Google: Censorship Requests "Alarming"

Per HuffPo:

Google has received more than 1,000 requests from authorities to take down content from its search results or YouTube video in the last six months of 2011, the company said on Monday, denouncing what it said was an alarming trend.

* * * * *
Many of those requests targeted political speech, keeping up a trend Google said it has noticed since it started releasing its Transparency Report in 2010.

"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Chou.

In the second half of last year, Google complied with around 65 percent of court orders and 47 percent of informal requests to remove content, it said.

(Emphasis supplied; more at the link.) It's even more alarming that it's reached the point that even Google finds it alarming.

Ideas for Facebook Apps

(1) "Who Are My Sycophants?"; and

(2) "Of Whom Am I on the Brink of Becoming Categorized as a Sycophant?"

Why We Need Net Neutrality: ISP's Are Already Throttling the Internet

If you had any remaining doubt as to whether and how much this is happening, wonder no more. Two projects have shown that Comcast and Road Runner consistently engage in substantial, discriminatory slowing or throttling of internet traffic (euphemistically referred to as "shaping") both to and from users, and that "Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping." (More at Boing Boing)

They claim they only do it to help manage traffic volumes. But there are many examples of known, wrongful censorship of political or other content, within as well as outside the U.S.; see, e.g., here (Comcast and/or Symantec blocked all e-mails containing URL of site calling for investigation into whether Pres. Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the push to invade Iraq, successfully reducing the impact of activists' efforts), here (AT&T censored Pearljam concert by deleting lyrics criticizing Bush), or here (Mindspring and OneNet Communications, successively, blocked site hosting Nuremburg Files).

As Lawrence Lessig stated in a recent article, "The innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact."

Bad enough that, as "Napoleon said . . . it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered." But worse, ISP's can suppress any info they choose in ways that make it unlikely that many users will ever become aware that anything's been filtered out.

And as stated at sp!ked-IT with reference to Wikileaks, among others, "when an ISP removes [or blocks] content, it invokes the cyber equivalent to the death sentence. When an ISP acts it can effectively destroy a business or censor a political campaign, by making access to that website impossible.

If you agree that protecting the internet as a source of uncensored political information is one of the most urgent issues of our time, please spread the word about it.

Egypt's Internet Tourniquet; Wikileaks Publishes New Cables Re- Egypt

"[T]the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. . . . [E]very Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs . . . is now cut off from the rest of the world. . . .

"At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. . . . Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

"This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

". . . . This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up." Details at renesys | blog.

span style="font-weight: bold;">The point of a tourniquet is to stanch bleeding from an expendable appendage; Mubarak is using it to cut the body off from the head (I'll let you to decide whether the people represent the body, the head, or both).

UPDATE: According to reports here and here, Christians and Muslims alike are involved in the demonstrations, and some police have removed their uniforms to join the protesters. More news re- the Egyptian uprising at the World; Al Jazeera's English-language live video stream here. Al Jazeera's live blog here (Jan. 29; you may need to click around to find subsequent days).

Also, recall that the U.S. is known to have rendered suspected terrorists to Egypt for torture, some of whom proved innocent (UPDATE: see FireDogLake).

Meanwhile, Wikileaks released a new batch of cables today:

"The Egyptian 'people blame America' now for their plight under Mubarak" http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10DOHA71.html

"10 Yemeni children were trafficked to Egypt for organ harvesting" http://wikileaks.ch/reldate/2011-01-28_0.html

"A new round of political arrests..." http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10CAIRO197.html

"Mubarak's terror against writers, bloggers and journalists" http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/07/09CAIRO1447.html

"Egypt's abuse of Emergency Laws" http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/01/10CAIRO64.html

"Military will ensure transfer of power..." http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/07/09CAIRO1468.html

Mubarak private briefing for senator Lieberman http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/02/09CAIRO326.html

"Rogue Egyptian priests feed US adoption racket" http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10CAIRO344.html

"Welcome to Egypt, FBI director...here's what's going on" http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10CAIRO179.html

The Commons that Was the Internet, & Why the Creative Explosion It Gave Us May Soon Be Over

Lawrence Lessig has a new article at Foreign Policy summarizing important factors behind the explosive growth of the Internet, and the imminent threats that could end it:

A “commons” is a resource to which everyone within a relevant community has equal access. It is a resource that is not, in an important sense, “controlled.” Private or state-owned property is a controlled resource; only as the owner specifies may that property be used. But a commons is not subject to this sort of control. Neutral or equal restrictions may apply to it (an entrance fee to a park, for example) but not the restrictions of an owner. A commons, in this sense, leaves its resources “free.”

. . . . But within American intellectual culture, commons are treated as imperfect resources. They are the object of “tragedy,” as ecologist Garrett Hardin famously described. Wherever a commons exists, the aim is to enclose it. . . .

For most resources, for most of the time, the bias against commons makes good sense. When resources are left in common, individuals may be driven to overconsume, and therefore deplete, them. But . . . . [s]ome resources are not subject to the “tragedy of the commons” because some resources cannot be “depleted.” . . . For these resources, the challenge is to induce provision, not to avoid depletion. The problems of provision are very different from the problems of depletion—confusing the two only leads to misguided policies.

* * * * *
. . . . [T]he Internet was born at a time when a different philosophy was taking shape within computer science. This philosophy ranked humility above omniscience and anticipated that network designers would have no clear idea about all the ways the network could be used. It therefore counseled a design that built little into the network itself, leaving the network free to develop as the ends (the applications) wanted.

The motivation for this new design was flexibility. The consequence was innovation. Because innovators needed no permission from the network owner before different applications or content got served across the network, innovators were freer to develop new modes of connection. . . . Since the network was not optimized for any single application or service, the Internet remained open to new innovation. . . .

* * * * *
Every significant innovation on the Internet has emerged outside of traditional providers. . . . This trend teaches the value of leaving the platform open for innovation. Unfortunately, that platform is now under siege. Every technological disruption creates winners and losers. The losers have an interest in avoiding that disruption if they can. This was the lesson Machiavelli taught, and it is the experience with every important technological change over time. It is also what we are now seeing with the Internet. The innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact.

The article's not super-long but contains much more that's well worth reading.

UPDATE: Great audio of Lessig here discussing the policy considerations underlying copyright law and some reforms we might consider that could actually afford greater compensation to artists while de-criminalizing non-commercial re-mixing and other uses.

Net Neutrality on the Ropes

You can sign a petition in support of net neutrality here. Note, I concur with Rep. Alan Grayson's take that neutrality should be protected by legislation, not just by FCC regulation, which can easily be revised under another administration.

UPDATE: Google and Verizon aren't waiting around for us to get our act together. Reportedly, they've now reached an agreement that would allow the partial destruction of net neutrality; see WaPo.

How Lo Can WaPo Go?

"Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive 'salon' at her home where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered [healthcare and other] lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to 'those powerful few' — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

"The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its 'health care reporting and editorial staff.'"

More here.

US Lawmakers Have $196M Invested in Defense Corps.

It doesn't have to be this way. More here.

"Save the Internet" Bill Is a Sham

If you get an e-mail urging you to support of the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008” (HR 5353), please be aware it's a sell-out.

Per ZDNet, the bill "carries no enforcement provision on network neutrality, and even carries the co-sponsorship of a neutrality opponent, Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi.

"Pickering has said he plans to leave Congress after this term and is expected to become a lobbyist. Defanging the network neutrality bandwagon will doubtless please his potential corporate employers.

"The bill is a fig leaf, offering vague 'principles' which would be 'guide stars' for future policy.

"Violation of the principles carries no penalty. The FCC would merely study the question and then suggest whether rules are necessary later." More at ZDNet.

Product Placement in Art Museums

The recent New York Times article about galleries paying museums to help finance exhibitions of artists represented by said galleries reminded me of a comment by David Lynch:


Also, the common view of politicians' solicitation of donations as "shakedowns."

Fine if you're an open, paid advocate for a certain party or point of view; not so fine if you purport to represent the general public or an independent point of view. The apparent conflict of interest undermines public confidence in the integrity of public institutions.

That said, I love the look of Takashi Murakami's platinum and aluminum Golden Buddha in the first pic above.

(Thanks to snarky for the tip on the Lynch clip!)