Letter to the editor 10/3/2013

To the Editor:

Thanks for the detailed coverage of Agibail Salisbury’s lecture last week about her experiences in Ethiopia. I wanted to clarify my comments about the ban on Skype in Ethiopia in your Sept. 26 article “Ethiopia bans access to student’s critical article.” Many, including myself, first thought that these actions were targeting freedom of speech, but that was not the full story. On May 24, 2012, Ato Shimelis Kemal, the Ethiopian minister of state at the Government Communications Affairs Office, clarified that “the use of VoIP, including Skype and Google Talk and similar services was not banned and that the proposed law was aimed at controlling service providers that operate illegally to generate revenues through these services.”

The digital revolution is exploding in Africa, as it did 15 years ago in the U.S. African governments are trying to adapt to a new cyber context where outdated laws do not reflect current realities. How does a government regulate an entity, like the Internet, that knows no sovereign border? As recent NSA revelations have shown, our own country is also trying to come to grasp how to respect our Constitution but also keep the nation safe from terrorists. And like in the U.S., countries like Ethiopia are quickly trying to create a legal framework for this new digital age. In countries where the government has held a traditional monopoly on telecommunications and IT infrastructure, the Internet is uncharted territory. 

Sincerely,

Anna-Maria Karnes