SAFEnet founding in Denpasar, Bali (27 June 2013)

On Thursday 27 June 2013, a gathering of bloggers, lawyers, and activists in Bali, Indonesia founded the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network — SAFEnet — the civil-society organisation that would become Indonesia's principal digital-rights anchor, the country's lead litigant against state internet shutdowns, and a regional cornerstone of the Southeast-Asian grassroots digital-rights ecosystem. SAFEnet co-founder Anton Muhajir described the founding directly: "Kami berdelapan berkumpul di Bali lalu mendirikan lembaga yang mengadvokasi korban kriminalisasi karena berekspresi di internet" — "we eight gathered in Bali and founded an institution to advocate for victims of criminalisation for expressing themselves on the internet." SAFEnet's own 2016 monitoring page records the founding group as fifteen bloggers, lawyers, and activists; the eight-person figure in Muhajir's testimony likely reflects the core founding committee within a wider founding assembly.

Context

The founding came during what the Global Network Initiative would later characterise as a period of increasing criminalisation of online speech across Southeast Asia. Indonesia's primary legal instrument for that criminalisation was Law No. 11 of 2008 on Information and Electronic Transactions (UU ITE) — a sweeping information-technology law whose defamation and "feeling offended" provisions had begun to produce prosecutions of journalists, activists, bloggers, and ordinary netizens for online speech. Co-founder and Executive Director Damar Juniarto, who transitioned from a copywriting career at international advertising agencies Leo Burnett and McCann to full-time digital-rights work after observing the law's effects, built SAFEnet initially on the side before the organisation became his principal work. The founding rationale — articulated plainly by Muhajir — was the absence of any organisation specifically advocating for victims of ITE criminalisation: the gap SAFEnet was created to close.

The founding and initial scope

SAFEnet was established on 27 June 2013 in Bali with its headquarters in Denpasar. Its initial programmatic scope, as ADN Asia records, was monitoring, advocacy, and solidarity on freedom of expression on the Internet — a three-part model of documenting ITE prosecutions, supporting victims, and building solidarity across the Southeast Asian civil-society field. The legal registration as Perkumpulan Pembela Kebebasan Asia Tenggara (Southeast Asian Freedom Defenders Association) did not come until January 2019, reflecting the organisation's origin as an informal network rather than a formally incorporated body. In 2018, SAFEnet expanded its advocacy scope from internet freedom of expression to the broader digital-rights register — internet access, freedom of expression, and safety in digital spaces — under which it has operated since.

Significance

The 27 June 2013 founding is the corpus's first Event anchored in Indonesia, the corpus's first event in the org-founding sub-type for a national-level civil-society digital-rights anchor, and the founding moment of the load-bearing Indonesian entry in the Southeast-Asian regional cluster the corpus has built around EngageMedia and the Foundation for Media Alternatives. SAFEnet functions in the corpus as the Indonesian counterpart to the Internet Freedom Foundation in South Asia and to FMA in the Philippines; this event is where that entity's civil-society life began.

The founding date of 27 June 2013 places SAFEnet's establishment two months after the April 2013 London launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots — the corpus's other 2013 entry event — within a single twelve-month window in which two of the corpus's most consequential civil-society organisations made their public entries. Where the Stop Killer Robots launch was a coordinated international coalition announcement at a multilateral-advocacy register, the SAFEnet founding was a small gathering in Bali by Indonesian bloggers, lawyers, and digital-rights advocates confronting a domestic legal threat: a contrast that captures the breadth of the make-AI-good movement's founding ecology — high-visibility multilateral coalitions and quiet local network initiations happening in the same months, from opposite ends of the global civil-society spectrum.

The founding also established the institutional vessel for what would become SAFEnet's two most consequential contributions to the movement's record: the successful 2019-2020 Papua internet-shutdown litigation against the Minister of Communication and the President of Indonesia — the corpus's most consequential piece of Southeast-Asian internet-rights jurisprudence — and the annual Digital Rights Situation Report of Indonesia, the most sustained country-level civil-society documentation line on Indonesian digital rights and the vehicle through which SAFEnet has tracked the deepfake elections, police-surveillance provisions, and platform-accountability rollbacks that have defined the Joko Widodo-to-Prabowo Subianto transition cycle.