Indonesia threatens prison time for unauthorized downloads of forest data

Indonesia’s government is imposing new restrictions on access to geospatial data, raising concerns among researchers and activists that it will suppress environmental science and advocacy work in one of the world’s most biodiverse countries.

For around a month, visitors to an interactive mapping platform maintained by the Ministry of Forestry have been greeted with a pop-up legal notice warning that the information is “view-only” and that anyone who “downloads” or “extracts” it without the ministry’s written permission “will be prosecuted” under the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions, or ITE, Law.

Anyone who wants to use the once freely accessible platform, known as SIGAP, must first agree to “terms and conditions” stating that the relevant articles in the ITE Law “carry penalties of up to 9 years in prison and/or a fine of up to Rp 3 billion [$170,000],” the notice says.

On Sept. 21, the ministry’s Directorate General of Forestry Planning posted a video to Instagram outlining a new application process that requires prospective users to disclose their research aims and submit supporting documents.

Doni Prabowo, the department’s head of forest monitoring and geospatial information, told Mongabay that restrictions were needed because geospatial data had been uncontrolled for a long time, creating opportunities for manipulation and illegal trading of the country’s precious information.

“What if somebody manipulates the data and says certain areas are not protected forest [when they really are]? It could be dangerous,” Doni said by phone. He said he’d heard of the ministry’s geospatial data being listed for sale on an online marketing platform, indicating the chance of illegal use.

Environmental researchers say they worry the new restrictions could hamper their ability to track things like whether a mining company is illegally clearing forest outside its concession, or if a zoning decision affects Indigenous lands. Researchers use the SIGAP platform to access government data on deforestation, fire hotspots, groundwater levels, and more, overlaid with the ministry’s zoning designations, such as protected forest area and production forest area.

Lukmanul Hakim, a geographic information system (GIS) analyst at HAkA, a conservation NGO in Indonesia’s Aceh province, said he uses the platform monitor the Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve, a haven for the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) that has lost thousands of hectares of habitat to illegal forest clearance.

“It’s narrowing the space for us to get public data,” he told Mongabay. “We haven’t heard any kind of public outreach about this.”

Another researcher who tracks deforestation in Indonesia said it was paradoxical for the ministry to try to stop users from downloading and analyzing data it was already publishing online.

“If there is a WebGIS [interactive map], then you can do a screenshot and turn it into a certain file type for digitizing,” said the researcher, who requested anonymity, citing the prospect of backlash from Indonesian authorities. “Technically we can still mine the data from the backend, but we are worried about the consequences in the future.”

Andreas Harsono, a Jakarta-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, told Mongabay the restrictions could reduce the ability of civil society to monitor Indonesia’s dwindling rainforests.

“It’s a typical Indonesian approach,” he wrote in a message. “It does not say that you cannot download the data, but you need to get a permit to download a government data. These permits are usually very long to get, taking so much time, if approved at all. It shows that the Ministry of Forestry does not have the goodwill to provide maps. It’s going to complicate land management in Indonesia as well as increase corruption opportunities.”

Doni denied the ministry was suppressing environmental science. “We are open to diverse analysis done by any institutions. Everyone has their own data source and methodology and we are OK with that,” he said.

The ministry, he said, was only restricting access to raw geospatial data in shapefile format (.SHP). SIGAP users, he said, can still download PDF files via a button on the platform without prior approval.

Shapefiles, he said, would be made available to researchers from universities and other government institutions via the application process, but not to NGOs. “If they [NGOs] want to do [their own] analysis of the raw data, they need to digitize it themselves or send us a request letter, and we’ll do the analysis for them,” he said.

Due to its digital signatures feature, the shapefile format enables the overlaying of multiple maps with greater accuracy and legitimacy than other formats. File formats like JPEG and PDF can be manually digitized, but the process is time-consuming and prone to inaccuracy.

Two legal experts told Mongabay the ministry was overreaching.

Herlambang Wiratraman, a constitutional law professor at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said the public has a right to access geospatial data under the 2008 Public Information Disclosure Act.

He cited the constitutional amendment passed in 2000, after the fall of strongman President Suharto, which states, “Every person has the right to communicate and to obtain information for the development of their person and social environment, and the right to seek, obtain, possess, store, process, and convey information using all available channels.”

“Access to public information is a human right,” Herlambang said. “Open access maps will create more public participation that will add more meaning to Indonesia’s democracy.”

Laode Syarif, a senior lecturer at Hasanuddin University Law School in Makassar, said the ITE Law does not criminalize the downloading of geospatial data as long as the user doesn’t manipulate it with the intent to deceive.

“If they use the data and present it the way it is, then there’s no problem with it. It’s a different case if they lie,” he told Mongabay.

Syarif, who served as deputy head of Indonesia’s anticorruption agency, the KPK, from 2015-2019, said geospatial data was an essential tool for fighting environmental crime and must be publicly accessible.

The forestry ministry under former President Joko Widodo, who left office in 2024, was no stranger to data-related controversies: among others, it blacklisted foreign researchers who challenged its claim that critically endangered orangutans were bouncing back; pressured a French landscape ecologist, later deported, to disavow an analysis he’d published of Indonesia’s wildfires; and fought an NGO’s request for shapefile maps of corporate land concessions all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the ministry.

Some conservationists have noted improved transparency under the current minister, Raja Juli Antoni, who took office in 2024, in the form of more frequent dialogues with conservation groups and the publication of a long-awaited elephant conservation plan. But the move to restrict geospatial data was “reminiscent of what the previous ministry was doing,” one researcher told Mongabay.

Syarif said many of the successes of environmental advocacy have relied on geospatial research, and that gatekeeping the supposedly public data could undermine Indonesia’s democracy.

“It’s a very powerful tool. Our country needs it,” he said. “And by country, I mean the country itself. Not only the government, but most importantly the public itself. Without them, a country does not exist.”

Banner image: A Sumatran orangutan in Bukit Lawang, North Sumatra. Image by Peter Steward via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

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