Global Digital Download - Asia News

Chinese government censors are silencing influential opponents by shutting down their social media accounts on the pretext of a campaign against online rumors, victims of the practice say. “The authorities believe that liberal ideology will undermine their rule,” says Murong Xuecun, a famous author and outspoken critic of censorship whose accounts on four Twitter-like platforms disappeared suddenly last Sunday evening. “The space on China’s Internet for public opinion is being narrowed.” 

We are a consortium of NGOs and individuals, committed to respecting user privacy and promoting freedom of expression and access to information. We express our dismay and condemnation over the presence of a FinFisher Command and Control server on a network operated by the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTLD’s). FinFisher, developed by a UK-based company Gamma International, has been used to target activists in Bahrain. Privacy International is currently engaged in a lawsuit over the export of FinFisher, and has also filed a complaint with the OECD.

Charges of terrorism laid and dropped against a journalist in Vanuatu over a Facebook comment need independent investigation, states the Pacific Freedom Forum. "A Facebook comment alone cannot possibly constitute terrorism," says PFF Chair Titi Gabi. "Governments of the day must not use terrorism laws against freedoms of expression, no matter how robust, rude, or just plain wrong. At the same time, media must ensure they use freedoms responsibly and try to avoid comments that could be misconstrued.  

Bloggers and netizens who took part in “picnics to discuss human rights” in public places in several Vietnamese cities on 5 May were violently attacked by police and many were briefly detained. “We firmly condemn this deliberate police violence against news providers and we are very disturbed to see that such unacceptable violence seems to be the automatic and systematic response from the authorities to any attempt to use freedom of expression,” Reporters Without Borders said.

Last week, we documented network interference in Malaysia: local internet service providers (ISPs) were obstructing the free flow of traffic from selected sites hosting opposition political content, right ahead of a critical election. Users attempting to visit certain pages on Facebook, or videos on YouTube, were unable to access that content: their ISPs were monitoring their networks, identifying user requests for select content, and then preventing those platforms from returning any data. To a user, it would appear that Facebook or YouTube were responsible, while in reality, the local network was actively preventing certain information from being shared.

Ahead of Malaysia's elections on Sunday, independent online media say they are being targeted in Internet attacks which filter content and throttle access to websites, threatening to deprive voters of their main source of independent reporting. Independent online news sites have emerged in recent years to challenge the dominance of mostly government-linked traditional media. The government denies any attempts to hobble access to the Internet in the run-up to a close-fought election.

Collateral Freedom: A Snapshot of Chinese Users Circumventing Censorship, just released, documents the experiences of 1,175 Chinese Internet users who are circumventing their country’s Internet censorship— and it carries a powerful message for developers and funders of censorship circumvention tools. We believe these results show an opportunity for the circumvention tech community to build stable, long term improvements in Internet freedom in China.

His bookshelves are filled with the collected works of Marx, Engels and Ho Chi Minh, the hallmarks of a loyal career in the Communist Party, but Nguyen Phuoc Tuong, 77, says he is no longer a believer. A former adviser to two prime ministers, Mr. Tuong, like so many people in Vietnam today, is speaking out forcefully against the government.

In the summer of 2012, Steve Fan suspended his graduate studies at Stanford University and headed back to China, which he had left four years earlier. The motivation of this computer science major -- to launch a start-up and cash in on an idea he spotted in the world's largest Internet market -- was not uncommon. Less expected were the extra costs he incurred for doing business in China. These had nothing to do with common costs like equipment, rent, or hiring workers. Rather, daily life involved finding workarounds past China's immense national Internet censorship apparatus, widely known as the Great Firewall.

Japanese people who "abuse" the Tor anonymous browsing network could be blocked from using it. The recommendation was made in a report drawn up for the National Police Agency (NPA) in Japan by a panel of technology experts. The panel was formed to help decide how to tackle crimes committed with the aid of the Tor network.

You have to wonder how this will be enforced, but China's State Administration of Press Publication, Radio, Film and Television has issued a "Notice on Strengthening Control of Media Personnel's Online Activities." Chinese media organizations have been told to stop posting foreign media news without government permission: "Without authorization, no kind of media outlets shall arbitrarily use media release from overseas media agencies and media websites," is the way Caijing magazine translated it.

Chinese Web users skirted the country's tough Internet censors to pay homage to former communist party leader and popular reformer Hu Yaobang, whose death 24 years ago sparked the Tiananmen Square protests. Hu's support for free market reforms and more government transparency during his time as the Chinese Communist Party’s General Secretary from 1982 to 1987 were welcomed by many Chinese, but made him the enemy of some powerful party leaders.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the baseless judicial proceedings brought against the detained blogger Asif Mohiuddin, who could be tried and convicted on a charge of blasphemy and “hurting religious sentiments” at his next hearing, scheduled for 15 April. “Keeping Mohiuddin in detention is unacceptable, especially as his family says his health has deteriorated,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The authorities must stop trying to appease the extremists and must end this persecution of ‘secularist’ bloggers.

At a rare public forum on cyberissues Tuesday featuring American and Chinese government officials, U.S. diplomats and business leaders tried using economic arguments to persuade China to stop its cyberattacks and Internet censorship. China’s heavy-handed Web restrictions not only slow Internet speeds and make company data less secure, but they also have “tangible economic” effects on the country, said Gary Locke, the U.S. ambassador to China.

Thirteen years ago Clinton, then America’s president, said that trying to control the internet in China would be like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall”. At the time he seemed to be stating the obvious. By its nature the web was widely dispersed, using so many channels that it could not possibly be blocked. Rather, it seemed to have the capacity to open up the world to its users even in shut-in places. Just as earlier communications technologies may have helped topple dictatorships in the past (for example, the telegraph in Russia’s Bolshevik revolutions in 1917 and short-wave radio in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991), the internet would surely erode China’s authoritarian state. Vastly increased access to information and the ability to communicate easily with like-minded people round the globe would endow its users with asymmetric power, diluting the might of the state and acting as a force for democracy.

On February 9th, Chinese New Year’s Eve, Fang Binxing, known in China as the father of the Great Firewall, wished his followers on Sina Weibo a happy Year of the Snake. As always whenever Mr Fang tweets, thousands of fellow microbloggers sent messages along the lines of “get lost”. They could not reply directly: Mr Fang gets so much abuse for his role in engineering China’s censorship technology that the “comments” function on his microblog page had to be disabled long ago. Nor can users easily find the comments on the 35,000 retweets of his new-year post: Sina has blocked access to those as well.

Thus far in its short term, the caretaker government has been content to stay relatively low-key, and even though a peaceful transfer of power to the next democratically-elected government is the main goal of the caretaker set-up, there is another area where it can stamp its mark. The ban on YouTube now stands at 200 days and counting.

In the last months, new research has made it clearer than ever that every computer in the world is a potential target for Chinese government hackers. So perhaps it’s no surprise that smartphones appear to be among those state-sponsored hackers’ targets, too. A report released Monday by the Citizen Lab, a group of information security researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, shows that Tibetan activists are being targeted with sophisticated malware designed to infect Android phones, allowing the malware’s operator to steal the user’s contacts and messages, and track his or her location.

The United Nations pointed out in 2010 that more Indians have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet. There are over 800 million mobile connections, although the number of unique users (excluding inactive connections) is estimated at around 600 million. Together with the fact that 60 percent of all households have cable and satellite television, providing access to many of the 700-plus television channels licensed to broadcast, it becomes clear that in garrulous India, mass poverty and marginalization do not result in a perfect “digital divide.” This, together with the fact that the public broadcaster’s prime terrestrial channel, DD National, covers about 92 percent of the 1.2 billion-plus population, clearly suggests that the users of digital technologies in India include many of the 300 million still below the official poverty line.

Several websites that carry independent news or defectors’ reports from North Korea said they were knocked offline Tuesday in what looks like another cyberattack from Pyongyang. The Daily NK, a news site about North Korea, said its website was “temporarily paralyzed this afternoon following an invasive attack by an external hacker.” In a statement, Daily NK said the attack, which appeared to have been routed through an Internet address in the United States, knocked the site offline for nearly an hour.

In China's Southern Guangdong province, the local government honored the Guangdong Baiyun University for its ‘excellent work’ in monitoring activities and opinions of students online, according to the Nandu Daily. Nicknamed the ”online red army” and led by nine teachers and six students, Guangdong Baiyun University's own “Student Internet and Social Media Information Monitoring” team was built in 2010 to watch student conversations and control negative sentiment online. Their daily work involves monitoring online chat rooms, following microblogging and tracking online forums. Hired students work 1.5 hours everyday and get paid RMB 200 ($32) per month.

The Australian Federal Police has revealed that its limited mandatory ISP filtering scheme based on a list of offensive sites supplied by Interpol has not yet been taken up by most of Australia’s ISPs, with only Telstra and Optus having implemented the filter so far and a further “large ISP” having flat out refused to comply with the project.

We are living in an unparalleled time for technological progress. In 10 years, it will be almost impossible to describe to any child in India what life was like before the internet. Only about two billion of the world's seven billion people have an internet connection, and i believe the remaining five billion will get one in the next decade. Almost one billion of them will come online in India. They will have different needs from people online today and expect different things from the internet. Now is the moment for India to decide what kind of internet it wants for them: an open internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation.  

After analyzing over 490 million posted messages from users of Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblogging service, a group of US-based computer scientists are beginning to understand how the platform's censorship mechanisms work. In a research paper entitled “The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions,” the group describes how they collected Sina Weibo posts both from common and “dissident” Weibo users. Launched in 2010, Sina Weibo had over 500 million users by end of 2012. Over 46 million users post messages on a daily basis.

You may not actually be able to see the Great Wall of China from space but you can certainly see the Great Firewall of China in action anywhere in the country. 
With the largest population of web users in the world, China also has one of the most restricted internets, with a host of measures employed to make sure that netizens cannot read about sensitive issues nor themselves post - or at least for very long - information the government deems threatening.





After more than a year in pre-trial detention, five independent bloggers amid other activists stood in a Vietnamese court for two days in January to hear they would live behind bars for up to 13 more years. They join a growing cohort of bloggers imprisoned for "activities aimed at overthrowing the people's administration," "undermining of national unity" and committing "propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam." Vietnamese bloggers tasted internet freedom over the last decade as online access grew, but social media is no game changer in a paranoid state.

China’s social media censors never sleep, though they do fall behind on their work late at night. That’s one of a number of findings from a new study by independent researcher Zhu Tao and a handful of U.S. academics that analyzes the mechanics of censorship on China’s most popular microblogging platform, Sina Corp.’s Weibo. Based on an analysis of 2.38 million Weibo posts published between July and September 2012 by users known to have run afoul of censors, the report lays out the approach most likely taken by Sina’s team of “editors” who are at the heart of the world’s largest effort to control social media.

Oftentimes, people like to compare Vietnam with China. In some ways, the similarities are pretty obvious. The Chinese dynasties ruled Vietnam for one thousand years. Vietnamese people celebrate Lunar New Year, and our names have Chinese roots. But online and in the tech industry, things look really different. In Asia, there are four communist countries: China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Laos and North Korea are so small they’re not really on the tech map (even if North Korea is finally using mobile internet). That leaves China and Vietnam. In China, Baidu, Tencent, and Sina Weibo are the search and social media giants. In Vietnam, Google and Facebook are tops and Twitter isn’t blocked. What happened?

What happens when a country's government censors the entirety of its domestic web, with no oversight or transparency? It turns out that politicians aren't the only ones with an interest in repressing free expression--and given a lever of control, a black market of censors quickly emerges. A group of investigators from Chinese magazine Caixin recently uncovered the activities of Beijing's "dark PR" agencies, who take money from private companies to bribe Internet censors to delete unfavourable commentary on Chinese forums and microblogging sites, using the infrastructure that the Chinese authorities have built for political censorship.

This photo by AP Korean bureau chief Jean H. Lee has rocketed around the Internet this week, and for good reason. It’s one of the first Instagrams posted since North Korea enabled 3G access for foreigners this week. Until just a few weeks ago, foreigners could not even bring their own phones into the country — they had to give them up at customs. The recent changes will allow foreigners to not only use their own cellphones (with North Korean SIM cards, of course) but also to Instagram, tweet and Skype from one of the world’s most isolated countries.

Cyberattacks on news websites and apparent government hacking into journalists' email accounts have raised new questions about the integrity of media reforms in Burma. The New York Times reported earlier this month that several journalists who regularly cover Burma-related news recently received warning messages from Google that their email accounts may have been hacked by "state-sponsored attackers."

Start asking security experts which powerful Washington institutions have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies, and this is the usual answer: almost all of them. The list of those hacked in recent years includes law firms, think tanks, news organizations, human rights groups, contractors, congressional offices, embassies and federal agencies. The information compromised by such intrusions, security experts say, would be enough to map how power is exercised in Washington to a remarkably nuanced degree. The only question, they say, is whether the Chinese have the analytical resources to sort through the massive troves of data they steal every day.

As protesters continued their chants at Shahbag calling for Bangladesh's war criminals and affiliates of the Islamist party to be beheaded, one of their own Ahmed Rajib Haider, was brutally killed outside his home in capital city Dhaka on February 15, 2013. The following day, thousands gathered around his body at the site of the protests, Shahbag square, to pay their last respects. Haider blogged under the pseudonym Thaba Baba (Captain Claw) and was on the forefront of the blogger and online activist-led Shahbag protests. For years, he had been writing about war criminals and Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh.

Nguyen Hoang Vi was knocked from her motorcycle in an accident she believes was no accident. The windows of a car she was riding in were smashed nine months later, gashing her arms, legs and face, she told activists. Last spring her passport was taken away, rights groups say. Then, in December, police arrested and stripped her, saying she was hiding “illegal exhibits” inside her body, she alleged. State nurses forcibly searched her as she screamed for help, she said. She was targeted, human rights activists claim, for blogging.

Authorities in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir on February 9, 2013, ordered citizens to remain indoors and restricted mobile Internet service and cable television across several districts in the lead-up to a controversial execution of a militant from the region, according to news reports. The curfew was imposed in parts of Kashmir hours before the execution of a convicted militant for his role in the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, news reports said. Clashes broke out between protesters and police and paramilitary forces after the execution, and at least two people were reported killed, news reports said.

Your internet service provider (ISP) could be blocking some content. A study conducted by a Canadian university has found that some major Indian ISPs have deployed web-censorship and filtering technology widely used in China and some West Asian countries. The findings, published on January 15, were the result of a search for censorship software and hardware on public networks like those operated by ISPs. A research team at Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, found a software-hardware combo package called PacketShaper being used in many parts of the world, including India.

Not every media company is as tempting a target for hackers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. Not every company can afford high-priced computer security consultants, either. Is there anything that everyday reporters and their editors can learn about protecting themselves, based on the revelatory details the Times and other targets made public last week? As we wrote at the time, the cyber-attacks on the Times, the Post, and the Journal came as no surprise to foreign reporters working in China or elsewhere who repeatedly face fake emails, custom malware, and hacking attacks on their webmail. But the level of access that the hackers obtained at the Times' main offices, and the publication of details by their technical advisers, can be instructive.

In a victory for digital rights and democracy activists in the Philippines, the Filipino Supreme Court today indefinitely extended a temporary restraining order (TRO) on a controversial cybercrime law. The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 was signed into law by President Benigno Aquino III in September, despite widespread public protests about harmful effects to free speech and internet freedom, and critical comments from lawmakers who claimed many aspects of the law were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court stepped in shortly after in October, putting the law’s implementation on hold until the Court could review its constitutional merits.

The Internet of Bangladesh has been connected to the world by a single submarine cable, Sea-Me-We 4 (SMW4), since this 18,800 kilometer-long optical-fiber system made its landing at Cox's Bazar in 2006. However, in the nearly seven years since SMW4's activation, national Internet outages have plagued Bangladesh with some regularity. When their portion of this system is sabotaged, suffers a failure or is down for maintenance, virtually all Internet bandwidth for the 7th most populous country in the world disappears, forcing local providers to fall back to slow and expensive satellite services or to simply wait for restoration.

Many employers are facing staff cutbacks amid the current bleak economic climate. But not Australia’s top surveillance agency—it’s recruiting a new batch of spooks while it seeks sweeping new powers to monitor communications.Last week it was confirmed that the Aussie Attorney-General’s Department wants to give the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization, which is tasked with protecting the country from terrorism and espionage, powers to hack into personal computers and smartphones to plant spyware for the purposes of monitoring “suspected terrorists and other security interests.”

More voices in the Philippines are questioning the Cybercrime Prevention Law as the oral arguments on the petitions against the law are being heard in the Supreme Court (SC) starting last January 15, 2012. The next schedule for the oral arguments will be held on January 22. The controversial law was signed by President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III last October despite massive protests and questions on its constitutionality.

Authorities in Bangladesh must immediately investigate Monday's stabbing of a blogger in Dhaka, determine the motive, and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Three unidentified men attacked Asif Mohiuddin, 29, as he left his office in Uttara district, and stabbed him several times in the neck and back, according to news reports. The journalist sought treatment at a local hospital, where he remains in critical condition.

After attending a training course in Bangkok organized by Vietnam Reform Party or Viet Tan, 14 people were arrested by Vietnam authorities for allegedly participating in “activities aimed at overthrowing the people's administration.” The arrested individuals were mostly Catholic students, bloggers, and human rights activists. Last January 9, a local court found them guilty of subversion by citing Article 79 of the penal code.

Spare a moment for the Chinese censor, stuck between a Communist Party that demands strict control and a few million Web users who increasingly expect the ability to speak their minds online. As controversy over a censored newspaper grows into one of China’s biggest and potentially most significant free-speech fights in years, party officials are likely seeking greater control at exactly the moment that outraged Web users are making that task most difficult. At least one censor on Weibo, the popular Twitter-like service that often serves as the closest China has to a public national conversation, seems to have snapped.

Vietnam's crackdown on independent bloggers hit a new low in recent days with reports of sexual violence perpetrated by state officials against a prominent online reporter. In a disturbing first person account posted Friday to the Danlambao collective blog, Nguyen Hoang Vi detailed how police officials beat and stripped her and ordered state nurses to conduct a vaginal cavity search while she was in custody on December 28 in Ho Chi Minh City's Nguyen Cu Trinh Ward.  

Google has quietly disabled a feature that notified users of its search service in China when a keyword had been censored by the Chinese government’s internet controls, according to censorship monitoring blog GreatFire.org. The blog reports that the change was made sometime between December 5 and December 8, 2012, with no official statement from Google to announce or explain its removal.

The fleeting nature of YouTube's availability in Pakistan this weekend--the site, which has been banned in the country since September, was unblocked for a whole three minutes--is only the latest emblem of Islamabad's erratic and confounding approach to Internet censorship. Those who have been hoping for less opaque tactics apparently are in for disappointment. "It's become even clearer that content regulation in Pakistan is not carried out in a transparent manner. Rather it is done at the whims of those in power," Sana Saleem, co-founder and director of Karachi-based group Bolo Bhi, which works on Internet freedom and digital security, told CPJ by e-mail. 

On December 28, 2012, the Chinese government approved a set of new net control laws that would make it compulsory for internet intermediaries such as Internet Service Providers (ISP) and Online Service Providers (OSP) to enforce users' real name registration. In South Korea, a similar online real name registration policy has been in place since 2005, but with little success and eventual failures. In this post, we will examine the South Korean experiment and see the lessons Chinese netizens can learn from it.

China's mounting crackdown on online news dissemination took an extra step today, when the country's Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, its de facto legislative body, announced new requirements on Internet service providers and mobile phone companies to identify their users. The new rules would potentially allow ISPs and the authorities to more closely tie real identities to posts and commentary on micro-blogging sites like Weibo, as well as connect text messaging and mobile phone conversations to individuals.

For years, China’s net nannies turned the other cheek to a loophole in their vast online censorship apparatus. Anyone who wanted access to blocked overseas websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and more recently, the New York Times, need only download foreign software called a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the Great Firewall. But in recent weeks, even these tools have begun to falter, frustrating tech-savvy Chinese and foreign businesspeople who now struggle to access Internet sites as innocuous as gmail.com and imdb.com.

The Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) would like to express its grave concerns regarding the recent move by the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) to restrict the freedom of the internet in Cambodia. This recent move was reported by the Cambodia Daily Newspaper on 13 December 2012, in the article entitled, "Government Order May Close Many of City's Internet Cafés". The Ministry of Post and Telecommunications has issued a Circular dated 12 November 2012 calling for the relocation of all internet cafés located within a 500 meter radius of schools and educational institutions in Phnom Penh. 

China appears to be tightening its control of internet services that are able to burrow secretly through what is known as the "Great Firewall", which prevents citizens there from reading some overseas content. Both companies and individuals are being hit by the new technology deployed by the Chinese government to control what people read inside the country. A number of companies providing "virtual private network" (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to "learn, discover and block" the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems.

Though North Korea remains as isolated as ever from the technological community (as TechPresident wrote last year,it was a full 48 hours after the death of Kim Jong-Il before the news broke on Twitter), the Internet is a temptation both for the country’s citizens and for the government of Kim Jong-Un, as the BBC reports. While the only telecom provider in North Korea has no mobile network, its 3G connection speed can be used on illegal cell phones smuggled from China, giving ordinary North Koreans the chance to go online. Many do so, even at the risk of imprisonment.

New proposals submitted to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) aim to redefine the Internet as a system of government-controlled, state-supervised networks, according to a leaked document. The WCIT-12 summit in Dubai is currently where the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is being held, where member state countries are going head-to-head about proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR), a legally binding international treaty signed by 178 countries.

If we look at the Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, despite their success in almost all other geographic regions, they enjoyed only brief bright moments in China before they lost their hard earned market share to their domestic competitors. How is Internet in China different? Their is no simple answer, but at least it is simpler than to answer how China is different. In this white paper, we try to offer glimpses into some unique aspects of Chinese Internet with the hope that an aggregate view can gradually be developed if one knows more specific differences in culture, regulations, demographics, competitions, and behavior for both the companies and the users.

he two young women who were arrested for their Facebook activity last week have found an unlikely champion for their cause: another young woman, Shreya Singhal, who filed public interest litigation with the Supreme Court to challenge one of the controversial laws used to justify the arrests.

Secret, undemocratic trade agreements that put shackles on our free speech online are nothing new. Civil society organisations have been fighting the passage of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for the past six years. But some bad ideas never die. The same year that ACTA was defeated in the European Union, a new agreement was forged behind closed doors: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Here’s the timeline: On November 8, the first day that Chinese leaders gathered for their once-in-a-decade Party Congress to announce the next generation of leaders, a Chinese-language Facebook page posted a clearly doctored photo of the party’s top officials doing the dance from South Korean pop hit Gangnam Style. On November 13, popular China blog Beijing Cream picked it up. The congress ended two days later, and on the 17th, a widely followed user on China’s popular Twitter-like service, Weibo, posted the image with a banal message about the song’s popularity. Censors pulled it down almost immediately.

The city of Mumbai's reaction to the death of Balasaheb Keshav Thackeray, founder of the Hindu right-wing Shiv Sena party in India, has raised concern in India (see Global Voices report). Shops, cinemas, public transport and other businesses in Mumbai were quickly closed either as a show of respect, or in fear of mob violence by Shiv Sena supporters. On Sunday, the funeral of Mr. Thackeray was held in Mumbai and an estimated one million mourners filled the streets of the city bringing it to a halt.

The ascension of China's propaganda chief into the country's core leadership has many netizens worried about the prospects of Internet freedom in the future, and experts believe their concerns are warranted. Liu Yunshan, director of the Department of Propaganda of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee, was announced as one of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee Thursday.

Police from the Fukui Prefecture raided Fukuoka-based video blogger Yuzuru Kaneko's home on October 1, 2012. He has been covering Japan's anti-nuclear protests on his youtube channel. Since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima following the 2011 Earthquake in Japan, the long believed myth of 'safe' nuclear power has lost its support, resulting in anti-nuclear protests all over the country.

For two months, Pakistanis have been unable to call up YouTube to watch an anti-Islam video that sparked deadly riots here and elsewhere in the Muslim world. But neither have they been able to use the service to view the U.S. presidential debates, to catch the “Gangnam Style” craze or even to laugh at silly kitties in the Friskies Internet Cat Video Awards. Now, the netizens of Pakistan are telling the government that they want their YouTube back, prompting a reevaluation of the ban.

Twitter is apologizing for setting off alarms about the possible hacking of accounts belonging to China-based foreign journalists, saying an email that went out earlier in the day was a mistake. Twitter posted the apology Thursday, hours after several journalists and analysts were notified of an attempted hacking. The emails came just as China's Communist Party begins a sensitive meeting that will set in motion a once-a-decade leadership transition.

Google's services went offline for many users for nearly a half-hour on the evening of November 5, thanks to an erroneous routing message broadcast by Moratel, an Indonesian telecommunications company. The outage might have lasted even longer if it hadn't been spotted by a network engineer at CloudFlare who had a friend in a position to fix the problem.

A city run by one of China’s incoming political leaders that has billed itself as a future international financial center is instead becoming the country’s internet censorship capital. Tianjin, whose Communist party secretary Zhang Gaoli is one of the seven men most likely to get a seat on the new politburo standing committee due to be unveiled at the 18th party congress starting on Thursday, is developing a replica of Manhattan to which it aims to attract global banks.

A Bangkok court acquitted the netizen Surapak Phuchaisaeng two days ago of charges of insulting the king (lèse-majesté), for which he had been remanded in custody since September last year. Reporters Without Borders is satisfied with the outcome of this case. “This case, involving a year in custody, underlines the failings of the Thai judicial system, particularly concerning allegations of lèse-majesté,” the press freedom organization said.

As China prepares for a generational power shift in the next two weeks, a similar shift is happening online that is testing the limits and displaying the evolution of China's legions of state-directed censors. Since its launch three years ago, Weibo, China's version of Twitter, has become the country's water cooler, a place where nearly 300 million Internet users opine on everything from Korean soap operas to China's latest political intrigue.

After seditious cartoons against corruption, now even a Tweet can get you arrested in India. Two recent Twitter-related arrests have triggered concern among many Indian users of social media. Ravi (one name), a small plastic packaging businessman in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, was arrested Tuesday for posting Tweets critical of Karti Chidambaram, son of India’s finance minister.

Officials from China's Communist Party should stop censoring and obstructing foreign journalists in the lead-up to the Party Congress scheduled for November 8, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Information security is notoriously tight before the five-yearly congress, which is expected to usher in high-level leadership change in 2012. Information officials blocked the New York Times' English- and Chinese-language websites on Friday when the newspaper published an in-depth report on the financial assets held by Premier Wen Jiabao's family. Wen's lawyers publicly disputed the article's findings.

The private sector has slammed the government for not acknowledging the impact of the new draft treaty on internet and telecommunications regulations, saying it will jeopardise businesses and individual users. Yongyos Protpakorn, vice-chairman of the Thai Chamber of Commerce's service sector, said it strongly disagreed with the new draft treaty as it will drastically affect internet users across the board. Mr Yongyos said he is disappointed the Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Ministry and the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission have no position on the draft by the International Telecom Union (ITU).

Two of the biggest threats to the Internet are two international agreements: the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). TPP continues to expand across the Pacific, with Mexico and Canada joining in the next round in New Zealand. With ACTA, it is increasingly doubtful that it was successfully defeated this summer. With these two agreements, both of which contain intellectual property (IP) provisions that would negatively impact digital rights and innovation, the country that sits at the center of play is Japan.

After years spent as one of the world’s most strictly controlled information environments, the government of Burma (Myanmar) has recently begun to open up access to previously censored online content. Independent and foreign news sites, oppositional political content, and sites with content relating to human rights and political reform -- all previously blocked -- have recently become accessible. These developments have occurred as part of a broader process of political and economic liberalization currently underway in this historically strict authoritarian state.

All emails, telephone calls and other communications with the rest of the world will begin to be monitored within 90 days at a cost of million of dollars, according to a deadline given by the government to operators including PTCL. The government has assigned PTCL and other operators to install monitoring equipment by the end of this year for checking voice and email communications from abroad and the services of the country’s spy agency will be used basically to check and curb blasphemous and obscene websites on the Internet.

Two days ago the 14-year-old blogger Malala Yousafzai, was shot and wounded in the head and neck by the Pakistan Taliban on her way home from school. A gunman stopped the school bus on which the young activist was travelling and shot her and two other girls whom he had asked to identify her. Doctors at the Saidu Sharif hospital in the northern city of Mingora successfully removed the bullets from her but for some time she remained in a critical condition.

Pakistani authorities have revealed that a whopping 20,000 web sites have been taken offline as part of a nationwide crackdown on “objectionable” content. The purge took places as part of government efforts across the Muslim world in the wake of widespread anger at “Innocence of Muslims” – a film ridiculing the Prophet Muhammed which was subsequently uploaded to Google’s popular video-sharing site.

The story of media digitization in China is inseparable from the country’s recent modernization. Probably nowhere else have so many other things been changing at the same time as the technological advances with which this study is concerned. And probably nowhere else has digitization flourished on such a scale in such a closed media environment. As a result, digitization has transformed the diversity of information and public opinion for many millions of people.

The government is gearing up to arm cyber sleuths with forensic tools to catch up with criminals who outsmart investigators by using secure mobile phones or password-protected computers that leave few footprints once the data is deleted. The Union home ministry has decided to buy more than 30 licensed software from firms in the US, Canada and Israel to crack open data in seized mobile phones and computers. The move comes after cyber forensic investigators failed to make much headway in deciphering password-protected data or retrieving deleted data from seized iPhones, BlackBerry handsets, Apple computers and even Windows-based mobile phones.

A new law called the Cybercrime Prevention Act has been passed in the Philippines. Although it claims to protect the people from cyber crimes such as cyber bullying, many have found loopholes in the newly signed law that will curtail the freedom of speech of Filipinos. It is to be enacted today, October 3. With the Cybercrime Prevention Act, where libel is considered a criminal act, a simple comment and retweet may send us to jail, where we can serve up to 12 years in prison. And because this law is a special law, good faith and intent does not come as a defense.

Baidu Inc., (BIDU) owner of China’s most popular search engine, asked a U.S. court to dismiss a lawsuit by Chinese-Americans who said the Internet company “censored” their articles on the pro-democracy movement in China. Baidu, in its first legal motion in response to a May 2011 lawsuit by eight residents of New York City, said the case should be dismissed because the complaint wasn’t properly served on the Beijing-based Internet company, according to a filing yesterday in Manhattan federal court.

A new report shows just how porous China's infamous Great Firewall might be for local Internet users determined to access banned websites. The country's censors have deemed Facebook and Twitter unfit for local viewing, but that hasn't stopped millions of Chinese from using the social-networking services, according to researcher GlobalWebIndex. There are 63.5 million Facebook users in China, up from 7.9 million two years ago, even though Facebook is officially banned there. Twitter has equally impressive numbers, with 35.5 million users in China, triple the number from 2009.

The 7-iron resting against the wall in Le Quoc Quan's office is for self-defense, not sport. The human-rights lawyer and blogger has not left home without the golf club since being beaten last month by iron-bar-wielding men he suspects were sent by the police. If the assault was meant to silence him, it failed. Within days he was back online, and reporting about the incident. The Internet has become the principal staging ground for dissent in Vietnam, and its Communist rulers are trying to clamp down with new laws, stepped up arrests, intimidation and longer prison sentences. But so far, it's a battle they are losing.

Warning of the "chilling effects" on individual rights of certain provisions of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, another petition was filed with the Supreme Court (SC) yesterday to strike them down as unconstitutional. There are now three petitions filed with the SC to stop the government from implementing Republic Act No. 10175 that was signed into law by President Benigno S. Aquino III on September 12.

Government restrictions on the Internet in Pakistan have risen over the past year with some use of violence against bloggers and turn to censorship and arrest to squelch calls for reform, a new report from a US advocacy group has found. Pakistan, Bahrain and Ethiopia saw the biggest rollbacks in Internet freedom since January 2011 and were among the 20 countries out of 47 assessed by Freedom House that declined in their rankings.

The often-rumored death of print media produces strong reactions, both in favor of traditional media and against it. But change is assured: globally, online advertising spending will surpass print ad dollars in 2012. Global newspaper ad spending will decline by about 2.8 percent this year (even though newspapers are thriving in some regions without quality internet access, like rural Australia). In Bangladesh, officials cite the changing media landscape to justify a strict new regulation on news portals and similar websites. However, a look at the law reveals ulterior motives, namely the government’s efforts to control free expression. Bangladeshi lawmakers propose requiring online news portals to register and pay a hefty license fee to publish. 

Reporters Without Borders is appalled by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s directive calling on the authorities to impose "serious punishments" on those responsible for three popular anti-corruption blogs that he described as "slanderous." The organization also deplores the arrest of the wife of the jailed journalist and blogger Dieu Cay, the sister of the jailed blogger Ta Phong Tan, and the Catholic priest Anton Le Ngoc Thanh by plain-clothes police during a protest yesterday in the southern city of Bac Lieu. Accused of causing a traffic accident, they were held for several hours.

Following the release of an anti-Islam movie “Innocence of Muslims” on YouTube, the Islamic world has been ablaze with protesters making a range of demands, from the prohibition of the movie and all websites hosting it, to the murder of all those associated with its production. Popular international opinion has found the movie baseless, crude, malicious, and unworthy of the publicity it has ended up receiving. Moreover, the movie is only an insignificant addition to a huge amount of online hate content and critiques of every religion, including Islam. This content includes films, drawings, articles, verbal narratives and so on, and has, in most cases, been condemned through non-violent expression, or simply ignored.

As the tension between China and Japan over the disputed Diaoyu Islands (also known as the Senkaku Islands) has elevated, large scale anti-Japan protests have taken place all over China in more than 80 cities over the weekend. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, protesters started attacking Japanese style restaurants, shopping malls and shops; some even tried to set fire to Japanese vehicles. Yet, in a country where online activities are closely monitored and public security forces are extremely effective, many wondered what made these nationwide protests possible.

Vietnam’s government has vowed to crack down on three dissident blogs, a move that appeared to backfire Thursday as record numbers of people visited the sites and the bloggers pledged to keep up their struggle for freedom of expression. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s order for police to arrest those responsible for the websites reflects growing unease within the Communist Party over the emergence of blogs and social media accounts that publish dissenting views, independent reporting and whistleblowing. The party doesn’t allow free media, and it fears criticism or discussion of its failings on the Internet could lead to social instability and — ultimately — loss of its power.

Social media in China are pushing the envelope of government control, but China’s censors are demonstrating that they still have the stuff. For instance, where to turn for news if one of your country’s top officials has mysteriously disappeared? If you are Chinese and the official is vice president and designated Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, who went missing from public view nine days ago, the tightly controlled state media would not be the place to look for information. You might try the Internet, where China’s social media website Sina Weibo is growing into a giant fast-flowing public square. However, China’s censors would have gotten there ahead of you there, too.

The Cambodian government is enforcing a circular drafted earlier this year which requires Internet cafes to set up surveillance cameras and to register callers. Based on an unofficial translation made by Jinja, the government said the circular was made in response to the rising number of cyber crimes in the country: "Past experiences of offense investigation and suppression have shown that, criminals and offenders always used telecommunications services such as mobile phones, fixed phones, VoIP and Internets as a means to commit terrorisms, trans-boundary crimes, robberies, kidnapping, murders, drug trafficking, human trafficking, economic offenses, illegal installment of and illegal corporation of all forms of telecommunications service, broadcasting of obscene pictures and debauchery, which affect national customs, traditions and social good moral values."

April 23rd, 2002 was a turning-point in American internet companies’ relations with China, though few knew so at the time. On that day Beijing’s state-security bureau requested information from the Beijing office of Yahoo!, an American internet company, about the creator of an online forum, as well as e-mail registrations and messages, in a case of what the bureau called “inciting subversion”. Yahoo! complied with this notice and another one that year, and soon the authorities had detained Wang Xiaoning, a democracy activist who had anonymously been using the forum and e-mail accounts to press for free elections. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

More than 10 exile Uyghur associations have suffered a viral hacking attack, one of the groups said Thursday, blaming the Chinese government for the blitz. Dolkun Isa, head of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said that his organization’s website had been crippled in recent days—though the site has since been functioning normally—and that its servers had been forced to distribute fake emails targeting activists from related organizations.

Chinese web users are giving low-brow meme culture a political tinge, pushing the boundaries of free online speech. Liu Bo is famous. One of many police officers assigned to quash recent protests over a planned molybdenum copper plant in Shifang, Sichuan province, Bo was famously pictured with a riot shield strapped to his forearm, baton raised, charging at the backs of a small crowd. His bull rush was captured on a mobile device, promptly shared on Chinese social media and soon after appeared in an article by Tea Leaf Nation's own Liz Carter.

The government has issued a key policy directive to block all blasphemous and pornographic material on the internet by installing effective modern filtration system but ensuring that it does not affect the freedom of information, writes Ansar Abbasi. Following the personal interest shown by the incumbent Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and after consulting President Asif Ali Zardari, the Ministry of Information Technology has already issued necessary directions to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to update the system for effective monitoring and control of blasphemous and pornographic material.

Malaysians are right to protest the recent amendments that the government made to the Evidence Act of 1950. Although they deal specifically with the internet, the amendments could have wider implications on media freedom, democracy, and human rights. Section 114A of the bill seeks “to provide for the presumption of fact in publication in order to facilitate the identification and proving of the identity of an anonymous person involved in publication through the internet.”

We, the undersigned public interest organizations, oppose the current framework for exceptions and limitations proposed by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) as the language stands in the August 3rd leaked text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). It uses the most restrictive three-step test language, extends the test to exceptions and limitations not currently under the test and jeopardizes countries' ability to set what best fit their needs. The US proposal misses opportunities to use the TPP to strengthen limitations and exceptions further.

On August 24, 2012, the Korean Constitutional Court struck down the country's infamous internet identity verification rule ("IVR", hereinafter) which had for 5 years required all major Korea-based website operators to obtain from all the posters their identity information and store the data so that it can be made available to investigative authorities upon request. After IVR was instituted in 2007, Youtube, a division of Google that has a Korea office and therefore is based in Korea, made a splash in 2009 when it snubbed the rule for the pretext that it had turned off the uploading feature on the "Korea" country setting.
 

Rapidly reforming Burma's decision to ease media censorship is being met with caution in neighboring China, where government officials have been adamant in maintaining their tight control over the flow of information. Burma announced Monday that local media will no longer be required to submit stories for review to state censors before publication, ending a key component of its long-reviled censorship policy.

Farmer Le Dung and his fellow villagers stockpiled rocks and petrol bombs to battle police trying to take over their land for a luxury property development near Vietnam's capital city. But their most powerful weapon turned out to be the equipment they had set up with the help of Internet activists to record and broadcast the confrontation, which was ignored by state-controlled media.

Censorship and government monitoring aren’t the only problems facing Syrian Internet users. There have been frequent, recent shutdowns of all Internet traffic crossing the Syrian border over the last few months, accompanying dramatic changes in how the country connects to the rest of the world. 

Myanmar on Monday lifted the nearly half-a-century old censorship on local media. The Press Scrutiny and Registration Department (PSRD) said that local publications would no longer need to submit their work to state censorship board before publication.

The Internet has become one of the most important resources in the world in just a few decades, but the governance mechanism for such an important international resource is still dominated by a private sector organization and a single country. The U.S. government said in a statement on July 1, 2005 that its Commerce Department would continue to support the work of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet’s 13 root servers.  

China’s investment prowess and construction know-how is widely on display in this long-congested African capital. A $200 million ring road is being built and partly financed by Beijing. The international airport is undergoing a $208 million expansion supported by the Chinese, whose loans also paid for a working-class housing complex that residents have nicknamed the Great Wall apartments.

The Indian government’s earlier proposal to control the Internet through a United Nations committee will now be reviewed through open public consultation. Independent Rajya Sabha member from Bangalore, Rajeev Chandrashekar on Monday tweeted that the government has accepted his positino to review the proposal.

The rise of Chinese microblog services like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo as a social phenomenon has been a common story as of late, but Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has stayed loyal to Twitter, which he calls his “favorite city,” as his outlet to the censorship he faces in Beijing. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Ai, a dissident who has suffered at the hands of the establishment, lamented Beijing as being “too simple” because it has just two types of people: ruthless, powerful types who can kick people out to build skyscrapers and “the silent people, who just have to bear it.”

Pakistan on Saturday moved to block more than a dozen websites over YouTube clips featuring two prominent parliamentarians, and allegations of a secret marriage of the boss of the country''s state-run television. The order, from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), affects some 15 sites, which featured recordings of mobile phone conversations between a male and female politician of the breakaway faction of the ruling coalition partner, Pakistan Muslim League. 

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has ordered all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block numerous scandalous internet sites, specifically the audio recording of a sensual conversation between two sitting parliamentarians. The footage of a press conference in which a lady TV artist claimed that she and a man working with a state organisation have secretly got married and they have a son, is also to be blocked.

Yesterday (August 8 2012), 4 masked men rushed into a citizen media advocacy group's office and smashed its computer equipment. [Disclosure: the writer of this article is a member of the organization.] The organization is Hong Kong In-Media, a non-profit organization aiming at promoting the development of independent and citizen media in Hong Kong. Since 2005, the organization has supported various local citizen media projects including the independent news website: inmediahk.net, which is run by a group of voluntary editors, reporters and writers. The articles in the websites are highly critical of the government and those in power.

Bytes for All (B4A), Pakistan is very pleased to share new research ‘Digital Security and Journalists: A Snapshot of Awareness and Practice in Pakistan’. Produced by Bytes for All, Pakistan and commissioned by the Internews Center for Innovation & Learning, this new research shows how journalists and bloggers in Pakistan are not aware of the ways to protect themselves, their data, and their sources online. Published online, the report has already received a great reception within the international media development organizations, especially those working in Pakistan.

In what could turn out to be its calling card for the 2014 general elections, the government is finalizing a Rs 7,000 crore scheme to give one mobile phone to every family living below the poverty line.

Three employees of China's main search engine, Baidu, have been arrested on suspicion of having accepted bribes to delete posts from its forum service. The web giant fired the three, along with a fourth person who was not arrested. Baidu's spokeswoman, Betty Tian, said the sums involved amounted to "tens of thousands of yuan" (thousands of pounds).

The refusal by either companies or MPs to shed their reservations about the proposed changes in the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which are part of the IT Act, 2000, has led to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal agreeing to engage in larger consultation.

The United States on Wednesday called on Vietnam to free three bloggers facing trial for propaganda against the state, voicing deep concern at the self-immolation of the mother of one of the trio. The defendants were arrested after posting hundreds of political articles on the banned Vietnamese website "Free Journalists Club", as well as writing on their own blogs, in a case that has been raised by US President Barack Obama.

This report examines Pakistan’s press system–still a work in progress–following a renaissance that began in 2002 when then-President Pervez Musharraf liberalized the broadcast laws and set in motion a media market boom that revolutionized how news was reported. From the most powerful metropolitan newspapers and TV channels to small radio stations in impoverished rural villages, it has been a whirlwind decade for the country’s journalists.

According to mainland Chinese media report, Beijing city steering committee and public security bureau had a working group meeting in July 24 on the control of the internet during summer vacation. The head of Beijing police Fu Zhenghua (傅政华）told the reporters that the public security authorities would strengthen law enforcement regarding illegal trading, spreading of rumor and online attack of the party, government leaders and political system.

Beijing police have announced yet another ‘clean-up’ of the web, this time closing hundreds of internet cafes and arresting thousands in the name of protecting the Chinese capital’s vulnerable youth.

Beijing police have announced yet another ‘clean-up’ of the web, this time closing hundreds of internet cafes and arresting thousands in the name of protecting the Chinese capital’s vulnerable youth. Fu Zhenghua, who heads up the city’s Public Security Bureau, said that just over 5,000 people had been arrested and the owners of more than 7,500 web sites punished recently, according to TechInAsia.

A local Hong Kong newspaper, AM730 found out that the Hong Kong government free wifi service is filtering away a number of politically sensitive websites. Even though most of the websites have been re-opened upon receiving netizens' complaint, netizens and human right groups are concerned about the lack of monitor over the filter list.

Australia is the latest democratic nation to introduce new national security measures that would vastly expand governmental surveillance powers, following an alarming legislative pattern that’s also unfolded in the United Kingdom and Canada in recent months.

A senior executive at U.S.-based search giant Google said that it is not desirable for mobile carriers KT, SK Telecom and LG Uplus to limit user access to competitive applications or networks. He said such a move will hinder the creation of an innovative ecosystem and that network neutrality should be taken into consideration as an issue of competition for people’s choice.

Data collected from Oman shows that web filtering applied by India-based ISPs is restricting access to content for customers of an ISP in Oman. While unusual, content filtering undertaken in one political jurisdiction can have an effect on users in another political jurisdiction as a result of ISP routing arrangements – a phenomenon known as “upstream filtering.”

The Indian government on Friday said it has no plans to censor the Internet and social media. Addressing a seminar organised by the Editors Guild of India, law minister Salman Khurshid said his colleague and information technology minister Kapil Sibal does not endorse the view of internet censorship in the country.

Vietnamese authorities must stop their harassment of independent blogger and rights activist Huynh Thuc Vy and allow her to report freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Huynh was briefly detained by police and threatened with anti-state charges on Wednesday, according to news reports.

China's government isn't the only one paying close attention to what the country's citizens are saying on social media sites. As China's 500 million Internet users rapidly adopt social media, academics and entrepreneurs are figuring out ways to track online messages and blog posts to better understand what the government censors—and even how to predict its intent.

The most popular website in Malaysia is an enigma – an online newspaper that’s thriving in a country where freedom of the press has always been suffocated. Malaysiakini, or Malaysia Now, operates out of shabby offices in Kuala Lumpur – with two-dozen reporters and a shoestring budget. Malaysiakini is considered to be the only independent media outlet with independent financing in all of Malaysia.

The Sri Lankan police arrested nine journalists and seized computers and documents from the office of an independent news Web site on Friday, said a media rights group in Sri Lanka, one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. The police said they had a court warrant to act against the Web site, srilankamirror.com, but they have not explained the reasons for the arrests, said Gnanasiri Kottigoda, the president of the media rights group, the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association.

American officials urged China on Friday not to censor its Internet after the government blocked access to the Bloomberg News Web site. The Chinese government had denied Web access to the financial news agency after an investigative article on massive wealth amassed by relatives of Xi Jinping, the man expected to become China’s president.

Internet censorship has become a buzzword these days. As the Centre is seemingly hell-bent on imposing stringent restrictions on the Internet, activist groups of different hues and orientations have been up in arms, protesting such moves tooth and nail. In this background, Rajya Sabha MP from Bangalore Urban district, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on May 15 with regards to India's proposal to the United Nations (UN) for control of the Internet through a 50-member, inter-governmental body.

The nine people selected later this year as China’s top leaders will largely determine whether, and how much, the country’s authoritarian political system yields to demands for change. And pushing them from the bottom will be a growing grass-roots army of bloggers, microbloggers and online activists who are demanding more accountability and gradually pressing the boundaries of freedom in this tightly controlled Communist-ruled country.

Vietnam, already infamous for its recent crackdown on bloggers, is further tightening its grip on free speech by putting forward a new decree to regulate online activity. The decree is problematic in that it requires all online users to use their real names and personal details, which in turn will create an environment of self-censorship. The decree also mandates for Internet companies to locate servers and offices inside the country, thereby placing them directly under Vietnamese law.

In November last year, a 61-year-old Thai man, Ampon Tangnoppakul, was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for sending four text messages deemed to have been offensive to Thailand's royal family. The case has reignited debate over Thailand's strict lese majeste law, which is enshrined in the nation's criminal code. The law is meant to prevent insults and threats to the monarchy. But many are concerned that the increasing use of it curbs freedom of speech and that it is not always used to protect the royal family's interests. Those who have felt the brunt of the law include journalists, authors and activists.

EFF has been monitoring governmental proposals for national identification schemes, with an eye toward evaluating the privacy implications of these new systems. In Japan, where an existing program issues unique ID numbers to citizens at the municipal level and shares information on a national network, a bill is under consideration that would create a new ID framework. Submitted by the Japanese Cabinet in February of 2012, the “My Number Bill” would issue new unique ID numbers to participating citizens. The stated purpose is to streamline information sharing between governmental bodies administering tax, social security, and disaster mitigation programs. If the law is enacted, the My Number system will begin operating in 2015.

A conservative South Korean newspaper said Monday it had been the victim of a major cyber attack, less than a week after North Korea threatened the paper and other Seoul media over their reports.

This report offers the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 95 issue areas.

Internet users in Bangladesh are facing major disruption to their service after a submarine cable was cut. The accident affected the SEA-ME-WE 4 optical fibre system that runs from France to Malaysia. The accident occurred earlier this week about 60km (40 miles) from Singapore's coast. India, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore also rely on the section of cable involved but have been able to route traffic via other connections.

When riot police broke up a recent protest over a forced eviction, Vietnam's bloggers were ready -- hidden in nearby trees, they documented the entire incident and quickly posted videos and photos online. Their shaky images spread like wildfire on Facebook, in a sign of growing online defiance in Vietnam, in the face of efforts by authorities to rein in the country's Internet community. "They follow me, they keep track of what I am writing, they keep track of all dissident bloggers. Anything they can do to harass us, they do," said blogger Nguyen Thi Dung, one of several bloggers who publicised the April 24 Hung Yen unrest on a variety of websites.

Street protests are being planned for this coming Saturday, June 9, in as many as 18 cities to protest laws and other government actions that a growing number of Indian Internet users believe have violated their right to free expression and privacy online. A lively national Internet freedom movement has grown rapidly across India since the beginning of this year.

The Thai government bought one million tablet computers last month to distribute to students across the country. This ambitious "one tablet per child" policy, one of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's campaign promises, is the largest such program in the world and shows that Bangkok wants to meet the challenge of an Internet-based economy. But the newly tableted youth will soon discover that Thailand's Internet is hampered by another challenge: restrictive laws on websites, social networks and search engines.

For China's ruling Communist party, the 1989 demonstrations that clogged Tiananmen Square in Beijing and spread to other cities remains taboo, all the more so this year as the government prepares for a tricky leadership handover. Searches for the terms related to the anniversary, such as "six four" for 4 June, have been blocked on Sina Weibo, the most popular of China's Twitter-like microblogging platforms. Users encountered a message that said the search results could not be displayed "due to relevant laws, regulations and policies".

The number of Chinese Internet users soared to 513 million in 2011, and half of them use micro-blogging services, according to official statistics. Ever wary of this powerful new media and its implications and influence over public opinion, Chinese authorities have made tremendous efforts to gain and maintain control of the virtual battlefield. Besides the Great Firewall, a less obvious tactic employed is the use of paid web commentators, known as the fifty-cent army, or Wu Mao.

Google's relationship with China's censors has always been rocky. It is likely to hit a new rough patch after the company rolled out a new feature on Thursday that warns Chinese users when they type words that are known to set off their government's censorship system. Now, when a user in China types a censored word into the search bar, a pop-up message warns: "We've observed that searching for [the censored word] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside of Google's control."

A Thai court sentenced the manager of an Internet message board to a one-year suspended prison term on Wednesday for comments posted by users that insulted the Thai royal family. The sentence was immediately condemned by Google and human rights groups.

Popular Chinese Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo issued a new warning to users to keep themselves in-check with the introduction Monday of a points-based system for measuring user behavior. The system, dubbed “Weibo Credit,” encourages users to report each other for activities ranging from harassment of others to the spreading of “untrue information,” with each negative report resulting in a lower credit score — leading eventually to the public humiliation of a “low-credit user” badge, and possibly even a deleted account.

Cambodia is drafting its first cyber law, a move designed to prevent “ill-willed groups or individuals” from spreading false information, government officials said yesterday. Press and Quick Reaction Unit spokesman Ek Tha said the law is not intended to restrict media, but to ensure that the “common interest is protected”. “The government right now is drafting the first-ever cyber law, given the mushrooming of … modern technology like Twitter and YouTube and email and all sorts of technology activity,” Ek Tha said. “We need to prevent any ill-willed people or bad mood people from spreading false information, groundless information that could tend to mislead the public and affect national security or our society. We need to control this,” Ek Tha said.

Pakistan banned access to Twitter on Sunday because of "blasphemous" material, a Pakistani official said, but normal service was resumed after 12 hours. The government did not specify which users or messages had prompted the ban on the microblogging site or why it was allowed to operate again so quickly.

Hacktivists have targeted two Indian government websites, as discussions of internet regulation took place in parliament. The websites of India’s apex court and the ruling Congress party were hacked in an apparent protest against the censorship of some websites by the Indian government. Hacking group Anonymous, who have protested the closures of video sharing websites Pirate Bay and Vimeo are believed to have been involved in the attacks.

On Thursday, the United States rolled back prohibitions against American companies doing business in Burma. The announcement marked the latest diplomatic reward given to President Thein Sein's quasi-civilian government for initiating reforms in what has historically been a military-run country. In making the announcement, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the democratic changes initiated so far were "irreversible," but that is a characterization few of the country's journalists would share.

Last week, Voice of America reported that Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging service, has released a new user contract. Updates to the contract include agreeing not to post content deemed "untrue," threatening to "the honor of the nation," promoting "evil teachings, or anything that "destroys societal stability." The announcement of the new contract solicited over 27,000 comments on the Weibo corporate website. The Wall Street Journal blog followed the commentary, which included both supporters and opponents. Many called it a move toward censorship and authoritarian regulation. Said one commenter, “All this does is provide an excuse for arbitrary take-downs."

The Burmese government will end prior censorship of news publications and form a press council to advise on media laws and ethnics, Information Minister Kyaw Hsan told journalists on Monday. Apparently, according to local editors, government officials said the new media law will permit all publications to run stories without submitting articles to censors prior to publication.

In today’s globalized world, you can’t avoid China, or so goes the cliché. Google is discovering that it’s actually true. Following a dispute over censorship, Google largely abandoned mainland China two years ago, redirecting its search operations to Hong Kong. Yet China is having the final word on Google’s biggest and perhaps most strategic deal to date — its proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, the American handset maker and communications company. Shareholders and other national regulators have signed off on the deal, but it must still be approved by Chinese antitrust regulators.

The growing availability of news media and cellphones in reclusive North Korea likely forced it to admit within hours that its long-range rocket launch last month was a failure, the U.S. human rights envoy to the country said Thursday. The envoy, Robert King, was speaking at the launch of a U.S. government-funded study that says North Koreans now have unprecedented exposure to foreign media, giving them a more positive impression of the outside world.

A moderator account on China’s popular microblog Sina Weibo recently made public the draft of a “Community Convention”  with the following tweet: "Dear netizens, in order to maintain order in the Weibo community, we are establishing open and transparent mechanisms to deal with violators of our regulations. Today we are issuing the “Sina Weibo Community Convention (Trial)”, along with the “Community Management Regulations (Trial)” and the “Community Committee System (Trial).” The above regulations will take effect on May 28th, 2012, at which time corresponding features will go live. Order is something that we all must work together to maintain."

A well-known blind activist's escape from house arrest in China has set off a cat-and-mouse conflict on the Internet between censors and netizens. As word of Cheng Guangcheng's flight surfaced and spread last Friday, admirers rushed to popular Chinese social media to cheer him on — and the censors swung into action to block key phrases.

Earlier today, press and human rights groups from around the world heard that the decision in the case of Chiranuch "Jiew" Premchaiporn, the manager of Thai online news site Prachatai, was being delayed yet another month. Chiranuch is charged under Thailand's Computer Crime Act for 10 counts of not deleting apparently anti-monarchy comments on Prachatai's online discussion boards.

In April 2011, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of India quietly issued ‘Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011’ restricting web content that are designated as “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.” Moreover, the Indian government has asked the United States to ensure that India-specific objectionable content are removed from the social networking such as Facebook, Google and YouTube. According to news reports they also want these international service providers to set up servers in India to help regulate the content locally.

China has stepped up its campaign to clamp down on the Internet, which has emerged as a virtual town square for exchanging information about the Bo Xilai scandal and the nation's biggest political upheaval in years.

Chinese Internet users took advantage of an apparent glitch in the country's extensive web censorship program Tuesday by accessing Facebook, which is usually blocked in the tightly controlled communist country. Internet users across the country reported being able to access the social networking website early Tuesday.

Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies may be required to censor their content in Vietnam, an overseas group said Wednesday based on draft regulations that have been released. If adopted, the draft decree, released Friday by the Ministry of Information and Communications, would require foreign businesses to cooperate with Vietnamese authorities in removing information from their sites.