political censorship

Our campaign in Wyoming to end the political censorship of world-class science standards that include climate science is gaining increasing national attention. More and more Wyomingites are speaking out for the right of our kids to have access to the highest quality science standards, free from political, economic and ideological censorship.

Those responsible for the anti-science legislation are on the defensive. They’ve been telling anyone who will listen that “outside interests” are stirring things up and that they speak for Wyoming parents and citizens, despite working hand in glove with a national group that has been campaigning against Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) across the country.

It’s time to tell Wyoming legislators and Governor Mead in clear terms that they weren’t speaking for us when they used a sneaky maneuver – a footnote amendment to the state budget bill -- to stop the Board of Education from adopting the best science education available to Wyoming kids.

Please sign our letter to Wyoming legislators and Governor Mead today: 
http://act.engagementlab.org/sign/WYSci_letter/?source=change

Here’s the choice facing Wyoming. We can move forward with 21st-century science standards that have been developed and recommended by leading science educators from Wyoming and throughout the country. Or we can allow ideological groups who don't accept the findings of science to hobble our kids’ educations.

Let's show state legislators and Governor Mead there’s a groundswell of public support to repeal this offensive footnote that stifles science education in Wyoming. The future prospects for Wyoming students are on the line.

Two state legislators (Rep. Hutchings and Rep. Reeder) told the State Board of Education that the Legislature was representing the will of their constituents when they voted to prohibit the Board from even considering the NGSS. Yet, there was no public discussion when the footnote was passed in the 2014 Legislature. It’s time for that discussion now.

Let’s tell those who claim to represent Wyoming citizens that we want great science standards. If the anti-science groups and legislators are not speaking for you by denying Wyoming kids a world-class science education, please add your name to our letter, and share it with everyone you know.

Sign the letter: http://act.engagementlab.org/sign/WYSci_letter/?source=change

Thank you for taking action!

Sincerely,

Cate Cabot, Mom and Climate Parents member 
Kelly, WY

Marguerite Herman, Mom and Climate Parents member 
Cheyenne, WY

Censorship in China

7 January 2013 Last updated at 12:04 GMT

Journalists at a major Chinese paper, Southern Weekly, have gone on strike in a rare protest against censorship.

The row was sparked last week when the paper's New Year message calling for reform was changed by propaganda officials.

Staff wrote two letters calling for the provincial propaganda chief to step down. Another row then erupted over control of the paper's microblog.

Supporters of the paper have gathered outside its office, reports say.

the WikiLeaks threat

By Mohammed Abbas and Alessandra Prentice | Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Thursday that any decision by Ecuador to give Julian Assange political asylum wouldn't change a thing and that it might still revoke the diplomatic status of Quito's embassy in London to allow the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder.

strange and absurd

Russian anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has been charged with embezzlement in a case he describes as "strange and absurd".

wikileaks at Amazon

Under pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman, Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks.org off its servers. But why stop there? There's all kinds of controversial customers the cowardly but remarkably convenient e-tailer can flee from.

an alarming trend

Google Bombarded with Requests to Suppress Information

“Google has received more than 1,000 requests from authorities to take down content from its search results or YouTube video in the last six months of 2011, the company said on Monday, denouncing what it said was an alarming trend. In its twice-yearly Transparency Report, the world’s largest web search engine said the requests were aimed at having some 12,000 items overall removed, about a quarter more than during the first half of last year.” (Reuters)

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(bbc) Google has revealed it removed about 640 videos from YouTube that allegedly promoted terrorism over the second half of 2011 after complaints from the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers.

The news was contained in its latest Transparency Report which discloses requests by international authorities to remove or hand over material.

The firm said it terminated five accounts linked to the suspect videos.

However, the firm said it had rejected many other state's requests for action.

Canada's Passport Office was among the organizations rebuffed. It had asked for a video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and then flushing it down the toilet be removed.

Google also refused to delete six YouTube videos that satirized Pakistan's army and senior politicians. The order had come from the government of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology.
Free speech

But Google did act in hundreds of cases, including:

• requests to block more than 100 YouTube videos in Thailand that allegedly insulted its monarchy - a crime in the country
• the removal of a YouTube video that contained hate speech that had been posted in Turkey
• the termination of four YouTube accounts responsible for videos that allegedly contained threatening and harassing content after complaints by different US law enforcement agencies.

Overall, the firm said it had received 461 court orders covering a total of 6,989 items between July and December 2011. It said it had complied with 68% of the orders.

It added that it had received a further 546 informal requests covering 4,925 items, of which it had agreed to 43% of the cases.

Google's senior policy analyst, Dorothy Chou, said the company was concerned by the amount of requests that had been linked to political speech.

"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," she said.

"For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors.

"In Poland, we received a request from the Agency for Enterprise Development to remove links to a site that criticized it.

"We didn't comply with either of these requests."

mutant bird flu research

The US journal Science published research Thursday on how a mutant bird flu may spread among mammals and possibly humans, following months of controversy over the risks of bioterrorism.

The paper detailed how a Dutch lab engineered an H5N1 bird flu virus that can be transmitted in the air among ferrets, and followed the publication last month of findings by a US-based team that made similar advances.

Last year, a US biosecurity panel called for only heavily edited results of the two papers to be released, for fear that an ill-intentioned scientist might be able to use the data to unleash a potent and lethal form of bird flu that humans could catch easily.

But international experts have since agreed that the benefits of publishing outweighed the risks.

Deadly flu pandemics have killed millions of people in the past. Until now, there have been fewer than 600 human cases of H5N1 bird flu infection in the world since it first infected people in Hong Kong in 1997, but more than half of all cases have been fatal.

The World Health Organization has tallied 606 human cases of bird flu since 2003 and 357 deaths, according to its latest report issued this month.

Lead researcher Ron Fouchier, a scientist at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, said the aim was to gain a better understanding of how avian flu is spread in order to prepare for a potential human outbreak.

"The virus did not kill the ferrets that were infected via the aerosol route," said Fouchier, who has frequently stressed that the dangers of his research were overblown in the media.

"Anybody with access to the scientific literature can read all about dangerous pathogens that are more interesting to terrorize the world with than our particular virus."

Instead, Fouchier and his colleagues showed that the H5N1 virus could become airborne among ferrets -- considered a reasonable but not perfect model for humans -- after as few as five mutations and without mixing H5N1 with another flu virus.

The previous paper by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin and colleagues, published in May in the British journal Nature, described how the virus could become airborne after a series of mutations and re-assortments with the 2009 H1N1 virus, or "swine flu."

The two papers offer important insights into what forms a spreadable bird flu may take, and could lead to more advances in how to stop it, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"I believe that the benefits are greater than the risks. Does that mean there's no risk? No, of course not," he said.

"Being in the free and open literature would make it much easier to get a lot of the good guys involved than the risk of getting the rare bad guy involved."

But it remains unclear just how much risk people face, according to Derek Smith from the University of Cambridge, who co-authored an article in the same edition of Science on the potential for such a virus to evolve in humans.

Smith said his team's research determined that viruses with two of the mutations are already being found in birds.

To reach the minimum level of five mutations that Fouchier's team described looks "pretty difficult, but we don't yet know how difficult it is," he said.

"We now know we are living on a fault line. What we have discovered in this working collaboration with Drs Fouchier and Kawaoka is that it is an active fault line," he told reporters.

Asked if such a virus would inevitably evolve in nature, Smith likened that to asking, "Could it ever snow in the Sahara?"

"It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that they could evolve in a human host or some other mammalian host. We see nothing -- we see no fundamental hurdle to that happening," he added.

In the meantime, Fauci said a voluntary moratorium on research that involves the causes or transmissibility of H5N1 has yet to be lifted, as leading US health officials try to establish rules for future experiments that could raise alarm among biosecurity experts.

"We are still struggling a bit," said Fauci.

"I can't tell you when it's going to be voluntarily lifted, but we are working very hard right now (to establish a) broad general criteria of the kinds of experiments that could be done."

The editor-in-chief of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the eight-month-long controversy "has shone a spotlight on the need to deal more effectively with 'dual-use research of concern.'"

Sina Weibo

A study by MIT Sloan student Chi-Chu Tschang (@tschang) took a look at the state of internet censorship on SIna Weibo.

the First Amendment

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- When a high school senior tweeted that Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback "sucked," among other invectives, reaction at the state Capitol led her principal to demand an apology. Instead, it was the Republican governor offering a mea culpa Monday, forced to admit to a self-described overreaction by his staff that subjected him to ridicule for efforts to police a teenager's Internet musings.

Emma Sullivan's tweet from the back of a crowd listening to Brownback speak last week, and her subsequent refusal to write an apology letter, spurred several thousand supporters to rush to her online defense - boosting her Twitter following from 61 friends to more than 12,000 people in less than a week.

The 18-year-old from the Kansas City suburb of Fairway was taking part in a Youth in Government program in Topeka when she tweeted from her cell phone: "Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person (hash)heblowsalot."

She said she was just joking with friends, but Brownback's office, which monitors social media for postings containing the governor's name, contacted the youth program. Sullivan said she was called to the principal's office for the first time ever and told to apologize in writing to the governor.

"My staff overreacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize," Brownback said in a statement Monday. "Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms."

The reaction exemplifies what Bradley Shear, a Washington, D.C.-area social media attorney, called an example of the nationwide chasm between government officials and rapidly evolving technology.

"This reflects poorly on the governor's office," Shear said. "It demonstrates their P.R. department and whoever is dealing with these issues need to get a better understanding of social media in the social media age. The biggest problem is government disconnect and a lack of understanding of how people use the technology."

Brownback's office declined to discuss its social media monitoring in detail, but politicians and governmental offices across the county are increasingly keeping an eye on the Internet for mentions of their campaigns or policies, not unlike the way newspapers and television broadcasts have been watched for decades. Many officials even maintain their own Facebook and Twitter accounts to inform constituents of events or policy announcements.

Shear said the disconnect comes in determining how, or if, to respond in a new age of interactivity.

"Whatever issues are out there, we're just starting the conversation about them," Shear said. "There needs to be a national conversation on how to respond to these issues and how to do it right."

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's office, for example, doesn't formally monitor comments about the governor posted through social media sites, nor has the office reached out to anybody because of comments they posted, spokesman Scott Holste said.

"Our focus and concerns are really on bigger things," Holste said. "It's an occasional glance, but it's not something that is systematic."

Sullivan's tweet Nov. 21 caught the eye of Brownback's deputy communications officer, who forwarded it to two staffers in the governor's office, according to a string of emails obtained by The Associated Press.

Niomi Burget, assistant director of scheduling, forwarded the tweet to Deborah Brown with the Shawnee Mission School District, who is state coordinator for the Youth in Government program, and said she didn't know if the student was in Brown's group, but thought if she was Brown might want to know about the tweet.

Brown responded that she had contacted Sullivan's principal, was embarrassed for the program, and hoped Brownback would speak to students again next year.

As Sullivan's tweet and her school's call for an apology letter gained traction online, Shawnee Mission East Principal Karl Krawitz emailed Burget to say that the teen never was threatened with punishment if she refused to write the letter. Krawitz, who said he had received "disgusting" hate mail over the incident, acknowledged he wasn't a Brownback supporter but was troubled that a student had been disrespectful while on a school trip.

"I am not a big fan of the governor, but I respect the person and the office," he wrote in the email Saturday, adding that he thought the incident "will probably get ugly."

The Shawnee Mission School District said Monday it was no long seeking a letter from Sullivan.

"Whether and to whom any apologies are issued will be left to the individuals involved," the statement said. "The issue has resulted in many teachable moments concerning the use of social media. The district does not intend to take any further action on this matter."

Doug Bonney, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, said the teen's speech was clearly protected by the First Amendment.

"Saying that the governor is no good and is a blowhard is core protected speech," Bonney said. "It's absolutely what the First Amendment was designed to protect."

Sullivan said Monday that nobody from the school told her about the statement it issued saying she didn't have to write the apology letter, nor did she hear from the Brownback's office about its apology. She instead heard about both from news media seeking comment.

"They were just kind of out there for the world, but no one reached me directly," she said.

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Milburn reported from Topeka. Draper reported from Kansas City, Mo. Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Mo., contributed to this report.

censored networks

The right to read is a fictional story but it warns of a future that has already started to arrive; it paints a picture where information is controlled with a heavy hand and simply reading, let alone speaking is an extremely dangerous activity. In the words of William Gibson, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". Restrictions on the right to read though the Internet perfectly match this observation. A lot should be said about perceptions of censorship, and it is often thought that places like Syria or Iran are unique. Generally, people in the West hold that those countries obviously censor as is consistent with facts of life in a supposedly non-free country. This probably holds a lot of truth but it absolutely fails to address the core of the issue — these countries and those networks are not unique.

In fact, we find uncensored networks to almost be an abnormal state. The so-called free countries in the West often shape and tamper with network traffic. They often also log data and even collaborate with governments. Generally, people don't see evidence of this and as a result, they often perceive that their Internet connections aren't monitored or censored. These days are quickly coming to an end and while it sounds like hyperbole, here are examples in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America.

Internet rumours

Chinese police have arrested six people and shut 16 websites after rumours were spread that military vehicles were on the streets of Beijing, officials say.

The web posts were picked up last week by media outlets around the world, amid uncertainty caused by the ouster of top political leader Bo Xilai.

The country will begin a once-in-a-decade leadership change later this year. But one of the main contenders for promotion - Bo Xilai - has just been sacked, suggesting a fierce fight behind the scenes for control of the ruling Communist Party.

Mr Bo was removed from his post amid allegations that his police chief and former ally had tried to seek asylum at a US consulate.

Chinese censors had previously blocked searches on various sites for terms linked to Mr Bo.

There have also been lurid, and unsubstantiated, rumours that Mr Bo's fall was also linked to the death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, who last year was found dead in a hotel room in Chongqing, the city where Mr Bo was Communist Party chief.

The State Internet Information Office (SIIO) said the rumours had a "very bad influence on the public".

Two popular microblogs have temporarily stopped users from posting comments.

The two sites, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, are still letting people post to their own sites. But they said commenting on other people's posts would be disabled between 31 March and 3 April, so they "could act to stop the spread of rumours".

A spokesman for the SIIO told state news agency Xinhua earlier that the two websites had been "criticised and punished accordingly".

To be completely correct we should say we do not know what's going on. The fact is there is no evidence of a coup. But it is a subject that has obsessed many in China this week.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of reporting on China in the past few days. Coup rumours ricocheted back and forth, most over the internet, but some were picked up by western newspapers. China's microblogs were awash with speculation. Hard facts were non-existent.
Purges and power-struggles

Photographs of tanks and armoured cars on city streets were flying around Twitter and elsewhere. On closer inspection though, some of the pictures seemed to be old ones from rehearsals for military parades, others did not even seem to be of Beijing, as they claimed, but different Chinese cities.

There has been no evidence to substantiate the coup allegations but the authorities considered them damaging enough to take this extreme action.

Internet forums, microblogging sites, are perhaps the only area in which people could freely express their views, and many have done so anonymously.

In a country where there is very little information from the authorities, rumours take on an added value in a way they perhaps would not in other countries.