https://carnegieendowment.org/
and
https://www.equaltimes.org/
intro by fuster
There is one basic human right. It's the right of every human to try to protect and prolong her/his life.In what is regarded as the best book of political philosophy ever written in English, Hobbes theorized that individuals who, by dint of their own efforts, managed to amass a surplus of food and clothing and other goods were sometimes bedeviled by stronger individuals or small groups and had their surpluses taken by force. The plundering would be accompanied by murder or mayhem.To protect their lives and goods, the individuals banded together and surrendered the greater part of their individual freedom in exchange for protection and security. The banding together, Hobbes theorized, resulted in the formation of societies and political organizations. In hope of protecting life and possessions from random violence and theft, individuals became subjects, sworn to obedience to king and country.Ever since, individuals have desired to maintain their societal strength and security while trying to take back some of the individual freedom that they've ceded.Later political theorists weighed into the struggle by postulating additional human rights. One group came up with:"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."claiming that human rights included liberty and the pursuit of happinessMany times since then, many other theorists have attempted to make further additions and lately, the UN has declared that it “affirms that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.”~~~~~~~~~
Why Internet Access Is a Human Right
- JUNE 01, 2017
- FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Source: GettySummary: With human rights and political activists increasingly organizing online, an authoritarian leader gains a crucial advantage when he or she can spy on his or her opponents’ plans.In early May, the Congolese government inked a $5.6 million deal with Mer Group, an Israeli security consulting firm with deep links to the Israeli intelligence services. Mer sells surveillance tools to foreign security forces, and its signature product is a big data analytics system called the Strategic Actionable Intelligence Platform, which allows users to penetrate closed forums and groups, monitor their activities, and run clandestine investigations.
The Congolese government has not explained why it signed the deal. But it seems no coincidence that the country’s embattled president, Joseph Kabila, who is facing a political crisis at home, is suddenly interested in technology that he could easily use against dissidents. After Kabila overstayed his constitutionally mandated term, which expired last December, the country erupted in protest. Only following repeated demonstrations and heavy international pressure did he agree to hold national elections by the end of the year. But there is a strong suspicion that Kabila has no intention of giving up power, at least not without a fight. If that is the case, that fight will most likely involve dividing the opposition, persecuting opponents, and stifling dissent.
Mer’s suite of surveillance tools will certainly help in that regard. With human rights and political activists increasingly organizing online, an authoritarian leader gains a crucial advantage when he or she can spy on his or her opponents’ plans. If the state security forces in Congo can identify and break up the leadership circles of the opposition and civil society groups that will drive protests in Kinshasa, they can bolster Kabila’s chances of winning (or, what is more accurate, stealing) an election considerably.
What’s unnerving is that Mer is not unique. As the watchdog group Privacy International observed in a recent report on the surveillance industry, 27 Israeli companies and 122 U.S.-based companies offer surveillance and intrusion technology to a variety of clients. Although these sales are not exactly illegal, they are pushing ethical bounds. As a result, governments are starting to assert a greater degree of scrutiny over such transactions. The European Commission, for example, has proposed controlling the export of surveillance technology on human rights grounds. What’s more, Freedom House’s report Freedom on the Net 2016 noted that two-thirds of all Internet users reside in countries where “criticism of the government, military, or ruling family are subject to censorship,” and that in the past year alone, authorities in 38 countries made arrests based solely on the content of social media posts. It is hard to say how many of these arrests resulted from technology peddled by companies such as Mer, but democracy groups estimate that 25 countries have implemented technical attacks against government critics and human rights groups using similar products.
Digital surveillance, however, is just one of the many tools available to governments that are bent on repressing dissent. One of the more popular and effective strategies is generating targeted network outages. If dissatisfaction and protests roil a particular province, the go-to response is to shut off local Internet access and create an information blackout. In Cameroon, President Paul Biya, who has ruled single-handedly and sometimes brutally for the past 35 years, used this tactic last year to quell protests in the Anglophone regions of the country over perceived economic and political discrimination by the Francophone majority. Biya’s response was quick and harsh. He pressured mobile operators to cut connections and deny Internet service to the affected regions. For 93 days, citizens in those areas were unable to communicate internally or with the outside world. By the time the government restored Internet access, the economic damage was significant—an estimated loss of over $3 million.
Internet blackouts are used to suppress dissent all over the world. The advocacy organization Access Now reported 15 documented shutdowns in 2015, including in Brazil, India, and Turkey. By 2016, the list of documented shutdowns had expanded to 56 and included countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. In addition, repressive governments seek to manipulate online discussions through the spread of propaganda; limit Internet access by making it unaffordable; and physically harass, intimidate, or arrest online activists. Such regimes also initiate state-sponsored cyberattacks against civil society organizations, political dissidents, and journalists, and they censor information via IP blocking (preventing connections from specific IP addresses), DNS filtering (restricting requests to access blacklisted websites), and TCP resets (tampering with the exchange of information necessary to set up an Internet connection).
HOW ADVOCACY GROUPS SHOULD RESPOND
Although the UN Human Rights Council has increasingly recognized that offline rights, such as the right to free speech and the right to peaceful assembly, should apply online as well, human rights law does not include explicit protections for online expression and association. As David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, notes, the closest protection lies in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The first Article 19 holds that “everyone has the right . . . to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” But the issue is that there is no specific, internationally recognized right to the Internet. These two articles bring international law closer to recognizing such a right, but norms are still catching up to technological advances, and repressive governments have an interest in slowing down any adoption.
Part of the burden for policy advocates, therefore, is to make a persuasive public case for either establishing a standalone right to online expression and association or elevating the two Article 19s as a de facto stand-in. This will require greater awareness building, campaigning, and public outrage every time a government undertakes an egregious action limiting citizens’ online rights, such as the banning of social media networks and mobile Internet services in Kashmir by the Indian government. Groups such as Access Now have taken important steps to build awareness of Internet shutdowns through the #KeepItOn campaign, but such efforts need to be supplemented by other creative measures. One proposal in Africa that has gained some attention is to have the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC), an agency responsible for managing and allocating IP addresses, deny distribution to government-owned entities in states that have enacted shutdowns. Such an idea would, for the first time, apply a direct cost to governments that choose to block Internet access. Although the proposal is overly broad in its formulation, and AFRINIC staff have determined that it would be completely impractical to implement in its current form, it does signify a greater push by activists to think outside the box in countering online restrictions.
Advocates should also galvanize the private sector to pressure the governments they work with to respect the right to the Internet by threatening to pull their investments. Just as activists named and shamed Nike and the Gap into ending child labor in their Vietnamese sweatshops, so they should similarly call out countries that harass, spy on, or disrupt or deny Internet access to its citizens. Ethiopia, for example, has been quick to enact draconian restrictions on Internet and mobile communications, including massive online monitoring and surveillance. Last October, following months of antigovernment protests across the country, Addis Ababa shut down all mobile Internet access and detained thousands of civilians. Advocacy groups should pressure companies to reconsider investing in Ethiopia, one of the many East African countries that corporations have moved to from Asia in search of more cost-effective labor pools in textile and garment manufacturing. Activists need to put a reputational element into play—impelling the public to question whether it is morally acceptable for a socially conscious company such as H&M, for example to manufacture its clothing in a country that systematically monitors, harasses, and denies Internet access to its people.
For these strategies to work, the human rights community needs the right tools, resources, and capabilities. Enhancing early warning systems for when network outages are about to occur and improving the ability to monitor when governments interfere with online activity will enable activists to sound the alarm and mobilize the international community to condemn the behavior. Dissidents in repressive countries must do their due diligence as well, adopting the right habits and techniques to circumvent government restrictions and enhance their digital security. Policy advocates must raise their voices about restrictions on Internet access and online surveillance and harassment, and connect with key stakeholders—foreign embassies, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers, and other decision-makers—in order to harness their collective influence over repressive governments.
Likewise, companies that peddle sophisticated surveillance and intrusion technology to repressive governments, such as Mer, should face pressure. Activists should insist that lawmakers explicitly include human rights considerations in their export-control policies. In other words, when the United States or the EU is determining whether to allow the sale of a technology to a particular country, its regulators ought to give equal weight to potential human rights risks, in addition to factoring in national security concerns and the prospective economic benefits. Just as countries restrict arms sales based on a hierarchy of considerations, including the potential for misuse, so should they scrutinize and restrict the sale of sensitive technology.
So far, the human rights community has been unable to launch a consistent and successful campaign against repressive governments that restrict the Internet or to spur the creation of an international norm to protect Internet access. This is partly because the issue is still nascent and has yet to gain critical public awareness. But it is also worth asking whether human rights groups are prioritizing access to the Internet as fully as they are capable of doing: for most groups, this issue does not rank as a first- or even second-order priority. As long as the international community continues to give a free pass to companies such as Mer, they will continue to peddle products to authoritarian governments that allow them to spy on their citizens, harass their opponents, and deny people access to the Internet.
~~~~
2.9 billion people, or 37 per cent of the global population, have never used the internet, according to a recent UN report.
Internet access: a new human right?
At the end of 1948, when the memory of the Second World War was still fresh in people’s minds, the General Assembly of the recently created United Nations (UN) adopted a text that would become a benchmark, a point of reference and an ideal: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The text enshrined 30 universal and inalienable rights and freedoms, including the right to life, equality, private property and freedom of expression. They are rights, as the UN itself defines them, that “we have simply because we exist as human beings – they are not granted by any state”.
Although the Declaration has not been amended since then, other rights have gained ‘human right’ status in recent years, such as the right to water, recognised by the UN in 2010, and the right to a healthy environment, in 2021.
Now, pressure is rising for the recognition of a new right, unimagined a few decades ago: the right to internet access. “Internet access should be recognised as a human right because, in our digital age, there are many other human rights that can no longer be adequately realised without access to the internet,” Merten Reglitz, lecturer in Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham and author of a paper on the subject, tells Equal Times.
The academic gives the example of access to health cover in developing countries as one of the rights that can now be accessed thanks to technology. “For some people, especially in developing countries, access to the internet has facilitated access to health services, where otherwise there would be none at all,” says Reglitz. The pandemic, he continues, has shown that this right is also fundamental in wealthier countries. “Even in the most developed countries, during the lockdowns, without access to the internet, we were not really able to exercise many of our freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of association or the right to information.”
Reglitz is not alone in thinking that access to the internet should be guaranteed. Among them is the father of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, who argued his case at a debate in the European Parliament in October 2020.
“As bad as it [the pandemic] has been, imagine a crisis like this but without the web. With access to the web, employees can work from home and keep economies afloat; governments and others are able to disseminate vital health information; families can keep in touch; students, if they are lucky, are able to keep their education intact and their dreams alive by learning online. In this crisis, for those who have it, the web is not a luxury, it’s a lifeline,” he insisted.
The idea also has its detractors. For them, internet access does not meet the minimum standards to be deemed a human right, as it cannot be considered inherent to being human. “We have to put it into context. Internet or digital connectivity cannot be considered inherent to the human race. The basic rights and services that people should be afforded are more important than the internet,” says Neth Daño, Asia director of the ETC action group on erosion, technology and concentration.
The danger, says Daño, is that focusing on technology – from which it is hard to dissociate large and powerful lobbies – could hinder the achievement of other, more basic rights.
“Can Indigenous peoples in remote areas, who don’t even have access to electricity, prioritise internet access over health, education, food and even energy?” asks Daño.
If it is recognised as a human right, governments may be faced with the dilemma of having to ensure access to it before they have been able to cover life’s most basic needs,” argues Daño. “Governments cannot put the internet before electricity, food or education,” she continues.
Others see access to the internet as an ancillary right that can facilitate the realisation of basic rights but should not be given the status of a ‘human right’ in itself. “It should not be considered a human right as such. From a potential point of view, it is true that basic rights and the internet are connected. Those who don’t have the internet will enjoy less protection of certain rights,” says Mark Coeckelbergh, professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna and researcher on the philosophy of media and technology.
“That is why I think it is important for it to be recognised as a right within our legal framework, so that access is ensured. But I don’t think it will ever carry the force that human rights have,” he continues. The United Nations itself endorsed this view in a non-binding resolution, passed in 2016, that recognised the importance of the internet for rights such as freedom of expression, education and freedom of conscience, and called for a “human rights-based approach when providing and expanding access to the internet”.
A story of rapid growth and imbalances
Shortly after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed, another revolutionary idea began to take shape. By the 1950s, computers had become increasingly common tools in universities and defence centres, but they were still heavy, static machines, and academics had to go to research centres to use them.
Various thinkers then began to envisage the possibility of linking these devices together in a network to increase their capabilities. It was the United States Department of Defense that first saw the potential of creating a large computer network and approved the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project, which created a first prototype in the late 1960s.
The impact this prototype was to have is well known. Today, the internet reaches a large part of the globe and by 1995 it had become the fastest growing communication medium in history. Technology firms now rank among the world’s largest companies, with Amazon and Apple now up there with big investment banks and oil companies.
And yet, many are still not familiar with the web. Although the pandemic has accelerated digitalisation around the world, 2.9 billion people, or 37 per cent of the global population, have never used the internet, according to a recent UN report. And many, even if they had access, would not be able to use it, as Daño explains. “Even if there is an internet connection, even if satellites make it possible to reach remote areas, it is of no use if you don’t have the devices, such as mobile phones or computers. And it’s useless if you don’t have the knowledge to use it. A lot of people don’t know how to use them,” she points out.
Daño also warns of the risk of further widening existing inequalities. “These technologies are only going to increase the gap between those who have access and those who don’t. And, above all, between those who control them and those who use them,” she explains.
This is particularly manifest in the data processing industry, which is already creating inequalities in sensitive sectors such as agriculture and imposing digital colonialism on the Global South, according to a report by the Transnational Institute. “Keeping control of the data is a way to allow local European companies to grow at the cost of an increasingly subjugated Global South, which will sell commodities in exchange for consuming everyday technologies, with ever weaker terms of trade,” warns the report.
This gap in the ownership of technology, which is largely in the hands of multinationals and governments, also means that the internet can be used as a powerful tool for social and political control, as seen with the increasingly common use of internet blackouts as a form of repression, not only by authoritarian governments but also within democracies, as witnessed in Indian-administered Kashmir.
For Reglitz, however, such phenomena are comparable to other ‘negative externalities’ that industries generate in the exercise of their activities, such as environmental externalities, and which can be regulated to minimise their impact. “Social media companies are an incredibly complex phenomenon, because they are private businesses operating in the digital sphere,” he says. “Governments have an obligation to create a legal framework whereby companies have to integrate human rights into their business operations,” he continues.
History provides us with similar examples. “When radio was developed, the German communists wanted to use it to educate workers. But the Nazis came along and made use of it,” he recalls. So, any form of technology, argues Reglitz, is a “double-edged sword” that can be used for good or for bad ends. “But that is not an argument against the right to access[...]. Recognising this right is not going to further such problems. It would, in fact, become a critical tool for establishing what is and isn’t wrong,” he concludes.
No comments:
Post a Comment