China Requires ID for Mobile Phone Numbers

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Windell Oskay

By Michael Wines | New York Times | September 1, 2010

BEIJING — China’s government began on Wednesday to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an attempt to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes.

The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that force users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users currently are unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish an ID by 2013 or lose their service, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper, Global Times, reported.

A government center that deals with cellphone complaints reported that an average Chinese phone user receives a dozen spam messages a week, and that three in four users received messages that involved fraud, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Wednesday.

Some analysts, however, questioned whether the new requirement would substantially reduce illicit messages. Instead, they warned that it could give the government new tools to locate and punish individuals who send cellphone messages that censors deem unacceptable. China’s central government has steadily tightened its censorship of the Internet and wireless communications since 2008, blocking increasing numbers of Internet Web sites, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and, most recently, shutting down microblogs that it regards as subversive.

The new regulation will be implemented largely by the three government-controlled companies — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — that provide all cellular service.

“Is China prepared for this?” David Bandurski, an author and media analyst at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a telephone interview. “Does it have the legal framework and the institutions in place to guarantee they can do this and still protect the privacy of consumers?

“People are basically providing their phone numbers and ID numbers” to the mobile carriers, he said. “Those are the two most important pieces of information that most people have.”

In an article posted Wednesday on the China Media Project’s Web site, a legal researcher at the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhou Hanhua, expressed doubts that requiring users to register their names with the companies would control spam.

Initially, he wrote, the rules likely will first create a black market in legally registered SIM cards that can be used for spam, and then spur hackers to find ways to circumvent the registration requirement.

“Technology innovation will soon trump the government’s control,” he wrote.

Others were less concerned. A professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Zeng Jianqiu, said that real-name registration was essential if services now common in other nations, such as payment by cellphone, are to become established in China.

Privacy “is a problem that needs to be considered seriously,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “The regulators and mobile operators also need to find ways to protect personal information. But I think some, like China Mobile and Telecom, are already doing this.”

Under the new policy, convenience store and street vendors who have been selling anonymous SIM cards were to suspend sales on Wednesday until they are trained to register their customers. Foreigners will also be required to furnish a passport or other identification when establishing cellphone service.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

The Read and the Black

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Kathy Hurley

Why are Latin American democracies suddenly attacking the free press?

By Mac Margolis | Newsweek | August 31, 2010

Here’s a puzzler. Latin America has never been more democratic: of 34 nations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, all except one (Cuba) are constitutional democracies, with laws guaranteeing open elections, independent courts, legislatures, and freedom of expression. So why do so many governments still trample on citizens’ rights, bully journalists, harass private business, and generally lord over hearth and home?

Incidents in just the last few weeks range from the grave (the Argentine government’s order to shut down the main Internet provider in retaliation to criticism from its owner) to the ridiculous (a Brazilian law banning parents from spanking kids). But the breadth of official incursions into citizen’s lives has sent out distress signals from Patagonia to the Antilles. In early August, after a shower of lawsuits filed by indignant politicians, the Brazilian Electoral Court ruled that television and radio comedians may not make fun of candidates in the coming national elections. The Argentine government declared war on its two largest independent media groups, Clarin and La Nación, which have been acid critics of president Cristina Fernandéz de Kirchner’s strong-armed rule. In Venezuela, where the homicide rate is soaring, the government reacted by getting a court to ban news media from publishing “violent, bloody, and grotesque images.” Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua have passed new media laws—all of them aimed at clipping the wings of privately owned news sources—and the call for “social control of media” is viral among lefty groups. (It was unanimously endorsed, for instance, by participants at an August confab in Argentina of regional leftist parties—which now govern 11 Latin American countries—called the São Paulo Forum.) “The threat to freedom is all around,” says Amaury de Souza, a Brazilian political scientist. “And it’s growing.”

The clampdown has the pundits and pols buzzing. To some, this is a relic of authoritarian culture dating from the time of military dictatorships, which between 1960 and 1990 kept many Latin nations in check with a boot and a gag. To others the habit dates to colonial times, when paternalistic monarchs ruled. No political party or ideology has a monopoly on the new authoritarianism; rank self-interest united Brazil’s politicians—from left, right, and center parties—in their effort to outlaw sendups by satirists that could make them look bad before millions of voters. And in Mexico, where drug lords are spreading terror and have killed 56 reporters since 2000, the latest threat is “narco-censorship,” in which drug cartels kill nosy reporters.

But it’s no surprise that the worst offenses have emerged in the most volatile flank of the region—in the Andean nations of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia—where the push by charismatic leaders like Hugo Chávez to reinvent their societies through “21st-century socialism” has produced economic dysfunction, hardship, and political strife. And where neo-despots are against a wall, they strike back in time-honored fashion—doctoring numbers, manufacturing applause, and crushing dissent. Populist Bolivian President Evo Morales has proposed a media law that calls for punishing news organizations that criticize candidates during an election year. The last time the Venezuelan government announced crime statistics was in 2004.

Meanwhile, the trouble in Argentina started in 2008, when Kirchner, looking to top up government coffers, slapped a 35 percent surtax on grain and food exports, which infuriated the country’s growers. The media took up the farmers’ cause and drew a swift response from the president, whose popularity is now wavering—just as she ramps up the dynastic plan to elect her husband, former president Néstor Kirchner, to succeed her in 2011 (just as she succeeded him in 2007). Ever since, she has spared no effort in trying to break up Clarin and its rival La Nación. This month, the row came to a boil when Kirchner ordered Argentina’s largest Internet service provider, Fibertel, to shut down on the claim that the parent company, Clarin, was violating its user license and building an illegal monopoly. Meanwhile, a million Internet users received notice they will have to find a new server. Then, on Aug. 27, in a clear move to muzzle dissent, she demanded that congress nationalize the country’s leading newsprint company, Papel Prensa, which is jointly owned by Clarin, La Nación, and a third paper.

That was not the first effort to spin the news in Buenos Aires. In 2007, with the economy faltering, Kirchner took control of the country’s statistics bureau, Indec, replacing its director and firing top staff. The move was seen as a thinly veiled attempt to cook the books and has since thrown a pall over Indec’s numbers. Officially, prices are rising in Argentina at the pace of 7 percent per year, while independent estimates put the number at twice that, with inflation heading to 20 to 30 percent over the next two years.

The spin is even more aggressive in Venezuela, where recession, spiraling prices, and the worst murder rate in the hemisphere (75 per 100,000 residents—three times the Brazilian homicide rate and nearly twice that of Colombia, a country still under siege by guerrilla insurgents) have pushed President Chávez’s approval ratings off a cliff. With congressional elections scheduled for late next month, the Venezuelan strongman has lashed out. Deploying the courts, the cops, and even loyalist mobs, he has muscled one independent media channel after another off the air. Those he cannot bully into silence, he buys. After hounding Guillermo Zuloaga, the director of the scrappy news channel Globovisión, into exile—“Why has he not been arrested!” the president publicly demanded—Chávez’s handlers picked a new manager and are now proceeding to purchase controlling shares in Globovisión in the name of the Bolivarian revolution.

Not all Latin Americans have been cowed into silence. Chile, Colombia, and Peru—all nations that have lived through brutal episodes of terrorism and censorship—are increasingly demanding transparency and democratic freedoms. On Monday, Argentina’s lower house denounced Kirchner’s move to shutter Fibertel as an assault on “democracy and the rule of law.” And even where authoritarian reflexes linger, the most vibrant democracies are fighting back—and winning. Last week, after a flood of writs and a jocular street protest by cranky Brazilian comedians, a supreme court judge suspended the gag order on campaign humor. The ruling: constitutional rights are no joke.

Jordan amends cyber crimes law after media outcry

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | ccarlstead

AFP | August 29, 2010

AMMAN — Jordan on Sunday approved a temporary law on cyber crimes after amending it to appease the fury of journalists who said the legislation was a means to control local news websites.

The law had initially allowed the authorities to raid and search offices from which websites are published and to access computers without prior approval from public prosecutors.

But under the new amendments approved by the government, searching such offices requires court permission and enough evidence that these places are used to commit cyber crimes, Information Minister Ali Ayed said.

Journalists have complained that one of the articles of the law banned sending or posting data on the Internet or any information system that involves defamation or contempt or slander, without defining such crimes.

“That article was removed because these crimes have been already tackled in other laws,” said a statement posted on local news websites, adding that “the amendments came in line with King Abdullah II’s directives.”

“Other changes removed all parts that could be used to affect press freedom and freedom of expression.”

The statement quoted Ayed as telling a group of journalists that the law “never targeted local news websites and that the amendments came to clarify things, remove any misunderstanding and make sure the law is implemented the right way.”

“The government has consulted several experts, including the National Centre for Human Rights and the Jordan Bar Association, before amending the law.”

International and local rights organisations had added their voices to journalists and opposition parties, including the Islamist movement, in harshly criticising the new law before its amendment.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had urged King Abdullah II to veto the law, saying it gave authorities “sweeping powers to restrict the flow of information and limit public debate.”

It’s not the Kremlin

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Josh Berglund

By A.S. | The Economist | August 25, 2010 

A.S. appears courtesy of Global Voices Online, an international community of bloggers

THIS summer Russians faced several state attempts to “filter” (selectively block) websites. And as in many other things, Russia has gone its own way with a slightly more complicated technique: regional filtering.

There are two ways to control the internet. You can influence the companies and bloggers who use the web, or you can muck with the architecture of the web itself to block or monitor traffic. China does both. Russia, so far, has leaned on websites and telecoms operators using its criminal code, and encouraged groups of like-minded citizens to nudge the online conversation in directions the Kremlin finds pleasing. Until now, few websites have been blocked altogether in Russia.

But this year three such cases were identified. In each, the site was blocked only within a certain region. On July 16th, the city court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur obliged Rosnet, a local internet provider, to ban YouTube and the Internet Archive, among other sites. The court was worried about far-right extremist material that can be found on the sites; it is the country’s first YouTube ban. The decision has not been enforced. For similar reasons in late July, a regional court in Ingushetia forced a local provider to block LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging site. And in August in the Tula region, the state-controlled local telecoms operator temporarily blocked the website of Tulksiye Priyanki, an independent regional news portal.

In each case, the region used internet-protocol or “IP” blocking, a straightforward way of preventing anyone within a certain network — in this case those of the regional providers — from viewing content at specific address. This could be described as an inefficient method, since it can be sidestepped with a proxy server, which mimics a location outside of the network.

But regional filtering is in many ways more efficient than national filtering. First of all, it attracts less media attention and is easier to hide. Even if the filtering is exposed it’s easy to say the site was inaccessible due to technical reasons. Second, regional blocking affects the target group only.

In Ingushetia and Khabarovsk the prosecutor’s office requested the filter. In Khabarovsk, the provider exposed the court’s decision and appealed it. It is likely that the higher court will overrule the lower court’s decision. In Ingushetia, the block on LiveJournal lasted for 17 days; it was removed as soon as several influential online media outlets wrote about it. In Tula it was allegedly the governor of the region, irritated by the website’s criticism, who ordered the block; Tulksiye Prinanki had already mirrored its site at blogger.com.

This news is both discouraging and encouraging. It proves that there’s room for internet censorship wherever a political power is aligned with a network. At a national level, Russia prefers internet monitoring to internet filtering; at a local level, Russia’s regions may begin to better understand how to manipulate their own networks. But all three attempts were technically crude and quickly detected, and none survived much contact with sunlight. That’s something to be thankful for.