Asia Pacific
In a piece for Agence France Press, Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Sarah McKune was quoted in response to a recent report outlying alleged Chinese hacking of US firms.
Professor Deibert spoke about the Canadian company Blackberry and the lack of transparency in Blackberry’s agreements with governments abroad.
In April 2010, China Telecom’s network announced incorrect paths to 50,000 IP prefixes, referred to as a “hijack”. The politically sensitive nature of some of the IP prefixes that were hijacked brought this incident to the attention of the US government. It raises many important questions about how we characterize and reason about large-scale routing incidents when they occur.
Google Policy Fellow Kieran Bergmann published an article for the Asia Pacific Memo. Bergmann’s article looked at Thailand’s lese majeste cases and the government’s method of controlling cyberspace.
After years spent as one of the world’s most strictly controlled information environments, the government of Burma has recently begun to open up access to previously censored online content. Recent OpenNet Initiative testing has confirmed these changes, finding a variety of opposition websites, critical blogs and foreign news sites to be accessible after years of blocking. This ONI blog post discusses recent developments in Burma and reports on the results of testing conducted in Burma in August 2012.
Online freedom of expression continues to be threatened in Vietnam, as recently proposed regulations and the ongoing detainment and harassment of bloggers combine with an already strict regime of Internet filtering to further restrict information openness. This OpenNet Initiative blog post describes these new developments and reports on the results of testing conducted in Vietnam from April to August 2012.
2012 Google Policy Fellow Kieran Bergmann wrote an article titled Outsourcing Censorship for the Canadian International Council on how governments in Asia are increasing their efforts to control online content.
OpenNet Initiative research has documented that web filtering applied by India-based ISPs is also filtering content for customers of an ISP in Oman. This “upstream filtering” is restricting access to news sites, political blogs and file sharing sites for customer’s of Omantel, who have limited opportunities for recourse. Combined with the significant filtering implemented by Omantel itself, this essentially puts users in Oman behind multiple layers of national-level filtering.
This post is the first in a series of analyses that the Citizen Lab is preparing regarding the urgent and ongoing threat presented by information operations deployed against Tibetans and others who advocate for Tibetan rights and freedoms, including in Tibetan areas of China.
Additional evidence gathered by the Citizen Lab from Burma since the publication of Behind Blue Coat has provided further confirmation that Blue Coat’s devices are presently in use in the country.