Vancouver Sun Article on "The Not So Free Internet."

Peter Wilson of the Vancouver Sun put together a lengthy feature article on the ways in which freedom of information exchange is being undermined on the Internet. I provided some background info and input.

The not-so-free Internet: From Chinese filtering to police access in Canada, governments are trying to regulate the Internet. But technology has a habit of bypassing everything regulators can throw at it.

Peter Wilson
Vancouver Sun
22 September 2005

Vancouver Sun
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Copyright © 2005 Vancouver Sun

“The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”
— John Gillmore, co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, circa 1992.

When Canadian Internet law expert Michael Geist tried to download his e-mail in a Beijing hotel room recently he ran into what he thought was nothing more than a technical hiccup.

“I’d be downloading and all of a sudden it would be cut off,” said Geist. “And at first I thought it was a coincidence and the network had a glitch.”

Continue reading

Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents

Reporters Without Borders has just released their very useful Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.

 The Citizen Lab contributed two chapters, one a  general guide to the Civiblog, and a second chapter by Director of Technical Research Nart Villeneuve on Technical Ways to Get Around Censorship.  Congratulations
Julien Pain and all of the people at RSF for what promises to be a timely and very useful contribution.

GulfNews.com Report on ONI

There is a story in GulfNews about the ONI’s country report on Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates. Thanks to Neil Hrab for forwarding and pointing that out.

I must say, though, that we certainly do not “praise” the UAE, that’s
for sure. I don’t know where the guy got that from. All we said is that
there is only slight blocking of political material (including by the
way, the entire .il domain, which is all of Israel). That’s pretty bad
as far as I’m concerned. I’m certainly not going to praise a regime
that does that, let alone uses Smartfilter to censor.

Makes you wonder what type of editorial controls go into stories like that in UAE, eh?

BBC, BBC5, and BBC Persian Interview

Among all of the press coverage of our recent Iran report, I thought I’d post this one from BBCPersian, which has an interview with me translated into Farsi. You can listen to the realaudio package here.
As an addendum, here is a nice BBC story by Clark Boyd, with a great interview with Nart Villeneuve, Director of Technical Research at the Citizen Lab. Additionally, I recently did an interview with the BBC5 program Up All Night. Here is a locally archived MP3 file for downloading and listening.

Iranian Internet Censorship Report ONI

We at the ONI have just released our report on Internet Filtering in Iran (in PDF format). Although it was known before, our report confirms the use of the US commercial filtering product, Smartfilter. Our report allso reveals patterns of Internet content targeted for filtering, including opposition websites, some lesbian and gay sites, and a lot of blogs, especially those written in the Farsi language. Stay tuned for the fallout….