CNET: Government censorship online coming from western democracies

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We need to be especially vigilant as Minister Toews continues to attempt to install his warrantless online spying scheme, Bill C-30, and as Canada considers signing onto the secretive and controversial TPP agreement, which, among other things, would step up the restrictions from controversial copyright bill C-11 and expand Big Media's powers to lock down the Internet.

Together we stopped the worst of the C-11 restrictions that Big Media pushed for; now we may well need to scale up and join with the pro-Internet movement around the world as we fight against lockdowns and surveillance, for an open and affordable Internet.

Article by Steven Musil for CNET:

Google reports it has seen an "alarming" incidence in government requests to censor Internet content in the past six months.

The Web giant said it received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world to remove items such as YouTube videos and search listings. The company, which said it complied with more than half the requests, released a catalog of those requests as part of its biannual Global Transparency Report.

"Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different," Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, said in a blog post. "When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not."

Google said it had received 461 court orders for the removal of 6,989 items, consenting to 68 percent of those orders. It also received 546 informal requests, complying with 46 percent of those requests. The study doesn't reflect censorship activity from countries such as China and Iran, which block content without notifying Google.

"Just like every other time, we've been asked to take down political speech," Chou wrote. "It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- western democracies not typically associated with censorship." Read more »

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