Antony Loewenstein

I’m currently at the Auckland Writer’s Festival. Wonderful event. Speaking to hundreds of people every day – mainly about the Middle East but also on the importance of alternative voices online – and the one message that keeps on coming up is how rarely dissenting Jewish perspectives or those critical of Israel appear in the mainstream here. These are issues I’ll be further exploring during my coming week-long tour around the country.

This story in today’s New Zealand Herald is a breath of fresh air:

Writers’ probing puts a modern edge on conflict in the Middle East

Yesterday was the Israel and Iraq double whammy at the Writers & Readers Festival. On Israel was Antony Loewenstein, who claimed that the Jewish state, like the old South Africa, had an apartheid system – only Israel’s was worse.

Loewenstein, an Australian journalist, is author of the controversial best seller My Israel Question in which he argues that the Jews’ history of persecution ought to make them better able to understand the importance of racial tolerance, and yet these values are anathema in present-day Israel.

He describes himself as a humanist Jew but says his critics have branded him a self-hating Jew for speaking out about Israel’s “blatant racism”. Yet he points out that the West has every right to comment on Israel “because we’re paying for its existence”.

Loewenstein was coherent, relaxed and used good-natured sarcasm: “Is [Israel] better than Iran? Well, yes. But is that the comparison?” Boycott, anyone?

The Iraq question went to Michael Otterman, co-author of Erasing Iraq, who was young enough to point out that the foreign press is now just a mouse click away if we care to Google, say, “Iraqi blogs”.

Both writers also commented that, despite adverts to the contrary, Barack Obama’s foreign policy looks like George W. Bush’s.

Otterman, interviewed by Sean Plunket (who just about kept his own ego in check), started with stats: Nearly five million Iraqis have abandoned their homes since 2003 – the largest movement of people in the Middle East since 1948 (when Israel became a state).

He visited Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan to ask: “What do Iraqis think?” He found that, to many minds, the war had been continuous since 1991, in the form of “genocidal sanctions”. Iraqi views of Saddam were mixed but views on the American occupation since 2003 ranged from bad to worse.

Otterman said ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq had undergone “sociocide” – “the killing of [their] way of life” – since 2003. He called it “evil”.

A session with 24-year-old boy wonder Ben Naparstek was a letdown. He didn’t mention most of the literary giants who feature in In Conversation: Encounters with Great Writers, the book of interviews he’s plugging.

Last night in Sydney I successfully debated with some other colleagues that governments should not censor the internet. One of my co-speakers, Google’s Ross LaJeunesse, has an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald arguing against Australia’s proposed mandatory internet filter.

I agree and it looks like many Australians do, too (via ABC Radio’s PM tonight):

ASHLEY HALL: It seems the more parents learn about the Government’s proposed internet filter, the less they like it.

That’s the finding of a survey of parents in marginal electorates commissioned by a group representing several internet companies, state school organisations and libraries.

The researchers say even though parents want to make the internet safer, they don’t think a mandatory filter is the way to do it.

Meredith Griffiths reports.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Most parents worry about what their children are exposed to online.

SUE VERCOE: So they did confess that in reality, while it was their responsibility to control their child’s internet use, often they were just too busy, they didn’t really know how to go about monitoring and installing the free filters and that it was impossible to monitor everything their child was exposed to.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Sue Vercoe is the chief executive of GA Research.

In January it asked 39 parents living in marginal electorates in Sydney and Brisbane what they thought about the Government’s proposed mandatory internet filter.

SUE VERCOE: They haven’t heard much about the Government’s internet filtering legislation but if you ask them whether they support or oppose it, around two thirds are supportive, because at first glance, they believe that it will help ensure their children are not exposed to inappropriate material online.

And some of them also think that it might help combat paedophilia. However, when they hear a little bit more about the proposal and they become aware that there are other filtering options available, their support drops significantly.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Sue Vercoe says even though the number of respondents is small, the survey is significant.

SUE VERCOE: The findings of focus groups can be considered broadly indicative, but they are supported by quantitative research that McNair Ingenuity conducted earlier this year.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: She’s referring to a survey of around 1,000 people in February.

It found 80 per cent of Australian adults supported the proposed mandatory government internet filter to block access to overseas websites containing refused classification material.

But 46 per cent didn’t want the government to determine which websites would be blocked.

Sue Vercoe says GA Research asked the parents to rank four different models of filtering.

SUE VERCOE: The first three preferences that they gave were firstly more education for parents and children about how to use the internet more safely and how to install free filters. The second preference was for an optional filtering system; and where different filter could be set for adults and children within the one household.

Their third preference was for, if it was going to be mandatory filtering, for it to just be a limited range of content, primarily focused on child pornography, and the Government’s more broader mandatory filtering, was actually their last preference.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: The research was commissioned by the Safer Internet Group, whose members include Google, iiNet, Yahoo7, the Australian Council of State School Organisations and the Australian Library and Information Association.

But the idea of a mandatory filter still has the support of the Australian Christian Lobby.

The Lobby’s Managing Director Jim Wallace says the new research isn’t valid.

JIM WALLACE: I think it’s typical of the misinformation that’s coming from those opposed to this government proposal. If you look at the Safer Internet Group, eight of the nine people in the association are internet related people.

The McNair Ingenuity survey was done to a bona fide survey model, it surveyed 1,000 people, and 80 per cent of those specifically said that they favoured the mandatory government internet filter that would block access to overseas websites.

So, I find this is spurious. They’ve used just focus groups. You know; who were in the focus groups?

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: A spokeswoman for the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the Government does not support refused classification content being available online.

She says the proposed filter would bring the internet into line with other media outlets.

Here’s a classic clip from the “shooting yourself in the foot” department.

A bunch of Israelis shoot a video called “I’m a Jew” but instead of celebrating the country’s racial diversity – namely, that not only Jews live in Israel – they talk about serving in the military (something Palestinians are unable to do).

The clip may have received more than 50,000 hits on YouTube but how is advertising Israel as a Jewish state help the country’s dwindling global image as a racist nation?

The following article by Erik Jensen appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Governments should not censor the internet. The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, disagrees and the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, broadly supports his position.

But two journalists and the head of government affairs for Google in Asia strongly agree with the proposition.

“We have to ask what the Rudd government’s agenda is,” said Antony Loewenstein, a freelance journalist and blogger who is speaking for the motion at the Herald’s IQ2 debate tonight. “And we have to assume it is to appease certain lobby groups – particularly the Christian lobby.”

Mr Loewenstein is joined in condemning clean-feed internet by the head of government affairs for Google in Asia, Ross LaJeunesse, and the Herald’s David Marr.

Broadly, the trio argue that censoring the internet will not work, is not the most effective way to deal with the crimes cited as reasons for censorship, and can be a front for government control of ideas. “The argument government goes for is they’re protecting citizens from harmful content, they’re protecting children from paedophilia,” Loewenstein said. “The truth is in all these countries [China and Iran] there is zero evidence that blocking content is doing anything to these crimes.”

But Elizabeth Handsley, a professor of law at Flinders University and third speaker for the negative, said the argument was not about implementation – it was about government responsibility and developing a mechanism to control content that was already illegal. “The government regulates every other medium of communication,” she said.

In arguing against the motion, she is joined by the Beijing-based commentator Kaiser Kuo and the founding director of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre, Alastair MacGibbon.

The Herald’s IQ2 debate is held at the City Recital Hall tonight from 6.30.

Whenever any repressive regime tries to censor online content, rest assured somebody somewhere will find a way around it (Western governments also take note):

While the Iranian government has intensified its aggressive efforts to expand Internet filters, Austin Heap, a young programmer in the U.S., says he has developed software that would enable Iranians to evade their censors.

In response to the widespread crackdown following Iran’s June 2009 presidential elections, the San Francisco-based Censorship Research Centre (CRC) developed a programme that provides unfiltered, anonymous Internet access.

Called Haystack, it uses a sophisticated mathematical formula to hide the user’s real Internet identity while allowing access to widely-used networking websites blocked by Iran’s government, such as YouTube, Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter.

“Now we can launch our efforts to help those in Iran access the Internet as if there were no Iranian government filters,” Austin Heap, CRC’s executive director, told IPS.

A welcome sign of transparency by Google – and far better than most other web companies – but there’s a long way to go. For example, what are the cosy deals between Google and governments who simply don’t like certain material and want it removed from YouTube?

Google Inc. has set up a new tool to show where it’s facing the most government pressure to censor material and turn over personal information about its users.

The country-by-country breakdown released Tuesday on Google’s Web site marks the first time that the Internet search leader has provided such a detailed look at the censorship and data requests that it gets from regulators, courts and other government agencies. The figures, for the roughly 100 countries in which it operates, cover the final half of last year and will be updated every six months.

Google posted the numbers nearly a month after it began redirecting search requests to its China-based service. Those requests are now handled in Hong Kong rather than mainland China so Google wouldn’t have to obey the country’s Internet censorship laws. Google said details about the censorship demands it got while in mainland China still aren’t being shared because the information is classified as a state secret.

In other countries, Google is making more extensive disclosures about censorship demands or other government requests to edit its search results. Google is also including demands to remove material from its other services, including the YouTube video site, although it is excluding removal requests related to allegations of copyright infringement, a recurring problem for YouTube.

Google is showing how often it honored those requests and spelling out which of its services were targeted.

In the United States, for instance, it received 123 requests to remove material from its services during the last half of 2009 and complied with 80 percent of them. Reasons include violations of Google’s own policies regarding extreme violence, profanity and hate speech. More than 40 of those requests included a court order, Google said.

Yet another example of why governments can’t be trusted to properly regulate/censor the internet. Their main goal will never be to provide maximum coverage but rather remove politically problematic material:

The [British] government forced through the controversial digital economy bill with the aid of the Conservative party last night, attaining a crucial third reading – which means it will get royal assent and become law – after just two hours of debate in the Commons.

However it was forced to drop clause 43 of the bill, a proposal on orphan works which had been opposed by photographers. They welcomed the news: “The UK government wanted to introduce a law to allow anyone to use your photographs commercially, or in ways you might not like, without asking you first. They have failed,” said the site set up to oppose the proposals.

But despite opposition from the Liberal Democrats and a number of Labour MPs who spoke up against measures contained in the bill and put down a number of proposed amendments, the government easily won two votes to determine the content of the bill and its passage through the committee stage without making any changes it had not already agreed.

Tom Watson, the former Cabinet Office minister who resigned in mid-2009, voted against the government for the first time in the final vote to take the bill to a third reading. However the vote was overwhelmingly in the government’s favour, which it won by 189 votes to 47.

Earlier the government removed its proposed clause 18, which could have given it sweeping powers to block sites, but replaced it with an amendment to clause 8 of the bill. The new clause allows the secretary of state for business to order the blocking of “a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright”.

The Labour MP John Hemming protested that this could mean the blocking of the whistleblower site Wikileaks, which carries only copyrighted work. Stephen Timms for the government said that it would not want to see the clause used to restrict freedom of speech – but gave no assurance that sites like Wikileaks would not be blocked.

Don Foster, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman for culture, media and sport, protested that the clause was too wide-ranging: “it could apply to Google,” he complained, adding that its inclusion of the phrase about “likely to be used” meant that a site could be blocked on its assumed intentions rather than its actions.

An important essay by the New York Times’ Public Editor about the limits a Western news organisation should go to when appeasing dictatorships.

I understand the dilemma but surely being able to write freely is paramount. And if one can’t write that, say, the leader of Singapore is an autocrat, then how much influence can you truly have? Apart from making money, of course:

Last month, on the same day The New York Times praised Google for standing up to censorship in China, a sister newspaper, The International Herald Tribune, apologized to Singapore’s rulers and agreed to pay damages because it broke a 1994 legal agreement and referred to them in a way they did not like.

The rulers had sued for defamation 16 years ago, saying a Herald Tribune Op-Ed column had implied that they got their jobs through nepotism. The paper wound up paying $678,000 and promising not to do it again. But in February, it named Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister now, in an Op-Ed article about Asian political dynasties.

After the Lees objected, the paper said its language “may have been understood by readers to infer that the younger Mr. Lee did not achieve his position through merit. We wish to state clearly that this inference was not intended.” The Herald Tribune, wholly owned by The New York Times Company, apologized for “any distress or embarrassment” suffered by the Lees. The statement was published in the paper and on the Web site it shares with The Times.

Some readers were astonished that a news organization with a long history of standing up for First Amendment values would appear to bow obsequiously to an authoritarian regime that makes no secret of its determination to cow critics, including Western news organizations, through aggressive libel actions. Singapore’s leaders use a local court system in which, according to Stuart Karle, a former general counsel of The Wall Street Journal, they have never lost a libel suit.

The notion that it could be defamatory to call a political family a dynasty seems ludicrous in the United States, where The Times has routinely applied the label to the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons. But Singapore is a different story.

Lee Kuan Yew once testified, according to The Times, that he designed the draconian press laws to make sure that “journalists will not appear to be all-wise, all-powerful, omnipotent figures.” Four years ago, The Times quoted his son as saying, “If you don’t have the law of defamation, you would be like America, where people say terrible things about the president and it can’t be proved.”

Steven Brostoff of Arlington, Va., wondered whether The Times had other agreements like the one with the Lees, and asked, “What conclusions should we draw about how news coverage from these countries is slanted?” Zeb Raft of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, asked if The Times was admitting that certain world leaders “deserve to be treated with deference. This is the implication of the apology.”

George Freeman, a Times Company lawyer, said the 1994 agreement was the only one he knew about and that it applied only to The Herald Tribune. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said, “Nobody in this company has ever told me what our reporters can write — or not write — about Singapore.” He said the Times newsroom has no agreements with any government about what can be reported. “We don’t work that way.”

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said, “If we have something that needs to be said on the editorial or Op-Ed pages, on any subject, we will say it, clearly and honestly.”

That is what the late William Safire did on the Op-Ed page in 2002, when he criticized Bloomberg News for “kowtowing to the Lee family” by apologizing for an article about the elevation of the younger Lee’s wife to run a state-owned investment company. Bloomberg, he said, had “just demeaned itself and undermined the cause of a free online press.”

Safire wrote that he took “loud exception” in 1994 when The Herald Tribune, then owned jointly by the Times Company and The Washington Post Company, “cravenly caved” over an article by Philip Bowring — the same Hong Kong-based columnist who sparked last month’s dust-up. “I doubt such a sellout of principle will happen again.”

Richard Simmons was the president of The Herald Tribune in 1994 and authorized the agreement that was broken last month — an “undertaking” by the company’s lawyers to prevent a repetition of the language that offended the Lees. “We had, in my view, no choice,” he said. “What the American media absolutely refuse to recognize is Singapore operates on a different set of legal rules than does the United States.” He said Western news organizations can accept the legal system there or leave.

For The Herald Tribune and all the other news organizations that have paid damages to Singapore’s rulers (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg) or had their circulation limited there (Time, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Economist), the choice has been to stay.

Singapore is tiny, with a population of around five million, but it has outsized economic power as a financial hub, making it an important source of news. For The Herald Tribune, the economic stakes are large: more than 10 percent of its Asian circulation is in Singapore. It prints papers there that are distributed throughout the region. It sells advertising to companies throughout Asia that want to reach readers in Singapore.

“If you want to be a global paper, it has lots of banks, lots of commerce, a highly educated, English-speaking population,” said Karle. “It’s hard to turn your back on that.”

Faced with this predicament when the Lees objected to the article last month, The Herald Tribune apologized and paid up — $114,000 — before it was even sued. Karle said the paper could have spent a million dollars for a worse result in court: forced to pay higher damages and make a more humiliating apology.

But settling the way it did has its own price. Roby Alampay, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, told Agence France-Presse, “This continuing line of major media organizations too quick to offer contrition and money is a sad sight and a persisting insult on legitimate journalism, fair commentary, free speech and the rights that Singaporeans deserve.”

Safire told The American Journalism Review in 1995 that the world’s free press should unite and pull out of Singapore in the face of any new libel action. I think that is what should happen too, but it never has.

That leaves the Times Company with its own choice if another challenge arises. “Singapore is an important market for The International Herald Tribune,” the company told me in a statement. “There are more than 12,000 I.H.T. readers who shouldn’t be deprived of the right to read the paper in print or online. In addition, getting kicked out of Singapore would also make it more difficult for others in the region to get the I.H.T. since we print in Singapore for distribution there and in the neighboring areas.”

Google faced a similar painful dilemma in China. With potentially billions of dollars at risk, it stuck to its principles, and The Times applauded editorially. I think Google set an example for everyone who believes in the free flow of information.

Is Australia trying to look foolish or do they truly want to look like a bumbling authoritarian state?

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant’s campaign against the government’s internet filtering policy.

In an interview on ABC Radio last night, Senator Conroy also said he was unaware of complaints the Obama administration said it had raised with the government over the policy.

The government intends to introduce legislation within weeks forcing all ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” websites for all Australians.

Senator Conroy has said the blacklist will largely include deplorable content such as child pornography, bestiality material and instructions on crime, but a large and growing group of academics, technology companies and lobby groups say the scope of the filters is too broad and will not make a meaningful impact on internet safety for children.

Google, which has recently been involved in a censorship spat with China, has been one of the filtering policy’s harshest critics. It has identified a range of politically sensitive and innocuous material, such as sexual health discussions and discussions on euthanasia, which could be blocked by the filters.

Last week, it said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia’s millions of internet users could “negatively impact user access speeds”, while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter “appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access”.

“We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia’s international reputation and it can be easily circumvented,” Google wrote.

Does the web need a bill of rights?

Jeff Jarvis writes in the Guardian that Google’s recent move in China is significant:

Google’s business strategy is dead simple: the more we use the internet, the more Google makes. If governments are allowed and enabled to restrict freedom on the internet to a lowest common denominator (as the UK’s libel tourism does for publishing), and if we worry that our data in the cloud is not secure, and if citizens of totalitarian states fear the internet will be used to jail them, then we will trust and use it less. Google loses. We all lose.

Is Russia Google’s next weak spot?

My following article is published today in the Melbourne Age:

About 100 Chinese citizens gathered outside Google’s Beijing office this week to sing the popular tune Grass Mud Horse. They paid their respects to the web giant after it announced the closure of its censored Chinese search engine and redirected users to a Hong Kong-based counterpart. The song signifies resistance to authoritarianism and roughly translates as “Screw Your Mother”.

Police soon broke up the vigil but the event indicated a small but significant shift in public opinion towards opposing internet censorship in the world’s biggest online market (384 million and counting).

There’s hardly revolution in the streets, but Google’s departure has left many Chinese upset and more aware than ever of their country’s repressive policies towards free speech. “The Google China incident”, according to friends there, has caused some normally apolitical users to question why their leaders are isolating them from the world.

Although the majority of Chinese netizens don’t engage in political activities online – preferring to download movies and music and chat with friends – a growing number resent being told what they can’t view by Beijing authorities. An estimated 400,000 people access a virtual private network that allows the ”great firewall” to be circumvented.

But the attitude of Chinese netizens is decidedly mixed (with most users viewing home-grown content with a nationalist bent). During research in China for my book, The Blogging Revolution, I found occasional backing for some kind of government filtering. The constant refrain was to “protect children” from “pornography”, a term that refers to both sexual and political content.

A 2008 collaboration between the Pew Internet and American Life Project and a group of respected Chinese academics found that nearly 85 per cent of those polled said they wanted the government to control the web.

Google’s decision has the potential to unleash forces in the communist nation that authorities have spent years trying to suppress. Beijing has cleverly allowed a growing amount of online venting towards corrupt officials and wayward pollution, but there are strict limits to debate.

Although the People’s Daily accused Google of playing God and forcing its “values” on the Chinese people, a democratic alternative to Beijing’s web-based dictatorship will be viable only if developed by the Chinese people. Google can simply provide a spark.

It’s certainly far too early to determine the real reason behind Google’s move. A sudden concern for human rights and freedom of speech is possible, but Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov suggests a more cynical strategy: “Google was in need of some positive PR to correct its worsening image (especially in Europe, where concerns about privacy are mounting on a daily basis). Google.cn is the goat that would be sacrificed, for it will generate most positive headlines and may not result in devastating losses to Google’s business (Google.cn holds roughly 30 per cent of the Chinese market).”

He may be right, though I suspect Google’s decision was also due to its largely stagnant commercial growth against far savvier and more ethically versatile competitors. Like any multinational business, human rights concerns are rarely a leading consideration. This is despite Google co-founder Sergey Brin urging the Obama administration this week to put a “high priority” on fighting Chinese web blocking.

One undoubted benefit of Google’s self-immolation in China will be a closer appraisal of internet censorship across the globe. In another case, in Thailand, YouTube has agreed to block videos insulting the revered king.

Recently, Google objected to the Australian government’s request that they ”voluntarily” censor YouTube videos in accordance with refused classification rules. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy curiously promoted Google’s censorship in China and Thailand as reasons why the company should apply the same rules here. It’s hard to fathom how using these examples fits with Australia’s democratic tradition.

Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said this week that, over time, “it is good for our business to push for free expression”. He clearly wasn’t just talking about China.

Western-style democracy is not wanted in China, but Google’s stunning move guarantees a robust online debate about what netizens aren’t being told.

Antony Loewenstein’s book The Blogging Revolution is published by Melbourne University Press.