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Mandelas Last Years, written by retired military doctor Vejay Ramlakan, has become a sought-after commodity since the publisher, Penguin SA, withdrew it from the shelves in July. Ramlakan was the head of the medical team that looked after Nelson Mandela until his death in 2013.

The withdrawing and pulping of a book represents a huge expense for a publisher, as well as a source of some embarrassment. So why did the publisher do it?

Soon after the book was published, members of the Mandela family, led by his widow Graa Machel, threatened legal action. It must be admitted that the basis for any legal action wasnt clear, although it was probably linked to defamation. The book, Machel argued, constituted an assault on the trust and dignity of her late husband.

Soon afterward, the authors employer, the South African National Defence Force, distanced itself from the book, suggesting that it may have contravened doctor-patient confidentiality.

The publisher bowed to this pressure and withdrew the book, stating that no further copies would be issued out of respect for the family. This is almost unprecedented, anywhere, and needs to be teased out more fully. After reading the book, Ive considered how and why the publisher may have come to this decision.

REASONS FOR PULPING A BOOK

The decision-making process for a publisher in a case like the Mandela book revolves around balancing the potential costs against reputational damage. The costs can be extensive - in publishing, all costs relating to editing, design, production, printing and distribution are made up front. It is relatively easy to make a decision to withdraw a book after publication when it may have contravened the law, mostly due to defamation of character.

Books may also be withdrawn after allegations of plagiarism, or because the accuracy of the content has been called into question. Publishers sometimes cancel contracts with their authors based on the standard waivers dealing with defamation and inaccuracies.

Publishers try to avoid these kinds of situations by performing due diligence to see if manuscripts contain anything defamatory or that breaches privacy. They employ fact checkers to avoid inaccuracy. And they require authors to warrant that their work is original and accurate.

This doesnt mean that errors dont sometimes slip through. But it is very unusual for a book to be withdrawn simply because its controversial. In fact, publishers usually support controversial titles because they create publicity, and publicity generally leads to sales.

So, what happened in this particular case?

The first set of questions would relate to the credibility of the author, and the publishers relationship with him. Ramlakan was the head of Mandelas medical team and had unique access to the former president over a long period of time.

This means that he certainly had the access and authority to write the book, and as far as I know, nobody is questioning its accuracy.

This is important, because truthfulness is one of the main defences against defamation, as is the issue of public benefit or interest. It seems highly unlikely that a publisher would allow a nonfiction title to include material that is patently untrue or that would harm the reputation of a man like Mandela. Is there really still a need to protect the reputation of a man of such global stature?

FAMILY PERMISSION

Linked to the question of authority is whether the work was authorised. The author has repeatedly claimed he wrote the memoir at the request of family members, and with their permission. In such a large family, it would be difficult to obtain permission from every family member, and it is quite common for family members to protest their treatment in a biography of a famous public figure.

Family members often argue that there has been a breach of privacy or that embarrassing private details have been made public. But the truth is that their authorization is not actually necessary. Many authors write unauthorised biographies or memoirs, and while they may prove controversial, they certainly do not contravene the law. The broad variety of books already available on Mandela shows that there is ongoing public interest. It seems unlikely that each one of them was authorised by the family.

What complicates this scenario is that, as a medical doctor, Ramlakan is also expected to uphold ethical standards that an ordinary writer wouldnt be subject to. I am not an expert in medical ethics, but there are very few medical details in the book that are not already in the public domain.

In fact, one of the purposes of the book was to counter the rumours and speculation around Mandelas medical condition in the last years and months of his life. It does this by quietly countering inaccurate statements and setting out the bare facts. It appears that the author made a deliberate effort to avoid breaching confidentiality, and ended up writing a very respectful book.

Some have suggested that the publisher and author were simply attempting to cash in on the Mandela legacy. Whatever their motives, they shouldnt be the basis for withdrawing a book from public circulation. Taste and motivation are not legal issues.

CENSORSHIP

Given that there is no apparent material basis for a legal attack on the book, its withdrawal reveals self-censorship on the part of the publisher. South Africa no longer has censorship laws in place, but an influential family can bring pressure to bear that amounts to the same thing. But also given that the book was already on the market, it should be asked what the effect of the withdrawal will be.

While fewer copies will be sold in bookshops, and fewer people will have access to it, its not possible to entirely withdraw a book from the online market. The book reviews already mention all of the most controversial parts of the book, and the action of withdrawal only serves to highlight them. The best course of action would be to allow the book to circulate freely and to stand - or fall - on its own merits. Anything else is censorship.

Beth le Roux is an Associate Professor, Publishing, University of Pretoria

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[OPINION] Withdrawal of Mandela book nothing short of censorship - Eyewitness News

When the Chinese government wanted to keep its users off Facebook and Google, it blocked the entire country's access to the U.S. companies' apps and sites. And when citizens started using third-party workarounds like Tor, proxiesand VPNs to get around those blocks, it moved to quash those,too.

So a handful of researchers came up with a crazy idea: What if circumventing censorship didn't rely on some app or service provider that would eventually get blockedbut was built into the very core of the internet itself? What if the routers and servers that underpin the internet infrastructure so important that it would be impractical to block could also double as one big anti-censorship tool?

It turns out, the idea isn't as crazy as it might seem. After six years in development, three research groups have joined forces to conduct real-world tests of an experimental new technique called "refraction networking." They call their particular implementation TapDance, and it's designed to sit within the internet's core.

In partnership with two medium-sized U.S. internet providers and the popular app Psiphon, they deployed TapDance for over a week this past spring to helpmore than 50,000 users around the world access the free and open internet the first time such a test has been done outside the lab, and at such a large scale.

The researchers announced the test in a paper presented at the annual USENIX Security conference earlier this week.

"In the long run, we absolutely do want to see refraction networking deployed at as many ISPs that are as deep in the network as possible," said David Robinson, one of the paper's authors, and co-founder of the Washington-based tech policy consulting firm Upturn. "We would love to be so deeply embedded in the core of the network that to block this tool of free communication would be cost-prohibitive for censors."

The concept of refraction networking which has also been called decoy routing has been around since at least 2011, and was independently developed by research teams at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinoisand Raytheon BBN Technologies. In 2015, with a research grant from the U.S. State Department, they formed a coalition to deploy TapDance within an ISP.

In the end, they actually settled on two Merit Network, a regional ISP in Michigan, and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The technique works like this: A user in a country where internet filtering exists uses a special piece of software in this case, a special test version of the app Psiphon to browse the web. To access a site that's otherwise blocked, the software first sends a request to an unblocked site that's likely to be routed through TapDance along the way.

An explanation of how TapDance works. (https://refraction.network)

The user's circumvention software tags this innocuous request with a little extra data basically a secret flag the censor can't see that says "Hey, I actually want this request to go somewhere else." The TapDance software in an ISP's infrastructurekeeps watch for this secret flagand, when detected, re-routes the user's connection to the blocked site instead.

The user gets to where they want to go, everything's taken care of behind the scenes, and the censor is none the wiser in theory.

In the near future, the researchers hope to deploy TapDance within more ISPs to test their approach on an even larger scale. But a still unanswered question is whether censors can tell when TapDance is in use.

It's a problem that's preoccupied PhD student Cecylia Bocovichand professor Ian Goldbergat the University of Waterloo, in Ontario.

"We believe that it is within the capabilities of more powerful censors to detect and blockTapDancetraffic in its current form," wroteBocovichin anemail, but nonetheless called the deployment "really exciting news."

The pairhave been working on an alternate approach to refraction networking called Slitheen that's designed to resist detection, but the trade-off is that it'smore difficult for an ISP to implement.

Instead of re-routing or refracting traffic, Slitheen actually hides censored content inside requests for images and videos from unblocked sites effectively swapping blocked data for what the censor believes is allowed. Hidden content is made tolookas close as possible to the original content's traffic pattern as it travels across the network, making the ruse extremely difficult to detect.

Even the TapDance papers' authors admit that they don't yet know how resistant to detection TapDance is in practice, given the limited amount of time their test was run. But if TapDance sensors are ever deployed as widely as its developers hope, it may not matter.

"If we have enough of them out there, the odds of going past a TapDance site increases," Robinson said.

And if enough of those sites happen to be within the heart of the internet, the cost of blocking them all would the researchers hope be too high.

Read more:
In fight for free speech, researchers test anti-censorship tool built into the internet's core - CBC.ca

President Trumps reelection campaign saidTuesdaythat CNN has denied its offer to buy air time for a campaign ad, marking the second time the network has refused to run a pro-Trump campaign spot.

The ad, called Let President Trump Do His Job, accuses the media of attacking our president and briefly displays pictures of news anchors from several news outlets, including CNN anchors Jake Tapper, Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper.

The presidents enemies dont want him to succeed, the ad states. Let President Trump do his job.

One of the many reasons that so many millions of Americans support President Trump is because of their complete mistrust of the mainstream news media, and the presidents refusal to allow their biased filter to interfere with his messages, Trump campaign executive director Michael Glassner said in a statement.

Today, CNN provided further proof that the network earns this mistrust every day by censoring President Trumps message to the American people by blocking our paid campaign ad, he continued. Clearly, the only viewpoint CNN allows on air is CNNS.

A spokesperson for CNN said the network asked for changes to make the ad "factually accurate" and that the Trump campaign declined.

"CNN would accept the ad if the images ofreporters and anchors are removed," a spokesperson said. "Anchors and reporters dont have 'enemies,' as the ad states, but they do hold those in power accountable across the political spectrum and aggressively challenge false and misleading statements and investigate wrong-doing."

Earlier this year, CNN refused to run a Trump campaign ad because it cast the mainstream media as fake news.

Trump and CNN are locked in an increasingly personal feud that has pitted the White House against the networks top on-air talent.

CNNs chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, has gained prominencefor his entrenched opposition to Trump.

Acosta has infuriated conservatives, who view him as a grandstander whose chief goal is buildinghis personal brand through viral clips of heated exchanges with White House spokespeople.

At a press conferenceon Monday, Acosta, who was representing the media through the press pool, shouted a question at Trump, who responded: Youre fake news.

Havent you spread a lot of fake news yourself, sir?Acosta shot back.

CNN has run its own ads with footage of anchors lecturing White House officials and talking about whether Trump will be impeached.

The network has attracted criticism for its relentless hostility toward the president. A Harvard study found that CNNs coverage of Trump was negative 93 percent of the time over the course of his first 100 days in office.

CNN's ratings are up, although the networkstill trails rivals Fox News and MSNBC.

- This story was updated at 1:06 p.m.

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Trump campaign accuses CNN of censorship - The Hill

A deal between Beijing and the increasingly despotic Erdogan regime in Turkey is raising fears of a new phase of Chinese political influence, in which Chinese soft power is used to persuade foreign governments to allow the same type of pro-Beijing censorship that constricts the Chinese internet in their own countries. After a meeting last week between Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, it was reported that Turkey plans to block anti-China reports from its media and Turkish language websites. This has worried many activists from Chinas persecuted Uighur minority, for whom Turkey has functioned as something of a safe haven after other Asian countries closer to Beijing crumbled in the face of political pressure to crackdown on Uighur refugees within their borders.

Within China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is steadfast on three sacred rights over which it perceives there is very little room for negotiations. These are continued unchallenged rule by the CCP at home; uncompromising defence of Chinese claims to sovereignty and territorial integrity within and without Chinas present borders; and continued economic expansion at home and abroad. Beijing has often sparred diplomatically with other countries and turned the screws on the private sector at home in pursuit of these three rights. It has also long threatened foreign governments and companies if it sees them as somehow challenging any of these core interests; what is new is that China now wishes to export the censorship methods it has perfected at home to foreign audiences whose interest and familiarity with China is very limited.

Of course, Beijing has long wielded control over what its own citizens can see or speak of both online and through media outlets whose output it can control domestically. But in a globalised world China is also the source of much concern from international observers, from the international status of Taiwan and the South China Sea to repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. It has been a source of great irritation to Beijing that media outlets online who are based overseas can contradict the official narrative without penalty. As China has grown stronger it has begun to try and impose a pro-Chinese narrative on media coverage overseas whose target audiences are not Chinese consumers. This overt effort especially targets Chinese dissidents searching for space to hide or places to broadcast from, but it also seeks to undermine foreign resistance to increasingly assertive Chinese territorial demands in places like the South China Sea.

In Turkey, media freedom has all but vanished following the failed coup last year and Erdogans victory in the April referendum. The Turkish media blackout there is only part of an offensive which China is carrying out with the help of autocratic states in the Middle East against Uighurs who have fled overseas. In Egypt, the military authorities have copied the example of Thailands junta and rounded up dozens of Uighurs for deportation back to China. But Uighurs are Turkic-speaking Muslims whose fate has traditionally been championed by Ankara. By muzzling the Turkish press, Beijing has both struck a blow against the international media coverage that Uighur activists have traditionally relied upon to publicise their cause, and made it easier to forcibly return such critics to Chinese soil without arousing much negative publicity.

Some may see the agreement between China and Turkey as constituting a special case; Uighur activists are vulnerable to accusations propagated from Beijing that their organisations are tied to terrorist groups. Some Uighurs have indeed joined international terrorist networks like the Islamic State and carried out attacks overseas which targeted foreigners and not Chinese state facilities (though these have been attacked too). This has made Middle Eastern governments, most whom are not particularly concerned with human rights, happy to be persuaded to fight Beijings battles for it. The terrorism connection has also muted Western and East Asian criticism of China, conditions which cannot be said to applied to issues such as Taiwan, Tibet or historical controversies that Beijing censors such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But success in controlling the narrative over its treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang is liable to encourage China to try this method of media manipulation in other regions, over other issues. Semi-democratic Malaysia for example, despite a border dispute with China, has cooperated with Beijing in the past, sending Taiwanese and Uighur detainees back to China despite international outcry. It is not hard to imagine Beijing demanding Kuala Lumpur extend its cooperation into the area of media censorship when Malaysia already has some of the toughest media controls in the modern world. This future blackout could be over the fate of Uighurs migrants as in Turkey, or it could be over a different issue entirely, such as corruption within the ruling CCP. Chinese dissidents are already vanishing overseas with the help of foreign governments; it is hard to image they will be keen to publicise the dirty work they carry out on Beijings behalf.

As democracy falters in the West and the rest, international human rights groups and large media conglomerates must remain wary of any emerging pact of censorship between China and the gaggle of autocrats and demagogues currently in vogue. Dictatorships can cooperate internationally to conceal the truth of their actions, as Latin American military regimes did when they joined together to hunt down dissidents in each others countries during Operation Condor. When one country inside such a pact is as powerful as China, such an arrangement would give the CCP almost unprecedented abilities to persecute its own people abroad, engage in bad faith negotiations over territorial disputes and manipulate foreign audiences sentiments in favour of CCP priorities. That is not a future which is good for China or the peoples with whom it is now coming into closer contact with in the 21st century.

See the rest here:
Chinese Censorship Hits the Middle East - Raddington Report (blog)

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

The Price of Censorship for China's Internet Giants Wall Street Journal (subscription) By blocking foreign competition, China's censorship regime has groomed the country's internet companies into some of the world's biggest companies. Now Big Brother is turning against the behemoths. The country's largest social-media platforms ... China's censorship crackdown targets WeChat, Weibo, and BaiduTNW China Steps Up Censorship of Social Media SitesTheStreet.com China probes Tencent, Baidu and Sina over subversive contentFinancial Times Fortune -BBC News all 87 news articles »

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The Price of Censorship for China's Internet Giants - Wall Street Journal (subscription)