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When staffers at GitHub first saw the email from a Russian agency claiming dominion over the internet last month, they didnt take it seriously. GitHub operates an enormously popular site where computer programmers share and collaborate on code, and to the Silicon Valley startup, an email requesting the removal of a list of suicide techniques from the site just didnt seem believable.

But GitHub is a place where you can post almost anythingnot just code. On a handful of GitHub pages, someone had indeed cataloged the pros and cons of different suicide techniques (with the pistol, the drawback was Time: From the fractions of a second to several minutes if bad aim). And the Russian agency was dead serious about wanting to take these pages down. Last week, after GitHub failed to remove the links, its service was blocked in Russia.

The outage lasted only a day, but it holds broader implications for US companies hoping to do business in Russia. Call it a minor skirmish in Russias larger battle to build a Kremlin firewall around the internet. Today, the Russian government is trying censor individual pages served from overseas, but a recently passed law could eventually prevent foreign internet companies from reaching Russia unless they set up computer servers inside the country, a setup that would leave them very much at the mercy of the local governmentand not only in terms of censorship.

Its a battle that threatens to put Russia on par with Chinaa world power whose people experience a downgraded and closed online experience. Unlike China, however, censorship on the Russian internet is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Eva Galpern, a global policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For a couple of decades, theyve actually had a relatively free internet, she says.

That all changed in the summer of 2012a year after Moscows streets were rocked by protests. Thats when Russia created the Roskomnadzor.1 Over the past two years, the agency has built out the muscle and infrastructure to take down anything it doesnt like. It administers a central blacklist of blocked sites, used by Russian internet service providers to manage the Kremlin firewall.

We should inform you that the URLcontains information which has been recognized by Federal service on customers rights protection and human well-being surveillance (ROSPOTREBNADZOR) as prohibited on the territory of the Russdan Federation, read the email the agency sent GitHub on October 21.

In March, the Roskomnadzor cut off access to websites run by Putin critics Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov. But its been harder for the agency to vaporize the instantly forkable GitHub suicide pages. Since news of GitHubs one-day outage went public last week, hundreds of new pages, including virtually identical content have sprung up on the website. The agency did not respond to WIREDs request for comment.

Ostensibly, the Roskomnadzors blacklist is there to keep what Russia considers to be dangerous content from the internetthings like suicide instructions, drug cookbooks, and information about terrorist organizations. But critics see it as a first step toward shuttering dissent. What we have discovered, of course, is because there is no accountability for who gets added to this blacklist, says the EFFs Galperin, they blocked pretty much all of the major independent news sites.

At the same time, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who runs the website Agentura.Ru, the governments long-term goal is to force companies U.S. companies to move their online operations into Russia. This year, the State Duma passed a law that would force foreign companies such as GitHub, Google, and Twitter to use servers located within the country when storing data from local users. Its set to take effect next year.

If their servers are in Russia, that would mean even stricter censorship for U.S. companies. But, as Soldatov explains, it would also open these companies to surveillance by Russias Federal Security Service, known as the FSB. The more likely outcome is that, if Russia clamps down on U.S. companies, some just wont play in the country. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal described the situation as a near-impossible challenge for US-based firms that have millions of Russian users but generally store data on servers outside the country.

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Russias Creeping Descent Into Internet Censorship

China is in a league of its own when it comes to online censorship. The government has long gone to great lengths to cleanse Chinese cyberspace of topics it finds objectionable. Even so, party official Lu Wei stands out for imposing unprecedented restrictions on Internet activities in the Peoples Republic.

The new Internet czar of China recently paid a visit to the US. And Lu had a packed schedule that included plenty of high-level meetings in Washington, which has taken an increasingly harder line toward China on matters of online censorship and computer hacking.

The meeting that attracted the most attention,though, was probably Lus visit to Mark Zuckerbergs office in Silicon Valley.

When Lu showed up, the Facebook chief executive just happened to have a copy of the Chinese presidents book sitting on his desk. Xi Jinping: The Governance of China is a weighty compilation its more than 500 pages in English of speeches and commentary by Xi, written with a heavy dose of Marxist jargon familiar to anyone who follows the Chinese Communist Party closely.

Mr. Lu is basically an old school propagandist, says Paul Mozur, who covers the Internet in China for the New York Times. And the book by Xi, as Mozur describes it, is the prime propaganda text thats been put out by President Xi Jinping.

Apparently, Zuckerberg told Lu that the Chinese presidents book is helping him and his staff at Facebook better understand socialism with Chinese characteristics. Mozur says he verified this account with someone who attended the private meeting.

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, leading to some instant criticism of Zuckerberg on social media for his perceived attempt at currying favor with the Chinese government.

The episode might be concerning to lots of Facebook users, says Mozur. Xis book doesnt hide the Chinese presidents skepticism toward the value of online freedom. Censorship and control over the Internet is a key element of Chinas goals for the future, is a message that comes through clearly in the book, Mozur says.

As the man in charge of implementing Chinas national Internet policies, Lu has made his own mark. He has singlehandedly presided over ... an unprecedented crackdown, Mozur says. Thats in a place where, already, the censorship regime and blocks were already [among] the most sophisticated and strict in the world.

It is easy to see why Zuckerberg would want Beijing to lift the ban on Facebook. China has more than 600 million people online and more than 40 percent of the global growth in the tech industry will come from China alone next year, according to Mozur. The big American tech players know they have to secure a place in the China market if theyre going to continue to grow.

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China's Internet censor-in-chief gets a warm welcome at Facebook headquarters

How often do corporate media mention that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Dream" speech called out "the unspeakable horrors of police brutality?" Never. But Ferguson and Staten Island call to mind those words and others by MLK, such as, "Riot is the language of the unheard" and his naming "[his] own government ... the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Today's police use militarized force to "protect and serve" the One Percent and intimidation to silence critics. St. Louis cops last week demanded that five black NFL players on the hometown Rams be disciplined for publicly showing solidarity with Ferguson protestors. And, for the past seven months, police pressured the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) into eliminating a lesson about MLK's deepest critique of American injustice. But persistent protest defeated this censorship.

Last April, Fox News reported that the national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) objected to a history unit on MLK's little-known radical ideas posted on the OUSD website. The unit included a lesson asking students to consider a parallel between textbooks' exclusion of King's radical ideas and media censorship of the most controversial death-penalty case of our time: the 1982 conviction of ex-Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal for killing a Philadelphia cop.

OUSD submitted to police pressure by taking the MLK unit offline, along with 26 other social justice lessons collectively called Urban Dreams. This ensured that students wouldn't learn about MLK's ideas challenging American society's core values or about Abu-Jamal, the nation's best-known critic of police violence.

The FOP professed reverence for MLK and outrage that a lesson connected him to Abu-Jamal. But police also spied on, abused, and threatened King. In his final year, King consistently opposed the Vietnam War, US aggression worldwide, and a system in which "profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people." He was murdered weeks before he was to lead a multiracial Poor People's campaign to occupy Washington, DC.

OUSD's decision to repost Urban Dreams shows that police censorship can be defeated. Persistent pressure from community supporters, teacher unions, the county labor council, Ed Asner, and Alice Walker prevailed.But the forces of "law and order" won't relent. It took activism by millions to win Civil Rights movement demands and end the Vietnam War. It will take more to achieve what King and Abu-Jamal both have advocated: a society with jobs, housing, food, education, medical care, and a healthy environment for all.

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Police Censorship Defeated for Now

Unnecessary Censorship in Smite part 7
Follow me on Twitch @ http://twitch.tv/n0r3st Twitter - @n0r3st Facebook - http://on.fb.me/NNuqlW Osiris, Neith, Nemesis, Chaac.

By: Doomshroom

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Unnecessary Censorship in Smite part 7 - Video

Singer Barbra Streisand and the governments of Turkey and Pakistan have little in common. But there is one thing: All have tried to censor the Internet, and all have failed miserably.

In a new paper, Zubair Nabi, with IBM Research's big data and analytics research group in Ireland, details how the so-called "Streisand effect" plays out over and over again when authoritarian governments try to censor information online, either by blocking or partially blocking "offensive" websites, throttling access speeds, or out-and-out manipulating content. Increased knowledge about the futility of censorship could help activists and researchers fight back against it and force regimes to rethink their censorship actionsor at least thats the hope.

The Streisand effect took its name when the Funny Girl star unsuccessfully sued to have an aerial photo of her Malibu beach house removed from the website of a photographer who had posted it along with thousands of other images of the California coastline. (He was actually aiming to document coastal erosion.) Prior to her lawsuit, only a few people had seen the image of Streisands house. After the ensuing lawsuit-related publicity, hundreds of thousands of people saw it.

A similar phenomenon played out in Turkeyone of the most connected nations in the worldearlier this year, when the government blocked access to SoundCloud to stop access to leaked recordings implicating the Turkish prime minister and other officials in corruption. Two months later, in March, the government also blocked access to Twitter and YouTube, also related to leaked recordings.

All of these efforts seemed to have failed, Nabi shows. Alexas rankings of website popularity show that YouTube stayed in the top 10 most-visited websites in Turkey during the censorship period. Google Trends showed that searches for the Twitter handle "Haramzadeler," which initially began uploading leaked recordings earlier in 2013 to no fanfare, spiked significantly when the government blocked SoundCloud in January 2014 and stayed high through late March. At the same time as the censorship events, searches for anti-censorship tools like "Tor," "Spotflux," "Ultrasurf," and terms like "unblock" and "proxy" also spiked, showing that people were actively working to get around the censors.

Last, Nabi analyzed YouTube statistics to see whether people searching for blocked content were actually able to access it. This was difficult in many cases because many videos were later taken down and because YouTube only shows graphs, not the actual data. However, Nabi was able to pinpoint YouTube stats for one video, which reveals the Turkish prime minister discussing construction permits with a business tycoon friend and was among the videos causing Youtube to be blocked in March. "It is clear from the graph that even though the video was uploaded in February 2014, its popularity spiked in March, after YouTube was censored," he writes.

More than 60 countries around the world today censor the Internet in some form, according to the paper. However, Nabi cautions that this Streisand effect does not manifest itself in all instances of censorship. Its existence in some cases only underscores the need for political activists and citizens to continue to develop and disseminate tools, such as VPNs and proxies, that circumvent censorship, he says.

The study also shows the Streisand effect at work in recent censorship episodes in Pakistan. However, it's also difficult to prove in many cases where data the data that companies like Google and Alexa provide is not granular enough or put into context. Nabi calls on more companies to open up more data to help the cause of anti-censorship activists.

"While the Streisand Effect is a handy instrument to keep censorship in check, it is only one of the many means to an end, not an end in itself. The end being an open, universally accessible Internet," he writes.

[Illustration: Daniel Salo]

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Government Internet Censorship Isn't Just Ineffective: Here's Proof It Backfires Horribly