INFLA Report on Internet Censorship Around the World

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutes (INFLA) has just released a 103-page report that looks at internet censorship in selected countries from around the world. You can access the freely available pdf here.

Trends in transition from classical censorship to Internet censorship: selected country overviews

ABSTRACT
Censorship is no longer limited to printed media and videos. Its impact is felt much more strongly with regard to Internet related resources of information and communication such as access to websites, email and social networking tools which is further enhanced by ubiquitous access through mobile phones and tablets. Some countries are marked by severe restrictions and enforcement, a variety of initiatives in enforcing censorship (pervasive as well as implied), as well as initiatives to counter censorship. The article reflects on trends in Internet censorship in selected countries, namely Australia, Chile, China, Finland, Lybia, Myanmar, Singapore, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (UK). These trends are discussed under two broad categories of negative and positive trends. Negative trends include: trends in issues of Internet related privacy; ubiquitous society and control; trends in Internet related media being censored; trends in filtering and blocking Internet content and blocking software; trends in technologies to monitor and identify citizens using the Internet to express their opinion and applying “freedom of speech”; criminalization of legitimate expression on the Internet; trends in acts, regulations and legislation regarding the use of the Internet and trends in government models regarding Internet censorship; trends in new forms of Internet censorship; trends in support of Internet censorship; trends in enforcing regulations and Internet censorship; trends in Internet related communication surveillance. Positive trends include: trends in reactions to Internet censorship; attempts and means to side-step Internet censorship; trends in cyber actions against Internet censorship; trends in innovative ways of showing opposition to Internet censorship. Detailed reports for each country are included as appendixes. A summary of how the trends manifest in the countries in which data were mined, as well as the trends per se is included in the article.

October CommQuote

There are many hotbeds around the world where it is dangerous to work as a journalist. Honduras is one of them. In the past ten years at least 32 journalists have lost their lives and many more have been violently attacked or threatened. It doesn't seem to matter if they work for mainstream newspaper and broadcasting outlets or alternative/community media outlets. One of the most shocking and recent cases is that of television journalist Anibal Barrow, abducted on June 24, 2013 only to be discovered, his body dismembered, days later (pictured below is his grieving son). The message to journalists is clear. Writes Dina Meza in the latest Index on Censorship (Volume 42, No. 3), in a piece titled Reign of Terror : "Those reporting on human rights violations, drug trafficking, organised crime, US intervention in Honduran politics and corruption are clearly vulnerable. Land issues are also highly contentious topics. Whether it’s the destruction of the environment for profit, particularly by mining and hydro-electric companies, land ownership or land-grabbing, these live issues galvanise communities and journalists alike, who use both traditional media and social networks to spread information."

So our CommQuote this month is our saddest one to date. It is a list, one compiled by the Honduran Human Rights Commissioner.

Honduras’s murdered journalists, 2003–2013Anibal Barrow, Globo TV, Cortes – 24 June 2013 Celin Orlando Acosta Zelaya, freelance, Olancho – 31 January 2013 Angel Edgardo Lopez Fiallos, journalism student, Francisco Morazan – 8 November 2012 Julio Cesar Cassaleno, Direction Nacional de Transito (Transport) – 28 August 2012 Jose Noel Canales Lagos, Hondudiario and SEPROC, Tegucigalpa – 10 August 2012 Adonis Felipe Bueso Gutierrez, Radio Naranja, Cortes – 8 July 2012 Erick Martinez, Asociacion Kukulcan, Francisco Morazan – 7 May 2012 Noel Alexander Valladares, Maya TV, Francisco Morazan – 23 April 2012 Fausto Elio Valle, Radio Alegre, Colon – 11 March 2012 Fabiola Almendares Borjas, journalism student, Cortes – 1 March 2012 Luz Marina Paz, Honduran News Channel, Francisco Morazan – 6 December 2011 Medardo Flores, Radio Uno, Cortes – 9 September 2011 Nery Jeremias Orellana, Radio Joconguera, Lempira – 14 July 2011 Adan Benitez, 45TV and Teleceiba Canal 7, Atlantida – 5 July 2011 Luis Mendoza, Macrosistema Company and Canal 24, Danli – 19 May 2011 Hector Francisco Medina Polanco, Omega Visión, Yoro – 10 May 2011 Henry Orlando Suazo, HRN, Atlantida – 28 December 2010 Israel Diaz Zelaya, Radio Internacional, Cortes – 24 August 2010 Luis Arturo Mondragon, Canal 19, El Paraiso –14 June 2010 Luis Chevez Hernandez, Radio W105, San Pedro Sula – 09 April 2010 Victor Manuel Juarez Vasquez, Canal 4 de Juticalpa, Olancho – 26 March 2010 Bayardo Mairena, Canal 4 de Juticalpa, Olancho – 26 March 2010 Nahum Palacios, Canal 5 de Aguan, Colon – 14 March 2010 David Meza, El Patio and Radio America, Atlantida – 11 March 2010 Joseph Hernandez, Canal 51, Francisco Morazan – 1 March 2010 Nicolas Asfura, Construction Company, Francisco Morazan – 17 February 2010 Gabriel Fino Noriega, Radio America, Atlantida – 3 July 2009 Osman Rodrigo Lopez, Canal 45, Francisco Morazan – 19 April 2009 Rafael Munguia, Radio Cadena Voces, Cortes – 1 April 2009 Bernardo Rivera Paz, Freelancer, Copan – 14 March 2009 Fernando Gonzalez, Radio Mega FM 92.7, Santa Barbara – 1 January 2008 Carlos Salgado, Radio Cadena Voces, Morazan – 18 October 2007 German Rivas, Corporacion Maya Vision Canal 7, Copan – 26 November 2003 To date, no one has been prosecuted for the above crimes Source: Honduras Human Rights Commissioner.

June CommQuote

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, has a more more sober view of the internet and social media as great liberators. He wrote a short piece on the subject a few months ago in Wired Magazine.

The last time American leaders were this ecstatic about the power of information was at the end of the Cold War, when illicit fax machines and photocopiers and the work of broadcasters like Radio Free Europe were presumed to have been a leading cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. (In 1990, Albert Wohlstetter—the ur-technocrat who was one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove—told an audience of perplexed eastern Europeans that “the fax shall make you free.”) Today, most historians reject such views as reductionist, but they are still extremely popular among US politicians (probably because celebrating smuggled technology allows them to celebrate the politicians who made the smuggling possible—particularly Ronald Reagan). Such Cold War thinking showed in Clinton’s speech: “Virtual walls,” she said, are “cropping up in place of visible walls,” and viral videos and blogging are “becoming the samizdat of our day.”

But not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are. Some of these governments are even beginning to follow the path laid by Western corporations, actively deploying regime-friendly bloggers to spread talking points. Is this “samizdat”?

Cold War baggage, in short, severely limits the imagination of do-gooders in the West. They assume that the Internet is too big to control without significant economic losses. But governments don’t need to control every text message or email. There’s a special irony when Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests—as he did in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last November—that China’s government will find it impossible to censor “a billion phones that are trying to express themselves.” Schmidt is rich because his company sells precisely targeted ads against hundreds of millions of search requests per day. If Google can zero in like that, so can China’s censors.

Calling China’s online censorship system a “Great Firewall” is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools. But modern authoritarian governments control the web in ways more sophisticated than guard towers.
--Why the Internet Is a Great Tool for Totalitarians, Wired Magazine, January 2011

BBC , Bush Free Speech Legacy, The Satanic Verses at 20

The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television' s last issue of 2008 (Volume 28, Issue 4) is devoted entirely to the BBC. This special issue is titled: BBC World Service, 1932-2007: Cultural Exchange and Public Diplomacy. In honor of the BBC celebrating its 75th year in broadcasting a conference was held in December 2007 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London to reflect on three quarters of a century of overseas broadcasting from Britain. "Organised by the ARHC-funded Open University research project, 'Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service', it brought together broadcasters, academics and policy-makers to engage in a series of debates about the World Service. The papers in this special issue...are drawn from that conference and will, it is hoped, add to the development of a critical mass that will ensure, in future, the history of international broadcasting receives the academic and public attention and understanding it deserves" (from the Introduction by Marie Gillepsie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann).

Index on Censorship (Volume 37, Number 4, 2008) assesses the future of free speech in the United States in the wake of the Bush era: Eric Lichtblau on the White House's wiretapping program, Patrick Radden Keefe on executive power, Jameel Jaffer on the remaining secrets of the Bush administration, Rich Piltz on climate change, Geoffry Stone on war and speech, Zoriah Miller on image control, Lawrence Krauss on intelligent design, Christopher Finan on monitoring libraries and reading habits, and more.

In this same issue is a special section honoring the 20th anniversary of a free speech watershed, the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Publisher Peter Mayer, Nadine Gordimer, Malise Ruthven, and others weigh in.

Both journals are available from the Penn Libraries page.

October CommQuote

This month's quote is from a New Yorker piece of this past summer on the rising neocon/nationalist movement among China's youth. The article profiles Tang Jie, a graduate student in Shanghai who made a 6-minute documentary that captures the nationalistic mood that has swept China since the Tibetan uprisings in March. The film has since widely circulated on You Tube.

"When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China's official media. Like others his age [he is 28], he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool - an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server - a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn't have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad....He's baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

'Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed," he said. "We are always eager to get other information from different channels." Then he added, "But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.'"

--Evan Osnos, Letter From China: Angry Youth (The New Yorker, July 28, 2008)