CIA Gains Technology to Monitor Social Media Buzz

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Graham

Online Media Daily | Laurie Sullivan | October 19, 2009

United States intelligence agencies will have a tool to read blog posts, Twitter tweets and chatter across the Internet. In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment arm of the U.S. government, has infused cash into Visible Technologies with plans to make the platform available to all 15 agencies it supports, including the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The decision represents a movement now underway by the United States government to become more familiar with emerging social media and Internet technology. In-Q-Tel also has made an investment in ThingMagic, a company deep in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.

Donald Tighe, vice president of external affairs at In-Q-Tel, says the company made the investment to introduce Visible’s technology to government agencies, but declined to provide specifics. He says In-Q-Tel’s average investment varies between $500,000 and $3 million per company. Since being founded in 1999, In-Q-Tel has invested about 80% in work programs and 20% in partnering with other venture capitalists, Tighe says.

Explaining how U.S. intelligence agencies might use Visible’s platform, Tighe points to technology that companies install to automate analysis of customer service phone conversations. Sophisticated technology can determine when it’s appropriate to bring in a supervisor to resolve disputes based on the tone of the person talking and the words being used in the conversation to convey the message.

Visible Technologies’ platform helps brands to monitor the millions of posts and conversations on blogs, forums, YouTube, Twitter and other online forums. “There is a world full of countries with people who are in online chat rooms,” Tighe says. “They may talk about something important to national security issues, or maybe someone becomes concerned about what they hear in one of these rooms. These scenarios are an example of the type of monitoring technology Visible Technologies offers.”

The government represents a new market segment opportunity for tech companies, according to Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies. In this case, the CIA has become interested in a feature in one of the platforms the company offers.

Visible crawls about 500,000 Web sites daily to gather information from more than 1 million posts and conversations. In-Q-Tel’s investment is not random, but rather is related to a particular project that Cahill declined to discuss. It could alter Visible’s product roadmap, fast-forward it and open avenues to data that had been closed in the past, he admits.

Arab Winds of Change

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | FaceMePLS

Guardian | Brian Whitaker | October 22, 2009

“Women, bloggers and gays lead change in the Arab world.” That is the headline of an article by Octavia Nasr for CNN’s blog AC360°. “Several new lines are being drawn in the Middle East’s desert sand simultaneously,” she writes. “If they continue to be drawn at this rate longer and thicker, it’s hard to foresee any governments, censors or jails being able to stop them.”

Though Nasr sounds a bit overexcited about the existence of a feminist mag in Arabic in which “no one dares to advertise” and a few other developments which are interesting straws in the wind but scarcely signs of an imminent revolution, I think she has a point. If asked where change is likely to come from in the Arab countries, I would not put much faith in “reformist” politicians and opposition parties – they’re mostly no-hopers – but I would definitely put feminists, gay men, lesbians and bloggers very high on my list.

It’s important not to exaggerate what they are actually achieving at the moment, but let’s consider their potential as challengers of the status quo and drivers of change. The “Arab problem” is mostly perceived in terms of the regimes: the lack of democracy, authoritarian rulers who trample over people’s rights, and so on. That was the perception of the Bush administration in particular and it led to the simplistic idea that regime change was the solution.

It’s now very clear (as I explain in my new book, What’s Really Wrong With the Middle East) that this was a mistake. You can overthrow dictators, you can force countries to have elections and you can even insist on voting procedures that are reasonably fair, but that doesn’t bring freedom unless it forms part of a much bigger social transformation.

What has emerged in Iraq, for example, is not so much a model for the rest of the Middle East (as originally intended by Bush and the neocons) but a model of it. As the smoke drifts away, Iraq is emerging as a fairly typical Arab state with most of their usual negative characteristics – a government with authoritarian aspirations, institutionalised corruption and nepotism, pervasive social discrimination and a rentier economy that produces little besides oil – plus, for good measure, resurgent tribalism and sectarianism.

Arab regimes, by and large, are products of the societies they govern and it is often the society, as much as the government itself, that stands in the way of progress. In Kuwait, for instance, it was not the hereditary emir who resisted granting votes to women, but reactionary elements in the elected parliament – and there are plenty of similar examples.

Khaled Diab, an Egyptian who contributes regularly to Cif, summed it up pithily when he told me: “Egypt has a million Mubaraks.” In other words, the Mubarak way of doing things is not confined to the country’s president; it is found throughout Egyptian society, in business and in families too. The Arab family as traditionally conceived – patriarchal and authoritarian, suppressing individuality and imposing conformity, protecting its members so long as they comply with its wishes – is a microcosm of the Arab state.

Changing the power structures within families (and in many parts of the Arab world this is already happening) will also gradually change the way people view other power structures that replicate those of the traditional family, whether in schools and universities, the workplace, or in government. This is where women come in. In an Arab context, demanding the same rights as men is a first step towards change. Asserting their rights doesn’t mean that all women have to be activists for feminism. Even something as simple as going out to work – if enough people do it – can start to make a difference.

Contrary to popular opinion, most human rights abuses in the Arab countries are perpetrated by society rather than regimes. Yes, ordinary people are oppressed by their rulers, but they are also participants themselves in a system of oppression that includes systematic denial of rights on a grand scale.

In these highly stratified societies, people are discriminated for and against largely according to accidents of birth: by gender, by family, by tribe, by sect. Women, as the largest disadvantaged group, can play a major role in overcoming this and helping smaller disadvantaged groups to do the same. Once the equality principle is accepted for women it becomes easier to apply it to others.

Discrimination against gay people has only begun to be challenged in the Arab countries during the last few years. In a patriarchal system, where masculinity is highly prized, any deviation from the sexual “norms” and expected gender roles is not only subversive but is regarded as extremely threatening. The vigilante killings in Iraq are the nastiest example – not just of men who are thought to be gay, but others who simply don’t dress and behave “as men should”.

The third group driving change are the bloggers. A recent survey found 35,000 people blogging in Arabic, plus countless others who use Facebook, Twitter, etc, to communicate over the internet. There has been much debate about the extent to which this is reshaping public discourse and undermining censorship, but that is not really the main significance of blogging and the internet in the Middle East. The traditional “ideal” of an Arab society is one that is strictly ordered, where everyone knows their place and nobody speaks out of turn. Basically, you do what is required of you and no more. You keep your head down, don’t make waves and let those who supposedly know better get on with running things.

The point about bloggers is that they want none of that. They are engaged, they are alive, and they’ll speak out of turn as much as they like. Put all these elements together and you can see how, sooner or later, the edifice could start to crumble.

Congratulations to Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

By BHRP

On October 19th, Secretary Clinton held a swearing-in ceremony for Michael Posner, who was sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Mike Posner has dedicated his life to fighting for a better world.  He spent over two decades (serving as its President and as Executive Director) at Human Rights First, the non-profit, nonpartisan international human rights organization whose mission is to protect people at risk around the world. He co-founded the Fair Labor Association, an organization that brings together corporations, local leaders, universities, and NGOs to promote corporate accountability for working conditions in the apparel industry. He also co-founded, along with Yahoo! and other stakeholders, the Global Network Initiative, which protects and advances freedom of expression in the Internet, communications and technology sector.

To learn more about Mike Posner’s work, please see here.

For the full text of Secretary Clinton’s remarks, please see here.

The BHRP joins Secretary Clinton in congratulating Mike Posner. His passion for and commitment to being a tireless advocate for the rights of the most vulnerable are an inspiration.

Introducing Evgeny Morozov, Our Newest Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

I’m thrilled to introduce Evgeny Morozov, our 2009-2010 Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University.

Evgeny is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine’s influential and widely-quoted “Net Effect” blog about the Internet’s impact on global politics.  Prior to his Yahoo! Fellowship, he was a fellow at George Soros’s Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program (one of the leading and most experimental funders for technology projects that have an impact on open society and human rights). Before moving to the US, Evgeny was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. Evgeny’s work has appeared in The Economist, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, The San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent and many other publications. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, SkyNews, CBC, Al Jazeera International, France 24, Reuters TV, NPR, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service.

Here is what Evgeny is working on, in his own words:

“The rapid spread of new communications technologies around the globe promised a new age of politics, where citizens would be able to educate themselves about important political issues of the day, form ad-hoc groups about the most important such issues, and use new media to strategically challenge the power of their governments. This was a very appealing narrative, because it also matched the rapid spread of freedom and democracy across the world, particularly in the 1990s.

Looking at some of these early predictions – about the end of nationalism or the demise of the nation state or the global triumph of Web-powered freedom – one easily detects the naiveté that underlined much of our thinking on these issues. As it turns out, conventional (and often brutal) politics still matters, even in the age of easy mobilization dominated by blogs and social networking.

In my own research – including my one year at Georgetown on a Yahoo fellowship – I’m focusing on how governments – especially those that are not particularly famous for their respect for democracy and human rights – have been adapting to the digital threat posed by this new era and minimizing the democratizing effects of these new technologies. Comparing the approaches in China, Russia, much of the Middle East, I came to see that the governments – and groups and networks affiliated with/ and supportive of what they do – have made a remarkable use of the very same technologies that have become favorite tools of the activists and NGOs. Similarly, many of the new public spheres that formed in digital spaces have also been receptive to numerous nationalist and extremist ideas that were not very conducive to deliberative democracy. How do we still promote activities of the “virtual civil societies” without empowering its enemies, who are sometimes even more dangerous than the authoritarian governments themselves? Were we too quick to assume that promoting democracy and freedom – as well as engaging in public diplomacy – would necessarily become easier and quicker in this new digital age?

These are some of the questions that I’m asking in my research and various events at Georgetown and that I’ll be discussing in my upcoming book about the Internet and democracy (to be published by PublicAffairs in late 2010).”

We are looking forward to bringing Evgeny to Yahoo!’s campus early next year to talk about his work. Congratulations, Evgeny!

Using the Internet to Empower Women in Yemen

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Rising Voices | EWAMT Workshop

I love stories about how the Internet and technology are being used as platforms for free expression around the world, so every once in a while, I’ll share them with you. I read a very interesting series of reports in Rising Voices about a really inspirational project.  Rising Voices is an outreach initiative of Global Voices, and their goal is to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation.  They do this by providing resources and funding to communities whose points of view are under-represented in global media.

In Yemen, Rising Voices is partnering with the Hand in Hand Initiative and Ghaida’a al-Absi to present  new media training courses for female politicians, activists, and human rights workers to diversify the Arabic-language blogosphere and to build an online network of Yemeni gender activists.

According to Rising Voices’ blogger Rezwan, the most recent workshop was held on October 15th, and participants blogged about a range of topics, from the spread of HIV/AIDS to poetry to the increase in the rate of drug addiction in Yemen.

To learn more about this fascinating project, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/empowerment-of-women-activists-in-media-techniques-yemen/

For Rezwan’s story about the most recent workshop, including links to the participants’ blogs, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2009/10/20/ewamt-blogging-and-social-networking-energizes-women-in-yemen/.

Filter report reignites censorship debate in Australia

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Linh rOm

Kumar Parakala | October 20, 2009

The release last week of the ACS report on ISP filtering has reignited the debate about internet censorship, with the ACS e-security task force suggesting that, if mandatory internet filtering is to occur, then a multi-faceted strategy would be needed to ensure that children are protected from dangerous or inappropriate material online.

The ACS neither supports nor condemns internet censorship, but given the current government policy to introduce mandatory ISP filtering, we established the e-security task force late last year to examine the technical issues associated with this approach in an objective and balanced way.

The task force, which includes some of the nation’s leading e-security experts, suggests that if the government remains committed to this policy, then ISP-based filtering, while an important first step, will not be sufficient to achieve the desired result.

Filtering alone is unlikely to adequately address cyber security issues or significantly impact those who deliberately produce, distribute or search for illegal material, since there are too many technical loopholes that can be exploited to evade detection.

With the government seeking to deliver on its election commitment to require ISPs to offer a clean feed internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, it’s clear that a mix of technical and education-based initiatives will be needed.

According to the ACS report, the diversity and sheer volume of content and web sites on the internet, the determination of those generating malicious or illegal content and the need to balance e-security concerns with freedom of speech and censorship issues means that there is no one solution that will solve all filtering needs.

While acknowledging the value of filtering, the task force has also called for better education of both parents and children on using the internet, and greater transparency around blacklists and their criteria.

The issue of internet filtering has been a contentious one with many stakeholders protesting that any moves to require ISPs to introduce filtering will degrade network performance and increase costs to consumers.

Certainly these are valid concerns and the task force report provides substantial detail around the technical issues associated with the different types and levels of filtering.

Some of the challenges identified include:

• A lack of clear definition about the types of content that will be subject to filtering;
• The technical limitations of automated ways to analyse video, pictorial and audio content;
• The need for clear and consistent criteria behind content labelling and rating systems;
• The impact on network performance of content filters, depending on where they are placed within the network architecture;
• The need for consistency in the blocking of content and how to avoid overblocking or underblocking;
• The difficulty in maintaining up-to-date black lists, white lists, keywords and phrases because of the rapid rate at which new internet content is being generated;
• How to effectively manage user-generated material, which is created on the fly since it is practically impossible to accurately label or rate these sites and content; and
• The need for ways to deal with encrypted traffic and secure channels, as encryption impedes filtering.

The report called for the government to clearly define the objectives of any ISP filtering program and provide more information around desired performance standards, the type of material to be filtered, reporting processes and the type of traffic and filtering mechanisms to be used.

Task force spokesman and Director of Information and Networked Systems Security Research at Macquarie University, Professor Vijay Varadharajan, said we need to clearly understand what we are filtering and why, as well as having specific strategies for how this might best be achieved.

Different levels of filtering will act with varying levels of efficiency and have different impacts on performance. There are obvious technical issues relating to the filtering of certain types of content, such as SSL content, peer-to-peer traffic, internet chat rooms and instant messaging from social networking sites.

Many of these are popular ways for seasoned purveyors of illegal material to communicate and exchange files, he explained.

The six experts on the task force believe there is no single mechanism that can accurately filter out or block illegal material on the internet 100 per cent of the time. A successful approach would need to incorporate filtering technologies at the ISP, user and enterprise level, as well as increased professionalism and tighter controls around domain name registration, education at all levels of society and greater oversight by parents.

The growing importance of the internet at all levels of society makes it essential that we seek ways to protect users and promote greater confidence in the internet as a safe and effective platform for business, education and social interaction.

We look forward to working with the government to identify effective strategies and tools that will deliver the right level of protection without compromising performance or negatively impacting ISPs and other ICT businesses.

Kumar Parakala is chairman of the ACS. www.acs.org.au

Yahoo! at the UN

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Victor Ricco | CEDHA

In October, Yahoo!’s BHRP had the honor of participating in the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ consultation on business and human rights in Geneva.  The consultation was presented by Special Representative of the Secretary-General on human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises,  John Ruggie, and chaired by the Ambassadors of Norway and Nigeria. More than 300 representatives from UN member states, human rights organizations, civil society, academia and business attended.

The Special Representative has the monumental task of defining the responsibilities companies should have in protecting human rights around the world. He began by creating a policy framework based on three principles:

1. The State duty to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including business;
2. The corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and
3. The need for greater access by victims to effective remedies.

The Special Representative will complete his mandate by translating the policy framework into specific actions that companies and nations should take to protect human rights, and the consultation was an opportunity for people and organizations to give their ideas and views about what the final product should include.

To learn more about the policy framework, go to:  http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/trans_corporations/index.htm

I had the privilege of representing Yahoo! on a panel about the second principle, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. I was asked to discuss the dilemmas companies like Yahoo! face when certain aspects of local laws, or their implementation, may conflict with international human rights norms, and to give recommendations on what the Special Representative should consider when developing specific guidelines for companies.

I talked about the power of technology and how access to the Internet is often even more important in countries that restrict free expression. I talked about the difficult choices companies face and how requiring information and technology companies to refrain from offering products and services in countries that restrict free expression can actually punish the citizens in those countries who rely on technology to communicate and connect with the outside world. I also asked the Special Representative to consider how the framework can show support for solutions like the GNI that draw upon the combined wisdom of companies, non-profits, academics, users and others.

To read the full text of my remarks, see here.

I learned a great deal from my co-panelists, including human rights giants like Jody Kollapen (former Chair of the South Africa Human Rights Commission, who represented Stephen Biko and who helped create the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission), Auret van Heerden (President and CEO of the Fair Labor Association and former exile from the apartheid-era South African government) and Salvador Quishpe, who represented the indigenous Saraguro community of Ecuador. I’m honored to have represented Yahoo!, and the BHRP looks forward to learning more about the progress of the Special Representative’s mandate, and to future conversations with these and other stakeholders.

Iranian Journalists Flee, Fearing Retribution for Covering Protests

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Faramarz

by Nazila Fathi

TORONTO — For two months Ehsan Maleki traveled around Iran with a backpack containing his cameras, a few pieces of clothing and his laptop computer, taking pictures of the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi during the presidential campaign. He did not know that his backpack and his cameras would soon become his only possessions, or that he would be forced to crawl out of the country hiding in a herd of sheep.

Mr. Maleki, 29, is one of dozens of reporters, photographers and bloggers who have either fled Iran or are trying to flee in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that promotes press freedom and monitors the safety of journalists, said the number of journalists leaving Iran was the largest since the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The wave of departures reflects the journalists’ anxiety over the retribution many of them have faced for reporting on the government’s violent suppression of the post-election protests. As bloody clashes unfolded in the streets of Tehran, the government went to great lengths to restrict the flow of information to the outside world. Foreign journalists were banned, and local reporters and photographers were warned to stay at home.

A number of Iranian journalists defied those orders, disseminating information in phone interviews, on Internet sites and through pictures sent to photo agencies. Now, they say, they are paying the price.

Many journalists in Tehran, including a Newsweek reporter, Maziar Bahari, who is also an independent filmmaker, were among the hundreds of Iranians arrested and jailed. Some are defendants in the mass trials the government is conducting. The wife of one journalist, Ahmad Zeidabadi, said he had been tortured while in prison.

The editors of some opposition blogs, which reported the killings and the mass burial of protesters, have gone into hiding, and their whereabouts are not clear. The homes of some journalists, like Mr. Maleki, have been ransacked.

Mahmoud Shamsolvaezin, a veteran journalist and media expert in Tehran, estimated that 2,000 Iranian journalists had lost their jobs recently. He said about 400 of them had approached him for reference letters so they could get work abroad. “Journalists are leaving more than other groups because the government has closed newspapers and it has intimidated and terrorized them,” he said in an interview.

The government, which has closed at least six newspapers in the past three months, has accused the media of lying about the protests. Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the media a major weapon, “worse than nuclear weapons,” in the hands of Western countries, according to the Fars news agency. Almost all news agencies in Iran are affiliated with the government and rely on it for financing. The state news agencies IRNA and Fars are run by arms of the government.

Mr. Maleki was covering a demonstration on June 20 when he and dozens of protesters were chased by members of the Basij paramilitary force. They fled to an apartment building, where Mr. Maleki had enough time to hide his camera inside a chimney before members of the militia arrested them. He was jailed with hundreds of others for a day. Without his camera, authorities could not identify him as a photographer, but they recorded his national identity number.

Mr. Maleki never went home. A few days later a neighbor told him that his house had been ransacked and that his computer and personal documents, including his passport, had been taken. “They found out that I was sending pictures to Sipa,” he said, referring to an international photo agency.

He said he slept in a different place every night and continued to take photos of the protests, but finally decided it was too risky to stay. He paid $150 to a smuggler who drove him to Kheneryeh, near the border with Turkey and Iraq. Accompanied by a Kurdish guide, he crawled among a large herd of sheep for half an hour until they crossed the Iranian border and reached a steep cliff.

“It took us seven hours to climb down and reach a road in northern Iraq,” he said in a telephone interview from Iraq. He would not disclose which city he was in for security reasons.

The journalists leaving Iran come from a range of news organizations, not just those sympathetic to the opposition. A Web site supportive of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Parcham.ir, reported last week that two journalists for state-run television had defected to Italy and Britain. At least two photographers who worked for Fars have also left. Among the journalists who have left is this reporter, who covered the election and subsequent protests before leaving Iran in early July because she felt her safety was threatened.

The exact number of journalists who have left is not clear. Some worry that their families could be harassed if the government learns they are gone. Others are reluctant to reveal their locations in neighboring countries like Turkey and Iraq, fearing that government agents might find them and return them to Iran. Reza Moghimi, a photographer who worked for Fars, acknowledged that he became emotionally invested in the protests.

“The protesters were young, just like me,” Mr. Moghimi, 24, said in a telephone interview from Turkey. “It was impossible to be indifferent. I felt it was my duty to take pictures and reflect their voices abroad.”

With the camera given to him by Fars he began taking pictures every day. He said one of his pictures appeared on the cover of Time magazine anonymously, but he never told anyone he had taken it.

Mr. Moghimi said his fear increased after he saw a former colleague, Majid Saeedi, who was jailed for a month. Mr. Moghimi said he looked terrorized.

A few days later the director of Fars delivered a stern warning. “We have learned two of our photographers have been taking pictures secretly and sending them to foreign media,” he said. “We are just waiting for more information and will confront them soon.”

Mr. Moghimi got on the first plane to Turkey the next day and has applied for asylum.

UN Rights Body Approves US-Egypt Free Speech Text

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Scazon

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. Human Rights Council approved a U.S.-backed resolution Friday deploring attacks on religions while insisting that freedom of expression remains a basic right.

The inaugural resolution sponsored by the U.S. since it joined the council in June broke a long-running deadlock between Western and Islamic countries in the wake of the publication of cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The resolution has no effect in law but provides Muslim countries with moral ammunition the next time they feel central tenets of Islam are being ridiculed by Western politicians or media through ”negative racial and religious stereotyping.”

American diplomats say the measure — co-sponsored by Egypt — is part of the Obama administration’s effort to reach out to Muslim countries.

”The exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression is one of the essential foundations of a democratic society,” the resolution states, urging countries to protect free speech by lifting legal restrictions, ensuring the safety of journalists, promoting literacy and preventing media concentration.

Rights groups cautiously welcomed the resolution as an improvement on earlier drafts, but said Egypt was in no position to lecture other countries about free speech as it has a poor record on the matter.

”Egypt’s cosponsorship of the resolution on freedom of expression is not the result of a real commitment to upholding freedom of expression,” said Jeremie Smith, Geneva director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

”If this were the case, freedom of expression would not be systematically violated on a daily basis in Egypt,” he said.

Others warned that the resolution appears to protect religions rather than believers and encourages journalists to abide by ill-defined codes of conduct.

”Unfortunately, the text talks about negative racial and religious stereotyping, something which most free expression and human rights organizations will oppose,” said Agnes Callamard, executive director of London-based group Article 19.

”The equality of all ideas and convictions before the law and the right to debate them freely is the keystone of democracy,” she said.

Although the resolution was passed unanimously, European and developing countries made it clear that they remain at odds on the issue of protecting religions from criticism.

Some Asian and African countries had called for stronger condemnation of articles, cartoons and videos they believe defames Islam.

Iran Stories

By Michael Samway | VP & Deputy General Counsel

UPDATE: ZDNet has retracted its story.

Yahoo! is committed to protecting the free expression and privacy rights of our users, so we are concerned by the misleading and incorrect statements in an article posted on ZDNet.com regarding Yahoo! and Iran.

The allegations in the story are false. Neither Yahoo! nor any Yahoo! representative has met with or communicated with Iranian officials regarding the matters referenced in the article, and Yahoo! has not disclosed user data to the Iranian government. The ZDnet article makes other inaccurate assertions. We don’t have a Yahoo! Iran website, as the article suggests. We don’t have employees in Iran either. And while we have a website targeted at users in Malaysia, we don’t have operations or officials there, also wrongly asserted in the article.

The power of the Internet means that information travels quickly, including claims that are false. We’re disappointed in this case that we weren’t given a chance to comment on the allegations before the story went live. We are, however, pleased that ZDnet’s editor has now said the report on which the article was based is considered unreliable. We intend to continue to demonstrate, through our actions, our deep commitment to protecting our users’ rights to free expression and privacy. Yahoo! was founded on the principle that access to information and to communications tools can improve people’s lives, and Yahoo! is committed to protecting and promoting freedom of expression and privacy around the globe, including in Iran.

To learn more about our human rights efforts, please visit our website, at http://humanrights.yahoo.com.

by Michael Samway, VP & Deputy General Counsel