Facing Unthinkable Threats to Online Speech
Extreme Violence in Mexico and the Middle East
This essay first appeared in the Internet Monitor project’s second annual report, Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World. The report, published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.
When the slaying of James Foley dominated headlines last August, I could not help but think of Marisol Macías Castañeda, the Mexican journalist whose severed head was found perched atop a computer keyboard in a city plaza, along with a note that read: “I am the Girl from Laredo and I am here because of my reports and yours.”
Macías had worked as the editor of a local newspaper, but prior her death in 2011 had also served as a leading contributor (under the pseudonym “La Nena de Laredo”) at Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, a volunteer-driven site where citizens can file reports of drug-related violence that they’d witnessed in the northern border region. Signed “Z Z Z,” the note beside Macías’ decapitated body attributed the act to the criminal syndicate Los Zetas.
Macías’ death was one in a series of brutal killings of northern Mexico residents who are using citizen and social media to report on drug violence. The tactics and visual presentation of brutality towards independent media workers by groups like the violent extremist organization known as ISIS are chillingly reminiscent of cases like Macías’.
Over the last four years, Syria and Mexico have been two of the most dangerous countries in the world for people doing journalism, regardless of whether they belong to established news outlets or report violence via social media. For years, large swaths of both countries have lain in unofficial jurisdictions controlled by highly organized groups of people, waging extreme violence in the interest of attaining power and profit.
The origins of these criminal organizations are distinct, as are the governments in these countries — human rights violations committed by the Syrian regime outstrip those of the Mexican government by several orders of magnitude, while the Mexican government has showed greater complacency in the face of cartels and organized crime than the Assad regime has toward ISIS. And although Mexico has paid lip service to the issue of extralegal threats to media workers, neither government has demonstrated a vested interest in protecting the rights and lives of these journalists. Both governments play a powerful role in enabling the conditions of possibility for these criminal organizations to thrive.
Caught between the brutality of these groups and repressive government tactics used to silence anyone seeking to uncover corruption or human rights abuses, many local journalists and news organizations have stopped reporting on these issues. In some cases, citizen media groups have stepped in to fill the void — projects like Syria’s Radio ANA and sites like Nuevo Laredo en Vivo in Mexico have taken on the challenge of telling these stories to the world. In some cases, this has proven fatal. For journalists like Radio ANA’s Rami al-Razzouk, who was kidnapped by ISIS fighters in autumn of 2013 and has not been heard from since, we simply do not know.
From the perspective of the media and Internet rights community, it is hard to see much good coming from directly asking groups like ISIS to stop persecuting media workers, much less anyone else. Though relatively scarce, campaigns addressing these issues tend to target government or intergovernmental organizations like the UN, or to raise public awareness about the problem, both worthwhile efforts, even if they reap limited results.
Among advocates for online rights, another common response to these events is something akin to paralysis. Stunned by the unthinkable nature of these acts, we find ourselves in a place where the tools and tactics that we typically deploy in the face of challenge seem useless. Our first thought is not, “this is a violation of the UDHR.” The response is emotional, not rational — we are human.
Above all, we are disposed to think of these groups as being “crazy” or “psychopathic killers,” as they’re often described. But in order to develop a logical strategy for change in the face of this threat, we may need to rid ourselves of this powerful idea. Their goals and tactics may seem inhumane and unthinkable to most people, but they are still acting rationally. Nobel laureate and economist Gary Becker once argued that people engage in criminal behavior “not because their basic motivation differs from that of other persons, but because their benefits and costs differ.” He argues that this determines their actions much more so than things like “biological inheritance,” “family upbringing” or “disenchantment with society.” This model may be useful in looking at the problem at hand.
When we develop an advocacy strategy, we map influential actors — government agencies, international organizations, tech and telecommunications companies, and human rights advocates typically fill in the grid. We identify their priorities, their strengths, their weaknesses. It is difficult to plug organized crime groups into this model — they’re outside the law, they’re not especially transparent, and it can be very difficult to figure out where they begin and where they end. But like most actors in our little grid, they seek to shore up power, money, and the kind of ideological influence that will help them to retain and expand their fields of power.
If we are going to campaign against this problem, or even write about it, we need to think in these terms. What government and intergovernmental policies and practices support the conditions that allow these groups to thrive? What are the economic drivers behind their dominance? Where do they get their weapons? Who supplies their fuel, food, water, housing? Who buys the drugs, weapons, and other goods that make up their business model? What surveillance technologies are they using to track the activities of media workers and human rights activists?
We must avoid becoming overly consumed by the activities of these groups where we see often see them first — online. And governments should, too — network shutdowns, online censorship, and mass surveillance have become routine responses to their acts that heavily infringe on the rights of all citizens to express themselves and report the news.
It may be time for open Internet advocates and citizen media groups start working in this frame of mind, a shift that could require us to zoom out from the increasingly narrow-seeming lens of fighting for digital rights. In the end, if we do not enjoy these rights “on the ground,” we do not truly enjoy them at all.
