Regardless of what you think of Edward Snowden's actions (fairly honourable, in my view), the attempt to hide out in countries with some fairly questionable records on media freedom is raising eyebrows.
Regardless of what you think of Edward Snowden’s actions (fairly honourable, in my view), the attempt to hide out in countries with questionable records on media freedom is raising eyebrows.
Doesn’t a whistleblower need to be consistent in their denunciations of injustice? Is freedom for those outside the bubble of the West not just as important as it is for Facebook-serfing Americans and Europeans?
It’s easy for me to say this from my warm office in East London of course, but I believe the answer is yes.
Calling the American state out for breaches of civil liberties would carry more weight in my opinion if Snowden wasn’t sheltering under the wing of some of the worst civil rights abusers in the world.
Here is the state of media and internet freedom in the countries Edward Snowden has already spent time in as well as two more (Cuba and Ecuador) it is speculated he is headed for.
It doesn’t make for pleasant reading.
China
Blocks on foreign websites, close monitoring of online activity, every internet user in China having to register with service providers using their full name. These are just some of the challenges internet users in China face. Freedom House ranked China as the third most restrictive country in the world in terms of internet access, after Iran and Cuba.
The main methods used by the Chinese to control the net are the Great Firewall – a system that limits access to foreign websites – and the Golden Shield, a method of domestic surveillance set up in 1998 by the ministry of Public Security.
Russia
In July 2012 the Russian Parliament adopted a bill to establish a central register of banned websites. Experts say the aim of the bill is to control the country’s civil society and social networks.
In 2011 an official with the federal security service proposed a ban on Skype, Gmail and Hotmail here because their use was “uncontrolled”.
President at the time Dmitry Medvedev criticized the proposal. However a spokesman for prime minister Vladimir Putin said it was worth studying and called the FSB’s proposal “quite well-reasoned.”
Cuba
Until very recently internet access in Cuba was severely restricted – most Cubans were only able to use a local intranet featuring government sites. Even for tourists access to the net in Cuba is both expensive and woefully poor.
If a Cuban citizen is able to gain access to a facility with internet access the cost is extremely prohibitive. An hour long web session can cost around $4 – almost a quarter of the average monthly salary.
“Cuba remains one of the world’s most repressive environments for the Internet and other information and communication technologies,” Freedom House wrote in its 2012 report entitled ‘Freedom on the Net‘.
Ecuador
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has presided over a gradual erosion of media and judicial freedom since he was elected president in 2006. His ‘new media law’, dubbed a gag law by human rights groups, gives the government greater power to regulate the media and called for the establishment of a watchdog which could impose fines and force public apologies.
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23 Responses to “Internet freedom on Edward Snowden’s flight path”
Neil Warner
I’m not. I’m not dismissing Chen’s situation, I’m pointing out that you are offensively dismissing Snowden’s. Yes Chen faced a situation I never will, but so does Snowden. What Manning has gone through has been appalling and as bad if not worse than what Chen went through, there is reason to believe Snowden would have gone through the same (or worse, considering his leak has been more significant than Manning’s)
Neil Warner
Sorry if reasoned argument bothers you. It is up for debate, whether you are open-minded enough to have that, and to consider my “question-begging”, is of course another matter entirely.
Alec
Yes you are dismissing it. Chen was reporting on daily privations which were forced in his and everyone else’s face. Snowden’s shake-down was for the hardly earth-shattering news that law enforcement agencies seek access to online data (both in principle, and in newsworthiness… this has been in the public domain for years). Both the Graun and WaPo have retracted the original claims of direct hacking and much more
There’s a reason Snowden and not Glenn Greenwad is being pursued. It’s because he broke his terms of employment and stole classified information whilst the other merely ‘reported’ – a very loose term – on it. Reporters get arrested and gaoled and killed in places like China or Russia or Cuba or Equador..
As for Manning, if he’d sought a controlled release of data as in Ellsberg and Russo, then I’d have seen him as a brave truthteller. Instead, what I see is an unsubordinate **** who was simply out for spiteful revenge after being passed over.
And Assange went ahead and published what was basically diplomatic gossip, putting in danger a great many like Chen. Then , to compound it, gave… no… sold unredacted data on Eastern European dissidents to an unreconstructed neo-Nazi with direct links to the Belarusian dictatorship.
Throw Manning in FedEx, and leave Assange to rot at the embassy.
~alec
Alec
You have a very high opinion of your argument style.
You are asking leading questions which place the worst possible interprepation of your opponents’ statements (often plucked out of thin air when compared to what they actually said). That is question begging.
The very fact that you and your contempories in the US are able to have this discussion without detention to the gulag shows that there is zero comparison to Lao Gai.
~alec
Neil Warner
No I don’t, I just think saying that there’s “no debate” is an incredibly silly assertion. An if anything simply shows that you have an incredibly high opinion of your own opinions, if you think there’s no debate. I never said there should be comparison to between the US and China as political systems- you let your emotion get the better of you, preventing you from seeing the comparison I’m actually making. I’m simply contrasting attitudes towards Chinese people seeking refuge from human rights abuse to Americans seeking refuge from human rights abuses. The two systems themselves don’t need to be the same for that comparison to be made.