In a 9 November televised address, President Nicolas Maduro announced that “through the Ministry of Science and Technology, we are protecting our country’s network and Internet, and we are taking the following websites off line: dolartoday.com, tucavidi.com, lechugaverde.biz, dolarparalelo.org and preciodolar.info…” These websites can no longer be accessed from within Venezuela, however they remain accessible from abroad.

In line with this rhetoric, the government refers to media reports about the parallel dollar rate and the current shortages as a “conspiracy” or a “plot” requiring appropriate reprisals. “The parallel dollar is a fictitious dollar, a fake dollar, created to foster the ongoing economic war,”the President said.

This major act of censorship comes amid a grave economic crisis. The Venezuelan government sets a fixed exchange rate for the US dollar that has differed from the international market rate since 2003. The difference between the official rate and the parallel rate (the real rate) is now enormous.

To justify the measure, the authorities are claiming that publishing parallel dollar exchange rates violates article 27 of the Radio, TV and Electronic Media Social Responsibility Law RESORTEMEC.

This article includes a ban on the dissemination of reports liable to “spread panic within the population or disturb public order.” It also holds Internet Service Providers responsible for the content on the websites they host.

CONATEL added that the law on illicit exchange rates bans currency transfers at rates different from the officially established ones. The NGO Espacio Público has pointed out the law does not prohibit mentioning the unofficial dollar rate, which is furthermore of public interest. While it is true that websites are reporting black-market dollar exchange rates, the publication of such information is not illegal, and the Venezuelan government is clearly applying censorship measures.

Bellow is a screenshot of the exchange rate published by one of the censored websites.

http://www.lechugaverde.biz/

"Since the closure of all brokerage firms in Venezuela by the Bolivarian government in 2010, all foreign currency selling outlets outlets, and even information about foreign currency, have been banned. Persons or businesses using the unoficial exchange rate be punished with seven years in prison or more.

Venezuela is ranked 117th out of 179 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

WeFightCensorship is posting the first of the two commentaries by Baydar that Sabah censored. Entitled “Dangers of swimming in turbulent waters,” it criticizes the way some Turkish media demonized the international media for their coverage of the “Occupy Gezi” protests. It urges them to halt the attacks and calls for solidarity among journalists.

The commentary was sent to Sabah’s editors on 24 June but, instead of publishing it, Sabah editor-in-chief Erdal Safak ran a scathing editorial about Baydar, who was very upset. He took several days off and wrote an op-ed piece blaming media owners for the self-censorship now widespread in Turkey. The New York Times published it on 19 July. When he went back to work at Sabah, he offered another commentary on relations between the ombudsman and the editor-in-chief. It too was never published.

Gezi Park highlights self-censorship

The demonstrations that began being held in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in late May to defend the park from the threat of demolition quickly grew into a national protest movement against the Erdogan government’s authoritarian tendencies. The protests were unprecedented in their scale and ability to transcend Turkish society’s deep rifts, and the authorities responded by criminalizing them and using force to disperse them.

Sometimes attacked by demonstrators, reporters were also the victims of systematic violence and arrests by the police. Outspoken journalists and social network users were branded as the Trojan horses of an international conspiracy to bring down the government.

The Turkish Union of Journalists (TGS) said that at least 22 journalists were fired during the protests and 37 were driven to resign. Some journalists reported that their editors had censored articles.

The Islamist daily Yeni Safak, for example, refused to publish an article by Isin Eliçin, entitled “External forces and Mehmet Ali Alabora,” in which she criticized the campaign of intimidation and disinformation that her newspaper had been waging since 10 June against Alabora, an actor who had expressed support for the demonstrators on Twitter. He was threatened after Yeni Safak portrayed him as one of the leaders of a “conspiracy designed to bring down the government.”

Six journalists resigned together from +1, a new privately-owned TV station, on 11 July, accusing the owner of interfering in its editorial policies.

Although exacerbated by the polarization resulting from the Gezi Park protests, this tendency is not new. There has been an increase in high-profile dismissals and resignations of leading journalists in recent years. The daily Aksam’s staff were “reined in” after a change of ownership in June 2013. Milliyet columnist Hasan Cemal was forced to resign in March over a controversial article on the Kurdish issue. Ahmet Altan had to resign from Taraf in December 2012. Aysenur Arslan was fired from CNN Türk, Andrew Finkel from Today’s Zaman, Banu Güven from NTV, Ece Temelkuran from Haber Türk and Mehmet Altan from Star. Some little-known journalists have meanwhile enjoyed meteoric promotions.

Although politicized, the Turkish media have the merit of being very diverse. But that may not last much longer. There are no safeguards that prevent media owners from meddling in the editorial independence of their staff. The vulnerability of their staff is increased by the fact that most newspapers are nowadays owned by big holdings that are active in such sectors as construction, finance and telecommunications ­– sectors in which winning state contracts is crucial.

As a result, it has become harder and harder over the years for Turkish business journalists to do in-depth investigative reporting. And to protect their business interests in the most profitable sectors, some media owners exercise all their influence to tone down their media’s criticism of the government.

The scale of the growing self-censorship trend was seen when many leading Turkish media ignored the Gezi Park protests for the first few days. The fact that CNN Türk broadcast a wildlife programme at the height of the clashes in Taksim Square on 31 May drew so much comment that the photo of a penguin quickly came to symbolize media connivance with the government. Another 24-hour news channel, NTV, had to apologize to its viewers for failing in its duty to report the news.

The contrast between the initial silence from leading Turkish media and the live coverage that the protests received from leading international TV broadcasters resulted in a big surge in the latter’s viewer ratings in Turkey. But it also elicited fierce hostility from government officials and pro-government media, which accused the international media of “disproportionate” and “biased” coverage.

Anti-foreign media hysteria

In speech after speech, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan portrayed the demonstrators as “vandals” and “fringe elements” acting at the behest of terrorist organizations and international speculators. He also targeted CNN, the BBC and Reuters. “You have been fabricating false information for days,” he said at a meeting on 16 July. “But you stand alone with your lies. This is not the nation whose image you have projected to the world.”

Some of the Turkish media quickly followed the prime minister’s lead, accusing the international media of deliberately orchestrating a campaign of disinformation against Turkey with the aim of besmirching its image or even bringing the government down. The climate of mistrust was extreme and worse was to follow.

The daily newspaper Takvim ran a fake interview with well-known CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour on its front-page on 18 June. Headlined “Dirty confession,” the bogus interview had Amanpour confess that CNN had slanted its coverage of Turkey’s protests “for money” and “under pressure from international lobbies.”
 
Ten days later, Takvim went so far as to file a complaint against CNN and Amanpour, accusing them of denigrating state institutions and using their coverage of the protests and “false news” to stir up hatred within the population. At the same time, a hostile campaign launched by Ankara’s mayor on Twitter against BBC correspondent Selin Girit set media and social networks ablaze and Girit found herself accused of being a British spy.

Website blocking and arrests

The old saying that “promises only mean something to those who believe them” has been well and truly confirmed in Zambia during the past two months. In June and July, the authorities blocked two news websites and arrested three journalists presumed to have been working for them or providing them with information.

On 24 June, the government blocked access to Zambian Watchdog, an independent news website that is based abroad and is critical of the current government. Its technicians reacted immediately by moving the site to a new domain name (http://zwd.cums.in) and Reporters Without Borders created a mirror of the site. Despite these measures, Zambian Watchdog is still inaccessible from within Zambia.

The authorities also arrested three of Zambian Watchdog’s presumed contributors: Thomas Zyambo, Clayson Hamasaka and Wilson Pondamali.

• Hamasaka is charged with possessing obscene material.
• Zyambo was freed provisionally after 48 hours in detention. He is facing up to seven years in prison on charges of sedition and “possession of seditious material with intent to publish.”
• Pondamali is facing a possible two-year jail term on a charge of “unlawful possession of a restricted military pamphlet.”

It was the turn of another independent news website, Zambia Reports, to disappear from the Zambian Internet on 16 July. Its staff received no explanation for this latest act of censorship. The blocking of the site was all the more surprising because in March 2012 the site agreed to a request from a member of the government to remove an article despite being under no legal obligation to do so.

Rampant surveillance

This recent wave of arrests and website censorship is the culmination of a new policy of intrusive surveillance in Zambia.

In September 2012, the Zambia Information and Communication Technology Agency (ZICTA) announced that it was implementing a requirement under the 2009 Information and Communication Technologies Act for all mobile phone users to register with their operators.

Each client now had to provide their name, the numbers of their national registration card and driver’s license (for Zambian subscribers), or passport and work permit number (for non-Zambian subscribers), their postal address, their email address and their SIM serial number.

The agency said the sole aim was to combat criminality but Zambian Watchdog insisted that “the secret service also known as Office of the President (OP)” was collecting all the data in order to identify government opponents.

The new surveillance measures are not limited to mobile phones. The NGO Global Voices reported in February that the Zambian government was working with Chinese specialists to install a system of Internet surveillance and control. It quoted an anonymous Zambian Watchdog source as saying:

They have already started their work (…) They have been visiting service providers so as to understand the topology of the network. For those who may not know, [this means] appreciating the network architecture, things like where the servers are so that they know [where] to install their interception devices.

The blocking of Zambia Reports and Zambian Watchdog is clear evidence that the new control devices are now in place. One of the security experts in charge of Zambian Watchdog’s website hosting said it was obvious from the way the Zambian authorities responded to the attempts to bypass the blocking that they were using filtering methods based on Deep Packet Inspection:

After twelve hours we could confirm that malicious traffic was not generated by the readers but was actively injected into the network when a reader was requesting content from the website www.zambianwatchdog.com and that this behaviour could only be explained by the presence of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) equipment inside Zambia.

Blurring the lines between government and media

The surveillance measures have been accompanied by pressure on the mainstream media. Shortly after Sata was installed as president, a dozen journalists with The Post Newspaper, one of the national dailies, were offered government jobs and the pay to go with it. One of The Post’s journalists told Zambia Reports:

We are living in fear because we don’t know whether to continue debriefing our bosses who in return report us to our government sources. What we’ve now resorted to is self-censorship; we kill these stories the moment we realize they implicate government officials.

Posts

We are posting two Zambia Reports articles that were published a year apart (available as PDF files). The first is the most recent one. Entitled “Zambia Requested to Stop Blocking Access to Websites” and published on 25 July 2013, it is an open letter to the information ministry from Zambia Reports in response to the blocking of its website.

It asks the ministry to explain the blocking. It calls for a National Assembly enquiry into online censorship. And it calls for the unblocking of Zambia Reports and all the other the other blocked sites. It also mentions Zambia’s use of Chinese help with installing an Internet surveillance system.

We are posting it here so that the Zambian authorities can read it (because Zambia Reports is still blocked within Zambia) and so that they can resolve what is perhaps no more than a misunderstanding.

The second article, entitled “Patriotic Front Heads Toward Confrontation with Online Media” and published on 25 July 2012, describes the decline in freedom of information in Zambia. Correctly foreseeing what lay ahead, the author concluded:

Despite a very low Internet penetration rate of just ten per cent, there are many people who fear that the government is determined to silence these Internet publications, depriving opponents of the ruling party of a voice to communicate their positions.

An “affaire d’état”

The “Bettencourt affair” began to make the headlines in 2007, when Liliane Bettencourt’s daughter set about trying to get Bettencourt declared a ward of court on the grounds those around her were exploiting her mental and physical frailty for personal gain. But what started out as a family affair quickly became an “affaire d’état.”

Recordings secretly made in her living room in 2009 and 2010 exposed dubious tax manoeuvres and links with politicians and judicial officials. What with secret funding of a political party, tax evasion, influence peddling, abuse of a person’s frailty, fraud and misuse of assets, the “Bettencourt affair” became a leading news story from the summer of 2010 onwards.

The judicial case was transferred to Bordeaux, where it resulted in more than ten formal investigations, including an investigation into former President Nicolas Sarkozy on suspicion of exploiting Bettencourt’s frailty for personal gain.

Affair within the affair – the recordings

Mediapart and Le Point published extracts from the secret recordings on 16 June 2010. The man responsible for them was the billionaire heiress’ butler, Pascal Bonnefoy, who wanted to provide evidence that advantage was being taken of his employer, then aged 86.

He handed the recordings over to Liliane Bettencourt’s daughter, Françoise, who in turn gave them to the Fraud Squad, which had been investigating suspected abuse of Bettencourt’s frailty since 2007.

Mediapart learned of their existence a few days later and, on the grounds that they contained information of public interest, decided to publish extracts that excluded “all allusions to personal privacy and intimacy.” Of more than 20 hours of recordings, Mediapart and Le Point published only one hour.

Court censorship and disproportionate sanctions

The removal of the recordings from the Mediapart and Le Point websites is the result a court’s opinion on the relative importance of privacy and the right to information of public interest. In its 4 July decision, the Versailles appeal court argued that revealing information of public interest can never justify an invasion of privacy.

“The requirement to inform the public in a democratic society, specified in article 10 of the aforementioned convention [European Convention on Human Rights], which could have been satisfied by investigative and analytic reporting carried out under the right to confidentiality of sources, cannot be justified by the dissemination of recordings or even extracts of recordings that were obtained by violating the right to privacy as affirmed by article 8 of the same convention.”

This ruling violates media freedom and does not accord with the judicial precedents established by the European Court of Human rights. The ruling in Fressoz and Roire v. France established that revealing information of public interest can justify a violation of privacy, contrary to the Versailles appeal court’s ruling.

The Versailles appeal court ordered Mediapart and Le Point to remove all the extracts of the recordings, even those that constituted evidence in other cases and allowed the public to learn of scandals involving leading politicians such as then budget minister Eric Woerth and former President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The Versailles appeal court’s decision also contradicts other European case law such as Vereniging Weekblad Bluf! v. The Netherlands (§43 and §44), on the absence of any requirement to prevent the publication of information that has already been widely disseminated, and Pinto Coelho v. Portugal (§38) on the journalist’s right to produce evidence of his claims.

The ruling in Público - Comunicação Social, S.A. and others v. Portugal made it clear that draconian financial sanctions – such as 10,000 euros a day – tend to push journalists to censor themselves. The court ruled: “Such an award [of damages of 75,000 euros each against four persons] would inevitably be likely to deter journalists from contributing to public discussion of issues affecting the life of the community and was liable to hamper the media in performing their task as a purveyor of information and public watchdog.”

For all these reasons, WeFightCensorship is publishing the content censored by the French judicial system.

Download all the recordings and transcripts.

Listen to a selection of extracts:

1. This passage from the Bettencourt recordings reveals the links that existed at the time between Nicolas Sarkozy’s legal adviser, the manager of Liliane Bettencourt’s fortune, Patrice de Maistre, and then Nanterre prosecutor Philippe Courroye. It concerns a judicial decision in the dispute between Bettencourt and her daughter. There are grounds for thinking that the Elysée Palace and De Maistre may have learned of this decision more than a month before it became public.

2. Cheques for three leading politicians are being signed. Liliane Bettencourt is giving 7,500 euros each to Eric Woerth, Nicolas Sarkozy and Valérie Pécresse (who at the time was a candidate for Paris mayor).

3. In this extract, De Maistre explains to his employer, Liliane Bettencourt, that he must go to Switzerland to close her bank accounts “before Christmas” because, on 1 January, the French government could obtain information from the Swiss authorities about the accounts of French taxpayers who are tax exiles. He is ready to transfer money from Bettencourt’s Swiss accounts to Singapore, another tax haven. As a result of the Mediapart and Le Point revelations, Bettencourt will have to pay the French government 100 million euros in readjusted back taxes.

The Versailles appeal court decision of 4 July 2013:

PDF : http://www.mediapart.fr/files/ArretVersailes-Bettencourt.pdf

Preceding court decisions

First decision: Paris high court

Liliane Bettencourt and her financial adviser, Patrice de Maistre, responded to the publication of the recordings by suing Mediapart and Le Point for violation of privacy on 22 June 2010. A Paris high court judge ruled on 1 July 2010 that the violation of privacy had to be defined by the content of the recordings and not just by the way they were obtained. Finding that the content was of legitimate public interest, the judge referred to article 11 of the Declaration of Human Rights and the Citizen and article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights expressing the need to reconcile freedom of expression and information with respect for privacy. He concluded that removing the recordings would constitute “an act of censorship contrary to the public interest.”

PDF : http://www.mediapart.fr/files/Ordonnance_Tribunal_de_Paris_0.pdf

Second decision: Paris appeal court

A few days later, on 23 July, a Paris appeal court upheld the high court judge’s decision, finding that the violation of privacy was minimal because the content published by Mediapart and Le Point concerned the management of Liliane Bettencourt’s assets and Patrice de Maistre’s professional activities. Mediapart had selected the content posted in order not to violate Bettencourt’s privacy.

PDF : http://www.mediapart.fr/files/Arret_Cour_dAppel_de_Paris_0.pdf

Third decision: Court of Cassation

The Court of Cassation quashed the appeal court’s decision on 6 October 2011 and transferred the case to the Versailles appeal court. The Court of Cassation found that recording private or confidential conversations without consent constituted a violation privacy that was not justified by the public right to information.

PDF : http://www.courdecassation.fr/jurisprudence_2/premiere_chambre_civile_568/898_6_21184.html