Supporting a Safer Internet

“Revenge porn” — a colloquial term for the non-consensual distribution online of intimate images — plagues the lives of countless women (as many as one in three) worldwide.

Enabled by “a technological and cultural upheaval, which has placed a cellphone with a camera in every pocket and produced an audience for almost every post that makes its way into the digital world,” incidents are wide-ranging and involve some of the most difficult problems of our time, involving aspects of sexual trauma, victims’ rights, internet privacy and freedom of expression.

To understand how diverse legal systems address this growing form of online gender-based violence, this paper, the second in CIGI’s Supporting a Safer Internet project, analyzes the state of the law in three countries in the Global South.

Jun. 24 – 9:30 a.m. EDT (UTC–04:00): Please join CIGI and moderator Ruhiya Seward, senior program officer at the International Development Research Centre, in welcoming Grace Mutung’u, Michelle Bordachar and Nonhlanhla Chanza, who provided the case studies in the paper, to a virtual panel discussion. These experts will speak about the issue as it pertains to Kenya, Chile and South Africa, respectively, and offer recommendations and road maps for further action.

Although employee monitoring isn’t new, the rapid shift to online work during the pandemic has fuelled demand for remote surveillance technologies. Teresa Scassa warns that we need to move quickly to weigh the benefits that these proliferating technologies offer employers against their intrusions on privacy and other direct human rights costs to employees.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government recently announced new “IT rules” that give authorities power to ask tech platforms and digital news media to trace chats, break encryption and block content. In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen and Pranav Dixit, tech reporter for BuzzFeed News, discuss how the same rules used to target hate speech can also be wielded to stifle political dissent.

Other countries have spent years on widely publicized public consultations, reports and white papers that have led to informed, productive debate and legislation. Blayne Haggart and Natasha Tusikov argue that without a similar process for the proposed revision to the Broadcasting Act, presenting Bill C-10 to Canadians and asking them to “trust us” is unlikely to create good platform regulation.

As part of CIGI’s continued work on reimagining a modern Canadian national security strategy, we recently hosted and recorded an event with Vincent Rigby, National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada. Rigby discussed his role in supporting the government in responding to national security challenges in the twenty-first century, the evolving global threat landscape, the best practices emerging in allied states and Canada’s response.