BETWEEN THE PULL OF PATRIOTISM AND SELF CENSORSHIP

Monde in New York, on 17 September 2001. In fact today, while countries throw themselves into a fresh military operation, the vigilance of organisations defending human rights and individual freedoms are all the more needed.

A number of regimes find the temptation too great to exploit the genuine emotion produced by these attacks on the United States on 11 September to restrict freedom of the press and more generally to silence domestic opposition under the cover of the struggle against terrorism. In countries such as Pakistan, Israel, Territories under Palestinian Authority or Liberia, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has recorded several incidents of press freedom violations directly linked to the events in America. While avoiding all linkage with these regimes, RSF also makes public here a serious of episodes affecting press freedom in the United States between 11 September and 7 October 20001, the date of the American military counter-attack. Most of them have been reported and commented on by the American press or by specialist Internet sites. Are these incidents of censorship or self-censorship? Are we witnessing a deliberate policy on the part of the authorities or a choice made by the main media themselves? What do American and foreign journalists working in New York think? What about organisations that defend press freedom? To try to answer these questions, two representatives of RSF went to the United States and meet representatives of the media, human rights organisations and US press specialists.

The first suspect: Internet

The unprecedented scale of the attacks on New York and Washington, and the presumed use by the terrorists of advanced computer technology, prompted fears among internet users of a tightening of web surveillance, as called for by the security services. A number of sources report that a few hours after the attacks on 12 September, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents turned up at the headquarters of the main internet providers (Hotmail, AOL, Earthlink, etc) to obtain information on possible email exchanges between the terrorists. Technicians working for these companies have said off the record to the American online magazine Wired that FBI agents wanted to install the electronic bugging system "Carnivore" (recently renamed DCS 1000) on the main computer of internet access providers based in the United States. "From Tuesday evening FBI agents showed up at our workplace wanting to set up their machines. They promised to pick up the tab for all the costs of installation and use". Another one working for Hotmail said that the FBI had asked for, and obtained, from company executives all information on accounts, whose names included the word Allah. All the major Internet access providers appear to have followed Hotmail¹s example and fully collaborated with the American secret services.

Once installed at an Internet access provider Carnivore can record and save all information exchanged between users. Under strong critical pressure from defenders of individual freedoms in the United States, the system had never been used until now except with the advance agreement of a judge. The "Combating terrorism Act" voted through after a half-hour debate in the Senate on 13 September, barely two days after the attacks, exempts the security services from judicial approval for the use of Carnivore. To become law this act has still to be approved by a joint commission of members of the Senate and House of Representatives.

In the same vein, a number of US leaders have started attacking encryption. This procedure allows internet-users to enjoy confidentiality when exchanging information on the Internet with the use of encryption software. the best known being PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), which can be freely downloaded from a number of sites. Already last March the head of
the FBI Louis Freeh said he was convinced that terrorist networks were using encryption. On 13 September the Republican senator Judd Gregg called in a speech to Congress for a worldwide ban on encryption software unless public authorities had been given the means to decode the messages. "One could fear that the authorities could take advantage of the emotion of the