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Chinas secret Internet cleanup team, responsible for taking down negative stories for their high-profile clients, made millions of yuan before being shut down by government officials.

According to an investigation by Chinas Caixin magazine, these Internet scrubbers are paid huge sums to erase any unwanted online mentions of their clients through various under-the-table means -- in other words, censorship that has been privatized.

Gu Dengda, a 30-year-old Beijing-based entrepreneur and public relations consultant, founded his Internet cleanup crew, Yage Times, in 2007. By 2011, his company made 50 million yuan (more than $8 million) in gross profits that year alone. Officially, the business falls under the information technology sector, but insiders told Caixin its main money-maker is getting rid of negative coverage for a hefty price.

Citing one job, the magazine wrote, Saving the Shenzhen-based firms image was not cheap, and it took more than two months to douse the flames of Internet news reports and rumors claiming executives had used a Ponzi scheme to bilk investors.

In China, bad press at any scale can take down even the biggest politicians or tarnish the names of major companies, so naturally, business for Gu was booming. Yage Times dealt with a wide variety of clients, from multinational companies to wealthy individuals. Most clients, however, were officials in second-tier or third-tier provincial cities.

Gu and his employees would often use bribery as a means of getting rid of negative news surrounding clients, but when that failed, they resorted to creating and sending out forged government documents that demanded specific content be removed from news sites.

Targets of bribery and the faked official documents ranged from low-level employees at public relations firms to major news portals such as Netease and Sohu, and even Internet search giant Baidu.

And while desperate clients were willing to pay lots of money for the illegal services provided by Yage Times, it seems that Gu is now paying the price.

Gu is now being held under police custody because of his shady, if lucrative, business practices. He is awaiting trial and has been charged with various crimes, including bribery. According to the report, Gu is one of at least 10 Internet- scrubbing specialists currently being detained by authorities. Additionally, Chinese authorities uncovered several other firms that operate under similar IT or public relations facades that also provide the illegal services.

According to Caixins report, Chinas authorities were determined to stop such underground business practices for good. Authorities were so determined to leave no stone unturned that every uniformed officer in the district was dispatched for the raids, even a forensic examiner, the report said. More than 100 police stormed Yages Beijing offices, arresting more than 100 employees from janitors to Gu himself -- and shutting down their operations.

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Privatized Censorship: China Cracks Down On Image-Rescuing Bribery Business

Musical Censorship Vlog
Don #39;t comment or Criticize me, this was just a project for a class i had, if you agree or have a different opinion that great for you

By: Dayum yo

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Musical Censorship Vlog - Video

Micro-blogging websites offer uncensored information, glimpse behind bureaucracy's secrecy By meghan cioci | Feb 17

A panel of international journalists met Friday in Clark Hall to discuss the role technology plays in combatting news censorship policies in China. The panelists highlighted the reporting challenges faced by international correspondents and Chinese journalists.

The discussion, entitled Covering China in the Age of Information, was moderated by Charles Laughlin, director of the East Asia Center, and included panelists Melissa Chan, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, Isaac Stone Fish, the associate editor of Foreign Policy magazine and Susan Jakes, the editor of the Asia Societys ChinaFile blog.

In the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, because of pressures from the international community, journalists faced fewer constraints, Chan said. But progress has since halted, she added.

Non-Chinese foreign correspondents enjoy relative security, Fish said, but their sources and Chinese counterparts often do not. Youre there, youre protected, but its very easy for you to burn your sources for you to endanger the people you talk to, he said.

Because of the risk news sources face, it is difficult for foreign journalists to hear peoples genuine opinions, Jakes said. Instead reporters must find these opinions in certain corners of the web.

One of the interesting things about these micro-blogging sites is that they can give us access to peoples unvarnished thoughts about all kinds of different topics, Jakes said. [It] provides a kind of window to life in China.

These micro-blogging sites, such as the popular Weibo, are censored, which results in a cat and mouse game between users and censors. Sometimes you can read things for a few minutes and then they just disappear, Jakes said. But these posts if seen during the brief time before censoring provide invaluable leads on news stories, panelists agreed.

The advent of image attachments, which are harder to censor than text, has furthered the ability for news stories to reach readers in China. One site, WeiboScope, selects 40-50 of the most popular stories and posts them in the form of image attachments, rather than the original text versions..

There is some stuff that is really pushing the envelope in terms of sensitivity [on WeiboScope] and [reading the site] is a good way to keep your thumb on the pulse of public discourse in China today, Laughlin said.

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Panel discusses Chinese journalism, government censorship

Benjamin Netanyahu ... instructions to editors failed to take account of the internet. Photo: Reuters

JERUSALEM: The blanket ban on reporting details of the detention and apparent suicide of an Australian prisoner jailed in Israel has raised pressing questions about the relevance of censorship in a digital age.

The mysterious case of Prisoner X briefly emerged in 2010 in an online news report which was immediately taken down due to a gag order, only to resurface on Tuesday when the ABC's Foreign Correspondent reported he was an Australian working for Mossad.

The results are ridiculous and, instead of hushing up the blunder, they merely shine a spotlight on it.

Although the news spread like wildfire across social networks, Israel's media outlets were uncharacteristically silent, gagged by a set of tight restrictions that barred them from even mentioning the ABC report.

The silence was broken only when three Israeli MPs used their parliamentary immunity to raise the issue in the Knesset, forcing the censor to ease its grip and permit coverage of the ABC report.

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Aluf Benn, editor of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, said the case highlighted the old-world thinking among Israel's top intelligence brass.

"I imagined yesterday that I met Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and that I tried to persuade him to remove himself for a day or two from the cloak-and-dagger world he lives in . . . But then I remembered that Pardo is still living in the previous century, when information is kept in regimes' safes," he wrote.

Shortly after the ABC report emerged, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called in the country's top editors to ask them to cooperate by withholding publication of information about an incident that was "very embarrassing to a certain government agency," Haaretz said, in a clear allusion to Mossad.

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Israeli censorship proves futile in digital age

The suicide of an alleged Mossad spy in an Israeli jail has raised the question of censorship in the digital age.

It has also more widely revealed the inner workings of the Israeli security establishment's relationship with the media.

Ben Zygier, also known as Ben Alon, held dual citizenship - Australian and Israeli.

When he was held by the Israelis his family was informed, but there was a news blackout in Israel on grounds of national security.

It is said that even his guards were unaware of his identity and he became known as Prisoner X.

The blackout continued after his suicide, but on Tuesday Australia's ABC network broadcast details of his death and the background to the case.

The news quickly spread to other foreign news outlets and then onto social media sites in Israel.

Despite, or perhaps because of that, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called in the Israeli Editors Committee (IEC) and "asked" members to continue to withhold information.

Breaking the security censorship laws in Israel can lead to prison sentences.

By this point ordinary Israelis were busy sending tweets such as: "Foreign media says the sun is shining in Israel today" and other pointed barbs at how the security establishment was trying to tell the tide not to come in.

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Israel, Prisoner X And Digital Age Censorship