‘Cypertroopers’ use colonial-era law to silence online critics
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA— Online critics of the Malaysian government would be well advised not to spend too much money on cellphones.
“Just lost number four,” Eric Paulsen, an outspoken civil liberties lawyer and compulsive tweeter, said Nov. 20 after nearly two hours of questioning at the main police station here over his latest sedition charge.
Paulsen went into the police station with a shiny new Chinese handset, a Xiaomi, and came out without it. At least it was cheaper than the iPhone and two Samsung Galaxy smartphones that previously were confiscated from him this year, apparently because they are tools in his social-media activism.
His friend Sim Tze Tzin, an opposition parliamentarian who also was questioned that day, still smarts over the iPhone 6 Plus that was taken from him this year. “Don’t they know how much that thing cost?” Sim said, laughing, after emerging from his own session with the police.
Malaysia, ostensibly one of the United States’ democratic allies in Southeast Asia, is engaged in a broad crackdown on freedom of expression that detractors say is all about silencing critics of Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is embroiled in a corruption scandal. And the crackdown is particularly focused on online commentary, which is proving much harder to control than traditional media.
“The government has at least two intentions,” said Yin Shao Loong, who is executive director of the Institut Rakyat, a think-tank, and is aligned with the opposition. “One is to stifle freedom of expression. The other is to harass the opposition and sap their energy and tie them up in court cases that could take years.”
Najib’s government has been making heavy use of the 1948 Sedition Act, a remnant of the British colonial period, which makes it an offence to “bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against any Ruler or against any Government.”
Among the three dozen or so who have been targeted so far this year are Azmi Sharom, a law professor at the University of Malaya who gave his legal opinion on a 2009 political crisis, and Maria Chin Abdullah, the leader of the Bersih group, a civil-society organization that promotes electoral reform, who has been charged with illegal assembly and sedition for or- ganizing huge anti-Najib rallies in August.
Numerous opposition parliamentarians also have been charged with sedition, most of them for criticizing a federal court’s decision in February upholding the conviction of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on charges of sodomy. That case is widely viewed as political.
S. Arutchelvan, a socialist politician, was charged recently with sedition for comments he made in February. The wellknown cartoonist Zunar, who in Septem- ber won an International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, has been charged with nine counts of sedition for nine tweets criticizing the Anwar conviction.
“Prime Minister Najib Razak and the Malaysian government are making a mockery of their claim to be a rightsrespecting democracy by prosecuting those who speak out on corruption or say anything even remotely critical of the government,” said Linda Lakhdhir of Human Rights Watch. The government, she added, should stop using “repressive laws to harass the media and intimidate its critics.”
Critics of Najib describe an elaborate effort to silence them. The Malaysian government has long controlled newspapers and TV stations. Although the rising use of cellphones and social media has loosened the state’s grip on information, especially in rural regions, the government is trying to get a handle on the new technologies.
“There are lots of cybertroopers monitoring posts by opposition (members of parliament), taking screen shots of them and then circulating them and tagging the police chief,” said the opposition parliamentarian Sim, who is being charged for a tweet in which he mistakenly suggested that the former attorney general was manhandled out of office. Sim deleted the tweet when he realized that the photo included was an old one and said it was a genuine mistake. Too late.
“The cybertroopers wrote, ‘Arrest Sim. He’s giving the government a bad name,’ ” the legislator said.