All Content Related to Take-down

FCC Plans Filtering for 2155 MHz Spectrum

brendan — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:13:28 -0500

Facing heavy pressure from Congress, the FCC last week delayed its planned auction for the 2155-2188 MHz band of spectrum. Among the points of contention, the auction as it is currently designed would require that the winner filter pornography from the freely-available portions of its network. I've already blogged about whether such a requirement is legally possible. Here I'll briefly touch on whether such a requirement is technically feasible.

Were filtering requirement to remain in the auction rules, the easiest way for the spectrum winner to filter pornography would be through what is known as TCP/IP header filtering. In this method, the network operator's routers would block any traffic headed to specific IP addresses (e.g. those of porn sites). But there are three problems (pdf) with this sort of method. First, IP addresses often direct to more than one website or service (e.g. email). Therefore users would not be able to access some websites or services because they shared an IP address with a blocked site. Second, no network operator could track every pornographic site, and so the TCP/IP filter would almost certainly fail to capture a significant portion of online pornography. Finally, any filter that identifies sites by keywords would block some sites that were not pornographic in nature. Sites about sexually transmitted infections, safe-sex, or any number of other topics might be blocked that ought not to be.

Ultimately, filtering might not be necessary to protect children from pornography. Depending who wins the auction, consumers might have to pay as much as $150 for the hardware to get on the network, keeping access unaffordable for most children.

Studying Chinese blog censorship

rebecca mackinnon — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:22:35 -0500

On Thursday this past week, Beijing-based lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan won Deutsche Welle's annual prize for the Best Chinese Blog. Then on Friday he discovered that the parallel blog he keeps at Sohu.com had been taken down. Fortunately, being a famous blogger, he was able to call an editor at Sohu and get it restored, although the editor wouldn't explain what had happened. Ironically, Liu had just praised Sohu in an interview with the Wall Street Journal for being a more, er, considerate censor than the other blog-hosting platforms he uses:

In the past I sued Sohu for deleting my blog posts, but now I want to praise them. Sohu is the only BSP that posts notices on my blog saying, “this post has been hidden/removed for certain reasons . ” As a result, when web users visit my Sohu blog, they can know that a post has been hidden by Sohu. I think Sohu is brave to do this. I also run blogs on Sina, Ifeng, and others, but they simply delete blog posts without notifying my readers.

Last year I met Liu around the time he was trying to sue Sohu for deleting some of his blog posts. He argued that the censored posts, analyzing criminal court cases, did not contain material that violated Chinese law, and that Sohu was therefore violating his user agreement. The lawsuit didn't get very far. Liu told me at the time that he writes on a dozen or so different blog hosting services because they all seem to have different censorship criteria - so for Chinese bloggers maintaining multiple blogs is the best way to keep your writing alive on the web.

My conversation with Liu inspired a systematic study of how blog-hosting companies serving mainland China censor their users' content. All Chinese blog-hosting companies are required by government regulators to censor their users' content in order to keep their business licenses. But as Liu discovered, they all make different choices not only about how to implement censorship requirements, but also how to treat the users who get censored.

Most Chinese bloggers who want an audience inside mainland China use domestic Chinese blog-hosting services - only a very tiny minority use overseas services like Blogger or Wordpress.com because they tend to be blocked, and even fewer have the tech skills to do their own custom Wordpress installation on their own rented server space. The aim of my research was to look at the Chinese blog-hosting services (which includes foreign brands offering services inside China to the Chinese market) and establish how much variation there is in terms of what gets censored and how it gets censored. Since it's not in the interest of people who work at blog-hosting companies to tell the truth about these things in great detail to a foreign researcher, I decided that the best way to do this would be to post a range of content across a number of blog-hosting services and track who censored what and how. With the help of John Kennedy, Ben Cheng, and some student research assistants, my team posted more than 100 pieces of content - passages from news items, blogs, and chatrooms of varying political sensitivity - consistently across 15 different Chinese blog-hosting platforms. We found that censorship levels and methods vary tremendously from company to company. I have written about some of the interesting findings that came up as we went along here, here, and here.

If I publish a chart (see below) naming who censors more than whom, it is likely that those who censor less will get in trouble with the authorities. Therefore in the chart at right I have changed all the company names to letters. Of 108 pieces of content on a variety of public affairs and news-related subjects from a variety of sources (ranging from Xinhua to dissident websites), the most censor-happy company deleted over half, while the most laid-back company censored only one. (Note that I only posted one item about FLG and one about Tiananmen because most bloggers expect those to be censored - it's more interesting to see how censorship works on topics that Chinese bloggers interested in current events might write about.)

UPDATE: In reaction to numerous queries I'm willing to disclose the list of blog hosts tested, but I will not say here on a public blog which ones correspond to the letters on the chart. The blog hosts are, in alphabetical order: Baidu, Blogbus, BlogCN, iFeng, Mop, MSN Live, MySpace, Netease, QZone, Sina, Sohu, Tianya, Tom, Yahoo! China, YCool.

Below are updated slides from presentation I gave at a recent conference discussing the details of my research results. A number of the slides illustrate the ways in which blog hosts not only censor different amounts of content, but examples of different censorship practices, with wide variation not only from service to service, but also depending on the nature of the content.

Censorship by Chinese Blog-hosting Companies

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: blogs chineseinternetresearch)

Originally posted at Rebecca MacKinnon's blog.

German Wikipedia Shut Down After Legal Action by Member of Parliament

daniel oppermann — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:03:47 -0500

Within a few days German member of parliament Lutz Heilmann (The Left – Die Linke) became famous in a way he probably had not expected. On Thursday, November 13, he successfully closed down www.wikipedia.de, the website of Wikipedia Germany which forwards inquiries directly to the German-written pages of Wikipedia, hosted on a server in the USA. On the 15th and 16th anyone trying to access Wikipedia via this website just saw a white screen containing a text informing about Heilmann's legal action and the restraining order he used against Wikipedia Germany. Nevertheless, using search machines or de.wikipedia.org still offered users access to the American server.

Heilmann's motivation to go against Wikipedia was based on some problems he had concerning the content of his Wikipedia page. According to him it contained wrong information about himself which he considered as being against his personal honour and hurting his personal rights. Although he did not offer closer information about this passages two days later the whole country was able to read about them. Apart from some facts about his personal life one could find out about an alleged threat he recently articulated against a second person (which Heilmann contested in a counterstatement). Furthermore the public got aware (once more) about his past life working for the Ministry of State Security (MfS) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1985 to 1990. While working for the MfS is already seen as a highly critical aspect in a person's life and career in Germany, Heilmann represents a special case, as he was the the first former member of the MfS who became a member of parliament (Bundestag). And at that point he still maintained silence about this part of his life when he was working as a personal body guard for the MfS, until the German magazine Der Spiegel found out about it in October 1995. Since his party The Left is considered to be the follow-up of the SED (ruling party of the GDR) they have quite a high number of former functionaries of the GDR which from time to time puts a dark light on their reputation. For this reason not only the public but also his own party criticized his legal action against Wikipedia which by at least a part of the popoulation was seen as an act of (attempted) censorship. On Sunday the 16th Heilmann withdrew his legal measures and on Monday www.wikipedia.de was back online.

The result of this wiki-weekend is quite a high temporary increase of donations for Wikipedia in Germany. Also, a member of parliament who has once again made bad PR for himself and his party and furthermore finds all the unwanted information about him in mostly all relevant newspapers in the country.
Daniel Oppermann

Adiós Diego: Argentine judges cleanse the Internet

chris — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:46:58 -0500

By: Firuzeh Shokooh Valle and Christopher Soghoian

Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of country's most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona.

Both Yahoo! and Google have implemented the court-order mandated filtering, although only Yahoo! has implemented complete blocking of all results for specific names. Both search engines have appealed the numerous restraining orders, and in a few cases, the firms have been fined for not sufficiently complying with some of the courts' censorship demands.

This is not the first time that a judge or government has tried to filter the Internet in an ill-considered way, an approach that is in the same stroke both disproportionately over-broad and ineffective. Recent examples of similar missteps include the blocking of scientist Richard Dawkins web site in Turkey and a US judge's order to shutter wikileaks.org.

The situation in Argentina is notable due to the fact that a search for many of the 100+ public figures on Yahoo! Argentina will result in zero results. That is, it is not a few particularly nasty or libelous results that have been removed, but all results for these celebrities, and anyone else unfortunate enough to share the same name, have been obscured from the Argentine web for those that rely on this search engine.

Try it yourself, and compare searches for Diego Maradona on Yahoo! Argentina (which blocks all results), as well as Yahoo! Mexico and Google Argentina (both of which do not block results).

In many cases, all of the search results for the public figures' names have been eliminated, while in others, only specific search results to pornographic, defamatory or copyright infringing websites have been removed. This is not just about tabloid celebrities; a central figure in this story is the judge María Servini de Cubría who has sought to block Internet content about herself that she finds personally offensive. Governments officials succeeding in limiting access to online information about themselves also sets a worrisome precedent.

All of the clients are represented a single lawyer, Martin Leguizamon Peña, who has claimed to have achieved a 80% success rate in obtaining restraining orders against Google and Yahoo!. Peña is also seeking compensation of 300,000 to 400,000 pesos ($90,000 to $120,000) from the search engines for each of his clients.

Peña has brought successful cases before scores of different judges. While the first restraining orders were issued back in 2006, we understand that the number of legal orders skyrocketed in May of 2008. Peña is reportedly obtaining new restraining orders for the same clients, week after week, with revised lists of websites, articles, blogs, and keywords that must be blocked. Many of the orders contain specific web pages to be blocked, however, some also ambiguously order the search engines to block all sites containing defamatory or scandalous portrayals of Peña's clients. It is then presumably up to Yahoo! and Google to determine which content is defamatory -- a task that neither company wishes to or is qualified to perform.

A representative from Yahoo! told us that the censorship order relating to Diego Maradona was first issued in September 2008. The order required Yahoo! Argentina to block all search results for Diego Maradona containing either pornography or images of the star and has since been expanded to include sites that reference thirty-three members of his family. Rather than dedicating the considerable resources to manually determine which sites on the Internet met this standard, Yahoo! instead implemented a block for all search results containing the football player's name.

The actual reach of the court orders, of course, is fairly limited. Internet users in Argentina who know about the censorship are free to use many of Yahoo!'s other Spanish-language search sites, for example, Yahoo! Mexico or Yahoo! Spain. Even those users unaware of the censorship are likely to seek out other search engines, such as Google, once they come across a search page with zero results. Poor typists are also in luck, as Yahoo! has clearly implemented the orders narrowly, not removing results for "diegomaradona" or "diego maradone," for example.

Even though the blacklist is easy to circumvent, it has the potential to cause significant collateral damage beyond those 100+ celebrities who have sought court orders. This is due to the simple fact that many of those individuals are unlikely to have unique names. Just as America's "no-fly list" has caused countless problems for innocent passengers who shared the name with someone else listed on the government's secret watch-list, so too does Argentina's Internet blacklist have the real potential to cause harm to others. These innocent people have now essentially vanished from a good portion of the Argentine Internet, simply because they happen to share their name with a celebrity.

Just a few weeks ago, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and a number of other groups, including the Berkman Center, announced the creation of the Global Network Initiative (GNI) -- a code of conduct and supporting structures to protect free speech and privacy against government mandated intrusions -- and to individually and collectively address situations such as these. While recognizing that the GNI is new, the framework would appear to directly forbid the silent implementation of court-ordered censorship that Yahoo! was performing:

Participating companies will seek to operate in a transparent manner when required to provide personal information to governments. To achieve this, participating companies will:

Clearly disclose to users the generally applicable laws and policies which require the participating company to remove or limit access to content or restrict communications....

Give clear, prominent and timely notice to users when access to specific content has been removed or blocked by the participating company or when communications have been limited by the participating company due to government restrictions. Notice should include the reason for the action and state on whose authority the action was taken.

Yahoo's lack of transparency in its implementation of the court orders, at least up until yesterday, is particularly concerning. Until Monday November 10th 2008, Yahoo! silently removed search results from queries on Yahoo! Argentina, and in some cases, removed all results (such as for Diego Maradona). Yahoo! has since added a note to the empty search results screen explaining (in Spanish) that:

"On the occasion of a court order sought by private parties, we have been forced to temporarily remove some or all of the search results relating to it."

Colin Maclay, who leads Berkman's work on the GNI, said, "this situation is another reminder of the need and urgency for developing clear guidance and best practices for companies, while also engaging in strategies for policy engagement and seeking to better understand evolving legal regimes and practices. Participation won’t change things overnight, but requires a determined, deliberate and sustained implementation. Based on the commitment we've seen by the participants thus far, I am optimistic that we'll make progress on these particular issues both in the near term and over time."

Google is not filtering results to the same degree as Yahoo!. For example, a search for Diego Maradona on Google Argentina returns nearly 2 million results. The company does, however, remove specific pages from the search results on its Argentina site. The search engine notifies its Argentine users of this censorship, just as as it does in Germany, France and China.

An example of Google's filtering in Argentina can be seen by searching for "susana gimenez sexshop" which will result in three links at the bottom of the page to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse -- a project that tracks these incidents and seeks to inform users of their rights.

When we spoke to Alberto Arebalos, Director of Latin American Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google last week, he stated that "we will exercise prior censorship of these sites" when required by a court order, but then added, "even if we were to eliminate all these sites, people in Argentina could look them up in the Google pages of other countries. In specific situations, we could block specific sites, but definitely not all the sites that appear under a name." Finally, he stated that Google is willing to fight the censorship cases all the way to the Argentine Supreme Court if necessary. Early in October, another Google employee similarly outlined the company's position on the company's Latin America blog.

Wendy Seltzer, the founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse described the situation in Argentina as "a telling example of the fragmentation of the Internet via intermediaries. Rather than going directly to the source of objectionable content, complainers find someone in the middle who can be persuaded to block access in at least some locations. This kind of takedown often obscures the source of the objections and removals." She added that, "Chilling Effects aims to add transparency to the process both by showing takedown demands and by allowing people to compare results across various localized versions of search engines."

When reached for his thoughts, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard and an ONI principal investigator, stressed the importance of transparency in cases of government-mandated censorship. "It's crucial for search engines and other intermediaries to be able to make it known when outside parties have ordered or pressured them to alter their results. The crudeness with which the filtering was carried out here made it eventually stand out -- but imagine eliminating half the results instead of all of them." He also added that "this is the first I've seen of filtering based on a search rather than on results, except for the narrow cases where, for example, Google will not permit searching by credit card number."

Globally, these blocking orders may be the tip of the iceberg as more countries and their judges struggle with controlling content online. This also provides a glimpse into the challenges companies face, and those ahead for organizations that hope to combat excessive restrictions on free expression online.

There are unquestionably measures that technology companies operating internationally can take to improve freedom of expression online. Two useful steps are to clearly communicate with their users where restrictions are applied and to appeal inappropriate government orders. This case also highlights the fact that it is the decisions and actions of government officials that are at the root of the issue. It is up to Argentina to decide whether this dubious blocking persists. In this instance, the decisions of the Argentine judiciary and the remedies that they mandate do not reflect the realities of the Internet. Going after the intermediaries with overly broad mandates is poorly conceived and stands to substantially threaten freedom of expression in Argentina.

Three Easy Steps to Block Sites in Turkey

jillian — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:12:05 -0400

In a clear instance of vexatious litigation, a Turkish court has blocked the Web site of prominent evolutionist Richard Dawkins following complaints from Islamic creationist and author Adnan Oktar. Oktar, who writes under the nom de plume Harun Yahya, filed the complaint last week; when Turkish Internet users now attempt to access Dawkins' site, they are presented with a message that reads: 'access to this site has been suspended in accordance with a court decision'.

This is not the first time Oktar has been involved in such litigation. In April 2007, Oktar successfully filed a defamation complaint against Turkish online news site Eksi sozluk. Oktar filed the complaint because of comments that users of Eksi sozluk had posted about him; a similar site, Superpoligon, was also blocked. Access to Eksi sozluk was restored shortly after the complaints were filed, and the offending remarks removed by the site's administrator.

Less than four months later, Oktar appealed to Wordpress.com to remove a number of blogs which he deemed slanderous. Following an unfavorable reaction from Wordpress, Oktar again filed a complaint with the Turkish judicial system, which in turn blocked Wordpress within Turkey. Oktar's complaint was based on a number of blogs created by rival Edip Yuksel, a prominent dissident. To date, Wordpress remains blocked, despite numerous campaigns to unblock the site. Turkish bloggers now use Wordprexy, a mirror site set up by activist group Great Firewall of Turkey, to read and post to Wordpress blogs. Less than six months later, Oktar filed a complaint against Google Groups, which led to that site being blocked within Turkey as well (Google.com remained accessible; only the subdomain groups.google.com was filtered). It is once again available.

Oktar's latest rancor is directed at Richard Dawkins, a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. Following the release of Oktar's creationist book, Atlas of Creation, Dawkins wrote on his Web site:

"I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content."

Oktar, who was involved in the attempt to ban Dawkins' book The God Delusion in Turkey, retaliated by filing a complaint in regards to Dawkins' Web site. A Turkish judicial court sided with Oktar, and ordered Turk Telecom to ban the site.

In each instance, the foreign press was quick to assume that the blockings were related to Turkey's rising Islamist party, the AKP. It is perhaps more alarming that politics had little to do with it. It is surprising that Oktar, considered a charlatan by the Turkish public, and having so recently run afoul of the law, carries so much weight in the Turkish judicial system.

In fact, Oktar carries neither more nor less weight than anyone else. According to a recent Reuters article, a law passed in May now allows the Telecommunications Directorate to close down websites based on complaints by individual users, thus enabling anyone with a complaint to get a site blocked. The problem therefore lies in the ease with which anyone can file such a complaint.

On Oktar's Web site, HarunYahya.com, there is a quote from the Qur'an: "Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Falsehood is always bound to vanish." If Dawkins' work is the falsehood Oktar is referencing, then indeed he has succeeded in making it "vanish"...if only from the Turkish Internet.

YouTube, Scientology and the DMCA

jillian — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:45:58 -0400

You've all seen the anti-Scientology protests; a group known as Anonymous, wearing Guy Fawkes, protest outside various churches of Scientology, or most recently here in Cambridge, outside of an exhibit aimed at teaching people about the religion. Many such protests have been videotaped, then uploaded to YouTube. Several users have also posted responses to protests.

Late last week, it was reported that American Rights Counsel LLC had sent over 4,000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube on the basis that some anti-Scientology videos on the site violated copyright. One such video is this one from Ironhead097, entitled "To Anonymous/Scientology":

During a span of twelve hours on September 4 and 5, several videos were removed and several users banned. YouTube users responded with DMCA counter-notices, and as a result, a number of accounts have been reinstated.

Subsequent investigations by YouTube users into the "American Rights Counsel LLC" have proved fruitless; a simple Google search shows that the company does not have a main website. In fact, every mention of the "American Rights Counsel LLC" on Google relates to Scientology.

The question is: Who are the American Rights Counsel LLC? This video, posted by a member of the group "Anonymous" asks the same question:

If, hypothetically, the claims in the video are correct and a member of Scientology has filed the DMCA notices fraudulently, there are legal ramifications. According to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse:

"Subsection 512(f) attempts to limit false and fraudulent claims of copyright infringement under the DMCA. Anyone who fraudulently claims copyright infringement or fraudulently claims that non-infringing material was wrongly removed, or that access to it was wrongfully disabled, is liable to anyone who suffers any damages because of that misrepresentation, including court costs and attorney's fees"

Whether the claims are true or not, this is ultimately a free speech issue as well as a potential legal one that should spur discussion yet again on the fairness of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Whack-a-Mole in New York

Rob — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:32:12 -0400

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on June 10th an “unprecedented deal” with Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint to “block major sources of child pornography.” The political logic of this action is abundantly clear, though it will have little impact on the spread of child pornography on the Internet.

The New York Times reports that the approach taken by Cuomo’s investigators was to pose as subscribers and file complaints with the ISPs regarding child pornography on their networks, despite user agreements that do not permit such activity. “After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations.”

The background to this story is that previous attempts to legislate mandatory Internet filtering in the U.S. have been overturned by the courts. The legal and practical obstacles to controlling online speech in a country that values free speech as highly as the U.S. have proven to be too great so far. (See here)

Therefore it is not surprising to see the emergence of creative approaches that coerce ISPs into taking action. Unfortunately, the chosen approach doesn’t seem to pass a reasonable benefit-cost test.

There are a few dimensions to the announcement, none of which involve filtering web sites. The agreement stipulates that these three ISPs will “purge their servers of child porn websites.” This makes sense, though it is not new or surprising. Child pornography is a crime and hence is not protected speech. The aspect that is new and somewhat troubling is that the organization which maintains a list of web sites that include child pornography, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), is a non-governmental organization and would carry out its role with no judiciary oversight, no transparency and no accountability to the public. The announcement states that the NCMEC “regularly reviews and updates its registry of these illegal sites to ensure the list reflects the current presence of such websites on the Internet.” However, there is no way to be sure the list is not over-inclusive, including sites that do not contain illegal content. These same problems of targeting, effectiveness, transparency and accountability plague similar initiatives designed to reduce illegal content in other western countries, including Finland, Canada,
and the UK.

The NCMEC obviously has no authority to decide what is illegal. What they can provide is opinions regarding what they believe are web sites that contain illegal material. This allows others, such as ISPs, to act upon this information if they so choose, or in this case, if they are threatened with unwanted legal attention, blurring the line between a legal mandate and voluntary industry action in a process guided by the determinations of a group with no legal authority.

Another component of the agreement stipulates that these three companies will “eliminate access to child porn Newsgroups, a major supplier of these illegal images.” The target here is Usenet, the newsgroup service that has played a central role in the evolution of the Internet, predating the World Wide Web by more than a decade. For almost thirty years, Usenet has hosted discussions that cover a wide range of topics from science, technology and current events to arts and culture. The architecture of Usenet is designed such that many servers around the world host material that is posted. ISPs that host Usenet will be therefore unwitting hosts to any illegal material that is uploaded onto the Usenet network. Cuomo’s investigation team found 88 Usenet groups (out of the more than 100,000 newsgroups) that contain child pornography. The New York State investigators found illegal material to be contained on one of the nine Usenet hierarchies, the alt.* section, which includes over 10,000 newsgroups. Declan McCullagh reports that the ISPs will deal with this in different ways. Sprint plans to block the alt.* newsgroups. Time Warner Cable will drop all Usenet services. Verizon hadn’t decided how to implement the agreement, though would probably block the alt.* groups. This approach would thereby suppress more legitimate speech than illegal content, reminiscent of the baby-bathwater combination that U.S. courts have overturned in the past.

This deal is another example of a major recurring theme in Internet filtering seen around the world—unless targeting a very small number of sites where individual legal review is possible, blocking attempts will fail to eradicate the targeted content while inappropriately removing unrelated material, in this case thousands of newsgroups. The real impact of this agreement on the spread of child pornography is minimal at best. Although still open to interpretation, the impact on free expression will be greater. Some users that subscribe to legitimate Usenet services might be deterred by this, while determined Internet users will be able to access Usenet via a number of web-based services.

At issue is the precedent and mechanisms. The sad fact of the matter is that there are no technical means that will effectively block child pornography on the Internet without stomping on the right to free speech. Nor can it be said that there is no harm in trying. No one should be declaring victory over this agreement.