike Harris, Protect Whistleblowers or you open the door to people like Julian Assange, The Independent

[6] Tunileaks by Nawaat

[8] PC Magazine, review of Encylopedia Britannica (1995)

[9] Growth in Wikipedia articles

Media plurality is just one of the issues raised in my recent report into the European Union’s record on freedom of expression, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression.

”Currently the EU does not have the legal competence to act in this area [media plurality] as part of its normal business. In practice, our role involves naming and shaming countries ad hoc, as issues arise. I am quite willing to continue to exercise that political pressure on Member States that risk violating our common values. But there’s merit in a more principled way forward” 

— Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes

Last week, Index on Censorship released ‘Time to step up: The EU and freedom of expression’ the first analysis of how the EU protects freedom of expression within the union but also externally in its near-neighbourhood and beyond. Attention was given to our call for the EU to do more to protect whistle-blowers after the failure of EU member states to give (or even consider to give) asylum to Edward Snowden, but the report also identified a number of significant challenges to media freedom within the European Union, in particular the growing problem of media ownership patterns that are reducing media plurality.

European plurality standards

The media in the EU is more concentrated than the media in North America even after taking into account population, geographical size and income. In fact, by global standards, media concentration in the EU is high indeed. This would perhaps be acceptable if the EU was merely a trading bloc, but it is isn’t. As the report reiterates, the EU is a broader project with a clear aspiration to protect and defend human rights.

This is a legal pre-requisite of membership and as the Treaty of Lisbon has made the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding, now an on-going commitment by member states. Every European Union member state has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and has committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Media plurality is an area the report argues where the European Commission has competency. Yet, the commission has until now left the promotion of media plurality up to member states. Now that this approach has been found wanting, the Commission is and needs to rethink its approach.

The Italian example

Italy is the most egregious example of an EU member state failing to protect media plurality. The famous Italian

“anomaly” had the country’s then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi exerting influence over the state broadcaster (which in turn was mandated by law to carry his political party’s views) alongside his personal ownership of the country’s largest television private television and advertising companies. The Gasperri Law of 2004 that was supposed to prevent media concentration may according to the OSCE have helped to preserve them.

While the European Parliament condemned Berlusconi’s personal influence over nearly 80% of the Italian television media, the Commission did not respond until July 2010 where it acted to remove restrictions placed on Sky Italia that prevented the satellite broadcaster from moving into terrestrial television.

Concentration throughout Europe

Italy is not the only EU member state where media ownership patterns have undermined plurality. The Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom demonstrated this year that strong media concentrations can be seen across the EU with large media groups holding ownership of a significant share of the domestic media in many member states. These media concentrations are significantly higher than the equivalent US figures.

The internet was supposed to drive competition in the media market, yet the Centre found the most concentration was in the online market. The reduction of the cost for new entrants to enter the media market facilitated by the internet was supposed to improve media plurality. There is alternative evidence to suggest this is happening.

Those who read their news in print in the UK, on average read 1.26 different newspapers; those who read newspapers online read 3.46 news websites. On the other hand, the convergence of TV stations, online portals and newspapers may produce even bigger media corporations.[1] New entrants to the market such as VICE Magazine and the Huffington Post have sold significant shares of their business to existing media corporations.

This process has not gone unnoticed by the Commission, with the independent High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism calling for digital intermediaries, including app stores, news aggregators, search engines and social networks, to be included in assessments of media plurality. The Reuters Institute is also concerned and has called for digital intermediaries to be required to “guarantee that no news content or supplier will be blocked or refused access”.

Match commitments with action

In a number of areas, the Index report has found the EU’s member states to be failing in their duty to protect freedom of expression adequately. Media plurality is one such area where a clear commitment by member states has not been matched by action from either the states themselves, or the European Commission. With increasing digital and media convergence, the role of the Commission will be crucial for the protection of media plurality. Unless the Commission is ready and prepared to act this convergence could have a significant impact on the range of opinions and views that European citizens are exposed to, with a chilling effect on freedom of expression in Europe. Italy may not be the anomaly in the near-future.

This blog was originally posted on the LSE Media Policy Project blog.

Europe’s last dictatorship is clamping down on online activism, with a new law effectively requiring everyone to be a state spy


As of this morning, the internet in Belarus got smaller. A draconian new law is in force that allows the authorities to prosecute internet cafes if their users visit any foreign sites without being “monitored” by the owner. All commercial activity online by businesses registered in Belarus is now illegal unless conducted via a .by (Belarusian) domain name. There are concerns that this gives Belarusian authorities the power to take the next step and criminalise Amazon and eBay’s operations unless they collaborate with the regime’s censorship and register there. The law effectively implements the privatisation of state censorship: everyone is required to be a state spy. Belarusians who allow friends to use their internet connection at home will be responsible for the sites they visit. Some have tried to defend the law, stating all countries regulate the internet in some form – but the Belarusian banned list of websites contains all the leading opposition websites. The fine for visiting these sites is half a month’s wages for a single view.

The Arab spring has been a wake-up call to the world’s remaining despots. The internet allowed images of open dissent to disseminate instantly. As Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak found out, once you reach a critical mass of public protest you haven’t got long to board your private jet. It’s a lesson learned by Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and Europe’s last dictator, and also by the Belarusian opposition.

Lukashenko attempted to destroy the political opposition after the rigged 2010 presidential elections. Seven of the nine presidential candidates were arrested alongside thousands of political activists. The will of those detained was tested: there are allegations that presidential candidates Andrei Sannikov and Mikalai Statkevich have been tortured while in prison. The opposition is yet to recover; many of its leading figures have fled to Lithuania and Poland.

Within this vacuum of leadership, the internet helped spur a civil society backlash. After the sentencing of the presidential candidates, a movement inspired by the Arab spring “The Revolution Via Social Networks” mushroomed into a wave of protests that brought dissent to towns across Belarus usually loyal to Lukashenko. As the penal code had already criminalised spontaneous political protest with its requirements for pre-notification, the demonstrations were silent, with no slogans, no banners, no flags, no shouting, no swearing – just clapping.

“The Revolution Via Social Networks” (RSN) helped co-ordinate these protests online via VKontakte (the biggest rival to Facebook in Russia and Belarus with more than 135 million registered users). RSN now has more than 32,000 supporters.

RSN splits its four administrators between Minsk and Krakow to keep the page active even when the state blocks access to the page, or the country’s secret police (hauntingly still called the KGB) intimidate them.

The protests were so effective at associating clapping with dissent that the traditional 3 July independence day military parade was held without applause with only the brass bands of the military puncturing the silence. As lines of soldiers, trucks, tanks and special forces paraded past Lukashenko and his six-year-old son dressed in military uniform, those gathered waved flags in a crowd packed with plain-clothed agents ready to arrest anyone who dared clap or boo.

The internet has kept the pressure on the regime in other ways. Protesters photograph the KGB and post their pictures online in readiness for future trials against those who commit human rights violations. A Facebook group “Wanted criminals in civilian clothes”, blogs and Posobniki.com all help to expose those complicit in the regime’s crimes. The web has also helped spread the stories of individuals who have faced brutality by the regime.

It’s this effectiveness that has made the internet a target for Lukashenko. The law enacted in July 2010 allowed the government to force Belarusian ISPs to block sites within 24 hours.

The new measures coming into force today merely build upon these restrictions. The official position of the Belarusian government from the operations and analysis centre of the presidential administration is: “The access of citizens to internet resources, including foreign ones, is not restricted in Belarus.” Yet, in reality the government blocks websites at will, especially during protests. Just after Christmas, the leading opposition website Charter 97 (which works closely with Index on Censorship) was hacked, its archive part-deleted and a defamatory post about jailed presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov published on the site. The site’s editor, Natalia Radzina, who has faced years of vile death and rape threats and escaped from Belarus after being placed in internal exile last year, says she has “no doubt” that the government was behind the hack. This is one of a series of attacks on Charter 97, which include co-ordinated DDOS (denial of service) attacks orchestrated by the KGB through an illegal botnet of up to 35,000 infected computers worldwide.

The regime has even darker methods of silencing its critics. In September 2010, I flew to Minsk to meet Belarusian civil society activists including the founder of the Charter 97 website, Oleg Bebenin. The day I landed he was found hung in his dacha, his leg broken, with his beloved son’s hammock wrapped around his neck. I spoke to his closest friends at his funeral including Andrei Sannikov and Natalia Radzina. No one believed he had committed suicide, all thought he had been killed by the state. Bebenin isn’t the only opposition figure to have died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances under Lukashenko’s rule, a chill on freedom of expression far more powerful than any changes in the law.

Today marks yet another low in Belarus’s miserable slide back to its Soviet past. Clapping in the street is now illegal. NGOs have been forced underground and their work criminalised.

Former presidential candidates languish in jail. The internet is the last free public space.

Lukashenko will do all he can to close down this freedom. In Europe, the battle has opened between the netizens of Belarus and its government. Who wins will be a matter of interest for us all.

This article was originally published in the Guardian on 6 January.

This article was originally published by Dissent on their excellent Arguing the World website.

Content creators haven’t had it easy in the last few years. The almost endless expansion of the Internet’s capacity to move content—first copyrighted text, then images, audio, and video—has fundamentally undermined the pay model of those who produce content. So the lobbying for draconian measures to protect traditional notions of copyright in Britain’s Digital Economy Act has been intense.

Lobbyists told politicians that:

British musicians, singers, actors, writers and directors are known and loved around the world and create some of our greatest assets. Together they contribute more that 7 percent to the UK economy.

The Digital Economy Bill brings both of these together. It will ensure that British creators, entertainment companies and the 1.8 million people who work in and around the cultural sector are respected and rewarded in the future as they have been in the past, and that they are fairly paid when they put their work online.

The lobbyists won. The Digital Economy Bill that was rushed through Parliament contained controversial clauses that potentially allowed “a three strikes and you’re out” rule that would block access to the Internet for users who are alleged by content creators to have downloaded or shared copyrighted material.

Although the specific clause that allowed for disconnecting a user’s access to the Internet did not pass (though the government intends to bring this back to Parliament after the election on May 6), the UK’s communications regulator (known as Ofcom) will still be able to order Internet service providers (ISPs) to sanction speed blocks, bandwidth shaping, site blocking, account suspension, and other limits against an ISP customer accused of downloading copyrighted material.

While content creators have every right to defend their material, the provisions in the Digital Britain Bill are arguably an extremely authoritarian way of going about this. The Courts will not decide whether an individual should be barred from having an Internet connection—but a tribunal panel at Ofcom. And if individuals appeal, they will shoulder one third of the costs of such an appeal without recourse to legal aid. As a result, it will only be a matter of time before national newspapers will carry stories of poor disabled people on council estates facing disconnection from the outside world—and with no money to appeal such a decision.

If you think this only affects Internet users in Britain, think again. As with so much illiberal legislation, once mandated in one country, it begins to creep abroad. As Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute writes in the latest edition of the Index on Censorship magazine: “The European Commission has been secretly negotiating a new anti-counterfeiting treaty with the US, Japan and other developed nations that would mandate a three strikes policy.”

THE DIGITAL Economy Bill also contains clauses that allows a secretary of state, by order, to apply technical measures (as described above) against any user for any reason—for example, a political or religious Web site considered extreme by the government of the day.

In 2008, the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told BBC Radio 4:

We need to work with internet service providers, we need to actually use some of the lessons we’ve learned, for example about how to protect children from paedophiles and grooming on the internet to inform the way in which we use it to prevent violent extremisms and to tackle terrorism as well.

In the event of another homegrown terrorist attack on UK soil, amending the Digital Economy Act to give a secretary of state the power to ban any website he or she chooses would be entirely possible under existing clauses of the act. At most it would require a “statutory instrument,” a type of mini-bill, that doesn’t need to be voted through Parliament but instead is voted through “on the nod” by a small Committee of MPs (this is how government Whips almost always get their way by convention).

The Digital Economy Bill passed through Parliament with almost no debate. Tom Watson MP, a close ally of the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was moved to rebel against his party. With legislation now at European level and the possibility of this legislation creeping abroad, what happens next? Ian Brown suggests it’s not over yet:

The House of Commons may have rushed through the Digital Economy Act with minimal scrutiny, but I think public protest over its far-ranging provisions is just warming up. Most of the UK’s 50m Internet users are only just hearing about this threat to their ability to work, learn and express themselves online.

The Internet’s democratic potential will be damaged by powers in the Act for users to be disconnected and websites to be blocked. But in the meantime, the tens of thousands of citizens who complained about the lack of debate to their MPs will be thinking about next month’s general election. Voters have an ideal opportunity to favour candidates that support freedom of expression and promise to block the secondary legislation that is still needed in the next Parliament to bring many of the Act’s provisions into force.