From Torrentfreak
Last Friday The Pirate Bay moved to Ukraine after its Swedish bandwidth supplier was forced to stop servicing the tracker. In the new setup, traffic to TPB is routed through The Netherlands, but anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now asked ISP NForce to stop handling TPB’s traffic. As a result the site is now down for most people.
Martin Rundkvist is an unusual combination he is an archeologist and a wikipedia watcher. His recent blog post discusses censorship on Wikipedia in an article Wikipedia Cracks Down On Cult Propagandists. The article b eginning with Wikipedias decision in May to bar all Church of Scientology users from editing CoS articles on wikipedia. But the interesting focus of his article is the struggle over the articles about Falun Gong (a.k.a. Chinese Scientology).
They used to be a battleground between Chinese Communist Party loyalists and Falun Gong devotees, both sides trying to cram as much propaganda into the articles as possible. Then the FGers managed to get the CCP guys banned from editing…it led to a prolonged situation where the articles were entirely taken over by cult propagandists… And now a similar clean-up effort has reached the Falun Gong pages. A swarm of experienced Wikipedians with no pro-FG or pro-CCP agenda has descended on them. Yesterday the nastiest of the FGers (a fellow Scandy, no less) was banned for six months from touching any of the FG articles. And the delicious irony is that this is the very same guy who got the CCP propagandists thrown out!
In the amazing arguments which pop up in academia about whether or not Wikipedia should be used by students or not. The facts of articles is often brought to the fore of the argument. But very rarely is there a initiated discussion about the truthfulness of wikipedia articles. Who is writing and editing them and why?
One of the most obvious censors are the voluntary editors within the system, here is a typical complain from The Register (2007)
Is Wikipedia running a censorship board? John Barberio thinks so. After more than two years as an active contributor to the free online encyclopedia, the 27-year-old Oxfordshire man recently left the project over the behavior of its “OTRS volunteers,” unpaid administrators who act on reader complaints about the site’s content…I dislike using the scary C word, but OTRS are acting as a censorship board,” he says. “And worse, they appear to be acting as an inept, heavy-handed amateurish censorship board.”
This is unfortunately nothing new but what is probably more concerning is the slick group of workers who change or adapt wikipedia to suit there own needs. The Independent in Wikipedia and the art of censorship (2007) have given several examples of such censorship including:
A computer registered to the Dow Chemical Company is recorded as deleting a passage on the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984, which occurred at a plant operated by Union Carbide, now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary. The incident cost up to 20,000 lives.
A computer linked to the Israeli government twice tried to delete an entire article about the West Bank wall that was critical of the policy. An edit from the same address also modified the entry for Hizbollah describing all its operations as being “mostly military in nature”.
A computer with an Amnesty International IP address was used to delete references accusing the charity of holding an anti-American agenda.
And finally there is the whole problematic issue of Jimmy Wales’ role in the suppression of the David Rohde capture by the Taliban.
What it all amounts to is the freedom of information or the importance of correct information or the dangers of sensitive information – who gets to decide and what the implications of such decisions are. This is a topic which cannot be easily fobbed off and needs to be discussed in much greater detail.
Twitter is struggling to overcome a denial-of-service attack, they wrote this five hours ago:
We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.
Reporters Without Borders has come out with a new version (Update: I am a year late with discovering this book see RSF release article) of its Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. The handbook offers practical advice and techniques on some easy and some quite complex issues.
Everything from how to create a blog, how to make entries and get the blog to show up in search engine results. It gives clear explanations about blogging for all those whose online freedom of expression is subject to restrictions, and it shows how to sidestep the censorship measures imposed by certain governments, with a practical example that demonstrates the use of the censorship circumvention software Tor.
The handbook is very useful on many levels so blog about it to make sure it gets out there.
The Swedish Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) or in English the National Defence Radio Establishment is looking for a lawyer. After a recent change in Swedish legislation (the FRA law, or FRA-lagen in Swedish) that came into effect on 1 Januarythe FRA is authorized to warrantlessly wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden’s borders. This obviously includes much of internal Swedish communication.
Anyway the FRA now are looking for a lawyer to
Funktionen svarar även för frågor om etik och integritetsskydd i signalunderrättelseverksamheten… Funktionen har även till uppgift att se till att myndigheten behandlar personuppgifter på ett lagligt och korrekt sätt.
The position is responsible for questions of ethics and integrity protection in relation to signals intelligence… The position also has the responsiblity to ensure that the agency treats personal data in a correct and legal manner [my translation].
Wow! Considering the task of the FRA is to eavesdrop on all traffic this job must be a doddle. Once you have made it legal to wiretap all internet traffic without the need for warrents – what integrity concerns can be left for the lawyer to deal with?
Listening to the radio this morning and heard that Karim Massimov, the Prime Minster of Kazakhstan started his private, yet official blog on 9th January and apparently has been so happy with the result that he has ordered his minsters to start personal blogs.
A politician starting a blog is hardly worth mentioning and starting in 2009 seems even to be a late starter but this one is a bit interesting.
According to the American State Department Country Report on Kazakhstan
The Government’s human rights record remained poor, and it continued to commit numerous abuses. The Government severely limited citizens’ right to change their government and democratic institutions remained weak. On some occasions, members of the security forces, including police, tortured, beat, and otherwise mistreated detainees; some officials were punished for these abuses. Prison conditions remained harsh; however, the Government took an active role in efforts to improve prison conditions and the treatment of prisoners. The Government continued to use arbitrary arrest and detention and to selectively prosecute political opponents; prolonged detention was a problem. Amendments to several laws governing the authority of procurators further eroded judicial independence. The Government infringed on citizens’ privacy rights.
Reporters sans frontières begin their 2008 report on Kazakhstan:
As well as the usual problems journalists get when they expose corruption or criticise President Nazarbayev, the media was the victim of power struggles inside the regime. Three opposition journalists died in suspicious circumstances and coverage of the August 2007 parliamentary elections was biased.
So the idea that the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan starting a blog and praising the way in which it allows citizens to communicate more directly with government is surprising to say the least. Either the whole thing is a propaganda attempt gone wrong or a total misunderstanding of the power of online communication.
Or maybe those in power just don’t get how bad they are?
Technollama point to an article in the Guardian that Richard Dawkins, has had his website banned in Turkey because a Creationist has found it “defamatory and blasphemous”.
Apparently the whole thing blew up when Dawkins commented on a the book of a Muslim Creationist (that had been sent to him by the creationist) and called it preposterous and wrote on his website that he was at “a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the ‘breathtaking inanity’ of the content.”.
Some comments from the Creationists office say it all:
We are not against freedom of speech or expression but you cannot insult people.
We found the comments hurtful. It was not a scientific discussion. There was a line and the limit has been passed.
And I thought mindless creationists were a particularly american thing but apparently they, as with all stupidity, are international.
Since I put many of my photo’s on Flickr I was disturbed to read the following story. The more I thought about it the more I realised that it was obvious that Flickr would have the same types of rules as all the other social networking sites but it is still a reason for concern.
Photographer Maarten Dors (his Flickr Profile) received the following email from Flickr concerning a picture if a young boy smoking (Would like put it online here if I had permission… hint hint).
====
case354736@support.flickr.comHi Maarten Dors,
Images of children under the age of 18 who are smoking
tobacco is prohibited across all of Yahoo’s properties.
I’ve gone ahead and deleted the image “The Romanian Way”
from your photostream.
We appreciate your understanding.-Terrence
====
According to Reason Magazine, Dors argued that the photo was not a glorification of smoking but a documentation of living condition in less prosperous countries. This somehow was motivation enough for Flickr to return the photo online. Then, apparently, another employee who was unfamiliar with the exception took it down again. Which was followed by someone else from Flickr returning the image again.
Even though I know better I sometimes get fooled into thinking that sites and services on the Internet are public “goods” services which we all can use and abuse on an equal and fair footing. Naturally this isn’t so. Flickr is, like all other online businesses, online for profit. They have no interest in protecting user rights – in fact if user rights conflict with profits they have a duty towards the shareholders to maximize profits and damn the users.
Naturally we as users have legally agreed to the rights of companies such as Flickr to behave in this way when we clicked on the “I Agree” button.
But, and this is a big but, the legal status of these agreements can be questioned.
I have commented the inequality, injustice and the ways in which we could argue against such agreements in my research but it can all be summed up in the with the idea that the agreements we sign cannot be binding if they are the product of a mix of encouraged misunderstanding and misdirection. By creating an environment of openness the companies should not be allowed to impose draconian user terms on their own customers.
However this is an argument from a human rights perspective and no matter how much we like them, most courts still prefer the security and predictability of contract law. So until the courts develop a sense of courage they tend to praise but not emulate the users of all technology are at risk through the licensing agreements they are forced to sign.
Thankfully the term “war on terrorism” seems to have fallen out of fashion. Unfortunately the threat of terrorism is being used to systematically and creatively remove civil liberties. At some point a society must ask itself if the security needed to prevent terrorism is in itself an act of terrorism and repression.
Unfortunately all the silliness is not confined to high government (even though a lot of the silliness originates from there). In times of tension the wacko’s, weirdo’s and sociopaths step forward and fill the lower levels of the security system. These are the working stiffs in the security system. Heady with power and filled with self importance they are responsible for degrading ordinary people all in the name of terrorism and security. In reality it’s all for their own little ego’s.
You think I may be exaggerating? Then give me some better explanations for these:
A man trying to fly British Airways to Dusseldorf was told that he could not board the plane wearing the t-shirt he had on. The offending t-shirt had a picture of Megatron (a 40 foot tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm).
In Canada (Kelowna Airport, British Columbia) a PhD student was not allowed to board the plane because she wore a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a gun (a silver classic Colt45, under two inches in length with no moving parts) story and photo here.
A classic example of misguided airport security in relation to clothes is Raed Jarrar’s experience at JFK where he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight; new BBC article. The story upset many people but inspired some: You can now buy t-shirts from Casual Disobedience with text “I am not a terrorist” in Arabic. I bought one and it is among my favorites.
Another classic is when John Gilmore was refused carriage by British Airways recently for declining to take off a button that read “Suspected Terrorist”.
These are only examples relating to clothes or jewelry in relation to airport security – there are plenty of stories of offending clothing (political, not sexual) that have got people detained or arrested. I think I need to develop this into a full length article…
There is a general assumption that people subjected to censorship are unhappy. A Pew Internet survey finds that most Chinese approve of internet regulation especially by the government (via Slashdot). The report can be downloaded here. This raises an interesting question: is censorship bad even if those who are affected by it approve of it?
Most people who argue for individual freedom would argue that it does not matter that those effected by a loss of liberty are OK with it – the very fact that individuals have lost their liberty is enough of basis to claim that censorship is bad. On the other hand such a claim would invalidate the opinions and ideas of the group who agree to being censored.
This is a tough call. Personally I do think that censorship is bad but it this is from my point of view and I am not being subjected to it. Certain acts are unconditionally bad no matter what certain groups may believe (for example female circumcision or child pornography) but lesser wrongs are more difficult to judge.