News & Events

RIM Calls India’s Email Demands ‘Astonishing’

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | tuxthepenguin84

By Amol Sharma | The Wall Street Journal | March 14, 2011

NEW DELHI—A top executive of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. said Indian security agencies are making “rather astonishing” demands for increased powers to monitor email and other data traffic, raising serious privacy issues that threaten to harm the country’s reputation with foreign investors.

Robert Crow, vice president of industry and government relations for RIM, said India’s Home Ministry, which oversees domestic security, wants the ability to intercept in real time any communication on any Indian network—including BlackBerry’s highly secure corporate-email service—and get it in readable, plain-text format.

Such a broad requirement raises the question of whether the government believes any communications are legally off-limits, he said, including email conversations of foreign ambassadors and financial records that get transmitted over secure telecommunications networks to Indian outsourcing companies.

“You connect those dots and you’re saying, ‘Holy smokes,’ ” Mr. Crow said during an interview. “This claim is made in an environment where we don’t really have any privacy- or data-protection laws—and where we have a pretty poor administrative record of keeping similar things like wiretaps secret.”

A spokesman for India’s Home Ministry declined to comment. Government officials in India have previously said they want to ensure suspected terrorists and criminals can’t elude government surveillance by using newfangled communications technologies. Under current Indian law, the home secretary—the top bureaucrat in the Home Ministry—authorizes all telecom surveillance by central-government agencies for 60 days at a time.

For several months, RIM has faced demands from India to give security agencies a way to access encrypted messages on BlackBerry’s corporate-email service. BlackBerry has repeatedly said its system is designed so that it doesn’t have the “keys” to unlock users’ messages—and it has refused to change its technology architecture in any one of the 175 countries where it offers service.

Mr. Crow said he is heartened, at least, that India no longer appears to be singling out RIM. India has realized, he said, that other advanced services—such as virtual private networks, or VPNs, and peer-to-peer messaging services, are outside its surveillance reach.

It isn’t clear whether the Indian government has set any firm deadline for when it should gain access to BlackBerry corporate-email and other services and whether it would take the drastic measure of shutting down services that aren’t compliant. Indian media reports have said the government has told Indian telecom operators to submit plans by March 31 showing how they would accommodate security agencies’ demands. But the government has made no announcement to that effect.

Mr. Crow said he is optimistic that India’s telecom ministry, which is beginning to assert more authority on the matter, will have a better understanding of the technological constraints RIM faces and will find a solution to the issue that doesn’t require BlackBerry to compromise user privacy. A telecom-ministry spokesman declined to comment.

But Mr. Crow said he expects talks with India to drag on, given the inherent delays in the country’s democracy and the lack of well-defined regulations on data protection and privacy.

“I think this may well go on and on in India, and frankly it will be one of those factors that people talk about in the Indian business environment—not one that will be seen in India’s favor in international comparison,” Mr. Crow said.

BlackBerry, which touts the highly secure nature of its email service as a key selling point globally, has faced intensifying demands from foreign governments for access to the service in recent months. The stakes in India are especially high, given that the country has more than 770 million wireless subscribers who are just beginning to shift from ordinary phones to smartphones such as BlackBerrys.

Mr. Crow said he has proposed ways for Indian intelligence and security agencies to advance investigations without gaining access to the actual content of encrypted BlackBerry email messages. He said telecom operators can glean so-called meta data about messages, such as the time messages were sent, and the corporate-email server they went through.

“If that pattern of communications were known to the authorities on lawful grounds,” Mr. Crow said, “then the authorities would be in a position to go to the correct corporate entity that owns the server” and pursue their investigation of a suspect.

In January, RIM resolved India’s security concerns with the BlackBerry Messenger chat service, which uses a lower level of encryption than corporate email. The company gave Indian telecom operators a system that lets them key in a suspect’s phone number and get unscrambled versions of Messenger chats, when a legal order has been provided, Mr. Crow said.

Mr. Crow said RIM is “kicking the tires” on potential plans to expand in India, where it already has a data center and where about 11,000 software developers are making programs to run on BlackBerrys. One possibility down the line is for India to manufacture some of the several thousand parts that go into a BlackBerry.

“There’s a heck of a lot of demand [for BlackBerrys] within three to four hours flight of most of the manufacturing places in India, including India itself,” he said.

Global Voices Gathers Information From Citizens All Over the Globe

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Mohamed ElGohary

By Jennifer Preston | The New York Times | March 13, 2011

As the protests spread across Tunisia for weeks, many international news organizations scrambled to cover the unrest just before President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled on Jan. 14, ending 23 years of authoritarian rule. But Amira al-Hussaini was all over the story.

Dictators and Internet Double Standards

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Michael Summers

By Gordon Crovitz | The Wall Street Journal (Opinion) | March 7, 2011 

In Tunisia, the self-immolation of street vendor Muhammad Bouazizi, protesting harassment by local authorities, led to demonstrations that toppled the regime. In Egypt, it was photos posted online of Khaled Said, who had been beaten to death by corrupt police officers. In both cases, Facebook pages drew attention to the cases, and Twitter posts helped organize protests. 

They do things differently in China. In contrast to more amateur authoritarians, Beijing is so sensitive to protests against similar abuses of power that it controls access to the Internet almost totally. 

Consider the case of a college student who might have been killed by railroad employees in January. According to researchers at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, Zhao Wei was on his way home to Inner Mongolia from his studies in Tianjin when he got into a dispute with a railway employee over his seat assignment. His parents were informed that he had committed suicide by jumping from the train. 

Last week, the parents managed to post on Sina, the domestic version of Twitter, photos of his dead body with injuries indicating death by beating. The post was quickly forwarded more than 66,000 times and commented on 14,000 times. 

The Hong Kong researchers found that mentions of the case have been “actively scrubbed from the Internet.” Domestic search engines have been so effectively filtered that searches result in a link simply saying the railroad is investigating. 

A similar case late last year involved the son of a public security official who ran over two university students in Hebei, killing one. When arrested, he said, “Go ahead—sue me if you dare. My father is Li Gang,” the local deputy police chief. The case quickly became well known on the Web, including a contest to use “My father is Li Gang” in a poem. The phrase became synonymous with shirking responsibility. The Central Propaganda Department then issued a directive that there be “no more hype regarding the disturbance.” 

In her famous 1979 Commentary essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union differed fundamentally from merely authoritarian ones. Today there is a gap between what we can call information totalitarians and information authoritarians. China has simply shut down communication services such as Facebook and Twitter and sources of information like Google. Likewise, Iran has largely closed off communication, and North Korea has no Internet access. 

Other countries are authoritarian but with modest openness. The Mubarak regime, for example, briefly shut down the Internet in Egypt, but only after reformers had used its tools to organize opposition. 

Beijing does not hide its ambitious control over the Web. According to a study by researchers at Tsinghua University, China spends about as much on domestic security—$77 billion—as it does on its military. There are officially some 80,000 protests a year in China, mostly over abuses such as illegal land seizures, forced evictions and refusals of officials to accept petitions of complaints. 

According to the state news service Xinhua, more than 300,000 government employees perform “community service management,” such as monitoring the Web for dissent. Propaganda ministry officials have told local officials they have about two hours between news of “sudden incidents” to close down online information flows and stop people from gathering for protests. Officials are working on new software to track trending topics such as complaints about corruption. 

More than 100 Chinese have been arrested and charged with “inciting subversion” for blogging about the Middle East demonstrations. When protest organizers used online tools to encourage people to go on “strolls” in cities across China every Sunday, the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists reported harassment and beatings of foreign journalists trying to cover these silent protests. 

There is a disconnect between the enormous economic progress China has made over the past generation and the tight lid it keeps on their ability to communicate. Chinese people have more reason to be confident and optimistic about their future than did Arabs in authoritarian countries, but they also want to be free of both petty and large corruption of local and national officials throughout China. 

Reformers within the government know they sit on a tinderbox, but Beijing opts to clamp down instead of letting people vent frustrations. Strong-armed control over the Web may be the clearest sign of political weakness. 

“The Chinese authorities instinctively choose repression when confronted with any problem: lock up people, censor their writings, block the Internet,” wrote veteran China watcher Frank Ching in the China Post last week. If this is really necessary, “maybe China is much more vulnerable that it would appear on the surface.” 

Sites Like Twitter Absent From Free Speech Pact

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Mario Werder

By Verne G. Kopytoff | New York Times | March 6, 2011 

SAN FRANCISCO — When Google, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a code of conduct intended to protect online free speech and privacy in restrictive countries, the debate over censorship by China was raging, and Internet companies operating there were under fire for putting profit ahead of principle. 

It seemed the perfect rallying moment for a core cause, and the companies hoped that other technology firms would follow their lead. 

But three years later, the effort known as the Global Network Initiative has failed to attract any corporate members beyond the original three, limiting its impact and raising questions about its potential as a viable force for change. 

At the same time, the recent Middle East uprisings have highlighted the crucial role technology can play in the world’s most closed societies, which leaders of the initiative say makes their efforts even more important. 

“Recent events really show that the issues of freedom of expression and privacy are relevant to companies across the board in the technology sector,” said Susan Morgan, executive director of the initiative. “Things really seem to be accelerating.” 

But the global initiative is not. All of the participating companies are American. Also,Facebook and Twitter are notably absent despite their large audience and wide use by activists, in the Middle East and elsewhere. 

Bennett Freeman, senior vice president of the mutual fund company Calvert Investments and a G.N.I. board member, pointed out that the three current members were among the biggest Internet companies, but acknowledged that “we are going to have to add some new companies soon to be truly influential.” 

The biggest test yet for the initiative comes later this year, when member companies are judged on whether they have adequate policies in place to address privacy and free speech issues. Independent auditors will issue a report after examining whether the companies narrowly interpret government demands for user information and whether they store users’ data in countries where free speech is protected, for example. 

Next year, the companies are to undergo a more thorough review of whether they lived up to code of conduct’s principles. 

The initiative was created in 2008 after human rights groups and politicians condemned the top Internet companies for complying with China’s restrictive laws rather than jeopardizing their business interests by challenging them. 

Yahoo had turned over data that led to the imprisonment of several Chinese activists. Microsoft had shut down a blog by a Chinese journalist who worked for The New York Times. Meanwhile, Google had introduced a censored search engine in China (although the company has since shut down that site). 

The initiative is modeled on previous voluntary efforts aimed at eradicating sweatshops in the apparel industry and stopping corruption in the oil, natural gas and mining industries. As with those efforts at self-regulation, this one came at a time when Internet companies were seeking to polish their image and potentially ward off legislation. 

The code of conduct says that companies must try “to avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression” and protect user privacy when demands by government “compromise privacy in a manner inconsistent with internationally recognized laws and standards.” 

In practice, however, the code offers flexibility. Companies that go along with a country’s censorship requirements can remain in compliance as long as they disclose it, as Microsoft does with its censored search results in China. 

A number of participants, which also include human rights groups, academics and firms specializing in socially responsible investing, agree that the initiative started slowly. Much of the focus since its founding has been on getting organized and hiring. 

Originally, the membership was supposed to include the entire spectrum of software, hardware and telecommunications firms along with Internet companies. The idea was that a bigger roster would mean greater influence and credibility. 

But recruiting efforts have been fruitless. Some companies have cited the auditing process as being too onerous, according to Global Network Initiative participants who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to discourage companies from joining in the future. Other companies do not see any financial benefit or think they can do it alone. 

Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for Facebook, declined to address why Facebook had not joined. But he said that his company took seriously the issue of user trust and was in regular contact with governments and human rights groups. 

“As Facebook grows, we’ll continue to expand our outreach and participation, but it’s important to remember that our global operations are still small, with offices in only a handful of countries,” Mr. Noyes said. 

Twitter declined to comment. 

Where the initiative has been most effective so far is in creating a forum for companies to easily get advice and share ideas. For instance, as the initiative’s participants were creating the code of conduct, human rights groups contacted Google after it removed videos in 2007 from YouTube showing police abuse in Egypt because of guidelines prohibiting violence. Google ultimately decided to restore the videos and adjust its policy to allow such clips. 

Some human rights groups said the initiative’s code of conduct was weaker than they would have liked. Getting companies to sign on would have been impossible otherwise, they acknowledged, describing the code’s final version as the best that could be hoped for at the time. 

Even with the code of conduct to help guide them, companies will inevitably come across issues that have no easy answers, said Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who specializes in online privacy and is a participant in the initiative. 

“Most of these issues aren’t black and white,” Ms. MacKinnon said. “The idea is to help them do the right thing rather than play ‘gotcha’ after they mess up.”

Nervous about unrest, Chinese authorities block Web site, search terms

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Gitgat

By Keith B. Richburg | Washington Post Foreign Service | February 25, 2011

BEIJING – Chinese authorities continued to tighten controls on Internet use Friday in the face of murky calls for “jasmine rallies” to emulate the anti-government protests convulsing the Middle East and North Africa.

The professional networking site LinkedIn was blocked in China, joining sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that already were inaccessible due to government controls. LinkedIn was apparently blocked after a user began a discussion group called “Jasmine Voice.” The user asked followers to comment on the possibility of a “jasmine revolution” in China.

“I think it’s pretty clearly connected to the number of postings about the jasmine stuff,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of a popular Chinese media blog and an expert on the Internet here.

Also Friday, the Chinese name of U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. joined the list of terms blocked from searches on popular Chinese micro-blogging sites, along with previously banned words including “Tunisia,” “Egypt” and “jasmine.” A search for Huntsman’s Chinese name on the sites turned up only the notice that the results could not be returned due to “relevant regulations and policy.”

Huntsman drew the ire of Chinese nationalists here after briefly appearing last Sunday in Wangfujing, a commercial pedestrian area of central Beijing. Organizers of the jasmine rallies, whose identities are unknown but who seem to be affiliated with an overseas organization, had asked Chinese to silently pass through the area as a peaceful form of protest against government authoritarianism. Few protesters actually appeared to show up, however, mainly due to a massive police presence in the area.

Huntsman, in sunglasses and a leather jacket, was out of his car talking to an unidentified passerby when he was caught on camera by a person who appeared to be a plainclothes policeman. That person confronted the ambassador, asking, “Do you want to see chaos in China?” Huntsman quickly left the area.

The U.S. embassy said Huntsman’s appearance at the site was “purely coincidental” because he was in the area with his family on a Sunday outing.

“We are aware that some Chinese domestic Internet sites are restricting searches of Ambassador Huntsman’s Chinese name,” said U.S. embassy spokesman Richard L. Buangan. “We urge China to respect internationally recognized fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression, and the human rights of all Chinese citizens.”

This week in Wangfujing, workers erected a large blue construction fence in front of a McDonalds restaurant where the rally organizers had asked protesters to silently pass.

Merchants in the area said the fence went up two days ago, ostensibly because of needed sidewalk repairs – but Friday there was no sign of any construction activity. The fence, however, takes up much of the pedestrian mall area and significantly narrows the space where people can pass.

Since the popular uprising began in Tunisia in January, nervous Chinese authorities have been on guard against any attempt to replicate the protests here.

Friday’s edition of Global Times – a tabloid newspaper owned by the Communist Party’s official organ, People’s Daily – ran a lead editorial titled: “Turmoil in China is wishful thinking.”

The editorial blames “a few Western media outlets” for trying to promote unrest in China, and opines, “Anyone knowing about the Chinese society would never predict a Chinese-style ‘Jasmine Revolution.’ This society is now generally stable.”

In another sign of the unease, several Western media bureau chiefs were called into the main office of the Beijing police on Friday and warned to be mindful of the State Council’s rules governing foreign reporters conducting interviews in China.

Washington Post researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.

Facebook’s Secret Role in Egypt

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | researchgirl

by Mike Giglio | The Daily Beast | February 24, 2011

As unlikely protests swept across Egypt on January 25, an administrator from the Facebook page that was helping to drive the uprisings emailed a top official of the social network, asking for help.

The popular page had sounded the call for the protests 10 days earlier. It then became an online staging ground for the budding movement, beaming a constant barrage of news and updates to the walls of its 400,000-plus fans, along with impassioned pleas for people to join.
Protests swelled into the night. The We Are All Khaled Said administrator worried that the Mubarak regime, clued in to the page’s importance, might respond with a cyber attack—to bring down the page or, worse, uncover the anonymous people running it.

It was unclear whether Facebook would help.

The page, titled “We Are All Khaled Said” in remembrance of an Alexandria man murdered by police last summer, was founded in June and snowballed into one of Egypt’s most influential activist sites. In November, as parliamentary elections approached, the page prepared to encourage its fans to document what was expected to be a heavily-rigged vote. But, on election day, the page went down. And that was when Facebook became embroiled in what would eventually become Egypt’s revolutionary push.

Email records obtained by Newsweek, conversations with NGO executives who work with Facebook to protect activist pages, and interviews with administrators of the We Are All Khaled Said page reveal the social media juggernaut’s awkward balancing act. They show a company struggling to address the revolutionary responsibilities thrust upon it—and playing a more involved role than it might like to admit.

On the night of January 25, Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of policy for Europe, responded to the worried administrator. “We have put all the key pages into special protection,” he wrote in an email. A team, he said, “is monitoring activity from Egypt now on a 24/7 basis.”

Allan, 45, is member of Britain’s House of Lords and was a Liberal Democrat MP from 1997 until 2005, when he ran the campaign of current deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, before taking a position with tech giant Cisco. During his time at Cisco, he chaired an Internet task force for the U.K. government. Friends at the company jokingly refer to him as “Lord Allan.”

Allan, who declined to comment for this story, joined Facebook in June 2009. In an August interview with the Financial Times, he listed among his responsibilities dealing with censorship, freedom of speech and privacy, as well as promoting Facebook for public use. “Richard has a great and wonderful passion for both politics and what companies can do in politics,” says a former Facebook official who asked not to be named discussing his old company.

Facebook insists that all users, from Lady Gaga to Burmese dissidents, use their real names, which has obvious drawbacks for people agitating in repressive countries. The network’s terms of service are available in only seven languages (and not in Arabic), which breeds confusion. (The help site, however, is available in more than 20 languages.)

Regimes have used the terms of service against users, bringing down sensitive pages at key moments, such as the early stages of a protest push. A clever cyberthug can discover when a fan page is being run by a pseudonymous account, and send in a well-tailored complaint that forces the hand of Facebook’s automated servers. Emails to the company’s generic appeals address can take weeks to receive a response. “The appeals process is probably not as well defined and staffed as it should be. It may take a couple of weeks to get to a human,” the former official says. “You do catch things that you’d probably rather not catch in that mix, too.”

And in the past, activists complained that when problems arose at sensitive times, they had little idea who to contact. U.S.-based NGOs such as Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists keep in regular touch with tech companies and the on-the-ground activists who use their services, acting as advisers and facilitators.

The structure at Facebook, though, was difficult for outsiders to discern. “It used to be Kremlinology,” says Danny O’Brien, the CPJ’s Internet advocacy director. “You’d sit there and you’d try to work out someone who could talk to someone else who could talk to someone else. … We all have stories of trying to catch Facebook’s eye.”

Last September, Allan traveled to Budapest for a Google conference on freedom of expression on the web, which was crowded with prominent net activists, as well as Egyptian cyberdissidents. There, Allan said that human rights concerns could be directed to him.

While this role is one of many, and remains loosely defined—“Richard doesn’t hold the switch. He has the ability to email the people who hold the switch,” the former Facebook official says—Allan has since developed into a crucial back channel into Facebook’s inner workings, particularly for the developing situation in the Middle East.

People such as Robert Guerra, who heads net advocacy at Freedom House and Danny O’Brien, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Internet advocacy director, have worked to build relationships with Allan in order to fast-track issues that need Facebook’s attention.

The Allan pipeline, activists say, came in the nick of time.

After receiving concerned emails from Guerra, O’Brien and others when the We Are All Khaled Said page went down in November, Allan responded quickly with a diagnosis: the page’s administrator had been outed for using a pseudonym. Refusing to budge on Facebook policy, Allan suggested a creative fix.

“There is no discretion here as the creation of fake accounts threatens the integrity of our whole system,” he wrote. “People must use the profile of a real person to admin the page or risk it being taken down at any time. It is not important to us who that real person is as long as their account appears genuine. So if they can offer a real person as admin then the page can be restored.”
Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian émigré and activist based in Washington, D.C., took on that role, passing her user name and password to Google executive Wael Ghonim, who was later unmasked as the creator of the We Are All Khaled Said page, and the page went on to document widespread fraud. That week it received 11,000 new fans.

The new arrangement served as a security blanket as the page became a key rallying point for the protests—as only Wahab could be uncovered if the page were hacked. So did the relationship with Facebook. Ghonim told Newsweek he had an “open line” of communication with Facebook during the protests. “Whenever anything happened, I called,” he said.

But Wahab—who provided the email conversations to Newsweek— remains frustrated that it took so much prodding to get the company to act. “Facebook helped. But it was almost like they were hesitant to help. They don’t understand, or they didn’t understand, the power of Facebook in all this,” she says. “I think it’s unfortunate that you have to have a title to get Facebook’s attention.”

As for the special security status Facebook gave the page, she says: “That’s their responsibility. They ask us to put our private information on their site. I think it’s their responsibility to keep it out of government hands.”

Ultimately, Egyptians remained in the streets for more than two weeks and ousted President Hosni Mubarak in what many came to call the “Facebook Revolution.” As a pro-democracy upheaval rocks the Middle East, the social media giant has been receiving a steady stream of praise. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an impassioned speech about Internet freedom that was peppered with glowing references to Facebook.

Facebook officials, however, have shrunk from the spotlight. (“Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts,” read a recent headline in the New York Times.) The company has been particularly tight-lipped about what role, if any, its employees have played in the ongoing unrest in the Middle East. “The trust people place in us is the most important part of what makes Facebook work,” said communications manager Andrew Noyes in an emailed statement. “We take this trust seriously.”

Some analysts say Facebook has yet to come to grips with its new activist role. The ambiguity also has fueled suggestions that business interests in repressive countries—such as Syria, where Facebook recently regained access, or China, where it remains shut out—keep the company from embracing an activist image. “Facebook has seemed deeply ambivalent about this idea that they would become a platform for revolutions,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society. “And it makes sense that they would be deeply ambivalent.”

The former Facebook official says of the company: “There’s a bit of schizophrenia in trying to think that you’re operating a neutral platform. People at Facebook definitely have pro-freedom views. And there’s also a desire to not get shut off.”

Complaints that Facebook is unprepared—or perhaps unwilling—to take on an activist role has led some prominent human-rights advocates to encourage cyberdissidents to avoid it. “I would recommend that activists find another platform for their activity,” says Jillian York, of Global Voices. Adds Guerra: “It’s not just a college kid’s web site. It’s real activists that are staking their lives for change.”

The still-disjointed chain of command, meanwhile, seems to indicate that Facebook is still in the process of figuring out its role at a sensitive time. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have designated executives to deal with human-rights concerns. “[Tech] companies operate in a very difficult and very complex environment,” says Ebele Okobi-Harris, the human rights director at Yahoo.” I think it’s very critical, in Yahoo at least, to have an organization, and people, and a person who are dedicated to these issues.”

Says Zuckerman: “The fact that it works that way shows the inadequacy of the system … They’re trying to figure out after the fact how to construct a process. And they’re doing it in a moment when things are crazy.”

In Tunisia, for instance, “Ali,” an anonymous activist who runs a Facebook fan page called SBZ News—named after Sidi Bouzid, the city where that country’s uprising first took hold—had no NGO connections. But he ran, anonymously, the main Facebook page that was providing news of that country’s revolution. Every time his page would grow in its following, it would get knocked down by Facebook. He says this happened five times.

Ali was running the page under a pseudonym with a wary eye to Tunisia’s notorious cyberpolice. Though fan pages such as his and Ghonim’s don’t show the administrator, that information can be found out if the page is hacked. Which is exactly what happened in Tunisia—the government was able to phish passwords of Facebook users. (Facebook responded by quickly rolling out a harder-to-crack https code.)

“When Facebook say that I’ve to use the real profile, what if the page was hacked? And there are some pages that were hacked by the cyberpolice. And some bloggers were arrested,” Ali says. “Just because I haven’t used my real ID, [is the reason] I’m talking now to you.”

With his pages getting spiked, Ali sent an email to the appeals address. Three weeks later, he finally received an emailed reply, asking that he send a scanned copy of his passport, and getting him even more confused. “Are Facebook administrators not supposed to help us?” he asks. “Are they interested in our personal information more than supporting a revolution?”

Facebook has yet to answer the question. Mike Giglio is a reporter at Newsweek.

China Stamps Out Attempt at Mideast-Style Protests

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Vanessa Pike-Russell

By Anita Chang | The Associated Press | February 21, 2011

BEIJING – Jittery Chinese authorities staged a show of force to squelch a mysterious online call for a “Jasmine Revolution,” with hundreds of onlookers but only a handful of people actively joining protests inspired by pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping the Middle East.

Authorities detained activists Sunday, increased the number of police on the streets, disconnected some cell phone text messaging services and censored Internet postings about the call to stage protests in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other major cities.

Police took at least three people away in Beijing, one of whom tried to place white jasmine flowers on a planter while hundreds of people milled about the protest gathering spot, outside a McDonald’s on the capital’s busiest shopping street. In Shanghai, police led away three people near the planned protest spot after they scuffled in an apparent bid to grab the attention of passers-by.

Many activists said they didn’t know who was behind the campaign and weren’t sure what to make of the call to protest, which first circulated Saturday on the U.S.-based Chinese-language news website Boxun.com.

The unsigned notice called for a “Jasmine Revolution” — the name given to the Tunisian protest movement — and urged people “to take responsibility for the future.” Participants were urged to shout, “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness” — a slogan that highlights common complaints among Chinese.

China’s authoritarian government is ever alert for domestic discontent and has appeared unnerved by protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria and Libya. It has limited media reports about them, stressing the instability caused by the protests, and restricted Internet searches to keep Chinese uninformed about Middle Easterners’ grievances against their autocratic rulers.

Though there are many similarities between the complaints voiced by Middle East citizens and the everyday troubles of Chinese, Beijing’s tight grip on the country’s media, Internet and other communication forums poses difficulties for anyone trying to organize mass demonstrations.

Police stepped up their presence near major public squares and canceled holidays for officers across 20 cities in response to the protest appeal, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported.

Extensive Internet filtering and monitoring meant that most Chinese were unlikely to know about the call to protest Sunday. Boxun.com is blocked, as are Twitter and Facebook, which were instrumental in Egypt’s protest movement. Tech-savvy Chinese can circumvent controls, but few of the country’s Internet users seek out politically subversive content.

Anti-government gatherings in China are routinely stamped out by its pervasive security forces, which are well-funded and well-equipped. A pro-democracy movement in 1989 that directly challenged the Communist government was crushed by the military and hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed.

On Saturday, President Hu Jintao ordered national and provincial officials to “solve prominent problems which might harm the harmony and stability of the society.”

One person sitting in the McDonald’s after the brief protest in Beijing said he saw Sunday’s gathering as a dry run.

“Lots of people in here are Twitter users and came to watch like me,” said 42-year-old Hu Di. “Actually this didn’t have much organization, but it’s a chance to meet each other. It’s like preparing for the future.”

With foot traffic always heavy at the Wangfujing pedestrian mall, it was difficult to discern who showed up to protest, who came to watch and who was out shopping. Many wondered if there was a celebrity in the area because of the heavy police presence and dozens of foreign reporters and news cameras.

As the crowd swelled and police urged people to move on, 25-year-old Liu Xiaobai placed a white jasmine flower on a planter in front of the McDonald’s and took some photos with his cell phone.

“I’m quite scared because they took away my phone. I just put down some white flowers, what’s wrong with that?” Liu said afterward. “I’m just a normal citizen and I just want peace.”

Security agents tried to take away Liu, but he was swarmed by journalists and eventually was seen walking away with a friend.

Two other people were taken away by police, including a shabbily dressed old man who was cursing and shouting, though it wasn’t clear if he was there because of the online call to protest.

In Shanghai, three young men were taken away from outside a Starbucks coffee shop in People’s Square by police, who refused to answer reporters’ questions about why they were detained. They trio had been shouting complaints about the government and that food prices are too high.

A couple dozen older people were drawn to the commotion and started voicing their own complaints and saying they wanted democracy and the right to vote. One woman jumped up on a roadside cement block to shout, “The government are all hooligans,” then ran off, only to return a bit later and shout again at the police and others crowded in the area before once again scampering away.

Security officials were relaxed toward the retirees and the crowd eventually drifted away.

There were no reports of protests in other cities where people were urged to gather, such as Guangzhou, Tianjin, Wuhan and Chengdu.

Ahead of the planned protests, human rights groups estimated that anywhere from several dozen to more than 100 activists in cities across China were detained by police, confined to their homes or were missing. Families and friends reported the detention or harassment of several dissidents, and some activists said they were warned not to participate.

On Sunday, searches for “jasmine” were blocked on China’s largest Twitter-like microblog, and status updates with the word on popular Chinese social networking site Renren.com were met with an error message and a warning to refrain from postings with “political, sensitive … or other inappropriate content.”

A text messaging service from China Mobile was unavailable in Beijing on Sunday due to an upgrade, according to a customer service operator for the leading service provider, who did not know how long the suspension would last. In the past, Chinese authorities have suspended text messaging in politically tense areas to prevent organizing.

Boxun.com said its website was attacked Saturday after it posted the call to protest. A temporary site, on which users were reporting heavy police presence in several cities, was up and running Sunday. The site said in a statement it had no way of verifying the origins of the campaign.

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Associated Press writers Cara Anna and Charles Hutzler in Beijing and Elaine Kurtenbach in Shanghai contributed to this report.

Internet Censored in Iran to Sabotage Pro-Democracy Protests

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Troy Holden

International Business Times | February 17, 2011

In an expected repeat of the January internet and electronic communication blockade in Egypt, Iranian authorities have begun censorship by disrupting mobile phone services and slowing down broadband speed in the major cities.

Following the outbreak of the Opposition-fueled pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran, pro-opposition websites have been blocked. The anti-government movement began in Iran on Monday, when thousands of supporters of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi took to the streets.

The anti-government dissidents have also been forced to compromise on electronic communication as mobile-phone and text message services stand disrupted.

Iran, along with Bahrain and Libya, is among the latest states to experience the aftermath of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions led to the ouster of autocrats. In all these regions, internet, especially social media platforms, were used to mobilize the protests.

Iran is among the group of 12 countries, including China, North Korea and Syria, which are labeled as ‘Internet Enemies.’ These countries have strict laws limiting Internet use and are known to block government-opposition and human rights websites.

Through URL blocking and keyword filtering of words such as ‘torture’ and ‘rape’, Iran has blocked 5 million websites. Now, in the wake of the protests, another word has been added to the list. The word ‘bahman’, which is the current month in the Persian calendar, has reportedly been blocked.

Media Gagged

Besides cutting of the communication life-line, authorities have also gagged the media by forbidding reporting of the events related to the protests.

Iran has blocked top two news sites, jammed satellite TV broadcasts and prohibited photography.

U.S. vows Internet Freedom Plan

Moved by the attack on freedom of expression in the pro-democracy protests across Egypt, Tunisia, and now Iran, the United States has vowed to push for global Internet freedom.

“There is a debate underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But as the events in Iran, Egypt and elsewhere have shown, that debate is largely beside the point,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday.

Also, departing from the wait-and-watch stance of the U.S. on its military allies in Egypt, Clinton hailed the “courage of the Iranian people.”

Internet Censorship Not New To Iran

Besides the fact that the current censorship in Iran is similar to the January 28 Egyptian Internet blackout, the country is not new to this form of censorship. In 2009, Iranians turned to internet and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to reach out to the world after the authorities imposed a media lock down. It was not long before Iranian bloggers were ordered to remove all pictures of protests from the web immediately or face legal action.

U.N. Rapporteur Reports Freedom of Expression Severely Curtailed in South Korea

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Ko_An

By Son Jun-hyun | The Hankyoreh | February 17, 2011

A report that is to be submitted to the United Nations this year states that freedom of expression has receded substantially in South Korea under the Lee Myung-bak administration and recommends that the South Korean government initiate improvements. The report, written by U.N. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank La Rue following a May 2010 visit and investigation, serves as an important measure of the human rights situation in the country and is expected to draw charges from the international community that South Korea is an underdeveloped human rights nation.

The English-language report titled “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, and Culture Rights, Including the Right to Development,” a copy of which was acquired Wednesday by the Hankyoreh, states that the scope of freedom of expression has diminished in South Korea since the candlelight vigil demonstrations against the full-scale resumption of U.S. beef imports in 2008.

The report also noted an increasing number of cases where individuals who present opinions that do not agree with the government’s position are prosecuted and punished based on domestic laws and regulations that do not conform to international law.

Over its length of 28 A4-sized pages, the report includes expressions of concern about or recommendations of amendments to the South Korean human rights situation in eight areas, including defamation and freedom of opinion and expression on the Internet, freedoms of opinion and expression during election campaigns, freedom of assembly, restrictions on freedom of opinion and expression for reasons of national security, and rights to free opinion and expression for government employees.

Citing the arrest of television news show producers who reported on U.S. beef, La Rue said that a number of criminal defamation lawsuits are being lodged in cases of expression for the public good and used to punish individuals who criticize the administration. Noting that prohibitions on defamation are also stipulated in civil law, La Rue recommended that the crime of defamation be deleted from the criminal code.

La Rue also made reference to a suit filed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) claiming damages from Hope Institute Executive Director Park Won-soon for defamation. La Rue said that government officials and public institutions should refrain from filing civil suits on defamation charges in the interest of citizen monitoring of public officials.
La Rue welcomed a December unconstitutionality ruling on the Framework Act on Telecommunications, which has been abused to restrict freedom of opinion on the Internet, as witnessed in the “Minerva” case. With regard to the Internet real name system, he recommended examining other means of identity verification and applying the system only in cases where there are substantial grounds for believing the individual will commit a crime.

La Rue also recommended the abolition of the Korea Communication Standards Commission (KOCSC), expressing concern about the fact that the KOCSC is empowered to review and reject or suspend information whose distribution is prohibited by the Information and Communications Network Act, including information deemed defamatory or a matter of national confidentiality. He expressed concerns that the KOCSC, whose members are appointed by the president, might function as what amounts to a censorship organization deleting online criticisms of the administration, and he remarked on the absence of sufficient safeguards to prevent this.

La Rue recommended remedial measures to address the practice South Korea’s notification system for assemblies, which in effect has operated as a permit system. La Rue also recommended remedial measures to address in addition to the failure to properly guarantee freedoms of political opinion and expression for public school teachers, and he urged the abolition of Item 7 of the National Security Act stipulating punishment for acts of praise and sympathy for anti-state groups.

“The Lee Myung-bak administration, which goes on about ‘advanced Korea’ every time it opens its mouth, suffered a major embarrassment from the international human rights community despite being a U.N. Human Rights Council member nation,” said former National Human Rights Commission of Korea Policy Director Kim Hyung-wan. “The international embarrassment could have been avoided if the NHRCK had just done its job faithfully.”

La Rue submitted the report to the South Korean government on Jan. 31. It was confirmed that around ten government institutions, including the Ministry of Justice, the NHRCK, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), the KCC, and the National Police Agency, have been examining the truth of the report’s claims since Feb. 14.

This is the first report from a U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression issuing recommendations to the government regarding the domestic human rights situation since a report issued 16 years ago in 1995 by Abid Hussain. At the time, Hussain recommended abolition of the National Security Act and the release of those imprisoned for exercise of freedom of expression.

A human rights group official who claimed to have examined the report said that it contained “a relatively accurate picture of the regression of human rights in South Korea.”

“Unlike the reports by international NGOs or individual countries, a U.N. report carries a high level of reliability and influence,” the official said.

The report is scheduled to be officially delivered to the UNHRC in June.

An official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the report was “a draft for which Mr. La Rue requested that the South Korean government verify the accuracy of the content prior to formal submission to the UNHRC.”

“We are still in the stage of gathering opinions from the different offices and ministries, so if a government opinion is issued, I imagine it can be done at the official announcement in June at the UNHRC meeting,” the official added.

After Egypt, Clinton Calls for ‘Serious Conversation’ On Internet Freedom

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | l r

By Sara Yin | PC Magazine | February 15, 2011

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on Tuesday called for a “serious conversation” about the principles of Internet freedom, championing the Web’s contribution to the uprising in Egypt, but maintaining her position that WikiLeaks postings are tantamount to theft.

“If people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us,” Clinton said during a speech at George Washington University.

This was Clinton’s second speech about Internet freedom; the first came 13 months ago in the midst of a censorship battle between China and Google. This time, Clinton focused on Egypt and Iran. While citizens in Egypt used the Internet to organize protests and Iranians banded together online after the last election, Clinton acknowledged that the Web is not solely responsible for what happened in those regions.

“What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the Internet,” she said. “Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future.”

“In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the Internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change,” Clinton continued.

Therein lies the challenge, Clinton said.

“Governments have to choose to live up to the commitment to protect free expression, assembly, and association,” she said. “For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness.”

That is sometimes easier said than done, thanks to several key challenges: achieving liberty and security; protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility; and protecting transparency and confidentiality. The Internet can be “a force for unprecedented progress” but also a haven for terrorists, she said. It can also create a forum for hate speech. It’s a delicate balance, and “I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers,” Clinton said.

On the transparency and confidentiality aspect, Clinton reiterated her opposition to WikiLeaks, which has been releasing confidential government documents that were reportedly stolen by military personnel and submitted to the whistle-blowing Web site.

“Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft,” Clinton said. ” Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree.”

Clinton also denied that the U.S. forced private companies to shut off access to WikiLeaks; “That is not the case,” she said. “Some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct,” she said.

In the wake of WikiLeaks releasing 250,000 State Department cables in late November, companies like Visa, MasterCard, Amazon, and PayPal cut ties with the Web site.

Critics have called Clinton’s speech hypocritical, given its pursuit of WikiLeaks. Clinton’s speech was actually timed hours after civil rights groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation went to a court in Alexandria, Virginia, to protest a government subpoena of the private Twitter accounts of suspected WikiLeaks affiliates.

“There is a jarring disconnect between the administration’s pro-privacy policies abroad and its pro-surveillance policies at home,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU Center for Democracy, said in a statement. “Americans deserve the same privacy protections that the State Department is eager to secure for people overseas. We commend the administration for its ambition to expand free speech abroad, but an administration truly committed to democratic freedom should not turn a blind eye to the hypertrophic expansion of government surveillance inside the United States.”

Chloe Albanesius contributed to this report.