CPJ Internet Channel

CPJ Internet Channel | China, India, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE

Use your Blackberry to map global surveillance

The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has announced a research project to analyze the global infrastructure of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. It's looking for BlackBerry users from any country to take part--especially those in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Russia and China.

All of these countries have at some point demanded that RIM make their BlackBerry network more surveillance-friendly. Some have threatened to ban BlackBerry services outright if their demands are not met. Other reports suggest that RIM has made concessions to some of these countries' demands.

One possible concession RIM might make is to move its Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) servers to locations within those countries' jurisdictions. BIS servers are the bridges between the internal BlackBerry network and the wider Internet. A locally-hosted BIS server would make it easier for domestic security services to monitor BlackBerry users' general Web traffic.

RIM has kept quiet about what agreements, if any, it has made with any government. Nevertheless, it is theoretically possible to work out the location of these BIS servers externally. If you're a journalist who uses a BlackBerry, all you have to do to help with this project is to visit the RimCheck website using your BlackBerry device and fill out a short form. The site will record the IP address of the machine your request comes from, and will attempt to determine where in the world that server could be located.

The conclusions that the RIM Check project draws from this study will be published when the group has collected enough data. Concrete statistics like this will mean we'll finally be able to see if BlackBerry's send their data exclusively through Canadian servers as some believe or whether RIM has distributed these servers globally--potentially allowing users' unencrypted Net traffic to be as monitorable as that sent through a local Internet service provider.

Read more at this site

CPJ Internet Channel | Bahrain, Iran, Thailand, USA

Internet blotter

CPJ protested the arrest of Bahrain blogger Abi Abduleman back in September -- The Wall Street Journal has a story on his continuing detainment.
Activism around the imprisonment of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan continues: PEN Canada is focusing on his case and Canada and France's foreign ministers have urged his release.
Local Thai ISPs are being called in by the government to help block the country's rapidly expanding website blacklist. The authorities want them to respond 24/7 to censorship requests.
The Journal of Democracy has published Ron Deibert and Rafai Rohozinski's overview of the pros and cons of new technology in authoritarian societies. It's available here in PDF format.
The New York Times has more info on US law enforcement's request to broaden its Internet interception powers.
Jared Cohen, the US State Department's advocate for high-tech diplomacy, has moved to Google. Foreign Policy interviews him on his new job.

CPJ Internet Channel

How many beat the world's Net censors?

Here's a great study by the Harvard's Berkman Center, estimating the actual usage of anti-censorship tools by Internet users in countries with pervasive website blocking.

Berkman estimates that 3% or less of the total Net population in these countries bypass censorship via web and http proxies, virtual private networks, or circumvention software like Tor and Psiphon.

The implication is that this is a surprisingly low figure, and that the unanswered question is why is it so low? Is it because these tools are hard to use, or is it because few see a need to use them?

I'd be fascinated to see even more research into these important topics, and ways devised to increase the numbers.

Even if a larger segment of the Internet population did have access to anti-censorship tools, though, the damaging effect of pervasive Internet blocking on journalists and the free press would still exist. It's not just the availability of particular news sources that makes for online press freedom in a country, it's the interaction and diversity of those sources. Even if you personally know how to reach a particular news story, you're not likely to link to it in your blog or your news site if you know that a sizeable proportion of your audience aren't going to see it - or that you'll be blocked if you do so. Circumvention tools are incredibly useful in spreading the news (and don't necessarily need a large userbase to do so), but they can only ever be a band-aid.

Read more at this site

CPJ Internet Channel | China, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan

Internet Blotter

Omid Memarian gives insight into the Iranian hardliner in-fighting that led to "blogfather" Hossein Derakhshan's arrest and sentencing.
Pakistan blocks Facebook, but doesn't block militant jihadi sites.
What happened when the authorities shut down the Internet in China's Xinjiang province.
"Deleted" Facebook photos can stay available for years (from the excellent Ars Technica, now banned in Iran).
Quote of the week, courtesy of Index on Censorship's Free Speech Blog. When asked about Egypt's new pre-election restrictions on mass SMS messaging, government adviser Mahmoud el-Gweini told reporters "We are not making life difficult. We are making life organized, that is all."

CPJ Internet Channel | Iran

Petition highlights Nokia sales to Iran

Imprisoned Iranian journalist Isa Saharkiz (sabzphoto)

Access, a global Internet freedom advocacy group, has launched a "No To Nokia" petition as part of a campaign supporting Iranian journalist Issa Saharkiz's lawsuit against Nokia Siemens. The Saharkiz lawsuit claims that Nokia Siemen's sales of mobile tracking technology to Iran was instrumental in allowing the Iranian government to locate the journalist when he went into hiding, and led to his subsequent "inhuman and degrading treatment" in prison. Access' petition demands that Nokia and the countries of the E.U. and U.S. "completely end all sales, support, and service of tracking and surveillance technology to governments with a record of human rights abuses. "

The Saharkiz case is being pursued through the U.S. court system using that country's Alien Torts Act, a statute from 1789 that lets American courts hear human rights cases brought by foreign citizens for conduct outside the United States. It's not the first time this 18th-century law has been used to address 21st-century press freedom issues. The mother of Shi Tao, the Chinese journalist arrested after information taken from his Yahoo! email account was passed onto the Chinese authorites, sued the American search engine under the same law in 2007. Yahoo! eventually settled that case.

Saharkiz is currently serving a three year sentence for "insulting the Supreme Leader" and "propagating against the regime". In May, Saharkhiz was transferred to a prison in Rajaee Shahr, near Karaj, according to the reformist news website Kalame, where he reportedly suffered a heart attack. CPJ has been unable to determine his current state of health.

(Image: Isa Saharkhiz, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sabzphoto's photostream)

CPJ Internet Channel | Afghanistan

Using new Internet filters, Afghanistan blocks news site

By Danny O'Brien with Bob Dietz/CPJ Staff

The news website Benawa has been blocked in Afghanistan. (AP)

Until recently, Afghanistan's Internet has been notably free of government censorship. That stems largely from the limited impact and visibility of the Net domestically: The Taliban banned the Internet during its rule, and despite a recent boom in use, the nation has only a million users out of a population of about 29 million. But the Afghan government finally got around to imposing national filters in June, when the Ministry of Communications instructed local ISPs to blacklist websites that promote alcohol, gambling, and pornography, or ones that provide dating and social networking services.

Continue reading »

CPJ Internet Channel | Burma, China, Vietnam

Internet blotter

The International Telecommunications Union starts its plenipotentiary meeting this week. Some worry that some nations will use their position at the ITU to attempt to grab more control over how the Internet works.
RSF covers the Burmese DDOS attacks. I've heard some really fascinating detective work on the real origins of these attacks - hope it gets published soon.
Viet Nam's state-owned media launches its own competitor to Facebook. The WSJ says you need to enter their government-issued identity onto the site before they can join.
Does the popular Chinese IM client scan personal data? The company's explanation, that it's performing an anti-virus check makes some sense, but somebody needs to look a lot closer.

CPJ Internet Channel | Burma

Wordpress: Helping journalists under cyber-attack

Blog hosting site Wordpress.com have just announced a great new feature which is also a simple way that hosting companies can help journalists under attack online. The blogging hosting site now lets you automatically redirect your old Wordpress web address to wherever you move to when you switch blog hosting services. When your readers come to the old site, they get automatically forwarded to your new address. Wordpress.com uses a technique that lets Google and other search engines know you've moved too.

That's not just a good customer relations exercise: it's a vital tool for journalists who have to switch services in a hurry -- not because they want to, but because they're under attack from hackers. In cases like that, it's the hosting service who often "encourages" them to move on before they bring down the rest of their customers.

Controversial news sites, like Russian investigative magazine Novaya Gazeta or, most recently, much of Burma's independent media-in-exile, can get taken off the Net with malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.

It's not only the targeted web site that gets blown offline by a DDOS. If it's on a shared server, all those other sites may be taken down too. And if the hosting service the news site uses pays for bandwidth, they could be saddled with a huge bill which no-one will be able to pay.

It's not surprising then that many hosting services would rather a controversial website leave than continue to cost them money and threaten their service to other clients.

I wish more big hosts would stand by their customers, but I understand why sometimes they can't. Making the passage when a customer moves onto another, more resilient web hsot, is not something that any company has to do for their clients, and it's not something that all hosts think about. But when you're dealing with independent media that may have to find a new home in a hurry, features like redirects can make all the difference between news sites that keep their readers during a DDOS, and those who lose them forever.

Read more at this site

CPJ Internet Channel | USA

U.S. proposals undermine secure, uncensored Internet

By Danny O'Brien/CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator

UPDATE, OCTOBER 22, 2010: CPJ's board of directors sets policy for the organization. At the October 18 meeting of the board, directors discussed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, known as COICA.

The September 30 blog post below incorrectly stated that CPJ had "joined with other press freedom and civil liberty organizations and the Internet's pioneering engineers to urge the U.S. Senate to reject COICA in its current form." After discussion, the board determined that CPJ should take no position on the proposed legislation at this time. The matter was referred to the CPJ policy committee for further review.

A bill sponsored by Sens. Hatch, left, and Leahy could damage a free Internet. (AP file)

Continue reading »

CPJ Internet Channel | Kyrgyzstan, Russia

Microsoft moves to fight anti-piracy raids in Russia

By Danny O'Brien/CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator

Microsoft's Brad Smith (Francois Lenoir/Reuters)

On September 11, The New York Times reported on the use of aggressive anti-piracy raids by Russian authorities to intimidate advocacy groups and independent media outlets. The article noted that these raids are usually prompted by false reports of pirated Microsoft software, sometimes from individuals claiming to represent Microsoft. This is a trend that CPJ has documented for some time. We've recorded incidents of independent outlets like Novaya Gazeta, Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye, Minuty Veka, and Kyrgyzstan's STAN TV having offices shut down and computers seized on the orders of lawyers claiming to be acting for Microsoft, even when the companies' software licenses are in order and shown to the investigators.

Continue reading »

Committee to Protect Journalists

Defending Free Expression Online

Use your Blackberry to map global surveillance

Internet blotter

How many beat the world's Net censors?

Internet Blotter

Petition highlights Nokia sales to Iran

Using new Internet filters, Afghanistan blocks news site

Internet blotter

Wordpress: Helping journalists under cyber-attack

U.S. proposals undermine secure, uncensored Internet

Microsoft moves to fight anti-piracy raids in Russia

More Entries »

Silence or Death

Defending Free Expression Online

A Year of Impact

CPJ International Press Freedom Awards 2010

Research

Regions

Data

About Us

Become a Supporter

Subscribe

Contact Us