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10Oct

State of Internet Freedom in Africa 2018 Report Focuses on Privacy and Data Protection

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FIFAfrica18 |
For the fifth year in a row, the Collaboration on International ICT policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) has produced a research report on the State of Internet Freedom in Africa, with the 2018 edition focusing on privacy and data protection on the continent. The report was launched at the annual Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica), which took place in Accra, Ghana, at the end of September and can be found here.


While the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is fast growing in Africa, there are several challenges related to privacy and data protection. According to the GSMA, at the end of 2017 Sub-Saharan Africa had over 444 million mobile subscribers representing a 44% penetration rate, while the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reports that 21.8% of individuals in the continent use the internet. However, as more users come online, many remain unaware of how their privacy rights could be affected by their use of digital technologies.
The report tracks key trends and challenges in recent years that have shaped this area of internet governance and use in the continent.
The report points out that  the state of personal data protection tends to mirror – and to affect – the state of internet freedom in a country. It notes that various African countries are witnessing worrying developments on the internet freedom front including an increase in digital rights violations such as arrests and intimidation of online users, internet blockages and social media shutdowns, and a proliferation of laws and regulations that undermine internet access and affordability, and weaken ICT’s potential to improve livelihoods, catalyse free expression and civic participation.
The countries studied are Burundi, the DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Findings indicate that many states are legitimising and increasing their surveillance capacity, including by requiring mandatory registration of personal details and increasingly compelling service providers to hand over users’ data. The surveillance is often not guided by judicial or other independent oversight, and in some instances there is no clarity as to which individuals and government departments have the authority to order surveillance or demand customers’ meta data from telecom companies.
This means that many government departments make such orders to the operators, who do not have the latitude to reject such requests. Telecom and ISPs are required by law to comply with information requests or requests for surveillance assistance, including the common requirement to install software with the technical capacity to conduct surveillance and to enable active communications monitoring, and to hand over data when asked.
In all countries reviewed, these requests are kept secret so it is difficult to establish the full extent of government requests for users’ data, the surveillance of citizens’ communications, and censorship of content. What is clear though, is that the trend is on the increase, and the types of user’s’ information which governments request is varied.
Additionally, a common trend in the countries studied, as well as around Africa, is the adoption of mandatory SIM card registration which requires that subscribers furnish telecom companies with extensive personal details, including names, home addresses and their National Identification details. In the absence of comprehensive privacy and data protection laws (and accompanying practice by government agencies and telcos that robustly protects such data), this data is at tremendous risk of abuse by state and non-state actors.
Despite the constitutions of numerous countries containing provisions that uphold the protection of the rights to privacy, of the 13 countries studied, only Ghana and Senegal have comprehensive privacy and data protection laws. The lack of a comprehensive standalone policy or legislation to protect the right to privacy and data protection was identified as a major weakness, since the provisions were fragmented and contained in various laws and policies, and did not adequately provide for protection of the right.  Some countries such as Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda have data protection bills but the proposed laws have for years failed to progress through their parliaments.
The report noted the low levels of public awareness about privacy and data protection, with many citizens tending to be indifferent to privacy and data protection issues. This low level of awareness among the public of privacy issues in the digital environment, a lack of transparency by data controllers, insufficient procedural guarantees, and limited independent oversight over the implementation of privacy and data protection, mirrors many other facets of the internet governance arena, and negatively impacts users’ digital rights. In turn, efforts to promote strong privacy and data protection regimes should go in tandem with multi-stakeholder efforts to advance broader internet freedoms in Africa.
See the full report which includes the various African Instruments on Privacy and Personal Data Protection, data collection programmes by governments, legal responsibilities of business entities as well as recommendations to the state, civil society, academia, the tech community and civil society.
 

10Oct

Lessons on Flying from the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa

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By Jason Pielemeier |

“Since men have learned to shoot without missing, we have to learn to fly without perching” — African Proverb

By citing these words in his opening message, Dr. Wairagala Wakabi, the Executive Director of the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), captured both the daunting reality and the irrepressible optimism surrounding the state of Internet freedom in Africa. This dynamic was also captured in Charles Onyango-Obbo’s keynote address, “Many African Governments Hate the Free Internet — And That Is A Very Good Thing.”

I was fortunate to represent the Global Network Initiative at the 5th Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica18) in Accra, Ghana from September 27–28, 2018. The event, co-hosted by CIPESA and the Ghana-based Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), featured a range of activists, academics, journalists, and government representatives from across the continent and the world discussing topics like censorship, big data, and gender-based violence online. While the topics were familiar to me, FIFAfrica18 offered a unique opportunity to hear fascinating African perspectives, narratives, and stories that are often absent from larger, more international Internet freedom conferences.

Over the two days, it became clear that while authoritarian governments in Africa may have come late to the Internet repression party, they are quickly catching up thanks to their own creative tactics, as well as foreign technology and knowledge transfer. As Onyango-Obbo noted in his keynote, African dictators are weaponizing the Internet for political purposes through the control and manipulation of a new digital bureaucracy (or as he calls it, the “digitocracy” and the “surveillance securitocracy”). Other speakers pointed out how anti-terrorism laws — sometimes left-over colonial versions, in other instances newer, Global War on Terror-inspired copies are being misused — to prosecute speech that should be protected. It was also pointed out that long legacies of information manipulation, combined with the fragility of the free press, have left many African countries susceptible to disinformation campaigns.

Other tactics are more creative. For instance, Tanzania and Uganda have pioneered taxes on social media and blogging respectively, which other governments are now seeking to replicate. And of course, when threatened, these regimes have not been afraid to order brute force network disruptions. Interestingly, the case was also made that the success that some repressive regimes are having with “fake news” may be leading them away from more scorched earth tactics like Internet shutdowns.

These efforts to clamp down on online freedom are often aided and abetted by technology and services procured from outside Africa. The role of China in financing and providing information and communication infrastructure that is perceived to facilitate state surveillance was a consistent topic across the sessions I attended. In addition, participants decried the increasing availability of more targeted hacking tools, peddled by Western and Israeli firms.

The combined power of these two forces — unreliable infrastructure and targeted hacking software — have been perhaps most prominently displayed by the government of Ethiopia, and FIFAfrica18 offered a fascinating opportunity to hear from the Zone 9 bloggers, a group of independent activists who were on the receiving end of their government’s oppression for several years until their recent release. Appearing as a group outside Ethiopia for the first time, the bloggers offered lessons from their experience, including the importance of solidarity, appreciation for support from activists abroad and diplomats at home, and gratitude to social media platforms for limiting the extent to which the government could persecute others in their networks. Perhaps more important though, was the inspiration they engendered through their ongoing commitment to continue to fight for human rights in Ethiopia and beyond.

Consistent with these notes of optimism and defiance were demonstrations of new tools like Netblock’s COST (Cost of Shutdowns Tool), which is already being used to underscore the disproportionate impacts of network disruptions in Chad and Ethiopia, and the power of collaborations like AccessNow’s #KeepItOn campaign. Building on the addition of several, new, Africa-focused members — CIPESA, Internet Sans Frontieres, and Paradigm Initiative– the Global Network Initiative hopes to do its part to harness this creative energy and facilitate new partnerships between the private sector and digital rights groups in Africa.

At the end of the day, the enduring commitment to freedom demonstrated by the Zone 9 bloggers, which was echoed across the Forum by brave journalists, committed activists, human rights commissioners, and others from Cameroon, Kenya, Zimbabwe and across Africa, that helped me understand and appreciate the intrepid spirit behind that admonition to learn to keep flying without perching, even if your wings grow tired.

03Oct

Emerging Challenges and Data-driven Solutions for a Connected Future at FIFAfrica18

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By Netblocks’ Writer |

At the 2018 Forum for Internet Freedom in Africa in Accra, Ghana, NetBlocks is demonstrating new tools and methodologies to defend human rights, empowering local communities and creating a space for open and progressive policies for internet access and telecommunications.

In a joint panel on data-driven advocacy on Friday, NetBlocks along with partners Access Now, CIPESA, the GNI and ISF, soft-launched the Cost of Shutdown Tool, an initiative supported by the Internet Society which enables participants to calculate the economic cost of internet shutdowns, network disruptions and platform blocking in sub-Saharan Africa. Economic arguments have proven to be an effective means to bolster the case for human rights online with a view to development and prosperity, a trend which is being recognised and made accessible to internet freedom campaigners by way of the new initiative.

The panel explored how communities have been adopting new tools and developing new workflows as part of the KeepItOn initiative to support internet freedom across the continent, documenting recent incidents of network disruptions during elections in Mali and in Chad, as well as collecting bodies of technical evidence around disruptions in Ethiopia and Cameroon at critical moments for democracy and society.

Thursday saw the launch of the latest edition of The Internet Measurement Handbook, which provides civil society organisations and human rights defenders with practical technical and policy advice on managing internet disruptions, with a copy provided to each FIFAfrica participant.

NetBlocks director Alp Toker and advocacy manager Hannah Machlin demonstrated new internet freedom measurement techniques which present a more accurate, live view of emerging network incidents. Demonstrations and workshops provided a hands-on introduction to real-time internet freedom monitoring, web probes and internet-scale visualisation, which are now being adopted across the continent and globally as part of the internet observatory project.

Working with other civil society groups, the team explored issues around internet governance, internet protocols and their impact on human rights, free expression and trade, producing a series of new alliances and partnerships to strengthen digital rights and protect the integrity of elections regionally and worldwide.

Connecting data and human rights

Sessions over the course of three days have helped build a bridge between technical work to track restrictions on free expression online, connecting the personal experiences of victims of human rights violations with policy makers, governments and ICT industry stakeholders.

About FIFAfrica

Organised by the Collaboration for International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) in partnership with the Media Foundation West Africa (MFWA) the 2018 edition of the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa  takes place on 26-28 September 2018 in Accra, Ghana.

The Forum is a landmark event that convenes various stakeholders from the internet governance and online rights arenas in Africa and beyond to deliberate on gaps, concerns and opportunities for advancing privacy, access to information, free expression, non-discrimination and the free flow of information online on the continent.

With strategic linkages to other internet freedom forums and support for the development of substantive inputs to inform the conversations on human rights online happening at national level, at the African Union and the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR), the African Internet Governance Forum (IGF), subregional IGFs, the global IGF, Stockholm Internet Forum (SIF), the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF), the Internet Freedom Forum (Nigeria) and RightsCon, among others, FIFAfrica provides a pan-African space where discussion from these other events can be consolidated at continent-wide level, drawing a large multistakeholder audience of actors.

24Sep

Meet representatives from the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) at FIFAfrica18

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Announcement |
Representatives from the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) will attend the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa 2018 (FIFAfrica18) taking place in Accra, Ghana on September 27-28. At FIFAfrica18, the FOC will introduce Forum participants to the work of the Coalition. Participants will also have the opportunity to engage with representatives from the FOC and the multi-stakeholder FOC Advisory Network, as well as and raise internet freedom issues they would like the Coalition to address.
The Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) represents 30 governments who have committed to work together to advance human rights and fundamental freedoms online through a multi-stakeholder approach.  The Coalition provides a forum for like-minded governments to coordinate efforts and work with civil society, the private sector, and other Internet stakeholders to support the ability of individuals to exercise their human rights and fundamental freedoms online.
The FOC is founded upon the notion that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online. The FOC seeks to identify best practices regarding the application of human rights obligations and commitments in the evolving online landscape, as well as to call attention to conditions that undermine those rights by issuing joint-statements, coordinating policy responses among members, and leveraging civil society, the private sector, and other internet stakeholders to encourage rights abiding behaviour online.
Further, the FOC Advisory Network serves as an additional mechanism for the FOC to engage with non-governmental internet stakeholders.  It serves as a platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue, advice, and collaboration.  The Digital Defenders Partnership, a grant making mechanism associated with the FOC, provides rapid response to a range of threats to internet freedom, from supporting bloggers and cyber activists who find themselves under digital attack, to helping them exercise their rights online in repressive environments.
FIFAfrica is hosted by the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) in partnership with the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) and focuses exclusively on internet rights and freedoms. It looks at them through the lens of policy, regulation, and governance and offers a platform for critical engagement of diverse stakeholders in identifying the most pressing internet rights-related issues and challenges that have to be addressed at national and regional levels in Africa. The Forum also identifies opportunities for bringing the debate on the importance of human rights online at national, regional and global fora and aims to identify effective ways to engage with them.
Join the FOC at an informal session on Friday September 28 at the FIFAfrica18 Main Hall during the lunch break at 13.00-14.00.

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