June 2012
3 posts
China blocks Tiananmen talk on crackdown...
(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...
Candles flicker out, Hong Kongers gagged on Sina...
(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...
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...
May 2012
23 posts
Kuwaiti tweeter jailed 6 months for insulting...
(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...
On the Use of Orwell’s “1984″ in Internet Policy...
(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...
NetApp Investigated By U.S. On Syria Surveillance...
(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...
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...
Illegal File-Sharing Chips Away At North Korean...
(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...
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...
UK government staff caught snooping on citizen...
(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...
FBI eyes Internet wiretaps
(Politico)
FBI Director Robert Mueller suggested to lawmakers Wednesday that the agency is weighing “some form of legislation” that could require Internet service providers and other companies to ensure their systems are compatible with federal wiretap orders.
Mueller made his remarks in response to a question by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) at an agency oversight...
Autocrats step in as the west's money runs out
(The Guardian)
[…]
Technological and economic changes are strengthening the ability of autocrats to dominate. Authoritarian men have learned the lessons of the Arab Spring well. They are exploiting the sinister potential of the new technologies to ensure that the net-literate activists never surprise them again. Western companies are eager to oblige them. A recent documentary on Swedish...
Internet activism? Let's look at the specifics
(Cato Unbound)
[…]
Whether the Internet remains conducive to political activism, or with liberal democracy for that matter, is by no means guaranteed. We face a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist: Activism is urgently required—nationally and globally—to ensure that the Internet remains compatible with activism.
Iran curbs foreign-sourced email providers
(AFP)
Iran’s telecommunications ministry has barred local banks, insurance firms and telephone operators from using foreign-sourced emails to communicate with clients, a specialist weekly said on Saturday.
“The telecommunications minister has ordered the use of domain names ending with .ir” belonging to Iran, Asr Ertebatat reported.
The order prohibits banks, insurance firms...
Sina Weibo Introduces "User Contract"
(Caijing English)
China’s web giant Sina, operator of Weibo.com, has created a “user contract” for this most popular twitter-like microblog service, shortly after it admitted it hasn’t fully implemented rules requested by the government that require users to submit their identifications.
The terms of the user contract, which include some of particular concern over...
Lukashenko: «All restrictive measures to the...
(Telegraf.by)
All the restrictive measures, in force in Belarus with regard to the Internet, are copied from American and European standards. We are concerned about hacker attacks, Internet fraud. We’ve clearly seen how they tried to undermine our country through the Internet, social networks, from the outside. We’ve given an adequate response to the subversive activities in social networks and...
FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites - now
(Cnet)
The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has...
Syrian Government Uses Skype To Push Malware To...
(Slashdot)
“The Syrian government is using Skype as a channel to infect activists’ systems with malware, installing Trojans and backdoors, according to security firm F-Secure. The evidence comes from a hard drive sent for analysis. ‘The activist’s system had become infected as a result of a Skype chat. The chat request came from a fellow activist. The problem was that the...
Britain looks at ISP block for adult content —...
(GigaOm)
According to a report in The Times, the U.K. government is planning to a review of current rules to consider whether explicit content could be better screened from children — and it is pushing the possibility that households will have to opt in with their ISP if they don’t want all adult content to be blocked.
China Convicts Spy Blogger, Lets Others Keep...
(Threat Level)
[…]
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army often welcomes bloggers with cameras nosing around seemingly secret facilities. Military hardware nerds called “forumers” — after the Internet forums where they post photos, videos and rumors — are the PLA’s main outlet for announcing new weapons developments. The Chinese army is known to tip off bloggers to the locations of new...
Internet freedom 'under threat from hasty...
(The Guardian)
Governments across the world – including those in the US and UK – are posing a threat to internet freedom through “hasty” legislation passed due to security fears, the head of an international media watchdog has warned.
Dunja Mijatovic, the representative for freedom of the media for the 56 countries that make up the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in...
Avatars, and friends
I share many of the concerns about the anti-social and standardizing effects of social media. Lanier, Turkle, Morozov, Carr even: they all have good arguments. Yes, we are too connected. Yes, sometimes we expect more from technology than from humans, with the risk of ending up automating ourselves - in our mode of expression, for example - and thinking that a piece of code we are attached to is...
Watch(Journalism Festival Web Tv)
The fight for online freedom of expression is conducted using the same weapons that authoritarian regimes employ in trying to suppress it. A fight in which the role of Western democracies is increasingly ambiguous: noble and impassioned declarations are made in support of dissidents and those seeking social&political change while at the same time giving the green...
The Tor Project's New Tool Aims To Map Out...
(Forbes)
Tor developers Arturo Filasto and Jacob Appelbaum are the co-creators of OONI-probe, an early-stage open-source software tool designed to be installed on any PC and run to collect data about local meddling with the computer’s network connections, whether it be censorship, surveillance or selective bandwidth slowdowns. OONI, their acronym for the Open Observatory of Network Interference,...
China Blocking All Mention of Chen and His Daring...
(IHT Rendezvous)
Online searches of Mr. Chen’s name also are being blocked inside China, including on the popular Twitter-like service called Weibo. Variations on his initials and the name of his prefecture are also off-limits, along with the words “blind lawyer,” “embassy,” “U.S. embassy” and “consulate.”
Banned searches turn up this message: “According to relevant laws, regulations and...
April 2012
30 posts
Bo’s Downfall Is Tied to Wiretapping
(The New York Times)
When Hu Jintao, China’s top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis.
The discovery of that and other wiretapping led to an official investigation that helped topple Chongqing’s charismatic leader, Bo...
China Internet Crackdown Silences Another
(The Wall Street Journal)
Popular Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo put users on notice on Tuesday by announcing the closure of accounts found to be spreading “malicious political rumors.” Apparently, they weren’t done.
Yang Haipeng, a Shanghai-based journalist who has been a prolific source of information about developments in the saga surrounding former Chongqing Communist Party boss...
ACTA measures to enforce IP rights in the digital...
(Europa.eu)
Today, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) adopted his Opinion on the proposal for a Council Decision on the conclusion of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The Opinion shows that the lack of precision of the Agreement about the measures to be deployed to tackle infringements of intellectual property rights (‘IP rights’) on the Internet may have...
Obama's New Tech Sanctions Could Hit Home
(The Atlantic Wire)
[…]
In a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the president debuted a new executive order that targets individuals and companies that provide authoritarian governments with “new technology that assists in civilan repression.” The president said these technologies should be used to “empower citizens, not oppress them.”...
Obama targets foreign nationals’ use of new...
(Washington Post)
[…]
Obama’s executive order, which he announced during a Monday speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is an acknowledgment of those dangers and of the need to adapt American national security policy to a world being remade rapidly by technology, according to senior administration officials familiar with the plans. Although the order is designed to target...
Iran Detects Computer Worm Targeting Oil Ministry,...
(Bloomberg)
Iran yesterday detected a computer worm that targeted the Oil Ministry, the National Iranian Oil Co. and other companies affiliated with the ministry, Mehr reported, without citing anyone.
The malware disrupted Internet access but was detected before it could infect the computer systems, the report said. Officials are looking into the matter, it said without giving further details.
Obama seeks to curb Iran, Syria dissident...
(Reuters)
President Barack Obama will announce sanctions on Monday on those helping Syria and Iran acquire technology that lets them target dissidents through their cell phone and Internet use.
Social media tools that allowed democracy campaigners to organize rallies across the Middle East and North Africa are being monitored by Tehran and Damascus to “facilitate serious human rights...
France: #RadioLondres, Election Day Fun and...
(Global Voices)
The French electoral code enforces a Euro 75,000 (US $99,000) fine for violation of the confidentiality of the results and has dispatched 10 official “censors” to monitor the Web and enforce the ban until the official result time, 8 PM local time (GMT+1), despite the fact that neighbouring countries Switzerland and Belgium can communicate preliminary results whenever they please...
Colombia: Approval of “Lleras Law 2.0″ Ignites...
(Global Voices)
The approval by the Colombian Congress of the proposed Law 201 (2012) -popularly known as ’Lleras Law 2.0′- which reforms [es] the framework to legislate and regulate copyright and intellectual property, sparked indignation among Colombian netizens.
The only pending step is the signature of President Juan Manuel Santos, who seeks to present the bill to President Obama as...
Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns...
(The Guardian)
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned that there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world. I am more worried...
Piecemeal Restrictions A Threat to Internet...
(Human Rights First)
Last week, an Egyptian administrative court ordered mandatory blocking of internet sites in an attempt to prevent pornography. The court’s ruling is broad and vague. To attempt to justify the ruling, the court cites Egypt’s religious nature and its “traditions, morals and ethics.”
As the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression has recognized, child pornography is one...
China: Testing for “Kill Switch” of the World Wide...
(Global Voices Advocacy)
[…]
There were no official explanation from the government on the access problem yet. C. Custer from Techasia believes that what had happened:
was a test of a new government “kill switch” that would allow it to quickly block access to all foreign websites and disrupt the use of VPNs that previously made it possible to circumvent China’s internet censorship...
New Clarity on China Internet Outage
(The Wall Street Journal)
[…]
contrary to what would be expected if the blackout were due to an equipment failure or break in an undersea cable – as many originally speculated after Wednesday’s magnitude 8.6 earthquake near Indonesia – only certain types of data had stopped flowing. China Telecom and China Unicom HTTP traffic – connections between clients and sites directly – mostly...
China Arrests Over 1,000 Accused of Spreading...
(Voice of America)
China’s state media say more than 1,000 people have been arrested since mid-February in an intense, nation-wide crackdown on what have been called “Internet-related crimes.”
The official Xinhua news agency had reported in late March that six people had been arrested in a campaign against the spreading of supposedly “harmful” online rumors, which was linked to widespread...
China's internet users temporarily blocked from...
(The Guardian)
China’s internet users have been cut off from accessing all foreign websites for around an hour in an unexplained incident that sparked speculation the country’s censorship system was being tested or further tightened.
[…]
Xu Chuanchao, an executive at Sohu, one of the country’s biggest internet portals, wrote on his microblog: “This malfunction is...
Siemens Allegedly Sold Surveillance Gear to Syria
(Der Spiegel)
German industrial giantSiemens sold network surveillance technology to the Syrian regime in 2000, public broadcaster ARD reported on Tuesday night. According to their news show “Fakt,” a product called the “Monitoring Center” was delivered to Syrian mobile communications company Syriatel. Nokia Siemens Networks confirmed the delivery, they reported.
The...
China microblog battle goes upstream
(Financial Times)
Since Bo Xilai, the ambitious but controversial Chinese politician, was sacked as Communist party secretary of Chongqing in mid-March, the party has cranked up its propaganda machine to levels not seen in years. One aim is to control the flow of unauthorised information through the Twitter-like microblogs, or weibo, which have become the driver behind China’s news agenda. Will...
China moves to contain Bo Xilai scandal
(CNN)
Hours before the news on Bo was read by CCTV announcers, producers at the network received by mobile text messaging an urgent notice: “All producers and section chiefs must inform all staff, including freelancers, before 10 p.m. tonight: no one should use weibo and other Internet tools to forward any untruthful statements. Whether or not they were sent by real-name or anonymous...
Kuwaiti writer gets 7 years for slandering...
(Ars Technica)
Kuwaiti writer Mohammed Al-Mulaifi was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in prison yesterday for slander and defamation against the country’s Shi’ite minority on his Twitter account. He said members of the country’s Shi’ite Muslim minority were loyal to foreign countries due to their alleged foreign origin. He was also fined US$18,000.
Kuwait is split...
Iran Plans to Implement "Clean Internet" by August...
(OpenNet Initiative)
Last Thursday, Iranian Information and Communications Technology minister Reza Taghipour announced that the government would set up a national Intranet by August 2012. The Intranet would effectively block services like Google, Gmail, Google Plus, Yahoo and Hotmail, in line with Iran’s plan for a “clean Internet.” The first phase of the plan will take place...
China tells military to ignore rumors, shuts...
(Reuters)
China’s top military newspaper told troops on Friday to ignore online rumors and authorities shut a left-wing website that has decried the ousting of populist official Bo Xilai, as the ruling Communist Party fought jitters over a leadership transition.
[…]
The paper admonished soldiers to “resolutely resist the incursion of all kinds of erroneous ideas, not be...
Dubai Police are monitoring Facebook and Twitter...
(The Next Web)
Last week the Dubai Chief of Police called for legal action to be taken against Twitter users who criticize the UAE. It would seem that the Dubai Police are keeping a close eye on Twitter, as well as Facebook, to catch out ‘culprits’.
Emirates 24/7 reports that the Dubai Police is keeping a 24 hour watch on both social networking sites, according to statements made Major Salem...
Cameron defends surveillance plans
(The Guardian)
“Let’s be absolutely clear, this is not what the last government proposed and we opposed. And let’s be clear, this is not about extending the reach of the state into people’s data, it’s about trying to keep up with modern technology.
“But we should remember that this sort of data, used at the moment, through the proper processes, is absolutely...
@Mujtahidd: Tweeting the Saudi Elite's Secrets
(Owni.eu)
Are those in power attempting to silence you?
I have received financial offers to stop. If they could physically reach me they would have arrested me. My Twitter account and email is constantly under attack from attempted hackings. But the thing they’re doing all the time, is to use their agents on to make negative remarks about me on Twitter. It isn’t working though […].