Rebecca MacKinnon

Ranking Digital Rights: Help decide how to rank companies on free expression and privacy

June 19, 2014 by Rebecca MacKinnon

The following post is featured on the London School of Economics “Measuring Business and Human Rights” blog:

Ranking Digital Rights: How can and should ICT sector companies respect Internet users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy?

Vodafone’s blockbuster Law Enforcement Disclosure report, published last week, reveals greater detail than any telecommunications company has previously shared about the extent and nature of government surveillance demands all over the world.

Vodafone is certainly not alone: the problem is rampant across the entire sector. Norway’s Telenor isunder pressure from Thailand’s new military leaders who just seized power in a coup to help monitor and censor any content that might “lead to unrest.” Human Rights Watch recently questioned the French company, Orange, about its operations in Ethiopia whose government jails bloggers for political critiques.

Censorship is also a serious and growing problem for the ICT sector. On the 25th anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre on Wednesday, LinkedIn blocked mentions of the tragedy for its users in China. Last month, Twitter came under fire from free speech activists for agreeing to censor several tweets in Pakistan at the government’s request. Earlier this year, The Atlantic reported that “the Syrian opposition is disappearing from Facebook” – and not by choice.

Clearly, the policies and practices of Internet and telecommunications companies have real impact for the free expression and privacy of people around the world. Are they living up to their responsibilities? Are they doing everything they can to respect the rights of their users?

Some companies are trying – to varying degrees, publishing “transparency reports,” signing up for assessment processes through membership the Global Network Initiative, and making joint commitments as part of the Telecom Industry Dialogue. Others are doing little more than public relations window-dressing, while yet others are making little or no discernible effort to respect their users’ digital rights.

Meanwhile, investors have begun to ask questions about the materiality of companies’ policies and practices related to freedom of expression and privacy. One concrete example is the addition of freedom of expression and privacy criteria to recommended SEC reporting standards by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board.

As Internet users, or as investors who care about social value as well as financial returns, what should we be asking of these companies? How do we benchmark and compare companies’ policies and practices affecting free expression and privacy? What should be considered “best practice” in a world where governments are making unreasonable demands of companies, whose staff risk jail or worse in many cases for non-compliance?

The Ranking Digital Rights project is working on answers to those questions, developing a system rank the world’s most powerful ICT sector companies on free expression and privacy criteria. We have just released a draft methodology on which we are now inviting public comment until July 7th. After further revision followed by a pilot study, we aim to start ranking up to 50 Internet and telecommunications companies in 2015. (We will add up to 50 more device, software, and equipment companies in 2016.)

The project is modeled after other efforts by investors, universities, NGOs and international organizations that measure companies on other human rights, social responsibility and sustainability criteria – from conflict minerals to labor practices to carbon disclosure. Many rankings efforts such as the Access to Medicines Index and the Corporate Equality Index have had real impact on corporate practices.

Thus we believe that if the methodology is well constructed, a ranking focused on the policies and practices of ICT sector companies affecting free expression and privacy can have a substantial, measurable impact on the extent to which companies respect and protect Internet users’ rights.

The current draft methodology is the product of more than a year’s worth of research and stakeholder consultation. The first step came with a stakeholder consultation in the Fall of 2012 to ascertain whether there was sufficient interest among investors, advocates, and technologists to proceed with the project. After some initial funds had been secured and partnerships forged, an April 2013 workshop at the University of Pennsylvania brought together a group of researchers from around the world, technologists, experts in business and human rights, and experts on rankings. Out of that meeting came a set of draft criteria in the summer of 2013: an initial list of questions that stakeholders believe are relevant to understanding how and whether Internet and telecommunications companies are making genuine efforts to respect Internet users’ freedom of expression and privacy. We then used the draft criteria as the basis for a set of case studies examining companies in the United States, Europe, Brazil, India, China, and Russia. The results of the case study in turn enabled us to make key decisions about the methodology’s scope and focus, and to publish a first draft in February. We then carried out another round of consultations with companies, investors, technologists, experts on business and human rights, and experts on rankings. After absorbing their feedback and carrying out further research, we were able to publish Version 2 of the draft methodology late last month.

Public consultation on the current draft runs through July 7th, after which we will make another round of revisions and produce Version 3. That version will be used as a basis for a pilot study focusing on up to 10 of 50 companies we are likely to rank in 2015. This pilot study will enable us to improve the methodology and make final decisions about scoring and weighting for the full ranking to be implemented in 2015. It will also enable us to identify adoption and advocacy strategies for investors and civil society, so that we can ensure that the ranking is produced in a manner that is as useful to these stakeholder groups as possible.

But first, in order to make sure that our methodology is as solid and credible as possible, it is important that we get feedback on our latest draft from experts on digital privacy and freedom of expression, anybody who might want to use our data when it comes out, as well as companies who may be candidates for ranking.

If you think you might be one of those people – or if you just care about these issues and want to weigh in – please click here, read the methodology, and help us improve it.

Filed Under: Articles, Ranking Digital Rights

Where is Microsoft Bing’s transparency report?

February 16, 2014 by Rebecca MacKinnon

On Friday The Guardian published an opinion piece I wrote on a tricky issue related to Chinese Internet censorship and the role of multinational companies. It begins:

Microsoft was accused this week of extending the Chinese government’sinternet censorship regime to the rest of the world through its Bingsearch engine. I don’t believe that Microsoft intended to do that, but the company is by no means off the hook.

After conducting my own research, running my own tests, and drawing upon nearly a decade of experience studying Chinese internet censorship, I have concluded that what several activists and journalists have described as censorship on Bing is actually what one might call “second hand censorship”. Basically, Microsoft failed to consider the consequences of blindly applying apolitical mathematical algorithms to politically manipulated and censored web content.

Click here to read the rest.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Censorship, China, Microsoft, Search

Playing favorites across a bordered Internet

February 13, 2014 by Rebecca MacKinnon

Earlier this month Guernica magazine published the first article I’ve found time to write in over a year. (The Ranking Digital Rights project and related work has been keeping me incredibly busy.) It’s about Internet companies as gatekeepers across an Internet on which national borders are more powerful than many people (especially in the West) realize. It begins with a description of the video above:

Last November, volunteers with a group called Pakistan for All filmed a man wandering the streets of Karachi wearing a cloth-covered cardboard box over his torso. The box was painted on four sides with YouTube logos, a silver TV antenna affixed to the top. He held a hand-painted sign: “Hug me if you want me back.”

Using The Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” as a soundtrack, filmmaker Ziad Zafar created a short and cheeky video featuring men, women, and children hugging the YouTube mascot in locations around Karachi. “God, please let them open YouTube,” one young man said to the camera. Another complained that his personal channel was now inaccessible: “I used to have so many videos.”

After explaining why YouTube is blocked in Pakistan I continue:

Public frustration over YouTube censorship in Pakistan is just one of many points of worldwide friction between old and new information sovereignties: sovereign nation-states versus globally networked commercial “sovereigns” of cyberspace. These commercial sovereigns like YouTube’s parent company, Google, are the new arbiters—sometimes censors, sometimes champions—of a large and growing percentage of citizen speech all over the world.

To find out how and what it all means click here to read the full article.

Filed Under: Articles, Video Tagged With: Censorship, Google, India, Netfreedom, Pakistan, Surveillance, Transparency

Ranking companies on whether and how they respect your digital rights

July 3, 2013 by Rebecca MacKinnon

Recent revelations about NSA surveillance and the demands placed on U.S. Internet and telecommunications companies have certainly highlighted a central theme of this book: How communications technology companies can serve as an opaque extension of state power if the public is not vigilant in holding both governments and companies accountable for how they collect and share our personal information.

For the past eight months I have been working on addressing a specific part of this problem in a very concrete way. I have published no articles and written few blog posts this year because I have been spending all my time launching a new start-up research and advocacy project called Ranking Digital Rights. Here is our mission statement from the project website:

Internet and telecommunications companies, along with mobile device and networking equipment manufacturers, exert growing influence over the political and civil lives of people all over the world. These companies share a responsibility to respect human rights. The Ranking Digital Rights project brings together a group of international researchers and advocates. We are developing a methodology to evaluate and rank the world’s major Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies on policies and practices related to free expression and privacy in the context of international human rights law.

Our work aims to a) inform companies, individual users, civil society, academics, investors, governments, and the public about the relationship between the ICT sector and human rights; b) encourage companies to develop, deliver and manage products and services in a manner consistent with international human rights norms; c) identify what specific legal and political factors prevent or hinder companies from respecting users’ and customers’ human rights.

For more detailed information please see the About page,Work Plan and Timeline, and other Project Documents. You can also go to the front page and subscribe to updates about the project’s progress.

Filed Under: Announcements

Freedom Online Conference: Keynote Speech on Surveillance

June 17, 2013 by Rebecca MacKinnon

Remarks at the opening ceremony of the Freedom Online Conference

Tunis, Tunisia. June 17, 2013.

(~~As written prior to delivery,~~ UPDATED ROUGHLY AS DELIVERED, relevant hyperlinks added.)

Thank you so much Moez.

It is a real honor to be invited as the only non-governmental speaker at this opening ceremony – and the only woman!

Congratulations to the Tunisian government organizers and to you Moez, for all you have done to make this conference possible, and thank you also Moez for all the important work you have done for the new Tunisia – and for the global Internet community.

Congratulations also to the people of Tunisia.

Those of you who have connected to the wireless Internet in this room will notice that in addition to the Sheraton wifi signal there is another signal, “openwireless.org.” That signal is generated by a group of hackers and activists from a room called the #404lab – in reference to the 404 browser error associated with censorship under the old regime. In fact, that lab is in a building that was once a private home of the dictator Ben Ali.

Speaking here today is especially meaningful for be because the first time I came to Tunis was in 2005 – for the United Nations World Summit for the Information Society. The Internet was censored. Tunisian civil society groups critical of the previous government were kept far away from the conference hall.

I came because I was invited to moderate a panel sponsored by the Dutch organization, Hivos, on the theme of “Expression under repression.” Our panel was almost canceled. Some of the people in charge at the time said the subject matter was unrelated to the designated theme of the conference’s NGO forum: “ICT for Development.”

We were able to proceed only after a diplomatic intervention by the Netherlands. Bloggers form China, Iran, Malaysia, and Zimbabwe spoke about the challenges and threats faced by citizen media in their countries. Then a member of the audience stood up and criticized our motives: Our topic, freedom of speech, was not relevant she said to developing countries.

Governments, she said, must first solve the problems of feeding, clothing, and housing before addressing other demands. I asked the panelists to respond to her critique. Taurai Maduna of Zimbawe immediately said: “Without freedom of speech, I can’t talk about who is stealing my food.”

The people of Tunisia have made it very clear that they agree.

Tunisia – like any new democracy – is now struggling to figure out how to balance all kinds of conflicting economic, social, cultural, and religious interests. It is inevitable that there will be never-ending tensions between the government’s duty to protect national security and fight crime, and the imperative of protecting civil liberties and human rights.

The world’s oldest modern democracies continue to struggle with that tension. The Internet has extended that tension into a new, more challenging and often confusing dimension. In fact my own country the United States is now facing something of a crisis over how to balance the government’s national security responsibilities with respect for fundamental – universal – human rights.

For those of you on Twitter, you may have noticed that one of the participants pledged to have a drink every time the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance program, PRISM, is mentioned in the plenary. So: prism, prism prism, prism, prism. Now if you see somebody stumbling around the corridors you’ll know who that person is.

The responsibility of a government to protect human rights relates not only to its own citizens but to people everywhere in the world who are using the Internet services that are based in or pass through its jurisdiction.

The governments that joined the Freedom Online Coalition deserve the world’s praise in taking two vital steps: recognizing that human rights extend to the Internet; and making a shared commitment to preserving and nurturing a free and open, globally interconnected Internet.

But without a third step that effort will fail. We are not going to have a free and open global Internet if citizens of democracies continue to allow their governments to get away with pervasive surveillance that lacks sufficient transparency and public accountability – mechanisms to prevent its abuse against all Internet users wherever they are connecting from.

Nobody will have good reason to trust any networks or platforms run by foreign organizations or companies – or trust any service whose communications traffic might cross through any jurisdiction whose government is not committed to being accountable and honest about its surveillance practices.

The Internet’s balkanization is inevitable unless and until we make a shared commitment to mechanisms, norms and standards that will hold government surveillance – and corporate business practices including compliance with surveillance demands – appropriately accountable to universal human rights standards.

A minister from one of the Freedom Online Coalition countries recently remarked on a conference panel that surveillance is not an obstacle to Internet freedom because it is discrete. That’s like saying execution by lethal injection is humane because it is painless.

Certainly, there is a real difference between countries where public debate about surveillance is made impossible by censorship and repression – facilitated of course by surveillance – and countries where it is in fact politically and legally possible for journalists and bloggers to report on government abuses, or write commentaries criticizing their leaders, in response to revelations about the abuse and over-extension of government surveillance powers.

But human history is a story of how un-checked power has always been abused, whatever good intentions those in power may hold at the beginning.

If surveillance is so discrete that there is no meaningful way to hold the abusers accountable, then democracy will be degraded and corroded.

The breakdown of democracy under pervasive unaccountable surveillance will happen subtly and gradually – unobtrusively – like a frog in a pot with the temperature rising so slowly the frog doesn’t notice until he’s nearly cooked.

Meanwhile governments of all kinds of political systems all over the world will point to the widespread deployment of unobtrusive and pervasive surveillance by the developed democracies to justify their own surveillance states as so-called “standard international practice.” Thus making it harder for citizens to use the Internet to expose government officials who may be stealing their food without being caught and punished immediately.

A recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Frank La Rue could not have come too soon. In it he presented examples from all over the world of exactly how pervasive and unaccountable surveillance threatens freedom of expression – and how this reality holds true for democracies and dictatorships alike.

He made several recommendations that will require effort but should be achievable. They include:

Updating and strengthening laws and legal standards to ensure that surveillance is conducted only in a manner that is publicly accountable.
Allowing and facilitating private, secure and anonymous communications.
Regulating the commercialization of surveillance technology.
Educating the public on the facts and implications of surveillance.
And making sure that international human rights mechanisms and frameworks are up to the task of identifying and constraining abuses by private and public entities alike.

Given the globally interconnected nature of the Internet it will not be enough if one or two enlightened democracies stand up and implement these recommendations while everyone else carries on as they presently do.

It is equally vital that the companies on whose platforms and services we depend – for practically everything in our lives these days – commit to technical and design standards, as well as business practices, that are consistent with universal human rights principles and standards.

Here in Tunis, the governments of the Freedom Online Coalition, civil society and private sector companies should commit to a multi-stakeholder process, working with civil society and the private sector, to determine how Mr. La Rue’s sensible recommendations can be implemented, along with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and other related principles like the Global Network Initiative‘s principles for the ICT sector on free expression and privacy. These must be implemented across the Freedom Online Coalition community and beyond. Here in Tunis we should come up with a plan and timetable for doing so.

That process will not be easy. It will make the efforts we have made thus far on behalf of a free and open Internet look like a walk in the park compared to the mountain we must now climb.

But we must start immediately. Winter is coming.

The window of opportunity to salvage our shared vision of a free and open Internet is closing fast. Our way forward could soon be blocked – unless we get moving. Right now.

May the force be with you – always.

[Note: Some of the most iconic Star Wars scenes for many of the movies were shot in Tunisia, and the Dutch foreign minister’s speech at the beginning of the opening ceremony contained multiple Star Wars references.]

Filed Under: Speaking

Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Confronting surveillance

June 16, 2013 by Rebecca MacKinnon

The paperback edition of Consent of the Networked came out in late April. I wrote the Afterword last December. It begins:

I ended Consent of the Networked with a call for action, and in 2012 netizens around the world proved they are willing to act, as demonstrated by the movement’s recent successes. But while we have gained momentum, we face continuing challenges in the pursuit of digital liberty that will not easily be overcome.

The most difficult challenges, I argued, are posed by the already well-entrenched, pervasive, unaccountable surveillance in the United States and other democracies. That argument has been vindicated, unfortunately, by recent news about the U.S. government’s surveillance programs.

Writing in December I concluded:

Citizens of democracies, companies that understand that they can build long-term global value for their brand by earning trust with their users, and politicians who understand the need to protect and strengthen the digital commons (even if mainly out of self-interest) must unite to demand a national and global reconsideration of already deeply entrenched surveillance laws, technologies, and corporate practices. There needs to be a more robust public debate about the facts of digital surveillance in democracies, the implications for accountable governance and social justice—and what can be done now that the surveillance state has already been allowed to reach too far, too fast. That debate requires data and information that companies as well as democratic governments have so far been reluctant to share. Companies claiming to support a free and open Internet and that benefit from the existence of a robust global digital commons are doing the commons no favors unless and until they agree to publish systematic and useable information about their relationships with governments.

Furthermore, governments that want their citizens to believe that their support for global Internet freedom and citizens’ digital rights is genuine—and not shallow political rhetoric—must make sure that laws are not preventing companies from releasing such information. All governments that intend to keep calling themselves “democratic” with a straight face should publish their own transparency reports so that engaged citizens can see enough of the whole picture that they can grant or withdraw consent for, or divest from, the surveillance systems and procedures governments and companies have built. Until these things happen, Western democracies and Western companies will remain net exporters of surveillance technologies, legal norms, and business practices that facilitate political abuse of surveillance powers by repressive regimes—and that will ultimately corrode existing democracies.

Getting governments and companies to do these things will make the fights against ACTA, SOPA, and ITU Internet incursion look trivial in comparison. The global movement for digital liberty spread its wings and took flight in 2012, but the real tests of its strength and agility have yet to come.

The whole chapter is available online here.

Filed Under: Chapters Tagged With: Surveillance

2013 Goldsmith Book Prize!

March 9, 2013 by Rebecca MacKinnon

Photo uploaded to Twitter by user @JFKJrForum.

It was a tremendous honor to receive the 2013 Goldsmith Book Prize in the Trade category last week from the Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Also honored were Jonathan M. Ladd in the Academic category for his book, Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters. An investigative team from the Chicago Tribune won the investigative journalism prize, and the New York Times’ Nick Kristof received the Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. Full video and audio of the ceremony, plus a Storify curation of tweets and photos, can be found here.

Filed Under: Announcements

Netizen Report: WCIT Edition

December 6, 2012 by Rebecca MacKinnon

Originally published December 6, 2012 on Global Voices Advocacy.

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade speaks at the opening ceremony at WCIT 2012, courtesy of Flickr user itupictures (CC BY 2.0)

This report was researched, written, and edited by Alex Laverty, Weiping Li, Renata Avila, Hisham Almiraat, Chan Myae Khine, Sarah Myers, and Rebecca MacKinnon.

The World Conference on Information Technology (WCIT) which opened in Dubai on Monday, 3 December 2012, is being hailed as ‘The Battle for Control of the Internet’, ‘The Conference to Define the Future of the Internet’, and ‘The UN Takeover of the Internet’ among other colorful headings. Officially, the meeting of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the 193 member countries is to review the current International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) that essentially serve as the rules of digital connections and interoperability of telecommunications and satellite networks. They do not currently cover Internet protocols, resources, or governance, and there is much controversy over whether they should.

Experts from Vint Cerf to Tim Berners-Lee have weighed in on the decisions that could be made at this week’s conference. Google, joining forces with civil society from around the world, has launched a campaign to make their position clear: the ITU should keep its hands off the Internet. However Google’s agenda has been criticized by ITU Chief Hamadoun Toure, who said that Google is “abusing its power”.

Two primary concerns among netizens and civil society are that countries that deploy heavy-handed censorship and surveilance will use the opportunity to define the global rules for the Internet in a way that favors greater worldwide censorship and surveillance, and that the UN will propose it take over the domain name coordination functions of ICANN. There is also concern that telecommunications companies which have lost revenue as people replace international phone calls with email and voice chat, will try to regain lost revenue by redistributing bandwith costs to Internet companies – which Internet companies and many users will stifle innovation and make free social networking services less accessible.

News coverage on this issue has been extensive, however good articles with background on WCIT 2012 are found in The New York Times, Council on Foreign Relations, Mashable, and Wired. Also be sure to check out recent coverage of WCIT on Global Voices Advocacy, plus a great breakdown of the issues and resources by our very own Ellery Biddle.

Internet Governance

Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla signed the Declaration of Internet Freedom in advance of the upcoming ITU meeting in Dubai. Costa Rican courts declared Internet access to be a fundamental right two years ago.

In the name of supporting innovation and keeping the cost of internet access low, Kenya will oppose broadening the mandate of the ITU at this week’s World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai (WCIT-12)

South Africa moved closer to hosting the administration of the .africa generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) with Namibia formally backing the Rainbow Nation. South Africa has already passed the 60% of support that ICANN requires with 75% of African nations backing the bid.

Censorship

Internet and mobile communication in Syria was disconnected late last week, and has since been restored. AllThingsD reported the disappearance of the country’s 84 IP address blocks, detected by networking firm Renesys. It is unclear how the country was disconnected by the government, which was accused of planning a nation-wide massacre during the blackout. In the absence of connectivity the Speak2Tweet technology used by Google and Twitter to allow mobile phone users to tweet by voice during the Egypt Revolution has been reactivated for use in Syria.

In Russia, pressure has mounted on ISPs to self-censor, with the nation’s highest court ruling that ISPs risk losing their license if they fail to block what is deemed illegal content. Later in the week a Moscow court ordered Pussy Riot’s online videos be removed on the basis that they are “extremist”. Google said it would comply with the order and block the videos from view by YouTube users in Russia.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation blogged about recent events in Central Asia that suggest digital, print, and social media are under threat in the region. Reuters reports that Tajikistan has restricted access to Facebook specifically as a result of “mud and slander” posted by agents paid $5,000 to $10,000 per comment, according to Beg Zukhurov, head of the state-run communications service.

The Wall Street Journal shows how Chinese Internet users are able to circumvent The Great Firewall using a technique that doesn’t involve setting up a VPN.

Global Voices covers a Catalan newspaper that deleted the blog post of a Spanish cyber activist who had interviewed workers striking against telecom giant Telefónica. She subsequently dissociated her blog with the newspaper in order to republish her post on a personal blog. Since the story broke, the newspaper has re-posted [es] her original article to their website.

Thuggery

The commander of Iran’s cybercrimes police unit was fired on Saturday over the death of an Iranian blogger arrested by the national police. The blogger, Sattar Beheshti, died early last month while in police custody, allegedly from beatings administered by interrogators in Tehran’s Evin prison.

Sovereigns of Cyberspace

Last week we covered Facebook’s proposal to change its site governance policies. The changes would affect user privacy and would also eliminate voting on future changes. Fortunately, users have one final chance to vote on the proposed changes before the right to vote is eliminated. You can do so here.

The Global Post has an article on the global ambitions of the Chinese search engine, Baidu.

Privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published their 2012 E-Reader Privacy Chart. Their table shows how different e-bookstores monitor and track their customer’s actions and preferences.

A US Senate committee approved a bill that would require a warrant for law enforcement agencies to gain access to citizens’ email and cloud storage. The measure still has to pass the full Senate and House to become law, but won applause from the American Civil Liberties Union, and many other free speech and privacy groups.

National Policy

Iran introduced a biometric ID card that would be loaded with encrypted digital fingerprints and other personal information of the user. The country would require this ID card to access the Internet and would block access for all those without the card.

A Tor Exit Node Operator in Austria had his hardware seized and was charged for the distribution of child porn as a result of the police failing to understand how the technology worked.

Copyright

Verteidige Dein Netz, a Google information campaign in Germany meaning ‘Defend Your Net’, launched this week. It seeks to alert netizens to a German law that would allow publishers to charge Google for the snippets of news that appear in Google News or Google’s search results.

A user of anonymous file-sharing network Retroshare was prohibited by a German court to use the network for unknowingly passing on a copyrighted music file.

The implementation of the “six-strikes” anti-piracy system by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which allows ISPs to locate user accounts involved in illegal file sharing and punish copyright infringers, has been postponed until early 2013 due to Hurricane Sandy which affected the testing schedules, according CCI.

A member of IMAGiNE Group, an in-theater camcording gang, was handed a 40-month prison term, the longest sentence awarded for illegal file sharing in US.

Cybersecurity

A number of websites in Romania with .ro domains including google.ro, microsoft.ro, yahoo.ro and paypal.ro were hijacked and redirected to a rogue server by changing DNS entries. We reported similar attacks that occurred in Pakistan last week.

An allegedly Egyptian hacker with the handle TheHell is selling a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Yahoo.com for US$700. The vulnerability allows the attacker to steal and replace tracking cookies, as well as read and send emails of Yahoo webmail users. Yahoo Director of Security has said that fixing the XSS vulnerability is easy once the offending URL is found.

Netizen Activism

Sana Saleem, a Global Voices author and executive board member of advocacy group Bolo Bhi, wrote an open letter to mainland Chinese netizens on behalf of netizens from Pakistan to appeal for solidarity against increasing censorship in Pakistan, which is reportedly aided by Chinese telcos such as ZTE and Huawei.

Julian Assange writes for the Huffington Post this week on the 2-year anniversary of the release of US State Department cables. He recaps the stories that have emerged since the Wikileaks posted classified diplomatic cables.

Cool Things

Those planning a trip to Botswana and can now scope out the country on Google’s Street View as the capital Gaborone and the national parks of Chobe and the Makgadikgadi pan were added to the mapping service.

Publications and Studies:

Center for Information Technology Policy: No Longer Bit Players: Internet Governance & Economic Growth in Developing Countries
Internet Society: Global Internet User Survey

Subscribe to the Netizen Report by email

For upcoming events related to the future of citizen rights in the digital age, see the Global Voices Events Calendar.

Filed Under: Globalvoices

Index on Censorship: Don’t Feed the Trolls

December 5, 2012 by Rebecca MacKinnon

In September, an anti-Muslim video demonstrated how politics of fear can dominate the online environment. In an essay that I co-wrote with my dear friend and former colleague Ethan Zuckerman for the latest edition of Index on Censorship magazine, we argue that concerted action must be taken to dis-empower and discredit those in the global information and media ecosystem who profit from fear and hate. Here is how the piece begins:

In September 2012, the trailer for the film The Innocence of Muslims shot to infamy after spending the summer as a mercifully obscure video in one of YouTube’s more putrid backwaters.

Since then, there has been much handwringing amongst American intellectual, journalistic, and political elites over whether the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections of freedom of expression should protect this sort of incendiary speech, or whether Google, YouTube’s parent company, acted irresponsibly and endangered national security by failing to remove or restrict the video before provocateurs across the Islamic world could use it as an excuse to riot and even kill.

Supporters of internet censorship argue that posting The Innocence of Muslims online is the equivalent of yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. The analogy is not entirely off-base – the director of the video hoped to provoke violent reactions to his work. But we make a mistake if we focus on the man yelling fire and not on the crowded theatre.

The Innocence of Muslims was successful in sparking violence not because it was a particularly skillful – or even especially offensive – piece of filmmaking. Instead, it had a dramatic impact because it was useful to a small group who benefitted from a violent response, and because it exploited the ugly tendency of media outlets to favour simple narratives about violence and rage over more complex ones.

Increasing censorship in the name of fighting hate speech will do nothing to address the broader environment in which hate is incubated and nurtured.

Even if the US had a more narrow interpretation of the First Amendment, or if YouTube and other internet companies had more expansive definitions of ‘hate speech’, combined with more aggressive censorship practices, that would not have solved the more deep-seated problems which made it so easy for people – most of whom had never even seen the video – to riot outside the US embassy in Cairo. And any number of offensive videos or web pages could have served the authors of violence as a convenient flashpoint.

The danger of increased control of online speech is that we will not guarantee the elimination of flashpoints of violence, but we will almost surely make it a more difficult environment for those who use the internet to reduce hate and increase understanding. But if the argument for free speech is to be won, we must make more concerted and deliberate efforts to strengthen the world’s immunity against the virus of hate – both on social media and in the mainstream media.

Click here to read the rest.

Filed Under: Articles

Netizen Report: Facebookistan Edition

November 29, 2012 by Rebecca MacKinnon

Originally published November 28, 2012 by Global Voices Advocacy.

Image via Flickr user opensourceway (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This report was researched, written, and edited by Chan Myae Khine, Weiping Li, Renata Avila, Sarah Myers, and Rebecca MacKinnon.

Facebook has faced another wave of scrutiny from Europe for changes to its privacy policies. Recently, the company proposed an amendment to its privacy policies requiring users to agree to share their data with other Facebook-owned applications, such as Instagram, with a possibility of expansion for use in ad targeting outside of Facebook. This proposal prompted Irish data protection regulators in the European Union to seek urgent clarification on the policy change.

Another challenge to Facebook comes from Scandinavian countries: the Consumer Ombudsmen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark sent a letter to the European Commission expressing concern that Facebook’s “sponsored stories” advertising program, which shows advertisements in users’ Facebook news feeds without users’ prior consent, may violate the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.

Facebook has also proposed a change in its “site governance process.” Instead of letting users vote on proposed policy changes, as the site has done in the past, the new system will let users comment on recommended changes and submit questions on its privacy policies. Facebook explained that the voting mechanism “resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality.”

Privacy

Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog issued a warning over the potential risks of using smartphones and related applications after commissioning a survey showing more than half of respondents did not know what personal information stored in their smartphones could be accessed by the apps they download.

Google has to pay US$22.5 million in a privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for breaching 190 million users’ privacy settings on their Safari browsers by planting cookies improperly.

Censorship

Reporters Without Borders has launched a new website, We Fight Censorship, which will serve as a global repository for online articles, photos, and videos that have been censored or which caused the content creator to be jailed.

Kyrgyz independent news website Ferghana News is seeking to overturn a ban on the website based on a 2011 parliament resolution. Critics believe the ban was in retaliation to the news website’s coverage of ethnic violence which took place in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010.

Alistair McAlpine, a British politician who was falsely accused by the BBC of child sexual abuse, is pressing for compensation from those who tweeted about the BBC story at that time. According to the Economist, about 1,000 Twitter users implicated McAlpine, and 9,000 or so retweeted the messages. At least 20 high-profile tweeters are being targeted by the lawsuit, while those who have fewer than 500 Twitter followers are being asked for an online apology and charity donation.

Thuggery

Eduardo Carvalho, the owner and editor of the Brazilian website Ultima Hora News was shot to death by two men on his way home. Carvalho had repeatedly received death threats after he published articles criticizing politicians and police.

The offices of Malaysiakini, Malaysia’s largest independent news site, were raided by police seeking information about a contributor who wrote an article asking why ethnic Malays had to be Muslims. The raid is part of a continuing trend of harassment of news sites by Malaysian police, including police threats, DDOS attacks, and requests for statements on website funding.

A Vietnamese court upheld a 6-year jail sentence that had been imposed on the dissident blogger Dinh Dang Dinh for criticizing the government on the Internet. According to a report by Radio Free Asia, the Vietnamese police beat the blogger and herded him into a truck following the hearing.

South Korean Twitter user Park Jung-geun has received a 10-month suspended jail term for retweeting North Korean propaganda posts from his Twitter account. Park was charged with violating South Korea’s National Security Law and propagandizing for the North Korean government. Park has asserted that his actions were intended as parody.

National Policy

Pakistani authorities temporarily suspended mobile phone services in major cities, including parts of the capital Islamabad, the southern port city of Karachi, and in Quetta in the south-east, to avoid the use of mobile devices to set off bombs during key Shia Muslim commemorations.

The Hamburg Tax office in Germany decided to retroactively revoke the non-profit organization status of Wau Holland Foundation, the main financial supporter for Wikileaks in Germany, claiming that the organization “did not satisfy the condition for the direct pursuit of tax-advantaged purposes.” The decision specifically applies to 2010, the year when Wikileaks published a series of classified documents.

A new campaign has launched [pr] to save the Marco Civil, a bill that would define the rights of the Brazilian Internet. A vote on the bill has been postponed several times already and could be postponed indefinitely.

Copyright

The Australian High Court rejected an appeal from Optus TV Now over a ruling that had determined the broadcast recording product, which would allow Optus customers to save recorded TV broadcasts to Optus’ cloud, infringes on copyright. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and eBay have called for Australian copyright law to be more technology neutral in response to the ruling.

Sovereigns of Cyberspace

Kazakhstan’s public prosecution office urged Google, Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal to take down pages that include content from opposition media, defining them as “directed at inflaming social hatred”.

Internet Governance

Google developed a Take Action website asking its users to sign a petition against upcoming United Nations International Telecommunication Union proposals that “could increase censorship and threaten innovation”.

ICANN will hold a meeting with representatives of around 50 countries to discuss requests for new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) names, including .bbc by the BBC, .google, .docs and .lol by Google, and other, more controversial terms including .church and .islam. As Google and Amazon requested broader terms such as .book, .search and .app, many governments voiced their concerns at pre-discussions for ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC) meeting.

The European Parliament has approved a Joint Resolution which expresses its support to maintain the transparent and participatory Internet governance model, and urges EU member states to vote for proposals to “maintain the current scope of the [treaty] and the current mandate of the ITU…” at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) which will be held in December in Dubai.

Cybersecurity

Pro-Palestinian hackers claiming to be Pakistani have targeted Israeli websites and social media, shutting down Groupon’s Israeli site, and hacking in to Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom’s Twitter and Facebook accounts to send out pro-Palestinian messages.

In Pakistan, a group of hackers under the name “eboz” defaced 284 websites with .pk domains including google.com.pk, microsoft.pk and apple.pk by changing DNS entries mangaged by MarkMoniter and leaving a message in Turkish with an English phrase “Pakistan Downed”.

Netizen Activism

Many activists in India including Marx Anthonisamy, a 63-year-old former professor and author, have demanded the revision of the “arbitrary and unconstitutional” Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. Mr. Marx has filed a lawsuit for its repeal.

Bytes for All (B4A), a Pakistani human rights organization launched a “Take Back The Tech!” 16 day campaign to encourage women to tell, listen and map their stories about cyber bullying.

Cool Things

Sana Saleem, a Pakistani activist and blogger, and a contributor to Global Voices Online, has been named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers 2012 for her efforts fighting against the Pakistani government’s online censorship.