More states censoring ‘net-CSM
27-02-09
The intensifying battle over Internet freedom
From China to Syria, repressive nations are cracking down hard on digital dissidents.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Christian Science Monitor: February 24, 2009
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0224/p09s01-coop.html
Eleanor Roosevelt never imagined the Internet.
Neither did the other framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 60 years ago when they enshrined the right to freedom of expression. Yet they wisely left room for just such a development by declaring in Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Today, the Internet is both the vehicle and the battleground for freedom of expression around the world. The struggle between writers and governments over this free flow of information has escalated this past year and promises to intensify. Those supporting open frontiers for ideas and information need to be on high alert and take steps necessary to protect those silenced and to keep the Internet unencumbered.
Last year became the first time that more Web journalists were jailed than those working in any other medium, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
China, Burma, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, and Zimbabwe have led the clampdown. They have arrested writers, blocked websites and Internet access, set strict rules on cyber cafes, and tracked writers’ work. In response, some writers have used proxy search engines, encryption, and other methods to try to get around censorship and detection.
“As in the cold war [when] you had an Iron Curtain, there is concern that authoritarian governments, led by China, are developing a Virtual Curtain,” says Arvind Ganesan, director of the Business and Human Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “There will be a free Internet on one side and a controlled Internet on the other. This will impede the free flow of information worldwide.”
In the past year, writers in general have been arrested and imprisoned for such alleged charges as “inciting subversion of state power” (China), “insulting religion” (Iran), “threatening state security” (Burma), “defaming the President of the Republic” (Egypt), “storing cultural products with contents against the Socialist Republic” (Vietnam), and “spreading false news” (Syria).
“The Internet is reshaping society from the ground up,” notes Larry Siems, the director of the Freedom to Write program at PEN American Center. “For instance there are two new novels from girls who are housebound in Saudi Arabia, but these were published on the Internet.” The question remains whether the writers can maintain their freedom in cyberspace, which they do not have in their physical space.
International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee regularly tracks approximately 900 cases of writers around the world who are under threat, arrested, attacked, or killed, with roughly 150 new cases each year. “There has definitely been a rise in the numbers of Internet writers, editors, and bloggers attacked,” notes Sara Whyatt, director of International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. “The Internet has caused an explosion of free speech. Governments of all sorts are finding this a challenge.”
China, which is particularly adept at blocking Internet use, leads the list of countries with long prison terms and the highest number of writers in prison. China’s crackdown on writers before the Olympics and the arrest in December of leading dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors of Charter 08, which advocates democratic reform in China, contradicts the government’s claim that it is easing up on restrictions. In spite of Liu’s detention, Charter 08 has circled the globe via the Internet, gathering signatures of Chinese from the mainland and the diaspora.
Because the Internet operates outside the structures of government, it challenges hierarchies of power and empowers the individual voice as never before. As many as 40 countries are engaged in some kind of Internet filtering and censorship, according to OpenNet Initiative. To counter these restrictions, human rights organizations and private companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo launched the Global Network Initiative (GNI) this fall. GNI, which sets voluntary standards to safeguard privacy and curtail censorship, is worthy of support.
The US Congress is watching its implementation closely and will also be considering legislation (the Global Online Freedom Act) to prevent Internet companies from assisting foreign governments in censoring content and revealing user information.
There are legitimate concerns about those who misuse the Internet, but a balance is possible between privacy and a government’s ability to track criminal and terrorist networks. Authoritarian governments should not use law enforcement needs as an excuse to shut down opposition and muzzle free expression. Keeping the digital highway open for the hundreds of millions of legitimate users is vital to freedom of expression and the free flow of information worldwide. It will take vigilance, agreed standards, and technological innovations to protect the Internet’s open structure.
One can imagine Eleanor Roosevelt today sitting at her computer sending out protests, even blogging as she and others frame the principles to keep this corridor of communication unfettered and free.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, a former Monitor reporter, is a vice president of International PEN and a board member of Human Rights Watch.
Entertainment Lawyers Attack Pirate Bay Witness’ Qualifications
Oskar Swartz
Wired: February 26, 2009
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/entertainment-l.html
The already-contentious trial of The Pirate Bay became even more heated Thursday, as an academic expert on the music industry testifying for the defense was hit with a fierce cross examination by entertainment lawyers.
Roger Wallis, a retired professor from Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, testified that the financial losses to piracy claimed by the entertainment industries are grossly exaggerated. On Wednesday, the chief executive of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries claimed that downloaders would have purchased every music track they pirated if it weren’t for file sharing services.
Four defendants, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström are accused of facilitating copyright infringement by running The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker that has 22 million users. They face up to two years in prison each, in addition to fines as high as $180,000.
Wallis, a song-writer and record company founder in the 1970s, received his PhD from University of Gothenburg in 1990 for his dissertation on the music industry. He went on to become a Research Fellow at City University in London and studied how the music cassette changed music creation, but was fought ferociously by the industry.
He said Thursday that he sees parallels in the file-sharing debate today. Digital technologies are weakening middlemen by allowing creators to market their work directly, he said.
“A never before seen transfer of resources from intermediaries like record companies to the creators themselves” is taking place,” Wallis testified.
Wallis said he worries that content producers will eventually lose the privilege of copyright entirely if aggressive lawsuits continue.
On cross-examination, the entertainment industry lawyers attacked Wallis’ academic title and publications. Agitated, he offered to show them his CV.
The proceedings were suspended twice by the court when emotions got too heated. At the end, a judge asked whether Wallis wanted any remuneration for appearing in court. He said no, but indicated he would accept flowers for his wife.
Pirate Bay fans watching the proceedings on a webcast immediately launched an IRC channel, a web site and Facebook groups to support Wallis, who later reported that his home was deluged with flowers and chocolates.
At the end of the day, two unrelated criminal cases against the Pirate Bay defendants were heard. Fredrik Neij was accused of having participated in a drunken burglary of a school when he was young, but the case was dismissed as too old. Gottfrid Svartholm was charged with possession of small amounts of illegal substances found during the raid of May 31, 2006.
Closing statements will be heard next week. Defense lawyers, however, indicated that there may be a long wait for a judgment. They said they may demand that the Stockholm court seek an opinion from a European Union court on whether The Pirate Bay is protected by an EU directive that provides a safe harbor for communications providers under certain circumstances.
Music Executive Ridiculed at Pirate Bay Trial
Oskar Swartz
Wired: February 25, 2009
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/piratebaywednes.html
Laughter filled The Pirate Bay trial here Wednesday when John Kennedy, the chief executive of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, testified that people would have purchased every music track they got free file sharing.
Kennedy answered an affirmative “Yes” to Pirate Bay defense attorneys when asked whether that was true. Bursting laughter could be heard from the audio room beside the courtroom where the trial’s sound was being broadcast.
The sleek executive, flown from London, was clad in a grayish-blue tailored suit and sported a helmet of stiff, reddish blown-dried hair. Or maybe it was a wig.
He explained that the IFPI is the industry organization of the record companies responsible for coordinating anti-piracy activities around the world and lobbying governments to pass laws making it easier to ding infringers.
When unauthorized copyright material is made available on The Pirate Bay, he said, sales of legitimate music slumps.
“If you lost 1,000 sales in week one, your recording, instead of going into the charts at number five, would go in at number 20. If you aimed at number 10 — which is good for a new artist – you could fall to number 75 and if you had aimed at number 20 you may not make the chart at all,” he testified.
The day’s testimony — which also came from Ludvig Werner, CEO of IFPI’s Swedish section and Per Sundin, CEO of the Swedish subsidiary of Universal Music -– amounted to accounts of The Pirate Bay ruining Hollywood.
All the while, lawyers for the four Pirate Bay co-founders drove home the point that the lobbying groups do not go after the millions of people who use The Pirate Bay tracker to search for pirated works online.
Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström face up to two years in prison each, in addition to fines as high as $180,000.
They are accused of facilitating copyright infringement under Swedish law by running a BitTorrent tracker that has 22 million users and points the way to where chunks of files of copyright works can be accumulated and automatically assembled into full copies of copyright material.
Sundin concluded the day’s testimony and perhaps was the most aggressive witness. He testified Pirate Bay was the root of the industry’s financial woes.
After the hearing, Sunde was seen chatting with Sundin about a lunch date.
[FACT comments: So is it money, or power or morality that drives governments to censor, or all three?]
ASIA HAND
An opening in cyberspace closes
Shawn W Crispin
Asia Times: February 27, 2009
http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/KB27Ae01.html
When a state-linked Cambodian Internet service provider (ISP) blocked access this month to a critical non-governmental organization report detailing the government’s alleged mismanagement of natural and energy resources, the censorship closed the loop on the region’s fast-closing cyberspace.
The Cambodian government has prioritized improving its Internet controls and legislation, despite the fact less than 0.3% of the population is online, one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the world. The recent bust of an alleged terror plot against the government revealed that authorities had capability to hack into suspects’ – and perhaps perceived other adversaries’ – e-mail accounts.
It wasn’t long ago that Asia’s Internet was being heralded as an inexorable force for democratic change across the predominantly authoritarian-run region. Rising Internet penetration rates and the proliferation of websites that provided alternative news and critical views, particularly in countries where the state had long dominated information flows, marked substantial democratic gains.
Across the world, governments are now bidding to claw back those gains and assert tighter control over the Internet through improved surveillance and censorship capabilities. Meanwhile, new laws are granting state authorities in many countries new powers to block and censor online content, often in the arbitrary name of maintaining social order or national security.
The battle for Internet freedom is particularly pitched in Southeast Asia, where even nominally democratic governments are now cracking down on journalists, bloggers and ordinary Internet users. China has emerged as the region’s Internet censorship role model, with its successful use of sophisticated filtering and surveillance technologies, widely known as Beijing’s “Great Firewall”.
Those capabilities have been widened through a new government-run computer monitoring information system, known as the “Golden Shield Project”. Of the 28 journalists now imprisoned in China, as tallied by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 24 of them were charged and sentenced for articles and commentaries they posted online.
In its recently released “Attacks on the Press” compendium, CPJ contends that a growing number of Southeast Asian governments have moved to emulate China’s cyber-censorship techniques. The advocacy group argues that as Western nations have moved to engage China’s authoritarian regime, several Southeast Asian governments no longer feel obliged to follow through on the democratic reforms – including commitments to Internet freedom – the West had once pressured them to adopt.
Those pressures are expected to diminish further as the US looks towards China to help bail-out its bankrupt financial and banking systems through the continued purchase of US treasury bonds. The US’s collapsing demand for regional exports and flagging outward investments is expected to eventually translate into reduced diplomatic clout in Southeast Asia, a retrenchment that will likely enhance China’s already rising regional influence.
Long-time US ally Thailand stands as a case in point. The Thai government has launched one of the most aggressive crackdowns on Internet freedom seen anywhere in the world – so far without a peep of dissent from Bangkok’s US embassy. The crackdown was presaged by the passage of the 2007 Computer Crime Act, which among other measures made the use of proxy servers to circumvent government blocks on websites an offense punishable by imprisonment.
The Information Technology and Communication Ministry has since earmarked millions of dollars to develop and deploy improved firewall technologies and the ministry now maintains an Internet “war room” where officials conduct surveillance over Internet content. The ministry said in early January that it had closed down 2,300 websites for posting materials deemed critical of the Thai royal family.
The Justice Ministry has since indicated it will seek a court order to block another 3,000 to 4,000 sites for the same reason. At least one Thai Internet user is currently in prison for posting materials deemed offensive to the royal crown, and two bloggers were temporarily detained but not formally charged on similar charges in 2007.
Cyber-backslider
Nominally democratic Malaysia is another prominent backslider. The government pledged in 1996 not to censor the Internet to lure foreign funds to the Multimedia Super Corridor project, an ambitious state gambit that aimed to incubate Malaysia’s own version of the US’s Silicon Valley. The no-censorship policy allowed online news providers and bloggers to report and comment on news that the state-controlled mainstream media either neglected or was instructed from above to ignore.
That commitment was symbolically dropped last year when the government ordered local ISPs to block access to prominent blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin’s Malaysia Today news site, which has a larger readership than several established state-influenced newspapers. He has been charged and detained under both the Sedition and Internal Security Acts for online writings which were critical of the government.
According to the CPJ, it’s still unclear whether Malaysian authorities have deployed the same type of filtering and monitoring technologies seen in China, but the government is known to monitor Internet content through three different state agencies, including the Prime Minister’s Office. According to e-mail correspondence shared with this correspondent, Raja Petra, now temporarily released on Internal Security Act charges, is under family pressure to flee the country rather than stand trial in Malaysia’s politically compromised courts.
The situation is worsening in less democratic countries. Vietnam, known to maintain some of Asia’s most extensive Internet controls outside of China, has in recent months moved to introduce more stringent regulations governing bloggers and their postings. Singapore authorities recently harassed an Asia Times Online contributor for a November story that detailed the island state’s mounting financial troubles.
Police claimed that the article had been sent with added malicious comments to the head of state, opposition politicians and newspapers from the reporter’s e-mail account. The reporter denied the charge and police officials later indicated that an unidentified hacker had sent the message from her account. Either way, the reporter has been put on official notice that her online writings and e-mail activities are under surveillance.
Meanwhile, countries as repressive as Myanmar are dedicating significant resources to Internet censorship. The country’s technological failure to control the Internet was apparent for all to see when undercover journalists sent footage and reports of the 2007 Saffron Revolution street protests to outside news organizations, forcing the regime to unplug the Internet altogether before its fatal, final crackdown. Still, it’s unclear how many undercover journalists the authorities have been identified and jailed as part of their wider crackdown on dissent.
There are indications that Myanmar authorities have since received censorship training from Russian and Chinese officials. Some contend that this explains the mysterious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on a number of exile media groups’ websites last year. Soe Myint, editor of the New Delhi-based Mizzima News, said during a recent presentation in Chiang Mai that the cost to effectively protect his website from future DDoS attacks is beyond his news organization’s financial means.
Despite these growing attacks, there is some cause for hope. Human rights organizations, investors and several prominent US Internet companies, including Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft, agreed in a joint initiative last October to follow guidelines to protect online expression and privacy when faced with repressive government requests for user identities or assistance in blocking targeted websites.
Meanwhile, some regional media groups have received foreign assistance to locate their servers anonymously and remotely in second countries to guard against future DDoS attacks. And ever-evolving proxy server and other roundabout firewall technologies continue to put Internet users in countries as isolated as Myanmar a step ahead of government censors.
Yet even with those agreements and technologies, Asia’s Internet is a substantially more dangerous space than it was previously. Southeast Asian governments are now responding with bigger budgets and heavier hands to the technological and political challenge presented by online expression. Under that mounting assault, previous high hopes for the medium’s democracy-promoting potential have in large measure faded.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online’s Southeast Asia Editor and Asia Program Consultant to the Committee to Protect Journalists. He may be reached at swcrispin@atimes.com.
[FACT comments: We find it particularly reprehensible that governments, including Thailand’s, are blocking Internet Archive. Internet Archive is a single largest repository of all web pages and artifacts in the public domain. Keep your mitts off our history!]
Technical aspects of the censoring of archive.org
Richard Clayton
February 17, 2009
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/02/17/technical-aspects-of-the-censoring-of-archiveorg/
Back in December I wrote an article here on the “Technical aspects of the censoring of Wikipedia” in the wake of the Internet Watch Foundation’s decision to add two Wikipedia pages to their list of URLs where child sexual abuse images are to be found. This list is used by most UK ISPs (and blocking systems in other countries) in the filtering systems they deploy that attempt to prevent access to this material.
A further interesting censoring issue was in the news last month, and this article (a little belatedly) explains the technical issues that arose from that.
For some time, the IWF have been adding URLs from The Internet Archive (widely known as “the wayback machine“) to their list. I don’t have access to the list and so I am unable to say how many URLs have been involved, but for several months this blocking also caused some technical problems.
The Internet Archive has robots that wander the web taking copies of websites to preserve for posterity. This is incredibly useful, because it is often the case that material isn’t preserved by the original website owner. However, from time to time, it seems that the robots unwittingly preserve sexual abuse images of children. Eventually someone discovers this and reports it to the IWF.
The IWF don’t immediately get in contact with website owners when those sites are based abroad; so they don’t immediately send an email off to the Internet Archive — even though I have no doubt that the Internet Archive has no intention whatsoever of hosting illegal images, and will act immediately once they understand what their robot has been doing. I’ve previously discussed how IWF’s reticence significantly prolongs the period for which images are available, and won’t labour that aspect here.
The important thing from the point of view of this article is that the URL of the image gets added to the IWF blocking list, and ISPs start to act upon it. In particular, Demon Internet, the well-known UK ISP, takes this list and arranges to block access to the URLs it contains. It does this by ensuring that all access to the Internet Archive passes through a web proxy — which will ensure that the blocked page is not served, but all other pages (and the Internet Archive has 66 billion of them) are available in the normal way.
However, some Demon customers unexpectedly found that the unblocked parts of the Internet Archive were being adversely affected. Pages of links to archives were populated with links that didn’t lead elswhere in the archive, but to Demon’s cache machine instead. This was first detected at the beginning of October 2008, but the problem almost immediately disappeared. It was reported again from time to time during the Autumn, but never resolved.
However, over the weekend of 10–11 January 2009, the problem returned, and this time the effect was straightforward to reproduce. Complaints by Demon customers — who deduced that the IWF wanted something on the Internet Archive censored — were picked up by the press, and The Register ran an article. The comments made on the article indicated that other customers at other ISPs were seeing the same effect… exactly the same effect! They were also seeing pages with links to Demon’s web proxy.
At this point the basic failure mechanism became clear, because these non-customers would not have been using Demon’s web proxy — the faulty pages were being constructed by the Internet Archive and served up not only to Demon, but also to people at other ISPs. Once that was realised, it was only a matter of time before there was a fix in place.
To understand the failure mechanism, it’s necessary to know that the Internet Archive keeps its pages in a database, with incomplete links from one part of an archived website to another. When these pages are served, the incomplete links are filled in with pointers within the Archive — so that you can navigate around the preserved copy of the website. To reduce load on the database the Internet Archive runs multiple proxy caches of its own, and the links in the pages are tweaked to ensure that your browsing stays on a single cache.
However, these caches were not filtering out request headers sent by the Demon web proxy, and so pages were being constructed with the links pointing at Demon’s system rather than at an Internet Archive machine.
Since these newly constructed pages were cached, customers of other ISPs could be sent them — and of course they were tending to look at the same pages as the ones that Demon customers were testing and then reporting to the press…
The fix was the simple expedient of filtering the request properly, so that the back end only saw Internet Archive cache headers (and of course flushing out the badly constructed pages).
There’s a bit more detail in this Usenet article posted once the fix was in place — there was no comment before that because once the mechanism was understood it would have been possible to deliberately craft requests that constructed pages where you were apparently looking at an archived site (of the White House in August 2001 perhaps) but following the links would take you to somewhere else entirely (perhaps fictitious pages showing that the conspiracy theorists are right!), whilst leaving the impression that you were looking back in time at real White House pages.
Sadly, as in the previous Wikipedia debacle, many of the reports generated by the public, and the diagnostic tests that they ran, were either useless or totally misleading. For example, the URLs that were blocked were for http://web.archive.org/ whereas many people checked out http://www.archive.org/ and found that it was not being censored at all — they were right, but they drew entirely the wrong conclusion.
Another issue worth noting is that no-one, so far as I am aware, has been able to determine which page on web.archive.org was actually being blocked — rather different from the Wikipedia event, where the blocked page was known with a few hours.
However, even though the technical failure in this case cannot be laid at the door of the IWF, it must still be wondered what the value is of diverting all of the traffic to a high profile, entirely reputable, website, when a three minute telephone call would have meant that the illegal material was immediately removed. We’ve now seen two high-traffic sites filtered in the past few months; and on both occasions bad things have happened, which have — rightly or wrongly — brought the IWF into disrepute. The underlying policy decisions need reconsideration.
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns of surveillance culture
The Times: February 27, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5812076.ece
Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country’s privacy watchdog has warned.
Richard Thomas told The Times that “creeping surveillance” in the public and private sectors had gone “too far, too fast” and risked undermining democracy.
The Information Commissioner warned that proposals to allow widespread data sharing between Whitehall and the private sector were too far-reaching and that plans to create a giant database of every telephone call, e-mail and text message risked turning everyone into a suspect. “In the last 10 or 15 years a great deal of surveillance in public and private places has been extended without sufficient thought to the risks and consequences,” said Mr Thomas, 59. “Our society is based on liberty and democracy. I do not want to see excessive surveillance hardwired into British society.”
He criticised proposals going through Parliament to allow mass data sharing between government departments and the private sector. Campaigners have claimed that Section 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill would enable the transfer of health and tax records to private companies such as insurance firms and medical researchers.
Last year Mr Thomas — who became head of the independent body charged with safeguarding privacy and freedom of information in 2002 — recommended to ministers that data sharing be allowed only in carefully defined circumstances such as law enforcement, improving public services and for research. They ignored his advice. The Bill “needs to be narrowed”, Mr Thomas said. He called on Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to write into it that “anything to justify a data-sharing order has to come explicitly under one of those headings”.
Whitehall sources told The Times yesterday that Mr Straw would amend the Bill in the next few weeks to meet Mr Thomas’s criticisms. Previously Mr Straw’s department had maintained that there were sufficient safeguards, including a requirement for parliamentary approval for each data transfer.
The Bill also gives the Information Commissioner the power to investigate public bodies without their consent where there has been a suspected breach of data protection law. Mr Thomas complained that the powers did not extend to private companies.
Other government plans also risked undermining people’s right to privacy, Mr Thomas said. Of the Home Secretary’s proposal to build a database to store information currently held by internet service providers and telephone companies, Mr Thomas said: “A government-run database of the communications of all citizens, every phone call, every e-mail, every text, every internet use; a database of all those activities held by the Government would be a step too far for the British way of life.”
He dismissed Jacqui Smith’s assurances that officials would have access only to data on who had contacted whom, rather than the content of the communication. “That A has telephoned B on a particular date from a particular location is actually quite intrusive,” he said. “If an MP logged on to a site selling Viagra, that tells you quite a lot. If a 16-year-old girl goes on to a website about abortion that tells you an awful lot about her too. I don’t think there’s a black-and-white distinction between traffic data and content.”
Mr Thomas made clear that he did not object to the monitoring of those suspected of involvement in terrorism and serious crime. “But I think that’s a very different situation from monitoring the communications of the entire population,” he said. “We’ve got to have a much clearer distinction between those who are suspects and everybody else and I think we’re at risk of making everybody a suspect if we go too far down this road.”
Security services have insisted that modernising the capacity to store and search telephone and internet information is crucial if Britain’s ability to combat terrorists and serious organised crime is to be maintained.
Mr Thomas said that forcing government officials to make specific requests every time they needed information — as they currently have to do – provided a crucial safeguard. “If you have a security service or a policeman making an application [to an internet service provider for records], at least each of those applications has to go through a process and is scrutinised by the ISP. That’s very different from it all being done behind the closed doors of a governmental agency.”
His concern about the erosion of the right to privacy extends to social networking sites.
People did not realise that information put on sites such as Facebook and MySpace could come “back to haunt them”, he said.
Another area of concern for Mr Thomas is the use of surveillance cameras: he criticised the police for pressing to have closed-circuit television cameras installed in pubs. “We’ve come out against the requirement for pub licensees to fit CCTV as a condition of their licence,” he said. “This is hardwiring surveillance into British pubs. It is unacceptable.”
He also expressed concern that even some schools were now installing cameras in the classroom. He said that it might be acceptable in the case of a particularly unruly class, “but to roll out cameras in all classrooms is unacceptable”.
The Information Commissioner added his voice to criticism of ContactPoint, a computer database containing details on every child in the country.
“I can see the benefits of a national database of children at risk … I’m less convinced that you need to have a database of every child in the country. Is it not better to have fuller details of children known to be at risk and make sure that information is used properly?”
Other key government surveillance measures had been “pushed through” without proper scrutiny or parliamentary debate. Of a database of DNA gathered from crime suspects, he said: “Clearly, the DNA database was set up with insufficient public debate. Part of the problem was that such debate took place on the assumption that it would be expensive to run DNA tests. The costs have absolutely fallen and it has become a matter of routine. We have to re-examine the issue in the light of current technology.”
He also lamented the lack of debate over the creation of a North London database that records details of car numberplates for up to five years. Mr Thomas questioned whether the Government had the legal authority for this and asked whether the public recognised that millions of their daily journeys were now being monitored. “We have to scrutinise every proposal very closely indeed to ensure that none involves a step too far.”
[FACT comments: When the president of the Canadian Library Association tells us Web filtering doesn’t work, we should listen.]
Internet filters aren’t the best way to catch pornography
Ken Roberts
The Record: February 26, 2009
http://news.therecord.com/Opinions/article/494421
As president of the Canadian Library Association, I am writing in response to the news reports concerning public library filtering.
Rev. Robert Merritt of the First United Church in Cambridge is quoted in his Feb. 13 letter to the editor, The Public Has Spoken, as insisting that libraries not condone the viewing of pornography.
The Canadian Library Association agrees. Pornography has no rightful place in public libraries.
At the same time, the Canadian Library Association strongly opposes any contention that filtering is required to ensure such safety.
Some library boards do filter and this is their choice. Still, filtering public access computers is not the only possible path or even the best method to ensure a safe environment. Many library boards make it clear, through policy, what type of use is acceptable and then empower staff and educate users to ensure compliance. Library boards that choose this model feel that community members are best protected when library staff are vigilant and actively enforce good policy.
Many library boards feel that vigilance is the only effective approach since filtering is not effective enough and does not prevent the viewing of inappropriate images on laptops using wireless connections or viewing material stored on memory sticks.
Vigilance allows people who abuse policy decisions to be identified and to be removed from libraries and to lose their rights of access or, where appropriate, to be arrested.
Staff at the Markham Public Library, for example, recently noticed inappropriate behaviour that led to the arrest of a library user. Several years ago, London Public Library staff also helped to convict a person who was engaged in illegal activity on a library computer. In both instances, filtering would not have stopped the offensive activity. Vigilance ensured that inappropriate behaviour was stopped. It is entirely possible that, if filtering had been in place, staff may have been less aware of potential danger.
When it works, filtering may recognize and stop for the moment some forms of unacceptable behaviour. Staff empowerment allows for illegal or inappropriate activity to be identified and stopped permanently.
If filtering can stop some forms of unacceptable activity, why is it not universally employed in public libraries? Filters do not block all pornographic or illegal sites. They can’t. Some citizen boards worry that the illusion of safety filters provide relaxes control of monitored use.
While we can agree with Merritt that libraries should be safe places, we may disagree on what safety means. Libraries should never be places that are safe from unpopular ideas and thoughts. Private sector technology driven filters do not limit themselves to trying to block pornographic images. They also block access to legitimate content.
Conduct a simple test. Find a computer that is filtered and search for articles critical of filtering. Conduct this same search on a computer that is not filtered and compare the results. If the results are different, ask yourself why a filtering company needs to filter articles critical of its own way of conducting business. You can do this same test for other topics, such as evolution or abortion or the controversial Bill Maher movie, Religulous.
The Canadian Library Association’s position is that the only effective filtering tool is human supervision and intervention supported by good policy. The best safeguard for children is the monitoring of use by a parent or guardian.
The association rejects any suggestion that only library boards which filter care about those they serve. We urge Cambridge city council to reconsider its motion calling for the province to force libraries to filter and we will strongly oppose Cambridge MPP Gerry Martiniuk’s private member’s bill.
Ken Roberts is chief librarian at the Hamilton Public Library and president of the Canadian Library Association. Second Opinion articles reflect the views of Record readers on a variety of subjects.
‘Fahrenheit 451′ heats up a cold day
Kevin Cowherd
Baltimore Sun: February 26, 2009
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-li.cowherd26feb26,0,5162602.column
Today, in another helpful public service provided by this column, I recommend the perfect book to curl up with on a cold winter’s day. Regular visitors to this space will recall that in recent years I have recommended a number of terrific novels for beach reading, among them such classics as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Charles Portis’ The Dog of the South.
But forget about the beach. Look, the way this economy is going, you won’t have enough money to go to a movie this summer, never mind the beach. So why not start reading a good book right now, before they turn the lights out on you?
The book I’m pushing this winter is Fahrenheit 451 by the great Ray Bradbury, which you would have read in high school if you weren’t so busy hanging around with your loser friends and getting in trouble.
This is the classic best-seller about a dystopian society in the future where books are banned – and so is all critical thought.
Reading books in this world gets you carted off to a mental hospital, but not before “firemen” arrive at your house to soak the books in kerosene and burn them at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bradbury says the novel, written in 1953, is not about censorship, as many think. Instead, he says it’s about how TV, the great time-waster, destroys interest in reading books.
(This makes me wonder what Bradbury thinks about the time-wasting capabilities of Internet sites like Facebook, which I just joined and wrote about last Sunday.
(If you’re scoring at home, I’m up to 130 Facebook “friends,” and that number is growing fast. This is what happens when you have no standards and will friend just about anyone with a pulse and an Internet service provider.)
Getting back to our subject, the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451 is a fireman named Guy Montag, who’s been burning books for 10 years and gets a rush out of his job.
”It was a pleasure to burn,” reads the opening chapter. “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”
Whew. Is it me or is it getting warmer already?
Then Montag meets a neighbor, a mysterious 17-year-old, Clarisse McClellan, a free-thinker who makes him question himself and his ideals.
Pretty soon he’s re-evaluating this whole book-burning business and hoarding books himself, until his secret is discovered and he turns his flamethrower on another fireman and flees and – look, you’re going to have to read it for yourself, OK?
What do I look like, Mr. CliffsNotes?
Here’s an interesting bit of Fahrenheit 451 trivia: Bradbury wrote it on a pay typewriter in the basement of the student library at UCLA. He had to put a dime in the typewriter every 30 minutes.
”Time was indeed money,” he wrote years later. “I finished the first draft in roughly nine days.
“ Nine days! It takes me nine days to figure out my Verizon bill.
In any event, you will love this book. I have read it three or four times and find it as riveting now as when I first read it in high school.
In fact, I’m so convinced you’ll love it that if you buy it and aren’t 100 percent satisfied, I will personally drive to your home and refund your money. (Note to editor: Please run the usual legal disclaimer here that gets me out of that. Thanks.)
To make up for any inconvenience, I’ll also take you out for dinner at a fancy restaurant of your choosing.
I should warn you, though, that the topic of conversation during our meal will probably be: What in God’s name is wrong with you that you don’t like this book?
And things might get a little loud, especially if we’re having drinks.
So you should think long and hard about asking for a refund. Sometimes it’s just not worth the aggravation.
USA: Freeing public documents-Wired
27-02-09
[FACT comments: We’ve reported about the effort to crowbar real freedom of information from government. We pay for it--it’s ours!]
Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama’s Printer
Ryan Singel
Wired: February 26, 2009
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/rogue-archivist.html
For more than a decade, Carl Malamud of public.resource.org has been angering government bureaucrats by setting government documents free using his online pirate printing press.
But now, Malamud is campaigning to be The Man.
Or, more accurately, the chief printer for The Man.
Malamud started by forcing the SEC to put filings online in the ’90s, moved into publishing the nation’s laws and regulations for free online, and is now fighting to free federal court document-retrieval systems from its onerous per-page fees.
It’s all part of his plan to open-source the nation’s operating system.
Now Malamud has launched a public campaign — found online at YesWeScan.org — to be nominated to become the “Public Printer of the United States,” the head of the Government Printing Office.
He writes:
In 2008, Public.Resource.Org published over 32.4 million pages of primary legal materials, as well as thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs. In the 1990s, I fought to place the databases of the United States on the Internet. In the 1980s, I fought to make the standards that govern our global Internet open standards available to all. Should I be honored to be nominated and confirmed, I would continue to work to preserve and extend our public domain, and would place special attention to our relationship with our customers, especially the United States Congress.
Malamud has already filed his radical transparency proposals with the Obama transition team, and now is looking for people to support his nominations by blogging about his campaign or adding their support in comments on blog posts.
Given Malamud’s ability to wear down government bureaucracies, the Obama administration might do well to save themselves the trouble. Malamud will be the nation’s public printer — it’s just a question of whether he’ll be rogue or legit.
Time of reckoning for Khmer Krom
Brendan Brady with additional reporting by Neth Pheaktra
Phnom Penh Post: February 25, 2009
Khmer Krom monks in Phnom Penh prepare to mourn slain brethren, while Vietnam is called to defend treatment of ethnic Khmers amid fresh stream of criticism by rights groups.
EUROPE TAKES NOTICE AMID REPORTS OF ABUSES
In December 2008, two Italian parliamentarians – one representing the EU – visited the region to advocate for greater cultural and religious freedoms for Khmer Krom. They were prevented from boarding a flight from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. The rebuff came from a Vietnamese state tour agency claiming the pair failed to supply sufficient itinerary information before their arrival, but to most local observers it seemed to be a thinly veiled attempt by some Vietnamese government officials to thwart any attempts at advocacy for ethnic Khmers in their country. Two months earlier the EU passed a resolution calling for increased pressure on human rights reforms in Vietnam, including a specific mention of “discrimination” and “persecution” against Khmer Krom, and, in one of its few references to individuals, singled out the case of Tim Sakhorn, an outspoken Khmer Krom monk who disappeared in Phnom Penh 2007, with some reports stating that he was crammed into a Toyota by unidentified assailants. He resurfaced in Vietnam, was charged with violating national unity, and after a year in prison, now reportedly lives under house arrest in Vietnam.
In February 2007, a young politically active monk was found dead at the Tronum Chhroeung pagoda in Kandal province: His throat had been slit.
The body of the monk, an ethnic Khmer born in Vietnam named Eang Sok Thoeun, was discovered the morning after he had taken part in a demonstration at the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh protesting the treatment of ethnic Khmers in southern Vietnam – a group known in Cambodia as Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer.
Police declared his death to be suicide and disposed of his body without further investigation. Rights groups and Khmer Krom activists suspected his murder was politically motivated.
This Friday, Khmer Krom clergy will gather at Wat Samaki Reangsay, their spiritual base in Phnom Penh, to commemorate the second anniversary of Eang Sok Thoeurn’s death.
The commemoration comes on the eve of a much larger forum to address what rights groups and Khmer Krom activists describe as a persistent and often violent campaign by the Vietnamese and Cambodian governments to stifle the rights and distinct identity of the ethnic group.
Pledge of action
Two centuries ago, what is now the southern delta of Vietnam was part of the Khmer Kingdom. Vietnam says one million ethnic Khmers still live there. Khmer Krom leaders put the number 10 times higher and claim a further 1.5 million Khmer Krom have migrated to Cambodia.
Abuses against Khmer Krom by the Vietnamese state will be raised at the United Nations Human Rights Council in May, according to local rights officials.
In meetings with the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, and the UN refugee office in Bangkok last month, Ang Chanrith, executive director of the Phnom Penh-based Khmer Kampuchea Krom Human Rights Organisation, was told the international body would call on Vietnamese officials to defend charges against its treatment of Khmer Krom and Montagnard hill tribes, as well as other indigenous groups.
“She said she would take action on the situation and that our case would be presented,” he said, adding that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Bangkok had also agreed to revisit past reports of official violent suppression received from Khmer Krom seeking asylum in Thailand. He said the UNHCR had previously not been receptive to these reports.
The news has renewed hope for Khmer Krom activists. For Young Sin, president of the Khmer Krom Buddhist Monks Association and a former teacher of the slain monk, the United Nations may be able to exert leverage over Vietnam in a way that regional groups cannot.
The government should be trying to engage in peaceful dialogue with the Khmer Krom, rather than throwing them in jail.
“If the UN intervenes and puts pressure on the Vietnamese government, it wouldn’t dare continue carrying out the kinds of repression it has inflicted on the Khmer Krom people,” said Young Sin, who is also abbot of Wat Samaki Reangsay.
A history of violence
Just how politically sensitive the topic is can be judged from the responses from Cambodia and Vietnam to a comprehensive report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the subject. Released last month, the report stated that Khmer Krom monks in Vietnam seeking greater religious and personal freedoms had been unfairly threatened, defrocked and imprisoned. In Cambodia, the rights group said, activist Khmer Krom monks have been deported to Vietnam.
The report – “On the Margins: Rights Abuses of Ethnic Khmer in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta” – tracked escalating tensions between Khmer Krom and the authorities on both sides of the border.
Hanoi’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dzung rejected the report as a “total fabrication”, and said freedom of speech and religion in Vietnam were constitutionally protected, the state-controlled Viet Nam News agency quoted him as saying. A spokesman for the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh also rejected the report, saying that his government did not discriminate against any of its 54 official ethnic groups.
HRW also accused the Cambodian government of abetting Vietnam, “a close ally”, to suppress the voices of Khmer Krom who flee across the border to Cambodia and advocate for greater freedoms for their communities.
Citing eyewitness accounts and confidential internal documents prepared by Vietnamese security officials, HRW said Vietnamese agents have long operated inside Cambodia with help from the government to identify “cells of reactionary” Khmer Krom and devise “effective measures of interdiction and management”.
Rights advocate Ang Chanrith corroborated the charge, saying the Cambodian government allows Vietnamese agents to operate locally: “We often see Vietnamese agents at our gatherings. They wear plainclothes and videotape us in order to identify the monks who attend demonstrations. They speak Vietnamese to each other, and our demonstrators see them often and can now recognise them.”
Reaction from the Cambodian government to HRW’s report was unsympathetic. Religious Affairs Minister Min Khin declined to comment, while Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith rejected the report’s findings, saying “criticism by civil society groups of the [Cambodian and Vietnamese] governments does not help protect the Khmer Krom”.
“They don’t know anything. They work only for money,” he added. “But the Cambodian government works peacefully with Vietnamese authorities for the prosperity of the Khmer Krom.”
Reporting in the Cambodian press was mixed. The major newspapers affiliated with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, such as Rasmey Kampuchea and Kampuchea Thmey – did not mention the HRW report, saying they did not receive it. Opposition-affiliated papers did.
Um Sarin, president of the Cambodian Association for the Protection of Journalists, said fears of government disapproval drove some newspapers to ignore the scathing report.
International image
Activists say the consequences of official suppression are thoroughly debilitating.
“Khmer Krom live in poverty, and their identity and religious practices have been destroyed,” said Thach Setha, head of the Khmer Kampuchea Krom Community. “The Vietnamese government doesn’t allow Khmer Krom to use the internet, to listen to Voice of America or Radio Free Asia on the radio, and has blocked our access to education.”
But Ang Chanrith is confident international attention to the issue will force Vietnamese authorities to relax their treatment, if not agree to real concessions.
“We have to use international groups to put pressure on the Vietnamese government to allow Khmer Krom to exercise their rights,” he said.
He recently returned from a trip to Stockholm, where he presented reports of abuses against Khmer Krom, including allegations of collusion between Cambodian and Vietnamese authorities to keep a tight grip on activists. He is banking on the UN, however, to bring results.
The human rights record of each UN member state is subjected to public scrutiny, or a Universal Periodic Review, every four years. This May, Vietnam’s number is up, amid a fresh stream of criticism against its government’s treatment of ethnic groups living within its borders.
Sara Colm, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that given the lack of independent oversight within the tightly controlled communist state, international organisations, including her own, submitted reports to the UN Human Rights Council detailing rights abuses in Vietnam, including the situation of the Khmer Krom. Vietnam is thought to have filed its own report to the UN over statements accusing it of rights abuses, although a spokesman for the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh said he was unaware of any such response.
Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said that although Vietnam has a bitter past with much of the West and remains a communist state, its integration into global markets means it needs to take international opinion into account.
“It’s clear Vietnam cares about its international image, including its track record on human rights,” he said. “In recent years, it has taken pride in its enhanced global standing through its admission into the World Trade Organization and its election to a two-year seat on the UN Security Council.”
“The challenge now is to get the Vietnamese government to replace its rhetoric about human rights with actual progress on the ground. The government should be trying to engage in peaceful dialogue with the Khmer Krom, rather than throwing them in jail,” Adams said.
Meanwhile, as the UN prepares for its review, the monks at Wat Samaki Reangsay rehearse the prayers they will chant for the soul of their slain brethren. Abbot Young Sin said threats will not deter his monks from practising their religion and fighting for others to do so. And he
rejected accusations that monks are overstepping their role as clergy.
“Buddhism is absolutely compatible with calling for peace,” he said. “Advocating for the freedoms for lay people is our responsibility.”
