Tag Archive for 'Google'

Google head, fond of Chinese censorship, worries about Arab repression

Published on 29 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips:

The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.

He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.
‘Completely wired’

Mr Schmidt said he believed the “problem” of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to “get worse”.

In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”

“The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”

“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he added.

The Net Delusion is alive and well

Published on 6 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THE NET DELUSION
Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane,
408pp, $29.95

As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost irrelevant.

Born in Belarus, Evgeny Morozov collects mountains of evidence to claim the internet isn’t able to bring freedom, democracy and liberalism.

Sceptics would tell him to watch Al-Jazeera and see the power of the Facebook generation in action.

In fact, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe, he argues, because countless regimes are using the same tools as activists – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and email – to monitor and catch dissidents.

He writes that “the only space where the West (especially the United States) is still unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda is in.”

Morozov condemns “cyber-utopians” for wanting to build a world where borders are no more. Instead, he says these well-meaning people “did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance” and the increasingly sophisticated methods of web censorship.

Furthermore, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Nokia and web security firms have all willingly colluded with a range of brutal states to turn a profit.

The Western media are largely to blame for creating the illusion of web-inspired democracy. During the Iranian uprisings in June 2009, many journalists dubbed it the Twitter Revolution, closely following countless tweets from the streets of Tehran. However, it was soon discovered that many of the tweets originated in California and not the Islamic republic. The myth had already been born.

None of these facts is designed to lessen the bravery of demonstrators against autocracies – and Morozov praises countless dissidents in China, the Arab world and beyond – but lazy journalists seemingly crave easy and often inaccurate narratives of nimble young keyboard warriors against sluggish old men in golden palaces.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen was right when he wrote in January that “the internet’s impact has been to expose the great delusion that has led Western governments to buttress Arab autocrats; that the only alternative to them was Islamic jihadists”.

But most protesters in the streets of Egypt had no access to the internet or any use for it and the main gripes were economic rather than ideological. However, it is undeniable that many of the young organised through online networks and clearly surprised the former Mubarak regime with their ability to harness a mainstream call for change.

Morozov, hailing from a country that knows about disappearances and suppression, urges the West to “stop glorifying those living in authoritarian governments”.

One of the Western fallacies of web usage in non-democratic nations is the belief that people are all looking for political content as a way to cope with repression. In fact, as Morozov proves with research, an experiment in 2007 with strangers in autocratic regimes found that instead of looking for dissenting material they “searched for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears”.

I noted similar trends in China when researching my book The Blogging Revolution and found most Chinese youth were interested in downloading movies and music and meeting boys and girls. Politics was the furthest thing from their minds.

This would change only if economic conditions worsened. A wise government would pre-empt these problems by allowing citizens to let off steam; Beijing has undoubtedly opened up online debate in the past decade, though there are certainly set boundaries and red lines not to cross.

Morozov sometimes underestimates the importance of people in repressive states feeling less alone and mixing with like-minded individuals. Witness the persecuted gay community in Iran, the websites connecting this beleaguered population and the space to discuss an identity denied by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ultimately, The Net Delusion is necessary because it challenges comfortable Western thinking about the modern nature of authoritarianism.

This year we have already been left to ponder the irony of the US State Department deploying its resources to pressure Arab regimes not to block communications and social media while the stated agenda of Washington is a matrix of control across the region.

These policies are clearly contradictory and a person in US-backed Saudi Arabia and Bahrain won’t be fooled into believing Western benevolence if they can merely use Twitter every day.

Perth Writer’s Festival, here I come

Published on 3 March 2011 in General and Israel. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

This will be fun. I’m about to head across to Perth in Western Australia for the Perth Writer’s Festival.

My events:

Sat 5 Mar, 2.00PM

The invasion of Gaza in 2008 provoked worldwide condemnation and questions aboutIsrael’s right to exist. Some asked why other nations acting unjustly don’t face debate about the validity of their sovereignty. Raimond Gaita and Antony Loewenstein discuss the issue.

Sat 5 Mar, 8.00PM

With the growing global influence of the Asia and Pacific region, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, bigotry, widening inequality and Facebook, Google and Wikileaks, do we have to rethink how democracy will work in the coming century? How do the 19th and 20th century ideals of democracy hold up? Tariq Ali, Ken Crispin, John Keane and Antony Loewenstein share their thoughts on the future of democracy.

Mon 7 Mar, 9.30AM

What capacity is there for information exchange in repressive regimes? Chinese author Yan Lianke has had his novels banned in his home country while freelance journalist and author Antony Loewenstein has looked at these questions in the Middle East. They discuss freedom of expression and the ways restrictive controls can be overcome.

If you’re in Perth and want to avoid the searing heat, you know you want to hear discussions about Wikileaks, democracy and war criminals (not necessarily in that order).

What New Delhi can learn from Cairo

Published on 16 February 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

My following article is published by leading Indian magazine Tehelka:

The Middle East is the region where global empires lavishly exercise their chequebook. Since the Second World War, America has bribed, cajoled and backed autocratic regimes in the name of stability.

Israel, self-described as the only democracy in the area, has been insulated from the vagaries of democratic politics by simply colluding with dictatorships across its various borders.

Zionism has thrived due to Arab leader corruption and silence in the face of occupation against Palestinian lands.

But the mass uprisings across Egypt are threatening these cosy arrangements.

The Israeli mainstream is fearful of what Arab democracy may mean, but for the majority in Egypt decades of repression may be coming to an end.

The resignation of President Hosni Mubarak is the first necessary step in restoring dignity to the Egyptian political process, though it is only the beginning.

The millions of demonstrators won’t tolerate a military coup simply replacing one tyrant with another.

We can marvel at the success of a peaceful protest movement and wonder which other western-backed thugs may be next.

Today, the Muslim world sees what is possible with weeks of determined protest; America and Israel no longer control the agenda of who rules the Arab street.

Tel Aviv is already fearful of what true democracy may mean for its position.

While there is no unified message of the protesters for the future, a few key demands are clear; free and fair elections, an orderly transition, an end to torture, better employment opportunities and an end to being manipulated by foreign powers.

Sadly and predictably, many neo-conservative and Jewish commentators in America are whipping up fear of an Islamist take-over of Egypt while the situation remains incredibly fluid.

Besides, the western world has consistently refused to accept to its own detriment the legitimate positions of many Muslims since 11 September 2001 who wants their religion integrated into a democratic system.

Turkey is a model here, an imperfect example of an Islamic democracy.

Former Egyptian President Mubarak, wholly supported by Washington and Tel Aviv for three decades and much of the US corporate press, has shaped a state that routinely tortured its own citizens as well as suspects in the American-led “war on terror.”

New Vice-President Omar Suleiman is implicated in a range of crimes committed since 9/11, including overseeing torture himself against alleged terror suspects.

The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer wrote last week:

“Technically, U.S. law required the C.I.A. to seek “assurances” from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture. But under Suleiman’s reign at the intelligence service, such assurances were considered close to worthless.

As Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. officer who helped set up the practice of rendition, later testified before Congress, even if such “assurances” were written in indelible ink, “they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.””

In the last weeks, Egyptians authorities blocked Internet access and mobile phone services in an attempt to stop information getting out to the world.

It failed spectacularly but far too many western commentators were quick to jump to conclusions and claim this was a Facebook revolution or Twitter revolution.

But, despite Facebook playing a key role in initially organising outrage, the vast majority of Egyptians didn’t need a website to register their anger.

It was pleasing to read Google and Twitter joining forces to launch SpeaktoTweet, a service allowing Egyptians to call an international number and record a voice message that would then be tweeted from a Twitter account.

It is increasingly difficult to silence the masses in a globalised age, though we shouldn’t be seduced by the false belief that free Internet access automatically brings western-style democracy.

The western reaction to the Egyptian protests has been a mixture of awe and confusion.

The internal logic of many westerners is contradictory and hypocritical.

Backing the US-led invasion of Iraq, currently run as a Tehran-friendly police state, was seen as a noble gesture to liberate the oppressed masses but when the citizens agitate themselves without our help they’re lectured about remaining ‘moderate’.

Famed Slavoj Zizek wrote last week in the UK Guardian that the West so rarely sees a revolutionary spirit in its own countries that there is automatic suspicion when it occurs somewhere else, such as Egypt.

Ironically, post 9/11 paranoia about Islamic fundamentalism is due to its presence in nations the West has supposedly ‘liberated’, namely Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither nation has a long history of religious extremism; foreign meddling has allowed these forces to incubate.

Dictatorships in the Arab world don’t just materialise, they are created and sustained over decades.

Washington funds Cairo to the tunes of billions annually (second only to Israel) and yet the results are clear to see; stagnation and political corruption on a vast scale.

This arrangement suits America, Israel and the West just fine; client states aren’t independent thinkers and that’s how their funders like it.

Take former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who told CNN that Mubarak had been ‘immensely courageous and a force for good’ in the Middle East over the Israel-Palestine ‘peace process’.

Blair was merely echoing the standard post 9/11 view of the region; political Islam must never be engaged, even if parties win legitimate elections (witness Hamas after its victory in Palestine in 2006).

But what comes after Mubarak? His infrastructure of terror must be dismantled but this can’t happen unless Western policy fundamentally reviews its attitude toward the Middle East.

Why should only Israeli Jews be allowed freedom in the region? Must Arabs be suppressed for the pleasure of the Zionist state?

Sixty years is more than enough of this paradigm. And Arab people-power has loudly announced that it won’t tolerate decades more living under autocracy.

Egypt provides salutary lessons for other nations, including India.

Mubarak created a highly centralised state of control allowing him to crush potential rivals. But the voice of the people has been bubbling beneath the surface for years – I witnessed it during various visits there, from bloggers, union members and dissidents.

Cairo, however, refused to listen, believing brute force would allow the status-quo to survive.

Responsive, democratic governments work best when the interests of the people, especially minorities, aren’t ignored but acted upon.

Blocking the Internet in a large country is almost impossible in the 21st century due to the economy’s reliance on it but Egypt joins an increasingly long list of nations attempting to shut out modernity (including Myanmar and North Korea).

Although the central government in New Delhi is unlikely to administer such a draconian plan, leaders should be open to robust debate on the most controversial subjects, including Kashmir and the Naxalites.

Mature democracies are ones that welcome disagreement and don’t threaten prosecution for those who dare challenge the mainstream view.

There are disturbing signs in many western nations of overzealous officials wanting to regulate the openness of the Internet in the fight against ‘terrorism’.

This must be resisted.

Likewise in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would be well advised to listen to dissent due to the decentralised nature of his country; ignoring such difficult questions is not the sign of a leader who consults but a man who relies on harsh counter-terrorism techniques to quash dissent.

Hosni Mubarak could inform him of the dangers of this path.

Australian journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, 36, has published a best-selling book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, My Israel Question, and has spent time working and travelling across the Middle East and beyond. His book, The Blogging Revolution, examines the role of the internet in repressive regimes, including Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. He has written for publications such as the Guardian, Haaretz and the BBC World and regularly appears in the local and global media discussing human rights and politics.

What corporates really want in employees during revolutions

Published on 13 February 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Egyptian Google executive Wael Ghonim was a major figure in the uprisings over the last fortnight. A positive thing all around, surely?

Don’t be so sure.

One:

A Google Inc executive who has become a hero of the Egyptian revolution is public relations gold for the Internet power, but analysts say the company must be careful not to overplay its hand.

Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim became the public face of the uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak handing power to the army on Friday.

Ghonim was detained by security forces and came out swinging on his release, calling for Mubarak to step down.

When Internet access was shut down during an early phase of the Egyptian protests, Google engineers hacked together a way to allow Egyptians to use Twitter by dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail message.

Despite its association with the events in Egypt, Google has not commented on the politics of the country’s upheaval.

Instead, it has focused on values surrounding freedom of information and the Internet. “We’re incredibly proud to see Googlers take a stand on those issues,” spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said on Friday, when asked about Ghonim.

That has played well for the company.

“This is going to get Google some positive publicity,” said Rosabeth Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School. But she added, “They have to be careful.”

Consumers and businesses would love the tools for communication that Google supports and provides – but less democratic governments might see Google as a threat.

“Google will not be their search engine of choice,” she said. “You’re going there to sell products and services, you’re not going there to topple the regime.”

Two:

In “How to Handle Employee Activism: Google Tiptoes Around Cairo’s Hero,” the Wall Street Journal has stumbled upon the silliest possible angle on the Egyptian protest saga — the threat to a multinational company’s brand that might accrue when employees get involved in politics.

As the world marveled this week at the remarkable story of Wael Ghonim, the Google manager who helped organize a popular rebellion in Egypt, a great sigh of relief could be heard rising from much of the rest of American business:

“I’m glad,” came the exhale, “the guy doesn’t work for us.”

Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey ends up quoting only one unnamed executive to support his rather dramatic generalization, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, even if despicable. You might think that a charismatic young man willing to die for his country in pursuit of liberty and freedom for his people would resonate with the very core of American values, but the most important insight offered by Bussey, although perhaps unintentionally, is that American corporations do not share American values.

A lot of U.S. companies, which now manage millions of employees abroad, watched with trepidation. Many of them now earn more abroad than they do in America. And much of that income comes from the sale of big-ticket items — power systems, infrastructure equipment, aircraft, telecommunications –that only governments can afford to buy….

Reflecting on Mr. Ghonim’s extracurricular activities, an executive at one big U.S. manufacturer operating abroad was adamant: “Anything that affects the brand — we hate that,” he said. “It wouldn’t be allowed.”

Wael Ghonim talks to CNN and dispels some myths over Egypt

Published on 11 February 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

He explains the major role of the internet in the uprisings, the non-existent place of the Muslim Brotherhood in the beginning and how the time to negotiate with the regime is over (when innocents are being tortured and murdered in the streets):

Google opens its heart a little in the Islamic Republic

Published on 21 January 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

During research for my book The Blogging Revolution, a great deal of time was spent examining just what companies such as Google actually do in Iran.

The company has posted the latest information:

During the protests that erupted in Iran following the disputed Presidential election in June 2009, the central government in Tehran deported all foreign journalists, shut down traditional media outlets, closed off print journalism and disrupted cell phone lines. The government also infiltrated networks, posing as activists and using false identities to round up dissidents. In spite of this, the sharing of information using the Internet prevailed. YouTube and Twitter were cited by journalists, activists and bloggers as the best source for firsthand accounts and on-the-scene footage of the protests and violence across the country. At the time, though, U.S. export controls and sanctions programs prohibited software downloads to Iran.

Some of those export restrictions have now been lifted and today, for the first time, we’re making Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome available for download in Iran. We’re committed to full compliance with U.S. export controls and sanctions programs and, as a condition of our export licenses from the Treasury Department, we will continue to block IP addresses associated with the Iranian government.

Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information. And we believe that more available products means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for individuals in Iran and across the globe.

Posted by Neil Martin, Export Compliance Programs Manager

Are Twitter, Facebook and/or Google monitoring Wikileaks?

Published on 8 January 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

We are entering an age where the complicity of internet companies in censorship is becoming clear to many. We have allowed them to become too powerful and now they can act like this. By the way, so much for the Obama administration being any different to the Bushies over human rights, secrets and intimidation:

WikiLeaks said on Saturday the Twitter accounts of four supporters have been subpoenaed in connection with an espionage investigation into the whistleblowing website led by a secret US grand jury.

“Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into Wikileaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.

WikiLeaks said legal action taken by micro-blogging website Twitter “revealed that the US State Department has requested the private messages, contact information, IP addresses, and personal details of Julian Assange and three other individuals associated with Wikileaks, in addition to Wikileaks? own account, which has 634,071 followers.”

It did not name the three other people, but Icelandic lawmaker Birgitta Jonsdottir tweeted overnight: “just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks)”.

She later posted “usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. do they realize I am a member of parliament in iceland?”

In another message she said “just got the request via twitter from a court in the usa”.

WikiLeaks said it also had “reason to believe Facebook and Google, among other organisations, have received similar court orders, and calls on them to unseal any subpoenas they have received”.

“WikiLeaks is opposing the subpoena order and is currently taking action to instruct US lawyers,” it said, urging Twitter to protect its users’ private information.

US government doesn’t quite get the internet part 8622

Published on 11 December 2010 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The CIA, keeping the US safe:

Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking?

Google, Twitter et al on path to helping US imperialism

Published on 9 December 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The introductory section of this recent essay in the London Review of Books paints a disturbing nexus between the US government and major web companies. They seem worryingly comfortable assisting US foreign policy goals. Putting a nice, sexy face to occupation. Beware:

On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak jackets, had been bundled around Baghdad in an armoured convoy, meeting anyone there was to meet. They’d been introduced to the prime minister’s council of advisers, glad-handed the Iraqi Investment National Commission and spoken to a group of engineering students from Baghdad University; they’d even had time to fit in a visit to the Iraqi National Museum. Among them were several high-ranking engineers from Google, the founder of the community organising tool Meetup, a vice-president of the firm behind the blogging platform WordPress, and an executive from Blue State Digital, the internet strategy firm that had done a fair bit to help Obama to the presidency the previous November.

The person getting all the attention was Dorsey, because by then Twitter was all anyone wanted to talk about. In fact one reason we know so much about the trip is that Dorsey and his colleagues spent much of their time tweeting about it, sending news of their journey in electronic haiku to their followers back home. ‘Lots of helicopters,’ Dorsey observed on his Twitter feed: ‘Met the president of Iraq. Amazing palace.’ In another tweet, he tells his followers that he’s been ‘talking to Iraqis to figure out if technologies like Twitter can help bring transparency, accessibility and stability to the area’. When he finds a wi-fi network in the presidential palace, he says how happy he is to be back online: ‘Catching up on the rest of the world.’ ‘Lots going on out there!’ he writes. Barham Salih’s inaugural tweet was less upbeat: ‘Sorry, my first tweet not pleasant; dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.’

This was the first time the US government had organised a new media delegation to a country in the Middle East. The idea was to introduce the minds behind America’s internet start-ups to the movers and shakers who were going to rebuild Iraq, but as Dorsey’s excitable tweets indicated, the audience back home was just as important.

Are we addicted or too pleased to notice?

Published on 23 November 2010 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Some startling facts:

- There are now more than 500 million active Facebook users, with 50% logging on to the site on any given day. Worldwide, users collectively spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook.

- Google’s email service Gmail ended July with 186 million worldwide users, a 22% increase from the same time a year ago. Both Microsoft’s Windows Hotmail (nearly 346 million users) and Yahoo’s email (303 million users) are larger, but aren’t growing as rapidly.

- As of September, Twitter, which launched in 2006, had 175 million registered users posting an estimated 95 million tweets each day.

- There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide. In many regions, penetration exceeds 100%, meaning more than one connection per person. Research earlier this year found that teenagers in American now use text as their main method of communication, with more than 30% of US teens sending more than 100 texts a day.

- More than 25% of the UK’s population – some 16 million people – accessed the internet from mobile phones in December 2009. Nearly half those total minutes online via mobile devices were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn – with Google on 400m in a very distant second.

How sensitive is Google to alternative thinking?

Published on 2 October 2010 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

What words does Google Instant not like?

Jon Stewart on using fooking humour to make his point

Published on 17 September 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Wonderful New York profile of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, a program that becomes even more essential as America’s two-party system crumbles before our very eyes (but don’t tell them; they don’t need to realise):

After September 11, Stewart began to employ his newfound anger, becoming a voice of comic sanity in the whirlwind of real and manufactured fear. Segments like “America Freaks Out” and “Mess O’Potamia” punctured the false-patriotic sanctimony being peddled by the Bush administration. Yet as appalled as Stewart was by the politicians, his greater scorn was increasingly aimed at the acquiescent and co-opted news media. “I assume there are bad actors in society,” Stewart says. “It’s inherent in politicians to be disingenuous. And a mining company wants to own the company store—as it is in SpongeBob. Mr. Krabs just wants to make more money. He’s not concerned with SpongeBob’s working conditions—although SpongeBob is putting in hours that are not humane, even for an invertebrate. I assume monkeys are gonna throw shit. I get angrier at the people who don’t go ‘Bad monkey!’ or who create distraction that allows it to continue unabated. The thing that shocked me the most when I first met reporters was the people who would step aside and say, ‘Boy, I wish I could say what you’re saying.’ You have a show! You are a network anchor! Whaddya mean you can’t say it?” Stewart says. “It’s one reason I admire Fox. They’re great broadcasters. Everything is pointed, purposeful. You follow story lines, you fall in love with characters: ‘Oh, that’s the woman who’s very afraid of Black Panthers! I can’t wait to see what happens next. Oh, look, it’s the ex-alcoholic man who believes that Woodrow Wilson continues to wreak havoc on this country! This is exciting!’ Even the Fox morning show, the way they’re able to present propaganda as though it’s merely innocent thoughts occurring to them: ‘What is this “czar”? I’m Googling, and you know what’s interesting about a czar? It’s a Russian oligarch! Don’t you think it’s weird that Obama has Russian oligarchs, and he’s a socialist?’ Whereas MSNBC will trace the word and say, ‘If you don’t understand that, you’re an idiot!’ The mistake they make is that somehow facts are more important than feelings.”

Get ready for the Ahmadinejad Google

Published on 1 September 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov explores the possibility of an Iranian search engine and the “growing politicization of the internet in general and of search space in particular.”

Not telling us how the web content arrives

Published on 10 August 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Looks like we’ll have to fight for a truly free internet:

So Google and Verizon went public today with their “policy framework” — better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it.

News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that’s seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling on Google to live up to its “Don’t Be Evil” pledge.

But cut through the platitudes the two companies (Googizon, anyone?) offered on today’s press call, and you’ll find this deal is even worse than advertised.

The proposal is one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet.

Real Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers can’t discriminate between different kinds of online content and applications. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies. It’s what makes sure the next Google, out there in a garage somewhere, has just as good a chance as any giant corporate behemoth to find its audience and thrive online.

What Google and Verizon are proposing is fake Net Neutrality. You can read their framework for yourself here or go here to see Google twisting itself in knots about this suddenly “thorny issue.” But here are the basics of what the two companies are proposing:

1. Under their proposal, there would be no Net Neutrality on wireless networks — meaning anything goes, from blocking websites and applications to pay-for-priority treatment.

2. Their proposed standard for “non-discrimination” on wired networks is so weak that actions like Comcast’s widely denounced blocking of BitTorrent would be allowed.

3. The deal would let ISPs like Verizon — instead of Internet users like you — decide which applications deserve the best quality of service. That’s not the way the Internet has ever worked,and it threatens to close the door on tomorrow’s innovative applications. (If Real Player had been favored a few years ago, would we ever have gotten YouTube?)

4. The deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into “two pipes” – one of which would be reserved for “managed services,” a pay-for-pay platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.

5. The pact proposes to turn the Federal Communications Commission a toothless watchdog, left fruitlessly chasing consumer complaints but unable to make rules of its own. Instead, it would leave it up to unaccountable (and almost surely industry-controlled) third parties to deicide what the rules should be.

Google and CIA work together

Published on 30 July 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Just what the world needs:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

…

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

Google and Beijing get back into bed together

Published on 12 July 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Sadly, Google has caved to Chinese demands and will once again censor some online content. Principles are clearly flexible for the web giant:

Google, the US internet search company, has agreed to submit to official Chinese censorship.

The Chinese government, on its part, announced the renewal of Google’s licence to operate in the country.

The government’s decision came after the California-based company pledged not to provide “law-breaking content” to internet users in China, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua reported on Sunday, quoting an official with China’s internet regulator, that the licence was renewed for another year for Beijing Guxiang Information Technology Co Ltd, the operator of Google’s China website.

The industry and information technology ministry’s website listed Guxiang among some 200 companies whose licences had been renewed until 2012.

Xinhua said Guxiang agreed to “abide by Chinese law” and “ensure the company provides no law-breaking content” in its renewal application letter.

Your mobile phone can be used to kill

Published on 1 July 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Foreign Policy features an article about the “geo-politics of the iPhone”.

Perhaps the most revealing section:

The business: If you thought military procurement was all about snapping up hardware like guns and tanks, think again. Increasingly, companies like Raytheon and Knight’s Armament are developing smartphone applications for the armed services. Apple and Google are marketing their respective products, too. And the Pentagon’s buying.

The politics: Normally, military innovation drives advances in the private market. Take GPS satellite navigation, for instance, or the microwave oven. In the case of smartphones, though, the tables have turned. Web-enabled phones are going to war in ever greater numbers, and the U.S. military hopes that such devices, with the help of the Internet, can provide soldiers with reams of live battlefield data. But it isn’t just their passive capabilities that the military finds attractive.

In the same way that civilian third-party apps have greatly expanded the potential of the iPhone and similar hand-helds, the Pentagon’s R&D house, DARPA, bets that a military app store can likewise reshape the way soldiers fight and interact with one another. One such app, BulletFlight, lets snipers plug in variables like windage, distance, temperature, and humidity to help them achieve the perfect shot. Another, the One Force Tracker, plots friendly positions on a map in real time, and a third, Vcommunicator, produces “spoken and written translations of Arabic, Kurdish, and two Afghan languages.” It’s no revolution in military affairs, but the smartphone revolution may still shake up war-fighting in a big way.

Israel and Iraq questions provide double whammy in Auckland

Published on 15 May 2010 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’m currently at the Auckland Writer’s Festival. Wonderful event. Speaking to hundreds of people every day – mainly about the Middle East but also on the importance of alternative voices online – and the one message that keeps on coming up is how rarely dissenting Jewish perspectives or those critical of Israel appear in the mainstream here. These are issues I’ll be further exploring during my coming week-long tour around the country.

This story in today’s New Zealand Herald is a breath of fresh air:

Writers’ probing puts a modern edge on conflict in the Middle East

Yesterday was the Israel and Iraq double whammy at the Writers & Readers Festival. On Israel was Antony Loewenstein, who claimed that the Jewish state, like the old South Africa, had an apartheid system – only Israel’s was worse.

Loewenstein, an Australian journalist, is author of the controversial best seller My Israel Question in which he argues that the Jews’ history of persecution ought to make them better able to understand the importance of racial tolerance, and yet these values are anathema in present-day Israel.

He describes himself as a humanist Jew but says his critics have branded him a self-hating Jew for speaking out about Israel’s “blatant racism”. Yet he points out that the West has every right to comment on Israel “because we’re paying for its existence”.

Loewenstein was coherent, relaxed and used good-natured sarcasm: “Is [Israel] better than Iran? Well, yes. But is that the comparison?” Boycott, anyone?

The Iraq question went to Michael Otterman, co-author of Erasing Iraq, who was young enough to point out that the foreign press is now just a mouse click away if we care to Google, say, “Iraqi blogs”.

Both writers also commented that, despite adverts to the contrary, Barack Obama’s foreign policy looks like George W. Bush’s.

Otterman, interviewed by Sean Plunket (who just about kept his own ego in check), started with stats: Nearly five million Iraqis have abandoned their homes since 2003 – the largest movement of people in the Middle East since 1948 (when Israel became a state).

He visited Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan to ask: “What do Iraqis think?” He found that, to many minds, the war had been continuous since 1991, in the form of “genocidal sanctions”. Iraqi views of Saddam were mixed but views on the American occupation since 2003 ranged from bad to worse.

Otterman said ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq had undergone “sociocide” – “the killing of [their] way of life” – since 2003. He called it “evil”.

A session with 24-year-old boy wonder Ben Naparstek was a letdown. He didn’t mention most of the literary giants who feature in In Conversation: Encounters with Great Writers, the book of interviews he’s plugging.

How many Australians want their government to filter online content? Hint: not very many

Published on 12 May 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Last night in Sydney I successfully debated with some other colleagues that governments should not censor the internet. One of my co-speakers, Google’s Ross LaJeunesse, has an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald arguing against Australia’s proposed mandatory internet filter.

I agree and it looks like many Australians do, too (via ABC Radio’s PM tonight):

ASHLEY HALL: It seems the more parents learn about the Government’s proposed internet filter, the less they like it.

That’s the finding of a survey of parents in marginal electorates commissioned by a group representing several internet companies, state school organisations and libraries.

The researchers say even though parents want to make the internet safer, they don’t think a mandatory filter is the way to do it.

Meredith Griffiths reports.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Most parents worry about what their children are exposed to online.

SUE VERCOE: So they did confess that in reality, while it was their responsibility to control their child’s internet use, often they were just too busy, they didn’t really know how to go about monitoring and installing the free filters and that it was impossible to monitor everything their child was exposed to.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Sue Vercoe is the chief executive of GA Research.

In January it asked 39 parents living in marginal electorates in Sydney and Brisbane what they thought about the Government’s proposed mandatory internet filter.

SUE VERCOE: They haven’t heard much about the Government’s internet filtering legislation but if you ask them whether they support or oppose it, around two thirds are supportive, because at first glance, they believe that it will help ensure their children are not exposed to inappropriate material online.

And some of them also think that it might help combat paedophilia. However, when they hear a little bit more about the proposal and they become aware that there are other filtering options available, their support drops significantly.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Sue Vercoe says even though the number of respondents is small, the survey is significant.

SUE VERCOE: The findings of focus groups can be considered broadly indicative, but they are supported by quantitative research that McNair Ingenuity conducted earlier this year.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: She’s referring to a survey of around 1,000 people in February.

It found 80 per cent of Australian adults supported the proposed mandatory government internet filter to block access to overseas websites containing refused classification material.

But 46 per cent didn’t want the government to determine which websites would be blocked.

Sue Vercoe says GA Research asked the parents to rank four different models of filtering.

SUE VERCOE: The first three preferences that they gave were firstly more education for parents and children about how to use the internet more safely and how to install free filters. The second preference was for an optional filtering system; and where different filter could be set for adults and children within the one household.

Their third preference was for, if it was going to be mandatory filtering, for it to just be a limited range of content, primarily focused on child pornography, and the Government’s more broader mandatory filtering, was actually their last preference.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: The research was commissioned by the Safer Internet Group, whose members include Google, iiNet, Yahoo7, the Australian Council of State School Organisations and the Australian Library and Information Association.

But the idea of a mandatory filter still has the support of the Australian Christian Lobby.

The Lobby’s Managing Director Jim Wallace says the new research isn’t valid.

JIM WALLACE: I think it’s typical of the misinformation that’s coming from those opposed to this government proposal. If you look at the Safer Internet Group, eight of the nine people in the association are internet related people.

The McNair Ingenuity survey was done to a bona fide survey model, it surveyed 1,000 people, and 80 per cent of those specifically said that they favoured the mandatory government internet filter that would block access to overseas websites.

So, I find this is spurious. They’ve used just focus groups. You know; who were in the focus groups?

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: A spokeswoman for the Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the Government does not support refused classification content being available online.

She says the proposed filter would bring the internet into line with other media outlets.