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AFP Friday, Jun 01, 2012

YANGON - The tormentor-in-chief of Myanmar's heavily censored media will put down his black marker pen for good in a month, signalling the end of one of the world's most draconian press scrutiny regimes.

Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutinisation and Registration Department (PSRD), said he will release its iron grip on the country's media in the latest significant reform for a country emerging from decades of repression.

"There will be no press scrutiny job from the end of June. There will be no monitoring of local journals and magazines," he told AFP in an interview in his office in Yangon.

"I would say it is the right time rather than we are ready. When we have parliament and government working on democratic process, how can censorship work at the same time?," he said.

Stifling pre-publication censorship - applied in the past to everything from newspapers to fairy tales and the winning lottery numbers - was one of the key symbols of junta-ruled Myanmar, where even seemingly innocuous details were scrubbed from public discussion.

Sweeping reforms under a new quasi-civilian government have seen a lighter touch from the once ubiquitous censors, with less controversial publications freed from scrutiny last year.

Editors across the news media are now eager to have the same freedom. A more open climate has seen private weekly news publications publish an increasingly bold range of stories, including those about opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose very name was taboo in the past.

Tint Swe directed the PSRD for seven years, mercilessly changing headlines, slashing paragraphs or scrapping entire articles deemed critical of the military and its cronies.

"He had one of the worst jobs in Myanmar," said an editor at a news weekly who requested anonymity. "He was pressured from above by ministers, officials and powerful business people to keep stories out and pressured from below by editors to keep stories in."

View original post here:
Media censorship in Myanmar to ease: Official

In its latest effort to squash efforts by Beijing to restrict online content, Google (GOOG) began warning people in mainland China on Thursday that certain keywords in searches may trigger the governments Internet blocks and break their connection.

Google, which has long fought against Internet censorship in China, launched this week a new feature on its search engine there that informs users which keywords are likely to trigger censorship blocks and cause a system outage for more than a minute.

- Google

The tech titan said it started reviewing the system after complaints by users on mainland China of spotty service. After taking a long, hard look at its system, it found no internal problems, but noticed specific keywords, such as the character Jiang, which is a popular surname that also means river, can cause connection problems.

The new mechanism includes a drop-down menu that appears under the search bar when problematic keywords are typed. The warning informs users that going through with the search may temporarily break your connection to Google, and ensures that that the interruption is outside Googles control.

Users can choose to either search anyway or edit search terms.

By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China, Google said in its official blog on Thursday. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on.

Google appointed a team of engineers in the U.S. to review the 350,000 most popular search queries in China. They looked at multiple signals to identify disruptive queries, and then identified specific terms at the root of the issue.

Weve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts, Google said.

For example, Jiang, the surname and word for river, not only causes problems on its own in a search, but will break connectivity if also searched with Lijian, the name of a city in the Yunnan Province, or the Jinjiang Star hotel chain.

Originally posted here:
Google Wages Keyword Battle Over China's Censorship

BEIJING (AP) -- Google has fired a new salvo in a censorship battle with Beijing by adding a feature that suggests alternatives for search terms that might result in blocked results.

Google's announcement Thursday did not mention of Beijing's extensive Internet controls. But it comes after filters were tightened so severely in recent weeks that searches fail for some restaurants, universities or tourist information. Authorities were aiming to stamp out talk about an embarrassing scandal over the fall of a rising Communist Party star.

Google Inc. closed its China-based search engine in 2010 to avoid cooperating with government censorship. Mainland users can see its Chinese-language site in Hong Kong but the connection breaks if they search for sensitive terms.

The new feature will alert users in China if they type in a search term that "may temporarily break your connection to Google" and suggest alternative terms, Google said in a blog post signed by a senior vice president, Alan Eustace.

"By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China," Eustace wrote.

Google cited as an example the Chinese character "jiang," or river, without mentioning that it also is the name of former President Jiang Zemin, the possible reason the government blocks search results. It says the site will recommend users in China write their search terms without that character.

A Google spokesman in Tokyo, Taj Meadows, declined to comment on reasons for the feature or whether the company was concerned about Chinese government retaliation.

Google was allowed to keep a network of advertising sales offices in China that might be vulnerable if the communist government tries to punish the company.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, had 16.6 percent of China's search market in the first quarter based on use of its global and Hong Kong sites, according to Analysys International, a Beijing research firm. It was in second place behind local rival Baidu Inc., which 78.5 percent, but ahead of other Chinese competitors.

Google is also promoting its Android mobile phone operating system for use by Chinese manufacturers. Chinese regulators approved Google's $12.5 acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a wireless device maker, last month on condition Android remains available to Chinese companies and others at no cost for five years.

See the original post:
Google adds feature to help China searchers

In a move designed to sidestep government censorship of search results, Google has added a new feature to Search in China: An alert that will tell users if their search terms are likely to trigger watchdog action.

In a move that will surely cause trouble for the Internet search giant, Google is changing its search service for users in China to add a warning that will alert users if theyre using terms that could result in some form of governmental censorship.

In a blog post today, the company announced that it will notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues, adding that [b]y prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. The problem with the user experience, according to the company, was that many Google Search results would be replaced with error messages reporting that This webpage is not available, or The connection was reset. Weve taken a long, hard look at our systems and have not found any problems, the blog post continues, However, after digging into user reports, weve noticed that these interruptions are closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries.

The blog post doesnt mention censorship at all, instead calmly referring to the companys wish to have as many people in the world as possible have access to our services. However, the company has had tumultuous relations with the Chinese government for some time, even getting to the point of accusing the government last year of attempting to hack the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior US Government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.

Itll remain to be seen whether or not China will respond to the changes. Technically, Google isnt actually stopping the Chinese government from censoring results, its merely warning users when they might be about to trip the censorship; the blog post announcing the change even offers that if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on. And yet by drawing attention to the issue in this way, and suggesting that their team of engineers has cracked the code of what, exactly, is likely to cause the censored search in the first place it feels as if this is almost daring China to respond in some way. I wonder how much trouble it would be to permanently offer 404 errors for all of Google Search

(Via)

Excerpt from:
Google changes Chinese search to alert for censorship

Illustration by http://www.fizzzbzzzz.com

Whats the opposite of free speech? If you answered, totalitarian censorship, you are right -- and you are old.

In the Internet age, censorship is all about allowing partial, temporary free speech, then shutting it down once enough has been said. The innovator, as usual these days when it comes to nondemocratic governance, is China, where the leading microblog site, Sina Weibo, unveiled its modified censorship model this week.

Users get 80 points. Monitors will take away points for violations. These include the censors old favorite, criticizing the government. You can also lose points for spreading rumor (which I thought was the whole point of the Internet) or promoting cults (a provision apparently aimed at the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong). The monitors will also scour your comments for puns or other circumlocutions used to avoid censorship in the past. If you run out of points, youre cut off.

If free speech is so threatening, why dont the powers- that-be in China just shut down the microblogs altogether? Part of the answer is that with 324 million users, Sina Weibo has become too big to fail, or at least too much a part of normal Chinese life to be eliminated. But the deeper reason to keep the masses microblogging is that the Chinese government reaps important gains from it. This is not your fathers Communist Party. Nor your grandfathers. Chinas leadership is engaged in a complicated, risky process of trying to gain some of the advantages of democratic government without the disadvantage of putting itself up for direct election. Free speech is a crucial part of the experiment.

A major benefit of allowing people to complain on the Web is that it allows society to blow off steam. This is a venerable value of free speech, recognized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in a famous dissent in 1951, responding to the courts choice to uphold the conviction of 11 American Communists for teaching subversive ideas. The airing of ideas releases pressures which otherwise might become destructive, Douglas wrote. If such release is beneficial in a democracy, its doubly so in a place where there is no robust public sphere.

Another advantage of limited free speech is that it allows the government to gather information about public concerns. Chinese authorities cant rely on ordinary polling data, because pollsters in China cant operate freely, lest they learn of serious opposition to the government. And its impossible to spy on 1.3 billion people all the time. The microblogs serve as the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, as Hamlet called the theater.

Once the microblogs have conveyed what people are thinking, the government can respond to their concerns, as it did last summer after the Zhejiang train derailment when Premier Wen Jiabao made a special visit to the site in apparent reaction to public frustration with bureaucratic silence and denials. Responding to public opinion is the hallmark of accountable government. Without elections to provide oversight, Chinas leaders need every opportunity they can get to demonstrate that they respond to peoples concerns. Seen this way, limited free speech, followed by government action, is an important part of how the Chinese Communist Party seeks to sustain its legitimacy.

The party is utterly aware that free speech could help bring the government down. That is why it is experimenting with freedom in moderation, and using quasi-private entities like Sina Weibo as its proxies. Chinas leaders are trying to gain the advantages of free speech without paying its full price. First Amendment absolutists will probably raise their eyebrows at this. After all, Americans have been raised to believe that free speech has a life of its own; that truth is great and shall prevail.

Yet there is an extraordinary precedent for Chinas censorship model: the history of free speech in England and the U.S. before the modern era. When it was drafted, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution didnt contemplate the radical freedom Americans now enjoy. Its language, drawn from English precedents, was aimed essentially at prohibiting what is called prior restraint: government censorship of books and newspapers before they could be published. As with the Sina Weibo rules, once you had spoken or written, you could still be punished for what you had freely said. You were accountable under the crime of seditious libel.

Original post:
China’s Blog Censorship Rules Have U.S. Parallels