The companies that provide blogging, social networking and video hosting services are becoming aware of the fact that a core user constituency is engaged in citizen journalism and digital advocacy. And that this also presents challenges. These companies are in a position in which they are are compelled to comply with the censorship and surveillance demands of governments and corporations in addition to protecting the privacy and freedom of expression of their users. In fact many of these services, such a Youtube and Flickr, have been censored in various countries. In other cases, they have chosen to self-censor to comply with local restrictions. They have also turned over data resulting in the arrest of activists and dissidents.
But just as users can protect themselves, so can companies.
1. If you log it, they will come. What you log, how it is stored (anonymized logs), and how long you keep them for are important.
2. Censorship is a double-edged sword. If you do not censor, there is a risk that your service will be blocked. If you do censor, you will be condemned. Therefore it is important to be open and transparent surrounding what and how you censor. Derek Bambauer has a great paper that expands on what the concept of transparency really means. It is well worth the read.
3. Awareness is crucial. Internal awareness of the use of your services by political activists and citizen journalists is very important. Consider the case(starts at 14:15 in the podcast) of Wael Abbas in Egypt: he uploaded videos of police brutality and torture in Egypt to YouTube which lead to the arrest of some officers involved. YouTube suspended his account for posting “inappropriate material” and did no respond to his emails asking for clarification. Only after his case appeared on CNN and major media outlets as well as a campaign by fellow bloggers did YouTube restore his account. YouTube said that the videos did not have sufficient context. Wael says that YouTube told him that the people staffing the suspensions were new and didn’t know what they were doing as all the complaints leading to the suspension of the account were from one source, most likely the Egyptian government.
4. Communication is vital. If is very important for users to know the potential risks they face. For example, it is now well known that Yahoo! China has cooperated with Chinese authorities turning over email and account information that helped convict at least four dissidents. The use of a foreign, well known email service did not provide them with any more protection than a domestic Chinese service would have. In contrast, Google has pledged to not offer certain products in China.
5. Know where your servers are hosted and what your partners/subsidiaries are up to. See Rebecca MacKinnon’s excellent paper for a thorough discussion.
July 17th 2008 
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When Jonathan Halevi found that websites affiliated with Hamas and Hezbollah were being hosted on servers owned by the Canadian company iWeb he contacted iWeb and asked for them to be taken down. He was not successful. However, when CBC translated some Arabic in the discussion forum and contacted iWeb claiming that they were hosting “a site whose content could violate Canada’s anti-terrorism act” iWeb re-evaluated and took down the sites.
It is unclear exactly which specific sites were targeted although both www.almanar.com.lb (Hezbollah affiliated) and www.aqsatv.ps (Hamas affiliated) were both previously hosted on iWeb. After the initial complaint, iWeb reviewed the English content of the web site(s) (almanar has an English section, aqsatv does not appear to have an English section it is not clear what was actually reveiwed) and determined that “the English version did not seem to have any content which could violate our policies or laws.” However, after CBC’s claim that they were in violation of Canada’s anti-terrorism act iWeb removed the site(s):
In this case, analysis of the site had been done on the English version of the site, a version that did not seem to include material or content that was illegal or in violation of our terms of service (these facts were confirmed by journalists involved in this case). We informed our customer of this complaint and of the conclusions we came to. We also informed the individual who made the complaint, who did not provide any feedback or additional information.
It actually appears that the offending content which lead to the removal of the web sites were actually COMMENTS posted beneath an article:
People’s comments under the article in question are a good example, several believe that the site had to be removed and others believe that this is freedom of expression; who is right?
In response to the original complaint iWeb suggested that that the RCMP be contacted and if the content violated the law they would act. But after CBC’s involvement they acted to remove the content without this:
For our part, we determine that the initial complaint, which did not target a specific part or section of the site was not, at first glance, substantiated and that the version and sections of the site that we analyzed were conformed with Canadian laws and our policies. That being said, we originally specified to the person who made the complaint that if they felt the issue required legal attention, that they should voice their concern to the competent authorities like the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) so that they can also analyze the content and that we will collaborate with their verdict. When the complaint reached us for a second time, the new information provided to us made us revise our position. We then agreed that it was not informative speech or opinion or freedom of expression anymore, but a threat to human beings who violates our policies for using this service and why we intervened by shutting down the sites in question.
The details are still a bit confusing:
- What were the exact web sites in question? Are they in fact www.almanar.com.lb and www.aqsatv.ps?
- What was the exact offending content that CBC felt was a violation of Canada’s anti terrorism act? Was it a post in a discussion forum? Was it a comment posted below an article? On which site?
- Were these web sites removed due to content posted by USERS and not by the owners of the sites?
- Were the owners of the web sites given the opportunity to moderate/delete the offending user comments?
- Were the owners of the web sites given the opportunity to keep the English version, which had no offending content?
This, of course, is not the first time this has happened. I have posted about this in the past:
Content removed for allegedly supporting terrorism is one of the least documented forms of takedown… The Internet Haganah, which calls for the removal of sites which allegedly support terrorism, had counted 600 successful takedowns by 2005. These include websites, groups hosted by Yahoo! and storefronts at Cafe Press. In 2005, the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center had several sites removed by their ISPs, one of which only contained a flag that carried the inscription, ‘There is no other God but Allah’. There was no hateful text or material advocating suicide bombing. The issue, as noted in the press release, was that the flag appeared to be the same one used by Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group that, at the time, was not on the US State Department’s or Canada’s list of terrorist organisations.
Pending answers to the questions above, it seems that the issue here is not one of content but of association, pressure and selective enforcement.
For example, the web site of KACH www.kahanetzadak.com, which is among a handful of websites listed as terrorist entities by the U.S., is also hosted in Canada:
OrgName: In2net Network Inc.
OrgID: IN2N
Address: 3602 Gilmore Way,
Address: Suite 210
City: Burnaby
StateProv: BC
PostalCode: V5G-4W9
Country: CA
These cases raise troubling question concerning transparency and due process the lack of which leads to chilling effects on freedom of expression. While the details are still unclear, it appears that these sites were removed after CBC determined that forums posts or comment posts were in violation of Canada’s anti-terrorism act. That is, not content posted by the owner’s of web sites but by users. And it is unclear if the owner’s of the sites were given the opportunity to moderate the offending content. This has consequences that go beyond just this case. The “vigilante model” of takedown puts the power of judge, jury and executioner in the hands of hosting providers and ISPs. The entire process lacks transparency, accountability and oversight.
July 16th 2008 READ MORE NO COMMENTS
The explosion of citizen journalism has allowed increased access to a diversity of voices around the globe. Issues and voices that are not represented in mainstream media are providing diverse perspectives on both popular and obscure political issues. However, this phenomenon is certainly not new. While recent attention has focused on bloggers around the world, past efforts, including the creation of Indymedia nearly ten years ago, leveraged the Internet for these same purposes. The success of citizen journalism is based on a combination of personal experience, opinion and analysis with traditional news to provide a compelling account of political events that engages and connects with the reader.
While bloggers are quite aware of the danger of government censorship and surveillance, the same skepticism concerning free expression and privacy often does not extend to the corporate sector. The blogosphere looks more like the logosphere, unlike the nologosphere of earlier incarnations of independent media. While some open, decentralized elements remain, particularly the use of open source software such as wordpress and open licensing such as creative commons, most of the tools and platforms used by bloggers are corporate, proprietary products: Blogger/Blogspot, Twitter, Gkype, Gmail, Feedburner, Flickr, Technorati, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube etc… This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just presents a different set of challenges.
After setting up a fake Facebook profile of a Moroccan Prince, Fouad Mourtada was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. Although Fouad was recently pardoned and released after an international campaign, the case has raised questions about Facebook’s possible involvement:
How the Moroccan police found out Mourtada’s identity remains a bit of a mystery. They could have obtained his IP address from Facebook, or from his service provider, Maroc Telecom, or from an old-fashioned snitch. But the preliminary court hearing did not include details of the police investigation, so the possibility of corporate cooperation cannot be ruled out.
In at least four cases Yahoo! cooperated with the Chinese government resulting in the imprisonment of dissidents. The use of a foreign, well known email service did not provide them with any more protection than a domestic Chinese service would have. Orkut, Google’s social networking site, handed over information to the police in India which was used to arrest a person for insulting a revered figure. Youtube, despite putting up a legal battle, has been ordered to turn over user information of everyone who has ever used Youtube to Viacom. Such services collect and store information about users that can and has been handed over to others, in some cases resulting in the arrests of activists and dissidents.
In other cases companies censor their users. Skype has partnered with a domestic Chinese company to provide a censored version of its popular voip/chat software. Microsoft deleted the MSN spaces account of a well known Chinese blogger and filters its service to prevent posts from being made that contain certain sensitive words. In fact, this is exactly what domestic Chinese blogging platforms do. The Chinese version of Myspace censors posts that contain sensitive words and also encourages users to report those who engage in “misconduct.” Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all maintain censored versions of their search engines for the Chinese market.
Internet users can and should take measures to protect themselves, even Indymedia’s servers were seized by police in the past. Projects such as Tor provide technical measures to enhance ones privacy online by providing a significant level of anonymity. Global Voices Advocacy has created a guide that shows users how to blog anonymously with Wordpress and Tor. The Citizen Lab has produced a guide to bypassing censorship. NGO-in-a-Box has produced a collection of security software that helps NGO’s secure themselves. It is important for citizen journalists to asses the threats they face and use tools that minimize those risks. A well recognized foreign brand is not a substitute for good security practices.
However, the strength of tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter rests upon their ease of use and most users will not take the additional steps necessary to protect ones privacy. Just as users may need to implement strategies to minimize their potential risks, the technology companies on whose services bloggers and citizen journalists rely should also take proactive steps to protect their users and communicate the limits of that protection to their users.
July 4th 2008 READ MORE NO COMMENTS
China’s Overeager American Censors - Forbes
Practically every U.S.-owned search engine has caved to the Chinese government’s demands that they censor political Web sites in China. But none of them seem to agree on just what sites need censoring.
Google, at times, blocks Chinese users’ access to the BBC while Yahoo! permits it. Yahoo! sometimes filters out Voice of America–Google doesn’t. And Microsoft removes entries from the Chinese version of Wikipedia from its results while every other search engine includes them–even the dominant Chinese search engine Baidu.com.
Confused?
Search Engines’ Chinese Self-Censorship - Technology Review and ABC
A report released last week by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto found that different search engines are blocking fairly different content. “The low overlap means that companies are choosing the exact content to censor or, alternatively, to not censor,” says Nart Villeneuve, a senior research fellow at the Citizen Lab and the author of the report. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not getting guidance from the Chinese government in other ways,” he notes. But Villeneuve says that if search engines are interpreting Chinese policies to decide what to censor, that introduces the possibility that they may block more content than is strictly necessary.
Read more about the Search Monitor Project here and here.
July 2nd 2008 READ MORE NO COMMENTS
There have been some reports suggesting that Facebook may be blocked in China, however, Facebook is not blocked in China. In fact, I experienced Facebook outages myself — from Canada — on July 1 too. At therecent Global Voices Summit I gave a presentation on detecting Internet filtering. While it is sometimes easy to detect, sometimes it is not — often there are alternative explanations.
www.facebook.com (and zh-cn.facebook.com) resolves to a variety of IP addresses, 69.63.176.140, 69.63.184.11 and 69.63.178.12 and a few of them. DNS servers in China and resolving www.facebook.com properly and these IP addresses are accessible when directly accessed from China.
However, while facebook is loading you have probably seen a domain like this, static.ak.fbcdn.net or like this static.ak.facebook.com, flash by in your browser’s status bar. Domains such as these resolve to IP addresses assigned to Akamai. Akamai is a mirroring service that has servers all over the world so depending on where you are you’ll be accessing the same content but from a different server.
One scenario is that there was some temporary issue with Akamai.
Another is that Chia may have blocked one of Akamai’s IP addresses. (Pakistan, for example, once disrupted access to numerous sites because they blocked portions of the Akamai network. Apparently, they did not realize that in trying to a few sites on Akamai they ended up blocking thousands of the world’s most popular sites.)
I tested a variety of Akamai IP addresses that Chinese DNS servers resolved the “static” facebook domains too and all were acessible from multiple points in the country.
July 2nd 2008 READ MORE NO COMMENTS
