Media Round-Up

Well its been a crazy couple of weeks with the media. The Globe and Mail put our efforts against censroship on the Front Page, USA Today upgraded me to Professor at University of Toronto (I am not a Professor :) ) and the Toronto Sun made me Head Hacker. All in all I like the positive coverage of hacktivism!

- U.S. technology has been used to block, censor Net for years - USA Today
- Cracks In the Wall - Forbes
- Google loses lustre in China - NOW
- Scaling the firewall of digital censorship - Globe and Mail
- The Hacker Prof investigates web misdeeds - Toronto Sun
- Beating censorship on the Internet - Boston Globe

Internet Filtering in Uganda

A website that is critical of the government suddenly became inaccessible to users in Uganda just before the election. The website radiokatwe.com is hosted in the U.S. First, the ruling Party, contacted the U.S. based hosting company and asked them to block access to the site and then contacted the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC).

The UCC ordered MTN and Uganda Telecom to block access to the website. The letter stated:

“Serious concerns have been raised in respect of the operations of the website identified by IP address 65.182.101.205. Due to the gravity of the concerns, this is to request you that, with immediate effect, you temporarily prohibit access to this address until further notice.”

657 completely unrelated websites are hosted on the same IP address, so by blocking radiokatwe.com by IP address all these are also blocked.

Website Registration in China

New ONI Bulletin!

The university- based OpenNet Initiative (ONI) today released a bulletin analyzing the effects to date of China's non-commercial website registration regulations on website owners and bloggers.

Effective March 20, 2005, China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) required that all non-commercial websites must register with the MII or face significant penalties. Regulation enforcement is a joint effort between the MII and China's Internet Service Providers (ISPs). By August 2005, China's MII reported that over 90 percent of covered websites had been registered, although anecdotal examinations of such websites seem to indicate fewer registrations. In December 2005, the Chinese government launched a major campaign to shut down unregistered websites.

The press release is available here, the full bulletin is available here.

CyberStorm

AP reports:

The government concluded its "Cyber Storm'' wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.

mock cyberterrorism = "no impact on the real Internet". :)

Oh, and the Internet "survived".

Why is the slippery slope so important?

Statements by Liu Zhengrong, deputy chief of the Internet Affairs Bureau of the State Council Information Office, China:

"Regulating the Internet according to law is international practice," Liu told reporters. "After studying Internet legislation in the West, I've found we basically have identical legislative objectives and principles."

Liu said "it is unfair and smacks of double standards when (they) criticize China for deleting illegal and harmful messages while it is legal for US websites for doing so."

Testimony from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google & Cisco

TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL CALLAHAN SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, YAHOO! INC

Testimony of Jack Krumholtz Associate General Counsel and Managing Director, Federal Government Affairs Microsoft Corporation

Testimony of Elliot Schrage Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs Google Inc.

Testimony of Mark Chandler Senior Vice President, General Counsel Cisco Systems, Inc.

Anti-China hypocrisy?

Declan McCullagh raises excellent points in his column. He points out that some Members of Congress focusing solely on censorship in China don't have the best record in their commitment to support principles of free speech and expression in other cases.

He notes that Lantos' Congressional Human Rights Caucus (where I recently testified) was the same commision that heard testimony from "Nurse Nayirah" which was a stunt pulled by public relations firm Hill & Knowlton in which the Kuwaiti Ambassador's daughter posed as a volunteer nurse who saw Iraqi soldiers pull infants out of their incubators to promote the 1991 Gulf War.

In their own words

Yahoo!: Our Beliefs as a Global Internet Company

Google: Human Rights Caucus briefing

Cisco Statement for Congressional Human Rights Caucus Meeting

Microsoft and Yahoo! Inc. Joint Statement to U.S. Congress Human Rights Caucus on Policies Related to Access to Internet Content

Internet Filtering in Syria

Elijah pointed me to a very interesting post on Internet censorship in Syria. In the post, Ayman Hourieh talks about the blocking of Wired as well as major email providers Hotmail and Yahoo.

In addition, a Syrian blog was blocked but access seems to have been restored.

For more information on internet censorship in Syria see the Human Rights Watch report.

From the inside

"History demonstrates that only a totalitarian system needs news censorship, out of the delusion that it can keep the public locked in ignorance"

That quote is from a letter denouncing the closure of the "Freezing Point" section of the China Youth Daily signed by "Mao's secretary and biographer, Li Rui; an ex-editor-in-chief of the Communist Party's own mouthpiece, the People's Daily, Hu Jiwei; a former propaganda boss, Zhu Houze; and a former deputy chief of Xinhua News Agency, Li Pu."


- Mao aide joins battle against China censors - Reuters
- Party elders attack China censors - BBC

No "Luv" 4 Google

Students for a Free Tibet's have organized a Valentine's Day boycott of Google in response to Google's censorship of the google.cn search engine.

Google Compare

To help understand how the results of Google.com and Google.cn differ, the OpenNet Initiative has assembled a tool that lets you simultaneously compare search results. The tool is accessible here.

Human Rights and the Internet

Testimony of Nart Villeneuve at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus Members' Briefing: Human Rights and the Internet - The People's Republic of China Wednesday, February 1, 2006.

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Caucus:

On behalf of the Citizen Lab, I would like to thank the Congressional Human Rights Caucus for inviting me to speak on the issue of Human Rights and the Internet. As Director of Technical Research for the Citizen Lab I have worked extensively over recent years on the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration between the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and the Cambridge Security Programme at Cambridge University focused on the study of Internet filtering and surveillance worldwide.