Following WSIS the U.N. "Internet Governance Forum" in Athens is in progress.

Kieren McCarthy has some coverage here



And a BBC blog is here.

The Observer :: Blog:

Google's soul-searching reflects a growing dilemma for all companies operating in countries and contexts where human rights are abused.

Some companies are now beginning to realise that to avoid the risk to their reputation of being seen to aid and abet repressive governments, they need to have in place comprehensive human rights policies.

The mistake that companies such as Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have made is to move into the lucrative Chinese market without understanding or addressing their impacts on human rights.

Aaron Glantz, OneWorld US:

- Executives at Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting Thursday turned down a request from the human rights group Amnesty International, which is demanding the world's most visited Web site stop censoring the Internet and referring dissidents to the Chinese government.

Amnesty is celebrating 45 years of activism by highlighting governments using the net to suppress dissent./.

An anonymous reader writes "Amnesty International has a new online campaign against governments which censor websites, monitor online communications, and persecute citizens who express dissent in blogs, emails, or chat-rooms. The website, Irrepressible.info contains a web-based petition (to be presented at a UN conference in November 2006) and also a downloadable web gadget which displays random excerpts of censored material on your own website."

Professor Deibert on the role of ONI in the campaign. The Observer is another partner in the campaign - just as the newspaper was 45 years ago . . .   more »

IFTF's Virtual China blog links to my post on the World Buddhist Forum & Internet Buddhism and highlights 'what is at stake in Virtual China'.

Civiblog partner Nepal Info continues to blog from Kathmandu, Nepal, as the current constitutional crisis unfolds . . BBC:

An alliance of opposition parties in Nepal has called for the biggest display of anti-monarchy protests in the capital, Kathmandu, on Tuesday, setting up a showdown with King Gyanendra.

Openflows has a thread that includes numerous backgrounder links largely focused on the ICT issues thrown up by the crisis.The BBC is also running special coverage on neighbouring Tibet:

As China prepares to open its first railway link to Tibet, the BBC News website looks at some of the dominant issues in this unique community.

A PBS backgrounder on Ultrareach, a software program designed for Chinese citizens to circumvent their government's Internet censorship: transcript.

Steven Mufson writes in the Wasington Post about the myopia of internet evangelists, a phrase coined by James Mulvenon

to describe those who cling to the belief that the Internet "leads to 'tulip' and 'orange' and every other possible color and flower of revolutions around the world."

Take China, for example. Sure, China is being gradually transformed by the Internet, although not in the way many the majority of observers would have predicted -

The Chinese Communist Party, long expected to be a victim of economic modernization and the transformative powers of technology, has instead been learning how to use those powers to its own ends. This isn'merely a matter of the widely publicized blocking of the Internet; the CCP has been learning how to use the Internet as a tool for surveillance.

In an interview with de Groene Amsterdammer's Richard de Boer [129(47) van 25 november 2005, pp.20-23.] I expressed frustration that media coverage of China's Internet experience focuses on state censorship (when it isn't breathless over the potential of 1 billion consumers logging on) at the expense of analysis of dataveillance:

"Westerse ngo's moeten begrijpen welke rol de staatssurveillance speelt in de onderdrukking van afwijkende meningen", zegt freelance onderzoeksconsultant Greg Walton: "De aan obsessie grenzende nadruk in het Westen op de Chinese internetcensuur leidt de aandacht af van complexere vraagstukken."

meanwhile China is itself transforming the Internet. China, the U.S., everyone is co-evolving within this framework. As I said in 2001,

The self-interested high-tech discourse promises that new information and telecommunication technologies are inherently democratic and will foster openness wherever they are used. China’s Golden Shield...debunks this myth. Technology is embedded in a social context and, in this report, it has been shown to bolster repression in a one-party state in the name of expanding markets and exponential profits.

U.S. corporate capitalism in the service of the security apparatus of Chinese communism ... baffled?!

Christopher R Hughes (reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) in oD on China's “socialist spiritual civilisation”:

The overall result is a peculiar globalisation of nationalism that allows some sense to be made of oxymoronic concepts like the “socialist market economy”. It also provides an ideological justification for the emergence of an elitist techno-nationalism appropriate for the current generation of leaders. This was systematically formulated as party orthodoxy when the theory of the “Three Represents” – coined by then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemim – was put alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory as an element of the party line at the Sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002. The Resurgence of Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era

How can China's security apparatus keep track of people in a country as vast as China?

By using much the same methods that the United States uses to track terrorist cells. Although the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program has attracted a lot of attention here, in China listening-in is an old habit. It's the way the NSA most likely identified the thousands of people it chose to listen in on -- through a program called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data -- that is the source of real hope for China's communist mandarins.

Can you still draw a line between China and U.S. agencies applying data mining to social control? MSNBC:

Holding the line at privacy invasions that “makes sense” is the most subtle of standards, a fine line that police, governments, and citizens will now try to walk in the post Sept. 11 world. Libertarian cries of absolute privacy sound empty these days, with the knowledge that Khalid al-Midhar and other plane hijackers exploited America’s lax security measures. At the same time, what’s to keep overzealous investigators from using the Anti-terrorism Act to create America’s version of Golden Shield? Sullivan, the techno-savvy police investigator, says the Supreme Court will play the crucial role in picking through those issues.

“The crux of the difference (between the U.S. and China) is the Supreme Court,” said Sullivan. “Ultimately they will decide what’s Constitutional and what’s not. We have the ability as U.S. citizens to cry foul. In China, citizens do not.”

WorldVoteNow & Aidworld are researching the infrastucture for a Global Human Referendum. They want to connect with individuals, groups, schools, institutions, organizations, administrations, countries and companies in every part of the world. They are especially interested in working with collaborators who want to participate in the GLOBAL E-VOTING SIMULATION. All that is required is a functioning internet connection and the desire to participate in the field test on May 15, 2006. To get involved with the World Vote Field Test, please contact the coordinating office in Madrid.

An expert team of researchers from the Public Policy Group of LSE has been appointed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as the independent reviewers of the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO). To participate in the GNSO Review, please visit http://www.icann-gnsoreview.org.

The GNSO plays a critical role in ICANN's policy development activities, particularly in relation to generic top level domains such as .com, .net, .info, .biz, .museum and, more recently, new top level domains such as .mobi and .travel. The review is an integral part of ICANN’s normal operational reviews and is part of its ongoing efforts to ensure maximum organizational transparency and efficiency.

This Review aims to survey awareness of ICANN's worldwide responsibilities and to find out if people, and particular public and private stakeholders, are satisfied with the accountability and transparency of GNSO's procedures. The review will take a number of forms including an online survey and in-depth face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders.

Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Professor of Political Science and chair of the Public Policy Group, will lead the review team. Commenting on LSE’s appointment to conduct the review, Professor Dunleavy said: 'We are delighted to have been appointed for this major piece of work which will inform the future direction and strategy of the global Internet community. Our approach will be to ask many people worldwide, through surveys and interviews, their views on the GNSO.'

ICANN is seeking broad participation in the Review, which is seen as critical to its success. 'ICANN and LSE are working closely together to ensure we gather as much relevant material as possible. Those wishing to participate in the review will be able to do so online, and during the upcoming international meeting taking place in Wellington, New Zealand, from 25-31 March,' said Paul Twomey, president and CEO of ICANN.

Michael Geist's weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC version, homepage version) looks back at last week's announcement of changes to the Chinese domain name system. While Chinese officials have clarified that this does not involve an alternate root, Geist argues that the developments are significant since they reinforce the mounting frustration with ICANN's failure to develop multilingual domain names. Moreover, China's ability to implement its own IDN system without ICANN support is likely to serve as a model for many other countries around the world.

The UN is building a new platform for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, The Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The mandate of the IGF is set out in Paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda. Mr. Nitin Desai, the Secretary-General's Special Advisor for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held consultations on the convening of the IGF in Geneva on 16-17 February. In advance of the event, the Internet Governance Project released a new discussion paper explaining how the Forum could work. The paper proposes three design criteria for the Forum:

1) It must be as open as possible and give all stakeholders equal participation rights;
2) its deliberations must be wide-ranging and resist politically motivated barriers to discussion; and
3) its products must feed into other, more authoritative Internet governance forums. We proposed a structure and process for the realization of these objectives. We also set out three policy problems that exemplify the kind of issues the Forum should take up: spam, Internet free expression, and public policy principles for the coordination of Internet resources.

The IGP summed up the consultations on the convening of the IGF in Geneva on 16-17 February:

At the conclusion of the meeting, Desai summarized the results as follows:
* A date for the first IGF will be announced in a few days.
* The Forum will have open participation.
* The first IGF meeting in Athens will take 4 days
* There will be a plenary and space for smaller meetings.
* Participants were asked to fix their ideas on three major themes and transmit them
to the Secretariat by March 31.
* It will be a UN process and thus will need a host country agreement
* There was no consensus on a management structure, or even on what to call
the representative decision making body. Desai did, however, rule out separate bureaus.
He asked participants (especially governments) to consider this issue and respond by
Feb. 28. Once the UN process constitutes it, they will solicit names from the various
stakeholders and that will take several weeks.
* In a victory for the civil society advocates, Desai concluded that the text of the
WSIS Agenda doesn't rule out any topic. What the Forum discusses, he said, is
just a matter of priorities.
...
All in all, the outlines of the new Forum are still hard to discern, but in those areas
where consensus was reached the results were not bad. IGP encourages civil society
actors to submit preferred "themes" such as human rights, freedom of expression
and privacy, as few governmental or business entities are interested in those topics.
Submissions should be sent to wgig@unog.ch.

In another article Milton Mueller [academic, lead voice of the Internet Governance Project] goes on to say: "I think it went pretty well. But we do believe the forum should integrate online collaboration into the process in a more radical way than people here can even understand." ®:

With the programme decided, the most controversial aspect of the forum will be the extent and depth of online collaboration between parties.

There was broad agreement that an Internet Governance Forum should have an online equivalent. However, many governments are hoping to keep the level of collaboration down to mere preparation for the annual meeting, while business, academic and civil society all want internet technology to be used to help build consensus, find and discuss issues, and effectively become the IGF.

Already there have been several offers to build and host online tools - one of the most comprehensive from a collaboration between Harvard and Stanford universities going under the name Geneva Net Dialogue. One of the key staff on the IGF's secretariat, Chengetai Masango, is also very knowledgeable about online collaboration tools.

However, governments are still uncomfortable with online interaction and are keen to limit its influence on the process.

Civiblog Central- Is there a possibility of an alternate internet source? Apparently yes.

Milton Mueller in Icannwatch:

This is being widely described as an "alternate root." Technically, this is true: it functions the same way as an alternate root. But in reality it is something more interesting (and dangerous?): it is a national root, a way of keeping the Internet bounded to a political jurisdiction so that it can be regulated more easily. China is not attempting to replace ICANN's root globally. It is not interested in adding TLDs for markets and users outside of China. It is interested in locking Chinese-speaking users within China into a DNS root under its own control.

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law:

China is preparing to launch what appears to be an alternate root. Starting tomorrow, they will establish four country-code domains. In addition to the current dot-cn, they will offer Chinese character versions of dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As one article puts it, this "means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States."

Geist has some quick commentary which includes:

"The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility
that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would
enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up
their bags and start a new game.

The U.S. control would accordingly
prove illusory since a new domain name system situated elsewhere would
be subject to its own rules. While the two could theoretically co-exist
by having ISPs simply recognize both roots, the system could "break" if
both roots contained identical extensions. In other words, one root can
have dot-com and other other can have dot-corp, but they can't both have
dot-com.

It is with that background in mind that people need to think about a
press release issued yesterday in China announcing a revamping of its
Internet domain name system. Starting tomorrow, China's Ministry of
Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains.
In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese
character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As
the People's Daily Online notes this "means Internet users don't have to
surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States."

In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow. With
it, the rules of the game may change as 110 million Internet users will
suddenly have access to a competing dot-com (albeit in a different
character set) and will no longer rely exclusively on ICANN for the
resolution of Internet domain name queries. This change was probably
inevitable regardless of the status of ICANN, however, the U.S. position
can't possibly have helped matters. Indeed, some might note that while
Congress has been criticizing U.S. companies for cooperating with
Chinese law enforcement and thereby harming Internet freedoms, those
same Congressional leaders may have done the same by refusing to even
consider surrendering some control over the Internet root to the
international community and thereby opening the door to an alternate
root that could prove even worse from a freedom perspective.

This week's announcement certainly doesn't mark the end of a global
interoperable Internet. It does move one step further toward that path
since in Internet governance terms, the credible threat is now real."

Update:: China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation (Rebecca MacKinnon)

Rebecca MacKinnon and John Palfrey If they're not careful, Western tech companies could break up the Web.

China has also proved that censorship pays: it has developed a successful model for how government and business can collaborate to censor a nation's Internet activities. This model could be applied in any country. If we're not careful, we may wake up one day to discover that what a person can see and do on the Web will be radically different depending on which country he or she lives in: the Internet will become "The Internets." And U.S. tech firms won't have much of value left to sell if the Internet ceases to be the wonderful, world-connecting thing it is today. They must find a way to make their money in China without checking their values at the border. Morality aside, the long-term survival of their industry depends on it.

Sarah Schafer, also in Newsweek International, looks deep into the Chinese blogosphere and reports that A proliferation of voices is slowly dismantling the status quo in China.

Richard C. Morais, (Cover story for Forbes)

. . . with engineering help from half a dozen Western firms, the Chinese Communist Party has erected a huge apparatus to censor free speech. A ragtag crew of hacker dissidents may succeed in tearing it down.
In a windowless room in New York City a computer engineer with owlish glasses--call her “Jenny Chen”--peers at a color-coded bar graph on her PC screen. Her group is launching attacks on the Chinese wall of censorship that blocks access to sites discussing verboten topics like civil rights and democracy. The graph displays how many Chinese that month evaded the country’s censorship to condemn the Chinese Communist Party.

Chen, a Beijing-born woman of about 40, runs her own IT businesses. Her group, and like-minded “hacktivists” (as they call themselves) spread around the globe, are chipping away at the Golden Shield, the term that describes the filtering system that censors the Internet and e-mail of China’s 110 million Internet users. The invaders slip contraband words and ideas in and out of the country via such means as mass e-mails, proxy servers that aren’t yet blacked out and code words that aren’t yet on government blacklists.

Live from the 'innaugural bloggers row' for this hearing are: Rebecca MacKinnon. Tim Chapman at Town Hall. Human Events Online The New York Times,

In a crowded House hearing room, Representative Christopher Smith, Republican of New Jersey, unleashed a scathing condemnation of four American Internet and technology companies — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco — for a "sickening collaboration" with the Chinese government and for "decapitating the voice of the dissidents" there.

Prepared testimony: The Honorable Christopher H. Smith, The Honorable James A. Leach, Mr. James Keith, The Honorable David Gross, Mr. Michael Callahan, Mr. Jack Krumholtz, Mr. Elliot Schrage, Mr. Mark Chandler, Ms. Libby Liu, Mr. Xiao Qiang, Ms. Lucie Morillon, Mr. Harry Wu, Ms. Sharon Hom



Live: webcast.

1801(GMT): Google's testimony begins.

HRIC's Sharon Hom at the congressional hearings this afternoon

Preparations for the 2008 Olympics have attracted the participation of foreign
companies across diverse sectors, including construction, advertising,
architecture, legal services, surveillance and communications. The
beneficiaries of the Olympic Games, and as such of the contracts agreed to
between foreign companies and Beijing as the host city, have always been
presented as the people of Beijing, and more broadly, of China. This is
documented not only in China's numerous promises to the International
Olympics Committee before being granted the right to host the Games, and
also in its 2002 Olympic Action Plan. During the Olympics, security
equipment and infrastructure will be operated by the government. How will
the hardware and technical know-how be used after the Olympics? The post-
Olympics use of this equipment and these technologies must be transparent
and monitored. Given China’s human rights record, what are the impacts on
privacy rights if these technologies are exported to other countries?
Any industry-wide code of conduct or specific legislation should move beyond
the narrow conception that technologies are used in isolation of one another.
The lines between online technologies and offline actions have been blurred.
Technologies such as Internet Web browsing, VoIP, e-mail, instant messaging,
SMS, podcasting, and more, work in interrelated spheres, impacting
journalists, students, activists, organizations, and individuals in their access
to and dissemination of knowledge.

Any recommendations and guidelines should not ignore the challenges and
opportunities that lie ahead in the expansion into the collateral uses of
surveillance or the restrictive uses of a particular technology. For example,
SMS messages will not only be increasingly filtered, but could also be
integrated into database systems used to store and track required pre-paid
cell phone user information, with serious implications for users who may send
and receive politically-sensitive messages.

Harry Wu:

A friend of mine recently tried to access some politically sensitive websites while
at an Internet café in a remote, small city in Xinjiang Province. The police quickly
showed up to arrest him. I don’t know who supplied the technology enabling the police to
track my friend’s Internet surfing, but I am pretty sure that U.S. technology was involved.
The PRC’s Ministry of Public Security has been continually upgrading and expanding its
$800 million “Golden Shield” project- a government-sponsored surveillance system that
was begun in 1998. The Golden Shield’s advanced communication network was
supposedly aimed at improving police effectiveness and efficiency. However, China has
also used the “Golden Shield” as a way of monitoring Chinese civilians. The project will
help prolong Communist rule by denying China’s people the right to information. In
order to develop the “Golden Shield,” China has utilized the technologies of a number of
foreign companies, such as Intel, Yahoo, Nortel, Cisco Systems, Motorola, and Sun
Microsystems. The “Golden Shield Project” would not have been possible without the
technology and equipment from these companies.

Xiao Qiang, China Internet Project at the Graduate
School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley:

The challenge in front of us, Mr. Chairman, is to find a way to help these information
technology companies work in concert, perhaps with some of the world’s great research
universities, to establish a set of guiding principles for the entire information and
communication technology industry. These principles, or standards and practices, should
transcend individual companies’ own relationship to any given market. In other words,
to seek collective ways to find the ability to resist demands for information or technology
that violate fundamental human rights .

Press release for the hearing in U.S. congress tomorrow. References State department's launch of GIFTF:

Rep. Chris Smith -- chairman of the House panel that oversees Global Human Rights -- is preparing questions for representatives of four major US internet companies that operate in China, State Department officials and representatives of human rights NGO's. The hearing will mark the first time in the House of Representatives that live bloggers will be permitted to report on the hearing in real time.

Earlier today, Secretary Condoleezza Rice announced a Global Internet Freedom Task Force in order to ensure "a robust US foreign policy response" to the international issues and fundamental human rights concerns inherent in the expansion of the Internet including: "the use of technology to restrict access to political content and the impact of censorship efforts on US companies; the use of technology to track and repress dissidents; and efforts to modify Internet governance structures in order to restrict the free flow of information."

"The establishment of the Global Internet Freedom Task Force by Dr. Rice is a welcomed step and is a provision already included in legislation that I am currently drafting to address the issue of internet freedom," said Smith. "I am looking forward to an honest and straightforward dialogue about the operating processes and procedures of internet companies in China, the demands put forth by this communist regime and the continuing human rights abuses by the PRC."

The cDc hereby commands that you print up t-shirts with this graphic and wear them with pride. Join our global campaign against Google's appeasement policy with China. Civiblog Central comments

If you feel outraged by Google's partnership with the Chinese government, make plans this Valentine's Day to boycott Google. Also, try a search engine comparison tool to see the difference made by blocked keywords.

For Joseph Khan, its all over anyway, So long, Dalai Lama: Google adapts to China . . .

The promise of e-government is a transparent, accessible, efficient state in a new partnership with its citizens. But, asks Giovanni Navarria, could it be the model of an invisible model of political control?

To comprehend this new environment of invisible power, George Orwell's Big Brother allegory is inadequate, as it rests upon the notion of the visibility of the control mechanism. A far better guide is Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality.
...
Citizens are learning to comply with the requests and the soft-diktats of the new environment, and – in the name of protection or in search of a better quality of life – giving up their right to privacy by allowing government to collect and retain data about every aspect of their lives. From their experience as consumers, they regard this as perfectly normal. As subjects always connected to the system, they become permanently surveyable and controllable: indeed, they become data shared on a computer's database that is always easily accessible and retrievable. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, their position and identity is always known.

....

The Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, in his classical study The Future of Democracy, addresses the risks hidden beneath the surface of what he called a "computerocracy". "(The) ideal of the powerful has always been to see every gesture and to listen to every word of their subjects (if possible without being seen or heard)", Bobbio wrote; but nowadays, in the information age, the ideal is realised. Bobbio went on to argue that the old question running through the history of political thought ("who guards the guards?") can now be reformulated ("who controls the controllers?"). "(If) no adequate answer can be found to this question, democracy in the sense of visible government is lost."

It is far from my intention to advocate a romantic return to a pre-technological age in government's activities. That, in my view, is neither possible nor desirable. Yet, given the present and strong convergence between government and technological means of control, more than ever we should – at least – try not to forget Bobbio's warning.

Following revelations concerning evolving U.S. Information operations doctrine, Andrew Koch Contributing Strategic Editor for Jane's forsees computer network attacks as tomorrow's WMD (subscription required).

Biogenetically engineered super viruses, deadly chemical agents specially designed to hang in the air for hours and armies of autonomously operated malicious software programmes called 'Cyber Bots', represent only a handful of potential threats that will be technologically possible within a decade, say US intelligence and defence officials.

While attacks by every type of tomorrow's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may not kill hundreds of thousands of people, each has the ability to cause catastrophic damage and disruption, whether through the destruction of economies, infrastructure or human life.

Hacking

Cyber attacks are far from what has traditionally been considered a WMD, yet with both civilian and military infrastructures increasingly reliant on computer networks to perform even basic functions, defence experts warn that terrorist and enemy states alike will have the ability to cause massive disruption if they can hack these networks.

"I worry we are creating an Achilles heel in our military structure. As we move toward the Global Information Grid and network-centric combat, what vulnerabilities are we creating that we are not protected against?" one defence official asked.

By some accounts, the development of cyber warrior tools is already well under way, with government-sponsored hackers in countries like China and North Korea preparing for a 'digital Pearl Harbor' if push ever came to shove in a conflict with the US military.

Hackers, who many US officials believe work for the Chinese government, have launched numerous cyber attacks against US military, defence contractor and other sensitive facilities in the past few years, with the aim of pilfering information.

These attacks, called 'Titan Rain' by US investigators, are likely the product of cyber spying by the Chinese military, Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an information security research and education organisation in the US, said in December. He noted that "we have a problem that our computer networks have been terribly and deeply penetrated throughout the US ... and we've been keeping it secret".

"In the rush of information technology, the human mind has lost its inner peace, which cannot be attained without spiritual growth," the Dalai Lama said in Himachel Pradesh on the occasion of 57th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination.

Mahatma Gandhi is more relevant today as people around the globe are finding his gospels of truth and non-violence more conducive to harmony and peaceful co-existence... There is a need to re-invent Gandhi at home in India in the present context," the Nobel Peace laureate said here on the occasion of the father of the nation's 57th death anniversary.

He said combined with its spiritual tradition, modern India could look forward to unprecedented development as it was the largest democracy "where a rule of law is in place".

Turning to Sino-Indian relations, he said "India and China are emerging as two of the most powerful economic powers in the world. Whereas India can take a cue from China in producing cheap goods of use becoming popular globally, China can learn from India to emerge as a strife-free society".

The Dalai Lama asked the country not to deviate from its ancient spiritual tradition despite materialistic progress and development, which also had its fallout.

Students for a Free Tibet, an advocacy network based in New York are currently engaged in a campaign against Google's decision to move into China with a self-censored search platform

Tibetans, their supporters, and Google users worldwide are outraged by Google's decision to join hands with the Chinese Government in its propaganda efforts. Google has launched a web search platform custom-built to the Chinese authorities' specifications that blocks access to information about Tibet, human rights, and other topics sensitive to Beijing. In doing so, Google isn't just helping the Chinese Government by censoring "sensitive topics." What Google is in fact doing is enabling the Chinese government's propaganda by returning search results tailored to Beijing's repressive policies. Searching for "Tibet" will bring up only official Communist Chinese disinformation on Tibet. Searching for "Dalai Lama" will only bring up sites portraying him as a "splittist."

With playful speculation bubbling around Google's next moves (Goobuntu or Napster etc.) I thought I might add some ludicrous suggestions of my own.

Google is one of the most powerful supercomputing platforms in the world. Tor is a distributed network that anonymizes web browsing and any other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor's security is improved as it grows and as more organisations volunteer the time and bandwidth to run servers. Google has alot of bandwidth and servers. (The Googlesphere, as presented in the company's public announcements, comrises more than 100,000 servers ranging from 533 MHz Intel Celeron to dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III - that's 126–316 teraflops, one third the speed of the Blue Gene supercomputer, the most powerful unclassified computing machine available to humanity. There's a significant difference between Google and Bluegene - Google is interwoven with the internet. Physical infrastructure - Google's four U.S.-based datacentres - two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia - each with an OC 48 (2488 Mbit/s) internet connection. Data - a constantly updated fascimile of the internet itself).

Suppose Google were to install Tor's Onion Routers throughout its serverfarms. Global internet users communications would bounce around anonymously in a massive distributed network of virtual tunnels. It would be unprecendented in scale, a network that would open up the internet to people in censored regimes all around the world. It would enable a generation of software developers to create new communication tools with privacy built-in. The Google platform running onion routers would provide an ecosystem for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their identity. By donating - say, 20kb/s of bandwidth per server(!) - Google would be in a position to - inadvertently - overwhelm, the 'Great Firewall' - a striking way to differentiate itself from competitors - particularly those invited to testify in congress todayand in two weeks time: Cisco Systems, (Google), Microsoft, Yahoo.

. . . I doubt Google can even afford to have people sitting around thinking about providing a free privacy service to the planet. For a (not-so-)small - but vocal - proportion of its users? Perhaps, - or is it that Google's business model is now inextricably linked into a downward spiral of content/user aware advertising and anti-democratic emerging markets - increasingly at the expense of its more mature markets?

Reuters Canada is reporting that Nortel Networks, and its key competitor in China, Huawei are forming a joint venture research and development product house focused on what they are calling 'ultra' broadband - user-aware, content-aware broadband access platforms capable of delivering IPTV (TV over the Internet) and NGN Next Generation Netwoks) to the home. Nortel, North American largest telecom equipment supplier, will hold the majority stake in the joint venture, which will be run from Ottawa.

A joint venture with Huawei raises some serious and immediate concerns. Craig Simons, writing in Newsweek International last month asked of Huawei,

Is it a security menace bent on doing Beijing's bidding, a legitimate international telecom competitor, or a corporate house of cards, all market share and PR releases but no profits? It's hard to answer those questions. CEO Ren refuses to talk with journalists, and there are persistent rumors that the firm is actually run by the People's Liberation Army. The company denies that, and has long claimed it no longer has any ties to the government. Huawei's books are audited by a well-known accounting firm (KPMG), but few of its financial numbers are made public. Opaque bookkeeping has also frightened analysts: an August report by the Thailand-based consulting company MWL argues that Huawei may rely on "unsustainably low prices and government export assistance" to make sales.

An unclassified CSIS commentary published 2003 on global weapons proliferation and the military-industrial complex of the PRC, on Huawei

There are two distinct components to the production and sale of arms in China: military and former military enterprises such as Poly Group, and civilian defence enterprises, both state-owned and private, such as NORINCO and Huawei...Besides state-owned defence producers, China also has private companies involved in defence production, such as the telecom firm Huawei. With offices in Cuba, Iran, and Burma, Huawei has been a major supplier of dual-use telecom equipment. In 2001, its Indian subsidiary was accused of tailoring a commercial order for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Also in 2001, Huawei supplied Iraq with fibre optics to link its radar and anti-aircraft systems, triggering U.S. and U.K. bombings. Private defence firms often also enjoy the shielding of powerful patrons. Huawei was founded by a former PLA officer, and benefitted from early sales to the PLA. But it also receives state support in the form of tax privileges and state-sponsored credit because it has been designated a “national champion” of new technology. Its supporters have included top general Yang Shangkun and head of the China International Trade and Investment Corporation, Wang Jun (also president of Poly). Unlike state-owned defence producers, private firms are more likely to be profitable. A further level of complexity in their proliferation activity is that foreign firms seeking to do business with them may try to shield them from U.S. sanctions.

A secret Pentagon "roadmap" on information opeartions, personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not "targeted," any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter. Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and posted on the Web, the 74-page "Information Operations Roadmap" admits that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa," but argues that "the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of U.S. government intent rather than information dissemination practices." Several press accounts have referred to the 2003 Pentagon document but today's posting is the first time the text has been publicly available. Sections of the document relating to computer network attack (CNA) and "offensive cyber operations" remain classified under black highlighting.

Adam Brookes, BBC Pentagon correspondent comments,

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system. "Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads. The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap. The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence. "Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing."

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum". US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum". Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet. Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon. And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.

The latest stage of Google's move into China has proved controversial, but Bill Thompson believes it has made the right decision

But if we in the West, with our liberal political culture and our attempts to build open societies, do not engage with China then we lose the opportunity to influence them and convince them of the benefits that this brings. If the Chinese government fears instability then we should offer help and advice and support, not closed borders and locked doors. Different circumstances require different responses, and just because sanctions were the right way to put pressure on apartheid South Africa does not mean that a technology blockade is the way to influence China. Constructive engagement in a way that respects but also challenges local law seems a far better option, and that, for all its risks, is what Google is attempting to do. They may make some money out of it, but that's fine, because they may also show the Chinese leadership that openness can bring benefits as well as pose threats.

The MacArthur Foundation has awarded $3 million to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and its partners to advance their collaborative study of state-sponsored Internet filtering worldwide through the OpenNet Initiative. In recent years the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint project among the University of Toronto, Cambridge University, Harvard Law School, and now, Oxford University, has produced a series of snapshots mapping internet censorship and surveillance practices on an international scale - a global MRI of the internet.

Statements from OpenNet Initiative Principals:

"Over the last several years, the OpenNet Initiative's careful and intensive research has put a spotlight on Internet filtering and surveillance practices worldwide, raising serious questions about the transparency and accountability of states and corporations who participate in them," said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. "The MacArthur Foundation's support for the Berkman Center and the OpenNet Initiative will help to sustain and broaden this research over the coming years."

"The contest between states, corporations, and individuals shaping the technology and rules that govern the Internet is at the core of the new geopolitical environment, and will define civil liberties in the coming decades," said Rafal Rohozinski, director of the Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Programme (Cambridge University). "The MacArthur Foundation's generous support to the OpenNet Initiative will ensure that the debate defining the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties is supported by credible comparative research."

Prof. Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Oxford University, has brought the Oxford Internet Institute into ONI. Writing recently Zittrain said

Collaborative is the key word. What is needed at this point, above all else, is a 21st century international Manhattan Project which brings together people of good faith in government, academia, and the private sector for the purpose of shoring up the miraculous information technology grid that is too easy to take for granted and whose seeming self-maintenance has led us into an undue complacence.

(London/ Davos): Google's launch of a self-censoring Chinese search engine is the latest in a string of examples of global Internet companies caving in to pressure from the Chinese government. The service curtails the rights of Chinese Internet users to the freedom of expression and freedom of information enjoyed in other countries.

Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amnesty International's Secretary General Irene Khan said:
"While acknowledging that Google has taken a number of steps to ensure access of Chinese users to the Internet, Amnesty International is nonetheless dismayed at the growing global trend in the IT industry.”

"Whether succumbing to demands from Chinese officials or anticipating government concerns, companies that impose restrictions that infringe on human rights are being extremely short-sighted. The agreements the industry enters into with the Chinese government, whether tacit or written, go against the IT industry’s claim that it promotes the right to freedom of information of all people, at all times, everywhere.”

Last year, Microsoft launched a portal in China that blocks use of words such as 'freedom' in blog text. The company recently closed down the blog of Zhao Jing, who used the blog name Michael An Ti, after he supported a strike against the politically-motivated sacking of an editor at the Beijing News.

Yahoo has admitted revealing email account details of the journalist Shi Tao to the Chinese authorities, who was peacefully exercising his right to impart information, a move that contributed to his prosecution and sentencing to 10 years in prison.

"Agreements between global corporations and the Chinese authorities has entrenched Internet censorship as the norm in China," said Irene Khan. "Internet companies justify their actions on the basis of Chinese regulations. In fact, such agreements and the resulting self-censorship, violate both international standards and China's own constitution, which protects freedom of expression."

International law guarantees the right to freedom of information and the free flow of ideas across borders. While some restrictions on these have been developed over the years, the manner in which IT companies are freely submitting to opaque Chinese policies, is unacceptable.

"The Internet heralded unfettered access to information in a borderless world. Instead, companies are helping governments build borders to prevent their citizens from accessing information," said Irene Khan.


Public Document
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Google's Answer to the China Question suggests T-Salon? I suggested this exact solution to Google PR people from my 'office' in Berkeley, Ca. in 2002 (old doors for office furniture, not included).

Google's announcement this morning that it has launched a Chinese version (Google.cn) of its hugely successful search engine may seem like no more than a footnote in the fast-moving history of the internet, writes The Guardian in today's leader. Backlash as Google shores up great firewall of China reports Johnathan Watts in Jinan. The world's favourite search engine admits inconsistency with its corporate ethics. Meanwhile, Google remains at loggerheads with US justice department says Julian Borger in Washington.

I'm sure I've been on about this for a while -- the more precise timekeeping system planned for Galileo could prove to be a major competitive advantage for the system over GPS:

the US must now recognize that it is in a “chronographical arms race” with the EU, and it cannot be passive.

To highlight the different aspects of this summit, Liisa has compiled a list of articles and relevant sites for your convenience.

The question of how the worldwide web is run, and how it can best safeguard basic freedoms and drive economic growth around the globe, will dominate the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis and will end on 18 November. The discussions of more than 50 Heads of State or Government, or their representatives, and of many non-governmental organisations and representatives of civil society, will also focus on financial mechanisms to bridge the digital divide.   more »

Some experts think Tunis could also be the scene of another major turning point: the breaking up of the internet into several rival management systems.   more »

Find it, fix it.   more »

Huang Ju Arrives in Tunis for World Information Summit   more »

Huawei hope to resolve their differences with BSNL.   more »

The following press release has been distributed by ARTICLE 19 on behalf of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Civil Society's Media Caucus:   more »