Transcript

Host: This is “On The Line,” and I’m Eric Felten.

The Internet services company Yahoo! settled a lawsuit brought by the families of Chinese dissidents who were jailed because of information provided to the Chinese government by Yahoo! Journalist Shi Tao and democratic activist Wang Xiaoning are each serving ten-year prison sentences.

To convict them of so-called subversion, the court used as evidence the men’s e-mails. The Internet messages were given to China by Yahoo!, which has expanded its business rapidly in the country. At a congressional hearing in Washington, Yahoo! executives apologized for aiding China in its crackdown on dissent, but the company’s top lawyer, Michael Callahan, said he could not ask Yahoo!’s Chinese employees “to resist lawful demands and put their own freedom at risk.”

The Internet has proved to be a powerful tool for gaining and spreading information in authoritarian societies, so much so that when the military junta in Burma mounted its assault on protestors, it began by shutting down access to the Internet. But the web is also being used to track and prosecute dissidents.

Joining us to discuss the Yahoo! case and U.S. policy on Internet freedom are Morton Sklar, Executive Director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, which filed the case against Yahoo!; Ammar Abdulhamid, founder of the Tharwa Foundation; and joining us by phone from Paris, Clothilde Le Coz, director of the Internet freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders. Welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Sklar: It’s nice to be here.

Host: Morton Sklar, let me start with you. Tell me about the case. What was the thrust of the lawsuit that you helped to bring against Yahoo!? What was the legal case about?

Sklar: The legal case focused on the idea that U.S. companies doing business abroad have a special responsibility not just to follow what the host country has asked them to do but also U.S. laws and international human-rights standards, that they can’t just abide, can’t just accept whatever requests are made of them, that they have to look themselves to evaluate whether the results of their involvement with foreign governments will put people in jail unlawfully.

Host: “Unlawfully” may be the key term. How does a company that gets a demand from China distinguish between what is a lawful subpoena -- Because, of course, these companies, when they’re operating in the U.S., they sometimes get subpoenas for information and are required by U.S. law to hand over that kind of information. So, how do you distinguish between what counts as a lawful request and one that isn’t?

Sklar: The words that Congress put to Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo! -- “You had to be either incompetent or negligent to not know that when the requests came in to you that they were not involved with the issues of political repression because of the way the requests were termed.” They used the keywords in China of “subversion of the state” and “state secrets.” These are the words that connote political repression.

Host: Clothilde Le Coz, are you there by phone?

Le Coz: Yeah, I am.

Host: There seems to be a sense that a lot of people using the Internet would assume that the e-mails they write are ephemeral -- they come and they go -- and yet it turns out that, of course, they can be dragged into court and used against people. How big a problem is this for people who are trying to organize and use the Internet to report?

Le Coz: You have a problem of how to survey Internet, and every mail you can send to a friend can be seen, but not every mail can be read. And, actually, you have means to avoid censorship and avoid all that the governments want to impose on the citizens. You have technical means to do that, and it’s called mostly proxies, for example. And the thing is most of the people -- they don’t know how to use it.

Host: And is it your sense that companies like Yahoo! and Google and other Internet-service companies from the West -- are they making it easier or not easy for people to try to maintain some level of privacy when they use the Internet?

Le Coz: At the beginning, they couldn’t really see the impact of that, and now we are realizing that you have a problem of privacy, and this privacy is, after that, reaching freedom of speech and freedom on the Internet. And most international companies are okay with the local rules of the country they are dealing with.

Sklar: It’s very interesting, Eric. The companies -- most of these companies -- are very committed to the concept of privacy and to keeping the Internet free from this kind of surveillance and abuse. It’s only when their business interests come into play that they change their mind and say, “Okay, yeah, we believe that the Internet should be kept as a free and protected area, but we’re going do something about it because our business interests require us to.”

Host: Ammar Abdulhamid, how is this playing out in the Middle East? How much freedom are people able to find in using the Internet? \

Abdulhimad: Actually, Internet penetration in the Middle East is still very low, and it, of course, varies from one country to another, with Syria being one of the lowest at this stage, and, for instance, I think Egypt and Morocco really rank among the highest, and Iran, of course, is even higher more. But the problem is simply not allowing access to the Internet. The Internet can have a major impact, even if only a few people used it, because there is always the knowledge that gets disseminated and through other means. The governments are really blocking a lot of sites, I think especially the major sites like YouTube and Facebook. For instance, the most recent development is Syrian government blocking Facebook. We know that sometimes YouTube is also blocked in Syria. Sometimes it’s in Egypt, for instance, in our situation where certain videos have been requested that they should be removed or, in fact, only that link was blocked. But most of the time, you find out that it’s a broad kind of repression, either through allowing the service to be provided only through the government or through specific services that are controlled by the regime. So, from the very beginning, the Internet was really introduced through very restricted means to the societies in the Middle East, and that’s one way of restricting access to it. It’s because of allowing only the government or only private companies that are controlled by a regime like this to provide the Internet service to begin with. This is one major way of restricting access to it.

Host: Clothilde Le Coz, your organization has put out a handbook for bloggers with suggested ways of getting around those kinds of restrictions. How effective are those methods? What are the key methods, and how effective are they when a country such as China or Iran is running the Internet service itself?

Le Coz: It’s very effective. You have, for example, something that allows you to avoid that censorship, the name [of which] is Tor, T-o-r, and it’s software that only change your I.P. address. So you can’t be really reached from the authorities or the government because they can believe that you are just logged in from Germany or from the United States. And, technically, what is very difficult to do is that all that is done to secure the Internet and, for example, how to use the software and proxies -- If they are misused, they can be tools for censorship, because, technically, it’s exactly the same and it works exactly the same.

Host: Ammar Abdulhamid?

Abdulhimad: I have, actually, a couple of interjections here that you should be aware of. The first interjection is the fact that the technology can be developed and we can find all the solutions to -- If you want to access a blocked site, there are always proxy breakers, and there are always tools that you can use to circumvent that, and there are always ways you can use to hide your I.P., but in the Middle East, at least, the way that the regimes actually get hold of people who are posting, even anonymously, on the Internet is actually through their friends. It’s not by using technology at all -- by using reporters on the ground, by using whatever reports get filed to them anonymously, and then they are able to pursue the person who submitted or who posted something on the Internet that they did not like. In fact, most people right now in prison in a variety of Middle Eastern countries, whether it’s Syria or Egypt or elsewhere, are in prison not because the government managed to track them down technologically and know, “This post came from that I.P. address.” It’s because someone -- one of their friends or one of their people close to them -- pointed them out, or perhaps it’s the Internet provider itself, the Internet cafe where they made the post. They’ve actually taken a photo of them, basically, and that’s how the authorities get hold of them, so technology is not necessarily always an answer here, in some societies, because the problem is not in the technology but in the repressive nature of the regimes that exist and the repressive nature of the society. The other point I want to make -- actually, it’s related to something that Sklar said earlier, and it’s about the law that is used or the subpoena that was sent to Yahoo! to actually ask for the information to be given to them -- is that they used sort of subversive action. But what if they used economic charges? But the reality -- the embedded reality -- is that they still are targeting people because of political issues. I mean, they can change the verbing, and, in my opinion, this is how they’re going to do it in the future. In a sense they are going use whatever issue that they can invent and still ask for the information to be given by Yahoo! Is Yahoo! now in a position to give that information still, or are they, after this case, in a position where they have to sort of be very careful about even sort of economic requests?

Host: Let me ask Morton Sklar. The next time China asks Yahoo! for the Internet e-mail traffic of various dissidents, what’s going to happen?

Sklar: Our view is that Yahoo! has to be careful beyond just the nature of the request that comes in. It’s not just the language. They have to look at the actual communication itself. In Shi Tao’s case, for example, he was sending a news dispatch to people in different parts of the world that talked about Tiananmen Square and the imposition of censorship restrictions on coverage of Tiananmen Square. It was a news story. They could look at that, and they know, just by looking at it, that what’s involved here is a news dispatch and what the government of China is trying to do is to censor and control the dissemination of news around the world so that the companies that are requested to make these disclosures have to look at the nature of the request first, but they also have to look at who the people are that are the subject of the requests, what the communications are -- Does it relate to news dispatches, discussions of democracy, discussions of freedom, of human rights? Then they know, or should know, that something more is involved here than bank fraud.

Host: Let me ask Clothilde Le Coz, is there any move for legislation, either in the U.S. or in Europe, in the West, along the lines of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was passed decades ago here in the U.S., which attacked the problem of bribes being demanded of U.S. businesses when they were trying to get business abroad, and it was decided that if you can make it a crime in the U.S. to pay such bribes, even if you’re paying the bribes abroad, that you can then take the pressure of making bribes off of everyone. Is there some similar kind of solution that should be made where legislation in the West clamps down on the ability of Western companies to participate in handing over information that has political purposes?

Le Coz: You have, in terms of legislation, the Global Online Freedom Act in the U.S., for example. It’s not adopted yet, but it has made wonderful advances for online free expression because it’s an act that [places sanctions on] the cooperation with repressive governments by American internet companies, and...

Host: And what kind of sanction would it put on companies if they cooperate in these?

Le Coz: I mean, the U.S. companies have to act transparently and to transmit information about the type of censorship they applied to an Office of Global Internet Freedom, and this Office of Global Internet Freedom would have the job of defining U.S. government policy [to them].

Host: Morton Sklar, what’s your sense of how that legislation would effect this issue?

Sklar: We haven’t been involved directly in it, but my impression is that it’s a criminal statute. It would say that if the companies do provide this information improperly, then it would be a crime and they’d be subject to criminal prosecution.

Host: And do you think that this would make a difference in how people are able to use the Internet abroad, Ammar Abdulhamid?

Abdulhimad: I think so. I mean, every device that you can have at our disposal we should really use. This is an ongoing battle, in fact, for freedom globally, so these kind of legal approaches are very important, especially with countries that have very close ties with Western companies. So, it may not have an effect on a country like Syria, which is cut off from, at least from the United States, but it will have a definite effect in Egypt, for instance, which has a lot of ties with the United States, or Jordan or Saudi Arabia, for instance. So, we definitely have to pursue every avenue that we have in order to put our case and state our case as strongly as possible.

Sklar: You have to give the U.S. companies a reason for not making these disclosures. Anything that you could do that encourages that would be a benefit, and if there is a U.S. law that prohibits their doing that, they have a reason to be more careful and a reason to say no when these requests come in to them. I think the international law is already pretty clear about that -- that complicity involvements in human-rights abuses like torture do present a situation where companies can be held liable for aiding and abetting torture.

Host: Clothilde Le Coz, let’s talk a little bit about various countries or the trend in Internet censorship. At Reporters Without Borders, you’ve put together a list of countries that censor the Internet, and you talk about China being perhaps the champion at it. Is there a China model at this point that other countries are trying to follow where they try to keep the Internet open enough for business purposes and economic purposes but then also use it for keeping track of dissidents?

Le Coz: Yeah. First of all, in China, you have like fifty cyber-dissidents, and that’s why we call it the champion of censorship. And Vietnam is going exactly the same. You don’t have as many cyber-dissidents as you do in China, but you have a big growth in Vietnam, and so firms are very interested in it. The development of the Internet has been huge for, let’s say, for two years -- from 2005 -- and, actually, when it comes to the Internet, you have two problems. Either you want to regulate it and so you are not forced, but the model is to control it totally, like China, or you don’t, and, for example, you have what can happen in Brazil, where you have exactly the same website as Facebook but named Orkut. I don’t know if you heard about it. And Orkut is apparently -- and, I mean, we have people in Brazil who can tell that -- a website only for dealers now: drugs and pedophilia, for example. And so it’s very important to find something just in between.

Host: Let me ask Morton Sklar real quickly -- we only have a couple of minutes left -- how do you distinguish between opening up the Internet so that people who are engaged in legitimate dissent have the freest possible expression while at the same time not empowering people who are engaged in criminal enterprises of operating their enterprise?

Abdulhamid: Or terrorism for that matter, because one of the best groups that use the Internet in all it’s facilities, whether it’s a blog or a social network, are really terrorist groups at this stage.

Sklar: I don’t think there’s any dispute from anybody that the regulation of the Internet to prevent pedophilia, to prevent bank fraud, to prevent other kinds of simple crimes, is something that we all approve of. It’s simply when it’s misused that we have a concern. And the China model that we talked about a minute ago involves three aspects that affect U.S. companies in particular. It involves a situation where U.S. companies are actually giving the information up to China; it involves situations where U.S. companies like Cisco systems are giving China the mechanisms, the technology to monitor the internet themselves, that they otherwise wouldn’t have. And it’s also investment by U.S. companies – that’s the latest rung of the ladder now – by U.S. investments in the Chinese companies that are carrying out these monitoring, surveillance and arrest practices.

Host: Ammar Abdulhamid, we have less than a minute, but I wanted to get to really quickly: the technology keeps changing, we see cell phones that are able to record video, people are able to put that video up and people are able to show human rights abuses, whether it’s torture or whatever, through that kind of video. What does the future hold for this sort of battle between control and new technologies that offer dissidents powerful tools?

Abdulhamid: I think, to be honest with you, I’m on the optimistic side. No matter how much you try to regulate the Internet, there are always ways of moving beyond the regulation. I mean, the technology is very difficult to control and I think if the users are careful on their end, they will be able to continue to challenge the government, to create virtual communities in my opinion and virtual organizations that can then take on the repressive regimes on the ground.

Host: I’m afraid that’s going to be the last word for today, but I’d like to thank my guests: Morton Sklar of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, which filed the case against Yahoo!; Ammar Abdulhamid of the Tharwa Foundation; and joining us by phone from Paris, Clothilde Le Coz of Reporters Without Borders. Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our Web site at w-w-w-dot-v-o-a-news-dot-com-slash-ontheline. For On the Line, I’m Eric Felten.