The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has released three new publications as part of their circumvention project. Over the past two years, the Center has carried out a number of research activities designed to improve our understanding of the knowledge, usage, and effectiveness of circumvention tools as a means to promote access to information online in repressive online environments.

On Tuesday, August 16, CBC Radio Calgary’s David Gray interviews Rafal Rohozinski on the future of cybersecurity. Dr. Rohozinski is in Calgary to speak at the Globalfest Human Rights Forum August 17th at 7:30am.

Listen to the full interview here.

The Canadian International Council (CIC) interviewed Mr. Jon Penney, a lawyer and Google Policy Fellow at the Citizen Lab, about a report recently released by McAfee, which contains “circumstantial evidence” pointing to the Chinese government involvement in what it claimed to be the largest series of cyber-attacks to date.

On Wednesday, August 17, 2011, Dr. Rafal Rohozinski, Senior Scholar at the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab, will be speaking at the 2011 GlobalFest Human Rights Forum Breakfast in Calgary, Alberta. His talk is titled Ghost in the Machine – The Battle for the Future of Cyberspace.

On August 8, 2011, Canada Centre Visiting Research Fellow in International Broadcasting, Karl Kathuria, and a team from the Citizen Lab presented a paper titled Bypassing Internet Censorship for News Broadcasters at the first USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’11) in San Francisco, California. The paper is concerned with Internet censorship as a major problem faced by news organizations.

This Financial Post article reports on a new research paper published by the OpenNet Initiative, which finds that in many majority Muslim countries, control of the Internet is based primarily on interpretations of the religious instructions of the Islamic faith. The author of the article, Helmi Noman, is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and a Research Affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. Mr. Noman says that “a number of Internet-specific fatwas (religious decrees) have been layered on top of regulatory boundaries on acceptable use.” For example, fatwas against browsing forbidden websites have resulted in the development of “websites with more palatable content such as NaqaTube.com, which promises users a Sharia-compatible YouTube-like experience.”

In this article, the Globe and Mail reports on the existence of a foreign entity that has been trying to steal data from more than 70 organizations including two Canadian government departments and the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal. The series of incidents were reported by McAfee, which claims to have access to log files from a command and control server used in the attacks. “Operation Shady Rat,” the company’s report on the affair, was released on Wednesday. The attackers have not been identified, however, some commentators are directing suspicions towards China given that the list of targets includes the United Nations, governments in the West and Southeast Asia, military-defence contractors, and international sports bodies that were hit around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

In this article, CTV News reports on the role of Western companies in promoting censorship in the Middle East and North Africa. Specifically, it looks at Netsweeper Inc., a Canada-based developer of content filtering software, and its role in providing governments in Qatar, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates with tools to filter online content.

Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, told CTV News that the recent controversy surrounding the Canadian company demonstrates that the Canadian federal government needs to take a clear position on content filtering, and within this, develop a clear foreign policy for cyberspace. For example, Deibert suggests that the Canadian government introduce legislation which makes it “illegal for Canadian companies to filter content in countries that violate the freedoms outlined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.” In essence, “take a major international treaty of the 20th century, and apply it in a decidedly 21st century context.”

Deibert said that Canada should take on a leadership role on cyber policy “in international forums to spotlight and develop a kind of normative agreement that is consistent with the values we hold as a country.”

For the full article see here.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) is pleased to release In the Name of God: Faith Based Internet Censorship in Majority Muslim Countries. This occasional paper analyzes the Internet censorship policies and practices of majority Muslim countries and finds that in many of these countries online information controls are primarily based on the Islamic faith and interpretations of its instructions