Blogging for Free Speech

The Red Herring:

Defending free speech for authors of online journals in countries where expression may be limited by law is a new challenge for a journalist advocacy group.

The Paris-based activists at Reporters Without Borders are struggling to define who deserves support and whether Western technology companies can be pressured to maintain U.S. speech protections that may contradict laws in China, Cuba, Iran and Tunisia, for example. READ MORE

The group, which in its native French is known as Reporters Sans Frontieres, lists news and abuses by nations, and works to assist jailed reporters worldwide. In some countries, reporters are licensed by the national government or forbidden from writing specific facts or opinions.

At a roundtable Tuesday at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, project leader Mr. Julien Pain explained that authors of political Web logs, or blogs, are fighting censorship, the threat of jail time, and often physical violence against themselves and their families.

The importance of blogging as an outlet for news and opinion led the group to develop a guide aimed at protecting bloggers from prosecution and maintaining the ethical standards of reporting, Mr. Pain said. The document is expected by September. Financial sponsorship of certain bloggers is being encouraged to support news reporting outside official channels.

"In this new form of journalism, 'cyber dissidents' and freedom-of-speech issues deserve to be protected as much as professional journalists," Mr. Pain said.

The goal is not to decide which blogs or individuals deserve protection, he said. Rather, his group wants to help bloggers pursue their activities without fear of reprisal.

The guide will offer tips on a range of topics, including how to hide Internet protocol addresses that might offer clues on writers' physical locations. The group also is seeking a global accord that would protect authors or hosts of particular documents from prosecution outside their home countries. For example, a French author of an article on China and human rights could only be tried in France.

International pressure gained the release of 20 people who were tortured in Iranian prisons last year, Pain said, adding that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty international also are active on the issues.

The role of U.S. companies that are tailoring products to local markets also is raising concerns, said Mr. Derek Bambauer, a Berkman research fellow. Internet filtering in countries including China and Saudi Arabia can be studied from the United States because internal study may be illegal.

Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and other companies are enabling Internet censorship, he said, even though Western standards let filtering decisions be made by Web users instead of service providers or government agencies. Consumer pressure to encourage corporate responsibility may come to resemble the market pressure that forced shoemaker Nike to stop using children for labor, Mr. Bambauer said.

"A Microsoft blog tool in Chinese will censor the word 'democracy' and suggest another word for 'human rights,'" Mr. Pain said. "We have to respect certain ethical principles, but just obeying Chinese laws is not an answer."