While I suggest you read the paper (or this excellent Wall Street Journal article reporting on it), I’d like to discuss briefly why my blog was categorized as pornography by Websense.  Frankly, I find it utterly fascinating: About a year ago, Helmi Noman–my co-author–discovered that this very blog was blocked in Yemen.  Upon further investigation, Helmi realized that the reason for the blockage was not political content or anything of the sort, but that my blog had been categorized–by Websense–as pornography.

After Websense barred Yemen from future software updates, I thought the problem had been solved until Luke Allnutt–who works at RFE/RL, which uses Websense in its offices–tweeted that he couldn’t get to my blog.

I quickly wrote to Websense, and received a fairly rapid reply, telling me that my blog had been reclassified as a personal site.  Great–I then pushed back a bit, asking how my blog had been categorized as a pornographic site in the first place.  My assumption was that their automated system was based on keywords, and that my blogging about Helmi Noman’s paper (“Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the ‘Arabian Countries‘”) had caused it; after all, it caused “Arab sex” to be the #1 search term for my blog.

Turns out, that wasn’t the case at all.  In fact, what happened was significantly more chilling.  Here’s the text of an email sent to me by Patricia Hogan, Senior Public Relations Specialist for Websense:

Hi Jillian,

Regarding your questions about blog classification, the problem seems to come from the comments, not the posts. Indeed, you appear to be the victim of comment spam (which often contains pornographic links or links to malware).

Look at the comments after this post: http://jilliancyork.com/2008/09/11/blog-strike-for-mohammed-erraji/. The last comment has pornographic links and the one preceding it has links to pharmacy spam, which often leads to malware. This is just one post that we looked at. You may have more.

Comment spam has been hounding bloggers (and more recently Facebook users), so Websense developed tools to help keep blogs and readers safe from spam like this. We offer free plug-ins for many blog platforms to help prevent this type of comment abuse (go to http://defensio.com/downloads for more information). We don’t want you to be victimized again from unscrupulous posts, and our plug-in allows you to control what content you wish to appear on your site.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any more questions.

Sincerely,

PATRICIA HOGAN
Sr. Public Relations Specialist

WEBSENSE, INC.
ph: +1.858.320.9393
fax: +1.858.784.4393
www.websense.com

What Hogan is saying is that anyone can manipulate Websense software by spamming a blog’s comments section with porn outlinks. Let me say that again: Websense can be manipulated by anyone wishing to censor anyone else, just by adding a few links to porn in the comments section.

SmartFilter appears to have similar problems. A few months ago, blogger Sabina England reported that her blog was blocked in the UAE, which uses the software. While she may have a similar issue with “porn spam,” our suspicion at the time was that SmartFilter was detecting keywords, and had blocked England’s blog based on the use of the words “cunt,” “sexy,” and “whores” in a poem she had written.

I find this utterly chilling; now, I will say that Yemen has stopped using Websense and we’re not aware of any other countries–at least in the Middle East and North Africa–that use the software. Nevertheless, plenty of schools, libraries, and workplaces use Websense and other tools, and while their blocking of pornography may be justified, the mis-categorization of URLs by these technologies means that there are chilling effects, even to blocking porn.

I’ve been away from home for over two weeks now with far less Internet and television access than usual, so it’s difficult for me to gauge what the American reaction has been to the strife in Tunisia thus far.  A quick Google search shows me a decent amount of US media coverage of the situation–both online and offline–though considerably less attention than was paid to the Iranian elections of 2009, which were undeniably ubiquitous in all forms of media, garnering widespread awareness of the situation.

Though I don’t like or agree with it one bit, I understand why the US government focuses disproportionately on Iran: fear of nuclear weapons, fear of attacks on Israel, fear of Islam.  I don’t understand, however, why public and media attention is equally disproportionate.  If media is not a mouthpiece of the government, then shouldn’t our outrage be equal?

The online media coverage of the Tunisian events may well be adequate (though is likely not), but where it the outrage we saw in 2009 vis-à-vis Iran?  Where are the ubiquitous hashtags?  Both the Iranian Green movement and the current outrage emanating from Tunisia are homegrown, native, huge, and yet, one garnered widespread international support while attention to the other is limited to a small transnational network, as far as I can see.

I very much understand the current outrage from my Tunisian friends, particularly as it is leveled at the US government in respect to Internet freedom.  While the US stepped forward to help Iranians (whether by fast-tracking circumvention tools for export or asking Twitter to halt its updates), little had been said publicly over the years regarding Tunisian censorship, nor the American companies that make it possible (Tunisia, like several other countries in the region, uses McAfee’s SmartFilter software to block a vast swath of websites, and does so with impunity).  Europe, on the other hand, has spoken up this time around.

Forget the government – where is the media outrage?  Sometimes I think the media has forgotten who it works for.  This isn’t Tunisia, we have a free press.  What’s their excuse?

Now, with the arrest of Slim Amamou, I call on my friends once again to speak out, loudly.  If you have connections to the media, use them.  If you have questions, I can put you in touch with people on the ground in Tunisia.  Don’t let this go ignored.

I beg to differ. Yesterday, the Guardian had a piece that asked “Blocking Internet porn…that’s censorship, isn’t it?” As Larry Flynt (Hustler) has argued many times, yes, it is. The way many of us think, first they’ll come for the porn, then they’ll come for the topless magazines, and then, what’s next?

Personally, I’m fairly agnostic about pornography. I certainly wouldn’t miss it, and if I did, I know plenty of ways to get around Internet filters (which is another point: if you block porn, are you going to block circumvention tools too?). So for me, this isn’t about pornography, but rather, about the systems in place to block it. I don’t trust them. Nor do I have any reason to.

In the UK, the body responsible for creating the country’s blacklists is the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). An extragovernmental body, the IWF was founded in 1996 by the Internet community (largely extragovernmental itself) for the purpose of monitoring and reporting “child sexual abuse content” on the Internet. Though the organization still carries out regular reporting on such content, their mission has been expanded to include “racist and criminally obscene” material. And while child abuse content is filtered (as it is often hosted outside the UK’s jurisdiction and thus cannot be taken down by their government), “criminally obscene adult content” and content containing “incitement to racial hatred” hosted in the UK are most often taken down by law enforcement, rather than filtered.

In 2009, a controversial decision by the IWF to filter the Wikipedia page of a 1977 Scorpions album because the album cover depicted a nude minor resulted in backlash against the organization. As a result, the organization retracted its ban on the Wikipedia page, but it was too late…trust was already lost.

Though filtering one page on Wikipedia might not seem like a big deal, it’s indicative of a serious problem: You’ve got a nongovernmental body with little or no government oversight deciding what’s best for us.  If this is reminiscent to my American readers, it should be: the IWF is very much like our own MPAA, that ominous body that decides our movie ratings.  Now, movie ratings may not seem important either, but consider this: The upcoming film Blue Valentine was recently given an NC-17 rating (later downgraded to an R) for depicting cunnilingus.  Films that depict fellatio, on the other hand, are regularly given an R rating, while by contrast realistic violence can get anything from a PG-13 to an R.  Blue Valentine‘s star, Ryan Gosling, called the decision “misogynistic by nature,” stating that films with violence, rape, and torture are regularly given R ratings (or shown on prime time television), while a loving relationship that includes oral sex is given the most extreme of ratings, often a death sentence for a box office film.

If all of this seems irrelevant, it’s not.  The MPAA is a perfect comparison to the IWF: two nongovernmental bodies comprised of regular (often untrained, often uneducated) people making decisions for the rest of us.  You should be very uncomfortable with this, whether you care about porn or not.

Tattu (I’ll be referring to her by first name for the sheer fact that it’s easier to type) begins by speaking about the history of Internet in Kyrgyzstan; Internet began to flourish with the competition of ISPs across the country.  Kyrgyzstan has a population of 5 million people; only 800,000 use the Internet.  ”We’re moving in the right direction, but we have many new challenges,” says Tattu, “The price for Internet is extremely high for most.”  Filtering policies in Kyrgyzstan are similar to those in Kazakhstan.  ”In the past couple of years, we have attempts to make Internet equal to mass media.”  The CIS countries all control the Internet in a number of ways.  ”For instance, intelligence,” says Tattu.

Sunil Abraham speaks up to respond to Rob Faris’s comments: “In America, there’s only 1% of Muslims, in India only 1% of Christians.  Yet, we have a lot of national channels with Christian preachers, but in America, there are no national channels featuring Muslims.”  He wonders if Internet filters are biased and asks: Is Internet freedom a human rights issue or a trade issue?  ”Access to knowledge is a precondition of freedom of expression,” Abraham says.  ”It’s all fine to talk about free expression in the political realm, but as soon as it influences intellectual property, we all have a problem with it.”

“In India,” Abraham says, “There is a preference for male children, and both abortion of girls and infanticide are common” (he calls it “the daughter deficit).  The Indian government has asked Google, Microsoft, etc, to block sex determination kits from advertising and related searches.  Civil society finds this hard to resist.

Abraham mentions Savita Babhi comic, one of the first websites to be filtered in India.  Rather than block porn, the government went after the comic.

Shahzad Ahmad notes that European governments have a lot of stake in the day-to-day processes; why don’t these governments raise their voices when other governments place bans on freedom of expression or activists organizing for their rights?  ”Probably it doesn’t suit them at that time,” says Ahmad, “they’re serving their own purposes.”

The censorship regime in Pakistan is bizarre; the first ever blocking incident in Pakistan was in February 2006 when Google’s Blogger platform was blocked for about two months.  ”The weird thing about is that they always block content, but there is always a political reason behind it,” says Ahmad.  When the Pakistani government blocks YouTube or another platform, it’s always political.  The Pakistani government blocks at the domain level, the IP level; a number of mechanisms in place.

Rob Faris comments: “I think that Sunil’s points are well taken; that different countries frame this issues in very different ways and by their own cultural history as well as their current legal framework and that the U.S. probably spent more time talking about the freedom of religious and political speech and less time talking about global access….I think that we need to find international accommodation in many of these areas.”

Tattu again comments: Policies regarding political content is often the only thing controlled, while the rest of the Web is more or less free.

Renata Uitz of CEU comments: There is a diversity of mechanisms as well as a variety of intents when it comes to blocking.  ”It would be nice to talk about an account of these seemingly local divergences and idiosynchrasies: how are some of the large providers trying to meet local requirements and protect themselves legally?”

“It would be interesting to see how aware various local speakers are of the international implications of the content being filtered.  Who is most vulnerable to self-censorship?” Uitz asks.

Tattu answers: “The most vulnerable are the countries that don’t have their own systems or satellites and must access the Internet through another country.”  Kyrgzstan’s Internet is filtered; citizens asked for less filtered access and we got it.  ”Countries with overlapping Internet should agree on what to filter and what not to filter.”

Abraham mentions policies such as France’s 3-strike policy.  He also discusses how global Internet memes can influence filtering: The example of a South Africa meme on Twitter called #whatdarkiesaid was deemed offensive by Black American Twitter users, who thus complained to Twitter.  The hashtag was then blocked.

Abraham also mentions Facebook’s decision to delete photographs of breastfeeding mothers; something often considered offensive in the US but commonplace elsewhere.

Abraham suggests the user communities in various countries need to speak up.

Ahmad speaks: “A major issue is hate speech.  I don’t know how to control it but it’s a big issue, particularly in Pakistan.”  He mentions the Draw Mohammed Page controversy; in this case, Facebook didn’t take down the page, when in a number of other cases it did remove pages.  Ahmad notes that in Pakistan, this is a major issue.  ”There shouldn’t be double standards; Facebook should’ve responded to this if they respond to other issues of hate speech.”

Ahmad also notes that, as a result of the Facebook page, Pakistan blocked the entire domain, as opposed to simply the page.  YouTube was later blocked as well. “Who suffered?”, he asks rhetorically: “All of the students, NGOs, and citizens who use Facebook and other social networking sites for work, school, and activism.”

Ahmad notes that double standards from companies create real problems for people on the ground.

Uitz asks: “How important do you think it is to make judges and decision-makers aware of the technical aspects of blocking content that might be considered vicious or harmful?” (note: Pakistan claimed inability to block only a Facebook page, thus overblocking the entire site; this can be a technical issue).  ”Who is best positioned to inform judges and decision-makers?”

Ahmad speaks up: On 19 May, Pakistani government issued a total ban of Facebook.  Pakistan has about 18 million Internet users.  When the case went to court, the court advised the government to take the lead from China and Saudi Arabia and implement more stringent filtering mechanisms.  The judiciary and lawyers don’t understand how such things function, says Ahmad.  Their lack of knowledge can create further problems.

Abraham: “This is large and complex problem.”  Microsoft organizes trainings for Indian judges in cyberlaw.  Large Western interests are in the business of training judges, which can be problematic.

Tattu: “We have a case where Uzbekistan asked Yahoo! to hand over user data.”  In this case, data was handed over and people were imprisoned.  If there had been a policy not to reveal data, people would be safer.  Nowadays, major players (such as Yahoo!, Yandex) need to create their own policies.  It’s difficult for such companies to understand the issues in each country; players must then set the rules.

The floor is now being opened to the audience; I’ll be tweeting over at @jilliancyork, back for another panel later.

A report from blogger Prosebeforehos indicates that US ISPs Comcast and Verizon have blocked the DNS entry for the site, however, commenter JMCesteves explains:

It seems just a problem of (now) lame DNS delegation (but I don’t know if any changes have been motivated by something else previously):
DNS service for the domain palestine-info.co.uk is delegated to ns1.palestine-info.com and ns2.palestine-info.com and from whois for palestine-info.com one can see these were supposed to be 62.149.0.82 & 62.149.0.196. The second one is not replying, and the first one doesn’t know those ‘ns1′ and ‘ns2′ names, although from it one can see that the only name server with authority for palestine-info.com is now supposed to be ns.palestine-info.com=62.149.0.82 and the one for palestine-info.co.uk is now supposed to be ns.palestine-info.co.uk=62.149.0.119. Meanwhile, previous identical results for the address of http://www.palestine-info.co.uk (also 62.149.0.119) may be cached in some name servers, explaining why some people can easily access the web while others can’t.

The normal people need to start making more noise and telling their providers that they want to look at pussy cat images (and not that other kind that comes up in Google).

While I find this particular request a bit bewildering (what’s wrong with adults looking at adult porn?), I get where Lambert is coming from: She’s looking for a solution to protect her children from vicious images online.  The problem?  Government or ISP-level filtering is not the solution.  Here’s why:

1. Filtering, no matter how layered, will not block all of its intended targets.

Let’s say you wanted to implement a comprehensive government- or ISP-level filter in a country to rid the Internet of pornography.  You would first block all known URLs dealing in pornography, simple.  You would then implement DNS filtering to block domains and sub-domains known to peddle porn.  Simple as well.  You might then implement keyword filtering for any and all keywords related to pornography, in the hopes of catching every offender.  None of these options will block all porn.  It might block a great deal of it, in English (or your country’s language), but it won’t get every site.  Nevertheless, kids won’t run the risk of stumbling upon the most obvious of porn sites, so you can turn your back for a few minutes.

2. Government level filtering is not the solution to family-level problems

I empathize with Lambert’s point of view, but I most definitely do not agree with her when she says:

I hope you tin-foil helmet wearing civil libertarians factor that in when you blaze on forums about human rights and freedom of expression. The rights of kids to be safe from sickos should always be higher on the list.

I don’t have kids.  I don’t want kids.  And while I do wish for a healthy society, implementing a filter, such as that proposed in Australia, brings in a pretty serious risk of blocking more than just porn (and again, why are we trying to prohibit adults from seeing porn?).  Fact: Every single government with a filtering mechanism in place blocks more than just porn. France blocks a couple of sites about Nazism.  The UAE blocks some social networks.  And Australia’s leaked blacklist filter included the web site of a dentist (had the list been implemented, it would’ve caused unknown damage to the dentist’s business). Government level filtering is not the solution to family-level problems.  Concerned parents should pay attention to what their kids do online, urge their schools to do the same, and if they so desire, implement filtering at the home level.

3. Filtering Child Pornography Does Not Rid the World of Child Pornography

Filtering child porn at the government level means that people in a single country cannot view it.  Even if the filter was 100% effective, however, people outside of that country would still retain viewing ability.  If we’re concerned about kids, we should be concerned about all kids, not just our own, and not just our own country’s.

The problem with filters is that they block porn, but that porn still continues to be produced, and is simply pushed underground, to be traded via P2P networks, or offline, as it was in the days before the Internet.  The better solution is going after the hosts, prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law, and working to go after the most dangerous criminals: the pornographers themselves.

We learned that the censorship imposed illegally on hundreds of Tunisian blogs and websites, both Tunisians and foreigners, was “shut off” temporarily for few hours on Monday, August 16, 2010. And although the information on this brief lifting of the censorship in the country is still contradictory – as some claimed they had no access to certain websites, while to others the same websites were accessible- it is still early to determine what really happened at the top level of Tunisian censorship, which is, remember, dark, top-secret, centralized at the highest level of the state and is never in the control of the several Tunisian ISPs, though, with an excess of zeal, they have the ability to add an extra layer of censorship to their customers.

Thus, we learned that access to Flickr, the photo sharing site (censored April 22, 2010) and video-sharing sites, blip.tv and wat.tv (respectively censored on the 22nd and 28th of April, 2010), has been restored. Ditto for many French and Arabic news websites. Curiously, during this same period, which lasted only a few hours, access to the two popular video-sharing websites, Dailymotion and Youtube (respectively censored September 3, 2007 and November 2, 2007) has not been restored. Something that raises some questions – but mostl importantly, provides some answers – about the nature of Tunisia’s secretive censorship infrastructure.

During this period, which lasted only a few hours, prompting hope amongst Internet users in Tunisia, many have raised the question of why YouTube and Dailymotion have remained inaccessible while other social websites like Flickr, became available from Tunisia. Why was the French Wikipedia page of Ben Ali inaccessible while the websites of Tunisian opposition parties, now censored, became available? Why was the blog Nawaat accessible while Nawaat’s Twitter page remained barred?

To understand what really happened, and then ascertain if any change in strategy at the organ level of censorship occurred, it is useful to clarify first the filtering techniques applied in Tunisia.

We will summarize the four Tunisian censorship processes. These four techniques have been adopted by the Tunisian censors at various times in the history of Tunisian Net, then gradually combined to form one of the most repressive online censorship machine.

1. Selective blocking by URL: such as is the case of Wikipedia. Indeed, rather than blocking the entire online encyclopedia, the censors selectively block the most “offensive” pages. This is why the French Wikipedia page on Ben Ali or the page relating to the practice of censorship in Tunisia remain inaccessible. Same for the Google video. If the majority of videos are still available, some, however, are blocked.
2. DNS Filtering: At the second stop, the Tunisian censors block the site by banning the domain and subdomain attached to it. This is the method most commonly used, especially to ban Tunisian bloggers emitting unpleasant opinions […] A situation that caused a cat-and-mouse game between bloggers and the censor through the successive creation of new sub-domains, which soon subsequently, are added the the block list.
3. IP Filtering: With the step above, the total blockage of the IP address of the site in question, whether or not the subdomain is used; this is the case of youtube.com, dailymotion.com and many others.
4. Keyword Filtering: Finally, we practice, for the most recalcitrant, a radical blocking through both, DNS and Keyword Filtering that block access to any URL path containing a specific keyword. This is the case with Tunisnews.net or Nawaat.org. With the latter procedure, any URL containing the string “Nawaat”, regardless of the domain, is systematically blocked. With this technique, the censors are trying to block every scrap of information on the keyword level that could appear on the screen of Tunisian Internet users.
   The Keyword Filtering when applied for example on the “Nawaat” string in any URLs results in a 404 page. Which practically means that @nawaat Twitter account is automatically blocked, as is the Nawaat Facebook account and all Google cache and search result pages that contain “nawaat” in their URL paths. […] In addition, the keyword in the URL blocks any image related to “Nawaat“, including those hosted on Google’s image search servers. Similarly, the string “Tunisnews” produces the same effects. Note that Keyword Filtering can be applied to block any content containing that specific string on any domain or subdomain.

So, in order to answer the questions raised above, let’s now recall the following facts that occurred during that brief lifting of the censorship in Tunisia, on monday, August 16th, 2010:

1. All sites censored by DNS filtering, including Flickr, were temporarily unblocked.
2. Both video-sharing websites, YouTube and Dailymotion, which are blocked in Tunisia by DNS and IP filtering, were not unblocked.
3. Ben Ali’s page on Wikipedia, which is censored by selective URL filtering, has not been unblocked.
4. Nawaat’s page on Twitter, which is subjected to a keyword Filtering, was also not available during the brief “lifting” of censorship.

This very revealing incident of the brief lifting of censorship has offered us, and for the first time, some insights about the extraordinary sophistication of the technical infrastructure of filtering in Tunisia. Thus, if the temporary “lifting” was a matter of a maintenance procedure, this leads us to note that there are at least two independent sub-facilities: one dedicated to DNS level filtering, and the second dedicated to keywords and IP filtering (and perhaps there is a third layer specially dedicated to the IP filtering). Thus, if a layer of these filters fails or is deactivated for some reason, such as maintenance or a server update, the independent secon–and possibly third–layers continue to operate.

Consequently, we can assume that this latest incident, the temporary “lifting” of censorship, has affected only one layer of the Tunisian censorship machine, the one responsible for the DNS filtering. This is what was observed on Monday. If we take the example of Nawaat (one of the few Tunisian sites censored by DNS and keyword filtering), we discovered that the DNS filtering was not working during that period, but during the same time, the keyword filtering within the URL was functioning efficiently. Thus, during this brief “lifting” of censorship, nawaat.org was accessible at the domain name level, but any URLs carrying the string “nawaat” were blocked (see below screenshots of the test on nawaat.org from Tunisia):

Click to enlarge

Now the other question that may arise, and that is important, is to know why the DNS filtering system stopped working for several hours while the other one or two layer(s) continued to ban “normally” all sites covered by IP, URL and keywords filtering?

It is possible that the Tunisian censors are currently improving their control over the network infrastructure for a better monitoring of “sensitive” topics, or even a more rigorous analysis of data packets traveling between the Tunisian network and the international one. A sophistication of the infrastructure could be very useful for mass logging and control of the online activities of users in Tunisia. With over one million and a half Tunisians on Facebook, hundreds of blogs (which are increasingly critical), more than a hundred of which are already censored, and a rather politicized stream of Tunisians on Twitter and other social web sites, the Tunisian regime has no choice but to increase its control over the network through a sophistication à la chinoise of its filtering and tracing infrastructure. Still, if there was an update of the infrastructure, such as another notch of sophistication, do not hesitate to all be vigilant and attentive to the processes used.

It is also probable that this was a “simple” update server; and rather than unblocking all of the traffic, the censor has maintained a layer or layers of URL, keywords and IP filtering while unblocking the other layer, that of DNS blocking. Once the update or change to the server made, everything was back to “normal”.

Other extrapolations, such as the Forum on Democracy and Trade Union Policy, could explain the temporary lifting of censorship:

It seems that international delegation is visiting our country to discuss freedom of the press and the veracity of allegations of civil society activists on Internet censorship …. we therefore expect that the lifting of censorship is temporary just long enough to fool the delegation mentioned above.

It is indeed possible, but unlikely for the following reason: in some circumstances, the Tunisian censors have unblocked sites to fool the international community. This happened during the WSIS and in certain international events in Tunisia. But each time, this was limited to certain sites such as those of political parties currently censored. Thus, the temporary lifting has never been as systematic as we experienced on monday, but rather on a site by site basis. In any event, during the interlude of “freedom”, neither the blog Nawaat nor Tunisnews have escaped the vile censorship filters.

Obviously all of these assumptions are mere speculations. This is an effort on our part to try to better understand one of the most secretive system of repression in Tunisia and to help demystify its processes. And obviously, we invite anyone with further information to make them public, and a fortiori, it may be that former collaborators of this repressive system finally reveal what can help Tunisia to get rid of this evil.

It is only a matter of time and, sooner or later, revelations, from those who are now involved in the censorship taking place, will occur. Also, remember our email Nawaat [@] gmail [dot] com. Our site is always open to any collaborator. It goes without saying that these collaborators have the absolute assurance about the confidentiality of their identity.

Written jointly by Sami Ben Gharbia and Astrubal. Translated from french by Jillian C. York .

Wong decided that Google, by using a technique called I.P. blocking, would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. For a time, her solution seemed to satisfy the Turkish judges, who restored YouTube access.

This morning, reports have emerged from Israel suggesting that the same is happening there. A video, released yesterday and entitled “Video Killed Israeli PR”, has been reported inaccessible by Israelis all morning:

A closer look determines that the video, which parodies Israel’s public relations, is perfectly accessible in the United States, and elsewhere…except in Israel. Ali Abunimah, who caught the story early on, writes:

After receiving an initial report that the video could not be viewed in Israel, I asked a contact there to check and he replied that when he attempted to view it on YouTube: “This video is not available in your country due to terms of use violation.” The screenshot below sent by http://twitter.com/AbuKedem shows what happens when someone in Israel tries to view the video:

Though no word from YouTube just yet (a few folks have sent out e-mails), it seems very likely that YouTube has blocked the video within Israel at the request of the Israeli government. It is unclear whether or not the video violates local laws.

Rarely do I cross-post from elsewhere onto my own blog, however, this warrants widespread discussion.  From the

Whilst attending the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, the OpenNet Initiative (along with partners of ONI Asia) gathered to present their upcoming book, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. A poster advertising the book was hung for the reception; UN security officials requested removal of the poster, which contained mention of China’s “Great Firewall.” When ONI officials refused to remove the poster, UN security bundled up the poster and took it away.

The sentence in question? “The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous ‘Great Firewall of China’ is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.”

OpenNet Initiative officials were told that the banner had to be removed because of its reference to China, a request repeated on several occasions, and in front of a number of witnesses, including the UN Special Rapporteur For Human Rights. Earlier, those same officials had asked ONI to stop circulating an invite to the event because it contained a mention of Tibet.

ONI officials requested to see governing rules pertaining to the act, however, UN security refused to provide them, with mention given to “objections of a member state.”

The incident has been covered in the major news media, most notably by the BBC, which quoted ONI Principal Investigator Ron Deibert as saying “If we are not allowed to discuss topics such as internet censorship, surveillance and privacy at a forum on internet governance, then what is the point of the IGF?” Deibert’s web site contains further information and will be updated to reflect new developments.

Access Controlled is slated for release in early 2010. Our previous volume, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering is available on Amazon.com and other booksellers; each chapter is also available individually online.

Don’t get it? Check out the video, subtitled in eight languages (so far) and narrated by Professor Jonathan Zittrain (who’s also the brains behind the idea).