Ordinary netizens – from bloggers to Facebook users – could be persecuted under the Philippines’ new Cybercrime Prevention Act. Credit: Kara Santos/IPS

By Kara Santos
MANILA, Sep 29 2012 (IPS)

A newly enacted cybercrime law in the Philippines has raised fears that not only online media but also ordinary netizens could be persecuted for exercising their freedom of expression.

Media groups have expressed concern that the law poses a threat to press freedom and limits freedom of expression in the country. Bloggers and social media practitioners also point out that the new law allows the government to shut down websites without due process, and makes Internet users liable for simply clicking the ‘like’ button on Facebook or re-tweeting something on Twitter.

Republic Act (RA) No. 10175, also known as the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, was signed into law by Philippine President Benigno Aquino III on Sept. 12. Actions now punishable as ‘cybercrimes’ include illegal access and interception of any part of a computer system without right, computer-related identity-theft, cybersex and child pornography, among others.

However, the law also broadens the coverage of libel as a content-related offense that can be committed by just about anybody using a computer.

Section 4 (4) of the Cybercrime Act deems as illegal any “unlawful and prohibited act of libel as defined in Article 355 of the Revised Penal Code, as amended, committed through a computer system or any other similar means which may be devised in the future”.

Libel is defined in Article 353 of the Revised Penal Code (RPC) as a “public imputation and malicious imputation of a crime, or of a vice or defect, real or imaginary, or any act, omission, condition, status, or circumstances tending to cause the dishonor, discredit, or contempt of a natural or juridical person, or to blacken the memory of one who is dead.”

Professor Luis Teodoro, who serves as deputy director of the Centre for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), says the new law actually strengthens an 82-year-old libel law that has been described by the United Nations Human Rights Council as “draconian” and “excessive”.

“At a time when the global trend is to decriminalise libel, the new cybercrime law is very regressive and takes us several steps backward,” Teodoro told IPS.

“In the age of new media, where ordinary citizens take to Facebook and Twitter as a venue for free expression, here is this absolutely objectionable law that gives agencies so much power to limit free speech,” he said.

He added that certain provisions of the law empower government agencies to take down or prevent people from seeing Tweets that have been deemed libelous, or even monitor activity on cyberspace, including private Facebook accounts.

The National Union of Journalists in the Philippines (NUJP) said that the enactment of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 betrayed Aquino’s commitment to transparency and freedom of expression.

In an interview with IPS, Secretary General of the NUJP, Rowena Paraan, called the law “sneaky”.

“Certain provisions in the law were not part of versions approved by the Senate and just suddenly appeared in the version that the president signed. These were not subject to consultations,” Paraan told IPS.

Many Filipinos are disturbed by the fact that the man allegedly responsible for this last-minute change, which lumps online libel with cybersex and child pornography, is notorious for plagiarising blogs, and recently elicited a spate of criticism from active netizens.

Citing Senate journals and interviews, investigative journalist and blogger Raissa Robles claims that Senator Vicente Sotto III pushed for the insertion into the law at the eleventh hour; an ironic twist, given various allegations that he copied parts of blog articles in previous speeches without crediting the bloggers.

Robles goes on to list some of the flaws in the law, including the difficulty of identifying the origin of libelous material, and extending the offending parties to those who “share” or “like” a post on Facebook or comment on articles agreeing with alleged libelous material.

“Historically, in the Philippines, it is the rich and the powerful who use libel as a weapon to suppress criticisms about them,” she added.

“Before the Internet came along, it was easier for the rich and the powerful to control criticisms. All they needed to do was buy a stake in newspapers, TV and radio. Or sue them. Now they have realised that the Web is beyond their control,” she wrote in a blogpost.

According to NUJP’s Paraan, anyone who uses the internet to express their opinions is now liable for what they post. Online statements posted on blogs and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, that can be interpreted as an attack on the reputation of an individual or an entity, may give rise to libel suits.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a statement Friday criticising the law, which, they say, “drastically increases punishments for criminal libel and gives authorities excessive and unchecked powers to shut down websites and monitor online information”.

“The cybercrime law needs to be repealed or replaced,” said Brad Adams, Asia director for HRW. “It violates Filipinos’ rights to free expression and it is wholly incompatible with the Philippine government’s obligations under international law.”

Various civil society groups have resorted to legal measures to stop government agencies from implementing provisions in the law.

“I’m quite happy that a lot of different groups have been questioning the threat to the rights of freedom of speech and due process and different provisions in the law,” Paraan told IPS, citing various civil society and blogger-led initiatives.

At the time of writing, at least five separate petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court, questioning the law’s constitutionality.

On Sept. 27 several bloggers and technology law experts hosted an online roundtable discussion on the Act using Google+ Hangouts. Netizens were able to view the live webcast via YouTube and send questions to speakers and lawyers through live chat and by using the #cybercrimelaw hashtag on Twitter.

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When Thai police raided the headquarters of the popular alternative news portal ‘Prachatai’ and arrested its executive director, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, back in 2009, the 46-year-old media worker was completely in the dark about her crime.

Premchaiporn claims she had never heard the expression “intermediary liability” before that fateful day.

“I had difficulty pronouncing and spelling this term correctly,” she recalled to IPS in a noisy canteen. “It was not easy to explain to people what it meant and I could not find the proper translation in Thai to explain its actual implications.”

Now she has had a harsh lesson in one of the more insidious aspects of censorship laws in the country. Intermediary liability falls under the 2007 Computer Crimes Act (CCA), approved by a parliament selected after the military coup in 2006, which threatens jail terms for those who allow the distribution of “prohibited” information in cyberspace.

A landmark verdict by the criminal court on May 30 found Premchaiporn guilty of neglecting her role as an “intermediary” by failing to monitor the comments on Prachatai’s online message board.

Her oversight resulted in a violation of the notorious lese majeste law, which threatens long jail terms for the publication of comments or actions deemed insulting to the royal family.

In justifying the verdict of a one-year suspended prison term for the media worker, presiding judge Kampol Rungrat brought into sharp focus the new responsibilities managers of websites, blogs and Facebook pages will now have to bear – to immediately censor “prohibited” comments posted on message boards.

As a webmaster, Premchaiporn was expected to bear the “liability of an intermediary,” the judge pointed out, adding that the she should have reviewed all messages on the website and removed any comments that were “prohibited by the CCA.”

It did not matter that the offending message had appeared at a time when Prachatai, then only five years since its launch and operating with a skeleton staff, was attracting between 20,000 to 30,000 users to a message board registering 2,800 comments daily, covering about 300 topics.

Since the country’s 18th coup in 2006, and the military’s ongoing domination of politics, scores of netizens were drawn to the website’s critical coverage of politics and forum for intense debates.

“This case was a test of how the criminal courts will interpret the CCA,” Teerapan Pankeere, Premchaiporn’s lawyer, told IPS. “This verdict should put all Internet service providers on (guard): they will have to seriously control and check messages posted on their website.”

The ruling comes at a time when Thailand is witnessing a rise in Internet traffic, with over 18 million of the country’s 66 million people online. The registered 14.2 million Facebook users partially explain why 27 percent of this Southeast Asian nation’s citizens are spending long hours surfing the net.

Thailand’s online business sector is also growing, with the global multinational Google helping 80,000 small and medium Thai companies “come on line to help improve their business” in the past year alone.

Many experts and press freedom advocates are growing increasingly concerned about the “chilling effect” draconian censorship laws are having on Thailand’s vibrant Internet community. Particularly worrying is a new wave of self-censorship that will likely gather speed as fear seeps into online fora.

“The guilty verdict for Chiranuch Premchaiporn, for something somebody else wrote on her website, is a serious threat to the future of the Internet in Thailand,” remarked Taj Meadows, spokesman for Google’s Asia-Pacific division.

“Telephone companies are not penalised for things people say on the phone and responsible website owners should not be punished for comments users post on their sites – but Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act is being used to do just that,” Meadows told IPS from his Tokyo office. “The precedent set is bad for Thai businesses, users and the innovative potential of Thailand’s Internet economy.”

The case has already created a “chill” on the message boards of many websites, and this self-censorship is going to worsen, warned Gayathry Venkiteswaran, head of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), a Bangkok-based regional media rights watchdog. “Thai websites that hosted web boards and forums have begun to take them down.”

Premchaiporn’s case came as yet another blow to the country’s netizens, who, aside from struggling under the military’s severe press regulations since the 2006 coup, have had to contend with efforts by a military-backed government to black out websites as part of a clamp-down on freedom of expression during bloody street protests in Bangkok in 2010.

Netizens have also had to endure the ministry of information and communication technology seeking court orders to shut down websites that supposedly violated the CCA.

According to Freedom Against Censorship, Thailand, a Bangkok-based media rights lobby, government officials have blocked close to 878,196 web pages since the 2006 coup, among them 90,000 Facebook pages.

The new burden on Internet intermediaries here places Thailand in the same league as other Asian countries such as Malaysia and India, which have passed laws that demand close scrutiny of online dialogue in response to the growing power of independent media. Some Asian governments such as China, North Korea, Singapore and Vietnam have been even harsher, authorising direct and often violent interventions against press freedom.

In Europe, by contrast, intermediaries are not held responsible for content posted on websites of which they are not the authors – an argument used by an international witness who appeared in the trial to bolster Premchaiporn’s defence.

One explanation for this difference is that Internet intermediaries here are mistakenly viewed as newspaper editors, who are subject to national press laws. “Thailand’s CCA is being used very much like the country’s press laws that hold editors liable for the content of their publications,” remarked Pirongrong Ramasoota, head of the journalism department at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, at a seminar on Internet freedom.

“You cannot treat intermediaries and web service providers as if they were newspaper editors,” she argued. “Till this difference is recognised, laws like the CCA will be used as roadblocks to slow down Internet traffic.”

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