Internet users in Tunisia were able to access the social networking Web site facebook today after it was blocked by the country's ISPs last month without giving any reason. Interestingly, the President of Tunisia Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali himself ordered the unblocking of the site, according to the Tunisia newspaper Alchourouk (Arabic) and the Tunisian news site Le Temps (French).
The two sources said the president ordered the unblocking of the site as soon as he became aware that it was blocked, but the sources did not give any reason as to why the site was originally blocked or why the unblocking now.
Several news portals and blogs picked up the story and reported different reasons as to why the unblocking. For example, Al-Arab Online said that, "Experts deem that the initiative of President Ben Ali mirrors the development of the internet usage in Tunisia."
A Tunisian blogger noticed (Arabic) that the unblocking coincides with the country's preparation to receive the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later this week.
Another blogger asked (French) if youtube and dailymotion will be released next.
This is probably the first time a site is reportedly unblocked by a presidential order in the Middle East and North Africa. But most importantly, the reports of the presidential intervention to give instructions to allow access to facebook imply admission of state filtering by a country that conceals its Internet blocking with an error message instead of an explicit blockpage!
Turkey has a contentious relationship with popular video-sharing site YouTube. Blocked for the first time in early 2007, YouTube was intermittently available for most of 2007, only to be banned again in January of 2008.
Each time, the block has been in response to political videos. In the case of the most recent block, the videos were said to have insulted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey; insulting Ataturk is a crime, as is "insulting Turkishness" under the controversial Article 301 of Turkey's penal code.
Turkey is not the only country to block YouTube. According to Rob Faris, Research Director of ONI, the site has been blocked in various countries over the past two years, including Armenia, Brazil, Burma, China, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. In the cases of several of the aforementioned countries, the site was inaccessible for only a short time; in others, it remains so.
So while there's nothing unique about a government blocking YouTube, the case of Turkey is different for two reasons: The first is that the government was explicit with users as to why the site was blocked; according to The New Anatolian, visitors to the site are greeted with a message in Turkish and English which reads: "Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/55 of T.R. Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace." In most other countries, the censorship is more surreptitious, with the government giving little explanation as to the reasons for the block.
What is most unique about this case, however, is what has unfolded over the past month. On August 18, Deborah Ann Dilley of Global Voices Online reported that Turkish bloggers have been protesting the blocks by self-censoring their own sites. According to Dilley, bloggers put up a message reading "Bu siteye eri?im kendi karar?yla engellenmi?tir," which translates roughly into “This site is blocked by [the author's] own choice”. TechCrunch picked up the story, drawing global attention to the protest.
While bloggers were uncertain that the protest would have any effect on the YouTube ban, it was widely reported on Tuesday that the site had been unblocked in Turkey. Turkey's Telecommunications Press Center stated that "Because the content which caused YouTube to be blocked by Ankara's 11th High Criminal Court without any justification was taken off from YouTube, the court decided to permit access to the Web site. YouTube is now online."
As bloggers undoubtedly prepared to rejoice, however, the Telecommunications Press Center rescinded their announcement, stating on their web site that "Several media organs reported that YouTube was accessible from Turkey. These news stories are incorrect and serve to confuse the public. The YouTube Web site was blocked by a court decision and the ban can only be rescinded by another court decision."
Fréderike Geerdink, a Dutch journalist based in Turkey, expressed disappointment in her blog, remarking "Now I see that newspapers have been copying each other’s news without calling anybody in Turkey to just ask if they could access the site again. They would have said: No, youtube is still off-line. And then today’s press anouncement would not have been necessary either: it was officially stated that youtube was still banned."
And yet, news reports reporting YouTube to be unbanned keep coming in; ONI will continue reporting on this story as we learn more about it.
On July 14, the International Herald Tribune reported that an Italian judge had ordered all ISPs in that country to filter access to The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites.
The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (also known as "torrents"), small files that contain machine-readable information necessary to download data files from other users.
This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has experienced legal troubles. In 2006, Swedish police conducted a raid against The Pirate Bay's servers. Earlier this year, a court in Denmark ordered Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay. And just this month, the International Olympic Committee asked the Swedish government for cooperation in preventing Pirate Bay users from sharing video clips of the Olympics. In response, The Pirate Bay renamed their BitTorrent tracker The Beijing Bay.
This time, Italy's attempt to block access to The Pirate Bay stemmed from an investigation into copyright violation by an anti-piracy group in Milan and was backed by Italian record labels. The action was quickly criticized in the Italian blogosphere, leading to increased traffic to the site.
In fact, traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay actually increased five percent during the first week of the block, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. Sunde also reported that he would be implementing a complex system that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia="the bay"). However, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak he was implementing "a really annoying system for them to filter" that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia is Italian for "the bay"). He also encouraged users to use OpenDNS to circumvent ISP blocks.
As the debate about copyright infringement and online file sharing rages on around the world, it is interesting to note that P2P file sharing as a practice continues to increase, with some sources claiming that file sharing actually boosts music sales.
And as for the future of The Pirate Bay in Italy? The company filed a lawsuit against the decree [it] used to force Italian ISPs to block the site. A decision is expected within a few weeks.
The independent website Malaysiakini.com, reportedly the country’s most popular alternative news source, has announced that the political website Malaysia Today has been blocked by order of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). On its home page, Malaysia Today claims it is being blocked by TMNet, the country's largest ISP.
Malaysia Today's founder, Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK), was charged with sedition in May 2008 and is scheduled for trial in October 2008. He had published an article on April 25 linking Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak to the October 2006 murder of a Mongolian translator. Lawyer Muhammad Shafee lodged a complaint against RPK on criminal defamation and sedition charges for claiming that Shafee was complicit in a conspiracy to fabricate sodomy charges against opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. On August 13, Kamarudin was ordered by the High Court to reveal his sources for three online articles concerning Shafee, reveal the identities of visitors who left comments and messages on Malaysia Today, and remove the articles and all comments from the site.
The targeting of Kamarudin is part of a more concerted effort to dampen the influence of independent news sites and blogs, which have been credited with providing opposition parties with a platform to mobilize around the March 2008 general elections. In March, the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition had its worst showing ever and five bloggers were elected to seats for opposition parties (including Jeff Ooi, who has himself been sued for defamation). Following the election, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said that the BN’s "biggest mistake" in the elections was in believing the "cyberwar” was unimportant.
Global Voices Advocacy reports that a mounting crackdown on Malaysian bloggers can be expected in the wake of the August 26 by-election, in which Anwar Ibrahim won a seat in Parliament and paving the way for his effort to topple the BN coalition by mid-September. Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak was reportedly one of the senior government officials who, in a meeting last week, decided to counteract criticism against them by taking bloggers to court for defamation and sedition.
Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices posted an excellent review of recently blocked blogs, social networking Web sites (including facebook), and video sharing sites. The post also presents users' reaction to online censorship and the anti-censorship campaigns organized by different groups. In addition, the post discusses how censorship in Tunisia is more than just technical filtering and how the climate of fear and arrests of journalists and online writers are part of the government's censorship strategy. Finally, Sami discusses two interesting issues: hacking of opposition Web sites and blogs and why some people believe that the government is behind the hacking, and reports that emails of some Tunisian NGOs and human rights activists are having trouble reading their emails.
The Sydney Morning Herald is among the first to report that Apple's iTunes store is blocked in some parts of China. Although Apple's China website is accessible, an attempt to access the iTunes store from an Internet connection in Beijing resulted in a reset (see screenshot).
The source of controversy is an album released on August 5 called Songs for Tibet, produced by The Art of Peace Foundation. The SMH cites a brief report from China Radio International, stating that the album advocated Tibetan independence. This stirred up "strong indignation among Chinese netizens" on online forums, who are denouncing Apple, boycott all of its products, and 'ban' the singers and producers of the album. An initial search on a number of Chinese-language forums did not yield any results relating to the iTunes controversy.
The organization's website is accessible in China, and while it is "dedicated to achieving the Dalai Lama’s vision of creating peace within our selves and in the world," it does not appear to openly support Tibetan independence. The album's webpage (also accessible in China) purports to "support peace initiatives and Tibetan cultural preservation projects important to the Dalai Lama." The Dalai Lama does not officially endorse independence for Tibet.
The Washington Post points out that “in an age of cellphone cameras and YouTube,” Chinese police have exercised restraint in using physical force to stop foreign protesters. So far, foreign-led protests have even achieved a fair measure of media coverage, though some question the effectiveness of these tactics and the organizations whose websites remain blocked in China (including Reporters Without Borders and Students for a Free Tibet).
For Chinese citizens there will likely be no YouTube moment. The foreigners that unleashed surprise protests at media-saturated zones, such as Tiananmen Square and the Olympic green, have been fed KFC and deported. Chinese citizens seeking to abide by the government’s self-initiated requirements for lawful demonstrations have found that this process exists only as a trap to identify themselves to authorities.
According to Human Rights Watch, applications to protest in the designated zones (four parks around Beijing) are subject to police approval. Many activists under surveillance don’t even get to the steps of the police station and are prevented from traveling to Beijing. The experience of Nicholas Kristof notwithstanding, at other times foreign journalists who accompany Chinese applicants in order to provide some form of protection have not been allowed to film or interview inside the station. In contrast, police do not stop filming video or snapping photos of applicants. The ones who are taken away, frequently by local government officials who forcibly escort them back to their hometowns, can manage only a few phone calls, if that, to notify others that they are in trouble. In this context, it is somewhat remarkable that 77 applications have been completed at all.
Apparently, this double standard resulting in a surveillance trap is merely China’s own way of exercising democracy. The Associated Press quotes BOCOG official Wang Wei:
"Many problems have not been solved, not even by the United Nations, and some want them to be solved during the Olympic Games, putting pressure on the International Olympic Committee and the Beijing Olympic Committee," Wang said.
"This is not realistic," he added. "We think that you do not really understand China's reality. China has its own version and way of exercising our democracy."
For all the plainclothes policemen in these protest-free parks, the 300,000 security cameras and tens of thousands of microphones in GPS-rigged taxis, blogger Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth suggests Beijing residents may reasonably be less concerned about their city’s upgraded surveillance apparatus. He argues that if police “spend all their time watching surveillance tapes, they won't have time to arrest protests, troublemakers, counter-revolutionaries and ‘splittists.’”
At least some surveillance measures seem temporary. Taxi drivers have reportedly been enrolled to report customers who request to be taken to the protest zones. According to The Australian, drivers “routinely inform the authorities about the number of such passengers, their description including dress, their nationality, the exact location where they left the taxi, and any interesting conversations that might have been overheard.”
ONI compared data from the Olympics Main Press Center (MPC) to that from other locations in Beijing, compiling a snapshot of Internet filtering in China leading up to week 1 of the Olympics.
Journalists’ access is home access
For each test at the MPC, ONI tested at other locations in Beijing with broadband Internet access provided by China Netcom. The filtering was nearly identical between the MPC and home access in Beijing, indicating that the incrementally increased openness achieved by reminding China of its Olympic promises benefit all Beijingers. Tests across China suggest that the same sites have been made accessible elsewhere, with the exception of http://usolympictibetinfo.blogspot.com
and the Tibetan and Uyghur language news sites of Radio Free Asia.
As noted in a previous blog post, any increased access to long-filtered content can be recognized as a promising development. However, foreign-hosted Chinese-language news sites have been the main beneficiaries of China’s Olympic guarantees, while the majority of advocacy sites and politically ‘sensitive’ organizations remain blocked. This filtering sweeps across a broad swath of issues, from the Dui Hua Foundation to the Three Gorges Probe, as well as nearly all Tibetan advocacy organizations. For example, while Chinese Wikipedia is accessible, the filtered status of Boxun.com, a dissident news website that Chinese government officials reportedly look to as a source of internal news, remains unchanged. Furthermore, the accessibility of any website does not guarantee that content on that site will be available, as China’s practice of filtering keywords through a tcp reset appears as robust as ever. In just one of many examples, a video of a protest led by a founder of Students for a Free Tibet near Tiananmen Square triggered a tcp reset.
The following sites were blocked at the Main Press Center as of July 25:
IP blocking
Uyghur rights
http://www.uyghuramerican.org/
Tibet-related content
http://tibetanyouthuk.blogspot.com/
http://tibetonline.tv/
http://woeser.middle-way.net/
http://www.actfortibet.org/
http://www.radiotibettoronto.com/
http://www.savetibet.org/
http://www.rsf.org/
http://www.studentsforafreetibet.org/
http://www.tcv.org.in/
http://www.thetibetconnection.org/
http://www.thetibetmuseum.org/
http://www.tibetanjournalists.org/
http://www.tibetanyouthcongress.org/
http://www.tibetbroadcast.com/
http://www.tibetsites.com/
http://www.tibhomes.org/
http://www.worldtibetday.org/
http://www.xizang-zhiye.org/
http://www.vot.org/
Watchdogs and advocacy organizations
http://crd-net.org/
http://www.boycottmadeinchina.org/
http://www.civilhrfront.org/
http://www.cpj.org/
http://www.duihua.org/
Http://www.hrichina.org/
http://www.hrw.org/chinese/
http://www.ned.org/
http://www.olympicwatch.org/
http://www.smhric.org/
http://www.threegorgesprobe.org/
Independent media and blogs
http://1bao.org/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/
http://memedia.cn
http://rconversation.blogs.com/
http://www.atnext.com/
http://www.boxun.com/
http://www.cchere.net
http://www.inmediahk.net/
http://www.newtaiwan.com.tw/
http://www.ntdtv.com/
http://www.orientaldaily.com.my
http://www.rfa.org/
http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/
http://www.rfa.org/tibetan/
http://www.rfa.org/uyghur/
http://www.rfanews.org/
http://www.wenxuecity.com/
http://www.youmaker.com
http://www.zengjinyan.org/
http://www5.chinesenewsnet.com/
DNS tampering only:
http://www.rsf-chinese.org/
Blocked by IP address and DNS tampering:
http://www.freetibet.org/
http://english.ntdtv.com/
http://www.secretchina.com
http://web.amnesty.org/
http://www.dajiyuan.com/
The website for the New Tang Dynasty television station (http://www.ntdtv.com/), which is affiliated with the Falungong, was blocked by IP address at the MPC and by both DNS tampering and IP blocking at a Beijing residential connection.
Blocked using a tcp reset:
http://www.mitbbs.com
http://guoweidong.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvF822Oh75c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BukWSNBBKdM
http://zengjinyan.spaces.live.com/
http://usolympictibetinfo.blogspot.com/
http://www.fillthesquare.org/
http://farm1.static.flickr.com
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/
http://www.tibet.ca/
http://www.libertytimes.com.tw
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tibet/
http://zh.wikipedia.org/
http://www.voanews.com/chinese/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/default.stm
As of August 1, the status of most of the above websites was unchanged, while a handful of others had been unblocked:
RFA and its sister non-English language websites
Apple Daily (http://www.atnext.com/)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/default.stm
http://usolympictibetinfo.blogspot.com/
http://www.libertytimes.com.tw
http://zh.wikipedia.org/
http://web.amnesty.org/
The press conference held shortly after injured Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang dropped out of the Olympics on August 18 was broadcast on all 5 CCTV channels dedicated to Games-related coverage. Since his surprise win in the 110-meter hurdles at the 2004 Athens Olympics, Liu has been a superstar in China. An atmosphere of bereavement permeated the aftermath, and at the press conference his obviously distraught trainer Sun Haiping couldn’t stop himself from sobbing.
Interestingly, some of the parlay between reporters and Feng Shuyong, head coach of the Chinese athletic team, involved the Internet as purveyor of the “Chinese street.” Although stressing that the severity of Liu's injury made it impossible for him to compete, Feng acknowledged that Liu was under a great deal of pressure, one contributing factor being that any time he went online he would see the frenzy being stirred over him. Another foreign journalist asked how the Chinese people are going to take the loss of the 'poster boy' for their Olympic hopes; in response Feng cited how many friends on the Internet were expressing understanding for Liu (this being mere hours after Liu limped off the field). Chinese netizens as stand-ins for the court of public opinion were cited once more, as Feng justified this blow to the Chinese Olympic team by citing an Internet 'investigation' finding that 60 percent, or more than half, of people surveyed would understand if Liu didn’t win gold.
Meanwhile, an attempt to access this article about the press conference from the Beijing International Media Center (the main press venue for non-IOC accredited journalists) resulted in a reset connection.
Inaccurate and inflammatory reports by Russian media sites are likely behind the decision by major Georgian ISPs to implement limited Internet filtering. The limited filtering of Russian media sites appears to be part of the governments declared state of emergency. At least two Georgian ISPs have implemented limited filtering this week as a "defensive measure" aimed at protecting the population and reducing the potential for panic during a time of national crisis. One of the two ISPs, the Georgian Research and Academic Network (GRENA), connects many of the country's schools. In recent days the scope of pro-Russian information attacks widened as sites like stopgeorgia.ru provide anyone connected to the internet with the opportunity to launch denial of service attacks against Georgian websites. Georgian government websites remain under attack. The website of the President of Georgia remains under heavy denial of service despite being moved to a service provider in the United States. Global Voices reports that Information attacks have spread to Web 2.0 with ICQ and social network sites targeted with pro-russian messages. The ONI's sister project, the Information Warfare Monitor continues to monitor the situation. The latest reports are posted to www.infowar-monitor.net.