Glutter

Freedom of Expression

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist at the BBC, and somehow the link to parts of it was sent to me in an alert by google. I am not even sure in what context this is in, or whether I have the rights to put it up. But here goes.... (I have to say it was well edited, because it got a lot of my points across in a more succinct than I put it.

Forbes: Congress To Google: Don't Sell Out To Censors
Andy Greenberg 10.23.07, 2:35 PM ET

For global tech companies like Google and Yahoo!, cooperating with repressive states like China has been a public relations nightmare. Now that ethical dilemma may be slowly widening into a legal morass.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs voted Tuesday to pass the Global Online Freedom Act, a bill designed to penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million if they cooperate with the technological surveillance of political dissidents or share technology and information used for "Internet-restricting" purposes.

"Dictatorships need two pillars to survive: propaganda and secret police. The Internet, if misused, gives them both in spades," said Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey. "Both wittingly and unwittingly, companies operating in places like China have discovered they're a part of these regimes."

Tuesday's bill must still pass several hurdles before reaching the House or Senate floor. But it is a clear sign of the growing frustration in Congress over the tug-of-war between supporting U.S. technology companies in politically charged countries and America's long support of human rights abroad.

Companies under the congressional microscope included Cisco, which Smith accused of helping China create a "police net" database used to track and imprison political dissidents around the country. He alluded to Yahoo!'s cooperation with Chinese police, offering up email information that led to journalist Shi Tao receiving a 10-year prison term in 2005 for "revealing state secrets." Smith also criticized Google for its decision to appease China by blocking politically controversial search results on its Mandarin site.

"Google has joined hook, line and sinker with the propaganda regime of Beijing," Smith said.

While Google and Yahoo! couldn't be reached for comment, Cisco responded with a statement denying any participation in government censorship and arguing that the company "supports transparency in the way the Internet is used and complies with applicable regulations."

Microsoft faces issues similar to those of Yahoo! and Google in countries that censor search results and track dissidents. The software giant said it is "not advocating for a legislative solution" and is instead working with organizations including Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy and Technology to develop new guidelines for protecting human rights abroad.

Since turning over information key to jailing Shi Tao, Yahoo! has been called before Congress to explain its actions. Yahoo!'s general counsel Michael Callahan told Congress last February that the company was unaware China's government would use Shi Tao's email information as evidence in a politically motivated trial.

Earlier this month, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos accused Yahoo! of knowing the Chinese government's intentions in that case and lying in the Congressional hearing. Lantos has demanded Callahan and Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang return to Congress for further questioning next month.

Legislators supporting the bill contend it could help protect dissents abroad by making it illegal for companies to store sensitive information that could be used to indentify individuals in countries with restrictive Internet policies, including China, Belarus, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Tunisia. U.S. search engines and Internet Service Providers would also be prevented from filtering search results at the request of a government or for any Internet-restricting purposes.

Not every member of Congress was convinced. Though the committee overwhelmingly supported the measure, Representative Adam Smith of Washington contended the bill was "overly broad," and in its current form, would simply prevent American tech companies from doing business in many countries around the world.

"This is a very delicate area, and a very indelicate piece of legislation," he added.

Internet companies in China already face an unfriendly business landscape. Despite cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship demands, Google has lagged its competitor Baidu in China. Monday, Google confirmed reports that some users were being mysteriously redirected from Google's search page to Baidu's.

But Representative Dan Burton of Indiana countered critiques that the bill would crimp U.S. business abroad by comparing those concerns to arguments in 19th century Britain over the fiscal sacrifices associated with ending slavery.

"Some nation has to start to change what's been going on in China," he said. "Let it be us, today."

When American corporations deliver U.S. foreign policy ...

Michael Likosky,Michael Shtender-Auerbach

Friday, November 2, 2007

The headlines that Yahoo had handed over Chinese journalist and democratic activist Shi Tao's e-mails and IP address to China's secret police dominated the news last year. This sent a panic through an industry usually praised for its social responsibility and unaccustomed to external scrutiny. Congress called in the general counsels of four of our leading high tech firms - Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - to account for their collaboration with the Chinese government. In the course of events, it became clear that the problem in the high-tech sector was not isolated but endemic.

Since this hearing, human rights activists have uncovered three additional cases whereby Yahoo's policy of sharing personal records of its users with Chinese authorities has led to arrest, alleged torture and lengthy prison terms. When our high-tech firms engage in such behavior abroad, they undermine a basic tenet of our foreign policy. What then is the appropriate response?

The U.S. foreign policy of "peaceful evolution" encourages the democratization of authoritarian regimes not through isolationist policies, but instead through constructive commercial engagement; that is, the promotion of free market capitalism abroad. However, some American companies promote and reinforce authoritarian capitalism and suppress democratic movements. The question is: How endemic is corporate-facilitated authoritarianism?

In places such as China, one worries that legitimate reform and resistance will be squelched with the help of U.S. corporations. Commercial engagement may at times produce the very authoritarianism that our high-tech firms make a claim to eradicating by virtue of their technologies. Sophisticated commercial actors and governments realize this.

On Nov. 6, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs will question Yahoo's senior executives on the veracity of testimony given by the company's general counsel during the 2006 hearing in relation to the Tao case. This offers Congress a unique opportunity to change the status quo for American high-tech companies cooperating with authoritarian regimes.

This hearing comes just two weeks after the same committee passed the Global Online Freedom Act, legislation aimed at promoting Internet freedoms and protecting U.S. firms from governments attempting to coerce them into participating in authoritarianism. It, in part, places constraints on U.S. firms, and then backs those constraints with possible civil and criminal sanctions.

Yahoo's director of global public affairs, Tracy Schmaler, maintains that Yahoo's legal counsel provided "truthful" testimony in 2006 and that Yahoo is working "to develop a global code of conduct for operating in countries around the world, including China." Corporate codes are important for advancing peaceful evolution and are part of the mandate of the Global Online Freedom Act. However, we must be wary of private solutions in which the regulator and the regulated are one and the same.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has tied wider corporate accountability in his industry to the need for new legislation, modeled perhaps on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Congress must assess the nature and extent of the social risks engendered by high tech corporate collaborations abroad. Are we genuinely concerned with the wider social harm of some transnational commerce? If so, what public or private institutions - domestic, foreign or international, or combination thereof, are the appropriate ones to assess and mitigate transnational high technology social risk?

Whether de facto or de jure, our companies are our foreign policy organs. American hi-tech companies - Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco - may not fly an American flag, but Chinese citizens, and others, may see it otherwise. The decision by Congress to summon the legal counsel of our blue chip high-tech firms into a congressional committee room last year was an important step in addressing this issue.

The continued congressional inquiry into Yahoo's testimony is further indication that our government values accountability and takes peaceful evolution seriously. While Lantos attempts to get at the truth of Yahoo's actions, Congress should consider legislative action, such as the one proposed by Gates, as an appropriate means for mitigating our collective social risks.

Michael Likosky is a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and author of "Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights," (Cambridge University Press). Michael Shtender-Auerbach is managing director and founder of Social Risks, LLC, of which Likosky is also a principal.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/02/EDQGT3KJL.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

When American corporations deliver U.S. foreign policy ...

Michael Likosky,Michael Shtender-Auerbach

Friday, November 2, 2007

The headlines that Yahoo had handed over Chinese journalist and democratic activist Shi Tao's e-mails and IP address to China's secret police dominated the news last year. This sent a panic through an industry usually praised for its social responsibility and unaccustomed to external scrutiny. Congress called in the general counsels of four of our leading high tech firms - Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - to account for their collaboration with the Chinese government. In the course of events, it became clear that the problem in the high-tech sector was not isolated but endemic.

Since this hearing, human rights activists have uncovered three additional cases whereby Yahoo's policy of sharing personal records of its users with Chinese authorities has led to arrest, alleged torture and lengthy prison terms. When our high-tech firms engage in such behavior abroad, they undermine a basic tenet of our foreign policy. What then is the appropriate response?

The U.S. foreign policy of "peaceful evolution" encourages the democratization of authoritarian regimes not through isolationist policies, but instead through constructive commercial engagement; that is, the promotion of free market capitalism abroad. However, some American companies promote and reinforce authoritarian capitalism and suppress democratic movements. The question is: How endemic is corporate-facilitated authoritarianism?

In places such as China, one worries that legitimate reform and resistance will be squelched with the help of U.S. corporations. Commercial engagement may at times produce the very authoritarianism that our high-tech firms make a claim to eradicating by virtue of their technologies. Sophisticated commercial actors and governments realize this.

On Nov. 6, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs will question Yahoo's senior executives on the veracity of testimony given by the company's general counsel during the 2006 hearing in relation to the Tao case. This offers Congress a unique opportunity to change the status quo for American high-tech companies cooperating with authoritarian regimes.

This hearing comes just two weeks after the same committee passed the Global Online Freedom Act, legislation aimed at promoting Internet freedoms and protecting U.S. firms from governments attempting to coerce them into participating in authoritarianism. It, in part, places constraints on U.S. firms, and then backs those constraints with possible civil and criminal sanctions.

Yahoo's director of global public affairs, Tracy Schmaler, maintains that Yahoo's legal counsel provided "truthful" testimony in 2006 and that Yahoo is working "to develop a global code of conduct for operating in countries around the world, including China." Corporate codes are important for advancing peaceful evolution and are part of the mandate of the Global Online Freedom Act. However, we must be wary of private solutions in which the regulator and the regulated are one and the same.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has tied wider corporate accountability in his industry to the need for new legislation, modeled perhaps on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Congress must assess the nature and extent of the social risks engendered by high tech corporate collaborations abroad. Are we genuinely concerned with the wider social harm of some transnational commerce? If so, what public or private institutions - domestic, foreign or international, or combination thereof, are the appropriate ones to assess and mitigate transnational high technology social risk?

Whether de facto or de jure, our companies are our foreign policy organs. American hi-tech companies - Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco - may not fly an American flag, but Chinese citizens, and others, may see it otherwise. The decision by Congress to summon the legal counsel of our blue chip high-tech firms into a congressional committee room last year was an important step in addressing this issue.

The continued congressional inquiry into Yahoo's testimony is further indication that our government values accountability and takes peaceful evolution seriously. While Lantos attempts to get at the truth of Yahoo's actions, Congress should consider legislative action, such as the one proposed by Gates, as an appropriate means for mitigating our collective social risks.

Michael Likosky is a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and author of "Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights," (Cambridge University Press). Michael Shtender-Auerbach is managing director and founder of Social Risks, LLC, of which Likosky is also a principal.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/02/EDQGT3KJL.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Spotlight: Jerry Yang - China success a two-edged sword
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Financial Times
updated 6:41 p.m. PT, Fri., Nov. 2, 2007

When Jerry Yang, chief executive and co-founder of Yahoo, appears before a congressional committee tomorrow, it is likely to be the kind of political theatre that US business leaders dread.

By handing Chinese authorities the e-mail records of one of its users, Yahoo helped to land Shi Tao, a dissident Chinese journalist, with a 10-year jail sentence. The company's chief lawyer apologised publicly last week for failing to hand over all the information he had on the affair to a House committee investigating the matter, but that may not be enough to draw the committee's sting.

For Mr Yang, an intensely private man who was an idealistic Stanford University student when he co-founded Yahoo at the start of the dotcom boom, the drawn-out controversy over the Shi case has come at considerable personal cost.

"I think this is really painful for him," says one former Yahoo executive. "Yahoo hasn't wrapped itself in grandiose language the way Google has, but he really built Yahoo to be a force for good."

Ironically, tomorrow's appearance in Washington will come on the very day that Mr Yang should be celebrating the culmination of Yahoo's new business strategy in China. According to some observers, that strategy should also serve to insulate his company in future from controversies such as this - though others believe it could instead backfire and leave Yahoo's reputation even more exposed.

The new approach to China began two years ago, when the US internet company folded its own stumbling operations there into a local e-commerce company, Alibaba. Along with a $1bn injection of cash, that bought Yahoo a 39 per cent stake.

Shares in Alibaba are set to start trading in Hong Kong tomorrow, capping the biggest initial public offering for an internet company since Google and valuing Yahoo's investment at about $3.5bn.

By reducing Yahoo's involvement in China to a minority investment, Mr Yang's deal with Jack Ma, the entrepreneur behind Alibaba, theoretically distances Yahoo from any future human rights controversies.

"It's for Jack Ma to follow local customs," says one person who has been involved in Yahoo's planning. "[The problem] does go away."

However, even though it has no direct control, Yahoo's reputation could still be on the line over Alibaba's actions. Mr Ma has made no secret of his own willingness to co-operate closely with the Chinese authorities in any investigations into his company's users.

Full Story

The New York Times

November 3, 2007
Yahoo Executive Apologizes to a Congressional Panel
By REUTERS

A senior executive at Yahoo has apologized for failing to give American lawmakers additional information about its role in the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident.

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said that Yahoo’s general counsel, Michael J. Callahan, gave false information at a hearing in 2006 about what the company knew of the Chinese government’s investigation of Shi Tao, a reporter who was sentenced last April to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets.

Mr. Callahan testified that Yahoo China, then a subsidiary of Yahoo, had passed information about one of its users to Chinese authorities in 2004 without knowledge of why China wanted the data.

It was only in October 2006 that he realized that the order from the Chinese government had mentioned an investigation into state secrets, a Yahoo spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, said.

The problem was caused by a bad translation of the 2004 Chinese order given to a company lawyer based in the region, she said.

In a statement dated Nov. 1, Mr. Callahan said he had neglected to alert the committee of the new information, leading to “a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologized to the committee for creating.”

At a Congressional committee hearing next week, Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, is expected to answer questions on his company’s disclosure of information to Chinese authorities. Mr. Callahan is expected to repeat his apology at that hearing.

Freedom of expression

I am about to speak in the Amnesty International Conference named "Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace."

You can watch it during the webcast live at 10:30 PST or 4:30 UK time and afterwards for replay.
http://www.gginternet1.co.uk/amnesty/irrepressible01/

Read Excerpts from Banned Internet Sites around the world




In order to add similar items to your website go to http://irrepressible.info/addcontent

Freedom of Expression/Just a grrl

Here I am, writing the first entry in two months. I am no longer in Hong Kong, in fact I am in Los Angeles. I live in a little house with a giant garden. I am trying to remember how to drive, work out where the supermarkets are, and most of all making a new life. It's really really hard. As much as I travel I still find it difficult to completely settle in. I think this is a normal process. In the back of my mind there is always something else I have to do, and it all takes a lot of time.

I have been thinking of Glutter as well, and what to do with it. I want to talk about free speech again, and the events in China but there have been so many changes in how I feel about things. When one lives in country where freedom is part of their constitution, when free speech is part of daily life, when all its glories can be reduced to porn, loud mouth rhetoric, and a place to hide for hateful and angry speech, one can feel frustrated. I feel frustrated when I hear people talk about politics here, and how much Americans take their freedoms so lightly, how the left is always complaining "how we don't really live in a democracy," when they really do. I get angry when I hear how Americans want to leave Iraq to their own devices when the country could be on the brink of civil war, I feel embarrassed that the "side" I have always been on has reduced their fight to legalization of marijuana, gay marriage, and bashing the system. I find myself wondering why is it that things are so easy here that people seem to have lost their focus on the big things. It's as if Americans take what they have so easily, that they forget Saddam was a dictator, that there are people in the world who is spending their lives working in factories in awful conditions, that a country under a totalitarian regime is allowing them to buy cheap goods. Trust me, I buy them too, but I do wonder where my social responsibilities end and my political consciousness begins.

Sometimes it just seems easier to go into a garden and plant flowers because I know when I wake up in fifteen years, I won't really have to worry that my children will go to jail for saying the wrong thing to school teacher or writing an email trying to learn about June 4th 1989. Sometimes I think I understand Americans more now. How freedom in a system is really more a "freedom of living without worry." One only has to worry about day to day things, the bigger things are enshrined somewhere else, placed there so they can go on living. I think it's easy to live here, the houses are large, the cars are large, I close the gate to my garden and we turn off for the night and there are hardly any neighbours. I think it's hard to live here because people are so disconnected as well. I don't really know what is better or worse, but I know that one feels like if something is wrong they can try and fix it. It's like living in the US allows you the option to not care because one is relatively safe, and an option to do something while being safe and having a place where it is safe to do it in.

Which leaves me sometimes just wanting to shut off and turn on some loud mouth radio and drive on the freeway.

But I know that I should not.

I know there are things going on somewhere else as well that I really care about.

So I decided to start up Glutter again, try to put all these new thoughts out there and see what happens.

I am going to "relaunch" (as they so LOVE saying over here) Glutter on June 6th. I would usually choose June 4th of course, the anniversary of the Tianamen Massacre. I would be in Victoria Park holding a candle. Instead I will be in Vegas with my family and we will be watching a Neil Diamond Impersonator. I guess one can't get more "American" than that.

On June 6th I will be a speaker in an Amnesty International Conference. I have ten minutes to talk about Censoring of News, of Corporate Responsibility of companies like Yahoo! and Google, about Glutter and why the internet is powerful. Part of me don't even feel I need to say anything. The fact, I sitting at my home with an idea in my head and a story to tell end up being able to speak in a Conference in London with the first NGO I ever joined, says everything. Without the internet I would just be a somewhat angry person at the world. With it I gained a voice.

It's been a bit quiet for a while, so I think it's time to speak again.

I will see you soon, or better yet, you will go to the webcast link either on the day or after and see all of us talk.

Yxxxx

6 June 2007, 18.30 - 21.00 UK Time
Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace

A unique global event linking activists from around the world to discuss the struggle against internet repression. Wherever you are, you will be able to watch the debate live on the day by webcast, and ask questions at www.amnesty.org.uk/webcast

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Some people think the internet is a bad thing
Someone doesn't want people to read this - irrepressible.info

Date: 6 June 2007

The struggle for freedom of expression in cyberspace
Computer keyboard © UPPA/Photoshot

Join Amnesty International UK and The Observer newspaper for a unique global event. We will use the internet to link activists from around the world to discuss the struggle against internet repression and to celebrate the irrepressible desire of people towards freedom of expression.
Speakers include:

* Martha Lane Fox - lastminute.com
* Clark Boyd – BBC
* Ron Deibert – Open Net Initiative
* Sami Ben Garbia – Tunisian cyber-dissident
* Josh Wolf – US cyber-dissident
* Morton Sklar –Yahoo! Court case
* Shava Nerad – The TOR Project
* Yan Sham-Shackleton – glutter.org
* Markus Beckedahl – netzpolitik.org
* Kevin Anderson – The Guardian

With contributions from:

* Jimmy Wales – wikipedia
* Richard Stallman – Free Software Movement
* Ethan Zuckerman – Global Voices (Watch a clip of Ethan Zuckerman about the human cost of internet repression)
* Dan Gillmor – Center for Citizen Media
* Yu Ling – wife of Chinese cyber-dissident
* Cory Doctorow – boing boing (Listen to Cory Doctorow talking about technology and freedom)
* … and you

Wherever you are, you will be able to watch the debate live on the day by webcast, and ask questions, make comments and put your point, at www.amnesty.org.uk/webcast (this web address will go live on 6 June)

If you would like to attend the event in person, please use the booking form below. There are limited tickets available only.

audio logoListen to a trailer to this event by BBC journalist Clark Boyd who will chair the event

* Find out more about Amnesty's campaign against internet repression
* Subscribe to the podcast

How to book

We have a limited number of free tickets for this event. Please use the booking form below. If possible, please limit your booking to up to 2 tickets only.

Event Type Conference
Event venue Online at www.amnesty.org.uk/webcast - broadcasted from the Human Rights Action Centre in London
Time 18.30 (UK / 19.30 Europe / 13.30 EST / 10.30 PST)
Price Free of charge