Weibo censorship in the Chen Guangcheng case

Alice Xin Liu

The twists and turns of the fate of blind lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng has had much of China’s online community in its thrall.

wo images featuring blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng are seen during a protest in front of the Chinese central government's liaison in Hong Kong (AP/Vincent Yu))

On April 27 Chen arrived in the US embassy from his native Shandong, where he had escaped from house arrest.  Despite news of the event being censored, Chinese internet users quickly became aware of his situation. This was especially true on Weibo – the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. To bypass the censors, netizens used nicknames concocted for Chen Guangcheng, including “Shawshank” and “Sunglasses.” But even these terms were soon blocked.

On May 2 things took a dramatic turn when he left the embassy under the guidance of U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke to seek medical treatment at Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital. It was said that he had left of “his own volition”.

Charles Custer, who runs blog site ChinaGeeks, explored in the post “Sina’s Softer Censorhip” how “on your own volition” had become a online meme by that evening. In the post, he says that instead of blocking the term, Sina Weibo simply stopped indexing any new posts that used the term. Custer said the maneuver created what he calls “an artificial silence”, where users may think no one is talking about the issue even though there were many posts discussing the matter.

The China Media Project, a media monitoring website set up by Hong Kong University, covered government editorials that ran in Beijing Daily, a State-owned paper that condemned the Chen Guangcheng case. In the editorials, Gary Locke was especially targeted.

David Bandurski, the website’s editor, recently wrote:

“That editorial, which accused U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke of playing “little tricks”, said that blind activist Chen Guangcheng represented not ordinary Chinese but only his “backstage boss, namely the interests of the hostile forces of the West.” It said Chen had become “a tool and pawn by which politicians in the United States blacken China.”

Bandurski tells VOA “The Beijing editorials last week were what I would characterize as a monumental failure. They were panned on Chinese social media as heavy-handed and backwards, until things escalated to the point that Beijing Daily itself became a restricted term on Sina Weibo.”

Blocking on Weibo has been systematic for the Chen Guangcheng case. For example, the term “Chaoyang Hospital” is now an unusable term. When you search for it, Weibo tells you that “according to the relevant regulations, search results cannot be shown.” The same goes for “CGC,” “blind man” and “Linyi”, the town where Chen Guangcheng had been under house arrest.

Bandurski says “China has been in the midst of a progressive tightening of media controls since the February [of] this year. One catalyzing incident, of course, was the Wang Lijun incident in early February, which put party infighting in the spotlight just as the leadership was negotiating the sensitive issue of succession ahead of the 18th party congress later this year.”

Some bloggers attitudes remain similarly pessimistic. “I don’t think much has changed,” said well-known Chinese blogger Michael Anti. “Reports [on sensitive issues] weren’t allowed before, and they’re not allowed now.”

By the way, if you’re interested, you can find a list of blocked terms related to Chen Guangcheng here. But rest assured, this list will only continue to grow.

There’s More Free Stuff Out There Than You May Know

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

May 8, 1977. The setting was Ithaca, New York; Cornell University’s barn-like Barton field house, specifically. On that particular Sunday evening, for the princely sum of $7.50 – $6.50 for students – you could buy one general admission ticket (assuming you could find any for sale) to hear a performance by the Grateful Dead.

For the Dead it was just another gig on an unending tour; the Ithaca stop was sandwiched between New Haven’s Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum and Buffalo’s War Memorial Coliseum.  Fairly to form, the band played 20 songs that night, starting with “New Minglewood Blues” and wrapping with the classic “One More Saturday Night.” Along the way they hit a number of fan favorites like “Fire on the Mountain,” “Not Fade Away” and “Morning Dew.”

At the time, May 8th was just another performance by the Dead, an enduring American band that had long attracted it’s own rolling culture of scruffy fans, hippies, dope-smokers and assorted others who followed the band from show to show. But for true “Deadheads,” it’s much, much more than that. For Deadhead Nation, May 8 is forever known simply as “Barton Hall.”

35 years later to the day, the Dead’s spring 1977 tour is now the stuff of legend, with the Barton Hall show the most celebrated performance of the band’s career. “I started hearing from other Deadheads that the Barton show was famous,” Brad Krakow tells the Cornell Chronicle. One of the lucky attendees that night, Krakow characterized the Dead’s performance as “tight, no mistakes and inspired. It is funny now when friends ask if that is ‘The’ Barton Hall when visiting. It is an icon.”

But don’t take Krakow’s word for it. Download the entire concert and decide for yourself. In fact, why not download every concert the Grateful Dead ever played to compare and contrast? Go ahead – you can do it all for free, and without any copyright worries, thanks to a website called “The Internet Archive.”

A Virtual Library of Alexandria

Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, the Archive is a digital warehouse of just about everything. Photographs, drawings, texts, recorded audio and video, the Archive storehouse is too vast to ever fully explain or explore, and it’s getting larger every day.

Logo for the Internet Archive

Want to see outtakes from the interviews from Glenn Greenwald’s 2004 movie “Outfoxed”? You can find them here on the archive for free. Want to download author Richard Willard Armour’s 1963 memoir “Through Darkest Adolescence”? You can get text, Kindle, .pdf or just about any other version with one easy click. Old movies, live concerts, classic photographs? They and much, much more are stored in the memory banks of  the Archive.

Founder Brewster Kahle says he wanted to create a virtual Library of Alexandria online; a place where much of the stuff of our daily lives could be preserved for future generations, and not lost forever, as much of the content of the ancient Alexandria library was so doomed. Kahle calls himself simply a “digital librarian,” but there’s nothing simple about the Internet Archive or Kahle’s ambitions.

In essence, Kahle wants to build a one-world library: one place where web content of all types can be sorted, stored, and accessed for free. Says Kahle:

“The web is ephemeral. About every 100 days a webpage is changed or deleted. So keeping up with the web is important. Next we started doing television, then movies, and now books.”

Take books, for example. If you want to share a book you own that isn’t int the Archive, you can scan it yourself and upload it, or just take it to one of the Archives hundred-odd scanning locations, where they’ll do it for you. Of course, at least some of those books are still under copyright, but due to special legal provisions regarding the blind and dyslexic, the Archive can store and even ‘lend’ these books, too.

The same is true for other forms of media. IA archivists work to ensure copyright protections where they’re are legitimate, but with the wealth of material that’s fallen out of (or never protected by) copyright, the Archive’s holdings are vast. The items may be mundane, but that’s no matter to Kahle. The more, the better.

One of the most popular features on IA is something called “The WayBack Machine.” Starting sometime in 1997, Archive engineers began trawling the web and grabbing screenshots of millions of webpages. Want to know what VOA’s webpage looked like – and what was news – back on, say, November9 2000? The Archive has it (and boy, have things changed a LOT since then!)

Preserving the Forgettable

Grateful Dead on May 8, 1977 (archive.org)

A lot of the stuff on the Internet Archive may be momentarily interesting, but one could ask about their long term value. For instance, do 100 newsreels from 1940′s America say anywhere as much important as just one classic book like “Death of a Salesman” or “For Whom The Bell Tolls”? Probably. But like with everything, context is all important, and what the Archive is saving is much of the ephemeral context that just ends up in history’s dustbin.

That said, there’s very little forgettable about many of the Archive’s holdings, such as the Dead’s Barton Hall classic. Years ago the band made a decision: rather than block crowd recordings and file thousands of copyright lawsuits, they agreed to make all of their concert recordings taken from the mixing board copyright clear. In other words if you had the right equipment, you could plug into the main soundboard, record any show, and do with it whatever you wanted.

That’s exactly how Barton Hall, May 8 1977 ended up on the Internet Archive; it and over 100,000 other live concerts.

It may soon be forgotten that 35 years ago today, the day of the concert, a freak snowstorm hit Ithaca, leaving hundreds of Deadheads nowhere to go but to break into a nearby dorm to warm up (and for other activities.) But thanks to the Archive, what happened during that concert will live on for decades, or longer.

Sex, Politics, Murder and the Web

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

In other times, the political excommunication of former Chinese rising star Bo Xilai would have been a relatively simple affair. Bo, the party boss of Chongqing, had for years built himself firm control over what happened in his province, along the way winning something of a reputation as a crusader for the people. But his sharp tongue and unconventional ways rankled Party officials in Beijing, and on April 10 he was suddenly demoted. End of story.

Bo Xilai, in a 2011 file image (VOA/Chinese)

But the Internet loves a scandal, and as scandals go, the story of Bo Xilai seems to have it all (much of it detailed here by VOA’s Matt Hilburn and Kate Woodsome.) Soon after his dismissal a flurry of stories from the official party apparatus suddenly linked Bo to a series of business and bribery deals gone wrong. The mysterious death of longtime friend and British business leader Neil Heywood, first blamed on alcohol poisoning, was quickly tied to Bo’s wife Gu Kailai. For her part, rumors began to float that Gu is volatile, depressed, paranoid or worse, possibly even having had an inappropriately close relationship to Heywood. Then came whispers, quickly swatted down by the government, of dissent among high levels in the nation’s military unhappy with Bo’s removal.

Stories like Bo’s, of course, are nothing new. It wasn’t all that long ago that Jiang Qing, perhaps better known as “Madame Mao,” was at the height of political influence as one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution. But with Mao Zedong’s death, it didn’t take long for her to be toppled, landing her in prison with the label “counter-revolutionary.”  Of the many opaque factions within the one permitted Chinese Communist party, there are always winners and losers. Bo Xilai has come out on the losing end of that equation. And that, traditionally, should have been that.

Which is exactly where the Internet comes in.

At first, government higher-ups appeared content to let China’s 350 million Internet users spread all sorts of negative rumors about Bo, Gu, and others associated with the disgraced two-some. But as we’ve often noted, the Internet sword cuts both ways, and soon users on sites like Weibo, Utopia and other popular networks turned the tables, repeating claims of a conspiracy to oust Bo led by party officials who had turned their back on the revolution. Very soon at least 40 websites were shut down, and the popular micro-blog Weibo was heavily censored. An uncertain number of people have been arrested and countless posts have been erased, with Beijing’s “State Internet Information Office” proclaiming the rumors a “very bad influence on the public.”

Yet key-word censorship is a tricky business, as Chinese users have become very adept at learning how to evade the censors by using similar but non-threatening words. Another oft-used tactic in China is shutting down nearly all access to the web in a specific geographic region, such as happens periodically in the ethnically-restive Xinjiang province. That can work to isolate one area for a limited time, but as a technique for stopping a national discussion it seems fraught with downsides. Just ask Egyptian officials.

In any event, as Helen Gao over at the Atlantic notes, the Internet cat may already be out of the bag:

“China’s heavy-handed censorship may now actually accelerate the spread of rumors, which could be seen as more plausible precisely because they are censored. Chinese web users trying to figure out the most likely truth must speculate not only about the rumors themselves, but also about every move the government makes in response. The tug-of-war between the government and the people over truth and rumor happens every day in today’s China. The rise of social media has made the struggle harder and the stakes higher.”

Alice Xin Liu

Every year around this time, China marks the Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day. It’s traditionally marked as a day for the living to celebrate the departed, marked by outings to cemeteries. Celebrants leave tea, burn paper or incense, and generally sweep the tomb down clean and clear.

But this year it was what the Chinese government was sweeping offline that had so many people upset.

Last week, it was revealed the Chinese government had closed 16 websites and detained six individuals for “fabricating or disseminating online rumors.” Many of those rumors center on the latest political scandal: the sacking of Bo Xilai, the popular former Chongqing Communist Party Chief.

They began to spread after his deputy, Wang Lijun, sought political asylum at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.  That resulted in the top leadership of the Communist Party putting the brakes on all the political intrigue surrounding the pair. After the sacking, rumors started swirling that “military vehicles” were marching into Beijing, and that it was the center of a coup. (These turned out to be false.)

Xinhua reported that the websites include meizhou.net, xn528.com and cndy.com.cn, but these small websites have not affected everyday life in China. But then on March 31, users of China’s most popular blog site, Sina microblog, – also known as weibo.com – woke up to find that although they could repost and share, they couldn’t comment on any of the posts. The same thing happened with another large microblog, qq.com; all comments were turned off.

Predictably, shutting off comments riled up many users, but Weibo had an explanation:

“Weibo users: lately, there have been a lot of unlawful and harmful content appearing in the comments section on microblogs, so from 8AM on March 31 to 8AM on April 3 our comment function will be suspended temporarily. After we have finished this round of regulation, we will re-open the function.”

Han Han, China’s foremost blogger, chose the second day of this three-day shutdown period to speak up. He wrote:

“Flowers lose their petals in the winter, and then bloom again in Spring. Some people go, some people come. In 2010, I closed this account, and also wrote an article about the reasons and my worries about keeping a microblog. In 2012, there is CWB (a service that lets you write more characters and then upload to microblog as an image) so I have decided to restart over here.”

From the morning of April 3, commenting on the microblogs had been returned. People today are still in the process of going back to microblogs and enjoying the newly returned function. Chen Qihan said:

“Even though they shut off the microblog [comment function], I still want to come on, this shows how addicted I am!”

‘China Citizen Li,’ a member of the Hebei Writers’ Association with over 3,000 followers, said ironically:

“On May 4, 2012, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, said that China’s internet is free and open, and that netizens enjoy full freedoms… — it’s just that sometimes, microblog commenting will be closed!”

Perhaps the best characteristic of Sina microblog users is how humorous they are. Of course, the closure of commenting fell on a national holiday, when offices, and presumably web monitors, would be off work for three days.

User ‘Decorate Your Dreams’ attached a screen capture of a news item asking people to visit the graves of China’s national heroes or martyrs. He wrote:

“They’ve turned off commenting on microblog, I don’t feel like going Grave Sweeping.. Even if I went and told the Heroes that the same things are happening today, about how landlords are bullying ordinary people again, the forced grabbing of land are coming thick and fast, and there are more cases of trafficking people, more random taxes, and concubines are in fashion… I don’t want to go, if I went the Heroes whose graves I sweep won’t have a good Festival at all…”

Vietnam Cracks Down On The Internet And Free Expression

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Dieu Cay knows the risks and rewards of being a blogger in Vietnam. On the risk side, he’s been tossed in and out of prison cells over the last five years, today finding himself detained once more.

His reward? He’s still among the most popular online figures in his nation.

‘Điếu cày‘ is a pen name meaning “peasant’s water pipe” in Vietnamese. The real person is Nguyen Van Hai, and he started blogging in 2007, just about the moment the Internet began spreading rapidly across the country. Unhappy about China’s policies in Tibet and the Spratly Islands, Nguyen started using his blog (now no longer viewable) to organize protests of the Beijing Olympics torch relay.

“BlogDieuCay” began quietly, but soon drew a lot of attention. Other Vietnamese citizens, unhappy with various Chinese policies, also began protesting the torch relay. Still others began speaking out online, inspired to start writing about Vietnam’s religious discrimination, land rights issues, or general corruption. In just a few months Nguyen was joined by fellow bloggers ‘AnhBa SG‘ (real name Phan Thanh Hai)  and former Communist Party member Ta Phong Tan to start the “Club for Free Journalists.” Weekly viewership of their blogs skyrocketed.

That’s when authorities stepped in. In late April 2009, Nguyen was arrested on tax fraud, a charge many considered trumped up. (Phan and Ta were also arrested on unrelated crimes.) He was subsequently released and began blogging again, only to be repeatedly harassed by police. In October 2010 he was again detained by police, and has not been seen by anyone since. Officially, he’s charged with violating Article 88: “Conducting Propaganda Against the State.” Unofficially, many more call it simply “Blogging While Vietnamese.”

“Abusing Democratic Freedoms”

Nguyen isn’t alone. In just the last few months, as many as nine journalists and 33 bloggers have been jailed in what has become Vietnam’s largest ever crackdown on free speech online.

“It’s bad…it’s very bad,” says U.S. Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia. “The American ambassador (there) is a failure, the American embassy is no longer an island of freedom,” says an unsparing Wolf, condemning what he sees as an Obama administration that’s weak on human rights and freedom issues. “This administration has not done a very good job of speaking out,” says the long time rights advocate, “so these countries don’t believe that the Obama administration cares about these issues, and they feel they can do whatever they want.”

Former Communist Party member Ta Phong Tan, in better days

Others see a different reason for the crackdown: a government motivated less by opportunism and more by fear.

“The government is threatened by the increasing use of the Internet by Vietnamese citizens,” says Human Rights Watch’s Phil Robertson.  “With the expansion of the Vietnamese language Internet, their ability to control what people are reading and seeing has definitely diminished.”

Whatever the reason, there’s no doubting that Vietnamese are moving online in droves. In 2000, less than one percent of Vietnam’s population had access to the web. Ten years later, that number had bolted to 27 percent, and it’s likely higher today. Young Vietnamese crowd into Internet cafes and snatch up the latest smart phones (over 111 million mobile phones are registered in a nation with a population of 86 million). All those eyeballs online make for a declining consumption of state-controlled newspapers and broadcasts, and that, says Robertson, has Hanoi nervous:

“When you roll in what has happened in the Arab world, that has caused a great deal of concern by the Vietnamese government. They’re worried if they don’t try to correct the problem, try to control what is going out and control some of the more prominent bloggers or people sharing information, that this situation may somehow get out of control.  That’s the core of the increasing crackdown we see by the government trying to go after the more prominent people making their views known, and harassing bloggers and harassing activists; not only trying to firewall their blogs or websites, but also the more traditional harassment: police going by, inviting people out to coffees or “chats,” going in and confiscating computers or cutting people off from the Internet by terminating their phone service.”

Nervous or not, Vietnamese authorities have clearly dropped the hammer recently on the nation’s most prominent bloggers and online activists. In addition to those detained, countless more are being monitored, forced offline or have had their computers seized.

The state has a grab bag of statutes that it can charge bloggers with violating. Most popular is Article 88, but there are many others, including Article 79 – “Subversion of the People’s Administration” – or the ironically termed Article 258:  “Abusing Democratic Freedoms to Infringe the Interests of the State.” Whatever allegation is used, the punishments are tough: prison sentences of five to eight years.

“Playing an Easy and Hard Game.”

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, 32 years old, is a mother in the central coastal city of Nha Trang. She was concerned about a controversial bauxite mining project nearby, and the Chinese partner on the project Chinalco. So in 2009 she began blogging about it, sharing news items or rumors she’d heard, her objections to the project, and what others were saying about similar projects.

Nguyen knew the dangers of blogging in Vietnam, and so adopted the pen name “Me Nam” – or “Mother Mushroom” in Vietnamese. People signed an online petition, and she printed shirts reading “Stop Bauxite – No China – Keep the country safe and clean.” Her blog became a smash success. That is, until the night of September 2, 2009, when 15 police agents smashed through her door and took her under arrest.

“The police arrested and kept  me at prison for 10 days,” Nguyen tells VOA in an email interview. “Their reason for my temporary imprison(ment) is ‘abusing democratic  freedom infringe upon national benefits.’”

After 10 days and no charges filed, Nguyen was released, but warned about continuing her blog. Despite that, she kept writing – posting her discontents with the government and its land policies. Since then she’s had police stationed outside her home, her landlord and employer have been pressured to fire her, she’s seen her family and friends harassed, and spent more time in jail.

Mother Mushroom says she, too, has noticed a marked increase in the level of harassment directed at her and her online colleagues. “Beside Dieu Cay and AnhBa SG, many young Catholic bloggers  are still in jail,” she writes.

“I think that they are warning the others have to be careful when using blog to speak out the idea about the Communist Party’s policy. Being a Vietnamese blogger, it looks like playing an easy and hard game. It will be fine if you just write about the daily simple life. However, you should be arrested at any time if you step over the ‘sensitive areas.’ I still keep writing because it made me feel free in my mind, at least. And the most important thing, we do not feel human if we don’t have the right to speak our mind.”

Nguyen is free at the moment, but acknowledges, amid the current crackdown, that she might be next to be imprisoned. Asked why “Mother Mushroom” keeps writing, she writes simply “Who will speak if you don’t?”

Fighting a Losing Battle?

“Clearly the activists recognize that they’re pushing the edge and they’re potentially facing long prison terms if they push too hard,” says Human Rights Watch’s Phil Robertson:

“But when you talk to them, they’ll say very clearly ‘Look, I’ve done nothing wrong. This is my right to speak out.’ And in fact, they’re right. Vietnam has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which clearly contains an Article 19 guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression. So by saying ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ they’re not backing off on this, and the government is just forced to continue to tilt after these activists, to chase them and harass them, and ultimately is continuing to imprison them.”

Early in her term at the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called freedom of online expression a basic human right, and pledged the Obama administration would do everything possible to lift the new “digital Iron Curtain” that was falling on various nations around the world. But critics say that since then, little has been done to help, while the situation in countries like Vietnam has grown only worse.

“In the old days…everyone was singing from the same page, and that’s that we were going to advocate for human rights and religious freedom around the world no matter where it would be,” laments Congressman Wolf. “That’s really what has to be done now, but that’s the exact opposite of what’s being done today.”

With all the other foreign policy issues at stake in the U.S. presidential election this year, online freedom of speech and the persecution of Vietnamese bloggers isn’t likely to rate very high. But that’s not to say there isn’t hope.

Columbia University professor Anne Nelson recently traveled to Vietnam, and wrote of her impressions:

“We can’t underestimate the suffering — to say nothing of the nuisance — inflicted by Vietnam’s cyber-cop crackdowns. But at the same time, it appears they’re fighting a losing battle. Vietnam’s media audience is moving online rapidly, partly because they are constantly learning new techniques for outmaneuvering the authorities — and partly because the Communist Party’s traditional news media have failed to hold on to their audience and advertising base.”

As in neighboring China, Vietnam is seeking to have it both ways: expanding access to the web and wiring the nation for the future while limiting what its citizens can do and say online. It’s a tricky balance, and one technology is constantly shifting.

In the meantime, somewhere in Vietnam, Dieu Cay sits in a prison cell, awaiting his fate.

The Battles To Keep Iran’s Web Up And Running

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

It’s no secret the Iranian government doesn’t much care for the Internet. At least, when it comes to their own citizens.

While maintaining its oil and financial industries’ links to the rest of the world via the Internet, Tehran continues to boast about creating it’s own “Halal Internet”, a one-nation-only intra-net that would cut off most of its population from the World Wide Web. “Aimed at Muslims on a ethical and moral level,” says Deputy Minister for Economic Affairs Ali Agha Mohammad, the Iran-only intranet would prevent all but the most web-savvy Iranians from accessing any website not based there.

There is precedent: North Korea operates what it calls the “Kwangmyong”, a nation-wide computer network that keeps its citizens safely confined within a tiny network controlled entirely by Pyongyang. But North Korea is a vastly different society, and one that has never had relatively free (if occasionally restricted) access to the entirety of the World Wide Web.  Iran’s population is young, tech-smart and blog-crazy; approximately 30 million Iranians surf the web daily. That’s a population unlikely to quietly accept being unplugged from the Internet.

But this week, Iran might have begun trying to do just that.

“They are afraid of any kind of demonstration.”

Graphic images of recent fall-off of Iranian web traffic (Courtesy: Tor)

Last week, analysts began tracking a significant drop in Internet traffic from Iran connecting to the rest of the web. Most of that traffic, writes Joe Brodkin at the excellent Ars Technica, involved security or encryption protocols, such as the “HTTPS” secure connection, or the SSL and TLS encryption layers that can cloak a user’s identity. For years Iranians have used these and other anonymizing services like Tor or Freegate* to evade Tehran’s censorship of certain parts of the web.

But as Thomas Erdbrink wrote recently in the Washington Post, many of those services have now stopped working. “When it sporadically returns, speeds are so excruciatingly slow that sites such as Facebook and Balatarin.com – which evaluates unofficial news and rumors in Farsi — become unusable,” he writes. As of this writing (Feb. 17, 3 hours UTC), web traffic from Iran appears to be bouncing back.

A quick check shows Iran continues to block some sites (voanews.com, unsurprisingly, among them, as are Facebook and Twitter.) Others, such as Google, remain unblocked, but only as long as the web user isn’t using any security-enhanced tools.

“They have invariably messed with HTTPS,” says Ken Berman, who heads up Information Systems and Technology for the International Broadcasting Bureau (and the parent agency of VOA.)  “HTTPS was shut down for almost a week. Even banking systems were down last Thursday till Sunday.”

Iran watchers noted the timing of the traffic squeeze – centering around Feb. 14. Last year that day, known as Bahman 25 in Iran, saw wide-scale protests in Iranian cities. Those protests were organized in part by bloggers, wanting to voice solidarity with the so-called “Arab Spring” protesters in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt.

This year, bloggers had hoped to mount similar demonstrations. But they were unable to communicate, largely because the web was largely useless. One Iranian blogger, Dara 1390, posted (in translation)

“Without any doubt the February 14th demonstrations are the reason why the government has interrupted the internet. They are afraid of any kind of demonstration in the streets. We do not know how people will react on February 14 but the regime is making itself ready for the day.”

This year Feb. 14 came and went without any major protests. The Iranian opposition group at Kaleme.com posted that security forces were out in heavy numbers in Tehran, leaving Azadi Square “…surrounded by security forces as well as special protection and special guards.” For the moment, the police have left the streets and web appears to be running again – if slowly.

So was this a crackdown to smother protests, a dry run for the national intranet, or something else? And whatever the answer, what can be done if (more like when) this happens again?

“An ace up our sleeves.”

Web encryption is very much a cat and mouse game: the encryptors develop some new technique to evade blocks, the censors respond and refine their techniques to counter the encryptors, and the encryptors implement a new new technique. Round and round, each side tries to keep a step ahead of the other in a game that never ends but always escalates.

Iranian journalism students at work at an Internet cafe (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

The Tor Project eludes the censors by wrapping an individual’s web activities in layers of benign activity, routing traffic through a global volunteer network of what they call “bridges.” Tor’s encryption is considered among the best available, but last week, Iran figured out how to block it. Within a day, Tor fired back.

“We’ve long had an ace up our sleeves for this exact moment in the arms race but it’s perhaps come while the User Interface edges are a bit rough still,” they posted on their blog. It’s complicated, and still somewhat obscure – perhaps the reason why Tor called this new workaround “Obfsproxy”, short for for “Obscured Bridge Proxy.”

Although still in rough testing, Tor says its new obfsproxy bridge is currently undetectable by Iranian censors. Data seems to bear that out; while large chucks of the Internet remain blocked in Iran, users there are once again able to reach the outside world via Tor. For the time being.

Of course, Tehran’s cyber-censors will respond, probably very soon. But Tor is just one of many privacy and encryption solutions, and each of them will keep Iranian censors busy with new upgrades and techniques.  They key, say encryption coders, is keeping as many Internet bridges outside the target country open as long as possible.

With the approaching elections and rising tensions in the Persian Gulf, it’s a sure bet Iranian authorities won’t be relaxing their Internet censorship anytime soon. However, points out the IBB’s Ken Burman, there are limits to what they can do.  Shutting down the Internet – as Egypt learned – is not a long-term option, says Berman:

“The Iranian public will not tolerate it, when it affects banking connection, a member of Parliament’s personal communications, and the business community.  It is really a balancing game whereby the regime continues to experiment with how much filtering they can introduce before the elite personally are affected and protest.  As stated, during recent https shut down even some of the members of the parliament voiced concern.”

At least for now, the Iranian regime has decided not to burn down the bridges to the rest of the Internet. How much traffic is allowed to cross is another matter altogether.

*Full disclosure: VOA and Freegate have worked together in the past, and continue to do so, on a variety of anti-censorship privacy and encryption tools.

Twitter’s New Policy And Debate About Online Speech

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

The announcement caught many Internet analysts off guard.

Late last week, on January 26th, the micro-blogging site Twitter said it was implementing changes that would allow it to withhold content from specific nations upon request. In other words, if a government asked, Twitter could block certain tweets or users on a nation-by-nation status.

“We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld,” the company wrote on its Twitter blog:

“We will evaluate each request before taking any action. Any content we do withhold in response to such a request is clearly identified to users in that country as being withheld. And we are now able to make that content available to users in the rest of the world.”

Initial reaction was rapid and heated. Al Jazeera’s assessment of “Twitter’s censorship plan” summed up much of the criticism, while bloggers such as Jacqueline Drayer accused the San Francisco-based firm of caving in to authoritarian governments in hopes of boosting its corporate profits. The hashtag #twittercensorship became a hot trending topic (of all places on Twitter) and organizers suggested a tweeting blackout on January 28th in protest. Russian journalist Oleg Kozyrev expressed concern about free speech during that nation’s upcoming presidential elections, and elsewhere the government of Thailand, which maintains tight control over web use, endorsed the idea.

For free speech advocates, it seemed at first like a bad development. But soon, some of the criticism began to moderate, and then give way to a new question. Namely, is Twitter’s new policy actually more pro-free speech?

Censorship or Transparency?

“Twitter did not do a very good job of communicating this change in policy,” notes Eva Galperin with the online rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Twitter has taken down tweets in compliance with valid court orders for years. Now, instead of taking down the tweet for everyone, they are able to block the tweet in the country where the court order originated. The net result is less censorship, not more,” she says.

It may be hard at first to see how a policy of selective censorship could be considered pro-free speech. There are, however, several points to consider:

• Twitter has always had the ability to block tweets or users, which it has exercised on rare occasions, usually for claims of copyright infringement. The difference is that those blocks were global, meaning specific comments or users were completely wiped off its site. Under its new policy, government requests to block information will apply only to that nation; users elsewhere will still be able to view the offending material. That’s small comfort to those whose feeds are being censored, but with the material available to the rest of the world, blocked tweets may eventually seep back into the blocking country.
• With approximately 1 billion tweets every three days, reading through all of Twitter is the Internet equivalent of sipping water from a fire hose. Consider what needs to happen: a government must comb through Twitter to find a specific tweet and prepare an official request, that request will be reviewed by Twitter’s legal staff, and only when it’s been deemed legitimate will the material be pulled. That’s a span of days in a medium that changes by the second. So by the time a tweet is yanked, most likely everyone interested in its content will have already seen it.
• It is almost comically easy to evade Twitter’s nation-by-nation blocks, as Twitter itself lays out in its online Help Center. By default, a users’ national status is determined by their ISP; however users can simply change their national status manually in their profiles.Thus if someone on Twitter sees that an account or message has been blocked, they can just update their profile and view the blocked post.

“In this particular policy, Twitter has done everything it can do to help free-speech advocates around the world except deliver coffee and bagels in the morning,” writes University of North Carolina technology professor Zeynep Tufekci. “This is a model of how Internet companies should behave.  I hope Twitter practices this policy as it outlined, and practices maximum transparency and minimum compliance with restrictive laws.”

To be clear, not everyone is comforted. Critics still worry that any trend toward less free speech online only empowers those seeking more censorship, and there’s no telling how – or how often – Twitter will use this new power.

By law, Twitter will have to comply only with legitimate blockage requests that come from nations where it actually has a physical presence. So, for example, in the case of Russia, Twitter has no offices on Russian territory, so technically it will be able to ignore any requests from Moscow if it wishes. However, Russian authorities always have the option of blocking Twitter completely, as several other nations have tried to do.

In the end, despite the initial ruckus caused by the announcement, little has changed. Twitter, like every other Internet firm, can remove content if it chooses, and nation states can try and remove websites, if they choose.

Says Galperin,”I would advise Twitter users all over the world to hold governments accountable for their Internet censorship policies.”

Just What, If Anything, Did Wednesday’s Protest Achieve?

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

UPDATE: Friday, January 20, 2012: Not content to leave the battle un-joined, the hacker group Anonymous stepped into the SOPA fray Thursday evening by launching a massive denial of service attack on several SOPA supporters, including Universal Music, the RIAA and MPAA. Also targeted was the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Copyright Office; although those attacks are likely to have been prompted more by Thursday’s shutdown of the website “MegaUpload” by Justice officials. AnonOps claims that 5,635 individual machines were used to launch the coordinated attacks, the largest single effort yet by Anonymous.  As we’ve noted before, when there’s a big story that has anything to do with the Internet, expect Anonymous to step in.

Whether the protests and hacks changed minds isn’t clear; however it has changed the bills’ fortunes on Capitol Hill. Friday Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced he would shelve SOPA for the moment, while in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) cancelled a vote on PIPA.

It had been building for days. “Twitter, join the protest,” tweeted Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the mega-successful “I Can Has Cheezburger” websites. “Go Google for blacking out logo!” read another.

For weeks Huh had been using his Twitter account and other means to encourage Internet companies of all stripes to join in a one day protest against two pieces of legislation currently before Congress. “SOPA”, for Stop Online Piracy Act, and “PIPA”, the “Protect IP Act” were designed, say its authors, to crack down on overseas copyright piracy by strengthening the U.S. government’s hand in who they could prosecute and remove from the web.

Introduced more than a year ago, the legislation has the strong support of major entertainment companies such as Sony or the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA. But it has equally strong opposition, centered mostly among civil libertarians, online freedom activists and Internet-based firms like Google and Wikipedia.

This back and forth has put the bills into a sort of legislative limbo – not scheduled for floor or committee markup, but not officially dead, either. So beginning early January, Huh and others proposed a protest that would grab headlines, and perhaps knock SOPA’s advocates back on their heels. Their Internet sites would go dark for 24-hours, replacing their usual content with a stark message warning about the dangers of the bills, and urging users to contact their members of Congress.

One of Ben Huh's many tweets about the dangers of SOPA

So what happened? To start, Wikipedia went dark – kind of. The online compendium of facts large to obscure was unavailable for 24 hours, offering instead a shadowy black-and-white message on why PIPA and SOPA would censor services like theirs. It was billed as a total blackout, but as mobile phone and tablet users quickly found out, there was a still a back door open for full access from mobile devices.  Ben Huh’s “I Can Haz Cheezburger?” family of 54 websites of lolcats and goofy pranks all featured a large shield that could only be removed by clicking through to a site warning about the bills, and urging users to sign letters of protest. (Once clicked, however, all the lolcats were again available.) Google slapped a large black box over its logo, although its search function continued to work, and online magazine Wired blacked out all the text on its site, which, however, became visible when you moused-over it.

“Boing Boing”, “Firefox”, “Tumblr”; these and many more sites limited services and featured ominous warnings about the bills. But many other sites did not participate. Twitter refused to join the protest, calling such a single-issue stoppage of a global company “foolish.” Amazon.com didn’t make mention of the bills either – but this perhaps was less surprising as retailers, in general, would not be as threatened under PIPA and SOPA than over content-rich sites. Even some editors of Wikipedia complained that the blackout could threaten Wikipedia’s reputation as a non-biased source of information. “My main concern is that it puts the organization in the role of advocacy,” editor Robert Lawton told the Associated Press.  “Before we know it, we’re blacked out because we want to save the whales.”

Screen grab from Wired's front page featuring SOPA-inspired blackouts

In the end, the protest garnered headlines but changed few minds. Ebay, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Twitter and others still oppose SOPA, while NBC Universal, Comcast, 3M, Walmart, the RIAA and others still support it. And the larger question now is: what will opponents do if and when the bills actually start moving again in Congress? A one day blackout is one thing; shutting access for an indefinite period of time will be a much harder, and costlier, sell.

For his part, SOPA author Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) has introduced a “manager’s amendment” – which you can read here – which represents a modification of the original bill, and one that, for parliamentary reasons, Rep. Smith may begin to move through committee as early as February. In the meantime, SOPA & PIPA proponents, such as the Creative Alliance, have announced they will soon launch an advertising campaign about the benefits of the bills.

And Ben Huh isn’t the only one taking his campaign to Twitter. SOPA supporter Rupert Murdoch tweeted yesterday: “Seems blogosphere has succeeding in terrorizing many senators and congressmen who previously committed. Politicians all the same.”

Stay tuned.

The Internet and Social Media Snap at Putin

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

There are few things worse for a politician than losing an election. One of those is being mocked.

Just ask Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.  In late November, two weeks before parliamentary elections, Putin decided to appear on live television to introduce a wrestling match. It was just the type of stage-managed, machismo-heavy photo opportunity that had been typical for Putin.  But there was an unexpected problem: the crowd.

As soon as Putin stepped into the ring, a chorus of boos rose from the crowd. Putin continued, but as video of the event shows, every time he tried to speak louder, the audience raised the volume of raucous hoots.

Embarrassing, but manageable. After all, the Kremlin has effectively been censoring stories on Russian radio and TV for years. But there was another unexpected problem; this time, it was the Internet.

The “Putin boo” clip went viral online, popping up and spreading via social networks faster than the Kremlin could swat it down. Satirists stepped forward and began to mock the Prime Minister as a frightened little boy, while critics seemed to lose fear of the heavy-handed Putin.

And things would only get worse for Mr. Putin from there, due in large measure to the Internet.

Putin’s “Power Vertical” Challenged

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev (AP)

When he first won office last decade, Putin spoke of creating a “power vertical” – meaning integrated and functional control of all of the tools of modern politics, including political parties, finances, the courts and the media. Coming on the heels of the chaotic Yeltsin years, it was neither surprising nor unwelcome.

In the years since, Putin and his associates have worked to consolidate power within the Kremlin by punishing opponents, muting dissent and tightly controlling the message. So complete was his power vertical that few analysts predicted his United Russia party would actually earn less than 50% of the vote on December 4. Fewer still predicted the swelling outrage over the questionable vote and the resulting mass protests across Russia, and nobody foresaw the entry of billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov as challenger to Putin in next March’s presidential election. Very suddenly, things appear to be unraveling.

Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Discontent has been growing in Russia for several years, sharpening its focus with President Dmitri Medvedev’s recent decision seemingly to hand power back to Putin. And it’s hard to imagine any way that Putin will not win election against the untested and unpopular Prokhorov. Still, there’s no doubting it’s a different world for Putin and United Russia, and that’s due in some measure to the web.

The “Power Horizontal” Speaks Up

The day after last weekend’s massive street protests, President Medvedev posted this on his Facebook page:

“Under the Constitution, citizens of Russia have freedom of speech and freedom of Assembly. People have a right to express their position that they did yesterday. Well, that all took place within the framework of the law. I do not agree with any slogans or statements made at rallies. Nevertheless, I have been instructed to check all messages with polling stations regarding compliance with the legislation on elections.”

A fairly bland comment, but one nonetheless that prompted an outpouring of bile and anger at the President. Over 16,000 comments have been left so far, very few of them positive. In fact, it appears Medvedev’s effort to reach out online has bitten him on the hand, re-energizing those who mistrust their government. As a social media tactic, it was flat footed…just like much of the Kremlin’s dealing with the web. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t consider it a serious threat.

Russian blogger Aleksei Navalny (Photo: Alexey Yushenkov/wikipedia)

Among the most influential protest leaders to emerge isn’t a politician, but jailed blogger Aleksei Navalny, whose LiveJournal blog attracts upward of a million hits a day. As VOA’s James Brooke notes in “Russia Watch“ Navalny has remained a powerful mouthpiece for the growing discontent, first describing United Russia as “the party of crooks and thieves” in a phrase that has become a rallying cry (all this while he has been sitting in prison). Our colleague Brian Whitmore, of RFE/RL’s “The Power Vertical” blog writes:

“Putin famously created Russia’s power vertical, the rigid top-down power structure that brought a semblance of order at the expense of the democratic process. But he also, unwittingly perhaps, created a ‘power horizontal’ — a highly educated, prosperous, and wired middle class that is now clamoring for its rights. This Other Russia has shown its face to the world — and it isn’t going away any time soon.”

The BBC, among others, reports of a flood of fake Twitter traffic aimed at drowning out Russians tweeting with each other about past and future protests, traffic that seems to be coming from a Russian botnet. And on Wednesday this week, the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said that the Internet must be subject to “reasonable regulation” – a clear signal that Moscow is tiring of criticism coming from the web and intends to crack down.

Free Speech of Slacktivism?

It’s unlikely a blogger can bring down a government, or that social networks like Facebook or VKontakte can uproot entrenched power structures by themselves. That didn’t happen in the so-called Arab Spring, and it won’t happen in Russia.

But what they did accomplish in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere was to help organize protest and dissent into a more coherent, focused effort. Egypt’s largest mass protests happened only after authorities shut down access to the Internet, but they wouldn’t have taken that step if the web didn’t present a clear challenge to their authority. “Slacktivism” – the casual use of the web to register displeasure but accomplish little else – may make a discontented voter feel better momentarily, but it won’t change the cause of the discontent.

Nobody – or nobody here at least – is predicting what may happen in Russia. But as we’ve noted before, the web takes as much as it gives, and autocrats can use it just as effectively as protesters.

Luke Allnutt, over at RFE/RL’s must-read “Tangled Web” blog, writes that the Kremlin is growing increasingly savvy about how to deal with the Internet, turning what appears to be free speech it to its own advantage:

“For a regime under pressure, addressing some of your key constituents (many of them middle-class and tech-savvy) on one of their key platforms, Facebook, and allowing them to vent seems to be a savvy way of tweaking the release valves. It presents the impression at least that the Russian authorities are listening to the people’s concerns. The Kremlin has always been as concerned with narrative-shaping as it has been with crude censorship.”

Vladimir Putin has learned the hard way that the Internet isn’t always your friend. He may also be learning how to make it an ally.