Lebanese Security Agency's Request Threatens Citizens' Right to Privacy

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Lebanese Security Agency's Request Threatens Citizens' Right to Privacy

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an interim member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, on 7 December 2012.]

A controversy arose in Lebanon this past week over revelations that the country`s Internal Security Forces (ISF) demanded the content of all SMS text messages sent between 13 September and 10 November of this year, as well as usernames and passwords for services like Blackberry Messenger and Facebook. The requests were submitted to the Ministry of Telecommunciations. 

Lebanon`s Telecommunications Minister, Nicola Sehnaoui, took to Twitter on 3 December to rally his followers against the privacy-invasive data request. “RT, SHARE, EMAIL, BLOG,” Sehnaoui urged. “Use ANY means you find fit to say `As a Lebanese Citizen I refuse to give up on my Internet Privacy` #ProtectPrivacy.” Retweeted more than 300 times, his post seemed to capture the attention of those not yet aware that the ISF`s Information Branch had issued this outrageous blanket demand for digital communications data. 

The debate is politically charged, and there are many factors at play. But at the end of the day, this ISF request represents an egregious privacy violation of millions of Lebanese citizens. 

"To catch a killer, you don`t put everybody under accusation until you find the killer,” says Mohamad Najem, cofounder of an organization that provides social media consulting to Lebanese non-profits for political empowerment. “It is not acceptable for the ISF to dig into who was talking to whom on mobile applications." 

Al-Akhbar, a daily Arabic paper, quoted Sehnaoui`s description of the data request. “They want user data: the usernames and passwords of Lebanese who use the Internet in Lebanon, in addition to information about service providers and entry points to the Internet,” the minister said. “Surely, we cannot agree to making such information available and violate the privacy of Internet users.” 

As-Safir, another Lebanese newspaper, reported that the matter had been referred to Lebanon`s Council of Ministers. 

While the news about the data request broke this week, the request was made earlier this year. The ISF justified its overbroad request by saying it would help generate leads in the investigation of a fatal car bombing that occurred in Beirut on 19 October. In that attack, the intelligence chief of the ISF and a senior official linked to Lebanon`s anti-Syrian regime camp, General Wissam al-Hassan, was killed. 

Rather than request user data only for persons suspected to be linked to the attack, the ISF apparently attempted to collect the information of every single mobile subscriber and Internet user in Lebanon. This constitutes an outrageous violation of privacy, and the hundreds of tweets reflecting the #ProtectPrivacy hashtag demonstrate that Lebanese citizens and supporters around the world are taking a stand against it. 

"I don`t think the council of ministers will approve the request,” Najem speculated, “but I`m worried that they will get to a middle ground and hand over the SMS data. If they give them the SMS, it will reveal for 3.7 million mobile users in Lebanon who texted whom, when, and the contents of the messages." 

The ISF`s response to the criticism has been to trot out the oft-repeated false dichotomy between individual privacy and security. According to an As-Safir newspaper article highlighted on the independent news site Lebanon Now, “A high-ranking security source … [who] requested to remain anonymous, told As-Safir that the state has to choose [whether] security in general or preserving [people`s] privacies are priorities.” 

Meanwhile, questions about exactly what the ISF asked for – and, for that matter, whether the security agency could even obtain the information it sought simply by asking a Lebanese government agency – seem far from settled. 

In an article published on 5 December by The Daily Star of Lebanon, an unnamed senior security official confirmed that the ISF had requested the content of all text messages sent in a two-month time frame overlapping the attack – but denied that the ISF had asked for any Internet-based information at all. 

At the same time, the independent news site Elnashra published a set of documents earlier this week that it described as “leaked official documents that specify the request that was provided to the Ministry of Information.” The above link takes you to Elnashra`s news site, where Arabic documents are displayed with relevant English words inserted. The first few lines of the Elnashra article are translated into English below: 

“This leaked request asks the Ministry of Information to turn over the contents of all `Data Sessions,` meaning the data sessions of all 3G and 2G data subscribers in Lebanon. These include log files. The log files detail access to Internet websites and IP addresses. Aside from the log files, the requests ask for usernames, phone numbers, addresses, names, passwords, and so on. The request asks for personal information including the applications that are used on the mobile phones of subscribers. The request asks for all data of this nature within the time-frame of 13/9/2012 until 10/11/2012.`” 

And Senhaoui has stated that the government doesn`t even have all the information the ISF is after. “There is some data which can be collected by the ministry, but the rest must be gathered directly from the companies involved,” he told Al-Akhbar. 

EFF is concerned about the privacy implications of this overreaching request, and stands with Lebanese citizens who are standing up for their right to privacy on the Internet. 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412