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UK view: The PC Myth Harvey Obliterated

The heroism shown by ordinary Texans after Hurricane Harvey is a great antidote to the prejudices expressed by well-off liberals towards deplorable Americans, notes Sean Collins at the British site Spiked. While the politically correct view depicts the nation divided by race, the scenes from Houston told a different story a black officer wading through floodwaters with a white child in each arm, a SWAT officer saving a Vietnamese woman and her baby and three Asian and Hispanic constables moving an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Unlike PC liberals, Collins adds, most people dont see life through a racial prism. In response to Harvey, we didnt see the diversity of essentially different people we saw citizens helping citizens, Texans helping Texans.

Tech report: Beware of Googles Enormous Power

The story of the New America Foundation firing staff for criticizing Google, a major funder of the think tank, sounded familiar, writes Kashir Hill at Gizmodo. Six years ago, while working at Forbes, she was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Googles monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. And that article stayed unpublished. Even more disturbing is that soon after, search results stopped showing the piece at all. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. Hill admits she doesnt have hard evidence proving Google manipulated results an almost dystopian abuse of its power. But the story Google didnt want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google.

Political scribe: GOP Needs Bogeyman for Midterms

Like most politics of recent years, warns Michelle Cottle at The Atlantic, next years midterm elections promise to be wild and weird, since its increasingly looking like whichever team more furiously fires up its base will come out on top. Democrats have it easy: Aim squarely at President Trump. But for Republicans, coming up with a suitably electrifying bogeyman could prove challenging. And with no obvious Democratic stars to target, Republicans are left focusing mostly on tired standbys. Theres one obvious target: the prospect of Nancy Pelosi becoming speaker once again. Her unpopularity in key districts is the gift that never stops giving. And while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may be history ... the GOP bases hatred for them is still red-hot.

Activist: Imprisoned for Wanting a Free Venezuela

Writing for The New York Times from a prison cell in the dungeons of the Venezuelan secret police, Yon Goicoechea offers a dramatic first-hand account of what Venezuelans, particularly dissenters like him, suffer under the regime. As he was set to speak at a Popular Will party news conference a year ago, he was taken by armed guards and locked in a cell without light or natural ventilation. Worm-infested food and scraps of clothing covered in feces lay on the floor. It felt as if I had been buried alive. Such is the punishment for many Venezuelans who dare to dream of a democratic society, free of Communism and open to the global community. All they want is free elections, good governance, free expression, judicial independence, personal security and a modicum of economic liberty that is, what so many other people around the world take for granted.

Economist: Tax Reform Conservatives Can Back

As Washington gets set for tax reform, economics prof Aaron Hedlund at National Review suggests Republicans avoid playing small ball and seize the opportunity to craft bold tax reform that tilts the balance of power back from D.C. to the American people. He lays out several principles: limit spending, aim for simplicity, insist on permanence rather than temporary patches and gimmickry. Republicans must also take the social-justice fight to the Democrats. They should point out that liberals obsession with using the tax code for social engineering and redistribution is responsible for the very favoritism that currently exists in the tax code: big business over small business, cohabiting couples over married couples, and so on. The GOP can provide an alternative by pushing for a level playing field.

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The PC myth Harvey destroyed, Google censorship, the 2018 boogeymen & other comments - New York Post

The Cuban government has blocked internet content deemed critical of the revolution from reaching users on the island for years, but apparently its censorship methods are not that sophisticated, according to a report by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an organization linked to the open network and free software, Tor.

After analyzing access to more than 1,400 websites in three Cuban cities between late May and early June, three OONI members who traveled to the island found that at least 41 are blocked, mostly news sites and websites of Cuban opposition organizations or human rights NGOs.

The main conclusion of this study is that Cuba's ISP [Internet Service Provider, in this case ETECSA] appears to mainly censor sites that express criticism (directly or indirectly) toward the Cuban government, explained Mara Xynou, one of the authors of the study. However, internet censorship in Cuba does not appear to be particularly sophisticated compared to other countries with more advanced censorship, such as China or Iran.

The OONI team concluded that censorship is done using a method known as deep packet inspection (DPI), which allows filtering of data when passing through an inspection point.

Only versions of sites that use the HTPP and not its secure version, the HTPPS are blocked, potentially allowing users to bypass censorship by simply accessing secure versions of sites, the report indicates.

Furthermore, while some sites that express political criticism were found to be blocked, many other international sites which arguably express more criticism were found to be accessible. This might indicate a lack in sophistication in both internet surveillance and censorship implemented in the country, said Xynou.

However, this could be a calculated strategy on the part of the Cuban government.

It seems to us that countries make budget-influenced decisions when implementing censorship: generally, the objective is to discourage most people from accessing specific resources at a reasonable cost, she added.

In the case of Cuba, the state telecommunications monopoly, ETECSA, controls internet access, which is expensive and limited although the company has pledged to expand connectivity.

An hour of internet browsing costs $1.50 in a country where the average monthly salary is about $30. According to the most recent official statistics, about four million users have access to the internet but most of them navigate through a government-controlled intranet. Cuban authorities do not define what they consider a user either. Across the country, there are only 370 public places with WiFi service. Home service has not yet been implemented on the island.

Given the high cost of accessing the internet, rendering it inaccessible to most Cubans, perhaps the Cuban government doesn't even need to invest in sophisticated internet censorship (yet). Furthermore, the political climate of the country appears to foster self-censorship, which arguably is the most effective form of censorship, Xynou said.

Since its launched in 2012, OONI has been mapping global censorship on the internet in an effort to increase transparency. The organization has developed free software to examine a network and gather information to determine who censors and how its done.

With this technology, the OONI team also verified that in Cuba censorship is carried out in a way that is not clear to the user. The user cant tell if the site or service is blocked, or whether there is just a bad connection. This is the case with Skype, which is blocked on the island through a method known as packet injection, a technique that has been used in countries such as China and prevents users from realizing if the service is intentionally blocked or not.

Although ETECSA uses the technology of the Chinese firm Huawei, the report authors could not determine if the same technology is used to censor.

Our analysis of the Cuban internet was limited to what we could observe publicly, at the network level, by sending and receiving data, said Xynou. It would have been much more difficult and also risky, to fully understand the internal implementation of the Cuban censorship apparatus We decided not to go down that route.

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Report reveals technical details on internet's censorship in Cuba ... - Miami Herald

Last month, the China Quarterly (CQ), the most reputed academic journal of China studies in the world, published by the Cambridge University Press (CUP), was asked by the Chinese government to block hundreds of articles in China. The censorship was sought with retrospective effect going back to the first issue in 1960. Most of the articles were on Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square protests, Taiwan independence, Falun Gong, Xinjiang, democracy and human rights.

This was an unprecedented move of academic censorship in China. It is common practice that foreign scholars excise sensitive information from their work published in Chinese on the mainland. This protects Chinese citizens associated with a particular piece of research and also guards against the possibility of visa denials for subsequent visits by scholars. However, the CQ censoring raised the stakes as this actively targeted the work of China scholars in English published outside China. The academic community reacted swiftly with stinging criticism. It criticised the CUP for its failure to stand up for academic freedom. This backlash worked and within three days the CQ reinstated the banned content in China.

Defending the ban, an editorial in the Global Times, the mouthpiece of the government, termed the ban a matter of principle and asked the West to fall in line with Chinese laws to do business with the vast Chinese market. It also stated that academic freedom is a western value.

CQ has over six decades built a reputation for upholding the highest standards of research on China, with defining conversations on Chinese politics, economy and society. It has created a well-informed discourse on China that is itself open to critique and discussion. This censorship would have prevented Chinese scholars from participating in this conversation. Further, CQ is equally valuable to Chinese and non-Chinese scholars. Its censorship was hardly likely to produce an affirming consensus around the Chinese governments view of its own politics within the Chinese academic community. As an English language journal, its readership in China is limited to the social sciences academics. Therefore, this censorship was not likely to have had a major impact on widespread Chinese efforts to control its popular mediascape. Why, then, did China risk a global political backlash from some of the most well-informed people on China?

It appears that there now is a broad policy of censoring academic debate in China. Following the CQ censorship, Lexis-Nexis, another widely used legal and academic database, revealed that it has been forced to pull two of its databases out of the Chinese market because of censorship. The Journal of Asian Studies, another top journal was also asked to remove content. While censorship is not new in China, its expansion to academic content in English is an alarming sign.

The Chinese panopticon has evolved from party units at the workplace, neighbourhoods, professional organisations, media and academia to the more omnipresent monitoring regime online. China has successfully bent global companies and its own citizens to its will in operationalising its panopticon. The latest casualty in this are the virtual private networks (VPNs) used by Chinese and foreigners on the mainland to access banned content. Apple, the global technology giant, was complicit in this exercise, removing an app last month from its online store that allowed users to access VPNs. While the panopticon has served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) well, it remains the Achilles heel of the party requiring constant political investment and tight operational control. To deal with this challenge, China is now trying to control the global conversation on the Internet and change the rules of how the Internet functions globally as a discursive space. Chinas articulation of Internet sovereignty is to territorialise cyberspace giving national governments greater control over access and content. This is philosophically opposed to the vision of the Internet as global space built of and building communities over and above territorial borders.

The attempt to censor the CQ is an outcome of this regressive policy. CQ was sought to be censored because it does not conform to the regimes attempts to revise Chinese history, purging it of critical reflection on Chinese politics. Chinese universities and research institutes have always functioned under tight political boundaries. It appears that the government wants to narrow these boundaries further by preventing access to critical material on Chinas contentious politics over race, sovereignty, political citizenship, and elite politics. The upcoming CCP Congress has also contributed to the attempts to sanitise Chinese cyberspace of any politically subversive content. However, even as that may be a catalyst for the CQ ban, the political provenance of the ban resides in the revisionism of Chinese history to bolster the legitimacy of the party.

The reliance on brute force of the market to censor is likely to create an undercurrent of resistance rather than an informed consensus in favour of the CCPs vision. China overplayed its hand here and clearly underestimated the resolve of the China scholars community in standing by their lifes work. The CUPs decision to reinstate its content provides a contrast to the capitulation by global corporations such as Apple, to the lure of the Chinese market. Evidently, it is the university and not the market that will produce a resistance to oppression and stand by what is worthy of a fight for all peoples. Precisely why nationalistic regimes the world over today are trying to turn universities into uncritical factories to churn out loyal foot soldiers of the state.

Sonika Gupta is Associate Professor, IIT-Madras China Studies Centre, Chennai

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Staring down censorship - The Hindu

A Chinese man has received a nine-month prison term for selling virtual private network (VPN) software designed to evade the governments repressive internet restrictions.

Deng Jiewei of Guangdong province was recently convicted and sentenced for providing software and tools for invading and illegally controlling the computer information system, the South China Morning Post reported Monday, citing documents published by the Supreme Peoples Court.

China imposes some of the worlds strictest internet censorship laws and for years has targeted commercially available VPNs, one of the easiest methods for bypassing its Great Firewall and accessing regionally banned websites such as Google, Facebook and YouTube.

Deng, 26, began selling software in October 2015 that let users visit foreign websites that could not be accessed by a mainland IP address, the verdict said.

He was apprehended by authorities the following August and was formally sentenced in March, but court documents concerning his case only began circulating Saturday, the Post reported.

Along with an unidentified business parter, Deng allegedly earned nearly 14,000 yuan, or about $2,136, before being busted, according to the report.

Millions of Chinese residents and citizens use VPN software and similar technologies to circumvent the governments repressive internet restrictions in order to access any of the thousands of websites barred by regulators, and the subject of Dengs arrest dominated discussions afterwards on Weibo, a regional blogging website, the Post reported.

If selling a VPN means a conviction for providing software and tools for invading and illegally controlling the computer information system, then everyone here who uses a VPN to evade the Great Firewall can also be convicted of illegally invading or illegally controlling the computer information system, right? one Weibo user asked, the report said.

I am scared we could all be arrested now, wrote another user, the Shanghaiist reported.

Bloomberg reported in July that Chinas three largest state-run telecommunication providers have been ordered to ban all VPNs effective February 2018, but the Ministry of Industry and Information has since called the claim into question. Apple, meanwhile, recently removed dozens of VPN apps from its regional App Store amid pressure from Chinese authorities.

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Chinese software vendor sentenced for helping circumvent online censorship: Report - Washington Times

The SPLC's chief trial counsel Morris Dees / Getty Images

BY: Juan LeonSeptember 5, 2017 3:27 pm

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a liberal, Alabama-based legal advocacynonprofit and civil rights watchdog, recently refused to designatethe radical leftist movement known as "antifa" as a "hate group," despite acknowledging that its members use violence andoppose free speech.

The SPLC's president, Richard Cohen, told the Washington Examiner over the weekend that his organization condemns antifa as "wrongheaded" for using violence and opposing free speech

"We oppose these groups and what they're trying to do. We just don't think anyone should be able to censor someone else's speech," Cohen said. "We think they are contributing to the problem we are seeing. We think it's likely to lead to other forms of retaliation."

However, Cohen refused to label antifa a "hate group" since its members do not discriminate on the basis of race, sexual orientation, or other categories protected by anti-discrimination law.

"There might be forms of hate out there that you may consider hateful, but it's not the type of hate we follow," he said.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Securityhave been warning state and local authorities since early 2016 that antifa had become increasingly violent,describing itsmembers as "anarchist extremists."DHS formally classified their activities as "domestic terrorist violence."

The SPLC on its website defines the criteria for being designated as a "hate group":

"All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."

The nonprofit organization, which came under fire last week after the Washington Free Beacon reported that it transfers millions of dollars to offshore entities as part of its business dealings, has been criticizedfor placing mainstream conservative and peaceful Christian organizations in the same category as racist and violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC publishes an annual "hate map"and claims 917 hate groups are actively operating in the United States at present.

Here are some of the organizationsthe SPLChas previously decided to designate as "hate groups":

The Singing Nuns in Spokane, Wash.

In 2013, the pastor of Mount St. Michael, Rev. Casimir Puskorius, told the Spokesman-Reviewthat he thought the SPLC's designation of his church as a hate group was "very unfair." Puskorius said he believed the SPLC's label was politically motivated to target a conservative Christian group. At one point, Mount St. Michael weighed a lawsuit.

"We considered suing them, some years ago, but they have more resources than us," Puskorius said.

Family Research Center (FRC)

In August 2012, a man walked into the Christian pro-family, non-profit Family Research Center's headquarters with the intention of killing "as many as possible" and smearing "Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims' faces." He found the organization through the SPLC's online listing of "anti-gay groups, which includes FRC because of its traditional marriage views.

"The SPLC's reckless labeling has led to devastating consequences," FRC president Tony Perkins told the Examiner. "Because of its hate group' lists, a deadly terrorist had a guidemap to FRC and other organizations. Our staff is still reeling from the attack, and the chilling effect this could have on organizations that are simply fighting for their values is outrageous."

Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

CIS executive director Mark Krikorian wrote a Washington Post op-ed earlier this year in which he argued against the SPLC's designation of his Washington, D.C. think tankas a "hate group."

"The wickedness of the SPLC's blacklist lies in the fact that it conflates groups that really do preach hatred, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Nation of Islam, with ones that simply do not share the SPLC's political preferences," he wrote. "The obvious goal is to marginalize the organizations in this second category by bullying reporters into avoiding them, scaring away writers and researchers from working for them, and limiting invitations for them to discuss their work."

American College of Pediatricians

The SPLC has accused the socially conservative organization of pediatricians and health care professionals of defaming "gays and lesbians in the name of protecting children."

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)

On the "Hate Watch" section of its website, SPLC justifies its inclusion of FAIR on its list of hate groups:

FAIR doesn't "just" research "the facts" about immigration policy. It is a lobbying organization. This is no secret. On its own website, under "Our Objectives," FAIR said it seeks "to influence public policy directly by lobbying (to the extent permitted by our tax status) and by protecting the citizens' rights in the courts." Its "mission," in part, is to "advocate immigration policies that will best serve American environmental, societal, and economic interests today and into the future."

So there's that.

And then there's the "facts" FAIR puts out there, the alleged "truth" that, you say, is so disliked by the "other side."

Sometimes FAIR's "facts" are true. More often, they're debatable, culled as they are from dubious sources like FAIR's sister organization, theCenter for Immigration Studies.

The bottom line is, FAIR doesn't peddle facts; it peddles hate.

SPLC then argued that FAIR exploits "racial tensions and economic anxieties" by promoting more strict immigration policies.

FAIR released a 25-page PDF guide in response to SPLC's charges, defending its legitimacy:

FAIR is also one of the very few charities in the United States certified by the Better Business Bureau as meeting all of its giving standards for a charitable organization, highlighting management, honesty, and responsibility. By contrast, the SPLC has been singled out as an organization that fails virtually every standard for accountability as a charitable nonprofit corporation.

FAIR also has a reputation of transparency, objectivity, and credibility with the national news media. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and National Public Radio are several examples of the elite news organizations that rely on FAIR for information, commentary, and analysis.

Link:
Southern Poverty Law Center Won't Call Antifa a 'Hate Group' Despite Violence, Censorship Efforts - Washington Free Beacon