Supporting Dissent With Technology

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Hamed Saber

by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan | New York Times | February 23, 2010

Cameran Ashraf was instant-messaging from Los Angeles with an activist in Iran during anti-government demonstrations Feb. 11 when the chat went dead.

Had Iran’s government “shut down the Internet” to thwart dissidents from organizing online, or had the authorities come to arrest the man, Mr. Ashraf said he wondered as he described the incident during an online video interview. Mr. Ashraf, who says he sees himself as a digital aid worker, immediately alerted other Iranian contacts to block surveillance of their Web traffic.

A 29-year-old American whose parents emigrated from Iran, Mr. Ashraf is a co-founder of AccessNow, a group of tech-savvy volunteers who joined forces during Iran’s crackdown on election protests last year to help Iranians evade censorship. They are the type of cyberactivists the U.S. State Department is seeking to support with $50 million in funds for an expanding counteroffensive against suppression of Internet freedom.

“The fact that many governments are trying to prevent their citizens from expressing themselves or obtaining information that would be critical” underscores the importance of defending online speech and assembly, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a Feb. 16 interview. The United States wants to support “garage type” outfits trying to circumvent Web censorship, she said.

AccessNow has communicated with Google on censorship and security issues and received help from its YouTube subsidiary when Iranian protest videos were hacked, said Brett Solomon, a co-founder of the group, in New York.

“This is what we do, at the core of who we are: to make sure that everyone has access,” said Scott Rubin, a Google and YouTube spokesman who works on free expression issues.

The State Department has given $15 million in the past two years to private projects that use technology and training to promote online freedoms. It is reviewing applications for $5 million to support work including research into circumventing firewalls and surveillance, and $30 million more will be available later this year, said Daniel Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

Helping activists creates a problem by exposing them to retribution from repressive governments. Projects are so sensitive and the people involved at such risk that the State Department declined to identify current applicants. One Washington-based group that got the bulk of the money doled out so far — more than $13 million for projects worldwide — asked not to be named, fearing that Chinese employees would be jailed.

AccessNow’s founders haven’t received government funds and said they would have reservations about accepting any because they want to remain independent and protect contacts in countries where taking foreign money is a crime.

The group does disseminate open-source software that receives indirect U.S. support, including Tor, a network of virtual tunnels that allows people to surf anonymously. Built on work by the Office of Naval Research, the science and technology arm of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, Tor was developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and by volunteers. It is used by an average of 8,000 people in Iran and 100,000 in China at any moment, said Andrew Lewman, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Scrutiny of digital dissidents drew headlines last month when Google, the Mountain View, California, search-engine company, said the e-mail accounts of Chinese rights activists had been singled out in an attack on its computer systems. Mrs. Clinton called on the Chinese authorities in a Jan. 21 speech to “conduct a thorough investigation” and said U.S. technology firms should use their influence to protest censorship, surveillance and theft of information.

Iran’s post-election restrictions on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook — used to organize and publicize protests — inspired Mr. Ashraf, Mr. Solomon and two Internet enthusiasts in Los Angeles, who all met online, to form AccessNow. A handful of other volunteers help run servers and share technical support.

“Our genesis is Iran, but the idea behind AccessNow is to develop a global movement,” Mr. Solomon, a 39-year-old Australian, said in an Internet video chat, adding that he’s sharing his experience with Tibetan, Burmese and Cuban dissidents.

The Internet has built-in perils for democracy advocates. Users who don’t utilize encryption or other methods to obscure their identity leave a digital trail of conversations, contacts and Web sites visited.

Global Voices Online, an international bloggers network, has documented 206 cases of bloggers under arrest or threat, most in China, Egypt and Iran. Last year, Internet journalists outnumbered print, radio and television reporters among 136 imprisoned members of the news media, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York.

Mehdi Saharkhiz, 28, an Iranian in New Jersey, joined AccessNow after his father, a journalist named Isa Saharkhiz, was arrested outside Tehran eight months ago. He has gathered 2,200 videos on his OnlyMehdi YouTube channel, including iconic footage by anonymous Iranians who won a George Polk Award in journalism last week for filming the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, who has become a symbol of resistance.

“YouTube videos provided some of the only perspective of what was happening in Iran,” said Olivia Ma, 27, news manager of the video-sharing site. During the protests this month, videos were hacked and erased; AccessNow alerted Ms. Ma, who restored them.

Not every problem is so easily resolved. Mr. Ashraf hasn’t heard back from the Iranian rights campaigner who disappeared from his screen.

2009 Unprecedented Year For Online Repression

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Zensursala

by Clothilde le Coz, Reporters Without Borders

2009 was an unprecedented year for online repression.

For the first time since the Internet emerged as a tool for public use, there are currently 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, according to Reporters Without Borders. This figure is indicative of the severity of the crackdowns being carried out in roughly 10 countries around the world. (In one example, Burma handed out long prison sentences to online dissidents.)

The number of countries pursuing online censorship doubled in the past year — a disturbing trend that suggests governments seek to increase their control over new media. In total, 151 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were arrested in 2009, and 61 were physically assaulted.

The crackdown on bloggers and ordinary citizens who express themselves online comes at the same time that social networking and interactive websites have become extremely popular, not to mention powerful vehicles for free expression.

China Still Leads in Online Censorship

China was once again the leading Internet censor in 2009. Countries such as Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan also blocked websites and blogs, and engaged in surveillance of online expression. In Turkmenistan, for example, the Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in jail, while the famous Burmese comedian Zarganar still has 34 years left on his prison sentence. These are but a few examples.

The list of approximately 120 victims of Internet censorship in 2009 also includes leading figures in the defense of online free speech, such as China’s Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo, and Vietnam’s Nguyen Trung and Dieu Cay.

People are usually targeted because they speak out on political matters, but the global financial crisis is also on the list of subjects likely to provoke online censorship. In South Korea, a blogger was wrongfully detained for commenting on the country’s disastrous economic situation. Roughly six people in Thailand were arrested or harassed just for making a connection between the king’s health and a fall in the Bangkok stock exchange. Censorship was slapped on media in Dubai when it came time for them to report on the country’s debt repayment problems.

Overall, wars and elections constituted the chief threats to journalists and bloggers in 2009. It is becoming more risky to cover wars because journalists themselves are being targeted for murder and kidnappings. It’s also just as dangerous for reporters in some countries to do their job at election time. Journalists have ended up in prison or in a hospital thanks to their election reporting. Violence before and after elections was particularly prevalent in 2009 inside countries with poor democratic credentials.

Iran Election Crackdown

Iran saw the most violence, censorship and arrests due to an election. Its elections this past summer saw more than 100 arrests, and many prison sentences handed down. The country, which is on the Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet,” has also deployed a sophisticated system of Internet filtering and monitoring, especially in recent months. The country’s main ISPs depend on the Telecommunication Company of Iran, which recently came under control of the Revolutionary Guard, and does not hesitate to flout international treaties or to restrict the free flow of information.

Within hours of the announcement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad’s election “victory,” journalists were being arrested by the intelligence ministry, Revolutionary Guard, and other security services. Most were taken to Tehran’s Evin prison. At least 100 journalists and bloggers have been arrested since June, and 27 are still being held. Today, Iran is one of the world’s five biggest imprisoners of journalists.

Since the election, national and international media in Iran have been subject to massive and systematic censorship that is without precedent. For the first time since the 1979 revolution, the security services are vetting the content of newspapers before they’re published.

The Iranian regime’s offensive against online free expression took a new direction in December after Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi announced he was going to prosecute two conservative websites for “insulting” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, several Internet service providers cut access to prevent political opponents from disseminating information during opposition demonstrations on December 27. After the demonstrations, the intelligence ministry and Revolutionary Guard began rounding up government opponents and journalists, arresting an estimated 20 people in the latest wave. Those targeted included a dozen or so journalists and cyber-dissidents. Alireza Behshtipour Shirazi, the editor of Kaleme.org (opposition leader Mirhossein Moussavi’s official website), was arrested at his Tehran home and taken to an unknown place of detention.

Trouble in Democratic Countries

Democratic countries have also enacted online censorship. Several European nations are working on new steps to control the Internet in what they say is a campaign against child porn and illegal downloads. Australia is also planning to set up a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced in December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers, the government will introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, pedophilic or particularly violent content.

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, raised concerns, saying, “Moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.” In a Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 Australians, 96 percent strongly opposed a mandatory Internet filtering system.

Yet that proposal — as well as many others around the world — continues to move ahead. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year for free speech online.

The Battle for Press Freedom Moves Online

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | James Buck

From Tibet to Tehran, more and more front-line reporting is being carried out by freelancers and published online. But the revolution in newsgathering—brought about by new technology and the downsizing of traditional media outlets—has a down side. For the first time, half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support.

These are the key findings of a report released Dec. 8 by the Committee To Protect Journalists. The annual census of imprisoned journalists was conducted on Dec. 1 and includes every journalist who was in jail on that day. All told, there are 136 journalists on the list, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.

For the 11th year in a row, China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 24 behind bars. It is followed closely by Iran, where 23 journalists remain in jail, out of dozens rounded up in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 election. Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma round out the top five.

A closer look at the numbers in China reveals just how dramatically the Internet has transformed both newsgathering and the dissemination of critical commentary in repressive societies.

A decade ago, when China first topped the list, most of those jailed were print reporters for mainstream media outlets who had gone too far in their criticism of government officials. The Chinese media are much more open today, but there are still clear limits, and journalists who displease the authorities face consequences. The difference is that they are more likely to be fired than thrown in jail.

But online journalists can’t be fired, blacklisted, or, in most cases, bought off precisely because most work independently. They don’t have employers who can be pressured. Chinese authorities have few options when it comes to reining in online critics—censor them, intimidate them, or throw them in jail. This explains why 18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China worked online.

In Iran, there’s a similar dynamic. The 23 reporters jailed there fall roughly into two camps—those who worked for print media outlets allied with opposition candidates and those who worked independently online. Under the reformist presidency of Mohammed Khatami, 1997-2005, the Tehran intelligentsia famously spent hours in cafes perusing dozens of newspapers and magazines, reformist and conservative. A crackdown on the print media that accelerated under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad closed many newspapers and forced top journalists and commentators online, fueling the rise of the Farsi blogosphere. Today, many of these journalists are in jail or in exile.

Unquestionably, the rise of Web-based reporting provides exciting new opportunities. An adventurous young freelancer can head out to cover the world armed with a laptop and a digital camera. Government critics from Burma to Vietnam are able to circumvent the censors and get their views out to the world.

But the sharp increase in the number of imprisoned online journalists highlights new vulnerabilities. They are utterly alone when authorities knock on the door to take them away. Freelancers face jail without legal assistance or the backing of an employer who can provide support for their families.

Even more alarming is the vulnerability of the Internet itself. The utopian notion that the Internet is impossible to censor or control has given way to a new reality. Even as new formal and informal news organizations emerge on the Web, traditional media—text and broadcast, public and private, partisan and nonpartisan, for-profit and nonprofit—are all converging online. The convergence creates an “information chokepoint” that repressive governments can shut down when a story gets out of control. Whereas governments used to have to close dozens of newspapers and shut down individual radio stations, now they can simply halt the circulation of information by pulling the plug on the Web.

In China, for example, the government shut down the Internet and even the cell phone network when riots broke out in Xinjiang province earlier this year. In Iran, citizen journalists’ reports about the post-election violence were eventually silenced as the mullahs shut down Internet communication and began rounding up critical bloggers. On Saturday, Iranian authorities did it again, shutting down the Internet and the cell system to disrupt planning for student protests held Monday. The shutdown was also intended to limit coverage of the events through the Web and social media sites.

This is why the battle for press freedom around the world has moved online. It’s no longer about keeping the presses running and unblocking the airwaves. Ensuring that people around the world have access to diverse news and information means keeping the Internet free.

In order to defend press freedom in this new environment, press freedom groups like CPJ need to change tactics. Traditional advocacy—protest letters to heads of state, detailed reports chronicling government crackdowns—will continue to be relevant, but there will also be a technological component to our advocacy that involves navigating around firewalls, circumventing censorship, and outflanking government efforts to control the Web. In order to better carry out this kind of advocacy, CPJ is adding a new specialized program dedicated to the defense of online journalists.

But technology has its limits, and the freedom to express ideas and disseminate information through the Internet cannot be taken for granted. Like all freedoms, it must be actively defended. While there are highly effective organizations like the OpenNet Initiative and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, media companies and journalists are just beginning to understand that they have a huge stake in preserving Internet freedom.

Internet and technology companies also need to do more. So far, they have a mixed record. It’s true that people in repressive societies benefit from access to the Internet, but not when companies collaborate in censoring content or exposing government critics, as Yahoo did when it turned over to Chinese authorities information used to arrest journalist Shi Tao in 2004.

Fortunately, these companies are taking steps to address the issue. CPJ is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, an organization of human rights groups, academics, socially responsible investors, and Internet leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These companies have agreed to a set of principles that will help them push back against censorship.

Traditional media companies and Internet service providers have complex commercial arrangements that make them partners in some realms and competitors in others. But they should be natural allies as the battle for press freedom enters this new phase. We need to form a united front to push back against government censorship, confront repressive regimes, blend traditional advocacy with technological innovation, and stand up publicly for journalists of all kinds who seek to report the news online.

Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee To Protect Journalists.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2237675/

Internet Provider Says It Blocks Sites

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Yeowatzup

New fears of Internet censorship spread in the Russian blogosphere Monday after a wireless Internet provider co-owned by Russian Technologies acknowledged blocking access to some web sites.

Moscow-based users of the Yota provider have been unable to access web sites such as Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks, bloggers and the sites’ editors said.

Access also was patchy until Sunday to the site of opposition magazine The New Times, its web editor Ilya Barabanov said Monday.

Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.

“In November, we got an order from prosecutors recommending that we close access to extremist sites,” he said in e-mailed comments. “Since we are a law-abiding firm, we put the order into practice.”

As for users’ lack of access to the opposition web sites, Sverdlov blamed technical difficulties that arose after Yota introduced new IP addresses to cope with the rapid growth of its customer base. “On Oct. 23, we were assigned a bloc of 65,536 IP addresses. After we put them to commercial use, we found that IT managers of some other sites could not exclude them from those IP addresses they filter,” Sverdlov said.

As proof that there was no censorship, he said President Dmitry Medvedev’s official site at Kremlin.ru was at times inaccessible as well.

Kavkaz Center was declared extremist in a 2008 court decision and appears 10 times on the Justice Ministry’s list of more than 450 items classified as extremist. The ministry’s list does not mention any of the opposition sites that have complained of being inaccessible to Yota users.

Critics say the extremism law, which was widened in 2006, is being used to silence the opposition.

It is unclear why, with the exception of Yota, most national providers do not block access to Kavkaz Center.

A representative at Yota’s technical support hot line told the Novy Region news agency on Friday that the company was blocking 29 extremist sites. The unidentified representative said Kasparov.ru was not on the list but the list had been updated a week earlier.

Bloggers, meanwhile, are rattled by an audio file posted online Sunday in which a female voice — purportedly of a Yota support representative — says Kasparov’s and Solidarity’s sites are blocked because they are on that list.

“This strongly smells of political censorship,” said Denis Bilunov, a senior member of Kasparov’s Other Russia movement.

He said the most likely explanation was Russian Technologies’ involvement in the company.

The state-owned arms and industry behemoth bought a blocking stake in Telconet in November 2008.

A spokeswoman said Russian Technologies could not immediately comment on the allegations Monday.

Skartel spokesman Anton Belkov said he would not comment beyond Sverdlov’s statement.

Skartel has been building a network providing high-speed wireless Internet service since last summer and has said it wants to become a nationwide operator covering 180 cities within three years. State corporation Russian Technologies holds a 25.1 percent blocking stake in Skartel’s parent company, Telconet.

The Internet has been called the country’s last bastion of free speech after the state brought most national television channels and influential print media under its control over the past decade. Fears of a crackdown were raised last month after a video address by police officer Alexei Dymovsky lambasting corruption unleashed a string of copycat whistle-blowers airing their complaints online. Also last month, top search engine Yandex stopped ranking popular blog posts after several entries exposed problems that embarrassed government officials.

Obama praises dissident Cuban blogger Sanchez

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | AndreDeak

By Jeff Franks| Reuters | Thursday, November 19, 2009

HAVANA (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama praised dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez and said in a posting on her website on Thursday that he looks forward to the day “all Cubans can freely express themselves.”

The U.S. leader, in responses to questions on Sanchez’s “Generation Y” site, also repeated his desire to improve U.S.-Cuba relations, saying he wants “direct diplomacy” with Cuba and could visit the Communist-ruled island.

“The United States has no intention of using military force in Cuba,” Obama wrote in a reply. “Only the Cuban people can bring about positive change in Cuba and it is our hope that they will soon be able to exercise their full potential.”

Obama’s comments broke no new ground on U.S. policy toward Cuba. Relations between Washington and Havana soured after Fidel Castro came to power in a 1959 revolution and were further strained when he pushed Cuba toward the Soviet bloc.

The United States maintains a 47-year-old trade embargo on the Caribbean nation.

But the unusual written exchange — Sanchez wrote that she sent questions to Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro — added to the blogger’s international stature as a leading dissident voice in Cuba.

“Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely,” Obama wrote.

“The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals,” he said.

A spokesman for the White House National Security Council confirmed that Obama had written Sanchez.

Raul Castro, however, has not responded, according to Sanchez, 34, who has won several international awards and was named by Time Magazine last year as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

She is among a growing group of young Cubans who have taken to the Internet to express their desire for change in Cuba.

DAILY HARDSHIPS

Her blog often describes the hardships of life in Cuba and criticizes the repression of dissent by the government, which has made clear its distaste for her. Havana views dissidents as mercenaries working for the United States and other countries.

Sanchez said two weeks ago that she was detained and roughed up by state security agents in what she believes was a Cuban government message to quiet her criticism.

The Cuban government has said nothing about the incident, but the U.S. State Department said it expressed its “deep concern” to Havana. Obama did not mention it in his reply.

Obama pointed out to Sanchez what he said were steps to improve relations with Cuba, including an easing of the trade embargo and the initiation of talks on migration and postal service.

But he has said further normalization of relations depends on Cuba making progress on human rights and releasing political prisoners.

Raul Castro, who replaced ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, has said Cuba is willing to talk to the United States about anything, but that it will make no unilateral concessions to its long-time enemy.

“I have said that it is time to pursue direct diplomacy without preconditions, with friends and foe alike. I am not interested, however, in talking for the sake of talking,” Obama told Sanchez.

Asked if he would be willing to travel to Cuba, Obama said, “I would never rule out a course of action that could advance the interests of the United States and advance the cause of freedom for the Cuban people,” he said.

Sanchez has a larger international audience but is little known in Cuba where Internet access is limited.

She asked Obama whether the U.S. trade embargo was to blame for Cuba’s lack of Internet, to which he pointed out that he had lifted restrictions on U.S. telecommunications companies that want to offer service there.

“These are small steps but an important part of a process to move U.S.-Cuban relations in a new and more positive direction,” he said of his policy.

“Achieving a more normal relationship, however, will require action by the Cuban government.”

(The website is http://www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/)

(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Jane Sutton and Paul Simao)

Toronto’s Citizen Lab uses forensics to fight online censors

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Hank Ashby

by Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director, CPJ

from CPJ’s Blog

A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

“We are testing in 71 countries,” says Deibert, who shares his data with Berkman. “We are testing all the time. We are the technical hub of ONI.”

“We started out in 2002 with China,” said Jillian York, project coordinator for Berkman. “The work evolved, and then with Cuba we cracked it.” By 2006, ONI had expanded its dragnet for blocked or filtered content to more than 40 countries. However, as Citizen Lab and Berkman gained expertise and resources so did the censors they battled.

“We are now onto third-generation controls,” York said of Internet censorship. “The first generation was simple filtering, IP blocking in China, for example.” The second generation was surveillance, which ranged from placing spies or closed-circuit cameras in Internet cafés to installing tracking software on computers themselves. “The third generation controls combine all the above. We see it in China, Syria, and Burma. It’s a very broad approach,” York laments.

ONI’s research and public awareness-raising provides just one weapon in the increasingly sophisticated armory that bloggers need to deploy against government encroachment. Some free-speech campaigners engage across a wide battlefront, taking on authorities in Tunisia or Pakistan, for example, to keep blogging and video platforms open. Others, like Deibert, devise tools for an individual user to tunnel beneath a firewall or slip past a digital spy undetected. He helped develop Psiphon, a free, open source application that channels data through a network of proxies to circumvent censorship. “Anyone can use it. It’s fast and there’s nothing to download onto your computer for the Internet police to find,” said Deibert.

It’s a game of digital cat-and-mouse with authorities hunting down circumvention nodes, and Psiphon switching to an alternate as soon as a node is compromised. Citizen Lab launched Psiphon in December 2006 but did not have the resources to develop it further. So in May this year, Deibert and another ONI founder, Rafal Rohozinski, spun it off as a commercial enterprise. It is still free to users but charges companies to deliver their blocked content. Clients so far include the BBC and the U.S. government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to Psiphon and other circumvention tools like Tor, spreading node connection information among bloggers and journalists. This was evident during the media crackdown in Iran that followed the disputed June presidential elections, when Twitter proved difficult to shut down.

Much of the light in Deibert’s Toronto basement may come from rows of LCD screens but unmasking digital spies is not all about electronic wizardry. “With ONI, we are testing all the time but we are not just a technical operation. The technology is not as important as the cultural information,” says Deibert, sounding like an old-school Le Carré character who stresses “human intelligence” over gadgetry. Reporting by volunteers on the ground in repressive countries provides vital information and context for monitors to analyze censorship developments and anticipate blocking strategies.

Berkman has expanded the reporting network through a crowd-sourcing tool called Herdict, which allows individuals to report a blocked Web site immediately.

“This is a constant struggle—the threat environment is always morphing,” according to Deibert. And the threats don’t just come from governments. Defenders of free expression and user privacy are increasingly concerned about the potential dangers of “cloud computing,” in which vast stores of personal data are held remotely by private companies both in democracies and repressive states. “Some of the biggest threats are from private companies. Cyberspace is largely owned and operated by private companies. Data is sent into a cloud over which we have no control,” Deibert says. The potential for such abuse is heightened in repressive states. An example of the dangers for the Citizen Lab team was TOM-Skype, the Chinese version of Skype. Citizen Lab uncovered a huge privacy breach where supposedly secure data were being stored secretly on servers in China.

Another case that Diebert says should concern us was in July this year when BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates were directed by text messages from their service provider Etisalat, which is majority owned by the UAE government to a link to upgrade their phones. The software they downloaded, however, turned out to be spyware. BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion Ltd of Canada, denied involvement and showed customers how to remove the software.

Deibert cautions online journalists in these days of increased third-party hosting to pay attention to corporate as well as government surveillance, and to read the fine print of terms-of-use agreements with ISPs and others before checking the sign-up box for an e-mail account or blog hosting platform.

“We need to lift the lid on the Internet. Where are the servers, where does your e-mail go, where is the Internet exchange point located, who has access to the building?” he asked.

Every day journalists and bloggers are reminded of the need to fight for their freedoms. Censorship and surveillance are slippery slopes. Take Pakistan. In February 2006, in its first case of Internet censorship, Islamabad decided to shield its populace from cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The Pakistan Communications Authority blocked 12 Web sites that reproduced the offending caricatures. By April of that year the authority was censoring five other Web sites saying they had published “misleading information”. In July, 30 more Web sites were blocked, nearly all of them associated with the movement advocating independence for the province of Baluchistan.

This censorship creep is an established phenomenon in Asia and the Middle East. But now it is spreading to Africa, where Internet use is still relatively low. Sub-Saharan African governments that have hobbled their own broadcast and print media have watched the celebrity-censors of other continents like China, Cuba and Iran and have drawn the inevitable conclusion: Online journalism is the future, so control it now.

“Ethiopia is going to be a test case,” says the Berkman Center’s York. “Internet penetration is low, yet platforms like Blogspot are blocked.”

When you talk to people at organizations such as ONI, one thing quickly becomes clear: They don’t know who is going to win the war for control of cyberspace. Circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon are tactical weapons. A strategic response requires unrelenting campaigning and public education to raise the economic, political and social costs of censorship and surveillance for governments and private companies.

Meanwhile, Citizen Lab keeps doing what it does best; “We combine the technology with human intelligence, then turn them around to watch the watchers,” Deibert said.

CIA Gains Technology to Monitor Social Media Buzz

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Graham

Online Media Daily | Laurie Sullivan | October 19, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arab Winds of Change

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | FaceMePLS

Guardian | Brian Whitaker | October 22, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using the Internet to Empower Women in Yemen

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Rising Voices | EWAMT Workshop

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

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

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

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

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

Iranian Journalists Flee, Fearing Retribution for Covering Protests

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Faramarz

by Nazila Fathi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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