ICT for Humanity
Information & Communication Technology for Human Rights, Humanitarian action, and social change
From Old Dominion University’s Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group blog:
“The Egyptian revolution on the 25th of January 2011 was unlike any other revolution in history because of the role of social media. Several blogs, Storify entries, web pages, channels on YouTube where created to document the revolution. Several books were even published documenting the 18 days. All of these contributions were made by the public, not historians, utilizing the tools of web 2.0. As a result of all these contributions we have an enormous digital content including thousands of posts, tweets, images, videos and sound files narrating and documenting the revolution. Unfortunately, at the first anniversary of this revolution over 10% of this digital content is already gone.”
“As stated earlier, there are several resources that curate the Egyptian Revolution and we want to investigate as many of them as possible. At the same time we need to diversify our resources and the types of digital artifacts that are embedded in them. Tweets, videos, images, embedded links, entire web pages and books were included in our investigation. For the sake of consistency, we will limit our analysis to resources created within the same time frame. For this purpose we tried to use the period of 20th of January until the 1st of March was selected as our temporal filter. Finally, to remove the possibility of transient errors skewing the results, we repeated our experiment 3 times over a period of three weeks before declaring a resource missing.
Our test collection consisted of:
- Three stories from Storify, which contributed a total of 222 resources (26 of which are videos, 179 are images and the remaining 17 are links).
- IamJan25.com website, from which we investigated all the pages containing user-contributed images (1225 images on yfrog and 1703 images on twitpic making a total of 2928 unique image links) and videos (2387 unique video links on YouTube).
- Tweets From Tahrir book having 1118 tweets, 23 of which have embedded images.
- 1000Memories/egypt webpage and its associated resources.”
Experiment results and data available here.
Post from Adam Clayton Powell III on the CPD blog on the battle over the Internet – full text available here.
“WASHINGTON — If you think China and Iran are where the fight for Internet freedom are centered, you may want to reconsider.
According to Bob Boorstin, Google’s Director of Corporate and Policy Communications, the crucial battles today are elsewhere.
“India is number one,” he said, when I asked which country was at the top of his list. Another is Russia, where he said the problem is the corrupt private individuals who may soon hold the Internet for ransom.
“You may soon be paying large fees to mysterious figures,” he predicted, for Internet access there.
Those countries, along with Indonesia, the Philippines and others described as worrisome, are issuing new laws and regulations that may limit free expression online and free access to information. Boorstin singled out two large, industrialized democracies for special attention.
“It has gone past the critical point in Korea; it gives me nightmares,” he said. “Brazil always worries me because there are a lot of prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves, and foreign companies are an easy target.”
Boorstin described all of these as the countries “in the middle.” He explained those are the countries between the very free – he named the U.S. and the Netherlands – and those at the other extreme, such as China and Iran.
“Which way are they going to go?” he asked. “That’s the question I’m focused on for the moment.”
Ben Scott, Policy Advisor for Innovation in Secretary of State Clinton’s office, was another participant at this morning’s forum sponsored by the Media Access Project. Scott agreed with Boorstin, mostly, but articulated a different set of criteria for the front lines of Internet freedom.
“Countries with rapid growth rates in Internet connectivity will deal with these questions more rapidly,” he said.
According to Scott, some of the most senior, educated people in foreign governments still do not understand the Internet.
“They see it as a problem that needs to be controlled,” said Scott, “not a net benefit to humanity.”
Asked what would drive the major developments on the Internet over the next 12-18 months, Boorstin and Scott both pointed to 3G- and 4G-equipped mobile telephones.
“The key development is smart phones,” said Scott. “More people are connecting to the Internet for the first time, and that will up the stakes. There will be a whole lot more money on the table.” And that money, he predicted, would be “pushing for business opportunities.”
“Whatever we see in the next 12-18 months will be in the mobile sphere,” agreed Boorstin. “Anybody who is looking at what’s next on the Internet will have to look toward the hand-held device and what it will allow people to do in everyday commerce, in organizing for political change, and free expression.”
Boorstin said he had good news, too, pointing to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, which “got the essence of the open Internet right.”"
“PARIS — As a rising tide of digital dissent raises alarms in many capitals around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Tuesday called on member countries to “promote and protect the global free flow of information” online.
The O.E.C.D. , a group of 34 developed countries, urged policy makers to support investment in digital networks and to take a light touch on regulation, saying this was essential for promoting economic growth via the Internet.
“It’s really a milestone in terms of making a statement about openness,” said Karen Kornbluh, the U.S. ambassador to the O.E.C.D. “You can’t really get the innovation you need in terms of creating jobs unless we work together to protect the openness of the Internet.”
The approval of the recommendations by the O.E.C.D. council builds on a communiqué issued at a meeting in June, when the broad outlines of the policy were drawn up. The guidelines are not binding, but are intended to work through the power of persuasion . Also, the Internet recommendations will from now on be included among the criteria for assessing candidates for membership in the O.E.C.D., which is based in Paris.
While the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other movements have shown the potential of the Internet for organizing political protest, there has also been a backlash, with a number of governments stepping up their efforts to crack down on free speech in the digital sphere.”
More at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/technology/oecd-calls-on-members-to-defend-internet-freedoms.html
The Global Network Initiative’s response to SOPA and PIPA:
“The Global Network Initiative (GNI) welcomes the decision by Congressional leaders to postpone immediate consideration of proposed intellectual property legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives. GNI supports the goal of protecting intellectual property online, but we firmly believe that the approach used in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect-IP (PIPA) is flawed and poses an unacceptable threat to global online freedom of expression and innovation.
We are encouraged by the worldwide outpouring of concern around these issues and urge Congress to adopt an inclusive and transparent approach as it considers how legislation might effectively protect intellectual property and uphold fundamental rights to free expression online. As the U.S. government considers alternative measures, the companies, civil society organizations, investors, and academics that make up GNI collectively recommend a transparent approach that not only includes content and Internet companies, but also civil society organizations and representatives of the users of the Internet.
The interconnected nature of the Internet means that a well-intended but narrow effort to address one set of problems can have serious unintended consequences on the integrity of the Internet and the rights of its users. Crafting effective legislation on technology requires the engagement of diverse stakeholders, especially those with deep understanding of both technical and human rights considerations.
The global implications of U.S. legislation merit particular attention, as laws and policies developed in Washington can serve as precedent or justification for those of other countries, with the potential to undermine the Internet’s capacity as a tool for protecting and advancing fundamental freedoms. With this in mind, we encourage the careful assessment of the global impact of proposed legislative provisions on human rights, especially freedom of expression and privacy.”
Upcoming event from the Media Access Project The Global Internet and the Free Flow of Information:
Please join MAP on Tuesday, February 7th, 9:30 am-12:30 pm at the Pew DC Conference Center for part two of MAP’s fifth annual Forum Series.
The entire series is free and open to the public. Continental breakfast will be available.
Please RSVP to Mera Szendro Bok at mera@mediaaccess.org
Ben Scott, Policy Advisor for Innovation at the Office of the Secretary of State, US Department of State
Bob Boorstin, Director, Corporate and Policy Communications at Google
Cynthia Wong, Director, Project on Global Internet Freedom, Center for Democracy and Technology bio
David Sullivan, Policy and Communications Director, Global Network Initiative bio
Christopher Soghoian, Security and Privacy Researcher bio
Ashkan Soltani, Security and Privacy Researcher bio
Mark MacCarthy, Vice President for Public Policy, Software and Information Industry Association and Adjunct Professor, Communications, Culture and Technology Program, Georgetown University bio
Additional speakers TBA
The Global Internet and the Free Flow of Information:
Events throughout the world have highlighted the role that the Internet plays in influencing the civil engagement, revolutions and the political process. The creation and deployment of free social technologies has reduced the barriers for individuals and groups who create and distribute their own content and those using technologies to organize groups or movements. As a result, some governments see the Internet as a threat to stability and seek to minimize its influence. Others seek to create a domestic Internet environment by placing barriers to content from other countries. Still other countries see their role as facilitating the creation of an unrestrained Internet marketplace of ideas, even as they try to impose restrictions on commercial uses in order to protect trade and intellectual property.
This forum will bring together diplomats, technologists, human rights advocates, and industry to discuss the freedom of expression opportunities and challenges presented to a variety of stakeholders by the Internet and new technologies.
9:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Freedom of expression threats and challenges that online stakeholders face:
This panel will bring together technologists, diplomats, human rights advocates and industry experts. The panel will focus on the variety of challenges online freedom stakeholders face moving forward in 2012. Relevant issues to be discussed include freedom of expression issues, cyber security issues and surveillance tech issues in the context of how they affect online users free speech rights. Participants will also discuss the future role of innovation on how people will gain access to information.
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Protecting online freedoms through effective public policy:
This panel will bring a variety of expert stakeholders together from government, industry and civil society to discuss the public policy forums and issues that are shaping freedom of expression online and internet governance. Currently, there are many discussions and actions being taken by international and public institutions that have the potential to shape the future of the Internet. Issues discussed will include, by whom and how the Internet should be governed, the challenges and importance of a multi-stakeholder approach, the role that network management plays and the creation of Internet Policy Principles.
Location:
South America Room
Pew Conference Center
901 E Street Northwest
Washington DC 20004
Twitter hashtag: #MAPForum
This event will not be live streamed, so please plan on attending.
From a UN report on the right to freedom of expression and the Internet:
“In recent months, we have seen a growing movement of people around the world who are advocating for change – for justice, equality, accountability of the powerful and respect for human rights. The Internet has often played key a role in such movements by enabling people to connect and exchange information instantly and by creating a sense of solidarity,” said UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, when presenting his annual report to the UN General Assembly.
The Internet has become a vital communications tool which individuals can use to exercise their right to freedom of expression and exchange information and ideas. Still, La Rue noted that in some countries where Internet access is widely available, online content may be heavily restricted. In other countries, where online content is not restricted, the Internet may not be accessible to the majority of the population.
The Special Rapporteur reminded States that, as a general rule, they must ensure that everyone enjoys his or her right to freedom of opinion and expression by maintaining free flow of information on the Internet, and ensuring that the Internet is available, accessible and affordable to all. However, La Rue recognized that freedom of expression can be restricted in very exceptional cases in line with international human rights instruments.
“Any restriction must be established by law and be in accordance with international standards; must pursue legitimate grounds for restriction as set out in article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and be proven to be necessary and proportionate,” stressed La Rue. “Expression such as child pornography, incitement to genocide, advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence and incitement to terrorism are all prohibited under international law.”
The Rapporteur advised that decisions to regulate content, such as blocking web sites, must be taken by a competent judicial authority independent of political, commercial or other unwarranted influences. He also recommended that all other types of expression which do not fall under the four exceptional cases delineated above be decriminalized to fully guarantee the right to freedom of expression.
“Governments are using increasingly sophisticated technologies and tactics which are often hidden from the public to censor online content and monitor and identify individuals who disseminate critical or sensitive information, which frequently lead to arbitrary arrests and detention,” La Rue said.
To reduce the digital divide between populations and allow indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities to participate in a truly global society, the UN expert recommended that websites be translated into multiple languages. Moreover, Internet literacy skills should also be included in school curricula and taught to all children at an early age.
“Three-quarters of the world’s population lacks access to the Internet,” La Rue noted. “Although Internet access is not yet recognized as a right in international human rights law, States have a positive obligation to create an enabling environment so that all individuals can exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression. This includes putting in place a concrete and effective policy and the political will to ensure universal access to the Internet”.”
More on Frank La Rue’s work as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression on the Internet is available here.
From a Huffington Post piece on the hacker group Anonymous:
“This struggle for control of the Internet goes back years, but it reached a crescendo just the day before the attack on the Justice Department, when Wikipedia went dark in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the controversial anti-piracy bills that were working their way through Congress. Google collected 4.5 million signatures on a petition against the bills. Mozilla redirected traffic from its sites. And thousands of other protesters, from Tumblr and WordPress to Some Guy with a Blog, blacked out their sites, took to the streets and posted messages opposing the legislation, saying it would hurt their business and amounted to censorship.
Across the battle lines stood film studios, music labels, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses intent on defending their copyrighted property from illegal sharing at a time when the Internet has made it possible for, say, a digital copy of “V For Vendetta” — an anon fave and the source of their iconic grinning Guy Fawkes masks — to travel from an iPad in the United States to a piracy site in Brazil to another viewer’s laptop in Korea.
These companies have faced a tricky problem: How do you sue a piracy site when it’s based in another country, especially one with looser intellectual-property laws? The bills’ answer: You don’t. You go after their enablers — websites that drive traffic to the piracy sites by posting links to them, even if they only do so inadvertently. Critics argued that the cost of getting rid of these links would drive smaller sites out of business.
Two days after the protests, in the face of public outrage and lobbying efforts from the tech sector, Congress shelved SOPA indefinitely. But that doesn’t mean the war is over. As one Anonymous tweet warned about SOPA: “It can be brought back anytime. The bill must be KILLED.”
Like the web companies involved in the protests, anons tend to argue that anti-piracy legislation could send the Internet down an ever-tightening spiral of government control. Many anons go further, portraying such bills as deliberate assaults on the right to free speech. They say they oppose anti-piracy efforts on idealistic grounds, not that they don’t enjoy a bit of pirated entertainment from time to time. In general, obeying the law isn’t their priority. “The Internet is the Wild West,” Phoenix said on the night of the attacks, “and Anonymous will fight against any attempt to tame it.”"
Excerpts from TechCrunch guest post by Richard Fontaine, a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security and the co-author (with Will Rogers) of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age:
“As an ever greater proportion of human activity is mediated through Internet-based technologies, the extent of our online rights — and what we really mean by “Internet freedom” — will take on greater importance in political and economic life. After a year in which new communications tools were used to dramatic effect throughout the Middle East, and at a time when autocratic governments are cracking down against online freedom, it is worth pausing to get straight the concept so many hold dear.
We might start by distinguishing between two linked but distinct concepts: freedom of the Internet and freedom via the Internet. Freedom of the Internet refers to the ability to engage in unfettered expression in cyberspace. This vision of Internet freedom, as scholar Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, represents freedom from something: censorship, government surveillance, DDoS attacks, and so on. The principles undergirding freedom of the Internet are articulated in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which describes as inalienable the right to receive and impart information without interference, “throughout any media and regardless of frontiers.”
In this sense, Internet freedom is little different from the notion of free expression, whose advocacy has been an element of U.S. foreign policy for decades. After all, American ambassadors have long pressed foreign governments to allow a free press, release jailed journalists and cease jamming unwanted broadcasts.
Freedom via the Internet is at once both a more alluring and complicated idea. Its advocates suggest that more online freedom can lead to more offline freedom; that is, the free flow of ideas over the Internet promotes democratization. Anyone who witnessed the Arab Spring cannot fail to be moved by the use of new communications tools by protestors to foment political change – nor by the desperate attempts by Mubarak’s Egypt, Qaddafi’s Libya, and others to stop them from doing so.
Then there is Internet access itself. While taking away the ability of individuals to engage in legitimate online expression seems clearly to represent a human rights violation, it is difficult to view governments that fail to provide broadband for their populations as human rights violators.
It is important that those who care about Internet freedom achieve a measure of conceptual clarity, because those who would abridge it are using definitions for their own ends.”
…
“None of this will be easy. Even some of America’s closest democratic friends have views of Internet freedom that are more restrictive than those widely held in the United States. Witness recent attempts by the government of India to have key Internet companies remove objectionable content or restrictions in Europe on online speech that insults population groups. But the effort begins with getting straight precisely what we mean by “Internet freedom.” The idea – and the reality – is too important to muddle.”
Read Richard Fontaine and Will Rogers’ report Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age here.
Highlights from Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner’s remarks at the State of the Net Conference (full transcript available here):
“People are using technology as a battering ram against the walls of fear and isolation that dictatorships erect to keep their populations quiescent. In country after country where governments have controlled nearly every aspect of life, people are demanding openness and accountability, as well as jobs and opportunity, using old ways and new ways to make themselves heard. They’ve done it online, and by risking life and limb on the streets; they’ve done it in song and text message, and in videos smuggled across borders when the Internet is turned off.
It turns out that two billion networked users are nearly impossible to silence.
In my world, the world of human rights, this new capacity for instant communication and participation has created an unprecedented dynamic. Let me give you an example. Last week in Syria, Arab League Human Rights monitors complained — unofficially — that they were not being permitted to view protests or interview demonstrators or travel freely to observe events. Yet that same day, anyone with an Internet connection could watch horrific footage on YouTube of wounded protestors in Syria who appeared to be dying on camera.
Syria is not having a Facebook revolution or a Twitter revolt or a YouTube winter. Syria is having a mass outbreak of courage. Tens of thousands of demonstrators know they risk arrest, torture and death if they take to the streets. But they’re doing it anyway. Day after day. Their courage does not emanate from any digital device. It comes from knowing that they are not alone.
So yes, the Internet is empowering. Yet we agree with Vincent Cerf, who wrote in an op-ed piece last month that Internet access is not itself a human right. Freedom of expression, assembly and association are human rights. Technology can enable those rights. Technology is not a substitute for political organizing or advocacy or persuasion. The Internet does not bring people into the street. Grievances do. The Internet did not spark the Arab Spring. Injustice did. It’s worth noting that the Arab Spring did not start because of Twitter. It started because of the heartbreaking decision by one vegetable vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, to set himself ablaze.
Connective technologies are powerful tools for strengthening and amplifying the bonds between people and organizations — for good and for ill. Last year, they enabled terrorists to recruit, and they enabled global cooperation to solve a myriad of human problems by transcending time zones, borders and even language barriers. The same connective technologies that enabled teenage bullies to orchestrate the persecution of their victims also enabled Russian activists to monitor parliamentary elections and then organize huge street demonstrations protesting the unfairness of those elections.
But let me be clear about U.S. policy: We don’t promote Internet freedom or connective technologies as a means of promoting “regime change.” We promote the freedoms of expression, association and assembly online and offline because these universal freedoms are the birthright of every individual. Human rights and human dignity are not bestowed upon people by groups or governments, and no government should feel empowered to deny them. It is up to every individual — and therefore the people of every country — to decide how to exercise them.
Let me state for the record that international law applies to online behavior. Full stop. We do not need to reinvent international human rights law, or our enduring principles, to account for the Internet. No deed is more evil — or more noble — when it is committed online rather than offline. You can’t sell child pornography in Farragut Square or Tahrir Square, and you can’t sell it on the Internet, either. You can’t break into a theater and steal the movie reels and you can’t steal movies online, either. You can’t beat up and gag a peaceful protestor and you can’t jail her for a blog post criticizing a government policy, either.
Now, I said earlier that we agree that no one has a human right to any particular technology. But at the same time, we believe that creators and purveyors of technologies have a responsibility to respect human rights through their products and their practices. Moreover, the responsibility of corporations to respect human rights extends far beyond the creators of a given technology. It is the responsibility of every company.”
From TechCrunch:
“Imagine you are a pro-democracy protester on the streets of a repressive government. You’ve got your cellphone and you are messaging your friends. In the crowd near you, the police start making arrests. Fearing the government will confiscate your phone and investigate your contacts, you push a “panic button” on your phone. It deletes the contacts in your address book and sends out an alert. Such an app wasn’t readily available so the U.S. State Department, acting as a venture capitalist, decided to build one.
The State Department tells TechCrunch government funded work is underway to build an Android version of this “panic button” app. No release date has been set. Another version designed to work on low-cost Nokia phones, more common in the developing world, is being considered. No iPhone app is planned for now.
The special app, first reported by Reuters, is part of an initiative to promote new technologies for social activists. So far, the State Department has funded $22 million in “Internet freedom programming.” The money goes to innovators in the form of small grants ranging from a few to tens of thousands of dollars. TechCrunch asked who was getting the money, but due to the sensitive nature of the project, the government won’t disclose names.
An open, competitive bid process was used to award the grants. While the government isn’t looking for more help building these apps, they may have future projects designed to advance “Internet Freedom” in other ways. Keep an eye on www.grants.gov for any additional info. Some of the past program objectives have included developing technology “to enable users in closed societies to get around firewalls and filters in acutely hostile Internet environments” and training bloggers and activists to safely and anonymously participate in online forums.
The effort is another example of how the administration sees the important role social media and technology has played in global politics. In 2009, the U.S. asked Twitter to delay maintenance work so real-time information about the Iranian protests could continue. The White House has also called on Egypt and Libya to restore internet blackouts.
The State Department says it’s not just writing checks. The government is trying to use venture capitalist techniques to produce the best results. No, the goal is not to make 10x on the investment. But, the government is supporting a diverse portfolio of innovation rather than just funding big established technologies. It’s providing knowledge and connections, not just cash. And they are investing to incubate a new community focussed on the intersection of technology and human rights.
Of course with any well intentioned program, there could be negative side effects. What happens if the panic button app gets into the wrong hands, such as drug dealers or terrorists? A State Department spokesperson tells TechCrunch it’s a legitimate concern and they are taking that into account when planning the distribution and publicity of the app. It seems TechCrunch readers won’t be a problem.”
