Category Archives: Censorship

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Chinas fearsome censorship apparatus is increasingly expanding beyond the confines of the Great Firewall to influence media outside its borders, often by online attack, according to a new report from a US Congress-funded think tank.

The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship (h/t WSJ) by Freedom House analyst Sarah Cook is a report for the Center for International Media Assistance, part of the Congress-backed non-profit National Endowment for Democracy.

Chinas increasingly proactive stance on how its portrayed outside the country comes in response to its tech-savvy citizens' growing desire to circumvent the Great Firewall to read international coverage, and Beijing's intensifying soft power battle with Washington.

The report continued:

Since coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has constructed a multi-layered system for censoring unwanted news and stifling opposing viewpoints within China. Over the past two decades, this domestic apparatus has spawned mechanisms that extend some censorship to media outlets based outside China. Reflecting the adaptive nature of Chinese authoritarianism, such pressures are a complex mix of overt official actions and more discreet dynamics.

China's efforts can be split into four distinct areas: direct action from Chinese officials to prevent negative articles being published and punishing media owners that disobey; economic carrots and sticks to induce self-censorship; indirect pressure by advertisers, foreign governments and others; cyber attacks and physical assault.

The report claimed that different strategies are used for different geographies and situations.

For example, Chinese language media owners outside of the PRC have been rewarded with lucrative advertising deals and other incentives for positive reporting, while for non-Chinese language outlets in Asia, Latin America and Africa local government officials are often approached to restrict damaging reporting, Cook said.

It continued:

The rest is here:
Beyond the Great Firewall: China's global censorship campaign

YouTube censorship? Wild Games Studio accused of blocking negative video review
Game developer Wild Games Studio is in crisis mode after using YouTube #39;s copyright complaint system to remove an unfavorable review. Game reviewer TotalBiscu...

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10/18/13: Video from 10/18/13: More censorship from YouTube?
Copyright L. Kochman, October 18, 2013 @ 11:30 p.m..

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10/18/13: Video from 10/18/13: More censorship from YouTube? - Video

IMPORTANT STOP ACTA NO CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET!
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The cadres in charge of controlling the media in Chinaand importantly over the last several years, influencing the media outside of Chinahave a crucial job to perform, necessitated by the internal logic of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule: On the one hand, they must show that the Party is the rightful and successful ruler of China; on the other, they must deal with those who would say otherwise.

As Sarah Cook, a researcher for Freedom House, puts it in her recent report: For the partys narrative to be convincing to audiences inside and outside China, reportingespecially investigative reportingabout the darker sides of CCP rule at home and Chinese activities abroad must be suppressed.

According to two new reports published on Oct. 22, Chinese communist propaganda and censorship officers have over the last few years developed a rich and nuanced set of practices and tactics aimed at affecting these outcomes.

Anne Nelson, another researcher, published a report on the international expansion of China Central Television, the broadcast mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, on the same day. Both reports were sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S.-funded agency that supports democracy around the world.

Cooks report methodically peels back the layers of the Partys censorship apparatus, examining each to see how it functions, who it targets, and what effect it has: there is direct action by Chinese diplomats, officials, and security personnel, who simply obstruct reporters and punish recalcitrant media outlets; there are economic inducements and punishments; there is indirect diplomatic, political, and economic pressure, transmitted through advertisers or governments; and then simply cyberespionage or even physical attacks.

There was, for example, the time that the chief editor of Bloomberg was approached by a top Chinese diplomat, who attempted to have him kill a story about the finances of the family of Xi Jinping, at the time the incoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. The story ran, but Bloombergs English website was blocked soon afterward.

That did not have a significant impact on Bloombergs business because its English-language readership in China is limited. The New York Times, however, was hit somewhat harder. After it ran an investigation that sought to show how the family of Wen Jiabao had gained vast wealth, the Chinese authorities shut down its Chinese-language website, which had just opened. The stock dropped 20 percent overnight, Cooks report says. Reprisals of this kind are meant as a warning to others who would transgress against the Partys reporting preferences.

Journalists on the ground in China can find that the face of censorship is a little more sharp-toothed. In February of this year, thugs believed to be dispatched by the local government of a village near Beijing intercepted the vehicle of a German film crew and smashed their windshield in with baseball bats.

The former chief technical officer of Epoch Times in 2006 was also a recipient of the kinetic approach: a group of men made their way into his home in Atlanta, tied him up, and beat him about the head with a gun handle. There is no direct evidence that the men were associated with the Chinese Communist Party, but Mr. Yuan believed it to be the case. Two of my file cabinets were pried open. Two of my laptop computers were taken away, but the more expensive items, such as cameras, were not.

More subtle forms of influence are almost ubiquitous. Eutelsat, a French satellite company, was one of the more disturbing examples of undue influence, Cook said at an Oct. 22 National Endowment for Democracy forum in Washington, D.C.

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Chinese Censorship Under the Microscope

At its Ideas Summit in New York, Google has announced that it is working on developing a browser extension that will act as an easy-to-use way to bypass country-specific Internet censorship and make connections safer and more private.

The tool, which was developed by the University of Washington and seeded by Google, is at its core a peer-to-peer personalized virtual private network (VPN) that redirects Internet traffic coming from an initial, less secure connection through a second, trusted connection, and then encrypts the pathway between the two terminals.

Whenever you access the Internet, the connection is routed through a number of terminals. At each step of the way the connection may be blocked, surveilled, or even tampered with (especially if the data is not encrypted). On the whole, the safety and privacy of your data is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.

Google's solution with uProxy was to develop a tool that makes it much easier to make an unsafe connection more secure, with the help of a trusted friend.

The software, which will be available as a Chrome and Firefox extension to begin with, can use existing social networks like Facebook or Google Hangouts to help find users who already have uProxy installed on their system. If two users agree to use the service in tandem, the software can begin to make data connections safer.

Let's assume that Alice, who lives in a country with an Internet censorship problem such as China or Iran, contacts Bob, who has much safer, or uncensored, or unmonitored access to the Internet.

Bob agrees to act as a proxy for Alice, and as long as his browser is open, Alice's outgoing web traffic will now be routed through Bob's connection, and so she'll now be able to access websites that she wouldn't otherwise be able to reach on her own. The connection between Alice and Bob is also encrypted.

To an external observer looking at Bob's connection, it would appear that he is simply surfing the net, while it is really Alice who's doing the browsing. Likewise, an observer looking at Alice's connection would only see a stream of encrypted data being sent from and to Bob, but would not be able to understand it, or determine whether it's "allowed" web traffic or not.

One more possible use for the software could be to proxy your own web traffic whenever you are traveling and worried about the safety of your connection (when you're connecting to an open Wi-Fi hotspot or public network, for example). In cases like these, you can use uProxy to route your web traffic back to your home computer and access the Web as if you were in your own home.

Internet proxies already provide a similar service, but the advantage with uProxy is that it's a true P2P service, so there is no centralized server that governments can block. The data packets in the encrypted connection between Alice and Bob aren't marked in any way, and so they can't be easily flagged by a malicious user (or government).

Continued here:
Google's uProxy could help fight Internet censorship

Google Inc. (GOOG), which has been the victim of censorship and cyber attacks in China, has decided to help smaller organizations to exist without similar attacks -- at least to the extent to which it is able. It announced a new program to shield several categories of Internet sites.

The search company has to be praised for the initiative, which is one of very few actually and practically aimed at solving the cyber-attack problem.

Its announcement tells the story:

As long as people have expressed ideas, others have tried to silence them. Today one out of every three people lives in a society that is severely censored. Online barriers can include everything from filters that block content to targeted attacks designed to take down websites. For many people, these obstacles are more than an inconvenience -- they represent full-scale repression.

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This week, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Gen Next Foundation, Google Ideas -- our think/do tank -- is hosting a summit in New York entitled Conflict in a Connected World.

The summit brings together hacktivists, security experts, entrepreneurs, dissidents and others to explore the changing nature of conflict and how online tools and can both harm and protect. Were also assessing what might be done to better protect people confronting online censorship. With our partners, we will launch several new products and initiatives designed to help:

Project Shield is an initiative that enables people to use Googles technology to better protect websites that might otherwise have been taken offline by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Were currently inviting webmasters serving independent news, human rights, and elections-related content to apply to join our next round of trusted testers.

The Digital Attack Map is a live data visualization, built through a collaboration between Arbor Networks and Google Ideas, that maps DDoS attacks designed to take down websites -- and their content -- around the globe. This tool shows real-time anonymous traffic data related to these attacks on free speech, and also lets people explore historic trends and see related news reports of outages happening on a given day.

uProxy is a new browser extension under development that lets friends provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web, helping protect an Internet connection from filtering, surveillance or misdirection. The University of Washington and Brave New Software developed the tool, which was seeded by Google Ideas. To learn more about the challenges uProxy aims to address, watch our video.

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Google to Keep the Internet Free from Censorship

Terminal Censorship in OS X

By: Andrey Keske

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Terminal Censorship in OS X - Video

" #39;Braking News #39;: Censorship, Media and Ukraine" Roundtable: Reporting on Ukraine
Roundtable: Reporting on Ukraine Participants: Brian Bonner (Kyiv Post); Myroslava Gongadze (Voice of America); Olena Tregub (Global Education Leadership); A...

By: columbiauniversity

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"'Braking News': Censorship, Media and Ukraine" Roundtable: Reporting on Ukraine - Video

10/18/13: Video from 10/18/13: Censorship from the hateful YouTube
October 18, 2013 YouTube and the rest of the conglomerate ridicule me all the time. If YouTube is sure that nobody takes me seriously, and that nobody could ...

By: journalfrombadalternateuniverse

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10/18/13: Video from 10/18/13: Censorship from the hateful YouTube - Video