Something quite quaint happened in Tunis last week. It was triggered by an alliance of freedom of expression groups withdrawing from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a major United Nations conference in Tunisia.
The protest was against the host country’s political imprisonment and censorship, and the striking contrast between this repression and the free speech being espoused by governments at WSIS. What’s old-worldly is how the Tunisian authorities dealt with the boycott.
The location was the media centre of the summit — a huge newsroom with more than 1 200 journalists hacking away at computers and gabbling into telephones. Conspicuous in this crowd were Tunisian security men — not there to protect the media from al-Qaeda bombs, it seems, but to play censor.
Their jobs meant stalking around the centre in search of subversive press releases — such as those issued by the freedom-of-expression groups.
”This must be controlled. It is not authorised,” said one gruff official, replying to criticism by journalists as he confiscated copies of the boycotters’ statement.
Think about this pathetically archaic action — and its underlying naivety that the story could be shut down by seizing a few sheets of paper. The action merely added news value to the story that was the talk of the day among the nearly 19 000 delegates. Besides, the press release itself had already long since echoed around the planet through electronic means.
Ironically, the power of information and communication technology (ICT) was exactly what the WSIS was about. But if the officials in the media centre hadn’t yet ”gotten” this, the Tunisian government is a tad savvier. It recognises the power of electronic communication — and accordingly blocks access to ”undesirable” websites (including one on German avant-garde art).
The choke was lifted at the WSIS venues — perhaps to give delegates the impression of an open society. Everywhere else in Tunisia, the filters stayed on.
Information suppression
What Tunisia’s rulers — like their minions — do not grasp is that information suppression produces not only more information, but also more damning information.
Tunisia’s jamming of websites makes it one of 15 countries to do so, according to Reporters sans Frontières — whose leader, incidentally, was refused entry to Tunisia despite being an accredited delegate to the UN summit.
Some democratic countries attending the WSIS drew attention to these matters. Swiss President Samuel Schmid raised them at the formal opening. Though Tunisian TV predictably excluded his remarks, he declared: ”It is, quite frankly, unacceptable for the United Nations to continue to include among its members states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government on the internet or in the media.”
Did South African President Thabo Mbeki, also at the WSIS, echo these sentiments? No. He repeated the well-worn theme about ICTs being important for development, and said not a word about democracy. Except in one respect: in regard to welcoming the WSIS’s setting-up, under the UN, of the multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Forum that will make global recommendations concerning the internet.
Also highlighting the need for democracy in cyberspace was the well-known democrat Robert Mugabe. He railed: ”We challenge the still undemocratic issue of internet governance, where one or two countries insist on being world policemen on the management and administration of the internet.”
The irony of the Zimbabwean misleader calling for internet democracy is underlined by the fact that the newspaper he banned, the Daily News, had to register its website under a .za domain name in order to keep a cyber-presence. The .zw domain continues to be the political property of the Harare regime.
Governance forum
While Tunisian and Zimbabwean dinosaurs continue to dig domestic graves for their countries and South Africa keeps mum, George Bush’s United States at least made a nod in the direction of democracy at the WSIS by agreeing to the formation of the Internet Governance Forum.
True, Washington retains ultimate power over the internet through its authority over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann). And US delegates were quick to veto proposed WSIS wording that the forum might have an oversight role over Icann.
However, in green-lighting the forum as an advisory body that represents a range of stakeholders ranging from governments to civil society, the US conceded the legitimacy of outside interests. The forum will raise issues of coordination, development, spam, cyber-crime and so on, and systematically bring wider concerns into Icann and other’s policies on the internet.
It significance was summed up by the head of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Yoshumi Utsumi, who declared: ”Now no one country or one group controlling the internet can make arbitrary decisions any more.”
For some commentators, however, the WSIS’s major concern with internet governance meant missing other major issues. One was ”digital solidarity”, the financing of connectivity, which saw no real progress at the WSIS.
Another view was that Icann-jurisdiction issues were relevant to e-mail and the web, but not to the growing areas of peer-to-peer networks, internet telephony and internet protocol television. Indeed, a whole host of new issues of governance are arising regarding these and other technical developments.
Internet of things
With relevance to such trends, the WSIS tabled a report called The Internet of Things. It predicts that intelligent objects (such as cars and even door knobs) will become the major online communicators. It is a glimpse of the future internet with billions of users — most of them non-human.
In this vision, the connectivity slogan of ”anytime, anywhere, by anyone” will extend to ”and by anything”. The WSIS report sees this scenario as emerging out of four trends — tagging, sensing, thinking and shrinking.
Sensor technologies will monitor environmental and physical changes, while intelligence will be embedded in everyday objects. Miniaturisation comes with nanotechnology. ”Tagging” is growing out of the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID), which keeps track of items wirelessly.
It was this system that drew criticism in Tunis because of RFID chips in delegates’ registration cards. Because many rooms apparently had an RFID identifier, it was technically possible to follow people’s movements around the WSIS venues.
The new internet, it seems, won’t only be about despots trying to suppress information, but also about collecting it for political control. Free speech and privacy, already compromised at the WSIS, will grow as human rights concerns in the future.
If leaders like Mbeki fail to raise the democratic issues of the African information society today, it will have to be civil society and the media doing so for tomorrow.