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Digital Munich Part 3
Wednesday, November 16, 2005   By: Juan Paxety

UN off the net

We've written before about the threat to Internet freedom posed by a UN summit that begins today. Now Claudia Rosette recalls Paul Revere - The UN is coming, the UN is coming.

The United Nations' so-called World Summit on the Information Society opens today in Tunis, Tunisia, proposing to set up U.N. sway over the Internet under the slogan of bridging the "digital divide." But that's the wrong metaphor. This three-day jamboree is a U.N. turf grab: the latest case of the U.N. misinterpreting its noble mandate to promote peace as a license to take a piece of anything it can get.

For anyone who cares about the vast freedoms and opportunities afforded by the Internet--for pajama-clad bloggers, for journalists, for businessmen and especially for people in the poorest countries--it is time for a call to arms. Sen. Norm Coleman, whose investigations into U.N. corruption have provided him with more insight than most into the cracks and chasms of that aging institution, has already warned in The Wall Street Journal against the possibility of Tunis becoming a "digital Munich." Whether America retains control over the root directory or some other setup ultimately evolves, the clear bottom line right now is that allowing the U.N. to involve itself in these questions is the wrong answer. A U.N. unable even to audit its own accounts or police its own peacekeepers has no business making even a twitch toward control of the Internet.

Worse, the corruption and incompetence at U.N. headquarters, however disturbing, are the least of the problems linked to the U.N.'s bid to control interconnectivity. The deeper trouble is that the U.N. has embraced the same tyrants who in the name of helping the downtrodden are now seeking via Internet control to tread them down some more.

The tyrants she refers to include fidel castro, the Saudis, Syrians, Libyans,  and the Chinese. These are not the friends of free societies.

In free societies, all sorts of good things flourish, including technology and highly productive uses of the Internet. In despotic systems, human potential withers and dies, strangled by censorship, starved by central controls, and rotted by the corruption that inevitably accompanies such arrangements. That poisonous mix is what prevents the spread of prosperity in Africa, and blocks peace in the Middle East, and access to computers, or for that matter, food, in North Korea (which is of course sending a delegate to Tunis).

And in the irony we have come to expect from the dictator loving UN, the host country of Tunisia has just been cited this week by Human Rights Watch for its oppression of folks using the Internet.

As the World Summit on the Information Society opens today in Tunis, Tunisia continues to jail individuals for expressing their opinions on the Internet and suppress Web sites critical of the government, Human Rights Watch said in a comprehensive new report on the repression of Internet users in the Middle East and North Africa.

 The 144-page report, “False Freedom: Online Censorship in the Middle East and North Africa,” documents online censorship and cases in which Internet users have been detained for their online activities in countries across the region, including Tunisia, Iran, Syria and Egypt. These attempts to control the flow of information online contradict governments' national and international legal commitments to freedom of opinion and expression and the summit's own Declaration of Principles.  
 
The report is based on an examination of thousands of Web sites from Middle Eastern countries and interviews with dozens of writers, bloggers, computer experts and human rights activists. 

 “Middle Eastern governments should prove they're committed to building an information society by ending political censorship of Web sites and releasing writers jailed for expressing their political opinions online,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.  

I say all governments, plus the UN, need to prove they're committed to building an information society by ending censorship of the Internet.

Here are some specifics from Human Rights Watch

  • Tunisian police in plainclothes arrested online Tunisian journalist Muhammad Abou on March 1. The night before, Abou had published an article on a banned Web site comparing President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Abou is now serving a three-year prison term in Le Kef, roughly 200 km (105 miles) southwest of Tunis.  
  • In Iran, as a consequence of the government's shuttering of reformist papers, the Web has become Iran's main outlet for the free exchange of political information and ideas. Today there are some 7 million Internet users in Iran, and cyberspace is fueling the development of civil society. In response, the government has detained dozens of online writers, bloggers, and Web site administrators.  
  • As a result of his public defense of human rights, Omid Memarian was arrested with more than 20 other bloggers in October 2004. He was detained in solitary confinement, tortured repeatedly and forced to make false confessions. Following international protest, including from Human Rights Watch, Memarian was released in December 2004.  
  • In Egypt, the Internet has likewise proven a boon to the development of civil society and freedom of information, but it has occasionally provoked government backlash as well. Egyptian activists and bloggers now use the Internet, e-mail and text messages to publicize human rights abuses, organize protests, and even coordinate slogans to chant at protests. The Egyptian Blog Ring, a Web site set up to highlight and catalogue local blogs, listed some 390 Egyptian blogs as of September 2005.  
  • At 3 a.m. on October 26, plainclothes security agents in Alexandria detained Egyptian blogger `Abd al-Karim Nabil Suleiman and confiscated printouts of his online writings. Suleiman was a student of Islamic jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University in Muharram Bek, a district of Alexandria that days earlier had been the site of deadly sectarian riots. On October 22, he had posted comments on the Internet criticizing the Muslim rioters and Islam.  
  • In Syria, authorities censor information and correspondence with a free hand under the terms of emergency legislation promulgated more than forty years ago. The government tampers with the very fabric of the Internet, restricting the use of the basic electronic protocols that allow people to send e-mails and construct Web sites. Security forces have held online writers incommunicado and tortured them simply for reporting stories the government did not wish to see told.  

The report deals mainly with the Middle East. Of course governments in countries such as Cuba, North Korea and China block the Internet to prevent the spread of information.

Update - CNN is reporting an agreement has been reached.

Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge of the Internet's addressing system, averting a U.S.-EU showdown at this week's U.N. technology summit.

U.S. officials said early Wednesday that instead of transferring management of the system to an international body such as the United Nations, an international forum would be created to address concerns. The forum, however, would have no binding authority.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael Gallagher said the deal means the United States will leave day-to-day management to the private sector, through a quasi-independent organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

We'll see what this really means in the long term.

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