Dead and under the sea

THE international furore over the recent detainment of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, who was working on the NSA revelation files, was one about freedom of speech and intimidation. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing came as more of a confirmation than surprise for many, everyone had suspected for a long time that the NSA is the new Big Brother. But as more information is unveiled, and The Guardian, along with The New York Times and ProPublica, continues publishing, the actual scope and capability of NSA and Government Communications Head Quarter (GCHQ) begins to emerge to form a dense web of secrecy and digital spying. Now the world knows about Prism and Tempora and how these security agencies have been monitoring our internet data and metadata; forcing big companies to install security glitches and compromising encryption so it is easier to decode. This brings us to Bangladesh. Of course, with the level of our technological advancement and access, we are a long way off from constant surveillance. But the deeper issue here is the attempt to gag and suppress free press. What happened in the UK with The Guardian can be seen on the rise here. The ICT Amendment Law was passed recently, which allows the police to arrest without a warrant anyone who violates the law. These include defamation and posting and sharing of vulgar data, according to Article 57 (1), both of which are very broad, ambiguous terms. Jyotirmoy Barua, an advocate of the Supreme Court, makes a very good argument when he criticises this law. His concerns include the ambiguous nature of the law, the unaccountability and scope for abuse, the conflicts the law has with other laws and, of course, the possibility of cyber crimes increasing in the digital world as it is easy to pose as someone else if you want to harm them. In his two part article in Bonik Barta, he terms the law as subversive to open thought. Is it safe to say that in a law where terms like vulgar are not clearly defined, can we rely on the police and the judges to clearly make a distinction? A critical thought can be open to intimidation because of the level of understanding of the police about the cyber world or of the thought itself. And most baffling is that for the publishing on paper of such things, the punishment is much less (maximum of two years); so why the disparity between the two laws? Parodies and satires about the government are taken for granted in a civilised society. Track record of the law system here shows the lack of transparency and following of proper channels, the police are open to bribery and have been known to act to intimidate. In these circumstances, what it means for the police to have the power to detain without a warrant is a scope for more abuse of power. Digital and cyber crimes are on the rise and laws are needed for it, but these laws need to be justifiable and without loopholes so that they cannot be abused. Sadly, the strong-arming police and vengeful political parties mean that free speech won't be so free anymore. As M.A. Hossain Tonu, who is a software engineer for Vantage Labs Dhaka, puts it: "The ICT law seem to be hardly rational on the new amendments, notably contextual experience of the domain specialists and end users of the internet may be missing." He says the law is ambiguous on practical implementation, as there is no precise definition of the terms like cracking/hacking, vulgarity, offensive content, degrees of offensive content sharing, etc., hence such terms can be abused. As an example, most newspapers run cartoons and caricatures of political figures and their gaffes, so, according to this law, will those be illegal if posted on the internet? The very nature of the internet gives users a certain degree of anonymity. The fake photos which incited the communal violence at Ramu prove how Photoshopped and shared photos can circulate in the internet with little footprint. Anonymity and fake profiles of social networks just adds to the vulnerability of harassment to the general people Tonu says. To protect the innocent, there is scope to improve the law. The ICT law also states as unlawful any post or information which can cause disturbance. So the Shahbagh movement under this law would be unlawful. In an age where social media is what gives informed citizens a voice and acts as their platform for revolutions, this law under a pretext of stopping cyber crimes destroys the whole essence of internet -- a medium which should be free. Then there is the Contempt of Court Act 2013, which gave journalists and the free press protection from persecution. On September 26, this law was declared unconstitutional and invalid. So now we have a state where, because of ambiguous and broad definitions of violation, a person can be detained without a warrant. In effect, the seeds have been planted of a legalised framework for gagging the media and burying it under the sea. The NSA started with a simple case. Police officers asked authorities to bug a phone call to detain a stalker and purse snatcher. What followed was the NSA, with its ears on every wall, scribing away every detail of our internet footprint. With no warrant needed for an arrest, we might just have to keep our mouth shut about everything that could be defamatory to the powers or vulgar by any standards. The writer is an online journalist of The Daily Star and a student of IBA, Dhaka University.