China’s Overeager American Censors

Published on Forbes.com
June 20, 2008

Practically every U.S.-owned search engine has caved to the Chinese government’s demands that they censor political Web sites in China. But none of them seem to agree on just what sites need censoring. Google, at times, blocks Chinese users’ access to the BBC while Yahoo! permits it. Yahoo! sometimes filters out Voice of America–Google doesn’t. And Microsoft removes entries from the Chinese version of Wikipedia from its results while every other search engine includes them–even the dominant Chinese search engine Baidu.com.

Confused? So are the search engines themselves, says Nart Villeneuve, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Open Net Initiative. In a study released on Wednesday, he points to the wild variation in search engine censorship in China as a sign that the Chinese government isn’t handing companies a uniform list of censored sites but leaving them to guess at which sites are contraband.
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In a congressional hearing before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on Wednesday, ONI director Ron Deibert held up the study as evidence of the complicity of U.S. firms in China’s control of the media. Worse, he argued, they seemed to be doing more than China’s dictators required to repress information.

“This kind of self-selection raises the prospect of anticipatory over-blocking, in which content not officially blocked by China ends up being filtered because of the eagerness of search engines,” Deibert said.

Read the entire article here

Read the my testimony to US Congress here

Read Nart’s research paper here

Testimony to US Congress

I am testifying to US Congress today, at the US China Economic and Security Review Commission. My testimony covers the research of the OpenNet Initiative on Internet censorship practices in China, the range and effectiveness of circumvention methods, including our own tool — psiphon, and the role of US and Western corporations in aiding and supporting Internet censorship in China. My full testimony can be downloaded here.

Access Denied Review

Published in the Guardian

Seth Finkelstein has written a thoughtful review of the OpenNet Initiative’s new book Access Denied in the Guardian. Seth says ” It’s a primer in methods and an atlas of studies. The first sections provide an analytical framework. Then prohibitions are examined across dozens of countries. The results show that far from the earlier idea of the internet destroying nations, nations are, arguably, domesticating the internet (or at least trying hard).” He concludes that “Access Denied will certainly become a standard reference. But it’s sadly not clear whether it will be more as a foundation for anti-censorship efforts – or as an initial chronicle of how visions of freedom turned into realities of control.”

Review of Access Denied + BBC on psiphon

Reviewed in BBC.co.uk

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering challenges the long-standing assumption that the internet is an unfettered space where citizens from around the world can freely communicate and mobilise. In fact, the book makes it clear that the scope, scale and sophistication of net censorship are growing.

“There’s been a conventional wisdom or myth that the internet was immune from state regulation,” says Ronald Deibert, one of the book’s editors.

“What we’re finding is that states that were taking a hands-off approach to the internet for many years are now finding ways to intervene at key internet choke points, and block access to information.”

Mr. Deibert heads The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. The Lab, along with Harvard Law School, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, has spent the last five years testing internet access in some 40 countries.

The full review is here

There is also a short story about Internet censorship in China, with a mention of psiphon here

BBC The World Today and CBC The World at Six

There were two radio reports about various aspects of the Citizen Lab’s research and development activities yesterday.

Clark Boyd did a report about the OpenNet Initiative’s new book, Access Denied on BBC’s The World Today.

I have uploaded a version of that broadcast locally here

Additionally, Eli Glasner did a report on the use of our new psiphon service with respect to ongoing events in Tibet and elsewhere, for CBC’s The World at Six.

I have uploaded a version of that broadcast locally here as well.

Eli’s story is notable for, among other things, the participation of our friend and colleague from Privaterra Robert Guerra. And it looks like there is an online print version of the story here

CBC Search Engine, Nature, and Digital Nation

Some recent items on psiphon, the ONI’s new volume, Access Denied, and others to report:

I did an interview with Jesse Brown of CBC’s search engine on psiphon. The full interview, including Mike Hull’s psiphon theme song, is available here
(Note: The interview with me starts at 16 minutes, 15 seconds into the podcast).

Bruce Schneier wrote a review of the ONI’s new volume Access Denied in the recent issue of Nature. A pdf of the review can be downloaded here.

Lastly, I recently had the pleasure of appearing on The Digital Age with James Goodale. The full interview has been posted on google video here.

Netxplorateur Award for Psiphon at French Senate

Yesterday we at the psiphon project were delighted to be given the Grand Prix at the Netxplorateur Forum in the Senate of France.

From their website:
La Commission du Forum Netxplorateur a décerné son Grand Prix 2008 au professeur Ron Deibert, directeur du Citizen Lab à l’université de Toronto, pour Psiphon. Ce logiciel visant à contourner la censure sur Internet a été choisi parmi 100 initiatives Web et numériques du monde entier.

“Le but de Psiphon est d’honorer la promesse originale d’Internet comme un lieu de libre expression et d’accès universel aux informations,” commenta le Professeur Deibert, “Nous sommes honorés de recevoir une distinction aussi prestigieuse.

La censure du Net est devenu un problème mondial majeur : des dizaines de gouvernements bloquent l’accès aux sites d’information, des droits de l’homme et d’opposition politique, ainsi qu’aux nouvelles médias d’expression comme les blogs et les vidéos en streaming.”

Congratulations to the entire psiphon team!

Access Denied review: IEEE Spectrum

“In the dot-com heyday of the ’90s and early 2000s…there was a myth that the Internet can’t be controlled,” says Ronald Deibert, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “There was some mysterious, magical property associated with it that will route around censorship.” The most exhaustive study yet of Internet censorship—Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, published this month by the MIT Press—pretty much disproves that notion.

From IEEESpectrum