It seems that I missed this article from 2006. The article discusses the creation of CENTCOM’s blog team.
The team’s motto is “Engage,” and Flowers and others work with more than 250 bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror.
The blog team also contacts or comments on blogs to correct “inaccurate or untrue information” or provide addition information for “incomplete” blog entries.
wordpress.com — a blog hosting service which hosts nearly 1.4 million blogs — is now blocked in Turkey and Thailand.
Wholesale blocking of blog hosting services is unfortunately becoming more common place. Ethiopia, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and China block all of blogspot, for example, and India, Tunisia and UAE selectively block some blogspot blogs.
The blocking of websites by national filtering systems make content unavailable to those in such countries, but the deletion of content makes it unavailable to all. The blog of my friend Hossein was recently shutdown due to legal threats, making it unavailable to all while it was previously only censored in Iran.
(Hossein’s update on the situation follows below.)
Threatening ISP’s with “take down” requests is one of the most undocumented methods of censoring Internet content. Some sites, such as ChillingEffects document this to some degree but most cases occur in silence. Since much of it is related to copyright violations or terrorism few are paying close attention. Libel and defamation cases are more notable especially the cases in Malaysia and Singapore.
While it is possible to detect and monitor censorship via internet filtering, as I do for the OpenNet Initiative, it is much more difficult to enumerate content that is simply removed by service providers.
Athough Blogspot is currently accessible in Pakistan the block has not been lifted.
In the past the blogs at *.blogspot.com were on one IP — blocked in Pakistan — while the interface to update your blog at blogger.com was on a different IP — unblocked in Pakistan. So you could update you blog, but you could not access it at the *.blogspot.com address (or any other blogs on blogspot). Google recently upgraded Blogspot — it is no longer “beta”. This resulted in several changes including the ability to login to all your Google services including Blogspot from one account. Quite simply, the IP address of *.blogspot.com has been changed. the new IP address is accessible, the old IP address is still blocked.
Global Voices reports that Dr Awab Alvi from the co-founder of the Pakistani “Don’t Block The Blog” campaign suggests that he “would not be surprised to see some blocking to come again.” The authorities have also stated that they are “are still filtering the websites”.
I have been wanting to build something monitor this for quite some time, especially after reading about the availability issues of wikipedia in China.
Nicholas Kristoff of the NY Times created two blogs on hosting services in China and posted content intended to be provactive. To his “frustration” he was not immediately censored (other than crude filtering, such as replacing keywords with asterizes). This expectation of instant censorship stems from myths surrounding internet censorship in China. Kristoff repeats the 30,000 internet police myth although referring to ineptitude rather than the usual omnipotence. This demonstration leads Kristoff to conclude that “the Internet is just too big and complex for State Security to control” and that he doesn’t “see how the Communist Party dictatorship can long survive the Internet”.
It’s funny. There always seems to be two approaches to the topic of censorship in China: the “1984″ and the “technoptimist”.
The “1984″ approach overstates China’s capabilties claiming that legions of internet police monitor everything in “real time” and are just one kick away if you make the wrong click. The “technoptimist” approach understates China’s capabilites and claims that the internet is a democracy-battering-ram chipping away at the crumbling walls of oppressive regimes.
Both are short on detail and long on hubris.
Dr. Awab Alvi gave a presentation on the Don’t Block the Blog campaign at the which is trying to get Blogspot unblocked in Pakistan. (His presentation can be downloaded here.) Pakistan has experimented with filtering porn in the past and now filters *.blogspot.com among several others. Reba Shahid of spider.tm gave me copies of the block orders received by ISPs in Pakistan which you can download here and here.
Update: Another block order targeting mostly Baluch sites.
The Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace in Manila is generating great discussion on aspects of censorship on the Internet. There were some great sessions that discussed the idead of “wiggle room” in confined speech spaces. Kunda Dixit of the Nepali Times talked about the information blackout that occured after the coup in Nepal. He discussed how the newspaper fought back against the imposed censorship through printing articles with whitespace where the censors had remoed parts of the story and through the use of satire. He also stated that Nepal is now blocking 8 or 9 web sites.
The impression of the situation in countries that heavily censor is often that there is an information blackhole or that no political discussion takes place. Or that if mention a sensitive topic the secret police will kick down your door. But sometimes you have to look between lines (in this case literally) to see the creative ways in which people are pushing the boundaries of “accepted” speech. It seems to me that supporting and understanding these creative forms of censorship resistance is extremely important.
Xeni Jardin has a nice peice in the NY Times about exporting censorship:
American technology companies are taking heat for helping China’s government police the Internet. But this controversy extends well beyond China and the so- called Internet Gang of Four: Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft. Just how many American companies are complicit hit home for me last month when readers of BoingBoing.net e-mailed us to say they had been suddenly denied access.
The cause was SmartFilter, a product from a Silicon Valley company, Secure Computing.
SF classified BoingBoing as “nudity” a category which most filtering admins block. This affects many schools, libraries, corporate offices, and even entire countries. (In fact ICE is classified as “hacking” and they won’t change it).
Secure Computing refused to provide me with a list of the governments that use its filters. However, the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership between the University of Toronto, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School, has compiled data on how such products are used in foreign nations where censorship is easy because the governments control all Internet service providers.
The initiative found that SmartFilter has been used by government-controlled monopoly providers in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. It has also been used by state-controlled providers in Iran, even though American companies are banned from selling technology products there. (Secure Computing denies selling products or updates to Iran, which is probably using pirated versions.)
Here is a great first hand account of of the state of the Internet in China. Of particular note is the point about network administrators blocking access to their networks from China (for reasons of spam etc… in effect a form of geolocation filtering).
After investigating the problem, I discovered that it was not a firewall restriction or China’s own network failure, but foreign networks and servers outside of China blindly blocking larger parts of China’s networks from connecting.
This, in effect, strengthen’s the mystique of the “great firewall”:
This failure to connect, both inside and outside China, is then attributed to the government sensors and the mystic of the firewall is reinforced. The effect is that the Chinese firewall, if only in part and inadvertently, is being reinforced by Western democratic countries and companies protecting their systems from China’s infected computers.
Charles Spencer suggests that network administrators should continue to protect themselves against spam and botnets but that “it needs to be done with more of scalpel and less of a howitzer. ” This is a very important point. Increasingly network administrators and ISPs are making decisions on blocking IP addresses in China and elsewhere based on their own discretion. The ONI has reported about such actions by Telus where in trying to block one Union website they blocked an additional 766 sites. The decision by ISPs to block, even temporarily, for spam, phising, DoS and so forth should be done in a much more accountable and transparent way. And the blocking along the lines of what Telus did is just plainly unacceptable.
Another point which Charles Spencer has right is on the ability to access information in China:
There are very real controls on the flow of information in China. What needs to be understood is the practical reality for millions of Chinese to access information is far less terrible than what it is made out to be in Western Press, at least on a Political level.
While there is significant censorship targetted at key topics there is a wide variety of information available. One of the inherent flaws with filtering is underblocking. But while information that provides a distinctly different view that the official Chinese Gov’t position may be available it is, as Charles Spencer points out, the “psychological intimidation” whihc encourages people to self-censor and not access the content in the first place.
In addition, it is the expression of an opinion which lands people in trouble. Generally, simply accessing information does not appear to invoke the full wrath of the security aparatus. But attempts at disseminating information, engaging in critical political discussions or organizing seem to trigger threats and arrests.
Microsoft’s MSN Spaces is now removing Chinese language blogs that contain politically sensitive terms. Not only are users unable to create posts that contain certain keywords in the title through technical means, entire blogs are now being shutdown. Michael Anti, an pro-democracy blogger, had his blog shutdown by MSN. Microsoft responded with:
As a multi-national business, Microsoft operates in countries around the world. Inline with Microsoft practices in global markets, MSN is committed to ensuring that products and services comply with global and local laws, norms, and industry practices. Most countries have laws and practices that require companies providing online services to make the internet safe for local users. Occasionally, as in China, local laws and practices require consideration of unique elements.
While Robert Scoble has been critical of the incident some MSN employee bloggers (here and here) are, in effect, mirroring the companies position in that the company must comply with local laws. Childish arguments aside (yes, we all know that you cannot scream “I have a bomb” in an airport and then claim freedom of speech), it is quite clear that transparency and accountabilty are the key issues in this situation, not whether or not Microsoft should do business in China. Just as the censorship “issue is not really one that is binary” neither is Microsoft’s role in China one of in or out. The key questions here are: what specific law did the censored blog violate? Did Microsoft receive a court order to remove it?
Does Microsoft not have lawyers?
If it is an issue of law, Microsoft should take the issue to court and cause the Chinese Government to openly state why this specific blog should be removed. If it is an issue of “norms and industry practices” — i.e. Microsoft’s choice, not legal obligation, to remove the blog — then be open about it. The secrecy and silence is unacceptable.
