DISINFORMAZIONE

E dopo l'input della Cina....
U.S. tech firms faulted over China curbs

By Tom Zeller Jr. The New York Times

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2006

WASHINGTON In a crowded congressional hearing room, Representative Christopher Smith, Republican of New Jersey, on Wednesday unleashed a scathing condemnation of four U.S. technology companies - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems - for a "sickening collaboration" with the Chinese government and for "decapitating the voice of the dissidents" there.

Smith's statements opened much-anticipated hearings aimed at getting executives of the four companies to give a more complete accounting of their business dealings in China, and to air the concerns of critics who say that the companies do business in China at the peril of human rights.

Among the chief issues is the alteration of online products in the Chinese market - including Internet search engines and tools for blogging, or building and maintaining Web logs - to conform with the repressive requirements of the government there.

Also of concern is the sale to China of Internet hardware that the Chinese government has been able to use in the surveillance of its online population, as well as the role U.S. companies are being forced to play in the imprisonment of Chinese citizens for online behavior that in the West would be considered simple free speech.

Executives on hand to testify Wednesday before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations included Jack Krumholtz, managing director for U.S. government affairs and associate general counsel of Microsoft; Elliot Schrage, a vice president for corporate communications at Google; Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco; and Michael Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel.

Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat whose own Congressional Human Rights Caucus was snubbed by all four companies when it invited them to speak two weeks ago, had sharp words for the executives.

"I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," Lantos said.

A series of episodes showing that the companies were bending to the restrictive demands of Beijing - filtering words like "democracy" and "human rights" from Chinese versions of blogging software, or censoring certain concepts from their China-based search engines - has leaked out from users inside China.

As questions were raised after each new revelation, companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco offered a variation on a common chorus.

"Just like any other global company," Mary Osako, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said in September, "Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based."

The subcommittee's chairman, Smith, plans to introduce legislation by the end of the week that would restrict an Internet company's ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms - even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it operates.

Smith's legislation, called the Global Online Freedom Act, would render much of what the Internet companies are currently doing in China illegal.

Among the act's provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for U.S. Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

Separately, the U.S. State Department announced Tuesday the formation of a Global Internet Freedom Task Force, charged with examining efforts by foreign governments "to restrict access to political content and the impact of such censorship efforts on U.S. companies."

Recent statements issued by Microsoft and Yahoo suggested that it was really the government's role to promote human rights abroad. Still, the Internet titans are finding it harder to avoid some tough questions, and a new note of contrition is likely to be heard.

"We always reserve the right to get better," Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel, said by telephone last weekend.

Yahoo, which has been providing Web services in China since 1999, has been criticized for filtering the results of its China-based search engine. But its bigger problems began last autumn, when human rights advocates revealed that in 2004, a Chinese division of the company had turned over to Chinese authorities information on a journalist, Shi Tao, using an anonymous Yahoo e-mail account.

Shi, who had forwarded a government communication on Tiananmen Square anniversary rites to foreign colleagues, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Last week, Reporters Sans Frontières, a group based in Paris, revealed that a Chinese division of Yahoo had provided information to authorities that contributed to the conviction in 2003 of Li Zhi, a former civil servant who had criticized local officials online. Li is serving eight years in prison.

The recent absorption of Yahoo's Chinese operations into Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company in which Yahoo now holds a 40 percent stake, also worries some critics. They fear that the move allows Yahoo to reap the benefits of China's booming market while escaping responsibility for what happens there.

For its part, Cisco, which has won annual contracts from China Telecom since 2000 to provide the hardware for the country's growing Internet backbone, has been criticized for selling its routers and equipment, which the Chinese government has in turn manipulated to monitor and censor communications.

Microsoft hit snags almost immediately after beginning its MSN China portal last spring, when users discovered that the accompanying MSN Spaces service, which provides tools for building personal Web sites and blogs, forbade blog titles containing what were deemed inappropriate concepts, like "human rights."

Then, last year, the company came under fire for shutting a Beijing blogger's MSN Web site at the request of Chinese authorities.

It was amid the fallout from that incident that Google stepped gingerly into the China fray three weeks ago. The company tried a different tack, announcing that search results would be filtered according to Chinese government specifications.

That sort of transparency was a welcome change, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. But the larger questions that have brought the companies to Capitol Hill remain.

"I think this is a very ripe time to take on some of the hardest questions," Zittrain said. "It's not a crazy position to say that these companies should not be there at all - but that's not my view, and I think there are ways to begin drawing lines so that there are ways that the companies can make the world better by being there."

Just what those lines might look like is difficult to say.

The U.S. Commerce Department, under the Export Administration Act, does restrict the sale of "crime control" equipment to repressive regimes, but Internet technologies have not been considered to fall into that category. The activist Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps before coming to the United States and who is scheduled to testify at the hearings, plans to ask why not.

"We never wanted to do any business with the Soviet 'evil empire,"' Wu said. "We embargo Cuba, we don't trade with North Korea, but with China it's O.K. I just always argue, why is it? Why do we single out China?"

Microsoft and Yahoo issued a joint statement two weeks ago acknowledging a responsibility to identify "appropriate practices in each market" where they operate, but they also urged the State Department and other agencies to pursue "government-to-government engagement."

Smith, the subcommittee chairman, says he thinks more than engagement is necessary.

"The bottom line is no one is being compelled to sell to China," Smith said.

Adesso arrivano anche India, Pakistan e Iran:
India angers bloggers as it cuts Web access

By Somini Sengupta The New York Times

Published: July 19, 2006

NEW DELHI As India's financial capital, Mumbai, observed a moment of silence Tuesday to commemorate the seven bombings of commuter trains seven days earlier, a blistering silence blanketed the Indian blogosphere.

For reasons yet to be disclosed by the authorities, the government has directed local Internet service providers to block access to a handful of Web sites that are hosts to blogs, including the popular blogspot.com, according to government officials and some of the providers.

The move has sown anger and confusion among Indian bloggers, who accuse the government of censorship and demand to know why their sites have been jammed.

Among the speculation offered was that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations.

Officials at the Ministry of Communications did not return repeated calls. Gulshan Rai, an official at the ministry's department of information and technology, said he was aware of "two pages" that had been blocked for spreading what he called anti-national sentiments, but did not provide details.

Nilanjana Roy, a Delhi-based writer who runs kitabkhana.blogspot.com, a literary blog, called it "a dangerous precedent."

"You have a right to know what is being banned, and why it's being banned," she said. "I can understand if it's China or Iran or Saudi Arabia. I'm truly appalled when it's my country doing this."

The ban, which has come into effect in recent days, means that people living in India are, in theory, kept from reading anything that appears on the blocked platforms, whether Indian blogs or otherwise.

But the ban seems far from effective. Some Internet providers have blocked access. Others have not, and many more blog aficionados have figured out how to continue reading their favorite sites.

One Web site offers help, by way of a free blog "gateway." "Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?" it asks, and goes on to offer instructions for outwitting the restrictions.

That site was prompted by the efforts of the Pakistan Telecom Authority to block blogspot.com in February, as a way to prevent Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad from spreading.

Last Thursday, a technician at a Bangalore-based service center of one Internet provider said the government had ordered blogspot.com to be blocked "due to security reasons." Another service provider in Delhi said the government, without explanation, had directed his company to block access to fewer than a dozen sites; he could offer no details on the nature of those sites.

The secretary for telecommunications, D.S. Mathur, the highest-ranking civil servant in the sector, hung up the phone when reached at home.

The tempest indicates growing government anxiety about how to control this mushrooming medium.

Like blogs anywhere, Indian blogs serve as forums to pontificate on national passions: books, movies, politics, cricket. There are blogs devoted to everyday self-indulgence: One blogger, a self-described amateur photographer, writes of jogging in the monsoon, while another recalls what she wore to a cocktail party.

And there are blogs that strive to be public service tools, including one that, within hours of the Mumbai train bombings, began listing phone numbers of hospitals where victims had been taken. Called mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, it is now blocked.

Last Tuesday's attacks in Mumbai killed 182 people and wounded more than 700.

It is impossible to know how many Indian blogs are affected. One blogger, Mitesh Vasa, from Vienna, Virginia, has documented "40,128 Indian bloggers who mention India as their country." That does not include those who do not name which country they are based in, nor others who identify their country of origin, as Peter Griffin does from Mumbai, as "utopia."

Griffin, who helped set up the mumbaihelp site, said he woke up Tuesday morning to a furious litany of 300 e- mail messages, mostly from bloggers enraged by the blockade.

"Even if that were true, it doesn't make sense," Griffin argued. Anyone with a domain name, he said, could do the same thing on an ordinary Web site.