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The BC Civil Liberties Association is helping two anti-Olympic activists to sue the City of Vancouver over a bylaw that would restrict free speech during the 2010 Games.

“The bylaw is an affront to free speech.  Its purpose and effect is to limit citizens’ rights to express dissenting views and to hear dissenting views on public property,” says David Eby, Executive Director of the BCCLA. Eby cited concerns about the bylaw restricting signs that aren’t “celebratory” and listing public facilities and even a city park as places where free expression is limited as particularly offensive. [...]

“Vancouver’s Olympic bylaw is an infringement on my Charter rights and those of all people who wish to express themselves and to listen,” said Dr. Shaw [Chris Shaw, one of the activists who filed the lawsuit]. “If the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is to be a guarantee of anything, if it is to be more than words on paper, this bylaw cannot be allowed to stand.”

This makes me happy.

Back in July, the City of Vancouver passed a bunch of bylaws to suppress free speech before, during, and after the Olympic games. Last week, we learned how the people in charge will be enforcing those bylaws:

Organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics will send roving teams of observers with the power to confiscate material that infringes on the Olympic brand outside the venues, CBC News has learned….

The Vancouver Organizing Committee’s 20 observer teams are intended to enforce its agreement with the International Olympic Committee that the local organizers must ensure the venues are “clean” of commercial, political or religious publicity.

That’s right: political speech has been deemed to “infringe on the Olympic brand” and is therefore forbidden.* Never mind that this policy directly violates your rights as expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Larry Campbell took away those rights back in 2005 when he signed Vancouver’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee, which actually requires host cities to suppress their citizens’ civil liberties in this manner for the duration of the Games. (Campbell was Mayor of Vancouver then; now he’s a Senator, proving once again that it pays to watch out for elite interests.)

Of course, if you plan to ignore Vancouver’s illegal bylaws and exercise your rights of free speech and free assembly during the Olympics, VANOC’s Special Higher Police roving teams of observers are among the least of your concerns. The cops have been busy these past few months harrassing anyone who voices opposition to the Olympics — not just activists, who have been subjected to surveillance, interrogation of themselves and their friends and neighbors, and intimidation by the cops, but ordinary people like the 73-year-old man who wrote a letter to VANOC and got a visit from the authorities by way of response. There is also some legitimate concern that the cops are planning to infiltrate protest groups and use agents provocateurs to discredit anti-Olympic activists, just like they tried to do in Montebello in 2007. And then there are the “free speech zones” designed to keep protesters out of sight during the Olympics — in the proud tradition of such bastions of liberty as the People’s Republic of China, which set up its own protest cages during the Beijing Games in 2008.

In response to all this nonsense, the folks at the BC Civil Liberties Association and Pivot Legal Society are training volunteers to act as legal observers during the Olympics:

Like many of you, Pivot and the BCCLA are concerned that when the more than 7,000 police officers, 5,000 private security guards and 4,500 members of the Canadian armed forces arrive in Vancouver this February, their presence may get in the way of citizens’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Bylaws recently passed by the City of Vancouver suggest that we have good reason to be worried.

We plan to be ready, with dozens of people prepared to act as eyes and ears on the streets. Legal observers will be trained to watch for violations and to document and report them.

The first BCCLA/Pivot training session was this past Sunday. More sessions will be offered once a month for the next three months. If you’re concerned about your rights being violated, I’d recommend checking them out.

Or you could, you know, hook up with the anti-Olympic movement, since crackdowns on civil liberties are one of the reasons they’re opposed to the Olympics in the first place.

German police have raided the home of the guy who owns the German domain name for Wikileaks, a well-known non-profit organization that anonymously publishes sensitive documents that governments and other institutions would like to keep under wraps.

What’s going on here? Well, it all starts in Australia, where the government has proposed legislation that would impose mandatory filtering of the Internet. They plan to do this by having a state agency maintain a blacklist of websites with content that some government bureaucrat thinks Australians shouldn’t be allowed to see. If the proposed legislation passes, Australian ISPs will be required to block all URLs in the list, and anyone who links to one of those URLs would face an $11,000-per-day fine. Child pornography is, of course, the main pretext here, as it so often is in Internet censorship cases.

Earlier this month, Wikileaks published Australia’s blacklist, revealing that numerous legitimate websites were wrongfully included on the list (which is no surprise, given that there’s virtually no accountability for the blacklist maintainers). Of course, the list also presumably includes some child porn sites; that’s what the program is supposed to be blocking, after all. Which brings us to Germany, where the current government has been pushing a scheme not unlike Australia’s — again, using child porn as a pretext for censoring Internet access. Since the blacklist published by Wikileaks presumably links to child porn sites, the German authorities figure that this makes Wikileaks guilty of helping to provide access to child porn — thus justifying the raids. Wikileaks, meanwhile, regards the raids as part of a broader political struggle over Internet censorship in Germany, and rightly so. Whatever you think of Wikileaks’ decision to publish the Australian blacklist, it’s hard to dispute that the raids are in part an attempt to intimidate opponents of the German government’s censorship plans.

Australia is far from the first country to try to censor its citizens’ Internet access under the guise of fighting child pornography. Nor is it the first to abuse its censorship powers to silence dissent and other legitimate speech: to take just one example, Finland got caught doing it last year. And the raids in Germany are only the latest attempt by the authorities in one country or another to clamp down on Wikileaks. Last year, for instance, in the course of a lawsuit over a different set of Wikileaks documents, an American judge ordered the site’s registrar to take its domain offline — a decision the New York Times described as “akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.” (The same judge later reversed his own ruling, citing “the futility of attempts to censor information …  after it has been posted to the internet.”) The trend is clear. I think we can expect more and more of this sort of thing in the months and years ahead.

And lest you think we’re immune to this sort of thing here in Canada, please note that we already have a “voluntary” censorship program — voluntary, that is, for the big ISPs that have signed onto it, not for their customers. The program is called Project Cleanfeed, and its blacklist, too, is secret. It’s maintained by a fairly reputable non-governmental organization that is specifically dedicated to fighting child porn, and for that reason (and also because I was more naive back then), I was willing to give the project the benefit of the doubt when I first heard about it in 2006. But having seen the results of similar programs in Australia, Finland, and elsewhere, and the lengths to which the authorities in other countries will go to prevent the dissemination of information they find distasteful, I no longer believe we should give Project Cleanfeed or any other such program the benefit of the doubt.

(Originally posted to The Information Policy Blog.)

Back in June, a group of activists in the Lower Mainland distributed a parody issue of the Vancouver Sun, highlighting what they saw as the paper’s strong pro-Israel bias. As you can see, it was extremely well-executed. When I saw a copy at a local cafe, it took me a few moments (and a closer examination of the content) to realize that it was a parody. This press release from the Palestine Media Collective has more details.

Unfortunately, the giant media corporation that owns the Vancouver Sun is suing the parody’s creators.

A writ of summons filed by CanWest Mediaworks Publications alleges that long-time left-wing activist Mordecai Briemberg, other unidentified activists and Horizon Publications conspired to produce and distribute a phoney edition of The Vancouver Sun on June 7, 2007. [...]

The suit said the defendants were “motivated by hostility to the principal shareholders of the plaintiff and by a desire to undermine, or hurt, the business of the plaintiff and its principal shareholders.”

The plaintiff’s writ, submitted by lawyer David Church, said Briemberg and six other unidentified people are involved in anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian media activities.

The writ alleges that the defendants “harbour antagonistic views towards the plaintiff, its principal shareholders and the reporting and editorial opinions expressed in the plaintiff’s publications, including in The Vancouver Sun.”

Just as a reminder, CanWest owns the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, the Vancouver Courier, the Victoria Times-Colonist, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and a few dozen other major and minor Canadian newspapers — not to mention Global (one of the major Canadian television networks) and several cable TV channels. Clearly they have trouble with the concept of dissenting opinions.

[UPDATED. See end of post.]

Canada’s big ISPs have agreed to block access to websites listed on a child pornography blacklist. The goal is laudable, but the devil, as usual, is in the details.

First, the facts: The initiative is called Project Cleanfeed Canada. It’s based on a similar project in the UK and has the blessing of the federal government. The blacklist will be maintained by Cybertip.ca, a group that already has a system in place for receiving and analyzing reports of child pornography online. Bell, Bell Aliant, MTS Allstream, Rogers, Shaw, SaskTel, Telus, and Videotron have all signed on.

It’s clear that everyone has their hearts in the right place here. No one wants to help creeps get access to kiddie porn. Aside from the obvious moral issues, child pornography is illegal in Canada — creating it, distributing it, and accessing it are all against the law. But a mandatory blacklist implemented at the ISP level is not the solution, for a whole bunch of reasons.

First off, there’s the question of effectiveness. As any good librarian can tell you, Filters Don’t Work. The history of internet filtering is rife with false positives and false negatives — sites get blocked when they shouldn’t be, and sites that should be blocked get missed. This system is going to miss out on a ton of child porn sites; inevitably, people are going to find the ones that haven’t been blacklisted yet. To an extent, false positives aren’t a big deal, since most people don’t encounter kiddie porn online to begin with and this initiative will make it even less likely. It’s also true that those who really want to get the stuff will find ways to circumvent Cleanfeed — even the RCMP have admitted that. So this is really just a way of protecting those of us who don’t want to be exposed to child porn.

I’m okay with that. But what about the false positives? What happens when sites get blacklisted by mistake? Michael Geist notes that there will be an appeal process, and also mentions that the blacklist will be kept secret to prevent it from doubling as a child porn directory. However, Cory Doctorow argues that this approach is flawed. There are several problems: a secret blacklist makes it hard to figure out that you’re being blocked like this; many non-Canadian website owners won’t go to the trouble of appealing — even if they figure out they’ve been blacklisted, which is unlikely; and even for Canadians, if they manage to find out what’s wrong, the appeal process can be a huge obstacle. (Cory, who has been a victim of wrongful blacklisting in the past, gives a great example of this last problem.)

Then there’s the question of precedent. At the moment, as I understand it, Canadian ISPs essentially bear no responsibility for the lawfulness of the content they transmit. (The full story is a bit more complicated, but for the purposes of this discussion that’s how things stand.) They can’t be sued for what their clients choose to look at or make available, and they don’t have to monitor or regulate the content that passes through their systems — in fact, they’re apparently not allowed to block access to content that doesn’t break the law. This is good for privacy (because the ISPs have no reason to monitor what you look at online), good for free speech, and good for the ISPs’ bottom lines. But now the ISPs are assuming the role of content watchdog, and that opens the door to pressure for increased access restrictions. How long will it be before we start seeing proposals, from either the government or the less civil-libertarian elements of the public, for blacklisting other types of objectionable content?

Now, to be fair, Michael Geist says that child pornography is a special case because of its legal status (it’s more restricted than anything else, even hate speech), and that it’s unlikely ISPs will start blocking other content. Dr. Geist knows what he’s talking about, so I’m willing to take a benefit-of-the-doubt stance. But on the other hand, it’s not like ISPs are bastions of intellectual freedom. In fact, we’ve already seen one major ISP block access to a website set up by its union — and, inadvertently, 766 unrelated sites (PDF) — during a lockout, purely because it didn’t like the content of the site. So if the pressure mounts for other blacklists beyond child porn — well, I for one won’t be surprised if the ISPs give in.

Finally, there’s the underlying assumption that this is something that should be imposed by the ISPs. There is a basic philosophical problem here. It’s not exactly censorship in the traditional sense that’s the issue — it’s not like, in Canada, child porn is protected speech and people have a right to look at it if they want to (it’s not, and they don’t). I’m saying that it’s wrong for ISPs to be doing this, because of their particular role in the transmission of information. ISPs are not content providers but access providers. To put it another way, it’s not their job to choose what content they make available; it’s their job to provide access to the content that others have chosen to make available. It sounds like a minor distinction, but it’s not — it means that those who control our ability to communicate online will now be in a position to choose, based on what we have to say, whether others get to hear us. Giving ISPs a veto over the content they transmit is inherently a major structural change in the free flow of information in this country, and the potential for adverse consequences is too great to ignore.

(I’ve linked several times to the excellent discussion of Project Cleanfeed Canada on Michael Geist’s blog. The comments touch on more aspects of the initiative than I’ve been able to cover here. The whole discussion is highly recommended.)

UPDATE, 4 December 2006: Michael Geist has written a Toronto Star column on Cybertip.ca. He addresses some of the concerns that have been raised, noting, for example, that there will be an appeals process with an independent review mechanism. Dr. Geist also mentions the slippery-slope issue, but concludes that despite some potential risks, “the project deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

As I said earlier, I’m willing to give Cybertip.ca the benefit of the doubt. They’re showing every sign of good faith (although it would be nice to see more information on the initiative on their website), and they are clearly responding to some of the potential pitfalls of their approach. However, several grave concerns still haven’t been adequately addressed:

• The accessibility of the appeals process is still an open question. How exactly will the process work? Does Cybertip.ca notify the site administrator when a site is blacklisted? How will Cybertip.ca ensure that the appeals process is open to everyone, including anonymous site owners and non-Canadians?
• The ISPs are still setting a bad precedent. Dr. Geist feels that the benefits of the initiative outweigh the risks of seeing the blacklist expanded to other types of content. But we’ve already seen that ISPs can’t be relied on to stand up for intellectual freedom, and I for one don’t think that the unique legal status of child pornography makes for a reliable safeguard.
• After all is said and done, this is still a case of ISPs regulating content — tentatively and at arm’s length, I know, but that’s still what they’re doing, and it’s a historically new role for them (at least in Canada) and a structural change in the flow of information online. That’s cause enough to be concerned.