China's Web Police

It appears that "Jingjing" and "Chacha" are being brought to Beijing. Two "virtual cops" will be appearing on users screen when they visit major news portal such a sohu and sina and warn them about illegal content. User's can click the images and be redirected to the police website "where they can report illegal activities and harmful information".

Dong Lin, chief technology officer of Xirang, a Beijing-based hosting service provider, said police have mobilized all forces, from China Netcom, the country's second largest fixed-line operator, to information security companies such as Symantec, to jointly combat online harmful information.

That's right, its says Symantec.

It seems that AP's report missed that detail and also stated that users can click the police images if they need "help" while Xinhua makes it clear the intent is to get users to report information to the police. The AP article also does not mention Symantec.

CENTCOM's blog team.

It seems that I missed this article from 2006. The article discusses the creation of CENTCOM's blog team.

The team's motto is "Engage," and Flowers and others work with more than 250 bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror.

The blog team also contacts or comments on blogs to correct "inaccurate or untrue information" or provide addition information for "incomplete" blog entries.

A waste of everyone's time and money?

A column in The Guardian asks if web filters are just a waste of everyone's time and money and a 16 year old Australian cracked the countries filtering software. Rather than implement a national firewall-type filtering system Australia makes filtering software available for free hoping that parents will restrict what their children can view online.

Which raises the question: wouldn't traditional parenting skills - such as talking to your children and teaching them about safe searching and surfing and being honest about sex and internet content - be a lot more effective, better-tailored and cheaper than huge government initiatives?

Yahoo! wants suit dismissed

A suit against Yahoo was filed in the U.S. on behalf of Chinese dissidents who were imprisoned based on convictions in which Yahoo! provided some evidence. Yahoo! is now seeking to have the suit dismissed. Rebecca has posted the full legal documents of the case.

State Secrets

China isn't the only one hiding behind "state secrets", it is now the defense in the law suit brought on by EFF on behalf of AT&T customers who were victims of illegal NSA spying.

EFF is representing the plaintiffs in Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit brought by AT&T customers accusing the giant telco of violating their rights by illegally assisting the National Security Agency in domestic surveillance. The U.S. government is fighting to get the class-action lawsuit thrown out of court, contending that the litigation jeopardizes state secrets.

"The courts cannot permit the government to evade responsibility for unconstitutional activities with thin claims of 'state secrets.' Without judicial review, there is no way to stop abuses of power," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "The courts are well equipped to protect state secrets while determining whether the spying is illegal and if so, to put a stop to it."

DCSNet

Wired reports that the FBI has created DCSNet, "a comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems". Agents can remotely begin tapping communications and send the data for translation and link analysis. DCSNet leverages CALEA compliant technology that mandates FBI backdoors in telephone switching equipment. The FBI is now targeting communications tools such as Skype.

Target: Wordpress

wordpress.com -- a blog hosting service which hosts nearly 1.4 million blogs -- is now blocked in Turkey and Thailand.



Wholesale blocking of blog hosting services is unfortunately becoming more common place. Ethiopia, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and China block all of blogspot, for example, and India, Tunisia and UAE selectively block some blogspot blogs.

U.S. Suspends Data Mining Program

The U.S., which has the most sophisticated electronic surveillance program in the world, has suspended yet another program, ADVISE (Analy­sis, Dissemina­tion, Visu­ali­zation, Insight and Semantic Enhance­ment), after it was found to violate privacy laws. The CMS which uncovered the program in 2006, reports:

From its earliest days, the system's pilot programs used "live data, including personally identifiable information, from multiple sources in attempts to identify potential terrorist activity," but without taking steps required by federal law and DHS's own internal guidelines to keep that data from being misused, the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a June report to Congress, which was made public Aug. 13.

This is the third shutdown following the closure of the Pentagon's TALON database -- which monitored peace activists among others -- and the infamous Total Information Awareness project.

Agents Provocateurs

Faced with video uploaded to YouTube the Sûreté du Québec have been forced to admit that they infiltrated the protest the summit in Montebello. Armed with rocks the fake protesters pushed their way to the police line and were confronted and uncovered by peaceful protesters. The SPP have now promised, after initial resistance, to conduct a review of its practices.

Red Flags

The legal notice that resulted in the deletion of some of Hossein Derakhshan's blog posts by his hosting company and lead to the termination of his blog's hosting service should raise red flags within the Anti-Censorship community.

First, the notice claims that in addition to Hossein, both the domain Registrar and the web hosting company are implicated in and/or liable for activities conducted on Hossein's blog.

In fact the notice seems to imply that each of the three named in the notice (the registrar, the hosting company and Hossein) "published" defamatory information.

Secondly, the notice asks for the IP addresses of everyone who visited the websites of Hossein.

Clarification by any lawyers out there would be appreciated, but to me the first seems to be clearly misguided. Holding a registrar responsible for the content hosted at a domain name?

On the second, I feel that this presents a grave privacy concern. Handing over the IP addresses of the visitors to Hossein's blog? I fail to see how that is related to the alleged defamatory claims.

Chilling Effects

The use of legal threats is not unique to hoder's case. Libel and defamation are being used to silence critics around the world. Fresh from GV Advocacy:

Monaco: webmaster accused of defaming the Head of State
... the owner of a new satirical website, featuring cartoons allegedly defaming and ridiculing the Prince...

Tunisia: online writer freed and website editor to appear in court
...the editor of the online news website Kalima (censured in Tunisia) Omar Mestiri is facing a libel suit...

Censored in Iran, Deleted in USA

The blocking of websites by national filtering systems make content unavailable to those in such countries, but the deletion of content makes it unavailable to all. The blog of my friend Hossein was recently shutdown due to legal threats, making it unavailable to all while it was previously only censored in Iran.

(Hossein's update on the situation follows below.)

Threatening ISP's with "take down" requests is one of the most undocumented methods of censoring Internet content. Some sites, such as ChillingEffects document this to some degree but most cases occur in silence. Since much of it is related to copyright violations or terrorism few are paying close attention. Libel and defamation cases are more notable especially the cases in Malaysia and Singapore.

While it is possible to detect and monitor censorship via internet filtering, as I do for the OpenNet Initiative, it is much more difficult to enumerate content that is simply removed by service providers.

Media Lens

There are two primary "filters" the colour media coverage on Internet censorship in China: the "1984" and the "technoptimist". I wrote about this a while back

Recently there's been a cluster of "technoptimist" articles:

• China trembles at the power of the blog


• Censors powerless against the Net


• Web censorship is failing, says Chinese official

As the Olympics draw near, the tone will likely shift.