Nathaniel
Global Integrity's recent work on freedom of speech online (featured on this blog) is cited on NPR's All Things Considered, in a story on online censorship and Wikileaks.
NPR.org: Ruling to Shut Down Leak Site Called Censorship
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Monday, February 25, 2008
Global Integrity on NPR All Things Considered
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Analysis of Orders Against Wikileaks
Judge Jeffery S. White, the judge who ordered Wikileaks.org scrubbed from the Web has begun backpedaling, saying that the site can stay up, as long as it doesn't post any documents (Amended order: pdf download).
Meanwhile, the Law Librarian Blog and Wikileak.org (a blog independent* of Wikileaks.org) have analysis of the judge's rulings. I am amused to note that the court orders were emailed to wikileaks.org after the judge had ruled that the wikeleaks.org domain name be inactivated. This means that while the orders were sent, they weren't received, because the courts had deactivated the defendants email.
Also of interest is the list of parties bound by the order, which must number in the hundreds:"all of the Wikileaks Defendants’ DNS host service providers, ISP’s, domain registrars, website site developers, website operators, website host service providers, and administrative and technical domain contacts, and anyone else responsible or with access to modify the website"
UPDATE: A nice breakdown of the first amendment implications by The California First Amendment Coalition.
*Correction: an early draft stated that wikileak.org and wikileaks.org were affiliated. Wikileak.org is an independent critic of wikileaks.org.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Internet Censorship: A Comparative Study
Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well.
Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.
We asked our local research teams to investigate two questions:
The Many Flavors of Internet Censorship
A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it's own flavor to the repression of online speech -- Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don't seem to work very well.
- Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech. [source]
- China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China is also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched. [source]
- Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique -- harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled "Cops Without Boundaries" until the government harassed her, "unknown people" beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques have shut down websites of opposition parties. [source]
- Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship -- rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well. [source]
- Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year. [source]
- Thailand's military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta's censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance -- message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not "provoke any misunderstandings." Message received. [source]
The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.
The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.
Online Censorship: Sounds good, but it never works.
While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world's worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn't work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.
So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.
UPDATE: for more reading on anti-corruption, governance and censorship, try the Global Integrity Report. For more on online censorship, try the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Open Net Initiative.
U.S. Court Order Shuts Down Wikileaks.org
Incredibly, Wikileaks.org, an organization devoted to exposing corruption, has been muzzled by a U.S. court order (pdf download). Rather than attack a specific finding or document, the court has ordered their DNS registrar to essentially erase the organization's website from the Web. While wikileaks.org is down, their site can be found via IP addess: http://88.80.13.160, which is hosted in Sweden.
The order comes at the request of a Swiss bank, Bank Julius Baer, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary who had been implicated in allegedly laundering money by documents posted on wikileaks.org. A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer is mirrored here.
I have had several conversations via email with people at Wikileaks as they worked to get their organization started up. I have been deeply impressed with the quality of their early work, and am genuinely shocked at this shutdown order. The U.S. joins China and Thailand in censoring the wikileaks.org website.
From the beginning, the Wikileaks folks have been expecting this kind of reaction all along, and have put serious thought into how to evade this kind of treatment. I thought they were being conspiratorial. I was wrong. I am confident that this will not slow them or their mission.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Will the Real Yemen Please Stand Up?
An email from one of Global Integrity's contributors -- apparently censored by government email servers -- prompts us to reexamine the "progress" in Yemen's movement towards open political discourse. Message 1: Message 2:
Yemen is a fascinating country when it comes to governance and corruption issues. A 2006 Global Integrity assessment for the country (published in January 2007) rated Yemen overall as "very weak" with a score of just 49, a disturbingly low total for any country. Serious weaknesses were cited in Yemen's media climate, judicial accountability, rule of law, and procurement practices.
Prior to our 2006 assessment, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) had suspended Yemen's participation in its Threshold program -- small grants designed to stimulate targeted reforms that then qualify the country for the really big MCC grants (MCC "compacts," in the company's parlance). The relatively negative 2006 Global Integrity assessment seemed to support that decision, taken in late-2005.
In February 2007, MCC reinstated Yemen to Threshold status, citing major reforms undertaken in the wake of the 2005 suspension -- a freer media, judicial reforms, and improved procurement practices were all specifically highlighted by MCC as areas where progress had been made.
I mention this because I received the following email message from one of our Yemeni colleagues this week who worked on the 2006 assessment. He had been trying to email me to congratulate Global Integrity on the release of the Global Integrity Report: 2007, which among other Key Findings warned against confusing cosmetic governance reforms for the real thing. His message, which he agreed I could publish, is below. Will the real Yemen please stand up?Dear Nathaniel:
Here is further proof of your conclusions on "Democratically Elected Governments." This is how Yemen views freedom of speech and the press: I have sent you the following two mesages and both bounced back (the regime is tightening up on all efforts to communicate any opposing contents by literally closing out any flow of news content or
opinion or any organizations or outsourced news item (they even closed out the Yemenportal.net. site)):
Dear Nathaniel Heller:
Thanks for the latest output from Global Integrity. Look forward to participating
in your continuous efforts to instill political sanity in this world.
Best regards,
[omitted for safety]
Dear Nathaniel
I just looked into your web site and found the GI website and found your GI report on Yemen for 2006. Would you mind if we delve into the Report on Yemen in a detailed article for the Yemen Times sometime later this week?
Thanks,
[omitted for safety]
I have just learned that they have in fact blocked all my outgoing messages via my mail.yemen.net.ye account, which is a government owned server. I am not sure if it is just me or everyone else, but this has been going on for the last three days. It is unlikely to be a technical error.
Monday, February 4, 2008
China: Citizen protests over censorship rising?
The International Herald Tribune has an analysis of online censorship in China.
In recent months, Chinese censors have tightened controls over the Internet, often blacking out sites that had no discernible political content. In the process, they have fostered a backlash, as many people who previously had little interest in politics have become active in resisting the controls. And all of it comes at a time of increasing risk for those who choose to protest. Human rights advocates say that the government has been broadening its crackdown on any signs of dissent as the Olympic Games in Beijing draw near.Is this true? Are Chinese citizens more willing to express their frustrations with online censorship, and perhaps by extension, all official censorship? Leave us a comment with your take on the issue.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
How the Middle East lost its Internet
Last Wednesday a ship's anchor cut two undersea fiber-optic cables, crippling Internet access for 75 million people in the Middle East and South Asia. This wonderfully executed data graphic from TeleGeography.com shows how it happened (click the image for full size).
UPDATE: The Egyptian government now says that no ships were present over the fiber-optic cables when they were cut near Alexandria. The actual cause of the cable failures is unclear. Unlike the conveniently timed "failure" of an undersea cable that severed Burma's connection to the outside world during pro-democracy protests last year, there's no obvious political incentive for this cable failure.
VERY LATE UPDATE: Deliberate sabotage speculation on the rise.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Cyberwar and international law
Extortion: it's not just for oppressive governments. According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, several power utilities outside the U.S. have received extortion demands, in which online attackers (perhaps with inside help) threaten to shut down power grids via internet-based attacks. Some attacks have been carried out, the CIA says, darkening entire regions. Information Week has the story.
Legal scholar Duncan Hollis addresses the legal implications of cross-border cybercrime, and the larger question of international conflicts played out via software, like the nationwide attack on Estonian computer networks last year. "War has entered the Information Age, and it's time for international law to get a needed update," he writes in the Los Angeles Times.
Via Slashdot.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
We're Not All Saints
Investigations by the Associated Press and The Register website reveal the tawdry history of one of the Wikimedia Foundation's top executives.
The AP's summary published in the Washington Post is pretty amazing. You can't make this stuff up.
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