China & Cisco

Wired reports the latest on the Cisco-China-gate and mention ONI:

A report from the OpenNet Initiative watchdog group last April singled out Cisco for allegedly enabling the Chinese government's notorious "Great Firewall," a filtering system that prevents Chinese netizens from visiting websites that criticize the government.

Cisco's routers, the report noted, form the backbone of China's internet access, and include the power to identify and filter packets based on keyword matches -- a tool typically used for fighting viruses and denial-of-service attacks that also makes internet censorship easier for repressive governments.

Rebecca has also been covering this story and has a detailed account of her conversation with a Cisco Rep generating, as noted, a lot of debate and criticism.

I think that there are two issues here, related for sure, but likely somewhat seperate: filtering and monitoring. We know that filtering is occuring on multiple levels and monitoring would follow that same pattern. Like filtering, the location at which the monitoring is taking place affects the usabilty of the data collected. It also affects the processing and response capability.

Kyrgyzstan

This article discusses the internet in the former Soviet Union with specific reference to Kyrgyzstan. It also discusses some of the ONI's work on election mointoring and event-based filtering & Denial of Service attacks in the Kygyz Republic during the recent elections and subsequent ousting of Akayev.

There was greater scope for investigation of these attacks, for instance by the Open Net Initiative (ONI), an Internet monitoring effort run by several Western universities, which issued reports on the attacks and their causes. These reports cited the role of a group known as "Shadow Team," which claimed to be behind the denial of service attacks and demanded that certain websites be removed if the attacks were to be halted. Under pressure to keep web traffic flowing, Elcat complied with this demand in cooperation with the owners of the targeted sites, which included those of the independent newspapers ResPublica and MSN, resulting, as ONI noted in their interim report, in de facto censorship.

Why Exaggerate?

China is engaging in plenty of Internet censorship, so why exaggerate? To me, it appears that there are two angles to most articles about Internet censorship in China one that underestimates China's information control capabilties and one that exaggerates them. Inspired by Ben Walker's five misconceptions here is my (incomplete) list of "Internet censorship in China myths" that are continuing to appear in the media.

Internet filtering in Japan?

Some bloggers have highlighted Japan's intention to implement Internet filtering. However, it appears that this effort is targetted towards urging "schools and public offices" to install filtering software, not nationwide filtering.

The government said officials will step up monitoring of suspicious sites, urge schools and public offices to install Internet filtering software and set criteria for service providers to disclose information they find on planned suicides.

The focus of the efforts appears to be enhancing Japan's internet surveillance capabilties while the filtering effort appears to be targetting text messaging. Still, as has been pointed out, efforts that move closer to creating the neccessary procedures for filtering and surveillance (gov't interfacing with ISPs) often occur in a non-transparent manner which raises serious concern about just how far information control policies will go. As we saw with Thailand, filtering that starts out targetting certain content is often and easily extended to targetting political content as well. However, it is unclear to me of how seriously Japan will take efforts to implement a centralized, nation-wide filtering system.

Censoring Zahra Kazemi

Zahra Kazemi was an Iranian-Canadian who was killed by while being interrogated by Iranian security agents. Kazemi was taking pictures of a student protest outside of a prison when she was arrested. Censorship, including Internet filtering, is occurring in Iran, but it is here in Canada where efforts are also being taken to censor Kazemi's work. Naomi Klein writes:

Close to two years later, there are new attempts to cover Kazemi’s lens, to prevent her photographs from reaching public eyes – only now the censorship is happening inside her adopted country of Canada. Last week Montreal’s Cote St. Luc Library removed five of Kazemi’s photographs from display after Jewish patrons complained of alleged “pro-Palestinian bias”; they left up the rest of the exhibition, which had already been displayed in Paris. Kazemi’s son, Stephan Hachemi, called the removal of the Palestinian photographs “a violation of my mother’s spirit” and rightly demanded that the library show the entire exhibit or nothing at all. So the library took down the entire show.

There are those trying to have the exhibit restored:

A Jewish group [Canada Jewish Alliance Against the Occupation] in Montreal is accusing city authorities of censorship over its decision to remove a library exhibit of the work of murdered photojournalist Zahra Kazemi.

www.zahrakazemi.com seems to be down. Anyone have a mirror of the five censored photos?

Internet Filtering in Nepal

Reports suggest that the websites www.insn.org and www.samudaya.org are being filtered in Nepal. Recall that Nepal actually severed its connection to the Internet itself after the royal coup.