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Published Date: March 12, 2012

Tags: censorship, extremist, Internet, Pakistan, religion

HUMAN rights activists have attacked Pakistans move to censor the internet, saying it is playing into the hands of extremists.

This is a horrible prospect we protested against crackdowns on news channels during past dictatorships and this democratic government is no different, said Saeda Deep, founder of the Institute of Peace and Secular Studies which is presently running an online petition against the move.

Restricting access to information and social media discussions will favor the agendas of extremists. Hackers will find access as always; government should concentrate [on] providing the poor with the basic necessities of life, she said.

The outcry comes after the government announced it wanted internet companies to introduce a nationwide filtering system and restrict access to 50 million web addresses. The aim is to block adult and blasphemous content.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority says it has already blocked 13,000 porn sites, and thousands of websites with alleged blasphemous content deemed offensive to Islam, as well as hundreds of sites and blogs run by Baloch separatists.

Report from ucanews.com

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Pakistan activists criticize internet censorship

BERKELEY, Calif.First Amendment advocates have accused Berkeley's police chief of intimidation and censorship after he sent an officer to a newspaper reporter's home in the middle of the night to insist on changes to a story.

Sgt. Mary Kusmiss knocked on Bay Area News Group reporter Doug Oakley's door around 12:45 a.m. Friday on Chief Michael Meehan's orders, the Oakland Tribune reported (http://bit.ly/AlRYtG).

Meehan apparently thought Oakley misreported what he said during a public meeting about the police department's response in the case of a local resident who was beaten to death last month.

But Jim Ewert, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publisher's Association, said if Meehan had a problem with the story, he should have called the newspaper the next day or written a letter to the editor.

"It's the most intimidating type of (censorship) possible because the person trying to exercise it carries a gun," he said.

Oakley said he was shaken by Kusmiss's visit to his Berkeley home. He and his wife thought that a relative may have died.

Meehan has since apologized, calling his actions "overzealous." He said he didn't think Oakley would be intimidated or upset since Kusmiss regularly deals with the media.

"I did not mean to upset (Oakley) or his family last night," Meehan told the Tribune. "It was late, (I was) tired too. I don't dispute that it could be perceived badly."

Oakley had covered a community meeting on Thursday about the beating death of 67-year-old Peter Cukor on Feb. 18. Cukor had called the department on its nonemergency line to report the suspect in his beating, Daniel Jordan DeWitt, about 15 minutes before his wife dialed 911 to report that DeWitt was attacking her husband. But police did not immediately respond to that first call.

Oakley wrote that Meehan apologized to the community at Thursday's meeting for the department's slow response. But Meehan said he apologized only for not informing the public sooner about why the response was slow.

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Police chief sends officer to reporter's house

World Day Against Cyber-Censorship is this coming Monday March 12.

Heres the official description for that:

World Day Against Cyber-Censorship (on 12 March 2011) is intended to rally everyone in support of a single Internet without restrictions and accessible to all. Never have so many countries been affected by some form of online censorship, whether arrests or harassment of netizens, online surveillance, website blocking or the adoption of repressive Internet laws. Netizens are being targeted by government reprisals. Around 120 of them are currently detained for expressing their views freely online. World Day Against Cyber-Censorship pays tribute to them and their fight for Internet freedom.

Google wrote a blog post about its approach to content removal today, gearing up for the event. The company says nothing has changed since it first outlined its approach, four years ago.

At Google, we have a bias in favor of free expressionnot just because its a key tenet of free societies, but also because more information generally means more choice, more power, more economic opportunity and more freedom for people, writes Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice President, Global Communications and Public Policy. As Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

That said, we recognize that there are limits, she adds. In some areas its obvious where to draw the line. For example, we have an all-product ban on child pornography. But in other areas, like extremism, it gets complicated because our products are available in numerous countries with widely varying laws and cultures.

Google says it takes down as little as possible when it comes to search, though it does remove content from results when required by law. As far as Googles user-generated content sites, it relies on use guidelines and polices these sites (like YouTube, Blogger, Google+, etc.) accordingly.

Google, of course, has its transparency report, where you can go anytime to see content removal requests (as well as data requests) by country.

Last month, an Indian court ordered some web companies, including Google (and Facebook), to filter some content deemed morally or religiously objectionable.

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Google On How It Censors Content (Ahead Of World Day Against Cyber-Censorship)

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Library event brings censorship awareness

Terms related to political activists, anti-government movements and state censorship efforts are the most likely to be censored on Chinese blogs and social media sites, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

The "Chinese Firewall" is known to blocks certain websites - including parts of Google and Facebook - but the CMU study is one of the first to examine individual messages, words and terms that have been censored.

SLIDESHOW: Photos: Saatchi & Saatchi's Bangkok office is off the hook

An inside look at censorship in China

Researchers found that the names Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo, two Chinese political protesters, as well as the term Linagui, which is a code term for planned protests, are blocked on Chinese websites and microblogs called weibos at high rates.

Researchers studied 57 million messages posted on Sina Weibo, which is a Chinese microblogging site akin to Facebook or Twitter with 200 million users. Researchers used the site's API to find terms that had been deleted.

During a two-day period in July, 93 of 114 messages on Sina Weibo containing the name of Tiananmen Square protester Jian Zemin, who was rumored to have died, were deleted. Researchers also found that politically sensitive terms, such as the name of Fang Binying, one of the reported architects of the Chinese Firewall, is likely to be blocked, as was a term meaning "to ask someone to resign," especially after a deadly high-speed rail crash last year.

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Even less innocuous terms were found to be censored, including words meaning iodized salt and radioactive iodine, which researchers found had high delete rates after the Japanese earthquake when there were some fears of salt contamination.

The study also found that some geographic areas had high levels of censorship compared to others. In Tibet, for example, which has been fighting for political freedom from the Chinese government, more than half of the posts originating from the area were deleted.

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Chinese Firewall's most blocked terms