CyberHumanRightsLaw

A good use of Anonymity: Tor Protects the Good Guys but Can Also Protect the Bad Guys:

The Berkman Center had a presentation on technology called Tor designed to protect dissidents from being tracked by governments etc. The technology seems well thought out and powerful.  Articles have been written about it in mainstream media like the Wall Street Journal. The key question is how to prevent the technology from being hijacked by the bad guys.  A student at Columbia Law School I know studying with Professor Moglen has said keep the anonymity and lets come up with other technology or human process solutions to deal with the bad guys. Will this work?  Any suggestions? E.g. to fight spam?

On using this to protect Chinese dissidents:  There are measures that can be taken but it sounds like a cat and mouse game. There are human engineering solutions that will help but won’t solve the problem completely.

According to Tor we need both perfect software and perfect people to get good use and not bad use.  E.g. When phishing messages have some publicly available personal information inside vs. those that don’t. If they don’t 15 percent respond.  If the messages do 85 percent respond. I think they said this is a Carnegie Mellon study.  Clearly the human side here is important.

10 million early adoptors would want to use Tor or so we are told.

Also vis a vis the question of those who believe in open source software: it seems they need to make it work in windows (at least to have a gooey front end) because the end users use windows.

Interestingly the speaker David Dingle Dine http://www.freehaven.net/~arma/cv.html (lead developer?) doesn’t use windows.

I can see this would be useful for allowing discussion of hot topics in our own country that people avoid because they are too hot. e.g. abortion etc. Is anyone thinking about this?  Who knows you might even be able to talk about how to achieve peace in the middle east without mudslinging.

The ACLU is even ready to defend any problems that come up with this.

Vis a vis publishing in places like Sudan Tor is only part of the solution not all of it.

Listening to this lecture what’s interesting is that clearly there are a number of people working on net anonymity.  Clearly this is an issue that concerns alot of people and not just Open Source Software users.  Microsoft should take note.  Perhaps if we knew for sure that big brother could not look over our shoulder so easily more people would be happy Windows users.

Human Rights on a micro scale

The New York Times recently had an article on how Craigs List is being sued for publishing ads in violation of the U.S. fair housing act. "The Ads Discriminate, but Does the Web?" One question here is whether a web site should be held liable for publishing ads that if published by a newspaper would be considered discriminatory and therefore illegal. 

My question is if you extrapolate from civil rights law to human rights law a question (hypothetical?) one might ask is: If an internet provider publishes a site created by a user that promotes race hatred or genocide should they or the person who created the site be held responisible and prosecuted?

I believe some of those that broadcast radio messages in Rowanda are or have been prosecuted for their acts.

What if a web site in the U.S. publishes a web site of a user that promoted the views of David Irving who was recently convicted of Holocaust denial in Austria.  If the web site were viewable in Austria could that countiry seek to arrest the creator or the publisher of the web site?  I realize this question raises a lot of issues which might make it moot such as cross border jurisdiction but it might actually happen in the future.

Other Places for CyberHumanRights Info...

The following was on the website of the Berkman Center at Harvard University Law School:

OpenNet Initiative Analyzes Effects of China's Mandatory Website Registration Regulations

2/22/2006 3:35 pm

Today the university-based OpenNet Initiative (ONI) released a bulletin analyzing the effects to date of China's non-commercial website registration regulations on website owners and bloggers.

The Berkman Center, along with the University of Toronto, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University, are members of the Open Net Initiative.  Berkman's John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain are ONI principals, and Berkman fellows Derek Bambauer and Eric Priest are ONI researchers.

Effective March 20, 2005, China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) required that all non-commercial websites must register with the MII or face significant penalties.  By August 2005, China's MII reported that over 90 percent of covered websites had been registered, although anecdotal examinations of such websites seem to indicate fewer registrations.  In December 2005, the Chinese government launched a major campaign to shut down registered websites.

The ONI bulletin analyzes the effectiveness of the regulation's legal provisions and measures the practical impact on Chinese users, including website owners and bloggers. For example, website owners who fail to comply with the registration regulation face two punishments: administrative fines and the removal of their content from the Internet as their ISPs make the sites inaccessible to the public. According to the regulation, those who do not register by the deadline will be subject to a fine of 10,000 RMB (roughly $1,200 U.S.) and must comply within a specified period. If the owner does not register within that period and intentionally refuses to comply, his/her site will be shut down. For most owners, the price of not complying with the registration requirement is prohibitive, since the fine accounts for 1/2 to 2/3 of the annual income of the average Chinese urban citizen (roughly 15,000 RMB).

*If you'd like to read more about the effects of China's non-commercial website registration regulations, please read ONI's press release.

*If you'd like to read the full bulletin, please go here.

*If you are a member of the press and would like to speak with ONI's researchers, please contact Amanda Michel (amichel AT cyber.law.harvard.edu/617 495 5236)

*To keep up to date on these issues, please visit ONI's blog.

Buy Tee Shirts to show your support for Cyber Human Rights

BoingBoing.net a popular tech blog has a story and link to a company making tee shirts parodying the companies doing net business in China who testified before Congress:

Show your solidarity with the global movement to stop Google facilitation of Chinese censorship. All profits are donated directly by Cafe Press to Human Rights in China, an international, Chinese, non-governmental organization with a mission to promote universally recognized human rights and advance the institutional protection of these rights in the Peoples Republic of China. HRIC is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

Some of the Parody Logos:

And the counter responses are rolling in...

The New York times reported today on the continuing human rights fracas:

The recent absorption of Yahoo's Chinese operations into Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company in which Yahoo now holds a 40 percent stake, also worries some critics. They fear that the move allows Yahoo to reap the benefits of China's booming market while escaping responsibility for what happens there.

This raises the question: how to keep the pressure up so this escape valve does not lead to any new bad behavior.

If we are lucky perhaps China will change...

Cyber Human Rights in China Make the News

Today the New York Times Technology section had TWO articles about cyber human rights.  One about Yahoo dealing with online rights, the other about Google.  Some serious decisions have to be made/are being made about how to deal with this problem.  You can read about Yahoo here and Google here.