from Paul Smalera:
Twitter’s censorship is a gray box of shame, but not for Twitter
Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be... well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, as a show of protest and solidarity with those who might be censored.
Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.
To understand why, let’s unpack the policy a bit: First, Twitter has strongly implied it will not remove content under this policy. If that doesn’t sound like a crucial distinction from outright censorship, it is. Taking the new policy with existing ones, the only time Twitter says it will ever remove a tweet altogether is in response to a DMCA request. The DMCA may have its own flaws, but it is a form of censorship that lives separately from the process Twitter has outlined in this recent announcement. Where the DMCA process demands a deletion of copyright-infringing content, Twitter’s censorship policy promises no such takedown: it promises instead only to withhold censored content from the country where the content has been censored. Nothing else.
To be sure, that’s censorship of a kind, but compared to the industry censorship even Americans have long lived with -- take the Motion Picture Association of America, which still censors films based on dubious standards of taste and morality -- it’s positively enlightened. And it never permanently destroys or pre-empts content, the way the MPAA does.
Further, for a country to censor content, it has to make a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity” to Twitter, which will then decide what to do with the request. Twitter will also make an effort to notify users whose content is censored about what happened and why, and even give them a method to challenge the request. According to Twitter’s post, a record of the action will also be filed to the Chilling Effects website. The end result of a successful request is that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored:
As a biological weapon, H5N1 is for the birds
By Peter Christian Hall The opinions expressed are his own.
Amid the furor over the U.S. government’s move to restrict publication of vital research into H5N1 avian flu, no one seems to be challenging a key assumption—that H5N1 could make a useful weapon. It wouldn’t.
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recently pressured Science and Nature not to fully publish two widely discussed papers detailing separate efforts to devise an H5N1 avian flu strain that transmits easily in ferrets and might do so among human beings. The proposed solution is to issue redacted versions and circulate details only to approved institutions.
This unprecedented interference in the field of biology could hinder research and hamper responsiveness in distant lands plagued by H5N1. If institutions there don’t know what gene changes to watch for, how quickly will we know if H5N1 replicates a pandemic combination defined by researchers on three continents?
There’s little question that this fearsome virus could wreak catastrophic harm if it learns how to circulate readily among humans. Through last week, when H5N1 killed a man near Hong Kong (site of the first official outbreak, in 1997), it has slain 60 percent of about 600 people certified as having been infected with it. Predictions of the global toll if H5N1 should turn pandemic reach as high as a billion people.
So why wouldn’t a desperate outlaw state—or terrorists—want to weaponize the most dreaded flu strain scientists have ever found?
Because H5N1 would make a wretched weapon.
We wouldn’t have vaccines if such an attitude had prevailed in the past.
Stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act
Now that Congress has hit pause on its controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and nearly every argument about the merits and failings of the piece of copyright legislation has been made, it’s a good time to ask: what, in 2012, will it take to actually stop a bill like this?
Because despite the delay, the situation still isn’t looking so hot for those looking to bring down SOPA. Amendments to tone down the bill’s more disliked points have been routinely defeated in the House Judiciary Committee by numbers sufficient to pass the bill to the full House floor.
But, at this point in the process, numbers aren’t everything. In the wake of the Arab Spring, talk of censoring technology hits the ears differently. More important is that in SOPA’s short two-month life, opposition to it has catalyzed online and off. But to succeed, its opponents will have to both boost the volume of their public alarm and convince Congress that, in an Internet-soaked 2012, questioning SOPA needn’t be politically fatal.
Washington isn’t the land of Luddites it once was. Members of Congress, of course, love their smartphones; Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are political staples. (Twitter says just over 85 percent of representatives in each chamber are on the service.) But the challenge for SOPA’s opponents has been to demonstrate that the power and joys of Facebook and, say, SOPA’s questionable domain-name filtering policy are two parts of the same webby whole.
We’re seeing that understanding catalyze amazingly quickly—at least among web users. Starting with a small band of early objectors, resistance to SOPA has been spreading out, gathering steam, and popping up in all sorts of places. There’s been a tsunami of Twitter traffic against the bill, much of it tagged with the #SOPA hashtag. That chatter has driven blog posts, given journalists fodder, and provided constant commentary on Congress’s often convoluted and confusing proceedings.
And, notably, the bill has prodded the entrepreneurs who run some of the Internet’s best-known sites into creative acts of protest. The blogging site Tumblr mock-censored itself. The file-sharing site Scribd posted a SOPA button that, when clicked, disappeared documents. Wikipedia is considering a temporary block on access to its millions of entries. Beyond that, heaps of calls have been made to Congress, engineers have written letters, and SOPA-doubting editorials have been penned by such newspapers as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Ronald Reagan engineered operation Plagiarized Indigantion to get rid of people hacking the Department of Defense and pentagon and he did a great job of it, ten years after his death it still serves globally.
from David Rohde:
China’s newest export: Internet censorship
Yet the days of Americans piously condemning China’s “Great Firewall” and hoping for a technological silver bullet that would pierce it are over. China’s system is a potent, vast and sophisticated network of computer, legal and human censorship. The Chinese model is spreading to other authoritarian regimes. And governments worldwide, including the United States, are aggressively trying to legislate the Internet.
“There is a growing trend toward Internet censorship in a range of countries,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a prominent online democracy advocate and author of the forthcoming book “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.” “The same technology that helps secure your network from attack, that actually enables you to censor your network also.”
The problem is not software or hardware developed in a secret Chinese government laboratory. Recent news reports have uncovered American and European companies selling surveillance technologies to Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Thailand and other governments that block the web and brutally suppress dissent.
While the Egyptian government’s attempt to shut down the Internet during the Tahrir Square protests drew headlines, western governments are increasingly using the web for law enforcement surveillance. In a biannual transparency report released earlier this month, Google reported a 70 percent increase in requests for content removal or user information from the American government or police in the first half of 2011. Brazil filed the most requests, followed by Germany, the U.S. and South Korea, according to The Guardian.
Western companies are also under fire. Research in Motion, the Canadian firm that produces Blackberry smartphones, acceded to demands from The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India for access to its users’ email messages. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet free speech group, has accused Cisco of selling surveillance equipment to the Chinese government that is used for human rights abuses.
A core problem is the pursuit of the almighty online dollar. An extraordinary story in The Guardian introduced readers to Jerry Lucas, the president of TeleStrategies, a Virginia company that organizes conferences around the world where firms sell surveillance and other technologies to governments. In an interview, Lucas said companies have no ethical obligation to determine if their products are being sold to regimes that will use them to suppress dissent.
“That's just not my job to determine who's a bad country and who's a good country,” he told the reporter. “We’re a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology."
Here’s something more to the point. The Librarians of any municipal library are the censors and filters of their holdings and there is seldom any complaint from anyone that they exert quality control. They filter out fakes, scams, and garbage. Sometimes they can go too far and start filtering out books they find objectionable of that some patron may find objectionable. And they are very like ODC description of Google in that they will tend to stock the books most in demand. They always have limited shelf space.
Reuters allows users to report abuse, as you know. A few of my early posts were pulled and I never knew why. They weren’t obscene or off topic and didn’t violate their rules as far as I could tell. But someone may not have liked what I had to say. That was a form of petty, vote-of-one censorship, as far as I know.
Another thing Librarians can do – and I know this from personal experience – is to cull valuable or rare books when they notice them. I have seen this happen twice. Once at a university library where an antique copy of a famous French architectural book vanished and the librarian (the same man who was there when I first saw the set (with Louis XV’s imprimatur) swore he had never seen it. It happened again in the small town I live in now where a copy of “Twilight in the Forbidden City” by RF Johnston (the movie had come out) disappeared about a year after I first noticed it. The librarian also didn’t remember seeing it.
The Google search that ODC mentions – not the only search engine but the most aggressive (I am more or less self taught on the computer I have now and the Google search engine found me before I even knew it existed) always seems to find hundreds of thousands of entries. But years ago when I first got my computer, I once tried to see what pages hundreds of entries later actually contained. I found that most of them were repetitive of the first 10 to 20 pages of entries. In a way – it’s a waste of time to bother to list them. I also suspect that paid sites – or rather higher cost sites will get more traffic than less expensive web hosting sites.
When I listed my own website for my small business, I was asked to pay more for more aggressive placement. I declined because I didn’t understand much about the services and didn’t trust that the fee actually bought more exposure. A Google search couldn’t find the title pages of my web site even when I put every key word I had used for it. None of the search engines may be as immune to “bribery” as they seem. The marketing of net access is a black box to most users. The consumer of Internet content receives zero assurances about almost anything on it.
I also resent the way tool bars will attempt to take over my home page and I am not always adept at stopping them. They can be clever and sneaky. The Internet is somewhat hazardous. Pop up ads, spam, etc. can be dealt with and there are free anti-virus programs etc. that seem to work fine. I do everything I can with free-ware and seldom use paid for services or I wouldn’t bother with the machine at all. It could be come a very expensive appliance and so many of the protective services could be scams themselves.
There is a world of difference between quality control and censorship but the discussion is not making that distinction.
China’s Web filtering starts in the West
– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –
The Chinese government has backed away from mandating filtering software on all personal computers in China, in a move that averts a dangerous escalation in its censorship powers.
But however controversial and unworkable China’s plan to require Internet filters on PCs proved to be, Western firms have largely themselves to blame for creating and selling such filters in the first place.
The danger rears its head whenever technology created to solve some specific security problem is put to new and unintended use, not just in repressive regimes like China, Iran or Saudi Arabia, but professed freedom-loving countries in Europe or the USA.
“What is good and what is evil?” asks Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish anti-virus software company F-Secure Corp. “It is really a very basic problem that security people face.”
A computer password cracker in the wrong hands is considered malicious, of course. But corporate network administrators rely on the same tools to recover lost documents when employees forget computer passwords. Voice recognition software used in corporate call centres to automate and improve customer service can be used by police to wiretap suspects on a grand scale.
On Tuesday, China’s official news agency reported that a government ministry had abruptly backed down from requiring that every PC sold in China include a censorship program called “Green Dam-Youth Escort”.
So… because the Internet exists, so does the security censoring software tools required to censor the porn and malicious code… therefore, the Internet shouldn’t have been built…. right? It’s all our (the West’s ) fault. What a ridiculous article. Anybody with a brain knows that with great power comes great responsibility — just ask Spiderman. The real issue here is the cowardly Chinese government who can’t be faced with their own corruption and power-hungry dweebs, so they do whatever they can to “save face” and stop any possible route for political progress or taking responsibility. The “porn” blocking is merely a front they hoped the rest of the world would accept as reasonable — that’s why they stole the code — they didn’t write that part, they wrote the part which spies on their own people in order to squash anything threatening their comfortable nation-robbing lifestyles.
Advancing global Internet freedom
– Leslie Harris is the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. The views expressed are her own. —
In the wake of troubling reports as recently as last year that Western companies were assisting China with Internet censorship and the unmasking of cyber-dissidents, governments around the world seemed poised to regulate the conduct of Internet companies. Lawmakers appear to have stepped back from those efforts, but the challenges of advancing global Internet freedom remain.
The Global Online Freedom Act, drafted in the U.S. Congress, would have made it a crime for Internet companies to turn over personal information to governments in cases where that information could be used to punish dissent. The bill produced a firestorm of controversy. Human rights groups campaigned for swift passage, while the tech industry scrambled to stop the bill, which they viewed as a global eviction order from many difficult but emerging markets. At the same time, several members of the European Parliament proposed a European version of the measure, taking the accompanying controversy global.
Now policymakers seem far less certain that global Internet freedom will be served by imposing harsh mandates on Internet companies that provide crucial services to customers in repressive regimes. The bill has not been reintroduced in the U.S. Congress this year, and earlier this month, a top European regulator, European Union Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding, dismissed the notion of Europe passing its own Global Internet Freedom Act, saying that she was not convinced that “hard law” was the best way to address the issue.
For Internet executives who feared that hard-line regulatory mandates might force them out of many countries, Reding’s comments came as welcome relief. But celebration is premature. Threats to Internet freedom are growing and lawmakers’ concerns about industry’s role remain rightly high. Those who choose to misconstrue Reding’s remarks as a free pass on this important issue do so at their peril.
Now is the time that Internet and technology companies must step up and take on the very challenges that the Global Internet Freedom Act was intended to address in order to ensure that their services and technologies do not become tools for surveillance and oppression.
Lest companies argue that the problem is too big and complex for any one company to make a difference, there is a responsible way forward. Late last year, a diverse coalition of leading information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders launched the Global Network Initiative, which seeks to provide a framework to help information and telecommunications companies chart an ethical and accountable path forward through the growing demands from countries to take actions that infringe on the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users.
You are right Leslie. Corporations should not assist governments attempts to silence or jail dissidents in return for being allowed to do business in any given country. The crux of the matter is how to enforce such laws internationally. Provisions for privacy and privileged conversation differ from country to country. I do not believe world government is the answer. One more nail in the coffin of globalization.
disagree with your reasoning if the end result of a successful censorship request is (quote) “that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored…. it’s instead a bright signal to a country’s online citizens that their government is limiting their free speech.”
condoms for tweets and safe social intercourse
timid walter mitty comes to mind … ‘bright signals’ and all
@ iq160 – finding alternatives to restrictive laws are the jouissance of internetting