China blocks Tiananmen talk on crackdown anniversary

(Reuters)

China’s censors blocked internet access to the terms “six four”, “23”, “candle” and “never forget” on Monday, broadening extensive efforts to silence talk about the 23rd anniversary of China’s bloody June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

[…]

Searches for the terms related to the anniversary, such as “six four” for June 4, were blocked on Sina Weibo, the most popular of China’s Twitter-like microblogging platforms. Users encountered a message that said the search results could not be displayed “due to relevant laws, regulations and policies”.

[…]

Microbloggers decried the overzealous rash of censorship, complaining that their posts had been “harmonized” - a euphemism for censorship - within minutes.

Censors also prevented microbloggers from changing their display photos in an apparent attempt to prevent them from posting any photo commemorating the anniversary.

Yet some people did manage to beat the censors, and a few pictures of the 1989 protests did find their way on to Weibo.

Candles flicker out, Hong Kongers gagged on Sina Weibo ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

(Shangaiist.com)

One day ahead of the 23rd anniversary of theTiananmen Square crackdown, China’s largest and most popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo has deactivated two widely used emoticons on its service, one after the other.

Sometime on Sunday afternoon, Sina first removed the candle emoticon, which is often used by members on the site to mourn the deaths of people reported in the news.

When netizens discovered the icon was no longer showing up on the platform, they began using another icon recently introduced on the site to promote the London Olympics. That icon was later taken offline by Sina Weibo.

In addition, searches for the Chinese characters for “candle” (“蜡烛”) have also been filtered out on Sina Weibo due to “relevant policies and laws.”

Creative dissenters then began posting photos of clocks and watches indicating the time when the crackdown on the Tiananmen student protesters began. These posts were also deleted shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, Sina Weibo users have reported being effectively gagged by the service.

Ethiopia Introduces Deep Packet Inspection

(Tor Project Blog)

The Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation, which happens to be the sole telecommunication service provider in Ethiopia, has deployed or begun testing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of all Internet traffic. We have previously analyzed the same kind of censorship in China, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

Reports show that Tor stopped working a week ago — even with bridges configured. 

Kuwaiti tweeter jailed 6 months for insulting Shias

(The Express Tribune)

Kuwait’s court of appeals Thursday reduced a seven-year jail term of a Sunni tweeter to a six-month imprisonment for allegedly insulting the faith of the Shia minority, his lawyer said.

[…]

The reduction of the jail term came after the court acquitted Mulaifi, a writer, from the charges of spreading false news about the Gulf state and promoting an illegal clandestine group, according to the court ruling.

He was convicted only on the count of disparaging the Shia faith in an Internet article which he posted on his Twitter account in February.

On the Use of Orwell’s “1984″ in Internet Policy Narratives

(TechLiberation)

[…]

Allusions to Orwell’s 1984 and “Big Brother” are increasingly common in Net policy books, blogs, essays and even newspaper articles. Variants on the “Big Brother” theme include: “Corporate Big Brother,” “Big Brother Inc.,” and even “Big Browser.” Similarly, back in 2008, a Public Knowledge analyst likened Apple’s management of applications in its iPhone App Store to an “1984 kind of total control.”

Let’s put an end to this silliness. George Orwell’s 1984 is a book about coercive, totalitarian governmental control in which citizens are forcibly and relentlessly brainwashed by an all-encompassing tyrannical Big Brother. It is a world of propaganda, censorship, historical revisionism, mind control, top-down planning, and total war.

By contrast, the modern digital devices and social media services that Keen and others repeatedly decry as “Orwellian” are nothing of the sort. First, and most obviously, they purely voluntary. No one forces us to use Apple, Google, or Microsoft devices or any other company’s digital technologies. Likewise, no one forces us to join Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, or others social media services.These companies and countless others compete for our allegiance and try to win our business. If we do choose to use their services, we are also free to later abandon them. These are not “crystal prisons,” as this recent EFF blog post suggested (at least of Apple). These companies can’t coercively keep us in their “walled gardens,” which really aren’t all that “walled” or “closed” as I have argued here before. And while we are using those services, there is no effort by any of them to brainwash us or encourage us to take up arms against others. They are just looking to make money, not war.

Forbes - Andrew Keen: Why 1984 Is Upon Us (Digital Vertigo)

NetApp Investigated By U.S. On Syria Surveillance System Sale

(Bloomberg)

U.S. regulators are investigating how a multi-million-dollar storage system from NetApp Inc. (NTAP) came to underpin a sweeping Internet-surveillance system being built last year for the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

[…]

The Internet surveillance system was being built to intercept and catalog virtually every e-mail flowing through Syria, and had been under construction as Assad’s regime waged a crackdown that has killed as many as 10,000 people.

Italian company Area SpA, which spearheaded the development of the surveillance project, bought the NetApp gear for 2.75 million euros ($3.5 million) from an Italian distributor and exported it to Syria, Bloomberg News reported in November. While the sale was indirect, workers for Area and NetApp communicated directly, e-mailing each other after the sale about configuring the equipment, copies of the correspondence show.

[…]

After Bloomberg disclosed the project, Area said it was exiting the deal and the European Union banned the sale of surveillance gear to Syria. On April 23, President Barack Obama authorized sanctions against individuals and entities that provide information technology that aids Syria and Iran in cracking down on dissidents.

[…]

NetApp has a market value of about $10 billion, and more than 10,000 employees.

China tightens grip on social media with new rules

(CNN)

Users of Sina Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like micro-blogging service, now have to abide by new rules aimed at preventing online rumors and other controversial posts.

The “user contracts” that took effect on Monday come as authorities put increased pressure on China’s social networks to police what their users are saying.

Sina has also rolled out a points system as a way to manage users who post content that contravenes the new rules, according todocuments posted on Sina Weibo’s website.

Under the system, each Weibo account will begin with a score of 80 and points will be deducted for any perceived misconduct. Accounts that drop to zero will be canceled.

Illegal File-Sharing Chips Away At North Korean Propaganda

(Torrentfreak)

In the high-stakes debate over control of the Internet, it is common to hear how the free flow of information is crucial to development of humanity. For North Korea, a country that has almost zero Internet access and is repressed beyond anything experienced in the West, the free flow of information is a distant concept. But according to a new report, the sharing of pirate TV shows and music among the citizens of the country is challenging the DPRK regimes’ depiction of the outside world.

A Quiet Opening - North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment [PDF]

FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit

(CNET)

The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police.

The center represents the technological component of the bureau’s “Going Dark” Internet wiretapping push, which was allocated $54 million by a Senate committee last month. The legal component is no less important: as CNET reported on May 4, the FBI wants Internet companies not to oppose a proposed law that would require social-networks and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail to build in backdoors for government surveillance.

During an appearance last year on Capitol Hill, then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni referred in passing, without elaboration, to “individually tailored” surveillance solutions and “very sophisticated criminals.” Caproni said that new laws targeting social networks and voice over Internet Protocol conversations were required because “individually tailored solutions have to be the exception and not the rule.”

UK government staff caught snooping on citizen data

(ZDNet)

The U.K. government is haemorrhaging data — private and confidential citizen data — from medical records to social security details, and even criminal records, according to figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

Just shy of 1,000 civil servants working at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), were disciplined for accessing personal social security records. The Department for Health (DoH), which operates the U.K.’s National Health Service and more importantly all U.K. medical records, saw more than 150 breaches occur over a 13-month period.

And all this comes to light no more than a fortnight after the Queen formally announced the U.K. government will monitor all Web and email traffic, and log all landline, mobile phone, and Skype calls.

And it’s the privacy campaigners who are in the wrong to say that the data won’t be illegally accessed or abused?

There is one, simple fact: from health records to criminal records, employment details and other personal data, government databases are not only open to abuse, but are actively being exploited by the very people we supposedly trust with our data.