Web Freedom Is Seen as a Growing Global Issue
Web Freedom Is Seen as a Growing Global Issue
By VINDU GOEL and ANDREW E. KRAMER JAN. 1, 2015
SAN FRANCISCO — Government censorship of the Internet is
a cat-and-mouse game. And despite more aggressive tactics in recent months, the
cats have been largely frustrated while the mice wriggle away.
But this year, the challenges for Silicon Valley will
mount, with Russia and Turkey in particular trying to tighten controls on
foreign-based Internet companies. Major American companies like Facebook,
Twitter and Google are increasingly being put in the tricky position of
figuring out which laws and orders to comply with around the world — and which
to ignore or contest.
On Wednesday, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin,
signed the latest version of a personal data law that will require companies to
store data about Russian users on computers inside the country, where it will
be easier for the government to get access to it. With few companies expected
to comply with the law, which goes into effect Sept. 1, a confrontation may
well erupt.
The clumsiness of current censorship efforts was apparent
in mid-December, when Russia’s Internet regulator demanded that Facebook remove
a page that was promoting an anti-government rally. After Facebook blocked the
page for its 10 million or so Russian users, dozens of copycat pages popped up
and the word spread on other social networks like Twitter. That created even
more publicity for the planned Jan. 15 event, intended to protest the
sentencing of Aleksei A. Navalny, a leading opposition figure.
Colin Crowell, Twitter’s global vice president of public
policy, said, “There are more and more requests for removal of information.”
Credit Troy Holden
Anton Nosik, a prominent Russian blogger whose work has
been censored by regulators, said it was absurd for a government to think it
could easily stamp out an article or video when it can be copied or found
elsewhere with a few clicks. “The reader wants to see what he was prevented
from seeing,” Mr. Nosik said in an interview. “All that blocking doesn’t work.”
Instead, that prompted the government to switch tactics,
moving Mr. Navalny’s sentencing to Dec. 30 with little notice in an attempt to
diminish protests.
The Turkish government faced similar embarrassment when
it tried to stop the dissemination of leaked documents and audio recordings on
Twitter in March. The administration of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was then
prime minister and is now president, ordered the shutdown of Twitter within
Turkey after the company refused to block the posts, which implicated
government officials in a corruption investigation.
Not only did the government lose a court fight on the
issue, but while Twitter was blocked, legions of Turkish users taught one
another technical tricks to evade the ban, even spray-painting the instructions
on the walls of buildings.
“We all became hackers,” Asli Tunc, a professor of
communication at Istanbul Bilgi University, said in a phone interview. “And we
all got on Twitter.”
Despite such victories for free-speech advocates,
governments around the world are stepping up their efforts to control the
Internet, escalating the confrontation.
“The trendlines are consistent,” Colin Crowell, Twitter’s
global vice president of public policy, said in a phone interview. “There are
more and more requests for removal of information.”
Pakistan, for example, bombarded Facebook with nearly
1,800 requests to take down content in the first half of 2014, according to the
company’s most recent transparency report. Google’s YouTube video service has
long been blocked there. And the government briefly succeeding in getting
Twitter to block certain “blasphemous” or “unethical” tweets last year until
the company re-examined Pakistani law and determined the requests didn’t meet
legal requirements.
It’s not just autocratic regimes that are pressing for
limits on free speech. In the European Union, a court ruling last year
established a “right to be forgotten,” allowing residents to ask search engines
like Google to remove links to negative material about them. Now privacy
regulators want Google to also delete the links from search results on the
non-European versions of its service because anyone in Europe can easily get
access to the alternate sites.
Free-speech activists view Facebook, the world’s largest
social network with 1.35 billion monthly users, as the company most inclined to
work with governments and do whatever is necessary to keep its service up and
running.
Last spring, while Twitter was blocked in Turkey and
YouTube was shut down, Facebook removed contested content and continued to
operate. It has a dedicated team of outside lawyers who field censorship
requests from the Turkish government and then recommend to corporate officials
whether content should be blocked.
“Facebook can be quite important to the people who use
it, so we try to make sure it remains accessible,” a company spokesman said.
“We aggressively push back on unlawful or overly broad government requests.”
Twitter, which has about 284 million monthly users,
styles itself as the world’s town square and a global champion of free speech,
conforming to the letter of censorship laws while winking at workaround strategies,
like users changing the location listed on their profile to evade specific
blocks that apply in a particular country.
For Turkey’s opposition movement, Professor Tunc said,
Twitter “basically created an opening, a refreshing alternative, especially
during the protests. And they know that. They act like a defender of freedom.”
As the biggest player, Google, whose YouTube service
seems to draw the particular ire of foreign governments, has been forced into
fights on many fronts. It is still viewed by many as a hero for its decision to
pull out of China in 2010 rather than continue to censor search results there.
The company explained its philosophy at that time: “We
have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression. We are driven by a
belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately
more power for the individual.”
While China remains a thorn in the side of most Western
Internet companies — Facebook and Twitter are basically blocked there — Russia
is the current flash point in the censorship wars.
Over the summer, the Russian government began demanding
that anyone with at least 3,000 daily visitors follow rules similar to those
applying to a media company and face content restrictions. So far, Twitter and
Facebook are simply passing those requests along to their users without making
sure anyone complies. Many do not, but so far the Russian government has not
pressed the issue.
But the pressure may intensify later this year. Starting
Sept. 1, foreign technology companies are supposed to store data about Russian
users on computers located in Russia and make a software key available to the
government that could be used to unscramble and monitor private Internet
communications.
That would give the government leverage in showdowns with
tech companies, since it could simply raid the facility or arrest local
employees.
Most Western technology companies have no data centers in
Russia and no plans to change that.
“Our data centers are all in the United States,” said Mr.
Crowell of Twitter. “It’s unlikely that our first data center outside the
United States will be in Russia.”
Google, whose search engine is the No. 2 player in Russia
after the local Yandex service, has gone further, announcing recently that it
will close its engineering offices in Russia. Although the company said it had
been consolidating such offices globally, one factor in the closure is the risk
of a raid by Russian authorities.
“If what’s going to happen is that Russians will show up
and stick an AK-47 in an engineer’s nostril, Google is going to make sure that
no one in Russia has a Google engineering logon,” said Ross J. Anderson, a
professor of security engineering at Cambridge University in Britain, who
studies privacy and censorship issues and did some work for Google in the past.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on its Russia
strategy, saying only, “We are deeply committed to our Russian users and
customers and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them.”
Twitter and Facebook have more room to maneuver. With far
fewer users in Russia and virtually no advertising there, they can resist the
government’s demands with fewer repercussions.
Robert Shlegel, a member of the Russian Parliament active
in shaping the Kremlin’s Internet policies, said in a phone interview that the
Russian regulations were in many ways a response to the revelations of the
former American intelligence contractor, Edward J. Snowden, about American
government spying through Silicon Valley companies.
“This problem was created by the United States,” Mr.
Shlegel said. Mr. Snowden lives in Russia, which granted him residency as the
United States government sought to arrest him for his leaks.
Russia’s first preference, Mr. Shlegel said, is to
persuade other nations to form a common, international set of rules for social
networking sites and crowdsourced news, clarifying when countries could block
pages to comply with national laws.
He said that Russian authorities had no intention of
blocking American Internet companies for failing to follow the data storage
law. “What we need to do is have a dialogue,” he said.
And given Western sanctions and the collapse in the
ruble’s value, Russia needs foreign business support, at least in part to
prevent its online economy from grinding to a halt. If strictly enforced, the
personal data law, for example, would close most Internet hotel and airline
bookings, sending Russians to stand in line at travel agencies instead.
Mr. Nosik, the Russian blogger, said that the country’s
Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, was unlikely to ban American companies like
Facebook, if only for fear that millions of Russians who suddenly lost access
to years of photographs, family memories, love letters and contacts with
friends would blame the Kremlin.
Only Mr. Putin could decide to cut off access, he said.
“The moment Putin wants it done, it will be done within minutes and no law will
be required,” Mr. Nosik said. “On the other hand, so long as Putin doesn’t give
the command to block them, they will not be blocked.”
Vindu Goel reported from San Francisco and Andrew E.
Kramer from Moscow.
A version of this article appears in print on January 2,
2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Web Freedom Seen
Growing as an Issue.
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