Arab Spring– and the Long Winter Ahead

By Nicole

Flickr Creative Commons| chris.corwin|

By Alison Craiglow Hockenberry| Huffington Post |August 16, 2011|

For all the debate about whether this is the year of the Twitter revolution and the Facebook riots, the much more interesting question is: What is not happening on the giant social media websites of the world?

The answer is: A lot.

About two billion people have been touched by the Internet revolution. The connections they have made, information they have exchanged, and actions they have taken are undeniably revolutionary and immeasurably profound. But Facebook and Twitter, for all their power to speed a new era of openness, can’t do it all.

While we celebrate the fact that two billion people now have access to the Internet’s opportunities for speaking out, five billion others are still waiting for their chance to be heard.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are countries with regimes every bit as repressive as those we hear about daily in the Middle East, in which Internet penetration is only about one percent.

This dismal rate is due to many factors, including the lack of cable and electrical infrastructure, a prohibitively-high cost of service, language barriers, and illiteracy. The region’s more readily-available mobile phones allow some information access, but sharing one’s own views and interacting over social media is not practical on a non-smart phone and in places where languages are not digitized.

Globally, there is another group without a strong enough voice: women. In much of the world where home Internet connections are prohibitively expensive, Internet communication happens mostly in cyber cafes. In regions where women are not allowed or not comfortable going to these public gathering places, it’s mostly men doing the blogging. This is a vastly unbalanced situation.

“If we want a world that is more just and more representative and involves more perspectives and more voices, and has more fairness for more people, then let’s build it,” said Ethan Zuckerman, who was recently named director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media. The big question is, he said, “How do we get our technologies to do what we want them to?”

In Afghanistan, for example, the Jalalabad-based FabLab develops locally-designed tech solutions from start to finish that address communications challenges specific to the country. Among other things, the organization aims to keep information flowing across Afghanistan despite sketchy infrastructure and a fluid political and security situation. FabLab is an initiative of MIT; there are FabLab workshops around the world.

Mizzima News Agency trains the passionate storytellers of Burma’s emerging democracy to create engaging, well-crafted narratives out of their citizen journalist impulses. Mizzima recognizes that in a country long under the grip of censorship, factual, compelling journalism of the kind that can engage citizens and hold the government accountable is a skill that needs to be developed. Citizen media cannot be the only source of checks and balances.

FreedomBox aims to confront the privacy risks associated with communicating over huge, easily-tapped networks by building simple, low-wattage devices that put privacy controls squarely in the hands of users. “We integrate privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy,” explained James Vasile, FreedomBox counsel. “Data stays in your home and can’t be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs, or even gossipy neighbors.”

Mizzima, FreedomBox, and many other brilliant ideas can be found among the entrants in Citizen Media, a Google-sponsored online competition with Ashoka Changemakers. The global competition welcomes innovations that “catalyze full information citizenship… to engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society.”

The competition seeks not only tools for increasing access to information and avenues for expression, but also to solve other challenges of a more open world, including: How to figure out what sources to trust, how to get other people to care about a story, how to share ideas efficiently and effectively and ensure people’s exposure to a diversity of opinion, and how to sift through the ever-growing supply of information.

These grass roots approaches may be the key to opening access to free expression to more and more people — especially those in the “Long Tail” — in rural and marginalized communities. The solutions may overcome the challenges of infrastructure requirements, expense, and cultural barriers that have left people totally unconnected, especially in places where the profit-potential hasn’t been attractive to investors.

“Free expression is a universal value,” said Jillian York, director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A universal value that’s not nearly yet experienced universally. You can help change that. If you have or know of a solution for creating a more engaged global citizenry through boosting media access, you have until September 14 to enter and vie for $5,000 and a chance to become an Ashoka Fellow, part of the world’s leading network of systems-changing social entrepreneurs.

Ebay, Yahoo, Google, Nokia and Skype launch Asia Internet Coalition

By Nicole

By Emily Tan | Campaign Asia | June 14, 2011 |

Flickr Creative Commons | Nicola Corboy

Five major technology players – Ebay, Yahoo, Google, Nokia and Skype – have joined forces to launch a new industry association. The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) aims to promote understanding and resolution of internet policy issues in the Asia-Pacific region.

The coalition, incorporated in October last year but officially launched on 14 June, is led by Dr John Ure, director of the telecommunications research project at Hong Kong University. It seeks engagement with policy makers, the industry and internet users to promote its aims of an open internet.

According to Ure, some of the AIC’s main objectives are to facilitate the development of the digital economy in Asia-Pacific and to provide a forum for information sharing between industry and governments.

“Hong Kong’s internet economy is worth US$12 billion (HK$96 billion) and underscores the importance of a healthy growth in information communications technology,” said Hong Kong Government chief information officer Stephen Mak in his keynote speech at the launch.

The AIC aims to facilitate this growth via regular consultation with the government and industry and also aims to address major policy issues that arise from such rapid growth. Since its incorporation in October last year, the AIC has already prepared position papers and proposals on topics such as internet privacy and copyright laws for Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines.

According to the association’s chairman, Valerie Tan who is also director of government and regulatory affairs, Asia-Pacific, the organisation’s beginnings were largely informal. “It started over drinks about a year ago. It felt natural to form a coalition to represent our beliefs collectively and provide a single voice representing the industry for governments and policy makers to communicate with.”

Membership to the AIC is open to any company with an internet-related business in at least two locations in the Asia-Pacific region and which agrees with the AIC’s constitution.

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)

Google Apologizes for Privacy Breaches

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Jon Delorey

New Zealand Press Association | December 14, 2010

After a slap on the wrist from the Privacy Commissioner, Internet giant Google has apologised to all New Zealanders for secretly collecting information from their wi-fi networks while filming for Street View and has promised to destroy that data.

Commissioner Marie Shroff found that although Google had a legitimate reason for collecting the openly accessible wi-fi information, it failed to properly notify the public about that collection, and the collection was unfair.

Google also breached the Privacy Act when it collected payload information (the content of communications) from unsecured networks, she said.  It had no legitimate reason for that collection, and the collection was seriously intrusive.

Police were asked to see if Google’s actions amounted to a criminal offence when Ms Shroff began her investigation in May, but she said the company had a legitimate reason for collecting data and police would not prosecute.

Google deliberately collected information about the networks, including their names and whether they were secured and signal strength, without telling people.  It also collected information such as emails crossing unsecured wireless networks at the time its street view cars were in range, including data used to determine the approximate location of a wi-fi device that lacked GPS hardware.

“Google has acknowledged that it went about things the wrong way here,” Ms Shroff said today. 

“It failed to tell people that it was collecting the open wi-fi information and what it was going to use it for. This was not good enough.”

Google’s methods of collecting information had prompted an increase in complaints and inquiries to the commissioner.

The 978 complaints in the past financial year were up on 806 the previous year. Inquiries were also up, by 500 to 7151, largely due to Google’s collection of data for its Street View.

In some American states, investigators have looked at prosecuting Google under wiretapping laws and prosecutors have demanded that Google turn over the data to regulators.

Google began driving its street view cars in New Zealand in 2007, to collect images for use in Google maps, but also collected wi-fi network data to improve location-based services for mobile phones.

Today it said it did not want the payload data – information sent over the wi-fi networks – it collected.

“Our collection of payload data was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry, and we’d like to apologise to all New Zealanders,” the company said.

While wi-fi network names and the unique numbers given to a device like a wi-fi router were are publicly broadcast “some people felt we should have been more explicit about what we were collecting,” engineering and research vice president Alan Eustace.

“We should have had greater transparency around our initial collection of publicly broadcast wi-fi network information. We’re sorry for not realising this sooner.”

Ms Shroff said if Google’s privacy practices had been more sound, it would have been far less likely to made mistakes.

“As soon as practicable, Google will delete the payload data that it collected,” she said.

“The apology, undertakings and destruction of the payload information are an appropriate and pragmatic way of resolving the problems.”

Europe Takes Up Debate on Universal Internet Access

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sébastien Bertrand

By Kevin J. O’Brien | New York Times | November 7, 2010

BERLIN — The global debate over how access to the Internet should be determined and paid for has attracted free speech advocates, telephone network operators and big online businesses like Google and Facebook.

This week, arguments over so-called network neutrality move to Brussels, where the European Commission and Parliament are holding a daylong meeting that is expected to draw speakers from industry, government and academia.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission attempted this year to bar operators — telecommunications and cable companies that offer connections to the Internet — from selectively managing the data flowing over their networks to assure that all customers got adequate service.

The commission tried to prohibit their extracting payment from big traffic generators like Google, but the proposal is bogged down in legal challenges. In Europe, the debate is not as far along, but the outcome is equally clouded.

Important signals about the Continent’s approach may come Thursday from Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for telecommunications, who is scheduled to speak at the meeting and must report to the Parliament on the status of net neutrality by the end of the year.

In the absence of new regulation, Europe appears to be on track to give mobile network operators a relatively free hand in managing the data flowing over their networks. That could include the imposition of additional charges on rivals, like the voice-over-Internet service Skype.

Ms. Kroes, in public statements this year, has warned operators not to bar rival services from their mobile networks but has not indicated that she intends to push for tighter regulation that would limit the way operators can manage their data traffic.

Jean-Jacques Sahel, the European director of regulatory affairs at Skype, said Ms. Kroes needed to make sure that the 27 E.U. national regulators — who must establish rules by May 1 defining “reasonable” traffic management practices — take an aggressive approach to ensure that operators do not discriminate against rivals.

In most European markets, Mr. Sahel said, operators are still charging an extra fee, usually €10 to €15 a month, or $14 to $21, for customers wishing to use voice-over-Internet services. “This is a form of economic discrimination,” Mr. Sahel said. “The question is: Where will this stop?”

Ms. Kroes declined to comment through a spokesman, Jonathan Todd.

Network operators say that charging mobile consumers for rival services like Skype is widely accepted and that there has been no evidence of widespread censorship or discrimination that would warrant more regulation.

A Sept. 30 report by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, the European Union’s telecommunications advisory group, seemed to confirm the industry position, concluding that there was no new need for regulation at this point.

The group, which is made up of the bloc’s national telecommunications regulators, said operators in more than a dozen countries — Austria, Croatia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Britain — had either blocked or throttled services like Skype or file-sharing Web sites. In general, using Skype allows callers to avoid paying the operators for local and long-distance calling; file-sharing sites put steep demands on mobile networks.

But most blocking stopped, the report said, after being reported to local media or regulators.

“To date, the survey carried out by Berec shows that incidents remain few and most of them have been solved voluntarily,” the regulators concluded. “These findings imply that there is currently little reason to undertake any new regulatory measures.”

Pierre Louette, the secretary general for the French carriers division of France Télécom, said extra charges to mobile users wishing to use voice-over-Internet services like Skype were accepted by regulators.

“These charges are considered standard industry practice,” Mr. Louette said during an interview. “We basically have to have the ability to generate revenue from our networks or we won’t be able to create the networks of the future.”

Another issue could present access issues, the regulators warned in their report — the shift away from flat-rate broadband packages to tiered service plans that tie greater speed and access to higher monthly fees. That transition is already under way.

In Spain this year, Vodafone has been testing a series of tiered pricing packages. Richard Feasey, the regulatory policy director at Vodafone, said consumers had reacted positively.

“From what we have seen in the blogs, our customers in Spain appear to be totally comfortable with paying more for greater levels of service,” Mr. Feasey said, comparing graduated Internet service with an airline’s economy, business and first-class ticket prices.

With the debate in flux on both sides of the Atlantic, U.S. operators are weighing in in Europe.

Mick Corkerry, the European executive director for AT&T, is scheduled to speak at the Brussels hearing Thursday. AT&T is a sponsor of a Brussels policy group called the Center for European Policy Studies, which opposes new net neutrality rules on operators.

Andrea Renda, the center’s head of regulatory affairs and a professor of antitrust law at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, said more network management regulations would “open a Pandora’s Box of new rules that would inevitably spread to search, apps and cloud computing.”

In the absence of new rules from Brussels, individual European countries will define their own versions of “reasonable” network traffic management, in most cases leaving great discretion to network operators, said Chris Marsden, a senior lecturer on Internet law at the University of Essex in Britain.

So far, only the French regulator, Arcep, has released a set of 10 principles it believes should guide operators’ behavior. In general, it recommended that Internet users be guaranteed the right to send and receive information of their choice and to use the applications and services they want, as long as they do not harm the network. Operators could suppress damaging Internet behavior, Arcep said, as long as the actions taken adhered to principles of relevance, proportionality, nondiscrimination, efficiency and transparency.

“But even Arcep is not proposing to go a step further and set deadlines for compliance and penalties,” Mr. Marsden said.

Even the French approach raises the potential for selective, arbitrary traffic management by network operators, said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament from Hanover, Germany, who will also be speaking at the event Thursday.

“The danger is there, because there are no rules on how the priorities should be set from the providers,” he said.

The outcome of the debate also has ramifications for Internet businesses like Google and Facebook, whose popular video-streaming services are generating much of the increased data load being handled by European mobile operators. In the United States, online businesses like Google sought to prohibit operators from charging online businesses to carry its services.

On Sept. 9 in Paris, Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, met privately with a group of about a dozen mid- and top-level executives from several European mobile operators, who pressed him on whether Google was ready to help pay for the traffic it was creating.

“He was extremely complimentary to the operators who were there, but basically he ducked the question,” said one executive who attended the event. “The message seemed to be: you build the networks and we’ll make the profit.”

Australia PM backs controversial Web filter

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Hai Linh Truong

AFP | October 12, 2010

SYDNEY — Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Tuesday renewed her backing for a controversial Internet filter, saying it was driven by a “moral question”.

The proposed filter will block access to material such as rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse, and will be administered by Internet Service Provider companies.

However, web giants like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have slammed the initiative as setting a precedent for censorship, while cyber-activists have hit government websites with a targeted hacking campaign.

“My fundamental outlook is this: it is unlawful for me as an adult to go to a cinema and watch certain sorts of content, it’s unlawful and we believe it to be wrong,” Gillard said in a press club address.

“If we accept that then it seems to me that the moral question is not changed by the medium that the images come through.”

The plan, which has also drawn concern from the US State Department, was put on hold pending a content review in July as national elections loomed.

Angry user groups have launched an online campaign accusing the government of censorship, likening the proposed system to firewalls operating in China and Iran.

Concerns have also been raised about the filter’s impact on Internet speeds and the methods through which restricted content would be determined.

Gillard said how to set up the filter “is more complicated, but the underpinning moral question is, I think, exactly the same”.

A review of what material should be excluded by the filter is expected to take at least 12 months.

‘Children’s Law’ Used to Censor Online Media in Turkey

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sinistra Ecologia Libertà

Turkish Weekly | September 27, 2010 

Bans on websites containing a small amount of content in violation of Turkish law may be depriving people of their constitutional right to free access to information, according to a legal scholar in Istanbul.

The popular websites YouTube and Google are among those Turkish users often have difficulty reaching, a problem the country’s president chalked up to tax-related issues, rather than censorship, in a recent speech.

“The law initially aimed to protect children and families, but it has mostly been used for political control and censorship,” Yaman Akdeniz, a lawyer and professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review late last week after an informational meeting. The meeting is a first step toward discussions that will be held among civil-society organizations and the Parliament on the “Internet ban” law in Turkey.

Law No. 5651, which entered into force in November 2007, followed by the approval of three related bylaws, authorizes the country’s courts or its telecommunications authority to cut off access to Internet websites under certain circumstances.

“Banning access [to Internet sites] does not solve the problem,” Akdeniz said, adding that problems such as child pornography, libel and the like, included in the framework of the law’s eighth article, cannot be solved in this way. Even if the law could solve such problems, blanket bans on access would be a disproportionate response, he said.

Akdeniz also said there were many gaps in the law and existing provisions were not being implemented properly by the relevant public authorities. “Those who commit crimes such as posting child pornography are not punished by the Internet ban,” he said, adding that it is the general public that is harmed by such bans.

“This is why I believe the law takes a disproportionate approach,” he said, explaining that criminals are left free to repeat their crimes while innocent people are deprived of the ability to use Internet website sources for educational, informational and other legal purposes. Moreover, Akdeniz said, the Turkish penal code already covers the crimes listed in Article 8 of the Internet ban law.

Once a court decides to ban access to certain Internet sites, the decision can be appealed within 10 days after it enters into force, a procedure Akdeniz objected to. “I see banning access to information as a violation of my constitutional rights,” he said, adding that there should be no time limit to appeal Internet ban decisions.

Moreover, Akdeniz said, even when he had appealed such decisions on time, the court said he had no right to appeal as he was not a party to the case, something he said was also unjust. “The wrong methodology is being applied,” he said.

Akdeniz also said Internet ban decisions carried the status of preventative measures, which had to be temporary in legal terms, but whose effects could eventually last permanently.

“The validity time for such decisions must be determined either by law, or by a court decision,” he said, explaining that the court had said in related decisions that a ban would be annulled once the violation of law No. 5651 had ended.

“This also constitutes a concern,” Akdeniz said, adding that Turkish courts considered the violation ended only if the content violating Turkish law cannot be accessed from anywhere around the globe. “Although many website-managing companies, such as YouTube, can localize an access ban to [block] content that violates Turkish laws within Turkey, Turkish court decisions have no jurisdiction across borders,” he said.

President Abdullah Gül said Friday in a speech to students at Columbia University in New York that blocking of websites in Turkey was due simply to unresolved tax issues. “A problem that stands is that some Internet sites are unreachable in Turkey, but this is not a result of censorship,” Gül said. “Tax laws have not been updated, and I have urged them to do so.”

Responding to the idea that certain Internet sites had been blocked because their owners had not paid taxes in Turkey, Akdeniz said Turkish tax law does not include any provisions predicting this scenario.

“Turkey is a country that aspires to join the EU, but its Internet policies are approaching [those of] China,” Akdeniz said.

The academic said after having exhausted all legal channels within the Turkish system, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is a last resort, a place where the issue may find a resolution that does not violate people’s fundamental right to be informed and get access to information.

Google, Skype targeted in India security crackdown

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | McKay Savage

 By Erika Kinetz | Associated Press | September 2, 2010

MUMBAI, India — India has widened its security crackdown, asking all companies that provide encrypted communications — not just BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion — to install servers in the country to make it easier for the government to obtain users’ data. That would likely affect digital giants like Google and Skype.

“People who operate communication services in India should (install a) server in India as well as make available access to law enforcement agencies,” Home Secretary G.K. Pillai told reporters. “That has been made clear to RIM of BlackBerry but also to other companies.”

On Monday, India withdrew a threat to ban BlackBerry service for at least two more months after RIM agreed to give security officials “lawful access” to encrypted data.

Indian officials have for some time also been concerned about Google and Skype, neither of which maintains servers in India. Google has an Indian unit, but Gmail is offered by Google Inc., a U.S. company subject to U.S. laws. Luxembourg-based Skype has no India operations.

India began a sweeping information security review after the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, which was coordinated with cell phones, satellite phones and Internet calls. Officials are also eager to avoid any trouble at the Commonwealth Games, a major sporting event to be held in New Delhi in October.

At the same time, India seems to be gaining confidence in its own attractiveness as a market, taking a tougher stance with international companies, not just in telecommunications — where it is the world’s fastest-growing major market — but also in mining and nuclear energy.

“Our stand is firm. We look forward to get access to data,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters. “There is no uncertainty over it.”

The U.N. technology chief expressed support for the Indian demand on Thursday. Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, told The Associated Press in an interview that officials fighting terrorism had the right to demand access to users’ information.

RIM maintains that the geographic location of a server has no bearing on a government’s ability to crack encrypted data.

But placing a server in India does allow the government to access user content more easily, using Indian laws, rather than waiting for the cooperation of a foreign company or security agency, Indian experts say.

“The moment you will be in Indian land, you will be able to be controlled by the government’s ruling,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India. “National security is supreme over privacy.”

He said there have been conflicts over data access in the past.

“Right now the server is located outside India. And despite our best efforts to require them to access data, they say we are not governed by your system, we will not be providing it to you,” Chharia said.

He said the government wants everyone — including RIM, Skype, Google, Nokia and MSN Hotmail — to give Indian security agencies more access to their user content.

Skype, Google and Microsoft all said Thursday they’ve yet to receive any notification from the Indian government.

Nokia has already agreed to place a server in India by Nov. 5.

The government says BlackBerry is exploring the possibility of installing a server in India, as part of ongoing negotiations that narrowly avoided a ban on its services on Aug. 31.

One possible compromise could be to set up a BlackBerry Messenger server in India for instant messaging, but keep key corporate enterprise e-mail servers abroad. BlackBerry is eager to convince corporate users that its enterprise e-mail will remain the gold standard for security, despite pressure from governments in Asia and the Middle East, which fear super-encrypted communications could be abused by militants.

Pankaj Mohindroo, president of the Indian Cellular Association, whose members include Nokia and Motorola, said Indian telecom laws are ambiguous, but can be interpreted to mean that all service providers must place servers in India.

He added that users should have faith the Indian government won’t abuse its privileges.

“Interception here is done after clearance by high levels,” he said. “Consumers should never worry some junior police officer is snooping their data. It’s rarely done, and it’s done with very good purpose.”

Looming behind the fight is a sense that India wants the same level of access granted other countries like China.

Google India spokeswoman Paroma Roy Chowdhury said Google does provide user content to law enforcement agencies, but only in exceptional circumstances. All requests are reviewed by an internal committee at Google, she said.

“There have been requests from law enforcement agencies,” she said. “These are reviewed on a strictly case-by-case basis. Only in exceptional circumstances — when there is a threat of large-scale human loss, like a bomb threat — is the content made available.”

According to Google’s website, India made 1,061 requests for user data in the second half of 2009, the most after Brazil, the U.S. and Britain. It did not disclose numbers from China because “Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets.”

Google did not disclose how many requests were granted.

Skype spokeswoman Eunice Lim said by e-mail from Singapore that the company “cooperates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally possible.”

Skype uses local servers in China and has said on its blog that chat messages into and out of China may be monitored and stored by local authorities. In places like China — where it works with a local partner, Tom Online Inc., and distributes modified Skype software — it complies with local, rather than Luxembourg, law in making data available to security agencies.

“This means there is a possibility that your communications and personal data could be stored, monitored, or blocked and made available to authorized local parties, for instance law enforcement, subject to the local legal standards,” Skype says on its website.

In 2008, a Canadian researcher discovered that the Chinese version of Skype communications software was snooping on text chats that contained certain keywords, including “democracy.”

However, Skype voice calls between computers are encrypted, much like BlackBerry e-mails, and it’s not clear what access law enforcement would gain even if Skype placed a server in India.

Associated Press writer Raphael Satter contributed to this report from London.

Yahoo! Declared Not Liable for Defamation in Argentina

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Steakpinball

On August 13, 2010, an Argentine Appellate Court overturned a 2008 ruling of a lower court that had found Yahoo! de Argentina SRL and Google Argentina  liable for defamation in the case of an Argentine entertainer, Virginia Da Cunha. Da Cunha is one of several Argentine celebrities who have been seeking money damages in relation to the companies’ alleged failure to block all third-party owned and controlled sexually-oriented Web sites that contain their name or images.

In issuing the 2-1 decision in favor of the companies, the Appellate Court concluded that the companies could be held liable for damages based on a defamation claim only if they were made aware of clearly illegal content and were negligent in removing it. The Appellate Court stated:

 “…this Court finds no liability can be held against Defendants (search engines) for injurious search results that appeared on the Internet before Defendants have received notice requesting the exclusion of said search results. The mere possibility that a (defendant) search engine produces search results from third party sites that yield offensive and scandalous information about an individual, which may cause injury or damage to that person’s image or reputation, does not by itself mean that said individual has a right to seek damages directly against the search engines.”

In response to the ruling, Bill Carvalho, Yahoo’s Regional General Counsel for Americas, issued the following statement:

“Yahoo! is happy with and encouraged by the Da Cunha ruling; we believe this will set precedence for similar pending cases in Argentina. Rulings in these cases and the preliminary orders associated with them seem to reflect the Argentine courts trying to develop their understanding of an issue created by the modern development of search engines. As they come to more fully understand the Internet and the roles of the various parties involved in these cases – from the search engines to the parties actually publishing the content objected to – we are confident that the courts will conclude that we neither control nor manage the content published by third parties and should not be held responsible or liable for their editorial choices on their own websites.

Yahoo! will continue to defend the important principles behind our position and pursuing these matters within the Argentine legal system. We believe a positive outcome for Yahoo! Argentina on the principles we are defending will also benefit Internet users throughout Argentina.

The ruling affected Yahoo!’s search engine in Argentina only and not the U.S. sites. The Argentine Appellate Court alluded to the importance and accessibility of information in a free and democratic society and that the Internet is but one important tool for Argentine society to be informed of different and diverse ideas. The Appellate Court concluded by stating:

 “Argentine Civil Law #26.032/05 has established that the search, receipt and exchange of diverse ideas from an Internet service, falls clearly within the constitutional guaranty of the freedom of expression”.

By Ernesto Luciano |General Counsel |Yahoo! Hispanic Americas

Google and Yahoo Win Appeal in Argentine Case

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Diegosaurius Rex

By Vinod Sreeharsha | New York Times | August 19, 2010

BUENOS AIRES — In a rare victory for Google and Yahoo Argentina, an appeals court has cleared the companies of defamation for including sex-related Web sites in their search results for an Argentine entertainer.

The appeals court overturned a lower-court ruling that had found the companies liable for defaming the entertainer, Virginia Da Cunha.

The lower-court decision last year had also ordered the companies to pay damages and remove all sites containing sexual, erotic and pornographic content that contained the name or image of Ms. Da Cunha from its results.

The 2-to-1 appeals court ruling, issued last week, said the firms could be held liable for defamation only if they were made aware of clearly illegal content and were negligent in removing it.

The Da Cunha case was the furthest along in the courts of at least 130 similar cases, dating back to 2006. Each one demands content removal. Plaintiffs have included a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, Yesica Toscanini, and the soccer legend Diego Maradona, but are mostly entertainers and models.

Latin America is growing in importance to United States technology companies, particularly those dealing with user-generated content. Despite the victory, Google and Yahoo Argentina’s legal battles are not over. Argentine judges are not required to abide by the latest decision and one of Ms. Da Cunha’s lawyers, Gustavo Tanus, said he intended to appeal to the Argentine Supreme Court.

Most injunctions have been upheld on appeal and take effect until liability is decided. But more than four years later, just two cases have been decided, in what Argentine lawyer Pablo Crescimbeni calls an “abuse of the system.” The Maradona case was reversed.

Google has maintained that it is unable to comply with broad injunctions. Yahoo has taken a different approach, saying the only way to follow the order is to block all sites referencing each plaintiff. So a Yahoo Argentina user searching for Yesica Toscanini gets a nearly blank page citing the judicial order.

The issue of liability over third-party Internet content has long been debated in the United States and Europe. Congress has largely shielded content carriers in the United States over what third-party sites put up. Internet filtering takes place in at least 40 countries, according to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Yet the Argentine cases are unusual, Internet legal experts say. “This is a unique situation in Argentina. I know of no other examples in which the search of an individual is completely blocked,” said Rob Faris of the center. He said China was the only other country requiring search engines to decide what was acceptable.

Ms. Da Cunha’s lawyers, Martin Leguizamon and Mr. Tanus, contend the two companies, by allowing third-party sex sites to mention their client’s name, are violating her privacy and producing “moral harm,” which they say is prohibited by Argentina’s constitution. They also argue that the search engines are violating the country’s copyright laws by allowing sites to display their client’s images without consent.

In a recent interview, Mr. Tanus said, “We are not these crazy Argentines who are against technology.”

Maria Baudino, Google’s Latin America counsel, said that most of the judicial orders against the company were “overly broad and would censor all content regarding an individual.” She argued that Google was a neutral platform and should not be held responsible for third-party content.

Bill Carvalho, Yahoo’s general counsel for Latin America, said that “it is not illegal in Argentina to have a person’s name next to a sexually related Web site or have any association with the Web site. That would be requiring search engines to decide what is defamatory.”