Mobile technology is helping the repressed find a voice. But that doesn’t make journalists freer.
Pravit Rojanaphruk worked at The Nation for 23 years. One of Thailand’s top reporters and editors, he was fired following the military coup of 2014, detained twice, forbidden to travel and harassed regularly by the world’s last remaining military junta. “I could never overstress the price I paid for being vocal,” Rojanaphruk says.
The Thai government has embarked on a “blitzkrieg” against press freedom, according to Benjamin Ismail, head of the Asia-Pacific desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the press freedom watchdog headquartered in Paris. But Rojanaphruk, despite having no access to print media, has been able to keep going — thanks to his mobile and internet access.
The Thai government is so concerned about Rojanaphruk’s online work that a soldier is permanently assigned to monitor his Twitter and Facebook accounts, he says.
“Journalists, myself included, use Twitter and Facebook to directly disseminate news and views as well as to connect with the public,” Rojanaphruk says. “Censorship on social media is more difficult (to execute), and citizens themselves are now increasingly becoming netizens with their own voices.”
But access to social media still hasn’t made Rojanaphruk free. Tim Unwin, the UNESCO chair for the Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D), says mobile and internet technologies are only so powerful.
“We all liked to believe a long time ago that mobile devices and ICT in general — the internet — were free, open and democratizing, and therefore had the potential to be anarchic and actually change regimes,” Unwin says. “I think the evidence is pretty clear now that … the vast majority of states actually monitor the use of digital technologies pretty closely. (And) it isn’t just what some people like to call oppressive regimes.
“The potential to change things, which fundamentally many of us believed in, may not really happen,” he adds.
Mobile and internet technology are now an indispensable part of every reporter’s arsenal. Many citizens are empowered like never before with information, even in some of the world’s most repressive regimes. Dictators and pseudo-democrats are afraid enough to invest massive amounts of time, energy and capital into monitoring, censoring and blocking what citizens can read, for fear they will know too much.
According to Unwin, however, these technologies alone are not enough. “We must get rid of what I call an instrumental view of technology, which sees the technology as making the change,” he says, “but instead see the technology as something that can be used for good or bad, (as) an accelerator.”
The crackdown on press freedom in Thailand is symptomatic of what is happening around the region. Whether it’s communist nations like China, Vietnam, Laos and the Thai junta, “managed democracies” like Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, or emerging democracies like Myanmar and East Timor — all across Asia, press freedom is tumbling south.
Journalists both professional and amateur are locked up, sued for “defamation,” beaten, stabbed, kidnapped, forced to recant their “crimes” on television and woken by the phone calls of terrified relatives begging them to stop reporting, according to RSF. Even Japan and South Korea, countries that like to boast of their Western-style press freedoms, have seen them severely decline over the past few years.
Regardless of the relationship between the government and the press, mobile and internet-based technologies have revolutionized how journalists, bloggers and other citizens express themselves and report the news. In the past, the news content available to Chinese consumers in print, on TV or on the radio was either provided by the government or distributed or broadcast underground by dissidents at great danger to both the users and the producers. For such consumers, mobile internet access has changed everything.
“What mobile access has done is place a world of information at their fingertips — (albeit) yes, a censored (one),” says Charlie Smith, cofounder of Great Fire, an organization dedicated to fighting censorship in China. “The Chinese are undoubtedly much better for whatever access to information they have.”
Every year, Smith points out, China sees tens of thousands of antigovernment demonstrations. While demonstrators may not be specifically demanding democracy, per se, “the vast majority (are) advocating for democratic types of things: more say in the choice of local officials, ending government corruption, securing land rights, putting a stop to pollution, improving education.”
Mobile technology has proven to be indispensable to the organization of these demonstrations, as well as to their subsequent underground press coverage — a direct challenge to President Xi Jinping’s pronouncements that all media must “protect the (Communist) Party’s authority and unity.”
For an example of this phenomenon, Smith points to the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, which was largely strategized using mobile technology, though the activities of Vietnam’s pro-democracy party Viet Tan would also suffice. In Malaysia, news site Malaysiakini provides an online platform to discuss local politics and affairs, away from government censors. And in South Korea, OhMyNews, an online news outlet powered by citizen journalists, has spent the past 10 years countering the oligopoly of the nation’s big, mostly conservative newspapers.
Buoyed by a slew of new technologies reaching markets around the world, repressed peoples are gaining unprecedented levels of access to uncensored content.
A notable contribution to modern tech is virtual private networks, which allow netizens to circumvent national controls by connecting to a third country’s network. Although only about 3 percent of Chinese users utilize VPNs, the government takes the offense of skirting censors seriously enough to shut down service providers by the handful. But once one is blocked, another takes its place.
This environment has led to the emergence of The Onion Router, also known as Tor, over the past decade. Originally developed by U.S. Naval Intelligence, Tor allows users to connect via a series of virtual tunnels — an “onion” network — rather than directly to a source, thus scrambling the message’s source and destination. Its developers say this prevents “traffic analysis” of a person’s internet use, thus making censored pages accessible and preventing authorities from tracking users.
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based human rights advocate, says Tor — which is used by Panama Papers investigative reporters — has been instrumental in getting around the country’s “Great Firewall.” Tor’s service has also found a supporter in anticensorship organization Global Voices Online.
According to Human Rights Watch, some “tens of thousands” of Chinese netizens were using Tor in 2006, but no more recent information is available. A Tor spokesperson simply said there were “lots” of Tor users in the Asia-Pacific region.
RSF and its leader Benjamin Ismail are most excited about a new technology known as Collateral Freedom. A type of code developed by Great Fire, Collateral Freedom allows replicas of existing websites, called mirror sites, to be posted on https:// websites that businesses and governments need to access. A Chinese dissident’s blog, for example, could be mirrored on Amazon Web Service.
Since https:// websites are encrypted, authorities cannot block specific parts of the website, according to Ismail. If censors wish to shut down the website, they must shut down the entire host site, something they would be loath to do with a large corporation.
Blocking Amazon, the Great Fire website notes, “would have devastating economic consequences inside of China.” And Amazon is just one example — other large corporations that do business in China, such as banks, would be similarly useful.
“The purpose is to leverage global internet infrastructure to deliver uncensored content to China,” says Smith. “The Chinese authorities are faced with one choice: to allow this information to make it through and into China, or to block foreign internet completely, which is what the ‘damage’ would be.”
A growing list of news outlets are adopting Collateral Freedom, from the Asia Sentinel, an independent online newspaper often targeted by Thailand and Malaysia, to the New York Times in China. Malaysia’s Sarawak Report, for example, covered a significant scandal involving the prime minister and was subsequently blocked, but Collateral Freedom enables the paper’s website to be accessible in the country.
The Chinese government in particular has not reacted positively to the emergence of Collateral Freedom. Great Fire was subject to a massive DDoS attack in March 2015. According to an investigation by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, the denial of service originated with Chinese search engine Baidu’s servers, but was almost certainly launched by the Chinese government with a hacking tool the report calls the “Great Cannon.” Baidu denies its servers were hacked, and the Chinese government has refused to answer questions about the event.
Individuals at Great Fire have also been threatened. “It has been difficult, but it has also been rewarding as we have made some progress,” Smith says, but can’t go into detail. “We believe in freedom of access to information for everyone, which is why we bother with this.”
But if mobile and internet technology are freeing up media around the world, these developments have not made journalists much freer, judging by RSF’s annual media freedom report for 2016. Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, argues that the world has become far more dangerous for journalists — and that digital technology is partly to blame.
Put simply, governments can use social media as a means of tracking dissident journalists — particularly those without publicized ties to multinational outlets. In an article by Quartz writer Anya Schiffrin, Simon addresses violence against reporters, saying, “Local freelancers and bloggers upon whom the media increasingly rely are far more vulnerable than big-name correspondents protected by the likes of the New York Times.” It would appear that the same technology that enables acts of citizen journalism also puts such contributors at risk for retribution from the regimes they challenge.
Evaluating the outcomes of informal news coverage, senior correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe stresses that mobile journalism alone, no matter how courageous, isn’t enough to end repression. “For democracy to advance (in repressive countries), action on the ground is needed by citizens who are willing to pay a price,” she says in a report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The ability to communicate and organize online may help such action occur, but it is only a small part of what is needed to create a critical mass of activity.”
Then there is the question of who is a journalist and what makes them qualified to report the news. In the face of those who questioned the ethics of his interview with fugitive drug baron El Chapo, actor Sean Penn demanded on “60 Minutes” that his critics show “the license that says that they’re a journalist.” There’s a reason why no such license exists in free societies — to decide who can and cannot become a journalist would be massive constraint of press freedom. But does that mean anyone with a mobile device and internet connection is a journalist?
“It would be a serious mistake to think that the so-called ‘citizen journalists’ — important as they are to public debate — can entirely replace large, professional institutions organized to report the news,” writes Lee Bollinger in Foreign Policy magazine. “The benefits of scale, professionalism and institutional support are significant when it comes to covering actions of governments or multinational corporations.”
Unwin admires how citizen journalists can reach places where regular reporters may not have access. In November 2015, he witnessed a suspected terrorist lockdown at Gatwick Airport and photographed and live-blogged the event. “I think that is a really neat example of the way citizens can get places that the formal media can’t,” Unwin says. “The dark side … was that it led to a whole lot of trolling as well.”
Terry Xu, chief editor of the Online Citizen, an independent online newspaper in Singapore, has been repeatedly harassed by the Singaporean government — a “managed democracy” that has sued and prosecuted journalists for sedition, libel and defamation to silence criticism. In spite of these setbacks, Xu continues to do what he does: namely, keep the electorate “informed and educated.” He says new technology has been of great help.
“Mobile technology has obviously helped independent media like The Online Citizen to reach out to a larger segment of society and deprive the conventional media of their monopoly through the printed medium,” Xu says. “(If) the only source of information (is the) mainstream media, it is very unlikely Singapore will see much progress in its electorate. This is why the site has to exist — to educate the public and to write on issues and injustice that people in Singapore face.”
Rojanaphruk, meanwhile, continues to use social media to fight and delegitimize the Thai junta.
“Social media has been big in opposing the military junta, and the regime appears very concerned about unchecked social media,” he says. “They have detained a few people who are political influencers on social media for up to seven days without charge, myself included, or tried some for sedition and for violating the computer crimes act,” a law that determines how citizens can act online.
But the technology only goes so far. Under the current regime, it remains nearly impossible to be an independent journalist in Thailand, with or without access to technology. The transition to a civilian government, as happened in Myanmar, will eventually be necessary for independent journalism to thrive.
Until then, Rojanaphruk says, “I try to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
The article was originally published on the website of the N3CON SEOUL 2016, n3con.com.
Source: http://www.koreaobserver.com/the-cyberfight-for-media-freedom-63035/