Internet Freedom: When and How Can It Be Restricted?

Posted by: raminta 9 years, 6 months ago

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Imagine China: a student called Ming from the Peking University attends a huge demonstration against the Chinese government. In the evening he writes a post on his blog about the event and shares his post on the social network Renren. He also sends all information by email to his friend, who lives in London. Unfortunatelly, the email does not reach his friend and his attempts to sign in to his blog fail. Chinese search engine Baidu cannot find the link to Ming's blog either, and his account on Renren becomes unavailable. What has happened with Ming's information? Why cannot he reach it on the Internet?

Restrictions on Internet freedom in China

This is a very typical and common situation in China, which is considered to be one of the biggest enemies of Internet freedom in the world. The Internet is censored by the leading Communist party, which uses the Great Firewall of China and the Golden Shield Project to monitor and to block local and international websites, emails and social network accounts. China has also shut down websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other websites managed by human rights organisations and international news agencies. The Government publicly states that such measures are aimed to protect state secrets and public safety, therefore all information, which could be understood as critics to the Government, becomes inaccessible to the Internet users.

Internet censorship

More than twenty years ago Sir Tim Berners-Lee tried to create a comfortable and easily accessible space for the exchange of unlimited amount of information. He did not expect that somebody could be willing to limit and disturb such flow and spread of knowledge.

Last year the Foreign Affairs Council has adopted the Guidelines on Freedom of Expression Online and Offline, where it has declared that the freedom of expression must be ensured online. It also stated that will "work against any attempts to block, jam, filter, censor or close down communication networks or any kind of other interference". Moreover, in 2011 the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that generalized Internet filtering violates the fundamental rights of European citizens, e. g. the right to the free flow of information online, therefore copyright cannot be guaranteed at the expense of the protection of freedom of information and privacy.

In spite of that, censorship, blocking and filtering of the Internet are being used in many countries with an excuse that it is being done for the necessity to protect state interests. Children pornography and exploitation, copyright infringements, hate speech, violence incitement and even gambling are considered as an improper information and thus restricted in many European countries.

Usually the Internet censorship is implemented by public authorities and Internet service providers, which monitor the flow of information and, under certain circumstances, can filter and block it. Filters on the Internet may be applied by employers, public schools, libraries and even parents, who can install filtering programmes as well; such programmes use "black lists" of websites and specific keywords, select forbidden links, and block them. In addition to that, the access to a website may be denied by state authorities when they upheld an investigation on the content of a website.

Often the access to a website is denied by using technical methods such as the IP address blocking and the DNS filtering and redirection. Interestingly, the blocking of websites only limits the possibility to access unwelcome content, but does not remove it from the Internet; therefore a website, which is blocked e.g. in Lithuania, may be easily accessed from another country. Moreover, a blocked website keeps on being accessible to smarter IT users, who use proxy servers or virtual private networks or bypass DNS filtering. The public authorities and legislators understand that, but still keep on using such measures on the basis that ordinary internet users cannot access the prohibited content.

How is the Internet censored in Lithuania?

In Lithuania a general rule allowing to block the Internet is set on the Article 4.3 of the Law on the Information Society Services. It allows the public authorities to ask a court order to ban access to a website, when it is necessary to protect the public interest, public health, safety and customer interests. Moreover, the Article 15 imposes a duty to the Internet service providers to monitor the customers' behavior, the websites they access, and the data they download, and to immediately inform the Information Society Development Committee about illegal activities.

In principle the public authorities have acquired such powers, and such robust duties on the Internet service providers have been imposed in order to limit the flow of some prohibited categories of information. According to the Law on the Provision of Information to the Public, the following categories information are prohibited:

• incitements to change the constitutional order and the sovereignty of the country;
• threats to public health, honor, dignity, and private life;
• information which might have a detrimental effect on minors' physical, mental or moral development when it discloses their personal data;
• instigation of war or hatred, ridicule, humiliation, discrimination and violence;
• dissemination and promotion of pornography and sexual services;
• promotion and advertising of addictions and narcotic or psychotropic substances;
• information which violates the presumption of innocence and impedes the impartiality of judicial authorities;
• disinformation.

Copyright violations and illegal online gambling complement this long list. The latter should be taken into consideration by the Internet service providers since January 1, 2016, as the amendments on the Gambling Law will enter into force.

With these amendments the online gambling has been legalised and, as a protection of state and gamblers' interests, it was set that the Commission of Gambling Supervision will have the right to request that the Internet service providers restrict the access to illegal gambling websites. In such case the Commission will be allowed to initiate the blocking of websites, including those which are not registered in Lithuania; this will be done solely under its decision and without a court order or a consultation from other public authorities. Moreover, it is not yet clear which criteria and processes will be applied when the Internet service providers will be obliged to block a certain content.

The initiators of these amendments were happy that such practise already does exist in Latvia, where the supervisory authority fills "black lists" and blocks IP addresses. This was considered as a great example, but unfortunately, a month ago, the Latvian Gambling Inspection has blocked the social network Reddit, which has been sharing the same IP address with the illegal gambling website www.rebbet.com. Although this ban has been removed in several days, it confirms that the applied methods are not perfect.

Even a representative of the Lithuanian Communications Regulatory Authority, Rytis Rainys, is not convinced about the effectiveness of the amendments mentioned above. In May, at the LOGIN conference, he has admitted that "the blocking should be implemented only after a thorough investigation by the police and should be sanctioned with a court order. It should not be limited to the decisions taken by the Communications Regulatory Authority or by the Commission of Gambling Supervision". According to Mr. Rainys, "there were not enough discussions on the amendments and, as a result, they have left lots of obscurities for the Internet service providers. Moreover, the blocking methods are not absolute and effective and always give a possibility to bypass them". This view was welcomed by the representative of the telecommunications company TEO LT, Vytautas Bučinskas, who added that "the Net neutrality is the main rule for the Internet service providers and when a client fails to access a website, it becomes a disadvantage for a service".

Looking from the human rights perspective, such unclear situation and vague regulations may seem as a restriction on the freedom of expression limiting access to the information. We can only hope that the legislators will not take this example as an excuse to create other reasons to block the Internet even more widely, and that the Government, which will explain the implementation of the amendments, will take into consideration the examples of bad practises.

This article has been published in cooperation with the Human Rights Monitoring Institute, a Lithuanian NGO defending human rights.

Image courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

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