Category Archives: Censorship

Adam might ruin your day. But he might save your future.

Adam Ruins Everything was one of my favorite TV shows. When it was canceled, I was really confused and wondered why. Apparently, thanks to a messy media merger, it was taken off the air when networks consolidated. Well, Adam Conover, the host of that show, took his time off and actually looked into media mergers.

What he uncovered is the fight of our life in Hollywood, and many of us do not know it yet.

Adam spoke before FTC Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter this week about how corporate mergers are devastating working conditions, access to diverse voices, and artistic freedom in media.

Check out this video fromAdam Conoveron the dangers of media mergers.

This was powerful and disturbing. It made me really worried about storytellers.

We've always been truth-tellers who were able to operate with thematic elements that helped us share our worldview. But with the haunting idea that a giant corporation might harbor a different view, and thus censor, cancel, or never allow you to work is a dystopian nightmare. I truly believe this is the fight of our era, especially as these media mergers take over movie studios and consolidate TV networks. And especially as brands like AT&T take over.

As Adam noted, the danger to jobs and to silencing stories they don't like is real. He knows this first hand.

He said,"Let's be clear: TNT and TBS made scripted television with great success since 1989over 30 years. They're still on in tens of millions of homes. The only reason these healthy broadcasters are committing suicide is because of a needless merger that only benefitted the wealthy. The last merger, with AT&T three years ago, killed my network truTV and folded it under TNT and TBS. Now this merger has killed those networks too. Whose jobs will the next merger eliminate? What voices will never reach your screen? Whose stories will never be told?"

That harrowing story shows that this is real and happening. And we need the government to take a much closer look at all of these mergers. If you want to tell stories, you should care about this. And we need to see action from the FTC and DOJ on it now, or we're going to start losing even more opportunities and have media stories controlled by the very few.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Excerpt from:
The Fight Over Corporate Censorship: Adam Conover Warns the FTC and DOJ About Media Mergers - No Film School

Last summer, as protests gathered steam in Cuba, the internet shut down. The general consensus was that the government had instituted the blackout to smother protests. Whether it worked or not is still under question, but that hasnt stopped internet censorship from spreading and not just among undemocratic governments.

Even some of the purportedly freest countries on Earth are increasingly being tempted to use censorship, especially as a blunt tool for unplugging the internet for all. And increasingly, this is now giving way to the surgical precision of specialized, cheap, off-the-shelf products that can help trace and silence specific groups, messages, or individuals.

In this sense, Latin America is a perfect testing ground. Its a region where the majority of states are technically democracies, but where governments slip towards authoritarian methods to get things done from time to time. Governments are using facial recognition technology that disproportionately hurts Black citizens or spying on opposition journalists, sometimes with the broad support of their own citizens.

But, as a global investigation undertaken by Rest of World revealed this week, the silencing goes beyond disruptive internet kill switches or the infamous, and expensive, Pegasus software used for years by governments across the world and Latin America. Today, far more sophisticated and affordable tools exist. These include deep packet inspection, known as DPI, which allows data and the way it moves on the internet to be read by an outside entity.

These rather shady-sounding tools often have legal and legitimate uses, either because of security concerns or because they can help ameliorate the efficiency of traffic. Its what makes this sort of software so problematic; it is a neutral tool that could prevent child pornography or make your Netflix run faster. It can also shut down and silence a governments political opposition.

The concern around these tools also goes beyond the usual suspects (like Cuba or Venezuela). As digital censorship becomes more accessible, more seemingly benign democracies with easy access to this software and with legal measures to use them may be tempted to deploy them improperly. Over the past three years, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua have all passed laws that allow for digital censorship and surveillance in one form or another. It takes just one government official with an authoritarian bent to turn these systems into tools of censorship and repression.

It is not only the governed that are worried though. As government institutions like Mexicos Secretariat of the Economy to Argentinas Senate know, non-state actors are also showing how vulnerable even the most powerful states can be on the internet. In Brazil, a famous group of hackers worked their way into the Ministry of Healths website a number of times. The Brazilian government was lucky; the groups intent was simply to make a point about how vulnerable everybody really is on the internet:

This site remains absolutely shit and nothing has been done to correct it, the hackers wrote on the Ministry of Healths site.

Here is the original post:
Censorship has never been so democratic - Rest of World

PROLOGUESpecial operation and peace

On February 27, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, radio journalist Valerii Nechay returned to St. Petersburg from a trip to the North Caucasus to find three men in his apartment. Wearing masks to disguise their features, they told him that if he wanted his mother to be left unharmed, he should leave the country.

They neednt have bothered. Nechay already had a one-way ticket booked to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. It actually just helped me to pack my bags much quicker, he said. From Armenia, he traveled on to Georgia and then on again. Rest of World agreed not to disclose his current location, out of concern for his safety.

For nearly two decades, Nechay has worked for the radio station Echo of Moscow, which has broadcast political talk shows and news since 1990. Soon after the invasion of Ukraine began, the station was told, like all media in Russia, to stop calling the war a war.

It led to some kind of jokes we used when we were on air, that Leo Tolstoy once published his novel called Special Operation and Peace, Nechay said. But we usually were trying to find a way to convey the real meaning of the word so saying something like, the war in Ukraine, which the Russian government calls the special operation.

The evasions werent enough. On March 1, Echo of Moscow was shut down by Roskomnadzor, the state media supervision authority. It was the first time it had been off the air since 1991. Its website was taken offline for a time, and its social media accounts soon went dark. The following week, Sputnik Radio, a government-funded radio station, announced it would now broadcast on Echos radio frequency. On March 4, a law was rushed through the State Duma, one of Russias chambers of parliament, banning public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Using anything other than the approved terminology special military operation is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Intimidating journalists and seizing the airwaves are timeworn methods of censorship. But to more comprehensively restrict alternative voices, the Russian government had to use more-sophisticated tools. Many journalists from closed-down publications and channels switched to publishing on social media. Internet users downloaded virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around blocks on overseas news outlets.

Just a few years ago, the wholesale blocking of social media and messaging platforms would have been almost impossible in Russia, where the internet infrastructure is sprawling and complex, with hundreds of internet service providers and many points of contact with global networks. But over the past five years, the government of Vladimir Putin has created a sophisticated infrastructure of internet control, built partly with commercially available tools, that has allowed the state to block social media, including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, inside Russia and to disrupt circumvention tools like VPNs, Tor, and the web proxy software Psiphon.

Russia is a pioneer in the use of these tools but not an outlier. The technologies it uses are proliferating, creeping into internet infrastructure all over the world, helped by multinational companies that have turned censorship into an off-the-shelf product. Censored Planet, an internet observatory in the U.S., has tracked more than 100 countries where internet censorship has worsened in the past few years. And even as technically sophisticated methods for information control become easily available, more and more governments are turning to blunt-force tactics, shutting down the internet entirely in response to political opposition or social pressure.

Over the last six months, Rest of World spoke to more than 70 technologists, telecomms experts, activists, and journalists from around the world to track how governments control over the internet has grown and evolved during the past decade. Their testimony shows that the free, open, global internet is under severe threat. Telecomms blackouts and mass censorship risk fragmenting the internet and even undermining its physical integrity. These threats come in many forms, but most of the experts we spoke to trace them back to a watershed moment, 11 years ago in Cairo, when, facing a mass protest movement that was evolving and growing online, the Egyptian government turned off the internet.

Few people have experienced the full arc of censorship and control in Egypt as comprehensively as Nora Younis. Younis started out as a political blogger in 2005, one of the first generation of Egyptian citizen journalists to report firsthand on protests and human rights violations and to publish online. She filmed protests and documented sexual assaults by the police and posted them to her blog and to social media, animated by a belief that shed be able to kick-start change in her country.

I was sure in my navety [that] its just that nobody was brave enough to do this [before], she told Rest of World. Nobody has the technology. Nobody has the evidence. She started reporting for the Washington Post, and, in August 2008, she was appointed digital managing editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm, a Cairo-based daily newspaper. She would soon help to lead the papers coverage of the most significant event in Egypts modern history, a massive popular uprising against the government that began in January 2011.

The beginning of the revolution was, she said, a magical moment. I was in the right position at the right time, in the right place. It was the kind of change that shed imagined years before, although, as a journalist, she insisted on keeping a professional distance. We tried to be reporting the revolution, not making the revolution, she said.

Social media wasnt the cause of the uprising, but it played a huge role. On Twitter, protesters posted images and eyewitness accounts; on Facebook, they set up event pages to coordinate the movement, telling their comrades to come to the squares, to dress in black, to congregate by riversides to protest. It made people feel the sense of usness, Younis said. There is a togetherness: its not me alone; there are others. I will go alone, but I will find others.

There is a togetherness: its not me alone; there are others. I will go alone, but I will find others.

On January 25, 2011, an estimated 50,000 protesters flooded into Tahrir Square, a circular road junction that is the focal point of the citys downtown district. Called to action at mosques, universities and colleges, and online, the protesters represented a coalescence of interests, from supporters of political Islam to liberal pro-democracy groups, feminists, and trade unionists, each with their own grievances against the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak. Tahrir Square Tahrir means liberation in English became the revolutions epicenter, occupied day and night: at times a celebration, at others a battleground. As Egyptian security forces responded with violence and the death toll mounted, it served as a place of collective mourning.

Caught off guard by the scale of the uprising, the security forces tried to shut down the protesters tools of communication. Twitter was essentially blocked from the evening of January 25 onward, and Facebook was blocked the following day. The restrictions werent wholly successful; information kept leaking out, and people still found ways to organize online. In the early hours of January 28, the government pulled the plug. Internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile operators were ordered to suspend their services, and power was cut to the main internet exchange point the physical meeting point of ISPs traffic in Cairo. For five days, Egypt was almost completely disconnected from the global internet.

On the streets, protesters struggled to communicate with each other and with the world. Banks shut, payments bounced. The stock exchange closed. The countrys huge services sector was left reeling as it lost contact with international clients. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank, estimated that the shutdown cost the Egyptian economy at least $18 million per day.

However, it wasnt as total a blackout as the government hoped. There were still places that had managed to stay connected, via private corporate networks or satellites.

On January 28, Younis checked into the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis Hotel, a five-star resort on Cairos corniche. Somehow, the hotels business center was still connected, as were the rooms, so Al-Masry Al-Youm moved its online operation to a suite there, later occupying three other rooms so editors and reporters could sleep on site.

The western-facing suite Younis and her team occupied featured a balcony overlooking the Nile and the Kasr El-Nil Bridge, one of the main river crossings leading to Tahrir Square.

From the balcony, Younis filmed as protesters moving across the bridge were confronted by riot police. She recorded for six hours as the clashes turned into a bloody, attritional mele. The protestors would get halfway across the bridge and be beaten back with tear gas, batons, and, sometimes, live rounds; then theyd regroup and fight their way forward again. Younis recorded people being shot, people being run down by armored cars. She cut the video together and published it on Al-Masry Al-Youms website, which was still accessible overseas. Egyptians could not see it, she said. But while we were still in that room, we found the video all over, on the BBC and CNN newscasts. They took it from our website abroad, and they streamed it on TV on international networks and the Egyptians were able to see it on TV.

The protests continued. The internet was largely restored on February 2. On February 11, Mubarak left office.

Egypt wasnt the first large country to shut down the internet in response to protests; during the Green Movement uprising in 2009, Iranian authorities throttled networks. But the Egyptian uprising coincided with the global explosion in popularity of social media. The shutdown made the physical vulnerabilities of the web apparent at the moment when belief in its liberating power was at an apogee.

[The internet] had become already so much part of contemporary life, for many anyway, that it was kind of inconceivable that a government would turn it off, or even had the power to turn it off, Brett Solomon, executive director and co-founder of Access Now, a human rights organization that campaigns against internet restrictions, told Rest of World.

Doug Madory, now director of internet analysis at internet monitoring company Kentik, was one of the first people to raise the alarm on Egypts sudden loss of connectivity in 2011. He has since become a kind of herald of impending disaster on the internet, identifying sudden outages and disruptions. Before Egypt, the idea of blackouts wasnt part of the public narrative, he told Rest of World. But the sudden shutdown crystallized in the minds of people watching that the internet wasnt invulnerable, that it could blink off.

The Arab Spring was the top story of the day, globally. You already had everyones attention, Madory said. It captured the imaginations for a lot of people, to have a country of that size just completely go lights out for days, in response to massive civil unrest.

For the protesters themselves, it was a sobering moment. We were very hopeful that now we had the tools to change the world. We were telling ourselves that you cannot really suppress people [who have the] internet, Abdelrahman Ayyash, an activist who was part of the movement and spent the first three days of the January protest in police cells, emerging into the blackout told Rest of World. I think we were a bit nave.

The internet was designed to have no single point of failure. Its a decentralized network of networks that is hosted on hundreds of thousands of machines spread around the world, connected at a software level by shared protocols that allow it to heal around a breach. That resilience was coded in as part of the U.S. governments Cold War planning many of the core mechanisms of the internet having been designed by that countrys military. If part of the network went out due to sabotage or a nuclear strike, the rest would continue to function. This supposed invulnerability is embedded in the internets mythology, later meshing with the freedoms felt by pioneers on the World Wide Web, who found they could build and organize out of the shadow of the old gatekeepers in business, politics, and media: The internet would be empowering, democratizing, and self-organizing; information wanted to be free.

But the internet isnt just software. Its a physical thing with its own geography: massive data centers on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., each consuming as much power as a town; roughly 1.3 million kilometers of inch-thick, fiber-optic cabling laid on seabeds; exchange points crammed into tower blocks in city suburbs; cell towers; and copper wiring. Its not coherent or homogenous but an agglomeration of each generation of technology, often jury-rigged together a reliable system built of unreliable parts, according to Andrew Sullivan, CEO of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates for an open web. Its a public good, run in large part on private systems and through private companies, and a global infrastructure that is subject to local laws and local norms.

Its often in its IRL manifestations, where the digital pokes through into meatspace, that the internet is vulnerable to accident or attack.

These are more common than the average Western user, whose networks are relatively robust, might think. Egypts first internet blackout this one unintentional took place in 2008, when several undersea cables were damaged, one reportedly by a discarded anchor, knocking out services across the Middle East and North Africa. This year, in the month of January alone, Gambia lost access to the internet for eight hours, after a fault on the submarine cable that serves West Africa; Tonga, which is served by a single undersea cable, was almost entirely offline for weeks after an undersea earthquake severed its physical link; and Yemens connection was cut by an airstrike.

But while these blackouts were the result of accidents or collateral damage, deliberate shutdowns have become increasingly frequent. The Mubarak regimes shutdown seemed to open a valve.

Access Now has recorded at least 935 total or partial internet shutdowns in more than 60 countries since 2016. Its an escalating pattern: the vast majority of the blackouts have happened in the last five years. Whole countries, including Sudan, Uganda, and Myanmar, have gone offline for days on end, as leaders try to cripple their opponents ability to organize or disseminate information during moments of political tension.

The era were in now started with Egypt. And its not stopped, Kentiks Madory said. Hes witnessed near-constant attacks on internet access, a pattern that isnt likely to reverse course and a remarkable complacency about the threats they pose to the internet. Were like the coyote that just ran off the cliff, Madory said. And then, like that, were falling.

The era were in now started with Egypt. And its not stopped.

Experts who track risks to the internet measure its fragility at a local level by looking at the number of physical entry points, the number of service providers, who owns the infrastructure, and, critically, the intent of the government. A country like the U.S. has more than 1,400 internet service providers and more than 120 internet exchange points, which are almost all privately owned. It has a government that is constitutionally bound to protect freedom of expression and a robust court system that can hold the state to account. It would be almost impossible for the government to legally order a shutdown of the internet in peacetime and difficult to do it illegally by force. That isnt true for countries with far more concentrated infrastructure, where blackouts can be startlingly easy to execute.

Media coverage of blackouts often references kill switches, suggesting that ministries have access to a red plunger that turns off the internet. Sometimes, those kill switches are really just fax machines.

When the Myanmar military seized power in a coup dtat in February 2021, it had just four telecomms operators to contend with, one of which, Mytel, it co-owned with another company linked to the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. Another, MPT, is a public-private partnership and had strong ties to the military establishment even before the coup. The other two were owned by foreign companies. Once it had taken control of the machinery of government, the military junta issued orders by fax to the telecomms operators whenever it wanted them to shut off the networks or to block specific websites, such as social media platforms or news websites.

Within the digital rights community, there are ongoing arguments over whether telecomms operators should comply with shutdown orders. If an order is legal, a company risks losing its license if it fails to comply. If its issued illegally, by an authoritarian regime or a military staging a coup, the stakes are higher.

When the Myanmar military wanted the internet turned off in February 2021, soldiers were dispatched to data centers, where they enforced the demand at gunpoint. Sources with knowledge of events at one of the ISPs later confirmed to Rest of World that staff had been physically threatened and equipment had been damaged. Several telecomms companies told Rest of World that while they might raise protests, they dont really have the power to defy an order given at the barrel of a gun and that they have an obligation to protect their local staff from reprisals.

Access Nows Solomon said he felt that operators overplay that argument. Im not saying its not a calculation, he said. But are you willing to sacrifice the rights of [millions of] subscribers on the basis of a potential risk to your staff?

These calculations are complicated by the fact that most blackouts happen at moments of acute political distress. The majority of internet shutdowns that Access Now has tracked over the past few years have been triggered by political turmoil, elections, and protests. In August 2020, as people took to the streets of Belarus to demonstrate against alleged voter fraud in the re-election of the president, Alexander Lukashenko, the governments information ministry shut down mobile telecomms. In January 2021, the Ugandan government turned off the internet for more than four days on the eve of presidential elections. That same month, as Indian farmers staged sit-ins and hunger strikes around Delhi, mobile internet services were cut for several days around the capital.

In Eswatini, the government turned off all internet services in June 2021, as pro-democracy protests spiraled into civic violence. The blackout added to the chaos. No one knew what was happening. But one thing for sure is that the police were killing people and the military were killing people. And the citizens were retaliating, Melusi Simelane, who is the chairperson of an LGBTQIA+ NGO, Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities, in the country, told Rest of World.

Simelane, who also consults for the Southern African Litigation Centre, a legal activist group based in Johannesburg, is a rare figure in the digital rights space: he challenged an illegal blackout order and won. With support from colleagues in Johannesburg, he sued the government of Eswatini, naming the telecomms companies that had enacted the shutdown as co-respondents. The activists laid an emergency case in front of the High Court, where the judge decided that if freedom of information was a constitutional right, then interfering with the means of communication must be a constitutional issue. She escalated the case to the defacto constitutional court. When the government realized that actually they were not going to win this thing, they turned back on the internet, Simelane said. The whole process took less than three days.

The activists ended up dropping the case on the basis that theyd achieved what they set out to do the internet was back on. The government hasnt shut down the internet entirely since last June, but it has imposed more targeted blocks on social media in response to fresh protests.

The reason that blackouts persist, and proliferate, is that they work. There are few more effective tactics for crippling an opponents ability to organize or disseminate information during moments of political tension.

In Kazakhstan, where the authorities shut down the internet for five days in January 2022, Aina Shormanbayeva, president of the NGO International Legal Initiative, told Rest of World that the blackout had created an information vacuum, in which state media said calm had been restored, as gunfire crackled outside her window.

Months later, activists and investigators are still trying to piece together events. [The blackout] is an effective tactic to hide the real situation that was on the streets and just wash our hands, our heads, our brains with propaganda through TV and radio, Dana Zhanay, a medical doctor and director of the Qaharman Human Rights Protection Foundation, told Rest of World.

These events, which have profound local consequences, are also a threat to the internet as a whole, experts said. The analogy that a lot of people have developed in their heads is sort of like a light switch: you know, you turn the lights off and then you can turn them back on, and it just goes back the way it was. And thats not actually true about the internet, Sullivan, from the Internet Society, said.

The internet runs because of common protocols, common technologies, and global connections. To shut bits of it off means to deliberately engineer vulnerabilities into parts of the network. Its designed to be connected, Sullivan said. Its not designed to be shut down. And, so, what you have to do is undermine the network resilience itself, in order to even get the feature where you can turn it off.

Although blackouts are likely to remain part of governments arsenal for the foreseeable future, they are economically and politically damaging NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages, estimates the cost to the economy of a single day offline to be more than $80 million in Kazakhstan, for example. On top of the direct costs, they create uncertainty that can stop businesses from investing in the digital economy. They cause disaffection among young, connected populations and can drive them to seek opportunities overseas, and they can cause long-term damage to confidence among foreign tourists and investors. Where they can, authoritarian governments want to avoid turning off the internet which is why many have invested in more targeted ways to impose control more constantly and more consistently.

For a short while after Mubarak stepped down, there was a sense of victory among Egypts protesters. Tech workers, bloggers, and Facebook page admins became resistance leaders, fted around the world. Journalists felt they could operate freely, and activists felt the future opening up ahead of them.

Several years after quitting Al-Masry Al-Youm, Younis launched her own digital publication, Al-Manassa, in 2016.

During the uprising, Younis had struggled to figure out where the line was between covering the movement and participating in it; the simple act of journalism felt revolutionary, and many young journalists were buoyed by the collective spirit the usness that Younis referenced and the promise of a future out of the shadow of censorship and oppression. Younis wanted Al-Manassa to reflect that. The site combines traditional journalism with a citizen-led, collaborative authoring platform similar to Medium. It publishes op-eds critical of the government and reports on crises and social issues that the mainstream press tend to ignore.

But in June 2017, Egyptian readers began reporting that they couldnt access the site. The domain almanassa.com had been blocked inside the country.

The Egyptian government has powers to order sites blocked, a practice which had been ramping up since 2010. There was no legal process; Al Manassa had just been added to a secret blacklist. Around the same time, Mada Masr, another independent Egyptian publication, was also blocked. Mada Masr took the governments telecomm authority to court to challenge the block, but because it wasnt clear who had ordered it or how it had been executed, the court said it couldnt proceed with the case, and essentially shelved it for technical review. The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

Younis team moved Al-Manassa wholesale to another domain, almanassa.net. And then we published a story that they didnt like, and they blocked Al-Manassa dot net, she said. The sites administrators have ended up in a game of whack-a-mole with their censors its not clear exactly who they are mirroring the site to a new domain, having it blocked, then moving again. When the cost of moving domains started to mount, Al-Manassa began using subdomains. Today, were using four Ws, and then almanasa dot run, Younis said. Theyve migrated 13 times. Each time they do so, they lose half their audience and have to rebuild, and while traffic from search engines, which still often index the .com domain, isnt always impacted, traffic from shared content on social media takes a 50% hit, she said.

After nearly three years of moving from domain to domain, Younis reached out to Qurium, a Swedish organization that helps news outlets and civil society defend themselves against cyber attacks and censorship, to try to understand what was happening.

Quriums analysis showed that the blocks were being achieved using a technology called deep packet inspection, or DPI.

Information moves around the internet in packets, which are made up of a payload the content and a header, which contains basic routing information: where the information is going from and to. Earlier network monitoring and control tools just looked at the header, but deep packet inspection allows operators and administrators to automatically look into the payload of a packet and route it based on its content.

This has legitimate uses. A network might want, for example, to prioritize video content that needs large bandwidth, imperceptibly slowing the loading of text-and-image pages for everyone but making sure their Netflix never stutters, or to give priority access to users of certain services. Network operators have also deployed it to try to identify and prevent the spread of illegal material, such as child sexual abuse material and pirated content.

But DPI can also be co-opted as a tool for censorship, redirecting traffic away from a specific website or service and into a dead end. This is what was happening in Egypt. Requests sent from users trying to access Al-Manassa were bouncing back too fast, suggesting that there was some device between the user and the website blocking access. The device returned different kinds of errors for different types of requests, giving Quriums researchers a digital fingerprint that they could use to identify it as hardware sold by Sandvine, an Ontario-based technology supplier of network management technology. Sandvine didnt respond to multiple requests for comment.

Its worth noting that DPI, in general, is a neutral technology, Ramy Raoof, an Egyptian privacy and security technologist, told Rest of World. Its a police officer in the street, organizing the traffic but it has the potential to abuse this traffic. In Egypt, he said, Sandvine has been used in ways that manipulate the internet.

DPI was designed to help telecomms operators route traffic more efficiently, but it can be used for subtle and targeted control.

When people think about online censorship, they tend to think about Chinas Great Firewall, which essentially puts choke points on the internet where it enters and leaves the country, allowing the government total oversight over content. Thats relatively easy in China, because there are only three main internet service providers, and they, and the infrastructure, are effectively state owned. The model has its drawbacks its expensive, because it means processing a vast amount of data at those choke points, and its not particularly subtle but its effective.

Chinas model, however, is hard to replicate. The government has long been committed to controlling what people see and has been willing to throw enormous resources into censorship and propaganda. These were built into the Chinese internet from the very beginning and have been maintained at great cost ever since.

A more likely blueprint for the shape of information control worldwide is Russia, according to Roya Ensafi, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan who founded and helps to runs the Censored Planet observatory, which uses 95,000 vantage points ways to observe traffic to measure blockages and detect major censorship events as they happen worldwide.

The topography of the Russian internet is far more complex than that of China. There are thousands of ISPs, most of which are privately owned, and the Russian government didnt invest early in the infrastructure for large-scale internet censorship. But DPI tools make it possible for it to have the same effect.

In 2016, Ensafi and her colleagues were alerted to a list on the GitHub repository by a contact in Russia. The list was a backup of a Roskomnadzor blocklist for web addresses. It was being updated on an eight-hour cycle, giving them a live look at how Roskomnadzor was shutting down information on the Russian internet. It started out with a few hundred entries but grew and grew, reaching more than 170,000 domains and 1,681,000 internet protocols (IPs) by 2019, when Censored Planet published a paper on the leak, and the live list was taken down. Many of the entries were gambling and pornography sites, but the list included Russian- and English-language news and politics sites and circumvention tools like VPNs.

The task of blocking these domains was mainly left to the ISPs, who had to block banks of IPs or interfere with the Border Gateway Protocol the mechanism thats used to route internet traffic to shut off access to international sites. That was very good at censoring or blocking specific websites. But not everything on the internet is a website, Vadim Losev, a technical specialist at Roskomsvoboda, a Russian digital rights organization, told Rest of World.

The turning point came in 2018, when the Russian government tried to block the encrypted messaging service Telegram, which had refused to give the security services access to user data. [Telegram] is not connected to a specific IP address, and it doesnt have a domain name, Losev said. So [the block] didnt work very well.

The government demanded that the ISPs put in place better controls. Many of them acquired cheap DPI tools, which allowed them to do more than just block individual sites.

Then, in 2019, the Russian government increased the pressure, passing a new digital sovereignty law, which mandated that ISPs install a deep packet inspection device called the technical solution for threat countermeasures, or TSPU, made by the Russian network equipment company RDP and controlled directly by the government. This has created two layers of censorship architecture: one owned and operated by the ISPs themselves, the other by the government.

The investment in censorship technology reflected a general shift by the Putin government toward ever-greater control of the public sphere, according to Nechay, the radio journalist who also taught a class on censorship at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. The government still conducted overt attacks on the press and political opponents, but it needed more subtle mechanisms. [Modern] dictators prefer to look like civilian leaders, Nechay said. So for this, [they] need to spend some time creating this kind of machine of censorship.

The TSPU boxes were activated in March 2021 to throttle Twitter across the country, after the government accused the social media site of allowing the spread of child sexual abuse material, drug content, and images of suicide, and saying that the platform hadnt complied with takedown requests. The throttling was mostly lifted in May.

Censored Planets analysis showed that the DPI boxes filtered for messages heading to and from Twitter-related domains, including twitter.com, t.co and twimg.com, and dropped any packets that exceeded 150 kilobytes per second allowing traffic to move through at only a snails pace, rendering the service all but unusable. The throttling was a potent demonstration of the technical capacity of DPI for mass censorship and how it could be used to more subtly control what people see online. Throttling of individual services and sites is harder to detect than outright blocking and bans and can be used to disguise censorship as a technical error or localized outage.

The Russian DPI architecture has been used on several other occasions for short-term or targeted blocks, including to restrict access to VPNs around elections in autumn 2021 and to the Tor private browser. Because it inspects the content of a package, rather than just its routing information, DPI can often identify traffic coming via VPNs and filter it out, rendering such circumvention tools ineffective.

Most recently, in March 2022, the TSPU boxes were activated to block Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in Russia and to try to block circumvention tools. The scale and speed of the blocking, combined with the propaganda machine that ramped up to fill the void left, has been a demonstration of the commitment of the Putin government to shutting down the information landscape in Russia.

For the past five years, the Russian government has been pursuing their model, this so-called cyber sovereignty, trying to erect digital borders over the internet so that the state can control what is or isnt online, Allie Funk, senior research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House said. And to watch how that has all come to fruition has been something really astonishing to bear witness to.

The success of Russias approach shows how it is now possible to impose control over a complex, robust network without spending huge amounts of money. The model is increasingly easy to replicate, due to the number of companies selling DPI technology. It has become cheap and accessible, with devices costing as little as $6,000 each from commercial suppliers like Sandvine and Allot, an Israel-based company that offers DPI technology.

Citizen Lab alleges that in Egypt, Sandvines PacketLogic DPI devices were used to redirect users away from political news sites and toward affiliate advertising or crypto mining. Citizen Lab said that in Turkey and Syria, it was deployed to send users to malicious sites, exposing them to spyware, and showing how the technology can straddle the divide between censorship and surveillance. In September 2021, Sandvine was used to throttle access to the internet in Belarus during street protests the company eventually canceled its contract there, following public outcry.

In January 2022, Bloomberg reported that the company for a time had deals in Algeria, Djibouti, Eritrea, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan. The newswire also reported that former employees felt the company had essentially abandoned a policy of not selling its technology into situations where it could be used to violate human rights in 2017, after its acquisition by Francisco Partners Management, a private equity firm whose investments at one point included a majority stake in NSO Group, the Israeli company behind the highly controversial Pegasus spyware. Francisco Partners didnt respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Allot has been accused of enabling censorship in Azerbaijan. Its technology was allegedly used in Kazakhstan to throttle Telegram and other social media and communications platforms, ahead of the main blackout on January 5, 2021. Allot did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts in the regulation and export of technology told Rest of World that the unchecked proliferation of censorship technology, like that offered by Sandvine and Allott, has seriously undermined the stability and openness of the global internet.

I think were in a significantly worse position today than we were back [in 2011]. Governments, with their corporate co-conspirators, have invested in the infrastructure of control, Access Nows Solomon said. Were trying as hard as we can to keep the internet open and keep the channels of communication secure but were up against very significant forces.

Al-Manassa occupies half a dozen rooms and a pair of balconies on the second floor of an apartment building on a quiet backstreet in the southern Cairo suburb of Maadi, surrounded by fruit trees and spindly palms. Younis chose the location, 10 kilometers from Tahrir Square and the frantic traffic of downtown Cairo, for its tranquility.

Younis is currently out on bail, after being arrested and briefly jailed in 2020 for allegedly using pirated software, which she denies. If the charge ever goes to court, she faces a fine of 300,000 Egyptian pounds ($19,100) or up to two years in prison.

The oppression she faces isnt just digital. Younis feels a broader tightening of control by the Egyptian government. She has seen friends and colleagues jailed or forced to flee the country. The authorities demand the publication gets more and more licenses to operate right now, Al-Manassa doesnt have licenses to use its own computers. Its journalists are unable to get certified by the national media syndicate, so they risk arrest if they report in the field. The government sets red lines around subjects that media cant report on freely, including the Covid-19 outbreak or the conflict in Sinai. Its like being a rat in a maze, she said. But whats really strangling Al-Manassa is the block on its website.

Younis said she has little hope of getting the government to loosen its grip, but at the very least, she wants to hold the companies that supply it accountable. She has reached out to Sandvine repeatedly, without response. She is now trying to figure out if theres a way to sue the company in Canada or the U.S. She compared the sale of censorship technology to that of arms. You cant sell weapons to countries if they are using it against civilians, right? Why is this not not happening in technology? she said.

Most of her generation of blogs and independent media are scattered or shut down. She counts just three publications still standing. In her words, The censors won. Al-Manassa limps on. Our minimum is to survive. What I tell myself is that at least we survive, we document. So one day when something changes, and anybody wants to look back, what happened in Egypt in those years, people dont [think] that it was completely black, that there was something happening.

This is often whats holding the free internet together: Individuals, NGOs scraping together their funding, embattled independent media clinging on. It is, Younis said, what keeps her going. Were still here.

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From the Arab Spring to Russian censorship: a decade of internet blackouts and repression - Rest of World

Chen Qiushi was born in Chinas remote, frigid north near the countrys border with Russia. An only child, he loved to tell stories and jokes to his family and classmates and dreamed of being an actor or a television journalist. But his mother objected, and Chen got a law degree from a local university and moved to Beijing, where he later took a job at a prestigious legal firm.

In off-hours, Chen continued to pursue his passion for performing. He dabbled in standup comedy at local bars and did voice acting. He became a contestant on I Am a Speaker, a talent show for orators modelled on The Voice. In his final performance, he expounded on the importance of free speech. A country can only grow stronger when it is accompanied by critics, Chen said. Only freedom of expression and the freedom of press can protect a country from descending into a place where the weak are preyed upon by the strong.

Chen won second place and used his newfound fame to build a large social-media following. In 2018, he uploaded more than four hundred short videos that provided basic tutorials on Chinese law on Douyin, a platform similar to TikTok, but only available for users in China. He gained more than 1.5 million followers, making him the most popular legal personality on the entire platform.

In the next year, Chen began providing independent journalism to his followers on social-media. In the summer of 2019, he travelled to Hong Kong to report firsthand on the pro-democracy street protests that had erupted in the city. Why am I in Hong Kong? Chen asked, in a video posted on August 17th. Because a lot is happening in Hong Kong right now.

Chen interviewed protesters and spoke with those who supported the police. He waded into simmering controversies, such as the use of violence by some demonstrators. He acknowledged that journalism was a hobby of sorts, but said that he still had an obligation to be present when and where news unfolded. He also pledged to be objective. I wont express my opinion carelessly, Chen promised. I wont say whom I support or whom I disagree with. Everyone has their own subjective prejudice. I wish to leave behind my own prejudice and treat everything with neutrality as much as I can . . . because I am not satisfied with public opinion and the media environment in China, I decided to come to Hong Kong and become the media myself.

Alarmed by the reach of Chens social-media posts, Chinese officials pressured Chens law firm to get him to leave Hong Kong. The firm told Chen that, if he did not return to Beijing immediately, he would be in grave danger. Four days after he posted his first video from Hong Kong, Chen flew home to Beijing. All of his public Chinese social-media accounts, including Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin, no longer worked. When he tried to open a new Douyin account a few weeks later, the account was deleted as soon as his face appeared in a video. He posted messages on his YouTube and Twitter, which are banned in China. After Chinese police interrogated Chen and demanded to know what he thought of the Hong Kong protests, he expressed frustration. No one cares about the truthall they care about is my stance, Chen complained in a YouTube video. This is the problem we face right now. It seems that truth does not matter at all.

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Six months later, on January 23, 2020, the city of Wuhan went into lockdown. The next day, Chen boarded the last train from Beijing to Wuhan. When disaster happens, if you dont rush to the front lines as soon as possible, what kind of journalist are you? he asked in a video he posted outside the train station. Chen seemed to believe that informing the public and insuring access to independent reporting was the key to fighting the disease. As long as information travels faster than the virus, we can win this battle, Chen said, in the video. Although I was blocked on the Internet in China for reporting on the events in Hong Kong, I still have a Twitter and a YouTube account. In the next few days, I invite you to find me through these channels. Id be happy to help get the voice of the people of Wuhan to the outside world. Chen apparently believed he could use his skills as an orator and his charisma as a performer to build an audience online, even if it was primarily on YouTube and Twitter and not the Chinese social-media platforms from which he was banned.

Over the next ten days in Wuhan, Chen visited emergency rooms and supermarkets, talked to doctors, nurses, and city residents, and uploaded daily video reports. On January 25th, the beginning of the Chinese New Year, Chen donned improvised personal protective gear, including swimming goggles, and filmed a busy scene outside a local emergency room. The next day, he visited the shuttered Wuhan wet market, where a seafood seller, Wei Guixian, was reportedly the first person to have fallen ill from the virus. Chen described the market as a colorful place that sold foxes, monkeys, and pangolins, and said local rich people do have a habit of eating wild animals to boost their health.

As Chen reported from the city, Chinese officials systematically covered up the outbreak. The National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease. Chen feared that such censorship was facilitating the spread of the virus and believed that his daily video reports informed the public. He facilitated donations of supplies and distributed food to hospital workers. He shared with viewers an encouraging note from his parents, who urged him to keep reporting but also to stay safe. He also implicitly criticized the countrys leadership after President Xi Jinping initially did not travel to Wuhan. I dont care where Xi Jinping is, Chen noted, addressing the citys residents. But I, Chen Qiushi, am here.

On March 10, 2020, nearly three months after the presumed first case, the President finally visited Wuhan. He praised the peoples war against the coronavirus, and brought along journalists from state-controlled media outlets. Through its global propaganda network, China told its pandemic narrative to the world. It used crude measuresa video, distributed by the state-run news agency Xinhua, featuring the Statue of Liberty failing to defend the U.S. from the virusand more sophisticated strategies, such as generating media coverage of the Chinese government delivering aid in places such as Pakistan and Italy.

Part of the governments argument is that its system of strict information control has allowed it to suppress misinformation and rumors, while providing the population with reliable health information and protocols to stay safe. A global survey released in June 2020 found that sixty per cent of respondents believed that China had responded effectively to the pandemic, while only a third felt that the U.S. had done so. The Chinese government used its near-total control over domestic news mediaas well as social mediato manage public perceptions of its coronavirus policies and to build popular support for its actions. It blocked or took down online posts that cast doubt on the governments response and, in some cases, arrested and prosecuted dissenters. Taking advantage of deteriorating relations with the Trump Administration, it expelled more than a dozen U.S. foreign correspondents, some of whom were asking uncomfortable questions about Wuhan.

China provided a playbook for information repression that spread around the world alongside the virus. Citing COVID, authoritarian governments in Russia, Iran, Nicaragua, and eighty other nations, according to Human Rights Watch, enacted new restrictions on free speech and political expression that were falsely described as public-health measures. In at least ten countries, protests against the government were also banned or interrupted. Information on the virus that did not come from the government was criminalized as fake news or propaganda.

Authoritarian regimes called the censorship necessary and much of it temporary, but, in reality, the pandemic amplified or accelerated a shift toward authoritarianism that, according to the U.S.-based pro-democracy organization Freedom House, had been under way for fourteen years. At least ninety-one countries that the group monitored restricted news media in response to the virus outbreak in the first months of 2020, including sixty-seven per cent of the states that the nonprofit classifies as not free.

These crackdowns were often fuelled by domestic political considerations, Freedom House found, including a desire to hide the extent of the outbreak from citizens and conceal government incompetence. The repression was facilitated by the narrative, created and spread by China, that authoritarian governments were better equipped to respond to the pandemic, in part, because of their ability to control and manage information. This was in sharp contrast, China argued, to the deficiencies in the democratic world, particularly in the United States, which was mired in division and misinformation and struggled to muster an effective public-health response. Today, as the most recent wave of the pandemic recedes, a post-COVID global political order is emerging where autocracies appear strengthened and democracies seem divided.

During his time in Wuhan, Chen visited the construction site of Huoshenshan Hospital, an enormous emergency medical facility that the Chinese government built, from scratch, in ten days. The hospital was both a response to the overwhelming demand for patient care, and a carefully calibrated propaganda effort intended to highlight the ability of the Chinese government to mobilize state resources and reorganize society in an emergency. During a car ride back with several Wuhan residents, Chen observed empty streets as he searched for a place to eat.

As his time in Wuhan wore on, Chen became increasingly agitated. He uploaded a twenty-seven-minute monologue in which he decried shortages of testing kits and hospital beds, described the exhaustion of doctors and construction workers, and reported that taxi-drivers in the city had figured out that a contagious disease was spreading weeks before the authorities made a public announcement. Despite the governments attempt to control the flow of information, they knew to avoid the Huanan market. Chen described the growing mayhem at hospitals, the lines, the patients being treated in parking lots and waiting rooms, and the body of a dead patient sitting in a wheelchair.

Several days after Chens arrival, someone from the Bureau of Justice called Chen and asked where he was staying in Wuhan. Authorities summoned Chens parents and asked them to pressure Chen to leave Wuhan. I want him to return home more than you do, Chen said his mother retorted. A week later, Chen told his parents he was planning to visit a temporary hospital. After being unable to reach Chen for twelve hours, his friends, following an agreed-upon protocol, logged into his accounts and changed his passwords. Though there has been no official confirmation, they suspected that he had been detained by Chinese authorities and was being secretly imprisoned.

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How Chinas Response to COVID-19 Set the Stage for a Worldwide Wave of Censorship - The New Yorker

A year into facing firein India for controversial content,Netflix Inc's (NASDAQ: NFLX) has partnered with the country'scentral government to launch a short video series.

The series 'Azadi Ki Amrit Kahaniya,' is created by the Indian governmentincollaboration with Netflix to commemorate the 75 years of Indian Independence under a state initiative.

Bela Bajaria, Head of Global TV, Netflix, said the company is "proud to partner" with the governmentto "celebrate and acknowledge the evolution of India over the past 75 years by celebrating its beautiful art, culture, and storytelling."

See Also: Netflix May Soon Clamp Down On Password Sharing: Here's How It Is Going To Work

She further added that it was "in pursuance of this partnership Netflix has created a series of short videos based on real-life stories aimed to celebrate the achievement of people from all corners of India."

The first set of videos features seven women changemakers from across the country who will share their experiences.

Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting of India Anurag Thakursaid"this initiative aims to bring out inspiring stories of Indians, and these stories shall motivate and empower more people to achieve their goals."

This isn't the first time that Netflix is partnering with the Indian government. Earlier, the ott platform, with other Indian peers, partnered with the government for the state-owned 52nd International Film Festival of India.

This came after India last year announced a new set of rules and guidelines under the existing laws to regulate digital content by the OTT platforms amid the row of controversial content leading to legal heat against the platforms.

Read Next:'Nice Growth' In APAC: Netflix CEO Highlights Rising Subscription Numbers In Key Region

2022 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Netflix In India: From Censorship To Partnership With The Government - Benzinga - Benzinga

In mid-April, Florida rejected fifty-four math books for classroom use, claiming they made reference to critical race theory and other prohibited topics.

What is novel for people to understand is that this is being organized and perpetrated at a level weve not seen before.

It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students, asserted Floridas Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. The rejected textbooks were not named and no examples of how they managed to run afoul of state educational standards were given.

The episode, which brought national ridicule to DeSantis and Floridas increasingly right-wing politics, is just one of a rapidly growing number of censorship actions being taken by local and state officials across the country.

PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend freedom of expression, reported that during a recent nine-month period there were 1,586 instances of books being banned, involving 1,145 unique titles. According to the report, these bannings took place in eighty-six school districts in twenty-six states, representing 2,899 schools with a combined enrollment of more than two million students.

What is novel for people to understand is that this is being organized and perpetrated at a level weve not seen before, Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, tells The Progressive. Its part of a movement adjacent to politics but very much part of an effort to gin-up outrage over books in schools in an election year.

Whether the books deal with race, sex, or gender, Friedman notes, the same lines or images are being used to remove those books, and [they] are being targeted across state lines.

Right-wing censorship efforts are focusing on classic works such as Harper Lees To Kill A Mockingbird, John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men, and Art Spieglmans Maus, and Ruby BridgessRuby Bridges Goes to School. Many others deal with LGBTQ+ and gender identity issues, including Maia Kobabes Gender Queer, and Justin Richardsons And Tango Makes Three. The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project has also come under widespread critical attack because of its alleged reliance on critical race theory, as have books by anti-racism writers and activists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. Even Toni Morrissons classic book Beloved has been pulled from the shelves.

Most distressing, according to PEN America , is that it is not just the number of books removed that is disturbing, but the processesor lack thereofthrough which such removals are being carried out. Two-fifths of the bans are tied to orders from state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books in schools, while nearly all (98 percent) of the 1,586 instances of banned books identified by PEN America involved departures of best practice guidelines designed toprotect students First Amendment rights.

Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who now teaches at New York Law School, tells The Progressive that many of these actions likely violate the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that governs expression in schools and libraries.

Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas, the court ruled in that case, Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those booksand seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.

Texas, with 712 instances of book censorship, is the number-one state in which these bans have occurred, followed by Pennsylvania and Florida with 456 and 204, respectively.

Last December, Representative Matt Krause, Republican of Texas, sent every school district in the state a list of 850 books he believes should be removed from libraries for allegedly containing material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.

Strossen sees this as evidence of a coordinated campaign: They are armed with a playbook and say, heres what you can do to challenge decisions that are being made about the curriculum, about library books, she says. And they get people, usually a relatively small number or percentage of the community, who are disproportionately active.

Strossen notes that Jerry Falwells Moral Majority was one of the groups that played this role in the 1980s. Todays book censorship campaign is being promoted by groups including Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and Parents Defending Education.

Censorship battles have long been a feature of U.S. political life.

In the late nineteenth century, Anthony Comstocks anti-obscenity campaign culminated with the U.S. Congress adopting the 1873 Comstock Act, the federal laws that banned illicit materials distributed through the mail. In the 1910s, near the end of his life, Comstock claimed that he had destroyed 3,984,063 photographs and 160 tons of obscene literature. These laws would remain in force until the 1950s.

The 1920s were marked not only by the Palmer Raids and the deportation of anarchists, but also by the banning in New York of James Joyces Ulysses, and D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover, and of Sinclair Lewiss Elmer Gantry in Boston, among other titles. It also saw Catholic leaders promote state censorship bills in an effort to clean up Hollywood movies.

In the post-World War II era, the United States has faced two perceived enemies: communism and obscenity. The U.S. Congress, both the Senate and House, led the nations battle against sin, sex, and subversion. Federal efforts against alleged immorality involved pocket-book pulp fiction as well as comic books, Bettie Page photos, and depictions of homosexuality. It was an era that saw schools host comic book burnings.

In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, which joined the American Family Association and Morality in Media (a.k.a. the National Center on Sexual Exploitation) in a campaign against obscenity in books and other media. Among the books banned during the 1980s were F. Scott FitzgeraldsThe Great Gatsby, Alice WalkersThe Color Purple, and John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men. In addition, the FBI initiated a program of library surveillance to check on the identities of people examining potentially controversial materials.

There were also campaigns to block exhibitions of artistic works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano (i.e. his work Piss Christ) as well as the theatrical screening of Martin Scorseses The Last Temptation of Christ.

Todays censorship wars are part of the larger culture wars driven by white evangelical Christians. Members of this group, in large part members of the Republican activist base, are waging an apparently coordinated campaign against reproductive choice, LGBTQ+ rights, and the teaching of what is falsely labeled critical race theory.

Whats key right now is engagement, PEN Americas Friedman says, when asked what people can do to resist this censorship wave. It comes down to affirming a simple message: We dont believe in banning books. We believe in freedom of speech. We believe in freedom of access to information. How this is regulated in schools needs to reflect those principles.

This is a very simple, non-partisan message, he adds. Its not a message about left or right or LBGTQ+ or race, but rather a fundamental belief that we shouldnt be banning books in this country.

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The New Censorship Wars - Progressive.org - Progressive.org

Texas A&M University is home to more than 70,000 students and 500,000 alumni many of whom hope to maintain the myriad traditions central to the institutions identity.

But rapid growth in A&Ms population means that change is occurring at the traditionally conservative university in College Station. Some students and faculty say several recent administrative decisions were unilateral and regressive, however, highlighting A&Ms struggle to weigh the desires of mounting liberal voices against those of a still-larger group of conservative students and alumni.

Heres what you should know about the latest conflict at A&M.

The school had more than 73,000 students in fall 2021, compared to under 50,000 students in 2010.

The alumni population is similarly large. More than 550,000 people have attended Texas A&M University, and more than 505,000 of them are still alive. Thats because more people graduated from the school in the past 20 years than in the first 120 years of the institution combined, according to the Association of Former Students.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Texas A&Mclimate lab, other agreements ended in wake of questions over China ties

Students and faculty say they have noticed a trend over the past year, especially since President M. Katherine Banks took the helm in summer 2021. The former engineering dean has ushered in several new changes, and not all of them were made with student and faculty input, those stakeholders say.

Some of the overarching changes involve Banks attempts to reorganize the universitys academic structure. A&M last year commissioned a study to address organizational efficiency, and in response to the findings, Banks identified several areas that will see transformation. She called her response, "The Path Forward."

One of the biggest recommendations that the university accepted is the merging of the College of Liberal Arts, College of Science and the College of Geosciences into a new College of Arts and Science. Another is the reorganization of the provosts office despite faculty concerns that changes might impact their freedom to teach on topics they choose. And University Libraries will no longer serve as a tenure home for faculty.

The university is also working to align the management practices of student organizations, although it received markedly split feedback on the suggestion.

"We are pleased to hear from different voices, even though sometimes we all dont agree on the outcome of a decision," Kelly Brown, vice president of marketing and communications, said in a statement. "Texas A&M has 72,000-plus students, more than 1,200 student organizations and countless competing priorities."

"Earlier this year, President Banks commissioned 41 working groups to review and make recommendations related to the Path Forward," the statement continues. "She asked for the direct input of students, faculty, staff and former students. She is seeking other opinions and is most definitely listening. Hard decisions are being made based on whats best for the university and those decisions are arrived at through research, careful thought and input from all stakeholders. Not all decisions will be favorable to everyone, however, the administration is committed to continue working together and listening to all campus voices."

In the fall, the university moved the three-day summer camp for incoming freshmen under a new umbrella. Formerly an independently run student organization, it is now a student organization that supports a university program meaning student leaders report to the university. The selection of leaders and counselors also has to be approved by the vice president of student affairs.

A&M further changed the camps mission statement to remove a phrase about creating an accepting environment, head director Mikayla Slaydon said. The university then aligned Fish Camps official values with the A&Ms official values, resulting in the loss of a camp value stressing diversity.

Slaydon said she found out about these decisions after the fact.

The university disaffiliated from "Draggieland" in the fall without providing an explanation, students said.

Students formerly managed the drag show throughMSC Town Hall, a student organization supporting a university program that brings events to campus. That group held the money in a university coffer, so A&M's disaffiliation meant the show couldn't access its funding.

Several LGBT groups fundraised themselves and held the pageant to a sold-out crowd. They suspect conservative lobbying groups influenced the administration. Several organizations heavily protested the event in 2020 and 2021, even though it was still a rousing success those years.

Another controversial decision came when the university in February gave editors of the student newspaper The Battalion an ultimatum to stop printing immediately. If they didnt move to an online-only format, they would lose several resources including their building space and faculty adviser, the newspapers editor-in-chief previously told the Chronicle.

Several students said they feel that The Battalion has covered more contentious issues on campus this year, such as sexual assault at Fish Camp. The Battalion is a registered student organization, which means it doesnt report to university administration. The threat led students and faculty to immediately raise concerns about censorship.

After news of the decision went viral, administration walked back the ultimatum and formed a working group to determine the future of the publication. Vice President of Student Affairs Gen. Joe Ramirez also issued a formal apology about several decisions madeon campus without student input.

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What to know about Texas A&M's censorship battles, including Draggieland show and The Battalion - Houston Chronicle

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain offered an interesting insight into Democrats 2022 midterm election strategy on Sunday, musing about French President Emmanuel Macrons ability to win reelection despite a 36 percent approval rating, implying a similar possibility for U.S. President Joe Biden. Instead of trying to turn Bidens sinking approval ratings around by ditching failed policies, Democrats seem content with their underwater numbers so long as they can drive Republicans popularity even lower with smears and censorship.

Bidens approval rating is at 40.9 percent, according to the RealClear aggregate, although a Quinnipiac poll has him as low as 35 percent and a CNBC poll has him at 38 percent. A February NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll reported that 56 percent of Americans thought Bidens first year in office was a failure, and the month before a mere 25 percent were satisfied with his administration.

The Biden administration has helped drive its own approval ratings into the ground with crisis after self-induced crisis. Democrat-led Covid lockdowns and ballooning federal spending have caused the worst inflationary crisis in decades, coupled with energy prices that were on the rise even before Russias invasion of Ukraine thanks to Bidens war on oil and gas. Destabilization in Ukraine and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan may top the list of Bidens most deadly mess-ups, but theyre far from the only line items.

From a first-day executive order requiringthat schools ignore the biological differences between male and female students from the athletic field to the bathroom if they wish to continue receiving federal funding, and keeping those same schools closed for months, to bragging about working with Big Tech to silence dissent, exacerbating a record-setting crisis at the U.S. Southern border, ousting people from their jobs with medical mandates, encouraging kids to chop off their genitals, and colluding with the National School Boards Association to smear parents as domestic terrorists, the Biden team has done everything possible to alienate voters.

Meanwhile, Bidens radical legislative agenda has crashed and burned, leaving him with nothing to offer voters but a list of failures. Biden could choose to learn from these mistakes and respond by securing the border, unhampering American oil production, respecting parents and free speech, and protecting minors from predatory sex propaganda. But instead, the White House is tacitly admitting it doesnt care that Americans dont like its agenda.

How is that a workable election strategy? It isnt, unless you can convince voters to hate or fear your opposition even more. Democrats spent all four years of former President Donald Trumps presidency pushing the Clinton campaign-funded Russia collusion hoax, aided by propagandists in the legacy media. When The New York Post broke news of sensational and incriminating Biden family scandals in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, Big Tech and big media collaborated to nuke the story and censor those who tried to share it.

Those are just two of the most explosive examples. There are countless more of tech companies censoring conservative perspectives (including a sitting president), journalists running cover for Democrat conspiracy theories while lying about Republicans, and even tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg funneling nearly half a billion dollars to take over local election offices.

In a fair system, a president with approval ratings that are underwater by double digits would be worried about his next election, and probably worried enough to be making some big changes. But Biden has done nothing but double down. That signals just how confident his people are in their ability to collude with the censorship regime to smear their opponents or keep their arguments from reaching voters entirely. Censorship is a powerful political tool, and its part of why the laptop class is so panicked at the idea that someone with slightly more respect for free speech than they now owns the Twittersphere.

All of Bidens disasters point to a Republican victory in the midterms this fall, but Democrats unwillingness to let nosedives in the polls budge their cultural battles should be a chilling reminder to Republicans that Democrats havent played by the rules for years. The collaborators in the Biden White House, in the legacy media, and in Big Tech are so confident in their backroom rigging that they dont think they need to listen to what American voters think.

This should put urgency and tangible political reforms behind the broad and bipartisan desire among Americans to ensure American election processes are beyond reproach.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Dems Have Zilch To Offer So They're Smearing, Censoring The Opposition - The Federalist

The pay dispute at Arriva London South is being followed closely by bus drivers across London from the standpoint of launching a long overdue fightback.

Opposition has continued to grow against Unites attempts to foist a below-inflation pay cut on Arriva south drivers. After last months strikes, Unite re-entered pay negotiations only to recycle a below inflation 3 percent offer which drivers had already rejected, with the proviso it is backdated and with the addition of an insulting 750 lump sum.

Unites actions refute the claims by a group of so-called union activists, defenders of Unite and promoters of its General Secretary Sharon Graham, that the union has been reformed under her leadership and will fight the corner of bus workers against the companies.

The activists responded to the growing exposure of Unite by attacking the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee, opposing its fight to organise bus and transport workers independently of the pro-company unions. The activists called for censorship against the World Socialist Web Site demanding drivers stop posting its articles on social media.

Their smear campaign followed publication of an April 13 article,Activists promote Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham in Arriva London South pay dispute.

Unable to answer WSWS politically, the activists responded with a pile-on slandering WSWS as liars and saboteurs, seeking to create maximum confusion over Unites 2021/2 pay claim and legitimise its below inflation deal. They resorted to anti-socialist red-baiting.

This was answered in the articleArriva London South pay dispute: Fact versus fiction which, along withUnite blocks joint action by bus drivers against pay restraint, attracted widespread readership and support among bus drivers on social media.

In their comments on social media, drivers condemned Unite. They described the union as being in the pocket of Arriva, called for a no-confidence vote in the union, and insisted on a pay demand of no less than 9 percent and up to 15 percent.

As we wrote, It is critical that drivers speak out and oppose the unprincipled efforts to silence the WSWS. Political censorship sets a dangerous precedent. It is a direct attack on drivers right to know information being suppressed by the mainstream media, the bus companies and Unite the union. It is aimed at blocking a politically conscious fightback by the working class.

Bus drivers have responded to this appeal by explaining their reasons for following and sharing the articles from the WSWS and the importance of the fight taken up by the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee.

An Abellio driver said, We are all following the strike at Arriva and were surprised to see that Brixton drivers had to work during the strike. Now we know that they could and should have joined the strike. That the legal case against them was a fraud is another example of the way the union separate us. I spoke to drivers on the 137 from Brixton and they all supported the strike and wanted to join it.

Our wages and conditions are very bad, the driver continued, explaining that they had changed the union in their garage and hoped they would see a change. Describing how drivers were leaving for another London company with better pay, they asked, Why cant we have London-wide pay negotiations?

A petition was being circulated here and in Camberwell garage to get rid of [Unite Regional Officer John] Murphy and the other full-timers but not Graham as its said she is different, but we have not seen any change at all. They are all the same. Why is it that its the same union that does the negotiations, but we end up with completely different wages and conditions?

Speaking on the censorship of the WSWS the driver said, So the attack on you is because you let drivers know what is happening in the different companies which the union keeps quiet about. I pass the WSWS articles on to our WhatsApp group so bus drivers can read the WSWS articles at the garage. So it gets around and the union knows this. That is what they are reacting to; their behind-closed-doors deals are being exposed. Its important that you keep this up.

A former RATP Dev driver victimised over COVID-related health and safety concerns told us, The truth will always hurt. The word unite means just that, but in Unite The Union it means to divide and conquer.

When RATP Dev bus drivers voted to go on strike over a year ago many of these RATP garages then became, overnight, with the blessing of Unite, different subsidiaries. WSWS exposed this and many dirty tactics of the companies, with the union having their hand in it too.

For example, Stamford Brook garage was prevented from going on strike with Park Royal and Shepherds Bush but all are RATP Dev-London United garages. Unite and RATP said Stamford Brook did not have a majority to go out on strike. Utter rubbish when it is Unite members who voted overall in favour of strike action across the garages.

An Arriva driver said, I have no trust in Unite based on experience, they have been useless. They should not be pushing 3 percent at Arriva which drivers have taken strike action against. The cost of everything is going sky high.

During the pandemic we were described as key workers but our safety was not taken seriously by the company or union. We made sure the NHS workers got to work and all those who were essential as well. During last summer we worked in 43-degree temperatures as there was no air conditioning in the cabs. The management were not bothered as they were in their air-conditioned offices.

Speaking to David OSullivan and the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee I became more aware about the dangers with COVID in the workplace and all the measures that could be taken to prevent infections and drivers losing their lives but which were not being taken. It was shameful how he was treated for trying to change things.

We have to raise our voices now and act together and unite regardless of which company we work for. It is not believable when they claim they do not have the money.

We do have the power to change things. If London Underground can be shut down why cant this happen on the buses. They will not listen to us otherwise.

I did not know about the struggle of bus workers in Maharashtra [India] until Dave made the appeal and I read about it on the World Socialist Web Site. Such an important fight over the most basic rights. We do need to look across national borders and see we are part of a wider struggle.

A Metroline driver explained, I think those who are defending Unite are worried about the facts you have exposed because of the outcomes and reaction of bus drivers.

The union is worried about the knock-on effect of the Arriva strike because they want to minimise all the pay disputes across London. We got around 2.5 percent for a two-year deal last time. The union rep at the garage is saying they are pushing for 10 percent in our pay talks this year but they have never discussed this with the drivers, it is a made up figure. They are keeping drivers in the dark about the other pay disputes like at London United.

Unite has failed to deliver on a long list of issueshealth and safety over COVID, pay, and terms and conditions. We voted to strike against Remote Sign On and this was not honoured, they do not respect our views.

The election of Sharon Graham has changed none of our circumstances, this does not change with a new name at the top of the union. The rank-and-file committees is a logical alternative to the union/management alliance, which is a poisoned mechanism, its a sick system.

The WSWS publishes the facts about our concerns which the union tries to silence. Unite has been covering up about COVID and then sided with the company when David OSullivan and the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee fought for action to protect drivers lives.

It is laughable to say there is no connection between pay and the broader issues. Everything is about profit, 100 percent, especially with the privatised buses. Workers are the main force in society. Without us there is no profit, but we have to fight for a pay rise just to make ends meet.

This is part of an international fight as the struggle by bus workers in Maharashtra, India shows. Its a different country but the same issues stemming from the system of capitalism which puts profits first. Workers need to be informed and gain knowledge against the propaganda and lies of the media.

Join the campaign to reinstate London bus driver David OSullivan!

OSullivan was sacked for upholding workers health and safety during a pandemic that has killed 60 bus drivers in London alone.

Read this article:
London bus drivers speak out against smears and censorship of WSWS by defenders of Unite - WSWS

Business administration discarded The Observer

Crystal Clausen

The shelf stands empty after the College of Business Dean and Associate Dean recycled copies of the paper on preview day.

Over the past weekend, we received a report of the College of Business Dean Jeffrey Stinson and Associate Dean Keke Coco Wu actively attempting to throw our papers in Shaw-Smyser into a recycling bin in response to our budget story that reported on 2023 budget cuts. It is disheartening our paper was discarded in an attempt to make the university appear in a positive light.

Stinson said out loud, while walking with Wu, the Observers Social Media Editor Crystal Clausen and her coworker, Im going to put these papers in the recycling.

After being asked why the papers were being thrown away, Wu told Clausen, Why did [The Observer] think it was smart to print that [budget] story on the day that we have so many students coming to campus?

We reached out to Wu and Stinson at the time of publication. Wu stated she was involved in a meeting that went past our deadline, so she declined to comment at the time; Stinson responded in an email.

In preparing our building for the CWU Preview Day on Saturday, I moved remaining copies of The Observer from the entry foyer, the email stated. Preview Day is critical to our recruitment efforts. Our desire is to present our prospective students and guests with a positive portrayal and outlook for the college and university. Our event day set-up and event delivery was organized to that effect.

The story in question regarding the 2023 budget was published one week ago. Vice President of Financial Affairs, Joel Klucking, provided information for this story and has not reached out regarding non factual details in the article. The budget is important to both the current CWU community and future CWU students.

Observer staff also witnessed incidents in the SURC where our paper was placed on the lowest shelf and another publication, the HYPE magazine, placed on top of ours.

The Publicity Center confirmed they did not make this change. While we cant confirm who did this in the SURC, two separate incidents against our paper in one day is upsetting.

I spoke to the Student Press Law Center regarding this incident, and they confirmed it impedes us in many ways. There is monetary value to what the offenders did. The amount we paid for those copies to be printed, the money we pay our staff, the amount different groups paid for their ads to be in our paper and so on.

I would like to take this time to give a reminder that censorship of the media is a real issue that should not happen to any publication, let alone to a student publication from administration within their own university. The First Amendment is to have freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There is no justifiable excuse to attempt to censor our reporting.

Our purpose is not to make people happy or to have the university, town or state look amazing. We are reporting on the facts of our campus community.

Reaching out to us by either a phone call or email is the correct form of action if upset, not throwing away our paper. You may also write a Letter to the Editor that will be published, and if necessary, we will have a response published with it.

Please know this is not going to make us alter our reporting in any way, shape or form. Our publication is here to present necessary information to the public. We are here to stay.

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Editorial: Censorship is alive and well The Observer - The Observer