Deeplinks Blog posts about Content Blocking
According to a report from Ma’an News published today, the Palestinian Authority has ordered the blocking of websites belonging to eight news outlets critical of President Mahmoud Abbas. The report states that technicians at PalTel—the largest ISP in the West Bank—tweaked their proxy server and web cache daemon to block the sites, while other ISPs are using similar setups. The blocking is inconsistent across ISPs, with at least one failing to block certain sites on the list.
The blocked sites—which Ma’an discovered with the help of a new project, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, founded by Jacob Appelbaum and Arturo Filasto—include the following sites:
Over the past decade, and particularly in the past year, media and civil society have had success through naming and shaming companies acting as “repression’s little helper”: U.S. and E.U. companies who have helped authoritarian countries censor the Internet and surveil their citizens with sophisticated technology. Today, EFF published a whitepaper outlining our suggestions for how companies selling surveillance and filtering technologies can avoid assisting repressive regimes.
In that vein, the newly-amended Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), just passed by a House Sub-Committee, while far from perfect, is an important step toward protecting human rights and free expression online.
47% of All Internet Users Experience Censorship, Says OpenNet Initiative
According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI)--a joint initiative of Harvard University, the University of Toronto and the SecDev Group--47% of the world's Internet users experience some form of fractured Internet. ONI bases their research on technical testing in 74 countries, 42 of which the researchers found engage in "some form of filtering of content." Though the aforementioned statistic (47%, or 960 million Internet users) includes countries like Morocco that engage only in "selective" blocking of websites, 31% of the world's Internet users live in countries that engage in "substantial" or "pervasive" online censorship.
Vietnam Aiming to be Enemy #1 (of the Internet)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has signed on to a joint statement with a global coalition of organizations to demand the Pakistani Ministry of Information Technology, the Information Communication Technology Research & Development Fund, and the Prime Minister, to publicly commit to stop all efforts to mandate a national Internet filtering and blocking system.
United Kingdom
On Monday, a joint Commons and Lords committee published a report urging Google and other sites to take proactive steps to monitor their search results in order to protect the privacy of certain individuals. As a result, a committee of Parliamentary members has begun pushing for legislation to force search engines and social networks to censor themselves. The committee, set up by the prime minister, arose out of increasing controversies and injunctions to protect people’s online image.
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