Internet Filtering in Bahrain

The OpenNet Initiative’s testing of more than 6,000 sites in Bahrain revealed only eight sites blocked. Three were pornographic; the others covered political and religious topics. In each case, sites with similar content remained accessible, and altering the requested URL slightly made several filtered sites available. Bahrain's legal system includes extensive potential controls of media, telecommunications, and the Internet, and its technical infrastructure has a single primary Internet Service Provider (ISP) and state-mandated Internet exchange point (IXP); this makes filtering relatively easy to implement. Our testing suggests that Bahrain’s filtering efforts have eased recently, but the recent arrests of the editors of a Web site, and the blocking of the site, indicate that Bahrain continues to combine technical and legal controls for on-line content. (Full Report - HTML) (PDF version)

What was interesting about working on Bahrain was that this country is often lumped in with China and Saudi Arabia when citing examples of Internet censorship along when in fact the amount of filtering in Bahrain is comparatively minuscule. Granted, they do have the infrastructure in place to increase the level of filtering at any time, but have chosen not to do so. In fact, they have even unblocked formerly blocked sites such as Voice of Bahrain (www.vob.org).

Internet Filtering in Bahrain in 2004-2005

The OpenNet Initiative’s testing of more than 6,000 sites in Bahrain revealed only eight sites blocked. Three were pornographic; the others covered political and religious topics. In each case, sites with similar content remained accessible, and altering the requested URL slightly made several filtered sites available. Bahrain's legal system includes extensive potential controls of media, telecommunications, and the Internet, and its technical infrastructure has a single primary Internet Service Provider (ISP) and state-mandated Internet exchange point (IXP); this makes filtering relatively easy to implement. Our testing suggests that Bahrain’s filtering efforts have eased recently, but the recent arrests of the editors of a Web site, and the blocking of the site, indicate that Bahrain continues to combine technical and legal controls for on-line content. Click Here for the full report.

Free speech or Hate speech

On Feb. 14 2005 CP reported that "six sites that fomented hatred against Jews or advocated terrorism or suicide-bombing have been pulled by the host in Kelowna, B.C." Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Weisenthal Centre, was surprised to find such sites hosted in Canada because Canadian ISP's have done "the best job in the last six or seven years of self-policing". The Criminal Code of Canada contains sections pertaining to hate propaganda as does the Canada Human Rights Act. The press release issued by the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center lists the six sites that were removed. Three of the six sites were back online the next day after switching hosting providers. Five of the six are now online, all hosted in the U.S.A.

One of the removed sites, www.al-thabaat.com, contains a flag that carries the inscription "There is no other God but Allah". There is no hateful text or text advocating suicide bombings. The issue, as noted in the press release, is that this flag appears to be the same flag as used by Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that is not on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations or Canada's version of the list.* Does this flag meet the requirements of hate speech under Canadian law?

Questioning Bloggers

It seems that the authorities haven't figured out what blogs are...

The blogger then spent the next three hours answering questions about blogs and how their contents can be controlled. He said he was also asked about his motivations for maintaining his site when he appeared to derive no income from it.

No, I'm not talking about this...

Jeremy Wright said he was halted at Toronto Pearson International Airport before dawn Wednesday and then searched, questioned for three hours and prevented from taking his flight.

In a telephone interview, Wright recounted his experience: "The guy kept saying, 'What do you do for a living?' I said I'm a blog consultant. He said, 'What's blogging?' But he didn't have any context for what a Web site was. His response was, 'You can't make a living from blogging. Stop lying and tell me why you're really here.' "

The first incident happened in Malaysia. Police officers and government officials questioned blogger Mack Zulkifli about blogging. Other bloggers were also question regarding the content of their posts. The second incident happened when Jeremy Wright tried to go from Canada to the US and was stripped searched, questioned and denied entry because the customs agent didn't understand what blogging was all about.

The similarity between the two is rather eerie and it does show a general lack of understanding of blogging by those in authority no matter the country. For more on the oppression of bloggers worldwide, check out committeetoprotectbloggers.blogspot.com

Kyrgyz Errata

A BoingBoing post echo's a woefully inaccurate post by Hans Henrik on the situation in Kyrgyzstan which cites some of the work I was involved with on the OpenNet Initiative project while in Kyrgyzstan during the recent election which is available here here and here. The websites in question www.gazeta.kg, www.kyrgyz.us, www.ar-namys.org were all hosted on Everyones Internet, Inc. in Houston Texas are were reportedly defaced on several occasions and were subjected to Denial of Service attacks, as were several other opposition newspapers hosted on other servers. Other sites affcted by DoS attack include www.respublica.kg, gazeta.respublica.kg and www.msn.kg which I have mirrored at respublica.citizenlab.org, gazeta.citizenlab.org and msn.citizenlab.org.

However, it is not accurate to say that the government hijacked these sites. The government may be suspected in the involvement in these attacks (which appear to be DoS for hire) but it is not true that www.gazeta.kg was hijacked by the government. Moreover, Internews is not a government controlled newspaper. Internews trains journalists and promotes independent media. They are active in Kyrgyzstan and maintain the site www.internews.kg -- it is not a "government controlled news agency", its funding comes from a variety of sources including OSI and USAID. And as far as bloggers go, check out kg.civiblog.org.

In other developments, the President has fled and the opposition have named a new leader.

Germany: Voluntary Filtering

Its been on the horizon for a while. Heise reports:

In Berlin today the search engine providers Google, Lycos Europe, MSN Deutschland, AOL Deutschland, Yahoo, T-Online and t-info announced the creation of a self-regulatory organization under the umbrella of the "Voluntary Self-Control for Multimedia Service Providers" (FSM).

Urs Gasser points out that among some of the interesting details "search engines are not allowed to make public which sites are filtered. " Initially, the search engines intend to filter out URLs on a list created by the Germany's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPJM). However, the BPJM states that, in the case of Internet sites being added to their "index" or "list of youth-endangering media", they do inform the author/distributor who then has the option to "remove the incriminating content and request a second examination".

As these initiatives move to becoming completely self-regulatory I wonder if there will be avenues for continuing review. There is a complaints procedure but this appears to apply only to complaints regarding illegal content, basically a mechanism to increase blocking. There does not appear to be a process whereby the URLs (and most likely, phrases) which are blocked are periodically assessed, its almost as if over-blocking isn't even on the radar.

China restricts BBS's

China has restricted access to popular university BBS systems to students only. Rebecca MacKinnon recently interviewed Chinese blogger Isaac Mao about the situation and asked whether blogging could fill the vaccum created by the loss of the BBS's:

Whether it’s easy to execute and maintain, the action will affect many of internet sites hosted in China. Although some guys like Maomy are seeking alternative solution, such as blog, [switching] from BBS. They don’t know how long they can live in this form. Zheng even predicts that there will be a new round of “Silence” in China cyberspace.

Domestic blog hosting providers already filter blog posts, and according to Isaac it may be getting worse:

As I know, the centralized bloghosting sites will soon add “Shui Mu Qinghua” [The name of the Tsinghua University BBS] as a blocked keyword in their self-policed system. By searching Grassland(an RSS search engine developed by cnblog.org team), some centralized blog sites has removed their user’s posts manually in last days, some links broken already.

Head over to Civiblog and get yourself a blog!

Belarus... A bit of the Old and New

Until January 2005, when Beltelecom blocked access to two Russian gay websites (which now appear to be down), Internet filtering was never officially acknowledged. During election in Belarus in 2001 several opposition websites experienced "suspicious problems". Similar suspicious outages occurred during the 2004 election. Now, not only does Belarus have official filtering in place, but the authorities also resort to takedown procedures. A forum, Grodnensky Forum (http://forum.grodno.by), was closed down because it contained posts thatwere critical of the president and local politicians.

Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates

The latest from the OpenNet Initiative:

The OpenNet Initiative announces the release of its study documenting Internet filtering in the United Arab Emirates. ONI tested over 8000 Web sites in the past six months, finding that UAE blocks material viewed as culturally inappropriate or offensive to the state's perception of Islam. The study notes that UAE relies on American software (SmartFilter) to implement its filtering, and points out that UAE's system suffers from considerable overblocking that prevents its citizens from accessing content unrelated to the state's expressed goals.

Read the full country study here.

Internet Filtering in United Arab Emirates in 2004-2005

The OpenNet Initiative announces the release of its study documenting Internet filtering in the United Arab Emirates. ONI tested over 8000 Web sites in the past six months, finding that UAE blocks material viewed as culturally inappropriate or offensive to the state's perception of Islam. The study notes that UAE relies on American software (SmartFilter) to implement its filtering, and points out that UAE's system suffers from considerable overblocking that prevents its citizens from accessing content unrelated to the state's expressed goals. Click Here for the full report.

Events-based Filtering & DoS

Some countries filter relatively few sites. Such implementation is framed in the context of fighting pornography (or child pornography), terrorism related sites, copyright violator (i.e. warez) sites, and hate speech sites etc... And although they may only filter relatively few sites they now have the capacity (technical infrastructure, trained personnel and administrative/procedural process) to increase the amount/scope of the filtering within an increasingly short time period. This phenomenon manifests itself during key periods such as elections or significant anniversaries or high profile international visits. The ability to quickly block or unblock specific content is handy for countries that filter for plausible deniability, or to respond to international pressure (temporarily). However, a technique has emerged that can be used in lieu of conventional filtering to silence opposition voices and disrupt the use of the Internet as an organizing tool: Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

Information War Intensifies as Unrest in Kyrgyzstan Continues

New information from ONI on the DDOS attacks during the Kyrgyz election:

The Kyrgyz Internet is becoming a battleground as unrest triggered by last week's inconclusive parliamentary vote spreads. Two leading Internet Service providers are embattled from an alleged hacker attack and pressure to remove information about growing unrest in the country. A series of e-mails from a hacker(s) calling himself "Shadow Team" posted to Elcat and Asia Info and obtained by ONI, claimed responsibility for the attacks and demanded that the service providers remove the websites of two Kyrgyz newspapers www .msn.kg and www.respublica.kg. "Shadow Team" also sent e-mail to a popular regional news site www.centralasia.ru, demanding that it stop publishing all information about the situation in Kyrgyzstan. Respublica's ISP, Elcat, complied with the hackers' demands and temporarily suspended publishing the newspapers website. The decision to suspend the website appears to have been agreed to by Elcat and the publishers of the newspaper, as Elcat also hosts many Kyrgyz NGOs, international organizations and other civil society groups.

Election Monitoring in Kyrgyzstan

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has been monitoring the Internet during the elections in Kyrgyzstan. Although the Internet is not widely used in Kyrgyzstan it is playing an important role in the election, and like traditional media, is being subject to disruptions. The ONI has released two press releases (available here and here) and our Kyrgyz friends have started a KG election blog hosted on another one of the Citizen Lab’s projects, the Civiblog. A quick summary of events so far flows below, stay tuned for more information.