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Rise of digital repression?
Twenty-three years after Soeharto told the nation he “quit”, both the hope for a more democratic Indonesia and the utopian vision of an egalitarian cyberspace seem to be far off from reality.
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A cyber security researcher canceled a hacking conference briefing on how he said he could crack biometric facial recognition on Apple Inc (AAPL.O) iPhones. (Shutterstock/Hadrian)
W
hen students took to the streets of Jakarta in 1998 to bring down an aging despot that had ruled the country for more than 30 years, the event was heroically described by an American political scientist as “the first revolution using the internet”.
Scholars may now debate whether the internet played a crucial role in ending the New Order regime, but there was no doubt that the new communication technology was then expected to reshape Indonesian politics in the following years.
With the spirit of reformasi (reform) engulfing the nation in the early noughties, the general mood was buoyant that the “liberation technology” would only foster democracy in the country.
Twenty-three years after Soeharto told the nation he “quit”, both the hope for a more democratic Indonesia and the utopian vision of an egalitarian cyberspace seem to be far off from reality. We are neither more democratic nor digitally liberated.
It has become a consensus among scholars that Indonesian democracy is regressing, with the political space for dissent shrinking, both offline and online. In the past few years, we have seen a slew of cases in which government critics and political dissenters have been charged and convicted with online defamation or spreading hoaxes. Some of them have also been fallen victims of various forms of digital intimidations.
The latest incidents of digital harassment befell a group of graft activists critical of a controversial plan by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) leadership to fire 75 of the agency’s employees, including top investigator Novel Baswedan, for failing to pass civics tests that are widely criticized for containing irrelevant if not absurd questions.
The victims include former KPK commissioners-turned-government critics Busyro Muqoddas and Bambang Widjoyanto and several members of the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), which organized an online event featuring the two ex-KPK leaders. The webinar was disrupted by trolls posting pornographic images and videos, while Busyro, Bambang and ICW activists claimed their WhatsApp accounts were compromised.
On Thursday night, Novel claimed on Twitter that his Telegram account had been taken over by an unidentified party. About an hour later, Febri Diansyah, a former ICW activist and KPK spokesman, announced that he could not access his WhatsApp account. Both Novel and Febri were highly critical of the current KPK leadership.
The attacks on Novel and other graft activists are not the first incidents. They were used in the past to harass those opposed to the revision to the KPK Law and the passage of the Job Creation Law. Those voicing their criticism over how the government has been handling security issues in Papua and the COVID-19 pandemic have also had their share of being digitally harassed. Some of them had their credentials stolen, others were hit by robocalls or received threatening text messages.
It is extremely concerning that digital intimidation is set to become normalized as a new method of deterring citizens from expressing their opinions online, especially when they are seen as critical of the government or the powers that be.
To be clear, there is no evidence showing that any state institutions were implicated in these digital attacks, but the government has the obligation to investigate these incidents. They will and should not be taken lightly, for our online freedom is now at stake.
