There are perhaps few elements which are as emblematic of the Awami League’s past 15 years of misrule than the Digital Security Act (DSA) and its latter manifestation the Cyber Security Act (CSA).
While the DSA set the stage for a Bangladesh, already undergoing rapid digitalization by that point, where freedom of speech would be severely limited in the online space, the CSA did little to improve upon its deficiencies and was akin to a rebranding more than an amendment.
For the interim government to even recently express that the CSA would be amended instead of being entirely scrapped, as experts and the civil society had long advocated for, was nothing short of an insult to every individual who had been falsely victimized by this incredibly draconian law.
It is with immense satisfaction that we as a publication can finally say that reason has finally prevailed, as the interim government has finally agreed to completely annul this remnant of Bangladesh’s decade and a half long authoritarian rule.
Laws such as the CSA have always run counter to our basic freedoms as Bangladeshis -- according to the Constitution itself, every citizen has the right to freedom of speech and expression, while the freedom of the press is held as sacrosanct.
Under the DSA, the nation saw countless unfounded cases being filed against regular citizens, while journalists were specifically targeted due to their vocation.
The question now is: What next? As a country that has witnessed rapid internet penetration over the past decade, we are of course still in need of cybersecurity laws.
To this end, the interim government needs to set the stage for a set of laws which would actually protect people and their information online from threats both local and foreign and do so in conjunction with experts on both cybersecurity and human rights so as to avoid falling into the same trap.
When it comes to balancing freedoms against security, the scales should always tip towards the former.