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Netizen Report: Transition Edition

June 22, 2012 by

The June 21st edition of the Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy begins in Myanmar, which is undergoing an uncertain political transition:

Myanmar’s resolve for an open Internet is being tested this week as the government declared a state of emergency on June 10, to contain deadly clashes between Muslims and Buddhists in the nation’s western Rakhine state. The country’s military junta was dissolved in 2011, so the government’s response to website comments inciting hate and murder could set a new tone for freedom of expression as the state goes through a seminal transitional moment.

Despite moves toward democracy, Myanmar was still listed as one of the ‘Enemies of the Internet‘ this year by free speech advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The government began political reforms last year and has increased access to the Internet by lowering firewalls that had blocked social media such as Facebook and the use of VoIP software.

The conflict between Buddhists and the Muslim Rohingya minority has galvanized Internet activity in this developing nation, but hate speech, ruthless pictures of dead bodies and street protests have spread quickly online. The independent Burmese website Democratic Voice of Burma also had its server overwhelmed in a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) by hacker group Blink, which used computers with IP addresses based in Singapore or Russia. The Blink website posted numerous anti-Islamist messages including “Get Out From Our Land .. Rohingya .. We Love RaKhine .. We Love Myanmar”, directing comments at the Muslim minority, which traces its origins to neighboring Bangladesh.

Myanmar’s government remains silent on these social media messages, but military officials have warned news media not to inflame the conflict through their reporting and demanded all articles be submitted for government review before publication. As in many countries under transition, it remains to be seen whether Internet freedom can survive this political and humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, the struggle for online freedom continues around the world..

Click here to read the rest.

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Foreign Policy: Ruling Facebookistan

June 14, 2012 by

Photo courtesy Max Schrems.

This image is a photoshopped composite created by Max Schrems, a Vienna-based activist and law student quoted in my latest piece for Foreign Policy about Facebook. As the tag line explains: “The world’s largest social networking site has a population nearly as large as China or India’s. And the natives are getting restless.” Here is how the piece begins:

At 6 p.m. Taipei time on Friday, June 1, Ho Tsung-hsun was suddenly shut out of his Facebook account. When he tried to log back in, a message in a red box announced: “This account has been disabled.” Ho, a veteran activist and citizen journalist on environmental and social issues in Taiwan, immediately took a picture of the message, then wrote an angry blog post on a Taiwan-based citizen journalism platform. He insisted that he had not violated any of the site’s community guidelines. Furthermore, he wrote, “the information I’ve collected and the Facebook groups that I’ve created and maintained all disappeared, which has caused inconvenience to my work and interpersonal relationships.”

Later that night, Ho’s account was restored — also without explanation. As it turned out, a number of Taiwanese politicians and activists hadall experienced similar problems on the same day. Angered by what seemed like an act of arbitrary punishment against people who were not violating the site’s rules in any way that they themselves could discern, Taipei City Councilor Ho Zhi-Wei wrote an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pointing out that Facebook — now a publicly listed company — “certainly has public responsibilities for public welfare.”

The incident underscored the extent to which people around the world have come to rely on Facebook for political activism and discourse — from the Green Movement in Iran, to revolutionaries in Egypt, to U.S. President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Facebook is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its “population” comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people’s online activities and identities.

In apparent recognition that it faces real human rights risks and responsibilities, Facebook recently became an observer member of the Global Network Initiative, an organization dedicated to promoting core principles on free expression and privacy in the Internet and telecommunications industries. Whether the company ultimately joins as a full member, committing to uphold these principles and be held publicly accountable to them, will be a key test of its core values. Meanwhile, the postings, pages, likes, and friend requests of millions of politically active users have helped to make Zuckerberg and colleagues very rich. These people are increasingly unhappy about the manner in which Facebookistan is governed and are taking action as the stakes continue to rise on all sides.

Click here to read the rest.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 10 Tagged With:

Netizen Report: Intervention Edition

June 14, 2012 by

This week’s Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy begins in Kuwait:

Throughout this week’s edition we highlight examples of government intervention to limit free speech online, ostensibly “for the greater good”. In Kuwait, a Shi’ite man has been sentenced to prison for ten years for allegedly insulting the Prophet Mohammad and Sunni Muslims via Twitter. Pleading innocent, Hamad Al-Naqi said the posts were written by someone who had hacked his Twitter account.

From there we travel to China, India, South Africa, Tunisia, Oman, Facebookistan, and beyond. Click here to read the whole thing.

Filed Under: Chapter 04, Globalvoices Tagged With:

Foreign Policy: The War for India’s Internet

June 9, 2012 by

Protests against Internet censorship are taking place this weekend in several cities across India. People are already posting photos and updates to Twitter. Follow the #opindia hashtag keep abreast of latest developments.

On Wednesday Foreign Policy published my latest commentary on The War for India’s Internet. Why does this war matter for the rest of the world? I explain:

Escalating political and legal battles over Internet regulation in India are the latest front in a global struggle for online freedom — not only in countries like China and Iran where the Internet is heavily censored and monitored by autocratic regimes, but also in democracies where the political motivations for control are much more complicated. Democratically elected governments all over the world are failing to find the right balance between demands from constituents to fight crime, control hate speech, keep children safe, and protect intellectual property, and their duty to ensure and respect all citizens’ rights to free expression and privacy. Popular online movements — many of them globally interconnected — are arising in response to these failures.

Only about 10 percent of India’s population uses the web, making it unlikely that Internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon. Yet activists are determined to punish New Delhi’s “humorless babus,” as one columnist recently called India’s censorious politicians and bureaucrats, in the country’s media. Grassroots organizers are bringing a new generation of white-collar protesters to the streets to defend the right to use a technology that remains alien to the majority of India’s people.

Click here to read the full piece.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 06 Tagged With: ,

Netizen Report: Telecoms Edition

June 9, 2012 by

This week’s Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy begins in Ethiopia:

In countries whose governments disrespect free speech and privacy, the introduction of new telecommunications (telecoms) infrastructure generally creates a new layer of censorship and  surveillance. One of the latest examples is Ethiopia. Last week Ethio Telecom, the sole telecommunication service provider in Ethiopia, announced a plan to relaunch its 3G wireless network to improve the quality and speed of Internet connections. However Tor, a project which supports anonymous online communication, recently found that Ethio Telecom has deployed or begun testing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of all Internet traffic, and has also blocked Tor. The Tor team has since developed a workaround for users in Ethiopia.

We proceed onward across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and provide an update on the battle over which international organizations should be allowed to govern parts of the Internet. Click here to read the whole thing.

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Foreign Policy: Google Confronts the Great Firewall of China

June 7, 2012 by

Last week I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy analyzing Google’s decision to roll out a new feature warning Chinese Internet users if they type a search term that could trigger censorship by the government’s network-level “Great Firewall.” In a nutshell:

For the first time, Google is making it crystal clear to Chinese Internet users that their frequent connection problems while using its search engine are caused by the Chinese government, not by its own systems. According to Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president for knowledge, the purpose of this feature is to “improve the search experience in mainland China.” Users are given the option to “refine their searches without the problem keywords” in order to “avoid connection problems.” What Google executives won’t discuss — at least publicly — is the obvious fact that they are exposing the Chinese government’s censorship tactics in an unprecedented way.

Read the whole piece here.

Meanwhile, in the week since it was published there have been some developments and reactions worth noting. Google has declined to publish a list of all the characters and phrases it has found likely to trigger censorship. But that did not stop different groups from reverse-engineering the list. It is now available on greatfire.org (explanation in English) and atgfw.org (explanation in Chinese).  It also didn’t take long for the engineers working on the Great Firewall to ramp up the arms race by another notch, blocking Google’s nifty pop-up alerts warning users about censored terms. Here is how the anonymous team at greatfire.org, a website that tracks Chinese Internet censorship from within China, reported on the situation:

Within a day, they disabled the new Google feature by blocking the javascript filethat contains the code altogether. This of course makes us wonder what Google’s next move will be. It would be very easy to rename the file or to embed it on the html page making it more difficult to selectively block features.

Going forward, there is much more that Google can do. Rather than just informing users that a search query has been censored, they could offer ways to get around it. The most obvious one would be to redirect users (automatically or manually) to the encrypted version of Google which is still not blocked in China (https://www.google.com.hk).

The fact that this functionality was rolled out, and not just on Google Hong Kong but actually any Google search engine that is accessed from China, shows that Google is actively working on ways to get around censorship in China.

Independent Beijing-based technology researcher Dave Lyons, who I interviewed for my piece, has a more cynical take about Google and its motivations over at the rectified.name blog:

While many people in China know that Google doesn’t always work because of government blocking, I’d bet that the vast majority of Internet users don’t know, or care for that matter, because if you’re planning a vacation to [丽江] [LiJiang, in Yunnan Province] where you want to stay in a [锦江之星] [MianJiang ZhiXing, the name of a hotel] which search engine are you going to use? The one that says: “Sorry, can’t use those words” or are you instead going to use one of those nice search engines that just deletes any politically sensitive search results and serves up those travel links? So while Google describes the move as “improving our user experience from mainland China,” from a user perspective this doesn’t really change anything unless you’re a political dissident trying to find the latest banned words, like a broken soda machine that always gives you Fresca no matter what button you push now has sign saying “In need of service: all buttons serve Fresca.”

Chinese internet users truly committed to seeking banned or sensitive information for the most part already have circumvention tools, and will use the regular Google.com like they did before, so this doesn’t really help them much unless they want vague confirmation from Google that a term is blocked. And this isn’t likely to earn Google any new friends in the Chinese government, which it already sees as in cahoots with the US State Department. If Google were serious about this, they would develop their own built-in circumvention tools, but they won’t — because that’s a bridge too far — and so I can’t help but think that the real audience for Google’s move isn’t in China but in the halls of Internet governance organizations like the ITU and global users who, they hope, will start having warm, fuzzy feelings about Google as a fearless advocate for free speech. Good luck with that.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 03 Tagged With: , ,

Netizen Report: Mexican Spring Edition

June 3, 2012 by

Galvanized online, tens of thousands of protesters marched in Mexico’s capital last month calling for more engaging issue campaigns by politicians and less biased reporting by mainstream media of the upcoming presidential election. This past week’s Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy discusses this and other key Internet freedom and control issues. Click here to read the whole thing.

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Mark News: Internet Freedom and the Erosion of Democracy

May 25, 2012 by

Canada’s Mark News has just published my latest essay on how increasing government surveillance around the world is threatening the freedoms granted by Internet access. An excerpt:

This week, at least 125 million people are watching the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual competition of singers from 56 countries across Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union. This year’s contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country whose human-rights record has come under heavy fire.

Azerbaijan is a classic example of how, even when people are free to connect to the global Internet, they can be subject to pervasive, unaccountable, and unconstrained surveillance. It is also a case of how, while western democratic governments have been quick to follow the lead of the United States and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in calling for a free and open global Internet, they are much more conflicted when it comes to surveillance. The democratic world has failed to address the freedom-eroding potential of government surveillance through commercial networks.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Filed Under: Chapter 04, Chapter 05 Tagged With: , , ,

Does CISPA Have Sufficient Safeguards?

May 25, 2012 by

Mike Rodgers, Republican Representative from Michigan and Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee, has responded to my article published on the Foreign Affairs website last month. In my essay, I argued that surveillance technologies and practices originating in the United States are undermining the Obama administration’s “Internet freedom” policy. He objected strongly to my critique of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) which recently passed the House under his co-sponsorship, accusing me of repeating what I had read on Twitter instead of reading the actual bill. I responded. The full exchange can be found here.

Filed Under: Articles, Chapter 05 Tagged With: , ,

Netizen Report: Runet and Eurovision Editions

May 23, 2012 by

The Netizen Report team produced two more excellent editions last week and this week on Global Voices Advocacy. Check out this week’s Eurovision Edition, highlighting government threats to online freedom in Azerbaijan, and last week’s Runet Edition, which begins with recent struggles in Russia. Both editions continue on their weekly world tour of the global struggle for freedom and control of the Internet.

Filed Under: Globalvoices
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