Following the release of Citizen Lab’s brief, Behind Blue Coat: Investigations of commercial filtering in Syria and Burma, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke to Marco Werman about the research findings on BBC’s The World.

Although Blue Coat has recently acknowledged the presence of their devices in Syria, this brief contributes to previous findings of devices in the country, documents additional devices in use in Syria, and identifies Blue Coat devices actively in use in Burma.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) is pleased to announce the availability of our summarized global Internet filtering data as a downloadable CSV file under a Creative Commons license.

An international research team, based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, has released a detailed report that tracks and analyzes the difficulties of broadcasting the news into jurisdictions that censor the Internet, including Iran and China.

In a new article for the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Director Ron Deibert writes about the rise of Asia’s cyberspace.

In this op-ed article, author Jillian C. York discusses the tendency of activists to censor themselves using special tools like Tor, or staying off certain networks altogether, due to the knowledge that posting the wrong picture on Facebook can get them arrested, if not worse.

The Guelph Mercury newspaper reports that a Guelph-based tech firm called Netsweeper, which is known for making tools to control information abroad, is tightening communications at home. After giving several media interviews during its rapid rise in the burgeoning internet security sector, Netsweeper now not only refuses to speak to reporters, but also recently rejected a meeting request by Guelph MP Frank Valeriote.

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, 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.