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Google Enumerates Government Requests
D H NG writes "In the aftermath of Google's exit from mainland China, it had sought to be more open about what it censors. Google has launched a new tool to track the number of government requests targeted at Google and YouTube. These include both requests for data and requests to take down data. A quick look at the tool shows that Brazil is the top country in both categories (largely because Orkut is popular there), and information for China cannot be disclosed because 'Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets.' As part of its four-part plan, Google hopes to change the behavior of repressive governments, establish guiding principles for dealing with issues of free expression, build support online to protest repression, and better provide resources and support for developing technology designed to combat and circumvent Internet censorship."
It's starting to sound like Google is pissed off and not going to just let it go. Go for it, Dude!
CG Pin-Ups?
Queue the people explaining how this is evil because its "not enough".
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
So if Google's already shown if a state considers that information a state secret they'll recind publishing it, who wants to bet there will be a bill in Congress by tomorrow classifying it in the states too?
This
Before everyone got distracted with all of the iPad hype and nonsense, we were all hearing about how Google was going to be pulling out of China. Whatever happened with that?
...information for China cannot be disclosed because 'Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets.' As part of its four-part plan, Google hopes to change the behavior of repressive governments...
I can see where this is going:
Citing pressure from Google all governments decide censorship demands are state secrets and cannot be disclosed publicly
I'd saw specifically because China says "state secret" you should do it.
Now I have something else to distinguish myself from our brothers to the south besides a ridiculous accent and a distinct smell of maple syrup!
And tell them where they can put their "state secrets". Maybe if they disclose all their "requests", they'll stop making them.. But no... appeasement is the word of the day.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
So why can't Google tell China to go pound sand and post them anyway? They can always blame it on some anonymous hacker, say the data was found in a bar, or just slip it to Wiki Leaks.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
What they DON'T show -- and I've sent feedback asking for -- is how many of these are legal demands, such as warrants or court orders, versus informal requests.
For anyone else interested in requesting the same info, here is the link: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/request.py?contact_type=privacy&ctx=contactpolicy
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What, because we are mostly pacifists you ignore our requests? You wanna fight about it?
All the talk of being asked to remove content made me wonder if they're simply removing it from public access and are keeping this information somewhere? If they don't destroy it and court ordered removed information gets out at some future point could Google be held liable?
I don't think Orwell saw that one coming...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I guess we can't have a completely free internet (Google self censors); however Google does work to have a mostly free internet except for where the majority of the worlds population would agree with them. If you are in a minority that believes Child Porn is OK and Hate speech is OK then you're out of luck. Other than that Google does seem to push back against the authority. I just hope they don't start self censoring morally ambiguous activities like sex and drugs.
The FAQ is interesting. The majority of requests are DMCA take down requests by private entities; which is not tracked by this tool.
google could have so easily gone the traditional "sacrifice all your values for the pursuit of money route", but they actually showed they have principles and a backbone
google, you've earned my loyalty and respect. integrity: what a rare and wonderful concept
as for china considering censorship requests to be state secrets: well of course it does. just like the church of scientology considers its sacred texts to be intellectual property. i mean, if you're going to be a controlling asshole, at least be true to the concept to the inevitable extreme of absurdity, right?
wikileaks: get that list of censorship requests. google, give that list up: you've already burned your bridges
oh, and btw: fuck you censorial controlling assholes. you are clearly on the losing side of history. i look forward to your inevitable demise
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Like why they were taken down...
Blogs taken down because of slander or libel.
Add taken off because of false advertising
Search terms that are using in pedophile.
I would like to see why they were down more then how much was taken down. I want to know what is being censored not how much we are censoring it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
One day, possibly not long from now, we're going to see China freed from the dictatorial, self-serving government Mao imposed on it.
That's going to be a pretty good day.
A quick look at the tool shows that Brazil is the top country in both categories (largely because Orkut is popular there)
The reason Brazil is the top country is not only due to Orkut's popularity, but because many Brazilian laws were designed to limit freedom of speech and free enterprise. Anyone remember this?
A significant part of these government requests is probably tied to lawsuits involving Adwords. In the past, companies have been sued and found guilty for using their competitors' names as keywords in Adwords, for example. This practice is perfectly legal in most countries, including the US.
I wonder if Google can make this popular enough to pressure countries into changing their laws.
Without China, other governments will get the same idea, and the tool becomes completely useless. C'mon Google, grow some balls.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
As a Brazilian, I'm glad this exposes a situation which isn't usually discussed but should be given more attention now that Brazil is trying to gain additional worldwide relevance (through G20 and all that).
Brazilian courts have been extremely unreasonable and have forced Google to hand over private information and take down pages without much fanfare. Even though none of the data is actually hosted in Brazil, the courts have fined and threatened to fine Google several times because of this.
In Brazil, service providers have liability for their users actions and there are laws protecting the "private image" of individuals (even celebrities). In effect, paparazzi can be sued around here. Journalists can be sued and bloggers aren't considered journalists. Writing a story denouncing a politician can get you a lawsuit.
All this mess accounts for a lot of these requests. Google isn't being evil, but I wish there was more international pressure against the Brazilian government.
China’s censorship demands stop being “state secrets” and become public knowledge as soon as they give them to a private international US-based company, Google, and that company decides to publish them.
Hey China: Secrets are things you don’t tell people. If you want to secretly censor stuff, we can’t stop you, but you can’t tell us to help you censor stuff and at the same time keep it a secret.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
How is that that Google has "exited" Chinese marked? They still own big chunk of Baidu they are not talking that loud of.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google
But they dumped that in 2006, see: http://www.danwei.org/internet/google_dumps_baidu_shares.php
...Googol is getting a thumbs-up from me. WTG Mountain View !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If Google pulls out and leaves China, what happens? I really don’t know. Are there Chinese people currently employed by Google? I suppose. Would they be in legal trouble if Google ditched them and left? They might. But I blame the Chinese government, not Google. It is not Google’s job to protect its Chinese employees from the tyranny of their own government. It is the Chinese people’s job to do that, and maybe if things get bad enough they’ll wake up and see this. And if things get REALLY bad, the other countries of the world may step in and do something... but it isn’t Google’s job. Google is a company, not a country.
It does sound cruel of Google to simply desert its Chinese employees. But I don’t understand why the Chinese government can seem to be holding an independent US-based company by the balls simply because they could jail a bunch of its former employees if Google doesn’t cooperate.
We don’t negotiate with terrorists, and that is a terrorist tactic: “we’ll hurt this innocent guy, whom you presumably care about, unless you do what we want you to do”.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
From: http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/faq.html
So basically, if the country agrees with Googles version of censorship, its okay ... but if it disagrees with Googles censorship, its not okay ...
I fail to see why exactly I'm supposed to be excited to trade one companies censorship for a countries censorship. In the end, the result will be the same, someone is still deciding who gets to see what, and that someone isn't me, so it doesn't matter who, what, when, where, or why ... Google is just as guilty of censoring as anyone else, by their own admission.
I'm rather happy to have certain things censored by Google. Censorship is not 'bad' just because. If you buy into this and think Google is good for it, you've just been manipulated by Google and a fair amount of your own ignorance. Good job, you're not officially a tool of the man.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I've seen the movie Brazil and I know what it's like there! Also interesting that in terms of information requests, USA is a very close second.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You also have better beer, an obsession with some bizarre game that involves using a broom on ice, and the penchant for putting gravy on fries. ;)
Pornography (child-involved and otherwise) is often the excuse governments use for politically-based censorship. In fact pornography is exactly the Chinese excuse for censoring the Internet!
And I hope Brazil's modernization goes well. The whole biofuel thing certainly raised interest outside of Brazil.
Israel has surprisingly few requests overall - 30 data and 10 removal requests - that's less than e.g. Canada on both counts! I would have expected that them to be be much more prolific with data requests, given their circumstances. I mean, it's a state for which "war on terror" is not an imaginary thing to scare voters into submission, but a very real part of day-to-day-life.
However, what's really weird is that only 20% of removal requests were complied with - and it seems to be the lowest figure overall (okay, Belgium shows 0%, but I suspect it's because it
was 1 removal request which was denied).
So, what's up with that figure?
So instead of being shocked at their own country's behavior, shown in real numbers, people here decide to drone the anti-china propaganda they were instructed to drone. Proud moment. Yeah we know china does censorship, but it's another country for most here, how about reacting on your own country and own elected officials doing it?
As I read the blog post, I kept wondering, what if Google did this for corporate requests as well? Information on the number of, say, DMCA take-down requests that the highest requesting corporations or individuals have made would be cool to see. So would the number of successful counter-requests. They could include information from other countries too, if they have a similar system.
The Wikimedia foundation has responded to 100% of government requests for censorship with a big "fuck you". On the flip side this is why their site is frequently blocked in China, and Turkey, and surreptitiously modified by ISPs in the UK and Australia (and who knows what other places), while google doesn't get blocked.
Well, according to their FAQ, they treat child porn separately and do remove it anyway, independently of gov. requests.
And thus they don't include it in these statistic.
So if they publish requests' PDFs, the child porn will be missing anyway.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Indeed, we can just imagine the public uproar.
All tabloids are just waiting for something like this to happen so they can plaster "USA following China's opressive steps !!!" everywhere.
(And several Godwin points to be awarded in the following discussion ;-) )
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
scientology did
no seriously, they consider their sacred text to be intellectual property you can't view without their permission (because they charge their members hundreds of thousands to view it)
i'm not joking, they really do this, and what blows my mind is that there are suckers out there who do work years of their lives to find out details of a bad sci fi story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Woooooooosh. You fail.
TFA divides the screen space into four roughly equal columns: the text, useless site tools, adverts and white space. Seriously, how can /. link to such an abomination?
That's interesting. Are they finally going to disclose their censorship of results in the US in response to demands from religious pressure groups? Or are they going to continue to pretend that this doesn't happen?
Hi Google,
Quick thought -- could you also publish the YouTube DMCA takedowns?
Thanks!
Bob
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
In both Google Blog posts, it is stated that they comply with takedown requests for such "obviously illegal" material as child pornography.
It would appear, however, that some of the material they treat as such is not in fact obviously illegal, is not child pornography, and does not fall within the scope of mandatory removal statutes of US federal law (viz. 18 U.S.C. 2258B(c)(1)).
Here is a report of one case where Google has acted on a child porn complaint while the material at hand was in fact Japanese pornographic comic books (i.e. drawings!):
This type of material may be unsavory to some, but it can be found on the official sites of many major Japanese publishers as well, and is widely available in Japanese book shops. The legality of the material in the US is not completely clear, but only because of obscenity laws (as opposed to child porn laws): i.e. it is on an equal legal footing with BDSM porn, scat, rape play porn and others (as in, possibly illegal in the Bible Belt and first amendment-protected speech elsewhere due to different community standards).
It appears that Google has ignored subsequent requests by the targeted site to reconsider the takedown:
Sure, they have a right to take down whatever they want, but it's a bit disingenuous to pose as virtuous defenders of free speech afterwards.
Maybe it's time to set up a nation on Antarctica. Viva la settling!
I wonder how 2 students got the money to pay for the servers and bandwidth to start up a business competing with an established market leader?
of course venture capital - but who's venture?
And there was Google reprehending Australia's government for wanting to censor data. But here we have Google's home country the USA giving 23 times the data requests and 7 times the censorship requests.
This doesn't change the fact that the internet filter is a stupid idea.
It does give a better view of how things are right now - one situation (the internet filter) is a possibility, it may happen, and one (current Google censoring requests) is reality, it's happening right now.
With the Google Sharing anonymizing FireFox plugin ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60333 ) enabled, I receive a 404 message. When I disable the plugin, I am able to pull up the page. Hrm. Interesting.
Why Governments are the only ones that have the right of data or removal request?
It is time that we people of the world have the right to control what Google show about us!
[I am guessing that tool is accesible for its employees as well, which makes it a little bit evil to be partial of who and who not has the right of those requests]
So the US made 123 requests, 80.5% were "fully or partially complied with" so that is 99 requests. Of the requests listed, 45 were from court orders which is 36.6%. So there are 99 - 45 = 54 requests that were not court orders, yet Google still complied with them. I would love to know what those were. DMCA requests? I thought they got gzillions of those a day, maybe they aren't even included. So what else? I might even like to see the letters "Please remove this content because... we... really want you too... because... I work for the government and you do what I say..."
What? No Streisand effect?
What are the SUM of the take down notices good for? Give all the details you SQL Nazis!