There have been reports of mobile and Internet disruptions across multiple service providers in Pakistan today as its people head to the polls for national elections. See our coverage on our Pulse site:
#InternetShutdowns#Censorship#Politics#Elections: "2024 is an unprecedented year for democracy. National elections are expected to take place in at least 64 countries, determining representatives for nearly half the world’s population. Among those countries, 24 have imposed shutdowns in the past, accounting for a combined population of 2.8 billion people, or about 1/3 of the total global population. With billions of people at risk of shutdowns in 2024 during election periods alone, the stakes for democracy and human rights this year are higher than ever.
That’s why the #KeepItOn coalition will be fighting to #KeepItOn in high-risk countries around the globe, during the 2024 election season and beyond.
Notably, the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) — a network of at least 38 countries — is standing with us in this effort and recently issued a joint statement denouncing shutdowns in times of elections and urging states to refrain from normalizing this practice."
3-Year-Old Supreme Court Orders Restricting Internet Outages Is Ignored In India, World’s Leading Offender
Three years ago, the Supreme Court severely restricted State power to shut down the Internet. Yet, in Manipur, a 5,000-hour Internet shutdown was the world’s longest in 2023, the year India also lost more than half a billion dollars due to such outages, according to two new reports.
In about 1 hour (2pm ET) I'll be on a livestream with David Belson ( @dbelson ) to discuss #Internet shutdowns and disruptions. We'll discuss his latest blog post about disruptions in Q4 of 2023, and I'll also provide some insight from what we are seeing at the Internet Society's Pulse platform (https://pulse.internetsociety.org/ ) It should be a good discussion!
Feel free to join in and listen! It will also be recorded for later viewing.
Telecommunications Bill Lays the Ground for Totalitarian Control of the Internet
While the Bill is being praised by the telecom industry for replacing archaic colonial laws, the Telecommunication Bill 2023 is expected to provide a larger control than these colonial laws to the Government of India and its institutions. Srinivas Kodali writes.
#Palestine#Gaza#Internet#InternetShutdowns#Israel: "While most telecom networks bury their cables 60cm (about 2ft) underground, PalTel buries its cables up to 8 metres (26ft) deep. In case the Israelis cut off electricity, its data centres in Gaza also have three layers of redundancy: generators, solar panels and batteries.
The company has also developed emergency protocols to direct workers remotely from the occupied West Bank, and if severed communications make this impossible, Gazan staff are empowered to act autonomously.
Despite all the redundancies and preparations, the sheer scale of bombings these past weeks has still crippled the network. About 70 percent of the mobile network has been taken offline. Solar panels have been rendered mostly useless either by being destroyed in attacks or covered in dust and debris.
The relentless nature of the conflict is also weighing on staff, who are dogged by danger from their house to the field."
#Palestine#Gaza#InternetShutdowns: "AMID A HEAVY retaliatory air and artillery assault by Israel against the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a message on Facebook to residents of the al-Daraj neighborhood, urging them to leave their homes in advance of impending airstrikes.
It’s not clear how most people in al-Daraj were supposed to see the warning: Intense fighting and electrical shortages have strangled Palestinian access to the internet, putting besieged civilians at even greater risk.
Following Hamas’s grisly surprise attack across the Gaza border on October 7, the Israeli counterattack — a widespread and indiscriminate bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip — left the two million Palestinians who call the area home struggling to connect to the internet at a time when access to current information is crucial and potentially lifesaving.
“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk,” Deborah Brown, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “It could help contribute to injury or death because people communicate around what are safe places and conditions.”"
In light of the most recent events in Israel and Palestine, APC stands in solidarity with @7amleh, SMEX and other members of our network in the region.
Digital access is a human right. #InternetShutdowns not only hinder people's ability to communicate and share their voices, but also restrict access to basic needs like urgent healthcare and reliable information. Israel and tech companies must not prevent Palestinians or anyone else from exercising their rights.
Inside the war India doesn’t want the world to see
From bombings to beheadings, ethnic violence has engulfed Manipur for the last two months. Facing an internet blackout and little word from prime minister Narendra Modi on the crisis, Namita Singh reports from a state that has been pushed to the brink of civil war.
#EU#DSA#Censorship#SocialMedia#InternetShutdowns: "Access Now and 65 civil society organisations from across the world are demanding clarification on European Commissioner Thierry Breton’s incendiary statements suggesting that arbitrary blocking of online platforms could be enforced and justified under the Digital Services Act (DSA). As it stands, there is no measure within the DSA to interfere with the right to receive and impart information online that isn’t considered a “last resort” measure, and planting a contrary notion is irresponsible and unnecessary. Read the open statement."
#India#InternetShutdowns#Censorship: "Why do Indian authorities excessively rely on internet shutdowns when compared to the rest of the world?
According to Radhika Jhalani, Volunteer Legal Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, “internet shutdowns are an easy, low-hanging fruit to tackle law and order breakdowns”.
A 2021 study by Dutch political scientist Kris Ruijgrok had, among other things, found that “[i]nternet shutdowns have become a first – instead of a last – resort for officials challenged with communal or social unrest”.
Jhalani underscored, however, that there is no evidence that such restrictions actually help control the situation. Instead, such shutdowns prevent accurate information from reaching the public, she added.
She emphasised that there must be more awareness about the devastating impact of such shutdowns on the lives of ordinary people. “For instance, gig workers lose their livelihoods on days when the internet is not available,” she said. “Digital payments get stuck.”"
Backstory: Revisiting the Ruins of Kashmir’s Media Ahead of the Fourth Anniversary of August 5
A combination of media manipulation and military mobilisation marked those early days. As additional reinforcements of security forces were marched in to complement the estimated 700,000 Indian armed personnel permanently stationed in Kashmir (and this may be a gross underestimation), there was a media gag so impenetrable, so sudden, so cynical, so ruthless, that the entire region was blindsided.
#EU#DSA#SocialMedia#InternetShutdowns#Censorship: ""When there is hateful content, content that calls – for example – for revolt, that also calls for killing and burning of cars, they will be required to delete [the content] immediately," Breton said in the interview on France Info, citing the Digital Services Act which will impose new requirements on large platforms from August 25.
"If they fail to do so, they will be immediately sanctioned. We have teams who can intervene immediately," he said. "If they don't act immediately, then yes, at that point we'll be able not only to impose a fine but also to ban the operation [of the platforms] on our territory.""