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McAfee became the latest major IT company refusing to work with the Pakistani government

On Monday evening, McAfee became the fifth major IT vendor to pledge it won't bid on a Request for Proposals from the Pakistani government for adding enhanced censorship capabilities to Pakistan's Internet backbone. Four other major IT companies have also pledged not to submit bids, and more than 16,000 people have signed a petition urging other companies to follow suit.

As we reported last month, Pakistan currently censors a wide variety of websites, including content that is "obscene," "blasphemous," and potentially embarrassing to public officials. Right now, the blacklists are maintained manually by Pakistani telecom companies, and those firms are overwhelmed. The Pakistani government wants to build a more centralized and automated system.

But the project has proven controversial. A Pakistani advocacy group has described the proposal as "the coldblooded murder of the Internet in Pakistan."

Last week, Sandvine, Cisco, Verizon, and Websense all signaled that they would not bid to participate in the projectthough some of them indicated their products wouldn't be a good choice for the job, anyway. The Global Network Initiative, an Internet freedom organization that counts Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo as members, has called for a boycott of the Pakistani project.

An advocacy group called Access has created a petitiontargeting other vendors of similar gear like Bluecoat, Huawei, McAfee, Netsweeper, and ZTE. When this story was written, the petition had about 17,000 signatures. McAfee has sincestated it won't participate in the project. The other petition targets have not commented. Bids are due on Friday.

One of the firms that have pledged not to bid for the contract, Websense, issued a particularly strong statement of opposition. "We call on other technology providers to also do the right thing for the citizens of Pakistan and refuse to submit a proposal for this contract," the firm wrote in a March 2 statement. "Broad government censorship of citizen access to the internet is morally wrong."

Access spokesman Mike Rispoli told Ars that in addition to the petition targeting international IT firms, his group is working with local Pakistani groups to pressure the government to drop the project. "Pakistan claims to be a democracy," Rispoli said, but "implementing such a system clearly undermines democratic values."

Of course, even if the campaign convinces most Western companies not to bid on the contract, the Pakistani government will likely find someone to build its censorship system. (The explicit goal of the tender is "indigenous development" of the censorship system.) But Rebecca MacKinnon, a scholar and Internet freedom advocate at the New America Foundation, told Ars that this doesn't absolve companies of responsibility for their actions.

"'If we don't do it somebody with even fewer scruples will' is never a legitimate excuse for corporations to collaborate with government actions that will clearly result in the violation or restriction of citizens' universally recognized rights," she said. "Such excuses contribute to a global race to the bottom in both government and corporate behavior."

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Immoral tech? IT vendors refuse to bid on Pakistan censorship scheme

They call it the Grass-Mud Horse lexicon, and, lucky for us language lovers, theChina Digital Times just started a recurring word of the week feature to go along with its catalog of the slang China's bloggers use to subvert government censorship. The first post, which went up last Wednesday, explainsthe project's namesake,Grass-Mud Horse. "Grass-mud horse, which sounds nearly the same in Chinese as 'f*** your mother' (co n m), was created as a way to get around and poke fun at government censorship of vulgar content," writes Fiona Smith. The term is perfect for a lot of reasons: It sounds like a swear, has its own YouTube cultureandreferences the Communist party, which is often referred to as "mother." All of that has led to its evolution as not only a term that means "someone who is web-savvy and critical of government attempts at censorship," in the words of Smith, but also the representation of an entire language.

RELATED: First SOPA, Then Identity: What We Can Learn from Chinese Censorship

Over at China Digital Space, where the Grass-Mud Horse project lives, we find the fullalphabetized list of common terms used on the heavily censored Chinese Internet platforms. Each letter has between 2 and 21 entries -- there's a lot on there. Here are some of our favorites:

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Term:Love the Future.

RELATED: Chinese Censors Prohibit Printing of U.S. Pot Writer's Book

Definition: "'Love the future' is a coded reference to Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei () that began to be used after Ai's disappearance in early 2011. Ais surname sounds the same as the word 'love' in Chinese, and his given name 'Weiwei' can be converted into the word future by adding two small strokes to the second character."

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What we love about it: The play on words just happens to work out so well for the beloved Chinese artist. Related, here's a video of the artist singing the Grass-Mud Horse song.

RELATED: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy of Twitter's New Censorship Rules

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The Slang Chinese Bloggers Use to Subvert Censorship

SAN FRANCISCO -- PayPal, the online payment service owned by San Jose-based eBay (EBAY), is backtracking on its policy against processing sales of e-books containing themes of rape, bestiality or incest after protests from authors and anti-censorship activist groups.

PayPal's new policy will focus only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text, spokesman Anuj Nayar said on Tuesday. The service will still refuse, however, to process payments for text-only e-books containing child pornography themes.

The revised policy will also focus on individual books, rather than entire classes of books, he added. E-book sellers will be notified if specific books violate PayPal's policy, and the company is working on a process through which authors and distributors can challenge such notifications, the spokesman said.

"This is going to be a major victory for writers, readers and free speech," said Mark Coker, founder of e-book distributor Smashwords. "They are going to build a protective moat around legal fiction."

PayPal warned Smashwords and some other e-book publishers and distributors earlier this year that it would "limit" their PayPal accounts unless they removed e-books "containing themes of rape, incest, bestiality and underage subjects."

PayPal's

PayPal is relaxing the policy after the main credit card companies made a distinction between extreme pornographic images and e-books that explore such topics with only the written word.

PayPal told e-book distributors earlier this year that the original policy was in place partly because the banks and credit card companies it works with restrict such content.

However, Doug Michelman, global head of corporate relations for Visa, suggested that the company would not crack down on e-books that explore such topics, according to a letter he wrote that was posted on the blog Banned Writers. A Visa spokesperson confirmed that the letter was real.

"The sale of a limited category of extreme imagery depicting rape, bestiality and child pornography is or is very likely to be unlawful in many places and would be prohibited on the Visa system whether or not the images have formally been held to be illegal in any particular country," Michelman wrote. "Visa would take no action regarding lawful material that seeks to explore erotica in a fictional or educational manner."

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Protests force PayPal to drop attempts at e-book censorship

PayPal has found itself at the center of a heated debate over online censorship after demanding that e-book publishers remove from their marketplaces titles with objectionable themes of rape, bestiality, incest and underage sexual activity.

PayPal, the primary payment services provider for independent online publishers such as Smashwords, has attempted to clarify its position, explaining that the decision to lean on e-book merchants is consistent with a longstanding usage policy and was motivated by the risks associated with trafficking in erotica that runs afoul of the terms of service of its financial services partners, seeking to tamp down allegations of censorship.

"PayPal is a payments company. The right to use PayPal's service is not the same as the right to speak," Anuj Nayar, PayPal's director of communications, wrote in a post on PayPal's corporate blog.

"Unlike many other online payment providers, PayPal does allow its service to be used for the sale of erotic books," Nayar said. "We believe that the Internet empowers authors in a way that is positive and points to an even brighter future for writers, artists and creators the world over, but we draw the line at certain adult content that is extreme or potentially illegal."

PayPal began approaching e-book publishers in February with what Smashwords has described as an ultimatum, insisting that the companies remove erotica titles containing objectionable content or see their accounts deactivated. Other affected companies include BookStrand.com, All Romance eBooks and eXcessica.

In the time since, PayPal has been in talks with the e-book publishers, and Nayar noted that the company has not severed its ties with any of them as it attempts to reach a solution. Smashwords, which has been among the most vocal about the imbroglio, has said that PayPal's enforcement team has been helpful and that talks have been productive, though it acknowledges that there is no clear and simple path forward.

Smashwords founder Mark Coker has also pointed out that PayPal is within its legal rights to bar payment services to marketplaces trading in content that violates its policies, and that, moreover, the crackdown on objectionable erotica comes at the behest of credit card companies, credit unions and other financial partners. Nevertheless, he is urging PayPal to relax its position, arguing that the company is unfairly targeting writers of erotica while the policy, carried to its logical extent, would also ban the sale of controversial mainstream literature such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

"There's no easy solution. Legally, PayPal and the credit card companies probably have the right to decide how their services are used. Unfortunately, since they're the moneyrunners, they control the oxygen that feeds digital commerce," Coker wrote in an email to Smashwords authors and publishers.

"Regardless (of) one's opinions about these objectionable topics, we view this attempted censorship as a bad precedent. Fiction is fantasy. It's not real," he said.

But PayPal disputes that point. Not only do e-books about subjects like rape and bestiality often contain objectionable images, they can fall into a dubious genre that is not entirely fictive, according to Nayar.

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PayPal Erotica Ban Touches Off Internet Censorship Debate

The companies, now on trial in India, potentially could be fined and see executives jailed over not censoring certain content.

In India, Web censorship is a huge concern. Google and Facebook are learning that the hard way.

The companies, as of today, are on trial in India over claims that they didn't censor content posted on their respective Web sites. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the case, Indian journalist Vinay Rai brought a criminal complaint against the Web giants, along with 10 other firms, alleging that their lack of censorship "will corrupt minds."

Censorship demands have long presented legal issues for Google and Facebook. Many countries have requested that the companies censor content to comply with local law. China has arguably been the most forceful in its call for censorship, going as far as blocking certain sites within its borders. A couple years ago, China forced Google to censor Web results. Soon after doing so, Google changed its mind and moved its Chinese search operations to Hong Kong.

So far, India hasn't gone as far as blocking Web sites, but the country has made it clear that it wants all "objectionable" content to kept away from its citizens. According to the Journal, Google and Facebook have said in India that they would block certain content, but only if they're notified of an infringement. The companies' core defense centers on India's information technology law, which they claim protects them against content added to sites by users.

A battle between the online giants and India seemed to be brewing in December when the government demanded that all Web companies prescreen user content before it hits the Internet. India's acting telecommunications minister, Kapil Sibal, said at the time that the move would limit the disparaging or inflammatory content that has found its way onto the Internet.

In a previous meeting with lawyers from several online firms and Internet service providers last year, Sibal showed them a Facebook page that included critical remarks about India's Congress Party president, Sonia Gandhi, according to a New York Times report. Sibal said he would want that kind of content erased before it had a chance to make it online.

The stakes are high for both Facebook and Google. According to lawyers with whom the Journal spoke, Facebook and Google could face fines, if found guilty of violating India's online censorship laws, and its executives could face jail time.

Neither Facebook nor Google immediately responded to CNET's request for comment.

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Facebook, Google in India's crosshairs over Web censorship