Sky's Blog

Communicating in a networked world

You are here: Home / Archives for Free Speech + Human Rights

Google and YouTube censorship

by 1 Comment

As a part of their effort to provide greater transparency about the use and blocking of their services, Google provides some interesting information which is available in “real time” online. Their Transparency Report: Traffic shows the relative traffic to their various services by country.

Just for example, if you look at traffic to YouTube from Iran, you’ll see this chart… showing high traffic until June, 2009, when YouTube was blocked in Iran. The scale runs from 0 to 100 and is “normalized” rather than showing absolute bandwidth that’s being used in each country. So it quite nicely illustrates  various cases of heavy-handed content blocking.

To see how censorship effectively blocks YouTube in other countries, try looking at Bangladesh, China, Libya, and maybe some others you can discover in the data.

Google and government requests for data or removal

by Leave a Comment

Google receives requests, including court orders, from many countries, for data or for removal of information on the various services it provides (search, YouTube, etc.).

They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

 

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

Who is looking at your email history?

by Leave a Comment

Who has access to your email addresses and your email-writing history?

The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is seeking to modify the 1993 Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that Internet service providers must turn over transaction records on email communications and possibly web browsing records, upon receipt of a “national security letter” from the FBI. This particular legal process doesn’t require review by a judge—unlike search warrants.[1]

The law does not allow access to the contents of those emails without judicial oversight…only the more externally-visible addressing information, and that does tend to be what email systems log and archive. On the other hand, the term “electronic communication transactional records” which is what the government could require ISPs to divulge, is not defined in federal statutes, according to the Washington Post.[2] And so it could conceivably be extended to include other person-to-person communications, such as social media contacts

Previous attempts to access your reading history

This is the same process the Bush administration used, in the early 2000s, to ask libraries to turn over the records of books checked out by patrons, which was strongly resisted by librarians at that time.

Phone companies keep records of all of the numbers you call, and these are subject to the same access rules. This has never been a question, and most people in the US are probably at least marginally aware of this.

The real question isn’t whether someone is reading your email addresses and headers—it’s how they are interpreting the titles, subjects, and names of the people you are corresponding with. In the McCarthy era here in the US, you could be blacklisted for associating with the wrong people.

If you have an inquiring mind, would you want someone to judge you based on the titles of the books or publications you’re reading? Or the subjects and addressees of your email?

[1] The Washington Post — original article 29 July 2010

[2] The New York Times 30 July, 2010 — secondary report and opinion

A whole nother ancillary question is whether your ISP actually keeps these records or not. If they do not, are they then exempt from having to turn over any records, or will the government require that they keep such records in the future? Some ISPs intentionally do not keep certain kinds of records, which helps keep your use of certain services anonymous. And, for instance, I’d guess that very few ISPs, if any, keep records of your browsing history, and this makes it prohibitively difficult to document all of the web sites you’ve visited.

Why “Shadows in the Cloud” should open your eyes

by Leave a Comment

The public release of the document Shadows in the Cloud is important because this document contains some very important messages—stated very clearly—that haven’t really been said publicly before.

If you’re not a cyberspace expert and don’t care for geek talk, you may think it’s just another report on cyber espionage. But the messages are important for everyone. And my point is that they are very clearly explained!

Ron Diebert and Rafal Rohozinski, in their Foreward, point out that crime and espionage go together. Or that wherever one goes, the other is soon to follow.

They don’t say this directly—these are my words: Crime, espionage (and warfare) seep into the interstitial spaces of society and occupy any vacuum they find. And from there they can grow to occupy the whole of the space, like a mold, fungus, or rot.

What we are seeing in online attacks against free speech sites these days, particularly drive-by attacks[1], is that they do not seem to be politically or idealistically motivated, instead they are opportunistic and (presumably) economically motivated because they’re focused on injecting spambots and trojans, not on altering the message of the nonprofit web site.

[1] See CyberSpark.net and click “drive-by” on that page