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Nyabola

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17

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2022-05-23

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2022-05-23

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1

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un-security-council

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1. “Finally, the United Nations must rally support for those who have been at the forefront of this work all over the world, often at great personal risk, speaking out in defence of those, such as Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who have suffered grave injustices because of the way they have used the Internet to advance democratic ideals. At this moment we are collectively on a trajectory towards an unjust digital future, but a different and more just path is possible, and the Council has an opportunity to move us closer towards that better future.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

2. “The United Nations must continue to use its unparalleled convening power to foster deliberation and rally support for the preservation of the Internet as a global public good. The United Nations must use its agenda-setting power to ensure that human rights are embedded retroactively and proactively in the digital technologies that we build and use. The United Nations must use its norm-setting power to foster agreement on the human rights standards that would make a free, safe and just digital future possible, not just for this generation but also for future generations.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

3. “Finally, whatever actions the Council chooses to take must look beyond this moment to protecting the aspirations of future generations. What shared digital future do our actions make possible, and what futures do they circumscribe? Evidently, there are many tensions and contradictions embedded within these principles. Do we want more Government or less? What role should private corporations play? How do we balance our desire for technical progress with a desire for holistic, equitable use? I believe that with those principles in mind, some actions that the United Nations can take to protect digital rights and ensure that digital technologies play a positive role in international peace and security become apparent.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

4. “In conclusion, I would like to once again recall the mandate of the Security Council in the preservation of peace and security and urge a multilateral, transnational and generational approach to addressing the challenges of human rights in the digital age. To achieve such an approach, I would urge the Council to recall three principles. First, digital rights are human rights, and any effort to address those challenges must first begin with the protection of the human from the excesses of the power of the State and private corporations. Secondly, despite those and more challenges, the power of the Internet can and must still be harnessed for the greater good, and we must shape and protect it as a global public good, without allowing the interests of security or profit to drown out the interests of peace.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

5. “At the same time, looking at the challenges facing the Internet today as purely national challenges results in the fragmentation of the regulatory response, and that undermines the value of the Internet as a connector. Our research finds that the threats emerging from digitalization are multilateral — that is, rarely remaining contained within a single country; transnational, because they routinely involve the transfer of technology across national borders; and generational, because we are mortgaging the possibility of a free Internet for future generations on the perceived security of the present moment. Those realities require a commensurate response. It is not enough to just single out individual countries. What we need to do is to identify cultures of digital authoritarianism before they take root and travel around the world.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

6. “Perhaps the biggest cause for alarm is that the rise of those practices is not necessarily restricted to certain types of Government or those that we would readily label authoritarian. Rather, our research found a growing tolerance for allowing concerns about national security to overtake concerns about human rights and democracy. Significantly, I must raise the alarm on the practice of building and exporting technologies that enable digital authoritarianism from countries that are nominally democratic to countries that are explicitly authoritarian. That is all before we address the injustices embedded within the technologies themselves, including concerns about the injustices embedded within artificial intelligence, for example.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

7. “Those practices are made possible by an Internet on which advertising drives traffic and, therefore, in which the perception of popularity can be purchased. In conflict zones, hostile Governments use coordinated inauthentic behaviour to silence critics by bombarding them with so many negative comments that their social media becomes unusable. Administrations in several countries have built Government departments specifically designed to shape online discourse, or news-like organizations to distort the perception of State behaviour or to pollute the lines of communication with so much noise that the signal cannot get through. Those practices together make it difficult to achieve peace because they make it difficult for people to agree on the causes of conflict and, therefore, what must be done to stop it.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

8. “It is worth emphasizing at this point that there is often a gender dimension to those practices, with female journalists such as Maria Ressa and Rana Ayyub, or members of civil society and even ordinary young women, specifically targeted for alleged breaches of public morality or for simply doing their jobs. Finally, the domain of information concerns practices that manipulate information in the public sphere in order to distort people’s perception of reality and therefore their ability to act appropriately in response to social or political issues. That includes practices such as misinformation, disinformation or malinformation, as well as the use of coordinated inauthentic behaviour or astroturfing to shift the public agenda on social media platforms.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

9. “There has been a dramatic increase in the use of legislation to restrict the ability of people to participate in such discourse, including laws that unjustly expand the definition of criminal libel to make almost all criticism of State officials illegal. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that at least 40 social media laws were passed between 2020 and 2021, and 30 more were under consideration during the same time period. Many of those laws contain such broad definitions of the underlying injuries that they supposedly address that they are routinely used first against journalists and critics of the State. The passage of those laws is generally followed by a spike in civil and criminal cases against journalists.”

   2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

10. “Furthermore, in some countries, including some wealthy countries, while there has been an uptick in making digital technology mandatory for civic life, including registrations of births, deaths and more, there has been a strikingly low investment in making digital infrastructure accessible to people with disabilities or in indigenous and non-dominant languages. The question of speech looks at restrictions to the freedoms of expression, information or opinion. In many countries, digital platforms work alongside analogue platforms, such as the media and physical public squares, as a place where people can assemble, deliberate and share ideas about how to improve their societies.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

11. “These disruptions are designed to chill civic discourse and participation and are a direct assault on democracy and peace. More broadly, there are several countries where women still face systematic obstacles to accessing the Internet — a fact that became particularly visible as schools around the world attempted virtual education in response to the coronavirus disease pandemic. In several countries where the transition did not happen properly, young girls bore the brunt of exclusion from accessing whatever technology was available because they were girls.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

12. “The question of access looks at active and passive practices that restrict people’s ability to get to the Internet, ranging from Internet and social-media shutdowns to gender disparities and the deliberate underinvestment in infrastructure, to the detriment of low-resourced communities. In 2021, the global digital rights organization Access Now documented 182 Internet shutdowns across 34 countries — an increase from the 159 shutdowns in 29 countries recorded in 2020. The longest Internet shutdown endured almost three years. The country with the most Internet shutdowns experienced 109 in a single year. In addition to Internet shutdowns, there has also been an increase in related practices such as bandwidth throttling and social-media shutdowns, particularly around fraught election periods.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

13. “As such, we join the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in urging a global moratorium on the development and sale of surveillance technologies and invite the Security Council to join in putting pressure on private corporations to comply with such a moratorium. There is also growing use of mass data-harvesting technologies by both State and non-State entities, or the datafication of our lives, without a supporting drive to protect or even raise awareness on key rights such as data privacy or protection. In conflict zones, the datafication of refugee lives has increased dramatically, including an increase in the collection and storage of biometric data from asylum-seekers that is held under opaque conditions and sometimes used to deny refugees entitlements or restrict their freedoms.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

14. “In the research that I lead with Advox, we use a simple typology to help us make sense of such threats, separating the domains of digital technology into four categories: data, access, speech and information. With regard to the subject of data-concerns practices that specifically target the data stack, such as surveillance or the growing use of biometrics, there has been an alarming rise of the global surveillance economy, including the widespread use of technologies such as Pegasus against political leaders, journalists and members of civil society. The technology that is developed to make those practices possible is developed in wealthy countries and then deployed or exported to poor countries, with no overarching consideration for the rights context, putting those who are at the forefront of advancing peace at grave risk.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

15. “After all, the mandate of the Council is the preservation of peace and security, and it is important to be guided by a spirit that is animated as much as, if not more, by a desire for positive peace as it is by an interest in security. The Internet has been a space for tremendous innovation, creativity and opportunity, and, in thinking about resolving the challenges that face the Internet today, I would like to urge the Council to commit to preserving the Internet as a global public good, much like we are led by a spirit of cooperation in thinking about spaces like Antarctica or outer space. Nonetheless, after many years of unchecked tech- optimism, we are now in a moment of growing cynicism, as the threats that were ignored while we were trying to accelerate progress have started to materialize.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

16. “Simply put, our appetite for digitalization is outpacing our awareness of its implications, and with the mounting evidence of the harms that disordered approach makes possible, now is a crucial moment to take stock and decide if we need to change or reverse our course of action. It would be foolish to attempt to summarize all the rights implications of the digital age in the time I have been given. Rather, in this briefing I will emphasize some big-picture challenges created by digitalization and three key principles that create opportunities for action to safeguard peace and security. As a preface, I would like to qualify my remarks by saying that speaking about digital technology in relation to peace and security must not be interpreted as an invitation for the militarization and securitization of the Internet.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source

17. “Ms. Nyabola: It is an honour and a pleasure to address the Security Council today on the question of digital technology as it pertains to peace and security. As members heard in the introduction, I am a researcher whose work examines the intersection of technology, society and politics, with a specific interest in deepening our collective understanding of digital rights. In the past two decades, we have witnessed a dramatic expansion of the use of digital technology at all levels of our social lives — at the individual, the collective, the national and the transnational levels. Unfortunately, that expansion has not been complemented by a similar investment in protecting ourselves from the harms that the expansion has created, nor by a commitment to understanding and defending the rights of the human within the system that we are building.”

    2022-05-23 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9039 (2022) · source