Filtering, denial of service attacks, withdrawal of content – censors use many different methods to silence news websites. In addition to drawing attention to these acts of censorship and providing the victims with legal, material and financial help, Reporters Without Borders has now decided to provide them with technical assistance as well.

So that independent news websites that are targeted by cyber-attacks and government blocking can continue posting information online, Reporters Without Borders is going to start mirroring sites. The first sites to be mirrored are those of the Chechen magazine Dosh and the Sri Lankan online newspaperLanka-e News. We urge Internet users all over the world to create more mirrors of these sites in an act of solidarity.

If a cyber-attack renders Doshdu.ru inaccessible again, as it was during last December’s parliamentary elections in Russia, Internet users will be able to access the exact copy created by Reporters Without Borders, http://dosh.rsf.org. The mirror will be regularly and automatically updated.

Mirror sites can also be used to circumvent blocking by governments. For example, the Lanka-e-News site, http://lankaenews.com, has been blocked in Sri Lanka since October 2011 (by blocking the site domain name or the hosting server’s IP address), but Internet users in Sri Lanka will be able to access the Reporters Without Borders mirror site, http://lankaenesw.rsf.org, which is hosted on another server with another domain name.

If the mirror is itself later also blocked, the creation of further mirror sites together with a regularly updated list of these mirrors will continue to render the blocking ineffective in a Streisand effect.

Reporters Without Borders will soon create other mirrors and urges Internet users who want to help combat censorship and have the ability to host a site on a web server to follow suit. A list of the mirror sites will be updated on this page. If you want to participate, send the URL of the mirror site you have created to wefightcensorship [at] rsf.org. We will add it to the list below. The next mirroring operations launched by Reporters Without Borders will be reported on the @RSF_RWB and @RSFNet Twitter accounts with the #RSFmirror hashtag.

Last month philosopher Patrick Lin delivered this briefing about the ethics of drones at an event hosted by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm (via the Atlantic):

Let’s look at some current and future scenarios. These go beyond obvious intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), strike, and sentry applications, as most robots are being used for today. I’ll limit these scenarios to a time horizon of about 10-15 years from now.

Military surveillance applications are well known, but there are also important civilian applications, such as robots that patrol playgrounds for pedophiles (for instance, in South Korea) and major sporting events for suspicious activity (such as the 2006 World Cup in Seoul and 2008 Beijing Olympics). Current and future biometric capabilities may enable robots to detect faces, drugs, and weapons at a distance and underneath clothing. In the future, robot swarms and “smart dust” (sometimes called nanosensors) may be used in this role.

Robots can be used for alerting purposes, such as a humanoid police robot in China that gives out information, and a Russian police robot that recites laws and issues warnings. So there’s potential for educational or communication roles and on-the-spot community reporting, as related to intelligence gathering.

In delivery applications, SWAT police teams already use robots to interact with hostage-takers and in other dangerous situations. So robots could be used to deliver other items or plant surveillance devices in inaccessible places. Likewise, they can be used for extractions too. As mentioned earlier, the BEAR robot can retrieve wounded soldiers from the battlefield, as well as handle hazardous or heavy materials. In the future, an autonomous car or helicopter might be deployed to extract or transport suspects and assets, to limit US personnel inside hostile or foreign borders.

In detention applications, robots could also be used to not just guard buildings but also people. Some advantages here would be the elimination of prison abuses like we saw at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This speaks to the dispassionate way robots can operate. Relatedly–and I’m not advocating any of these scenarios, just speculating on possible uses–robots can solve the dilemma of using physicians in interrogations and torture. These activities conflict with their duty to care and the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Robots can monitor vital signs of interrogated suspects, as well as a human doctor can. They could also administer injections and even inflict pain in a more controlled way, free from malice and prejudices that might take things too far (or much further than already).

At the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

…

So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.

Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.

Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.

But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed. Is Wikileaks in the same category? Clearly not, but Washington’s counter-attack may be far too draconian for a supposed democracy:

The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

The twin efforts show how President Barack Obama’s administration is racing on multiple fronts to plug the holes in U.S. cyber defenses.

Notwithstanding the military’s efforts, however, the overall gap appears to be widening, as adversaries and criminals move faster than government and corporations, and technologies such as mobile applications for smart phones proliferate more rapidly than policymakers can respond, officials and analysts said.

A Reuters examination of American cyber readiness produced the following findings:

* Spin-offs of the malicious code dubbed “agent.btz” used to attack the military’s U.S. Central Command in 2008 are still roiling U.S. networks today. People inside and outside the U.S. government strongly suspect Russia was behind the attack, which was the most significant known breach of military networks.

* There are serious questions about the security of “cloud computing,” even as the U.S. government prepares to embrace that technology in a big way for its cost savings.

* The U.S. electrical grid and other critical nodes are still vulnerable to cyber attack, 13 years after then-President Bill Clinton declared that protecting critical infrastructure was a national priority.

* While some progress has been made in coordinating among government agencies with different missions, and across the public-private sector gap, much remains to be done.

* Government officials say one of the things they fear most is a so-called “zero-day attack,” exploiting a vulnerability unknown to the software developer until the strike hits.

That’s the technique that was used by the Stuxnet worm that snarled Iran’s enriched uranium-producing centrifuges last summer, and which many experts say may have been created by the United States or Israel. A mere 12 months later, would-be hackers can readily find digital tool kits for building Stuxnet-like weapons on the Internet, according to a private-sector expert who requested anonymity.

“We’re much better off (technologically) than we were a few years ago, but we have not kept pace with opponents,” said Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “The network is so deeply flawed that it can’t be secured.”

“IT’S LIKE AN INSECT INFESTATION”

In recent months hackers have broken into the SecurID tokens used by millions of people, targeting data from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3 and almost certainly others; launched a sophisticated strike on the International Monetary Fund; and breached digital barriers to grab account information from Sony, Google, Citigroup and a long list of others.

The latest high-profile victims were the public websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate – whose committees are drafting legislation to improve coordination of cyber defenses.

Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour.

The documents also show that in the earliest years of the prison camps operation, the Pentagon permitted Chinese and Russian interrogators into the camps — information from those sessions are included in some captives’ assessments — something American defense lawyers working free-of-charge for the foreign prisoners have alleged and protested for years.

There’s not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing Bin Laden. In fact, the documents suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of hunting down the al Qaida inner circle and sleeper cells.

The file of one captive, now living in Ireland, shows he was sent to Guantanamo so that U.S. military intelligence could gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain is shipped to Guantanamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on “personalities in the Bahraini court.”

…

Here’s the 2011 TIME 100 Poll featuring Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Whoever wrote this blurb clearly doesn’t care about the serious war crimes allegations against his government:

Since ending Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and grabbing control over once independent institutions like commissions on human rights and elections, Mahinda Rajapaksa has come to dominate the institutions of his nation more than any other democratically elected head of state. He challenged the U.S., the European Union and the U.N. to prosecute him for war crimes, confident that Russia, China and India would not support it — the latter two have billions of investment at stake in Sri Lanka.

The trial of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky shows the Kremlin preserves a “cynical system where political enemies are eliminated with impunity”, US diplomats say in classified cables released by WikiLeaks today.

Attempts by the Russian government to demonstrate the rule of law is being respected during Khodorkovsky’s prosecution are “lipstick on a political pig“, says a communique to Washington from the US embassy in Moscow in December 2009.

Khodorkovsky, 47, an oil tycoon who was arrested in 2003 and sentenced to eight years in jail for fraud two years later, will appear in court in Moscow today to hear the verdict in his second trial on embezzlement charges. Supporters of the man once Russia‘s richest say the Kremlin ordered the prosecutions in revenge for his funding of opposition parties.

Khodorkovsky could get up to six more years in jail at the end of his current sentence in October next year, if convicted. His business partner, Platon Lebedev, faces the same punishment.

While US officials have already publicly criticised the trial, which began in March last year, the baldness of the language in the secret cables is striking.

Writing to Washington in December last year, a political officer in the US embassy in Moscow noted that one international legal expert believes the trial judge is trying to give Khodorkovsky’s defence lawyers a chance. However, in a withering assessment, the officer adds: “The fact that legal procedures are apparently being meticulously followed in a case whose motivation is clearly political may appear paradoxical.

“It shows the effort that the GOR [government of Russia] is willing to expend in order to save face, in this case by applying a superficial rule-of-law gloss to a cynical system where political enemies are eliminated with impunity.”

The diplomat’s assessment reaffirms those made in US cables released earlier by WikiLeaks, in which Russia is described as a kleptocratic “mafia state” in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are inextricably linked.

Every day brings huge new revelations, leaving so many in the mainstream media simply ignoring the best bits (hello ABC Radio’s AM today, utterly shunning anything about the issues).

One:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wanted to expose China‘s and Russia‘s secrets as much as those of the US, and believes Hillary Clinton should resign if she ordered diplomats to engage in espionage.

“[Clinton] should resign if it could be shown that she was responsible for ordering US diplomatic figures to engage in espionage of UN activities, in violation of the international covenants to which the US signed up,” he said in an interview with Time magazine, published yesterday following the leak of secret US diplomatic cables that have caused huge embarrassment for the country.

Assange gave the interview via Skype from an undisclosed location after a warrant was issued by Interpol following rape allegations in Sweden, which his lawyer said amounted to persecution and a smear campaign.

While Assange has been accused by former members of the WikiLeaks project of obsessively focusing on the US, he said countries with less transparency, such as China and Russia, had the most potential to be reformed by whistleblowers.

“We believe it is the most closed societies that have the most reform potential,” he said. Assange said that while parts of the Chinese government and security services “appear terrified of free speech” he believed it was “an optimistic sign because it means speech can still cause reform.”

He added: “Journalism and writing is capable of achieving change which is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it.”

Assange argued that countries like China could be easier to reform than countries like the US and the UK, which “have been so heavily fiscalised through contractual obligations that political change doesn’t seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn’t result in change.”

While secrecy was important, Assange said, in keeping the identity of sources hidden, secrecy “shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.”

He said that revealing abuses could lead to positive changes in countries and organisations. “They have one of two choices … to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavours, and proud to display them to the public” or “to lock down internally and to balkanise, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.”

Turning back to the US, Assange said he believed American society was “becoming more closed” and its “relative degree of openness … probably peaked in about 1978, and has been on the way down, unfortunately, since.”

Speaking about accusations that he had singled out the US as a force for harm in the world, Assange said the view lacked “the necessary subtlety”.

“I don’t think the US is, by world standards, an exception; rather it is a very interesting case both for its abuses and for some of its founding principles.”

Assange said the media interest in the WikiLeaks cables had been tremendous.

“The media scrutiny and the reaction are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it,” he said, with “a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries”.

Assange also gave a glimpse into why WikiLeaks had chosen to partner with traditional media organisations to release the files, rather than, as might have been expected, amateur bloggers. In 2006, “we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on,” he said.

But “when people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not, with some exceptions, their goal to expose the truth.

“Rather, it is their goal to position themselves amongst their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that, is simply to take the story that’s going around, [which] has already created a marketable audience for itself, and say whether they’re in favour of that interpretation or not.”

Now, he said, the analytical work was “done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human rights activists. It is not done by the broader community.” Social networks acted as amplifiers, he added – and, as WikiLeaks gained more publicity, an important supplier of source material.

Two:

Russia tried to block the extradition of the suspected international arms trafficker Viktor Bout from Thailand to America by bribing key witnesses, the US claims.

Diplomats in Bangkok alleged in cables released by WikiLeaks that Bout’s “Russian supporters” had paid witnesses to give false testimony during his extradition hearing.

Dubbed the “merchant of death”, Bout was seized by the Thai authorities in March 2008 but only extradited to the US on 16 November this year. The US accuses him of conspiring to sell millions of dollars of weapons to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebels to kill Americans. The Kremlin strongly opposed his extradition.

The Russian businessman, accused of running arms-trafficking networks around the world, maintains he is innocent in a case that turned into an undignified tug-of-war between Washington and Moscow.

In a cable written on 13 February 2009, US diplomats said that in the year after Bout’s arrest, extradition proceedings in Thailand were “going in the way we want” – albeit at a “painfully slow” pace.

More recently, however, the case had taken a worryingly wrong turn: “There have been disturbing indications that Bout’s … and Russian supporters have been using money and influence in an attempt to block extradition,” the diplomats reported.

Three:

The WikiLeaks website exposé of the inner workings of American diplomacy continued Wednesday, with revelations that Berlin pushed for the U.S. to impose a settlement freeze on Israel.

According to a telegram published by the whistleblowing website, two weeks before Israel’s inner cabinet decided on a settlement construction freeze in November 2009, a senior German government official urged the United States to threaten Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he did not agree to a moratorium, Washington would withdraw its support for blocking a vote on the Goldstone Report at the United Nations Security Council.

Four:

A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.

The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish “at the request of the Obama administration”. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly- distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website.

As a result, a key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration’s ballistic missile defense policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has instead produced a spate of stories buttressing anti-Iran hysteria.