Google argues against censorship calls

Πηγή: FT
By Maija Palmer
March 28 2012

Google has rejected calls from UK politicians to put in place additional measures to stop people breaking Ryan Giggs-style privacy injunctions online, saying it would be impossible to censor material on the web effectively.

“Requiring search engines to screen the content of their web pages would be like asking phone companies to listen in on every call made across their networks for potentially suspicious activity,” Google said on Tuesday. “Google already remove specific pages deemed unlawful by the courts. We have a number of simple tools anyone can use to report such content, which we then remove from our index.”

Twitter similarly said it would continue to operate its current system, under which it evaluates legal requests to remove material on a case-by-case basis. Facebook said it was still reviewing a report from UK politicians that had called for a change in internet companies’ behaviour.

A committee of MPs on Tuesday called for internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to take practical steps to stop people from using the internet to find out information that had been protected by court orders. The joint committee on privacy and injunctions said that if the companies failed to do this, laws should be developed to force them to do so.

“Google and other search engines should take steps to ensure that their websites are not used as vehicles to breach the law and should actively develop and use such technology,” the report said. “We recommend that if legislation is necessary to require them to do so it should be introduced.”

The issue of privacy injunctions hit the spotlight last summer, when it emerged that Giggs, the Manchester United footballer, had taken out a super-injunction to prevent the newspapers from reporting allegations he had an extramarital affair with Imogen Thomas, a model. However, details of the injunction and the alleged affair were widely reported on social networking sites, such as Twitter, eventually leading John Hemmings, a Liberal Democrat MP, to name Giggs in Parliament.

Max Mosley, the former head of Formula One, has also sued Google over the internet company’s refusal to remove links to a sex video, in which he featured, from its search results.

These proceedings, in France and Germany, continue.

The events sparked an extensive debate over privacy and injunctions, and prompted David Cameron, prime minister, to set up a committee to investigate free speech and privacy.

The committee said on Tuesday that new privacy laws were not necessary, but called for an enhanced press regulator, with powers to fine newspapers. It also singled out internet companies for criticism.

Google has argued that it would be difficult to put in place a mechanism to identify banned pictures or words, because such as system would not understand context.

However, the committee said Google’s objections to putting a system in place were “totally unconvincing”.

The government must to respond to a select committee report within 60 days of publication and publish its response. However, it is not obliged to take the matter further or enact legislation.

AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook

Πηγή: AP
By KIMBERLY DOZIER

Nov 4 2011

McLEAN, Va. (AP) -- In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets - up to 5 million a day.

At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms - anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. But its several hundred analysts - the actual number is classified - track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."

Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open source officer," Naquin said.

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said.

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by languages. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with speakers of Arabic and Turkic tweets charging that Obama favored Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab.

In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.

The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.

"We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas they are monitoring has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in areas like Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country."

Sites like Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.

As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.

The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the rioting as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighborhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.

The army moved in, and traditional media reporting slowed to a trickle as local reporters were either trapped or cowed by government forces.

"But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook," the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations. The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.

"That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on," he said.

Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA's open source analysis throughout the crisis.

Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media During the Arab Spring?

Πηγή: Pitpi
Sep 11 2011


After analyzing over 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a new study finds that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. Conversations about revolution often preceded major events on the ground, and social media carried inspiring stories of protest across international borders.

Focused mainly on Tunisia and Egypt, this research included creating a unique database of information collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The research also included creating maps of important Egyptian political Websites, examining political conversations in the Tunisian blogosphere, analyzing more than 3 million Tweets based on key-words used, and tracking which countries thousands of individuals Tweeted from during the revolutions. The result is that for the first time we have evidence confirming social media’s critical role in the Arab Spring.

The contributors include Philip Howard, Muzammil Hussain, Will Mari, and Marwa Mazaid at the University of Washington, Deen Freelon at American University, and Aiden Duffy at Amazon Web Services.

Opening Closed Regimes

Study confirms social media’s revolutionary role in Arab Spring

Πηγή: Digital Trends
By Andrew Couts
Sep. 13 2011


A study from the University of Washington shows that social media, like Twitter and Facebook, did, indeed, play a major role in sparking the Arab Spring revolutions that engulfed the Middle East and Northern Africa this year.

Social media really did play an instrumental role in the wave of “Arab Spring” revolutions that swept across parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa earlier this year, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Washington sifted through more than 3 million tweets, countless hours of YouTube videos and gigabytes of blogs to find out whether the Internet, and social media services like Twitter and Facebook really played the revolutionary role many claimed they did.

According to the study, online chatter about revolution often began just before actual revolutions took place. And social media also served as an outlet for citizens of the region to tell their stories of revolution, which played an inspirational role for neighboring countries, the study found.

“Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising,” said Philip Howard, a University of Washington communications professor and the study’s leader. “People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”

In Egypt, where the Arab Spring blossomed, Howard and his team found that the number of tweets that mentioned revolution in that country exploded from 2,300 per day to more than 230,000 per day. The number of videos, Facebook updates and blog posts about government opposition also rose dramatically.

Because Twitter users can send updates from any mobile phone, Howard says that platform offers the “clearest evidence of where individuals engaging in democratic conversations were located during the revolutions,” since many people in the region do not have standard Internet access, but most do have a cellphone.

The study also found that government efforts to cut off access to Internet and cell phone service likely caused an increase in activism, especially in Egypt where access was shut down for five daysbefore being restored.

“Recent events show us that the public sense of shared grievance and potential for change can develop rapidly,” said Howard. “These dictators for a long time had many political enemies, but they were fragmented. So opponents used social media to identify goals, build solidarity and organize demonstrations.”

More recently, social media helped fuel days of riots in London and elsewhere in the UK. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded by saying that citizens who organize uprisings on social networks should be banned from accessing them — a suggestion that evoked ridicule from the notoriously authoritarian Iranian government. That idea was later discarded following a meeting between the British government, Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry.

The Spy Who Tweeted Me: Intelligence Community Wants to Monitor Social Media

Πηγή: Wired
By Sharon Weinberger
September 7, 2011


A research arm of the intelligence community wants to sweep up public data on everything from Twitter to public webcams in the hopes of predicting the future.

The project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa, a relatively new part of the spy community that’s supposed to help investigate breakthrough technologies. While other projects exist for predicting political events, the Open Source Indicators program would be perhaps the first that mines data from social media websites.

The idea is to use automated analysis to sift through the deluge of publicly available data to help predict significant societal events, like a popular revolution. The nascent project, called “Open Source Indicators,” is just the latest move by the national security community to come to grips with the flood of information now available on social media. As Danger Room’s Lena Groeger has reported, it’s also intended to predict natural disasters or economic disruptions.

The science underlying the project is the notion that early indicators of major social upheavals might be hidden in plain, socially-networked sight. “Some of these changes may be indirectly observable from publicly available data, such as web search queries, blogs, micro-blogs, internet traffic, financial markets, traffic webcams, Wikipedia edits, and many others,” the announcement, published August 25, says. “Published research has found that some of these data sources are individually useful in the early detection of events such as disease outbreaks, political crises, and macroeconomic trends.”

Indeed, social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, garnered major attention during recent events like the Arab Spring, and have been credited with helping to organize protesters and even foment revolution. Authoritarian governments trying to hold on to power noted the trend, and attempted at times to shut down access to those sites — and occasionally the Internet as a whole — in the hopes of stymieing efforts to organize protests.

The idea of the U.S. intelligence community culling data from social media is still a new one, and is likely to raise a number of questions. For example: what constitutes public data?

Iarpa, for its part, defines public data as “lawfully obtained data available to any member of the general public, to include by purchase, subscription or registration.” That raises its own host of questions, like whether the intelligence community could register a fake profile on Facebook, in order to “friend” people and obtain more information.

For those who fear the all-seeing surveillance state, Iarpa says there are some things the program won’t do. It won’t be used to predict events in the United States, for instance. Nor will it be used to track specific individuals.

Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry to attend riot summit

More than 1,400 people have appeared in court in connection with the riots

Πηγή: BBC

25 August 2011

Home Secretary Theresa May will meet senior police officers and executives from the major social networks later to discuss this month's riots in England.

Representatives from Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry are expected to attend the meeting, which will look at how to stop people plotting violence online.

The networks were criticised during the riots after it emerged they may have been used to plan some of the disorder.

The prime minister has said police may need extra powers to curb their use.

David Cameron also said the government would look at limiting access to such services during any future disorder.

But a Home Office source said there was "no suggestion" that any of the sites would be closed down.

Networks such as Blackberry Messenger - a service which allows free-of-charge real-time messages - were said to have enabled looters to organise their movements during the riots, as well as inciting violence in some cases.

Last week, Facebook and the owner of Blackberry, Research in Motion (RIM), both said they welcomed the opportunity to discuss the matter with Mrs May. Twitter has yet to comment.'Whether and how'

Crime and Security Minister James Brokenshire and Lynne Owens, assistant commissioner of central operations at the Metropolitan Police, will also be at the meeting - as will a member of the National Security Council.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the talks would explore "whether and how we should be able to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said one social media executive had told him the networks were keen to co-operate but that the idea of trying to block communications was "ludicrous" and had not been thought through.

Our correspondent said it was unclear whether the hour-long meeting would produce any major new policies.

Facebook says it has already prioritised a review of content that is "egregious during sensitive times like the UK riots" with the hope of being able to take down such material more swiftly.

A number of people have appeared in court in recent weeks for organising or attempting to organise disorder on social networks.

Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw were jailed for four years for incitement on Facebook

Jordan Blackshaw, 21, from Marston, Cheshire, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, Cheshire, were jailed for four years for online incitement.

Blackshaw had created a Facebook event entitled "Smash Down Northwich Town" while Sutcliffe-Keenan set up a Facebook page called "Let's Have a Riot in Latchford". Both have said they will appeal.

Meanwhile, 21-year-old David Glyn Jones, from Bangor, north Wales, was jailed for four months after telling friends "Let's start Bangor riots" in a post that appeared on Facebook for 20 minutes.

And Johnny Melfah, 16, from Droitwich, Worcestershire, became the first juvenile to have his anonymity lifted in a riot-related case for inciting thefts and criminal damage on the site. He will be sentenced next month.Plotting violence

In the aftermath of the riots, which spread across England's towns and cities two weeks ago, Mr Cameron said the government might look at disconnecting some online and telecommunications services if similar circumstances arose in the future.

"We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," he told MPs during an emergency session of Parliament.

Tim Godwin, the Met police's acting commissioner, also said last week that he considered requesting authority to switch off Twitter during the riots.

However, he conceded that the legality of such a move was "very questionable" and that the service was a valuable intelligence asset.

Meanwhile, Guardian analysis of more than 2.5 million riot-related tweets, sent between 6 August and 17 August, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting, including organising the street clean-up.

The newspaper found the timing of the messages posted "questioned the assumption" that Twitter was used to incite the violence in advance of it breaking out in Tottenham on 6 August.

Currently, communications networks that operate in the UK can be compelled to hand over individuals' personal messages if police are able to show that they relate to criminal behaviour.

The rules gathering such queries are outlined in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

'Twitter and BBM gave us riot intelligence - we decided against pulling plug': Met Police

Social media monitoring helped the police thwart an attack on the Olympic ParkPhoto: The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games

Πηγή: silicon
By Jo Best

16 August 2011

Despite accusations that social services such as BBM and Twitter were responsible for facilitating last week's UK riots, senior police figures have revealed they did not request that the services be switched off.

Prime Minister David Cameron last week said the government is examining whether to stop individuals using social media if they are plotting violence or crime.

However, the Metropolitan Police's acting deputy commissioner Tim Godwin told the Home Affairs Committee today that while the Met did mull over getting social networks temporarily closed down during the riots, it backed away from such a plan, citing questions over legality.

"[Switching off the likes of BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter] has been a matter of negotiation and debate. We did contemplate - and I contemplated - seeking the authorities to switch it off," Godwin said.

"The legality of that is very questionable and additionally it is also a very useful intelligence asset. We did not request that that was turned off but it is something we are pursuing as part of our investigative strategy," he added.

The Met's top brass also told the committee how BBM and Twitter had proved valuable for gathering intelligence during the disturbances.

"We used Twitter a lot and other social media sites [during the riots]," said Godwin, adding that assistant Met Police commissioner Lynne Owens had encouraged the force to make better use of Twitter and other social media services after the student tuition fee protests last year.

Owens - also at the committee hearing - said that using intelligence gathered through BBM and Twitter, the force discovered that Westfield shopping centres, Oxford Street and the Olympic site were to be targeted by rioters and was able to prevent any attacks.

"We were able to secure all those places and indeed there was no damage at any of them. We were able to respond because of our live-time monitoring of Twitter and BBM," she said.

However, both Godwin and Owens highlighted that despite the potential of Twitter and BBM as sources of police intelligence, separating the services' wheat from its chaff is an ongoing challenge for the Met.

"I think one of the challenges going forward is how we resource responding to [social media] in live time because one of the things we did see is huge amounts of - and I think the word intelligence is overused, I would use the word chitter-chatter - across BBM and across Twitter. Actually our capacity throughout this operation until very recently to keep up with the information on there was overwhelm[ed]," Owens told the committee.

Godwin added: "The only problem with it is, it is a massive amount of information that you need to synthesise and some of it is quite obviously wrong and rather silly."

The police are already working with RIM, Twitter and other social media companies over the riots, according to Godwin, who said he could not provide any details of what the collaboration entailed as it is "an investigative strategy".

If We’re Turning Off Social Media, I Want News Channels Shut Down, Too

Πηγή: Wired

By Duncan Geere

August 13, 2011

Amidst widespread calls from MPs, David Cameron has pledged to investigate the possibility of turning off social networks during times of crisis, lumping Britain in with some rather unsavory company.

The U.K. has long criticized countries like China, Iran and Libya for censoring the web and clamping down on dissent, which appears incredibly hypocritical to the rest of the world if he then proceeds to do the same thing on his own turf. Opinion pieces in international newspapers have already started popping up with headlines like “what goes around, comes around.”

The Telegraph quotes one commentator in China’s official Communist Party mouthpiece — People’s Daily — going even further. The commentator says “The West have been talking about supporting internet freedom, and oppose other countries’ government to control this kind of websites, now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit [of their complacency] and they can’t complain about it.”

Chief among the claims by those who want to see more controls on freedom of speech on the web is that social networks amplify panic, spread misinformation and cause already-stretched police communications channels to be overloaded by people worried about some rumor they’ve read online.
Why aren’t politicians demanding that news channels, with their greater reach and potential to panic the public, be turned off during exceptional circumstances, too? After all, it’s all for the safety of the public. Right?

That might be a valid complaint, and even the most synergistic of social media gurus would have to admit — between creating engaging integrated solutions, no doubt — that Twitter wasn’t exactly a paragon of truth and accuracy during the riots, but you can hardly pin the blame solely on social media when rolling news channels like BBC News 24 and Sky News are running looped footage of burning buildings, overlaid with interviews with those who’d lost property and possessions in the looting. It might have been passed through an editorial filter, but continually presenting the worst of the footage creates a very skewed representation of reality.

Hitwise reckons that 3.4 million people in the U.K. visited Twitter’s homepage on Aug. 9, the day with the most hype around the riots, compared with numbers from Sky News and BBC News 24 of 9.2 million and 13.1 million, respectively. With so much of a greater a reach, clearly the scaremongering potential of traditional media is far higher than that of social networks. We’ve seen that in the past, with innocent people targeted by vigilante mobs after theNews of the World ran a campaign to “name and shame” paedophiles.

On the flip side, social networks allow for others to debunk claims, rapidly establishing what the facts about a situation are with thousands of eyes on the ground. One cyclist in Bristol was even taking requests from Twitter to go around, fact-checking whether buildings were in fact damaged or not. It’s hard for traditional news infrastructure to cope with situations where violence is springing up in multiple locations simultaneously, but it’s trivial to set up filters for social media that cut through the rumour to deliver eyewitness accounts. Filtering out any tweet with the word “apparently” in would be a good start.

So if we’re turning off social media for “safety”, why aren’t we shutting down television networks at the same time? Why aren’t politicians demanding that news channels, with their greater reach and potential to panic the public, be turned off during exceptional circumstances, too? After all, it’s all for the safety of the public. Right?

Cheshire men jailed for four years for inciting riots

The men were jailed at Chester Crown Court

Πηγή: BBC

16 August 2011

Two men from Cheshire have been jailed for four years each for using Facebook to incite disorder during riots in England last week.

Jordan Blackshaw, 21, of Vale Road, Marston and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, of Richmond Avenue, Warrington, were jailed at Chester Crown Court.

The Recorder of Chester, Judge Elgan Edwards praised the swift actions of Cheshire Police.

He said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent to others.

Both men pleaded guilty under sections 44 and 46 of the Serious Crime Act to intentionally encouraging another to assist the commission of an indictable offence.

Martin McRobb, from the Merseyside and Cheshire Crown Prosecution Service, said: "They both used Facebook to organise and orchestrate serious disorder at a time when such incidents were taking place in other parts of the country.

"Both defendants, in Northwich and Warrington respectively, sought to gain widespread support in order to replicate similar criminality.'Abused technology'

"While the judge heard the two defendants were previously of good character, they admitted committing very serious offences that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years."

Assistant Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, Phil Thompson, said: "From the offset Cheshire Constabulary adopted a robust policing approach using the information coming into the organisation to move quickly and effectively against any person whose behaviour was likely to encourage criminality.

"Officers took swift action against those people who have been using Facebook and other social media sites to incite disorder.

"The sentences passed down today recognise how technology can be abused to incite criminal activity and sends a strong message to potential troublemakers about the extent to which ordinary people value safety and order in their lives and their communities.

"Anyone who seeks to undermine that will face the full force of the law."

Twitter unmasks anonymous British user in landmark legal battle

Twitter's actions have prompted concerns over free speech on the internet. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle / Rex Features

Πηγή: The Guardian

California court forces site to reveal personal details of user accused of libelling local authority in north-east England

By Nigel Green and Josh Halliday

Sunday 29 May 2011 13.17 BST

Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of a British user in a libel battle that could have huge implications for free speech on the web.

The social network has passed the name, email address and telephone number of a south Tyneside councillor accused of libelling the local authority via a series of anonymous Twitter accounts. South Tyneside council took the legal fight to the superior court of California, which ordered Twitter, based in San Francisco, to hand over the user's private details.

It is believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users and comes amid a huge row over privacy and free speech online.

Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer named as being the plaintiff in a gagging order preventing reporting of an alleged affair with a reality TV model, is separately attempting to unmask Twitter users accused of revealing details of the privacy injunction.

However, Giggs brought the lawsuit at the high court in London and the move to use California courts is likely to be seen as a landmark moment in the internet privacy battle.