Recent statements by Vladimir Putin and Russian Member of Parliament (MP) Aleksey Mitrofanov, as well as raids on human rights organizations, signal that the threat hanging over civil society and freedom of expression in Russia has become reality. Since Putin returned to presidential office in May, the Kremlin has passed a series of restrictive laws and provisions, but until recently authorities had not acted upon many of them.

In Moscow last week, Mitrofanov, who heads the parliament committee on information policy, technology, and communications, warned a press conference that “an era of absolutely free Internet in Russia has ended.” The deputy noted the expanded role of the Internet in Russians’ social and political life and made clear that authorities are seeking to expand control, local press reported. “When there were around two million users, the Internet was not a political or economic factor; it was not a factor at all. But when it became a factor then they [authorities] are going to deal with it,” Mitrofanov said, according to news agency Interfax. The MP acknowledged that his press conference was directly related to a speech by Putin at the February 14 board meeting of Russia’s security service, the FSB.

In that speech, Putin equated extremism with terrorism, and urged FSB generals and officers to fight extremism by “blocking the attempts by radicals to use social networks, the Internet, and other Internet technologies as propaganda tools.” According to the independent news website Gazeta, Putin said a “direct link between extremist and terrorist groups is obvious. Hence, it is necessary to act decisively… Citizens’ constitutional right of freedom of speech is firm and irrevocable–however, nobody has a right to spread hatred or shake up society and the country.”

For the full article, see here.

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A court in central Vietnam convicted 14 bloggers, writers and political and social activists on Wednesday of plotting to overthrow the government and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 3 to 13 years in what human rights groups said was the largest subversion case to be brought in years. Activists convicted in Vietnam crackdown on dissent

The defendants were arrested in 2011 and accused of links to a banned pro-democracy group led from California. The government says the group — Viet Tan, or Vietnam Reform Party — seeks its overthrow.

A number of the defendants are members of the Redemptorist group in the Roman Catholic Church, which has been engaged in community service and has taken up the causes of land seizures and corruption. Redemptorist activists have become increasingly assertive in Vietnamese movements for democracy and human rights, and some churches and parishes have become centers of dissent.

For the full article, see here.

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The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) apparently has placed a resolution on the Internet in the regulations being developed at the meeting, drawing accusations that it acted improperly.

At the close of the Wednesday sessions of WCIT, which continued into the night and concluded early Thursday morning in Dubai, the chairman of the conference apparently turned an informal process into a vote, according to the Internet Society.

Adopting a resolution on the Internet violated assurances that the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) being developed at WCIT wouldn’t be about the Internet, said the non-governmental group, which advocates equal access to the Internet. It wasn’t immediately clear what the resolution stated.

The U.S., the European Union and some other countries have opposed bringing the Internet under the ITRs, and this has been one of the key issues at WCIT. The treaty being developed at the meeting has to be signed by Friday.

“What was first termed as getting a ‘temperature of the room’ by the Chairman of the conference turned into an apparent ‘vote’ to include an Internet Resolution in the ITRs,” The Internet Society said. That action “resulted in much confusion among the delegates,” the group said.

The Internet Society expressed concern that language about competition, liberalization, free flow of information and independent regulation largely had been removed from the text of the treaty.

For the full article, see here.

The post Controversy erupts at WCIT over resolution on Internet appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

Representatives of 193 countries are meeting in Dubai to update a treaty known as the International Telecommunication Regulations that was last negotiated in 1988 and governs the exchange of telephone traffic between countries.

But a group of countries led by Russia and China are trying to use the deliberations, the first in 24 years and taking place under United Nations auspices, to undermine the open spirit of the Internet.

The United States, the European Union and other countries have rightly resisted any such effort, which is also supported by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Bahrain. It is bad enough that most of these countries already restrict the online speech of their citizens, but now they want international law to endorse their control and censorship of the Internet and possibly even tighten control in ways that would make it harder for users to get information online and allow governments to monitor Internet traffic more readily.

For the full article, see here.

The post Global Internet diplomacy appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT, a convening of mostly government officials from member countries of the ITU – the Internet Telecommunications Union, a UN body – that will determine how the global internet is governed in the future, started in Dubai on December 3 and will continue till December 14, 2012.

The meeting has been the subject of controversy since as early as May, when leaked documents pertaining to WCIT were posted on WCITleaks, prompting fury from digital rights advocates.

The documents, proposals for how the internet ought to be governed, show the extent to which certain countries are seeking more power over the internet. One proposal shows how a group of Arab countries is advocating strict identification of all internet users, while the Africa regional group is pushing for “harmonisation” amongst member states when it comes to the retention of data. And leaked Russian proposals suggest countries should have the right “to regulate the national internet segment”.

Civil society groups and web companies have joined together in opposing what many perceive to be a takeover of internet governance by the ITU. If the UN body were to gain more control, those parties would be the biggest losers: the current governance structure is made up of a mix of organisations and companies which convene each year at the Internet Governance Forum, recently held in Baku, Azerbaijan.

For the full article, see here.

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Last week’s jarring shutdown of the entire Syrian Internet raised a number of questions, some of them scary: How does this even happen? How could an entire country be pulled offline so quickly? Who else is vulnerable?

The wizards in The Washington Post’s graphics department – I’m not kidding, I think they must have wands or something, though none are bearded – managed to answer these questions in a single infographic, which is copied below. You can see a larger version here.

The good news is that, if you’re American (or British, Japanese, Russian, Canadian, Australian or Swedish), your country’s Internet infrastructure makes it almost impossible for a Syria-style blackout. The bad news is that much of the world is vulnerable, though Syria’s case is unusual.

For the full article, see here.

The post Infographic: Is your country vulnerable to a Syria-style Internet blackout? appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

The United Arab Emirates this week introduced sweeping new regulations that forbid web users from criticizing the government and organizing protests online. According to state news agency WAM, the laws explicitly prohibit users from publishing any material that would “endanger the security of the state and its supreme interests,” including any content that calls for regime change or mocks national leaders. President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan announced the regulations in a decree issued Monday, introducing them as amendments to an existing law on cybercrime.

As Reuters reports, the amendments outlaw a wide range of activities, including using the internet for prostitution and human trafficking. Yet those pertaining to online dissent are by far the most expansive, calling for “penalties of imprisonment on any person who creates or runs an electronic website or uses any information technology medium” to criticize or deride the government. This extends to criticism or caricatures of political leaders, emirate rulers, the national flag, and any national symbols. The law also punishes anyone who uses the internet to criticize Islam, as well as those who organize demonstrations without first obtaining a license.

Although the UAE wasn’t touched by the Arab Spring protests that spread across the Middle East in 2011, critics say the country’s stance on human rights has deteriorated in recent months.

For the full article, see here.

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Google has experienced a precipitous drop in traffic from China, which a Web-monitoring group attributed to the search engine being “blocked” by the government.

Data provided by Google’s Transparency Report shows a sharp drop off in traffic — to roughly half the normal amount — to Google’s Web sites as of early this morning California time.

GreatFire.org, which performs real-time monitoring, suggested that the drop meant the Chinese government is “one step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the block was intended to be long-lasting, or whether it’s been lifted and Chinese Internet users will be able to connect to Google when they wake up. It’s 3:50 a.m. in Beijing right now.

Google has been wrestling with censorship in China for more than half a decade. In April, Google Drive was blocked. Even after switching to a Hong Kong domain in 2010, sensitive topics remained off-limits.

Google sent CNET a statement today saying: “We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.”

For the full article, see here.

The post Google disrupted in China, once again appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

Dear Mr. President,

As a citizen and former prisoner of conscience, I am glad that Azerbaijan is hosting the Internet Governance Forum. Since freedom of speech is a central issue at such a forum, I’d like to take this opportunity to address you.

You once suggested in a speech that the internet is free in Azerbaijan. I am sure you will repeat this message at this global forum. It is true that people in Azerbaijan are free to use the internet, but it is also a fact that they can be severely punished afterwards for doing so. We have reports indicating that the government monitors all our internet communication carried through Azerbaijani providers without acquiring a warrant or notifying the individual or provider. Today many of our fellow citizens do not dare to speak out against your policies, online or offline. You have successfully managed to silence them.

People in Azerbaijan live in fear. We fear for our lives, we fear for our jobs, we fear for the lives and jobs of our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, we fear for our friends. We fear every time when someone close to us dares to disagree with you. We also pay a high price when we dare not to fear.

Before 2009 I had criticized you mostly online. Then I was attacked in the centre of Baku. I was arrested and later sentenced in a show trial on fake charges of hooliganism. My father died while I was in jail, his health was deteriorating since the day of my arrest. I could not be there when he was placed in hospital and I was not there the day I lost him. Some of my relatives and friends lost their jobs. They were told that they are too close to “the enemy of the state”. Now, many people I knew are afraid to communicate with me online and offline and I can understand them.

For the full letter, see here.

The post The internet is not free in Azerbaijan: A letter to president Ilham Aliyev appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

A city run by one of China’s incoming political leaders that has billed itself as a future international financial center is instead becoming the country’s internet censorship capital.

Tianjin, whose Communist party secretary Zhang Gaoli is one of the seven men most likely to get a seat on the new politburo standing committee due to be unveiled at the 18th party congress starting on Thursday, is developing a replica of Manhattan to which it aims to attract global banks.

But local government officials explaining a mock-up of Yujiapu, the new district on the site of a former fishing village, last week said they did not know of any foreign bank that had committed to coming. Meanwhile, some of China’s leading internet firms are relocating their censorship operations to Tianjin as they battle soaring labor costs.

Tianjin’s tale illustrates China’s rapidly changing economic landscape but also puts a question mark over the reform and economic policy credentials of the country’s incoming leaders.

For the full article, see here.

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