Africa’s Gay Activists Use Internet to Advance Homosexual Rights

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Les Chatfield

By Nico Colombant | Voice of America | June 15, 2010

African gay activists in Africa and in the diaspora are increasingly using the Internet to have their voices heard, while still trying to figure out how to advance homosexual rights on the continent.

One of the most popular blogs advocating gay rights in Africa is called Gay Uganda. Its author chooses to remain anonymous.

“I am somebody in the heart of Africa who has been lonely without the rest of the Internet, without the rest of the global sphere, talking about what I would like to talk about, with that kind of freedom,” he said from Kampala.”I cannot do it elsewhere.”

While harsher laws are being proposed against homosexuality across the continent, including in Uganda, the author of Gay Uganda says what he is doing helps Africa’s homosexual community.

“It started off as a way of venting, but then later I realized that it was a way of putting across to the rest of the world what our lives were more or less,” he said. “The things that have been happening around Kampala, in Uganda, and all over the continent – it is strengthening to me personally, that is why I do it.”

He says that in Kampala, very few people know he is gay. But online, he has a community of followers who support him. He adds that the types of articles he writes would never be allowed in traditional media.

“Society is more or less homophobic and the reporters come from the society. But also you have to consider that in a place like Uganda, you cannot write a positive story about gay people. That is a matter of fact,” he added.

Uganda’s Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo said recently that the government is concerned about what he called the “mushrooming” number of gays and lesbians in the country. He said he wants a law enacted that would criminalize confessing to being a homosexual.

Even in African countries like Ghana, which are seen as being relatively tolerant, anti-homosexual activities, such as marches denouncing gays, are becoming more frequent.

Media and influential politicians and religious leaders often denounce homosexuality as Western contamination. And they say homosexuality is contrary to traditional family values.

More than three dozen countries in Africa, including Senegal, have laws criminalizing homosexuality. Selly Thiam, who lives in the United States, is a native of Senegal. She is the founder of the None on Record website, which records testimonies of gays, lesbians and transgender people from Africa, most of them anonymously.

Thiam says she hopes the website will be used to help change policies toward homosexuals.

“None on the Record is just at the beginning of understanding or even becoming conscious of how we fit into the larger movement,” said Thiam. “I think we will have more opportunities in the future to see how we can really impact and support the organizing that is going on in the continent and around the world in other LGBT communities as well.”

LGBT refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

Thiam says that although it is important for her to build contacts through the Internet, face-to-face interaction is also important, even if most pro-gay groups in Africa work underground.

“That is why I have to keep going back to work in concert with people who are organizing. It is an issue of safety, and something that I have to think about all the time. But I have to also continue to do my work,” Thiam added.

A columnist from the United States, Reverend Irene Monroe, says her own work and Internet outreach have put her in contact with many gays and lesbians in Africa like a woman from Kenya who recently wrote her an email.

“She says here, ‘I need encouragement. Here homosexuality is punishable by 14 years imprisonment and 28 strokes of the cane. “The church is also extremely hostile. Some suspected lesbians from my church were once beaten and burnt,’” Monroe said.

Gay activists in Africa say it is a very difficult process to advance homosexual rights, especially in difficult economic times, when scapegoats are used by politicians and religious leaders to divert attention.

Irene Monroe links discrimination to a lack of democracy and government policies toward HIV and AIDS.

“Countries that tend to be more open around addressing the issue of HIV/AIDS and have a lot more financial solvency and really do run more in terms of employing a democratic model, you will find in those small pockets throughout Africa and other parts of the world people are more tolerant in the different ways in which people express love,” she said. “And we see it here when we see rabid forms of conservatism here we find in most groups of people who are less tolerant of LGBT folks, it operates similarly believe it or not in Africa too. Culturally, it looks different. But the seed around what gives rise to the kind of homophobia that blossoms in the way it does, it is planted in the same soil.”

Gay activists say they hope those advocating homosexual rights eventually will succeed – one blog entry and appeal for understanding at a time.

Beaten to Death for Using the Internet

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Mark Kobayashi-Hillary

By Reagan Kuhn | Human Rights First Blog | June 11, 2010

Activists and supporters of Internet freedom in Egypt have described to Human Rights First different measures the Egyptian authorities take to control the activities of people accessing the Internet, but as of last week, it seems they have reached a whole new level. A young man was dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death after refusing to show his ID card to police.

Patrons of Internet cafés are often required to provide identification details before logging on, and then their searches and activities online can be monitored. Police officers carry out random raids on Internet cafés and gather identification information from those present, even though there is no justification in Egyptian law for this kind of demand.

On the evening of June 7, 2010 what appeared to be one of these random raids escalated into the horrific brutalization of a young man by two policemen. Reports now reveal that the man may have been targeted for exposing police corruption. He posted a video on the internet depicting officers sharing the profits of a drug bust.

One thing that distinguishes this incident from other incidents of government intimidation of bloggers and activists is that it was carried out in plain view, and other citizens were able to capture and transmit images of police brutality before they could be confiscated. As human rights defenders in Egypt have told us, the government’s usual approach is to brutalize activists/netizens after detaining them and to hold them in custody until the bruises have disappeared. Gamal Eid, lawyer and Executive Director for Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, has said that with respect to bloggers and Internet activists, the government will find reasons to “kidnap them, torture them, take their passport and send them to prison until the hurts on their body become normal so for us there is no evidence of what happened.”

Here are the facts of this tragic case: Khaled Mohamed Saeed, 28, was at an Internet café that he frequented in the Sidi Gaber district of Alexandria when two officers from the local police station entered the café and demanded to see everyone’s ID cards, claiming that they were authorized to do this under the Emergency Law, a law that has been condemned by international human rights organizations and Egyptian activists as allowing security forces to commit abuses with near impunity.

Khaled objected to what he saw as a violation of his rights. There are various reports of what happened next. One press report mentions that the police bound Khaled’s hands and started to beat him, others just describe the beating. Police officers knelt over him beating his head against the marble floor tiles of the café. Khaled was then dragged outside the Internet café, covered in blood, and the beating continued in full view of many witnesses, some of whom pleaded with police to stop. Two doctors even tried to help. Eyewitnesses said his head was banged against an iron door, steps and walls of an adjacent building. He was thrown into a police vehicle, and fifteen minutes later, his gruesomely disfigured dead body was deposited in the street.

Police cordoned off the area, barring patrons from the Internet café, and then passed through the crowd reportedly confiscating cellphones on which people had been taking photographs and shooting video of the beating. Some of these images have appeared online.

Khaled’s family filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Alexandria. Hundreds of protestors have taken to the streets calling for a prosecution in this case. Security forces have responded with further brutality and arrests and in some cases attempted to ban media and journalists from the scene.

Human Rights First is joining with Egyptian human rights activists and bloggers and calling for a prompt, thorough investigation into the brutal killing of Khaled Mohamed Saeed. Those responsible need to be brought to justice.

Human Rights First also calls upon the United States government to defend citizen access to the Internet by expressing strong concern regarding this incident to the Egyptian government.

Egyptians should be able to access the Internet in cybercafés free from harassment and intimidation—when an online post or a random ID check turns into a murder, it is an entirely different problem, and just can’t stand.

For more information, see:

• Video depicting security officers aggressively confronting protestors following the death of Khaled Saeed.
• Egyptian Democratic Academy campaign video depicting Khaled Saeed as a martyr following his death.
• “The brutal killing of Khaled: **Viewer discretion is advised**, June 10, 2010″ blog summarizes accounts including the Facebook post of opposition leader, Ayman Nour and an article in al-shorouk newspaper that describe how Khaled Saeed was brutally beaten by police at an Internet café for refusing to comply with an inspection under the national emergency law and noting that police are trying to avoid liability for the death.
• A news article reporting on the death of Khaled Saeed at the hands of police for failing to comply with their request for identification at an Internet café and noting that police are saying Saeed was using narcotics.

Rebecca MacKinnon explains China’s Internet White Paper

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Tomislavmedak

Here’s an illuminating post from RConversation, Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog on China’s recently released “White Paper on the Internet in China“.

China’s Internet White Paper: networked authoritarianism in action

The release of the Chinese government’s first-ever White Paper on the Internet in China provoked some head-scratching here in the Western world. Part Three of the six-part document is titled “Guaranteeing Citizens’ Freedom of Speech on the Internet.” I’ve heard from several journalists and policy analysts (not people based in China, for whom such cognitive dissonance is normal) who at first glance thought they were reading The Onion or some kind of parody site. How, people asked me, can a government that so blatantly censors the Internet claim with a straight face to be protecting and upholding freedom of speech on the Internet? The answer of course is that China’s netizens are free to do everything… except for the things they’re not free to do.  The list of the latter, outlined in the next section titled Protecting Internet Security is long, vague, and subject to considerable interpretation:

…The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safe flow of Internet information, actively guides people to manage websites in accordance with the law and use the Internet in a wholesome and correct way. The Decision of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee on Guarding Internet Security, Regulations on Telecommunications of the People’s Republic of China and Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services stipulate that no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information having the following contents: being against the cardinal principles set forth in the Constitution; endangering state security, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing national unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime; humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.

Other than that, people are totally free. What’s more, the use of the Internet by the people to “supervise” public officials is praised. As long as – in the process of said supervision – state power is not subverted, “state honor” is not jeopardized, nobody is humiliated or slandered, and no “rumors” are spread. The rise of Twitter-like microblogging services is even praised. (Twitter itself is blocked by the “great firewall,” though tens of thousands of Chinese Internet users are believed to access it anyway through third-party clients and circumvention tools).

As I’ve frequently pointed out in the past (see here, here and here for starters), blocking of foreign websites like Twitter is just the top layer of Chinese Internet censorship. Beneath the “great firewall of China” is a sophisticated system by which censorship is delegated to the private sector. The first company to set up a Chinese Twitter-clone was a startup called Fanfou. Last June they got shut down because they failed to police the service adequately: users apparently shared too much content that violated the above no-no list. Other micro-blog services have since emerged. One run by the People’s Daily and another by the popular web portal Sina.com. They seem to have learned from Fanfou’s troubles and have put aggressive censorship systems in place. As Chen Tong, Sina’s head editor, recently commented at a 3G Wireless Industry Summit: “controlling content in Sina microblogs is a problem which is a very big headache.” (The Shanghaiist blog reports that the Sina.com news article reporting Chen’s comments has itself been censored, but not before getting quoted and reported around the Internet.) According to the Sina.com account of his remarks, Chen went on to describe Sina’s microblog-censorship strategy in some detail: 24-7 policing; constant coordination between the editorial department and the “monitoring department” (all social networking companies in China must have one of those in order to stay in compliance with government expectations);  daily meetings; and systems through which both editors and users are constantly reporting problematic content.

Even so, Chen Tong says in his speech that microblogging has been tremendously empowering in China. He says that micro-blogs have become “people’s personal web portals” and that a lot of recent incidents that have generated widespread public concern first emerged on microblogs.

Despite all the policing and the round-the-clock censorship, Chinese Internet users still feel much more empowered to participate in public discourse and even bring issues to national attention than they ever could have imagined in the past. (See Guobin Yang’s excellent book, The Power of the Internet in China for many examples.) As I described it to one journalist, it’s as if a bird that has lived in a cage all its life (one which has been gradually upgraded, with steadily improving food and which is much cleaner than it used to be) suddenly gets released into a large atrium. The bird is likely to feel excited and empowered for quite some time and may not realize that even broader freedom is possible or even desirable: after all, without the atrium walls might she get lost and starve? Or get eaten by other birds? There are plenty of security arguments in favor of supporting the atrium’s legitimacy and necessity; there are even ethical justifications.

Thus China is pioneering what I call “networked authoritarianism.” Compared to classic authoritarianism, networked authoritarianism permits – or shall we say accepts the Internet’s inevitable consequences and adjusts – a lot more give-and-take between government and citizens than in a pre-Internet authoritarian state. While one party remains in control, a wide range of conversations about the country’s problems rage on websites and social networking services. The government follows online chatter, and sometimes people are even able to use the Internet to call attention to social problems or injustices, and even manage to have an impact on government policies. As a result, the average person with Internet or mobile access has a much greater sense of freedom – and may even feel like they have the ability to speak and be heard – in ways that weren’t possible under classic authoritarianism. It also makes most people a lot less likely to join a movement calling for radical political change. In many ways, the regime actually uses the Internet not only to extend its control but also to enhance its legitimacy.

At the same time, in the networked authoritarian state there is no guarantee of individual rights and freedoms. People go to jail when the powers-that-be decide they are too much of a threat – and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Truly competitive, free and fair elections do not happen. The courts and the legal system are tools of the ruling party.

Connecting every citizen in China to the Internet via multiple devices might sound like something the Chinese Communist Party would want to avoid. Several people who contacted me about China’s Internet White Paper were surprised at the Chinese government’s enthusiasm for connectivity. Such enthusiasm does not jive with most American and European notions of how an authoritarian state would be run by a party that calls itself Communist. What’s important to understand is that Chinese authoritarianism in the Internet age is not the same as the crumbling, centrally-planned authoritarianism of the Eastern Bloc, disconnected from the Western capitalist world.

The CCP leadership recognizes that they can’t control everybody all the time if they’re going to be a technologically advanced global economic powerhouse. What’s more, high Internet penetration is necessary if the Chinese government wants to continue high rates of economic growth, which economists agree requires boosting domestic consumer demand as well as pushing Chinese companies to the cutting edge of technological innovation.  China catapulted itself to become the world’s second largest economy by turning itself into the world’s factory. But Chinese labor has grown expensive compared to some other markets in poorer countries. In order to stay competitive and keep growing, China needs to transition from a manufacturing-fueled economy to an economy fueled by domestic consumption at home, while being an innovator for advanced technologies and services that can compete with American and European companies.

Another component of the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy involves influencing the Internet’s technical evolution in ways that are most compatible with censorship and surveillance goals. China already has more Internet users than there are Americans on the planet. As the world’s biggest market for Internet technologies, it is starting to influence how these technologies evolve. The Internet is quickly morphing from something we’ve mainly used through our computers into a new, more mobile phase in which all devices, appliances and vehicles – from our phones to our cars to our refrigerators – will be connected to the network. The Chinese government is embracing this future. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao now gives speeches in which he waxes enthusiastic about the “Internet of things.” Chinese Internet and telecommunications companies receive substantial government support in hopes that they will lead the world in shaping the next generation of Internet technologies.

Beyond China, the fastest-growing markets for mobile Internet technologies are in Asia, the Middle East and Africa: exactly those parts of the world where authoritarian governments are most concentrated. Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE (the “Ciscos of China”) are already dominant in many African and Middle Eastern markets. They are building Internet and mobile networks in countries whose governments would prefer to have their systems built by Chinese engineers rather than by Americans.

Another thing that has puzzled some of the American journalists and analysts who contacted me is the Chinese government’s assertion of its “sovereignty” on the Internet, given that the Internet is a globally inter-connected network and derives much of its value from the fact that borders are collapsed online. Yet at the same time, it’s a physical reality that web sites have to be hosted physically on computers that are located in some jurisdiction or another; they are operated by physical human beings who reside under a government jurisdiction and can thus be physically controlled when necessary; they are operated by businesses that have to be registered in one or more jurisdiction and their physical operations are subject to government regulation; and the Internet runs on networks that physically exist within or pass through nation-states. The White Paper is a clear articulation of the Chinese government’s long-standing position that nation-states should have “sovereignty” over all aspects of the Internet – human or equipment or signal – that reside within or pass through Chinese sovereign territory. Google is challenging this notion as it pushes the U.S. government to take action against China for violating WTO rules by using censorship as a barrier to trade. (For further discussion of China and Internet sovereignty see this Interview with Columbia University’s Tim Wu conducted by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos.)

The White Paper also re-emphasizes the Chinese government’s long-standing position that the global coordination tasks required to make the Internet function – what Internet policy wonks call “Internet governance” – are best left to governments, not private entities or companies or others.  The White Paper did not condemn ICANN, the private non-profit which coordinates the Internet’s domain name system – in fact it didn’t even mention ICANN or other non-governmental organizations that coordinate the Internet’s functions and anoint preferred global technical standards. Nor did it say anything negative about the “multi-stakeholder” governance approach currently favored by Western democracies, which includes non-governmental “civil society” organizations alongside governments and companies. But the document made clear China’s position that ” the UN should be given full scope in international Internet administration.” As Brendan Kuerbis of the Internet Governance Project puts it, China is not intending to disengage from the existing Internet governance frameworks, but can be expected to exert its influence in shaping these frameworks in its preferred direction.

The White Paper’s message is that the Chinese government is not running scared from the Internet. It is embracing the Internet head-on, intends to be a leader in its global evolution, and intends to assert its influence on how the global Internet is governed and regulated.

Note that China is not the only country seeking to assert its brand of Internet sovereignty. For an analysis of what’s happening in Russia, read this chilling overview by Gregory Aslomov at Global Voices. For more on the Russia situation as well as an alarming global overview, be sure to read “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace” just published by the Open Net Initiative.

On a more optimistic note, the White Paper does have its domestic critics. Blogger, journalist and journalism professor Hu Yong argues (writing on a domestic blog which has not been censored) that most of the regulations governing the Chinese Internet have no clear basis in Chinese law and are arguably unconstitutional. “At a time when the Internet is raising a lot of questions that we don’t have answers to,” he writes, “the government may not have the best solutions. It’s possible that the Internet could give birth to new forms of regulation that aren’t as coercive, and which place greater trust in the strength of individual freedom and the self-governance of citizens.” While the Internet does need to be regulated, he concludes, the public needs to participate in the creation of those regulations.

But as long as all of China’s Internet companies and the few foreign Internet companies with a local presence in China continue to do whatever the government demands, no matter how little legal or constitutional legitimacy such demands might have, the government will have little incentive to accept the kind of change that Hu Yong envisions. Note that many of the big Chinese companies receive American investment dollars or are publicly traded on U.S. stock exchanges, sending a clear message that whatever U.S. elected officials might say about “Internet freedom,” many American investors are quite happy to profit from China’s status quo.

–

Rebecca MacKinnon

Visiting Fellow, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University

Co-founder, GlobalVoicesOnline.org

Cell: +1-617-939-3493

E-mail: rebecca.mackinnon@gmail.com

Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/rmack

Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/rebeccamack

Privacy and Free Speech: It’s Good for Business!

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

On Tuesday, June 15, I participated in a panel discussion at the 2010 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference. The panel was moderated by the ACLU of Northern California, and based upon a primer for business that they produced in 2009 entitled (naturally) “Privacy and Free Speech: It’s Good for Business“. Panelists included perspectives from legal advisors to companies, venture capitalists, and companies. We discussed specific case studies and why it makes good business sense to incorporate privacy and free speech considerations when making business decisions, creating/launching new products and, for new companies, during the start-up phase.

For video of the event, see here.

Privacy in Peril: Lawyers, Nations Clamor for Google Wi-Fi Data

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sébastien Bertrand

By David Kravets | Wired Magazine | June 11, 2010

A hard drive with perhaps several hundred gigabytes of internet surfers’ private data resides under lock and key in a Portland, Oregon, federal courthouse.

Regulators and private lawyers across Europe and the United States are demanding, and in some cases obtaining, access to data that Google sniffed for the past three years from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots across the globe.

The requests are coming in some of the eight proposed class actions targeting Google that have cropped up across the United States, as well as from various governments investigating whether Google violated their laws.

The demands for data raise a paradox of sorts: How many eyeballs, in the name of privacy, will eventually see the data that likely includes snippets of e-mail, web surfing, documents and other private data?

“It will be relevant evidence in our lawsuit. We will ask for production of that data. Lawyers representing plaintiffs in the case will review the data,” said Patrick Keyes, a top lawyer in one of the proposed class actions lodged in the District of Columbia. “This would be in the context of presenting the legal interests of those who have had their data intercepted, and would typically be produced under a protective order.”

Google has already said it would forward to German, French and Spanish authorities the portion of the data intercepted in those countries.

No government agency in the United States has yet demanded a copy of the intercepted data, but several are investigating Google.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said he wanted to “scrutinize this situation” while Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has demanded “detailed records on any information taken from networks” from his state.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz told Congress, “We’re going to take a very, very close look at this.”

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said Friday that Google’s actions “warrants a hearing, at minimum.”

Ironically, it appears that protecting privacy and administering justice might just involve violating privacy.

“That’s true. All of this raises a lot of First Amendment questions,” said Jeffrey Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “It is problematic. Some of these lawyers see a quick buck without thinking of the consequences.”

U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman in Oregon has locked away the data (.pdf) as that class action proceeds. ISec Partners, a San Francisco security consulting firm, has made encrypted copies of the drives at Google’s request and destroyed the originals.

“The encryption keys for these drives are possessed by only myself and one other person. and the hard drives are securely stored in a safe controlled by Google’s physical security team,” (.pdf) Alexander Stamos, one of iSec’s founding partners, told the Oregon judge in a court filing before the data was forwarded to the Portland courthouse.

But Aaron Zigler, a lawyer in the Illinois class action, said, “I don’t want to see the actual data that has been intercepted.”

Class members of the lawsuits can be determined without actually reading the contents of the payload data packets, he said. “There is enough data to figure out who everyone is: date, time and location, and unique MAC addresses of the Wi-Fi network they intercepted,” he said.

Pablo Chavez, director of public policy for Google, said in a letter to Congress released Friday that Google is “aware of only two instances when any Google engineer even viewed the payload data.”

“The first instance involved the individual engineer who designed the software,”  (.pdf) he wrote. “The second instance was when we became aware that payload data may have been collected from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, and a single security engineer tested the data to verify that this was the case.”

Google has repeatedly said it is working with the relevant government investigators, and is demanding that all the litigation be consolidated in California, where it’s headquartered.

The Mountain View internet giant maintains the collection of data while taking photos for its Street View program was inadvertent –- the result of a programming error with code written for an early experimental project that wound up in the Street View code (.pdf), an explanation some of the lawyers suing Google have disputed.

Google said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in dozens of countries for the last three years, until German privacy authorities questioned what data Google’s Street View cameras were collecting. Street View is part of Google Maps and Google Earth, and provides panoramic pictures of streets and their surroundings across the globe.

And Google said no U.S. wiretapping laws were breached because the Wi-Fi signals were “readily accessible to the general public” (.pdf).

At least insofar as the proposed class actions were concerned, Jennifer Granick, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested having a judge or a so-called “special master” sift through the data to determine whose data Google obtained. That should only happen if Google is found to have done something unlawful, she said.

“This raises my eyebrows,” she said. “I don’t think we need to know what any of this data is yet, because there’s nothing to suggest Google did this intentionally.”

Google Calls for U.S., Europe to Crack Down on China Web Censorship

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Tim Yang

By Clint Boulton | eWeek.com | June 10, 2010

Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wants the U.S. and European governments to nudge China to cease its censorship of the Internet because it restricts free trade. The Internet sector is vital to Google’s hopes for international expansion. China boasts more than 400 million Web users and Baidu is the leading search engine in mainland China. Censorship in the form of the Great Firewall of China has been a long-standing complaint about China from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other companies looking to extend their tendrils in Asia.

Google wants the U.S. and European governments to nudge China to cease its censorship of the Internet, the search engine’s lead lawyer told the Associated Press in Brussels.

David Drummond, chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development at Google, June 9 said that China’s censorship restricts free trade for the Web, where Google is hungry to expand in China.

Western governments should defend the free trade for the Internet with the same kind of rules that they use to complain of China’s sale of products below cost, Drummond added.

Censorship in the form of the Great Firewall of China has been a long-standing complaint about China from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other companies looking to extend their tendrils in Asia while enjoying the same fair trade rules they enjoy in the U.S.

The sticky issue reared its head again in January when Google said it discovered a cyber attack originating from China in which users Gmail accounts were accessed.

Threatening to cease doing business in China entirely, Google in March shuttled its Chinese search operations to the region of Hong Kong, which doesn’t follow the same censorship restrictions as mainland China.

Shortly after this move, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told The Guardian he hoped the U.S. would make China’s Web censorship a “high priority.”

While the U.S. publicly supported Google’s position, little has happened on this front.

In country, U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration are dealing with issues such as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, in which thousands of barrels of crude oil are blotting the Gulf of Mexico each day.

Drummond called the hack attack the “final straw” and reinforced the company’s stance that China’s censorship restricts free trade.

“Censorship, in addition to being a human rights problem, is a trade barrier,” said Drummond, according to the AP. “If you look at what China does — the censorship, of course, is for political purposes but it is also used as a way of keeping multinational companies disadvantaged in the market.”

“It should be obvious that the Internet sector is very important to the west and so we should be working on seeing that that kind of trade is protected.”

Holding sway in China is crucial to Google’s hopes for international expansion. China boasts more than 400 million Web users and Baidu is the leading search engine in mainland China. Being marginalized at Google.hk won’t do anything to help Google challenge the incumbent there.

The U.S. could make a case versus China with the World Trade Organization, though Drummond wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that.

He did say he received some support in the U.S., French and German governments and with the European Union executive for pressing Google’s case against Chinese Web censorship.

Bangladesh lifts Facebook ban

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | John Pavelka

Associated Press | June 7, 2010

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Bangladesh has lifted a weeklong ban on the social networking website Facebook imposed for a page urging people to draw images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, an official said Sunday.

Bangladesh become the second South Asian nation after Pakistan to ban the popular site over religious concerns. Pakistan lifted a court-imposed ban last Monday after an information technology official said Facebook officials had apologized for the page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents. (Facebook has denied apologizing or removing the content; it said it was merely blocking access to it to users in certain countries including Pakistan.)

Many Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favorable ones, as blasphemous.

The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission ordered access to Facebook restored around midnight Saturday, and the site was available Sunday, said the commission’s chairman, Zia Ahmed.

Facebook had removed the objectionable page, he said. The page could not be accessed in Bangladesh on Sunday.

The ban was imposed because Facebook was carrying caricatures that might hurt the religious sentiments of people in Bangladesh, where about 85 percent of the 150 million people are Muslim, Ahmed said earlier.

The commission said the U.S.-based company also agreed to remove “obnoxious” images of some of the country’s political leaders, including Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and opposition leader Khaleda Zia. The commission did not elaborate.

Nearly 1 million people in Bangladesh use Facebook, according to an estimate by the Bangladesh ISP Association.

Taking offline censorship online: Rwanda may start filtering

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Colleen Taugher

By Rebekah Heacock | OpenNet Initiative Blog | June 7, 2010

In April the Rwandan government suspended two independent newspapers, both critical of the ruling party. The six-month suspension will prevent the papers from covering the country’s 2010 presidential elections.

The Committee to Protect Journalists called the move “a thinly disguised attempt at censorship” and notes that while the papers were accused of “insulting the head of state, inciting the police and army to insubordination, and creating fear among the public,” no specific articles were cited in the accusation. Reporters Without Borders points out that, under Rwandan law, newspapers can only be suspended for two weeks at a time unless they are repeat offenders. Neither paper has previously been suspended.

Rather than backing down, the editor of suspended paper Umuvugizi decided to move online, publishing articles in English and Kinyarwanda at Umuvigizi.com. The government has not taken kindly to this decision, announcing that it will block the site if the suspension is not obeyed.

This would be the first case of Internet filtering in Rwanda and only the second recorded incident in eastern Africa (in 2006 the Uganda Communications Commission blocked the anti-governmet website RadioKatwe during the presidential election campaign).

Activists worry about a new ‘Green Dam’ in Vietnam

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | McKay Savage

By Robert McMillan | IDG News | June 4, 2010

Human rights activists are worried that new software mandated by Vietnamese authorities may lead to an Internet clampdown in the country’s largest city.

In April, local officials issued new regulations covering Internet cafes and service providers in Hanoi, ostensibly designed to crack down on hacking and other service abuses. Buried in the regulations is a mandate that service providers must add special software to their domain servers, used to authenticate systems on the network.

Under the new rules, domain servers must install a copy of the “Internet Service Retailers Management Software,” the regulations state.

Nobody quite knows what the software is, but activists in the U.S. worry that it may be used to clamp down on Internet usage in a country that has seen more and more grassroots information-sharing on social networks over the past year.

“There are now 25 million Vietnamese online and the government is afraid that the people have a venue that is relatively free of censorship where they can exchange their views,” said Duy Hoang, a spokesman with Viet Tan, a pro-democracy political party that is critical of the Vietnamese government. “The government doesn’t want independent sources of information,” he said.

“This recent move by the Hanoi authorities is definitely an obstacle toward Vietnamese people using the Internet,” Hoang added. He worries that the government-mandated software will be similar to China’s Green Dam censorware.

Last year China tried to force PC makers to ship Green Dam with all computers sold in the country, saying the software would help crack down on online pornography. But Chinese authorities eventually backed off from their plans after critics raised a host of privacy, security and system stability concerns, and Chinese Internet users showed no interest in installing the program.

Whether the Retailers Management Software is censorware is unclear, however. Given the government’s vague description of the product, it’s unclear what it does, said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan assistant professor who analyzed Green Dam last year. “This might be for blocking; it might be for surveillance,” he said. “We don’t know. This isn’t enough information.”

Still, he’s interested in studying it.

There is at least one major difference between this software and Green Dam, however: the Retailers Management Software lives on a server, not the desktop.

Local media reports say the software was developed by the National University of Hanoi, and is expected to be installed in all of the city’s 4,000 Internet cafes by 2011, Hoang said.

The Embassy of Vietnam in Washington, D.C., did not return messages asking about the software on Friday.

No matter what Hanoi’s new management software actually does, the fact that government-controlled software is going into Internet cafes will have a chilling effect on Internet usage, said Kim Pham, outreach director with AccessNow, a group that provides technology support for human rights activists. “This is a public directive intended to let people know the government wants to monitor communications,” she said.

As Vietnamese Internet users have increasingly turned to social media sites such as Facebook and Yahoo360 to share information, the sites have been selectively blocked in the country, Pham said.

The Internet was a focal point for opposition to government plans to start a massive bauxite mining operation in Vietnam’s lush central highlands region. In late 2009, Bauxitevietnam.info, a Web site that had galvanized opposition, was knocked offline by a distributed denial of service attack. And around the same time, someone hacked the Web site run by the Vietnamese Professionals Society and slipped a Trojan horse program into a Vietnamese-language keyboard driver that the site offers as a free download.

Activists like Pham and Hoang believe the Vietnamese government has a strong interest in spying on online conversations, especially after seeing how the Internet was used to spread information about last year’s Green Revolution in Iran. “They’ve seen what’s happened with Iran and they’re very concerned about that,” Pham said.

A New Tool for Censorship

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

I spent Friday, June 11 at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where they hosted a roundtable discussion/workshop on denial of service attacks/distributed denial of service attacks (DoS/DDoS attacks).

It was a fascinating discussion about some of the methods that certain governments and other groups are using to suppress free expression around the world. Rather than (or in addition to) standard methods such as filtering/blocking websites, the sites are crippled, sometimes permanently, by coordinated external attacks, such as overwhelming the site with enormous quantities of communications requests. The discussion was informed by a diverse multi-stakeholder group. Participants included human rights activists and independent news platforms such as Irawaddy from Burma, The Caucasian Knot from Eastern Europe and Boxun News from China, as well as organizations that help to protect against DDos attacks such as Team Cymru.

For a description of Irawaddy’s experience with a DDoS attack, see this article from the Wall Street Journal.

The Berkman Center is building a map of DDoS attacks and is leading an effort to develop a set of response strategies that can be used by human rights and independent media sites that find themselves under attack, and Friday’s discussion will help to inform their final results. It was a fantastic learning opportunity, as well as a chance to find ways that Yahoo! and the BHRP can continue to address this issue on behalf of our users.

To learn more about this effort, contact the Berkman Center.