Thursday, 12 June 2014
No candle-lit vigils for raped and murdered girls
No candle-lit vigils for raped and murdered girls
By Mari Marcel Thekaekara
Another horrendous rape. Two young girls, 14 and 16-year old cousins, were abducted, raped, tortured and hanged from a tree last week in Badaun, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It’s a completely sickening scenario. No, far worse than sickening actually. But it’s hard to churn out words or emotion, day after day, week after week, as each new rape hits the news with almost monotonous regularity.
It was a normal day for the teenagers. Before going to bed on that fateful night, they stepped out to go to the loo. Except that the average Indian villager does not have a loo to go to. Millions of village women are forced to defecate or pee in the open fields close to their houses. They normally choose to do this under cover of darkness, at daybreak and after sunset. But the routine turned into a nightmare as a group of men grabbed the girls and took them away. An uncle of one of the girls saw them being dragged by the hair and protested. He was threatened with a gun. One girl’s father ran to the police station begging for help. The policeman callously told him to go away, his daughter would return in the morning. When the desperate father fell at his feet begging the cop to do something, the cop slapped him. This is the sort of scenario that is commonplace for poor and dalit families.
It’s been pointed out that these girls are not dalit, though most Indian newspapers reported otherwise. They were, nevertheless, extremely poor, powerless and from a lower caste. The perpetrators, apparently, routinely molested and raped lower caste women and this particularly brazen rape and murder, was to teach the poor and powerless a lesson, to show them their place in the feudal, caste hierarchy. Recently, dalit and lower caste people had protested against the behaviour of the dominant caste Yadav men who until now have ruled the roost in the surrounding villages. The local policeman who slapped the victim’s father belonged to the same caste as the perpetrators. And two policemen reportedly, not merely abetted in the crime, but participated in the assault too.
The girls’ bodies bore marks of excessive brutality. The usual scratches, bite marks, bruises, but also a pattern of blood clotting which indicated beating and torture. And the post mortem revealed they were hanged while still alive. Commentators have pointed out that the levels of violence and viciousness in the new rape culture is frightening, calling for immediate and effective action. Much of it comes from the porn which circulates freely on mobile phones. It’s not merely rape now. And the fact that I write ‘merely rape’ illustrates how terrifying the situation is. Almost as though one has to be grateful one is ‘merely raped’.
It is with a heavy heart that I note, that the outpouring of grief and outrage which rocked India in December 2012 for the Nirbhaya Delhi rape victim, is noticeably absent in cities across India, for the Badaun cousins. They are not middle class, dominant caste, city women. These were two lower caste, village girls. Not ‘people like us’.
The UN and the US have commented on our horrifying new status as an ‘unsafe destination for women’. Tourism is being affected, our economic watchdogs tell us, because our ‘rape’ cases are being showcased across the world. Perhaps the politicians and powerful people who want India to ‘shine’ will finally do something drastic to cut crime against women. I don’t see much concern for the women victims involved, apart from public posturing and political speeches about women’s empowerment. Political parties across the board use each rape to score points against their rival parties. They should now work together to ensure that the perpetrators of rape and murder are stringently punished along with the policemen involved. Our rape laws, even our new ones, remain toothless if the supposed guardians of the law jump on the bandwagon, not merely in dereliction of duty but to participate in caste-based crimes.
As a country we are reaching boiling point. Will this force change?
how can we secure food supplies?
A growing issue: how can we secure food supplies?
By Bryn Smith
Our world relies on an intricate system of transport, communication and trade to bring food from the fields to our tables, but any system is subject to flaws and can buckle under stress.
A broken rail line in Jordan halts the delivery of grain from the ports. Typhoons in the Philippines destroy rice paddies belonging to thousands of smallholder farmers. A civil war in Côte d’Ivoire prevents transport of milk and sugar into Mali and Burkina Faso. Due in part to these flaws in food security, 842 million people still live in hunger across the world. Over a billion suffer from zinc, iron and vitamin A deficiencies.
The World Bank has confirmed that food security is a growing issue that now includes concerns about water, energy, social policy and international relations. Its recent goal of cutting extreme poverty to 3 per cent by 2030 must consider food security; the two go hand in hand.
Making this problem worse are the two food price spikes in the last decade, one in 2007-08, the other in 2010-11. These spikes came like tsunamis, and though they usually failed to break through the dykes and floodwalls of first world nations that have secure food supply and production chains, this was not the case for the developing world, where these spikes cause untold damage and disruption, and created dangerous inflation in the basic foodstuffs necessary for survival. If the developing world cannot construct a secure food chain, malnutrition causes loss in human capital. A World Bank report has confirmed malnourished children will have at least a 10-per-cent reduction in lifetime earnings. This flows on to losses in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and tax revenue.
We need to take a long, hard look at how we farm, ferry and eat our food.
Leaving fields fallow is fine in temperate zones, but an empty field in tropical climates just creates desert. Peter Andrews, who was awarded the Order of Australia for his work on promoting sustainable and natural farming methods, proves this in Australia by showing how fields left devoid of vegetation have vital nutrients and water sucked out by the sun and atmosphere. He encourages farmers to increase their ‘green surface area’, allowing everything from weeds to willows to grow in fields, and instead of spraying herbicides and ploughing, to mulch existing plants to create a sustainable fertility bed that crops may grow in.
Our crops increasingly rely on fertilizers, which are inefficient and unnecessary. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has discovered that as little as 30 to 40 per cent of the fertilizer is soaked up by soils, with over half being absorbed into the atmosphere and ground waters, contaminating it. That means that over half of all fertilizer produced is not only wasted, it’s damaging our ability to produce food. Farmers must start a micro-approach to fertilizing instead of saturating fields with it – that is, until new technologies make fertilizers redundant, such as the zero-tillage project in India being co-developed by Australia and Brazil.
Biofuels are taking advantage of generous government subsidies, taking up area that should be dedicated to crops. This reduces supplies drastically. An expert report on food security found world biofuel production has risen from 20 to 100 billion litres per year. That’s a lot of crop that could be feeding a lot of people.
Infrastructure needs to be better planned. A case study comparing Bahrain to Jordan found the simple placement of silos and mills for grain reduced transport costs by 0.14 per cent of GDP. Future reconstruction projects need to take this into account when building a new road, railway or anything in between.
And finally, water. Water is critical to food and farming, with 85 per cent of world water usage allocated to growing food, more than industry and domestic use combined. Irrigation is no longer a good idea, especially in hotter, drier climates and places of water scarcity, where water will simply evaporate and raise ground salt levels. Half a billion people currently live in water-scarce countries, a number expected to rise to 3 billion by 2050. Future use of water must be efficient and practical, making each drop go as far as possible.
The World Bank’s mandate, etched on a marble wall in its headquarters in Washington DC, is to create a world free of poverty. Food and the security of its supply are an undeniable part of that mission. The World Bank can also continue to foster good relations with its majority donors. Nurturing these relationships brings benefits in the form of unique technologies and agricultural science.
Food, and its supply, from rice to rye and beef to bacon, will be a paramount issue as we march towards a population of 9 billion in 2050. Let’s get to work and make sure that world hunger ends before then, or is at least well on its way out.
Bryn Smith is a student at James Cook University and was a Global Voices Delegate to the World Bank & IMF Spring Meetings in April this year.
New Internationalist Magazine June 2014
The brave and the blameless: women survivors of war-time rape
The brave and the blameless: women survivors of war-time rape
A global summit to end sexual violence in conflict takes place this week. Subi Shah reports.
One night, when Anisa* was 14 years old, she was dragged from her bed by six soldiers and taken at gunpoint to the field which backed on to her small house. It was 1971 in the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the bitter and bloody war for independence from Pakistan raged on. That night, she was gang-raped by the soldiers who had just killed her parents. ‘I was so scared,’ she says. ‘It hurt terribly at first but then I became wooden. I don’t remember how many times they raped me; after a while I didn’t feel or think anything. There was no-one to hear me scream.’
Now in her mid-fifties, Anisa is one of an estimated 200,000 Bangladeshi women who were raped by state-backed Pakistani troops during the war.
Her experience is not unique, according to the charity Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) – it is being repeated in war zones throughout the world today. MSF is now delivering medical aid to sexual assault survivors in conflicts across the globe, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Darfur.
‘Sexual violence during war can have several objectives,’ says Françoise Duroch, MSF’s expert on violence. ‘Rape can be used as a weapon, meaning it is carried out with martial reasoning and used for political ends. It can be used to reward soldiers, or remunerate them, to motivate the troops. It can also be used as a means of torture, sometimes to humiliate the men of a certain community. Systematic rape can be used to force a population to move. Rape can also be used as a biological weapon to deliberately transmit the HIV/AIDS virus. In war, we also find the phenomenon of sexual exploitation, forced prostitution or even sexual slavery.’
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A global summit to end sexual violence in conflict takes place this week. Subi Shah reports.
Quinn Dombrowski under a Creative Commons Licence
One night, when Anisa* was 14 years old, she was dragged from her bed by six soldiers and taken at gunpoint to the field which backed on to her small house. It was 1971 in the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the bitter and bloody war for independence from Pakistan raged on. That night, she was gang-raped by the soldiers who had just killed her parents. ‘I was so scared,’ she says. ‘It hurt terribly at first but then I became wooden. I don’t remember how many times they raped me; after a while I didn’t feel or think anything. There was no-one to hear me scream.’
Now in her mid-fifties, Anisa is one of an estimated 200,000 Bangladeshi women who were raped by state-backed Pakistani troops during the war.
Her experience is not unique, according to the charity Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) – it is being repeated in war zones throughout the world today. MSF is now delivering medical aid to sexual assault survivors in conflicts across the globe, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Darfur.
‘Sexual violence during war can have several objectives,’ says Françoise Duroch, MSF’s expert on violence. ‘Rape can be used as a weapon, meaning it is carried out with martial reasoning and used for political ends. It can be used to reward soldiers, or remunerate them, to motivate the troops. It can also be used as a means of torture, sometimes to humiliate the men of a certain community. Systematic rape can be used to force a population to move. Rape can also be used as a biological weapon to deliberately transmit the HIV/AIDS virus. In war, we also find the phenomenon of sexual exploitation, forced prostitution or even sexual slavery.’
Strategic weapon
This week, London will host The Global Summit To End Sexual Violence In Conflict. The four-day long summit, hosted by Foreign Secretary William Hague and Special Envoy For The UK High Commissioner For Refugees, Angelina Jolie, is the largest gathering ever brought together on the subject. The message is clear: rape and sexual assault of women and children in conflict is not an opportunistic ‘spoil of war’ – rather, it is a used as a strategic weapon by invading military, and the international community must work together to hold those responsible to account.
Though sexual violence in armed conflict is recognized as a war crime by the United Nations, the organizers of the Summit say that to force change, more work must be done to raise awareness of its impact on communities, families and individuals.
British Bosnian charity Remembering Srebrenica says rape was used as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing during the conflict in the 1990s. It estimates that somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 women were assaulted by invading soldiers during the war, with the aim of impregnating Muslim women with Serbian babies. To date, only seven soldiers have faced trial over these charges.
Meldisa* was 17 when she was kidnapped from the streets of Sarajevo before being raped and impregnated by Serb soldiers. During her four months in captivity, she was burned with cigarette butts, beaten and spat on. She was raped ‘countless’ times, often at knifepoint. She says her attackers told her that ‘there are too many Muslims here, you will have a Serb child’. When the soldiers grew bored of her, she was taken to Tuzla and dumped in the street. She had a late abortion there.
‘Healing cannot happen without acknowledgement. Now in Bangladesh, the women who suffered and survived the pain and humiliation of rape during the battle for independence are brave enough to speak out about what happened to them’
Reporting rape in non-conflict zones is challenging enough for the victim – often the social stigma or legal infrastructure makes speaking out impossible – but in the chaos of a war zone there is seldom anyone to tell.
London-based writer and actor Leesa Gazi is working hard to change this, collating the experiences of women raped by soldiers during Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan. The women’s stories have been put together for a new production by her theatre group, Komola Collective. The play is entitled ‘Birangona: Women Of War’. Birangona means ‘the brave and blameless’.
Gazi says recording the experiences of these women is a vital part of Bangladesh’s short but bloody history – and confronting the harsh reality of what happened to them is part of the healing process.
‘There is hope,’ she says. ‘Healing cannot happen without acknowledgement. Now in Bangladesh, the women who suffered and survived the pain and humiliation of rape during the battle for independence are brave enough to speak out about what happened to them. They want the world to know our history and they want justice for the war crimes committed against them. I hope this week’s summit in London achieves its aims because the terrible legacy of rape in conflict goes on a long time after the war itself ends.’
*name has been changed.
Subi Shah is a journalist and documentary film producer based in London. She has worked in Srebrenica, Tuzla, Dhaka, Mumbai, Northern Ireland and Los Angeles.
New Internationalist Magazine June 2014
Language
Sign language is our rightful mother tongue by Jill Jones
Minority languages around the world are under threat – and that includes sign languages.
British Sign Language (BSL), for example, has only around 1,000 deaf children who use it ‘to some extent’, from a potential of approximately 42,000 deaf children in Britain. All languages, spoken or signed, are at imminent risk if there is no intergenerational transmission from parent to child, as stated by Joshua Fishman, renowned linguist and the instigator of a scale to measure at what level of endangerment languages are fixed, and how to address the problem. Since only approximately 5 per cent of parents of deaf children are themselves deaf, this means that all sign languages are automatically at risk unless steps are taken to ensure transmission from one generation to the next.
Some countries have legally recognized their sign language(s), but this has not made a significant impact: legal recognition has not led to practices which facilitate their transmission. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states that all Member States must recognize and promote their sign languages, but this, again, is insufficient without a well devised language plan.
The Deaf Ex-Mainstreamers Group (DEX) has developed a language plan for BSL. It measured the usage of BSL, to identify the level of endangerment, and found that it is severely endangered. At the LAUD 36th International Symposium at the University of Landau in Germany in April 2014, distinguished linguists eminent in the field of language planning conceded that BSL is indeed severely endangered, and that sign languages should be included in the list of endangered spoken languages.
There are other reasons for BSL’s demise in terms of the numbers of future users. These include the fact that deaf people are viewed as disabled, whereas congenitally and early deafened people are in fact a language community; sign language is our natural language, just as spoken language is appropriate for hearing people. The DEX language plan addresses these issues.
Attempts to make deaf people ‘hearing’ with technical aids and aides to hearing, such as digital hearing aids and cochlear implants, are only appropriate in order to enable deaf people to learn spoken language for some assimilation into the hearing society.
At the same time it is vital to acknowledge that, for some deaf people, sign language is the main, and maybe only, language, since spoken language is too inaccessible for them. For those deaf people who have useful hearing with aids/aides, spoken language is still incomplete with respect to learning and communicating, and sign language is therefore an essential part of the whole lifelong learning package for us.
Finally, sign language is our rightful mother tongue and means of communicating fluently with other deaf people, and with hearing people who live and work with us. The banning and prevention of deaf children from a high level of quality exposure to BSL, and other sign languages, is a violation of human and linguistic rights.
Jill Jones is Company Secretary for Deaf Ex-Mainstreamers Group Facebook: DEX Perience
New Internationalist Magazine June 2014
Thursday, 28 June 2012
German credit agency plans to use Facebook data
German credit agency Schufa is planning to use 'crawling techniques' like those used by search engines to find relevant information with aim of 'identifying and assessing the prospects and threats'.
The agency is looking into using information from other sources including Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Street View to assess individual credit ratings.
In the UK, using such information without consent could be in breach of the Data Protection Act.
Visa bans rival debit/credit cards from the Olympics
Olympic sponsor Visa has been accused of exploiting spectators by effectively banning the use of rival cards at Games venues.
It is ordering the closure of all cash points which accept MasterCard or American Express.
Non-Visa customers will not even be able to use their cards to pay for goods at checkouts.
Spectators without Visa or cash can look forward to a day without food or drink and a miserable Olympic experience, all thanks to Visa's corporate greed, sorry we mean sponsorship.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Does the government have the right to monitor private emails?
Surveillance expert Robin Tudge and Professor of Conflict Beatrice de Graaf go head-to-head.
(from New Nationalist Magazine issue 454)
Robin
A defining element of the kinds of abusive, totalitarian regimes seen in our lifetimes has been all-pervasive surveillance – be it in East Germany, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, or Qadafi’s Libya – including the routine steaming open of people’s letters, tapping phone calls, or sifting through their emails.
But Western governments have passed law after law, ranging from the UK’s new bid to monitor all our online usage, to the US Patriot Act, the US’s impending Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and the EU’s Data Retention Directive, all supposedly protecting us from terrorism and crime in the age of global communications, but really demolishing our rights to privacy and to live free of this blanket, state-directed paranoia in which people’s lives are shut down on suspicion alone. These are freedoms that previous generations paid mightily to protect, but which governments are now casually destroying.
Sifting through private emails and phone calls only obscures the genuine threats and throws up false leads, while laws allowing such practices to become warped by function creep. The UK’s Regulation of Investigative Powers Act was brought in to guard against terrorism and serious crime, but is mostly used to monitor fly-tipping or to see whose children live in a school’s catchment area.
If we lose the right to privacy and allow all-pervasive monitoring then people will fear becoming a target for greater state scrutiny and curtail their own political, creative and social engagement: all while the state remains unaccountable and democracy silently dies.
This lack of transparency leads to corruption – the state becomes the one with something to hide – while regimes increasingly use surveillance to crush the growing dissent. Ultimately, the seeds of oppression reap revolution – see the Communist Bloc, the Arab Spring, even News Corp – but only after countless innocent lives have been lost or compromised and blood has been spilled on the streets.
Beatrice
Rather than dramatizing the cumulative effect of privacy and surveillance failures – which still do not amount to the level of repression exercised by regimes in East Germany or Syria – experts should be much more vocal on the lack of effect of these monitoring efforts and on the real reasons why they are used.
First of all, we cannot make a case for the rise of a bloodstained Big Brother state (yet) in Western democracies. Yes, there have been numerous insults, wrongdoings and police failures in Britain, France or other European countries, let alone in the US. But these do not compare to intentional killings by Syrian secret police, or to the psychological warfare communist countries once waged against their populations.
Second, the general views about repressive surveillance will be swept away with one single terrorist attack, or even thwarted attack.
Third, leaving security out of the equation exposes a black hole of uncertainty and fear that cannot be filled by human rights or freedom principles alone, however noble they may be. It just does not work that way in populist politics any more.
Being too dependent on monitoring is the real problem. In a world of economic cutbacks, the danger of over-reliance on privatized and computerized security looms large. Israeli airports have exchanged detectors for highly trained, schooled and professional human officers – because they produce better results.
If experts are not able to educate and inform the public about the real costs of security, the side-effects of monitoring and the lack of real effects in terms of preventing attacks, we will keep collecting haystacks with small chances of actually finding the needle. Thus, rather than presenting monitoring as either a catch-all solution or an Orwellian nightmare, let’s present it as it is: at best a second-tier, expensive and ambivalent assistance to real-life security personnel that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails in the struggle against terrorism and crime.
Robin
Citizens don’t have to justify their need for privacy; the state has to justify its need to subject everybody to wholesale suspicion. No-one would accept having a police officer or bureaucrat sit alongside as they wrote an email or text, so why should they endure such surveillance if it’s done remotely by unknown persons for reasons unknown?
Nor are people so stupid or weak simply to allow governments to demolish their ‘noble’ rights following terror attacks. While the US Patriot Act was passed before the dust of 9/11 had even settled, enough people persistently and emphatically rejected and eventually killed off the following Total Information Awareness program that would have collated all real-time communications and databases everywhere. Opposition to ID cards in Britain strengthened even after 7/7, because people knew these tracking devices couldn’t stop terrorism but would create a mother lode of personal data for the government, hackers and criminals to trawl through and sell.
Guantánamo Bay, confessions extracted by waterboarding, executions by drones, extraordinary rendition and torture in ex-Soviet gulags, and the lies that led to the Iraq War, as well as enterprises set up or colluded in by the CIA, MI6 and elected governments in the US, Britain and Europe – all these show how very violent and repressive Western states actually are.
This is not to mention that anyone foreign-looking may be subject to stop searches, deportations, shootings in underground stations or house-arrests for non-existent plots involving ricin or [the Manchester United stadium] Old Trafford. And apparently we can forestall the inevitable blowback by ever more irrelevant surveillance measures, such as governments reading our emails. To which I will not say ‘go right ahead, I’m sure it’s all for my own good’.
Beatrice
Zigazou under a CC Licence Blatant injustices and torture speak for themselves. Hardly anyone would want to justify the gross violations of human rights that happened in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the extra-rendition prisons in some remote countries. However, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are really 2004’s problems. What we are facing now is a much more complex, stealthy and pervasive threat: that of all kinds of data-retention programs, vetting and profiling attempts – not so much initiated by governments, but by commercial enterprises, operating without boundaries, borders or oversight mechanisms.
Thus, again, rather than pointing to supposedly oppressive regimes, we should be aware of the ‘security as enterprise’ approach that is pervading our industrialized world. Security nowadays is nothing much to worry about for most people. Current worries are presented by the monetary and economic crises, not by invisible data collection programs. But this ‘security as enterprise’, or even ‘security as comfort’ approach creates victims by the thousands: it divides whole populations into risk-free citizens on the one hand and risk-bearers on the other. People with double passports, travellers to the Middle East, even people with diabetes, if profiled as bearing a risk to the commercial enterprise of an airport, or as otherwise deviating from purported safe standards, will be tracked, endlessly vetted, and discriminated against in all kinds of ways.
In short, rather than remaining entrenched in last year’s battles, let’s concentrate on the techniques of profiling and collecting data. And let’s not point fingers at governments alone, but challenge private companies to come clean about how they sell false security promises for their own benefits, creating new divisions in societies in their wake.
Robin
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issue 454
Surveillance expert Robin Tudge and Professor of Conflict Beatrice de Graaf go head-to-head.
Every month we invite two experts to debate, and then invite you to join the conversation online. The best comments will be printed in the next magazine.
Robin
A defining element of the kinds of abusive, totalitarian regimes seen in our lifetimes has been all-pervasive surveillance – be it in East Germany, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, or Qadafi’s Libya – including the routine steaming open of people’s letters, tapping phone calls, or sifting through their emails.
But Western governments have passed law after law, ranging from the UK’s new bid to monitor all our online usage, to the US Patriot Act, the US’s impending Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and the EU’s Data Retention Directive, all supposedly protecting us from terrorism and crime in the age of global communications, but really demolishing our rights to privacy and to live free of this blanket, state-directed paranoia in which people’s lives are shut down on suspicion alone. These are freedoms that previous generations paid mightily to protect, but which governments are now casually destroying.
Sifting through private emails and phone calls only obscures the genuine threats and throws up false leads, while laws allowing such practices to become warped by function creep. The UK’s Regulation of Investigative Powers Act was brought in to guard against terrorism and serious crime, but is mostly used to monitor fly-tipping or to see whose children live in a school’s catchment area.
If we lose the right to privacy and allow all-pervasive monitoring then people will fear becoming a target for greater state scrutiny and curtail their own political, creative and social engagement: all while the state remains unaccountable and democracy silently dies.
This lack of transparency leads to corruption – the state becomes the one with something to hide – while regimes increasingly use surveillance to crush the growing dissent. Ultimately, the seeds of oppression reap revolution – see the Communist Bloc, the Arab Spring, even News Corp – but only after countless innocent lives have been lost or compromised and blood has been spilled on the streets.
Beatrice
Rather than dramatizing the cumulative effect of privacy and surveillance failures – which still do not amount to the level of repression exercised by regimes in East Germany or Syria – experts should be much more vocal on the lack of effect of these monitoring efforts and on the real reasons why they are used.
First of all, we cannot make a case for the rise of a bloodstained Big Brother state (yet) in Western democracies. Yes, there have been numerous insults, wrongdoings and police failures in Britain, France or other European countries, let alone in the US. But these do not compare to intentional killings by Syrian secret police, or to the psychological warfare communist countries once waged against their populations.
Second, the general views about repressive surveillance will be swept away with one single terrorist attack, or even thwarted attack.
Third, leaving security out of the equation exposes a black hole of uncertainty and fear that cannot be filled by human rights or freedom principles alone, however noble they may be. It just does not work that way in populist politics any more.
Being too dependent on monitoring is the real problem. In a world of economic cutbacks, the danger of over-reliance on privatized and computerized security looms large. Israeli airports have exchanged detectors for highly trained, schooled and professional human officers – because they produce better results.
If experts are not able to educate and inform the public about the real costs of security, the side-effects of monitoring and the lack of real effects in terms of preventing attacks, we will keep collecting haystacks with small chances of actually finding the needle. Thus, rather than presenting monitoring as either a catch-all solution or an Orwellian nightmare, let’s present it as it is: at best a second-tier, expensive and ambivalent assistance to real-life security personnel that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails in the struggle against terrorism and crime.
Robin
Citizens don’t have to justify their need for privacy; the state has to justify its need to subject everybody to wholesale suspicion. No-one would accept having a police officer or bureaucrat sit alongside as they wrote an email or text, so why should they endure such surveillance if it’s done remotely by unknown persons for reasons unknown?
Nor are people so stupid or weak simply to allow governments to demolish their ‘noble’ rights following terror attacks. While the US Patriot Act was passed before the dust of 9/11 had even settled, enough people persistently and emphatically rejected and eventually killed off the following Total Information Awareness program that would have collated all real-time communications and databases everywhere. Opposition to ID cards in Britain strengthened even after 7/7, because people knew these tracking devices couldn’t stop terrorism but would create a mother lode of personal data for the government, hackers and criminals to trawl through and sell.
Guantánamo Bay, confessions extracted by waterboarding, executions by drones, extraordinary rendition and torture in ex-Soviet gulags, and the lies that led to the Iraq War, as well as enterprises set up or colluded in by the CIA, MI6 and elected governments in the US, Britain and Europe – all these show how very violent and repressive Western states actually are.
This is not to mention that anyone foreign-looking may be subject to stop searches, deportations, shootings in underground stations or house-arrests for non-existent plots involving ricin or [the Manchester United stadium] Old Trafford. And apparently we can forestall the inevitable blowback by ever more irrelevant surveillance measures, such as governments reading our emails. To which I will not say ‘go right ahead, I’m sure it’s all for my own good’.
Beatrice
Zigazou under a CC Licence Blatant injustices and torture speak for themselves. Hardly anyone would want to justify the gross violations of human rights that happened in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the extra-rendition prisons in some remote countries. However, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are really 2004’s problems. What we are facing now is a much more complex, stealthy and pervasive threat: that of all kinds of data-retention programs, vetting and profiling attempts – not so much initiated by governments, but by commercial enterprises, operating without boundaries, borders or oversight mechanisms.
Thus, again, rather than pointing to supposedly oppressive regimes, we should be aware of the ‘security as enterprise’ approach that is pervading our industrialized world. Security nowadays is nothing much to worry about for most people. Current worries are presented by the monetary and economic crises, not by invisible data collection programs. But this ‘security as enterprise’, or even ‘security as comfort’ approach creates victims by the thousands: it divides whole populations into risk-free citizens on the one hand and risk-bearers on the other. People with double passports, travellers to the Middle East, even people with diabetes, if profiled as bearing a risk to the commercial enterprise of an airport, or as otherwise deviating from purported safe standards, will be tracked, endlessly vetted, and discriminated against in all kinds of ways.
In short, rather than remaining entrenched in last year’s battles, let’s concentrate on the techniques of profiling and collecting data. And let’s not point fingers at governments alone, but challenge private companies to come clean about how they sell false security promises for their own benefits, creating new divisions in societies in their wake.
Robin
It seems we agree that endemic surveillance is hell on wheels and is being implemented with the illusion of being done in all good faith by governments and private companies, although it’s palpably not true to say that Guantánamo etc is ‘2004’s problem’.
They illustrate the extremes of abuses that governments of all hues and their privatized partners readily undertake while demanding from us that the price of freedom is to stand naked at all times before the state under all-pervasive suspicion, where threat is based not on realities, but on what might be.
This has been enabled by the pernicious concept of ‘risk’, taken up by governments working with no open oversight or scrutiny, providing entirely venal solutions to non-existent problems, leading to schoolchildren having to surrender their fingerprints to take books out, or mothers needing criminal record bureau checks to taxi their chronically ill children to hospital.
The surveillance industry is a growing business that provides profits, employment and sponsorship for politicians pushing a world where it’s not about who you are or what you know but what you can prove you’re not.
Beatrice
‘Risk’ is indeed the new buzzword; it is not just a new way of perceiving security issues, but has become a mode of governance. The concept of risk not only tackles historical and actual threats (by using them as calculation models for future ones), but also suggests a taming of an uncertain future. By means of risk assessments, apocalyptic horrors are invoked on a daily basis, based on worst-case scenario thinking, stress testing or premeditation.
We see it in courts, where what-if arguments replace habeas corpus considerations, such as in the numerous convictions of terrorism suspects that were apprehended on little more than rumours, or ambiguous taped conversations. Securitization of justice is well under way.
Risk has also become the new dividing principle throughout society, whether you’ll be profiled as a risk while queuing at an airport, or as an uninsurable citizen, forced to pay outrageous insurance premiums.
Therefore, rather than focusing on the obvious and blatant transgressions of democratic rule of law or human rights alone, we should demonstrate how the new politics of risk and prevention work, and how they are increasingly overturning considerations of prudence, accountability and civil rights.
There is enough work to be done for all of us, experts, academics and human rights activists alike. The new ideology of risk and security management is simply too expensive, too ineffective and plain unjust.
Robin Tudge is the author of the No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance, inspired by his campaigning for NO2ID. He also wrote the pioneering Bradt Guide to North Korea and is now based in Newcastle where he works as a freelance journalist and actor.
Beatrice de Graaf is Professor for Conflict and Security History at Leiden University, the Netherlands and the author of Evaluating Counterterrorist Performance: A Comparative Study. Visit her research site at: http://hum.leiden.edu/history/enemies-of-the-state
What do you think?
(from New Nationalist Magazine issue 454)
Robin
A defining element of the kinds of abusive, totalitarian regimes seen in our lifetimes has been all-pervasive surveillance – be it in East Germany, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, or Qadafi’s Libya – including the routine steaming open of people’s letters, tapping phone calls, or sifting through their emails.
But Western governments have passed law after law, ranging from the UK’s new bid to monitor all our online usage, to the US Patriot Act, the US’s impending Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and the EU’s Data Retention Directive, all supposedly protecting us from terrorism and crime in the age of global communications, but really demolishing our rights to privacy and to live free of this blanket, state-directed paranoia in which people’s lives are shut down on suspicion alone. These are freedoms that previous generations paid mightily to protect, but which governments are now casually destroying.
Sifting through private emails and phone calls only obscures the genuine threats and throws up false leads, while laws allowing such practices to become warped by function creep. The UK’s Regulation of Investigative Powers Act was brought in to guard against terrorism and serious crime, but is mostly used to monitor fly-tipping or to see whose children live in a school’s catchment area.
If we lose the right to privacy and allow all-pervasive monitoring then people will fear becoming a target for greater state scrutiny and curtail their own political, creative and social engagement: all while the state remains unaccountable and democracy silently dies.
This lack of transparency leads to corruption – the state becomes the one with something to hide – while regimes increasingly use surveillance to crush the growing dissent. Ultimately, the seeds of oppression reap revolution – see the Communist Bloc, the Arab Spring, even News Corp – but only after countless innocent lives have been lost or compromised and blood has been spilled on the streets.
Beatrice
Rather than dramatizing the cumulative effect of privacy and surveillance failures – which still do not amount to the level of repression exercised by regimes in East Germany or Syria – experts should be much more vocal on the lack of effect of these monitoring efforts and on the real reasons why they are used.
First of all, we cannot make a case for the rise of a bloodstained Big Brother state (yet) in Western democracies. Yes, there have been numerous insults, wrongdoings and police failures in Britain, France or other European countries, let alone in the US. But these do not compare to intentional killings by Syrian secret police, or to the psychological warfare communist countries once waged against their populations.
Second, the general views about repressive surveillance will be swept away with one single terrorist attack, or even thwarted attack.
Third, leaving security out of the equation exposes a black hole of uncertainty and fear that cannot be filled by human rights or freedom principles alone, however noble they may be. It just does not work that way in populist politics any more.
Being too dependent on monitoring is the real problem. In a world of economic cutbacks, the danger of over-reliance on privatized and computerized security looms large. Israeli airports have exchanged detectors for highly trained, schooled and professional human officers – because they produce better results.
If experts are not able to educate and inform the public about the real costs of security, the side-effects of monitoring and the lack of real effects in terms of preventing attacks, we will keep collecting haystacks with small chances of actually finding the needle. Thus, rather than presenting monitoring as either a catch-all solution or an Orwellian nightmare, let’s present it as it is: at best a second-tier, expensive and ambivalent assistance to real-life security personnel that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails in the struggle against terrorism and crime.
Robin
Citizens don’t have to justify their need for privacy; the state has to justify its need to subject everybody to wholesale suspicion. No-one would accept having a police officer or bureaucrat sit alongside as they wrote an email or text, so why should they endure such surveillance if it’s done remotely by unknown persons for reasons unknown?
Nor are people so stupid or weak simply to allow governments to demolish their ‘noble’ rights following terror attacks. While the US Patriot Act was passed before the dust of 9/11 had even settled, enough people persistently and emphatically rejected and eventually killed off the following Total Information Awareness program that would have collated all real-time communications and databases everywhere. Opposition to ID cards in Britain strengthened even after 7/7, because people knew these tracking devices couldn’t stop terrorism but would create a mother lode of personal data for the government, hackers and criminals to trawl through and sell.
Guantánamo Bay, confessions extracted by waterboarding, executions by drones, extraordinary rendition and torture in ex-Soviet gulags, and the lies that led to the Iraq War, as well as enterprises set up or colluded in by the CIA, MI6 and elected governments in the US, Britain and Europe – all these show how very violent and repressive Western states actually are.
This is not to mention that anyone foreign-looking may be subject to stop searches, deportations, shootings in underground stations or house-arrests for non-existent plots involving ricin or [the Manchester United stadium] Old Trafford. And apparently we can forestall the inevitable blowback by ever more irrelevant surveillance measures, such as governments reading our emails. To which I will not say ‘go right ahead, I’m sure it’s all for my own good’.
Beatrice
Zigazou under a CC Licence Blatant injustices and torture speak for themselves. Hardly anyone would want to justify the gross violations of human rights that happened in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the extra-rendition prisons in some remote countries. However, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are really 2004’s problems. What we are facing now is a much more complex, stealthy and pervasive threat: that of all kinds of data-retention programs, vetting and profiling attempts – not so much initiated by governments, but by commercial enterprises, operating without boundaries, borders or oversight mechanisms.
Thus, again, rather than pointing to supposedly oppressive regimes, we should be aware of the ‘security as enterprise’ approach that is pervading our industrialized world. Security nowadays is nothing much to worry about for most people. Current worries are presented by the monetary and economic crises, not by invisible data collection programs. But this ‘security as enterprise’, or even ‘security as comfort’ approach creates victims by the thousands: it divides whole populations into risk-free citizens on the one hand and risk-bearers on the other. People with double passports, travellers to the Middle East, even people with diabetes, if profiled as bearing a risk to the commercial enterprise of an airport, or as otherwise deviating from purported safe standards, will be tracked, endlessly vetted, and discriminated against in all kinds of ways.
In short, rather than remaining entrenched in last year’s battles, let’s concentrate on the techniques of profiling and collecting data. And let’s not point fingers at governments alone, but challenge private companies to come clean about how they sell false security promises for their own benefits, creating new divisions in societies in their wake.
Robin
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issue 454
Surveillance expert Robin Tudge and Professor of Conflict Beatrice de Graaf go head-to-head.
Every month we invite two experts to debate, and then invite you to join the conversation online. The best comments will be printed in the next magazine.
Robin
A defining element of the kinds of abusive, totalitarian regimes seen in our lifetimes has been all-pervasive surveillance – be it in East Germany, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, or Qadafi’s Libya – including the routine steaming open of people’s letters, tapping phone calls, or sifting through their emails.
But Western governments have passed law after law, ranging from the UK’s new bid to monitor all our online usage, to the US Patriot Act, the US’s impending Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and the EU’s Data Retention Directive, all supposedly protecting us from terrorism and crime in the age of global communications, but really demolishing our rights to privacy and to live free of this blanket, state-directed paranoia in which people’s lives are shut down on suspicion alone. These are freedoms that previous generations paid mightily to protect, but which governments are now casually destroying.
Sifting through private emails and phone calls only obscures the genuine threats and throws up false leads, while laws allowing such practices to become warped by function creep. The UK’s Regulation of Investigative Powers Act was brought in to guard against terrorism and serious crime, but is mostly used to monitor fly-tipping or to see whose children live in a school’s catchment area.
If we lose the right to privacy and allow all-pervasive monitoring then people will fear becoming a target for greater state scrutiny and curtail their own political, creative and social engagement: all while the state remains unaccountable and democracy silently dies.
This lack of transparency leads to corruption – the state becomes the one with something to hide – while regimes increasingly use surveillance to crush the growing dissent. Ultimately, the seeds of oppression reap revolution – see the Communist Bloc, the Arab Spring, even News Corp – but only after countless innocent lives have been lost or compromised and blood has been spilled on the streets.
Beatrice
Rather than dramatizing the cumulative effect of privacy and surveillance failures – which still do not amount to the level of repression exercised by regimes in East Germany or Syria – experts should be much more vocal on the lack of effect of these monitoring efforts and on the real reasons why they are used.
First of all, we cannot make a case for the rise of a bloodstained Big Brother state (yet) in Western democracies. Yes, there have been numerous insults, wrongdoings and police failures in Britain, France or other European countries, let alone in the US. But these do not compare to intentional killings by Syrian secret police, or to the psychological warfare communist countries once waged against their populations.
Second, the general views about repressive surveillance will be swept away with one single terrorist attack, or even thwarted attack.
Third, leaving security out of the equation exposes a black hole of uncertainty and fear that cannot be filled by human rights or freedom principles alone, however noble they may be. It just does not work that way in populist politics any more.
Being too dependent on monitoring is the real problem. In a world of economic cutbacks, the danger of over-reliance on privatized and computerized security looms large. Israeli airports have exchanged detectors for highly trained, schooled and professional human officers – because they produce better results.
If experts are not able to educate and inform the public about the real costs of security, the side-effects of monitoring and the lack of real effects in terms of preventing attacks, we will keep collecting haystacks with small chances of actually finding the needle. Thus, rather than presenting monitoring as either a catch-all solution or an Orwellian nightmare, let’s present it as it is: at best a second-tier, expensive and ambivalent assistance to real-life security personnel that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails in the struggle against terrorism and crime.
Robin
Citizens don’t have to justify their need for privacy; the state has to justify its need to subject everybody to wholesale suspicion. No-one would accept having a police officer or bureaucrat sit alongside as they wrote an email or text, so why should they endure such surveillance if it’s done remotely by unknown persons for reasons unknown?
Nor are people so stupid or weak simply to allow governments to demolish their ‘noble’ rights following terror attacks. While the US Patriot Act was passed before the dust of 9/11 had even settled, enough people persistently and emphatically rejected and eventually killed off the following Total Information Awareness program that would have collated all real-time communications and databases everywhere. Opposition to ID cards in Britain strengthened even after 7/7, because people knew these tracking devices couldn’t stop terrorism but would create a mother lode of personal data for the government, hackers and criminals to trawl through and sell.
Guantánamo Bay, confessions extracted by waterboarding, executions by drones, extraordinary rendition and torture in ex-Soviet gulags, and the lies that led to the Iraq War, as well as enterprises set up or colluded in by the CIA, MI6 and elected governments in the US, Britain and Europe – all these show how very violent and repressive Western states actually are.
This is not to mention that anyone foreign-looking may be subject to stop searches, deportations, shootings in underground stations or house-arrests for non-existent plots involving ricin or [the Manchester United stadium] Old Trafford. And apparently we can forestall the inevitable blowback by ever more irrelevant surveillance measures, such as governments reading our emails. To which I will not say ‘go right ahead, I’m sure it’s all for my own good’.
Beatrice
Zigazou under a CC Licence Blatant injustices and torture speak for themselves. Hardly anyone would want to justify the gross violations of human rights that happened in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the extra-rendition prisons in some remote countries. However, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are really 2004’s problems. What we are facing now is a much more complex, stealthy and pervasive threat: that of all kinds of data-retention programs, vetting and profiling attempts – not so much initiated by governments, but by commercial enterprises, operating without boundaries, borders or oversight mechanisms.
Thus, again, rather than pointing to supposedly oppressive regimes, we should be aware of the ‘security as enterprise’ approach that is pervading our industrialized world. Security nowadays is nothing much to worry about for most people. Current worries are presented by the monetary and economic crises, not by invisible data collection programs. But this ‘security as enterprise’, or even ‘security as comfort’ approach creates victims by the thousands: it divides whole populations into risk-free citizens on the one hand and risk-bearers on the other. People with double passports, travellers to the Middle East, even people with diabetes, if profiled as bearing a risk to the commercial enterprise of an airport, or as otherwise deviating from purported safe standards, will be tracked, endlessly vetted, and discriminated against in all kinds of ways.
In short, rather than remaining entrenched in last year’s battles, let’s concentrate on the techniques of profiling and collecting data. And let’s not point fingers at governments alone, but challenge private companies to come clean about how they sell false security promises for their own benefits, creating new divisions in societies in their wake.
Robin
It seems we agree that endemic surveillance is hell on wheels and is being implemented with the illusion of being done in all good faith by governments and private companies, although it’s palpably not true to say that Guantánamo etc is ‘2004’s problem’.
They illustrate the extremes of abuses that governments of all hues and their privatized partners readily undertake while demanding from us that the price of freedom is to stand naked at all times before the state under all-pervasive suspicion, where threat is based not on realities, but on what might be.
This has been enabled by the pernicious concept of ‘risk’, taken up by governments working with no open oversight or scrutiny, providing entirely venal solutions to non-existent problems, leading to schoolchildren having to surrender their fingerprints to take books out, or mothers needing criminal record bureau checks to taxi their chronically ill children to hospital.
The surveillance industry is a growing business that provides profits, employment and sponsorship for politicians pushing a world where it’s not about who you are or what you know but what you can prove you’re not.
Beatrice
‘Risk’ is indeed the new buzzword; it is not just a new way of perceiving security issues, but has become a mode of governance. The concept of risk not only tackles historical and actual threats (by using them as calculation models for future ones), but also suggests a taming of an uncertain future. By means of risk assessments, apocalyptic horrors are invoked on a daily basis, based on worst-case scenario thinking, stress testing or premeditation.
We see it in courts, where what-if arguments replace habeas corpus considerations, such as in the numerous convictions of terrorism suspects that were apprehended on little more than rumours, or ambiguous taped conversations. Securitization of justice is well under way.
Risk has also become the new dividing principle throughout society, whether you’ll be profiled as a risk while queuing at an airport, or as an uninsurable citizen, forced to pay outrageous insurance premiums.
Therefore, rather than focusing on the obvious and blatant transgressions of democratic rule of law or human rights alone, we should demonstrate how the new politics of risk and prevention work, and how they are increasingly overturning considerations of prudence, accountability and civil rights.
There is enough work to be done for all of us, experts, academics and human rights activists alike. The new ideology of risk and security management is simply too expensive, too ineffective and plain unjust.
Robin Tudge is the author of the No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance, inspired by his campaigning for NO2ID. He also wrote the pioneering Bradt Guide to North Korea and is now based in Newcastle where he works as a freelance journalist and actor.
Beatrice de Graaf is Professor for Conflict and Security History at Leiden University, the Netherlands and the author of Evaluating Counterterrorist Performance: A Comparative Study. Visit her research site at: http://hum.leiden.edu/history/enemies-of-the-state
What do you think?
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