A company that should be named, shamed and shunned (via the Sydney Morning Herald): Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people. Dan Ward, of US law…
Showing all posts tagged censorship
Web “security” firms doesn’t mean helping autocrats feel secure
Surely companies that assist repressive regimes in their censorship should pay a legal and ethical price in their home country? This is an argument in my book The Blogging Revolution (just re-released in an updated edition). This story is from Guelph Mercury: A Guelph tech firm with a reputation for making tools to control information…
The Blogging Revolution updated post the Arab revolutions
In 2008 my second book, The Blogging Revolution, was released. It told the story of the internet in repressive regimes. Now, post the Arab uprisings, I’ve updated the title and it’s been released globally this week as an e-book via Melbourne University Press:
Iran’s insecure mullahs attempt to cut off country from the web
Insane, unworkable and signs of autocrats who fear freedom of expression and their own citizens: Communication and information technology minister Reza Taqipour Anvari announced at the start of July that the first phase of a “National Internet,” also called “Clean Internet,” will get under way at the end of August, offering an 8 Mbps speed…
Ahmadinejad’s Iran looking to isolate itself bit by bit
What a paranoid and fundamentalist regime looks like: Iran has stepped up online censorship by upgrading the filtering system that enables the Islamic regime to block access to thousands of websites it deems inappropriate for Iranian users. The move comes one month after the United States announced plans to launch new services facilitating internet access…
Al-Jazeera’s Listening Post on Syria media restrictions
The struggle for democracy in Syria has continued for most of this year. The media has been largely locked out of the country, so independent reporting has been very difficult (though local bloggers have remained essential). Al Jazeera’s Listening Post discusses the crackdown and I was asked to comment (my last appearance on the show…
Internet turning into tool of national security state
We see evidence for this everywhere, in both democracies and repressive nations alike. But how many of us in Western states recognise that tools like Facebook can be utilised for both “good” (connecting friends and family) and bad (surveillance)? Freelance journalist Inga Ting interviewed me for this piece in Crikey yesterday: Yet the problem may…
Google head, fond of Chinese censorship, worries about Arab repression
His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips: The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.…
US official; we love the internet (as long as views approved by State Dept)
Let me get this straight. A web evangelist, working for the US government, admires the ability of the internet to assist Arab revolutions and compares its power to Che Guevera, a man the establishment regards as a terrorist. I guess backing real freedom in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is a bridge too far for this…