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29 April 2010
Online Journalists Increasingly Risk Censorship, Imprisonment
Washington — For the first time, the number of online journalists in prison almost surpasses the number of jailed traditional print and broadcast journalists, according to the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), an initiative of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to strengthening democratic institutions around the world.
In a special event on Capitol Hill April 27 in honor of World Press Freedom Day on May 3, CIMA, with the support of the U.S. Congressional Caucus for the Freedom of the Press, hosted a morning-long panel discussion entitled “Bloggers Behind Bars.”
“The battle for press freedom has moved online,” said Robert Mahoney, an experienced international journalist and deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In its 2009 prison census, CPJ found that at least 68 bloggers, Web-based reporters, and online editors are under arrest worldwide, constituting about half of all journalists now in jail, he said.
Online journalists are especially vulnerable to persecution, Mahoney said, because most of them are independent freelance writers without the protection of an established media company that would have the legal resources and political connections to keep them out — or get them out — of prison. Bloggers without a high profile on the international stage are especially vulnerable to intimidation, abduction and worse, he said.
And it’s not just repressive governments that are hunting down online journalists, Mahoney said. Powerful gangs seek to silence bloggers who dare to expose the illegal activities of criminal organizations, he said.
Repressive regimes can halt the use of the Internet more easily than they can close down news organizations, according to Mahoney. Filtering systems, firewalls and pressure on service providers are their tools for suppressing free speech, he said, adding that Internet service providers have little motivation to protect online journalists.
The tactics for silencing online journalists differ by country, said Robert Faris, the research director for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Internet filtering is especially prevalent in Syria, for example, while Egypt doesn’t attempt to block the Internet but does go after the online journalists themselves, he said.
Faris said that repressive governments are becoming more sophisticated in using the Internet to suppress free speech. And for every blogger they put in jail, a real — but undocumented — “chilling effect” is put on other bloggers, he said. Even so, bloggers in general have succeeded in expanding accepted political discussion not tackled by traditional media outlets, Faris said.
According to Tienchi Martin-Kiao, the president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a nonprofit organization supporting journalism freedom in China, the Chinese government has developed a sophisticated filtering system designed to flag words it finds inflammatory. Nonetheless, Chinese bloggers and their readers, she said, have gotten around censorship by developing their own language — a sort of “electronic vocabulary” used to criticize the government while evading the “Internet police.” But it’s a “cat-and-mouse” game, Martin-Kiao acknowledged, and the Chinese government can often make blog entries not to its liking disappear within minutes of their posting.
Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist and blogger who in 2004 spent time in prison for his work, said many former Iranian officials have turned to blogging to criticize the current government. “The more people who have access to the Internet and [free] discourse, the more they can pressure the government” for change, he said. Memarian emphasized that activist bloggers need access to proxy websites with online security to evade government suppression.
But Faris said circumvention technology is only a short-term solution. “This is a political problem that needs a political solution,” Faris said. Attacking Internet censorship, added Mahoney, requires an international commitment.
The Obama administration, for its part, is reinvigorating the Global Internet Freedom Task Force as a forum for addressing threats to Internet freedom around the world. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a major speech delivered in January, said the United States is urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance.
“The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression,” Clinton said. “And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply what’s a quick profit.”
Clinton also said the Obama administration is “encouraged” by the work currently being done by the Global Network Initiative, which is a voluntary effort by technology companies — along with nongovernmental organizations, academic experts and social investment funds — to respond to government requests for censorship. As a part of the U.S. government commitment to support responsible private-sector engagement on information freedom, the State Department held a high-level meeting in February to bring together companies that provide network services for talks about Internet freedom.
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(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
