-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 07 Oct 2010
Until recently, Afghanistan's Internet has been notably free of government censorship. That stems largely from the limited impact and visibility of the Net domestically: The Taliban banned the Internet during its rule, and despite a recent boom in use, the nation has only a million users out of a population of about 29 million. But the Afghan government finally got around to imposing national filters in June, when the Ministry of Communications instructed local ISPs to blacklist websites that promote alcohol, gambling, and pornography, or ones that provide dating and social networking services.
Afghanistan's Internet regulators are still struggling to enforce their rules. Despite the order, the vast majority of sites violating the regulator's code are still available. Even ostensibly blocked sites are easily viewable using straightforward proxies or circumvention software.
Yet the government has already been tempted to use the new Internet regulations for more than just defending public morals. Just three months after the introduction of the rules, the government told ISPs to include news reporting websites on their blacklists. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Pashto-language website Benawa had been blocked in the country after it incorrectly reported that the first vice president, Mohammed Qasim Fahim, had died. (The site corrected the error within a half hour.) The site is available on its U.S.-based servers, but Benawa's U.S.-based owner and manager Khalid Hadi told CPJ: "Our site is now banned on 97 percent of ISP servers in Afghanistan, and the Afghan government says the ban will stay indefinitely." Understandably, Hadi is angry about being pushed off Afghan servers.
There are also reports that a ban is being sought for another Pashto news site, Tolafghan.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 06 Oct 2010
Reporters Without Borders is outraged that the Iranian government is reinforcing and extending its online censorship and repression of netizens. Several news and information websites have been blocked in the past few days including those of two influential Grand Ayatollahs, which have been inaccessible in Iran since 3 October. Online women’s rights and student activists are among those who continue to be questioned and threatened.
It is now the ayatollahs’ turn to be censored. It seems that the Islamic Republic’s government, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supported by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can no longer tolerate the views of some of Iran’s leading clerics. Their websites cater to spiritual needs and are far from being news outlets or sources of information about opposition politics. But they are being targeted by the government. By preventing Muslims from visiting these sites, the Islamic Republic is taking censorship to a new level.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Oct 2010
Senate sponsors have eased off a bill aimed at cracking down on online piracy after an outcry from Internet engineers who say the proposal would effectively censor the Web.
The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act still would contain some highly controversial provisions, but senators proposed an amendment Wednesday to strip from the bill language that allowed the Justice Department to publish a blacklist of websites "dedicated to infringing activities."
Under the original bill, the Justice Department would be able to green light Internet service providers to go after those sites by providing them legal immunity.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Oct 2010
A battle has intensified over federal rules to prevent online piracy, with Hollywood, Web site operators and engineers clamoring to influence the outcome of a Senate bill.
In one corner, the U.S. Chamber, Hollywood and artists support Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) bill that allows attorneys general and the Justice Department to shut down the domain names of the worst of worst offenders of copyright laws. They say companies are losing revenue from pirated movies, shows, handbags and pharmaceuticals that directly trickle down to job cuts and turmoil in their sectors.
In the other corner, public interest groups and some network engineers say Leahy’s bill, which has a slew of bipartisan co-signers, allows the federal government to overreach and could lead to censorship of the Web. They say by seizing domain names, the basic infrastructure of the Internet is disrupted.
“There is an epidemic of digital theft on broadband Internet,” said Rick Cotton, general counsel for NBC Universal and chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce cross-sector Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy. “This bill is actually quite a narrow, focused effort to address a portion of that epidemic.”
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 04 Oct 2010
The United Arab Emirates has restored access to Flickr after years of blocking the popular photo-sharing website.
The decision this week to ease restrictions on the Yahoo-owned site comes amid a debate over digital freedom in the Gulf nation ahead of a planned block on BlackBerry smart phone services.
Yahoo Middle East executive Ahmed Nassef calls it a positive development. He says in a statement on the company's regional website that Yahoo is working with authorities to unblock a feature known as Flickr Groups that's still off-limits.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Sep 2010
More than half a year after Google announced that it would stop censoring its content in China, it’s still hard to say whether the move did more to help or hurt free access of information within the country. Though users in China may still access Google’s overseas websites, access is inconsistent and unstable, with the Chinese site being occasionally blocked by the mechanisms of the so-called Great Firewall. Still, Ross LaJeunesse, Google’s head of government affairs in Asia, says the company continues to push for more freedom in China as part of its government relations strategy.
“I believe strongly that Google is fighting the good fight in China, in Asia and around the globe,” Mr. LaJeunesse said at a recent lecture at the University of Hong Kong. “And we’ll keep fighting because if we don’t, there’s a very real danger that the Internet will look a lot different in the future than it does today.”
Mr. LaJeunesse said the Chinese are fighting back against censorship. Chinese opposition to implementing a monitoring software called Green Dam Youth Escort, for instance, forced the government to stop funding the initiative in July.
Even though 30% of the world’s population is online, many governments have been wary to welcome the Internet unfettered. In the 100 countries Google operates in, about 25 have blocked various Google products, from YouTube to Blogger, Mr. LaJeunesse said. In China, Iran and North Korea, YouTube is blocked entirely.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Sep 2010
(CNN) -- On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren't as easy to monitor as traditional telephones.
The government wants to force companies to redesign their communications systems and information networks to facilitate surveillance, and to provide law enforcement with back doors that enable them to bypass any security measures.
The proposal may seem extreme, but -- unfortunately -- it's not unique. Just a few months ago, the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India threatened to ban BlackBerry devices unless the company made eavesdropping easier. China has already built a massive internet surveillance system to better control its citizens.
Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Sep 2010
Tech groups and other Internet stakeholders this week expressed concern with a pending copyright bill that would allow the U.S. government to seize domains with infringing content and require ISPs to cut off connections with the offending sites.
The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Patrick Leahy, is "unprecedented in the U.S.," Leslie Harris, president and chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), said in a Tuesday call with reporters. It tackles a topic that "requires enormous caution and a very deliberative process."
Specifically, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) would allow the Department of Justice to obtain an injunction and seize the domain name of a site found to offer pirated goods – like music streams or movie downloads. It would go one step further, however, and require U.S. ISPs to cut off contact with these domains.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 30 Sep 2010
Internet entrepreneurs are in a panic over a Senate bill they say will censor the Web, stifle Silicon Valley startups, damage the United States' credibility on free speech and ultimately trigger the creation of an alternate-universe Internet.
The West Coast engineers say they were blindsided last Monday when the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act was introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill has a bipartisan roster of co-sponsors who say it will be a tool for stopping the worst offenders in the world of online piracy.
The bill would give the attorney general new powers to shut down websites deemed dedicated to counterfeit material -- by going through the courts and by encouraging service providers to go after sites the Justice Department puts on a public blacklist.
-
By: Jillian C. York
Date: 29 Sep 2010
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, has proposed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which would give the US Department of Justice (DoJ) powers to "crack down" on "websites that are dedicated to making infringing goods and services available".
Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that the proposal endangers users' and site publishers' rights to free expression.
"This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time – by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites," said an EFF statement.
"This is a censorship bill that runs roughshod over freedom of speech on the Internet," it said. "Free speech is vitally important to democracy, which is why the government is restricted from suppressing speech except in very specific, narrowly-tailored situations. But this bill is the polar opposite of narrow – not only in the broad way that it tries to define a site 'dedicated to infringing activities,' but also in the solution that it tries to impose – a block on a whole domain, and not just the infringing part of the site."
The proposed law would create a list of websites which internet service providers (ISPs), web hosts and other intermediaries would have to block access to on the Attorney General's order, the EFF said. It said that another list of sites the DoJ suspected of infringing would be produced which could be blocked by intermediaries with legal immunity.
