Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference: Not your ordinary discussion on business and human rights

Call me an optimist. Over the past decade I have attended several conferences dealing with business and human rights in many parts of the world, and at many places the conversation stays on the ground floor.

Do human rights matter to business? Is it an issue for business? Should business do anything about it? Isn’t it for the government to deal with?

Then a delicate, intricate pas de deux between non-governmental groups and businesses follows: should they talk to each other at all? When they do talk, they sometimes talk past each other, restating existing positions. They sometimes haggle over the agenda, over who else is being invited. And they debate if the standards should be voluntary (companies’ preference) or mandatory (the NGO preference). This cycle goes on – it keeps conversations moving, but it keeps progress at a glacial pace.

I am in San Francisco, near Silicon Valley, where things are supposed to move at Internet speed, where explosive growth is taken as the norm, and the disruptive nature of technology is considered as given. I was invited to speak at this week’s Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (organised by the NGO Access Now), where the tone of the dialogue, and the level of conversation, has been in marked contrast to what I have seen with similar conversations in other industries. Here are some impressions of what I saw and heard.

First, there are the individuals confronting real human rights challenges. The Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd el Fattah, who faces possible prosecution in Cairo from the military regime, is here urging companies to support the Arab Spring. There is Rosebell Kagumire from Uganda, who has used Internet-based technology to tell stories of violence against women.

Maria al-Masani from the Yemen Rights Monitor, applauded the audience for their commitment, and ended her presentation, quoting from a verse in Arabic: “One day our darkness will cease. The rays of light can reach the farthest sky. That is our dream.” Then she paused, and added: “Let's illuminate the world,” and the lights dim, and the screen comes alive with a woman from Yemen, on a live feed, speaking from a protest where a day ago ten people had been killed, thanking Silicon Valley for providing the tools and technologies that have kept the bright flame of the Arab Spring alive. Behind her is a banner with the logos of Skype, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook – companies that didn’t exist two decades ago.

Think of that for a moment: it would be nearly impossible to find a victim of oil pollution, or a survivor of a massacre by security forces, or someone who was forced to work against his will, at such a gathering. If at all, such individuals would be protesting the industry. Here, they are urging the industry to do more. And the industry is listening. If Silicon Valley has a governing ethos, it is creative destruction. The industry does not like limits, and wants to figure out new ways to make user experience richer.

We heard many examples of such efforts. Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of Mozilla, talked of ways to conceive of technology that can help human rights defenders discover safe spaces on the Internet so that they can continue their work without the government going after them.

Dorothy Chou, a policy analyst at Google, explained how its transparency report forced the Indian Government to drop an annoying amendment which would have required Internet intermediaries to take down content, because a young parliamentarian in India complained that his government was making too many frivolous complaints about the Internet.

Two techies – Jim Fruchterman and Patrick Ball - realised how human rights defenders lacked software tools that allowed them to tell their stories better, and created a service that helps the groups do just that. “We are geeks, and our job is to help them,” Fruchterman says, describing Benetech and Martus, a global justice monitoring system. And Mary Wirth, senior counsel at Adobe, thinks of creative ways a company can say no to an oppressive government, when it seeks sensitive data, by saying that the data is simply not within their domain.

But it is not a mutual admiration society. Rebecca Mackinnon reminded the audience that with great power comes great responsibility. She showed images of Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and the late Steve Jobs – icons of this landscape – and raised uncomfortable questions about the choices these companies have made. These include taking down content to meet community standards, complying with government requests to take down certain sites or provide information on users, making it harder for human rights defenders to use the web anonymously, and not caring about the consequences of how a product might get used by the state.

So just as these companies have provided technology that enables the protection and defence of human rights, there are other companies, which are providing surveillance equipment and censoring and filtering software tools to governments that seek to establish control. Open Net Initiative’s recent report, West Censoring East, shows how western companies have provided technology to authoritarian governments to suppress human rights. And governments, which were caught unawares, are themselves coming up with sophisticated ways to beat the system, by creating false identities to infiltrate spaces on the web that users consider safe, and by spamming accounts, which interfere with the government’s political project.

It is wonderful that companies burn midnight oil thinking of ways in which they can defend freedom. Victoria Grand of YouTube said she and her colleagues have long internal debates and arguments about whether or not to take down specific content because a government, or a community has requested, and how they prefer to err on the side of freedom. Welcome though that is, protection of human rights is too important to be left entirely in the hands of executives of companies that want to do the right thing.

A clearer framework that can defend companies’ right to say no to governments, in order to protect free speech, is necessary. The Global Network Initiative is a welcome development, which Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google – all companies that have learned the hard way how to deal with difficult governments – are part of, along with NGOs, academic institutions, and experts.

More companies need to be part of this effort – companies from other sectors, like telecom, and companies from other parts of the world, such as Europe, Asia, and elsewhere – so that those who speak truth to power, in Tunis, Cairo, Sana’a, Yangon, Beijing, Caracas, Kampala, Pyongyang, and elsewhere, even in Washington, London, and Paris – know that they are never alone.