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Whats the opposite of free speech? If you answered, totalitarian censorship, you are right -- and you are old.

In the Internet age, censorship is all about allowing partial, temporary free speech, then shutting it down once enough has been said. The innovator, as usual these days when it comes to nondemocratic governance, is China, where the leading microblog site, Sina Weibo, unveiled its modified censorship model this week.

Users get 80 points. Monitors will take away points for violations. These include the censors old favorite, criticizing the government. You can also lose points for spreading rumor (which I thought was the whole point of the Internet) or promoting cults (a provision apparently aimed at the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong). The monitors will also scour your comments for puns or other circumlocutions used to avoid censorship in the past. If you run out of points, youre cut off.

If free speech is so threatening, why dont the powers- that-be in China just shut down the microblogs altogether? Part of the answer is that with 324 million users, Sina Weibo has become too big to fail, or at least too much a part of normal Chinese life to be eliminated. But the deeper reason to keep the masses microblogging is that the Chinese government reaps important gains from it. This is not your fathers Communist Party. Nor your grandfathers. Chinas leadership is engaged in a complicated, risky process of trying to gain some of the advantages of democratic government without the disadvantage of putting itself up for direct election. Free speech is a crucial part of the experiment.

A major benefit of allowing people to complain on the Web is that it allows society to blow off steam. This is a venerable value of free speech, recognized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in a famous dissent in 1951, responding to the courts choice to uphold the conviction of 11 American Communists for teaching subversive ideas. The airing of ideas releases pressures which otherwise might become destructive, Douglas wrote. If such release is beneficial in a democracy, its doubly so in a place where there is no robust public sphere.

Another advantage of limited free speech is that it allows the government to gather information about public concerns. Chinese authorities cant rely on ordinary polling data, because pollsters in China cant operate freely, lest they learn of serious opposition to the government. And its impossible to spy on 1.3 billion people all the time. The microblogs serve as the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, as Hamlet called the theater.

Once the microblogs have conveyed what people are thinking, the government can respond to their concerns, as it did last summer after the Zhejiang train derailment when Premier Wen Jiabao made a special visit to the site in apparent reaction to public frustration with bureaucratic silence and denials. Responding to public opinion is the hallmark of accountable government. Without elections to provide oversight, Chinas leaders need every opportunity they can get to demonstrate that they respond to peoples concerns. Seen this way, limited free speech, followed by government action, is an important part of how the Chinese Communist Party seeks to sustain its legitimacy.

The party is utterly aware that free speech could help bring the government down. That is why it is experimenting with freedom in moderation, and using quasi-private entities like Sina Weibo as its proxies. Chinas leaders are trying to gain the advantages of free speech without paying its full price. First Amendment absolutists will probably raise their eyebrows at this. After all, Americans have been raised to believe that free speech has a life of its own; that truth is great and shall prevail.

Yet there is an extraordinary precedent for Chinas censorship model: the history of free speech in England and the U.S. before the modern era. When it was drafted, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution didnt contemplate the radical freedom Americans now enjoy. Its language, drawn from English precedents, was aimed essentially at prohibiting what is called prior restraint: government censorship of books and newspapers before they could be published. As with the Sina Weibo rules, once you had spoken or written, you could still be punished for what you had freely said. You were accountable under the crime of seditious libel.

Original post:
China’s Blog Censorship Rules Have U.S. Parallels

In an interview conducted by Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News over the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the Anonymous Group members used various nicknames like +Gummy, Amikanon and others

MUMBAI, INDIA: Anonymous Group, which has carried out several cyber attacks against Reliance Communications as well as several government and political parties websites in the past few weeks, talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about the groups prime objective to fight censorship of Internet, blocking and curtailing of websites by ISP and government bodies and the Occupy Protest on 9 June.

CIOL: Can you brief us on what led you to start the attacks on RCom and other websites early this month?

+Gummy: Last year itself some ISPs like BSNL and others, had blocked some sites mainly Torrent, Songs.pk, etc. without any court ruling. And then when Isac revealed to us that Reliance Communication is blocking more than 350 plus sites, we decided to act that was on 6 May and then we decided to protest and started 'operation India' or '#OpIndia'. People became aware of it and joined us some of them had hacking skills, some didnt; while some learnt, some were taught. But our main goal was to get rid of the censorship and here we are.

CIOL: Is this the right method to achieve your goal and to protest against censorship?

+Gummy: Who knows? Shouldn't the government be doing something about it? And we are not causing damage to sites. Its the people who have to do that! Did they (government) talk about it in the parliament before censoring? No.

CIOL: Even though it's others and not you damaging the sites, the customers might be suffering?

+Gummy: We did not hit any site which affects commoners. We could have targeted the media sites or IRCTC or passport to get quick attention but no we are among the people.

CIOL: After the 6 May attack, how many more attacks have been carried out and who were the targets?

+Gummy: We did not keep a count because we have no leaders as soon as a website is attacked, we release it to the masses and it gets restored in some time. Government has absolute power and Reliance Communication has absolute money, which makes them a lethal corrupt combo.

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To protest until censorship stops: Anonymous

Rogue copies of Green Simurgh, an Internet proxy software application used in Iran and Syria, have been found to contain malware that records users' activities and keystrokes.

Green Simurgh is an anti-censorship application that routes a computer's outbound connections to a server located in the U.S. This allows the software's users to bypass network filters and access Internet resources that would normally be banned by their ISP.

Green Simurgh doesn't require any installation and can run directly from USB memory sticks, which makes it suitable for users who access the Internet from cafes and public computers.

The software has been used in Iran since 2009 and, according to the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto laboratory that researches digital media, global security and human rights, Syrian users have also began to rely on it.

"It has recently come to our attention that this software is being recommended and circulated among Syrian Internet users for bypassing censorship in their country," said Citizen Lab technical advisor Morgan Marquis-Boire in a blog post on Friday. "This information led to the discovery and analysis of a back-doored version of this software."

The malicious version is being distributed from file sharing websites like 4shared.com as a package called Simurgh-setup.zip. The archive contains an executable file that masquerades as a Green Simurgh installer.

When run on a Windows machine, the rogue installer drops a legitimate copy of the Green Simurgh software in the Program Files directory, but also installs a computer Trojan horse that runs in the background.

"[The Trojan horse] keeps a log of your username, machine name, every window clicked and keystroke entered," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at antivirus vendor Sophos, in a blog post on Tuesday. "It attempts to submit these logs to some servers located in the United States, but registered to an entity that appears to be based in Saudi Arabia."

Considering that thousands of users depend on the legitimate Simurgh software, it's likely that a lot more people have been impacted by this malware than by Flame -- a recently discovered cyberespionage threat that has received a lot of attention in the media -- Wisniewski said.

"Unlike Flame, which is a highly targeted malware that has only been found on a handful of computers globally, this malware is targeting users for whom having their communications compromised could result in imprisonment or worse," he said.

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Copies of Anti-censorship Software Used in Iran and Syria Contain Keylogger

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's Sina Corp has introduced a code of conduct for users of the local version of Twitter amid accusations of censorship to rein in what has grown into a raucous online forum to air political and social grievances.

The code of conduct, first announced earlier this month, stipulates that users of Sina's Weibo microblogging site cannot post information that is against the principles of the constitution, cannot harm national unity, disclose state secrets or publish false information, among other rules.

Many users said the restrictions were aimed at muzzling the often scathing and anonymous online chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for open discussion.

The move, the latest in a series of steps to rein in discussion on Weibo, comes as China prepares for a once-in-a-decade leadership handover, expected to be announced at a party congress later this year.

Sina, the biggest of the Weibo operators, also introduced a points system in which a user starts with 80 points and loses points for every violation. A score of zero results in a cancelled account. A user can gain points for validating his or her real identity.

"It gives Sina a firmer basis for expanding a ban on whatever is considered sensitive news," said one prominent Weibo user who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The definition of what counts as sensitive was always loose and it's expanding all the time. Of course, nowadays, they're worried because of all the scandal and rumors before the 18th Congress."

In a sign of how intensely sensitive the issue is for the ruling Communist Party, censors blocked online searches for the name of Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party boss cast out of the party's Central Committee.

Internet users have skirted restrictions on Weibo by using code words to discuss the issue. Sina employs technicians to scrub Weibo of politically sensitive posts.

Sina's move to implement a user contract comes after Beijing demanded last December that microblogging operators ensure their users are registered with their real names.

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China moves to tame microbloggers amid censorship claims

SHANGHAI - China's Sina Corp has introduced a code of conduct for users of its Weibo service - the local version of Twitter - amid accusations of censorship to rein in what has grown into a raucous online forum to air political and social grievances.

The code of conduct, first announced earlier this month, stipulates that users of Sina's Weibo microblogging site cannot post information that is against the principles of the constitution, cannot harm national unity, disclose state secrets or publish false information, among other rules.

Many users said the restrictions were aimed at muzzling the often scathing and anonymous online chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for open discussion.

The move, the latest in a series of steps to rein in discussion on Weibo, comes as China prepares for a once-in-a-decade leadership handover, expected to be announced at a party congress later this year.

Sina, the biggest of the Weibo operators, also introduced a points system in which a user starts with 80 points and loses points for every violation. A score of zero results in a cancelled account. A user can gain points for validating his or her real identity.

"It gives Sina a firmer basis for expanding a ban on whatever is considered sensitive news," said one prominent Weibo user who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The definition of what counts as sensitive was always loose and it's expanding all the time. Of course, nowadays, they're worried because of all the scandal and rumors before the 18th Congress."

In a sign of how intensely sensitive the issue is for the ruling Communist Party, censors blocked online searches for the name of Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party boss cast out of the party's Central Committee.

Internet users have skirted restrictions on Weibo by using code words to discuss the issue. Sina employs technicians to scrub Weibo of politically sensitive posts.

Sina's move to implement a user contract comes after Beijing demanded last December that microblogging operators ensure their users are registered with their real names.

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China tames local Twitter amid censorship claims