Category Archives: Censorship

Egypt's communications ministry is asking citizens to report web pages showing blasphemous content.

The Egyptian government is now crowdsourcing censorship efforts. A new web page created by the country's National Telecommunications Registry Agency, allows citizens to report blasphemous websites (Arabic-language links). According to Alix Dunn of tech activism blog The Engine Room, the site is designed to help find pages showing a controversial anti-Islam film. The film, a low-budget American effort called The Innocence of Muslims, portrays Mohammed in extremely negative ways and sparked violent riots worldwide.

Visitors to the National Telecommunications Registry page are instructed to leave the offending URL on a page with a CAPTCHA link; government bureaucrats then review the page and block it if it leads to blasphemous content. This service follows on the heels of a failed attempt to ban YouTube in Egypt because of numerous uploaded copies of The Innocence of Muslims.

The film itself was directed by an Egyptian-American Christian with previous fraud and methamphetamine arrests; actors in the movie were apparently unaware of what they were being filmed for and anti-Islamic dialogue was overdubbed in post-production. YouTube banned the video in Egypt and Libya earlier this year in response to widespread public outcry in those two countries.

[Image: Flickr user gr33ndata]

Original post:
Egypt Crowdsources Censorship

Chinas secret Internet cleanup team, responsible for taking down negative stories for their high-profile clients, made millions of yuan before being shut down by government officials.

According to an investigation by Chinas Caixin magazine, these Internet scrubbers are paid huge sums to erase any unwanted online mentions of their clients through various under-the-table means -- in other words, censorship that has been privatized.

Gu Dengda, a 30-year-old Beijing-based entrepreneur and public relations consultant, founded his Internet cleanup crew, Yage Times, in 2007. By 2011, his company made 50 million yuan (more than $8 million) in gross profits that year alone. Officially, the business falls under the information technology sector, but insiders told Caixin its main money-maker is getting rid of negative coverage for a hefty price.

Citing one job, the magazine wrote, Saving the Shenzhen-based firms image was not cheap, and it took more than two months to douse the flames of Internet news reports and rumors claiming executives had used a Ponzi scheme to bilk investors.

In China, bad press at any scale can take down even the biggest politicians or tarnish the names of major companies, so naturally, business for Gu was booming. Yage Times dealt with a wide variety of clients, from multinational companies to wealthy individuals. Most clients, however, were officials in second-tier or third-tier provincial cities.

Gu and his employees would often use bribery as a means of getting rid of negative news surrounding clients, but when that failed, they resorted to creating and sending out forged government documents that demanded specific content be removed from news sites.

Targets of bribery and the faked official documents ranged from low-level employees at public relations firms to major news portals such as Netease and Sohu, and even Internet search giant Baidu.

And while desperate clients were willing to pay lots of money for the illegal services provided by Yage Times, it seems that Gu is now paying the price.

Gu is now being held under police custody because of his shady, if lucrative, business practices. He is awaiting trial and has been charged with various crimes, including bribery. According to the report, Gu is one of at least 10 Internet- scrubbing specialists currently being detained by authorities. Additionally, Chinese authorities uncovered several other firms that operate under similar IT or public relations facades that also provide the illegal services.

According to Caixins report, Chinas authorities were determined to stop such underground business practices for good. Authorities were so determined to leave no stone unturned that every uniformed officer in the district was dispatched for the raids, even a forensic examiner, the report said. More than 100 police stormed Yages Beijing offices, arresting more than 100 employees from janitors to Gu himself -- and shutting down their operations.

View post:
Privatized Censorship: China Cracks Down On Image-Rescuing Bribery Business

New Delhi, Feb. 20 -- In an Arindam Chaudhuri Facebook post on February 9, 2013, there's a picture of the man, shining smile et al, with the caption: "The highest followed management guru and teacher on earth (sic) has two million fans," followed by two exclamation marks. It has, till this report was filed, 124,057 likes. On February 15, the government had ordered, following a Gwalior court directive, blocking of sites critical to the IIPM that Chaudhuri runs.

Among the content blocked included a University Grants Commission (UGC) notice against the private B-school. It reads, "IIPM is not a university within the meaning of Section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956. It does not have the right of conferring or granting degrees as specified by the UGC under Section 22(3) of the UGC Act. It is clarified for information that IIPM is neither entitled to award MBA/BBA/BCA degree nor it is recognised by UGC."

Public ire against the censorship forced the government to lift the censorship. Along with the content that went off the internet included articles which gave details of IIPM's questionable tie-ups with institutes abroad, even when it did not have AICTE/UGC approval.

An education magazine had a few years ago revealed that IIPM had been advertising an agreement offering with IMI Belgium - an institute not recognised by the regulatory authority in Belgium, similar to UGC.

There was also a tie-up claim with the University of Buckingham, which was subsequently denied by the UK university, the magazine reported.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Hindustan Times.

Original post:
Online protests rage against govt censorship

Harlem Shake (Parents edition Without Censorship)
You laugh a lot It #39;s funny

By: MrShaol

Read the original post:
Harlem Shake (Parents edition Without Censorship) - Video

Micro-blogging websites offer uncensored information, glimpse behind bureaucracy's secrecy By meghan cioci | Feb 17

A panel of international journalists met Friday in Clark Hall to discuss the role technology plays in combatting news censorship policies in China. The panelists highlighted the reporting challenges faced by international correspondents and Chinese journalists.

The discussion, entitled Covering China in the Age of Information, was moderated by Charles Laughlin, director of the East Asia Center, and included panelists Melissa Chan, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, Isaac Stone Fish, the associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine and Susan Jakes, the editor of the Asia Societys ChinaFile blog.

In the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, because of pressures from the international community, journalists faced fewer constraints, Chan said. But progress has since halted, she added.

Non-Chinese foreign correspondents enjoy relative security, Fish said, but their sources and Chinese counterparts often do not. Youre there, youre protected, but its very easy for you to burn your sources for you to endanger the people you talk to, he said.

Because of the risk news sources face, it is difficult for foreign journalists to hear peoples genuine opinions, Jakes said. Instead reporters must find these opinions in certain corners of the web.

One of the interesting things about these micro-blogging sites is that they can give us access to peoples unvarnished thoughts about all kinds of different topics, Jakes said. [It] provides a kind of window to life in China.

These micro-blogging sites, such as the popular Weibo, are censored, which results in a cat and mouse game between users and censors. Sometimes you can read things for a few minutes and then they just disappear, Jakes said. But these posts if seen during the brief time before censoring provide invaluable leads on news stories, panelists agreed.

The advent of image attachments, which are harder to censor than text, has furthered the ability for news stories to reach readers in China. One site, WeiboScope, selects 40-50 of the most popular stories and posts them in the form of image attachments, rather than the original text versions..

There is some stuff that is really pushing the envelope in terms of sensitivity [on WeiboScope] and [reading the site] is a good way to keep your thumb on the pulse of public discourse in China today, Laughlin said.

Excerpt from:
Panel discusses Chinese journalism, government censorship

Harlem Shake (home version of censorship)

By: #1060; #1080; #1083; #1080; #1087; #1087; #1086; #1074; #1072; #1040; #1083; #1077; #1085; #1072;

View original post here:
Harlem Shake (home version of censorship) - Video

Benjamin Netanyahu ... instructions to editors failed to take account of the internet. Photo: Reuters

JERUSALEM: The blanket ban on reporting details of the detention and apparent suicide of an Australian prisoner jailed in Israel has raised pressing questions about the relevance of censorship in a digital age.

The mysterious case of Prisoner X briefly emerged in 2010 in an online news report which was immediately taken down due to a gag order, only to resurface on Tuesday when the ABC's Foreign Correspondent reported he was an Australian working for Mossad.

The results are ridiculous and, instead of hushing up the blunder, they merely shine a spotlight on it.

Although the news spread like wildfire across social networks, Israel's media outlets were uncharacteristically silent, gagged by a set of tight restrictions that barred them from even mentioning the ABC report.

The silence was broken only when three Israeli MPs used their parliamentary immunity to raise the issue in the Knesset, forcing the censor to ease its grip and permit coverage of the ABC report.

Advertisement

Aluf Benn, editor of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, said the case highlighted the old-world thinking among Israel's top intelligence brass.

"I imagined yesterday that I met Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and that I tried to persuade him to remove himself for a day or two from the cloak-and-dagger world he lives in . . . But then I remembered that Pardo is still living in the previous century, when information is kept in regimes' safes," he wrote.

Shortly after the ABC report emerged, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called in the country's top editors to ask them to cooperate by withholding publication of information about an incident that was "very embarrassing to a certain government agency," Haaretz said, in a clear allusion to Mossad.

Read the original:
Israeli censorship proves futile in digital age

Israel is able to suppress stories like Prisoner X because so many citizens regard security as sacred Israels media operate under official censorship.

That has been a fact of my professional life as a journalist covering foreign policy and national security. Heres how it works: any story involving defence, intelligence or nuclear matters must be submitted to the military censors office. It can run only after being stamped for approval.

Israel being Israel, and not China or the former East Germany, its censorship is less scary than it might appear. The 35 military censors are not faceless bureaucrats. You know them personally and can negotiate wording to let the story pass.

Paradoxically, the existence of censorship has its advantages. Military and intelligence sources are more likely to give you secret information, trusting the censor to play bad cop. And once you have submitted anything to the censor, youre relieved of legal responsibility.

The main goal of censorship is deterrence: you know that your story will be blacked out, so why bother writing it. All of us are well-trained in self-censorship and in using code words such as nuclear capability or nuclear option rather than nuclear weapons.

The success of censorship relies not on coercion, but on public support. The military and intelligence community enjoy a sacred status in Israeli society, and national security resonates much better than civil liberties. Many journalists accept censorship willingly, and criticise their peers who break with the official line. They are even proud of knowing the story and withholding it.

As a young journalist in the late 1980s, I prepared a critical story about the Mossad. Do it in your free time, itll never see the light of day anyway, my editor warned me. It was duly censored. My new editor, Meir Schnitzer, appealed to the high court. We won a landmark case, which set the scope of censorship.

Since then, the tide of censorship has turned in tandem with the public sentiment toward security. The second Lebanon war of 2006 caused a major setback, as the media were blamed for disclosing the locations of rocket attacks and thus supplying Hezbollah with targeting data. The Olmert government, and the Netanyahu government that succeeded it in 2009, leveraged the public anger to impose stricter censorship.

In most cases the media live with restrictions through quoting foreign sources. At Haaretz, we cant write that Israel bombed a nuclear reactor or arms convoy in Syria, but if its published in a London-based newspaper its fine.

This week, however, we were told not to even quote foreign sources, when Australias ABC news broke the story of Ben Zygier, an Australian-born Mossad agent who had strayed from his mission, was locked secretly in solitary confinement, and committed suicide in prison in 2010. The affair was covered by a gag order, which is stronger than ordinary censorship: disobeying it risks criminal prosecution. We ran a story quoting the broadcast, and were told to take it off our website. Then the editors of Israels newspapers, TV and radio news channels were summoned to a private briefing by the Mossad head, Tamir Pardo, who asked them to ignore the story.

Read the original here:
Censorship in Israel's media is widespread

How to spot a creationist censorship of an Atheist Shockofg
Just so you know this is something called evidence mr shockofgod. Notice how we observe and take note of the actual facts taking place in your biased video.

By: Mitchell Nichols Jr

Read more here:
How to spot a creationist censorship of an Atheist Shockofg - Video

CENSORSHIP-Short Film Directed by Elisabetta Fornarelli
CENSORSHIP SHORT FILM 2011 A FILM BY: ELISABETTA FORNARELLI Interpreters: Slim Ayedi - Andrea Monaldi Subject: Elisabetta Fornarelli - Andrea Monaldi Screenplay: Andrea Monaldi Editing: Elisabetta Fornarelli Photography: Elisabetta Fornarelli Technical Assistance: Mirco Morroni Graphics Designer: Mirco Morroni Soundtrack (copyright-free): freemusicarchive.org WEB SITE:www.censorshipmovie.altervista.org Based on a true story. Images of this work are taken from Tunisia. All the material has been produced during the months between January and April 2011. This document wishes to tell a recent cross section of current history. The foreground role which Tunisia had in the geo-political chessboard of the revolutions within the whole of the South Mediterranean basin. This small nation gave rise to the Arab Spring. Regardless of the difficulties encountered throughout (from the police with their checks and to the numerous faithful followers of the old regime who hindered all those who wanted to document that which was going on, not in a kind way either), we came across many infinitely dignified people. We interacted with the true protagonists of these events. The main theme running through the document, censorship, which still pervades these countries, comes to the fore through certain events we bore witness to, in a most tangible way. The difficulties and intimidation civil journalists have to endure on a day-to-day basis is a truth we just have to realise. We have, therefore ...

By: censuramovie

Originally posted here:
CENSORSHIP-Short Film Directed by Elisabetta Fornarelli - Video