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Internet Freedom Under Global Threat, but Activists Push Back: report

Updated 10 October 2013, 14:14 AEST

Reporeter: Sen Lam Radio Australia

Slug: Asia internet freedom

INTRO

A new US-based report has pointed to a decline in internet freedom across the world, as some

governments push through new laws to control web content and boost surveillance.

The independent watchdog, Freedom House says its research on 60 countries, also found that

activists retaliated by raising awareness of emerging threats and sometimes even forestalled

new repressive measures.

Sen Lam from Radio Australia talked to Madeline Earp, Asia research analyst for Freedom

House in New York.

TEXT

EARP CLIP 1 (Female, English) : Freedom House studied 60 countries as part of this report

and the most repressive were China, Cuba and Iran, and that covers a whole range of issues

from access to the internet, to as you mentioned, government surveillance. What we're hoping

for is to see more countries push towards the freer end of the spectrum, and the best countries

this year were Iceland and Estonia.

Tell us a little bit about your methodology - what do you base your assessment of

internet freedom on?

EARP CLIP 2 (Female, English): The methodology is very complex. Its divided into three

main sections so that we get a really holistic view of the internet. The first is how easy it is

for people in the given country to access the internet, how expensive it is, what the business

environment is like. The second is about what kind of content is being shared and is widely

available. So that covers government censorship as well as citizens sharing access to political

mobilisation, and those kinds of activities. The third section is about user rights, and in

countries where people are imprisoned for things that they say on the internet or where they

face excessive lawsuits for example, that's something that we cover there.

And do you think modern technology also lends itself to greater spying or surveillanceactivities?

EARP CLIP 3 (Female, English): I think part of the problem is that it's much easier and

much faster to spy on what people are doing digitally. I think also new laws have yet to catch

up with that technology, so a lot of governments are taking advantage of the new technology

without having put sufficient protections in place.

And the report touches on internet control as well. What are the most common

practices adopted by repressive or less than democratic governments?

EARP CLIP 4 (Female, English): That's a great question, we actually studied at least tencontrols that are being observed more and more around the world.

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Of course in Asia, China and Vietnam are notorious for their controls on content, and they

pursue this using a range of means. China's very technologically advanced, can censor things

by key word, even sometimes seconds after something's being published for example to a

social media site. And that is accompanied by a lot of restrictions on what users can be, or a

lot of criminalisation of user activity.

So Vietnam for example has seen as many as 30 people facing charges for something that

they've done on the internet. So it's a kind of dual pronged approach; on the one hand you

make the content illegal and you try and restrict access to it, and on the other hand you try

and pursue and target the people who are breaking those rules.

Civil society groups in Malaysia have used the internet and specifically social media to

open up a democratic space for public discussion, which was not available even as

recently as ten years ago. Is that a global trend as well?

EARP CLIP 5 (Female, English): That's absolutely a global trend. And you're right, that isthe positive side that comes out of these findings, not just Malaysia but several countries,

particularly in southeast Asia have a freer space on the internet than they do in the traditional

media sphere, which is often subject to tight controls. And that means that activists are able to

take advantage of this new medium and redress the balance, to get citizen voices out there.

I think what we have to be very careful of is that the government doesn't then pass new laws

to try and restrict that activity. And we've seen some very encouraging signs from countries

like the Philippines where a lot of activism followed the passage of a restrictive cyber crime

law last year, and as a result of that people filed petitions to the Supreme Court and the

Supreme Court ultimately suspended the law. Now obviously it's better if those laws don't get

passed at all, and if all stakeholders are involved in the discussion process so that they don't

retain repressive measures in the final draft. But it is encouraging to think activists can have

that kind of impact in preventing the implementation of harsh measures.

But there are governments, particularly in Asia, which have adopted measures to

counter that kind of social media freedom?

EARP CLIP 6 (Female, English): That's right and that's as I mentioned China and Vietnam

are notorious for that.

But we also see a number of countries trying to target social media use; India was a surprisethis year. India actually saw the biggest decline worldwide in the entire survey, and in part

that was because they have laws which target social media users in their use, not so much to

fully prosecute people, but were seeing people called in by police facing charges based on a

comment that they made on Facebook or a tweet that they've tweeted on Twitter.

So the facts that there are these laws that are potentially targeting not necessarily even

political activists, but just your regular sort of citizen internet user is very concerning.