I've posted a few pieces on Nortel's GSM-R system along the Qinghai-Tibet railway & located a new tele-geography of security that parallels China's Western Development Strategy.

Lobsang Yeshi, takes up the theme; [“The only thing rising faster than China is the hype about China.”] . . :

The most precise location-tracking system GSM-R digital wireless communication network and surveillance system acquired from Canadian Nortel Networks Corp for the railway is believed to be meant for other strategic purposes.

Phayul had an article at the weekend that helps develop this theory:
Sabotage angst along Tibet Railway

Along the entire railway line, the Military Area Commands of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and Qinghai Province have reportedly deployed a security safety net with a contingent of up to ten thousand soldiers and civilians patrolling day and night. The Head Quarters of Qinghai Armed Police Force has assigned several branches of its force to safeguard the train throughout its journey.

Communication for security forces along the railway has been stepped up so that conversations on walkie-talkie are now possible on long distance. To this effect, China Telecommunication Company and China Railway Communication Company installed adequate communication equipment and communication stations every 6 kilometres along the whole railway line.

The report suggests that Chinese paramilitary forces are directly benefitting from the GSM-R installation along the railway.

Pico Iyer reviews Lhasa: Streets with Memories in Time Magazine.

Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett, is, on its surface, a meditation on the city's past and future (see Ma Jian's latest book) by a lecturer at Columbia University in New York, who draws heavily on such cultural icons as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Italo Calvino. But underneath the high-toned exterior, it is something much more interesting: Barnett spends part of each year in Lhasa, and appears in no hurry to alienate his Chinese hosts; at the same time, he was one of the few foreigners to witness the demonstrations Tibetans staged in Lhasa in 1987, and so can understand the pain and fear that lie just below the city's ever more modern surfaces. His rumination on the capital of Tibet is the rare book that can draw tears just with its assemblage of neutral, entirely unpolemical facts.

[...]

And yet, in the face of these losses, Barnett reports that more and more Chinese visitors now give offerings to the Buddhas in the Jokhang Temple, adopt Tibetan names, and even seek out lamas to instruct them. Might Tibet creep into Chinese souls and consciences even as China takes over Tibetan streets? Barnett is too subtle and skeptical to concentrate on anything more than the silences that lie at the heart of many a Lhasa conversation, and the human realities that remain too complex for any simple right or wrong. In Lhasa: Streets with Memories, though, he shows us with overpowering restraint a city that, increasingly, has no memory at all.Memory —like history and culture and religion—is just one more redundancy pushed aside to make room for more skyscrapers.

Time Magazine

Claude Arpi has a guest column on Rediff that looks at the Qinghai-Tibet railway's impact on Sino-Indian security. Arpi discovers China's version of RMA, the strategic implications of the railway for China's Second Artillery (rail based tactical nukes), the relevance of the latest QDR to Sino-American-Indian relations, and the infamous strategy of Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Interesting to see this in mainstream Indian publication, a wake-up call to South Block perhaps.

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.”

An interesting paper by Dimitrios Delibasis, State Use of Force in Cyberspace for Self-Defence: A New Challenge for a New Century published in Peace Conflict and Development: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Issue 8, February 2006

Time can only tell how much of a threat information warfare will eventually prove to be. However, it has undoubtedly given a completely new meaning to the term ‘warfare’ and nullified traditional borders between States. In essence, it has set forth, for the first time in the history of the law on the use of force, several new regulatory challenges the successful answering of which calls for the creation of a new paradigm with regard to the legal norms relating to forcible action. This is an issue which sooner or later the international legal community will have no choice but to face. And before it finally does so, perhaps it should remember the words of James Thurbur: “In times of change, learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned are beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists”.

I hadn't given much thought to this question before reading Delibasis' paper. So, how do you regulate the use of non-kinetic force in international conflict? The Red Cross (ICRC) maintains a reference section on their website that includes documents that explain how parties to a violent conflict are limited in their choice of methods and means of warfare; the rules in force define permissible uses of weapons and military tactics. The ICRC defines IW

as operations to disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information resident in computers and computer networks, or the computers and networks themselves. The methods and means used are defined as predominantly information systems based or designed to specifically effect the information infrastructure without immediate traditional physical damage.

The work of Dr. Knut Dörmann, (Deputy Head of the Legal Division, ICRC, Geneva) provides a helpful conceptual framework for considering the implications of CNA to International Law, for example:

Computer network attack and international humanitarian law Extract from The Cambridge Review of International Affairs "Internet and State Security Forum", 19 May 2001, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK
& Applicability of the Additional Protocols to Computer Network Attacks

A Force More Powerful, The Game of Nonviolent Strategy developed by ICNC, Yorkzim, and Breakaway Games Ltd. has been released - you can order it online here. (Individuals active internationally in campaigns to win rights and freedom who wish to obtain copies should direct requests to ICNC).

Some apprehension communicated to me relating to this brief post the other day - Cybersatyagraha ... Gandhi needs to be reinvented in India today. ..er, no - not a call for "cyberterrorism" or "eJihad". Just what Nagarjunawould make of DDoS I'm entirely unsure, but even the most basic reading of Gandhian thought highlights an overriding commitment to communication - and to keeping channels of communication open: Basic Concepts of Satyagraha: Gandhian Nonviolence: (from the APT Nonviolence Trainer's Manual).

II. "Ahimsa" --- refusal to inflict injury on others.
A) Ahimsa is dictated by our commitment to communication and to sharing of our pieces of the truth. Violence shuts off channels of communication.

You'll find that same commitment in discussions around hacktivism: Hacktivism and Human Rights: Using Technology to Raise the Bar (July 14, 2001, DEF CON 9, Las Vegas).

. . I think it's important to make that clear right from the start. That we're not talking about cyberterrorism, we're not talking about information warfare, we're not talking about taking down the Chinese backbone. We're talking about more constructive, positive ways of dealing with human rights abusers. I think that's something we all agreed on, straight away.

der Derian's concept of Infopeace describes it beautifully:

Information peace (infopeace) is the production, application, and analysis of information by peaceful means for peaceful ends. Starting with Gregory Bateson's definition of information as 'any difference that makes a difference', infopeace seeks to make a difference in the quality of thinking about the global contest of will, goods, and might. Measuring information in terms of quality rather than quantity, and assessing quality by the difference it makes in the reduction of personal and structural violence, infopeace opens up possibilities of alternative thought and action in global politics. Unabashedly utopian and pragmatic, it counters a 'natural' state of war with a mindful state of peace.

A mindful state of peace posits the eventual abolition of violence as a global political option. Peace-mindedness ranges from the prevention, admonition and mediation of violence, to the outright disavowal of violence as a political option for the resolution of problems in the international arena. It draws on a long tradition of peace-thinking, exemplified in early Christian pacifism and Eastern philosophies, in which the need for peace begins internally and proceeds outwardly. It starts by embracing a wholeness of the individual, and expands to families, communities, countries, and beyond. The notion of Gaia, as a self-regulating biosphere, contributes to the rhetoric of peace thinking; but it is the networked reality of an expanding infosphere which makes peace an attainable and evermore vital necessity.

Infopeace seeks to prevent, mediate, and resolve states of war by the actualization of a mindful state of peace. Following Gilles Deleuze's insights about the virtual possessing a reality that is not yet actual, infopeace stresses the actualization of peace through the creative application of information and technology. Critical imagination is the best antidote to the kinds of technological determinism that increasingly circumscribe human choices.

Infopeace integrates a strategy in which difference, conflict, and antagonism are recognized as essential aspects of human relations. It aims to develop an awareness of how these aspects can be addressed by non-violent means. Infopeace accepts the Augustinian paradox that the actualization of peace might entail (limited) violence, yet seeks to apply alternatives means of securing the self, the group, or the state. In short, infopeace is utopian in intention, pragmatic in application.

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".

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.

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).

. . . privately, UK civil servants familiar with NISCC's investigation agree that the attacks on the UK and US are coming from China. This almost certainly means some state sanction or involvement - perhaps even a "shopping list" of requirements.

Some of the attacks have been aimed at parts of the UK government dealing with human rights issues - "a very odd target", according to one UK security source.

There is another, more compelling reason. "Hacking in China carries the death penalty," says Professor Neil Barrett, of the Royal Military College at Shrivenham. "You also have to sign on with the police if you want to use the internet. And then there is the Great Firewall of China, which lets very little through - and lets [the Chinese government] know exactly what is happening." The internet traffic to the UK, and its origin, would all be visible to the Chinese government. Finding the culprits would, in theory, be a simple process.

The Guardian has learned that the oldest modern democracy came under a sustained attack aimed at stealing sensitive information. It was launched by cyber criminals almost certainly operating in the world's next superpower, China.

The attack on the Commons may be the most eye-catching attack from Chinese-based hackers, but is certainly not unique.

According to a spokesman for MessageLabs, the company responsible for filtering malicious email from government networks, similar spy emails - called "targeted Trojans' - were noticed about 18 months ago. "There were not very many, maybe one every two months, but now they are coming in at the rate of one to two a week," said Maksym Schipka, MessageLab's senior anti-virus researcher.

Last June, the government sent out a warning in which Roger Cummings, the head of NISCC, spoke about the threat of attacks from far eastern gangs on the UK critical national infrastructure (CNI) - the key network of transport, energy, financial, telecommunication and government organisations. At the end of November, Cummings warned that targeted Trojans from foreign powers were a significant threat.

In mid-December, the Cabinet Office - which has overall responsibility for ministries - joined in the chorus at a conference at Glamorgan University. Senior civil servant Harvey Mattison, the head of accreditation for the Cabinet Office's Central Sponsor of Information Assurance, the unit responsible for protecting communications between government departments, gave a keynote address on the threat from the far east. "We were given the impression it was coming from one ISP in Guangdong," said a delegate.

PetroChina, the state owned operators of China's controversial West-East Gas Pipeline have chosen Nortel Networks to supply communications, both wired and wireless, along its 4,200-kilometre route. The pipeline is the longest in China, spanning nine provinces to transport natural gas from the rich Lunnan gas fields of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region all the way to the economic hub of Shanghai and other regions of the Yangtze River Delta. Nortel has been winning critical infrastructure network supply contracts with Chinese utilities: water, electricity and notably with China's railway networks. . & - like the Qinghai-Tibet railway

"This pipeline is being built more for political reasons than for economic reasons," said Dinakar Sethuraman, an analyst with World Gas Intelligence in Singapore. "Its prospects for profit are cloudy."

..

China's leaders have staked their credibility on the pipeline. It is a central component of the government's "Go West" initiative, pressed by President Jiang Zemin as a way to lift China's impoverished western provinces by pumping billions of dollars into the region.

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.

On the flight from Paris I read an International Herald Tribune article by Nicolai Ouroussoff (As Israeli barrier goes up, views harden on all sides). The article focuses on Eyal Weizman's critique of the concrete barrier that is encircling Palestinian terriroty:

on a fundamental level, it is also a piece of architecture. And its construction has generated an architectural debate as charged as any in the political realm.

That debate has pitted strategists who mine the leftist architectural theories of the 1960s for ideas on contemporary urban warfare against architects who see the barrier as a perversion of those ideas, along with the utopian visions of Modernists who believed society's problems could be solved with concrete, glass and steel. It is not only unfolding in the halls of academia but in Israeli and American military circles. And it presents a vision of the wall as a system of complex, interweaving spaces - some concrete, some invisible - that is far from our normal perception of an international border.

At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in colonizing the West Bank.

Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Weizman, 35, makes no distinctions between architecture and politics.

I first understood Eyal Weizman’s extraordinary cartography of Israeli control over the West Bank through a series of essays in openDemocracy and it really allowed me to see the Israel-Palestine conflict in a new way. What is rather interesting is that IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute has been reading into Deleuze:

Among the most provocative counterpoints for Weizman's analysis is Shimon Navez, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli Army. Navez, who revels in the kind of jargon heard in architecture studios, directs the Israeli Defense Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains senior military staff in innovative war tactics.

"We were looking for new modes of thinking that could be suitable to military strategy," he said. "The Americans were looking for technological solutions; we wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem. It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor."

Navez has little faith in the barrier, which he called "too simplistic, too vulgar" to accomplish its task. "It is a tragic regression in terms of strategy," he said. "It derives from a necessity, but in the longer range it will create a lot of damage - a lot of antagonism. It is a huge violation of space that will be hard to remove."

Navez speaks of "striated" and "smooth" spaces - of a world shaped by solid walls and a more fluid one virtually without boundaries. In his view, the West Bank is an example of smooth space.

It is segregated into carefully defined zones, some of them controlled by the Israeli military and others jointly with the Palestinian Authority. Satellite and aerial surveillance has become ubiquitous.
And an Israeli company is developing a handheld thermal-imaging machine that will let soldiers detect human figures through concrete.

Navez does not direct Israeli military policy. But his views have exerted an influence over a small group of Israeli generals whom he refers to as his "disciples."

He has also met with officials at the Pentagon and American military research groups like Rand to discuss urban warfare in the Middle East, where "swarming" - the idea that soldiers infiltrate enemy space like "clouds" in small, loosely coordinated groups - has become a catch phrase. In such a scenario, the traditional command structure does not apply. Urban soldiers communicate directly with one another in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises.

Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a counterpart to the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes - to separate civilization from barbarity.

Yet to Weizman, these are simply two forms of the same evil. Navez, he said, "is simply trying to replace one form of control with another that is less visible."

The Go lounge at CCC   more »

Security experts have revealed tantalising details about a group of Chinese hackers who are suspected of launching intelligence gathering attacks against the US government.   more »

'France is paying for its arrogance' : What the French papers say about the spreading urban unrest   more »

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, York Zimmerman Inc. and BreakAway Ltd. have been collaborating on A Force More Powerful � The Game of Nonviolent Strategy, set for release in early 2006.   more »

From nuclear weapons to climate change, the Vietnam war to urban segregation, the prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling�s leaps of lateral thinking are weapons of enlightenment, says The Undercover Economist.   more »

China's Middle East policy is undergoing a major shift (a really major shift).   more »

The Human Security Centre announces the launch of the 2005 Human Security Report.   more »

New Left or "Neo-Comm"? Capitalism or Social Democracy? Co-existence or Containment? The routes open are many - but no one, least of all China, seems to know which way it will go ...   more »

Stephen Howe, 28 - 9 - 2005

Behind recent violent unrest in Loyalist working-class communities in Northern Ireland is a story of promiscuous cultural borrowings attempting to shore up a collapsed political identity, says Stephen Howe. In the first part of a two-part essay, he examines their manifestations in music, visual display and political rhetoric.

Gangtok - China’s sudden decision to defer the opening of border trade through Nathu La pass has come as a jarring note in the improvement of relations on the Sino-Indian border.   more »

Dir. Muhammed Rum, USA, 2004, 110mins,
Cast: Edgar Oliver, Waleed Zuaiter, Hussam Hamadeh, James Arnold   more »

All the mos had indicated towards a successful international run, and Khyentse's film second film did not disappoint. Magicains and Travellers., as far as I know, the first feature film shot entirely on location in Bhutan.

Buddhist lama and filmmaker Khyentse Norbu ("The Cup'') made "Travellers & Magicians,'' the first feature film shot in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, with nonprofessional actors using an official national language, Dzongka, that only some of the film's participants knew beforehand. If this effort sounds more admirable than enjoyable, take heart: "Travellers'' is visually accomplished and loads of fun.

Norbu frames a sensual fable with the humorous modern-day tale of Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), a Westernized government official who wants to leave his post in a remote Bhutanese village for America. Late for the bus, Dondup is forced to wait roadside as he tries to thumb a ride, encountering among his fellow foot travelers a monk (Sonam Kinga) who will relate the fable.

"Travellers'' contrasts traditional and modern elements to produce some fish-out-of-water laughs a la "Northern Exposure.'' City slicker Dondup -- or as slick as people from Bhutan's capital of Thimphu can be -- likes rock 'n' roll, prefers his traditional garb sewn in denim and rolls his eyes at the unhurried conversations of folks in the village where the government placed him. (SFgate review via friend in Berkeley, CA.).

www.chinaview.cn 2005-09-23 13:26:18: BEIJING, Sept. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A Paris-based media watchdog released a free guide Thursday to help bloggers and cyber-dissidents avoid political censorship in countries as far apart as Iran, Vietnam and Cuba.

The guide, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and partly financed by the French Foerign Ministry, identifies bloggers as the "new heralds of free expression" and offers advice on how to set up a blog and run it anonymously.

"Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure," wrote Julien Pain, head of RSF's Internet Freedom Desk.

"Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest."

The 87-page "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" was launched at the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday. It can be downloaded from the RSF website (www.rsf.org), and is available in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi . . .

Kaishin Yen, a writer and graduate of Columbia�s School of International Affairs and Erping Zhang -- currently a Mason Fellow at Harvard University (Epoch Times)   more »

The Bite the Mango film festival presents a discussion and Q&A session focusing on the issues surrounding film censorship and classification around the world and drawing comparisons between systems of ...   more »