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Twitter grapples with censorship issues

January 29th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Microblogging giant Twitter recently announced plans to begin censoring some content in response to restrictions and/or laws in place within individual countries. The six-year-old Internet company has gained prominence as a tool for change in recent years as users employed tweets to reach a global audience during post-election protests in Iran, in the wake of the Haiti earthquake and throughout the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Some Twitter users and observers have blasted the censoring plans as social suicide, but the company has chosen to publicly address and engage on an issue that has plagued other Internet content related companies.

In a post on January 26, Twitter stated, “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

In the past, Twitter has deleted content, but was only able to do so on a global scale by deleting the tweet entirely. The company has thus far limited itself to snuffing out content related to things such as child pornography or pro-Nazi sentiment, but it could also include tweets from protesters in specific countries like Egypt, Iran, and Syria if given the right opportunity. With its new technology, the site will be able to determine if a tweet is breaking a law in a specific country and remove the tweet from that region while still leaving it visible for the rest of the world to see. If a tweet is removed, the site “will post a censorship notice” for users in that country, much in the same way Google Inc. practices in countries “where its service operates requires a search result to be removed.” Twitter, like Google, will use Chillingeffects.org to share the removal requests it “receives from governments, companies and individuals.” The site “sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or “tweets,” remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world.” The company will also have the ability to censor individual accounts as well, given their location within a country where a law has been broken.

Alexander Macgillivray, general counsel to Twitter, helped draw up the censorship policy for the site, just as he did for Google when he worked for them, which explains the similarity Twitter’s new policy has to Google’s. “The critics are jumping to the wrong conclusions,” Mr. Macgillivray said. “This is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency and accountability. This launch is about us keeping content up whenever we can and to be extremely transparent with the world when we don’t. I would hope people realize our philosophy hasn’t changed.”

But, Twitter may have suffered a backlash as users protested on January 28 in a boycott, organizing the event by using the hashtag #TwitterBlackout. In a similar fashion to the Internet blackout protest two weeks ago, which included websites such as Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit in response to the controversial anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, many Twitter users planned to “turn off the tweets” for a day.

What seems to be forgotten is that Twitter has always had the ability to remove content when necessary, but the company does stand for freedom of speech, as it signed the letter to Congress about SOPA along with several other Internet companies like Google and Facebook.

“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice,” Thursday’s Twitter post said. “We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The tweets must continue to flow.”

One thing protesters failed to notice was the bypass Twitter makes very easy to find in its Help Center so that content can’t be censored or deleted, and all it requires is changing the country in which one resides. The tweets can’t be censored if they’re being tweeted from a country where the law isn’t being broken.

ICT companies and their stakeholders broadly agree on the transformative power of the Internet and efforts to promote universal access. The reality that companies find themselves operating in environments governed by repressive or restrictive regimes that will attempt to limit access is one that all parties have to recognize and manage—and Twitter has shown it is prepared to do just that.

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Struggle against conflict minerals continues

January 27th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Despite the recent departure of a main stakeholder from the Kimberley Process—a standard-setting multistakeholder effort to curb the trade in blood diamonds—similar efforts continue to gain traction on the issue of conflict minerals. The European Union is considering action after the U.S. passed legislation to curb the trade, while the private sector and activist stakeholders simultaneously seek ways to sever the connections between mineral trade, warfare and human rights abuses.

But what happens when implementation of legislation and certification schemes at the local levels is stymied by a lack of infrastructure, corruption and political interests? What is to keep multinational corporations from turning to alternative sourcing to avoid the pitfalls of a lack of local capacity? How do these efforts affect local populations and development? And how long do various stakeholders stay engaged in a process when progress is limited?

Almost a decade after the Kimberley Process came into being to curb the trade in diamonds sold to support deadly conflict, stakeholders are still grappling with such questions. Global Witness, which helped drive the creation of the KP, withdrew from the process in December 2011 in frustration over chronic corruption and the continued ability of human rights abusers to bring their product to market through the KP.

As efforts to stem the flow of conflict minerals move towards systemic shifts in the way the trade is managed, the challenges of the KP may seem all too familiar.

Some American companies like Apple, Inc. are looking to stop the sourcing of any minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in order to prevent conflict minerals from reaching its products—the opposite effect U.S. legislators intended with the Dodd-Frank Act. As much as 90 percent of the previous level of DRC exports have ceased as multinationals back away for to avoid running afoul of pending reporting rule associated with the Act. Hewlett-Packard, Inc. has also joined Apple, Inc. in stopping the flow of potential conflict minerals from reaching its products.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which came into being July 2010, requires the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to force companies to report all minerals, such as tin, gold, and tungsten, used in their products—cell phones, computers, GPS systems—and where those minerals come from, even trace amounts, to prove such minerals were derived from a “conflict free” area of the DRC. Legislators hoped this would pressure DRC rebel groups and other combatants that profit from the trade but has shaken up the international mineral markets.

“If you go from compliance on through, this starts to set up not only nightmare scenarios, but also costly scenarios that make it difficult for companies to ensure an adequate supply of raw materials,” Tom Quaadman, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said.

AT&T has criticized the Dodd-Frank as too broad and raising concerns the new requirements “could trip up companies who contract with manufacturers and have little, if any, control or knowledge about the origins of minor amounts of minerals that end up in their products.”

The United Nation’s (UN) Group of Experts stated in a report that the situation has helped further entrench corruption and made the situation worse by leaving many DRC exporters “bereft of their main, or only customers, and therefore incomes.”

In late December 2011, a UN report confirmed that the “crackdown” on conflict minerals has pushed “trade deeper into the hands of criminals and smugglers “including former rebel officials who are now in the Congolese army. The report warns, “(It) appears to have increased the need for fraudulent operators to seek or accept military assistance in their mineral smuggling operations” and suggests a rise in the smuggling of conflict minerals into Rwanda because Rwanda’s reported production is much higher than what industry analysts deem realistically possible.

Several groups, companies and attorneys “have urged the SEC to phase in the new rules over time to help make it easier to comply,” as well as “narrow the scope of the rule” so the corporation won’t have to “track trace amounts of minerals.” However, human rights groups oppose a “phase-in” period and state that the “SEC needs to follow the Dodd-Frank mandate and implement the rule without delay.” Since the rule is a legal requirement, the SEC can’t stray from its intent.

Amol Mehra, coordinator of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, said, “Businesses should be held accountable for human rights issues, and investors find these concerns to be material in that they, at the end of the day, affect companies’ image and bottom line. All companies need to do…is simply tell us what is in their products.”

The challenges facing efforts to remove conflict minerals from the global supply chains of major multinationals are significant but doing nothing is simply no longer an option—and that is a point that stakeholders from across the spectrum continue to agree upon.

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Netizens get viral over SOPA/PIPA

January 20th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Anyone surfing the World Wide Web this Wednesday couldn’t help but notice an unusual amount of black as websites across cyberspace blocked out their banners or went completely dark in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Some sites participated in the protest for a few hours, while others like Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. The effort brought together stakeholders from a variety of disciplines united in the desire to express concern over Internet freedoms. The effect was almost immediate.

In response to the protests, two of PIPA’s co-sponsors, Florida’s Marco Rubio (R) and Missouri’s Roy Blunt (R) have backed away from supporting the bill. Mr. Rubio posted on Facebook that he and his fellow Senators “heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill [PIPA] could have on access to the Internet.”

While each bill covers specific agendas, both bills focus on online piracy and illegal copies/downloads of film and music, as well as other media and software. If the bills were to pass, they would not only outlaw those sites containing the pirated content, but they would also outlaw any websites that link to information on how to access the outlawed sites.

PIPA, a bill that looked like it would easily pass on January 24, 2012 now may be in trouble due to the protests.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia service, and WordPress, a blog service, were two of the many high-profile websites to block their content. Wikipedia’s English-language website left a note, stating: “Imagine a world without free knowledge . . . The US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.” Google, one of the world’s most popular search engines, placed a black box over its name for the US version of the site, but users could still access the search engine. The search engine also posted on its blog that the bills wouldn’t stop online piracy. Craigslist, an online marketplace, like many others, had a note up asking its visitors to contact representatives in Congress before accessing the main website. According to the US news website Politico, approximately 7,000 sites were blacked out by Wednesday morning.

At the end of the protest—midnight EST—Wikipedia said: “Thank you for protecting Wikipedia.”

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hollywood’s key supporter of SOPA, “branded the protests as ‘irresponsible’ and a ’stunt’” on Wednesday. While no one protesting is pro-piracy, as some supporters of the bills have claimed, they are pro-freedom of speech, and when proposed bills such as SOPA and PIPA have the potential to infringe on that freedom, American citizens are going to speak up.

Technology has helped small and medium-sized businesses increase their productivity by 10 percent, and the U.S. Internet’s contribution to the GDP is larger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, and utilities combined. Unfettered access to the Internet for hundreds of millions of Americans remains a vital asset to the world community and U.S. economic growth and job creation.

SOPA and PIPA, in enacted, could hinder the economic possibilities.

WordPress’ co-founder, Matt Mullenweg summed the whole situation up by saying, “The authors of the legislation don’t seem to really understand how the internet works.”

If they did, they could see the potential disaster and consequences of such legislation on America’s Internet freedoms.

Supporters of SOPA and PIPA describe the protests as an “abuse of power.”

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information,” Chris Dodd, former Connecticut Democratic Senator and now Chairman and CEO of the MPAA, said. Perhaps Mr. Dodd didn’t check that some of the websites protesting were still accessible. Mr. Dodd also claimed that the high-profile websites’ actions were “yet another gimmick.” The US Chamber of Commerce agrees, adding that any “claims against the legislation had been overstated.”

But the bills are out there for everyone to read, and quite a few have done just that, as well as analyzed and broken down the language.

Chris Heald, a writer for Mashable.com, is one of many who has studied the bills and explained them in an article posted on Wednesday.

“Implementing censorship protocols and giving the keys to the government is a scary, scary thing, and SOPA should be opposed simply based on this provision alone,” Mr. Heald said, referencing China’s Internet censorship and Iran’s Internet firewalls. “Any site that allows users to post content is ‘primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.’ The site doesn’t have to be clearly designed for the purpose of copyright violation; it only has to provide functionality that can be used to enable copyright violation.

“This means that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be ‘Internet sites . . . dedicated to theft of U.S. property,’ under SOPA’s definition. Simply providing a feature that would make it possible for someone to commit copyright infringement or circumvention is enough to get your entire site branded as an infringing site.”

There are three major supporters of SOPA—the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And it looks as though “Hollywood has outspent Silicon Valley by about tenfold on lobbyists in the last two years.” In total, SOPA has the support of more than 400 businesses. But Wednesday’s blackout protests and the numerous calls to representatives and Senators, which caused many servers to crash, may result in further significant changes to that list.

GoDaddy had to pull their support of the bills because customers protested, and in two days, pulled over 37,000 domain names from the site, transferring them elsewhere.

Spain recently approved similar legislation, creating a government body with the power “to force Internet service providers to block sites” within ten days. Though Spain’s legislation is also supported by the media industries, it is also facing stiff criticism from Netizens.

Congress may still approve both SOPA and PIPA, but President Barack Obama has expressed concerns and may veto them. In a statement issued at the weekend, the White House’s official response was, “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.”

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China labor condition concerns continue

January 9th, 2012

Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

While China’s labor conditions have remained a mainstay of activist stakeholders’ campaigns and been featured in the international media for years—notably following allegations in 2004-05 about labor practices in manufacturing plants producing products sold in Wal-Mart stores, and reigniting after 10 Foxconn employees committed suicide in May 2010 at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant—some recent stakeholder assessments have found a slow pace of improvement.

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, employs nearly one million people throughout China and builds products for corporations like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Motorola, and Dell. Mike Daisey, a monologist who performs an Off Broadway show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in Manhattan’s Public Theater, decided to visit the Foxconn plant recently for a little research to see for himself what the safety and working conditions were, and “what he found surprised him beyond belief.”

“What I was really shocked by was institutionalized dehumanization,” he said. “The systems that are put in place are working and the objective of them working is to work people, basically, to death.”

While most Americans don’t routinely consider the human cost associated with the production of popular consumer electronics products, Daisey firmly believes that Steve Jobs knew of the conditions in which his products were built at Foxconn, as does Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook. “Apple is a company that believes in micromanagement. They pay attention to details,” Daisey said. “There is no question in my mind that they know what conditions are like on the ground.”

For the past two decades, multinational corporations have shipped thousands of jobs to companies like Foxconn in China, taking advantage of cheap labor in developing countries. “Unfortunately in doing so, Corporate America chose to ignore its Western values and high labor standards,” Daisey said. Several of the workers Daisey met had been doing the same tedious job over and over for so long that the “joints in their hands have disintegrated from doing that work…. [Hands] literally swollen, literally deformed [and] permanently warped.”

But the days of the docile worker in China are coming to an end, and the Chinese corporations know it. Workers like Lan Yimin, 22, represent “the new generation of Chinese factory workers,” who are unwilling to settle for low wages and long hours. Lan, who works in a factory in Shajing, China, doesn’t want to “eat bitterness—as the Chinese call it.” With more information at their fingertips, and as China’s economy booms, Lan’s generation knows more about their rights than their parents before them did. “The young generation has a wider social circle; we talk more about factory conditions and we know more about our legal rights,” Lan said.

As Chinese workers fight for higher wages and labor standards by going on strike, the Chinese government isn’t sitting idly by. In recent years China has moved legislatively to mandate better salaries and working conditions “and is now trying to maintain a delicate balance of improving income levels for workers while not scaring away foreign corporations with higher labor costs.”

“If the [Chinese] government does not treat the workers’ struggle for collective bargaining seriously, if it decides to treat these demands as political, then this will turn into a political struggle,” says Han Dongfang, a labor activist who, for his role in the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, was deported to Hong Kong.

Microsoft has also come under scrutiny for China-related labors concerns with conditions at the KYE Systems factory where Microsoft hardware is assembled for export to the United States, Europe and Japan. Labor rights advocates have raised questions over 15-hour work days and 65 cents-per-hour pay rates affecting thousands of teenage and young adult workers. Employees are prohibited from listening to music or talking. One worker told the National Labor Committee, “We are like prisoners. It seems like we live only to work. We do not work to live.” Microsoft accounts for approximately 30 percent of the work performed at the KYE Systems factory. Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Acer, Logitech and Foxconn also outsource their production to KYE Systems.

Workers at both the Foxconn and KYE Systems factories sleep in dormitories, work long hours and do not get bathroom breaks during shifts.

“And in what must be the best of both worlds for U.S. companies like Microsoft, the workers give the U.S. companies a pass,” the NLC’s report states. “The young workers never think or talk about the foreign companies and put all the blame on the factory. No one has told them how wealthy and powerful Microsoft and the other companies really are.

“Since the young Chinese workers would never dream of making demands against Microsoft or the other corporations, this permits the corporations to tout their codes of conduct while knowing full well that they will never be implemented. It’s all just part of the game.”

Microsoft responded to the NLC report’s allegations of its knowledge of workers’ treatment expressing the company’s commitment to fair labors standards. “Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors. Microsoft has invested heavily in a vendor accountability program and robust independent third-party auditing program to ensure conformance to the Microsoft Vendor Code of Conduct.

“Actions for non-compliance with our requirements may include corrective action plans, remedial training, certification requirements, cessation of further business awards until corrective actions are instituted, and termination of the business relationship. We unequivocally support taking immediate actions to address non compliant activities.”

Foxconn Technology Group has announced plans to replace its human workers with one million robots, a feat that doesn’t sound easy, but it would certainly cut down on worker abuse and remove some concerns about low labor standards. While such a strategy may help get rid of the bad publicity associated with the past two years’ suicides, it doesn’t represent the kind of systemic shift in attitudes on labor conditions and rights that the majority of stakeholders want to see from Chinese companies.

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Global Witness departure damages Kimberley Process

January 5th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Global Witness recently made a difficult decision to withdraw from its official observatory position of the Kimberley Process (KP) over concerns the scheme was serving “an accomplice to diamond laundering“—a process by which dirty diamonds are mixed with clean ones en route to international markets. The withdrawal of a key stakeholder from an international process to curb the trade in products used to fund deadly conflict raises concerns not only for the integrity of the multistakeholder process that has driven the KP’s evolution, but for efforts on other supply chain issues such as the trade in conflict minerals.

The KP, which Global Witness helped form in 2003, was initially created due to conflicts in Sierra Leone and Angola where the trade in rough diamonds was used to fund conflict and drive massive human rights abuses, to help regulate the sale of certified rough diamonds and remove “blood diamonds” from the international market.

Global Witness’ main concern ahead of the recent withdrawal was KP’s decision in late 2011 “to allow Zimbabwe to export diamonds from the Marange fields, which has been singled out repeatedly by international human rights stakeholders as an area where local government officials are colluding in extensive human rights violations and national authorities have little interest in cleaning up the practices. The NGO also claimed that KP failed to evolve and didn’t address any “clear links between diamonds, violence and tyranny” during the past nine years.

Charmian Gooch, founding director of Global Witness, said in a statement, “Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from, nor whether they are financing armed violence or abusive regimes.

“The scheme has failed three tests: it failed to deal with the trade in conflict diamonds from Ivory Coast, was unwilling to take serious action in the face of blatant breaches of the rules over a number of years by Venezuela, and has proved unwilling to stop diamonds fuelling corruption and violence in Zimbabwe.”

The decision by KP helps pave the ways for others like Anjin Investment, a Chinese-Zimbabwean company, to sell millions of dollars worth of diamonds from the country. There have been allegations Zimbabwean army officers hold senior positions in Anjin, and that some high-ranking officials—top military personnel such as Emmerson Mnangagwa, General Constantine Chiwenga of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), and Colonel Sedz—are “involved in the daily management and operations of [Anjin].”

Gooch reported, “Over the last decade, elections in Zimbabwe have been associated with the brutal intimidation of voters. Orchestrating this kind of violence costs a lot of money. As the country approaches another election there is a very high risk of Zanu PF hardliners employing these tactics once more and using Marange diamonds to foot the bill. The Kimberley Process’s refusal to confront this reality is an outrage.”

Anne Dunnebacke, senior campaigner at Global Witness, stated that “the Zimbabwe incident was the catalyst for the organization’s withdrawal,” but that it wasn’t the only reason.

“We’ve been pushing for reform within the process on a number of issues for many years,” Dunnebacke said. “Over the course of the nine years some improvements have been made and we’ve seen instances where reforms have been adopted. But in recent years that has not been the case. There is next to no political will by governments or industry to reform and make it credible.”

Dunnebacke believes that in order for the industry to take action, a different kind of pressure needs to be applied and vowed Global Witness would remain part of broader campaigns to reform the diamond trade. She claims the industry has stepped back with the excuse, “‘We have the Kimberley Process for diamonds, so that’s that—we’ve solved the problem of blood diamonds.’”

Global Witness has 50 participants worldwide, including the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), with more than 70 countries as its members, who “account for around 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds,” and have all “signed the Kimberley Process agreement to adhere to United Nations-backed safeguards on trade” in the rough diamond field.

Farai Maguwu, director of the Center for Research and Development (CRD) that is based in Zimbabwe, believes that while Global Witness withdrawing wouldn’t collapse the entire KP system, it was “a very big blow.”

Maguwu was arrested in 2010 “as an enemy of the state…allegedly for ‘endangering national security’ by holding information pertaining to the Zimbabwean military’s gross human rights violation at Marange’s diamond mines,” but was cleared of the charges after several civil society movements and local and international NGOs lobbied on his behalf.

“The Kimberley Process will never be the same,” Maguwu said of the Global Witness withdrawal. “A very influential member of the Kimberley Process has cast a vote of no confidence.”

Michael Mann, Catherine Ashton’s spokesman for the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in early December, and after Global Witness withdrew from KP, sent out an e-mail stating that while the KP “may not be a perfect instrument, …it is the best we have, and therefore all parties, including civil society, should work to make it effective.” Mann included, “Abandoning it doesn’t help achieve that common goal.”

The United States became chairman of the KP in the last rotation, a position which was last held by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC’s tenure at the helm was also controversial given that the country is at the heart of trade in “conflict minerals”—tin, tantalum, gold and others—that are the current subject of vociferous campaigning by human rights stakeholders and multistakeholder efforts to address concerns.

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Battle over censored content heats up

December 27th, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

The battle against censored Internet content is heating up heading into 2012 with the U.S. Congress set to vote on a measure opponents worry would adversely affect the climate of innovation and free expression that helps drive the Internet, and related entrepreneurship and development around the world. From Internet users and private sector players protesting the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) to Michael Posner’s speech entreating multinational corporations (MNCs) to stand up and protect free speech and the World Wide Web, stakeholders are lining up to oppose the changes.

In his speech at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference on October 25, 2011, Posner—the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor—said, “To advance these fundamental freedoms, we need the help of citizens, corporations and global civil society for what is likely to be a long, tough struggle with regimes that do not share our values or our views on the merits of openness. And I particularly want to call attention to the role of companies, because today corporations have more global influence than ever.”

Several Internet corporations have pulled their support of SOPA after customers have threatened to take business elsewhere. GoDaddy was in full support of SOPA until its customers voiced their opposition and threatened to pull thousands of domain names from the domain name registrar. And companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter, expressing their concern over the “legislative measures that have been introduced in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.”

While the companies support the goals of SOPA and PIPA—to provide additional tools to combat “rogue” websites that practice copyright infringement or counterfeiting—none of these companies agree with the current drafts of the bills, which “would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that would require monitoring of web sites.” The companies have asked the U.S. Congress to look for “more targeted ways to combat foreign “rogue” websites,” while protecting innovation and technology “that has made the Internet such an important driver of economic growth and job creation.”

When Internet-related innovations and technology have helped small and medium-sized businesses to increase their productivity by 10 percent, and the U.S. Internet’s contribution to the GDP is larger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, and utilities combined, the success and substantial benefits of accessing the Internet for hundreds of millions of Americans is a vital asset to U.S. economic growth and job creation.

SOPA has the potential to halt that growth.

Over the next decade, the next 3 billion customers benefitting from that innovation and technology will be residents of developing countries, where companies like Samsung and Microsoft have created jobs and helped drive sustainable development. Samsung Africa, for example, has tapped into innovation to revolutionize education with the launch of the company’s portable, solar-powered classrooms in October 2011. Such advancements provide an opportunity for education to those in rural areas. However, as these technologies advance and are introduced to developing countries, some have used them as tools to silence dissenting voices. China, Vietnam, Egypt and Bahrain are among the countries where authorities routinely seek to censor the Internet and/or prosecute individuals for their online activities.

Though China began censoring its part of cyberspace before the Arab Spring, Posner voiced that the Arab Spring “brought home the power of the Internet to governments far beyond the Middle East, and the result has been more censorship, more surveillance and more restrictions.”

Unfortunately, these repressive governments have the money and the power to block external content and track what their citizens are doing online, Posner noted. “They are exerting overbroad state control over content, over users, and over companies. And they’re trying to change national and international legal standards to legitimize it all.”

There are three major supporters of SOPA—the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In total, SOPA has the support of more than 400 businesses.

The Senate Judiciary committee approved PIPA and the floor vote is scheduled for January 24, but Sen. Ron Wyden has put a hold on it. SOPA supporters lead in the majority on the committee, and when Congress returns in 2012, the bill is expected to be approved, but “Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, has introduced the so-called OPEN Act that would cut off the flow of funds to alleged pirate Web sites without requiring them to be blocked.”

“Silicon Valley has already given birth to game-changing technologies and a profoundly new approach to philanthropy. Many people here have made it their life’s work not only to develop transformative technologies but also to put them in the hands of people in places where digital empowerment is leaps ahead of political or financial or educational empowerment. Never have great ideas gone from dream to global distribution so quickly.

“But with great code comes great responsibility.”

Posner is correct. There is a giant responsibility that comes with the World Wide Web, but if we don’t figure out how to preserve its current nature; if we don’t protect its freedom, “the autocrats will figure it out for us” and that freedom could vanish.

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Using digital data to better protect vulnerable populations

December 19th, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

The United Nations and current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon have emerged as some of the most vocal supporters of Internet & Communications Technology tools as a powerful force for change and development.  Beyond endorsing efforts to affirm access to the Internet as a basic human right, the UN has initiated—or joined forces with NGOs, aid groups and/or the private sector—to field test applications for technology to promote development, domecracy and the protection of human rights.

Global Pulse, the United Nation’s digital data project, is a prime example of those efforts. The project, that aims to streamline the retrieval of information to protect the world’s vulnerable populations and facilitate access, was created by the UN Secretary-General in 2009 to help “better understand the way we live and how global crises impact people” in real-time. Global Pulse brings together governments, UN agencies, academia, and private sector players for an innovation laboratory to research and develop new tools for capturing real-time data to specifically help humanitarian crises and stop human rights crimes.

The Fall 2011 Global Pulse report discusses closing the information gap by using digital data to better plan humanitarian disaster and crises response efforts. With today’s hyper-connected world, policymakers “are grappling with a volatile environment in which crises in one part of the world emerge suddenly, reverberate around the globe, and amplify the effects of crises already underway.” With private sector companies already analyzing collected real-time data to better understand their customers, “the time has come to learn how to use this new data to understand when households are struggling to make ends meet.”

Remote sensing via satellite has given physical science fields like ecology, atmospheric physics, geosciences, and chemistry valuable insights for decades. It is just in recent years that the UN and other stakeholders have realized what a powerful tool satellite remote sensing can be in the realm of human and socioeconomic processes. Measuring the growth of cities, crop health, slum development, transportation networks, and soil moisture by visible and multispectral imagery, and studies of human behavior have been made via proxy with remote sensing. Events such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, and civil unrest can be monitored successfully via high spatial resolution remote sensing. Such data can be used to immense effect to accurately map a developing situation on the ground as we saw in the aftermath of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake where volunteer users of OpenStreetMap updated the maps using GeoEye imagery to help Search & Rescue and Relief teams. High resolution commercial imagery can potentially bear witness to humanitarian crises and human rights violations as well.

According to Zazie Schafer, Deputy Director of UN Global Pulse, the information people share across the Internet can help provide better information during global crises, such as when a population is experiencing an extremely stressful time. “So what we are looking at in this new age of data as people go about their daily lives. They generate a lot of data. They make calls on mobile phones, they search on the internet, the call agriculture hotline, they interact with their friends on Twitter on Facebook…so this generates a lot of data and we are looking at how to harness that data to provide better information on when populations are experiencing stress.”

On the Global Pulse blog, Lela Prashad, Chief Technology Officer for NiJeL, writes that “The NASA/NOAA image of Earth’s “Lights at Night” is routinely used to estimate economic development and population density.” Prashad is also the Director of the 100 Cities Project at Arizona State University. One of the ways in which this type of remote sensing is used is in humanitarian-related projects like the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) and the UNITAR’s Operational Satellite Applications Program (UNIOSAT)—humanitarian and disaster relief projects. Prashad states that even with these applications, “we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what remotely sensed data can provide for prevention, mitigation and response to acute and chronic human crises.”

Global Pulse focuses on three interdependent areas of activity:

  • Data Research
  • Technology Toolkit
  • Pulse Lab Network

The research conducted tracks the use of digital data—mobile phones, online behavior on websites such as Twitter or Facebook—and provides real-time data on global situations. With each passing day, the digital data trail expands and gives “a fuller picture of the changes, stressors, and shifts in the daily living of a community.” When these changes are compared to wages, gas or food prices, especially during times of global shocks, the more immediate picture provided by the ever-changing digital data can give governments and agencies the knowledge they need to prepare and act.

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Human Rights and Information Technology, Doing Well and Doing Good

December 8th, 2011
By Erik Wohlgemuth COO, The Future 500

Historically, telephony has been highly regulated while the Internet has not.  With the convergence of mobile telephony and the Internet, a host of regulatory and legal frameworks that manage spectrum and protect individual rights are being challenged for inadequacy.  In the developed world, governments fighting the war on terror want access to individual mobile phone and internet data.  In the developing world, oppressive governments from the Arab world to China, seek to aggressively suppress dissent by monitoring individual mobile phone and internet activity.  Human rights advocates worldwide are vigorously resisting governmental attempts to access individual data and often vilify the companies that comply with governmental requests, calling on companies to increase individual security and anonymity on mobile devices and resist government law enforcement requests.

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Internet controls still a global battle

November 1st, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Internet censorship in China has gained the spotlight again recently in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. China’s ability to forestall the use of Internet-based tools to drive public protests, and to successfully block searches for events like the Egyptian protests in January 2011 that dominated the global airwaves are both a demonstration of the government’s continued strength and an admission by authorities that the potential power of technology worries them.

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UN sets broadband targets

October 31st, 2011
Posted by Juliette Terzieff

In an effort to bring at least 60 percent of the population in developed countries into cyberspace by 2015, the United Nations’ Commission for Digital Development has set goals to make it happen, calling the plan ‘The Broadband Challenge’. “Communication—a human need and a right,” says the Broadband Challenge report, issued on Tuesday, October 25, 2011. The goals have been called ‘ambitious but achievable’ by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the commission, which is composed of policy-makers, executives, academics, and government officials, hopes for a lower cost—around 5 percent of the monthly average incomes—for these developed countries. The UN commission is looking to the private sector and governments to help meet the goal, which would require a large amount of cooperation and commitment from both, if they wish to reach their targets within the estimated time.

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