Our truly wonderful colleague in the ONI, Nart Villeneuve, director of technology at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto (and, truth be told, a key element of the brains behind all filtering research), has a timely new article in First Monday on filtering. His abstract: “Increasingly, states are adopting practices aimed at regulating … Read more
I am here in Hammamet, Tunisia for the World Summit on the Information Society. On many levels, it’s lovely to be here — beautiful, temperate, a gathering of all manner of interesting, public-spirited people from around the world who care about information and communications technologies. Inside the enormous function hall where the world’s telecomms/technology regulators have gathered … Read more
The US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released its International Religious Freedom 2005 report.
We at the OpenNet Initiative released our study on Iran today. Of the states that we have studied, Iran has one of the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship regimes. Iran has demonstrated its commitment to extensive Internet filtering through the targeting of weblogs, particularly those written in Farsi, the local language. The state blocks political, … Read more
Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge’s computer science labs is here with us today at the Berkman Center as a participant in our luncheon series. He describes his scholarly efforts focused on BT (Britain’s largest telecommunications provider) and its blocking program: “I’ve been looking at BT’s CleanFeed system (it’s [sic] proper name is the … Read more
Ben today released a new report in his and JZ‘s series of analyses on Internet filtering. I consider this research among the most important strains of thinking underway in Internet law today. Their piece to tie it all together — China, Saudi Arabia, Google, other filterers — will be a great read.
A judge dismisses a lawsuit regarding the rights of researchers looking into filtering software.
Berkman Student Fellow Ben Edelman offers this (and more) about what he heard during yesterday’s SCOTUS proceedings regarding the challenge to CIPA and related filtering laws: “The government’s most successful argument yesterday seemed to be that, they allege, libraries and librarians have long made decisions as to which books to obtain and which to exclude … Read more