Citizen Lab has come across a database, which has thousands of words, that are considered to be politically sensitive. Whenever a Skype message contains any of these words, it gets automatically blocked. The database on which these words are stored also stores the personal information of the users, including their IP address, username and phone number. The database is insecure and hence is publicly available, which is a blatant breach of security for the users.

According to Citizen Lab, there is a surveillance system in place, which selects and stores messages transmitted through online telephones, and text messages. The messages that get deleted may contain some commonly used words such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, Voice of America, milk powder, Olympic games, earthquake, Tiananmen and SARS. The database reportedly contains over 1,50,000 messages, and it is possible to identify all the senders and recipients by entering just a username.

The internet service provider Skype, which runs its services in China in a joint venture with the Chinese company TOM online, under the name TOM-Skype, says that they are aware of the filtering of data by the Chinese authorities, but are concerned by reports about the resultant breach of security.

Citizen Lab has enquired whether or not Tom online and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese authorities and if so to what extent.

President of Skype, Josh Silverman has said that it is common knowledge that that Tom Online follows procedures to meet the local laws and regulations, such as monitoring and blocking messages containing certain words, which the Chinese government disapproves of. However according to policy these messages are to be deleted. They will have to investigate to know if the policy has been changed to allow storage of these messages and why.

In a bid to retaliate, some Chinese citizens demonstrated against and decided to boycott the French hypermarket chain Carrefour in China from May 8 to 24, the time during which the Olympics will be held in Beijing. Soon after that, it was found that searches carried out on Google.cn for the word “Carrefour” did not show any results even though Google.com has over 6 million results on the subject and they are available in Hong Kong, which is outside China’s national network.

Searches for Carrefour on Google China bring up a message that informs us that ‘this information cannot be accessed and one should return to google.cn for other information’. News and video searches for Carrefour have also been blanked out.

Censorship of domains is quite a common practice in China, but censorship of keywords is something relatively new. It is believed, that if this censorship has been carried out by Google under instructions from the Chinese government, it is more likely to have been ordered with a view to appease the agitating public rather than to hurt Carrefour per se.

While the Chinese government encourages a show of patriotism, it is not in their best interests to encourage huge hordes of angry protesters, as this may eventually harm their own set up – they intend to use the Olympics to project an image of tolerance and non-dictatorialism to the world.

In the past Google has often cooperated with the Chinese government and agreed to impose a degree of self-censorship. For example, some satellite imagery is not available on Google Maps, and a number of domains relating to human rights organizations are missing from the search index. Anti-government sources have also been removed from Google News.

It is not absolutely certain, though, whether this ban is from Google or the Chinese government. It is quite possible that the Chinese have developed some system to block specific search queries, perhaps based on the specific URL returned for individual queries. At present, neither part has commented on the ban.

Twitter, the fast growing social networking and micro blogging site, has been banned in Dubai. The official reason given is that its content is not consistent with the religious, moral and political values of the region. The event however, seems to have been triggered by equally interesting event…

James Karl Buckley, a student of journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, was arrested last week by the Egyptian law enforcers for photographing some noisy demonstrators. Buckley who had access to Twitter through his mobile phone, typed in the word “ARRESTED” and sent it out through the ubiquitous mobile messaging service of Twitter

Buckley’s message reached all his contacts in the U.S.A. and many anti-government bloggers in Egypt, on whom his journalism project is based. The next day he not only had an Egyptian lawyer hired by UC Berkeley, but also the support of the U.S. Embassy, and he walked out a free man in no time.

Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Twitter are gaining tremedous popularity in the East as a vehicle for repressed individuals to broadcast their plight and gain international sympathy. Protesters in Tibet used YouTube to show the world Chinese governmental heavy-handedness and an individual in Egypt used Twitter to draw international attention to himself.

These social media websites are turning into a real threat to the oppressors. It is just easier for certain governments to ban such sites in order to prevent the spread of any anti-government propaganda, or a threat to their sovereignty.

Internet users in Dubai saw a notice saying “Site Blocked” when they tried accessing http://twitter.com. Interestingly enough, the government was also polite enough to say “If you think this site should not be blocked, please visit the Feedback Form available on our site.” One does wonder how safe anyone who questions such a government’s motive, by filling in this feedback form, would actually be?

Micronet, one of the local ISP’s in Pakistan sent out an email to all users, apologising for the ban on YouTube. User jk on the Pakistaniat blog shares the email contents:

Dear Valued Customer:

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (www.pta.gov.pk) has directed all ISPs of the country to block access to www.youtube.com web site for containing blasphemous web content/movies.

The site would remain blocked till further orders from PTA. Meanwhile, Internet users can write to youtube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable the authorities to order un-blocking of this web site.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Best Regards

Manager
Technical Assistance Center
Micronet Broadband Pvt. Ltd.
Islamabad

This isn’t the first time Pakistan has tried to block Internet access and messed up while doing so. Back in September 2006 the government of Pakistan blocked access to BlogSpot, the then most popular blog platform for Pakistanis. This was later reported to be just a technical glitch. Then in March 2007 the national ISP, Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), ended up blocking access to a large number of popular websites including Google, Microsoft.com, BBC, CNN and Yahoo! in an attempt to follow the Pakistani Supreme Court’s order to filter all websites containing “blasphemous” content.

Religious reasons cited by the government, however, seem to be a ruse to cover-up a political agenda. President Musharraf has been accused of exploiting the religious sentiment of the nation to suppress a number of videos uploaded on YouTube that apparently show evidence of vote rigging in the country’s recent election.

What might have been just another case of censorship in the state that went largely unnoticed outside Pakistan, became an international even when the resulting ban on YouTube got propagated outside Pakistani ISPs, blocking users from accessing the website in most countries across the world.

A post on the Wired Blog explains that Pakistan Telecom complied with the government directive by changing the Border Gateway Protocol entry for YouTube – essentially updating its local internet address book for where YouTube’s section of the internet is. The idea was to direct its internet users to a page that said YouTube was blocked.

Unfortunately, the ISP announced the new route to upstream providers. The upstream providers didn’t verify the new route but accepted it and then passed it along, cascading the bad address around the net, until most everyone using the net on Sunday would have been directed to the Pakistani’s network block. The blunder not only took down YouTube, but also choked the Pakistani ISP, which was quickly deluged with millions of requests for videos.

However she seems to have quite a logical reason behind this diktat. She has found that most of her students just reproduce the same information that they find on the search engine and online encyclopedia.

In truth, most citizens in developed countries have totally surrendered to the wonders of technology, but in the process have given up using and developing their own minds to understand and analyze. It looks almost as though students pay good money and attend universities only to learn how to use Google!

The result of this blind allegiance to the wisdom of websites like Wikipedia is that students come up with average and humdrum results on their research projects; whereas what is required of students at the university level is the ability to study various issues and then think for themselves and come to their own conclusion regarding the issues at hand.

Prof Brabazon believes that it is upto the educational institutions to prevent students from having a sheep mentality where everybody blindly follows the internet. Speaking to a local newspaper she said, “”I ban my students from using Google, Wikipedia and other websites like that. I give them a reading list to work from and expect them to cite a good number of them in any work they produce.”

It is convenient for lecturers and professors to allow their students to just use easily accessible online resources for the projects assigned to them, but that is not what they are paid to do. It is the job of each teacher to impart knowledge to and guide students to think for themselves and experience things first hand rather than rely solely on computers.

Professor Brabazon personally forbids her students to use search engines for their projects. While this does seem rather drastic, it is really worthwhile wondering if she may be right in doing so, as we seem to have become slaves to the world of technology; computers in particular.

The ads in question were part of a Christmas campaign by Pampered Passions. The ads, such as the one featured below show men about to “get some” in return for having bought sexy lingerie for their wives / girlfriends. The combination of topless male torsos and suggestive tag lines, though was far too much for the Google editors.

According to Google, “Only family-safe images will be approved. Images that are classified as non-family-safe or adult content are disapproved and will not run.” They further added that images that contains nudity or have a mature theme are a complete no-no.

View the ads banned by Google

It increasingly seems that Google is trying to play the role of an Internet nanny! The ad in question does not have any overt sexual tones or nudity. It is just a harmless campaign, which at most can be seen as a bit on the naughtier side. There is nothing illegal or offensive about the ads. However, Google being an American company seems to force American “values” down everyone’s throats.

We don’t need no moral police!

The move comes across as slightly ridiculous and prudish. If such content does not bother the audience and they are comfortable viewing it, then why is Google hell bent on being the moral police? In fact the stringent policies of Google have started to take an irksome note and have become a frequent occurrence.

This definitely polices the creative freedom of advertisers and the viewing freedom of consumers. In fact steps such as these inconvenience advertisers by compelling them to adopt other marketing strategies. Google shouldn’t try to force its own narrow mindedness on audiences worldwide. A more sensible approach would be to create editorial policies according to the culture and laws of individual countries that they operate in.