People around the world faced further restictions on Internet freedom
last year, as governments grew bolder in attempts to monitor and
control web information. In its fifth annual “Freedom on the Net”
report, Freedom House found goverments expanding online controls
“rapidly” in 2013 and early 2014, with the adoption of “new laws
that legitimize existing repression and effectively criminalize
online dissent.”
This is the fourth consecutive year that global Internet freedom
has declined. An increase in surveillance, new regulatory controls,
and a proliferation of invasive laws all share some of the
blame.
“As a result, more people are being arrested for their internet
activity than ever before, online media outlets are increasingly
pressured to censor themselves or face legal penalties, and private
companies are facing new demands to comply with government requests
for data or deletions,” notes Freedom House. Measures criminalizing
online defamation were also a “prominent trend”.
“Authoritarian and democratic leaders alike believe the internet
is ripe for regulation and passed laws that strengthen official
powers to police online content,” said Sanja Kelly, project
director for Freedom on the Net.
For this year’s report, Freedom House examined developments in
65 countries between May 2013 and May 2014. Overall, 36 of these
countries (55 percent) experienced “a negative trajectory” in terms
of online privacy and freedom of speech and information. Twenty-one
countries passed new laws increasing online censorship. Arrests for
online political communications were documented in 38
countries.
The worst abuses of internet freedom came from the usual
suspects: Iran, Syria, and China. But Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine
also saw “major deteriorations” in online freedom, and “very few
countries registered any gains”. The only three countries with
notable improvements were India, Brazil, and Belarus.
Laws empowering government agencies to block content without
judicial oversight and little or no transparency were especially
bad in Turkey, Thailand, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Italy. Russia,
Jordan, and Singapore all introduced, updated, or enforced rules
requiring journalists and bloggers to register with the
government.
The United States scored pretty high on the Internet freedom
scale. Freedom House considers a score of zero to 30 to
represent a “free” Internet, 31-60 “partly free”, and 61-100 not
free. Scores were determined by considering a set of
“21 questions and nearly 100 accompanying subpoints” surrounding
things such as obstacles to access (infrastructural barriers,
government blocking of specific apps or technologies), limits on
content (filtering and blocking websites, censoring online news
media), and violations of user rights (surveillance, legal
restrictions on online activity). America received a score of 19, coming in just
behind Australia (17), Germany (17), Canada (15), Estonia (8), and
Iceland (6), and and just ahead of France (20), Italy (22), Japan
(22), Hungary (24), the U.K. (24), and South Africa (26).
In terms of emerging threats to Internet freedom, Freedom House
says the three biggest are:
Data localization requirements, which require
private companies to maintain data storage centers within a
given country. For instance, Russia passed a law in July 2014 that
requires Internet companies to store data from Russian citizens on
servers in Russia.
Digital threats and harassment of women and
LGBT individuals, which “can lead to self-censorship” and
significantly inhibit freedom of expression and the ability to
freely use certain digital tools. In Egypt, for instance, there
were reports of “authorities used the dating application Grindr to
entrap and prosecute gay men.” In Russia, “vigilante groups used
online tools to bait gay men, luring them to in-person encounters
where they were physically assaulted and threatened with public
exposure.”
Malware attacks, which are getting increasingly
sophisticated and are employed against government critics and human
rights organizations (documented in 32 of the 65 countries
examined).
On the bright side, Freedom House found that “pushback by civil
society was amplified this year”, largely in reaction to the
National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance revelations. “In
select cases, long-running internet freedom campaigns finally
garnered the necessary momentum to succeed,” it notes. See the full report here.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1yRX8WS
via IFTTT