Posts tagged internet freedom

Google: Government Requests for Online Data Spike

Every six months, Google releases a Transparency Report to show how many government requests it receives to take down content or provide information about its users.

Google complies in a majority of cases, but not all. For example, the company writes that it refused a law enforcement agency request to remove a YouTube video showing police brutality.

Via NextGov:

Governments around the world more and more are asking Google for information, a trend the Internet giant says highlights the need for new rules governing online data.

In the first six months of 2011, government agencies in the United States, for example, made 5,950 requests for information from 11,057 accounts at Google and its video service YouTube, according to numbers released on Tuesday.

That’s an average of 31 requests a day, and amounts to a 29 percent increase over the 4,601 requests of the previous six months. Google says it complied with 93 percent of the 2011 requests.

For the first time, Google also released data on the number of times foreign governments asked it to remove online content. Brazil topped the list with 224 requests, while Germany, which has strict hate-speech laws, asked Google to remove 2,405 separate items. Google complied with most of the requests from both countries.

From January to June 2011 in the United States, there were 92 requests to remove 757 items. Google says it complied with 63 percent of those inquiries.

Chinese Censors Target Social Media

“China is faced with an Internet-management crisis,” Liu Yunshan, the country’s propaganda chief, said back in September

Liu is talking about the country’s inability to control and censor communication across social networks. Of particular concern is Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, which currently has about 400 million users.

The country is famous for its Great Firewall and thirty-plus thousand censors that investigate Web sites and join message boards to either delete comments or spin government messages their own way. But trying to do the same to the Chinese equivalent of Twitter posts has escaped the censors.

As the Sydney Morning Herald notes, “As quickly as [censors] delete individual messages, they find they have already been spread by hundreds, or thousands, of others.”

Proposed solution: Throw more censors at the “problem”. Sina just hired a thousand people to monitor messages across its network.

Via the Sydney Morning Herald:

China’s Communist Party has set out to curtail social networking following years of unfettered growth after its top committee issued an edict launching a new drive to control open messaging.

Websites such as Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, have been allowed to grow explosively, with 400 million Chinese posting opinions and sharing information.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party, a 300-strong body of party, state and army leaders, has signalled its alarm that there is no equivalent to the Great Firewall that marshals the internet. It has promised to “strengthen the guidance and administration of social internet services and instant communications tools” to ensure “orderly dissemination of information”.

Anyone spreading “false rumours” was threatened with stern punishment.

According to the Vancouver Sun, punishment includes arrest:

Already a number of people have been put under what China calls “administrative detention,” usually 15 days under arrest. One was accused of writing a fake report about changes to the income tax system. A student was jailed for claiming that cancer had killed eight village officials in Yunnan. A third was detained for writing that a Chinese jet had crashed.

Wikileaks Broke, Will Stop Publishing

View ReadWriteWeb:

Days after the announcement that the US troops would be withdrawn from Iraq, Wikileaks announced today that it will cease publication of new leaked documents to focus on rebuilding its finances.

The organization alleges that Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union have refused to process or withheld 95% of the attempted donations from the public to Wikileaks. Wikileaks will now focus its energy on rallying supporters to make financial donations through the limited channels still available.

What’s the relationship between Wikileaks and a US troop pullout from Iraq?

US-Iraq relationship were strained with the release of a US diplomatic cable via Wikileaks that outlined the execution of Iraqi citizens at the hands of US soldiers. 

Egyptian Blogger Continues Prison Hunger Strike

Maikel Nabil Sanad was sentenced to three years in prison for criticizing Egypt’s military. Today he enters the 42nd day of a hunger strike.

Via Index on Censorship:

It’s Maikel Nabil Sanad’s 26th birthday but he is in no celebratory mood. When I arrive at El Marg prison north of Cairo during visiting hours on Saturday 1 October, I can barely hide my shock at seeing his bony physique. Maikel is wearing a wrinkled blue track suit and on his head is a baseball cap worn backwards in a sign of rebellion. It is clear that Maikel is in extremely frail health. He attempts to stand up to greet me but almost immediately falls back into his chair in sheer exhaustion. That’s because today, Maikel tells me, is also the 40 day of his hunger strike — one that he had hoped would draw public attention to his plight and force the ruling military council to reconsider what he describes as the military’s “discriminatory “policies.

Sanad’s crime was accusing the military of submitting female protestors to “virginity tests”, a charge a senior military general later admitted was true, according to CNN.

Governments Co-opting Internet Firms for Surveillance

Via Reuters, from an Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi:

Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies, Web experts said this week.

Although such companies try to keep their users’ information private, their business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted advertising, and when governments demand they hand it over, they have little choice but to comply.

Suggestions that BlackBerry maker RIM might give user data to British police after its messenger service was used to coordinate riots this summer caused outrage — as has the spying on social media users by more oppressive governments…

…Demands from governments for Internet companies to hand over user information have become routine, according to online privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian, who makes extensive use of freedom-of-information requests in his work.

“Every decent-sized U.S. telecoms and Internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information,” Soghoian told Reuters in an interview.

Soghoian estimates that U.S. Internet and telecoms companies may receive about 300,000 such requests in connection with law enforcement each year — but public information is scarce.

Somewhere arguments about Internet privacy just got more academic.

China: Microblog Platforms Need "Greater Self Discipline"

Chinese authorities announced some bloggers would have their Weibo accounts suspended for spreading rumors.

Weibo is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter and has approximately 200 million users.

In a visit to Tencent, another Chinese microblog platform company, Zhou Yongkang, a Politburo member who oversees public security, said the company  needs “greater self-discipline” in order to ensure that the Internet promotes social harmony.

Via the New York Times:

The Chinese authorities have pursued two tracks with regard to the Internet, allowing freewheeling debate on topics unrelated to high-level politics and governance, but carefully monitoring — and sometimes banning — discussions on topics deemed too sensitive. Censors frequently notify users that a specific posting “was deleted according to relative laws and regulations.”

But official concern appears to have risen after two recent episodes demonstrated the potential power of the Chinese Web to mobilize social protest.

In the first, tens of million of online bloggers assailed government railway officials after a June 23 train crash near Wenzhou that killed 40 people, accusing the officials of incompetence, corruption and a cover-up. In mid-August, residents of Dalian in northeast China flooded microblogs with photographs of their protest against a local chemical factory, overwhelming censors’ attempts to delete the posts.

Since then, a welter of commentaries and articles in Communist Party newspapers have debated the need to rein in comments on the microblogs. The Chinese government abruptly blocked Twitter and Facebook in 2009. The services remain blocked today. But many analysts say that the government will not completely close the hugely popular microblogs for fear of a public backlash.

Technology, Trade and Human Rights

Last week we noted that Chinese dissidents were suing Cisco, and accused the company of aiding China in its surveillance of them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation fills in the details with a terrific backgrounder:

What responsibility do corporations have to consider human rights when making business deals? Are companies that build and market equipment for the purpose of surveilling and censoring pro-democracy activists in authoritarian regimes culpable when those activists are imprisoned or tortured? Do companies bear a special responsibility if they customize products to improve the efficacy of tracking dissidents and choking free speech? What if the companies train government agents in using the technology to ferret out activists?

Two cases — one in the United States District Court of Maryland and another in the Northern District of California — are attempting to create legal precedent around these issues of corporate social responsibility. In Du v. Cisco, three named plaintiffs – Chinese citizens Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi, and Liu Xianbin – are joining 10 unnamed “John Doe” plaintiffs in suing the American company Cisco Systems for their role in assisting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in violating human rights. The complaint against Cisco alleges that the plaintiffs in the case:

Have been and are being subjected to grave violations of some of the most universally recognized standards of international law, including prohibitions against torture, cruel, inhuman or other degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention, and forced labor, for exercising their rights of freedom of speech, association, and assembly, at the hands of the Defendants through Chinese officials.

…As noted above, Du v. Cisco is only one of the two lawsuits currently pending against Cisco Systems for their hand in facilitating human rights abuses in China. The other case, filed by the Human Rights Law Foundation on behalf of members of Falun Gong and pending in the Northern District of California, is attempting to seek class-action status for the many Falun Gong members who were identified, imprisoned, tortured and (in some instances) killed by Chinese government agents relying on information obtained using equipment supplied by Cisco.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Cisco and Abuses of Human Rights in China

Blaming the tools: Britain proposes a social-media ban

Via Matthew Ingram, GigaOm:

It seems totalitarian states like Egypt and Libya aren’t the only ones struggling with the impact of social media and the desire to muzzle services like Twitter and Facebook. In the wake of the riots in London, the British government says it’s considering shutting down access to social networks — as well as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry messenger service — and is asking the companies involved to help. Prime Minister David Cameron said not only is his government considering banning individuals from social media if they are suspected of causing disorder, but it has asked Twitter and other providers to take down posts that are contributing to “unrest.”

The British PM also said he has asked the police whether they need any new powers to stop the violence, including the ability to shut down social networks or communications services if they believe these tools are being used to incite unrest.