CyberLaw Blog

Archive for March, 2009

Film of Tibet violence may have prompted China to block YouTube: “Video images of Chinese police beating Tibetans as they lie trussed-up on the
ground may have prompted the country’s censors to block access to YouTube,
the popular video-sharing website.”

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

China brands Tibet beating video fake: “

Edited together from different sources

The Chinese government has branded a YouTube video, purportedly showing Chinese police viciously beating Tibetan protesters, as a fake.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

China criticised over YouTube: “China is criticised for blocking access to the popular video sharing website YouTube.”

(Via BBC News.)

China blocks YouTube as internet crackdown spreads: “The online video website YouTube has been blocked in China for more than a
day, the company said.”

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

China Blocks YouTube, Google Tries to Reinstate Access: “Google doesn’t know why China is blocking access to every video on YouTube, but says it’s trying to end the blockage as soon as possible.

(Via Wired News.)

‘Unafraid’ of Internet, China Appears to Block YouTube

BEIJING (Reuters) – China is not afraid of the Internet, its Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, even as access to the popular video sharing site YouTube appeared to be blocked.

YouTube has been unavailable for users in China, which filters the Internet for content critical of Communist Party rule, since late on Monday.

‘Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite,’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.

Qin said China’s 300 million Internet users and 100 million blogs showed that ‘China’s internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security.’

He said he did not know about YouTube being blocked.

Access to YouTube had been spotty earlier in March, the one-year anniversary of widespread protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule.

An Internet crackdown that began in January has closed hundreds of Chinese sites, including a popular blog hosting site and several sites popular with Tibetans.

It has been described by analysts as another step in the Party’s battle to stifle dissent in a year of sensitive anniversaries, including the 20th anniversary of the government’s bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

(Reporting by Lucy Hornby; Editing by Nick Macfie)

(Via Wired News.)

China blocks YouTube after Tibet complaintsAttack on video showing security forces beating Tibetans

China has blocked the video-sharing network YouTube after Beijing denounced footage appearing to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year as ‘a lie’.

The authorities have blocked the service on previous occasions and, more frequently, have prevented access to specific videos.

Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed that Beijing halted access to the site this week but said it did not know why.

‘We are looking into it and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible,’ spokesman Scott Rubin said in an email to the Associated Press.

It is not clear why China has blocked it now. But the state news agency, Xinhua, yesterday condemned a video released by the Tibetan government-in-exile, which was posted on YouTube recently .

The government-in-exile said the video showed the brutal beating of Tibetan protesters and the wounds of a young man called Tendar. It allegeed he was detained for attempting to stop police beating a monk, and later died of his injuries.

But Xinhua, citing an unidentified official with China’s Tibetan regional government, said that the video was a lie.

‘Technology experts found that video and audio was edited to piece together different places, times and people,’ said the official.

He said that an officer had ‘defeated’ a man named Tendar, but acted in self-defence after the man slashed him with a knife and ignored several warnings to stop. He added that Tendar ‘died from a disease at home awaiting court trial’; that the person shown in the video was not Tendar; and that the wounds shown were in any case fake.

‘The Dalai Lama group is used to fabricating lies to deceive the international community and the aim of this video is to hide the truth of the March 14th riot,’ he said.

Tibet is a particularly sensitive issue at the moment because this month marks one year since fatal riots in Lhasa sparked wider unrest across Tibetan areas, and 50 years since a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Large parts of western China are still under heavy security.

A foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, told reporters yesterday that he did not know about the block, adding: ‘Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the internet. In fact, it is just the opposite.’

Citing the country’s 300 million internet users – the world’s largest online population – and 100m blogs, he added: ‘China’s internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security.’

One blogger commented wryly that Qin had spoken accurately, because ‘it has always been that the internet fears the Chinese government’.

In January, the authorities launched a crackdown on ‘vulgar’ content which led to the closure of hundreds of sites, including a popular blog hosting site. Critics argue that the campaign is designed to intimidate bloggers and discourage dissent. Several other countries have blocked YouTube in the past.

(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)

Students Sue Prosecutor in Cellphone Photos Case: “Almost unheard of a year or two ago, cases related to ‘sexting,’ nude or seminude photos sent over wireless phones, are popping up all over the country.”

(Via NYT > Child Pornography.)

Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites – Wikileaks

March 19, 2009, By Asher Moses (Sidney Morning Herald)

The Australian communications regulator’s top-secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of Australia’s forthcoming internet censorship regime.

Wikileaks, an anonymous document repository for whistleblowers, obtained the list, which has been seen by this website, and plans to publish it for public consumption on its website imminently.

Wikileaks has previously published the blacklists for Thailand, Denmark and Norway.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list ‘constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material’.

He said the leaked list would become ‘the concerned parent’s worst nightmare’ as curious children would inevitably seek it out.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

‘It seems to me as if just about anything can potentially get on the list,’ Landfelt said.

The blacklist is maintained by ACMA and provided to makers of internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their PCs.

However, if the Government proceeds with its mandatory internet filtering scheme, sites on the blacklist will be blocked for all Australians. The Government has flagged plans to expand the blacklist to 10,000 sites or more.

In a special report, written in conjunction with the Internet Industry Association and presented to the Government over a year ago, Landfeldt warned that ‘list leakage’ was one of the main issues associated with maintaining a secret blacklist of prohibited sites.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, dug up the blacklist after ACMA added several Wikileaks pages to the list following the site’s publication of the Danish blacklist.

He said secret censorship systems were ‘invariably corrupted’, pointing to the Thailand censorship list, which was originally billed as a mechanism to prevent child pornography but contained more than 1200 sites classified as criticising the royal family.

‘In January the Thai system was used to censor Australia reportage about the imprisoned Australian writer Harry Nicolaides,’ he said.

‘The Australian democracy must not be permitted to sleep with this loaded gun. This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks.’

The leaked list, understood to have been obtained from an internet filtering software maker, contains 2395 sites. ACMA said its blacklist, as at November last year, contained 1370 sites.

Assange said the disparity in the reported figure is most likely due to the fact that the list contains several duplicates and variations of the same URL that stem from a single complaint. Alternatively, some sites may have been added to the list by the filter software maker.

ACMA said Australians caught distributing the list or accessing child pornography sites on the list could face criminal charges and up to 10 years in prison.

Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin said the leaking of the list was irresponsible but highlighted how this type of information could surface despite the efforts of ACMA to protect it, and could be used by those with a perverse interest in its content.

‘The regrettable and unfortunate reality is there will always be explicit and illegal material on the web and – regardless of blacklists, filters and the like – those with the means and know-how will find ways of accessing it,’ he said.

‘Adult supervision is the most effective way of keeping children safe online and people shouldn’t be led into believing by Labor that expanded blacklists or mandatory filters are a substitute for that.’

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the leak was not surprising and would only get worse once the list was sent to hundreds of Australian ISPs as part of the Government’s mandatory internet filtering policy.

He said the Government could be considered a ‘promoter and disseminator of links to some pretty unsavoury material’.

‘The list itself should concern every Australian – although plenty of the material is unsavoury or even illegal, the presence of sites like YouTube, MySpace, gambling or even Christian sites on the list raises a lot of questions,’ he said.

‘There is even a harmless tour operator on there, but there is no mechanism for a site operator to know they got on or request to be removed. The prospect of mandatory nation-wide filtering of this secret list is pretty concerning from a democratic point of view.’

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the leak and publication of the ACMA blacklist would be ‘grossly irresponsible’ and undermine efforts to improve cyber safety.

He said ACMA was investigating the matter and considering a range of possible actions including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Australians involved in making the content available would be at ’serious risk of criminal prosecution’.

‘Under existing laws the ACMA blacklist includes URLs relating to child sexual abuse, rape, incest, bestiality, sexual violence and detailed instruction in crime,’ Senator Conroy said.

‘No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list.’

First seen in the Sidney Morning Herald. Thanks to Asher Moses and the Sidney Morning Herald for covering this issue. Copyright remains with the aforementioned.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China ‘blocks YouTube video site’: “China ‘blocks YouTube video site’

By Quentin Sommerville, BBC News, Beijing, Tuesday, 24 March 2009

China is reported to have blocked the YouTube video-sharing website because it has been carrying video of soldiers beating monks and other Tibetans.

The date and location of the footage, posted by a Tibetan exile group, cannot be ascertained.

A Chinese government spokesman would not confirm whether YouTube had indeed been blocked.

China has a history of blocking websites which carry messages it views as politically unacceptable.

In most of China, YouTube has suddenly become inaccessible.

The site has been carrying a graphic video released by Tibetan exiles, which shows hundreds of uniformed Chinese troops swarming through a Tibetan monastery – a group of troops beat a man with batons.

In another scene a group of men, including a monk, are beaten, kicked and choked, while they lie on the ground. Some have their hands tied others appear to be unconscious.

The date and locations of the footage cannot be confirmed. Beijing maintains that it dealt lawfully with last years protests in Tibet.

On Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said that China ‘is not afraid of the internet’. However, he was unable to confirm if YouTube had been blocked.