Internet freedom

Wednesday marked the second and final day of the London Cyber Conference, hosted by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

Some have pointed to a disconnect between British foreign and domestic policy with respect to online freedom of expression. One UK member of parliament has called for new domestic Internet filters for pornography, in addition to other previous calls for powers to block access to social media services. Many activists and authors wrote an open letter to Britain's foreign minister, William Hague, calling on him to reject the new policy proposals and outlining their support for increased Internet freedom.

Deutsche Welle spoke with Peter Bradwell, a conference attendee and campaigner with the London-based Open Rights Group, which signed the letter.

Deutsche Welle: What are your impressions of the conference so far?

Peter Bradwell: I think it's great that so much attention is being focused not only on cyber security, but on freedom of expression and privacy. Many of the panelists have gone to great lengths to emphasize how important privacy and freedom of expression are. However, I think that the important thing is not only that we look at international standards, but also domestic policies to make sure that we're not undermining those international standards.

It seems that in the UK and the US, the left hand sometimes doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Just a few months ago, British Prime Minister David Cameron was calling for more restrictions on social networking, and here he is calling for more Internet freedom. Is there a split personality when it comes to policy here?

Absolutely. Perhaps it's easier for the FCO to notice how important Internet policies that uphold human rights online are. And perhaps it's difficult for the Home Office to recognize that the policies we make here can undermine those international inspirations. Whether it's in the counter-terrorism strategy that talks about blocking violent content online, or this inquiry into child protection, where we're talking about how we can block content that we might find undesirable, which are nonetheless legal. Those policies are very dangerous because they are forms of censorship that make it hard for other countries to step away from censorship and blocking.

Everyone at this conference knows that countries like Russia and China don't respect offline speech, so why should Western countries expect them to respect online speech?

It's obvious that there is an error - in that this discussion as to which countries have poorer domestic policies hasn't been on the table. Most generously you could say that this is part of a broader international discussion with those countries to say that they shouldn't fear the speech of their own citizens.

So, then, does 'Internet freedom start at home?'

Yes, absolutely. These are tricky, tough principles to live by, and it's easy to talk a good game on freedom of expression, but it's much harder to show that you're upholding these principles. That's why we wrote to the foreign secretary that if you don't look at the updates that the Home Office is updating with respect to privacy and communication intercepting, and if you don't look at default settings for content filtering in the UK, you can't go around the world saying, "You should stop filtering content," because then they will ask why you're doing that.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken before on Internet freedom, and in recent years the American government has been behind projects like the "Internet-in-a-suitcase." Do you know if the UK has taken on any similar projects?

I don't. But what has been interesting is that some of the research that has been done on surveillance technologies has often come from European countries. But just as with international arms trade, the trade often uncomfortably leads back to our own countries. That's really something that policymakers need to focus on - sales of surveillance materials to repressive countries.

Interview: Cyrus Farivar, London
Editor: Andrew Bowen