From healthcare to public debt, pundits are attacking President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address from almost every conceivable angle.
When it comes to Obama transparency, Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kurt Opsahl points out that the chief executive told the American public one thing Wednesday night and a federal appeals court another just a few weeks ago.
The issue at hand surrounds lobbying. “It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress,” the president said during his televised address.
But, before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month, the Justice Department argued that it should not have to disclose the names of telecommunication industry lobbyists. Those companies successfully lobbied Congress and President George W. Bush in 2008 to approve legislation that provided their companies with retroactive immunity to lawsuits accusing them of funneling, without warrants, all domestic electronic communications to the National Security Agency.
That legislation killed the EFF’s case against the telecommunication companies. The EFF then sued the government, seeking the lobbyists’ identities. A California federal judge agreed, and then the Obama administration appealed.
“There is no public interest in the compelled disclosure of the representatives’ identities” (.pdf), the administration told the federal appeals court in San Francisco Dec. 14.
Opsahl points out that there is no national security concern with disclosing the information.
“What they want to hide will not give some advantage to our adversaries,” Opsahl said in a telephone interview. “They want to protect the telecoms and themselves from the embarrassment to be involved in lobbying to deny millions of Americans their day in court.”
It remains to be seen, Opsahl added, “whether the administration will file another paper with the court clarifying that their position has changed.”
In case you forgot, Obama, as a senator from Illinois, voted for the immunity bill that President George W. Bush signed.
Photo: Tim Sloan/AP
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Critical infrastructure systems around the world are the targets of repeated cyberattacks, according to a new global survey of technology executives in these industries. They believe some of the attacks are coming not just from individual cybercriminals but terrorists and foreign nation states.
The United States and China are believed to be the most likely countries to conduct a cyberattack against the critical infrastructure of another nation, according to the respondents.
Companies and agencies operating in the banking and finance sectors, energy and natural resources, telecommunications and internet service providers, transportation and mass transit, chemical production and storage, food distribution and government services are considered critical infrastructure companies.
The attacks that are occurring include massive denial of service attacks, stealthy efforts to penetrate networks undetected, DNS poisoning, SQL injection attacks and malware infections. The aims of the attacks vary from shutting down services or operations to theft of services and data or extortion attempts.
Among the more serious findings in the report is that some of the most sensitive critical infrastructure entities around the world, such as those for energy and natural-resource industries (such as water and sewage plants), are some of the least secure.
For example, 80 percent of executives working for entities that use SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) or Industrial Control Systems say their systems are connected to the internet or some other IP network, putting them at possible risk of intrusion. Executives at water and sewage facilities also reported having the lowest level of security measures in place.
About 55 percent of respondents in the energy and power and the oil and gas sectors reported that the attackers most often targeted the SCADA or other operational control systems, although the survey offers no indication of how successful these attacks were.
Only 57 percent of respondents across all sectors said their organization installed security patches and updated software on a regular schedule.
The report, “In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyberwar,” was commissioned by anti-virus firm McAfee and coordinated by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. It was led by Stewart Baker, a visiting fellow with CSIS and former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Security during the last Bush administration. Baker was also general counsel for the National Security Agency in 1992 to 1994.
The survey involved 600 IT and security executives in critical infrastructure industries in 14 countries, including financial, transportation and mass transit, energy and natural resources, telecoms and ISPs. The executives surveyed have responsibilities in information technology, security and operational control systems.
The release of the report was timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum being held through the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, and follows on the heels of a serious and coordinated cyberattack conducted against Google, Adobe and other U.S. companies in the finance, technology and defense industries.
The report is believed to be the first of its kind to examine the security of critical infrastructures around the world, although it has a number of shortcomings that the coordinators don’t address. Many of the findings, for example, are provided without elaboration, making it difficult to know what the survey participants meant in their responses.
For example, the report indicates that large-scale DDoS attacks had a particularly severe effect in the energy and power and water and sewage sectors, but doesn’t elaborate on what consequences were suffered as a result of these attacks.
Also, the report states that attacks are “often from high-level adversaries like foreign nation-states” but doesn’t indicate how this is known when attribution in cyberspace is often impossible to determine.
About 75 percent of executives in China believe foreign governments have been involved in cyberattacks against critical infrastructure in that country, while 60 percent in the U.S. believe this is the case.
In a conference call, the organizers of the survey acknowledged that respondents who indicated that foreign-nation states were behind attacks were not asked how they knew attacks against them came from nation states. The organizers said the respondents were likely basing their responses simply on perceptions gained from news reports rather than firsthand knowledge of the source of attacks.
More than half of executives surveyed (54 percent) said they suffered large-scale DDoS attacks and stealthy infiltration attacks by high level adversaries, such as organized crime, terrorists or nation-state actors.
Nearly 30 percent of those surveyed reported suffering large-scale DDoS attacks multiple times each month, with about 64 percent saying the attacks impacted their operations in some way, such as interfering with website operations, e-mail servers or phone systems.
Of those that suffered sensitive data leaks and loss from network intrusions, 15 percent said the impact was serious, while 4 percent said it was critical.
The most common target in such attacks was financial information, with a little more than half reporting that this was the aim of intruders. The least common target was password and login information, which was targeted in only 21 percent of attacks. Although the report doesn’t note this, in order to get to financial data, intruders often obtain password and login credentials at some point in their intrusion. So while the password and login may not be the final target, it is often a means to the target.
One in five respondents said they were the victim of extortion through a cyberattack or threatened cyberattack within the last two years. Extortion was most common in India, the Middle East, China and France and rarest in the U.S. and U.K.
Again, the survey provides little elaboration other than to point to now disputed media reports attributing power outages in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 to hackers.
These incidents were reported last year by 60 Minutes. The 60 Minutes story, however, has been harshly criticized privately by a number of the show’s own sources, who say it was based on rumor, and has been denied by the Brazilian government. Brazil released a report attributing the outage in 2007 to soot-covered insulators.
The 60 Minutes story was based in part by information from CSIS’ own James Lewis, a senior fellow in its technology and public policy program. So, citing disputed media reports to support extortion claims when those media reports were in part the result of disputed information provided by CSIS is a curious move.
With regard to securing against attack, critical infrastructure entities in China have the highest rate of adopting strong security measures such as encryption, user authentication and strict security polices. About 62 percent of Chinese executives said such measures were in place, while only 53 percent in the U.S. indicated this.
The adoption of strong security measures, however, didn’t necessarily translate to better protection from high-level attacks. For example, although China has a high adoption rate for security technologies and policies, it “is not notably free from high-level attacks,” says the report.
Among the 600 respondents to the survey, 100 are based in the United States; there are 50 respondents each in Japan, China, Germany, France, the U.K. and Italy; another 30 each are in Russia, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and India; and 20 are in Saudi Arabia. The sectors most represented in the survey are the banking and finance sector and government services. Each of these sectors had 145 respondents. The oil and gas, energy and power, transportation and mass-transit, and
telecommunications sectors had representatives ranging from 59 to 82 respondents. Only 23 respondents come from the water and sewage sector.
Chart above courtesy of CSIS
A data breach at the National Archives and Records Administration is more serious than previously believed. It involved sensitive personal information of 250,000 Clinton administration staff members, job applicants and White House visitors, as well as the Social Security number of at least one daughter of former Vice President Al Gore.
The data, which included more than 100,000 Social Security numbers, was stored on a computer hard drive that the NARA discovered missing last April from a data processing room in Maryland. It’s unknown if the drive was lost or stolen.
Last month, the NARA sent out about 150,00 letters to former Clinton staff members and White House visitors warning them that their information was involved in the breach, putting them at risk for identity theft. The agency said it is still identifying potential victims and will send more letters as it does.
Earlier this year, the NARA had sent out only about 26,000 letters to people affected by the breach. It didn’t know at the time how many other potential victims it might uncover.
The NARA, which has been under fire for the breach, has offered one year of free credit monitoring, identify theft insurance and fraud resolution assistance to those affected by the breach. It has also offered a $50,000 reward for the return of the external hard drive.
The hard drive was part of a collection of electronic storage tapes with data from computers belonging to former employees of the Clinton administration, according to news reports. Data for Executive Office staff was on the drive, as well as Secret Service and White House operating procedures, event logs, social-gathering logs and political records.
Former Vice President Al Gore has three daughters, Karenna, Kristin and Sarah. Fox News reports that the Social Security number of at least one of the daughters was on the missing hard drive, but didn’t indicate which daughter.
The NARA was harshly criticized for another potential data breach it may have suffered involving the records of 70 million U.S. military veteran. The records were on a defective hard drive that the agency sent to the drive vendor for repair. The agency failed to delete data on the drive before sending it to the vendor. When the vendor determined the drive couldn’t be repaired, it passed the drive to another company for recycling.
Photo courtesy of National Archives
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The recording industry is demanding Jammie Thomas-Rasset pay $25,000 to settle out of court the nation’s first file sharing case against an individual to have gone to trial –- a settlement offer the Minnesota mother of four is rejecting, lawyers in the case said Wednesday.
The development came days after the federal judge in the case reduced to $54,000 a jury’s June finding that Thomas-Rasset must pay $1.92 million for file sharing 24 songs on Kazaa. Following Friday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, the Recording Industry Association of America proposed that Thomas-Rasset pay $25,000 to close the case.
“She is rejecting it,” Joe Sibley, one of Thomas-Rasset’s lawyers, said in a telephone interview. “I think it proves our point. They want to use this case as a bogeyman to scare people into doing what they want, to pay exorbitant damages.”
The rejection means there could be a new jury trial solely on the amount of damages the woman must pay, or an appellate court might step in and review Davis’ head-spinning Friday ruling. It also leaves the door open for Thomas-Rasset to challenge the constitutionality of the reduced award, which Sibley maintains is still excessive.
“It is a shame that Ms. Thomas-Rasset continues to deny any responsibility for her actions rather than accept a reasonable settlement offer (.pdf) and put this case behind her,” Cara Duckworth, an RIAA spokeswoman said via e-mail.
The Copyright Act allows damages of up to $150,000 per track. A Minnesota jury dinged Thomas-Rasset $80,000 a song. Davis, the judge who presided over the trial in Duluth, Minnesota, lowered it to $2,250 per song — three times the $750 minimum. The judge declared the $1.92 million verdict “shocking” and said damage awards “must bear some relation to actual damages.”
Judge Davis declined to rule on Sibley’s position that the Copyright Act in the file sharing context was unconstitutional. Instead, the judge exercised what is called remittitur. That’s when a judge reduces a jury’s damages award upon a finding that there was no rational basis for the jury to have reached its decision.
Davis’ decision was the first time a judge has reduced the amount of damages in a Copyright Act case.
Still, the legal jockeying may not have much application in the real world.
The RIAA is winding down its six-year-old lawsuit campaign and instead is working with other rights holders and internet service providers to adopt a program to discontinue internet access of online copyright scofflaws. The only other file sharing case to have gone to trial resulted in a Boston jury in July awarding the RIAA $675,000 for 30 songs.
Lawyers in that Joel Tenenbaum case are asking for a new trial or for the judge to reduce damages to the minimum $750 a track.
See Also:
- Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
- Judge Refuses to Punish Lawyer for Anti-RIAA Blogging
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- Obama: Stop Filling Administration With RIAA Insiders
- Thomas Seeks New RIAA Trial; Says $1.92 Million Verdict ‘Monstrous’
- New Jammie Thomas Lawyers Vow to Put RIAA on Trial
- RIAA Fears Thomas Keeps on File Sharing, Despite $2 Million Verdict
Going to medical school can be expensive.
So Kenneth Chou, a 30-year-old student at SUNY Upstate Medical University in New York, decided to copy Kaplan lecture DVDs from his school’s library and resell them online to help pay for his tuition.
Chou admitted to raking in more than $100,000 for the pirated materials, but is now facing a fine that is four times that much.
He’s also been expelled from school for concocting a scam that elevated him to the status as the leading Kaplan-materials pirate.
Chou, a former boy-band member in Taiwan, has been ordered by a federal judge in New York to pay $400,000 to Kaplan in damages and legal fees.
Kaplan, which offers courses and publications to help students prepare for college entrance and professional exams, claims Chou infringed at least 17 copyrighted works and made between $100,000 and $200,000 from selling the data. The company, as well as the Software and Information Industry Association, sued him as a “John Doe” in November 2007, before uncovering his identity in 2008.
“Chou was not an ordinary computer hack, but rather an ambitious medical student,” Keith Kupferschmid, the SIIA’s senior vice president for intellectual property policy and enforcement, said in a statement. “He mistakenly thought he could pursue his dream of being a doctor while running a sophisticated counterfeiting operation. After being kicked out of medical school and then convicted in this case, Chou finds that his dream is gone, his reputation ruined and he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars — far more than he ever profited.”
Chou was born in Ohio and grew up in California. He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Irvine in 2005, but at one point went to Taiwan to cut two rock albums with a boy band called Machi. The albums sold very well in China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore, according to a deposition Chou gave in the case.
Chou, whose father is a doctor of internal medicine and geriatrics in California, entered medical school in 2005.
He began copying Kaplan lecture DVDs and other study materials and selling them online in March 2006 through eBay and a number of sites he set up, such as USMLEPro.net.
He claims he sold more than $100,000 worth of DVDs until April 2008 when he closed the sites after being named in the lawsuit. He stated that he had 6,000 DVDs in his apartment at the time of the deposition and charged between $1,000 and $2,000 for a course set that included 70 DVDs.
To thwart detection, he used aliases and phony return mailing addresses to deliver the materials to buyers. He was also accused of destroying sales records to stifle Kaplan’s investigation of the matter, according to court documents (.pdf).
According to Kaplan spokeswoman Carina Wong, the company doesn’t sell DVDs outright but allows students to purchase access to them for a period of time. A three-month subscription to access materials for a course can run about $3,400, allowing the student to view the DVDs at a Kaplan center during that time.
Chou’s medical school library had a special license with Kaplan that allowed students to view materials at the school.
The company cited lost revenue of more than $600,000 to its Kaplan Medical division and sought $450,000 in statutory damages plus attorney’s fees and a ban on Chou reproducing or distributing Kaplan materials in the future.
“Chou knew his conduct was unlawful, and he acted without the slightest pretense of a justification,” plaintiff attorneys asserted. “His objective was to steal, plain and simple. This was not a momentary lapse, but a sustained commercial enterprise that likely would still continue but for this lawsuit.”
Judge Harold Baer Jr., however, awarded Kaplan only $250,000 — $25,000 per each of 10 works that were infringed — and $150,000 in attorney fees. Judge Baer, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, also ordered Chou to relinquish his hold on the web domains he used to sell the Kaplan materials.
Neither an e-mail to Chou nor a call to his former counsel were returned immediately.
LONDON (Reuters) – China’s most popular search engine Baidu has been cleared of piracy in a dispute with the music industry, the IFPI trade body for the music sector said Tuesday.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said it was disappointed with the ruling after a court in China decided that the search engine had not broken rules by linking to music downloads that infringe copyright.
The case was launched in the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court by Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Hong Kong and Warner Music Hong Kong in early 2008.
They accused Baidu of providing “deep links” to hundreds of thousands of infringing tracks on third-party sites.
Another site called Sohu was also cleared, the IFPI said.
“The judgments in the Baidu and Sohu/Sogou cases are extremely disappointing, and we are considering our next steps,” the IFPI said in a statement. “The verdicts do not reflect the reality that both operators have built their music search businesses on the basis of facilitating mass copyright infringement, to the detriment of artists, producers and all those involved in China’s legitimate music market.”
No one at Baidu or the court was available to comment.
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- MPAA Says Copyright-Treaty Critics Hate Hollywood
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A Nebraska man is pleading guilty in federal court to a computer-disruption charge for his role in the 2008 distributed denial-of-service attack that temporarily shuttered Church of Scientology websites, the authorities said Tuesday.
Los Angeles federal prosecutors said Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, 20, signed a plea agreement Friday admitting his role in the January 2008 attack (.pdf) –- bringing to two the number of defendants convicted in Anonymous’ attack on Scientology. Next week, Mettenbrink is expected to officially enter his plea, which carries a year sentence, prosecutors said.
“He took their websites down,” Assistant United States Attorney Erik M. Silber said in a brief telephone interview from Los Angeles. “Anonymous: I think one of their primary missions is to bring down the Church of Scientology.”
Mettenbrink’s attorney did not return repeated telephone calls.
Last year, another member of the online troublemaking group Anonymous, Dmitriy Guzner, pleaded guilty to similar charges and was sentenced to a year in prison in what at the time was the first-known prosecution of an Anonymous member.
Past Anonymous targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a neo-Nazi webcaster.
Anonymous members formally declared war on the Church of Scientology in January 2008 after the secretive religious group tried to suppress a creepy Tom Cruise video produced for Scientology members.
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Three U.S. oil companies were targeted in a coordinated hack that sought valuable information about new discoveries of oil deposits and other data, according to a new report in the Christian Science Monitor.
The attacks predated by two years recent intrusions into Google and other companies but shared some similarities to those attacks. Highly targeted malicious e-mails were sent to employees and customized spyware attempted to grab specific data.
The hackers sought “bid data,” which details the location of oil deposits around the world as well as their size and value.
“Knowing which one of those blocks is oil-bearing — and which to go for and which not — is clearly worth something,” Paul Dorey, former chief information security officer at BP, told the Monitor. “If I was a foreign government, that’s the data I would want to get — and any analysis that reveals [a company's] intention.”
The three companies that were hit — ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil — didn’t confirm the hacks to the Monitor. But according to sources who spoke with the paper, the companies were unaware of the extent of the attacks until authorities disclosed that the hackers had been siphoning e-mail passwords and other data associated with executives who had access to proprietary oil exploration and discovery information.
“We’ve seen real, targeted attacks on our C-level [most senior] executives,” an anonymous oil company official told the Monitor.
In February 2009, federal officials from the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force met with oil company executives and their technology teams to discuss what occurred.
Marathon Oil first became suspicious when, on Nov. 13, 2008, a senior executive in the company’s Houston office received an e-mail that appeared to be a reply to a message she had sent a corporate colleague overseas. The original message, which included a URL, related to the U.S. government’s bailout plan for U.S. banks. The executive did not send the original message and warned colleagues to avoid the e-mail if they received one.
Investigators would ultimately learn that similar e-mails had been sent to key executives at ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, as well. Some of the data siphoned from the companies went to computers overseas, including one located in China.
The Monitor doesn’t say what vulnerability the malicious e-mails targeted. And it’s unclear whether hackers managed to obtain the “bid data” they sought.
It was an Internet Explorer flaw that allowed hackers to breach Google, Adobe and other companies recently targeted in a coordinated attack that hit 34 U.S. firms in the technology, finance and defense industries. Google has indicated that the intrusion into its network originated in China, though attributing attacks definitively is often impossible to determine, because hackers can control computers in China or anywhere else to launch an attack.
The Financial Times reported Monday that the hackers who hit Google focused on employees who had access to proprietary data, then targeted their friends on social networking sites. The hackers were able to take control of the social network accounts of those friends with the aim of sending the targeted employees malicious e-mails from these trusted sources.
Photo: Justin/Flickr
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Lawyers for a music file sharer said Monday they would challenge a judge’s order reducing from $1.92 million to $54,000 the amount their client, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, must pay the recording industry for copyright infringement of 24 songs.
The appeal concerns Friday’s head-spinning order by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis. The Minnesota federal judge dramatically lowered the amount a jury in June ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay — after being found liable in what at the time was the nation’s first Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case to reach trial. Most of the RIAA’s 30,000 lawsuits were settled out of court for a few thousand dollars during the record companies’ six-year litigation campaign, which is winding down.
Joe Sibley, Thomas-Rasset’s attorney, said in a telephone interview that even the reduced amount of damages is unconstitutionally excessive. It’s a penalty of 2,250 times an assumed $1 cost of a music download.
“We’re still appealing the underlying constitutionality,” he said. “It’s the difference between Joseph Stalin and the Khmer Rouge,” Sibley said. “It’s still egregious.”
The Copyright Act allows damages of up to $150,000 per track. A Minnesota jury dinged Thomas-Rasset $80,000 a song. Davis, the judge who presided over the trial in Duluth, Minnesota, lowered it Friday to $2,250 per song — three times the $750 minimum. The judge declared the $1.92 million verdict “shocking” and said damage awards “must bear some relation to actual damages.”
Judge Davis declined to rule on Sibley’s position that the Copyright Act in the file sharing context was unconstitutional. Instead, the judge exercised what is called “remittitur.” That’s when a judge reduces a jury’s damages award upon a finding that there was no rational basis for the jury to have reached its decision.
To be sure, the RIAA now finds itself in a legal conundrum as it sorts out a response to the only court decision to reduce a copyright damages award.
The reduced verdict, $54,000, is a big penalty, and the RIAA could walk away a courthouse winner.
But would the RIAA stand idle and refrain from challenging a legal decision that for the first time seemingly created a judicial right to alter a jury’s copyright infringement award? The music industry’s lobbying and litigation arm isn’t disclosing its next move. The group must inform the judge of it response by Friday.
In court briefs, however, the group told the judge earlier that it might accept a reduced award in the interest of “finality.” Copyright attorney Ben Sheffner suggests that the judge’s decision has left the RIAA between a rock and a legal hard place.
Lory Lybeck, the Washington state attorney leading a proposed class action against the RIAA on accusations that its six-year-old litigation campaign has been a “sham,” said Davis’ decision was “a huge win for the RIAA for the judge not to say these civil penalties are unconstitutional.”
For the RIAA to challenge Davis’ decision, Lybeck suggested, “would be a very strange strategy.”
Still, the legal jockeying may not have much application in the real world.
The RIAA is winding down its lawsuit campaign and instead is working with other rights holders and internet service providers to adopt a program to discontinue internet access of online copyright scofflaws.
That change in strategy is not lost on Sibley. But he said the RIAA could once again renew its litigation campaign.
“Somebody needs to decide the application of these ridiculous damages,” he said. “In this digital world, somebody has to say there isn’t any constitutional basis to allow this kind of threat to continue.”
See Also:
- Judge Sides With RIAA in ‘Sham’ Litigation Class Action
- RIAA Racketeering Lawsuit Revived; Will it Survive?
- Net Spying Firm and ISPs Sued Over Ad System
- File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA Litigation
- Analysis: Despite Blogosphere Reports, RIAA Retains Legal Muscle Under Howell Decision
- New Jammie Thomas Lawyers Vow to Put RIAA on Trial
- Beckerman: RIAA’s ‘Vexatious’ Charge Reeks with ‘Falsehood and Fallacy’
- No Settlement in RIAA v. Jammie Thomas
In the wake of a recent speech by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning countries that censor the internet and engage in hacking, China has lobbed a return volley and accused the United States of hypocrisy and initiating cyberwarfare against Iran.
An editorial in the People’s Daily — the primary mouthpiece for China’s Communist Party — accused the United States of doublespeak and of using “online warfare” to instigate violent unrest in Iran with Twitter and YouTube following that country’s national elections in June.
“We’re afraid that in the eyes of American politicians, only information controlled by America is free information, only news acknowledged by America is free news, only speech approved by America is free speech, and only information flow that suits American interests is free information flow,” said the Sunday editorial, according to the Guardian newspaper.
The editorial was taking aim at a speech by Clinton last Thursday in which she said that access to information, and the internet, is a basic human right. She said that countries around the world were erecting virtual walls in place of the physical walls that generally characterize oppressive regimes.
Clinton urged U.S. media companies to challenge foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance.
Clinton did not mention China specifically but also said that “Countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation.”
She was speaking in the wake of an announcement from Google that it had decided to stop censoring search results on its Chinese-language search engine and may vacate China altogether after discovering that it, and nearly three dozen other companies, had been the target of a coordinated hack attack that originated in China.
The People’s Daily, however, didn’t take the speech calmly.
“Behind what America calls free speech is naked political scheming. How did the unrest after the Iranian election come about?” said the paper. “It was because online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter microblogging, spread rumours, created splits, stirred up and sowed discord between the followers of conservative reformist factions.”
Last June, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance that would have increased its server capacity but also would have closed down the system for a short time during the daytime hours in Iran, preventing Iranian protestors from using the social-networking service to organize and chronicle a government crackdown.
“When we worked with our network provider yesterday to reschedule this planned maintenance, we did so because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone disclosed in a blog post at the time. “It made sense for Twitter and for NTT America to keep services active during this highly visible global event.”
Iranian voters took to the streets to protest the election between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and defeated challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, accusing the government of having rigged the election. The unrest resulted in unknown numbers of deaths and arrests. Iranian protestors used numerous social networking services to communicate with others inside and outside the country about the events in their country.
A State Department spokesman at the time denied that the U.S. was intruding on Iran’s domestic affairs.
“This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media,” spokesman Ian Kelly told Reuters.
China began blocking YouTube last March in anticipation of protests on the anniversary of uprisings in Tibet. It also began blocking Twitter in June, prior to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Reuters reports that Facebook has also been down in the country since July.
Photo courtesy U.S. State Department
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