CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘Bloggers’ Category

Iran Threatens Bloggers, ‘Deviant News Sites’: “Iran’s bloggers and in-country journalists are told to tone down their rhetoric by the fearsome Revolutionary Guard, or face some unpleasant consequences.

(Via Wired News.)

Iran’s Twitter Revolution: Ahmadinejad’s Fear of the Internet: “With the Iranian authorities cracking down on the international press, the West is reliant on the Internet to find out what is happening on the ground. Hard as it might try, it will be difficult for the regime to easily stop the flow of information online. Web users around the world are rallying behind the protesters.”

(Via SPIEGEL ONLINE – International.)

Google, Facebook rush Iranian language support: “

Twitter has the starring role as opening up Net communications about Iran’s turbulent politics, but Google and Facebook are jumping in with their its own hasty efforts.

Google is adding Farsi, or Persian, language support to its translation service, the company announced Thursday night. Google rushed out the support …

“

(Via The Iconoclast.)

Internet proxies let Iranians and others connect to blocked Web sites | Science & Technology | Deutsche Welle | 18.06.2009

New media tools like Twitter have helped organize protests from Georgia to Guatemala and, now, Iran. Experts say regimes can block access to such sites, but proxy technology helps keep lines of communication open.

With independent media blocked from reporting on recent demonstrations in Iran after Friday’s election, many people around the world turned to the micro-blog service Twitter for a detailed account of events in Tehran and other Iranian cities.

But if the Iranian government so chose, it could attempt to cut off Iranians’ direct access to Twitter and other social media services to prevent the spread of information, according to Yaman Akdeniz, director of the UK-based Cyber-Rights.org.

“Undemocratic countries like Iran rely on crude blocking and filtering mechanisms to limit their citizen’s usage of the Internet temporarily, or indefinitely,” he said. “The true extent of the Internet censorship attempts in Iran remains to be seen.”

Tehran blocked the popular networking site Facebook for two days before the elections and only restored access after a massive public outcry. Since the elections, authorities have attempted to deny access to several pro-opposition Web sites and news portals likely to challenge current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s announced victory, according to the media rights group Reporters Without Borders.

Anonymous Web surfing

There are, however, technical ways for Iranians – and others living under repressive regimes that filter the Internet – to access all the material on the World Wide Web, according to Akdeniz.

“However hard the governments try, total censorship and control will not be achieved on the Internet,” he added. “Going back to the topic, the Iranians will find ways and means of accessing the Internet, regardless of their government’s crude attempt to control the free flow of information.”

Computers outside the country filtering the Web can be set up as so-called proxy servers, which pass along information from one Internet connection to another like an anonymous virtual messenger whose presence doesn’t tip off security authorities.

Reporters Without Borders has for years encouraged cyber-dissidents to make use of such proxy services, including the popular program Tor, which passes data through a random series of three computers before it arrives at its destination.

Mirroring Internet traffic

The program, which builds a network of currently about 2,000 volunteers who act as online go-betweens, allows, for example, an Iranian to see otherwise blocked sites by encrypting and routing his request through a series of three random computers with access to the entire Web, then sending the data they acquire back through the same anonymous network, explains Andrew Lewman, the executive director of the Tor Project.

“Someone watching the Internet would not be able to track who you are and where you are going,” he said, adding that the number of Tor connections from Iran has doubled since last week’s election, moving the nation up the Tor user list from near the bottom 50 to within the top 15 of the some 500,000 people using Tor each day,

More people using the network, regardless of their location or what they’re doing on the Web, makes Tor more effective at making the Internet anonymous, Lewman said, adding that the service is simple to install and wouldn’t work if only activists and dissidents used the program.

“The more normal people who turn on a connection on their home computer the better, because then it looks more and more like the general Internet,” he said. “If Tor becomes an activists’ network and anyone watching would say, ‘That’s an activist network connection; we should watch that.’”

Proxy critics remain

Despite the protection proxy services offer those living under oppressive governments, the system does have some detractors. Critics say the network can be taken advantage of by terrorists and other criminals. That’s an argument Lewman said isn’t as persuasive as it may seem.

“Criminals have far better anonymity and privacy than most likely anyone in the world,” he said. “If you’re already willing to break the law, then you can do far more private things. If you steal a person’s identity on the Internet you’ll have more anonymity than any tool can provide.”

While Tor and other tools can help Web users get around the blocks and filters governments put on the Internet, they should not be seen as the final answer in the fight to stop online censorship, according to Akdeniz.

“Circumvention technologies provide only a partial solution to the problem of Internet censorship,” he said. “Unless there is a process towards democratization and openness, censorship will be the norm.”

Author: Sean Sinico

Editor: Susan Houlton

Iranians find ways to bypass Net censors: “

A new generation of Iranians has found ways to bypass the country’s notoriously censorial Internet restrictions and disseminate details about Iran’s internal turmoil in the wake of the recent election.

In technical circles, at least, Iran is well-known for erecting one of the world’s most restrictive Internet …

“

(Via The Iconoclast.)

IR – The Twitter crisis: how site became voice of resistance in Iran: “(Guardian)
As foreign journalists were expelled from Iran or confined to their hotel rooms, and as events moved at speed through the day, web users across the world turned in enormous numbers to their counterparts in Iran, who were using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites to spread information that would otherwise not have reached a wide audience. As one Twitter user with apparent links to the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi put it: ‘Everybody try to film as much as poss today on mobiles ? these are eyes of world.’ Mobile phone footage and grainy pictures were copied on to blogs and news sites, while mainstream broadcasters, their correspondents constrained, relied on user-generated footage in an attempt to circumvent the censored state broadcasts.

“

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

NightJack blogger Richard Horton gave tips on beating the police – Times Online: From Times Online
June 16, 2009

NightJack blogger Richard Horton gave tips on beating the police.

Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent

The policeman who failed to secure an injunction to prevent The Times revealing his identity had used his anonymous blog to offer advice on how to undermine police investigations as well as revealing confidential information about his cases.

Richard Horton, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, began the NightJack blog in February last year.

At one stage he attracted nearly 500,000 readers a week with his pithy observations of life on the front line of policing. He was awarded an Orwell Prize for political writing in April this year.

The award judges were not aware that he was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.

The detective has now deleted the website and received a written warning for misconduct for the fact that he was writing a blog, the success of which has led him to receive numerous offers to publish a book. His superiors are aware of the allegations that he was also revealing confidential information.

Some of the best-read sections of the blog were anecdotes about cases on which Mr Horton has worked. The people and the locations in the cases were anonymised, and some details subtly changed, but could easily traced back to real-life prosecutions.

One entry described the author investigating the rape of “Melissa”, a 14-year-old girl who was plied with alcohol and then raped in a hotel room. Mr Horton wrote that the offender had an Asian name, had hepatitis, and assaulted the girl at a seaside hotel, while filming it on his mobile phone.

A month earlier Ajmal Mohammad received an indefinite sentence at Preston Crown Court for raping a drunk teenager in a Blackpool hotel room. The court heard that he was infected with hepatitis C, and had filmed the attack on his phone.

Writing on the blog, Mr Horton revealed information that could have influenced the case, such as his suspicions that a key witness had misled police about her knowledge of the sex attack.

Another entry described an investigation against “David” a “local politician . . . with a seat on the council” who was found to have child abuse pictures on his computer. The blog said that “David” received a non-custodial sentence after a guilty plea.

In 2003 Bill Chadwick, a Preston councillor, pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and was fined £1,000. But on the blog Mr Horton also revealed confidential details of other serious allegations against Mr Chadwick, which the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to pursue.

Other cases described on the blog can also be traced back to genuine prosecutions. In another entry entitled “A Survival Guide For Decent Folk”, Mr Horton offered advice to people who found themselves the subject of a police investigation.

His advice was to “complain about every officer… [and] show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it”. Other observations included: “All you are trying to do by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that a significant statement and we love it.”

When first confronted by The Times, Mr Horton refused to confirm or deny that he was the blog’s author, before trying to gain an injunction in the High Court preventing his name from being made public.

Lancashire Constabulary launched an investigation after being told that Mr Horton was the author.

A spokesman said: “The commentary in the blog is indeed the work of a serving Lancashire detective and clearly the views and opinions expressed are those of the author himself and not those of the wider Constabulary.

“We have conducted a full internal investigation and the officer accepts that parts of his public commentary have fallen short of the standards of professional behaviour we expect of our police officers.

“He has been spoken to regarding his professional behaviour and, in line with disciplinary procedures, has been issued with a written warning.”

Analysis: bloggers can no longer be sure on anonymity – Times Online: June 16, 2009

Analysis: bloggers can no longer be sure on anonymity
Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

Thousands of bloggers churn out opinions daily — secure in the protection afforded to them by the cloak of anonymity.

From today, however, they can no longer be sure that their identity can be kept secret, after a landmark ruling by Mr Justice Eady.

The judge, who is known for establishing case law with his judgments on privacy, has struck a blow in favour of openness, ruling that blogging is “essentially a public rather than a private activity”. In the first case of its kind, Mr Justice Eady ruled that a serving police officer could not have an injunction to stop The Times identifying him as the author of the NightJack blog.

The judge applied a two-fold test that is now established in privacy cases: first, whether the police officer had a reasonable expectation of privacy (in this case over his identity); and if so, whether that right to privacy was overridden by public interest in disclosure of his name.

The police officer failed on both grounds. Just because he wished to remain anonymous, the judge said, did not mean that he had a reasonable expectation to remain anonymous; nor that The Times was under an legally enforceable duty to protect his identity.

Key to the judge’s decision was the unmasking of the News of the World undercover journalist, Mazher Mahmood, when the MP George Galloway published a picture of him on the internet in his guise as “fake sheikh”.

Mr Justice Eady was persuaded by the judge’s reasoning in that case in 2006 that a journalist who writes under a pseudonym as part of his undercover work had no reasonable expectation of privacy over his identity.

Here, the police officer was not a journalist, Mr Justice Eady said, but the function he performed via his blog was similar.

He added that people who “wish to hold forth” to the public often took steps to disguise their authorship. But it was a “significantly further step” to argue that if people could deduce their identity, they should be restrained in law from revealing it.

The judge then goes on to say that even if the officer had won the argument for a reasonable expectation of privacy, he would lose on public interest grounds.

He was a serving police constable and his work mostly dealt with police work and social and political issues relating to the police and administration of justice, on which he expresses “strong opinions”, including some on subjects of political controversy.

One reason he was keen to preserve his anonymity was fear of disciplinary action if he were exposed.
(more…)

Iran election: state moves to end ‘Facebook revolution’: “The Iranian government is mounting a campaign to disrupt independent media organisations and websites that air doubts about the validity of the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the nation’s president, according to various sources.

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

@DW Global Media Forum: Net censors are ‘on the wrong side of history’, say bloggers | Media | guardian.co.uk: “@DW Global Media Forum: Net censors are ‘on the wrong side of history’, say bloggers

Bloggers discuss internet censorship in their countries – Turkey, Egypt and China – and discuss what needs to be done to keep the internet open.

International bloggers at Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2009
From left to right: Lisa Horner, Yang Hengjun, Noah Atef and Yaman Akdeniz

For the first time this year, out of 125 journalists jailed, more than half were web-based, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. As blogging has become an important mode of expression, governments around the world have moved quickly to control the internet and to harass and detain bloggers.

The Committee to Protect Journalists was launched in 1981, and Frank Smyth, its journalist security co-ordinator, admits the group was ’slow to recognise the importance of the internet in terms of press freedom’. But he said that was the past, and they have recognised that the countries that jail the most journalists – such as China, Cuba, Burma and Uzbekistan – are also some of the most repressive in terms of freedom of expression for bloggers. The panel looked at censorship on the internet around the world.

Panelists:

• Noah Atef, journalist and blogger
• Yaman Akdeniz, director of Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties (UK)
• Yang Hengjun, Chinese blog-writer
• Lisa Horner, research and policy, Global Partners and Associates

Initially Turkey had a very hands-off approach to the internet, according to Akdeniz. But between 2001 and 2007, home internet access exploded in Turkey.

The Turkish government then started to consider regulating the internet. The drive was cast as mostly an effort to stop pornography, piracy and defamation. Some of the legislation was defended as an effort to protect children.

In 2007, the Turkish parliament fast-tracked legislation. The bill was passed in just 59 minutes. In under two years, the number of sites being blocked in Turkey went from zero to 2600.

It has led to Blogger, owned by Google, being blocked temporarily because a blog was being used to distribute pirated video of football matches. Richard Dawkins’s site was blocked over complaints by Turkish creationists. Turkey is one of a handful of countries that completely blocks YouTube, mostly due to videos that are seen as defamatory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. YouTube offered to block access only inside Turkey to the videos, but the Turkish government asked the videos to be removed from the global site. Google itself was almost blocked because it allowed people to search for sites that were deemed defamatory of Atatürk.

As with many of these efforts by governments, they are ineffectual. Everyone in Turkey knows how to bypass the restrictions, and no one is afraid of doing so, Akdeniz said. While authorities know how to block YouTube on the internet, they have been unable to block it on the iPhone.

Currently, an administrative agency reviews sites submitted for blocking, but there is no transparency in the process. He believes that the website review process needs to be more open people know why sites have been blocked.

A licence to imprison

Egyptian blogger and journalist Noah Atef spoke about censorship not only in her country but across the Middle East and North Africa. In 2005, a number of Arab countries launched reforms. They wanted to appear democratic, Atef said. Bloggers commented on these efforts. The governments didn’t know who the bloggers were.

But countries across the Middle East have used various methods to control blogging. In the United Arab Emirates, the government passed a law in 2006 ‘combatting information crimes’. It criminalises ‘those who are feeding the web with content that harms the public order or the moral values’. The maximum punishment is five years in prison. Atef said:

It is a licence to put somone in prison.

Different countries in the Middle East have adopted different ways of combating blogs. In Tunisia, government censors actually edit posts and delete pictures. Egypt has attacked the credibility of bloggers. In 2008, more than 100 bloggers were arrested in Egypt. They have also been seized from the streets of Cairo and detained in a van. The van might drive around for up to 24 hours before releasing the blogger, Atef said.

Other countries simply make it expensive and slow for bloggers so it is technically difficult to blog. She pointed to Lebanon, where costs are high and speeds are slow.

Chinese bloggers and ‘35 May’

Internet censorship is well known in China, but blogger Yang Hengjun said the cyber police are only one way that the government controls expression on the internet.

The government also uses technological filters, often with the help of western companies. He said to these companies:

Foreign companies, you have a right to make money in China, but I don’t think you have the right to suppress people. You are on the wrong side of history.

But the most insidious form of control is fear. Police might come to knock on a blogger’s door at midnight.

Most of the censorship isn’t done by the government, but by people themselves.

He even admitted to self-censorship himself:

They are more free on the internet than I am, but because they are more free, they are less free in the real world.

Yesterday was a very special day for Chinese bloggers, the 20th anniversary of the protests at Tiananmen Square. Bloggers are not able to talk about 4 June so they talk about 35 May. The Tiananmen Square protest was to ask for government reform, and they continue to demonstrate on the internet. ‘We turned every blog into Tiananmen Square,’ he said.

The Chinese government has adapted to challenges to its authority.

They opened up borders, but one thing they keep tight control on: The control of people’s mind.

They build a wall, an invisible wall on the internet. That makes the Chinese internet different from the rest of world. That is why we go online to pull down that invisible wall.

Lisa Horner, of research and policy at Global Partners & Associates, talked about ways to challenge this censorship from regulation to protecting the openness of the network and the applications themselves. She said that international human rights system lacked the teeth to fight censorship.

One response has been to create the Global Network Initiative,which was established after internet giants Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google were accused of complicity with the Chinese government. The initiative is not without its critics who say it’s a front for profit-motivated companies, that self-regulation doesn’t work, that it is too western-oriented and that the principles and guidelines do not go far enough, she said.

However, fighting censorship online is not just about governments and authorities, she said, adding that users can do a lot to defeat censorship.

One member of the audience asked whether by discussing tools and methods to circumvent censorship that it will just allow governments to defeat those tools.

Akdeniz said that it was always a game of cat and mouse between governments and authorities and those trying to maintain the freedom of expression on the internet. He added:

It’s a continuing technological battle. It’s only half of the solution. Tools are important, but it’s the governments that need to change.