Surveillance

ONI Blog: After the Green Movement: Internet Controls in Iran, 2009-2012
This report, titled "After the Green Movement: Internet Controls in Iran, 2009-2012", details Iran’s increasing Internet controls since 2009, when protests against the victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad rocked the country. The election protest campaign--dubbed the “Green Movement”--was marked for...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: August 10, 2012
Iran's telecommunications minister announced on Sunday that the government's project to replace access to the global Internet with Iran's own domestic intranet system is scheduled to be completed within 18 months. The proposed insular intranet would be heavily regulated...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: July 27, 2012
The Beijing police have announced a successful "clean-up" of the web, in which ten thousand internet cafes were inspected, five thousand people were arrested for Internet crime, and seven thousand web site administrators were punished. The police described the clean-up as...
ONI Blog: Facebook uses scanning technologies, alerts authorites about content
In March of this year, authorities in south Florida arrested a man in his thirties who had used Facebook to make plans to meet up with a minor. According to Reuters, a program designed by the social networking platform to...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: July 13, 2012
The Russian Duma, the lower house of Parliament, unanimously passed a controversial Internet bill after four amendments were inserted. While these amendments were inserted to substantially narrow the criteria under which the government could shut down a site deemed...
ONI Blog: Multiple cyberattacks on Syrian activists linked to same party
In the ongoing Syrian uprising, regime supporters have targeted opposition activists with increasingly sophisticated malware for remote surveillance and data exfiltration. Since February 2012, when CNN first reported on the cyberespionage campaign being waged against the opposition, surveillance software has been...
ONI Blog: Harvard Team Releases Paper Detailing China's Internet Censorship Tendencies
Our colleagues at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) have just released a new paper analyzing Chinese censorship. The study, which is directed at longform blogs and message boards, aims to understand what web content Chinese censors...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: June 15, 2012
On Thursday, the UK Home Department released a draft of the Communications Bill. Home Secretary Theresa May defended the bill saying, “If we stand by as technology changes, we will leave police officers fighting crime with one hand tied behind...
ONI Blog: Stuxnet-Flame Connection Highlights the Rise of State-Sanctioned Cyberweaponry
Researchers at the Kaspersky Lab in Russia are reporting that the destructive malware known as Flame, a bug that has been infecting computers in Iran and elsewhere, is now being tied to the other superbug dubbed Stuxnet, the computer bug suspected of...
ONI Blog: Syria ramps up cyber mining to target activists
While web surveillance is far from a new issue in Syria, it appears that under the current state of insecurity the Assad government is raising surveillance to the next level, militarizing the web and using the internet as a tool to target...

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