Category Archives: Uncategorized

1May

Digital Rights 102: Highlighting the issues affecting Canadians

This post is the second in a series being hosted by TechSoup Canada, whose mission is to help Canadian nonprofits, charities, and libraries achieve greater impact through the effective use of technology. TechSoup Canada does this by connecting nonprofits to affordable technologies, so they can invest the majority of their resources into their mission, and by providing valuable learning resources so nonprofits can make smart technology decisions. In our last blog post for TechSoup Canada, we talked about how technology affects human rights for all. It both expands our ability to exercise our rights and facilitates new ways that they can be infringed. You can see evidence of how technology is changing our relationship to free expression, for instance, all around the world, from the growing prevalence of false news and disinformation coming out of Syria, to internet shutdowns in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon. By building our awareness of how our human rights are impacted online, we can become better equipped to protect and extend them. In Canada, we need only look at the current headlines to see proof that there are pressing digital rights issue — existing and emerging — facing communities across the country. Read on for a look a

24Apr

Digital Rights 101: Understanding how technology affects human rights for all

This post is the first in a series being hosted by TechSoup Canada, whose mission is to help Canadian nonprofits, charities, and libraries achieve greater impact through the effective use of technology. TechSoup Canada does this by connecting nonprofits to affordable technologies, so they can invest the majority of their resources into their mission, and by providing valuable learning resources so nonprofits can make smart technology decisions. Today, technology touches nearly every aspects of our daily lives, affecting our activities both on and offline. In many ways, tech empowers us to exercise our rights more fully by providing new opportunities to build connections and share ideas beyond our immediate community. The internet has expanded the possibilities for work, education, access to healthcare, and more. But these same technologies can unfortunately serve to infringe our rights. They can be used to surveil and silence marginalized communities at a scale that was never before possible. That is why organizations like Access Now are fighting to ensure that as technology advances, human rights protections advance along with it, and fundamental rights like privacy and free expression are maintained in digital spaces. The question of how technology shapes the way organizations and communities operate is vitally important. If you or your nonprofit haven’t started thinking about digital rights, here’s why you should:

Marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by digital rights violatio

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13Apr

Community Voices: Melanio Escobar is helping Latin American civil society stay safe and spread their message online

Español disponible aquí With only a few weeks to go until RightsCon Toronto, we are highlighting the vital work of our community members around the world in defending and extending human rights in the digital age. Melanio Escobar is a Venezuelan activist, journalist, and technologist working to protect secure communications and free expression online in Latin America. From 2013 to 2014, Venezuela was in great chaos, with months of daily demonstrations protesting the economic crisis and increasing restrictions on basic human rights. The government imposed heavy crackdowns, arresting hundreds of protesters — many of whom were young students — and denying them access to their families, friends, or lawyers. Melanio explained, “As a journalist, I couldn’t believe that traditional media didn’t show any of this on their TV and radio stations.” Venezuela experiences heavy censorship because the regime controls most of the country’s traditional media outlets. To fill the gap, Melanio used social media to inform people where the detained students and protesters were being held. The Maduro regime also started detaining people for speaking out on social media, and used a range of online surveillance tools to identify and track people to be jailed. “In the middle of that chaos, I found myself training activists around the country about digital security and how to avoid being tracked by the government,” Melanio said. Building on those efforts, he founded RedesAyuda, which uses tech and communications to empower NGOs and activists across Latin America. RedesAyuda supports civil society across the full human rights spectrum, from indigenous groups, to LGBTI communities, to civil rights and gender rights activists, and many more. “We believe that anyone fighting for freedom and the recognition of rights needs to be supported and protected,” Melanio said.

29Mar

Community voices: Ahmad Primo combats false news and disinformation coming out of Syria

We’re six weeks away from RightsCon, and as we put the final touches on our community’s most ambitious program yet, we are highlighting the vital work of our community members around the world in defending and extending human rights in the digital age. Ahmad Primo is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Verify-Sy, a platform to refute inaccurate and fabricated news coming out of his home country, Syria. While the organization officially started in 2016, its mission to dispute disinformation and disseminate accurate coverage of the Syrian civil war grew from Ahmad’s experiences years before that. Shortly after the 2011 uprising began, Ahmad began working with a website to report on human rights violations against protesters by the Assad regime. It didn’t take long for the government to arrest Ahmad and his colleagues, shut down the website, and delete the archives. In the years following, Ahmad worked under a pseudonym to provide accurate and reliable coverage of the political turmoil within his country. Despite his efforts to operate anonymously while both reporting and combating disinformation campaigns, he was targeted and arrested two more times. Through this courageous work — while witnessing the emergence of numerous non-official Syrian media institutions, many of which were sharing large amounts of news on a daily basis —  Ahmad founded Verify-Sy. According to Ahmad, “In the absence of censorship, there has been an unintended or deliberate confusion on public opinion regarding what is happening in Syria, sometimes through the dissemination of false news.” A very real consequence of this false news movement has be