United States/Canada

ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: June 22, 2012
On Monday, Google released its bi-annual transparency report, documenting a drastic increase of takedown notices from around the globe. Highlights include a 49% increase in content censorship in India and a huge spike in requests from democratic regimes. The International...
ONI Blog: Documents Leaked Detailing Proposals for UN Telecommunications Summit
Leaked documents for the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), have caused alarm in many Internet activists who claim the documents, which propose possible revisions to the current regulations governing international telecoms, demonstrate the potential for governments to...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: June 15, 2012
On Thursday, the UK Home Department released a draft of the Communications Bill. Home Secretary Theresa May defended the bill saying, “If we stand by as technology changes, we will leave police officers fighting crime with one hand tied behind...
ONI Blog: Stuxnet-Flame Connection Highlights the Rise of State-Sanctioned Cyberweaponry
Researchers at the Kaspersky Lab in Russia are reporting that the destructive malware known as Flame, a bug that has been infecting computers in Iran and elsewhere, is now being tied to the other superbug dubbed Stuxnet, the computer bug suspected of...
ONI Blog: Secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Threatens Web Freedom, Critics Say
News of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) surfaced last week with the leak of the US chapter concerning intellectual property. A trade agreement between nine countries including Australia, Singapore, and Peru, the bill threatens even more restrictions on intellectual...
ONI Blog: $17M Lawsuit Filed Against Baidu for Censorship
The news recently surfaced that group of eight Chinese writers in New York filed a lawsuit in May against Baidu for complying with government policies to censor their writing, Bloomberg reports. They claim that the search engine banned their writings supporting...
ONI Blog: ONI Releases 2011 Year in Review
The OpenNet Initiative is proud to announce the release of its 2011 Year in Review, a collection of the year's top instances of filtering, surveillance, and information warfare around the globe. Starting domestically, 2011 saw the beginnings of SOPA and PIPA, bills...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: April 20, 2012
Google co-founder Sergey Brin criticized China, Iran, entertainment companies, and Facebook for obstructing the openness of the Internet. He specifically targeted oppressive policy measures to censor content and the fact that Facebook's platform remains closed to Google's search crawls. Contemporary artist and...
ONI Blog: Sergey Brin criticizes China, Hollywood in interview on web freedom
In an exclusive interview with The Guardian UK, Google co-founder Sergey Brin criticized governments, companies, and industries for threatening free Internet activity. He called attention to China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with restrictive Internet policies as threats to the...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: April 13, 2012
Iran's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has denied that they are planning a domestic intranet. In a statement, they claimed that rumors about an intranet were the result of hostile propaganda from the west. Major software and Internet companies have ...

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