Freedom House’s 2015 Freedom on the Net report describes widespread setbacks in global access | Democracy, elections and voting at Democracy Chronicles

From Freedom House and by Sanja Kelly, Madeline Earp, Laura Reed, Adrian Shahbaz, and Mai Truong

Internet freedom around the world has declined for the fifth consecutive year, with more governments censoring information of public interest and placing greater demands on the private sector to take down offending content. The goal of these restrictions is usually to protect powerful figures and the official views on religion or morality that may undergird leaders’ popularity.

State authorities have also jailed more users for their online writings, while criminal and terrorist groups have made public examples of those who dared to expose their activities online. This was especially evident in the Middle East, where the public flogging of liberal bloggers, life sentences for online critics, and beheadings of internet-based journalists provided a powerful deterrent to the sort of digital organizing that contributed to the Arab Spring.

In a new trend, many governments have sought to shift the burden of censorship to private companies and individuals by pressing them to remove content, often resorting to direct blocking only when those measures fail. Local companies are especially vulnerable to the whims of law enforcement agencies and a recent proliferation of repressive laws. But large, international companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have faced similar demands due to their significant popularity and reach.

Surveillance has been on the rise globally, despite the uproar that followed the revelation of mass data collection by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013. Several democratic countries, including France and Australia, passed new measures authorizing sweeping surveillance, prompted in part by domestic terrorism concerns and the expansion of the Islamic State (IS) militant group. Bans on encryption and anonymity tools are becoming more common, with governments seeking access to encryption backdoors that could threaten digital security for everyone. Evidence that governments with poor human rights records are purchasing surveillance and malware technologies from Western companies like Hacking Team has fueled suspicions that these tools are being used to crack down on political dissidents.

Nevertheless, activists, advocacy groups, and journalists have pushed back against deteriorating conditions for global internet freedom. In India, legal petitions against Section 66A of the Information Technology (IT) Act—a restrictive provision that was used to criminalize online speech, particularly on social media—succeeded when the Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional in March 2015. In Argentina, the Supreme Court protected intermediaries from pressure to preemptively censor third-party content. And in the United States, the June 2015 passage of the USA Freedom Act marked an incremental step toward surveillance reform after nearly two years of debate over NSA practices.

In more repressive settings where the potential for legislative change is limited, activists have had some success in using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to hold government officials accountable for abuses. In Ethiopia, demands for the release of the Zone 9 bloggers, who were being tried on terrorism charges, garnered global attention under the #FreeZone9Bloggers hashtag, apparently contributing to the release of five of the nine defendants in July 2015. And in Saudi Arabia, the ubiquity of smartphones enabled activists to post documentation of human rights violations online, sparking public outrage and resulting in the dismissal of two government officials.

While the overall trajectory for internet freedom remains negative, the declines over the last year were less precipitous than in the past. The small victories described above are promising signs that the setbacks of recent years can be reversed, and that the fight for a free and open internet will continue even under the harshest conditions.

See more at: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net-2015/freedom-net-2015-privatizing-censorship-eroding-privacy