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Could be GI Green there on the other side of the planet

There's plenty of it in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave as well

For Westerners who enjoy living in democracies, its easy to answer the question of whether or not censorship is desirable. It is not. But in China, which doesnt respect free speech, thats not an especially useful question. A more uncomfortable question would be: Just how different is Chinas censorship from ours?

New data released by Google as part of its Transparency Report shows that government agencies in many Western democracies have asked the company to remove political content that users had posted to its services. Its alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect Western democracies not typically associated with censorship, wrote Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post yesterday.

In the second half of last year, for example, US agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts, or archives of online videos a 718 percent increase from the first half of the year. During the same time period, US law enforcement agencies lodged 187 take-down requests, including one related to a blog post that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.

Google received numerous similar requests from Spain, Italy, Australia, Germany, Poland, Canada, and others. It did not comply with most of them, but the company did act in response to 42 percent of removal requests from the US in the second half of 2011.

Google was also at the center of the highest-profile censorship debate related to China. In 2010, much was made of the companys partial withdrawal from the country in response to what it said was a sophisticated cyber attack that targeted the Gmail accounts of dozens of China-connected human rights activists. No sane person would contend that such hacking was justified. But few could feign surprise. Government surveillance of its citizens is an unfortunate fact of life not just in China, but also in other, supposedly free countries. The Bush Administrations warrantless wiretapping program, a huge breach of privacy and human rights conducted with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, is the most obvious example of that.

Supporters of that wiretapping program, carried out as part of that embarrassment to freedom known as the Patriot Act, might protest that it was conducted in the name of stamping out terrorism, and that casting such a wide net monitoring thousands of innocent Americans was justified for the good of the country. The CCP would argue, too, that their surveillance is also for the good of the country. That is particularly true when it comes to the sensitive topic of spreading online rumors.

Just last weekend, it demonstrated how seriously it takes that by arresting two people for spreading rumors that a cloud of pollution over the city of Wuhan was caused by an explosion at a chemical plant that leaked toxic gases. Spreading rumors falls into one of the nine categories of information that the government deems harmful and therefore bans. As we all know, it also has no qualms about blocking specific news sites and thwarting searches for key terms (three of which begin with the letter T).

Originally posted here:
Internet Censorship Isn't Just for China