What’s Scarier:
Terrorism, or Governments Blocking
Websites in its Name?
By Glenn Greenwald
March 18, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Intercept"
-The French Interior Ministry on Monday
ordered that five websites be
blocked on the grounds that they promote
or advocate terrorism. “I do not want to
see sites that could lead people to take
up arms on the Internet,” proclaimed
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
When the block functions
properly, visitors to those banned
sites, rather than accessing the content
of the sites they chose to visit, will
be automatically redirected to the
Interior Ministry website. There, they
will be greeted by a graphic of a large
red hand, and text informing them that
they were attempting to access a site
that causes or promotes terrorism: “you
are being redirected to this official
website since your computer was about to
connect with a page that provokes
terrorist acts or condones terrorism
publicly.”
No judge reviews
the Interior Ministry’s decisions. The
minister first requests that the website
owner voluntarily remove the content he
deems transgressive; upon
disobedience, the minister unilaterally
issues the order to Internet service
providers for the sites to be blocked.
This censorship power is vested pursuant
to
a law recently enacted in France
empowering the interior minister to
block websites.
Forcibly taking down
websites deemed to be supportive of
terrorism, or criminalizing speech
deemed to “advocate” terrorism, is a
major trend in both Europe and the West
generally. Last month in Brussels, the
European Union’s counter-terrorism
coordinator issued
a memo proclaiming that “Europe is
facing an unprecedented, diverse and
serious terrorist threat,” and argued
that increased state control over the
Internet is crucial to combating it.
The memo noted that
“the EU and its Member States have
developed several initiatives related to
countering radicalisation and terrorism
on the Internet,” yet argued that more
must be done. It argued that the focus
should be on “working with the main
players in the Internet industry [a]s
the best way to limit the circulation of
terrorist material online.” It
specifically hailed the tactics of
the U.K. Counter-Terrorism Internet
Referral Unit (CTIRU), which has
succeeded in causing the removal of
large amounts of material it deems
“extremist”:
In addition to
recommending the dissemination of
“counter-narratives” by governments, the
memo also urged EU member states to
“examine the legal and technical
possibilities to remove illegal
content.”
Exploiting terrorism
fears to control speech has been a
common practice in the West since 9/11,
but it is becoming increasingly popular
even in countries that have experienced
exceedingly few attacks. A new
extremist bill advocated by the
right-wing Harper government in Canada
(also supported
by Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau
even as he recognizes its dangers)
would create new crimes for
“advocating terrorism”; specifically:
“every person who, by communicating
statements, knowingly advocates or
promotes the commission of terrorism
offences in general” would be a guilty
and can be sent to prison for five years
for each offense.
In justifying the new
proposal, the
Canadian government admits that
“under the current criminal law, it is
[already] a crime to counsel or actively
encourage others to commit a specific
terrorism offence.” This new proposal is
about criminalizing ideas and opinions.
In the government’s words, it “prohibits
the intentional advocacy or promotion of
terrorism, knowing or reckless as to
whether it would result in terrorism.”
There can be no doubt
that such new criminal laws
are specifically intended to ban ideas
these governments dislike. The Canadian
Centre for Policy Alternatives
lays out numerous ways that the law
will allow the government to imprison
people for the expression of political
ideas:
The new offence
will bring within its ambit all
kinds of innocent speech, some of
which no doubt lies at the core of
freedom of expression values that
the Charter was meant to protect. .
. .Even if the government exercises
restraint in laying charges and
arresting people, the result is an
inevitable chill on speech. Students
will think twice before posting an
article on Facebook questioning
military action against insurgents
overseas. Journalists will be wary
of questioning government decisions
to add groups to Canada’s list of
terrorist entities.
If someone argues that
continuous Western violence and
interference in the Muslim world for
decades justifies violence being
returned to the West, or even advocates
that governments arm various insurgents
considered by some to be “terrorists,”
such speech could easily be viewed as
constituting a crime.
To calm concerns,
Canadian authorities point out that “the
proposed new offence is similar to one
recently enacted by Australia,
that prohibits advocating a
terrorist act or the commission of a
terrorism offence-all while being
reckless as to whether another person
will engage in this kind of activity.”
Indeed, Australia enacted a new law late
last year that
indisputably targets political
speech and ideas, as well as
criminalizing journalism considered
threatening by the government.
Punishing people for
their speech deemed extremist or
dangerous has been a vibrant practice in
both the U.K. and U.S. for some time
now, as I
detailed (coincidentally) just a
couple days before free speech marches
broke out in the West after the Charlie
Hebdo attacks. Those
criminalization-of-speech attacks
overwhelmingly target Muslims, and have
resulted in the punishment of such
classic free speech activities as
posting anti-war commentary on Facebook,
tweeting links to “extremist”
videos, translating
and posting
“radicalizing” videos to the
Internet,
writing scholarly articles in
defense of Palestinian groups and expressing
harsh criticism of Israel, and even
including a Hezbollah channel in a
cable package.
In this regard, having
the French Interior Ministry now
unilaterally block websites is the next
logical step in this growing attack on
free speech by Western governments in
the name of stopping extremism and
radicalism. The large red hand of state
censors over the Internet is a perfect
symbol of the prevailing mindset in the
West, whose fondness for
self-righteously condemning China and
Iran for their attempts to
control Internet content is
bottomless. The ironic
mass arrests by France of people who
“glorify” terrorism — carried out in the
immediate aftermath of the Paris “free
speech” rally — largely targeted that
country’s Muslims.
Let’s briefly note the
futility of the French efforts: in the
way that censorship efforts fail
generally and are particularly doomed to
failure in the Internet era. I’m
currently in Germany, just a few miles
from the French border, and am able to
access all the banned sites. Reports
suggest that the French government
failed miserably on technical grounds to
block the targeted sites, as at least
four of the five are still fully
available even in France. The owner of
the hosting company for one of
the banned sites, islamic-news.info, insisted
on Twitter yesterday that he was
never contacted with any request to
remove offending material.
Beyond the technical
issues, trying to legislate ideas out of
existence is a fool’s game: those
sufficiently determined will always find
ways to make themselves heard.
Indeed, as U.S. pop star Barbra
Streisand
famously learned, attempts to
suppress ideas usually result in the
greatest publicity possible for their
advocates and/or elevate them by turning
fringe ideas into martyrs for free
speech (I have zero doubt that all five
of the targeted sites enjoyed among
their highest traffic dates ever today
as a result of the French targeting).
But the comical
futility of these efforts is exceeded by
their profound dangers. Who wants
governments to be able to unilaterally
block websites? Isn’t the exercise of
this website-blocking power what has
long been cited as reasons we should
regard the Bad Countries — such as
China and
Iran — as tyrannies (which also
usually
cite “counterterrorism” to justify
their censorship efforts)?
As those and countless
other examples prove, the concepts of
“extremism” and “radicalizing” (like
“terrorism” itself) are incredibly vague
and elastic, and in the hands of those
who wield power, almost always expand
far beyond what you think it should mean
(plotting to blow up innocent people) to
mean: anyone who disseminates ideas
that are threatening to the exercise of
our power. That’s why powers
justified in the name of combating
“radicalism” or “extremism” are
invariably — not often or usually, but
invariably — applied to activists,
dissidents, protesters and those who
challenge prevailing orthodoxies and
power centers.
My arguments for
distrusting governments to exercise
powers of censorship are set forth
here (in the context of a prior
attempt by a different French
minister to control the content of
Twitter). In sum, far more damage
has been inflicted historically by
efforts to censor and criminalize
political ideas than by the kind of
“terrorism” these governments are
invoking to justify these censorship
powers.
And whatever else may
be true, few things are more inimical
to, or threatening of, Internet freedom
than allowing functionaries inside
governments to unilaterally block
websites from functioning on the ground
that the ideas those sites advocate are
objectionable or “dangerous.” That’s
every bit as true when the censors are
in Paris, London, and Ottawa, and
Washington as when they are in Tehran,
Moscow or Beijing.