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?
Tag Archive for 'Google'
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.
The role of the Chinese regime in hacking sensitive information just became even creepier:
Reporters Without Borders is deeply disturbed and outraged by cyber-attacks on the Google E-mail accounts of several Beijing-based foreign journalists. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) sent its members a note today alerting them that at least two foreign news bureaux in Beijing have been the target of attacks by hackers.
The warning follows Google’s revelation that the Gmail accounts of several dozen Chinese human rights activists were the target of sophisticated attacks in December.
“The hackers who targeted foreign journalists based in Beijing were probably trying to get contact details and information about the human rights activists who talk to the international press,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Compromising these reporters’ communication methods endangers and intimidates their sources and constitutes a serious violation of their privacy, their professional work and their freedom to provide news and information.”
The press freedom organisation added: “We firmly condemn these attacks and we call on the ministry of industry and information technology to provide an explanation.”
An APTN journalist whose account was hacked told Reporters Without Borders told Reporters Without Borders that her emails were being forwarded to another, unknown account. “I have the feeling that my privacy has been violated,” she told Reporters Without Borders on condition of anonymity. “And so many people have been put in danger by these leaks, it’s terrible.”
A key reason behind Google’s announcement this week that it will probably leave China was allegedly due to human rights concerns:
Google moved quickly to announce that it would stop censoring its Chinese service after realising dissidents were at risk from attempts to use the company’s technology for political surveillance, according to a source with direct knowledge of the internet giant’s most senior management.
As the US intervened in Google’s challenge to Beijing, the source told the Guardian the company’s decision was largely influenced by the experiences of Sergey Brin’s Russian refugee background.
The Google co-founder “felt this very personally”, the source said. “The notion that somebody would try to turn Google’s tools into tools of political surveillance was something he found deeply offensive.”
The New York Times remains unsure whether Google departing China will mainly affect the Chinese people themselves:
“In the 20 years I’ve been doing this work, I can’t think of anything comparable,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has enjoyed remarkable success in encouraging China to release dissidents. Mr. Kamm, a former business leader himself, argues that Western companies could do far more to project their values.
With news that Google is threatening to leave China over its oppressive censorship and hacking systems, this news (which is impossible to verify) is either scare-mongering on a massive scale or signs of a brave new world:
A classified FBI report indicates that China has secretly developed an army of 180,000 cyberspies that “poses the largest single threat to the United States for cyberterrorism and has the potential to destroy vital infrastructure, interrupt banking and commerce, and compromise sensitive military and defense databases.”
These spies are already launching 90,000 attacks a year just against U.S. Defense Department computers, according to a senior FBI analyst familiar with the contents of the report, making news Tuesday that the Chinese government may have hacked the email accountings of human-rights activists, prompting Google to consider withdrawing from that country, seem like child’s play.
The state of human rights in Iran in 2009 has been grim and worsening.
Reporters Without Borders highlights the web apartheid (possibly backed by Western multinationals):
The authorities have also targeted the Internet in an attempt to extend their control to the new media. News websites that were likely to criticise Ahmadinejad’s victory, including around 10 opposition websites, were pre-emptively censored on 11 June, the eve of the election. Since then, every effort has been made to prevent news and information about the regime’s opponents circulating online.
This policy is continuing. Internet connections were slowed right down or blocked altogether in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz on the eve of opposition demonstrations that were announced in advance, such as those on 4 November and 7 December.
The slow-down began earlier than usual before the latest protests on 7 December. Internet connections became very slow on 5 December, making it impossible to browse or send emails. Gmail and Yahoo welcome pages no longer displayed. “I wanted to send emails but even if the Gmail welcome page displayed, the ‘Send’ button did not,” one Iranian told Reporters Without Borders, referring to his Internet connection on 7 December.
While Iran erupts again with protesters against dictatorial rule, Reporters Without Borders finds massive attempts by authorities to shut down modern communications (a futile act, and only temporarily successful, that shows its desperation):
The Iranian censors targeted the new-generation media with renewed energy. The authorities have responded, blow by blow, to demonstrations in recent months but this is the first time that have acted with so much anticipation:
Internet connections been blocked or slow since 5 December, especially in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, making it difficult or impossible to surf the Internet or send emails, several sources in Iran told Reporters Without Borders. One referred ironically to broadband speeds of less than 56Kb (dial-up speed). The Gmail and Yahoo! welcome pages do not display. Access to proxies is haphazard, complicating the use of censorship circumvention methods to access such blocked websites as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Mobile phone and SMS service are also suspended or jammed in many parts of the country including Tehran.
Agence France-Presse quoted technicians as saying these problems were the result of a “decision by the authorities” rather than any breakdown in service. The main Internet service providers use the network of the state-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Despite the existence of privately-owned companies, the state dominates this sector and any instructions it issues are immediately implemented.
Is there anywhere on the planet that Google doesn’t exist?
It spread across the web like a wildfire: Google chief Eric Schmidt visited Baghdad today. Yes, just like a statesman. He attended a ceremony with the US Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, at Iraq’s national museum, where he announced that the search giant would post photographs of the museum’s ancient treasures on the net early next year.
The museum – which hosts artefacts from Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian cultures – hit the headlines when it was looted in April 2003 during the Iraq war. Its director, Amira Edan, estimates that only around 5,000 of the 15,000 artefacts taken have been recovered so far.
The US has been criticised for not using troops to protect the museum and other cultural institutions with their troops. Now Google has taken more than 14,000 pictures of the treasures to be put online. That is good. Due to security concerns the artefacts of the cradle of civilisation have been largely closed to the public, even after the museum opened earlier this year. But it leaves a strange feeling as well, with private company Google once again serving a more public interest.
China, we are listening, can you hear us?
When Barack Obama told students in Shanghai last week that he had never used Twitter, there were two responses. In the west, surprise from some of his 2.6 million followers. And in China, reportedly, a surge in queries on Google China: “What’s Twitter?”
On the mainland, it is “popular only within a tiny circle of white collar workers”, observed a state-run website recently. The article failed to mention that the service had been blocked a few weeks before – two days before the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square.
Other sites, including Facebook and YouTube, are victims of a longer running clampdown. While the tech-savvy still access them via proxies or a virtual private network (VPN), to do so is increasingly inconvenient. “If you look at the sites blocked now and those blocked five years ago, it’s gone from web 1.0 to web 2.0 – it’s social media,” says Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on internet use in China. “The authorities are not worried about people having access to what the rest of the world is saying, but about the ability of these tools to spread rumours very, very quickly.”
Two of Twitter’s most popular local rivals – Jiwai and Fanfou – were taken offline shortly after 197 people died in clashes in Xinjiang. State media have alleged that social media “spread misinformation” and even that outsiders used them to orchestrate the violence.
The Iranian regime, already isolated internationally (well, the West doesn’t like her) continues to arrest dissenters.
But this news places the country in the dubious role of copying China’s most draconian web censorship:
On Wednesday, authorities temporarily blocked all access to e-mail programs such as Gmail and Yahoo during the demonstrations to prevent people from sending images to foreign media organizations. Still, many managed to upload cellphone clips to video sites, which were widely broadcast by foreign-based Farsi-language satellite channels.
Google fans, hold your applause, as it looks like one of its founders backs the colonial project in Palestine:
Jewish Billionaire, Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, donated $1 million to the so-called Hebrew national Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) which heavily encourages Jews around the world to immigrate to Israel and the United States.
The organization is one of the biggest supporters of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In 1979, Brin, at age 6, emigrated with his family from the former Soviet Union to the United States.
He said that HIAS helped his family leave the Soviet Union, and that his donation comes on the thirtieth anniversary of leaving Russia.
His current wealth is estimated by $16 billion.
The recent Fatah conference in Bethlehem was a sign that the US-backed Palestinian party was utterly removed from reality.
But not to worry, why do Palestinians need a state when they have this?
Ten years after Google Inc first rolled out its internet search engine, Palestine finally has its own Google domain, enabling the territories to access localized search results. Since Google launched its iconic website in 1998 it has been slowly adding many of the world’s local domains like google.co.uk (Google UK) and google.jo (Google Jordan), but it was not until Thursday that Google launched google.ps, enabling the Palestinian Territories’ estimated 2.4 million residents to redefine searches.
Jonathan Zittrain writes in the New York Times about the web’s future:
Earlier this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.
Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.
The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.
He’s absolutely right. Relying on any company to store all our personal information is foolish. For example, Google has assisted the Chinese regime in censoring its own search engine.
We trust any one firm at our peril.
We reported some time ago on the complicity of Nokia in the recent Iranian crackdown. Western multinationals have become pretty good at working with authoritarian regimes (witness Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in China.)
The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.
Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.
There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran’s state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.
What’s a fair financial, ethical and practical share in the age of Google?
This news is welcome in a nation such as China where web repression is deep:
A Chinese academic has successfully sued an internet company for closing his website after he posted articles on subjects including corruption and environmental issues.
Hu Xingdou, professor of economics at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said he hoped his case would encourage other users to protect their rights and net censors to make decisions more responsibly.
“I was surprised when I won. In the past, there have been people suing like me, but either the court did not take the case or they failed. This is the first successful case in China of a netizen or internet user suing their internet service provider,” Hu told the Guardian.
I discuss in my book The Blogging Revolution about growing attempts by Chinese citizens to hold web companies to account, but I look forward to the day when Western firms like Google and Yahoo are fully investigated over their complicity.
Not unlike Shell is currently experiencing in a New York courtroom.