“Internet freedom” at Google Trends: Washington, Toronto, Beijing – cities with the most searches (via Evgeny Morozov).
Tag Archive for 'censorship'
Iranian dissidents clearly need more global support but surely backing from the US government is sending the completely wrong message?
At a time when the Obama administration is pressing for harsher sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, democracy advocates in Iran have been celebrating the recent decision by the United States to lift sanctions on various online services, which they say only helped Tehran to suppress the opposition.
But it is still a long way from the activists’ goal of lifting all restrictions on trade in Internet services, which opposition leaders say is vital to maintaining the open communications that have underpinned the protests that erupted last summer after the disputed presidential election. In recent months the government has carried out cyberwarfare against the opposition, eliminating virtually all sources of independent news and information and shutting down social networking services.
The sanctions against online services — provided through free software like Google Chat or Yahoo Messenger — were intended to restrict Iran’s ability to develop nuclear technology, but democracy advocates say they ended up helping the government repress its people. “The policies were contradictory,” said Ali Akbar Moussavi Khoini, a former member of Parliament who now lives in Washington, where he pressed for the change.
The new measure will enable users in Iran to download the latest circumvention software to help defeat the government’s efforts to block Web sites, and to stop relying on pirated copies that can be far more easily hacked by the government.
But the government’s opponents say they need still more help in getting around the government’s information roadblocks.
“The Islamic Republic is very efficient in limiting people’s access to these sources, and Iranian people need major help,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, the founder of one of the largest Persian-language social networking Web sites, the United States-based Balatarin. “We need some 50 percent of people to be able to access independent news sources other than the state-controlled media.”
The undeniable power of the Wikileaks website – releasing supposedly classified documents to allow transparency in the public domain – now makes a rather comical story in the New York Times:
To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.
The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked “unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.” It concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.
WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on Monday.
Lt. Col. Lee Packnett, an Army spokesman, confirmed that the report was real. Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, said the concerns the report raised were hypothetical.
“It did not point to anything that has actually happened as a result of the release,” Mr. Assange said. “It contains the analyst’s best guesses as to how the information could be used to harm the Army but no concrete examples of any real harm being done.”
WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization, has rankled governments and companies around the world with its publication of materials intended to be kept secret. For instance, the Army’s report says that in 2008, access to the Web site in the United States was cut off by court order after Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss financial institution, sued it for publishing documents implicating Baer in money laundering, grand larceny and tax evasion. Access was restored after two weeks, when the bank dropped its case.
Governments, including those of North Korea and Thailand, also have tried to prevent access to the site and complained about its release of materials critical of their governments and policies.
The Army’s interest in WikiLeaks appears to have been spurred by, among other things, its publication and analysis of classified and unclassified Army documents containing information about military equipment, units, operations and “nearly the entire order of battle” for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in April 2007.
WikiLeaks also published an outdated, unclassified copy of the “standard operating procedures” at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. WikiLeaks said the document revealed methods by which the military prevented prisoners from meeting with the International Red Cross and the use of “extreme psychological stress” as a means of torture.
The Army’s report on WikiLeaks does not say whether WikiLeaks’ analysis of that document was accurate. It does charge that some of WikiLeaks’s other interpretation of information is flawed but does not say specifically in what way.
The report also airs the Pentagon’s concern over some 2,000 pages of documents WikiLeaks released on equipment used by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon concluded that such information could be used by foreign intelligence services, terrorist groups and others to identify vulnerabilities, plan attacks and build new devices.
WikiLeaks, which won Amnesty International’s new media award in 2009, almost closed this year because it was broke and still operates at less than its full capacity. It relies on donations from humans rights groups, journalists, technology buffs and individuals, and Mr. Assange said it had raised just two-thirds of the $600,000 needed for its budget this year and thus was not publishing everything it had.
Perhaps the most amusing aspect of the Army’s report, to Mr. Assange, was its speculation that WikiLeaks is supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. “I only wish they would step forward with a check if that’s the case,” he said.
The charming behaviour of a reliable American ally:
A Saudi man who was arrested in January on charges of homosexuality, a “general security” offence, and impersonation of a police officer has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes, plus a fine of 5,000 rials (US $1,333) and a year in prison.
Authorities say their attention was drawn to his behaviour after a video he made was circulated locally via SMS, and later uploaded to YouTube. In the lighthearted video, the man is in a car, dressed as a Saudi police officer. He is seen dancing to club music, rubbing his chest, and flirting with the man holding the camera.
The video has since been blocked in Saudi Arabia.
I’ve written extensively over the years about Iranian web censorship.
My following piece was commissioned by BBC Persian on the role of the web in Iran’s current political troubles (yes, it’s in Farsi).
Here’s the English version:
The face of murdered Iranian woman Neda Agha Soltan by a sniper’s bullet echoed around the world. Murdered in June 2009 during the upheaval after the disputed presidential election that saw a new term for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the vast majority of iconic images seen outside the Islamic Republic were shot by citizens on mobile phones or digital cameras. They were raw, brutal, confused and powerful. Their aim was to document events and let historians and journalists find order in the chaos.
A society was challenged in a way that rocked the foundations of the state.
Neda’s boyfriend, Caspian Makan, who fled the country soon after her death, told the Guardian in November 2009 that Neda’s death forced him to become political and speak out against the regime. “As I left Tehran”, he said, “I was looking around at the good people of Iran, who are kind and patient. They looked so weighed down.”
This is exactly the sentiment I found in Iran during my visit there in 2007 during research for my book, The Blogging Revolution. I spoke to countless bloggers, editors and dissidents to determine the effect of the internet on civil society. It was both profound and frustrating. The last years have undoubtedly seen a growth in countless websites dedicated to the discussion of once-hidden subjects, from gay emancipation to dating. But despite the often-liberating nature of the technology, nobody talked about using the web alone to bring democracy.
Besides, many Iranians don’t use the internet and have other issues on their minds, such as regular work and decent housing. The liberal Iranian elite largely despises Ahmadinejad’s conservative brand of Shia doctrine and wishes for change but the President has large swatches of support across the country, especially in the poorer regions. Far too many Western journalists visit Tehran and only thrive in the northern parts of the city, believing that more tolerant views towards gender and politics reflect the will of the entire nation.
After an initially slow acknowledgement of the power of the web to shape public opinion, the conservative clerics appropriated the medium with ruthless efficiency. Numerous reports have emerged over the last months of an Iranian Cyber Army hacking numerous websites critical of the mullahs and threatening stronger action. One message read: “U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But They Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power.”
A fundamental misreading of last year’s public protests in Iran led many in the West to conclude that a Twitter Revolution was brewing and would inevitably bring down the state. A journalist from the Atlantic visited the holy city of Qom a few months after the June uprising and found little evidence of tension. In fact, he found “the happy docility of a one-party state.”
This is not to diminish the undeniable resistance to authoritarian rule in the Islamic Republic. I found an impatience either expressed by leaving the country for better opportunities or venting anonymously on blogs and online forums. There was fear of being caught by authorities but also a growing bravery in flouting the “red lines” in society. Criticism of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was largely impossible – though the last months have seen public protests with shouts of “Death to the Dictator” – but his infallibility was no longer sacred.
The New York Times tried to capture the mood on the streets during the June 2009 uprising. Reluctant to call events the Twitter Revolution – a hesitancy unwisely not shown by countless Western news networks, including many interviewers who wanted me to explain why Twitter was about to bring down the mullahs – the paper offered six lessons of the technology. “Twitter is self-correcting but a misleading gauge”, it wrote. It went on: “Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election.” The most tech-savvy web users were largely critical of Ahmadinejad and used Twitter to mobilise citizens on the streets. This didn’t mean the majority of the population backed these moves.
Too much of the Western press coverage of Iran reflects the projected wishes of the American political elite, namely “regime change” or at least a radical shift in policy. The nuclear enrichment issue hangs over virtually every discussion with Iran. Bloggers both inside and outside the country try to understand the seemingly impenetrable moves of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. But the prospect of tighter sanctions against Tehran will likely only result in greater internal repression.
The most appropriate ways to support movements against the regime, according to New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, is to back the US State Department’s request for issuing a general license that “would authorise downloads of free mass-market software by companies such as Microsoft and Google to Iran necessary for the exchange of personal communications and/or sharing of information over the internet such as instant messaging, chat and email and social networking.” How many Iranians trust the interests of the State Department is another question entirely.
Harvard University’s Ethan Zuckerman argues that the US government doesn’t fully the ramifications of potentially providing a proxy service for users in, say, Iran or China, to circumvent all censored content. Furthermore, domestically blocked content is not included in this proposed system, the material likely to be used by most web surfers.
But the key question remains: how central is the internet in Iran to challenging the Ahmadinejad regime? Web commentator Evgeny Morozov wrote in Prospect in January that it was unwise to see online social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others) as central to the so-called Green Revolution. He argued that the Iranian government “has not only survived but has in fact become even more authoritarian”, utilising the same tools of the protestors to entrap and monitor their every move. “What do we really gain”, he posed, “if the ability to organise protests is matched (and perhaps even dwarfed) by the ability to provoke, identity and arrest the protestors?”
The Wall Street Journal outlined in December 2009 the myriad of ways that Iran was now monitoring dissenters outside its borders and interrogated some who arrived in Tehran and demanded Facebook accounts be examined at the Imam Khomeini International Airport.
Turning the tools of revolution on the revolutionaries.
The ascendency of the Revolutionary Guard to a ruling position is ominous for the foreseeable future in the country. The simple truth is that brutal regimes can block the use of text messages, email (Google’s Gmail was recently censored) and imprison, torture and kill opponents. There is little dissidents can do in the short-term to counter these overwhelming factors, as we have seen in Burma and China.
I’ve heard from various sources that many once-active bloggers have gone underground for fear of arrest. The online voices from Iran we are reading today are therefore either strongly backing Ahmadinejad or the forces against him but the latter are at a distinct disadvantage without the apparatus of the state behind them. But they have achieved hugely through people power and innovative use of online tools.
Iran’s future will not be written in London or Washington. We should be cautious of any Western player claiming to know what the Iranian people want. Exaggerating the influence of the internet on Iranian society is dangerous but so is excluding its potentially liberating effect.
I remember speaking to many Iranians in the country who couldn’t imagine life without the ability to communicate with friends, lovers and students and share stories that were once only whispered. Predicting the demise of the Islamic Republic is a fool’s game. But we can listen to the thoughts and requests of Iranians who long for a brighter future, both those online and the millions of others who dream of the day when their country’s poverty is alleviated.
The ground-breaking website Wikileaks – unafraid to publish pretty much any information that comes its way – is clearly a threat to the empire:
This document is a classifed (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. “The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out”. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whisteblowers”, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site”. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justificaton for the plan, the report claims that “Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Kora, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website”. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Cemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanmo Bay.
What is the effect of Washington’s recent decision to allow web companies such as Google and Yahoo to operate in closed societies, such as Cuba and Iran?
The following article by Linda Herrick appears today in the New Zealand Herald:
A Sydney writer who describes himself as “an atheist Jewish-Australian political activist” is coming to Auckland in May as part of the international lineup for the Writers and Readers Festival.
Antony Loewenstein is the author of My Israel Question, a highly critical book on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. It has been the subject of heated debate around the world over Loewenstein’s call for Israel to end the occupation of Gaza.
His latest book is The Blogging Revolution, on the impact of the internet in repressive regimes, and he co-founded the advocacy group Independent Australian Jewish Voices.
Loewenstein joins a diverse lineup in the festival, which this year celebrates its 10th birthday.
Historian and travel writer William Dalrymple, who lives part of each year in India and known for his prize-winning books City of Djinns, The Age of Kali and White Mughals, will be here to discuss his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.
Also appearing will be John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford University and chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times, who has won rave reviews for last year’s biography of Lord of the Flies author William Golding.
At the other end of the spectrum, flamboyant DJ Charlie Dark, a member of the hip-hop group Attica Blues, will liven up the festival with his repertoire of spoken word and fast moves. English poet and novelist Jill Dawson will also be at the festival, with popular young adult writer Charlie Higson, who starred in Harry Enfield’s Fast Show. His new zombie adventure series for kids is called The Enemy.
A range of New Zealand writers, including Charlotte Grimshaw, Rachael King, Gordon McLachlan, Lloyd Jones, Anne Salmond and Ian Wedde, will complement the lineup.
Tickets to seven “special events” went on sale this week, and all other tickets will be available from March 29. The festival runs from May 12 to 16 at the Aotea Centre.
Iceland may soon become a safe haven for investigative journalists and media in repressive states looking to protect sensitive information. Once again, the website Wikileaks is a trail-blazer. Al-Jazeera reports:
It’s very hard to judge this case except to say that Hamas should either charge the man or release him:
A British journalist who has been held in Gaza for two weeks without charge faces a further fortnight in detention after a court ordered an extension to his arrest.
Paul Martin, a 55-year-old film-maker who was arrested last month, is the first foreign journalist to be detained in Gaza since the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas seized full control of the strip almost three years ago.
Martin had entered Gaza to testify on behalf of a Palestinian accused of collaborating with Israel, but when he began to speak the prosecutor ordered that he be arrested and said he was wanted in connection with the case.
His lawyer, Sharhabil Zayim, said today that the court had extended his detention order for a second 15-day period, after which he would be charged or released.
Martin, who has worked for the BBC and the Times, is being held on suspicion of harming Gaza’s security, a Hamas spokesman said last month. However, he has not been charged and it is unclear what the allegations against him are.
He had reportedly been working on a documentary about Mohammad Abu Muailik, a former member of the Abu Rish Brigades, a Gaza militant group linked to Hamas’s political rival Fatah.
Abu Muailik was arrested several months ago and accused of collaboration with Israel, and Martin went to a Gazan military court to speak on his behalf.
Last month, the Foreign Press Association, which represents foreign journalists working in Israel and the Palestinian territories, said it was “deeply concerned” and called for Martin to be released.
“We expect Hamas, as we do all parties, to respect the rights of every journalist on assignment to work without fear of being arrested,” it said.
Reporters Without Borders firmly condemns the Chinese government latest attempt to tighten its grip on the Internet. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced today that anyone wanting to operate a website would have to meet with regulators in person and bring identity documents.
Any decent human being should be against the outrageous online censorship employed by the Islamic Republic but do dissidents in that country really want Washington giving them a hand?
The State Department says it is working furiously to increase its capabilities to confront the kind of censorship promulgated by Iran last week, bringing major Silicon Valley companies and top tech executives into the fold, and rushing to develop technologies that can overcome even the most draconian measures.
Is this move by Nicolas Sarkozy about protecting the children or cementing a base that loves the idea of the state intruding on our private business?
The lower house of the French parliament has approved a draft bill that will allow the state unprecedented control over the Internet. Although the government says it will improve security for ordinary citizens, civil rights activists are warning of a “new level” of censorship and surveillance.
For members of the French administration, it is a law against digital crime. For civil rights activists and politicians from opposition parties, it is a plan for censorship that excites fear and loathing — and even conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state.
The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, passed the first draft of the bill, known as “Loppsi 2,” on Tuesday. It will now go on for a second reading in the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, thanks to the government’s majority. If the Senate approves the bill, the new law could come into force as early as this summer. The legislation could have far-reaching consequences: Loppsi 2 contains rules that would make France the European country where the Internet is subject to the most censorship, regulation, control and surveillance.
The new legislation could in the future force Internet service providers (ISPs) to shut off access to criminal sites, should they be officially instructed to do so. According to the draft legislation, the law “makes it the responsibility of each Internet service provider to ensure that users don’t have access to unsuitable content.”
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Under the new French legislation, police and security forces would be able to use clandestinely installed software, known in the jargon as a “Trojan horse,” to spy on private computers. Remote access to private computers would be made possible under the supervision of a judge.
Who said Chinese bloggers are happy with the country’s insanely tight web censorship?
Famous amateur film-maker, Hu Ge, has recently made a new satirical piece on the Internet censorship in China. The 7-minute piece, ‘Animal World: the Home-living Animal’ is styled as an animal-planet type of documentary and has attracted hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of a few days. The piece presents to the audience the so-called ‘home-living animals’, who are in fact China’s tens of millions of netizens.
The campaigning website Wikileaks, recently out of action due to lack of funds, may soon have a new lease on life, thanks to the forward thinking of Iceland:
In my role as WikiLeaks editor, I’ve been involved in fighting off more than 100 legal attacks over the past three years. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.
We’ve become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can’t expect everyone to make such extraordinary efforts. Large newspapers, including the Guardian, are forced to remove or water down investigative stories rather than risk legal costs. Even internet-only publishers writing about corruption find themselves disconnected by their ISPs after legal threats. Should these publications not relent, they are hounded, like the Turks & Caicos Islands Journal, from one jurisdiction to other. There’s a new type of refugee – “publishers” – and a new type of internet business developing, “refugee hosting”. Malaysia Today is no longer published in Malaysia. Even the American Homeowners Association has moved its servers to Stockholm after relentless legal attacks in the United States.
That’s why I’m excited about what is happening in Iceland, which has started to see the world in a new way after its mini-revolution a year ago. Over the past two months I have been part of a team in Iceland advising parliamentarians on a cross-party proposal to turn it into an international “journalism haven” – a jurisdiction designed to attract organisations into publishing online from Iceland, by adopting the strongest press and source protection laws from around the world.
Because of the economic meltdown in the banking sector, which, per capita, was the largest of any western country, Icelanders believe that fundamental change is needed in order to prevent such events from taking place again. Those changes include not just better regulation of banks, but better media oversight of dirty deals between banks and politicians.
In fact, Iceland’s banks became fans of libel tourism. For instance, the largest, Kaupthing, succeeded in bringing a libel suit against a Danish tabloid, Ekstra Bladet, in London. A similar Danish article looking into the alleged Russian connections of Landsbanki, Iceland’s second-largest bank, and its online banking arm Icesave, was also attacked and removed from the online public record.
Then, on 31 July last year, WikiLeaks released Kaupthing’s confidential large loan book, which exposed €6bn of loans. Kaupthing threatened us and our source with a year in prison under Icelandic banking secrecy law. The leak was to become a major story, but five minutes before the national broadcaster, RÚV, could report it, the news desk was slapped with an injunction by Kaupthing. The first such Icelandic newsdesk injunction in living memory. Lost for words, RÚV filled the time with an image of WikiLeaks, outraging the public, who could all access a copy of the primary source document.
This is the backdrop which has led to the development of the “Icelandic Modern Media Initiative”, a proposal that binds the government to draft legislation to develop an attractive package of free speech and openness laws, including source protection, internal media communications protection, protection from libel tourism, immunity for intermediaries such as ISPs, and a tight statute of limitations on litigation. It is to be filed by tomorrow and has cross-party support, including from the governing coalition. Although the political environment in Iceland is still highly charged over the 6 March referendum about the Icesave dispute, it is expected to be voted through. Not surprisingly, the foreign press has developed an interest in the proposal. All over the world, the freedom to write about powerful groups is being smothered. Iceland could be the antidote to secrecy havens, rather it may become an island where openness is protected – a journalism haven. Sleet Street 2.0.
The Islamic Republic is determined to crack down on any dissent on the 31st anniversary of the 1979 revolution:
Iran’s telecommunications agency announced what it described as a permanent suspension of Google Inc.’s email services, saying instead that a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out. It wasn’t clear late Wednesday what effect the order had on Google’s email services in Iran.
The Iranian government plans to permanently suspend Google’s email service in the country, it was reported yesterday.
Google said it experienced a sharp drop in email traffic in Iran, and that some users in the country were having trouble accessing Gmail, but said its networks were working properly.
There is currently blood on the streets but we should not assume that the majority of Iranians regard the Ahmadinejad government as illegitimate.
The reality is messy. Bottom line: the worse thing the West can do is bully/bomb/threaten Tehran.
Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in 1979 but now strong critic of Tehran, talks to Foreign Policy:
I hope that the Obama administration and other democratic countries will be more supportive of the struggle of the people of Iran for democracy and human rights. I can summarize it in four items. First, sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard. Second, technical support like satellite Internet for Iran and pressure on companies like Nokia which have sold devices to control SMS, cell phones, and Internet in Iran. Third, help asylum seekers. Some of the activists, journalists and freedom seekers are now out of Iran in Turkey, Iraq, or Dubai. We need to help to bring them to Western countries. The last one is, please everybody, help to prevent any military strike against Iran, especially from Israel, because it would be a gift for this regime. We believe that this regime will be overthrown by the people, and a military strike would be the only solution for this regime to save the government.
The OpenNet Initiative estimates that at the end of 2009, 32% of all Internet users [globally] were accessing a filtered version of the Internet.
Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, a brave soul and long-time enemy of the US-backed client state, speaks out on what he dreams for his country:
A black day for the crusading website Wikileaks:
The anonymous whistleblower website Wikileaks, which has been a thorn in the side of governments and big business for three years, has shut down temporarily because it has run out of money.
The document repository, founded by an Australian living in East Africa, has been the catalyst for countless front-page stories around the world.
It has exposed serious business and political corruption and sparked a political scandal in Australia when it published the federal government’s secret blacklist of banned websites.
In a message posted on the site, founder Julian Assange appealed for donations from the public, saying he had received hundreds of thousands of pages relating to “corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others” but did not have the resources to release them.