The Chinese government has quietly mandated that any personal computer sold in the country be pre-installed with government-approved software that blocks access to a government-created black list of “harmful� sites.

The alleged intent of such a move is to protect children and provide them with a safer online environment. The question of how to do that effectively and not trample on Internet freedom is a difficult issue that is being debated everyday in countries around the world.

But it strains credulity to believe that the latest effort of the Chinese government is anything more than an effort to further choke over access to information and free expression. Savvy Internet users in China are increasingly finding ways to circumvent the Great Firewall and government mandates to censor content on chat rooms, blogs and search engines are hardly airtight. Now the government is adding the software mandate to bring censorship directly to the desktop.
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It’s getting to be decision time for the future of ICANN–the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers–and the Obama Administration is going to have to get up to speed quickly.

Since its creation in 1998, ICANN has managed the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) under several contracts with the U.S. government. One of those contracts, known as the Joint Project Agreement, expires on September 30 of this year. This “JPA” has been used to spur ICANN procedural reform. ICANN says it has done enough, so that the U.S. can cut the umbilical cord. Most observers, even those who support the independence of ICANN, say it is just a little too soon to let go.
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The Chinese government has blocked access to Twitter and a slew of other online platforms for expression in China on Tuesday. Users report that Twitter, Flickr, Bing.com, Hotmail, Windows Live, Blogger.com, and other services are unavailable. YouTube has also been largely blocked since March.

The Chinese government often restricts access to online services during politically sensitive periods. As this week marks the twentieth anniversary of the deadly crackdown on democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, “politically sensitive� would be an immense understatement in describing the tension in Beijing and permeating the rest of the mainland.

The Chinese government has been here before:  The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations were organized with help of a “new” communications technology called a fax machine.  “Rogue” fax machines (outside the control of the Chinese government) scattered in universities across the country provided a key platform for organizing and free expression.  Similarly, text messaging, blogs, and other social media platforms have unleashed a torrent of political discourse in recent years — from the incendiary to the mundane — as 300 million Chinese have quickly embraced the Internet and other communications technologies. Twitter has become immensely popular as a way for sharing politically sensitive news, and text messaging has been used to organize protests around community concerns.

The current social media blackout serves as a sharp reminder of how vital these platforms are for enabling unfettered speech and grassroots democratic reform movements. Afraid of being held accountable by its own people, the Chinese government once again looks to shut down online discourse over the Tiananmen Square incident and deny an entire generation of Chinese access to a key piece of their country’s history.

Promoting global Internet freedom must be a core priority in the U.S.’s foreign and domestic policy. The democratic revolution (and its iconic Tank Man) may not be televised—but it could be online.

Now that U.S. telecom companies seem poised to gain access to Cuba, the big question is whether those companies can help to change the island nation’s repressive Internet censorship regime.

President Obama’s plan to allow U.S. telecoms to do business in Cuba is the right thing to do. Gaining access to the Internet and new communications technologies is a huge benefit for people living in restrictive regimes like Cuba and hold the promise of advancing freedom for millions of Cubans.

But overlooked in the understandably favorable news coverage of the White House plan has been Cuba’s troubling history of monitoring and censoring its citizens’ previously limited electronic communications.
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It’s been awhile since we last blogged about Phorm, the UK company proposing to partner with ISPs to create behavioral profiles of their subscribers for use in targeted advertising. Over the past several months, the European Commission and the UK government have been enagaged in a policy ping-pong of sorts, with the EU continuing to press the UK on the government’s conclusion that the Phorm system passes muster with EU privacy law, and the UK continuing to express its approval of the company’s practices.

The Commission opened a new chapter today by opening a formal legal proceeding against the UK government. PC World has the details:

The European Commission began legal action against the U.K. Tuesday over its failure to protect Internet users from Phorm — a covert behavioral advertising technology tested by the U.K.’s biggest fixed line operator, BT, in 2006 and 2007.

The move signals growing concern in Brussels over the way new Internet-based technologies are using people’s personal data. In addition to taking legal action against the U.K., the Commission also issued a general warning to all 27 E.U. countries to uphold privacy laws, especially regarding social-networking Web sites and users of RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies.

The Commission, the executive body of the European Union responsible for upholding laws, said the U.K. had failed to enforce E.U. data protection and privacy rules, because broadband Internet subscribers were not informed that their browsing was being tracked.

“We have been following the Phorm case for some time and have concluded that there are problems in the way the U.K. has implemented parts of E.U. rules on the confidentiality of communications,” said Viviane Reding, the E.U.’s telecom commissioner.

She called on the U.K. to change its national laws and ensure that its national privacy authority is given greater powers to tackle privacy threats from emerging technologies. “This should allow the U.K. to respond more vigorously to new challenges to eprivacy and personal data protection such as those that have arisen in the Phorm case. It should also help reassure U.K. consumers about their privacy and data protection while surfing the Internet,” Reding said.

On Monday the folks running Google’s China operations began to notice a dramatic drop in YouTube traffic. By Tuesday afternoon YouTube had turned into a digital ghost town; traffic dropped to nearly zero, the company told the New York Times.

Chinese officials, big shocker, have given Google no official reason for shutting down access to the video platform, nor have they actually admitted shutting down the YouTube pipes. Instead, Chinese officials are engaged in their own fanciful brand of obfuscation. “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet,” said Qin Gang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “In fact it is just the opposite.” Sounds like some Chinese press aide has been reading a little too much George Orwell.

This incident makes me believe that the leaders of the Middle Kingdom are operating from a playbook published in some mythic tongue straight out of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and there’s no Gandalf around to interpret. No company can possibly devise a coherent push back policy when there’s not even a set of rules to push against.

While Beijing may be operating with blinders on, the rest of the world is watching this game of geopolitical charades in crystal clear, high def. The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is fast approaching and the Chinese aren’t taking any chances that subversive digital propaganda will trickle into their country on the bitstream

These actions come as no surprise, or shouldn’t. There is a long history of China violating the international right of free expression. On Monday they flipped some switches, monitored some blinking LEDs on a console, and choked off YouTube’s air supply. Twenty years ago they did the same sort of thing, but did it with tanks, troops, bullets and blood.

The nation’s preeminent health policy publication, Health Affairs, is holding an event today highlighting a series of major policy papers published in its latest issue. CDT’s Deven McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project, will speak today about key points contained in one of those papers that she and several CDT colleagues authored for the peer-reviewed journal.

HPP’s paper describes a proposed privacy framework developed by the Markle Foundation’s Connecting for Health initiative that would incorporate key privacy principles. Those principles include specific network design features, and oversight mechanisms to establish greater public trust in health IT.

The folks at Health Affairs will cover the event the health IT event live on Twitter. You can follow those updates by following the hashtag #HAHIT (health affairs health IT); you can search Twitter for that hashtag by clicking this link.

The Health Affairs communications staff will be sending “tweets” about speakers key points; linking to abstracts, news coverage, websites, or other relevant information online; and posting photos from the event.

Here’s how Health Affairs describes the current issue:

As the U.S. government prepares to embark on major new investments in health information technology, the latest issue of Health Affairs explores the benefits, challenges and potential risks of transforming the health care system through the use of IT. A series of papers and perspectives suggests that the gains could be real and dramatic – but are often not easy to achieve.

Despite the promises health IT offers, protecting the privacy of people’s health information is a major challenge to ensuring widespread adoption of health IT in the United States. Several papers in the March-April issue tackle the various debates over health information privacy, and offer potential solutions to this thorny issue.

Reports of crumbling economies around the globe are sucking all the oxygen out of the news cycle. Certainly we can’t ignore the financial peril that many countries are facing; just as certainly, we can’t ignore the perils facing a vital engine of the global economy: The Internet. Yet is precisely at such times that those fighting to keep the Internet innovative, open and free from repression must be the most alert.

CDT President Leslie Harris writes about this in a new OpEd piece published by Reuters:

“Now is the time that Internet and technology companies must step up and take on the very challenges that the Global Internet Freedom Act was intended to address in order to ensure that their services and technologies do not become tools for surveillance and oppression.”

Leslie writes that companies doing business internationally no longer have to operate in a vacuum, feeling like they must construct ad hoc policies when confronted with government requests that violate the human rights principles of freedom of expression and privacy.

Leslie’s OpEd highlights the work of the Global Network Initiative in her piece. The GNI exists to provide companies with a framework for operating in countries with repressive regimes.

“Companies that participate in the Global Network Initiative will be prepared to do the right thing regardless of whether or not there is a legal mandate to do so. At the end of the day, this is about leadership on a fundamental issue of human rights that will not go away.”

The Election of the Century is just a day away. Lots of things are on the electorate’s mind, but we here at CDT hope the next president – whomever he is – devotes considerable attention to one last major issue: global Internet freedom.

What is Global Internet Freedom?

Whether you call it global Internet freedom, digital human rights, or something else, it’s the idea that governments around the world will not interfere with the free flow of information and ideas on global communications networks, particularly the Internet.

It’s the idea that governments will respect, regardless of the medium of communication, the universally recognized human rights of freedom of expression and privacy enshrined in global documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s the idea that governments won’t directly or indirectly (for example, by putting pressure on technology companies) block, take down, or otherwise engage in censorship of online content, and access users’ personal information, conduct electronic surveillance or persecute cyber dissidents and citizen journalists.

However, many governments are successfully remaking the Internet into a tool of government control. They recognize that the Internet has become a global communications medium that fuels both economic growth and democratic reforms. The global Internet’s inherent openness and lack of central control is particularly threatening to authoritarian countries and those with weak rule of law and poor human rights records. Such countries want to harness the Internet’s economic power while limiting the personal freedoms the medium bestows, and are making significant strides to do so.
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This week, a diverse coalition of leading information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders launched the Global Network Initiative. The initiative seeks to help information and telecommunications companies chart an ethical and accountable path forward through the growing demands from countries to take actions that infringe on the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users. Equally important, the initiative intends to engage in collective action to promote the rule of law and the adoption of public policies that protect and respect core human rights on the global network. Three technology giants (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!) have shown critical leadership by committing to the Initiative, and others both here and in Europe are likely to join in the coming weeks and months.

While there will be an understandable temptation to dub this effort as “China principles” given the challenges faced by U.S. technology companies operating there, such a characterization would miss the point. Technology companies are under increasing pressure from governments all over the world to participate in network censorship and otherwise comply with laws that are outside the bounds of internationally recognized human rights standards and norms with respect to users’ free expression and privacy. While China is perhaps the most familiar or visible example, recent reports from the OpenNet Initiative make clear that Internet censorship and surveillance are a growing concern all over the world. These are global issues and this is an initiative with global application—and yes, that does include the United States.
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