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OTTAWA Defence department censoring of crucial internal documents is impeding the search for the truth of why a young Canadian veteran killed himself, the chairman of a federal military inquiry said Tuesday.

In his first, albeit brief, public criticism of DNDs repeated blocking of documents related to the 2008 suicide of Afghan veteran Cpl. Stuart Langridge, Glenn Stannard said the censorship flies in the face of seeking the truth.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay has refused to allow the release of documents though has not publicly stated why.

Military Police Complaints Commission lawyer Mark Freiman echoed Stannards comment as the thorny issue of solicitor-client privilege and redacted documents sparked another round of testy sniping between inquiry lawyers.

I want to note how awkward and artificial ... extraordinarily artificial ... what we are doing is, said Freiman toward the end of his questioning of military police Sgt. David Mitchell, an investigator with the National Investigation Service (NIS).

Freiman, who has clashed several times over the redaction issue with federal lawyer Elizabeth Richards, said advice Mitchell sought from military lawyers during his investigation was key.

We are looking to see whether a reasonable investigation was conducted, said Freiman. A key element in that investigation has to do with legal conclusions that were formed in the course of the investigation, and we are not able to look at anything to do with that key element.

Richards has repeatedly told Stannard that Parliament has given his commission limited power and says he has no right to see documents that fall under solicitor-client privilege.

MacKay is legally the client of DND lawyers and the only person who can waive the privilege.

Parliament in its wisdom has seen to exclude from the oversight of this commission the ability to look at the legal advice that was sought and received by military police.

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Censorship impedes military inquiry, official says

PETALING JAYA (June 4, 2012): The laws of the land must prevail over the Internet as promises of no online censorship was not meant to prejudice existing legislation, said Information, Communications and Culture minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.

He was responding to former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's call for the government to reconsider the "absolute (Internet) freedom" as provided for under the Communication and Multimedia Act 1998, as well as the Bill of Guarantees of the Multimedia Super Corridor.

"When I said there should be no censorship of the Internet, I really did not realise the power of the Internet. The power to create problems and agitate people.

"Before (pornographic) magazines and all that could be banned from coming into our country, now it (the Internet) is so porous that we cannot prevent all this filth from coming into our country," Mahathir reportedly said in an interview with New Sunday Times.

As such, Rais said that the former premier's call for tightening regulations on online contents is timely because if left unchecked, the country may turn into a free for all domain.

"A segment of our society has now become culpable of various ills through the Internet: Internet gambling, child pornography, illicit adverts, false reporting, cheating, privacy intrusions and many more," he said stressing that Internet freedom does not equate to flouting the laws.

On the same note, Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) chairman Datuk Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi argued that what constitutes as an offence offline, should also be made illegal online.

"People need to distinguish between censoring (the Internet) and enforcing laws of the land," he said, citing the controversial decision to block 10 file-sharing websites found to have contravened the Copyright Act 1987 as an example.

"If stealing is illegal offline, than downloading of pirated contents is also an offence," he added.

Mohamed Sharil also pointed out that the Communications and Multimedia Content Forum, since its inception in 2001, has been put in-charge of overseeing the implementation of a self-regulatory content code which includes "model procedures for dealing with offensive and indecent content."

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INTERNET CENSORSHIP: Rais echoes Dr M's call

Google recently launched an anti-censorship tool for Chinese search users, announcing the update on their Inside Search blogwhile carefully dancing around any direct mention of government censorship. Searchers will see a warning when the term they are searching for could cause an interruption in their connection with Google.

Google reports theyve observed that users see messages such as This webpage is not available, or The connection was reset, followed by service interruptions of a minute or more when searching Google from mainland China. The problem isn't on their end, they say, noting that theyve found the interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries.

They explained in the blog post:

To ensure that users understand which queries could result in a frustrating loss of connectivity, Google is now displaying warnings on flagged queries, with options to either edit the search query or continue anyway.

The word interruption in the warning links to a Google web search help article that makes clear the interruptions are are outside Google's control and unrelated to our technology. They manage to point the finger at government censors without coming right out and saying Hi, youre being censored.

Google hasnt actually operated in China since early 2010, when they decided they would no longer censor search results on Google.cn. That move came after Google sustained a cyberattack originating in China, designed to steal the GMail information of Chinese human rights activists. The Chinese government has long denied any involvement.

Users in mainland China can still search using Google Hong Kong.

Google released a video detailing their findings after investigating user complaints. They used three different browsers and searched 350,000 of the most commonly searched terms in China to recreate the issue.

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Google Search in Mainland China Now Shows Censorship Warnings

CNN / Getty Images

A lone demonstrator stands down a column of tanks June 5, 1989 at the entrance to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The incident took place on the morning after Chinese troops fired upon pro-democracy students who had been protesting in the square since April 15, 1989.

In the years immediately following 1989, the anniversary of the deadly June 4 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing was marked by smaller memorial protests. At universities in the northwest of the city, students would distribute leaflets, sing the Internationale and break bottles in a show of disrespect to the then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, whose given name is a homophone for little bottle. In 1992, a protester unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square itself before being dragged away by police. But such public displays have grown rare. This year, on the 23rd anniversary of the crackdown by troops that killed hundreds, possibly thousands of protesters, the anniversary was marked online, on services like Facebook and the Sina Weibo microblog, and possibly even by the Shanghai Composite index.

The benchmark began the day at 2,346.98, which read backwards gives 89.64, the year, month and date of the Beijing massacre. As if to reinforce the point, the index dropped by 64.89 points Monday. There was no immediate official explanation for the historically symbolic numbers.This opening level is normal, an employee of the Shanghai exchanges media department told the Wall Street Journal. Opening levels are decided by appropriate regulations and todays opening level was normal. The Shanghai exchange has long been seen as a hub of insider trading and market manipulation, but this is the first time it may have been tweaked for political symbolism.

The Shanghai index numbers are likely a random accident, Reuters reported. Regardless, Shanghai stock market joined a long list of search terms banned on Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like microblog service. Other banned search terms include 64, as the Tiananmen crackdown is known in Chinese, Tiananmen, and even the Chinese word for today. The candle emoticon, used to express mourning, was also disabled from the service, as were searches for the Chinese characters for candle. So a few Sina Weibo users resorted to typing the English word candle. The popular services censors were busy deleted any messages even remotely connected to the massacre, but a few cryptic references survived. One message reposted more than 500 times Monday discussed the 228 Incident, when Chiang Kai-sheks Kuomintang killed thousands of civilians in Taiwans capital of Taipei in 1947. The Kuomintang ruled much of China for two decades before losing a civil war with Maos Communist Party in 1949, forcing the remainder of Chiangs armies to retreat to Taiwan. In 1995, as part of a process of ending its autocratic rule over the island, the Kuomintang apologized for the 228 crackdown. The Kuomintang had the courage to overturn its decision, wrote one person on Weibo, a message meant as much for a Communist Party that has refused to address its 1989 decision that the Tiananmen protests were a counterrevolutionary riot.

The specter of Tiananmen censorship also spread to Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous Chinese city where the 1989 crackdown is remembered in annual vigils. On Friday afternoon about 10 political activists including Legislative Council member Leung Kwok-hung saw their Facebook accounts disabled, says Charles Mok, chair of the Hong Kong branch of the Internet Society. Mok says that he was able to get in touch with a Facebook representative from the companys Washington, D.C. office and the accounts were restored by Friday evening. The social networking giant didnt offer a reason for the account closures, Mok says, though activists in Hong Kong suspect it could have been due to false complaints filed in an attempt to thwart organizing ahead of Hong Kongs June 4 memorial vigil.

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Amid Censorship, China's Tiananmen Crackdown Is Remembered Online

Google has introduced a new feature for Chinese users that will pull back the curtain on Chinese Internet government censorship.

This week the search engine giant Google kept a polite smile on its face as it stuck its shiv in up to the hilt, introducing a feature to its Chinese site that tells users exactly when the censors have blocked a search word for being too sensitive.

Beijing Bureau Chief

Peter Ford is The Christian Science Monitors Beijing Bureau Chief. He covers news and features throughout China and also makes reporting trips to Japan and the Korean peninsula.

The Chinese government keeps its list of banned search terms secret; Google is now revealing them. But not once did Google Vice President Alan Eustace mention the word censorship in his blog introducing the new feature.

Instead he noted that users in China are regularly getting error messages when they search for a particular subset of queries. He mentioned the word jiang as a case in point but did not explain why such a common surname that also means river should be a banned search term.

Its because jiang is the surname of former president Jiang Zemin, about whom the censors dont want Chinese citizens to find out much because most of what is written about him on the web concerns his allegedly poor health and his role in succession struggles within the ruling Communist party.

The problem for Google users in China, and Google, is that whenever a user searched for a banned word not only would the search yield only an error message, but the connection to Google would be lost for a minute or so, which is highly inconvenient.

No wonder that Google has only 16 percent of the Chinese search engine market, way behind local competitor Baidu, with 78 percent. Baidu self-censors, so its users have no problem searching jiang. Google has refused to self censor since 2010, when it withdrew from the mainland and based itself in Hong Kong.

Googles new feature, designed, says Mr. Eustace, to help improve the search experience in mainland China, will warn users when they are searching for a banned word that will cut their connection, allowing them to re-define their searchwords.

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Sly Google wields the knife in Chinese Internet censorship tussle