Revisiting the Colombo Declaration on Media Freedom: The importance of new media, the web and Internet

I was invited to present some thoughts on a session on new media organised by the Sri Lanka Press Institute (SLPI) as part of a workshop that would renew the 1998 Colombo Declaration on Media Freedom.

Before the panel began, D.B. Nihalsingha, the Chair for the panel, asked Rohan Samarajiva and I what the acronym ICT stood for and what the ICT Agency did in Sri Lanka. It wasn’t a good omen. In the 10 minutes he wasted introducing the topic, he noted that DVDs were also part of new media. Perhaps D.B. Nihalsingha believes that Web 2.0 can be installed off a DVD…

The Chair also tragi-comically cut off my presentation, which is below.

I noted in an email sent to SLPI that placing a media dinosaur like Nihalsingha, with no demonstrable wit to engage with, much less understand or use new media, to moderate a session on the issue and related technologies was akin to putting someone from SLPI as moderator on a panel discussing molecular biology at a bio-ethics workshop.

 

Faith or intervention?

In a pursuant discussion with co-panelist Rohan Samarajiva on the points I noted in my presentation, it emerged that he believed that the incompetence of the Rajapakse regime was it own best safeguard against measures such as the filtering of pornography on the web and other measures taken to curtail, block and undermine communications over the web and Internet. We agreed on the point of the regime’s incompetence.

Where I disagreed was the point that this alone was a safeguard against policies and practices that would and could seriously undermine communications over the web and internet that sought to hold the regime accountable for its actions, make governance transparent, expose corruption or strengthen debates on human rights.

I also made the point that ISPs today – the likes of Mobitel, Dialog, Suntel etc – are supinely subservient to the MoD and the Rajapakse regime. Rohan pointed to existing regulations and legislation that was in place to ensure that there was in theory a paper trail for government – ISP interactions and communication. We both laughed at the fact that existing legislation and regulations, in the context of a Supreme Court operating on personal bias and an Executive operating on alien logic at best was pretty much useless in practice.

 

Holding ISPs in Sri Lanka accountable

I went on to make the point that given their capacity to covertly monitor, curtail and block communications at the whim and fancy of the regime to meet its parochial interests, ISPs needed to be held up to public scrutiny. Their policies and practices needed to be explicit on how they would handle extraordinary requests from government to monitor communications.

I was cognisant though that the lack of an enabling Right to Information legislation in Sri Lanka severely hampers consumer awareness and protection in this regard. As citizens, we have no choice but to accept what government and ISPs tell us they are doing to protect our privacy.

This is simply not good enough.

The market in Sri Lanka will not check or hold accountable practices that target communications and the sources of content that embarrasses big business and its egregious complicity with a brutish regime. One mobile phone provider / ISP had explicitly told someone who had met them recently to find out about partnership opportunities for civil society content production and dissemination that it would not entertain any content on its network without clearing it first internally and then also through the MoD. Another telco had informed a customer that it was discontinuing its teleconferencing services for ’security reasons’.

The burden of proof of on-going measures taken to ensure customer privacy and non-discriminatory network management lie with ISPs, not with consumers. Yet who in Sri Lanka is looking at this and calling for such proof? As I noted in a recent email to some colleagues,

It’s ironical – we are able to measure telcos’ quality of service in a technical sense. Yet, the open and sustained condemnation of practices and policies inimical to the freedom of expression by telcos over their networks is much harder to come by. All our telcos choose to operate in a manner that is supinely sycophantic towards the Mahinda administration. This has a direct, real impact on human rights. It’s time telcos were told this in no uncertain terms.

That said, my fear is that inspired by the proposed Data Communications Bill in the UK (see The rise of Big Brother in the UK: The problems for the rest of us), the new anti-porn ISP filtering regime in Australia and the antics of the NSA in the US (see When civil liberties are trumped and communications intercepted) Mahinda’s regime and Sri Lankan telcos are going to get much worse.

As I noted in the presentation (Slide 24) we need to name and shame ISPs and telcos that encourage policies and practices inimical to human rights, privacy and the freedom of expression.

 

A Sri Lankan EFF?

One idea that I wanted to emphasize before the Chair cut me off was the creation of a (in)formal body on the lines of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to monitor practices and policies of ISPs in Sri Lanka, using tools like Switzerland (Slide 22). It could mature into an entity that provided education on web security, undertook pro-rights / pro-consumer Public Interest Litigation and also provide bloggers with legal protection and advice. 

 

Recommendations for the new Colombo Declaration

What the audience missed out on, and what may be most important to the drafters of the new Colombo Declaration, were 6 recommendations from Reporters Without Borders and the OSCE to ensure freedom of expression on the Internet. These are worth underscoring here as principle deeply relevant to the context of new media, telecoms regulation and internet / web communications in Sri Lanka. 

 

1. Any law about the flow of information online must be anchored in the right to freedom of expression as defined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
2. In a democratic and open society it is up to the citizens to decide what they wish to access and view on the Internet. Filtering or rating of online content by governments is unacceptable. Filters should only be installed by Internet users themselves. Any policy of filtering, be it at a national or local level, conflicts with the principle of free flow of information.
3. Any requirement to register websites with governmental authorities is not acceptable.
4. … A decision on whether a website is legal or illegal can only be taken by a judge, not by a service provider. Such proceedings should guarantee transparency, accountability and the right to appeal.
5. All Internet content should be subject to the legislation of the country of its origin (“upload rule”) and not to the legislation of the country where it is downloaded.
6. The Internet combines various types of media, and new publishing tools such as blogging are developing. Internet writers and online journalists should be legally protected under the basic principle of the right to freedom of expression and the complementary rights of privacy and protection of sources.

Perhaps if the SLPI and PCC moved away from geriatrics and engaged more with vibrant, compelling content produced by Sri Lankan bloggers and citizen journalists, there would be a better chance of progressive conversations, inter-generational learning as well as mutually beneficial exchanges of technologies and ideas hugely relevant to journalism in the future.

Groundviews presentation at Manthan Awards 2008

Manthan Awards 2008

Groundviews was shortlisted in the e-news category of the 2008 Manthan Awards, the only site outside of India in this category. We didn’t go on to win, but it was tremendously exciting to see winners from Sri Lanka in other categories whose products and innovation richly deserved the recognition.

The presentation on Groundviews I made at a session on e-news and e-content is below.

Click here for a report on the winners, including those from Sri Lanka.

I find that the real challenge to communicate the potential of CJ in a country such as Sri Lanka to interrogate war, peace, governance and democracy WITHIN violent conflict is to juxtapose an initiative like Groundviews with large, better known initiatives such as Ohmynews. While certain principles are shared, smaller CJ initiatives operating within violent conflict pack a punch above their weight. Measuring the impact of such initiatives is a pressing challenge I’ve blogged about earlier, but dismissing their impact and importance using criteria developed and used to judge commercial, larger web media initiatives is a genuine problem.

The rise of Big Brother in the UK: The problems for the rest of us

Reading an article on mobile phone surveillance in England, I remembered a scene from the film the Bourne Ultimatum where the character Jason Bourne, played by Matt Damon, buys a phone off the counter in London and uses it to communicate securely with a reporter. The reporter eventually gets killed and that sadly seems to be the fate of civil liberties and privacy in the UK as well.

As Times Online notes,

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

Just as with extra-ordinary rendition and Guantanamo in relation to the US, actions such as this have significant repercussions on the freedom of expression in repressive regimes, such as that we find in Sri Lanka. These regimes, ever on the look out for ways to justify their repression and outright violence against democratic dissent and inconvenient truths that embarrass them, often use the argument that Western regimes who criticise them are no better than them.

There is some truth to this assertion. The proposed Data Communications Bill in the UK will make it difficult, if not impossible, for the UK to seriously promote civil liberties and the freedom of expression. If itself becomes what is encourages other democracies to avoid becoming, HMG stands to severely undermine efforts by DFID and other developmental (and conditional aid) efforts, supported by the British public, to strengthen democracy elsewhere in the world. While it is fairly clear now that the British Government does get violent with those who disagree with its policies, it is unclear just how the Government will use information siphoned from the private communications of its citizens against them.

Say for example I was on the CC list of an Al Qaeda spam email that is a sophisticated argument for matrydom. In the interests of my research on countering Islamic radicalisation through ICTs, I forward this to some other colleagues. A lively discussion ensues over email, SMS and voice calls. Under the proposed surveillence regime in the UK, if any one of the recipients was a British citizen living in the UK, does this mark me out as a threat in the data mining algorithms that HMG / MI5 will use to identify embryonic terrorist activity? Will this communication be used against me if I apply for a VISA to the UK? Will I have to pass more stringent customs and border control checks? Will this information be communicated to other intelligence services, or used in conjunction with existing programmes such as Echelon to create profiles that can be matched, discriminated against, sold, exchanged, stored even after death and negatively impact upon my children, friends, colleagues and partners?

There are also serious concerns about the ability of the British Government to actually securely store the information it gathers.

The proposed Data Communications Bill, just as with an issue such as Net Neutrality in the US, are not challenges that are limited to the national boundaries of the UK and US respectively. Their outcomes shape the reality of communications and all that is dependent on it in other countries as well. If the raison d’etre of ICT4Peace is to engender ways through which communications helps peacebuilding, I am yet to be convinced that what the UK is planning on doing will in any way help it combat the root causes of terrorism.

Location based social networking: A glimpse of the future?

For years, I’ve been looking forward to and calling for the development of location based social networking tools. Such tools could in the future be adapted to help coordination and collaboration of actors involved in peacebuilding as well as aid and relief work in sudden onset disasters. Though the underlying technology of 3G and the high-end iPhone 2.0 make Brightkite.com inaccessible to most in developing countries, and especially when telecoms are fragile after a disaster, this video is extremely compelling. For me it shows off once again the beauty and simplicity of the iPhone’s UI leveraged here to provide location based information and interaction. 

Of course, we in Sri Lanka will never get to experience this sort of technology. 

But I wonder if this, coupled emergent technologies with huge potential such as InSTEDD’s Mesh4X can be combined to create interoperable, SMS based location aware services that may not look as good, but are good enough for the field?

It would be such a pity for these tools and services to be limited only to the US to find corner-side coffee stores and invite friends, who are around the block, for a latte.

US airlines inspired by the Rajapakse regime

American Airlines and Delta, two airlines in the US, have decided in an epiphany akin to that which the Rajapakse regime experienced in Sri Lanka, to ban pornography over their in-flight WiFi services.

Of course, the Rajapakse regime goes further and bans ‘hosting’ porn on mobiles to boot. Perhaps Delta and AA will realise this too in the fullness of time.

As Ars Technica notes,

In-flight WiFi, on its own, though, doesn’t quite open up a Pandora’s Box of sin—travelers have always been able to bring video porn onto planes ever since the advent of the laptop and portable DVD player. Before that, the plethora of “men’s magazines” being offered at airport kiosks have made (and still make) it possible. We guess all those swaths of travelers who need to get their porn fix in the air will have to go back to preloading it on their laptops before they board.

Also, I wonder how AA, Delta and the Rajapakse regime will deal with someone interested in reading up on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) by typing that acronym into Google…

Skype, Censorship and China – A shameful nexus

In what is a shameful and outrageous admission, noted VoIP provider Skype recently admitted that a joint venture in China Monitors users communications. Global Insight breaks it down thus,

Significance

Skype has admitted breaching customer privacy with its Chinese joint-venture.

Implications

Several internet companies, including Google and Yahoo, have been criticised in the past for being too helpful in enabling censorship in China.

Outlook

A group of international internet service companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are drawing up a voluntary code of conduct in negotiations with human-rights groups, academics and investors.

First revelations that Skype wasn’t as secure as it made itself out to be came from Austria. These reports from China don’t help in restoring public confidence in the company, even though in many cases, it is still by far the most secure communications platform available for the likes of human rights and media freedom defenders. As reported by Reuters,

“We may never know whether some of those people whose conversations were logged have gone to jail or have had their lives ruined in various ways as a result of this,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet expert at Hong Kong University. “This is a big blow to Skype’s credibility, despite the fact that Skype executives are downplaying it as not such a big deal.”

British government will record every call and e-mail, only to be sold on eBay?

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain. GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project. Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers – thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Big Brother may soon be far too real. News reports suggest that the UK plans to intercept communications on a scale that dwarfs (publicly known details of) other regimes and mechanisms to intercept communications of citizens. But going by other accounts, the British Government has more to worry about its intelligence leaking out into the public domain.

As TechCrunch reported recently,

A 28-year-old delivery man from the UK who bought a Nikon Coolpix camera for about $31 on eBay got more than he bargained for when the camera arrived with top secret information from the UK’s MI6 organization. Allegedly sold by one of the clandestine organization’s agents, the camera contained named al-Qaeda cells, names, images of suspected terrorists and weapons, fingerprint information, and log-in details for the Secret Service’s computer network, containing a “Top Secret” marking.

Doh.

If these governments really want to make the world a safer place, how about investing all this money on the same technology to support efforts to build bridges between and within divided communities?

US Presidential candidates promise better broadband

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, Both Obama and McCain have promised better broadband in the US if they are elected, helping the country address abysmal broadband offerings at present. I prefer Obama’s plan over McCain’s:

For cable and phone companies, connecting scattered populations in rural areas doesn’t make financial sense. Mr. McCain favors encouraging private companies to build out the Internet infrastructure by providing business tax incentives. But if a hands-off, free-market approach fails, he supports letting local governments step in to take over the job.

Mr. Obama gets there a somewhat different way. He wants to redirect the Universal Service Fund, fed by fees collected from telecommunications companies, so that instead of mostly promoting better phone service for rural and low-income Americans, it helps pay for affordable broadband.

Both candidates say they will look at underused portions of the wireless spectrum that could be tapped to provide low-cost broadband. Neither one seems tethered to hardened positions, however. That flexibility bodes well for a wired America, no matter which candidate wins.

When Obama is elected, the potential for broadband to be used within the US for ICT4Peace (e.g. for the promotion of content creation and wider dissemination of ethnic media within the US that augments inter-cultural relations and celebrates diversity) is the same as that which I noted in my post on universal broadband access legislation by 2010 in the EU.

Artificial intelligence as a peace negotiator? Not quite…

 

Elbot

 

 

When I first started to programme in BASIC on the Sinclair ZX-81, the programme that captured my interest and imagination the most was Eliza. I spent hours entering strings of phrases and took delight when the programme appeared to engage with me in ‘conversation’. 

For Mac users, you can see what Eliza was like by using a hidden feature in Terminal. 

I was interested to read about Elbot, an artificial intelligence programme, that fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being during the final round of the Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence this year. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing’s criterion for a true artificial intelligence.

Sadly though, Elbot is so underwhelming and unconvincing that you begin to wonder more about the intelligence of the 25% of interlocutors who thought it was human. As the Guardian notes,

The winning software, designed by an American and called Elbot, fooled 25% of respondents. “We really, really have come very close,” said Warwick. His sample size, in a field made up largely of computer experts and journalists: 12.

Here’s a sample conversation I had with Elbot just a few minutes ago. 

Elbot: Well, this is indeed a surprise. A visitor from Sri Lanka!

Me: Wow. How did you guess?

Elbot: In order to guess, I just look up ‘accepting things at face value’ in my instruction manual and do whatever it tells me to do.

As long as the conversation is this grammatically correct, stilted and isn’t littered with the odd expletive, anyone who is a tad more intelligent than Elbot won’t have a hard time distinguishing between a real person’s and a computer generated conversation.

I have no doubt that computer speech synthesis and recognition, with real time semantic language processing run on massively parallel processing power (perhaps the combined power of the Internet via the cloud?) will make it impossible to distinguish between human and machine conversation. Like KITT in Knight Rider, or HAL 9000 in Space Odyssey.  

Until such time though, I think it’s a safe bet to keep peace negotiations to humans.

Richard Stallman’s head is in the clouds

I don’t agree with Stallman’s recent comments that users of cloud computing are stupid. I do agree that the growth of web services, including software as a service, have created walled gardens with huge concerns of data integrity, privacy and interoperability, amongst others noted by the NY Times recently.

Cloud computing confuses some. For example, some conflate FOSS, social networking, online storage, software as a service and blogging as cloud computing, which is not terribly useful to interrogate Stallman’s concerns. Speaking from experience, I’ve never had confidence in the ‘cloud’, which is why systems I design for peacebuilding and peace negotiations, inter alia, are designed to work over multiple internet transports, most of them low bandwidth, based on open standards and when possible, open source, are interoperable to the extent possible with other relevant systems and are redundant - the failure of a single node will not, akin to the Internet itself, bring down the whole network.

Organisations that believe they are users of the ‘cloud’ often fail to realise that complete reliance on these services is very dangerous, as it holds hostage mission critical operations and processes to server side outages, local network and ISP outages or blocks, data loss resulting from bankruptcy of the parent company and the infringement of civil liberties through insecure content management.

So in this sense, Stallman is right – we are stupid to not look at ways to reduce our reliance on the cloud, believing in its benign munificence as a guarantee that data will always be safe, secure and available. Through bitter experience, this is something I have written on at length – see WordPress.com goes down – A chink in the “cloud” and how to plan for it

However, Chanuka’s point in this comment is also correct. Proponents of the idea of using alternatives to walled-gardens as they exist today – be it Gmail, Facebook, Myspace, Amazon’s S3 servers or Google Docs – rarely have any viable alternatives that offer the same set of features, ease of use and functionality.

Because of the nature of repressive regimes, HR defenders and those at the frontlines of strengthening democracy often have no option but to rely on cloud storage and information dissemination, given the risk associated with local data storage. But bad practices and ignorance lead to deplorable habits online, leaving many HR defenders, few of whom are IT literate to the extent they need to be today, very exposed to data leaks.

So Stallman is only partly right. His comments, like most of what he says, alienate even those who recognise that there is great value in the issues he raises. The manner he raises them however relegates him to a fringe lunacy, an binary mentality that cannot grasp, much less articulate, a more nuanced approach to and understanding of issues such as cloud computing.