Session
This informal, collaborative session organized by the Freedom Online Coalition's Working Group 1 'An Internet Free and Secure' aims to encourage an open discussion among a number of organizations and individuals engaged in cybersecurity and human rights on approaches to mitigate the potential risks that cyber threats and responses, as well as cybersecurity policies/strategies, can pose to human rights.
The discussion will investigate the importance of ensuring that cyber policies and responses are rights-respecting by design and explore both theories of cyber harm and the various tools and frameworks that have been developed to date to measure, assess and compare regional and other differences in understanding harm to human rights.
It is hoped that the session will not only help to enable better collaboration in the field, but that the findings from the session would be used to develop the WG's future priorities and work.
Understanding Cyber Harm: the Human Rights Dimension
Session report
This informal, collaborative session was organized by the Freedom Online Coalition Working Group 1 'An Internet Free and Secure' with the aim of encouraging an open discussion among a number of organizations and individuals engaged in cybersecurity and human rights on approaches to mitigate the potential risks that cyber threats and responses, as well as cybersecurity policies/strategies, can pose to human rights.
The session was well attended by a cross section of stakeholders from government to regional organizations, civil society representing all regions. The discussion was wide-ranging, delving into a number of key questions as follows:
● How can stakeholders better understand and measure cyber harms?
● Is ‘harm’ understood in the same way - nationally, regionally, globally?
● Which parts of society face greater threats and harms than others - particularly individuals and groups at risk
● Is online abuse the same as offline abuse – is it a cyber harm (or just a harm)?
● How is the individual impacted by cyber attacks, cyber responses and cyber policies and how can such harms be better understood and assessed?
A number of key issues were touched upon in the discussion. Cyber harms is a complex and ill-defined field with only one or two approaches that attempt to establish process and measurement-based methodologies for its fuller analysis (including Oxford’s excellent Cyber Harm Model: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/cybersecurity-capacity/content/cyber-harm-conc…). Cyber harms will be interpreted and understood in differing ways depending on, among others, cultural, linguistic and societal differences around the globe – and this is compounded by similarly differing views on rights. Cyber harms can be inflicted by institutions, policies, persons, processes and a range of other initiators; they can also be inflicted on individuals and groups at risk, be gender and sexual orientation based, etc., all with devastating impact. Finally, there were concerns that the identification of cyber harms could also be used to further undermine rights through ever more harmful rights-impinging cyber measures.
The session concluded that there remained much to do and elaborate. Further work could include more study and elaboration of the theories of cyber harm and development of measurement tools and frameworks to assess and compare regional and other differences in understanding harm to human rights. It was also hoped that the session would not only help to enable better collaboration in the field, but that the findings from the session would be used to develop future priorities and work, including a possible proposal for a formal workshop at the IGF in 2019.
The full discussion can be found in the transcript and video recording here: https://www.intgovforum.org/content/igf-2018-day-2-salle-viii-understan…;