Dec 9, 2011

Threats to Freedom of Expression in the Age of Information

Remarks by Carl Gershman, President, The National Endowment for Democracy
At the conference on “The Epoch-Making Power of Free Speech”
Sponsored by the Václav Havel Library
Prague, December 9, 2011

In preparation for this conference, we were asked to read Václav Havel’s essay “A Word about Words,” which he wrote when he received the Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1989. In this essay, Havel writes that the word of God is the source of all creation, and that the miracle of human speech is the key to the history of mankind. I interpret this to mean that Havel believes that freedom of expression, the theme of this conference, is not just an aspect of democracy, something added on to the constitutional structure of democracy, as in the case of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is really the essence of liberal democracy, the foundation on which all the other rights, institutions and democratic processes are based.

I have used the term “liberal democracy” to describe a political system in which freedom of expression and other basic rights are fully protected by the rule of law. Electoral democracy is a political system that falls short of liberal democracy in such areas as the rule of law and the independence of the media and the judiciary, but where the government is chosen through elections that are free and fair. According to the most recent Freedom House Survey of Freedom in the World, some 87 countries are considered to be liberal democracies, and another 28 countries are electoral democracies.

There are, of course, many countries that fall short of being liberal or electoral democracies, but that are also not absolute dictatorships. Such systems are described as semi-authoritarian or hybrid because they combine the features of a dictatorship, such as an all-powerful central government and a weak parliament and controlled judiciary, with some limited democratic features, such as independent media and civil society organizations that operate in a very restricted political environment. Such systems also lack a level electoral playing field. In this category you can place countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador in Latin America, as well as back-sliding or semi-authoritarian systems in countries like Russia and Zimbabwe. Egypt, with its very uncertain transition, is moving in this direction, as is Ukraine. In all of these cases freedom of expression is under attack. We’re even concerned about developments in neighboring Hungary and, therefore, will be having a public forum at NED next week to mark the first anniversary of the new media law that gives the Media Council there wide powers, making the independent media very nervous about the arbitrary enforcement of vague rules.

There are, of course, a number of governments that call themselves democratic but which do nothing to protect basic rights and, in fact, repress them. For example, such rights are not protected in Russia’s “managed democracy,” or in Venezuela’s “Bolivarian democracy,” or in Iran’s “Islamic democracy,” let alone in China’s “socialist democracy.”

The fact that democracy is so frequently compromised would not have surprised Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy’s first great analyst, who believed that liberal values had to be defended at a time when social and technological progress was contributing to the steady advance of equality in the world. All the great events of the past 700 years, he wrote in 1835, had had a leveling effect, from the English wars that had decimated the nobles, to the discovery of firearms that had equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle, to the rise of Protestantism that “proclaimed that all men are equally able to find the road to heaven.” The revolution that had convulsed France nearly a half century earlier was a consequence of this growing equality and posed what Tocqueville understood to be an unprecedented threat to liberal values, including of course freedom of expression. The great challenge, he believed, was to find a way to preserve liberty in the context of advancing equality. Toward that end, he came to America to study a society that had found a way to embed liberal values in democratic institutions. Today, almost two centuries later, the need to develop such institutions remains an historic challenge in countries throughout the world, from the post-communist region to the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Bearing in mind Tocqueville’s model of historical development, where great events ineluctably advance the principle of equality, we can identify the revolution in communications technology as the great event of our own time that has transformed the world and contributed to greater equality of condition. The Internet and other new communications technologies have given billions of previously marginalized people unprecedented access to information, raising human consciousness globally and increasing the demand for human rights, economic empowerment, and representative democratic institutions. Yet even as they advance equality, these technologies are also being used to limit rights and freedom of expression.

In fact, the growing field of new communications technologies and social networking is an area of sharpening contestation today between democracy advocates and their opponents. These technologies were, of course, a key factor in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions earlier this year, enabling activists to communicate rapidly with each other to spread information about human rights abuses and corruption, and to mobilize at critical moments. The use of social networking and other technologies so alarmed dictatorial regimes that some of them have shut down the Internet entirely to contain protests, as Burma did in 2007 and Egypt did last February. In response to the growing use of these technologies by human rights defenders, bloggers, and democracy activists, China and other authoritarian governments have developed sophisticated measures of filtering, censorship and surveillance, including malware attacks on opposition websites. During the recent Russian elections, for example, the websites of monitoring groups like Golos were hit by something called “distributed denial of service” attacks, a malware technique where websites are flooded with crippling volumes of artificially generated Internet traffic. Groups in China are hit by so-called “fifty-centers” who inundate the message boards of dissident websites with pro-government commentaries.

Authoritarian governments also monitor the users of cybercafés and shut down the Internet at critical moments, for example during protests or before major political anniversaries. More recently, autocrats have tried to normalize their command of cyberspace by establishing a new legal framework to legitimize information control and warrantless surveillance, and to create “national-cyber-zones” that give them absolute control over Internet access and domain-name registration. By abolishing anonymity on the Internet, they can target, detain and imprison specific users.

Democrats are fighting back, as they have done in Syria recently by using an encryption system called Psiphon that protects users from detection by Syrian security forces. Dissidents have been aided by coalitions like the Global Network Initiative that convene activists, analysts and companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft to help ensure that Internet regulations safeguard access, privacy and basic rights. But even if they succeed in eliminating Internet control by governments, authoritarian regimes could still control dissidents the old-fashioned way by jailing bloggers. “It would be a cruelly paradoxical outcome indeed,” Evgeny Morozov has written, “should liberation technology’s very success spur the creation of a sociopolitical environment in which there would be nothing for technology to ‘liberate.’” Given the importance of Internet communications as an instrument of both protest and control, cyberspace will clearly remain a critical sphere of democratic contestation in the period ahead.

Since tomorrow is December 10 and the anniversary of the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, to the imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, I would like to close with a passage on freedom of expression taken from “I Have No Enemies,” Liu’s eloquent closing statement at this trial. “I look forward, he said, to [the day] when my country is a land of freedom of expression,…where every citizen can state political views without fear, and where no one can under any circumstances suffer political persecution for voicing divergent political views. I hope that I will be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisitions and that from now on no one will be incriminated because of speech.

“Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth.” Let us work for Liu’s freedom, and for China’s as well.