Central and East European online environmentalism targeted

Fidanka and Eoin McGrath, a family soon expecting their first child, spent two of the hottest August days in a quite unusual way – having a friendly talk with police officials. Unlike the character of Bruce Willis who co-operated with hackers to save the nation in the summer Holywood blockbuster Die Hard 4, on a number of occasions authorities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have targeted environmental activists for things they did – or did not do – over the

internet. The McGraths were the last to experience that.

The young couple could make a micro case study of successful coexistence between

European integration and environmental sustainability. She – a Bulgarian environmental activist – and he – an Irish computer programmer – moved to Bulgaria’s

countryside to live on their own organic farm.

The family life was disturbed abruptly this summer, when the two were called in by

the local unit of the GDBOP – an abbreviation in Bulgarian for the Chief Directorate for Combat against Organised Crime. GDBOP is one of Bulgaria’s

special service agencies, which inherited the notorious communist State Security after 1990.

Eoin

was the first to take up the invitation and appear at the police station –

without a lawyer or translator – just to learn that he had been identified as

the author of a bomb-threat. The threat, sent in February from a Russian server

and signed by a non-existing environmental group, was popularised by mass media.

It warned that in retaliation for the environmental damages in Bansko, planned

explosions were ready to detonate and ignite a catastrophic avalanche over the

ski centre.

Eventually,

the police did not find any explosives but the operations in the resort were

disrupted for a few hours, media reported. Active environmental organisations

from the Save Pirin coalition, which had campaigned against the resort’s

development, condemned the threat as a provocation. The interrogating officers

urged McGrath to “admit”, because that would “make things easier”, the online

daily MediaPool reported.

Neither

Eoin, nor Fidanka McGrath admitted any involvement with the email threat during

the two days. “The police were friendly, but we don’t know whether this was an

interrogation technique or a speculation,” Fidanka told MediaPool.

The

investigating police officer refused the media any comments. The incident

sprang outrage among environmental campaigners, as it was the second in less

then a month when authorities were putting pressure on activists for allegedly

illegal online activities. “Internet communications were involved again by the

repressive organs [of the state] in order to prove how easy it is to organise a

terrorist act in Bulgaria,”

wrote Petko Kovachev – a colleague of Fidanka McGrath at CEE Bankwatch, and

founder of the Green Policy Institute in Sofia.

The

McGrath story looks like part of a true investigation, on a true illegal

matter. This could not have been said on a previous occasion, just a month earlier.

Criminalisation of green bloggers in Bulgaria

Michel

Bouzgounov was called in by GDBOP and advised in a similarly “friendly” way to

refrain from covering environmental protests in his blog. Street protests

against the brutal over-construction of the Black Sea coast, had reached their

peak in July, after the Supreme

Administrative Court in Sofia removed the protected status of the

country’s largest natural park Strandja.

The

court’s ruling greenlighted yet another major coastal hotel project. After the

“friendly” chat, the blogger had to sign an official warning that he would

“refrain from quoting other sources of information in his personal blog – when

possible violation of law is involved, namely, organising of unpermitted civil

protests”.

No copy

of the protocol was handed to him. Bouzgounov described the event in his blog:

“Yes, I wrote about Strandja. Because I care whether tomorrow this park will be

there or not! No, I did not call for riots, illegal action, violence or

anarchy!”

But

he vowed not to remain silent that a special service, supposedly dealing with

organised crime, has found the time, agents, and the money to “investigate

bloggers, free people, writing about Bulgaria’s nature, reporting on

future and past protests in its defense”.

The

intervention of the police against bloggers, expressing opinion or posting

information about the environment is completely unacceptable, said Dan

McQuillan – the coordinator of Amnesty International’s Irrepressible.info

internet rights campaign.

“Authorities

cannot clamp down on things written by bloggers, simply because they are

inconvenient,” he affirmed. Lawyers from the Access to Information Programme in

Sofia backed

his opinion. Publishing of information in the internet, including blogging, is

a form in which the right to freedom of expression is exercised, guaranteed by

the European Human Rights Convention and by the Bulgarian Constitution, the

organisation stated.

Bulgaria has not been the first in the region to

exercise pressure against online environmentalism.

Romanian

environmentalists watched online, visited offline

On March 12, 2004 the Romanian

campaigner Eugen David was called for interrogation by Romania‘s

General Police Inspectorate (GPI) for almost two hours. David is the president

of Alburnus

Maior – a non-profit

group carrying out a campaign against a gold extraction project in the Rosia

Montana region.

The activist claimed that the project

would involve the involuntary resettlement of over 2000 people and destroy

unique archaeological and natural sites. The police action was caused by the

posting online of a report, describing the impacts of the project over

archeological sites in the nearby Cirnic mountain. A complaint filed by the

report’s author for infringing author’s rights was the reason that got the GPI

to start preliminary investigation leading to a penal procedure.

According to an Alburnus Maior press

release the inception of the questioning did not clarify David’s statute or

role within the procedure. Throughout the meeting Eugen David was not given

access to the complaint; but instead was read random excerpts by the GPI

Commissioner.

The report “Ancient

Gold Mines of Dacia –Rosia Montana District” written by Beatrice Cauuet, a scholar

at the University of Toulouse in France, was the first proof of

valuable archeological findings in the potential gold mining site, explained

Stefanie Roth – a campaigner at Alburnus Maior.

Roth, who received the Goldman

Environmental prize for her campaigning work in Rosia Montana since 2002, was outraged by the

action of the police. “They were looking for one guilty person;

playing the good cop and bad cop; trying to single out who posted the report on

line”, Roth told. But the activists maintained their version – that the

campaign had more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world and anyone

of them could have posted it. A final ruling by the court that the publishing

of the report served public interest, brought a happy end to the case, Roth

recalled.

Fake campaigners and e-moles in Hungary

In Hungary, campaigners against the construction of

a NATO radar installation on the Mount

Zengo experienced a

softer but more deceitful touch at the hand of authorities back in 2004.

Fake news items were filed in the

Hungarian Indymedia – the independent online outlet of citizen journalists.

A contributor to the portal

presenting himself as a local citizen from Zengo kept submitting articles in

favour of the controversial radar construction project, said Fidusz, the

Indymedia editor at the time.

After checking the internet

protocol address of the sender, Fiduz realised the articles were sent from the

servers of the Security Investment Department of the Ministry of Defence – the

proponent of the NATO radar locator project. The case was publicised and did

not affect the campaign, which finally lead to the relocation of the radar from

Zengo, Fidusz recalled.

While a mole has been a most popular nickname

for undercover police informers in latest history, cyberage has created its own

prototype. Internet moles, or paid contributors to civil society online

discussion forums have become very common, said Laszlo Perneczky – Pepe, a

long-serving environmental activist from Hungary.

E-moles

are anonymous contributors propagating certain political or business interests.

They participate in almost every public online forum, just using their

nicknames; we sometimes even know who they are in real life and who pays their

salaries, but there is nothing we can do – it is all legal, and this is the

nature of the internet, Pepe commented.

Expansion

of copyrights

The

aggressive expansion of copyright and intellectual property rights pose another

major threat on internet freedoms, especially in the field of environment,

commented McQuillan.

Corporations have

already responded aggressively to the use of their logos in online campaigns, although happily, robust defences by

organisations such as Greenpeace have been resisting.

Websites

can be subject to take-downs through legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act – a form of legalised harassment and

disruption of campaign websites, he warned.

 “I am not surprised to see examples of

pressure against bloggers in Central and Eastern Europe,”

added McQuillan, explaining that the freedom of the internet, just like the

freedom of the press and all other freedoms we – probably wrongly – take for

granted. It will go through a long struggled before it gets established. “If we

do not constantly defend it, we shall have less and less freedom of internet

expression,” McQuillan warned.

International media and

activists notice

The threats on

online activism did not remain unnoticed by the international Internet rights

community. Already in 2004, the Romanian e-network Strawberry Net, which hosted

<www.rosiamontana.org>, alerted the Association for Progressive

Communications (APC) – the global civil society network supporting the use of

information technologies for social change.

APC has maintained

a fast response network for moving content under threat across national borders. In Bulgaria, APC’s member BlueLink.net

launched a campaign in support of the freedom of internet expression at

<freenet.bluelink.net>. As a network of environmental NGOs, BlueLink has

been hosting and providing online support to some of the major environmental

campaigns since 1998, including Save Pirin. Both Bozgounov and McGrath happen

to be the present and the former web managers of BlueLink.

“The FreeNet campaign demonstrates the

intersection between the online freedom of speech/internet rights dimension,

and the protection of the environment and citizen’s rights to public

participation,” commented APC’s Executive Director, Anriette Esterhuysen.

Since 2005, APC has launched an initiative to analyse and

promote the Aarhus convention globally, as

well as other instruments that bridge the policy gap between Information

Society and Environmental Sustainability, said Esterhuysen.

McQuillan has also identified a deeper

imperative arising from the nature of the information society, which is the

fact that the

internet itself is becoming an actor in many thematic fields of

activism, including the environment. An example for that is the Aarhus

Convention and the Pollutant Relase and Transfer Registers, which require the

posting of environmental information online.