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.” 

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.

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.

___

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.

Egypt’s Web, Mobile Communications Severed

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Divine Harvester

By Shereen El Gazzar, Lilly Vitorovich, and Ruth Bender | The Wall Street Journal | January 28, 2011

The Egyptian government’s crackdown on protestors intensified Friday with access to most forms of mass communication, including the Internet, mobile and SMS down, even as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that “freedom of expression should be fully respected.”

Government-owned Telecom Egypt runs the country’s fixed-line network. Attempts to connect to the websites of several Egyptian ISPs, including EgyptWeb, TeData and Purenet all failed.

U.K.-headquartered Vodafone Group PLC said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been “instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.” It said the Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said in comments to a Davos session on mobile devices that “Egyptian authorities” had asked the company to “turn down the network totally.”

Mr. Colao said Vodafone determined that the request was legitimate under Egyptian law, and therefore complied with the request. “I hope” the decision will be reversed by Egypt “very soon,” Mr. Colao said.

In a blog, U.S.-based Internet intelligence firm Renesys recorded how late Thursday it saw “the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table,” in what it called “an action unprecedented in Internet history.”

It contrasted the scale of the crackdown with the “modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up,” but download times were slowed.

During the rallies in Iran in 2009, one account from a person in the capital, Tehran, said it took 20 minutes to download Yahoo’s website and that landlines, satellite phones and SMS were all disrupted.

And in 2007, security forces in Myanmar cracked down on communications following monk-led protests against the regime there, disabling some mobile phones and closing some service providers, but images of the clampdown continued to be relayed out of the country via cellphones. More than 110,000 people joined the Support the Monk’s Protest in Burma group on Facebook. Facebook and Twitter weren’t immediately available to comment on what is happening in Egypt.

France Telecom also confirmed that the Egyptian authorities had taken “measures to block mobile phone services,” and apologized to Mobinil customers, adding it had no information about when service would be restored.

All attempts to reach other mobile and Internet operators in the country were unsuccessful either because offices were closed due to the weekend or because mobile numbers weren’t working.

“From my knowledge of the region, I suspect the Egyptian government controls the main ISP in the country and would thus be able to decouple the main backbone in Egypt from the rest of the Internet,” said Sean Sullivan, security adviser at Finnish IT security firm F-Secure. Mr. Sullivan drew parallels with Syria, where the government also has full control of the Internet backbone and can therefore shut down the network if it wishes.

According to Egypt’s National Telecom Regulatory Authority, or NTRA, mobile subscribers in the country reached 53.43 million by the end of the third quarter of 2010, the latest figures available.

Earlier this week, blogs and social networks were full of calls to take to the streets to bring down the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s Interior Ministry had warned it would take decisive measures against the protestors in the Arab world’s most populous nation, after organizers said demonstrations set to take place after noon prayers Friday would be the biggest in decades.

The protests in Egypt come after the 25-year regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in Tunisia, sparking shockwaves across the Arab world.

—Alan Murray in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this article.

How Egypt Killed the Internet

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Syd Daoust

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries | WSJ Blogs | January 28, 2011

UPDATE: This post has been updated with more detailed information on the timing of the shutdown.

How do you turn off the Internet in an entire country?

Egypt severed mobile and Web communications late Thursday, the Journal reported.

Mr. Cowie said in an interview with Digits that he isn’t privy to how Egypt actually shut down the Web but outlined a scenario based on his “knowledge of how the Internet is structured.”

“People have talked about a ‘kill switch’” that would link to every router and be able to shut each one off from a central location, “but that is not realistic,” he said. “What is most likely is that somebody in the government gives a phone call to a small number of people and says, ‘Turn it off.’ And then one engineer at each service provider logs into the equipment and changes the configuration of how traffic should flow.”

Mr. Cowie said a detailed look at the traffic shows that Egypt’s Internet providers started shutting down their networks at about midnight Cairo time. Rather than turning off all at once, they each initiated the process separately, starting with Telecom Egypt at 12 minutes and 43 seconds after midnight. Raya started the process about a minute later, and the other networks followed at intervals of two to six minutes. This could lend credence to the theory that a decision to shut down was made around midnight and each operator was notified in succession and began the process shortly thereafter.

In many countries, including Egypt, the Internet involves a few large providers that sell service to smaller providers. The large providers — of which there are a handful in Egypt — pay money to international carriers to transmit internet data over undersea cables. Ordinarily, the large providers announce via computer code that they will accept and send transmissions. But late Thursday, the code at most providers simply switched to stop allowing that — thus blocking communications altogether.

About 3,500 of these “border gateway protocol” routes were withdrawn, Renesys reported. BGPmon, which also monitors such traffic, said more than 88% of Egyptian networks were unreachable as of early Friday morning, Egyptian time. As of Friday evening, Renesys reported that 93% were offline.

And what about the small number of Egyptian networks that are still transmitting? One major network appears to have been entirely unaffected: Noor Group. It’s unclear why this provider didn’t go silent, but Mr. Cowie pointed out that it has one of the Internet protocol (IP) addresses for the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com). “Apparently they didn’t get the call, or if they got the call, they didn’t listen to it,” he said.

So could this sort of shutdown happen in the U.S.? Mr. Cowie said it’s unlikely, and not just because of the legal issues involved. Egypt’s Internet ecosystem is small enough that a few phone calls could shut it down, but that’s not the case in the U.S. “To say the least it would be very implausible,” Mr. Cowie said. “You’d have to make far too many phone calls, and most of those people would ignore you.”

Tunisia’s Bitter Cyberwar

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Ricardo Leal

by Yasmine Ryan | Al Jazeera | January 6, 2011

Thousands of Tunisians have taken to the streets in recent weeks to call for extensive economic and social change in their country.

Among the fundamental changes the protesters have been demanding is an end to the government’s repressive online censorship regime and freedom of expression.

That battle is taking place not just on the country’s streets, but in internet forums, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

The Tunisian authorities have allegedly carried out targeted “phishing” operations: stealing users passwords to spy on them and eradicate online criticism. Websites on both sides have been hacked.

Anonymous, the loosely-knit group of international web activists that drew world attention for their “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks on the servers of companies that blocked payments and server access to the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks, joined the fray, in solidarity with the Tunisian uprising.

Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven’t generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.

Killing dissent

The attacks against some of the most vocal voices in the Tunisian cyber-community were sharp and swift.

Sofiene Chourabi, a journalist for Al-Tariq al-Jadid magazine and blogger known for his unabashed criticism of the Tunisian authorities, has been unable to recover his email and Facebook accounts after they were hijacked several days ago.

The first attempted hijacking of his Facebook account happened last week.

“My personal account on the Facebook, including around 4200 friends, was exposed to failed hacking attempt last Friday, but I quickly recovered it after an unidentified person had taken control of it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Then, on Monday, Chourabi was locked out of his Facebook and Gmail accounts.

Chourabi says he believes the Tunisian Internet Agency is responsible for hijacking his accounts. The agency has blocked access to his Facebook wall since October 2009, and his blogs are also unreachable from within Tunisia.

Several of his friends have contacted Facebook and Google asking for his accounts to be returned, to no avail. 

“I think it is high time for Facebook and Google to take serious steps to protect Tunisian activists and journalists,” he said in an interview via email, using a new account.

Facebook is working to ensure it can respond to all its users, Stefano Hesse, Facebook’s head of communications for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Al Jazeera.

“One thing needs to be clear: we, as Facebook, are not censoring any content, and we had not been approached by the local government in order to do anything regarding anyone,” Hesse said via email.

Google did not respond to requests for comment from Al Jazeera.

Lina Ben Mhenni also had her Facebook page and Yahoo email account pirated, although she managed to retain control of her blog.

She told Al Jazeera that, as of Wednesday, web users in Tunisia were unable to change their passwords for Facebook.

Another activist who was caught in the phishing campaign is a Tunis-based man, who goes by the name of Azyz Amamy in the online world.
 
Amamy told Al Jazeera in a phone interview that his Facebook and email accounts had been hijacked on Monday. Amamy was able to recover both accounts within two hours, after Facebook and Gmail responded to his request. The difference is that he had retained control of a separate email account with which he had registered both accounts.

Two hours was enough time for the authorities to get the login information for his four blogs from his email accounts, deleting all the content.

“When they took Lina [Ben Mhenni]‘s account, and Sofiene Chourabi’s, within an hour all the Facebook pages they administrated had disappeared. And then their accounts were deleted,” Amamy explained.

The speed of the phishing operation, hitting several high-profile targets in a single day, demonstrated that it was exceptionally sophisticated, he said.

As well as Chourabi, Amamy and Ben Mhenni, those known to have been targeted include Med Salah M’Barek and Haythem El Mekki. 

Amamy suspects the phishing operation was far-reaching and that many more were hit, but are too scared to go public.

Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.

‘Phishing’ for dissent

The phishing was carried out by a malware code, several sources told Al Jazeera.

Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia’s web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique.

The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol.

The government’s internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals’ usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations.
 
“The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer,” a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview.

The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for firefox internet browsers that deactivated the government’s malicious code.

The script had been installed 1,669 times at the time of writing.

“It isn’t like China and Gmail several months ago, where China attacked Gmail,” the web professional said in an email, referring to last year’s incident when Chinese hackers allegedly broke in the accounts of Chinese dissidents.

“This is much more intelligent (and I’m proud of this intelligence!). It’s the communication with Gmail [and the other sites] that is intercepted,” he said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign was organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.

Unexpected allies

Tunisian web activists found an ally in Anonymous, whose international activists have turned their attention to overthrowing the Tunisian regime of web censorship.

The group’s DDoS attacks, which began on Sunday night, local time, succeeded in taking at least eight websites, including those for the president, prime minister, the ministry of industry, the ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange.

The web site of the government internet agency – known by Tunisian web dissidents ironically as “Ammar 404″, or “Page not found” for its oversight of censorship operations - was also targeted.

In email correspondence with Al Jazeera, one Anonymous activist described the group as a “hive mind,” centred on collective, rather than individual, identity. 

The activists, who prefer to go unnamed, co-ordinate their operations through discussions held in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks, a type of online discussion forum.

Al Jazeera discussed “OpTunisia” with a group of the online activists on Tuesday. The operation began when one Anon spent last weekend “spamming” the forum, drawing support from activists around the world.

The Tunisian government first drew the Anons’ ire, they say, when it extended its pervasive filtering to WikiLeaks.

“The thing that did it for us, was initially their censoring of WikiLeaks, when WikiLeaks reports on .tn came out,” one participant in the forum wrote in response to questions from Al Jazeera, referring the Tunisia-based website that had been set up to host the WikiLeaks memos.

With their collective gaze turned to Tunisia, the Anons came into contact with Tunisian web activists.

“We did initially take an interest in Tunisia because of WikiLeaks, but as more Tunisians have joined they care more about the general internet censorship there, so that’s what it has become,” another Anon said.

It is hard to generalise the Anons’ diverse range of motivations and ever-changing targets, but most appear to share an outrage over the Tunisian government’s censorship and phishing activities, and a sense of solidarity with Tunisian web users.

Attacking government-linked websites is much more dangerous for those living within Tunisia, they noted, who risk arrest if they are identitied by the authorities.

“Although many Tunisians understandably do not feel comfortable participating in this operation out of precaution, I estimate there [were] about 50 Tunisians participating, to whom we provide the means and knowledge to properly secure their online behaviour from exposure to their government,” one Anon activist wrote via email.

Ben Gharbia says he accessed IRC to observe the discussions, and that there were some people chatting in Tunisian dialect.

By Tuesday, the government appeared to have taken steps to protect its websites from attack by making them inaccessible from overseas. The same sites were available within Tunisia.

On Wednesday, Anonfymous informed Al Jazeera that its own site was under DDoS attack. Anonymous was continuing its DDoS attacks on Thursday, and is likely to move on to another target now that momentum has gathered.

“We, as Anonymous, feel we have accomplished our mission with the major media now involved in Tunisia.  We will keep DDoS’ing that DNS server probably until after the [Thursday's] strike,” wrote the source by email.

Government hacking, en masse

This is hardly the first time Tunisian censors have phished for dissidents’ private information, nor is its censorship anything new.

Most popular video-sharing websites have been blocked for years now. Facebook was completely blocked in 2008.

Tunisia no longer blocks the entire Facebook platform, and is one of the main ways people are able to share video.

Individual Facebook pages are quickly censored, however, often within an hour of going online, Ben Gharbia said.

“Once they identify a link that needs to be blocked, they block it instantly,” he said.

In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites.

Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the “killing” of the Tunisian blogosphere. 

Ben Mhenni said that the government’s biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites.

She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored.

Amamy said the government’s approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling.

“Here we don’t really have internet, we have a national intranet,” he said.

You can follow Yasmine on Twitter @yasmineryan

Updates:  Azyz Amamy was arrested on Thursday, sources in Tunisia told Al Jazeera. Another web activist, Slim Amamou was also taken by the authorities.

Amamy’s last Tweet prior to his arrest was published on Thursday morning, as was Amamou’s. (6 Jan 2011 21:03 GMT)

Will ‘Porn-Lock’ in UK and France Lead to Internet Censorship?

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Miroslav Petrasko

by Dana Kennedy | AolNews | December 20, 2010

Ed Vaizey, Britain’s communications minister, told the Sunday Times the government is considering a plan to restrict pornography websites to protect children from seeing them.

“This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that some up with solutions to protect children,” Vaizey said.

Vaizey plans to meet with the country’s Internet service providers soon about a proposal that would mean blocking porn sites so children wouldn’t be exposed to them rather than relying on existing parental controls. Customers would have to “opt-in” if they wanted access to pornography sites.

“I’m hoping they will get their acts together so that we don’t have to legislate,” Vaizey said. “But we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years.”

Opponents of the measures say the government is using legitimate concerns over kiddie porn and the early sexualization of children who access adult porn online as a way to gain control of the Web. Britain has already had success with measures designed to block kiddie-porn sites.

“It’s like they want to play God on the Internet,” Gilles Lordet, the Paris-based chief editor of Reporters Without Borders, told AOL News today.

“Nobody wants to be seen as fighting an attempt to cut down on kiddie porn or on children watching porn online. But it’s a very slippery slope to more censorship. We know that in a lot of undemocratic countries they start with censoring porn and they move on to other sites,” Lordet said.

Last week, France’s National Assembly passed a bill that is part of the controversial LOPPSI 2 — a law on guidelines and programming for the performance of internal security — allowing the government to filter the Internet without any judicial oversight.

The bill, expected to be approved by the Senate and become law next year, is designed so that the Ministry of the Interior can draw up a blacklist of kiddie-porn sites and tell the ISPs to block them.

Some ISPs in the U.S. reached a more open agreement in 2008 with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers of child-porn-related newsgroups as well as kiddie-porn websites identified by a regularly updated registry.

But critics of the French bill worry that giving the government unfettered power in making a blacklist could mean increased blocking of other undesirable sites.

“If you can suppress any content on the Internet you can suppress it all,” John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told AOL News today. “What these laws will do is requires ISPs to become censorious.”

During a parliamentary debate last month in the U.K., Claire Perry, a Conservative MP who wants stricter Internet controls, said that 60 percent of 9- to 19-year-olds had watched porn online, calling the Web “the Wild West.” Perry also said that only 15 percent of computer-literate parents knew how to use filters to block access to certain sites, the Guardian reported today.

Such statistics are hard to argue with, but experts say the larger picture is more complicated.

“Anytime you see countries move in the same way restricting access to information, it may be with the best of intentions,” said Erik Sherman, a BNET analyst. “But suddenly it becomes about other things. And look clearly at the U.K.’s plan to let people ‘opt-in’ for porn sites. Opting in is a way to register people. Think about that.”

New Rules to Rein in the Internet in Venezuela

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | nadiobolis

By Humberto Marquez | Inter Press Service | December 16, 2010

CARACAS — Controversy has flared up in Venezuela over planned reforms to the law on online media, especially because restrictions that already apply to the content of radio and television broadcasts would be extended to the internet. Portals and networks that transmit messages deemed to be illegal may face heavy fines, or even be shut down.

The single-chamber legislature, made up of over 90 percent pro-government lawmakers, approved the first reading of an amendment to the 2005 Social Responsibility in Radio and Television Law (Ley RESORTE), extending its provisions to electronic media.

Under the proposed amendments, radio, TV or internet messages that “could incite crimes against the president”, “could stir up unrest or disturb public order”, “defy the legitimately installed authorities,” or that promote law- breaking, war, hate or political, religious, racial, gender or xenophobic intolerance, will be actionable.

The reform bill is likely to be adopted at its second reading this week, along with other draft laws speeding through Congress in a race against time. Emergency sessions are being held this month at all hours, before the newly elected Congress takes office Jan. 5, with a strong opposition that is still in the minority, but will be vocal.

“No one need be afraid,” said the chairman of the congressional Media Committee, Manuel Villalba. “The reforms are to protect citizens against problems like pornography and paedophilia. There are those in the internet world who use technology to give free rein to the baser instincts, so the state must protect the general public.”

That is why “we are extending the Ley RESORTE to online media. If a blogger posts a message inciting murder, he or she must be held accountable, as well as the person administering the web page, because they ought to use the portal responsibly,” said Villalba, of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

According to Reporters Without Borders, “the original version of the Ley RESORTE already encourages media self- censorship by defining offences in a very general and convoluted manner that is open to all kinds of interpretation. The new version develops this flaw to the point of caricature.”

Carlos Correa, the head of Espacio Público, an NGO that works for media freedom, told IPS that “stretching audiovisual media regulations to cover the internet is not compatible with international standards, and puts enormous discretionary powers in state hands. Furthermore, this reform bill affects substantive rights and should be widely discussed in society, instead of being rushed through Congress.”

The proposed amendment establishes the social responsibility of those who provide television, radio and internet services, and will affect all text, images, sound or content sent or received in Venezuela, including the content of advertising spots or material broadcast by independent producers that use their air time.  Internet providers are required to have mechanisms in place to restrict messages and access to websites that break laws, to be used at the request of the telecommunications regulator.

Meanwhile, there is a proposal to reform the Telecommunications Law, enacted in 2000 during President Hugo Chávez’s first term of office (he has been in power since 1999), which is ready for debate in Congress, and would require all radio and television operators to renew their licences.  Controls are to be stiffened and penalties will be more severe, ranging from mandatory airing of educational messages, to definitive closure and revocation of broadcasting licences.

The opposition bloc, private media critical of the government, journalists’ associations and Catholic Church leaders have criticised the tightening of state control and the penalties envisaged by the reforms.

“Who could be against protecting children and adolescents from harmful messages? No one is suggesting limiting access to the internet; the aim is to establish mechanisms to ensure it is used properly. This is a global debate,” said PSUV lawmaker and journalist Desirée Santos when she presented the new Ley RESORTE in Congress.

But in the view of critics like Correa, “the praiseworthy goal of protecting children and adolescents should not lead to measures that progressively reduce public access to communications and limit the variety of options to choose from.

“Penalties are being applied to content, even though the criminal code already provides for punishment for the same crimes, for instance for offences against public officials. Yet on the other hand, there are no measures to protect citizens from being bombarded by such officials in the media,” said Correa.

Early drafts of the reform bill, circulated among lawmakers over the past three days, set off alarm bells because they were even more restrictive than the draft finally presented to Congress for deliberation.

For example, earlier proposals called for the creation of a government-run internet hub to manage all traffic transmitted from and received in Venezuela; a ban on radio repeater services which would eliminate sports and news broadcasts on private national relays; and a ban on expanding coverage to the whole of Venezuela, by subscription viewing, of television channels licensed for a single city.

The United Nations rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, said he regretted the tenor of the reform bills before the Venezuelan Congress because, in his view, internet regulation should be kept to a minimum, in order to preserve its freedom.

Similar problems “arise when China bans on-line reports on the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo, or when the United States wishes to suppress Wikileaks. There is a failure to understand that criticism may be embarrassing, but this does not turn it into a security problem,” La Rue said.

In the same vein, Luis Pardo Sáinz, head of the International Radio Broadcasting Association (AIR), complained that “Venezuela is showing a lack of democratic will: instead of trying to silence dissident voices, it should encourage more and more of them, whether they are fair or not.”

Lebanese Bloggers Seek Freedom in Virtual World

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Don Toye

Al Arabiya | December 15, 2010

DUBAI — The political and sectarian unrest from which Lebanon has been suffering for a long time initiated an atmosphere of media bias where most TV channels and newspapers promote the ideologies of one group or another.

In came bloggers to break this pattern and establish a free medium of their own.

Within a short time, the number of Lebanese bloggers reached 400, all enjoying the freedom of expression offered by the internet. Despite the relative freedom of expression for which Lebanese media is generally known, several bloggers noted that owners of TV channels tend to restrict speakers in their shows in accordance with their political or religious affiliations.  While expressing their opinions freely, Lebanese bloggers exercise some kind of self-censorship to avoid becoming victims of clampdowns that targeted several of their fellow writers, especially that they usually write about sensitive political issues.

Four bloggers were arrested and briefly detained after launching a Facebook page that criticizes Lebanese President Michel Suleiman. This incident led many bloggers to be cautious over the content of their blogs of fear they might be tracked down and interrogated or arrested.

Lebanese blogger Engy Nassar views objectivity as the best way to strike a balance between freedom of expression and self-censorship.

“In my blog, I try to be objective while always emphasizing that any political entity in Lebanon is liable to criticism,” she said. “I also refuse to promote the ideologies of a certain religion or party or to criticize for the sake of criticism.”

Lebanese blogs reflect political divisions and their content is usually determined by the political scene and the latest events.  More than 900,000, one quarter the population in Lebanon, have accounts on the social networking website on Facebook and as inhabitants of the virtual world increase by the minute, the emergence of more blogs is expected in the coming years.