[spectre] the great firewall of china; the googly gate of germany and france

[Amy Alexander]

internet censorship discussions du jour: 

today slashdot posted this story:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/04/1752217

about the ongoing berkman center (harvard) study 
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china
into internet censorship in china

and some of the websites they found censored there:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/china-highlights.html

but the study is actually about filtering worldwide:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/

the study cites quite a bit of interesting research and links, 
including the one about localized google filtering for google.de and 
google.fr :
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/

and a listing of some of the excluded sites:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/results1.html

this part of the study seems to have been released about a month ago - i'm 
curious how much media coverage this has gotten in europe? i only 
find tech journals discussing this in U.S... of course it's reminiscent of 
the yahoo/nazi war memorabilia vs. france case of a few years ago, in that 
content internationally available on the internet is censored on a 
per-country basis.  but there are some differences:

1) in the yahoo case, there was at least an accuser and a court case.  
here, nobody is owning up to doing the censoring - it's left totally 
ambigous, sites just silently from google listings. from the study:

'The policy for removals based on government invocation of local laws 
remains itself somewhat shrouded. For example, while Google's terms of 
service explains that it removes search results in response to DMCA 
notifications and sets forth some other situations where Google might 
remove search results, there is no mention of government-mandated (or 
-requested) removals, though there is mention of the prospect in at least 
one apparent message from Google support staff. This may well be due to 
the fact that there are no industry "best practices" or other easy means 
of determining an ideal course of action by search engines when confronted 
with requests or demands for exclusions grounded in part in alleged legal 
requirements.'

the aformentioned message from google support staff:
http://www.fitug.de/debate/0208/msg00420.html


2) in the yahoo case, the action was taken against the site (yahoo)  
actually hosting the content. in the google case, the action is taken at
the meta level: the search engine *listing* of the content. as is
increasingly the trend, google's dominance of access to information on the
internet is used to subtly and non-confrontationally censor content.  
sometimes a high profile case ensues - as it did with scientology - but
usually it goes virtually unnoticed. here's an example list of sites
excluded from google.fr and/or google.de, but not google.com:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/results1.html

users in france and germany can still have access to the excluded google 
content by choosing to switch to the english-language google.com site. but 
the default versions served in france and germany, i.e. the ones in which 
the interface appears in the local language, are google.fr and google.de.

so... does that mean google.com is immune to content exclusion? nope. 
the chilling effects clearinghouse maintains a database of removal 
requests (what are commonly called "cease and desist" letters, though 
i think that's not legally accurate.):
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/keyword.cgi?KeywordID=2

note that the above letters were apparently submitted to the clearinghouse 
by google themselves, but it's not possible to know how many were not 
submitted to the clearinghouse (i'm not a lawyer, but i imagine 
they probably receive requests not citing the DMCA, requests labeled 
"Confidential", etc.) 

meanwhile, back in china, the govt.-run network folks have also gotten 
into the google games. sometimes they block searches for specific 
keywords, other times they replace google with something else entirely. 
and now and then, they make yer DSL drop out if you search for the wrong 
thing (interesting: hi-tech crack on the knuckles with a ruler.) 

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/google-replacements/

meanwhile, anticensorware researcher/advocate seth finkelstein reminds us 
how much china censorware and "free world" censorware have in common:
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/china.php
http://www.sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php

the loophole article is particularly interesting, i think, because it 
points to how algorithms are used to censor other algorithms -  
the censored algorithms are dangerous because they are capable of 
providing access to anything and everything.

which begs the question: 
what would be a good way to censor "everything"? 
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php

i tried to visual the above situation in my head, and it came out to be a 
klein bottle. (the situation, not my head.)

that's my post-game wrap-up for now... would be curious to hear whether 
the google.de/fr stuff is old news already in europe or not... 

meanwhile, for those who are wondering, "am i censored in ________ ?"
the beckman study people put these tools online, but i can't swear they 
work properly. i tried it with some sites i'd expect china to ban and 
it said they were accessible, but, anyway:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/

or for testing for presence or absence of sites in google.de and 
google.fr, scroll to the bottom of:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/

happy (or not so happy) form inputs, 
-@