��Ī - censorship

Internet censorship: making the hidden visible

sc604 — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 08:43:12 +0000

For all the controversy it caused, Fitna is not a great film. The 17-minute short, by the Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, was a way for him to express his opinion that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Understandably, the rest of the world did not see things the same way. In advance of its release in 2008, the film received widespread condemnation, especially within the Muslim community.

When a trailer for Fitna was released on YouTube, authorities in Pakistan demanded that it be removed from the site. YouTube offered to block the video in Pakistan, but would not agree to remove it entirely. When YouTube relayed this decision back to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), the decision was made to block YouTube.

Although Pakistan has been intermittently blocking content since 2006, a more persistent blocking policy was implemented in 2011, when porn content was censored in response to a media report that highlighted Pakistan as the top country in terms of searches for porn. Then, in 2012, YouTube was blocked for three years when a video, deemed blasphemous, appeared on the website. Only in January this year was the ban lifted, when Google, which owns YouTube, launched a Pakistan-specific version, and introduced a process by which governments can request the blocking of access to offending material.

All of this raises the thorny issue of censorship. Those censoring might raise objections to material on the basis of offensiveness or incitement to violence (more than a dozen people died in Pakistan following widespread protests over the video uploaded to YouTube in 2012). But when users aren’t able to access a particular site, they often don’t know whether it’s because the site is down, or if some force is preventing them from accessing it. How can users know what is being censored and why?

“The goal of a censor is to disrupt the flow of information,” says Sheharbano Khattak, a PhD student in ��Ī’s Computer Laboratory, who studies internet censorship and its effects. “internet censorship threatens free and open access to information. There’s no code of conduct when it comes to censorship: those doing the censoring – usually governments – aren’t in the habit of revealing what they’re blocking access to.” The goal of her research is to make the hidden visible.

She explains that we haven’t got a clear understanding of the consequences of censorship: how it affects different stakeholders, the steps those stakeholders take in response to censorship, how effective an act of censorship is, and what kind of collateral damage it causes.

Because censorship operates in an inherently adversarial environment, gathering relevant datasets is difficult. Much of the key information, such as what was censored and how, is missing. In her research, Khattak has developed methodologies that enable her to monitor censorship by characterising what normal data looks like and flagging anomalies within the data that are indicative of censorship.

She designs experiments to measure various aspects of censorship, to detect censorship in actively and passively collected data, and to measure how censorship affects various players.

The primary reasons for government-mandated censorship are political, religious or cultural. A censor might take a range of steps to stop the publication of information, to prevent access to that information by disrupting the link between the user and the publisher, or to directly prevent users from accessing that information. But the key point is to stop that information from being disseminated.

Internet censorship takes two main forms: user-side and publisher-side. In user-side censorship, the censor disrupts the link between the user and the publisher. The interruption can be made at various points in the process between a user typing an address into their browser and being served a site on their screen. Users may see a variety of different error messages, depending on what the censor wants them to know.

“The thing is, even in countries like Saudi Arabia, where the government tells people that certain content is censored, how can we be sure of everything they’re stopping their citizens from being able to access?” asks Khattak. “When a government has the power to block access to large parts of the internet, how can we be sure that they’re not blocking more than they’re letting on?”

What Khattak does is characterise the demand for blocked content and try to work out where it goes. In the case of the blocking of YouTube in 2012 in Pakistan, a lot of the demand went to rival video sites like Daily Motion. But in the case of pornographic material, which is also heavily censored in Pakistan, the government censors didn’t have a comprehensive list of sites that were blacklisted, so plenty of pornographic content slipped through the censors’ nets.

Despite any government’s best efforts, there will always be individuals and publishers who can get around censors, and access or publish blocked content through the use of censorship resistance systems. A desirable property, of any censorship resistance system is to ensure that users are not traceable, but usually users have to combine them with anonymity services such as Tor.

“It’s like an arms race, because the technology which is used to retrieve and disseminate information is constantly evolving,” says Khattak. “We now have social media sites which have loads of user-generated content, so it’s very difficult for a censor to retain control of this information because there’s so much of it. And because this content is hosted by sites like Google or Twitter that integrate a plethora of services, wholesale blocking of these websites is not an option most censors might be willing to consider.”

In addition to traditional censorship, Khattak also highlights a new kind of censorship – publisher-side censorship – where websites refuse to offer services to a certain class of users. Specifically, she looks at the differential treatments of Tor users by some parts of the web. The issue with services like Tor is that visitors to a website are anonymised, so the owner of the website doesn’t know where their visitors are coming from. There is increasing use of publisher-side censorship from site owners who want to block users of Tor or other anonymising systems.

“Censorship is not a new thing,” says Khattak. “Those in power have used censorship to suppress speech or writings deemed objectionable for as long as human discourse has existed. However, censorship over the internet can potentially achieve unprecedented scale, while possibly remaining discrete so that users are not even aware that they are being subjected to censored information.”

Professor Jon Crowcroft, who Khattak works with, agrees: “It’s often said that, online, we live in an echo chamber, where we hear only things we agree with. This is a side of the filter bubble that has its flaws, but is our own choosing. The darker side is when someone else gets to determine what we see, despite our interests. This is why internet censorship is so concerning.”

“While the cat and mouse game between the censors and their opponents will probably always exist,” says Khattak. “I hope that studies such as mine will illuminate and bring more transparency to this opaque and complex subject, and inform policy around the legality and ethics of such practices.”

Despite being founded on ideals of freedom and openness, censorship on the internet is rampant, with more than 60 countries engaging in some form of state-sponsored censorship. A research project at the ��Ī is aiming to uncover the scale of this censorship, and to understand how it affects users and publishers of information

Censorship over the internet can potentially achieve unprecedented scale

Sheharbano Khattak

Hernán Piñera

Barbed wire

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Opinion: Morocco’s war on free speech is costing its universities dearly

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 17:00:34 +0000

Morocco frequently turns to the courts when it doesn’t like what its critics have to say. The charges levelled against journalist and historian Professor Maati Monjib reinforce just how common this tendency, which emerged during the 1970s, is in Morocco. The State tries to quash critique among journalists and other public intellectuals by using the judicial system and imposing extraordinary fines.

Professor Monjib and six others have been accused of “threatening the internal security of the State” and “receiving foreign funding without notifying the government”. He has staged two very public hunger strikes to protest the allegations. Monjib has been a fervent supporter of investigative journalism in the country and an outspoken critic of the very restrictive state.

Several journalists have left the country in the face of state censorship. Others have quit the profession.

In an age of digital media and the rapid flow of information, the state’s campaign against freedom of expression serves mostly to generate international attention to Morocco’s human rights record. When one journalist or intellectual is arrested, articles published abroad inevitably list the charges against other intellectuals and journalists. These charges are sometimes completely unrelated to their profession.

One blogger wrote of the case against Monjib:

The campaign against Maati Monjib is incomprehensible … His views may be unorthodox, but hardly a menace that would explain the level of persecution he has endured. The level of negative international press coverage his case is generating has done a great harm to Morocco’s image.

Morocco was a French Protectorate until 1956, when it became independent again. The country has one of the oldest monarchies in the world, and the King still retains substantial power in the constitution and in governing. Morocco has an elected parliament led since 2011 by the Islamist party Parti de Justice et Developpement.

Morocco has an important geopolitical role as a conduit between sub- Saharan Africa and Europe. While there is a long history of protest and leftist and Islamist opposition in Morocco, the Arab Spring did not have the same depth as in other countries in the region, aside from the 20 Fevrier movement.

Universities under pressure

The case against Monjib and his co-accused also damages academia and university research in Morocco.

There is very little funding available for research at the public universities that dominate the North African country. Most private higher education colleges and universities focus overwhelmingly on teaching, particularly vocational or professional degree programmes like business management. For now, this takes the place of research or training in research skills.

Morocco has also, particularly over the past five or seven years, followed the lead of the US and Europe when drafting education policies. Recent policy strategies to reform higher education and research have adopted a neoliberal approach. This means treating students like consumers who need to be satisfied with a product, as well as strengthening oversight of “product” sales – that is, teaching – and trying to align skills with job market demand.

Some American and British academics have criticised this trend in their own countries. They argue that students' ability to think critically declines and they acquire less general knowledge when they are treated like consumers.

In Morocco, the language of higher education has become very much about categorising students as customers in an expanding marketplace.

Freedom to think differently

What connects restrictions on freedom of expression for journalists and the motivation and ability of researchers to practice their trade with independence and free thought? Quite simply, without the freedom to think differently, research cannot address real issues: poverty, unemployment and public health. Those who want to do such research or use their education to find practical solutions may try to leave. Those who want to stay in Morocco often leave academia.

Instead, what research and critical thinking does exist in Morocco often comes from foreign academics. Moroccan academic Youssef Chiheb has criticised

the lock that foreign experts and consultants have on the process of finalising public policy or strategies while graduates are not eligible or trained to take on the challenge because of a lack of mastery of a section of knowledge and a firm grip on foreign languages, French and English in this case.

Opening up new spaces

The threat of legal action may effectively narrow public debate within Morocco, but the growth of online news and blogs, often based abroad, has more than compensated. Access to Internet reporting and diverse, often critical, viewpoints means that an alternative public sphere exists. This is especially true for younger generations.

In my research in Morocco, and in Europe, individuals and groups find satisfaction in initiating social change in their local areas. This suits local governments that lack the resources to address social problems. Individuals and community-based organisations abandon the notion that they can affect change at a national level. They may try to have an influence beyond their country’s borders through the Internet and participation in international movements, whether mainstream or radical.

Professor Monjib and other journalists and public intellectuals work at a national level. They contribute to building a public sphere in Morocco that welcomes debate and new ideas organic to the country rather than imposed from elsewhere. Importantly, they provide an example for expressing different points of view, encouraging especially young people to believe they can make a difference, rather than seeking other outlets to prove themselves – such as becoming radicalised.

If Monjib and his colleagues cannot do this work, their other options are to go elsewhere – or quit. Neither is good for Morocco.

Shana Cohen, Senior Research Associate, ��Ī

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ��Ī.

Shana Cohen (Department of Sociology) discusses censorship and free speech in Morocco.

Reuters

Professor Maati Monjib has become the face of Morocco’s war on freedom of expression

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Opinion: How free are we really?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:11:02 +0000

Freedom. A word redolent with benevolence. We like the idea of being “free”. We are outraged at the thought of being “un-free”. It is often presented to us as a polarity: free expression, free choice and democracy, on the one hand – and repression, censorship and autocracy on the other. We are to guard the former from the latter.

But is that all? What is the “freedom” we are told about, think about and experience? What does it consist of? What uses do we put it to or – perhaps even more importantly – not put it to?

In the advanced capitalist polities of the West, we are repeatedly told that freedom is the defining value of our time, that it is a precious possession to preserve by almost any means, even a measure of un-freedom, say, in the form of increased surveillance or accelerated militarisation. As such, it is a word that is put to many dubious uses including, of course, the now familiar idea of “bringing” freedom and liberty to a “recalcitrant world”, as David Harvey puts it. He asks:

If we were able to mount that wondrous horse of freedom, where would we seek to ride it?

Where indeed?

Freedom ‘thingified’

Has “freedom” turned into one of those buzzwords honoured more in the invocation than in its exercise? A talismanic utterance commandeered for various agendas including offering a reinforcing platform to the rich and the powerful, even when some of those people are responsible for squashing free expression and academic freedom – and worse – in their own states?

Would you like dignity with those? PROistolethetv, CC BY

“Free speech” – rather than being the nurturing and encouragement of real courage and the opening up of the imagination to new possibilities – is in danger of becoming one of the great banalities of our day, trotted out much more by the establishment for explaining its more degraded moves than a channel for producing meaningful dissent that could lead to material alternatives for the majority.

As something “thingified” – to borrow a word from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism – freedom isn’t seen as a practice which requires constant, vigilant exercise on all our parts. It becomes, for example, something that must be transmitted through teaching from an already free West to the un-free zones of the world. Here’s US president, Barack Obama, addressing the British parliament about the “Arab Spring”:

What we are seeing in Tehran, in Tunis, in Tahrir Square, is a longing for the same freedoms that we take for granted here at home … That means investing in the future of those nations that transition to democracy, starting with Tunisia and Egypt – by deepening ties of trade and commerce; by helping them demonstrate that freedom brings prosperity.

Freedom friendship: Obama addresses the UK parliament.

Once again then, freedom carefully channelled through the checkout lane.

Gregarious tolerance

It’s often assumed that science and rationalism are “free” while religion and faith are not. Yet some of the most uncritical acquiescence to the regimes of our day comes from science and many scientists in their collaboration with the privatisation of knowledge by big corporations who determine what questions get asked and what gets funded.

More often than not, what must be opposed is not just the openly repressive or oppressive (that of course, must be done – and is done by people who show astounding courage in their daily lives under harsh conditions: Saudi bloggers, women seeking education in Afghanistan, Irom Sharmila on hunger strike for a decade against army atrocities in India). What we must all guard against is rather more subtle and creeping.

We may have to recognise that the greatest danger to our exercise of freedom is lapsing into habits of thought where we acquiesce – where it becomes easier to think of the way things are as the way things ought to be, or will always be.

Speaking of intellectuals who shy away from the task of speaking difficult truths, the late Edward Said deprecated what he called “a gregarious tolerance” for the way things are. This gregarious tolerance is rife in our society and more tragically, more inexcusably, in our universities and among our intellectuals where one of the biggest assaults on independent thinking – increasing tuition fees, bloated managerial salaries, greater corporate presence in research funding – is failing to provoke a collective resistance.

Mounted Police at the Tuition Fee Protest. SomeDriftwood.

We need to guard against turning “freedom” into a weapon of smugness, cultural certainties to be wielded against apparently lesser cultures rather than a tool constantly sharpened through speaking truth about and against power. When freedom is seen as a “thing” – a value to be worshipped rather than as a practice – it atrophies into something that shores up power and the status quo ordained by it and as such becomes its opposite, an ossified, rather toothless idea.

Frederick Douglass. Wikimedia commons.

Freedom as an idea and practice, of course, also has a very different history or histories when we think of struggles against power from below. That sense of freedom was perhaps best articulated by remarkable former slave and anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Douglass, in his famous speech commemorating the West Indian emancipation. After noting that those “who would be free, themselves must strike the blow”, Douglass famously declared:

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.

Maintain the rage

There Is No Alternative – Margaret Thatcher’s beloved TINA – is now being carried forward through Cameron and Osborne’s austerity regimes. An unfree, repressive, autocratic and despotic idea if there was ever one, but using “freedom” as its logo, the claim there is no “alternative” immediately narrows down “freedom” to consumer choice and business transactions at the expense of all other rights.

Cameron, you’ll note, saw no irony in feting Xi Jinping, an unelected ruler from an autocratic regime, and spouting platitudes about human rights. China in many ways represents a capitalist wet dream: a constrained population offering up wage labour without meaningful rights but “free” to consume what they can afford.

Meanwhile as we’ve seen with the hysteria over the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, his once rather widely accepted ideas about social and economic justice are shrilly denounced as dangerous extremism which must be rooted out immediately – no free flourishing of alternatives there. Protest and anger? Bring out the demonising smears, the batons, the legislation, the water cannons.

How then to be free? Face them down. “Indignez vous”, as the French campaigner, Stephane Hessel, put it. Stay indignant. Protest, undermine, challenge and change. Douglass again, famously: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This is an edited version of a talk delivered by the author at the ��Ī Festival of Ideas.

Priyamvada Gopal, Lecturer, Faculty of English, ��Ī

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ��Ī.

Priyamvada Gopal (Faculty of English) discusses freedom as a practice rather than a value to be worshipped.

Jonathan Potts

Manchester protest (27 September 2014)

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Innocent landscape or coded message? Artists under suspicion in the First World War

amb206 — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:53:59 +0000

Last month the government announced an initiative to commemorate the First World War with a programme of cultural events called 14-18 NOW. Through Arts Council England, it will fund commissions by leading artists from Britain and around the world “to create works that reflect on the impact and legacy of the First World War”.

Art has long been at the mercy of politics. Research by art historian and broadcaster Dr James Fox reveals that a century ago the present government’s predecessor in the shape of Asquith’s wartime cabinet was convinced that art posed such a threat to the security of the nation that it made painting out of doors illegal around the country.

Fox, a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College and known to public audiences for his BBC documentaries, first came across the subject while researching his PhD about art and the First World War. He explained: “I kept finding strange passages in which artists confessed to being abused, interrogated and arrested while painting and sketching outdoors. Virtually nothing had been written about the reason for these bizarre experiences, so I set about trawling newspapers, government reports and police records in search of clues. What I discovered was astonishing.”

Fox’s findings were first published in the British Art Journal in 2009. A more extensive discussion of the same topic will form a chapter in his forthcoming book, Business unusual: British art and the First World War, 1914-1924.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people – who had only recently become obsessed with spy novels and films – grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation. “The public became suspicious of almost everyone who didn’t fit in. Of the many groups who suffered from these suspicions, some of the most adversely affected were artists,” said Fox.

The notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Fox said: “In his book My Adventures as a Spy, Baden-Powell revealed how he and other British spies on the continent had posed as artists and disguised their plans of forts, harbours and industrial areas as innocent sketches of stained glass windows or ivy leaves.

This was one of the reasons why, with the declaration of war in August 1914, artists quickly fell foul of emergency legislation. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) imposed a regime of draconian censorship on artworks. It also made it illegal to make “any photograph, sketch, plan, model, or other representation of any naval or military work, or of any dock or harbour, or with the intent to assist the enemy, of any other place or thing”.

The effects were significant. As one artist explained: “No sketching whatever is allowed within four, and in some cases, seven miles of the coast... Even though the subject of the sketch may be a group of trees, a cathedral or a paintable cottage, the rule applies strictly.”

As a result of the legislation, many artists were challenged or arrested: in Scotland the society painter and Royal Academician John Lavery was arrested for painting the Fleet at the Forth Bridge; in Dover the renowned landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer was accosted by “some blighter [who] comes up and wants to see my permit which is very upsetting in the middle of laying a wash”. Reporting from the west coast of Ireland, the post-impressionist Augustus John poked fun at the nation’s panic with the account that “around the harbour… if one starts sketching one is at once shot by a policeman”.

Those most severely hit by the restrictions imposed on painting included the artistic communities based in Cornwall, a county where fears about German invasion were strongest. Artists in the clusters at Newlyn, St Ives and Lamorna felt the restrictions keenly at a time when wartime austerity was already depressing art sales. In Newlyn, the figurative painter Laura Knight wrote that “even to write a perfectly straight line might be interpreted as a sinister act”. In Lamorna, Alfred Munnings (famous for his paintings of horses) remarked that he “dared not be sketching out of doors in the country at all”.

Fox said: “As the war progressed, art itself began to be perceived in an increasingly negative light, downgraded from merely pointless or unnecessary activity to one that was improper and immoral, encouraging selfish and profligate behaviour when selfless sacrifice was what counted. Artists were bracketed together with other alien identities – Jews, pacifists, profiteers, foreigners, newly naturalised Britons.”

Bohemianism itself signalled a lack of patriotism. When a British artist-couple rented a cottage in the West Country, there were immediate suspicions that they were German agents. The villagers’ vendetta against them prompted the police to call one of the artists in for questioning. He was soon released. The local schoolmistress exclaimed: “If he is not a spy, why does he wear a hat like that?” In London the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with his modernist work and German name, found his studio ransacked.

Fox’s research reveals that in the first month of the war, some 9,000 cases of espionage were reported, yet during the four years of the conflict just 29 spies were convicted. “Hundreds of artists were arrested and questioned, an experience that must have been deeply distressing. But only one of them was found guilty. The Norwegian painter, Alfred Hagn, was sentenced to death after invisible ink was discovered in his hotel room in London, but was extradited after going on hunger strike,” said Fox.

The case that made the biggest impression on the public was that of Philip de László, a famous society portraitist who was Hungarian by birth. His naturalisation as a British subject in 1914, and his easy access to the powerful elite, put him under suspicion. The patriotic newspaper John Bull wrote: “The distinguished character of M. de László’s clientele would have afforded him fine opportunities for obtaining first-class information if he had really been desirous of getting it… Cabinet Ministers… are such busy people that they frequently go on working while the artist plies his brush… King George… walks about the room and dictates to his Secretaries while he is “sitting” for his portrait.”

De László was arrested and interned. He was condemned in the press for being one of “the most dangerous spies” of the war, and many called for him to be executed. “After several years imprisoned without charge, De László, rightly, was exonerated. But it had a huge effect on his career, and it took a long time for him to recover,” said Fox.

The treatment of artists during the First World War seems, with the benefit of hindsight, laughable. Indeed, the notion of middle aged artists being arrested by over-zealous officials while painting pretty watercolours out in the countryside was lampooned in the press at the time. But Fox reminds us that things are not so different today.

“In recent years the government’s attempts to combat terrorism has led to new legislation that authorised police officers to stop and search anyone who appears to be photographing or filming sensitive locations. The medium might have changed, but the principle is the same. We remain innately suspicious of images”, he said.

During the First World War artists were widely believed to be spies and, around much of the country, painting became illegal. Research by art historian and broadcaster Dr James Fox reveals how deeply artists were affected, not just by the government’s ban but also by a surge of public paranoia.

The public became suspicious of almost everyone who didn’t fit in. Of the many groups who suffered from these suspicions, some of the most adversely affected were artists.

James Fox

The Illustrated War News (7 October 1914)

'An Apparently Innocent Landscape'

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�������������Ī - censorship

Internet censorship: making the hidden visible

Opinion: Morocco’s war on free speech is costing its universities dearly

Universities under pressure

Freedom to think differently

Opening up new spaces

Opinion: How free are we really?

Freedom ‘thingified’

Gregarious tolerance

Maintain the rage

Innocent landscape or coded message? Artists under suspicion in the First World War

��Ī - censorship