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Category: Censorship

  • Patriot Act 2, Censorship, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism, and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. They will be geared at preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for in the United States by the American people.

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    Listening to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.

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    “Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.

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    Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.

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    Liberals learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and now they are academic experts on both of these things.

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    The narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from “Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and #MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.

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    Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:

    • Stop lying all the time
    • Stop killing people
    • Stop promoting conspiracy theories (eg Russiagate)
    • Stop doing evil things in secret
    • End government opacity
    • Stop conspiring

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    To support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.

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    I don’t share people’s magical fascination with the word “tolerance”. As far as I can tell it’s an empty and irrelevant concept. This isn’t about tolerance, it’s about trusting government-tied tech oligarchs to regulate speech around the world on monopolistic speech platforms.

    The future of humanity depends on our ability to wake up a critical mass of people to how fucked things really are, and if speech which doesn’t conform to establishment orthodoxy is censored on the platforms the mainstream crowd use to share ideas, that will become impossible.

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    “We need to stop fascism so let’s give massive sweeping powers to an elite alliance of unelected authoritarians.”

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    “Well I’m a leftist and I haven’t been banned on social media.”

    That’s because the left is politically impotent in our society. Unless this is just a hobby for you, at some point you should plan on the left becoming a threat to the oligarchs and warmongers. What do you think happens then?

    Do you really think if the left actually becomes a threat to the status quo the Neera Tandens and Rachel Maddows aren’t going to suddenly discover a reason why you’re dangerous and need to be censored? The only way to be fine with censorship is to plan on never challenging power.

    Tech billionaires are not on your side, and neither are the government agencies and plutocratic media leaning on them to implement censorship. Those institutions don’t give a shit about silencing the right, they want to implement measures to silence you. The left is being censored already, but it hasn’t seen anything yet.

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    “As a leftist I’m fine with censorship because it’s not like the leftist revolution is going to be organized on social media.”

    Social media isn’t for organizing the leftist revolution you bonehead, it’s for creating more leftists. It’s for reaching the mainstream.

    A leftist’s first and foremost job is to create more leftists. If the left becomes a potent political force, all the censorship protocols they’ve been putting into place these last few years will be used to stop it from infecting the mainstream herd. You shouldn’t want this.

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    Trying to stop fascism by making it invisible is like trying to avert a charging bull by putting your hands over your eyes.

    If you want to stop the rise of fascism you need to change. Change your sick society. Profoundly. Not just cover up the manifestations of that sickness. Compartmentalizing and covering up the problem instead of pouring money and resources into creating a healthy society which addresses the underlying problems is the most shitlib thing ever.

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    Saying you are free to leave these monopolistic platforms and go to some fringe website no one uses is the same as saying you are free to dig a hole and yell into it. There is no magical free market solution to this problem, because the problem is that imperial power structures are deliberately herding people onto monopolistic speech platforms that they can then censor under the guise of terms of service.

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    All of the most critical factors determining what people’s lives are like are invisible now. Most people don’t even know they’re happening. Oligarchy. Neoliberalism. Imperialism. Used to be you knew who the king was, and he’d openly do anything he wanted. Now that’s all kept carefully hidden.

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    Why is it kept hidden now? Well there are a lot of factors, but mostly it’s because the rank-and-file public discovered guillotines. Ever since then your rulers are out of necessity kept hidden from you, and so is their totalitarianism.

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    The US government is the most evil and destructive force in the world. Not Trump. The US government. This will not change in any meaningful way when Trump leaves. Massive amounts of manipulation have been poured into keeping you from seeing this.

    ____________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Boot Is Coming Down Hard And Fast

    A lot’s been happening really fast. It’s a white noise saturation day and it’s impossible to keep track of everything going on, so I’m just going to post my thoughts on a few of the things that have happened.

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    Biden has announced plans to roll out new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.

    “Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.

    Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?

    The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

    This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

    “Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

    Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

    “Civil libertarians were opposed to it,” Biden said in 2002 of his bill. “Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, ‘Joe, I’m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.’”

    A recent Morning Joe appearance by CIA analyst-turned House Representative Elissa Slotkin eagerly informed us that the real battle against terrorism is now inside America’s borders.

    “The post 9/11 era is over,” Slotkin tweeted while sharing a clip of her appearance. “The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens our democracy. If we don’t reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside.”

    “Before Congress, Elissa worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and helped destabilize the Middle East during the Bush and Obama admins,” tweeted journalist Whitney Webb in response. “What she says here is essentially an open announcement that the US has moved from the ‘War on [foreign] terror’ to the ‘War on domestic terror’.”

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    In response to pressures from all directions including its own staff, Twitter has followed Facebook’s lead and removed Donald Trump’s account.

    And it wasn’t just Trump. Accounts are vanishing quickly, including some popular Trump supporter accounts. I myself have lost hundreds of followers on Twitter in the last few hours, and I’ve seen people saying they lost a lot more.

    It also wasn’t just Trump supporters; leftist accounts are getting suspended too. The online left is hopefully learning that cheering for Twitter “banning fascists” irrationally assumes that (A) their purges are only banning fascists and (B) they are limiting their bans to your personal definition of fascists. There is no basis whatsoever for either of these assumptions.

    Google has ratcheted things up even further by removing Parler from its app store, and Apple will likely soon follow. This push to marginalize even the already fringey social media sites is making the libertarian/shitlib argument of “If you don’t like censorship just go to another platform” look pretty ridiculous.

    This is all happening just in time for the Biden administration, about which critics had already been voicing grave concerns regarding the future of internet censorship.

    The censorship of a political faction at the hands of a few liberal Silicon Valley billionaires will do the exact opposite of eliminating right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone knows it. You’re not trying to make things better, you’re trying to make them worse. You’re not trying to restore peace and order, you’re trying to force a confrontation so your political enemies can be crushed. You’re accelerationist.

    A Venn diagram of people who support the latest social media purges and people who secretly hope Trumpers freak out and attempt a violent uprising would look like the Japanese flag.

    The correct response to a huge section of the citizenry doubting an electoral system we’ve known for years is garbage would have been more transparency, not shoving the process through and silencing people who voice doubts and making that entire faction more paranoid and crazy.

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    Supporting the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is suicidal.
    ____________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship

    The United States received a very small taste of its own medicine today as rioting Trump fanatics temporarily forced their way into the nation’s Capitol building, and now the whole nation is freaking out.

    I am being generous when I say that America was given a very small taste of its own medicine; unlike the horrific coups and violent uprisings the US routinely orchestrates in noncompliant nations around the world, this one stood exactly zero chance of seizing control of the government, and only one person was killed.

    I am also being generous when I say the rioters “forced their way” in; DC chose not to increase its police presence in preparation for the protests despite knowing that they were planned, and there’s footage of what appears to be cops actively letting them through a police barricade. There was some fighting between police and protesters, but contrasted with the unceasing barrage of police brutality footage which emerged from Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months prior it’s fair to say the police response today was relatively gentle.

    Predictably, this entirely American disruption has blue-checkmarked commentariat shrieking about Vladimir Putin on social media.

    Just as predictably, it’s also got them calling for the censorship of social media.

    The New York Times has published two new articles titled “The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media” and “Violence on Capitol Hill Is a Day of Reckoning for Social Media“, both arguing for more heavy-handed restrictions on speech from Silicon Valley tech giants.

    In the former, NYT’s Sheera Frenkel writes “the violence Wednesday was the result of online movements operating in closed social media networks where people believed the claims of voter fraud and of the election being stolen from Mr. Trump,” citing the expert analysis of think tank spinmeister Renee DiResta of “Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset” fame. As usual no mention is made of DiResta’s involvement in the New Knowledge scandal in which a Russian interference “false flag” was staged for an Alabama Senate race.

    “These people are acting because they are convinced an election was stolen,” DiResta said. “This is a demonstration of the very real-world impact of echo chambers.”

    “This has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and an offline world and that what is said online is in some way kept online,” DiResta adds.

    This narrative which seeds the idea that unregulated communication on the internet will lead to violent uprisings is funny coming from Frankel, who, as a Twitter follower recently observed, wrote a piece in 2018 condemning the Iranian government for restricting protesters’ social media access during the demonstrations at that time.

    “Social media and messaging apps have become crucial to antigovernment demonstrators around the world, as a means of both organizing and delivering messages to other citizens,” Frankel wrote. “Not surprisingly, restricting access to such technology has become as important to government crackdowns as the physical presence of the police.”

    In the other article, co-authored by Frankel, Mike Isaac and Kate Conger, the message is driven home even less subtly.

    “As pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday and halted the certification of Electoral College votes, the role of social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in spreading misinformation and being a megaphone for Mr. Trump came under renewed criticism,” reads the article, adding, “So when violence broke out in Washington on Wednesday, it was, in the minds of longtime critics, the day the chickens came home to roost for the social media companies.”

    The article reports on the US president’s temporary suspension of social media privileges for allegedly inciting violence with his posts, then discusses the various kinds of disinformation and violent ideation being circulated in Trump discussion forums.

    “Those alternative social media sites were rife with Trump supporters organizing and communicating on Wednesday,” NYT tells us. “On Parler, one trending hashtag was #stormthecapitol. Many Trump supporters on the sites also appeared to believe a false rumor that Antifa, a left-wing movement, was responsible for committing violence at the protests.”

    “We know the social media companies have been lackadaisical at best” at stopping extremism from growing on their platforms, Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, told NYT. “Freedom of expression is not the freedom to incite violence. That is not protected speech.”

    We will likely see many more such articles in the coming days, arguing for increased regulation of internet communication to prevent future incidents like today.

    In and of itself this won’t sound terribly concerning to the average citizen. Nothing wrong with taking steps to prevent people from plotting violence and terrorism on social media, right?

    But how do you predict what protests are going to be “violent”? How do you decide which protests and what political dissent need to be censored and which ones should be permitted to communicate freely? Do you just leave it up to Silicon Valley oligarchs to make the call? Or do you have them consult with the government like they’ve been doing? Are either of these institutions you’d trust to regulate what protests are worthy of being permitted to organize online?

    Because the actual power structures in the United States seem to be interested in simply censoring the internet to eliminate political dissent altogether.

    In 2017 top officials from Facebook, Twitter and Google were brought before the Senate Judiciary Committee and admonished to come up with policies that will “prevent the fomenting of discord” in the United States.

    World Socialist Website reported the following in 2017.

    Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii demanded, for her part, that the companies adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord.”

     

    The most substantial portion of the testimony took place in the second part of the hearing, during which most of the Senators had left and two representatives of the US intelligence agencies testified before a room of mostly empty chairs.

     

    Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer, former FBI agent, and member of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, made the following apocalyptic proclamation: “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

     

    He added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

    That sounds an awful like government officials and operatives telling social media corporations that it’s their job to censor communication which could facilitate any kind of unrest, no matter how justified.

    Do you trust these monopolistic megacorporations to decide whether or not people’s dissident speech is acceptable? I don’t.

    As Julian Assange is condemned to remain falsely imprisoned and the mass media ramp up their case for more imperial narrative control, we are now in a battle for the sovereignty of our very minds.

    ____________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Year Zero

    2020 was GloboCap Year Zero. The year when the global capitalist ruling classes did away with the illusion of democracy and reminded everyone who is actually in charge, and exactly what happens when anyone challenges them.

    In the relatively short span of the last ten months, societies throughout the world have been transformed beyond recognition. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Protest has been banned. Dissent is being censored. Government officials are issuing edicts restricting the most basic aspects of our lives … where we can go, when we can go there, how long we are allowed to spend there, how many friends we are allowed to meet there, whether and when we can spend time with our families, what we are allowed to say to each other, who we can have sex with, where we have to stand, how we are allowed to eat and drink, etc. The list goes on and on.

    The authorities have assumed control of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. We are being managed like inmates in a prison, told when to eat, sleep, exercise, granted privileges for good behavior, punished for the slightest infractions of an ever-changing set of arbitrary rules, forced to wear identical, demeaning uniforms (albeit only on our faces), and otherwise relentlessly bullied, abused, and humiliated to keep us compliant.

    None of which is accidental, or has anything to do with any actual virus, or any other type of public health threat. Yes, before some of you go ballistic, I do believe there is an actual virus, which a number of people have actually died from, or which at least has contributed to their deaths … but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any authentic public health threat that remotely justifies the totalitarian emergency measures we are being subjected to or the damage that is being done to society. Whatever you believe about the so-called “pandemic,” it really is as simple as that. Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a health threat of this nature.

    The notion is quite literally insane.

    GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions.

    The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

    As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just that they would rather not have to unless it’s absolutely necessary. They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,” governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and otherwise control us with sheer brute force.

    People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force. Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so their psyches will not allow them to see it.

    Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e., the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China, the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter bull-goose lunacy.

    They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.

    The point of the lesson is that GloboCap — the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity — can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force. It can (a) declare a “global pandemic” or some other type of “global emergency,” (b) cancel our so-called “rights,” (c) have the corporate media bombard us with lies and propaganda for months, (d) have the Internet companies censor any and all forms of dissent and evidence challenging said propaganda, (e) implement all kinds of new intrusive “safety” and “security” measures, including but not limited to the physical violation of our bodies … and so on. I think you get the picture. (The violation of our bodies is important, which is why they love “cavity searches” in prison, and why the torture-happy troops at Abu Ghraib were obsessed with sexually violating their victims.)

    And the “pandemic” is only one part of the lesson. The other part is being forced to watch (or permitted to watch, depending on your perspective) as GloboCap makes an example of Trump, as they made examples of Corbyn and Sanders, as they made examples of Saddam and Gaddafi, and other “uncooperative” foreign leaders, as they will make an example of any political figurehead that challenges their power. It does not matter to GloboCap that such political figureheads pose no real threat. The people who rally around them do. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether these figureheads or the folks who support them identify as “left” or “right.” GloboCap could not possibly care less. The figureheads are just the teaching materials in the lesson that they are teaching us.

    And now, here we are, at the end of the lesson … not the end of the War on Populism, just the end of this critical Trumpian part of it. Once the usurper has been driven out of office, the War on Populism will be folded back into the War on Terror, or the War on Extremism, or whatever GloboCap decides to call it … the name hardly matters. It is all the same war.

    Whatever they decide to call it, this is GloboCap Year Zero. It is time for reeducation, my friends. It is time for cultural revolution. No, not communist cultural revolution … global capitalist cultural revolution. It is time to flush the aberration of the last four years down the memory hole, and implement global “New Normal” Gleichschaltung, to make sure that this never happens again.

    Oh, yes, things are about to get “normal.” Extremely “normal.” Suffocatingly “normal.” Unimaginably oppressively “normal.” And I’m not just talking about the “Coronavirus measures.” This has been in the works for the last four years.

    Remember, back in 2016, when everyone was so concerned about “normality,” and how Trump was “not normal,” and must never be “normalized?” Well, here we are. This is it. This is the part where GloboCap restores “normality,” a “new normality,” a pathologized-totalitarian “normality,” a “normality” which tolerates no dissent and demands complete ideological conformity.

    From now on, when the GloboCap Intelligence Community and their mouthpieces in the corporate media tell you something happened, that thing will have happened, exactly as they say it happened, regardless of whether it actually happened, and anyone who says it didn’t will be labeled an “extremist,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “denier,” or some other meaningless epithet. Such un-persons will be dealt with ruthlessly. They will be censored, deplatformed, demonetized, decertified, rendered unemployable, banned from traveling, socially ostracized, hospitalized, imprisoned, or otherwise erased from “normal” society.

    You will do what you are told. You will not ask questions. You will believe whatever they tell you to believe. You will believe it, not because it makes any sense, but simply because you have been ordered to believe it. They aren’t trying to trick or deceive anybody. They know their lies don’t make any sense. And they know that you know they don’t make any sense. They want you to know it. That is the point. They want you to know they are lying to you, manipulating you, openly mocking you, and that they can say and do anything they want to you, and you will go along with it, no matter how insane.

    If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids. If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas. The choice is yours … it’s is all up to you!

    Or … I don’t know, this is just a crazy idea, you could turn off the fucking corporate media, do a little fucking research on your own, grow a backbone and some fucking guts, and join the rest of us “dangerous extremists” who are trying to fight back against the New Normal. Yes, it will cost you, and we probably won’t win, but you won’t have to torture your kids on airplanes, and you don’t even have to “deny” the virus!

    That’s it … my last column of 2020. Happy totalitarian holidays!

    The post Year Zero first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • CIVICUS criticises Pacific countries over use of covid to curb freedoms

    By Sri Krishnamurthi of the Pacific Media Centre

    Australian authorities’ heavy-handedness and the use of the covid-19 pandemic to curb civic and media freedoms are major concerns in the latest report, People Power Under Attack 2020, released by the international non-profit organisation CIVICUS.

    Australia was downgraded last year (2019) and is still rated as having freedoms “narrowed” with Fiji, Nauru and Papua New Guinea remaining in the “obstructed” category.

    However, there are bright spots for civic freedoms across the Pacific compared globally with the report finding that 87 percent of the world’s population now live in closed, repressed or obstructed countries.

    “For many observers, the state of civic space in Pacific may seem relatively positive. However civil society groups are concerned about the increasing use of laws to silence dissent,” said Josef Benedict, Asia-Pacific civic space researcher for the CIVICUS Monitor.

    “They are also worried about attempts to censor journalists and cover up criticism, especially around governments’ mishandling of the pandemic,” he said, as reported widely in Asia Pacific Report in May.

    In the Pacific region, the CIVICUS Monitor documented the use of restrictive laws against activists and critics.

    Australia deployed its Intelligence Services Act to prosecute a whistleblower for disclosing the bugging of Timor-Leste government buildings in 2004, with essential parts of the trial to be held in secret.

    Criminal libel laws ‘chilling’
    In Fiji, the Public Order (Amendment) Act 2014 has been used to silence and prosecute critics, including trade union leader Felix Anthony, while in Samoa, criminal libel laws continue to create a “chilling effect” for those wanting to speak up and criticise the authorities, the report found.

    There were concerns raised about the promulgation of a public health emergency law in Papua New Guinea which was passed hurriedly without adequate consultation and contains various provisions that could restrict human rights without adequate oversight.

    Censorship was another major another violation documented by the Monitor in the region; and it was particularly concerning during a pandemic, when access to accurate information is vital.

    In August 2020, Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama ordered the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, which is run by Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, brother of Fiji’s Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, to stop airing a debate.

    n Vanuatu, media outlets were not allowed to publish articles on covid-19 without government authorisation, and in the Solomon Islands the authorities sent out a memo threatening to sack staff who post comments online criticising the government’s covid-19 response.

    Tonga passed new regulations that could be used to restrict press freedom in August 2020, while Nauru continued to impose high visa fees on foreign journalists hoping to access the country to report on human rights issues.

    Also alarming were reports of harassment of activists and journalists.
    In Australia, even as fires and floods swept the country, environmental and climate action protesters were publicly vilified, with the Prime Minister Scott Morrison branding environmental activists as “anarchists”.

    The CIVICUS world map.

    Experienced journalists attacked
    In Papua New Guinea, the police minister attacked two experienced journalists in April 2020 and called for them to be sacked.

    “Australia was downgraded last year to ‘narrow’ but still we continue to see restrictions on civic freedoms and a growing climate of intimidation aimed at discouraging dissent,” said Benedict.

    “A range of problematic security laws have had a chilling effect on journalists and whistle-blowers. There have also been efforts to weaken privacy rights in the name of national security while stricter anti-protests laws are being pushed through.”

    Despite this onslaught against civic freedoms, in the past year there have been some small victories such as the passage of the whistleblowers law in Papua New Guinea. In April 2020, four women made history by winning seats in the Kiribati parliament, the highest number of women so far.

    Civil society and community groups in the region have also continued to organise and mobilise against mining, logging and development projects affecting environmental and indigenous rights, including in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand.

    More than 20 organisations collaborate on the CIVICUS Monitor to provide an evidence base for action to improve civic space on all continents.

    The Monitor has posted more than 500 civic space updates in the last year, which are analysed in People Power Under Attack 2020.

    Civic space in 196 countries is categorised as either closed, repressed, obstructed, narrowed or open, based on a methodology which combines several sources of data on the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Canadian Media Refuses to Publish Op-ed by Venezuelan Foreign Minister

    Despite claims to objectivity and fairness, when it comes to Canadian interference in other countries’ domestic affairs, there’s long been only one side to the story reported in the dominant media.

    Even so, the pro-Ottawa slant on Venezuela is shocking.

    Recently Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza published an op-ed titled “Regime Change with a Human (Rights) Face: Trudeau’s Venezuela Policy”. The commentary notes, “Relations between Venezuela and Canada are currently at their worst point. Although previous Canadian governments did not hide their dislike for our policies aimed at reclaiming sovereignty over our natural resources and prioritizing social policies, none had so actively imitated the U.S. regime change policy as much as the current Trudeau Administration.” Arreaza criticized Canadian sanctions on Venezuela and noted that “Canada was the only country in the world that specifically forbade Venezuelan diplomatic missions” from allowing Venezuelans to vote during the May 2018 election. Venezuela’s former vice president also invited Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne to meet to discuss restarting diplomatic relations.

    Few saw Arreaza’s op-ed since it was published in The Canada Files, an upstart left-wing website. But, the article was submitted to a number of major daily papers. Apparently, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and others didn’t consider criticism by the foreign minister of a country of 30 million, that’s had diplomatic relations with Canada for seven decades, important enough to offer their readers. Blind to the irony, they would likely justify their decision on the grounds that Venezuela’s government is authoritarian and suppresses oppositional voices!

    In September lawyer Andrew Dekany published a long article arguing that Canada’s first round of sanctions on Venezuela contravened Canadian law. Licensed to practice in Ontario, Dekany wrote that the August 2017 sanctions weren’t in accordance with Canadian legislation stating that international sanctions be adopted only as part of international alliances. As such, the Trump administration aided the Trudeau government by creating the US-Canada “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela” to conform to the existing sanctions legislation. In a Venezuela Analysis article titled “Do Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela Violate Canadian Law?”, Dekany writes, “there is no reason for Canada to ‘create’ this association but for its desire to help the U.S. out [by sanctioning Venezuela], having failed to persuade the one obvious organization (Organization of American States) which it had democratically joined to, among other things, act in such a way.” I couldn’t find any mention of Dekany’s arguments in any major Canadian media. (The Toronto Sun published an op-ed on the subject by Dekany in 2017.)

    An April 2019 Center for Economic and Policy Research report written by prominent economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot concluded that 40,000 Venezuelans may have died in 2017 and 2018 as a result of US sanctions. The intensity of the US sanctions, as well as their impact on Venezuelans’ ability to eat and access medicine, has grown significantly since then. A search of Canadian Newsstand, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail elicited two mentions of Sachs and Weisbrot’s findings (A Halifax Chronicle-Herald story titled “Four million Venezuelans have fled crisis: UN” mentioned it at the bottom of the story and an op-ed in the Hill Times by Canadian Foreign Policy Institute director Bianca Mugyenyi.)

    Since the fall of 2017 Canadian taxpayers have been paying a hardline pro-corporate, pro-Washington, former diplomat hundreds of thousands of dollars to coordinate the Liberal government’s bid to oust Venezuela’s government. There’s been total silence in the dominant media about Allan Culham’s role as Special Advisor on Venezuela.

    As Arreaza pointed out in his op-ed, the Trudeau government’s Venezuela policy took a sharply belligerent turn after Donald Trump became president and Chrystia Freeland replaced Stéphane Dion as foreign affairs minister. In reaction to Freeland’s January 2017 appointment an official at the US embassy in Ottawa claimed Justin Trudeau appointed her to promote the interests of Washington. In July 2019 researcher Jay Watts disclosed a dispatch from the US embassy in Ottawa to the State Department in Washington entitled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.” Uncovered through a freedom of information request, the largely redacted cable also notes that Trudeau’s government would be “Prioritizing U.S. Relations, ASAP.” Despite all kinds of fawning coverage of Freeland, the dominant media has completely ignored the US cable.

    In A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation I detail extreme media bias in favour of power on topics ranging from Haiti to Palestine, investment agreements to the mining industry. Considering the pattern, the Venezuelan coverage is not surprising.

    But, the growth of left and international media, as well as social media bubbles, makes it is easy to forget how few Canadians are actually receiving this critical information. Canadian media rejecting a commentary by the foreign minister of a country of 30 million is a reminder of just how biased foreign policy coverage is.

    This article was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2020 at 10:54am and is filed under Canada, Censorship, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Social Media Under Pressure Part I: Trump Lashes out at Twitter

    Rhetorically framed as defense of free speech, the President’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, is exactly the opposite: an attempt to intimidate social media platforms into yielding to the president’s views of what speech should be allowed online. While we agree that social media platforms “function in many ways as a 21st-century equivalent of […]

    The post Social Media Under Pressure Part I: Trump Lashes out at Twitter appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Social Media Under Pressure Part II: Protests, Polarization, and Social Media Regulation

    As misinformation proliferates, protests escalate, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election looms, how much should social media companies regulate the content on their platforms? Rules and regulations are changing as social media giants are figuring out how to wield their unprecedented power over information. As an organization committed to free expression, we welcome efforts to […]

    The post Social Media Under Pressure Part II: Protests, Polarization, and Social Media Regulation appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Cancel Culture: Can Free Speech in Cultural Institutions Survive the Onslaught of Moral Outrage?

    Svetlana Mintcheva, NCAC’s Director of Programs, presented a talk at the Harvard Law School Library on the effects contemporary moral outrage has on the arts and culture.

    The post Cancel Culture: Can Free Speech in Cultural Institutions Survive the Onslaught of Moral Outrage? appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Back to School: 7 Resources for Parents, Teachers, and School Administrators

    This list of our best resources on censorship and the First Amendment in schools will help you get ready for the school year.

    The post Back to School: 7 Resources for Parents, Teachers, and School Administrators appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Remembering Toni Morrison

    Joan Bertin (former executive director, NCAC), Toni Morrison, Fran Lebowitz “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that […]

    The post Remembering Toni Morrison appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Truth to Power: Film Contest Winners and Semi-Finalists

    Over 100 teen filmmakers spoke Truth to Power for this year’s YFEP Film Contest. We invited teens to speak directly to those in power to lead change about issues that matter to them. The 12 finalist films tackled a wide range of polarizing, and often taboo, topics including gun violence, immigrant family separation, gender […]

    The post Truth to Power: Film Contest Winners and Semi-Finalists appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • The Value of Political Freedom: Russia and Belarus

    By Thomas Rozanov

    I first experienced the value of political freedom in the 2004 Orange Revolution protests in Kyiv, Ukraine. I was only seven years old then, yet I quickly caught inspiration for the rapidly evolving ‘PORA’ and ‘Tak!’ movements and the revolution. Next, fast-forward ten years, and I was driven by the 2014 Euromaidan movement.

    2014 Ukrainian Euromaidan protests
    Reuters/Gleb Garanich

    It is extremely important to have the right to gather inspired people, to freely voice opinions, to strive to achieve justice and change. My energy was bursting at both periods, just as millions of other like-minded people. I cannot imagine how it would be to not be able to release this collective energy, to dream, to unite, to speak out, to protest. These events let the most important lesson be revealed and re-emphasized—the value of political freedom, which should be recognized and respected.

    Today, we must be reminded of the value of political freedom and the right to protest when it is repeatedly brutally offended by government authorities in Russia and Belarus.

    Opposition supporters attend a rally in Moscow, Russia, on March 26, 2017
    Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

    In Russia, opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 15 days in prison and thousands of peaceful protesters were detained after mass anti-corruption demonstrations were held across Russia in late-March. According to independent sources, over 1,000 people were taken into custody in Moscow alone, with hundreds more people detained in cities across Russia for involvement in the protests.

    Alexei Navalny escorted upon arrival for a hearing after being detained at the anti-corruption protest
    Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

    “By detaining hundreds of protesters, the Russian authorities have demonstrated their profound disdain for the right to freedom of expression and assembly,” said Sergei Nikitin, Director of Amnesty International Russia.

    Police detain a protester during the anti-corruption demonstration in Moscow on March 26, 2017
    EPA/Maxim Shipenkov

    Out of over 80 rally authorization requests submitted to local authorities across Russia, only 21 approvals were granted. Hence, protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg gathered despite de facto bans in place.

    Further repression was directed towards employees and volunteers of the Russian Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) founded by Alexei Navalny. The ACF provided a livestream of the protests from their Moscow office, as an alternative to state-run and controlled media which ignored the significant political event. According to the ACF, the stream gained over 170,000 live views, and over 4.47 million recorded views. There were two attempts to interrupt the broadcast by law enforcement officers, first by searching the ACF office for explosives, and later by an alleged fire alarm.

    Police arrested 12 ACF staff and volunteers, and pushed administrative charges and detention ranging from five to seven days for “disobeying police officers’ legitimate orders”. Trials were conducted over two days, on March 27 and 28, only one day after the protest rallies.

    Leonid Volkov, the ACF’s project manager and head of Alexei Navalny’s presidential campaign was sentenced to 10 days of administrative detention.

    Leonid Volkov
    Image from Open Russia

    Amnesty International calls on Russian authorities to end reprisals against peaceful protesters, political activists, and journalists. Amnesty urges to release all detained members of the ACF, and other prisoners of conscience. Russian authorities should respect the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, and abstain from any further attempts to prevent ACF employees and volunteers from the legitimate exercise of these rights.

    Amnesty notes that the office searches, confiscation of computers and documents undermines ACF’s ongoing work, and uncovers individual sources which are now in danger of facing criminal prosecution for exposing corruption.

    More details on the ACF arrests may be found in the Amnesty’s report ‘Russian Federation: Detained Members of Corruption Watchdog Are Prisoners of Conscience and Should Be Freed Immediately,’ released on March 31, 2017.

    In Belarus, a day prior to the March 26 protests across Russia dozens of peaceful protesters were arrested with the use of excessive force by police for participating in the yearly ‘Freedom Day’ held on March 25 commemorating the creation of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BPR) in 1918.

    Riot police and protesters amid a rally in Minsk, Belarus on March 25
    Radio Liberty

    “Freedom Day proves this year more than ever, how little genuine freedom the people of Belarus have,” said Denis Krivosheev, Deputy Director for Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International.

    This followed the oppression of the prominent human rights group ‘Vyasna,’ and the detention of over 48 protesters, including civil society leaders and journalists across Belarus on March 10, 11, and 12, 2017. Many of those detained were involved in the mid-February anti-Presidential decree protests, in response to the Presidential decree “on Prevention of Social Dependency” which introduced a special tax for the unemployed and those who have not contributed taxes for over six months.

    This decree triggered significant political upheaval in Belarus. “With basic freedoms strangled in Belarus, it has been years since we saw protests of this scale,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia.

    For more info and background on the past Belarussian events please view the ‘Belarus: Biggest crackdown in years as dozens detained at peaceful protests’ news post dating March 13, 2017.

    This post was originally published on Human Rights Now.

  • Big Brother in Practice: An Overview of Unlawful Surveillance

    By Thomas Rozanov 

    What George Orwell once fantasized in his novel ‘1984,’ is an actual threat today. Individuals are confronted with surveillance that interferes with private lives, and human rights. Big Brother tyranny is set into practice with modern widespread technology. “Telescreens” used by Oceania’s ruling party to constantly surveil citizens and prevent conspiracies and “thoughtcrimes” are now being replaced with unlawful access to online accounts, phone surveillance, cyberattacks, and hacking.

    What once seemed like a dystopian plot, is now a reality. I suspect this dimension will play out more in the future, as individuals are becoming more technologically integrated and dependent. We should be warned to not only protect our physical human rights, but also the privacy of our virtual spaces and communication via technology. I draw attention to recent cases of unlawful surveillance and cyberattacks by governments targeting individuals in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Belarus.

    Two weeks ago Amnesty released a report ‘We Will Find You, Anywhere’, outlining the unlawful surveillance by Uzbekistan government, targeting citizens in the country itself and abroad. The report focuses on seven individuals whose human rights were tampered, through unlawful surveillance. Earlier, Amnesty International has documented serious human rights violations in Uzbekistan, including pervasive torture by security forces, and arbitrary detention.

    Dmitry Tikhonov, a human rights defender, was forced to flee Uzbekistan after his work on a project to document forced labor, including child labor, during the cotton harvest, resulted in: an E-mail hack, burning of his house, initiated administrative cases, and lastly, accusation of involvement in a terrorist group.

    Dmitry Tikhonov, image from ‘We Will Find You Anywhere’ report

    Many Uzbekistani asylum seekers and refugees are forced to cut off contact with family inside Uzbekistan, due to fear of government surveillance and consequential persecution.

    “In Uzbekistan everyone knows that the government is monitoring communications,” an undisclosed political activist seeking refuge in Sweden says. Landlines and mobile phones fall under surveillance, and families of refugees are visited regularly by security services.

    Nadejda Atayeva, the President of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia has been cut off from her family for almost 17 years since she left the country. “My relatives’ phones have been under surveillance since we left the country, almost 17 years ago. And the other political immigrants are in the same situation,” she says. Her relatives were coerced to file a statement refusing to communicate and consider her as a bad dangerous person.

    Nadejda Atayeva, image from ‘We Will Find You Anywhere’ report

    Gulasal Kamolova a journalist who fled Uzbekistan in 2015 because of her work for an independent news website Uznews, says since residing in France for 11 months, she has avoided phone communications. She says the government attempted to find her number by questioning her close friends and relatives. But more importantly after being directly threatened upon departure, she does not feel safe anymore. She recalls as the Uzbek secret service officer said, “wherever you are, we will find you, anywhere.”

    Gulasal Kamolova, image from ‘We Will Find You Anywhere’ report

    Galima Burkharbaeva former editor of Uznews.net, and Kamolova’s colleague ran her website from abroad after fleeing Uzbekistan in 2005, most recently from Berlin, Germany. In November 2014 her e-mail account was hacked, later social media pages were created under her name with pornographic material.

    Galima Bukharbaeva, image from ‘We Will Find You Anywhere’ report

    Galima says one of her main struggles is facing constant anxiety and remote threats such as this cyberattack. As other Uznews.net journalists faced danger, after the government released a full list of names of journalists working for the site, she was forced to close Uznews.net in December 2014, even further reducing the small number of independent news sources on Uzbekistan.

    Amnesty International calls for the government of Uzbekistan to reform laws governing surveillance, cease all harassment or targeting of family members of criminal suspects or other detained individuals. Amnesty calls other governments to ensure that no licenses are granted for surveillance technology to Uzbekistan until surveillance laws and practice are reformed to conform to international human rights law and standards. Amnesty calls telecom companies to consider impacts of operations, and support human rights by preventing and mitigating adverse impacts.

    For more on the Uzbekistani government conducting unlawful surveillance, please view the film ‘The Global Shadow of Uzbekistani Surveillance’ produced by AI.

    In Azerbaijan, human rights activists, journalists, and political dissidents have been targeted using multiple cyberattacks compromising passwords, contacts, emails, and social media. AI conducted research presented in report ‘False Friends – how fake accounts and crude malware targeted dissidents in Azerbaijan’ published on March 9, 2017. It details how victims have been targeted using a practice know as ‘spear phising’, which involves an email with an attachment containing a virus – known as malware – being sent to a target from a fake address.

    In Belarus, the government is using phone networks run by some of the world’s biggest telecom companies to stifle free speech and dissent. Last year AI released a report ‘Belarus: “It’s enough for people to feel it exists”: Civil Society, Secrecy and Surveillance in Belarus’, which details how civil society operates under surveillance, international human rights law and surveillance, Belarus laws and practice, and the role of private companies.

    Belarusian authorities have unfettered access to communications. Amnesty International sent letters to the three largest mobile phone providers which are partly owned by foreign companies—Turkcell, Telekom Austria, and MTS, and did not receive any response.

    Amnesty International believes that the companies are violating well-established standards on business and human rights. Under the UN’s Guiding Principles for Business, national laws where a company operates cannot be used to justify human rights abuses.

    Lastly, on a slightly positive note, for the World Day Against Cyber Censorship held yearly on March 12, ProtonMail and Amnesty International joined forces to fight cyber censorship by showing how internet restrictions affect people around the world.

    As ProtonMail’s 2 million users from 150 countries logged into their inboxes they saw Amnesty International’s latest findings on cyber censorship.

    In 2016, Amnesty International documented 55 countries where people were people were arrested for peaceful expression online. Each year governments around the world continue to restrict internet freedom, for example, Turkey and Saudi Arabia block over 50,000 and 400,000 websites, respectively, including social media and news sites. China continues to restrict internet to over 800 million users via the Great Firewall.

    While widespread technology certainly provides numerous advantages to society and development, it also enables governments to gain more unlawful power and control over their citizens. Government security forces are no longer limited by physical barriers and the need to travel, now, information can be intercepted across states in a matter of minutes. How should human rights activists respond to threats in this arena? What are some ways to cope with the anxiety that this creates? Are you attentive to your communication and internet security?

    Personally, I underestimate the potential power and threat of tracking and persecution. By gaining access to my cloud storage, e-mail, and social media page, one is able to find all my activity, finances, personal information, and contacts. Who knows if webcams and microphones embedded in nearly all devices (computers, tablets, phones, and even TVs) are not monitoring you. Surely there is potential.

    Thomas Rozanov is a volunteer at Eurasia Coordination Group, Amnesty International USA.

    This post was originally published on Human Rights Now.

  • Ethiopia: Zone 9

    By Adotei Akwei and Miho Mitobe

    At the end of 2016 Amnesty International published a report titled Ethiopia Offline: Evidence of Social Media Blocking and Internet Censorship in Ethiopia. This report documented how social media and networks in Addis Ababa and the Oromia region were being blocked by the Ethiopian government. Among the more alarming findings is that AI and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), who co-authored the report, detected the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, which can be used to monitor and filter internet traffic. The Ethiopian government appears to be using the technology for “mass surveillance internet censorship.” The government’s actions constitute a violation of Ethiopia’s obligations to protect freedom of expression under the African Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and also drastically restricts access to information for the Ethiopian people.The internet crackdown is linked to a brutal crackdown by the government in response to protests that started in the Oromo region in November 2015 against the Addis Ababa City Integrated Development Master Plan. This led to nationwide protests following a stampede in Oromia region on October 2, 2016 that followed attacks on foreign and local businesses. In response to the attacks and the protests, the Ethiopian government declared a State of Emergency (SOE) on October 9, 2016. The government declared that under the SOE they could “restrict freedom of expression where such freedom is abused”, and imposed a wide range of restrictions on internet access.  The government also arrested more than 11,000 people charging them with “violence and property damage.”

    Based on the standards of the ICCPR, the State of Emergency in Ethiopia has resulted in many derogations that fail to meet international human rights law. For example, the Ethiopian government established a Command Post whose purpose was to “stop any media, prohibit any assembly and search and seize any person or place.”  Under the SOE, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter were either blocked or inaccessible in Ethiopia, especially in the Oromia region. Further, certain types of URLs were blocked, including news media, web pages of political opposition, LGBTI, calling for freedom of expression, and circumvention tools such as Tor and Psiphon.

    The Ethiopian government continues to misuse the Anti-terrorism Proclamation (ATP) legislation to charge and arrest people critical of government policies or actions. Amnesty International believes that “the acts of censorship, conducted outside a clear legal framework, over several months and affecting dozens of websites and social media platforms as well as the State of Emergency itself – which is so broadly drafted violates Ethiopia’s international legal obligations and permits violations of numerous human rights.”

    These violations include the arrest of a number of government critics such as Bekele Gerba, a leading Oromo human rights activist, Eskinder Nega a prominent journalist and a human rights defender. Who was sentenced to 18 years in jail after he wrote articles demanding freedom of expression and an end to torture in Ethiopia.. Yonatan Tesfaye, a prominent opposition figure facing a possible death sentence due to his Facebook post opposing a government plan to extend the capital’s administrative authority to the Oromia region and Merera Gudina, a human rights activist and leader in the Oromo community.

    An untold number of Ethiopians are subject to human rights violations as a result of the State of Emergency, the Anti-terrorism Proclamation and other legislation that the government is using to impose order, and, according to the government, restore peace and security.

    As 2017 begins however, the government of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn will face very stark truths. In can continue down the current path of increasing repression, and jail anyone who it considers unacceptable, creating a nationwide detention camp, or

    it can display the leadership the country needs by ending the State of Emergency, allowing an independent commission of inquiry into the protests that have shaken the country for the last two years, repeal the draconian laws it created to silence opposition, and release the scores of prisoners that it will need to talk to and work with to address the governance and human rights challenges the country is facing.

    The world is watching and time is running out.

    This post was originally published on Human Rights Now.