Blocking and Filtering

The official re-election site of President George W Bush is blocking visits from overseas users for “security reasons”.

Repressive regimes are taking full advantage of the net’s ability to censor and stifle reform and debate, reveals a report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to mark Press Freedom Day.

Reporters Without Borders condemns China’s new real-time surveillance system for SMS (mobile phone text) messages.

Wikileaks, a proposed system enabling whistle-blowers and cyber-activists to post confidential documents anonymously from repressive regimes, has been criticised by the BBC’s Bill Thompson for promising more than it can deliver, as the service prepares to go live.

Reporters Without Borders call for online journalists, as well as journalist website operators and bloggers, to be accorded the same legal protections as journalists with the traditional press.

Microsoft’s chief executive said “Bill receives 4m pieces of email per day, most of it spam.”

The People’s Republic of China has passed a new law aimed at curbing spam that makes it a crime to own an unregistered mail server. Businesses and ISPs must inform the government at least 20 days before an email server is built and must keep all email for a minimum of 60 days.

E-mails objecting to a house extension failed to reach a council planning department because its computer system would not let through the word “erection”. His third e-mail, which contained the same word, somehow squeezed through but arrived after the plans had been approved!

Over 20 sites are now unavailable – Indymedia seeks to know how and why a server outside US jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities.

A judge is expected to order internet giant Google to turn over some search data to the US government to help prevent access to online pornography, but he will weigh the government’s need to gather da

Google has denied accusations that its new Chinese-language search engine is operating without a licence.

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the closure of Advar News, a website linked to an independent student group, which has been shut down since intelligence agents raided its office on 19 September. A blog service, persianblog.com, was also briefly blocked “by mistake” by Iranian ISPs.

Weblog entries on some parts of Microsoft’s MSN site in China using words such as “freedom”, “democracy” and “demonstration” are being blocked.

Various stars, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu are among nearly 20,000 people who have backed the Observer and Amnesty International campaign to end repression on the internet. This remarkable response to the launch of irrepressible.info included support from around the world.

New plans to scan e-mails for illegal images of child abuse may give the appearance that children are being safeguarded but they may not be as effective as they first seem.

A website that hosts a network of blogs about Central Asia and the Caucasus has been inaccessible for several weeks. It is thought that local ISPs were orederd to block the Neweurasia.net domain name after it launched Russian and Uzbek-language versions.

- Reporters Without Borders say that the Singaporean authorities are violating free expression and trying to foster self-censorship in the country’s blogosphere.

Human Rights Watch has a 149pp report on how China keeps control of free thought on the net, including with co-operation from Microsoft, Skype, and search engines. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee also denounced such collaboration as ‘morally unacceptable’, and HRW suggests ways of bringing pressure to bear. The report itself is also likely to be censored – read our mirror of it here.

It is believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other country in the world.

The authorities are censoring Wikipedia in the same way that they censor thousands of websites with information that strays from the official Chinese propaganda, RSF report.

of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google to use their power as consumers to help end corporate complicity in suppression of the internet in China. Download a copy of the report (PDF format).

Pro-democracy writer Wang Yi’s blog was closed down just days after it was nominated for the “freedom of expression” category in a blog contest being organised by the German radio station Deutsche Welle.

The Ukrainian secret police (SBU) have bid to take over management of the national domain name “.ua” and propose legalising e-mail monitoring.

Google’s recently launched news service in China doesn’t display results from websites blocked by that country’s authorities, leading to accusations of Google cooperation with Chinese censorship.

Reporters Without Borders has called for his immediate release.

Plans for new anti-terrorism controls on websites have led to a government defeat in the Lords – by just one vote. The original plans would have allowed a police constable to decide that information on the internet could be related to terrorism. But peers changed the Terrorism Bill to ensure police have to ask judges before telling ISPs that web pages should be removed.

Reporters Without Borders has condemned a bid to intimidate a blogger after the minister of internal security threatened to imprison the person who runs the weblog.

Several countries that have harshly cracked down on Internet use have been involved in preparatory meetings in advance of next year’s summit (WSIS).

The Singapore government has extended censorship laws to ban podcasts and videocasts that carry political content in the run up to the country’s parliamentary elections. Reporters Without Borders have condemned the suppression of a genuinely democratic debate on the Internet

The Information Commissioner’s Office says Government inaction is hampering attempts to prosecute people who send spam emails.

A new report ‘Internet Filtering in Burma in 2005’ from the OpenNet Initiative raises tough questions about the use of filtering technologies by autocratic governments wanting to control what their citizens see on the web.

“Being online here is a distinctly hit and miss experience” reports the BBC, as increasing numbers of informational sites (or anything considered remotely sensitive) experience “technical difficulties”…

Gender IT reports from the Internet Governance Forum.