Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Internet?

T.M.

In January 2010, web-based Arab LGBT magazine, Bekhsoos.com, published a series of articles celebrating a decade of LGBT activism in Lebanon. “It’s actually been over a decade,” says the magazine’s Arabic editor, Aphrodite. “We consider the registration of GayLebanon.com in 1998 as a marker of the start of an organized movement. But we wanted to celebrate the past decade in which most of the crucial developments occurred.”

Most of the commemorative articles featured a Top 10 listing of different categories: the most prominent hang-out places, the best LGBT publications, music videos, films, etc. Among these was one that listed the top seven online tools that played a major role in the LGBT movement and community-building from “ONElist that later became eGroups that later became Yahoo! Groups that branched off into other mailing lists” (Bekhsoos.com) to Twitter. Clearly, one cannot speak of sexual rightsⁱ activism in Lebanon without speaking at length about internet usage, as both are tied together at levels from personal identity and relationships to political activism and mobilization.

Lebanon’s internet users enjoy freedom of speech and access online, an advantage strongly contrasted with their neighbors in Syria and Egypt. Those two were listed in the top 10 worst countries to be a blogger (#3 and #10 respectively) in a report published last year by the Committee to Protect Journalists¹. Random arrests, detentions at the airport, even fabricated court cases commonly occur in Syria and Egypt against bloggers and website owners.

Jordan, long considered an exception with a booming IT start-up industry, has now succumbed to similar restrictions. On January 13, 2010, the Jordanian blogosphere woke up to the devastating news of a decision by Jordan’s Supreme Court to regulate websites through the already controversial Press and Publication Law. The court ruling came as the result of a public defamation suit against two Jordanian men who run news websites. Some journalists hailed the move as well-intentioned allowing “[journalistic] integrity to extend to the internet, as well as extending the rights of citizens for protection from attacks on their image to apply on the internet” (7iber.com). Most bloggers, however, are outraged at the restrictions such a move places on online freedom of expression .

In the midst of strongly censored neighbours, Lebanon enjoys online freedom that is hampered only by very slow and very expensive internet connections. The lack of infrastructure for broadband connections is the leading source of frustration with bloggers and online entrepreneurs, a group of whom launched “The Broadband Manifesto: Economic Growth and Social Development for Lebanon” (www.broadbandlebanon.org).

Their manifesto demands 100Mb connection speed (among other things) and that “citizens should be able to choose the services they wish and should have access to unrestricted information. Online content – ranging from governmentⁱ, media, culture, health, business, learning, entertainment, sciences, and inclusion – all need to be made accessible to all.”²

Internet regulationⁱ

What is noticeable in Lebanon is the lack of any stateⁱ or ISP censorship or cybercrimeⁱ laws when it comes to internet usage. In October 2006, the Ministry of Interior proposed a “Technology Committee” to draft a policyⁱ to regulate online fraud, cybercrimes, and pornography, but there was no follow up.

Access to internet pornography is widespread in internet cafes, and sites such as Pornhub.com, Redtube.com, youporn.com, and livejasmin.com are consistently among the Top 30 on Lebanon’s Alexa.com rankings. One article on the popular online news site NowLebanon.com made a reference to these websites on Valentine’s Day, advising women to “pull up the blinds and settle down in front of the computer for some RedTube before bed.”³

Online pornography usage is especially common in internet cafés (known as “networks” in Lebanese Arabic) where fees are cheap (~$0.66 per hour) and opening hours extend late into the night. A combination of online pornography, network games that promote violence (such as Counter Strike), swearing, smoking, and alcohol consumption have caused parents think of internet cafés as unsafe spaces for their daughters. These factors add to the gender inequality in using and becoming familiar with technology, as girls from working classes whose families cannot afford computers or an internet connection are denied access to cheap internet cafés.

The Open Net Initiative published research in 2009 that looked at internet filtering in the Middle East and North Africa and determined that “Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank do not currently filter any material […] Some internet café operators in Lebanon have admitted to using surveillanceⁱ software to monitor browsing habits of clients under the pretext of protecting security or preventing them from accessing pornography.”⁴

On all university campuses in Lebanon, wireless internet connections are censored using different techniques from keyword filtering to site blockage and bandwidthⁱ limitations. At the American University of Beirut a number of websites are filtered by keywords such as “lesbian” or “porn”. On the same blockage page, the university links students to a request form should they wish to report the website as safe and remove it from filtering.

In September 2009, an Islamic search engine, ImHalal.com was launched with pre-filtered search that allowed Muslims to avoid surfing across any website that wasn’t Halal (i.e. permissible within Islam). Bekhsoos.com reported on the new website noting that:

“Nipple” will get you a Haram (i.e. sinful) level 1 out of 3, while “breast” gets you 2 out of 3. When I first checked the site in August, “lesbian” would get you a 3 out of 3 Haram level (in red!) but now it’s been reduced to level two. Fastest Ijtihad (i.e. process of re-interpreting the Qor’an) I’ve ever seen.⁵

The sexual rights movement

The laws governing sexuality in Lebanon are conservative, as is the general public discourse (of all religions) around sexuality. Homosexuality can be punished with up to two years in prison under Article 534 Lebanese Penal Code. Two years in prison is the same sentence for rapists, whose charges are dropped if they marry their victims. Abortion (without a death risk to the mother) is illegal under Articles 539-546. Sex outside of marriage is strongly discouraged. Proper sexual education is not available in either public or private schools (with the exception of a few upper class private schools).

The domain nameⁱ www.gaylebanon.com was registered on September 29, 1999 and is considered one of the first manifestations of an organized LGBT movement. Gay and lesbian activists and individuals who were unable to come out publicly were able to use the website to find information, resources, links to chat rooms and mailing lists, and a connection to a larger community.

On April 3, 2000, a vice squad conducted a raid on the offices of Destination, the Beirut ISP wrongly associated with the website. Ziad Mughraby, owner of Destination, was interrogated to reveal names of people responsible for gaylebanon.com but did not have the information the Hobeish Police Station wanted.

A human rightsⁱ organization MIRSAD (Multi-Initiative on Rights: Search, Assist and Defend), led by Kamal Batal, took up the case issuing a press release highlighting “the unlawful attempts by the police to interfere in the freedom of the internet and the freedom of expressionⁱ of the gay community.”⁶ Both Batal and Mughraby (who are civilians) were then transferred to a military court and charged with “tarnishing the reputation of the vice squad by distributing a printed flyer.” They were eventually released with fines of USD219 each.

Gaylebanon.com is the only Lebanese website known to have been prosecuted and to face a court case, albeit against the only two people the police could find who were remotely connected to the owners. The website, registered in the US survived as a portalⁱ of knowledge and paved the way for many other websites. The most popular tool used on the internet was the mIRC chatroom, #gaylebanon. In an interview, one of the operators, T.M., explains the complexities of individual privacyⁱ, security, risk, and protection at the time:

“I joined #gaylebanon in 2000 and was made an operator because I had a cable internet connection and spent a lot of time online, so I could moderate (and) keep an eye on the room. Hundreds of gay men (and a few women) would flood in every night. You could find many of them online during the day time too. Most of the connections made were for casual sex, but people forget that friendships and partnerships also started in that chat room. It was a sense of community for all of us, a virtual living room where we all hung out. At least once a night, a homophobic person would enter and be verbally abusive to people, so I would kick him out. Every once in a while, someone would warn people that one of the nicknames is an undercover cop or thief. And we’d always hear stories about this guy who got blackmailed, that guy who got a gun pointed to his head, but they were a lot less than the stories about guys who were lying about their sexual preferences (eg. claiming to be tops when they are bottoms) and those were more important to us. My theory is that the sheer number of users provided protection for all of us. You can scam one person, but he will warn the other 1000.”

Online meetings led, inevitably, to offline in-person meetings. With time, and particularly during 2001 and 2002, the LGBT community delved into heavy patterns of “meetings,” which was used in Lebanese Arabic to denote going to meet someone whom you know online. While many criticised this phenomenon a being merely gay men cruising and looking for sex, underneath these meetings were forming a network.

Across the past decade, there have been many LGBT groups that have been known as the “activist communities”, many facilitated by encounters that took place at #gaylebanon on mIRC. Out of this group came those that founded ClubFree, an underground grassroots community that organized social activities for LGBTs, and the first formally organized structure for the LGBT community.

In contrast to other issues around sexuality, the gay rights movement was able to capitalise on these developments because of a shared identity and this underlying network.

Crowdsourcing as research methodology

What is clear about the internet is that it is currently one of the world's fastest-changing media. The rules of engagement change very quickly, as demonstrated by Jordan’s latest decision to control freedom of speech online. To answer the question of “why does Lebanon not apply offline censorship rules to cyberspaceⁱ?” online crowdsourcing emerged as an appropriate tool.

The basic idea of crowdsourcing is to throw out a question or problem to a crowd using internet tools and expect the best solution to come out of that process (either one person finds the answer or a group of people do collectively). Therefore, we published a blurb about the research online⁷ and spread the word (mainly through twitter) seeking tips, contacts, links, and opinions related to the topic of the lack of internet censorship in Lebanon.

The methodology has proved interesting, though it requires a lot of follow-up in terms of asking people to help spread the word online. After a number of tweeps⁸ cried out “don’t wake a sleeping giant,” some people left comments, but a larger number sent in thought-provoking emails (to guard their anonymity and to keep the information private). One example of an anonymous email cited:

“[The Telecommunicationsⁱ Minister] is seeking a filtering system from Saudi Arabia to implement in Lebanon. Then, he would be able to ban pages but also keywords. He has purchased the system (hardware and software) and installed it. They tested it once and the whole internet was down. The links not passing through Ogero [Lebanese phone company] continued working fine and Ogero claimed it was a global failure. They have been testing again to have it running and the political deadlock has prevented the censorship from going into effect right now. The Minister wants all ISPs to go through Ogero not only to get the government more money from the Internet, which he could have one through a tax. The main goal is to have a hub where they will be able to monitor and control the Lebanese internet. I don’t have a lot of proofs, but maybe you can use some of my leads and talk with people in ISPs to get more information. ISPs are required by law to keep a log of the http requests of their users. That means they know if you visited google, facebook, alfa, makebombs.com or porn.com.”

Over the next few months, the research team will be seeking out more contributions from internet users over internet filtering to try and get a sense of the contradictions between freedoms and online restrictions.