Iran: Student and Civil Unrest provokes Internet Censorship, Journalists confined to quarters

As the rain poured down, Government opponents shouted "Allahu Akbar" and "Death to the Dictator" from Tehran's rooftops on the eve of student demonstrations planned for Monday.

Authorities choked off Iran's Internet access and have given severe warnings to journalists working for foreign media, to stay in their offices for the next three days. Journalists working for foreign media organisations are banned from covering Monday's protests. They were told by the Culture Ministry that their press cards would be suspended for three days starting Monday.

Thousands of riot police and Revolutionary Guard members armed with tear gas, batons and firearms were deployed Monday outside Tehran University to prevent student demonstrations backed by the opposition. Witnesses said police were conducting ID checks on anyone entering the campus to prevent opposition activists from joining the students.

The measures were aimed at depriving the opposition of its key means of mobilising the masses as Iran's clerical rulers keep a tight lid on dissent.

Government opponents are seeking, nonetheless, to get large numbers of demonstrators to turn out on the streets on Monday and show their movement still has a potent momentum.

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi threw his support behind the student demonstrations and declared that his movement is still alive. A statement posted on his Web site said the fundamental clerical establishment cannot silence students, free speech and was losing legitimacy in the minds of the Iranian people.

China Web Sites Seeking Users' Names

China Web Sites Seeking Users' Names - NYTimes.com

BEIJING - News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments.

This is the latest shift in policy that the country's Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.

Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.

The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.

The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.

But the requirement adds a critical new layer of surveillance to mainstream sites in China, which were already heavily policed. Further regulations of the same nature also appeared to be in the pipeline.

And while the authorities called the measure part of a drive to forge greater 'social responsibility' and 'civility' among users, they moved forward surreptitiously and suppressed reports about it, said the editors and others in the media industry familiar with the measure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk.

Asked why the policy was pushed through unannounced, the chief editor of one site said, 'The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.'

China Harass US Film-makers: Deny Visas and Banned from Chinese Festival

BEIJING — When the American filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill traveled around Sichuan Province last year to document the anger of parents whose children had died in school collapses during the earthquake in May, they ran into a chilly reception from officials.

Chinese Police officers harassed the two film-makers and their co-workers, detained and interrogated them for eight hours.

Now, the Chinese government has denied both of them visas, blocking them from presenting their documentary, “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province,” at the Beijing Independent Film Festival this week. The two men, who made the film for HBO with the co-producer Peter Kwong, said their visa applications were rejected late last week.

“We are extremely disappointed that the Chinese government denied our request for visas and that we will not be permitted to discuss this film with a Chinese audience in Beijing,” Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill said in a joint e-mail message. “The denial of our visas fits in with a pattern of what seems to be a complete commitment on the part of this Chinese government to crush any inquiry into the possibility of wrongful deaths during the earthquake in Sichuan.”

Chen Cong, a vice consul in the press office of the Chinese Consulate in New York, declined to explain the rejection, saying that diplomatic organizations had “the right not to give a reason for why the visa was denied.”

Mr. Alpert and Mr. O’Neill have both won Emmy Awards and have worked together on highly praised documentaries, including “Baghdad ER.” The Sichuan documentary was shown on HBO in May, one year after the earthquake, and got positive reviews. The official Web site of the film is blocked in China.

The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to silence any mention of the collapsed schools and, according to an official count, the 5,335 children who died or remain missing. In the weeks after the earthquake, which left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, parents took to the streets to demand official investigations into why so many school buildings had collapsed even though other buildings around them remained standing. The parents said shoddy construction and corruption were the obvious causes.

Local officials ordered security forces to detain the parents or tried to buy the silence of the parents with compensation money. Meanwhile, journalists who tried approaching the schools were stopped, and two rights advocates who pressed for official inquiries were detained. The two advocates, Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren, were put on trial last month.

Artists trying to raise consciousness over the collapsed schools have been similarly harassed. The Chinese filmmaker Pan Jianlin was tracked by security officials after his documentary on the deaths, “Who Killed Our Children?” was shown last year at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea. Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who often criticizes the Communist Party, had his Web site blocked after he tried to compile online a comprehensive tally of dead schoolchildren. He was temporarily detained in Sichuan last month when he tried to attend the trial of Mr. Tan.

A person helping to organize the film festival in Beijing said the HBO documentary would be shown on Thursday even though the filmmakers would not be able to attend. The festival is showcasing more than 80 films, and each one is generally shown once.

Chinese Government Backdown on Censorship Software

In a previous blog we reported on the Chinese Government IT ministry's order to compulsory install censorship software on every computer in China.

Thankfully, this order has now been withdraw and the Chinese Government has climbed down and put the legislation on hold.

Advocates of free-speech and human rights said that the program was a clear attempt by the Chinese government to extend its control and censorship of political opinions, from public places into people’s living rooms.

The contentious order was first issued last May 19, and had stirred an outcry from Chinese Internet users and foreign computer manufacturers alike, arguing that the software ran counter to China’s proclaimed goal of creating an information-based society.

Although the government insists that the program is meant to shield children from online pornography and paedophiles, its filter is automatically updated by the government and targeted many topics with political overtones.

From a comercial viewpoint, the United States also warned China that the installation requirement would be seen as a violation of world trade regulations.

Green Dam Software
The information ministry previously had suspended the Green Dam pre-installation mandate on June 30, one day before it was to take effect, saying that computer makers needed more time to accommodate it as a pre-installed package in their manufacturing process.

Pre-installed on new computers
The statement by Mr. Li appeared to make that initial suspension, more permanent. Mr. Li said the government would neither require the program to come pre-installed on new computers or force computer makers to include the program on a CD with other optional software.

Lenovo, Acer and Sony
A few Asian computer manufacturers, led by China-based Lenovo, Taiwan’s Acer, and Japan's Sony, nevertheless, include the software on computers sold in China for fear of being barred from a lucrative market.

Filtering remains Mandatory for Public Internet Users
Although Mr. Li’s concession is a step backward for the Green Dam program, the software remains mandatory in schools, Internet cafes and other sites used by scores of millions of people.

The government already takes extraordinary steps to monitor computer use in Internet cafes, which remain common in a nation where owning a computer remains a comparative luxury.

Only 25% of Chinese people have access to a computer and the Internet. This number is equal to the entire population of the US and is growing.

China makes Internet Filtering Software Mandatory

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) mandated that everyone must install filtering software known as Green Dam Youth Escort. More of a chaperone or minder than an escort. The Filtering Bully is content-control software.

The decree ensures that, depending on your interpretation, it is provided or installed on every computer sold in China. This applies to all global computer manufacturers and suppliers supplying China with equipment.

The wide spread use of Internet Censorship is an obvious indication of the Chinese government's determined efforts to suppress the growth and freedom of the Chinese people and to prevent the free exchange of news and views with other peoples, countries and cultures.

'Net Users Outraged
The ensuing outrage by Chinese netizens has created a slight back peddling by MIIT on their determined stance and a slight softening of the tone of their mandate. The netizens see it as another barrier to censor and restrict their access to the global village, via the internet.

Government links to software
Whether or not the mandate or the program survives the outcry, is currently a heated subject of debate. However, it is not surprising that the companies involved in producing the software are known to have close government and military ties.

Site License
The government has already paid the equivalent of $6M for the software. This covers a site license for the entire country, a user base that is potentially 4 times the size of the US population.

US Computer Makers Reluctant
US computer manufacturers are dragging their feet on this emotive issue due to moral grounds thinly disguised as ' copyright concerns.'

Sony Capitulates
Japanese manufacturer Sony has reportedly already started to comply, for fear of sanctions against the company and a reduction in revenues from its largest and most aggressive neighbour.

Chinese News Sites Go Down After Reporting on Government Scandal

The Namib Desert a source of wealth and minerals as well as stunning beauty and mystery!

Two of China's most popular technology news Web sites went offline Tuesday, after carrying news reports that linked the son of China's president to a corrupt African deal.

The technology news sections disappeared for several hours from major Chinese portals Sina.com.cn and NetEase.com early Tuesday afternoon, when they started redirecting viewers to general news pages.

Both tech sections had carried reports on a state-owned company accused of bribing Namibian officials in the last day, but those reports were missing when the Web pages reappeared.

The suspensions appeared to be a government penalty against the companies for reporting on a sensitive political anti-government issues.

Media Censorship - "I'm impressed by the bravery of Sina and Netease in attempting to report this at all," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a Hong Kong-based expert on the Internet in China, in an online message. Clearly, the threats and intimidation being meeted out is having an effect in the media's self-censorship.

The Golden Children - Information on top leaders' children has always been off-limits in Chinese media, though the Internet has made it more difficult to control discussions on such topics, MacKinnon said.

Internet Police - Chinese police heavily patrol the Internet, and Internet companies run rigorous screening to prevent sensitive information from appearing on user forums or in search results on their sites. Companies can be punished if that process fails to catch certain political or pornographic content.

"This is not particularly surprising or different from long-standing censorship patterns," MacKinnon said.

NetEase story canned - A story posted on the NetEase tech page the night before its suspension cited English broadcaster BBC as saying that Nuctech, a Chinese company, was suspected of bribery in a deal to provide scanners for airports and ports in Namibia.

The BBC report had said Namibian authorities wanted to question Hu Haifeng, the former company president and son of Chinese president Hu Jintao, but did not suspect him in the case.

The NetEase story was careful not mention Hu, but it said that Namibia wanted to question "relevant" Nuctech executives.

Sina's article blocked - Sina's tech page carried a similar article the next morning, hours before the sites went down. After the tech sections returned to the portals, visiting the URLs of the scandal reports returned messages that they could not be found or had been deleted.

An employee who answered the phone at NetEase Tuesday said its tech section was down for tests. Sina did not respond to a request for comment.

Big Brother Tsinghua - Nuctech's parent company, Tsinghua Holdings, controls a range of other technology companies including Chinese PC maker Tsinghua Tongfang.

Iran using more Sophisticated Tactics to Block Internet Access for Government Critics

Iran is using a number of new technologies to censor the Web. Some of these Government tools are simplistic and blunt, while others are more precise and surgical. Both are intended to stifle so-called dissidents.

One month after a disputed presidential election sparked widespread unrest in Iran, the country's government has initiated a cyber-crackdown that is challenging hackers across the globe to find new ways to help keep Iranian dissidents connected to the Web.

Iranian Government Strategy step-up
While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were crude and consequently ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online.

NedaNet
One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to "help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymisers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organise."

NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers, says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not.

Chinese Internet censorship: An inside look
"China has several gigabytes per second of traffic to deal with and has a lot more international businesses," he says. "They can't be as heavy-handed with their filtration. The Iranians aren't as concerned about that, so they get to use all these fancy toys that, if the Chinese used them, could cripple their economy."

Here are five of the most commonly-used technologies the Iranian government has been using to stifle dissents, as outlined in Sennhauser's paper.

IP Blocking
IP Blocking is one of the most basic methods that governments such as Iran are using for online censorship. It simply prevents all packets going to or from targeted IP addresses. Sennhauser says that this was how the government banned access to the BBC's Persian news services and how it took down websites that were critical or in any way negative about the election.

While these operations are relatively simple to execute, they don't tackle the problem of individual communications between users, especially if the users have set up multi-hop circuits that, in themselves use multiple servers to create a proxy ring.

Traffic Classification (QoS)
QoS is a much more sophisticated method of blocking traffic than IP blocking, because governments can halt any file sent through a certain type of protocol, such as FTP. They can simply limit the bandwidth available on that port and throttle transfers because the government knows that FTP transfers are most often sent through TCP port 21.

Sennhauser says that this type of traffic shaping practice is the most common one used by governments today, as "it is not too resource intensive and is fairly easy to set up."

Shallow Packet Inspection
Shallow packet inspection is basically a blunter, broader version of the deep packet inspection (DPI) technique that is used to block packets based on their content. 'Shallow packet' inspection makes broad generalities about traffic, based solely on checking out the packet header, unlike DPI, which intercepts packets and inspects their fingerprints, headers and payloads.

Although shallow packet inspection can't provide the Iranian government with the same detailed traffic assessments as DPI, Sennhauser says that it is much better at handling volume than DPI.

Reading the label on the packet
"It's a less refined tool, but it can also deal with a lot more traffic than true DPI." he explains. "Shallow packet inspection is more like judging a book by its cover. If a packet says that it's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) in the header, then a shallow packet inspector takes it at face value."

However, this is a double-edged sword. If a user disguises their SSL packets as FTP packets in the header, the shallow packet inspector won't be able to tell the difference.

Packet Fingerprinting
This is a slightly more refined method of throttling packets than 'shallow packet' inspection, as it looks not only at the packet header but at its length, frequency of transmission and other characteristics to make a rough determination of its content.

Sennhauser says the government can use this technique to better classify packets and not throttle traffic sent out by key businesses.

Mix 'n Match
"A lot of things don't explicitly say what they are, e.g. a lot of VPN traffic is indistinguishable from SSH traffic, which means that it would be throttled if SSH was," he says. "but what if businesses relied on VPN connections? You'd move the system to fingerprinting, where the two are easily distinguishable."

Deep Packet Inspection / Packet Content Filtering
DPI is the most refined method that the government has for blocking Internet traffic. As mentioned above, deep packet inspectors examine not only a packet's header but also its payload. This gives governments the ability to filter packets at a more surgical level than any of the other techniques discussed so far.

"Viewing a packet's contents doesn't tell you much on its own, especially if it's encrypted," he says. "But combining it with the knowledge gained from fingerprinting and shallow packet inspection, it is usually more than enough to figure out what sort of traffic you're looking at."

DPI Downside
There are downsides to using DPI, of course: it's much more complicated to run and is far more labour-intensive than other traffic-shaping technologies. On the down side, Sennhauser says there is no magic bullet for getting around DPI. Users can usually only temporarily elude it by "finding flaws in their system." and even this won't help for long, as the government can simply correct their system's flaws once they're discovered.

"Once they fix the flaw, you've lost unless you can figure out some real way to circumvent it," Sennhauser notes.

Endgame still unclear
Sennhauser says that the government has employed these technologies very quickly and very smartly, despite being caught flat-footed by the initial furor after the election. Indeed, he thinks the only reason that Iran hasn't yet completely shut down dissidents' communications is that they've had to fight with an army of hackers who tirelessly search for flaws in their system.

"It really is like an arms race," he says. "They create a problem, we circumvent it, they create another, we get around that one. This continues on until the need to do so is removed. The circumstances which will end the competition aren't clear yet."

Unrest in Iran - Cyber-Attacks Begin in earnest

An apparently ad-hoc cyber protest against the results of recent Iranian elections has knocked out key Web sites in the country.

On Monday, sites belonging to Iranian news agencies, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were knocked off-line after activists opposed to the Iranian government posted tools designed to barrage these Web sites with traffic.

This type of attack, known as a denial of service (DoS) attack, has become a standard political protest tool, and has been used by grassroots protesters in several cyber-incidents over the past few years, including cyber events in Estonia in 2007 and Georgia last year.

Activists had encouraged anti-government protesters to use automatic Web page refresh tools such as Pagereboot.com, to hit government run site. But they have also developed custom DoS tools. One such tool, called BWRaeper was posted to an Iranian sports discussion forum on Monday. Others are being promoted via Twitter and blogs, and hosted by activists in the U.S.

The "campaign is starting to target international users, compared to the original one aiming to recruit Iranians only," said Dancho Danchev, a security consultant who has blogged about the tools. "Judging by the effect this crowdsourcing is having, they've disrupted the sites set as targets."

Danchev counts 12 sites as being under attack, including other news agencies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice, National Police, and the Ministry of the Interior.

In response to the attacks, state-sponsored Iranian News site Fars News added a small piece of Web code that redirected the attack to pro-opposition Web sites, Danchev said via instant message. "Apparently, they thought that the attackers wouldn't stop their attack since they were also indirectly loading the [attack code]," he added. "They, however, didn't stop the attack."

Web disruptions have occurred on both sides of the dispute. Last month, Iran blocked access to Facebook, apparently to prevent opposition voters from using the social networking service to promote their candidates in last week's elections. YouTube and the BBC's Web site have also reportedly been blocked. BBC satellite service to the country has also been jammed.

General Internet service in Iran was also disrupted, though that lasted for just a short period of time, according to network monitoring company Renesys.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in Iran to protest the results of last week's presidential elections. Protesters claim that their candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, lost because the election was fixed by the government.

Although it has been reported as inaccessible by some Iranian users, Twitter has emerged as the major source of information on the protests, and is being credited with driving coverage of the event on U.S. television networks such as CNN.