FINISHED FILE
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI, INDONESIA
BUILDING BRIDGES - ENHANCING STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 24, 2013
9:00 AM
WORKSHOP 297
PROTECTING JOURNALISTS, BLOGGERS,
AND MEDIA ACTORS IN DIGITAL AGE
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> GUY BERGER: Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for coming. This is a wonderful turnout and we have a wonderful panel so I think it will be worth your time. We will ask them to speak relatively short so that you have a chance to engage and put your point of view, ask questions, criticize, comment, and debate with us.
We also with have remote participation, we have our moderator, Sara. Thank you. I'm Guy Berger, the Director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO.
UNESCO you may know is part of the UN system. It's the specialized part of the UN dealing with issues of media, communication, culture, world heritage, et cetera, while we hope that journalism and media are part of world heritage. UNESCO proposes that to find one's peace in the world you have to have a free flow of expression. And this position is in the UNESCO Constitution and came about because the analysis after World War II was the only reason why the Japanese, Germans, Italians, could mobilize their population for war was because there was no free media. So part is that UNESCO should promote free media internationally.
Well, we sit in a world today very different than after the first world war but principles still hold the same I think. But we also sit in a world where the Internet exists and cell phones exist and I think the digital world of course is wider than the Internet because it's not part of the Internet and many digital things are not part but they are still digital, and digital has very big consequences.
It has consequences also what happens in the digital sphere, has consequences for the off-digital sphere, real world. So journalists can be identified as to their movements based on cell phone movements or based on what is put on Facebook perhaps by a friend and can be attacked because of that. What happens in the digital world can have a consequence in the physical world.
We also are in a world would journalists today, everybody says how can media people make use of data and that's a positive thing. At the same time we have bad experiences, the British tabloid newspapers hacking into digital information for purposes most people would not think are legitimate.
However, we also have a world in many which, many people, not just journalists employed by the media, can participate of course in public discourse, doing the kind of journalism we can define as public interest news, news for the public, and is comment for the public and that is in the public interest.
That's different than personal use. Much of the use of social media is not really journalism but still is of course entitled to freedom of expression but as societies we are very concerned, especially with those contributed journalism to the public sphere, whether journalists or not journalists. If they are contributing journalism this is important and this is what the UN indeed is arguing, that it's not so much who is a journalist, but the function that is being performed, contribution to journalism and to society.
Of course, it's very important to journalists, contributing journalists should feel safe because also their visibility of journalists is that if a journalist is attacked, those not doing journalism but want to venture an opinion, will feel intimidated. So it is symbolically really important the freedom and safety after journalists is of relevance to everybody else. Not just the journalists but sources are also a big question in this day of age because sources who communicate digitally with journalists but who need to remain anonymous because they are whistle-blowers about corruption or human rights violations, we have to look at the question of how they are protected there.
So I think there are different levels at which the safety of online actors, particularly those doing journalism, become relevant. One is the individual level and this relates to their digital literacy, how much they know when you produce a image, Word document, there is metadata which is not immediately visible but which can be used to identify where that document comes from, who produced it, what date, et cetera.
If journalists have an iPhone, they should know you can be tracked wherever you go because you can affect the battery. So there's an individual level there. That is at one level of safety of online actors.
The other is an institutional level. This is where journalists working for media houses, to what extent do the houses have policies to protect them, policies for data security, to deal with threats, online threats against journalists, policies to fight against hacks and those kinds of issues. And not just media houses but also applies to online intermediaries, Facebooks, Googles, do they have a policy to protect people's speech online, particularly journalistic speech?
Then finally you come to the societal levels. Individual, institutions and now societal level and this is: What is the society's system on privacy rights? Public policy about dealing with crimes against freedom of expression. These are some levels. Our speakers will address different levels of those issues.
The last thing I want to mention is that so UNESCO's interest is in of course freedom of expression on all media platforms. But one thing we've done to try to have a holistic approach to this is to put together as many other members of the UN as possible into what is called the United Nations Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists to find common ground with other UN agencies to say it's in your interests as a UN agency dealing with children or humanitarian issues in crisis situations or human rights, you could really join with us at UNESCO in promoting freedom of expression and safety of journalists.
I'm glad to tell you that heads of all UN organisations agreed to this. They have all signed off so every UN organisation is committed to trying to make a contribution and in particular we have identified five countries to try to work, four countries and we also will begin work in other countries as well, to try to bring together the UN as well as other stakeholders because the problem of safety is much bigger than any individual actor can do.
Part of the UN plan, for example, in Pakistan is to bring together political parties, governments, media, NGOs, freelancers and the UN to say let's develop a national strategy and to give further example in Pakistan an editor of "Dawn" magazine said in the past year he receives many death threats on e-mail and on cell phones and he said this is not coming from the Taliban and rural areas because they do not have connections. This is coming from people in the urban areas. He said of course he's getting threats digitally, quite possible for the digital trail to be followed and these people threatening him with death to be brought to book and account.
The biggest problem of the safety issue is that those who are committing crimes against journalists or those contributing journalism are not brought to book, so you have the situation of impunity.
In Pakistan and other countries we really have to get the rule of law in place so that people realize those who want to suppress information, they realize that there are consequences if you are going to attack journalists in one way or another.
That's by way of introduction. Our first speaker follows from this introduction because it's Ms. Jennifer Henrichsen and she will speak about a research programme we are doing for UNESCO because it's important we try to actually deal with the real complex situations as to who is attacking, how are they attacking, why to they attack, how many death threats or issued before a person actually gets killed, for example, these are complex issues to try to understand, what is happening in terms of what can journalists do at the individual level, what can institutions do and what can society do.
Jennifer will tell us about the study. She's part of a consortium we contracted to do the study and her own credentials and why they won the contract from UNESCO is that she is author of a unique book called "The War On words: Who Should Protect Journalists?" She is also the founder of a Working Group on protection of journalists and her everyday job is communications associate at Hathaway Communications which does research, which conducts campaigns, and she's a former employee of The Open Society and Ford Foundation.
So Jennifer, please, over to you.
>> JENNIFER HENRICHSEN: Thank you. First of all, I want to say thank you to UNESCO for having me here and also having the opportunity to speak to you as well as learn from you today and in the coming days.
It's an extraordinary time to study the safety of online journalists. Every day we have a new revelation about surveillance concerns, for example, or even journalists themselves online and off are attacked for their work.
I want to cover a couple things because I have about five minutes, then open the floor to questions. First I want to give you an overview of our project. This is just beginning and so I really want to treat this session as consultation and to get feedback on what it is we are looking to study. Second, I'd like to share with you a few best practices for online journalist who implement perhaps immediately against some of the threats they may be facing.
Guy talked about what we mean by a journalist so I won't go into that but it is worth noting that it is really more about function of news gathering as opposed to a journalist being accredited with a news organisation or having formal education. As Guy mention I'm one of three authors on this report for UNESCO. Other two unfortunately could not be here but they include Dr. Joanne Wizosky who is a journalism professor as well as Michelle Betz who many of you know, she works in the international media space and is right now Senior Advisor to United Press International Media Division.
Also on this project we have a 12-member, six men and six women, advisory committee to guide us and give us insight and expertise on issues in their countries and also to connect us with journalists so we can interview them for this project.
Research will include in-depth interviews with media actors in countries around the world as well as a global study and we have done a focus group with this study, just releasing it to about 17 people thus far and we're using those insights to then craft a goble survey we will disseminate in the next week and I have also it translated into different UN languages to reach as many people as possible.
So today I want to give you a sense of the type of thematic areas we plan to cover in the study and get your feedback as well. I have written them down so you can see them all. First one is illegitimate surveillance including geolocation tracking and phone tapping. Second is DIO aattacks when a blog site is attacked and causes it to go offline like the "New York Times" experienced, "Washington Post" experienced, by the Syrian Electronic Army.
Other digital attacks include malware when a journalist maybe clicks on a malicious link unknowingly and has something installed to track their movements. In the initial focus group we have conducted number one threat we have heard thus far is threats via e-mail and I'm not sure exactly why that is the case but it would make sense because it's quite easy to do. Easy to make sure someone feels intimidated immediately, just by sending an e-mail threat. Then also I have heard back from people who have experienced digital intimidation in online forums in response to the work they have done.
We're also going to be looking at digital disinformation including cyberimpersonation and misrepresentation and I was talking with someone a couple days ago here about her experience receiving the sort of misrepresentations online through social media.
Then of course the very mundane but very important threat of the theft of your laptop, for example, if you are a newspaper office is ransacked by someone who wishes to censor what you are doing and steals your laptop. That's a lot of valuable data that's on that.
In addition, the additional thematic areas is gender perspective on safety issues. We want to know if women journalists are being targeted in a different way than male journalists and if so maybe what are the reasons, what does that look like?
We also want to know how people have digital literacy training or security training. From the initial focus group the majority of people haven't had any sort of formal training and perhaps it's not surprising but definitely shows a huge need for this type of training.
We also want to look at the issue of outing of a journalist. Maybe an anonymous blogger yet identity is revealed and therefore at risk and that has been revealed through data mining or digital records requisition of their work.
We want to also bridge the space and go into the telecommunications restrictions and abuse such as mobile phone denial of service or using metadata to reveal sources which has happened. One case immediately comes to mind is "Associated Press" in the U.S., how the metadata of a few reporters calls was used to prosecute someone.
We also want to look at digital storage security. Are people having violations of what they are putting in the cloud? What really is secure and what is really not? What are techniques and tactics journalists can use in order to make sure it is secure or more secure because as we know nothing is completely secure.
Also consequences of digital security ignorance. What happens, there was an example of a journalist reporting on Syria and unfortunately did not encrypt his hard drive, laptop was taken and all sources revealed and had to flee the country.
So understanding those types of situations and giving best practices to journalists to use in order to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
So one thing that I want to talk about again since our research is beginning and because it's so complex depends on which country, what your function is as a journalist in that country, all sorts of different actors involved. So I want to talk a little bit about the concept of threat modeling because this is something that you can take away today. Many of you may have actually already known about this but if you don't there are four basic questions you can ask yourself with a threat model and this comes from Jonathan Strayer from Columbia Journalism School. He's one of the experts on this issue. You need to ask yourself, What do you want to keep private? Specify all info that needs to be secret to make sure you are not vulnerable to attack including notes, documents, files, identities of sources or even the fact someone is working on a story.
Second question that you need to ask yourself is who wants to know? Not all attacks are the same. Is it a government looking at your sources or you're worried about who is looking? Law enforcement officials? Corporations? Other non-state actors. May be a single person or entire organisation or state or even multiple entities. Asking yourself that question and finalizing the answer would be helpful to yourself when you are trying to do this study.
Also listing each adversary and their interest. What can they do to find out. Every way they could find out this information and then develop a response to it. Third question that you need to ask is: What is the risk? What can they do? Are you worried about them eavesdropping or serving you a subpoena or other actions? And then finally what happens if they succeed? Is it as limited in some ways as maybe a story is blown or as serious as someone is maybe killed as a result?
Those are some four questions that you can use to ask yourself. Now, some just best practices and again this is always changing because the digital security landscape is always changing but here are a few best practices that you can implement immediately. Obviously use strong passwords, make sure at least eight characters long, exclamation points or other symbols, numbers, use a password management system that is encrypted on your desktop or filed away somewhere else so that you are not just carrying around passwords in your back pocket and you lose that list.
Use encryption. So many different ways of encrypting and I will wrap up because I am going over. You can use FileVault which encrypts hard drives if you have a Mac, BitLocker if you have Windows PC, TrueCrypt which encrypts different files on your system, gives you denial, plausible denial, encrypted e-mail. I'm sort of speaking to the choir because you are all involved in Internet and security research but you can use PGP or BGB as well as encrypt on cloud devices. Use Tor, it's one of the better items out there for anonymizing and encrypting communications, always update software immediately to avoid that being exploited. Use anti-virus software although it's really not that amazing, it will protect you a little bit but use open source forms of software as well. Because you don't want a back door installed in it if using commercial version. And use something basic like two-factor authentication with Gmail account or even Twitter. Those are just some best practices.
Then I want to talk really briefly about some additional resources. Of course just a very short list but community -- based in New York has a really good information security report on this sort of issue. Freedom of Press Foundation has encryption guide that is helpful. Colombia University is doing a lot of work. Obviously Electronic Frontier Foundation is a very good resource, Night Foundation is based in the U.S. and it has developing an online course on digital security. I'll be referencing that in my research and of course Article 19 who I think is present on the panel and then if you want to follow me on Twitter I try to update as much as I can as well.
So thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. If you think you have good stories this research should take cognizance of, please do tell her and she's here in person, you don't have to use electronic communication to reach her and she can guarantee you anonymity if you wish? This panel is also presented not only by UNESCO but two other partner organisations. I'll introduce them. First is Article 19 on my right over here. Laura Tresca, journalist, social scientist, she has worked as a professor in communications faculty at the University of Brasilia, she is now employed by Article 19 since 2010, Freedom of Expression officer. Wonderful job. She works particularly with Internet policies and protection issues and coordinates research, advocacy and campaigns.
Laura, thanks for Article 19, being here and we look forward to your presentation.
>> LAURA TRESCA: Good morning. I greet all panelists with greeting, Mr. Guy Berger. I would like to take pleasure in debating in this and issues first. It's important to say that Internet Governance is a debate on infrastructure, content, freedom, but also the debate about people. Once people start to be threatened by ideas and opinions they express online protection becomes a thing. You can find it out the room. Some of our recommendations in this document are bloggers should never be required to blog or be required to register with the government or other official bodies. As a general rule, bloggers should not be held liable for comment made by third parties on their blogs where they not have intervened or modified those comments. In Brazil we support of the case of blogger -- that was -- comment post to her blog.
And in general, the term journalist must be considered broadly in order to include also bloggers. So the main protections that oblige journalists must apply to bloggers. Such as the case of the right to protect sources, accreditation, and guarantee of safety.
This last point is very important. Online environment freedom of expression violations could be defined out of the right hand of -- linked to the web such as web neutrality, and surveillance practice, restriction to file sharing, among others. Besides this specific violations particular to online content, serious Internet-related crimes such as attempt -- death threats, kidnaps and disappearance are also threatened. What has been associated with journalists is now extended to people that elected the Internet as their main tool of expression, for instance, bloggers, editors of websites and Internet users. In addition to physical violence it's important to also mention increasing use of lawsuits to silence bloggers, at least in our region. Many legal provisions on criminal defamation and related crimes for the feeling of lawsuits that could led to disproportional financial compensation. The threats of such legal provisions can spread fear and censorship or materialize very concrete challenge to the free flow of information. There are notable signs which indicate that those violations, both physical violence and use of lawsuits, have the potential of getting more intense against these communicators who are generally individuals acting -- without any support from the big companies from the communication sector. Last year -- registered -- serious freedom of expression violations in Brazil. 16 was related to Internet. Two bloggers and one site owner were murdered. UNESCO and UN have launched the plan to protect journalists, Article 19 welcomes this plan and is committed to its proposals and some countries including Brazil have started to evaluate implementation but states must take into consideration protection measures must apply to bloggers, too.
Finally, I would like to highlight that due to initial tweets the states must take positive measures to attempt any kind of attack that aims to silence people on the Web even if violent actions are done by -- actors, although it's certain effective measures should be made available by the states to victims of violence, states should focus on preventing further violations by addressing the structure that led to such situations of risk but bloggers' protections should be an issue of concern of all society. Thank you.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you very much, Laura. So we'll keep on going through the speakers so you have the whole picture and then really engage with you. Bear with us a bit more and you can see I think how this issue of safety for online actors ranges across the individual level, institutional level and societal level.
So I think our next speaker is Mr. Eduardo Bertoni who represents an organisation that is also co-sponsor of this panel. It is CELE, Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access of Information at Universidad de Palermo School of Law in Argentina.
Eduardo was the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights at the Organisation of American states. He is on the Board, advisory board, of many foundations and a well known international scholar and I think he'll give us something that is now even broader than this issue to the global level.
>> EDUARDO BERTONI: Hello. Well, okay, good morning to everybody.
We are very happy to co-host this workshop with UNESCO and Article 19. I would like to be very brief and some of the things that I wanted to say, Laura just mentioned. A little bit of history. I was also invited to UNESCO, to one meeting, earlier this year to speak on a panel and the title of the panel was digital security or something like that. And I at that time I added another layer when we start talking about digital security, which is as Laura related to and I would say legal security and this means the security that a journalist or blogger should have when he or she is writing something that he or she is not going to be sued for the defamation coming from another country. Maybe you can think that this is something that is not really new, and it is not really new, journalists that were you know working for international media in the past, international newspapers, always faced this challenge, that problem.
But the difference now is the scale of the problem. When you were a journalist in the past working let's say for the "New York Times," you can anticipate when you were writing where your article is going to be read. Anticipation is important because you can decide if you are going to say something or not to say something or if you want to run the risk in a country you probably will be sued.
But today with Internet it's impossible to have that anticipation. It's impossible because as soon as your piece or blog or anything is online you cannot know where this is going to be read. The problem is worse because there are not clear definitions related to the jurisdiction and the law that could apply in those cases. Let me explain. Let's say you are writing an article from Argentina mentioning some things, President of Ecuador -- and the President of Ecuador who started recently many cases against journalists on criminal defamation read the article when he was in a tour, official tour in Venezuela. Can he start defamation, criminal defamation case in Venezuela because he said well, my reputation was damaged when I was here. Can he start it in his own country? Can he start it in Argentina?
So I am trying to raise the point that when we are talking about safety online, of course the first things that came up to my mind to our minds that come up to our minds is that the threats that were mentioned at the beginning of this presentation and it's okay, I think we need to touch all of those things and to try to see how we are going to solve those kind of problems. But there is an old problem, defamation, that would be very important problem in the online world just because we cannot anticipate where the civil or criminal defamation case could be started unless we start working to have clear rules that define jurisdiction of the choice of law in the online world.
Thank you.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you very much, Eduardo Bertoni, and I'm sure people here know and I'm sure also we heard from Laura in Brazil it is a big thing of journalists and bloggers being intimidated or pushed into self-censorship through defamation cases that are even national and it's a question of the international standards about what is a person's right to reputation stop and where does freedom of expression stop and what is the proportionate situation so that is it proportionate that defamation should lead to a criminal sentence, act of speech, or are there other measures of dealing with this thing on a global scale as well as international scale. These are societal level and global level as you said issues related to safety in that era.
Moving on, our next speaker is Joana Varon-Ferraz. She is a Research and Project Coordinator at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio. She works with public policies related with ICTs, lawyer, musician also, she put that in her cv, and she is very much evaluating major Internet policies and human rights in the foundation that she works for.
She is also a activist in terms of promoting her work. If you Google her and you Google the center, CTSFGV you will find interesting stuff. Same applies to Article 19 and CELE. Wonderful websites with information on these.
>> JOANA VARON-FERAZ: Thank you, Guy.
So also I have prepared a very quick presentation and I also focus on societal level of freedom of speech and you know bloggers and journalists, people that have been very active in social media lately in Brazil regarding or concerning protests that are going on in the country. Just to mention I was also habitat of Brazilian mapping -- report, just got this copy, guys, proofreading copy will be launched soon so many things that as we speak here will be in this report available soon.
So as many of you know Brazil will host this summit or non-summit meeting on Internet governance but what caught my attention here is that in this news, the photo that the paper brought is our President with Jefferson Montero, the guy who invented (inaudible. That is a Facebook page and that is where now I go to have the agenda of the President because he is a character, pretending to be Juma and he uses the Facebook to criticize and to give the wider audience what is going on, information about what is going on about the President.
For instance, he makes like interfaces from other social media so here is like Juma talking to Justin Timberlake and Beyonce during Rio -- Rocking Rio and then the candidate from the opposition enters the room and everybody laughed so he makes lots of jokes with that.
I bring this because Brazilians are heavy users of social media and becoming very important user, producers of content and of news and of criticisms and comments. We use mostly Facebook and YouTube. They are second and four more URL at least in September in the country. That was used of course for all protests and for people to convene and organise protests going on in Brazil since June. The reasons of the protests are many. If you go throughout every -- how do you say that... sign, there will be one different issue, but the things that the police responded very violently to, so violent that even Batma had to come to the protest to support the teachers and so on.
Among those protests media, the monopoly of media outlets were one of the biggest issues so many people were complaining global and how it covers all the issue and what we could see was that protesters got -- and journalists, not journalists, people that were in the protest, started to cover everything that wasn't being shown in the media with the mobiles and streaming it, so we have media initiative and media hacker initiatives and those channels started to be online channels, started to be more watched and became the major source for people who want to know where the protests was going on.
As it all happened, of course the government was trying to block this and then we could observe very weird and threatening initiatives to be able either to monitor what was going on so our intelligent agencies started to monitor all this social networks and even what's up, which is not public, so it's complicated, and then there was this act from the mayor of Rio, saying that ISPs should deliver the data of the users within 24 hours, special commission that was analyzing this. This decree changed later after the usual position but what brings us to attention is that Brazil is going to have the Olympics, World Cup, and it's becoming a hot market for surveillance technologies. This is just a start. And now we need to have a proper laws there for data protection which we don't. We don't have our draft view on online data protection is still being debated and also laws about intermediary.
In Brazil, if you go to the Google transparency report, Brazil is in -- coming back to what Eduardo was telling us, Brazil is among the highest in terms of highest numbers in terms of content removal due to defamation and because of that we have some cases in which in Brazil, a Google person was almost arrested, Facebook was almost taken down, and that contest of international surveillance also helped us. I'm going to wrap this, just addressing this issue.
As our President was the focus of the surveillance, one very important draft bill that was in the Congress got priority so in order to try to do surveillance, she demanded that -- civil rights framework that deals with privacy issues, that deals with data protection and mostly with intermediary liability promoting or providing Safe Harbor for intermediaries is going to be voted in an expedited manner.
So and we are still, yeah, one thing that we included was the nationalization of data centers in this bill that was in there before and it's a bit worrying because exactly because we don't have this bill on data protection. I will stop here so thank you.
(Applause)
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you very much, Joanna, also for reminding us that -- need to be safe on online and to also say Brazil besides for the World Cup and other events they recently hosted world conference on investigative journalism and of course those journalists are probably the most endangered species because of the interests they are disturbing. And I do think that particularly in terms of a threat analysis, investigative journalists need to be at the foremost of doing their threat analysis particularly when it comes to analyzing threats from the Mafia.
Anyway, I also want to mention on the tweets, Twitter stream, Jorge Luis has been tweeting a lot of resource links related to this. Thank you for that. If anybody else wants to be recognized from the floor, tweet! From the panel.
Our next speaker is Mr. Budi Putra from Indonesia. He's a technology journalist always although today he's CEO of the Jakarta Post, for Tempo, editor of Tempo Interactive, written four books in Indonesian so we really look forward to hearing what he has to say. He runs the Asia Blogging Network so let's hear from Mr. Budi Putra.
>> BUDI PUTRA: Thank you. An honor for me to speak on this occasion and thanks for UNESCO for inviting me and the other organisations also. I am already preparing a very short note on in order to discuss this topic so I want to address more about the rights of bloggers because besides journalists and also blogger and I now am running a business of the Jakarta Post. So this is interesting that why we need to protect bloggers. I learn some existing discussion on this topic, so we can see that there are some bloggers journalists, online media and they are already being shot sued and online for defamation. More, even some media actors and journalists are being killed because of their online journalism activities. We should -- we should address this threat because just like previous speaker said that we can come blogger as journalist also so just like UN Human Right Committee defined journalism as a function shared by a wide range of actor, including provisional time reporters and analysts as well as blogger and others who engage in publication on the Internet or elsewhere.
So we should see journalists or journalism as a function instead of just particular provision that links to the newspaper or press. Article 19 that already was shared by previous panelists are a paper, I think it's an interesting paper, that contain the rights of blogger. In a sense bloggers should be protected as well as journalists. Journalists not only defined as provision or occupation that only related to the body threatening -- or professional body, but there are issues also. Since we consider blogger as journalist, there are some areas that blogger should face. For example, licensing. Real name, registration, accreditation, the protection of the sources, protection from violence, likeability and ethical responsibility, so once we agree to come to consider blogger like journalist, and there are some issues also that apply to that blogger so this is very interesting issue that we need to discuss because different than journalists, journalists are protected by their own organisation, their own newspaper, if there is a problem so maybe the editor or two editors will take responsibility.
But blogger is individual and they are doing similar job just like journalist but once they face problem or being sued, it's very weird because who -- you know, will take responsibility? Who will represent them? Who will speak or find lawyer et cetera. So this is why we need to help bloggers, to address this issue. Do they need association? Do they need, you know, court of conduct? To they need court of ethics or something like that? Because journalism as we know already have you know variety of ethics and standards. Maybe we can adopt some standard that are related to blogger so that blogger know the rights and maybe their obligations, too. That comes if we can -- I think Article 19 is set up, a set of recommendations that is very useful. Once we have this outcome it can be used as practical guide for bloggers but how they can explain if they face some situation, right?
So -- and this outcome can be used also as a recommendation to government, to actors, policymakers, especially what this would do to bloggers. In the bigger pictures, this would be, you know, part of for assets just like we see the press.
So that's all and then we can continue the discussion later. Thank you.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you very much.
So to just tell you in the tweets Dominique tweeted saying journalism should no longer -- journalists should no longer be considered special actors in the digital space, all digital actors require same protections. Point of view from Dominique. So I thank Budi Putra from raising the issue about to what extent there is self-regulation and now we come to another Indonesian speaker who will speak about self-regulation in part in some of his remarks Because he is the Deputy Chair of the Indonesian Press Council. This is Mr. Bongbong Haramuti, Tempo Daily magazine, he's an internationally known journalist and strong campaigner for press freedom in the country and as opposed to being a UNESCO -- won a World Prize for freedom of expression -- World Press Freedom Prize.
Hope you will address this question of self-regulation as well as factor in the safety of online communication.
>> Thank you. Like I said before when you were not here I'm hoping this would be a good place to promote an issue for next year's freedom of the press celebration of UNESCO. Because we need this also in -- why I said this? We need to protect better our blogger, our freedom of speech and freedom of expression because I can tell you the good news. Because Indonesia has been elected or to host this event. Suddenly I found out the Indonesian government made an official requirement to revise our Internet law. So now we can announce that the government of Indonesia has made a formal request and has been accepted by the Indonesian Parliament to revise the Internet law which is the problem of our Internet law.
(Applause)
Yeah, so if you do it next year, Indonesian President, maybe even better decision because it's supposed to be next year. Here is my problem as I'm no longer the press Council since last year. -- is now member of the Press Council. He's a good guy, brave guy that 15 years ago the Indonesian Special Forces think he should be kidnapped so he was kidnapped in an undercover situation but fortunately we had -- so we can release him alive.
This is Indonesia -- Freedom House. As you say we although we already on road to democracy since 15 years ago our press freedom is still not free according to the Freedom House. It is still partly free. Although politically as a country in this region, Indonesia is the only free country because of the political situation but press freedom is not yet free because we still have criminal defamation mandate. And I want to tell you a story because I'm a journalist, story-teller basically. In the Indonesian Internet law started something very innocent. In fact it was with all good intention and as people say, road to hell is littered with good intentions. Right? And in 2003, two ministry Indonesia, Ministry of Telecommunication post and telecommunication and transportation and the other one is Ministry of Trade and Industry, nothing to do with freedom of the press.
Third with the IT we need a law to protect the business section using IT. So they created two drafts from each ministry using our university academic and then those two, you know, take a long time to draft a law in Indonesia. Five years later those two became one draft and it was under the Ministry of Information and telecommunication. It was all purely about business transactions. At that time the minister was good friend of mine when we were studying in Boston, he had this attitude that anything about freedom of the press I would leave it to the Press Council, so I can concentrate on the telecom side. So he send me the draft of this law. He send it to the Press Council for comment. So the Chair of the Press Council asked me to read it through, about 50 something articles and give recommendation about or any advice on it.
I look at the draft and it's all purely about business transaction. So I recommend a note and accept it and send to the ministry back that since there is nothing in it against press freedom we have no objection and no opinion so please proceed. You know? So we thought it's a safe law, safe draft. They went back to the small Committee in the Parliament. What we didn't realize at that time was that suddenly there was this case. Someone create a website using our President's name and it's a pornographic site. There is a complaint, complaint by the chief police says we cannot to anything about it because we don't have law to do it. So obviously there was then someone in the small Committee decided to put three articles which become a nightmare for all of us without really knowing, with good intention to protect the President against someone using his name for pornographic sites.
But what happened was then it put a lot of people in jail.
So this is the law if you want, you can download it later maybe, and here is the bad Article is 27 and 28 and 45 which is basically saying if you use Internet to defame someone or to put pornographic things or gamble, then you are liable for up to six years jail term and between $100,000 to $200,000 maximum fine. And here is the problem of maximum six years. Long time to be in jail. Not only that. Even if you are innocent proven in the court, if the sentence is more than five years and the police can detain you and the prosecutor can detain you and the court can detain you for up to I think it's about four months. So even if you are found in the end you are innocent, you still can be jailed for that time.
This thing as been greatly misused in our experience by people in power. Not necessarily from the state. Here is a case of victims journalist, I think he is still in detention right now, my friend is trying to release him now. This is just to show you why this has really been misused. This journalist was writing about alleged mass corruption involving almost everybody in the local government and this is usually happening in local government has a rich resources. Like oil, gas, or coal and so on.
So that the corrupt region usually can bribe everybody including the mainstream media. So in this case usually only very small media which for some reason, either they were too small to be bribed or it's owned by someone who is probably a business competition with him, they put this story and he was -- detained despite the fact in Indonesia the Press Council has an agreement with the chief of police that anything that is related to media, the police order by the chief police to ask expertise from the Press Council, to see if this case is valid or not. We are also -- Press Council also has an agreement with the chief prosecutors. Same thing. And even we could not have the Press Council could not have agreement with Supreme Court but after talking with the Supreme Court actually release and order, ordering all judges if they have problem with media, they should ask the Press Council expert to give, to test before you proceed with the court.
So in this case, they did not -- they thought they don't have to obey all this, these things because everybody is there. They just say this is no media method. They decided, police, prosecutor and the judge there. This is not a media thing. Because this is a very rich local government and in Indonesia, you might note we have a mass problem of local government corruption especially in rich areas because it takes a lot of money to be elected directly and of course when you have to get your money back when you are in power and of course the easiest way is to corrupt the money. So we have more than 200 former or still active local government in jails and more than 1,000 of local Parliament members also in jail for corruption. The reason is because we have a good independent anti-corruption agency but they are based in Jakarta, Indonesia is so big if we put it in Europe it's like 25 European countries or between if you put the west in London and then East would be Moscow or the other way around, logistically it's difficult to supervise and we have only 50 investigators in the anti-corruption agency while we have, like, almost 50 provinces and about 400 districts.
So here is why I'm campaigning for my good friend who had me -- here in Indonesia. Because for all of us, it's better that these three articles is enough not in the revised law because you know anyway all these supposed to be problem, they already have taken care in other law. So even if you take away this, the defamation will, you can use other law, gambling and everything. But so far the plan right now is still only one to decrease the sentence to less than one year in prison. So they are still talking about it. In fact I'm going to have lunch today with some government official to push for this.
And I think we just have to do it and I want to end with this. Last night we have this blogger, his name is Ben Hun or -- and last night he talk because he was detained for a day at least before the bloggers all created trending topic in tweets because he had a fight with -- flaming fight with a guy who was already sentenced for corruption but then somehow he managed to get himself acquitted but not long after he got acquitted the anti-corruption agency found out the judge who acquitted him actually received bribes. So all the cases here, I can tell you, only the bad guys use this law. It's just like the empire, they need darkness, they cannot have openness so that's why let's keep Indonesia open, have the sun shine so we can get rid of all these vampires everywhere. Thank you.
(Applause)
>> GUY BERGER: So other speakers, Mr. -- has he managed to arrive yet? No. If he comes we can include him. He was -- he's Anishan, the man who said was kidnapped under the old regime so he's called the Father of Indonesian bloggers so we hope he will come. I should say that I see -- tweeted, he got on the platform and tweeted Indonesians are bringing out their big guns, we have one big gun and another but we hope he will join us. It's now as they say in Paris for your comments and your questions and your critiques and perhaps you could also -- since we don't have Mr. -- here at the moment who is also in the Press Council maybe you also want to ask him a bit about the role of the Press Council indefinitely with self-regulatory issues. We'll take a couple questions or comments and ask the panel to respond.
>> Good morning, I'm (inaudible), a blogger and activist from Nepal, also related with ISOC. Founding member as well as treasurer. I have a few things to say. I was going through all the information and I think it's quite the scenario is quite broad about the whole theme. I believe, sincerely believe journalism, journalist and bloggers and activists, these are different parts because journalists, may be right from your perspective where there is standardization in policy as well as all charters and rights like rules and regulations being adopted in developed countries but if countries but if you look at the developing countries, scenario is completely different. When I see this, in terms of action I mean. Journalists they are protected by rights like they have all nations to deal with federation, to deal with but when you talk about bloggers and activists they have nobody.
In regards to this, I would like to put my scenario in because I have worked as mainstream journalist, had experience working in Nepal for more than 13 years and I have been through the phase of being active journalist to blogger and now I'm like a journalist and became a blogger and now activist. The thing that happened was recently. CIMA, published a report about me being one of the bloggers in the south Asia and the thing that happened was as soon as it published the World Bank had picked up the report and published it. What I did was updated my LinkedIn profile with that link and for my surprise I was called by my office, I work in a different office, I was called and like, um, given a you know informal notice saying we can't have a blogger. It is a -- office still. The situation is that worse. I came here to IGF leaving my job behind.
You know, they gave me options saying you want to go to IGF anding be a blogger or you want to do your job? I said I want to have my freedom. I don't want to shove my ass there and work myself with no reason so I'm here. And apart from that when it comes down to reality and in the developing world the thing that happened to me was I have been very actively involved with citizen journalism. A year past in 2011 November 16 I was aattacked because one of my reports was published in -- report so it was vetted. It was about the closure, political closure, that was going on in Nepal. I had to confront a lot of situation at that time because there were organisations which came up front but since I was not -- I was not part of the journalist federation formally so you know they just issued a press release.
That is about it. I was not their member.
Though they tried to help, kind of like they issued a press release. The situation is, reality is that. Right? Reality doesn't look like, it's not all these standard norms and values. It's like reality is there is no one to help you at times of need. Bloggers are alone. Right now it's coming up, evolving, but I think we need strong actions, strong mechanism, strong rules and regulation to help them around the world and I think IGF is the only forum that talks about how to help and how to evolve freedom of expression because ultimately if you come down to developing world scenario, journalism and journalist 78 organisation are more commercialized. Most of the journalists, they write about things with options. In regards to what they are doing and like in regards to business option and they take the situation of being a blogger, anonymous blogger but for a real blogger who has his name, has been putting or putting their voice in, they face the real situation.
Citizen journalism, activism and all these rules, when it comes down to that attack it's like nobody is there with you! You are the only one single hand standing there and facing the situation and all these rules and regulations, it doesn't bound because the country has signed a charter and they don't follow. Right? I received e-mail threats like before I was attacked.
>> GUY BERGER: I think we definitely get your point.
Back there.
>> I'm -- (Inaudible) -- Executive Director of the Union of Tanzania Press Clubs coming from a country whereby a journalist was killed last year. I think you all know killed when he was covering a political rally. Now, I have two to three issues here. Number one, this is very important. Do we migrate -- do we migrate from journalism to activism? Do we define journalists also as activists?
The point of departure here is journalists have their code of conduct, code of ethics which is really measuring whether they are performing properly or not properly and that is their law when they are going to be put to test. Let us all try to discuss here citizen journalism vis-a-vis traditional journalism, whereby one journalist is sending the information to many, that is one to many journalism, or, rather, now we are in a situation which is chaotic situation whereby everybody is a journalist. Now journalism is many to many. That is the situation. Which will be the law to govern such a situation? And do we have any research which is showing the world to how far the journalists themselves contribute to being attacked by their misdemeanor or the way they violate media ethics, the way they play into the hands of tycoons or political power people. Sometimes it's ourselves to blame the way we violate media ethics and then to come into big forums like here, complaining, complaining, complaining. So let us also discuss the way we contribute ourselves to being attacked. Thank you very much.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you.
>> I'm (inaudible) from the Southeast Asian Press Alliance. One question is from Eduardo you talked about I guess the issue of jurisdiction, also raised in the discussion about cloud so do you have any thoughts about where people should start looking at resolving that? Even himself he was a victim of cross jurisdiction defamation threats. Second is when we talk about impunity we documented 100 cases of impunity in which some of them were attacks against journalists where it was done with impunity and no prosecution. But on the other hand we also see the use of extensive use of laws specifically under Penal Code or national security to detain, harass, intimidate, particularly bloggers. Then there's very little recourse and very little accountability on the part of the government. We have started to say that the abuse of laws and going unchecked is also a level of impunity.
I wonder if any panel members would like to comment because it's something we want to mainstream discussions that impunity is not necessarily the absence of the prosecution but the abuse of the law and then not being held accountable is also a form of impunity. Thanks.
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you. Anybody else? Then I think we'll -- three. Please be shorter and we'll ask the panel to respond. We have to wrap up.
>> Good morning. I'm Octavia, I run a journalist security programme called (inaudible). We integrate training and physical with psychosocial care. I have a couple comments and also have some questions. I think the first one goes to Jennifer. I'd like to know more about the structure and methodology of the study and why you structured it the way you have. I have a comment about the tools that you mention. If you could elaborate a little bit more about your comment on that these tools always change and what you mean with that because yeah I would like to hear more about that. Then I wanted to thank the gentleman from Argentina, sorry I forgot your name, the complexities of the legal frame works. That is very important and don't think it necessarily has anything -- I'm one of those people that doesn't necessarily think the physical and digital worlds are miles apart.
It's pretty much the same, digital tracking leads to physical attacks which leads to psychosocial and psychological impact which again leads to this spiral. Just wanted to thank you for pointing out legal frameworks are an issue. As a global society it will be very interesting how we tackle that. Thank you.
>> I'm Marianna with IFIX Global Network. Just to follow up on what buy was saying I was in a panel the other day a gentleman from Morocco mentioned even though bloggers are not persecuted under pre-freedom laws what the state will do is use the excuse of when they are participating in some other kind of action, say a protest and then they might be detained or harassed under an excuse of public order disturbance which I thought was an interesting complication in looking at this legal implication. Not maybe on paper it looks like there's no one being harassed under the defamation laws or that type of legislation but there's a kind of side-door or back-door so I wanted to add that complexity. Are people starting to look at that? Can we possibly address those kind of harassments? Thank you.
>> Good morning, I'm a journalist from the Philippines and in our country impunity is really a big problem. Just wanted to ask what trends do you observe about attacks offline getting translated or evolving to the online or digital space. In a country we have a lot of violence against journalists offline but our Internet penetration rate is not yet that high so we have not observed a lot of cases of attacks or serious attacks online on journalists and bloggers and media actors. I want to ask in developing countries what have your observations been? What are the usual cases for countries where it is starting to develop Internet infrastructure and also attacks possibly getting translated or even becoming sophisticated online?
>> GUY BERGER: Thank you. Well, I hope we can respond to most of those points if not all of them. Let's go right to left.
>> EDUARDO BERTONI: Thank you for the questions. I would like to start by saying I elaborated more the idea of solution or some ideas related to defamation and jurisdiction in an article published in a book published by our organisation CELE, Towards Internet Without Censorship. Available in our website in Spanish -- originally published in Spanish but all articles are in English. And it is in English. Website is www.palermo.edu/cele. You can find under publications the book and the article on defamation but to give you a snapshot of what I'm thinking, we need to clarify what we are talking about, if we are talking about criminal defamation or civil defamation. I think international standards for some kind of specific kind of expressions don't allow criminal defamation so the first solution of the jurisdictional problem is to go through harmonization process where the countries start repealing criminal defamation laws. This sounds not very realistic but this could be one solution. And another solution is that countries adopt some sort of bilateral or multilateral treaties saying they are not going to comply with orders coming from abroad when cases regarding defamation are not respecting international standards. This also is a little bit complicated because what are the international standards.
In the article I published I focus on international standards coming from the American system regarding freedom of expression and defamation. In some way the solution is similar of the solution that the U.S. jurisdictions found when they passed the law that don't allow the compliance of the decisions coming particularly from the UK when they are not in concordance with First Amendment standards but we don't have a universal First Amendment. That's why I'm trying to use this model to an international level. Those are paths to start thinking on solutions. I agree that maybe it is not realistic right now but it's something we need to work more. That's it. I think I answered it. Thanks.
>> GUY BERGER: So just before we move on, anything from the remote participants? No. Okay.
>> Hello? Just observations, colleague from Philippines was asking about how to avoid attacks and in Brazil and this context of protest, when we did workshop, technical tools for alternative communications, and it was not even focused on journalists but other subscribers for the workshops were journalists so for me it was a surprise and something we have to think about and foster. I just want to highlight we are going through the process of the -- plus 10 review and UNESCO is part of it as well. Maybe is an opportunity to take the issues that came out in this session in actions, lines, and have it more explicitly throughout discussions.
>> I would comment the first case I read that there are notable signs that those violations, both physical and years of lawsuits can get more and more intense against bloggers who are generally individuals acting without any support from the big companies from communication sector. But we should focus on protection of the speech, not any specific activity because speech, freedom of expression is a human right, not exactly a specific profession or activity. I disagree with that, we need to come up with principles and standards to start to address this problem because it's also a structure, structural problem. That's all.
>> I want to talk about issues from our friend from -- you are right that in cases blogger is always alone so since they don't belong to any association or press or newspaper so at least we can see that blog blogger can be a stakeholder for Press Council, local Press Council so if it happened at least Press Council can take the case and try to mediate or to talk with them so we can anticipate because this is very -- it's not easy. This is very complex that we can see blogger is journalist. It's just beginning so at least we can define solution in local level maybe in Nepal, Indonesia, we have a Press Council here and to some extent maybe blogger can approach or talk with Press Council so we can find the way to respond if something happened regarding bloggers. Thank you.
>> JENNIFER HENRICHSEN: To respond to Octavia from -- you asked about what I meant when I said tools always change. Basically what I mean by that, little tongue-in-cheek I suppose but I'm talking about technological solutions that we try to use in order to protect ourselves online, thinking about in particular the belief Skype has been impenetrable for a long period of time so people have been able to -- or people have used it to communicate with each other but then recent revelations suggest that no it's not a method of communication that is impenetrable. So what I mean is it's not only the technological solutions that we need to use in order to protect ourselves; it's many more than that but at the same time we need to understand that technological solutions are changing depending on the revelations that come to light. That's what I was trying to get across with that.
Then I think you had another question. But I can discuss it with you after. Methodology. Yes. Survey will be in several different languages, English, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and French and will be disseminated via individual networks as well as through listserves, press associations around the world so it's an online survey and I think that's making a lot of sense considering we're looking at online journalists but that is in a nutshell the methodology for the survey. Then to respond to a question she's now over there, you were asking about whether or not physical threats lead to digital threats and I don't know the answer to that. That would be very interesting to study but I don't have any response at this point.
>> Bloggers in Indonesia are alone by choice. If you don't want to be alone, you have also your choice. Because in Indonesian press law we define journalists as anyone who do journalism work, one, and second regularly and second, that he or she abide by ethical code of journalists so you don't have to have media. Anyone who claim that is a journalist. Because of that the Press Council is by law have to defend you, even if you don't ask. So but if you decide to say that I don't want to abide by journalism code, that's so your choice. In this case in Indonesia most bloggers are defended if in trouble, defended -- including this guy in Facebook who was sent to jail. So other things, about harassment, I think everywhere I'm asked to give advice for any countries who want to create press law.
I think that is one thing we got it right here in Indonesia. It's an Article that is saying anyone who is found guilty of infringement of press freedom can be sent to jail for up to two years. I have in my experience six years in the Press Council this has been very effective. I remember one day the Minister of Communication Information who hosted this things was planning to make a minister regulations on Internet and I know the minister for some time so I told him, look, it's not because I am your enemy or I'm not your friend but if you sign this regulation the day you sign this regulation I will go to the police to send you to jail for two years because clearly this regulation in our belief, and we can prove it, will infringe on freedom of the press. Really? Yes. So you are a criminal if you sign this. He didn't sign it.
And many cases this -- so you turn the table back. Unfortunately I haven't been able to convince my friends to put this in the law and also different in Indonesia but I'm hoping if one day you have a chance to create press law, please put this, and anyone found guilty of infringement of press freedom can be sent to jail. I can assure you they don't like to be put in jail.
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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