All Content Related to Arrests and legal action

Turkey's Capricious Filtering - Just Too Easy

jillian — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:31:33 -0500

Turkey has made headlines lately for its capricious filtering; although previous incidents involved filtering sites which insulted Kemal Ataturk or "Turkishness" in general, lately, the filtering seems nearly impulsive.

A site entitled List of websites blocked by Turkish Telecom...or how Turkey disgraces herself shows that, while many of the blocked sites are pornographic by nature, there are plenty which aren't. One can search by categories on the site: the category entitled "Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar" refers to Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, who of late has come under fire in the news for his incessant filtering requests in Turkish courts; another category entitled "Mistake/Overkill" shows that the Turkish Telecom isn't even careful: "imbd.com" appears to be filtered in place of popular film database "imdb.com" (why that site was meant to be filtered in the first place remains unknown).

It seems that the majority of filtered sites not relating to gambling or pornography fall into two categories: those which insult Turkishness (including those insulting Kemal Ataturk) and those which Adnan Oktar has managed to get shut down. As we said earlier, it's amazing that one man has the ability to get so many sites filtered.

The administrator of Mindtrick.net pointed me to a Turkish site to which anyone may submit a filtering request. The site [in Turkish] breaks sites down into nine simple categories, making it simple for anyone to register a complaint.

In other words, anyone could play the role of Adnan Oktar. It seems that, without change, it won't be long until Turkey has censored the entire Internet.

Three Easy Steps to Block Sites in Turkey

jillian — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:12:05 -0400

In a clear instance of vexatious litigation, a Turkish court has blocked the Web site of prominent evolutionist Richard Dawkins following complaints from Islamic creationist and author Adnan Oktar. Oktar, who writes under the nom de plume Harun Yahya, filed the complaint last week; when Turkish Internet users now attempt to access Dawkins' site, they are presented with a message that reads: 'access to this site has been suspended in accordance with a court decision'.

This is not the first time Oktar has been involved in such litigation. In April 2007, Oktar successfully filed a defamation complaint against Turkish online news site Eksi sozluk. Oktar filed the complaint because of comments that users of Eksi sozluk had posted about him; a similar site, Superpoligon, was also blocked. Access to Eksi sozluk was restored shortly after the complaints were filed, and the offending remarks removed by the site's administrator.

Less than four months later, Oktar appealed to Wordpress.com to remove a number of blogs which he deemed slanderous. Following an unfavorable reaction from Wordpress, Oktar again filed a complaint with the Turkish judicial system, which in turn blocked Wordpress within Turkey. Oktar's complaint was based on a number of blogs created by rival Edip Yuksel, a prominent dissident. To date, Wordpress remains blocked, despite numerous campaigns to unblock the site. Turkish bloggers now use Wordprexy, a mirror site set up by activist group Great Firewall of Turkey, to read and post to Wordpress blogs. Less than six months later, Oktar filed a complaint against Google Groups, which led to that site being blocked within Turkey as well (Google.com remained accessible; only the subdomain groups.google.com was filtered). It is once again available.

Oktar's latest rancor is directed at Richard Dawkins, a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. Following the release of Oktar's creationist book, Atlas of Creation, Dawkins wrote on his Web site:

"I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content."

Oktar, who was involved in the attempt to ban Dawkins' book The God Delusion in Turkey, retaliated by filing a complaint in regards to Dawkins' Web site. A Turkish judicial court sided with Oktar, and ordered Turk Telecom to ban the site.

In each instance, the foreign press was quick to assume that the blockings were related to Turkey's rising Islamist party, the AKP. It is perhaps more alarming that politics had little to do with it. It is surprising that Oktar, considered a charlatan by the Turkish public, and having so recently run afoul of the law, carries so much weight in the Turkish judicial system.

In fact, Oktar carries neither more nor less weight than anyone else. According to a recent Reuters article, a law passed in May now allows the Telecommunications Directorate to close down websites based on complaints by individual users, thus enabling anyone with a complaint to get a site blocked. The problem therefore lies in the ease with which anyone can file such a complaint.

On Oktar's Web site, HarunYahya.com, there is a quote from the Qur'an: "Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Falsehood is always bound to vanish." If Dawkins' work is the falsehood Oktar is referencing, then indeed he has succeeded in making it "vanish"...if only from the Turkish Internet.

Speaking Out in Malaysia

sw — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:33:48 -0400

The arrest of blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act on September 12, just as his website Malaysia Today (http://mt.m2day.org/) was reported to be unblocked, provides an ominous reminder that there may be more effective ways of silencing independent voices than Internet filtering.

Kamarudin was one of three individuals detained under the ISA on September 12. The reporter Tan Chee Hoon was briefly detained for writing about a ruling party official’s racist remarks, and has been released. Teresa Kok, an opposition member of Parliament, was reportedly detained for objecting to a mosque broadcasting its morning prayers too loudly. Kamarudin has already been embroiled in legal action this year, facing sedition and criminal defamation charges for his writings on Malaysia Today accusing government leaders of malfeasance. However, the provisions of the Internal Security Act (ISA) are far more draconian. The ISA allows for government officials to order the preventive detention of individuals suspected of acting in a manner "prejudicial to the security of Malaysia” for up to two years (and renewable indefinitely) without trial or any judicial review. Not only do the provisions of the ISA violate the right against arbitrary detention, the right to a fair and just trial, and other fundamental human rights, but detainees have also been subjected to torture and other abuses.

De facto Law Minister Zaid Ibrahim, a member of the ruling BN coalition who resigned over his government’s use of the ISA in these cases, said "there were ample punitive laws to act against lawbreakers without having to invoke the ISA. [The law] should only be used on armed terrorists or those out to topple the government by force.”

Along with Burma, Singapore and China, Malaysia’s print and broadcast media is either dominated by or closely aligned with government interests. Into the breach, independent news sites and bloggers have become popular and influential sources of information, and their pivotal role in mobilizing the opposition in Malaysia’s March 2008 general elections was a watershed moment. Until recently, legal resort to defamation and related charges against bloggers and media appeared to suffice for the Malaysian government, as well as for Singapore. ONI testing last year found no evidence of technical filtering in Malaysia, and indeed the promise to abstain from Internet filtering was a guarantee made to companies participating in the development of a national high-tech corridor. While many viewed targeted defamation suits as arbitrary abuses of law perpetrated by the powerful to punish and silence their critics, Malaysia and Singapore did not engage in another form of prior restraint by blocking access to politically sensitive information online. In this way, they provided an alternative model to the rapaciousness of China’s Great Firewall. Now, despite the relative absence of filtering, Malaysian leaders are proving to be increasingly intolerant of critical online political speech.

Malaysia Today is only one site among hundreds that publish information critical of certain government leaders, and blocking it was a sign that the arbitrariness inherent in using executive power to silence one’s enemies has been extended to the Internet. And yet the blocking of Malaysia Today, as with all technical means of filtering the Internet, was imperfect and incomplete. In detaining Kamarudin by using a law that denies him due process rights, and in effect silencing him indefinitely, Malaysia’s ruling coalition is showing itself to be manifestly insecure in its standing with its own people.

Italy blocks The Pirate Bay, inadvertantly increasing traffic to the site

jillian — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:25:59 -0400

On July 14, the International Herald Tribune reported that an Italian judge had ordered all ISPs in that country to filter access to The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites.

The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (also known as "torrents"), small files that contain machine-readable information necessary to download data files from other users.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has experienced legal troubles. In 2006, Swedish police conducted a raid against The Pirate Bay's servers. Earlier this year, a court in Denmark ordered Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay. And just this month, the International Olympic Committee asked the Swedish government for cooperation in preventing Pirate Bay users from sharing video clips of the Olympics. In response, The Pirate Bay renamed their BitTorrent tracker The Beijing Bay.

This time, Italy's attempt to block access to The Pirate Bay stemmed from an investigation into copyright violation by an anti-piracy group in Milan and was backed by Italian record labels. The action was quickly criticized in the Italian blogosphere, leading to increased traffic to the site.

In fact, traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay actually increased five percent during the first week of the block, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. Sunde also reported that he would be implementing a complex system that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia="the bay"). However, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak he was implementing "a really annoying system for them to filter" that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia is Italian for "the bay"). He also encouraged users to use OpenDNS to circumvent ISP blocks.

As the debate about copyright infringement and online file sharing rages on around the world, it is interesting to note that P2P file sharing as a practice continues to increase, with some sources claiming that file sharing actually boosts music sales.

And as for the future of The Pirate Bay in Italy? The company filed a lawsuit against the decree [it] used to force Italian ISPs to block the site. A decision is expected within a few weeks.

Can The Government Censor Wireless Broadband?

brendan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:43:06 -0400

Free wireless broadband has been a goal of academics, activists, and politicians for years, and M2Z, a new start-up led by former FCC official John Muleta might give it to them. Unfortunately, it will not be the broadband they’ve been looking for, because the FCC has proposed that M2Z “filter[] or block[] images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography.”

Now, Wendy Seltzer and ONI’s Sally Walkerman have already written some great posts about how this sort of restriction would hurt innovation and free speech. This post focuses on the potential legality of such regulation.

The US government has tried once already to prevent minors from finding pornography online: it was the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and key portions of it were ruled unconstitutional a year later in Reno v. ACLU. The reasons the court overturned those provisions are highly relevant to the proposal the FCC is making today.

Television and radio, the court observed, have been regulated by the government since their inception. Additionally, they are inherently scarce media: there just isn’t enough spectrum to present every possible view. And relatedly, they are traditionally invasive media: if a television is on in a public room, it’s hard not to pay attention. For these three reasons the court believed itself justified in regulating certain content on TV and radio.

Justice Stevens, writing for the majority in Reno, observed that none of these conditions exist for the Internet. There is no substantial history of regulating cyberspace, nor is its content scarce, nor is it an inherently invasive medium: computers in public places are easily ignored.

Furthermore, with TV or radio it is comparatively easy to control content at its creation: NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox are all headquartered in the United States. If they broadcast pornography they can be sued, or if necessary, their executives can be arrested. But no such legal options exist online. It is virtually impossible to control content from the source of creation – there are too many people creating content in too many different places to effectively regulate them all.

And so, the court ruled, the government could not regulate pornographic content online for the purpose of protecting children. Would this ruling apply to the FCC’s proposed standards for M2Z? It’s an interesting question. While M2Z’s network like television or radio would be carried over the airwaves, its content would not be scarce or invasive in the way radio and television content is. And while the wireless network would be free, making it easier for children to find Internet access outside the home, it would remain easier to censor at the end-user, not the content-creation level. Of course, all this is just speculation – these proposed rules may not even be adopted. But you can contribute to the debate by filing a comment with the FCC here (the proceeding number is 07-195)

Lawsuit initiated over shutdown of Chinese BBS on Hepatitis-B Virus

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 02:02:23 -0500

On November 20, 2007, the Beijing Communications Administration (BCA) ordered the closure of a popular Internet forum on the Hepatitis B virus (HBV). The Hepatitis B Camp Network of China [?????? ] (http://hbvhbv.com/) was started in September 2001 and has over 300,000 registered users. Lu Jun, the site administrator, filed a lawsuit last week alleging that the BCA committed an unlawful administrative act in ordering the closure of the site without notice. He is simultaneously pursuing negotiations with the Bureau to re-open the forum. Since its shutdown, the BBS has been hosted overseas.

As an online community for people with HBV, the message forum hosted medical advice from professionals, the first HBV-related ‘rights protection’ board and a ‘blacklist’ of companies promoting fake treatments and drugs. The BBS is an initiative of the Beijing YiRenPing Center, a rights defense organization that fights discrimination against people with HBV.

In China, over 800 people die daily as a result of the Hepatitis B virus while approximately 120 million people, almost 10 percent of the population, are carriers. Despite its being epidemic in China, HBV has received what many criticize as a more uneven and lackadaisical government response than HIV/AIDS, despite its comparatively low estimate of those infected.

According to the complaint, the BBS became inaccessible around 6:00 pm on November 20. The forum’s network access provider stated that the BBS was ordered closed by the BCA, the bureau responsible for the capital city under the Ministry of Information Industry. The BCA’s specific justification for the closure was the Ministry of Health’s 2001 Measures for the Administration of Internet Medical Health Information Services (in Chinese). These Measures state that websites providing medical health information services or publishing medical health information to online users must register with the departments responsible for Internet Information Services (Articles 2, 6). In the complaint, Lu Jun claims that the Hepatitis B Camp Network of China BBS consists entirely of user-generated discussions and forums rather than medical health information services, and therefore did not need to undergo registration procedures. He also cites to both the Measures and the State Council’s Measures on the Management of Internet Information Services, which require that infringing websites be given notice as well as a period of time to ‘cure’ before being shut down.

One of the functions of the BBS has been to combat a cycle where companies spread misrepresentations about HBV in order to sell medical testing services or fake cures to the public and end up exacerbating persistent discrimination against HBV-positive people. Two main sites of discrimination are the workplace and schools, where annual compulsory testing is common. Students and employees who test positive for HPV are frequently expelled, fired, or forced out of their employment contracts. Despite a number of official directives lifting the ban on people who are HBV positive in civil service and instructing employers not to discriminate against HBV-positive job seekers, there is still enough ambiguity in the law and paucity of enforcement to empower government agencies, employers and universities with wide discretion. A number of NGOs have been pursuing impact litigation to stem discriminatory employment practices, including the YiRenPing Center’s 15 HBV-related anti-discrimination lawsuits in 2007.

Belgian ISP appeals anti-piracy injunction mandating filtering

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:09:38 -0400

The ISP Scarlet (formerly Tiscali SA) has appealed a Belgian court’s order to implement a filtering mechanism as part of granting an injunction against music piracy. On June 29, 2007, the Brussels Court of First Instance (decision available here) ordered Scarlet to implement one of seven filtering ‘solutions’ to prevent P2P file-sharing of copyrighted material over its network. Scarlet was sued by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) in June 2004, and upon granting SABAM a temporary injunction in November 2004 the court appointed an outside expert to conduct a technical and commercial evaluation of filtering applications.

In apparently the first inquiry its kind in Europe, the expert investigated 11 types of filtering tools, found only 7 P2P blocking mechanisms to be applicable to Scarlet, and out of these determined that only one was capable of parsing out specific protected musical content. Audible Magic’s CopySense application claims to cover over 70 percent of copyrighted songs shared over the Internet. In support of its decision the court promoted Audible Magic's deals to supply its ‘digital fingerprinting’ system to Internet giants such as MySpace and Microsoft. It also accepted the expert’s calculation that the cost of rolling out CopySense would be minimal—estimating that the 3 year cost spread out over 150,000 people would only be .50 euros a month.

In citing the technical and automatic nature of this filtering mechanism, the court rejected all of Scarlet’s arguments:

Rights to freedom of expression, privacy, and privacy of correspondence:
The court rejected Scarlet’s position that this type of filtering violates freedom of expression or right to privacy by stating simply that Scarlet had not provided any support for its argument.

“Mere conduit” limitation of liability for ISPs:
As defined in Article 12 of the EU Directive on Electronic Commerce, the “mere conduit” limitation of liability for ISPs appears to be analogous to the safe harbor provisions for online service providers (OSPs) in the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998. While different in important respects, both the E-Commerce Directive and the DMCA limit liability for service providers that do not initiate the transmission, select the receiver of the transmission, or select or modify the content of the transmission.

In the US, benefiting from the safe harbor requires adherence to the DMCA’s “notice and takedown” procedures, where upon a notice of infringement filed by a copyright holder with agents designated by the service provider, the service provider must quickly remove or disable access to the infringing content and give notice to subscribers whose content has been removed.

The Belgian court's remedy eliminates these formal steps. While its approach is not binding on other jurisdictions, commentators (see, e.g. here and here) are discussing the implications of this decision for the enforcement and implementation of copyright protections across Europe.

Service providers not responsible for monitoring:
Finally, the court also rejected Scarlet’s argument that the E-Commerce Directive similarly protects ISPs against government-imposed obligations to monitoring or surveillance of their networks (Article 15). Its reasoning that filtering of copyrighted music would be enabled purely by technical and automatic tools, and thus the intermediary would have no role in filtering, allowed it to distinguish filtering from surveillance.