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DonateYou have to wonder how this will be enforced, but China's State Administration of Press Publication, Radio, Film and Television has issued a "Notice on Strengthening Control of Media Personnel's Online Activities" (关于加强新闻采编人员网络活动管理的通知). Chinese media organizations have been told to stop posting foreign media news without government permission: "Without authorization, no kind of media outlets shall arbitrarily use media release from overseas media agencies and media websites," is the way Caijing magazine translated it.
Committee to Protect Journalists
CPJ Internet Channel
Defending Free Expression Online
China
Not every media company is as tempting a target for hackers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. Not every company can afford high-priced computer security consultants, either. Is there anything that everyday reporters and their editors can learn about protecting themselves, based on the revelatory details the Times and other targets made public last week?
China's mounting crackdown on online news dissemination took
an extra
step today, when the country's Standing Committee of the National People's
Congress, its de facto legislative body, announced new requirements on Internet
service providers and mobile phone companies to identify their users. The new
rules would potentially allow ISPs and the authorities to more closely tie real
identities to posts and commentary on micro-blogging sites like Weibo, as well
as connect text messaging and mobile phone conversations to individuals.
This week, Morgan Marquis-Boire and Bill Marczak of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab provided a disturbing look into the likely use of a commercial surveillance program, FinFisher, to remotely invade and control the computers of Bahraini activists. After the software installs itself onto unsuspecting users' computer, it can record and relay emails, screenshots, and Skype audio conversations. It was deployed against Bahraini users after being concealed in seemingly innocent emails.
The last few weeks have offered the strongest indications
yet that nation-states are using customized software to exploit security flaws
on personal computers and consumer Internet services to spy on their users. The
countries suspected include the United States, Israel, and China. Journalists
should pay attention--not only because this is a growing story, but because if
anyone is a vulnerable target, it's reporters.
I've been telling reporters that Twitter's new national blocking policy was like Chekhov's gun. Its recent appearance inevitably prefigured its future use.
Last week, Twitter provoked a fierce debate online when it announced a new capability--and related policy--to hide tweets on a country-specific basis. By building this feature into its website's basic code, Twitter said it hoped to offer a more tailored response to legal demands to remove tweets globally. The company will inform users if any tweet they see has been obscured, and provide a record of all demands to remove content with the U.S.-based site chillingeffects.org.
At the launch of Google+, Google's attempt to create an integrated social network similar to Facebook, I wrote about the potential benefits and risks of the new service to journalists who use social media in dangerous circumstances.
Despite early promises of relatively flexible terms of service at Google+, the early days of implementation were full of arbitrary account suspensions - particularly of pseudonymous users - and the appeals process was unclear. The result was a lot of early bad press for the service from the traditional "first adopter" crowd, a framing it has subsequently struggled to escape.
It's easy to use polarizing descriptions
of online news-gathering. It's the domain of citizen journalists, blogging without
pay and institutional support, or it's a sector filled with the digital works
of "mainstream media" facing financial worries and struggling to offer employees
the protection they once provided. But there is a growing middle ground:
trained reporters and editors who work exclusively online on projects born independent
of traditional media. They share many of the practices of an older generation
of reporters, but their work draws from the decentralized and agile practices of
the digital world.
The last two weeks have seen a spate
of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks against news sites, coordinated attempts to
overwhelm outlets with fake incoming data so the sites cannot respond to legitimate
users.
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