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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
Are Chinese mainland citizens, as has been reported, finding their telephone conversations cut off whenever they mention the word "protest?" While large-scale, real-time voice recognition is a technological possibility, it is at the edge of what is believed likely. It would certainly be revealing about the capabilities of the Chinese government if these anecdotes proved to be widespread.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
Google Inc. accused Chinese authorities on Monday of interfering with its Gmail service, just as China’s own Jasmine Revolution is picking up steam.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 25 Mar 2011
China's latest efforts at tightening its control over the Internet -- including the blocking of Gmail and Web software that can bypass the censorship -- have hampered the work of human rights activists, say groups based in the U.S.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Mar 2011
In a post for Global Voices Advocacy, Onnik Krikorian notes that Facebook has been used to "encourage and maintain contacts between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the absence of traditional forms of communication blocked off as a result of the still unresolved conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 07 Feb 2011
British Columbia Ferry Lines (BC Ferries) - the largest passenger ferry line in North America - has reportedly blocked access on its free Wi-fi service to any site that has sex education or abortion-related content.
In response to a 'Freedom of Information' request, BC Ferries released several documents which show that its BC Ferries' online web filters are designed to block all websites having any kind of sexual material - even if it pertains to legitimate sex education, reproductive health and abortion.
The list of blocked category contents include other predictably filtered items such as like "child porn," "hate speech," "illegal activities" and "non-sexual nudity" as well as bandwidth-hogging stuff such as "streaming media" and "file transfer services."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 07 Feb 2011
The Obama administration is quietly seeking the power for it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a move that raises questions about free expression, national sovereignty, and the role of states in shaping the future of the Internet.
At stake is who will have authority over the next wave of suffixes to supplement the venerable .com, .org, and .net. At least 115 proposals are expected this year, including .car, .health, .nyc, .movie, and .web, and the application process could be finalized at a meeting in San Francisco next month.
Some are likely to prove contentious among more conservative nations. Two different groups--the dotGAY Initiative and the .GAY Alliance--already have announced they will apply for the right to operate the .gay domain; additional controversial proposals may surface in the next few months. And nobody has forgotten the furor over .xxx, which has been in limbo for seven years after receiving an emphatic thumbs-down from the Bush administration.
When asked whether it supports or opposes the creation of .gay and .xxx, an official at the U.S. Commerce Department replied that "it is premature for us to comment on those domain names." The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., that has a contract with the U.S. government to manage Internet addresses, is overseeing the process of adding new domain suffixes.
A statement sent to CNET over the weekend from the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, said its proposed veto procedure "has merit as it diminishes the potential for blocking of top level domain strings considered objectionable by governments. This type of blocking harms the architecture of the DNS and undermines the goal of universal resolvability (i.e., a single global Internet that facilitates the free flow of goods and services and freedom of expression)."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 01 Feb 2011
The Iranian government has blocked the Iranian people from accessing thousands of websites; it has slowed down the speed of the Internet in Iran to a maddening crawl; and it has used the Internet to track down protestors and their families. It has also jailed Iranian bloggers, and given several severely long prison sentences.
Now the Iranian government says it stepping up its efforts to patrol and control the Internet. It has announced the formation of a new cyber police force whose targets specifically include anti-government websites and political dissidents using social networking sites. "Through these very social networks in our country, anti-revolutionary groups and dissidents found each other and contacted foreign countries and triggered riots," Iran's chief police official Brigadier General Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said, as he announced the launch of the first new cyber police unit. "There is no time to wait," he said. "We will have cyber police all over Iran."
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 01 Feb 2011
Egyptian authorities received worldwide condemnation last week for effectively shutting down the nation's access to the internet as people flooded the streets to demand the ouster of their longtime leader, Hosni Mubarak. But a bill that would hand President Obama the power to similarly shut down the internet in the U.S. without judicial review may be reintroduced in Congress this year. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the bill's co-sponsor, says the ability to control access to the internet would be a vital tool in a "national cyber emergency," such as a targeted virus or hacking attack. But is an internet "kill switch" really an acceptable extension of presidential powers?
No. Politicians will abuse it: Mubarak was able to "shut down dissent" in Egypt by switching off the internet, says Chris at AmericaBlog. Don't think American presidents wouldn't do the same. "Politicians will abuse the power they have," and this plan "won't even allow the courts to get involved" when that abuse inevitably occurs. This bill impinges on our freedom.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 31 Jan 2011
On Thursday January 27, the Egyptian government did something extraordinary--it "turned off the internet" within the country's own borders. There's no mystery about how this happened -- the Egyptian government owns the largest service provider in the country and had only to make a few phone calls to bring the remaining ISPs in line.
The old fashioned nature of this technological shutdown -- human beings switching off Border Gateway Protocol routers at the point of a gun, more or less -- suggests that Egypt's leadership has yet to consider the consequences of such an act, economic and otherwise.
Destruction of your own increasingly-vital communications infrastructure is known as the Dictator's Dilemma. It's a concept explored by economist and later secretary of state George Shultz, and was born in a very different era--the mid-80's ascent to power of Gorbachev, who is reported to have been directly influenced by the notion that an increasingly information-dependent economy could not thrive when information itself was prevented from flowing freely within and outside a country.
Again and again, from Myanmar to Iran, the Internet has demonstrated an ability to facilitate the organization of social and political protest, if not revolution. Countries wishing to avoid its facility for aiding organized resistance, such as Cuba, are forced to forgo the benefits of an information society altogether.
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By: Jillian C. York
Date: 31 Jan 2011
BEIJING—Chinese authorities have blocked the word "Egypt" from searches on Twitter-like microblogging sites in an indication of concern among Communist Party leaders that the unrest there could encourage similar calls for political reform in China.
Internet censors also appeared Sunday to have deleted almost all of the comments posted beneath the few limited reports on the unrest—mostly from the state-run Xinhua news agency—that have been published on Chinese news sites in the past few days.
The strict online controls illustrate the party's concern that the Internet is providing China's citizens with a new means of information and organization that could challenge its monopoly on power, as has happened with other authoritarian governments in recent years.
