Internet & Democracy Blog

On Tuesday, Google released a Transparency Report that shows the number of government inquiries it receives for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content.

The report, which Google presents in the form of an interactive map and traffic graphs, reveals the number of content removal and data requests that it received from government agencies around the world during the first 6 months of 2010. (See this Herdict post on the traffic graphs.)

The map tool allows one to see:

The number of government requests we received to remove content, per country;

The number of individual items asked to be removed, per country (as there may be many URLs per request) — this is new for 2010 data;

The products that contained the content; and

The percentage of those requests that we fully or partially complied with on a country-by-country basis.

Internet censorship around the world is on the rise, according to the report. A comparison of data from the internet service database that it released 5 months ago and the current version shows that there has been an increase in the number of government requests, suggesting that internet freedom may be taking a turn for the worst. Note: the map tool excludes data request information for a number of countries, most notably China and Iran. Using the traffic graphs, however, one can see how much traffic Google services get in those countries. The U.S. currently occupies the #1 spot with  4,287 government requests for data information during the first half of 2010. Directly behind it are Brazil with 2,435 and the U.K. with 1,343. Just five months ago, however, Brazil was in first place, the U.S. in second, and the U.K. in third.

While the report does contain important and telling information about censorship levels worldwide, the data that Google provides is not totally comprehensive and accurate. It fails to address a couple of major criticisms that arose when it first released an internet service database. Most notably, the  tool does not reveal query specifics, such as how many requests government agencies made for the same user data and what the total amount of requests across all categories of content is. Google also admits that among its limitations is the fact that that it has not included statistics for countries in which fewer than 30 requests for user data in criminal cases during the observation period.

Moreover, the report does not account for government-mandated service blockages—only content removal requests. A major addition that Google has made to the tool, however, is the ability to see how many requests it has honored: 138 in the US, 398 in Brazil, and 48 in the UK.

Google says that it would  like to be able to share more information with the public, but lack of standardization among user data requests, as well as the difficulty in categorizing and quantifying those requests, prevent it from doing so. But the internet search giant has expressed its intention to offer more information in the future, as well as a desire to fuel debate on government censorship.

“We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests,”  Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a post on Google’s official blog.

By Marianna Tishchenko

This front page New York Times article, which describes how Russian officials have used trumped up charges of software piracy to pressure Russian advocacy groups, led quickly to a blanket license for Russian NGOs from Microsoft. The article appeared on Sunday; the blanket license was announced on Monday. Microsoft lawyers are now also are effectively prohibited from assisting in these cases.

The raids, however, have taken place since 2007. Russian security services have conducted dozens of raids on Russian NGOs and media organizations that voice their opposition to the country’s leadership, according to the article. Although Russian officials have claimed that the raids have no political basis, the Times notes the government “rarely if ever” conducts such inspections for advocacy groups and news organizations that support the government, suggesting that officials have used piracy concerns as an excuse to silence dissenters.

Cliff Levy of the Times focuses on one case involving the Russian environmental NGO Baikal Environmental Wave. Russian police stormed the NGO in January—supposedly in order to investigate its possession of illegal software after receiving a ‘civilian complaint’—and confiscated staff computers that may have contained illegally downloaded software. The NGO insisted that it had paperwork that could prove that the Microsoft products had been legally purchased. Russian officials were not interested in seeing it, however.

The fact that Baikal Environmental Wave had been planning protests against a government-sponsored reopening of a paper factory near Lake Baikal when Russian officials stormed their facility makes their intentions suspect.

Since the release of the NYT article, a great deal of speculation has surrounded Microsoft’s role in raids. And in an attempt to dispel rumors and ward off criticism, Microsoft issued a statement on Sept. 13, in which it expressed strong disapproval of the use of software piracy concerns as a scapegoat for “nefarious purposes.” The company also announced its intention to create a unilateral software license for NGOs that will give them free and legal software.

“Whatever the circumstances of the particular cases the New York Times described, we want to be clear that we unequivocally abhor any attempt to leverage intellectual property rights to stifle political advocacy or pursue improper personal gain,” Senior Vice President and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in the statement. “We are moving swiftly to seek to remove any incentive or ability to engage in such behavior.”

One hopes that Microsoft will get out ahead of any efforts by other governments to carry out similar raids in other countries.

This is a visual representation of the Moscow metro bombing discussion on Twitter. It is a word cloud of 1000 random tweets from the #moscow hashtag (which saw a five fold increase after the bombings) based on research we’re doing with the Sam Gilbert and the Web Ecology Project. We are still working through #metro29 and other hashtags that were more popular among Russian language Twitter users. Turns out it’s pretty hard to say anything too original in 140 characters.

And for comparison, here’s a word cloud representing the discussion on the bombings in the US and Russian press, drawn from the full text of 68 articles related to the bombing from Johnson’s Russia List. Both clouds were created with Wordle.

This is intended mostly as a fun experiment as we build more accurate tools to make these type of inter platform comparisons, but it is still pretty striking to see how limiting Twitter can be when trying to tell a story. In any case, it is still far better than Russian TV news.

Update: I replaced an earlier Twitter cloud to strip out the date, which I think was a cut and paste error on my part, since that doesn’t appear in the text of the Tweets.

As I wrote last week, Twitter is starting to expand beyond its English-language roots in the US. Yesterday the Russian search engine Yandex released a short fact sheet on Russian language Twitter users. Here are the highlights (via Nick Wilson):

* Yandex estimates 183 thousand Russian accounts on Twitter
* More than 60% of Russian-speaking users update their Twitter stream every day
* 67% of all Tweets contain links, 8% of Tweets contain links to the media.
* During the winter 2009-2010 the number of Russian-speaking users on Twitter has
increased by 42%. In the year period from March 2009 to March 2010, by 26%.
* About 150 thousand Tweets (messages) are posted each day in Russian. 5% of them are ReTweets.
* There are more than 125 thousands links published on Twitter each day.
* Yandex studies more than 20 microblogging services in RuNet. Every day, more than 2 millions entries are made.

Perhaps most interesting is how strong the growth is during the winter compared to spring – gotta do something during those long Russian winters I guess. Yandex has also created a list of the most popular Russian Twitter users. Not much on the substance of the discussions taking place, but we are starting to dig into that now.

This morning the New York Times quotes a ‘senior administration official’ who says that the US is set to relax sanctions against Iran, Syria and Cuba to allow US companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to allow downloads of personal Web-based services in those countries. Around the water cooler this morning, my colleague Jill York correctly pointed out that the article appears to conflate too many things together when it describes ‘Internet services’ that are currently banned, and that might be allowed as part of the planned waiver. My understanding is that any service that is based ‘in the cloud’ (gmail, twitter, etc.) is currently allowed to be used in Iran, Syria and Cuba because they do not require users to download software to use those services. It seems that Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is considering a blanket waiver that will permit US companies to allow users in those sanctioned countries to also use services (such as MSN chat) that require a download. It’s not clear if the type of software downloads will be limited to ‘communications’ services, or if broader downloads of services such as Google Earth or Adobe Photoshop will be allowed. It strikes me that the broader the type of downloads allowed the better, since the more services available not only allow for greater creativity in how users mash-up blogs, video, photos, email, etc., but that also makes it harder for states to block one type of service if many are available and being used together. However, given that circumvention tools will not be included in this waiver, it appears that the language may be fairly restrictive. Regardless of how the technicalities shake out, this seems like a positive step forward and I’m hopeful even smaller companies like Blue Host, that have been denying use of their Web hosting service in any country with even fairly limited US sanctions, will again make their services more widely available.

UPDATE: Here’s the official Treasury announcement and the updated rule–looks like Syria loses out on this one. From Deputy Treasury Secretary Wolin:

The new general licenses authorize exports from the United States or by U.S. persons to persons in Iran and Sudan of services and software related to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, including web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, and chat; social networking; and photo and movie sharing. Today’s amendments also provide that specific licenses may be issued on a case-by-case basis for the exportation of services and software used to share information over the Internet that not covered by the general licenses.

According to the Twitter blog, last year Twitter use grew by 1,400%, and now there are over 50 million tweets a day, or 600 a second on average. Our friends at the Web Ecology Project have done some of the best early research on Twitter. While #iranelection was a major story in 2009, it pales in comparison to the number of Tweets about Michael Jackson’s death (78 per second at its peak) over a similar two week period. In fact, it appears that Jackson’s death actually sucked all the air out of the Iran election discussion on Twitter, according to what Ethan Zuckerman tells me based on Media Cloud data.

While this remains primarily an English language and US-centered technology, it has been interesting to see the growth of other languages, including Russian, which we are digging into more deeply, (to say nothing of the strength of Malay(!) on Twitter). The Russian search giant Yandex already has a number of Tweeters among their top 1000 bloggers, and they reported last year that microblogging platforms have seen impressive growth, led by Twitter but also including Juick, a Jabber application. Whether or not all of this is a good thing we’ll leave up to others to debate, but it seems that the people are voting with their feet on this one.

Hat Tip: The Daily Dish

On February 20, Harvard Business School hosted its eleventh annual African Business Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  While the conference broadly addressed the continent, a number of breakout events focused on the centrality of mobile technology, as addressed in titles such as “Reaching Africa’s Un-banked Population,” and “African Telecom: Growth and New Opportunities.” The over 4 billion mobile phones now buzzing around the planet, however, hide the fact that in Africa mobile penetration is only 40 percent.

Mobile mixed with e-commerce may yet be the most empowering platform, in Africa and beyond. This “e-Mobility” is taking shape, as mobile payment platforms improve access to services, and reduce transaction costs associated with payments.  Lowering transaction costs saves time and travel, effects that improves household disposable income by between 5 and 30 percent. A CGAP report indicates that mobile transactions cost one-fifth of traditional ones.

Mobile banking and transaction enabled phones bring the un-banked population into the formal folds of financial services, a delicate process necessitating new trust, but one through which inflows of capital expand the ability of local banks to provide entrepreneurial loans, expanding business and jobs, and fueling growth.

One HBS panelist and McKinsey principal, Zakir Gaibi, focused on subscriber growth as a vital first step to improving mobile access.  Foremost, was the need to reduce handset costs to facilitate access within the ultra poor demographics of the regions in Africa, such as the Sahel.  In Niger, Chad, and even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he noted that mobile penetration is cited as low as 10 percent.  High tele-density is not yet universal.

Subscriber growth in unsaturated markets will be contingent on reduced costs of access, notably in headset costs, and in voice service costs.  Due to poor power infrastructure, African telecommunications companies rely on expensive generators that drive up costs.  It’s often quipped that second to power companies telecommunication groups produce the most energy in Africa.  However, these costs are passed onto consumers in the form of expensive voice and data plans, some approaching per minute costs in developed markets, despite drastic differences in purchasing power.  Moreover, concurrent deficiencies in local human capital necessitate talent sourcing abroad, and ex-patriot retention packages impact consumer prices, further impeding subscriber growth in the poorest markets.

Countries that recognize mobile trends could capitalize in the form of economic growth, and increased employment opportunities.  Countries like Morocco have built upon expanding tele-density, and created an infrastructure that has enabled them to provide services to the European market.  Given their geographic and temporal proximity to the EU, and their linguistic overlap in French, Spanish, and English, mobile penetration, tele-density, and infrastructure investment have created a conduit for service export, economic growth, and human capacity building.

Perhaps investment in reducing headset materials cost could increase mobile penetration, improve access to mobile banking, help formalize financial services the poorest regions of Africa, facilitate greater access to capital, and improve growth.  Or then again maybe cheaper headsets coupled with mobile promotions and spotty service will mean that those Africans who currently carry two phones to compensate for poor coverage might just pick up a third.

The fiercely independent Novaya Gazeta has been under a sustained DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for the last week. Many have speculated that the site came under attack because of a story last week on corruption by Yulia Latynina, but the deputy editor of the paper told the Sydney Morning Herald that the paper had “many friends” who might like to see the paper at least temporarily inaccessible. The new Russian version of Herdict, called Nardict, Berkman’s distributed Web filtering reporting tool, confirms that the site is still inaccessible around the world and in Russia.

While the Russian government doesn’t actively filter the Internet, it does shut down extremist content, and, as the Moscow Times notes, the government is suspected of supporting similar DDOS attacks against targets in Georgia and Ukraine, while the leader of a pro-Kremlin youth group admitted to orchestrating DDOS attacks against Estonian government and banking sites in 2007.

Although the attacks have weakened from a high of 1.5 million hits a second last Thursday, the paper’s servers remain overwhelmed. However, the newspaper’s stories continue to appear on its LiveJournal blog. The editors wrote on the blog that:

We understand that the purpose of a hacker attack was undoubtedly to hamper the free flow of information across the network.

We also believe that the network nature of the Internet is always stronger than any attacker, any botnet, or any DDoS-attacks.

Our friends over at USIP are hosting a discussion right now on Iran and welcome your online participation. Twitter users can follow the discussion at #usipiran. Here’s some background on the event from the organizers, with what looks like a very interesting group of panelists:

US Institute of Peace online event on Iran’s Regime and Opposition Movement

The US Institute of Peace will be holding an event on February 1 from 10 am to 12 pm (Eastern) entitled “A Revolution Undone?: Regime and Opposition in Iran. ” It will explore how the evolving clash between regime and opposition affects the stability of the Islamic Republic, on the one hand, and its foreign relations, on the other. It will feature former Iranian parliament member, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, as well as scholars such as Daniel Brumberg (Acting Director of USIP’s Muslim World Initiative) and Robin
Wright (prominent journalist and author on Iran and the Middle East), among others.

USIP will be webcasting the event while maintaining live chat and Twitter discussions during the webcast. (Twitter hashtag: #usipiran). Questions from the online audiencewill be put to the panel. It promises to be an exciting talk.

You can find information about the event (here)

Adam Federman has an excellent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the state of the Russian press, and the informal set of rules journalists must navigate to avoid the wrath of the Kremlin and their wealthy friends. As the Times recently noted, the atmosphere for political dissent on Russian TV has been so bad for so long that Russian political TV stars have had to flee to neighboring Ukraine to find work, leaving radio stations like Echo Moskvyi, newspapers and Internet publications to pick up the slack.

While it is difficult to underestimate the chilling effects of the assasination of journalists on political reporting (four from Novoya Gazeta alone have been killed), Federman found a number of Russians willing to navigate the maze of political and financial red lines that if crossed can lead to the end of their careers, or even their lives, in pursuit of hard hitting stories on corruption and critical analysis of the government. As one western reporter who covers Russia told Federman: “For every journalist who gets killed there must be twenty who decide that they’re not going to write the story that they might have written.” But, as Federman writes, there is some room left for optimism:

[L]ately the faint outlines of a new paradigm seem to be emerging. Several independent magazines and newspapers, including Newsweek, Forbes, The New Times, Vedomosti, and Novaya Gazeta, have survived longer than might have been expected given the circumstances. And they usually publish what they want, free of interference from the state. At the same time, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, has made a point of reaching out to critics, even granting Novaya Gazeta the first full-length interview of his presidency, an unimaginable gesture under Putin.

“We live on islands in Russia,” Maxim Trudolyubov, the opinion-page editor of Vedomostitells me in a quiet café not far from the subway entrance where Markelov and Baburova were shot last January. He’s referring to the large body of state-controlled media—what he calls a continent—and the small handful of independent newspapers and magazines that publish freely. Last June, Vedomosti launched an investigative desk, headed by Irina Reznik, a leading expert on Gazprom, who writes frequently about Putin’s circle of friends. “If you do it the right way, usually you can do it and get away with it,” Trudolyubov says.

And even though it’s reach is still quite limited, the Internet has provided another inexpensive route for quality journalism (and, as we’ve noted here before, Internet penetration is expanding rapidly).

[S]everal Russian Web sites have become increasingly important as both sources of information and public forums. Newsru.com and grani.ru are the pet projects of Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, respectively, exiled oligarchs and media moguls who were early casualties of the Putin era. According to a 2008 Reuters Institute report on the Web in Russia, both sites “carry generally reliable and often critical information and comment.” Meanwhile, other large news sites—including gazeta.ru and the liberal-leaning lenta.ru—have expanded their presence.

For now the Web is a largely unregulated and open space. In 2007, when the FSB unofficially tried to force Moscow Internet providers to block access to a host of Web sites, including kasparov.ru, a political news site founded by Garry Kasparov, the chess legend, only a handful acquiesced. Oleg Panfilov, director of Moscow’s Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, who is working on a study of the Internet and freedom of speech in Russia, says that even though the authorities are starting to use legal measures, such as a relatively new law against extremism, to intimidate and even silence bloggers, it is too late for them to turn the Web into a kind of state-run media monopoly. “It is technically impossible to control the Internet in Russia,” he told me. Unlike China, Panfilov says, Internet service providers in Russia are privately owned, and have largely resisted efforts on the part of the state to manipulate content.

I think our different research platforms here at Berkman will be able to tell us a great deal about just how different the stories in these ‘islands of freedom,’ especially those online, are from media outlets controlled by those close to the Kremlin, but in the mean time this piece is well worth the read for its qualitative take on the state of newspapers and independent journalism in Russia.