Yahoo

Yahoo is taking a lot of heat (and rightfully so) for handing over information that landed Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, in jail. But it's not just in China. Yahoo recently refused to comment on whether they turn over user data to the NSA.

Callahan [Yahoo's senior vice president and general counsel] refused to say whether a demand from the NSA--not backed by a court order--qualifies as required by law.

It is becoming increasingly clear that electronic surveillance (including illegal eavesdropping) is becoming normalized. These practices were once thought to only be prevelent in authoritarian countries, such as China. But the same techniques used to spy on Chinese dissidents are being used against anti-war activists and others and it is not unreasonable to believe that tech companies are willing, just like in China, to turn over your data.

Surveillance

From the L.A. Times:

For years, the FBI's definition of terrorism has included violence against property, such as the window-smashing during the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. That definition has led FBI investigations to online discussion boards, organizing meetings and demonstrations of a wide range of activist groups.

The FBI has been monitoring a variety of groups:

The list included Food Not Bombs, which mainly serves vegetarian food to homeless people, and — with a question mark next to it — Indymedia, a collective that publishes what it calls radical journalism online.

And just in case you all were worried:

"We don't have enough agents," Kelso [Denver FBI spokeswoman Monique R. Kelso] said, "to go out there to monitor and surveil innocent people."

Whew. I feel a lot better. Kind of reminds of of something....

Exporting Censorship

Xeni Jardin has a nice peice in the NY Times about exporting censorship:

American technology companies are taking heat for helping China's government police the Internet. But this controversy extends well beyond China and the so- called Internet Gang of Four: Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft. Just how many American companies are complicit hit home for me last month when readers of BoingBoing.net e-mailed us to say they had been suddenly denied access.

The cause was SmartFilter, a product from a Silicon Valley company, Secure Computing.

SF classified BoingBoing as "nudity" a category which most filtering admins block. This affects many schools, libraries, corporate offices, and even entire countries. (In fact ICE is classified as "hacking" and they won't change it).

Secure Computing refused to provide me with a list of the governments that use its filters. However, the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership between the University of Toronto, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School, has compiled data on how such products are used in foreign nations where censorship is easy because the governments control all Internet service providers.

The initiative found that SmartFilter has been used by government-controlled monopoly providers in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. It has also been used by state-controlled providers in Iran, even though American companies are banned from selling technology products there. (Secure Computing denies selling products or updates to Iran, which is probably using pirated versions.)

Wake Up Call?

Two Chinese-language blogs, Massage Milk and Milk Pig, replaced their blogs with this text: Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed.

The BBC and other media quickly reported the closure and added, as fact, that the "Chinese authorities" had shutdown the blogs. In fact, the blogs had not been shutdown, the bloggers "temporaily closed" themselves to demonstrate how "irresponsible" the Western Press is. One of the bloggers told Interfax:

"I just wanted to make fun of Western journalists? [content] doesn't need to be serious on the Internet. I don't like it that Western media take a distorted view of China, though China does have problems," Wang told Interfax in an emailed statement, "I thought that if I closed my blog, it would stir their imagination and then they would begin blah blah. It really is as expected. So let's they have an April Fool's day in advance."

I have been asking the media to stop exaggerating for some time. There is plenty of real Internet censorship going on in China, there really is no need for, as BBC reporter Sebastian Usher (the person who wrote the original BBC report) stated, "a knee-jerk reaction amongst journalists... to stories that seem to show the Chinese cracking down on freedom of expression on the Internet" or what Danwei describes as "sensationalism".


The lesson here is not just that reporters should fact check, I'd say that's pretty clear. Its that when it comes to China and Internet censorship there seems to be a different playing field. Sometimes it seems that China is the only country in the world that censors the Internet or, at least, the only one that anyone seems to care about. And whether it is the media or Congress there appears to be a frame of misconceptions through which Internet censorship in China is interpreted.

When myth is treated as fact and assumptions go unchallenged we all get fooled. :)

Internet Filtering in Yemen

The OpenNet Initiative has released Internet Filtering in Yemen 2004-2005, a country study that documents the degree and extent to which the Republic of Yemen controls the information environment in which its citizens live. Drawing from technical, legal, and political sources, ONI's research finds that Yemen limits its citizens' access to Internet content by using commercially available American filtering technology from Websense. The ISPs primarily target pornography, gambling, proxy servers, and gay/lesbian materials, and neither blocks political material. Click Here for the full report.