Censorship Cases Revive Net Freedom Bill

By BHRP

By Tom Risen | National Journal | April 2, 2010

In the wake of high-profile Internet censorship cases overseas, some in Congress are renewing their calls for U.S. regulation. But some companies are continuing to call for self-regulation, fearing possible restrictions on doing business in the future.

New Jersey Republican Chris Smith, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reintroduced the Global Online Freedom Act last month to support companies like Google as they face censorship pressure in foreign markets. He first introduced the bill in 2006.

Since then, Google’s defiance against Chinese censorship and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Internet freedom platform have built momentum on the issue and helped lawmakers reach consensus, according to Jeff Sagnip, Smith’s press secretary.

Smith’s bill would establish an Office of Global Internet Freedom in the State Department to identify repressive countries, and it would make U.S. companies answerable to the attorney general if they collaborate with requests to take part in censorship or divulge personally identifying information.

“By creating an independent office in the State Department that focuses on Internet freedoms, it would simplify the question ‘who do I call?’” Sagnip said. “There’s a lot of momentum on it this year, as opposed to 2006, when there weren’t as many cases of censorship. The bill’s goal is not to inhibit companies seeking work overseas but to give them a legal foundation.”

The degree of violations that could merit punishment under the bill include the allegations made against Cisco Systems of modifying equipment to be used for Chinese censorship. Sagnip said this bill or another may be amended to deal with European-based Nokia Siemens Networks, which has been accused of supplying Iran with equipment also meant for censorship.

When Smith first introduced the bill four years ago, companies like Yahoo were monitoring abuse independent of the government. Yahoo and other Internet heavyweights co-founded the Global Network Initiative in 2008 along with other corporations, nonprofits and universities. Today, the company is wary of potential restrictions on what countries it could or couldn’t do business with, and to what extent.

“While the goals set forth by the sponsors of GOFA are noble, the bill’s scope could ultimately mean that companies will have to cease providing information services in some countries,” said Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman. “Yahoo will continue working with Congress on this legislation, to ensure that its goals can be achieved and that companies can continue to bring transformative technology to people in all parts of the world.”

Sagnip said China’s hack of Google and Iran’s suppression of protesters last summer were signs that self-regulation is not enough.

“Everyone was resistant to intervening with legislative effort,” Sagnip said. “Unfortunately, we walked away from 2009 thinking, ‘OK, it’s even worse now.’ Hence, they might need teeth — or that could be the wrong word. Rather ‘legs,’ or ‘standing.’”

Smith recently partnered with Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., to form the Global Internet Freedom Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers who will advocate for Internet freedom laws. The Senate followed about two weeks later, creating a similar bipartisan group led by Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Ted Kaufman, D-Del.

“What I see is that both sides of the aisle are looking for an avenue, and that could be a path for some congressional action,” Sagnip said.

Some Yahoo email accounts hacked in China, Taiwan

By BHRP

By Lucy Hornby and Alexei Oreskovic| Reuters | April 1, 2010

BEIJING/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo email accounts of some journalists and activists whose work relates to China were compromised in an attack discovered this week, according to rights groups and foreign correspondents, days after Google said it would move its Chinese-language search services out of China because of censorship concerns.

Several journalists in China and Taiwan found they were unable to access their accounts beginning March 25, among them Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist in Beijing. Her access was restored on Wednesday, she told Reuters.

The compromised accounts included those of the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group that China accuses of inciting separatism by ethnic Uighurs in the frontier region of Xinjiang.

“I suspect a lot of information in my Yahoo account was downloaded,” the group’s spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, told Reuters on Wednesday. He said the email account, set up in Sweden, has been inaccessible for a month.

“A lot of people I used to contact in Lanzhou, Xi’an and elsewhere have not been reachable by phone for the past few weeks,” he said, adding that he had used the Yahoo email account to contact them in the past.

Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times in Beijing said on Wednesday that his Yahoo Plus account had been set, without his knowledge, to forward to another, unknown, account.

In late 2009 and early this year, several human rights activists and journalists whose work related to China had discovered that their Gmail accounts had been set, without their knowledge, to forward to unfamiliar addresses.

Google cited the Gmail attacks in January, when it announced a hacking attack on it and more than 20 other companies. It cited those attacks and censorship concerns in its decision to move its Chinese-language search services last week to Hong Kong.

A source at the time told Reuters that Yahoo knew it had been a target of attacks and discussed them with Google before Google went public.

It was not immediately clear whether those incidents were related to the latest security breaches sustained by users of Yahoo mail.

Yahoo did not comment on the nature of the attacks on its accounts, or whether they were coordinated or isolated incidents.

“Yahoo! condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose,” spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek said in an email response to a Reuters query.

“We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach.”

CHINA PARTNERS

Yahoo’s direct involvement in China has been limited since 2005, when it transferred control of its online operations to the Alibaba Group, a Chinese Internet company in which Yahoo owns a 39 percent stake.

Yahoo maintains a research and development facility in Beijing, but the company does not have any role in the day-to-day operations of the Yahoo China website, or maintain email servers in China. Email accounts tied to China’s .cn domain are managed by Alibaba, which has servers in mainland China, a Yahoo spokeswoman said.

Despite Yahoo’s limited direct involvement in China, analysts consider the company’s China assets to be among its most valuable.

Clayton Moran, an analyst with The Benchmark Company, said he saw limited risk to Yahoo’s Chinese assets from censorship and privacy issues, with the bigger risk relating to investor enthusiasm for the Chinese Internet market in general.

“If you see a pullback in the Chinese economy, the Chinese Internet, or if multiples contract because investors get less excited about the China opportunity, then Yahoo’s valuation will have a significant impact,” Moran said.

China’s regulatory and political environments have been sources of consternation for Yahoo in the past.

Yahoo was criticized by the U.S. Congress when it released to Chinese authorities information relating to the email account of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who was arrested in 2004, before Alibaba took over Yahoo’s China operations. Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in jail for revealing state secrets.

After Google’s January announcement about cyber attacks originating in China, Yahoo said it was “aligned” with Google’s position, a statement that its Chinese partner, Alibaba Group, called “reckless”

Google’s announcement of the hacking attacks drew unprecedented outside attention to cyber-security and China’s Internet controls, used to limit discussion of topics deemed sensitive or threatening to “social stability.”

China’s control of the Internet and media has intensified under the current leadership and reflects a lack of understanding of the Chinese public, said Hao Xiaoming, a China media expert at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information in Singapore.

“China is going back rather than going forward in terms of information and control. That reflects the lack of confidence in the (current) Chinese leaders,” Hao said.

“China’s Internet has become a controlled Internet, an internal Internet rather than linked internationally. It defeats the whole purpose.”

(Additional reporting by Melanie Lee in Shanghai; Editing by Ron Popeski and Sugita Katyal)

Internet’s not special, says Communications Minister

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Digital Reflections

by Asher Moses | Sydney Morning Herald | April 1, 2010 |

Web experts recoiled today at communications minister Stephen Conroy’s assertion that the internet is not “special” and should be censored like books, films and newspapers.

In an on-camera interview with Fairfax Media’s national Canberra bureau chief, Tim Lester, Senator Conroy dismissed the torrent of criticism directed at his policy as “misleading information” spread by “an organised group in the online world”.

Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were “100 per cent accurate – no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds”.

But Mark Newton, an engineer with ISP internode, said: “Censorship will not catch a single pedophile, will not cause a single image to disappear from the internet, will not protect a single child.”

Senator Conroy also brushed aside concerns from leading academics and technology companies that the plan to block a blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australians was an attempt to shoe-horn an offline classification model into a vastly different online world.

“Why is the internet special?,” he asked, saying the net was “just a communication and distribution platform”.

“This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west. I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world.”

Newton said this was a “gross oversimplification”, pointing out that Australia Post and Telstra’s telephone network were also distribution platforms but were not censored.

“Why should the internet, a distribution platform for all manner of intangibles, be censored as if it was a movie theatre? It makes no sense, the model doesn’t fit,” he said.

The Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam was also quick to ridicule Senator Conroy, saying books and films were distinctly different because they are “dicreet, physical packages of content”, whereas the internet is dynamic and has “a trillion web pages already indexed and an unknown amount more added every day”.

“To characterise sustained opposition by individuals and groups as diverse as EFA, Google, SAGE, Yahoo, Save the Children, Reporters without Borders, Justice Kirby, Choice Magazine, leading online academics and industry associations and the United States Department of State as ‘an organised group in the online world’ is a remarkably naive misreading of how unpopular this proposal is,” Senator Ludlam said.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the difference between submitting a book for classification and having an organisation classifying and blocking websites without anyone’s knowledge was that, in the book case, “it is well known that the book was censored and there can be a debate about the correctness of the decision”.

Landfeldt said it was true that the filter system would block all websites it was told to block but the trillions of pages on the internet means the government will not make the internet a safe place for children and will only be able to stop access to “a small minority” of web pages.

Senator Conroy said the aim of his policy was to “ensure that particularly children … don’t stumble across this material”, which he described as being child pornography, bestiality, extreme violence and pro-rape websites.

He neglected to address widespread concerns that the “refused classification” rating also applies to sexual health discussions, euthanasia material such as the Peaceful Pill Handbook, historical war footage and instructions in minor crimes such as graffiti.

Senator Conroy admitted that his filters would not do anything to stop the spread of child pornography on peer-to-peer file sharing networks, and that they will “slow down the internet” if applied to high-volume sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia.

He mentioned he was in discussions with Google over a way for the company to apply the filter to YouTube but Google has already rejected these requests.

“If we know there are 355 websites today that have child pornographic images on it, should we say well we’re not going to do anything about it?,” he said.

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said this comment ignored evidence that the overwhelming majority of child pornography was traded in others ways such as by peer-to-peer. It also ignored the fact that anyone who wanted to bypass the filters could do so quite easily.

Senator Conroy has been on the attack against Google after the search giant issued a withering critique of his policy. After questioning the company’s credibility in an ABC Radio interview on Monday night, he fired off another broadside in yesterday’s interview.

He said Google already censored more material than the Rudd Government was proposing to block with its filters, pointing to its blocking of R-rated and X-rated material on YouTube and its censorship of search results in Thailand that are critical of the Thai king.

“Google are welcome to their view but Google have got to be prepared to be consistent,” said Senator Conroy.

Jacobs said suggesting that enforcing YouTube’s terms of service was equivalent to state-sponsored censorship was “at best misleading”. Senator Ludlam said Senator Conroy’s attacks on Google were “a deliberate misdirection of the debate”, while Jacobs said they “smack of a personal vendetta”.

Senator Conroy also rejected concerns that the government was creating a new mandatory censorship mechanism that would be prone to abuse by future governments.

“I think in Australia we have a vibrant democracy and anyone who wanted to try to expand beyond existing banned material – RC – would have one hell of a fight on the floor of Parliament,” he said.

Asked whether it was a fact that the blacklist, a catalogue of some of the worst websites, was likely to leak at some time in the future, as has occurred in a number of other countries, Senator Conroy responded: “so the alternative is just to leave them out there and do nothing?”.

He said he realistically would not expect to see legislation enabling the filters to be introduced before the second half of the year, after which it would “go through an open and transparent consultative process”.

“For $44 million, we’re buying ourselves an initiative which will have no measurable impact whatsoever,” Senator Ludlam said.

“In exchange, we establish the architecture for future governments to abuse the loose and undefined ‘RC’ category to add a creeping range of material to the list. Once this architecture is established, the idea that its scope won’t be expanded by future governments is a gamble we don’t believe we should take.”