Censorship and Privacy (Week 11)

            In recent times, privacy and censorship have come under scrutiny, and information has become a critical asset to both governments and individuals alike gone are the days when people weren’t ultimately affected by what they saw or heard. Even to the point, it has become weaponized. Almost paradoxical, governments try to hide more, and individuals try to seek more. But what do we mean when we say censorship and privacy? In simple terms, censorship is when content is withheld upon a predetermined set of rules that are there to determine whether said content is obscene meanwhile, privacy is the capability of a person to hide their identity and by doing so they would reveal themselves minimally. In the following paragraphs, I entail interesting scenarios both in censorship and privacy that came into a general world view.

Ban of Twitter in Nigeria

         One of the captivating examples of censorship is when Twitter was banned in Nigeria from June 5^th, 2022, until January 13^th, 2022 [1]. During The End SARS protests on police brutality, and profiling, which occurred at the height of tensions in the African State, Twitter played a prominent role in the spread of information, it was used actively by the citizens of the state to share what they perceived as their truth, as regards whether the police murdered the protesters that fateful day, as the government vehemently denied such claims.

[source: https://lawglobalhub.com/twitter-ban-in-nigeria-what-happened-current-state-of-things/]

Tensions reached a peak when the former Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey. Took note of the heavy traffic coming from the African state, and actively came out in support of the protests much to the ire of the government. As he went as far as even contributing monetarily to the peaceful protesters. In retaliation, this led to nationwide censorship of Twitter as it was accused of heightening political unrest in the country through the spread of misinformation and was only lifted in 2022 as Twitter acceded to the requests of the government to set up a taxable office in the country where its activities could be monitored. In truth, this is probably a ploy by the state to be able to manipulate the firm when they need what they perceive as misinformation to be taken down from the site.

The Celebgate

         On the other hand, the iCloud leak known as “Celebgate” is one of the cases in which the privacy of multiple celebrities (especially the women) was violated on August 31, 2014 [2]. A few examples of celebrities are Miley Cyrus, Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence, and so on. There were multiple theories regarding how the hackers were able to steal such data from iCloud. One theory was that these pictures were being collected by one hacker and later on these pictures fell into the hands of another hacker who found a way to get access to the original hacker’s machine [3]. However, Apple claimed that the access was gained with the help of the spear-phishing attacks which denied the previous statements regarding the issue with the iCloud’s API [4]. This is surprising as Apple had a bug in Find my iPhone which let people guess the passwords multiple times without any recourse. Apple denied the fact that the breach was caused by the flaw in the Find my iPhone and briefly after they patched that issue.

Conclusion

         In conclusion, I discussed several cases in regard to censorship and privacy which included “The ban of Twitter in Nigeria” and “The Celebgate” event. This goes to show how information can be used, hidden, or stolen and that even celebrities are vulnerable and human just like the rest of us.

 

References

[1]	E. Akinwotu, "Nigeria lifts Twitter ban seven months after site deleted president’s post," The Guardian, 13 January 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/13/nigeria-lifts-twitter-ban-seven-months-after-site-deleted-presidents-post. [Accessed 1 March 2002].
[2]	"2014 celebrity nude photo leak," Wikipedia, [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak. [Accessed 1 March 2022].
[3]	"Naked celebrity hack: security experts focus on iCloud backup theory," The Guardian, [Online]. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/01/naked-celebrity-hack-icloud-backup-jennifer-lawrence. [Accessed 1 March 2022].
[4]	"Apple denies iCloud breach in celebrity nude photo hack," The Verge, [Online]. Available: https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/2/6098107/apple-denies-icloud-breach-celebrity-nude-photo-hack. [Accessed 1 March 2022].