Professor Julie Cohen of Georgetown Law School is visiting at Harvard Law this year and working on a book, “Configuring the Network Self”. Speaking at Berkman today, she explains that she’s had two motivations to undertake this work – an understanding of information technology possibility framed through the idea of the “structural conditions of human flourishing”. One is a sense that discourse about IT policy (in the US – she distinguishes US from European disrouce) tends to use “grandiose language” about poicy choices for free speech and free markets, but generally seem to create circumstances that don’t appear especially free. Users face complex rules about content they can and can’t use, but there are very few rules that govern how users can be watched, monitored and aggregated. There’s a disconnect between the copyright debate – where much of the discourse is unquestioningly in favor of openness – and the privacy debate. We need a discourse that makes a space for privacy in the environment of openness.

Second, she notes that most (US) discourse comes from liberal political theory, a space where there’s a great deal of discussion of autonomy and freedom. This discourse comes with an assuption of rational choice, the idea of disembodied individuals at play in the realm of the virtual, exercising autonomous choice. “This is not a worldview that has much relation to reality, in my opinion.”

Cohen wants to explore ideas of internet policy based on the “experienced geography of the information society”. This means accepting that people are real, embodied, located in cultures and context, and experiencing the network mediated by platforms and devices. The framework we’ve inherited from liberal theory doesn’t give us very good tools to examine these questions – fortunately, there’s lots of folks thinking about embodied use, just not in the legal field. People in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies and information studies look closely at these questions… and they tend to be dismissed, pejoratively, as “postmodernists” by legal thinkers. Cohen’s goal is to unpack this set of literatures and ask how the information society works in terms of situated, embodied users, and then ask how this understanding might then inform our law and policy.

She traces her narrative framework to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s discourse about “capabilities for human flourishing”. She wants to articulate a regime of law and policy for information technology spaces that seeks to let humans flourish. Acknowledging that there’s a danger of turning anything into a requirement for flourishing, she suggests we start by looking at these literatures, at the relationships between self and culture, self and community, and identify what’s really necessary for human flourishing. “Selves are constituted by culture -there is a mutually constituting relationship between information technologies and our embodied perception” of the world through them. These tools reconfigure our acess to the world, change the nature of geography as we experience it.

Cohen wants to root thinking about internet policy in the concept of “everyday practice”, which she describes as an “anti-paradigm”, a useful tool for describing what people actually do, rather than what we ideally believe they do. The dominant paradigm in legal literature, she tells us, is to evaluate a technology in terms of its effects on freedom of speech or a user’s ability to make free choices within a market. This paradigm tends to lead to reductive models of human behavior – do humans simply make rational choices in markets? Are we always motivated by romantic concepts of dissent? Everyday practice describes the welter of other motives that accompany our interactions with information technologies.

When thinkers critique copyright in intellectual property literature, they often talk about the concept of “play”, the idea that people should have freedom to play with cultural resources. The value of play is stated in terms of its links to creativity and invention. Cohen wants to broaden the discourse around play to encompass “the play of circumstances”. She theorizes that creativity blossoms not because an individual decides to play, but because life puts random incidents in your path. Policy needs to foster this sense of play – not play by individuals, but play in terms of random circumstance.

Cohen cautions the limitations of the Access to Knowledge movement. She acknowledges the importance of A2K, but suggests that it’s insufficient to provide a base for human flourishing. The A2K paradigm, she arges, doesn’t include rights to reuse the materials you have access to. It doesn’t guarantee a user’s rights of privacy – she worries that most privacy frameorks tend to put forward a vision in which more openness is always best.

Future policy strategies need to consider issues of operational transparency. It’s insufficient to build policy based solely on what information about a user is going to be collected. We need to know how that information is going to be used. “It’s not enough to offer a choice between Google and… whatever else there is. Between iPhone and Blackberry. We need to be given sufficient information to know what’s being offered as a possibility to us and what’s being closed off.”

Cohen hopes that information technology policy will provide open spaces through “formal incompleteness”. It’s a mistake that we need to invoke a catch-all defense like fair use in the copyright space – we need space to play with technologies, to repurpose and remix media without bumping into creator’s rights. Within rules about aggregating and monitoring the use of online spaces, we need to ensure there’s space for users to play with identities. With this in mind, Cohen worries that an architectural presumption – that everything will be better if we have seamless interoperability between platforms – is limiting our choices. In a seamless universe, our data moves around with no one to stop it. We may want some friction in our platforms as well as whitespace in which we can play and experiment.

(I caught only part of the question and answer exchange.)

Q: If “churchlady43″ is also “pornstar565″ and “terrorist 12″, we could see a security theater response to online speech, an attempt to squeeze out anonymity and make it harder for individuals to engage in identity play. An integrated online environment means that every environment is a workplace environment because someone might connect my unpopular opinions in one identity to my professional one. Will this lead to a revival of McCarthyism?
A: A great comment. There’s a tendency to say that if we restrict the flow of information, we’ll move down the slippery slope to Chinese censorship. That’s an oversimplication – we need to consider times we might restrict information flow to maintain the capabilities of these new spaces.

Q: (Charlie Nesson) I perked up at the mention of copyright and play, the idea that a playful person needs a defense besides fair use. How would we get there?
A: We should look back to the copyright law of 1909, a law that’s generally reviled by publishers. Under the 1909 law, there were narrowly defined categories for copyright – you couldn’t get the rights to a work unless it fit within the categories. Rights were far more limited. It’s possible to build a copyright system that gives significant rights to copyright holders and reserves rights for users.

1909 copyright law reviled by publihers – categories, couldn’t get the rights unless you fell without the categories. And rights were much more limited.
define rights to reproduction, adaptation which gives significant rights to copyright owners, reserves rights to users

Q: (Christian Sandvig). A book from a decade past, called “The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach”, makes the argument that the Internet is culturally embodied and located. In short, the authors argue that if you’re in Trinidad, the net is one thing – if you’re not, it’s another thing. The authors rushed the book into print because they thought they were about to witness a trend of scholarship that saw the internet as culturally embodied. That trend hasn’t caught on – why not?

A: Our discourse about cultural embeddedness tends to not go further than the digital divide. If your connectivity is limited, your knowledge is limited, and we want to help you overcome those limitations. That’s okay – it would be nice to have a comprehensive broadband policy designed to give access to everyone. But the assumption that there’s a uniform digital ethos, a universal competency to strive for is troublesome.

Q: (Salil Vadhan): Could you elaborate on the implication that interoperability implies a desire for information to flow freely between systems – those seem like two separate things.
A: We probably shouldn’t decree by fiat a set of randomized incompatibilities between systems. But there’s a value to not fixing all these incompatibilties. The challenge is to design a framework that encourages and rewards gaps between systems. But everything is driving against it… it might just be quixotic to think we can avoid this seamless integration.

Q: (David Weinberger) That the Internet is a different thing from Trinidad and from Cambridge seems incontestible. That said, as long as the internet is present in any recognizable form, in Trinidad, Beijing or Cambridge, you’ll have the sense that ideas can be linked, that there’s more information than you could ever consume, that much of that information is from people like you, and that there’s a lot of disagreement. Are these characteristics really universal, embodied within the technology, or is this culturally embodied? Is there something that can be said about the internet cross-culturally?
A: It depends on your level of abstraction. Technodeterminism comes into play if you think there’s only one set of rules that could apply within a digital space. It’s not at all obvious that there’s a single way the internet could (or does) work.

When we start talking about aspirations for how the internet should work, liberalism makes its way back into the project. We don’t want to throw away all the aspirations – but aspirations are a crappy descriptive tool. Critical subjectivity is an aspiration of liberalism, but it’s something we’re not very good at getting to.

Q: (Fernando Bermejo): Scholars of linguistics have been accused of creating an object – language – at the expense of speakers. Similar accusations can be raised about cyberlaw, internet studies and the spatial metaphor for cyberspace.
A: I wrote a paper about this, and agree that there’s a tendency to reify, separate cyberspace, then project our fantasies of social ordering on it. I prefer “network space”, a real space created by networks, defined by what people can do. Network spaces include the realization that Paris and New York may now be closer than New York and Williamsburg, VA, because there’s a regular flow of people from New York to Paris, a networked connection that reshapes realworld geography.

Please see David Weinberger’s excellent notes from the talk here.

I lost an hour this morning to a documentary on Liberia, which I stumbled onto through Twitter. VBS – the television and video arm of Vice Magazine (wikipedia article, official site) – has produced critically acclaimed content including “Heavy Metal in Baghdad“, a documentary about Iraqi metal band, Acrassicauda. This month, they’re releasing an eight-part series titled “The Vice Guide to Liberia”. The first seven sections are available online – the next will be released within 48 hours. I’ve just watched the first seven episodes, and I’m not at all sure what I think.

There’s no shortage of earnest, thoughtful, responsible documentaries about Liberia’s civil war and its aftermath. A partial list might include “Liberia: America’s Stepchild“, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell“, “Iron Ladies of Liberia“, “Liberia: An Uncivil War” and “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here“. Vice’s production – narrated by magazine/production company/media empire co-founder Shane Smith – is an abrupt break from the careful interviews and swelling music that accompany most of these films. Then again, what would you expect from a group “which reliably regards the world with unbridled ridicule”? (Jon Fine, in Businessweek).

Shane Smith and Vice are in Liberia expanding on an earlier Vice Magazine story – “Gen. Butt Naked Versus The Tupac Army” – which considered the civil war from the perspective of fashion, reporting the widely reported but still titillating “news” that Liberian rebels fought dressed in hiphop t-shirts, women’s wedding dresses or naked. So it’s not a big surprise that Vice’s story is designed to shock at least as much as it is to enlighten. The third of eight episodes looks at UN and international relief efforts in the country, and dismisses their failure by focusing on a neighborhood with no plumbing where residents shit on the beach. (This may be shocking to Canadian hipster filmmakers, but isn’t especially shocking to anyone who’s spent time in West Africa or any very poor parts of the world.) As the end of that episode description puts it, “From there it’s off the visit a heroin den, where we watch a twelve year-old smoke heroin and describes raping a woman at gunpoint. It gets worse.” Much of the Vice travel aesthetic seems to come from Canadian journalist Robert Young Pelton, whose “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” isn’t the world’s most helpful travel guide, but is one of the most entertaining.

Much of what seems to scare Smith and his crew – situations they inevitably describe as having “a heavy vibe” – are cases where they (a bunch of white guys with expensive camera equipment) are surrounded by poor Africans who’d like some money. It’s hard not to notice that most of the uncomfortable situations are ones they’ve chosen to put themselves in – “Hey, let’s go film inside a brothel in a tough part of town in the middle of the night – what could go wrong?” On the other hand, some of the footage that comes from these poor decisions is evocative and worth watching. Their experience trying to get a former rebel general released from a police station so they can interview him – and, predictably, getting shook down for a bribe – gave me warm feelings of familiarity as I remembered my worst experiences with law enforcement in difficult parts of the world.

Charles Taylor Jr. with Vice magazine reporter in Monrovia, Liberia

So, is this a straightforward case of overprivleged westerners making fun of the poor, a contemptible piece of exoticism? I think the filmmakers see themselves doing something different: showcasing the strange culture collisions that occur in a world as interconnected as ours. This interview with aspiring hiphop star Charles Taylor Jr. – son of the notorious warlord and former President – captures that aesthetic neatly… as does the photo of Taylor Jr. sporting a Boston Celtics throwback jersey (what does Larry Bird think about this photo?)

The cultural collision at the heart of the Vice documentary is the story of Joshua Blahyi, the aforementioned General Butt Naked. Blahyi developed a reputation as a particularly savage rebel leader loyal to coup-installed President Samuel Doe. He and his men fought naked, except for their guns and Chuck Taylor sneakers, believing the rituals performed before battle protected them from enemy gunfire. Blahyi says the rituals involved slaughtering children, eating their hearts and drinking their blood. In testimony before Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he estimates that he and his men killed at least 20,000 people during the civil war.

The TRC accepted Blahyi’s testimony, and he is a free man in Liberia – a circumstance that some point to as evidence that Liberia needs a war crimes tribunal, not just a TRC. In recent years, Blahyi has converted to Christianity and now prefers to be known as “Evangelist Blahyi”. He leads the Vice filmmakers to the abandoned hotel that served as rebel headquarters, through a malarial swamp to the mission where he shelters former combatants, to a graveyard where he talks about exhuming bodies and sleeping in empty graves. In this last scene, he and Smith are dressed in matching white suits, looking like televangelists. They discuss cannibalism in the graveyard, then proceed to a church where Blahyi takes the stage and preaches about his conversion.

Are we to take Blahyi’s conversion seriously? The pairing of the evangelist and the skeptical filmmaker in matching suits suggests that the Vice crew is having fun with the scene, looking for a laugh. But they’ve put their finger on some of the most difficult questions that face contemporary Liberia. How does a nation recover from a brutal past – does it embrace those who’ve asked for forgiveness, or turn them away? Is Blahyi genuinely repentant about his ghastly past, or has he simply adopted an identity likely to allow him to survive (and thrive, evidently) in contemporary Liberia?

It’s worth watching Vice’s time with Blahyi (in episodes 6 & 7) and then the promo for Gerald K. Barclay’s film, which also centers on Blahyi. Barclay features chilling footage of Blahyi talking about his past crime, overlaid with pieces of Peter Gabriel’s score for the film “Passion”. It embraces the conventions of the American socially-progressive documentary film: an outline of the challenges facing a group of disadvantaged people, a set of stories that illustrate those challenges, a moving story behind the making of the film. Barclay is a Liberian exile, and he returned to West Africa – first to Budumburum refugee camp outside Accra, Ghana and then to Liberia – to shoot “Liberia: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.”

I’m much more comfortable with the motivations behind Barclay’s work than with the newer piece from Vice. But I have no doubt that Vice’s piece – even if distributed solely online – will reach a wider audience. Smith and his crew aren’t shooting for an audience predisposed to care about Liberia – they’re making a film for an audience that’s looking for excitement, shock and the unexpected, qualities their story has in spades. This isn’t a usual documentary audience, as tweets about the series indicate:

Something about the VBS documentaries – the high quality of production, the unfamiliarity of the subject matter, the narrative of “adventure” rather than history – is generating a lot of buzz. As much as I want to object to the VBS video, which sensationalizes, uses historical footage with little context, and is a classic example of parachute psuedo-journalism, I have to admit that it’s a compelling piece of storytelling and that it caught my attention. Rather than critiquing it, I’m interested in picking it apart and starting to understand what makes it work. What could documentary filmmakers learn from VBS to generate a wider audience for their work? Is it possible to broaden your audience without playing to their desire to see something shocking and outrageous? Is it acceptable to use shock and outrage to get people to pay attention to parts of the world they know and care little about?

I’m fascinated by VBS because they appear to be getting people to pay attention to a part of the world that receives very little media attention. At minimum, Vice’s documentary demonstrates that there are stories to tell about Africa’s history that can reach an audience beyond the NPR/PBS community. The open question for me is whether the story they tell is a constructive one, one that can help Liberia move forwards, or merely a shocking, exploitative one. And, as I said 1500 words back, I’m not sure what I think – what do you think?

Many good friends are in Washington, DC today to hear Secretary Clinton’s speech on Internet Freedom, and will be offering their reactions across a swath of online and offline media. I’m enjoying my own brand of internet freedom, the one that allows me to get the transcript of her speech as it’s delivered and offer my reactions online, while helping Rachel look after the joy and terror of our lives. I’ll link to their posts or tweet them as they come in, but I was asked by friends at the Index on Censorship to offer some thoughts on the speech, and I thought I’d (expand on and) share what I wrote for them.

It was encouraging to hear Secretary Clinton sounding like a dyed in the wool cyberutopian. Her description of the Internet as a “new nervous system for the planet” reflects aspirations much more than reality. Yes, we’re getting information from Hunan and Haiti… but we’ve got a lot of work to do to ensure that these networks allow all people to speak and to be heard. That’s not just a function of open networks and a battle against censorship. It’s a challenge that forces us to consider digital divides, language barriers, parochialism and patterns of news coverage and information flows. (I’ll be talking about these issues in a lecture – delivered online – at Stanford tonight.) I’m excited to hear Secretary Clinton offer her unambiguous conviction that the internet is a force for positive connection, even in the face of dangerous uses by criminals or terrorists – I hope that we can move on from offering the potential of a “new nervous system” into a conversation about the difficult realities of achieving that vision.

I’d been worried that Clinton’s speech might propose a new “charter of internet rights”, an idea that’s been percolating in Washington circles since early in the Obama administration. I’ve opposed the idea that the US should propose a novel set of rights, both because the rights we’d advocate for are well covered in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly in article 19, and because US advocacy for a new set of rights would make it easier for some nations – including nations that actively censor the internet – to claim that the right to information on the Internet was a manifestation of US first amendment freedoms, rather than a universal right. I thought Clinton did an excellent job of connecting her support for a “freedom to connect” in American tradition and history, but rooting it in international law. (I doubt she meant to give such a boost to my friend David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference…) It’s hard for me to believe that the international institutions, like the UN Human Rights Council, will be especially effective guardians of these freedoms, given the embarrasing track record of international agencies like the ITU… but I think she’s wise to challenge international institutions to protect these rights.

I hadn’t heard about major policy initiatives linked to the speech, so I wasn’t especially surprised that there wasn’t much policy meat to the speech. (By the way, the speech had been scheduled well in advance of Google’s China announcements – it wasn’t a response to those developments. That, in turn, raises questions about the logic of the speech, since it wasn’t scheduled to be timely, or to make a major policy announcement. I think it’s simply a priority of her tenure, and a speech she’s wanted to give.) The US government is going to keep sponsoring tools and services that allow people to circumvent firewalls, as they’ve done for years. A number of commenters – and a couple of journalists – responded to my suggestion that Google could become a major player in the internet circumvention space by asking, “Wouldn’t that mean Google was declaring war on China?” If so, the US declared war on China years ago. Support for anticensorship tech is old news. Alec Ross has made clear – in some excellent speeches – that State would engage in diplomacy in the internet medium. The idea of a contest to develop new applications is cool, but not especially new.

What was interesting was hearing Clinton suggest that taking a stand against censorship should
become part of the “American brand”. It’s possible that we’re going to see the Google/China controversy revive discussion of using export bans to prohibit American companies from doing business with countries that censor. I think that’s a bad idea – it punishes a company like Cisco and provides more opportunity for Huawei, who are perfectly capable of building censorious routers all on their own. (A better path is the idea advocated by Tim Wu and others that the US seek trade sanctions against countries that censor the internet as an unfair restraint of trade.) By suggesting that companies embrace the branding opportunity of promoting freedom, I think she’s signalling a hope that companies will do the right thing rather than endorsing new export constraints.

The endorsement of the GNI was encouraging – GNI is a collaboration of major industry players, academics and NGOs (Berkman colleagues are closely involved in GNI, and I was involved in early meetings that led to the group’s formation.) Google’s been a big voice in GNI, and Clinton’s endorsement of the group sounded like like a hearty endorsement of their recent decision to change China business practices, and a challenge to other US companies to reconsider how they engage with nations that censor the Internet. Of course, it’s not clear that challenging companies to embrace their best aspirations is going to have any effect on Microsoft’s engagement with the Chinese market, for instance.

In other words, it’s encouraging to see Clinton and the State Department unambiguously on the right side of these issues. It’s hard to know whether there’s any concrete implications to these words today beyond a worthy set of aspirations. Here’s hoping the next step is a conversation about how we would move from the right intentions to real-world outcomes, not just on censorship, but on the provocative idea of the “freedom to connect” and the vision of a “new nervous system for the planet.”

When disasters strike, one natural – and admirable – response is an outpouring of sympathy and support for those affected. Another natural response is more troublesome – the tendency to ask the question, “Could the same disaster befall me?”

My local newspaper, evidently short of news to report, ran this wonderful non-story two days after the tragic Haitian earthquake: “Berkshires unlikely to get major quake“. The article quoted an eminent geologist at nearby Williams College, who explained that the largest earthquake to hit Massachusetts had occured hundreds of years ago on the other side of the state, and that there’s essentially no seismic activity in our valley. I tweeted the link, noting “I understand the need to make news localy relevant, but this is absurd.”

Turns out there may be good reasons to report than an earthquake is unlikely to happen. Many Ghanaians spent Sunday night sleeping outside, for fear that a major earthquake would hit Accra, destroying vulnerable buildings and trapping their occupants. The story, coming out in blogs and news reports, reads like a textbook example of how bad information spreads and how hard it can be to contain.

Around 8pm on Sunday the 17th, people began receiving this text message: “Today’s night 12.30 to 3.30 am COSMIC RAYS entering earth from Mars. Switch off ur mobiles today’s night. NASA BBC NEWS. Plz pass to all ur friends.” As this message passed via voice and text message, it somehow morphed into a message about an impending earthquake, a message taken very seriously by Ghanaians who were watching the situation in Haiti closely. By early morning, the messages had grown more specific – some report receiving messages that the impending quake was an aftershock of the Haitian quake. David Ajao slept through much of the excitement, but woke to a pair of rumors, which he laughed off:

* an earthquake had already shook a town around Kasoa and was headed towards Winneba and Cape Coast
* an earthquake was due to shake Accra

Megan had a harder time shaking off the warning, in part because everyone around her was taking it quite seriously:

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

Frantic knocking. Check my watch. It’s 4am. Stumble out of bed to the door, and find a stranger standing there, already knocking on my neighbor’s door.

“There’s going to be an earthquake. You have to get out of the building.”

Ama and I walk outside together, confused, a little scared. Outside I see all 80 or so students who live in the ISH, milling about in their pajamas. The especially studious ones are hunkered down with flashlights reading microbiology (there’s an exam at 9am, and yes they are that intense), while the rest just mirror my own dazed look.

As she woke up, she began deciphering the rumors. “Everyone was just passing on the story they heard via cellphone from ‘a friend’ or ‘my family.’ I started to doubt the whole thing when I heard the followup rumors that ‘Cosmic rays are going to hit Earth from Mars!’ and got really upset that the person who felt the need to wake 80 students didn’t have the leadership to actually inform us of his sources, his information, or any school-wide evacuation plans.”

She explains that one of the problems was that radio stations – the most pervasive source of information in Ghana – were neither confirming or denying rumors in the early morning hours. According to BBC’s David Amanour, PeaceFM – one of Accra’s best radio stations – began calling the phone messages a hoax early in the morning, helping calm people’s fears. Unfortunately, by the time government ministers began taking to the airwaves to calm people, thousands – perhaps millions – had left their homes. Professor Stephen Yeboah paints a vivid picture:

Within minutes, the news had circulated down to even the last village you know of without proper access to telecommunication services.

Almost every Ghanaian was caught at parks, open fields and playing grounds with the notion that earthquakes are limited to houses only or less devastating in open places where there are no structures. Last prayers were said with diverse modes on biblical and unbiblical tongue speaking.

It’s unclear whether the initial message was a prank, an inside joke that got out of hand, or something more sinister. Close observers of Ghanaian politics won’t be surprised to learn that the propoganda secretary of the ruling NDC party has declared that the hoax was orchestrated by a rival political party to detract from NDC’s party congress in Tamale, the largest city in northern Ghana. Perhaps he’ll be proven right – The Ghanaian Times reports that various intelligence services are now trying to determine who started the rumors and why. Their article cites a businessman, who suggests the rumor points to a need to register all mobile phones and SIM cards. The Ghanaian Times reporter put this idea in front of a former Director of the Bureau of National Investigations, who praised the idea but made clear that it would be unlikely to pass parliament on grounds of individual privacy.

For me, the earthquake rumor is an interesting illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of various communications networks. A rumor like this one might start with malicious intent, but it’s spread by people who’ve got the best of intentions – they’re sharing critical information with friends and loved ones in the hopes of preventing disaster. The stranger knocking on Megan’s door wasn’t playing a prank – he thought he was saving her life. The pervasiveness of the message says a lot about the “we’re all in this together” nature of Ghanaian society, as well as the incredible reach of the country’s mobile phone networks.

The spread of the rumor evidently served as a stress test for mobile phone companies. David Ajao reports that the friend who reached him at 6:15 am had been trying to text and phone him since 2am – MTN’s mobile phone network had evidently prevented her from getting through, jammed with panicked phonecalls from other users trying to warn friends. If you’re a network engineer for MTN or competing carriers, this should serve as a wakeup call – a real emergency would likely unfold in much the same way, and if the networks can’t remain up in a hoax, it’s unclear they’d stay accessible in a real emergency.

I’m interested in the power of broadcast media being used to combat misinformation. It sounds like many Ghanaians didn’t realize they were in the clear until authority figures took to the airwaves to calm people down. Misinformation spread rapidly over mobile networks, taking multiple paths to its destinations, and gaining authority from the invocation of authorities like the BBC and NASA in the text messages and the imprimateur of a friend forwarding the message. Is it possible that the correct information could have spread over the mobile networks as well? Or does misinformation spread better through person to person networks and authoritative information through broadcast media? It’s an interesting thought experiment, if not something we’d want to test in the field.

Lest anyone conclude that rumors are restricted to the developing world, it’s worth looking at some of the hoaxes that sped around Twitter in the days after the Haitian earthquake struck. Twitterers shared the joyful news that American Airlines would fly any doctor or nurse to Haiti for free, and that UPS would ship up to 50 pounds to Haiti for free. Neither piece of “news” was accurate. It’s possible that someone posted a suggestion that AA should fly doctors for free, and that well-meaning retweeters turned a suggestion into fait (not) accompli. Again, it’s a demonstration of the power of well-meaning people, social media and the infinite human capacity for misunderstanding.

Yesterday, Google announced a major change in their policy in engaging with China – they will no longer censor search results on Google.cn to comply with Chinese policy. This almost certainly means that Google.cn will be blocked by the Great Firewall and that Google will no longer be able to operate in China.

While this aspect of Google’s announcement is sparking a great deal of conversation online, it comes at the end of a bombshell of an announcement – Google’s decision follows what appears to be a coordinated act of espionage aimed at its servers by Chinese attackers. The attack resulted, Google reports, in a theft of their intellectual property. They also report that a goal of the attack was to access the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and supporters of Chinese human rights around the world. MacWorld reports that the attack targeted an internal system that Google had built to comply with search warrant requests for information on users. When it became clear that this internal system – evidently set up for the benefit of Chinese authorities – was being attacked and used to compromise Google’s internal networks, Google began discussions about disengaging from the world’s largest internet market.

There’s at least four ways to read Google’s decision:

Google decided to stop being evil.
Google has received reams of bad press from their decision to comply with Chinese government regulations and censor search results for Chinese users. It’s never been entirely clear to me why Google’s received more criticism than Microsoft – who admit they censored Chinese bloggers, and whose Chinese-language tools prevent posting of articles about human rights and democracy – or Yahoo, who turned over information on user Shi Tao to Chinese authorities that led to ten years imprisonment for “leaking state secrets”. I suspect we want to hold Google to a higher standard because they’ve put forth an informal motto: “Don’t be evil”, and compromising with the Chinese government looks like a violation of that stance.

Google’s taken steps to minimize the exposure of user data in China – services like Gmail, which contain sensitive personal data, or which permit publishing, like Blogger, are hosted in the US, not China. (This has made it harder for these tools to achieve market share against Chinese competitiors.) They censored in a more transparent fashion than some of their competitors, displaying a message at the bottom of each page, stating that sites had been removed from the results to comply with regulations. Google is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a partnership between industry, academia and the nonprofit community designed to develop best practices for engaging in closed societies like China.

In my opinion – shaped, no doubt, by the fact that I’ve got a lot of friends within Google and have worked closely with the company in a couple of contexts – Google was a lot less evil than some of its competitors. But continued involvement in China continued to be a thorn in the side of Google on the PR front, and I know many people within the company questioned whether engaging in China was worth the compromises it entailed. The move to leave the Chinese market may be an example of Google returning to its core values and demonstrating an unwillingness to compromise.

Google retreated from a very tough market.
Google wasn’t doing all that well in the Chinese search market – they were a distant second to Baidu, and faced extreme challenges in gaining market share. Google’s main properties – google.com and related sites – are frequently inaccesible through the Great Firewall, and Google’s Chinese site – google.cn – was subject to a great deal of scrutiny from the Chinese press and from regulators. CCTV ran an “exposé” on Google.cn, demonstrating – horror of horrors! – that the internet includes links to pornography – this story led to increased oversight of Google’s Chinese site. Friends within Google tell me that it was a constant struggle to respond to complaints from Chinese regulators, and that they believed competitors like Baidu were reporting Google’s alleged violations to regulators, increasing scrutiny on the company.

The situation within Google China was already quite complicated. Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s China chief, quit in September, giving no clear reasons for his departure. His departure started speculation that Google might be discovering that they couldn’t be competitive in a Chinese market without making even larger compromises to corporate ideals.

It’s hard to imagine Google walking away from a market as potentially lucrative as China, even if they were in a tough battle for second place. And they certainly didn’t walk away quietly. By (obliquely) accusing the Chinese government of involvement in corporate espionage and challenging the government to shut the company down for providing uncensored search, “Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it.” (Those evocative words are from top Chinablogger Imagethief.) This isn’t a temporary strategic retreat – this is a retreat where you detonate the bridges behind you.

Google abandoned Chinese users.
Despite its second place in the market behind Baidu, there are millions of dedicated Google users in China, and many of them are deeply disappointed today and worried about losing access to services they’ve grown to depend on. Reading their comments in translation on Global Voices, thanks to Bob Chen, it’s clear the frustration is less with Google than with the Chinese authorities. One translated tweet is especially poignant:

The sin of facebook is that it helps people know who they wanna know. The sin of Twitter is that it allows people to say what they wanna say. The sin of Google is that it lets people find what they wanna find, and Youtube let us see what we wanna see. So, they are all kicked away.

Bob also shares a joke about China in the years after Google’s departure:

People born in 90s: Today I stepped out of the Great Firewall and saw a foreign website named Google. Shit, it is all but a copy of Baidu.
Born in 00s: What do you mean by stepping out of Great Firewall?
Born in 10s: What do you mean by website?
Born in 20s: What is “foreign”?

Perhaps most striking is a campaign to lay flowers in front of Google’s headquarters in Beijing. Rebecca MacKinnon reports that Tsinghua University’s security department has banned students from taking flowers to Google headquarters without permission.

(Here’s a sympathetic view of Google’s decision to pull out from Chinese activist Michael Anti, who’s been censored in the past by Microsoft.)

Google is about to join the front lines of the anticensorship wars.
Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I published a study of tools designed to subvert and circumvent internet censorship a few months back, based on research we conducted over the course of three years. In the course of that research, we ended up with a simple realization about the design of censorship circumvention software:

A robust anti-censorship system has, at minimum, three components:
- Lots of non-contiguous IP addresses, making it difficult for censors to block the entry points into the system
- Huge amounts of bandwidth that can access the public internet, as a censorship circumvention system is basically an ISP
- Multiple methods to feed fresh IP addresses to your users

This isn’t a complete definition, of course – good anticensorship systems use SSL encryption to prevent keyword blocking, but that’s a solved problem. The three components above tend to be very hard for small anti-circumvention projects to solve. It’s very hard to obtain lots and lots of IP addresses, and very expensive to provision sufficient bandwidth… unless you’re Google, in which case, these obstacles should be trivial. There’s still lots of work that needs to be done ensuring that users of circumvention systems get fresh IP addresses, but a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today.

These tools would have a built-in market – the millions of users who were enjoying Google’s tools from within China – and could radically change the landscape of the internet freedom field. An emphasis on internet freedom tools would allow Google to engage with a smaller Chinese market, but would allow them to maintain a toe in the waters while maintaining a stance of disengagement with the Chinese government.

Is Google going to do this? I have no idea. I hope so. They could have done so previously, but it would have been viewed as a shot across China’s bow. Now that they’ve launched a torpedo, that shot across the bow seems more likely.

At Global Voices, we were thrilled that Google chose to partner with us and Thompson/Reuters in offering the Breaking Borders Award “to honor outstanding web projects initiated by individuals or groups that demonstrate courage, energy and resourcefulness in using the Internet to promote freedom of expression.” It would be very exciting to see Google becoming one of those groups using their energy, resourcefulness and resources to combat censorship online… and it would certainly take some corporate courage on their part.

We’ll know a lot more about what Google’s doing in the next few days. Responses are already piling up online. Evgeny thinks Google is bluffing, or simply retreating from an unsuccesful market position. Jonathan Zittrain sees this as a masterstroke, aligning Google’s business with its values, and shares my hope that Google will dedicate major resources to censorship circumvention. Dharmishta Rood links to a bevy of reactions from around the web. I’m anxiously awaiting Rebecca’s analysis, which she promises when she finishes two other articles that are due. (Man, I know that feeling.)

A massive earthquake hit Haiti last night, with an epicentre only 15 kilometers from Port au Prince, the capital city. It will be some time before the extent of the devestation is known, but early reports suggest that thousands are likely to be reported dead. Major landmarks, including the Presidential Palace, National Assembly and Port au Prince cathedral have been destroyed. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and the damage from the earthquake will compound the massive challenges the country already faces.

Reporters are racing to Haiti to report on the disaster, but voices are already making themselves heard from the decimated city. Georgia Popplewell, Global Voices’s managing director and pioneering Caribbean blogger, has been rounding up tweets coming from Haiti on our site. Some of the tweets include photos that show the intensity of the destruction.

Photo sent to twitter user marvinady by Carel Pedre of Haiti’s Radio One.

Georgia has started a list on Twitter, aggregating accounts of people who are posting from Haiti. Pooja Bhatia is apparently posting from Port au Prince and reported last night, “quake happened as sun was setting but in plenty of time to see that all the slum houses built into the hillsides disappeared”. Her posts today have documented the devestation of various landmarks and people’s increasing concern about obtaining food and water. Other Twitter users are enroute to PAP and writing about their progress and setbacks in reaching the city.

Troy Livesay, a missionary in Haiti, is writing long, informative blog posts as well as tweets. This morning’s post reveals the extent of uncertainty the island is feeling:

There are buildings that suffered almost no damage. Right next door will be a pile of rubble.

Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people.

I cannot imagine what the next few weeks and months will be like. I am afraid for everyone. Never in my life have I seen people stronger than Haitian people. But I am afraid for them. For us.

Response to the tragedy has been rapid online. My twitter-scanning scripts estimate that 1.5-1.8% of tweets on Twitter this morning have mentioned Haiti – that’s much higher than mentions of “china” or “google”, refering to the major story breaking in technology news, Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China. Much of the Twitter conversation centers on ways to help the Haitian people – in the US, texting “haiti” to 90999 donates $10 to the Red Cross to support Haitian relief efforts. Chris Sacca offers five more ways you can help, donating to other worthy organizations and learning more about relief efforts as well as about Haiti’s history and resilience. Jen Brea is tracking reactions from the Haitian diaspora and efforts to help, including the project organized by Haitian-American rap artist Wyclef Jean.

We’ll be tracking the crisis and response in Haiti closely on Global Voices and expect to have a special coverage page up within an hour. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone in Haiti and Haitians in the diaspora around the world.

Hosting an international event – a conference, a sporting event – is a classic strategy for rebranding a troubled nation. Concerned that your rigged elections and abysmal human rights record makes you look a little backwards? Host an international meeting on information technology to prove you’re firmly rooted in the 21st century. (Yeah, that went well.) Concerned that you’re better known for violent civil war and land mines than for your booming oil industry and bustling capital? Host the Africa Cup of Nations!

Actually, hosting Africa’s biggest football tournament – that is, up until the World Cup later this year – was probably a good branding move for Angola, which has made vast strides since the Angolan civil war ended in 2002. The mistake was in holding one of four sets of matches in Cabinda. It proved to be a tragic, deadly mistake: Separatist guerillas attacked a convoy of team buses, led by Angolan military, as they travelled from Congo-Brazaville into Cabinda, killing three members of the Togolese national team’s entourage and wounding nine others.

If the world’s media wasn’t busy asking itself, “Where the heck is Yemen?“, we’d probably be asking “Where’s Cabinda?” It’s not in Angola – at least, it’s not geographically contiguous with Angola – it’s a small enclave separated from Angola by a 60km wide strip of the Democratic Republic of Congo. About the size of Puerto Rico, it’s ethnically and linguistically separate from the rest of Angola – Cabindans speak Cabindês and French, rather than Portuguese. About 100,000 Cabindans live in Cabinda – twice as many live in exile in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville and DRCongo.

Oh, and Cabinda is very, very rich. Which is to say, it’s got 60% of Angola’s oil… and Angola is now the largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. (According to one history, Cabinda is part of Angola through Chevron’s support of Angolan MPLA forces in 1975.) As often happens in resource-rich nations, Cabinda doesn’t see much of that oil money, a major grievance of the Cabindan people. A recent agreement invests 10% of oil profits into Cabinda. That agreement helped the Angolan government achieve a ceasefire with some members of the FLEC – Forces for the Liberation of Cabinda.

At least one faction of FLEC – the Forces for the Liberation of the State of Cabinda-Military Position (FLEC-PM) – wasn’t on board with this plan. Their general secretary Rodrigues Mingas told the media that he’d warned Cup of Nations organizers not to hold matches in Cabinda, as his faction of FLEC considered themselves to be at war with Angolan forces. Mingas went on to apologize for the loss of Togolese life:

We didn’t specifically target the Togolese. It could have been Angola, Ivory Coast, Ghana… Anything is possible,” he said. “We are at war, and it’s no holds barred.”

“We always regret the death of human beings but there are also thousands of Cabindans killed over 35 years,” he said.

Obviously, the attack by FLEC-PM on unarmed footballers is a horrific and disgusting act of terrorism. But it’s hard to imagine the Angolans screwing the situation up much more thoroughly. First, hosting matches in Cabinda was clearly a political decision designed to demonstrate Angola’s firm hold over this disputed territory. Colin Droniou, writing for the AFP, observes that police presence in Cabinda is currently higher than normal, but quips: “Normal in Cabinda means one soldier for every 10 residents.” Human Rights Watch reports that those military forces are routinely involved with the detention and torture of rebels. The Angolan government had to know that there was a risk of violence during the tournament, a risk they could have mitigated by moving matches out of Cabinda. One analyst calls the decision to host matches in Cabinda “stupid and tragic“.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has refused to move the matches – instead, he’s increased security. And tournament organizers have been less than accomodating towards Togo, whose backup goalkeeper is in hospital in South Africa and one of whose coaches was killed in the assault on their bus. Togo’s players returned home for three days of national mourning, and requested that the organizers allow them to return and play a delayed opening match against Ghana. The organizers refused, and Togo has evidently been disqualified for failing to arrive for their scheduled match. The other teams competing in Cabinda – Ghana, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso – all had discussions about whether to pull out of the competition, but elected to stay and play.

The results of an attack like this one are complex and far-reaching. Obviously, the attack has called attention to FLEC’s cause and the “forgotten war” in Cabinda. Whether that attention helps their cause – or causes the Angolan military to attempt to crush them once and for all – is unclear. Angola, which had been hoping to showcase its newfound stability and prosperity, has probably taken a major step in the wrong direction.

It’s possible that the attacks in Cabinda will make it significantly harder to host international football tournaments in the future. Kevin Eason, writing in the Times of London, points out that African football teams generally can’t insure their players when they travel to a location like Cabinda. Some of the stars on African sides might have anti-kidnapping coverage through their European clubs – many others don’t. It’s likely that top European sides may be more reluctant to release players like Didier Drogba or Michael Essian to play in tournaments like the Cup of Nations if they’re worried not just about injury, but about kidnapping and death.

The killings in Cabinda are also putting a dark cloud over the upcoming World Cup in South Africa… even though the countries don’t share a border. Critics of the decision to host the World Cup in South Africa suggest that the attacks in Cabinda point to the “danger” of the African continent. Danny Jordaan, the leader of South Africa’s organizing committee, responded to this suggestion angrily: “The world understands that sovereign countries are responsible for their own safety and security and to say what happened in Angola impacts on the World Cup in South Africa is the same as suggesting that when a bomb goes off in Spain, it threatens London’s ability to host the next Olympics. It is nonsensical for South Africa to be tainted with what happens in Angola…”

Nonsensical, yes, but it seems likely that the attack in Cabinda could change the travel plans of some global football fans. Perhaps they should consider the fact that the Confederations Cup, and the U-17 and U-20 tournaments all took place this year on the African continent and went without a hitch.

Meanwhile, Cabindan rebels threaten more attacks. My fingers are crossed for the Ghanaian, Burinabe and Ivorian players, the fans and everyone in Cabinda.

Stories like this one take you into some of the stranger corners of the Internet. Reading about Cabinda, I learned that the country was a member of UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and People’s Organization, an international group for peoples, territories and groups that aren’t recognized by the UN. UNPO is able to point to four former members who’ve gone on to become recognized, soverign nations. And they’ve got fifty four members, who range from an Australian aboriginal group to Somaliland, which often functions more effectively than its nominal parent nation, Somalia. It’s fascinating to imagine the conversations at UNPO, especially given that one of the members is Freedom Front Plus, an Afrikaner group that seeks a separatist Afrikaner volkstat in the Northern Cape of South Africa. I wonder if they and the Cabindans ever meet for friendly soccer matches?

• Wikipedia article traffic statistics
  Very cool alpha tool for tracking searches on wikipedia and determining attention to specific topics.
  (tags: wikipedia statistics data attention web media)
• Wikibumps Boing Boing
  Clever little idea – use search volume to Wikipedia as a way of measuring interest in specific topics
  (tags: technology wikipedia statistics boingboing reference attention data)
• Media: A world of hits | The Economist
  Terrific essay looks at the question of why hits persist in a long tail age. Suggests that hits are mostly viewed by people who don't consume a lot of a particular type of media, who tend to be far less picky than experts. (Transformers the movie is rated more highly than Fassbinder films on Netflix because the Fassbinder fans tend to be a lot more critical…) Suggests there's money in the long tail, but way more in the big head… and that the bad news is in the mediocre middle.
  (tags: media economics longtail cinema culture music publishing entertainment film analysis hollywood market blockbuster)
• Global Web Index || globalwebindex@trendstream.net
  Very pretty visualizations of somewhat suspect data. Suggests that the vast majority of Chinese internet users are bloggers, which seems like an overestimate to me
  (tags: web internet data socialmedia statistics global map)

Since the underwear bomber attempted to bring down Northwest 253 on Christmas Day, it’s been all terror all the time across news media. Project for Excellence in Journalism reports a rare occurance – stories surrounding NW253 have dominated coverage in all the media they track – blogs, twitter, newspapers, television and radio. There are numerous threads to the story – a predictable debate over whether the attack is Obama’s fault, discussions of the failures of US intelligence, speculations about changes in airport security (theatre).

And then there’s Yemen. As Michael Cohen puts it on Democracy Arsenal, “Yemen is the New Black!” There’s no better way to get coverage on cable news this week than to declare that the US should invade/support/stabilize/redecorate/pave Yemen immediately to address the threat of Al Qaeda. And news organizations are falling over themselves to provide background information on the country, its politics and the possibility that Yemen may be emerging as a “safe haven” for terrorist training.

Brian Katulis, writing for the Center for American Progress, does an excellent job of shattering the “safe haven myth”, pointing out that the critical preparations for 9/11 took place in Germany and in flight schools in the US, not in Afghanistan. The first line of his piece, especially, is killer: “America’s attention deficit disorder-afflicted media spent the last week rediscovering Yemen as a country of serious concern for global security.”

Just how quickly has attention shifted on Yemen? The New York Times has run 79 pieces of content on their website that mention Yemen in the past 7 days. In the previous year, only 189 stories mentioned Yemen. In most years, 79 stories is roughly a half-year’s quota for Yemen attention. (I don’t mean to pick on the Times. The Washington Post ran 317 piece on Yemen since 2008, and 92 in the past three days. It’s just that the Times has the best archives of any US paper and lets me search year by year…)

New York Times stories on Yemen. The first 7 days of this year are in blue.

So what? Yemen’s important. If Al Qaeda is training bombers in Yemen, we need to hear this story!

Fair enough. But Yemen’s been important for a long, long time. In October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by Al Qaeda suicide bombers, killing 19 (17 sailors and the two bombers). Yemen was likely the venue for the attack because it was a country where Al Qaeda operatives found it easy to operate. A second attack destroyed a French oil tanker in 2002, spilling 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Aden.

As Katulis points out, the US has had concerns about terror in Yemen since 1992, and removed personnel from Aden out of concern for their safety. Things haven’t gotten stabler in Yemen since the Cole bombing – a civil war, which some see as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has destabilized the northwest of the country and the Yemeni government doesn’t appear especially inclined to extinguish an Al Qaeda presence in the nation. In 2008, car bombs attacked the US embassy in Sana’a, killing sixteen – al Qaeda is widely credited with the attack.

So the question isn’t why Yemen’s receiving so much attention now, but why it’s not a regular focus in our discussions of insecurity, terrorism and failed states. In other words, why don’t we watch Yemen, Somalia and other failing and failed states as closely as we watch Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq?

The simple answer is that journalists – and their readers – are herd animals. We want to know the important, breaking story and so journalists work hard to deliver that story to us, at the expense of other, potentially important stories. When a major story is breaking, other stories get less attention. My colleague Hal Roberts and I tracked media attention to the Green Revolution in Iran in the weeks that followed the disputed elections. Iranian electoral protests were the biggest story in many news outlets… up until the day Michael Jackson died, displacing Iran as the most “important” story.

In a print age, media pack behavior made slightly more sense. Most readers read only a daily newspaper or watched a specific newscast. If that news outlet didn’t report on Michael Jackson’s death, their viewers wouldn’t have this critical bit of cultural information – it made sense for all the outlets to flock to the key stories. But it’s a maladaptive behavior in an internet age. If the Times is all over Yemen like white on rice, I don’t need the Post to be as well – in fact, I’d probably benefit if they were able to turn their attention to another part of the world, one not at the top of the news agenda today, but likely to be important in the future. Or if they used the shoebomber story to explore other related issues – Muslim/Christian tensions in Nigeria, the fact that the alleged bomber was the child of great privlege in Nigeria (characteristic of many terrorists, countering the narrative that terrorist cells prey on the weak, disadvantaged and ignorant), or even on the weird Ghana connection to the story.

Attention deficit disorder-afflicted journalism is virtually guaranteed to be bad journalism. The reporters jetting off to Sana’a don’t know the country as well as people who cover the country through news droughts as well as floods. Foreign Policy Passport has been doing an excellent job of lining up knowledgeable Yemen commentators, offering a useful Yemen for Dummies, links to Ginny Hill’s exemplary Yemen reporting, and Marc Lynch’s caution against military intervention in Yemen (or virtually anywhere else).

Houses in Sana’a's medina – photo by Sandy Choi on ForeignPolicy.com

Most useful for me was a photo essay on Foreign Policy by Sandy Choi, a photographer who captured several corners of Yemen, urban and rural. Her photos turn an abstract spot on the map into a place that’s real, magical and beautiful.

In years past, newspapers and television networks had foreign correspondents living throughout the world, ready to report on breaking news if it occured, and filing stories on local politics, trends and ideas the rest of the time. The deep knowledge a reporter would develop of a country would make her insights indispensible when breaking news struck and the world suddenly shifted attention to the country in question. That age is over – it’s unlikely that newspapers will support dozens of correspondents, and I wonder whether projects like GlobalPost, a network of freelance foreign correspondents who syndicate to major news outlets, are the way forward. I’d like to see international media pay more attention to people who are from these countries and who write online, like Omar Barsawad’s Moments in Words blog from Hadhramout, Yemen.

The issue isn’t the content, ultimately – it’s our attention. There’s been rich, nuanced, sophisticated writing about Yemen for the past several years. I didn’t read any of it, in part because I didn’t know I needed to, and no one (successfully) made the case that it was worth my attention. If we want to get beyond the limitations of an ADD media, we’ve got to work to flock less and wander more in our own media consumption.

If I had to pick a project that most excited me in 2009, it would be Yeeyan, a distributed translation project focused on making influential English-language media accessible to a Chinese-speaking audience. Yeeyan’s founders built a community that included thousands of translators and struck partnerships with content providers like The Guardian, giving them permission to publish translated content. I was particularly struck by the talk Yeeyan cofounder Zhang Lei gave at the 2009 China Internet Research Conference at UPenn Annenberg – he made it clear that the motivation behind Yeeyan was a desire to use translation as a bridge between cultures, letting Chinese and English-speakers see the world from each other’s perspective.

I was singing the project’s praises to a journalist last week when he pointed out that Yeeyan’s website was down. I hadn’t checked in on the site in the past few weeks – I’ve been a little busy in newborn land – but was disturbed to find that Yeeyan has been mostly offline since early December. The Guardian, who partnered with Yeeyan, reported on the closure, and their editor Alan Rusbridger expressed his unhappiness and concern that the closure of Yeeyan reflected attempts to control the range of ideas and opinions Chinese readers are exposed to.

Danwei’s article on Yeeyan’s closure gives a sense for how abrupt the move was. Translating from Yeeyan’s status page on the closed site, the site administrators say:

Due to our errors in handling some of the articles on the website, we went against the relevant regulations; therefore Yeeyan has to temporarily shut off its server, and adjust the relevant content.

As for closing the website without giving notice, and for causing inconvenience, we are deeply sorry.

Please don’t worry too much, we have saved all users’ data. We will solve the problem we face as quickly as possible, and recover the articles and personal information treasured by everyone.

In other words, Yeeyan ran afoul of one or another group of Chinese internet censors and was told they’d have to stop publishing until they ensured tighter control over their content. The fact that the site hasn’t come back quickly suggests this was more than a couple of controversial stories that were translated – it suggests that Yeeyan may need to review translations to ensure they don’t cross any red lines.

(Censorship on the Chinese internet happens in multiple places – it’s not just a firewall that makes it difficult to access certain web content. Chinese web 2.0 companies maintain internal teams that monitor content and prevent certain sensitive content from being published. These teams have a great deal of discretion in their decisionmaking, and often come to very different conclusions, as this paper from Rebecca MacKinnon, experimenting with the censorship of blog content on 15 Chinese-hosted blogging providers demonstrates.)

I’ve been catching up on my China censorship news from friends who follow that space more closely than I do. It’s been a tough winter for free speech on the Chinese internet. Rebecca MacKinnon has an excellent overview of four troubling developments that have recently unfolded in the Chinese internet:

- A crackdown on pornography on mobile devices
- A focus on eliminating “obscenity” from search engines
- A shutdown of file-sharing websites
- Restrictions on .cn domain names, which can now only be registered by companies, not by individuals

Some of these steps are defensible – Rebecca reports that CNNIC put restrictions on domain name sales because so many domains were being used for phishing and other criminal activities. But as friends at Open Net Initiative have documented for years, a crackdown on pornography almost invariably turns into restrictions on political speech.

It’s hard to see how any of these crackdowns would affect Yeeyan directly – the site made it possible to read The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times and ReadWriteWeb in Chinese, and none of those publication routinely print much pornography. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least one of the authorities that control the Chinese internet – which include the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology – found the prospect of frequent, high-quality translation of US and European media threatening. This is consistent with the history of internet censorship in China – the BBC’s Chinese-language service is blocked far more often than the English-language version, for instance, suggesting that blocking focuses on content that can be easily read by large audiences, and less on potentially sensitive English language content. (That previous sentence is a massive oversimplification – ONI’s most recent country study on China is helpful in understanding some of the nuances of this complex situation.)

So what’s next for Yeeyan? A post on the site today announces that translation will begin again on January 8th. Reading an automatic translation of the most recent post, I believe there’s a new system announced that will audit all translations, holding some up as long as 24 hours before they go live. It sounds like the Yeeyan team has been working hard to review all previously translated content and will launch with about 70% of it, and will work to bring the rest of it online. The post also made clear that Yeeyan’s community had rallied around the founders and that there is a great deal of community support for bringing the project back to life.

Obviously, I’m no fan of censorship – much of my work focuses on testing, improving and disseminating tools that allow unfettered access to the internet and the ability to publish despite firewalls. But there’s something that I find particularly galling in seeing a project like Yeeyan censored. Yeeyan’s not an activist site – they’re not pushing a particular political agenda. They’re trying to open a window on another set of perspectives, to help people in China understand US and UK perspectives on the world. They’ve got a mission analagous to what we’re trying to do at Global Voices… a site that also gets censored fairly often.

So, as sad as I was to see Yeeyan go down, I’m at least as happy to see their community and founders rally around and bring the site back up. I’ll be interested to see if Yeeyan can sustain the energy of volunteer translators now that they won’t be able to see their hard work on screen immediately. It will be interesting to see what stories the community is and isn’t willing to translate, and what scrutiny the site will face from regulators. And I continue to wonder whether we could rally a parallel effort in the US or Europe to translate key Chinese media into English, building on the critical work done by Danwei and by the indefatigable Roland Soong.

So welcome back, Yeeyan – we missed you, even those of us who didn’t know we were missing you.