Category Archives: Censorship

Ban makes it harder to use Facebook, Skype

While most industrialized nations today exercise a degree of online censorship, Iran has often been billedas among the worst. Much like China, Iran both blocksmaterial questioning the ruling party, and material it finds morally questionable (such as pornography).

I. Iran Bans Uncensored VPNs

In regimes like Iran, one common way to get around filters is to use an encrypted virtual proxy network (VPN), which funnels requests for forbidden content, encrypted, to servers outside of Iran, and then replies, encrypted, to the customer. But Iranian internet censorship ratcheted up this week as state authorities began blocking traffic from encrypted VPNs.

Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, a Parliamentarian from Iran's ruling ABII party and the head of parliament's information and communications technology committee, calls VPN use"illegal" for most citizens. In comments to state news agency Mehr, he remarks, "Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked. Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used."

The blockade inadvertently cut off access to Google Inc. (GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) search portals, which aretypically allowed in censored form. Mr.Sobhani-Fard said the government was looking into that unpleasant side effect of the new censorship rollout.

Reutersreports that an internet user inIsfahan, Iran's second largest city, confirms that VPNs are no longer working. The man, who went by "Mohamad", comments, "VPNs are cut off. They've shut all the ports."

The blockade bans popular internet telephony services such as Skype and Viber. It also blocks access to the world's most popular social network -- Facebook. Iran views Facebook, Inc.'s (FB) network as a portal to dissent and has banned it; yet despite that the network has been popular in Iran thanks to the use of VPNs.

II. Political Unrest is Boiling in Islamist Republic

The crackdown on VPNs coincides with a dangerous time for Iran's ruling regime.

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Iran Beefs up Internet Censorship With Proxy Crackdown

World Day Against Cyber Censorship today

World Day Against Cyber Censorship is being observed around the globe on Tuesday calling on activists, movements and organisations to remind their constituents of the importance of protecting free expression online.

The aim of the day is to defend human rights online, promote Internet accessibility for all, and expose enemies of Internet openness along with governments that are gradually becoming more controlling over how their citizens use the Internet , said Reporters Without Borders.

The rights group has named Bahrain, China, Iran, Syria and Vietnam "State Enemies of the Internet." Similarly it has categories countries such as Australia, Egypt, France, India, Malaysia Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates as countries under surveillance.

RSF said the five countries governments "are involved in active, intrusive surveillance of news providers, resulting in grave violations of freedom of information and human rights."

"Increasingly widespread cyber-censorship and cyber-surveillance are endangering the Internet model that the Nets founders envisaged: the Internet as place of freedom, a place for exchanging information, content and opinions, a place that transcended frontiers," the Paris-based NGO said in a statement. Nepalnews.com

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World Day Against Cyber Censorship today

Iranians face a decent amount of governmental censorship when they attempt to log into the Internet from their country. However, for even the most not-so-savvy of tech folk, receiving unfettered access to the Web at large is as easy as firing up a VPN application and tunneling your way past governmental blocks.

Or, at least, it was.

"Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked," said Iranian official Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard in an interview with Reuters. "Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used."

So, those looking to tap into Facebook, YouTube, various news sites and, yes, even Google's search engine itself (among other banned websites) will have to find different methods for doing so which do exist, according to an Iranian interviewed by Reuters who said he was using an unnamed software tool to bypass Iran's blocks.

Of course, it would be incorrect to say that Iran's banning VPNs in general. In actuality, the government is already supplying access to "official" and "legal" VPN services that Iranian businesses can tap into.

"We have started distributing official VPN services for Iranian users. Those need this service to open safe connections can apply in the program and we will review their cases one by one. If their request was approved, then we will introduce legal providers and licensed clients can buy their needed services," said Iran's Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi in February interview with the Tehran Chronicle.

Of course, such a move also allows government officials to more directly monitor that which users are attempting to access via said government-sanctioned VPNs.

"By launching this program, Iranian government can prosecute users who are violating state laws and Internet Filtering Committee will be able to take offenders to national courts under supervision of judiciary service," Behabadi said.

It remains to be seen just how Iran's latest crackdown on Internet access or in this case, the means by which the country's industrious citizens bypass Iran's filters for the Web will play a role in the country's upcoming presidential election in June. Protesters during the 2009 Iranian elections made good use of social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to receive news, organize, and post up-to-the-minute information about that was happening during their various demonstrations.

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Iran Blocks VPNs to Prevent Circumventing Web Censorship

If you wanted to learn more about Sina Weibo's censorship patterns, today is your lucky day. A group of computer scientists from Bowdoin College, Rice College, and the University of New Mexico have, along with an independent researcher, released the results of an academic study of Sina Weibo's censorship practices. The study, which we came across via MIT Technology Review, used "architecture [that could] detect post deletions within one minute of the deletion event," giving the researchers perhaps the most precise look yet into how quickly Sina's content team takes down sensitive Weibo posts. The results? Sina is pretty darn fast:

So Sina's censors are pretty fast. But what, exactly, are they deleting? Researchers used a variety of analytical tools to look at what content was most quickly deleted, and found that:

Researchers also found that, unsurprisingly, users with more total deleted posts tended to get their posts deleted more quickly than other users, suggesting that Sina's content team was watching their accounts more carefully. The following chart from the study shows the downward trend in post lifetime as a user's number of total deleted posts increases:

Of course, it's not all humans doing the deleting. In fact, by the study's estimations, for an all-human team to censor Weibo, 4,200 team members would be required, assuming each team member could read at the blazing rate of 50 posts per minute. The study points out that as a result of that, weibo's censorship system has become an incredibly complex system, employing both human and software censors, employing multiple blocked keyword lists that trigger different censorship responses, search filtration systems, and more. (Of course, none of that should come as much of a surprise to longtime weibo users, who have likely experienced many of the different types of censorship on Sina Weibo firsthand).

If you're really interested in Weibo censorship, the full paper is worth a read, and although it's a bit dry and quite technical in places, the good news is that it's only ten pages long.

(via MIT Technology Review)

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Censorship Alert! Academic Study Shows Sina Weibo's Human Censors Are Pretty Darn Fast

Censorship on Weibo, Chinas version of Twitter, is near real-time and relies on a workforce of over 4,000 censors who stop work during the evening news, according the first detailed analysis of censorship patterns.

The Chinese version of Twitter is a microblogging service called Weibo which launched in 2010. This allows users to post 140 character messages with @usernames and #hashtags, just like Twitter although 140 characters in Chinese contain significantly more information content than in English.

In just three years, Weibo has picked up some 300 million users who between them send 100 million messages each day at the rate of 70,000 per minute. That makes the inevitable process of censorship a tricky task for the Chinese authorities. So an interesting question is how they do it.

Today,Dan Wallach at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a few pals reveal the results of a detailed study of censorship on Weibo. Their method has allowed them to reconstruct the censorship techniques used by the government, to calculate the number of workers who must be involved and even to discover their daily work schedules.

The work is possible because at least some of the content on Weibo is not censored prior to publication, only afterwards. Their approach was to collect posts from a set of users once every minute. They then tracked these posts to see which ones later became unavailable.

Of course, its not feasible to track everyone on Weibo so Wallach and co spent some time looking for users who seemed to have posts deleted more often than others, assuming that these users would be more likely to be censored in the future. Using this manual technique, they ended up observing some 3500 users over a period of 15 days last year who between them experienced around 4500 deletions per day, or about 12 per cent of the total.

Not all deletions are the result of censorship, however, since a user can delete his or her own posts. Wallach and co say that through their own trial and error they observed two types of deletion which return different messages. When users delete their own messages, a query for the post returns a post does not exist error message.

However, when a post is deleted by the censors, Weibo returns a different message saying: permission denied. It is these second type of deletions that Wallach and co concentrated on.

The results of their study are fascinating. They say that in their data set about 5 per cent of the deletions occur within 8 minutes of posting and around 30 per cent within 0 minutes. In total, 90 per cent of deletions occur within a day, although at times deletions can occur several days later.

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Computer Scientists Measure the Speed of Censorship On China's Twitter

25 - Free Energy, 9/11 and Weather Control - Ongoing Cover Up, Muddle Up and Censorship of Evidence
9/11 Finding The Truth by Andrew Johnson playlist - http://www.youtube.com Andrew Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.com Individual audio files of the articles in Andrew Johnson #39;s book 9 Finding The Truth can be downloaded from Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.com There are also many more related audios in the 9/11 archive on Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.com Individual articles from 9/11 Finding The Truth can also be read on Johnson #39;s website - http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk There #39;s also a zip file for the entire book: Audio Book - 9-11 Finding the Truth.zip (296.4 MB) (Modified: Jan 20 2013 11:22:27 AM) Link to zip file - http://www.checktheevidence.com 9/11 Finding The Truth is also available in other formats for free from here - tinyurl.com --- This video is made from the audio entitled 25 - Free Energy, 9-11 and Weather Control - Ongoing Cover Up, Muddle Up and Censorship of Evidence.mp3 (3.6 MB) (Modified: Sep 13 2012 07:26:49 PM) mp3 - http://www.checktheevidence.com Link to original article (April 18, 2009) - http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk --- What really happened on 9/11? What can the evidence tell us? Who is covering up the evidence, and why are they covering it up? This book attempts to give some answers to these questions and has been written by someone who has become deeply involved in research into what happened on 9/11. A study of the available evidence will challenge you and much of what you assumed to be true. "Now we are discovering that there is a highly ...

By: matrixcutter

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25 - Free Energy, 9/11 and Weather Control - Ongoing Cover Up, Muddle Up and Censorship of Evidence - Video

Political Correctness is Censorship

By: W1NGXER0

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Political Correctness is Censorship - Video

Breaking Through Chinese State Censorship - Changchun Signal Interruption Remembered
Something unexpected happened in China #39;s Changchun city today mdash;on March 5th mdash;back in 2002. For forty minutes, the local state-run television #39;s programming was interrupted by this. The documentary, False Fire, disproved the self-immolation incident that was staged on Tiananmen Square a year earlier. Chinese state-run media claimed five Falun Gong practitioners had set themselves on fire. They broadcast the propaganda every evening to incite public hatred against the spiritual practice. It helped justify the Chinese Communist Party #39;s crackdown on the group since 1999. [Lan Lihua, Falun Gong Practitioner]: "I saw an article about a Falun Gong practitioner using television signal jamming technology to broadcast the persecution of Falun Gong to thousands of households. I thought this was a great way to get the message out." Like millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China, Lan Lihua was thinking of ways to break through the Chinese regime #39;s censorship. She connected two people she knew who would be able to take over the airwaves. After months of planning, on March 5th, Changchun residents watched on TV how Falun Gong was welcomed and practiced around the world. They saw how the Communist Party was lying to them. [Bill Xia, CEO, Dynamic Internet Technology]: "It represented Falun Gong practitioners #39; efforts to bring real information to the Chinese and for that particular event it was actually dramatic and had a big impact. In a few hours it reached millions of people" And that ...

By: NTDonChina

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Breaking Through Chinese State Censorship - Changchun Signal Interruption Remembered - Video

Tuesday, 05 March 2013 09:19

PARIS: Chinese filmmakers must fight censorship even if it means removing their name from their own work, one-time banned Chinese director Lou Ye told AFP ahead of this month's Asian Film Awards.

His crime thriller "Mystery" has been nominated in six categories at this year's awards.

Lou's film, his second since he was banned from filming in China for five years in 2006, tackles the subject of a new breed of wealthy and middle income men in post-socialist China for whom taking a mistress is the norm, in a practice that harks back to imperial China.

With nominations including best film, best director and best actress for Hao Lei's portrayal of a betrayed wife, "Mystery" begins with a violent death and tells the story of one man's double life.

"The film is about a very small group of people. It is about what happens between two women, the double life that this man leads, but through this I get to talk about things that happen in wider society," he said in Paris where the film was shown as part of a China programme at the city's Forum des Images in February.

"What is important to me is the way in which we see that all the protagonists are linked to the death of this young girl, the way that no-one can say this has nothing to do with me," he said.

According to Lou, having a mistress is now commonplace in China for anyone with sufficient means.

"Currently we see this way of life in particular among people who have money," he said adding that it was seen as a status symbol for men while a woman acting in the same way would be stigmatised.

The film is his second since the end of the ban imposed after he took his love story "Summer Palace", set around the taboo subject of the 1989 pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests, to Cannes without official approval.

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Keep up censorship fight, urges acclaimed Chinese filmmaker

BEIRUT: You have the right not to remain silent, says MARCH, an NGO that is fighting media censorship and teaching young people how to use their right to freedom of expression as a basis for peaceful coexistence.

The problem is that people in Lebanon dont know their duties or rights as citizens, said Lea Baroudi, co-founder and general coordinator of MARCH. We realized that freedom of expression is the right which accompanies all civic rights, and decided to start with the basics.

Founded in 2011, MARCH aims to create an empowered civil society, the cornerstone of which is reconciliation of differences and fostering of respect between various groups, through freedom of expression.

Freedom of expression is the catalyst for tolerance, Baroudi added. We have to learn how to agree to disagree.

Hand in hand with the NGOs FREE initiative (Freedom and Right of Expression Events), which includes around-the-year workshops, conferences and distribution of newsletters tackling basic civil rights, is its fight against media censorship.

MARCH set up The Virtual Museum of Censorship (MOC), an interactive online database of censorship cases in Lebanon since the 1940s. The website provides information about the content, date and reason of censorship for material across different categories; press, books, theater, music and more.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle, says the MOC website, which offers individuals a platform to report cases of censorship to be added to the database of censored material.

The 2013 international Press Freedom Index proves the bleak reality of Lebanons censorship authorities. According to the index, published by Reporters Without Borders, Lebanon dropped eight places since last years report and now ranks at 101, below countries such as Guatemala, Mongolia and Kosovo.

General Security, the Information Ministry, the Interior Ministry all have a say in what gets published, Baroudi said. Then there are the unofficial authorities: religious entities, political parties and foreign embassies all can apply pressure.

Aiming to expand their network of volunteers and engaged citizens, MARCH is in the process of creating student clubs in universities such as the American University of Beirut, Lebanese American University, Saint Joseph University and Notre Dame University, among others.

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MARCH and bloggers fight censorship