Antony Loewenstein

A welcome sign of transparency by Google – and far better than most other web companies – but there’s a long way to go. For example, what are the cosy deals between Google and governments who simply don’t like certain material and want it removed from YouTube?

Google Inc. has set up a new tool to show where it’s facing the most government pressure to censor material and turn over personal information about its users.

The country-by-country breakdown released Tuesday on Google’s Web site marks the first time that the Internet search leader has provided such a detailed look at the censorship and data requests that it gets from regulators, courts and other government agencies. The figures, for the roughly 100 countries in which it operates, cover the final half of last year and will be updated every six months.

Google posted the numbers nearly a month after it began redirecting search requests to its China-based service. Those requests are now handled in Hong Kong rather than mainland China so Google wouldn’t have to obey the country’s Internet censorship laws. Google said details about the censorship demands it got while in mainland China still aren’t being shared because the information is classified as a state secret.

In other countries, Google is making more extensive disclosures about censorship demands or other government requests to edit its search results. Google is also including demands to remove material from its other services, including the YouTube video site, although it is excluding removal requests related to allegations of copyright infringement, a recurring problem for YouTube.

Google is showing how often it honored those requests and spelling out which of its services were targeted.

In the United States, for instance, it received 123 requests to remove material from its services during the last half of 2009 and complied with 80 percent of them. Reasons include violations of Google’s own policies regarding extreme violence, profanity and hate speech. More than 40 of those requests included a court order, Google said.

Is Australia trying to look foolish or do they truly want to look like a bumbling authoritarian state?

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant’s campaign against the government’s internet filtering policy.

In an interview on ABC Radio last night, Senator Conroy also said he was unaware of complaints the Obama administration said it had raised with the government over the policy.

The government intends to introduce legislation within weeks forcing all ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” websites for all Australians.

Senator Conroy has said the blacklist will largely include deplorable content such as child pornography, bestiality material and instructions on crime, but a large and growing group of academics, technology companies and lobby groups say the scope of the filters is too broad and will not make a meaningful impact on internet safety for children.

Google, which has recently been involved in a censorship spat with China, has been one of the filtering policy’s harshest critics. It has identified a range of politically sensitive and innocuous material, such as sexual health discussions and discussions on euthanasia, which could be blocked by the filters.

Last week, it said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia’s millions of internet users could “negatively impact user access speeds”, while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter “appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access”.

“We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia’s international reputation and it can be easily circumvented,” Google wrote.

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.

The Jerusalem Post explains why the growing public protests over Sheikh Jarrah have been helped greatly by the web (and ironically, the failure of the Western press to adequately report an issue a few kilometres from their offices):

Social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, along with a slew of blogs, are playing an increasing role in the growing participation of young Israelis in protest rallies in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, activists and journalists familiar with the situation there told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Activists and journalists both described a situation in which protesters were relying on the Internet to try and affect change on the ground and raise awareness of the arrests made during demonstrations in the neighborhood.

“It’s all Facebook, e-mails and Twitter,” said Didi Remez, a human rights activist, who has become noticeably involved in the Sheikh Jarrah protests as of late. Remez was arrested during a protest there last Friday.

Remez also said that distant audiences, like American Jews, who might be deprived of Sheikh Jarrah coverage due to the mainstream media’s lack of interest, were instead staying abreast of the situation via social networking sites.

“The American media is for some reason refusing to cover this,” he said. “Even though it’s becoming a major issue in Israel. And still, despite that, there’s a lot of awareness [of this issue] among Jewish Americans, the reason being that they are increasingly connected through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on.”

“They’re getting information on this without The New York Times,” Remez continued. “So, something that hasn’t been covered at all by the [American] mainstream media, is still getting coverage through new media, and I think that’s a statement about the decline of the mainstream media and maybe a larger comment on the shift away from it.”

My following article appears today on ABC Unleashed/The Drum:

Google has threatened to withdraw entirely from China in protest at the authoritarian regime’s oppressive online censorship and continuing attempts by Chinese hackers to gain sensitive information of local human rights workers.

Perhaps most significantly, Google’s Chinse search engine, Google.cn, now allows once banned material to be displayed, such as images of the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. A few people even placed flowers outside the company’s offices in Beijing as a sign of respect and perhaps admiration for the company’s position.

It is a highly unusual move by a multinational with roughly 30 percent market share in an internet market of over 350 million people, the largest in the world. Furthermore, it recognises the increasing pressure placed on the company by Communist officials, including the banning of YouTube, attempts to illegally gain corporate information and persistent efforts by hackers to discover the private details of dissenters on Gmail.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Open Space Institute and an expert on the Chinese Internet, told the New York Times that, “Unless they turn themselves into a Chinese company, Google could not win. The company has clearly put its foot down and said enough is enough.”

A Google spokesman wrote in a blog posting on 12 January:

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

News reports indicate that the Obama administration has been in negotiations with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco, companies with a long history of assisting Beijing in its censorship program, to implement a far-reaching initiative to help citizens in repressive regimes access banned online information. China is only the worst culprit of this growing trend; Iran is not far behind, especially since last year’s disputed election.

Despite Google’s seemingly brave move, already praised by human rights groups around the world, questions remain whether other large web firms will join them. It should be remembered that the country’s largest search engines, such as Baidu, are Chinese-owned and remain close to the regime. They are unlikely to follow Google’s lead.

The last months have seen cyber wars within China and from the outside heat up considerably. Chinese netizens have pledged to help their Iranian colleagues while government-backed activists from Iran moved to disable Chinese websites.

Chinese writer and blogger Alice Xin Liu argued earlier this month that the banning of increasing numbers of websites by paranoid authorities was both impossible to predict and avoid. She shared the news that officials are threatening to release a “white-list” of approved websites, with foreign websites forced to register before they launched or allowed to continue online.

Although some technology writers are cynical over Google’s latest stance (“More about business than thwarting evil”, says one), the company’s relationship with the Communist regime has never been especially close. It was slammed internationally for agreeing to censorship its search engine in the first place. Google’s global standing plummeted since 2006: “On a business level, that decision to censor…was a net negative,” co-founder Sergey Brin told the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2007.

When I visited China in 2007 during research for my book, The Blogging Revolution, I found widespread mistrust of the company. Although Gmail was regarded as far safer option than Hotmail or Yahoo!, the search engine was regarded as a pale imitation of Chinese equivalents.

The Great Firewall (GFW) is an ingenious system that doesn’t actually block all banned content. Instead, explains leading internet censorship expert Nart Villeneuve, “the GFW doesn’t have to be 100% technically effective, it just has to serve as a reminder to those in China about what content is acceptable and that which should be avoided. The objective is to influence behaviour toward self-censorship, so that most will not actively seek out banned information or the means to bypass controls and access it.”

My own research in China found a remarkable amount of material still existed that could be deemed controversial. Sexual content, political writings and corruption discussions remained available. The last decade has seen an explosion of once-forbidden issues now analysed, challenged and framed in the Chinese blogosphere. Crusading journalism is still possible in today’s China. This is not to deny the pervasive censorship regime but to highlight a more nuanced view of Beijing’s attitude towards its citizens.

The wider context for this story is the economic rise of China; the elephant in the room between Washington and Beijing. America fears a business and political rival and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded this week that China explains its ongoing cyber-attacks against Google and other firms. It was yet another warning from the super-power to the competitor snapping at its heels.

Veteran China watcher James Fallows argues that the significance of Google’s decision is the challenge to China’s “Bush-Cheney era”. China “is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world” but is not a threat to American hegemony.

The real agenda behind Google’s decision may never be known but it is unlikely to change in the short-term the Communist Party’s stranglehold on information. If the move forces Western companies to more closely examine their motives and practices in the dictatorship and the collusion that inevitably comes with this process, Google will have recovered a modicum of respect.

Resistance in Iran continues to take many forms. Global Voices shows us one way:

Hundreds of Iranian men have dressed as women in Hijab to support Majid Tavakoli, a student activist who was arrested on December 7. Iranian authorities claim Mr. Tavakoli was dressed as a woman to escape after delivering a speech in Tehran on Student Day.

However, human rights activists in Iran have also published a report from an eyewitness saying: “All the pictures published by the state media are false and a clear use of immoral means against student and civil activists in Iran.”

Hundreds of Iranian men are now dressed as woman in their FaceBook profiles. Here is a YouTube video in support of Majid that has collected some of these photos:

Talking about internet censorship in a nation like Iran is necessary and chilling.

But, correctly writes the New York Times in an editorial today, how much do we know about the American government’s meddling in the online world?

The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.

Law enforcement is not saying a lot about its social surveillance, but examples keep coming to light. The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that state revenue agents have been searching for tax scofflaws by mining information on MySpace and Facebook. In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of a man suspected of helping coordinate protests at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh by sending out messages over Twitter.

In some cases, the government appears to be engaged in deception. The Boston Globe recently quoted a Massachusetts district attorney as saying that some police officers were going undercover on Facebook as part of their investigations.

Wired magazine reported last month that In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, has put money into Visible Technologies, a software company that crawls across blogs, online forums, and open networks like Twitter and YouTube to monitor what is being said.

This month the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law sued the Department of Defense, the C.I.A. and other federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act to learn more about their use of social networking sites.

The suit seeks to uncover what guidelines these agencies have about this activity, including information about whether agents are permitted to use fake identities or to engage in subterfuge, such as tricking people into accepting Facebook friend requests.

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.

Zionist propagandists, don’t feel alone. Israel has a job for you.

One truly wonders whether Israel is stupid or just overly optimistic. Better PR and more use of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to change the woeful international image of the Jewish state. Ending the occupation will help but there ain’t no chance of that anytime soon:

Israel’s army is recruiting soldiers for a new unit that is waging a virtual public relations battle on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to improve the military’s image.

“Because of the platform you can get a lot of information out relatively easily,” said Sergeant Aliza Landes, who heads the unit. “The Internet, and especially social networks, Web 2.0 and bloggers, are an increasingly important and powerful way to disseminate information.”

Israel first began seriously using the Internet as a public-relations tool during a three-week military initiative in the Gaza Strip that began on Dec. 27 to stop rocket attacks on its southern towns and cities. The army launched a YouTube channel that month and broadcast footage of air force attacks on Gaza targets, including one of a missile aborted once officers realized civilians were in the area.

A unit dedicated to Internet publicity was officially formed in September and we “continue to grow and invest in manpower and resources,” Major Erik Snider, an army spokesman, said by telephone. “It is absolutely important for the Israeli army to be out there. There are few armies around the world that receive the scrutiny and attention that the Israeli military does.”

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.

My following article appears in the Asia-Pacific Magazine The Diplomat:

Our writer argues that his young tech-savvy peers, celebrity fixations aside, are increasingly engaged in global issues like this summer’s riots in Tehran.

The violent June uprisings in Iran ricocheted around the world. While young, old, conservative and liberal Iranians protested the stolen election win of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the global online community rushed to support the cause. Although the Western rhetoric of good versus evil was embarrassingly simplistic – most of the protesters weren’t calling for the end of the Islamic Republic, merely reform – it was gratifying to find international interest for the rioting Iranians.

This backing took many forms. Web-savvy youth provided tools for Iranians to avoid government-backed censorship. One man in California published an online guide for geeks to set up proxy servers for Iranian citizens, as a way to get around the blocking of sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. “I felt like it was my responsibility to use my skills to help”, he told the US-based Tehran Bureau website. Many others volunteered their time and energy to allow Iranian youth to maintain an online voice.

Even singers Madonna, U2’s Bono, Jon Bon Jovi and Joan Baez stood alongside the protestors. Joan Baez recorded a version of “We Shall Overcome” – the anthem of the American civil rights movement – with some lyrics translated into Farsi.

When news circulated in June that phone companies Nokia and Siemens had sold Iran a monitoring centre that enabled security forces to tap mobile phones, scramble text-messages and interrupt calls, the worldwide response was immediate. A “Boycott Nokia” campaign sprouted almost overnight, bringing tens of thousands of signatures. According to the Guardian, Iranians themselves started to back an economic boycott as those sympathetic to the protest movement began targeting companies seen to be collaborating with the regime.

By mid-July, however, the story had largely fallen out of the news, not helped by the fact that the vast majority of Western journalists had been kicked out of the country and the authorities had brutally cracked down on local bloggers and dissidents. In the week June 29-July 5, Iran-related stories accounted for only four percent of total news coverage, down from 19 percent one week earlier, according to Pew Research.

For a few weeks, Iran seemed like the biggest story in the world, although the possibility of a full-blown revolution was always very unlikely. Beirut-based think-tank Conflicts Forum wrote in July that, “The events in Iran centred on a dispute about the role of certain powerful clergy as well as an airing of old grievances between several strong personalities. This does not imply a leadership so ‘divided’ that it is about to fall.” This was no Eastern European “colour” revolution, despite the best efforts of the Western media to claim otherwise.

Many young Iranian friends reminded me not to be seduced by the romantic notions of liberty and freedom. The vast majority of support for Iranian “democrats” in the West isn’t so much about the individuals or groups but a way to overthrow or challenge the Islamic Republic. A revolution from within is the only way forward.

Outside interference in Iran is a time-honoured tradition, something that even US President Barack Obama acknowledged in his famous Cairo speech in June. “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”, he said, in reference to the 1953 coup which overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

The global response to the Iranian uprisings proved that some dissent to authoritarian is more acceptable than others. Video footage was pouring out of Iran and world sympathy was clearly on the side of the protestors. Iran was the good fight, the just battle, and the inspiring struggle for democracy.

The democratic battle for Palestinian rights is framed in a completely different way. During recent travels around Israel, I was constantly told by Israelis that there was “no partner for peace” and checkpoints, walls and barriers had to be erected to prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Young American journalist Max Blumenthal correctly pointed out the inherent hypocrisy in the media’s response to these conflicts, noting “When Palestinians employ direct action tactics to protest Israeli oppression, and when Israeli forces respond with wanton brutality, they are ignored by the US media, even when footage is already available through online sources. It seems they can only generate media when they resort to violence, a dynamic the Israeli government obviously welcomes.” The only rational response is that Palestinians have been demonized so effectively over so many decades that any sympathy for them in the corporate media is automatically equated with anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism.

Despite these geo-political and media realities, the Palestinian cause is growing in strength across the world, especially among the younger generation. I encountered countless Western human rights activists throughout Palestine coming to protect Palestinian farmers from settler attacks or acquaint themselves with the realities of Israeli occupation. It is a cause that can’t be so easily erased by media silence. The Internet has allowed new voices to be heard – anti-Zionists, pro-Palestinian activists and critical perspectives against the Israel lobby – and has posted a fundamental challenge to the decades-old narrative of defenceless Israeli against aggressive Palestinian. Journalists in Gaza said that they were humbled with Western activists and journalists coming to the besieged Strip to hear their stories.

But neither Palestine nor Iran (or even the recent Uighur protests in China’s Xinjiang province) could match the outpouring of global grief over Michael Jackson’s death. It was at once dispiriting yet fleeting. Like Princess Diana, the emotions expressed were both deeply felt and artificial. Jackson’s music was undoubtedly influential but I suspect many simply longed to reclaim his once-cherished innocence and wished he had been able to resurrect his stalled career.

The public passions experienced over Jackson’s demise were a manifestation of celebrity culture run amok. But the global Web community is now so fragmented, offering the ability to support or advocate for countless causes, that enough individuals are still following and supporting the Iranians, Palestinians and Uighurs.

The baby boomers largely protested themselves out in the 1960s and 1970s – and many finally embraced the belief that pure capitalism was the best way to ensure social equity, despite the vast evidence challenging this thesis. In contrast, generation x and y are far less likely to burn out; activism is easy with the click of a mouse button.

As a member of Generation X, I don’t find apathy among my peers, but engagement, dedication and a belief in human rights. Perhaps the majority of the world’s population doesn’t care that Israel continues to illegally occupy the Palestinians or that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime tortures dissidents in jail, but the sheer force of powerful images and words transmitted by bloggers, satellite television and alternative media has created an unruly collection of conflicting messages and talking points. These causes are known because they are right and just. Solely relying on establishment news outlets to get informed is no longer a viable option.

Order is the enemy of progress.

Antony Loewenstein is a Gen X, Sydney journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

There have been countless allegations of torture and abuse at the hands of the Iranian regime since the disputed election in June.

Now testimonies of rape and torture are being spread online. Here’s one:

They took us with tens of others to Kahrizak camp. At least in that room that I were held there were another 200 people, all were injured beaten by batons. you could hear people crying everywhere….the plaincloth guards came into room…beat whom they could. they did for half an hour…after that they put a flash light in our faces and say if you make a noise with put these batons in your asses….to prevent us dying of hunger, everyday they give us a bag of leftover food.

Below is a former political prisoner recounting the experience of being imprisoned, tortured and raped in an Iranian prison in the 1980s. She was only 17 years old at the time and did not know why she had been arrested. More than 90,000 people have watched her testimony on YouTube.