Over the past week, anti-American protests spread across North Africa and the Middle East in response to an American-made anti-Islam video that mocks the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a lecherous fraud. As a result, both Google and various countries have moved toward either restricting access to the controversial video or YouTube as a whole.
After the initial eruption of violence in Libya and in Egypt on September 11, Google announced that it would not remove the video from YouTube, as the video “clearly” complied with YouTube’s terms of service. Google has held fast to this decision, despite the White House’s request for a reevaluation. Nevertheless, Google has voluntarily placed a temporary block on the video in Libya and Egypt, citing the “very difficult situation” in those areas. Moreover, Google has permanently blocked the video in India and Indonesia in response to formal government requests due to violations of local law. Google describes these practices as “entirely consistent with principles we first laid out in 2007.”
So far, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan have acted directly to block the video. Afghan authorities say that their block of YouTube, which began on September 13, will continue until the video is removed. Authorities in Afghanistan have cited as their main concern the video’s potential to inflame violence. One Afghani ISP explained that it preemptively blocked YouTube “to avoid the blood of innocents spilling over. All it takes is one Mullah watching that video, and then he’ll preach about it later on, causing chaos.”
On September 14, Pakistan blocked all particular instances of the video, stating that it would not tolerate such a “defamatory” and “abominable” treatment of the Prophet. As of September 17, Pakistan blocked YouTube entirely.
On September 17, Sudanese Twitter users began to report that YouTube had been blocked. Their reports have been corroborated by the Sudan Tribune, a Paris-based news site, though no official Sudanese media outlet has yet reported the blockage.
Outrage over the video has spread to over twenty countries, and protesters have attacked American, British, and German embassies in Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, and India. Tensions remain high, and the deadly provocation of this video may inspire governments to step up online filtering and thus pose a sustained challenge to freedom of expression.
Let Herdict know whether YouTube is accessible in your country, particularly if you live in a region that has threatened to block it. Reports can be submitted via the Herdict homepage, the Herdict add-on, Twitter, or email.
When we unveiled our new home page design in April, I mentioned that this was just a placeholder while we worked on a more drastic redesign and some great new features. Today I’m excited to announce the release of the new Herdict site and several of those new features.
The first thing you’ll notice is the new look. We wanted to redesign the site around the two most common ways that people use Herdict: testing sites and exploring our data. That’s why our new homepage is devoted to four large buttons: two for testing sites (“Test Sites” and “Help Our Partners”) and two for exploring data (“Explore Real-Time Data” and “Create and Share Lists”).
Testing Sites
This is where we’ve made the most changes. If you’ve used Herdict before, you’ve probably used our “Reporter,” which loads a list of sites that need to be tested. We recently updated our algorithm that chooses those sites, and now we’ve changed the look of the Reporter itself. When you click “Test Sites,” the Reporter now loads in a pop-over, so that you don’t leave whatever screen you’re on. This is important because the Reporter is now accessible from almost every page without navigating you away.
Once in the Reporter, you’ll see on the far left a column of different lists that you can test. The first, with the Herdict logo, is the Reporter queue that you’re used to. In the next column you’ll the upcoming sites in the list represented by screenshots. Now you won’t be surprised by which sites load, and you can easily skip ahead if you’d prefer. In the main window the selected site will load. Clicking Accessible/Inaccessible will automatically load the next site in the list. This redesigned Reporter makes it easier than ever to help Herdict and test sites.
You can now also help organizations such as EFF, Global Voices, OpenNet Initiative, Reporters Without Borders, and Twitter. By clicking on these organizations’ icons in the first column, you can access lists of sites that they have identified as important to them. You can also explore the lists and data about them on our “Browse Lists” page. Thanks to this new feature, if you support EFF for example, you can actively help them by testing sites they need tested.
Exploring Data
We’re also enhancing how you can explore data. If you click on “Explore Real-Time Data,” you’ll see live screenshots of different kinds of data that we have available. In the top row you’ll see different ways to slice our data relating the Internet as a whole, including maps, time graphs, the raw data feed, and our in-depth sheets. In the second row you’ll see dashboards for the Herdict queue and our partner organizations’ queues. Clicking on any screenshot will take you to the full-size version of that page.
“Create and Share Lists” will soon be a new way to explore data and interact with Herdict. We are extending the same code that lets our partners create lists of important sites in order to make it possible for all of users to do that. When that feature goes live, this will be where you can explore the lists that you and other users have created.
I am really excited about all of these changes. I think they make Herdict more useful for reporting web blockages and learning about the instantaneous health of the Internet. I hope you’ll play around with the site and keep participating.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me at ryan AT Herdict dot org.
Reports of plans for a nationwide intranet to replace the world wide web in Iran have surfaced once again. The Telegraph claims that Iran is planning “to move key ministries and state bodies off the worldwide internet next month” as part of “a project to replace the global internet with a domestic intranet system scheduled to be completed within 18 months.”
Herdict previously covered Iran’s alleged plans for a “halal internet” in April 2012, when the Iranian government refuted Western media reports that Iran was planning to replace the Internet with a closed, national Intranet. Outlets that had carried the story, such as the International Business Times and the OpenNet Initiative, issued retractions. Since then, coverage of the topic has remained highly speculative. Ars Technica explains that while Iranian government officials have referred to a “halal internet,” “the government has not yet explained precisely what they mean, what its technical capabilities are, nor when it would launch.”
The latest update from The Telegraph claims that Iran has begun to disconnect “key ministries and state bodies” from the global internet in response to “disruptive cyber attacks” like Stuxnet. The Stuxnet attribution is somewhat tenuous, since Stuxnet entered a closed Iranian network via a USB drive, not via the Internet. Nevertheless, Internet-based cyberattacks are a threat to state networks, so sealing off government bodies from the world wide web can be a legitimate protective measure and need not be cause for concern by itself. However, if Iran also intends to restrict its civilians to domestic intranet access, online freedoms of expression will be crippled even more than they already are in Iran. A domestic, state-run intranet would represent a powerful tool for filtering, surveillance, and censorship.
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