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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 16 Nov 2009
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has made a right mess of the opening day of its meeting in Egypt.
Already under fire for holding the forum in Egypt, which banged up a blogger for four years, the group also made a truly ham-fisted attempt to censor debate at the meeting.
A security guard was told to remove a poster created by the OpenNet Initiative which included the incendiary line: "China's famous 'Great Firewall of China' is one of the first national Internet filtering systems."
The risk of this outrageous piece of entirely unstartling information upsetting a Chinese delegate was presumably behind the move.
Unfortunately the incident was filmed and later put on YouTube.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 16 Nov 2009
SHANGHAI — U.S. President Barack Obama told Chinese university students Monday that he was "a big believer" in openness and "non-censorship" on the Internet.
"When it comes to the flow of information, I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can call their own government to account," the president said. "They can begin to think for themselves."
It took a "planted" question that was submitted to the U.S., Embassy website, chosen by a U.S. reporter and asked by the U.S. ambassador to China, to give Obama the opportunity to talk on Internet censorship, a touchy subject that the Beijing government would certainly rather avoid, but one Obama was almost obliged to raise.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 16 Nov 2009
The UN has been criticised for stifling debate about net censorship after it disrupted a meeting of free-speech advocates in Egypt.
UN security demanded the removal of a poster promoting a book by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) during a session at the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt.
The poster mentioned internet censorship and China's Great Firewall.
The UN has said that it had received complaints about the poster and that it had not been "pre-approved".
"If we are not allowed to discuss topics such as internet censorship, surveillance and privacy at a forum on internet governance, then what is the point of the IGF?" Ron Deibert, co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative told BBC News.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 12 Nov 2009
The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts).
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 12 Nov 2009
For some, Malaysia’s position on Internet censorship appears unclear, despite a law against such meddling.
“As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.” — Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832).
In early August this year, the Malaysian public was alerted to the Government’s plan to introduce an Internet pornography filter similar to the “Green Dam” filter software in China.
Sources indicated that such news came from the Minister of Information, Communication and Culture, Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim. However, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak swiftly responded by assuring the public that the Government would not impose censorship of the Internet, which presumably does not include any such filter.
Such a plan, if there ever was one in the first place, would have been nothing new in the international arena. It would have just been the latest in a long line of controversial governmental initiatives in other countries which have sought to control and suppress publications and information on the Internet and, in every case, is met with stiff opposition and a public outcry.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 12 Nov 2009
During the Beijing Olympics, 40 athletes bought a pro-Tibet charity album through iTunes. This was such a threat to national security that the Chinese government, never shy with a bit of well-placed censorship, completely blocked iTunes, even after repeated promises to cut down on Internet censorship during the Olympics. China has shown little interest in relaxing most of its Internet restrictions, but a new paper asks whether a novel approach to the question of censorship might force China—and many other countries—to curb their blacklisting ways.
What if China was taken before the World Trade Organization (WTO) and charged with not living up to its commitments on free trade?
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 12 Nov 2009
The UK's new cyberwarfare unit will be ready for action on 10 March, according to the government.
The Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), located at GCHQ in Cheltenham, will have an initial staff of 19, said Baroness Crawley.
CSOC will monitor the internet for threats to UK infrastrucutre and counter-attack when necessary.
The staffing figure, released in response to a Parliamentary question, puts paid to recent hyperbole suggesting the intelligence agencies were recruiting a 50-strong "army" of teenage hackers.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 10 Nov 2009
SHANGHAI — Chinese netizens are marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a little anarchy of their own.
They are flying over the Great Firewall of China (GFW) in exuberant numbers to send messages to an anniversary website in Berlin that was set up to allow people to share memories of the night the wall came down, or, recommend "which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place."
The opportunity to use the forum to chip away at Beijing's heavy Internet censorship was obviously too good a chance for many Chinese netizens to ignore and they deluged the site with calls for web freedom. Until the Chinese government caught wind, that is.
On the evening of Nov. 2, 13 days after its launch, the Berlin Twitter Wall became inaccessible in China. At that point, according to organizers, 1,500 of the 3,300 tweets posted had been written in Chinese.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Nov 2009
America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 09 Nov 2009
Reporters Without Borders' recent freedom index generated negative reactions throughout the Arab world, reports Asharq-Alawsat.
Reporters Without Borders, a nongovernmental association advocating freedom of the press, released its 2009 freedom index in late October. The index measures both internal and external press freedom in countries throughout the world. According to Muhammad Diyab at Asharq-Alawsat, most Arab countries were placed in the lower rankings of the index.
Time Magazine's analysis points out that Israel no longer has the freest press in the Middle East. According to the article, Israel's position slipped in the rankings due to journalists' arrests, the death of three reporters in the Gaza Strip, and "military censorship" applied to the media.
Kuwait, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) lead the list of Middle Eastern countries, ranking at positions 60, 61, and 86 respectively.
